Communication failure of the hero of the story phone zoshchenko analysis. Analysis of the works of M. Zoshchenko. Essay on literature on the topic: Analysis of M. Zoshchenko’s story “Nervous People”

26.06.2020

Analysis of the story “Aristocrat” by M. M. Zoshchenko. Already the first satirical works of Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko indicated that Russian literature was replenished with a new name of a writer, unlike anyone else, with his own special view of the world, social life, morality, culture, human relationships. The language of Zoshchenko's prose was also not similar to the language of other writers working in the genre of satire.

Zoshchenko in his works puts the heroes in circumstances to which they cannot adapt, which is why they look funny, ridiculous, and pitiful. Such, for example, is the character of the story “Aristocrat” Grigory Ivanovich. The narration is narrated by the character himself, that is, we hear the whole story from the first person. Grigory Ivanovich talks about how his infatuation with the aristocrat ended. It must be said that the hero clearly understood for himself what aristocrats look like - they must definitely wear a hat, “she has fildecos stockings,” she can have a pug on her arms, and have a “golden tooth.” Even if a woman does not belong to the aristocracy, but looks as the narrator described her, then for him she automatically goes into the category of aristocrats hated by him after what happened.

And the following happened: the plumber Grigory Ivanovich saw just one of these “aristocrats” at a meeting and became interested in her. The hero's courtship of the lady he likes causes laughter - he comes to her “as an official person” and is interested “in the sense of damage to the water supply and the restroom.” After a month of such visits, the lady began to answer the gentleman’s questions in more detail about the condition of the bathroom. The hero looks pathetic - he absolutely does not know how to carry on a conversation with the object of his interest, and even when they finally began to walk through the streets arm in arm, he feels awkward because he does not know what to talk about and because people are looking at them.

However, Grigory Ivanovich still tries to join the culture and invites his lady to the theater. He is bored in the theater, and during the intermission, instead of discussing what is happening on stage, he again starts talking about what is closer to him - about the water supply. The hero decides to treat the lady to a cake, and since he has “little money,” he pointedly invites her to “eat one cake.” The narrator explains his behavior during the scene with the cakes as “bourgeois modesty” due to lack of money. This very “bourgeois modesty” prevents the gentleman from admitting to the lady that he is short of money and the hero is trying in every possible way to distract his companion from eating cakes that is ruinous for his pocket. He fails, the situation becomes critical, and the hero, disdaining his former intentions of looking like a cultured person, forces the lady to put back the fourth cake, for which he cannot pay: “Put it down,” I say, “back!”, “Put it down,” I say , - to hell with your mother!” The situation also looks comical when the assembled people, the “experts,” evaluate the fourth cake and argue whether it has “a bite” or not.

It is no coincidence that the story takes place in the theater. The theater is considered a symbol of spiritual culture, which was so lacking in society. Therefore, the theater here acts as a background against which the lack of culture, ignorance, and bad manners of people appear most clearly.

Grigory Ivanovich does not blame himself for what happened; he attributes his failure in love affairs to the difference in social origin with his subject of passion. He blames the “aristocrat” for everything, with her “aristocratic” behavior in the theater. He does not admit that he tried to be a cultured person, the hero believes that he tried to behave in relation to the lady as a “bourgeois, uncut”, but in fact he is a “proletariat”.

The funny thing is that the lady had a very distant relationship with the aristocracy - perhaps the matter was limited only by external resemblance to the representative high society, and even then in the understanding of Grigory Ivanovich. This is evidenced by both the lady’s behavior and her speech. Not at all like a well-mannered and cultured person belonging to the aristocracy, she says at the end of the story to Grigory Ivanovich: “That’s quite disgusting on your part. Those who don’t have money don’t travel with the ladies.”

The entire narrative causes a comic effect, and in combination with the narrator's language - laughter. The narrator's speech is replete with jargon, colloquialisms, puns, and blunders. Just look at the expression “an aristocrat is not a woman to me at all, but a smooth place”! About how main character“walked” the lady, he himself says this: “I’ll take her by the arm and drag her around like a pike.” He calls the lady “a kind of freak,” and compares himself to “a bourgeois uncut.” As the action of the story develops, the hero no longer minces his expressions - he tells the lady to put the cake “to hell,” and the owner, in the words of Grigory Ivanovich, “twists his fists in front of his face.” The narrator gives own interpretation some words. So, for example, to remain indifferent means “to play around.” This hero, who claims to be a cultured person, is not one. And all his attempts to get closer to “culture” look ridiculous. The importance of Zoshchenko’s creativity is difficult to overestimate - his laughter remains relevant in our modern times, because human and social vices, unfortunately, still remain ineradicable.

The work of Mikhail Zoshchenko is a unique phenomenon in Russian Soviet literature. The writer, in his own way, saw some of the characteristic processes of contemporary reality, brought out under the blinding light of satire a gallery of characters who gave rise to the common concept of “Zoshchenko’s hero.” All the characters were shown with humor. These works were accessible and understandable to the common reader. “Zoshchenko’s heroes” showed people who were modern at that time... just a person, so to speak, for example, in the story “Bathhouse” you can see how the author shows a man who is clearly not rich, who is absent-minded and clumsy, and his phrase about clothes when he loses his number “let's look for him by signs ” and gives a rope from the license plate. After which he gives the following signs of an old, shabby coat on which there is only 1 button on the top and a torn pocket. But meanwhile, he is sure that if he waits until everyone leaves the bathhouse, he will be given some kind of rags, even though his coat is also bad. The author shows the comicality of this situation...

These are the situations usually shown in his stories. And most importantly, the author writes all this for the common people in a simple and understandable language.

Mikhail Zoshchenko

(Zoshchenko M. Selected. T. 1 - M., 1978)

Zoshchenko devoted about four decades to Russian literature. The writer went through a complex and difficult path of quest. Three main stages can be distinguished in his work.

The first occurs in the 20s - the heyday of the writer’s talent, who honed his pen as an exposer of social vices in such popular satirical magazines of the time as “Behemoth”, “Buzoter”, “Red Raven”, “The Inspector General”, “Eccentric”, “Smekhach” ". At this time, the formation and crystallization of Zoshchenko’s short story and story takes place.

In the 30s, Zoshchenko worked mainly in the field of large prose and dramatic genres, looking for ways to “optimistic satire” (“Youth Returned” - 1933, “The Story of a Life” - 1934 and “Blue Book” - 1935). Zoshchenko's art as a short story writer also underwent significant changes during these years (a series of children's stories and stories for children about Lenin).

The final period falls on the war and post-war years.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was born in 1895. After graduating from high school, he studied at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. Without completing his studies, in 1915 he volunteered to join the active army, so that, as he later recalled, “to die with dignity for his country, for his homeland.” After February Revolution battalion commander Zoshchenko, demobilized due to illness ("I took part in many battles, was wounded, gassed. I ruined my heart...") served as commandant of the Main Post Office in Petrograd. During the anxious days of Yudenich's attack on Petrograd, Zoshchenko was the adjutant of the regiment of the village poor.

The years of two wars and revolutions (1914-1921) are a period of intense spiritual growth of the future writer, the formation of his literary and aesthetic convictions. Civil and moral formation of Zoshchenko as a humorist and satirist, an artist of significant public issue falls on the pre-October period.

In the literary heritage that Soviet satire had to master and critically rework in the 1920s, three main lines stand out. Firstly, folklore and fairy tale, coming from the raeshnik, anecdote, folk legend, satirical fairy tale; secondly, classical (from Gogol to Chekhov); and, finally, satirical. In the work of most of the major satirical writers of that time, each of these trends can be traced quite clearly. As for M. Zoshchenko, when developing the original form of his own story, he drew from all these sources, although the Gogol-Chekhov tradition was closest to him.

The 1920s saw the heyday of the main genre varieties in the writer’s work: a satirical story, a comic novella and a satirical-humorous story. Already at the very beginning of the 20s, the writer created a number of works that were highly appreciated by M. Gorky.

Published in 1922, “Nazar Ilyich’s Stories of Mr. Sinebryukhov” attracted everyone’s attention. Against the background of the short stories of those years, the figure of the hero-storyteller, a seasoned, experienced man, Nazar Ilyich Sinebryukhov, who went through the front and saw a lot in the world, stood out sharply. M. Zoshchenko searches and finds a peculiar intonation, in which a lyrical-ironic beginning and an intimate and confidential note are fused together, eliminating any barrier between the narrator and the listener.

“Sinebryukhov’s Stories” says a lot about the great culture of comic tales that the writer achieved at an early stage of his work:

“I had a close friend. A terribly educated man, frankly, gifted with qualities. He traveled to various foreign powers with the rank of valet, he even understood French and drank foreign whiskey, but he was just like me.” , all the same - an ordinary guardsman of an infantry regiment."

Sometimes the narrative is quite skillfully constructed according to the well-known absurdity that begins with the words “a tall man of short stature was walking.” This kind of awkwardness creates a certain comic effect. True, it does not yet have that distinct satirical orientation that it will acquire later. In “Sinebryukhov’s Stories” such specifically Zoshchenko-esque turns of comic speech appear for a long time in the reader’s memory, such as “as if the atmosphere suddenly smelled on me”, “they will pick you up like crazy and throw you behind their dear relatives, even though they are your own relatives”, “second lieutenant wow, but he’s a bastard,” “disturbing the riots,” etc. Subsequently, a similar type of stylistic game, but with an incomparably more acute social meaning, will appear in the speeches of other heroes - Semyon Semenovich Kurochkin and Gavrilych, on whose behalf the narration was conducted in a number of the most popular comic short stories by Zoshchenko in the first half of the 20s.

The works created by the writer in the 20s were based on specific and very topical facts, gleaned either from direct observations or from numerous letters from readers. Their themes are motley and varied: riots in transport and in hostels, grimaces of the New Economic Policy and grimaces of everyday life, the mold of philistinism and philistinism, arrogant pompadour and creeping lackeyness and much, much more. Often the story is constructed in the form of a casual conversation with the reader, and sometimes, when the shortcomings became particularly egregious, the author’s voice sounded frankly journalistic notes.

In a series of satirical short stories, M. Zoshchenko angrily ridiculed cynically calculating or sentimentally thoughtful earners of individual happiness, intelligent scoundrels and boors, and showed in their true light vulgar and worthless people who are ready to trample on everything truly human on the way to achieving personal well-being (“Matrenishcha”, "Grimace of NEP", "Lady with Flowers", "Nanny", "Marriage of Convenience").

In Zoshchenko's satirical stories there are no effective techniques for sharpening the author's thoughts. They, as a rule, are devoid of sharp comedic intrigue. M. Zoshchenko acted here as an exposer of spiritual smoking, a satirist of morals. He chose as the object of analysis the bourgeois owner - a hoarder and money-grubber, who from a direct political opponent became an adversary in the sphere of morality, a breeding ground for vulgarity.

The circle of people acting in Zoshchenko’s satirical works is extremely narrowed; there is no image of the crowd, the mass, visibly or invisibly present in humorous short stories. The pace of plot development is slow, the characters lack the dynamism that distinguishes the heroes of other works of the writer.

The heroes of these stories are less rude and uncouth than in humorous short stories. The author is primarily interested in spiritual world, the system of thinking of an outwardly cultured, but even more disgusting in essence, bourgeois. Oddly enough, in Zoshchenko’s satirical stories there are almost no cartoonish, grotesque situations, less comic and no fun at all.

However, the main element of Zoshchenko’s creativity in the 20s is still humorous everyday life. Zoshchenko writes about drunkenness, about housing issues, about losers offended by fate. In a word, he chooses an object that he himself quite fully and accurately described in the story “People”: “But, of course, the author will still prefer a completely shallow background, a completely petty and insignificant hero with his trifling passions and experiences.” The movement of the plot in such a story is based on constantly posed and comically resolved contradictions between “yes” and “no”. The simple-minded and naive narrator assures with the whole tone of his narration that exactly the way he does is how one should evaluate what is depicted, and the reader either guesses or knows for sure that such assessments and characteristics are incorrect. This eternal struggle between the narrator’s statement and the reader’s negative perception of the events described gives special dynamism to Zoshchenko’s story, filling it with subtle and sad irony.

Zoshchenko has a short story “The Beggar” - about a hefty and impudent individual who got into the habit of regularly going to the hero-storyteller, extorting fifty dollars from him. When he got tired of all this, he advised the enterprising earner to drop in uninvited visits less often. “He didn’t come to me anymore - he was probably offended,” the narrator noted melancholy in the finale. It is not easy for Kostya Pechenkin to hide double-mindedness, to mask cowardice and meanness with pompous words (“Three Documents”), and the story ends with an ironically sympathetic sentiment: “Eh, comrades, it is difficult for a person to live in the world!”

Mikhail Zoshchenko's laughter is both funny and sad. Behind the “everyday” absurd and funny situations of his stories are hidden the sad and sometimes tragic reflections of the writer about life, about people, about time.
In the 1924 story “Nervous People,” the writer touches on one of the main problems of his era - the so-called “housing question.” The hero-narrator tells readers about a seemingly insignificant incident - a fight in a communal apartment: “Recently, a fight occurred in our apartment. And it’s not just a fight, but a whole fight.”
Zoshchenko gives a specific designation of the location of his story and its participants - Moscow, 20s, residents of an apartment on the corner of Glazovaya and Borovaya. Thus, the writer seeks to enhance the effect of the reader’s presence, to make him a witness to the events described.
Already at the beginning of the story, a general picture of what happened is given: a fight occurred, in which the disabled Gavrilov suffered the most. The naive narrator sees the reason for the fight in the increased nervousness of the people: “... the people are already very nervous. Gets upset over small trifles. It’s getting hot” And this, according to the hero-narrator, is not surprising: “It is, of course. After the civil war, they say, people’s nerves are always shaken.”
What caused the fight? The reason is the most insignificant and ridiculous. One resident, Marya Vasilyevna Shchiptsova, took a hedgehog from another resident, Daria Petrovna Kobylina, without permission, in order to clean the primus stove. Daria Petrovna was indignant. So, word for word, the two women quarreled. The narrator delicately writes: “They began to talk to each other.” And then he continues: “They made a noise, a roar, a crash.” Using gradation, the author reveals to us the true state of affairs: we understand that two neighbors began to quarrel, quarrel and, probably, fight. In addition, thanks to this gradation, a funny, comic effect is created.
Daria Petrovna’s husband, Ivan Stepanych Kobylin, appeared in response to the noise and swearing. This image is a typical image of a Nepman, a “bourgeois undercut.” The narrator describes him this way: “Such a healthy man, even pot-bellied, but, in turn, nervous.” Kobylin, “like an elephant,” works in a cooperative, selling sausage. For his own, money or things, he, as they say, will hang himself. This hero intervenes in the quarrel with his weighty word: “...under no circumstances will I allow unauthorized personnel to use these hedgehogs.” For Kobylin, other people, even neighbors, are “foreign personnel” who should not touch him in any way.
All the residents of the communal apartment came out to the scandal - all twelve people. Having gathered in the cramped kitchen, they began to resolve the controversial issue. The appearance of the disabled Gavrilych and his words “What is this noise, but there is no fight?” became the impetus for the climax of the story - the fight.
In the cramped and narrow kitchen, all the residents began to wave their hands, venting their dissatisfaction with both their neighbors and the terrible living conditions. As a result, the most innocent and defenseless person, the legless disabled man Gavrilych, suffered. Someone, in the heat of a fight, “hits a disabled person on the dome.” Only the arriving police were able to calm the raging residents. Having come to their senses, they cannot understand what led them to such a serious fight. This is scary, because the victim of their madness, the disabled Gavrilych, “lies, you know, on the floor, boring. And blood drips from my head.”
At the end of the story, we learn that a trial was held, the verdict of which was to “register the Izhitsa,” that is, to reprimand the residents of the apartment. The story ends with these words: “And the judge, also a nervous man, got caught and prescribed Izhitsa.”
And here we hear the voice of the author rather than the hero-storyteller. In these words, Zoshchenko himself expresses his attitude towards everything described. For killing a person - a reprimand?!
It seems to me that this verdict confirms the typicality of such situations for Moscow in the 20s of the 20th century. According to Zoshchenko, communal apartments are an absolute evil. Of course, it all depends on specific people. After all, there were also communal apartments in which neighbors lived as one family and never wanted to leave. Of course, the author satirically reveals the image of Kobylin, an uneducated and arrogant grabber. But, at the same time, there is some truth in the words of this hero. Why doesn’t he, like the other twelve residents of a small communal apartment, have the right to his own personal space, to his own apartment? Excited by the cramped space and the fact that they are constantly forced to deal with their not always pleasant neighbors, “nervous people” are constantly in conflict. Every little thing causes a storm of emotions in them, as a result of which the most terrible things can happen.
The fact that the “housing issue” is not a trifle, the solution of which can wait, is indicated by the tragic ending of the story “Nervous People”. As a result of the fight, an innocent person, the disabled Gavrilych, dies.
This story by Zoshchenko introduces us to the world of Moscow in the 20s of the last century. The image of the hero-storyteller - an ordinary Muscovite, naively telling about his life, what he knows, and what he witnessed - helps to create the flavor of that time. The language of the narrator and the characters of the work is a mixture of vernacular, vulgarisms and clericalisms, borrowed words. This combination paints a truthful portrait of Zoshchenko’s contemporary and, at the same time, creates a comic effect, causing a sad smile in the reader.
I believe that by exposing the shortcomings of his time, Zoshchenko sought to improve the lives of his contemporaries. Talking about seemingly trifles, the writer showed that life, the life of individual people, consists of little things. Writer Mikhail Zoshchenko considered improving this life his highest goal.

Essay on literature on the topic: Analysis of M. Zoshchenko’s story “Nervous People”

Other writings:

M. Zoshchenko’s story “Glass” (1923), at first glance, is very “light” and relaxed. However, it touches on important problems in relationships between people - issues of education, tact, and kind attitude towards each other. The writer shows that philistinism has penetrated so deeply into man that Read More......
True, Zoshchenko’s attempts to write in a new way were not immediately understood. Zoshchenko brought one of his first stories to the Sovremennik magazine, whose editor was the poet M. Kuzmin. The story was not accepted. “Your stories are very talented,” says Kuzmin... – But you must agree – this is Read More......
Glass In his story “Glass,” Mikhail Zoshchenko reveals the important problem of mutual understanding between people, the issue of education and simple attitude towards each other. At first the work seems easy and understandable, but there is a hidden tact in it that makes you think about yourself and Read More......
There is hardly a person who has not read a single work by Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the 20-30s, he actively collaborated in satirical magazines (“Behemoth”, “Smekhach”, “Pushka”, “The Inspector General” and others). And even then his reputation as a famous satirist was established. Continuing the analysis of Zoshchenko traditions in Read More......
The Zoshchenko Theater has 10 plays, 8 one-act comedies, 2 librettos, many sketches (for the satirical magazines of the 20-30s “Buzoter”, “Smekhach”, “Behemoth” - under different pseudonyms), miniatures for the stage. He wrote for the theater and about the theater. One way or another, a specific analysis Read More......
Mikhail Zoshchenko is a unique writer. His works have a unique flavor: the spirit of Soviet streets of the 20s of the 20th century. While almost all Soviet writers sang the Great October Revolution, turned to heroic themes, Zoshchenko wrote about a common man living in Read More......
Zoshchenko has a lot of “narrating” characters who explain their lives. To a large extent, these qualities are endowed with the narrator, who sometimes talks very colorfully about serious problems. Having begun to “philosophize” about culture, the narrator continues: “And the question of culture is a dog’s question. At least about Read More......
In the work of Mikhail Zoshchenko, in particular in his stories, a special place is occupied by the position of the author's face and the author's mask. In this topic, I would like, to the best of my knowledge of M. Zoshchenko’s work, to reveal the mechanism of the author’s position. The purpose of this essay is to try to understand Read More......

Analysis of M. Zoshchenko’s story “Nervous People”

Zoshchenko decided on the issue of relations with the previous culture in accordance with the social order received from the “man of the masses,” believing that the current situation requires a total revaluation of cultural values. This pathos is expressed by him in the “Blue Book” - a kind of adapted encyclopedia of all previous human civilization. The creative task here is the desire to present a set of certain cultural values, ignoring the entire tradition accumulated over centuries of their generalization, comprehension and transmission in the chain of human generations.

The narrator of the Blue Book, Proletarian Writer of the first half of the 1930s, sees the task in displacement historical fact and its distortion, in the assertion of inaccuracy, in the erasure of cultural context in the name of simplicity and accessibility. Working with literary-historical, philosophical, and encyclopedic sources, which the writer naturally used, boiled down to distorting historical fact from the point of view closest to the readership. Inaccuracy in the perception of fact became the artistic task of the writer. The angle of this inaccuracy is due to an attempt to give historical event in the context of realities accessible to the mass consciousness of the 1920s, which is why similar phrases appear in the book:

“For example, such a large, juicy satirist is the writer-fellow traveler Cervantes. His right hand was cut off... Another large fellow traveler is Dante. He was kicked out of the country without the right to enter. Voltaire’s house was burned.”

Cervantes and Dante as fellow travelers (the latter without the right of entry) - such a perception of history seemed to sanction the demand of the “man of the masses” to see everything through his own prism, to measure the long past by the yardstick of his own political, everyday, cultural experience and to consider this measure to be the only objective and possible one. At the same time, Zoshchenko is absolutely serious, adapting culture to the needs of the “working person.” By erasing everything that, from his point of view, was unimportant, he preserved the right to abstract himself from it, while bringing the very process of adaptation of history and culture for discussion with his reader. But with such selection, absolutely everything turns out to be unimportant and unimportant for the new culture! Therefore, the narrator seems to be weighing this or that fact, as if considering whether it should be consigned to oblivion or perpetuated:

“There they had, if you remember, several Henrys. Actually, seven. Henry the Birder... Then they had this Henry the Navigator. This one probably liked to admire the sea. Or he, perhaps, liked to send sea expeditions... However, it seems that he ruled in England. Or somewhere in these coastal regions. For the general course of history, it is absolutely unimportant where this Henry was."

Another example of erasing historical memory:

“As the poet said about some, I don’t remember, animal - something like this: “And under each leaf / There was a table and a house ready.” It seems he said this about some individual representative of the animal world. I read something like that in childhood. Some kind of nonsense. And then it became clouded with fog.”

The proletarian Writer, whose mask Zoshchenko put on, claims to pass judgment on the entire previous civilization, considers this court to be infallible, for it expresses the psychology of a person who is sincerely confident in his own rightness and in his own right to judge everything. If something is “shrouded in fog,” then “it is absolutely unimportant for the general course of history.”

“I was born into an intelligent family,” wrote Zoshchenko. “I was, in essence, not a new person and a new writer. And some of my novelty in literature was entirely my invention.”

This “novelty” led the writer to a creative crisis of the 1930–1950s, the first sign of which was “The Blue Book”, and the culmination of which was the story “Youth Restored” (1933). Conflicting attitude towards your hero at the beginning creative path(evil irony and at the same time sympathy) gave way over time to acceptance of it. The gradual loss of distance between the author and the audience turned into a conscious rejection of culture, oblivion of the fact that the writer was nevertheless born into an “intelligent family” of Russian culture and genetically belongs to it, that the voices of the creators of “The Overcoat” and “Poor People” are heard in his voice.

But " little man“, having turned into a “man of the masses” in the 20th century, demanded the complete subordination of the writer, who felt sympathy and compassion for him, and gave him his social order for the Proletarian Writer. Zoshchenko took this order. After that, he never spoke in his own voice could. And if in the early 1920s, saving irony determined the distance between the author and the hero, then its loss led to the fact that Zoshchenko’s hero, having supplanted his creator, himself became a writer, forcing his literary creator to speak in someone else’s voice, forgetting his own.

Analysis of the works of M. Zoshchenko.

These are the situations usually shown in his stories. And most importantly, the author writes all this for the common people in a simple and understandable language.

Mikhail Zoshchenko

(Zoshchenko M. Selected. T. 1 - M., 1978)

Zoshchenko devoted about four decades to Russian literature. The writer went through a complex and difficult path of quest. Three main stages can be distinguished in his work.

The final period falls on the war and post-war years.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was born in 1895. After graduating from high school, he studied at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. Without completing his studies, in 1915 he volunteered to join the active army, so that, as he later recalled, “to die with dignity for his country, for his homeland.” After the February Revolution, battalion commander Zoshchenko, demobilized due to illness (“I took part in many battles, was wounded, gassed. Spoiled my heart...”) served as commandant of the Main Post Office in Petrograd. During the anxious days of Yudenich's attack on Petrograd, Zoshchenko was the adjutant of the regiment of the village poor.

The years of two wars and revolutions (1914-1921) are a period of intense spiritual growth of the future writer, the formation of his literary and aesthetic convictions. The civil and moral formation of Zoshchenko as a humorist and satirist, an artist of significant social themes, occurred in the pre-October period.

The 1920s saw the heyday of the main genre varieties in the writer’s work: the satirical story, the comic novella and the satirical-humorous story. Already at the very beginning of the 20s, the writer created a number of works that were highly appreciated by M. Gorky.

“Sinebryukhov’s Stories” says a lot about the great culture of comic tales that the writer achieved at an early stage of his work:

The heroes of these stories are less rude and uncouth than in humorous short stories. The author is primarily interested in the spiritual world, the thinking system of an outwardly cultured, but even more so essentially disgusting, bourgeois. Oddly enough, in Zoshchenko’s satirical stories there are almost no cartoonish, grotesque situations, less comic and no fun at all.

This sad and ironic “probably offended” and “it’s difficult for a person to live in the world” is the nerve of the majority comic works Zoshchenko 20s. In such small masterpieces as “On Live Bait”, “Aristocrat”, “Bathhouse”, “Nervous People”, “Scientific Phenomenon” and others, the author seems to cut away various socio-cultural layers, getting to those layers where the origins of indifference nest , lack of culture, vulgarity.

The hero of "The Aristocrat" became infatuated with one person in fildecos stockings and a hat. While he “as an official person” visited the apartment and then walked along the street, experiencing the inconvenience of having to take the lady by the arm and “drag like a pike,” everything was relatively safe. But as soon as the hero invited the aristocrat to the theater, “she developed her ideology in its entirety.” Seeing the cakes during the intermission, the aristocrat “approaches the dish with a lecherous gait and grabs the cream and eats it.” The lady has eaten three cakes and is reaching for the fourth.

“Then the blood rushed to my head.

“Lie down,” I say, “back!”

After this culmination, events unfold like an avalanche, drawing everything into its orbit. larger number actors. As a rule, in the first half of Zoshchenko's short story one or two, or even three, characters are presented. And only when the plot develops highest point, when the need and necessity arise to typify the phenomenon being described, to sharpen it satirically, a more or less written out group of people, sometimes a crowd, appears.

So it is in "The Aristocrat". The closer to the finale, the greater the number of faces the author brings to the stage. First, the figure of the barman appears, who, in response to all the assurances of the hero, who passionately proves that only three pieces have been eaten, since the fourth cake is on the platter, “behaves indifferently.”

“No,” he answers, “although it is in the dish, the bite is made on it and crushed with a finger.” There are also amateur experts, some of whom “say the bite is made, others don’t.” And finally, the crowd, attracted by the scandal, who laughs at the sight of an unlucky theatergoer frantically emptying his pockets with all sorts of junk before her eyes.

In the finale, again only two characters remain, finally clarifying their relationship. The story ends with a dialogue between the offended lady and the hero, dissatisfied with her behavior.

“And at the house she says to me in her bourgeois tone:

Quite disgusting of you. Those who don't have money don't travel with ladies.

And I say:

Happiness is not in money, citizen. Sorry for the expression."

As we can see, both sides are offended. Moreover, both sides believe only in their own truth, being firmly convinced that it is the other side that is wrong. The hero of Zoshchenkov's story invariably considers himself infallible, a “respected citizen,” although in reality he acts as a arrogant man in the street.

The essence of Zoshchenko’s aesthetics is that the writer combines two planes (ethical and cultural-historical), showing their deformation, distortion in the consciousness and behavior of satirical and humorous characters. At the junction of true and false, real and fictional, a comic spark flashes, a smile appears or the reader laughs.

Breaking the connection between cause and effect is a traditional source of comedy. It is important to capture the type of conflicts characteristic of a given environment and era and convey them through the means of satirical art. Zoshchenko is dominated by the motif of discord, everyday absurdity, some kind of tragicomic inconsistency of the hero with the tempo, rhythm and spirit of the times.

Sometimes Zoshchenko’s hero really wants to keep up with progress. A hastily adopted modern trend seems to such a respected citizen to be the height of not just loyalty, but an example of organic adaptation to revolutionary reality. Hence the addiction to fashionable names and political terminology, hence the desire to assert one’s “proletarian” insides through bravado through rudeness, ignorance, and rudeness.

It is no coincidence that the hero-narrator sees a bourgeois bias in the fact that Vasya Rastopyrkin - “this pure proletarian, non-party member, God knows from what year - was thrown out from the tram platform just now” by insensitive passengers for dirty clothes (“Bourgeois”). When clerk Seryozha Kolpakov was finally given the personal telephone he had been fussing over so much, the hero felt like “a true European with cultural skills and manners.” But the problem is that this “European” has no one to talk to. Out of sadness, he called the fire department and lied that there was a fire. “In the evening, Seryozha Kolpakov was arrested for hooliganism.”

The writer is concerned about the problem of life and everyday anomalies. Looking for its causes, carrying out exploration of the social and moral origins of negative phenomena, Zoshchenko sometimes creates grotesquely exaggerated situations that give rise to an atmosphere of hopelessness, a widespread spill of everyday vulgarity. This feeling is created after reading the stories “Dictaphone”, “A Dog’s Scent”, “After a Hundred Years”.

Critics of the 20-30s, noting the innovation of the creator of “The Bath” and “The Aristocrat,” eagerly wrote on the topic of “face and mask” of Mikhail Zoshchenko, often correctly comprehending the meaning of the writer’s works, but embarrassed by the unusual relationship between the author and his comic “double” . The reviewers were not satisfied with the writer's commitment to the same mask chosen once and for all. Meanwhile, Zoshchenko did this deliberately.

S.V. Obraztsov in his book “Actor with a Puppet” talked about how he searched for his path in art. It turned out that only the doll helped him find his “manner and voice.” The actor was able to “enter into the character” of this or that hero more relaxed and freely “through the doll.”

Zoshchenko’s innovation began with the discovery of a comic hero, who, according to the writer, “almost never appeared in Russian literature before,” as well as with the techniques of a mask, through which he revealed aspects of life that often remained in the shadows and did not come into view satirists.

All comic heroes from the ancient Petrushka to Schweik acted in an anti-national society, but Zoshchenko’s hero “unfolded his ideology” in a different environment. The writer showed the conflict between a person burdened with the prejudices of pre-revolutionary life, and morality, the moral principles of the new society.

By developing deliberately ordinary plots, telling private stories that happened to an unremarkable hero, the writer elevated these individual cases to the level of significant generalization. He penetrates the inner sanctum of a tradesman who involuntarily exposes himself in his monologues. This skillful mystification was achieved through masterful mastery of the manner of narration on behalf of the narrator, a tradesman who was not only afraid to openly declare his views, but also tried to inadvertently not give rise to any reprehensible opinions about himself.

Zoshchenko often achieved a comic effect by playing on words and expressions taken from the speech of an illiterate tradesman, with characteristic vulgarisms, incorrect grammatical forms and syntactic constructions (“plituar”, “okromya”, “hres”, “this”, “in it”, “brunette”, “dragged”, “for the bite”, “weep crying”, “that poodle”, “a dumb animal”, “at the stove”, etc.).

Traditional humorous schemes were also used, which have come into wide use since the time of the Satyricon: the enemy of bribes, giving a speech in which he gives recipes for taking bribes (“Speech delivered at a banquet”); an opponent of verbosity, who himself turns out to be a lover of idle and empty talk (“The Americans”); a doctor sewing a “pan gold” watch into a patient’s stomach (“The Clock”).

Zoshchenko is a writer not only of a comic style, but also of comic situations. The style of his stories is not just funny words, incorrect grammatical phrases and sayings. This was the sad fate of the authors who tried to write “like Zoshchenko”, that they, in the apt expression of K. Fedin, simply acted as plagiarists, taking off from him what was convenient to take off - his clothes. However, they were far from comprehending the essence of Zoshchenko’s innovation in the field of skaz. Zoshchenko managed to make the tale very succinct and artistically expressive. The hero-narrator only speaks, and the author does not complicate the structure of the work with additional descriptions of the timbre of his voice, his demeanor, the details of his behavior. However, through the skaz style, the hero’s gesture, the tone of his voice, his psychological state, and the author’s attitude to what is being told are clearly conveyed. What other writers have achieved by introducing additional artistic details, Zoshchenko achieved it in a manner of skaz, with a short, extremely concise phrase and at the same time a complete absence of “dryness”.

At first, Zoshchenko came up with various names for his fantastic masks (Sinebryukhov, Kurochkin, Gavrilych), but later abandoned this. For example, “Funny Stories”, published on behalf of the gardener Semyon Semenovich Kurochkin, subsequently began to be published without reference to the personality of this character. The tale has become more complex and artistically polysemantic.

The skaz form was used by N. Gogol, I. Gorbunov, N. Leskov, and Soviet writers of the 20s. Instead of pictures of life, in which there is no intrigue, and sometimes any plot action, as was the case in I. Gorbunov’s masterfully honed miniature dialogues, instead of the emphatically sophisticated stylization of the language of the urban philistinism, which N. Leskov achieved through the lexical assimilation of various speech elements and folk etymology , Zoshchenko, not shying away from these techniques, seeks and finds means that most accurately correspond to the character and spirit of his hero.

Zoshchenko in his mature years followed the path paved by Gogol and Chekhov, without, however, copying their manners, unlike numerous accusers of the 20s.

K. Fedin noted the writer’s ability to “combine irony with truth of feeling in a finely constructed story.” This was achieved using Zoshchenko’s unique techniques, among which an important place belonged to especially intonated humor.

Zoshchenko's humor is completely ironic. The writer called his stories: “Happiness”, “Love”, “Easy Life”, “Pleasant Meetings”, “Honest Citizen”, “ Rich life", "Happy Childhood", etc. And they were talking about the exact opposite of what was stated in the title. The same can be said about the cycle of "Sentimental Stories", in which the dominant principle was the tragicomism of the everyday life of a tradesman and One of the stories bore the romantic title “The Lilac is Blooming.” However, the poetic haze of the title dissipated already on the first pages. Here the life of the musty bourgeois world, usual for Zoshchenkov’s works, flowed thickly with its insipid love, betrayals, disgusting scenes of jealousy, and massacres.

The dominance of trifles, the slavery of trifles, the comedy of the absurd and absurd - this is what the writer draws attention to in a series of sentimental stories. However, there is a lot here that is new, even unexpected for the reader who knew Zoshchenko the short story writer. In this regard, the story “What the Nightingale Sang About” is especially indicative.

Here, in contrast to “Goat”, “Wisdom” and “People”, where the characters of all kinds of “former” people were drawn, broken by the revolution, knocked out of their usual everyday rut, a completely “fire-resistant type” was recreated, which was not shaken by any storms and thunderstorms past social revolution. Vasily Vasilyevich Bylinkin steps broadly and firmly on the ground. “Blinkin wore his heels inward all the way to the heels.” If anything crushes this “philosophically minded man, burned by life and shelled by heavy artillery,” it is the feeling that suddenly surges over him for Lizochka Rundukova.

In essence, the story “What the Nightingale Sang About” is a subtly parodic, stylized work that sets out the story of the explanations and yearnings of two hotly in love heroes. Without betraying the canons of a love story, the author sends a test to the lovers, albeit in the form of a childhood disease (mumps), with which Bylinkin unexpectedly becomes seriously ill. The heroes stoically endure this formidable invasion of fate, their love becomes even stronger and purer. They walk a lot, holding hands, and often sit over a classic river cliff, albeit with a somewhat undignified name - Kozyavka.

Love reaches a climax, after which only the death of loving hearts is possible, if the spontaneous attraction is not crowned with a marriage. But here the force of such circumstances invades, which crush the carefully nurtured feeling at the root.

Bylinkin sang beautifully and captivatingly, his intermittent voice carried out gentle roulades. And the results?

Let's remember why in the previous satirical literature The matrimonial advances of equally unlucky suitors failed.

It’s funny, very funny, that Podkolesin jumps out the window, although there is not that extreme decline of the hero as in Zoshchenko.

Khlestakov's matchmaking is disrupted because somewhere in the depths of the scene the figure of the true auditor looms with stern retribution.

Krechinsky’s wedding cannot take place because this clever swindler aims to get a million dowry, but in last moment takes a too clumsy step.

What explains the sad and farcical outcome in the story “What the Nightingale Sang About”? Lizochka did not have her mother’s chest of drawers, which the hero was counting on. This is where the mug of the tradesman comes out, which before - though not very skillfully - was covered with thin petals of "haberdashery" treatment.

Zoshchenko writes a magnificent ending, where the true cost of what at first looked like a reverently generous feeling is revealed. The epilogue, in peacefully elegiac tones, is preceded by a scene of a stormy scandal.

In the structure of Zoshchenko’s stylized and sentimental story, like veins of quartz in granite, caustic sarcastic inclusions appear. They give the work a satirical flavor, and, unlike the stories where Zoshchenko openly laughs, here the writer, using Mayakovsky’s formula, smiles and mocks. At the same time, his smile is most often sad and sad, and his mockery is sardonic.

This is exactly how the epilogue of the story “What the Nightingale Sang About” is constructed, where the author finally answers the question posed in the title. As if returning the reader to Bylinkin’s happy days, the writer recreates the atmosphere of love ecstasy, when Lizochka, overwhelmed “by the chirping of insects or the singing of a nightingale,” innocently asks her admirer:

Vasya, what do you think this nightingale is singing about?

To which Vasya Bylinkin usually responded with restraint:

He wants to eat, that’s why he sings.”

The originality of "Sentimental Tales" is not only in the more meager introduction of elements of the comic proper, but also in the fact that from work to work there is a growing feeling of something unkind, embedded, it seems, in the very mechanism of life, interfering with its optimistic perception.

The disadvantage of most of the heroes of “Sentimental Stories” is that they slept through an entire historical period in the life of Russia and therefore, like Apollo Perepenchuk (“Apollo and Tamara”), Ivan Ivanovich Belokopytov (“People”) or Michel Sinyagin (“M.P.” . Sinyagin"), have no future. They rush through life in fear, and even the smallest incident is ready to play a fatal role in their restless fate. Chance takes on the form of inevitability and regularity, determining much in the crushed spiritual mood of these heroes.

The fatal slavery of trifles distorts and corrodes the human principles of the heroes of the stories “The Goat”, “What the Nightingale Sang”, “A Merry Adventure”. There is no goat - and the foundations of Zabezhkin’s universe collapse, and after this Zabezhkin himself dies. They don’t give mother’s chest of drawers to the bride - and the bride herself, to whom Bylinkin sang so sweetly, is not needed. The hero of "A Merry Adventure" Sergei Petukhov, who intends to take a girl he knows to the cinema, does not find the required seven hryvnia and because of this is ready to finish off his dying aunt.

The artist depicts petty, philistine natures, busy meaninglessly circling around dull, faded joys and familiar sorrows. Social upheavals have bypassed these people, who call their existence “worm-eaten and meaningless.” However, it sometimes seemed to the author that the foundations of life remained unshaken, that the wind of revolution only stirred up the sea of everyday vulgarity and flew away without changing the essence of human relations.

This worldview of Zoshchenko also determined the nature of his humor. Next to the cheerful things in the writer, sad things often appear. But, unlike Gogol, with whom Zoshchenko was sometimes compared by contemporary critics, the heroes of his stories so crushed and drowned out everything human in themselves that for them the tragic simply ceased to exist in life.

In Gogol, through the fate of Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, one could see the tragedy of a whole layer of disadvantaged people just like this petty official. Their spiritual poverty was determined by prevailing social relations. The revolution eliminated the exploitative system and opened up wide opportunities for every person to have a meaningful and interesting life. However, there were still many people who were either dissatisfied with the new order, or simply skeptical and indifferent. Zoshchenko at that time was also not yet sure that the bourgeois swamp would recede and disappear under the influence of social transformations.

The writer feels sorry for his little heroes, but the essence of these people is not tragic, but farcical. Sometimes happiness wanders onto their street, as happened, for example, with the hero of the story “Happiness,” glazier Ivan Fomich Testov, who once grabbed the bright peacock of luck. But what sad happiness this is! How hysterical drunk song with tears and heavy stuporous oblivion.

Tearing off the new overcoat from the shoulders of Gogol's hero, the kidnappers took away with it all the most cherished things that Akaki Akakievich could have had. A world of immense possibilities opened up before the hero Zoshchenko. However, this hero did not see them, and they remained treasures for him with seven seals.

Occasionally, of course, such a hero may experience an anxious feeling, like the character in “The Terrible Night.” But it quickly disappears, because the system of former everyday ideas is tenaciously held in the consciousness of the tradesman. A revolution took place that shook up Russia, but the average person for the most part remained almost unaffected by its transformations. Showing the power of the inertia of the past, Zoshchenko did a great, useful thing.

“Sentimental stories” were distinguished not only by the originality of the object (according to Zoshchenko, he takes in them “an exceptionally intelligent person”, but in small stories he writes “about a simpler person”), but they were also written in a different manner than short stories.

The narration is conducted not on behalf of the tradesman, the layman, but on behalf of the writer Kolenkorov, and this, as it were, resurrects the traditions of Russian classical literature. In fact, instead of following the humanistic ideals of the 19th century, Kolenkorov turns out to be imitation and imitation. Zoshchenko parodies and ironically overcomes this outwardly sentimental manner.

Satire, like all Soviet fiction, changed significantly in the 30s. The creative fate of the author of "The Aristocrat" and "Sentimental Tales" was no exception. The writer who exposed philistinism, ridiculed philistinism, wrote ironically and parodically about the poisonous scum of the past, turns his gaze in a completely different direction. Zoshchenko is captivated and fascinated by the tasks of socialist transformation. He works in the large circulation of Leningrad enterprises, visits the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, listening to the rhythms of the grandiose process of social renewal. There is a turning point in his entire work: from his worldview to the tone of the narrative and style.

During this period, Zoshchenko was seized by the idea of merging satire and heroics. Theoretically, this thesis was proclaimed by him at the very beginning of the 30s, and practically realized in “Youth Restored” (1933), “The Story of a Life” (1934), the story “The Blue Book” (1935) and a number of stories of the second half: 30s.

Our enemies abroad often explain Zoshchenko’s attraction to a heroic theme, a bright positive character, by diktat external forces. In fact, this was organic for the writer and testified to his internal evolution, so common for Russian national tradition since the time of Gogol. It is enough to recall Nekrasov’s confession bursting out of his sore chest: “The heart is tired of feeding on malice...”, Shchedrin’s burning thirst for the lofty and heroic, Chekhov’s unquenched longing for a man for whom everything is fine.

Already in 1927, Zoshchenko, in his characteristic manner at that time, made the following confession in one of his stories:

“Today I would like to flaunt something heroic. Some kind of grandiose, broad character with many progressive views and moods. Otherwise, everything is petty and petty - it’s just disgusting...

And I miss, brothers, a real hero! I wish I could meet someone like that!”

Two years later, in the book “Letters to a Writer,” M. Zoshchenko again returns to the problem that worried him. He claims that “the proletarian revolution raised a whole and enormous layer of new, “indescribable” people.”

The writer's meeting with such heroes took place in the 30s, and this contributed to a significant change in the entire appearance of her short story.

Zoshchenko of the 1930s completely abandoned not only the usual social mask, but also the fantastic manner developed over the years. The author and his heroes now speak in completely correct literary language. At the same time, naturally, the speech range fades somewhat, but it became obvious that it would no longer be possible to embody the previous Zoshchenko style new circle ideas and images.

Several years before this evolution took place in Zoshchenko’s work, the writer foresaw the possibility for him of new creative solutions dictated by the conditions of the developing reality.

“They usually think,” he wrote in 1929, “that I distort the “beautiful Russian language”, that for the sake of laughter I take words in a meaning that is not given to them in life, that I deliberately write in broken language in order to make the most respectable audience laugh .

This is not true. I distort almost nothing. I write in the language that the street now speaks and thinks. I did this (in short stories) not for the sake of curiosity and not in order to more accurately copy our life. I did this in order to fill, at least temporarily, the colossal gap that occurred between literature and the street.

I say temporary, because I really write in such a temporary and parodic way."

In the mid-30s, the writer declared: “Every year I removed and am removing more and more exaggeration from my stories. And when we (the general mass) speak in a completely refined manner, believe me, I will not lag behind the century.”

The departure from skaz was not a simple formal act; it entailed a complete structural restructuring of Zoshchenko’s short story. Not only the style is changing, but also the plot and compositional principles are being widely introduced psychological analysis. Even externally, the story looks different, being two to three times larger in size than the previous one. Zoshchenko often seems to return to his early experiences of the early 20s, but at a more mature stage, using the legacy of the fictionalized comic novel in a new way.

The very names of the stories and feuilletons from the mid and second half of the 30s (“They acted tactlessly,” “Bad wife,” “ Unequal marriage", "On respect for people", "More on the fight against noise") quite accurately indicate the issues that now concern the satirist. These are not everyday curiosities or communal problems, but problems of ethics, the formation of new moral relations.

The feuilleton “Good Impulses” (1937) was written, it would seem, on a very private topic: about tiny windows at the cashiers of entertainment enterprises and at information kiosks. “There are only the cashier’s hands sticking out, a ticket book and scissors. That’s the whole panorama.” But the further we go, the more the theme of respectful attitude towards the visitor, client, and every Soviet person develops. The satirist rebels against the cloth-slumbering, uniformed well-being and the inevitable trepidation before the official “point”.

“It’s not that I want to see the expression on the face of the one who gives me the certificate, but maybe I want to ask him again, to consult. But the window fences me off and, as they say, chills my soul. Moreover, just a little - it slams shut with a bang and you, realizing your insignificant place in this world, again leave with a constricted heart.”

The plot is based on a simple fact: the old woman needs to get a certificate.

“Her lips are whispering, and it’s clear that she wants to talk to someone, find out, question and find out.

Here she comes to the window. The window opens. And there the head of a young nobleman appears.

The old woman begins her speech, but the young gentleman says abruptly:

Abra sa se kno...

And the window slams shut.

The old woman was about to lean towards the window again, but again, having received the same answer, she walked away in some fear.

Having thought up this phrase “Abra sa se kno” in my head, I decide to make a translation from the language of the poetry of bureaucracy into the everyday everyday language of prose. And I get it: “Turn to the next window.”

I tell the old woman the translated phrase, and she walks with an uncertain gait to the next window.

No, they didn’t keep her there for long either, and she soon left along with her prepared speeches.”

The feuilleton is pointed against, as Zoshchenko delicately puts it, the “unsympathetic style” of life and work of institutions, according to which a not very outwardly distinguishable, but quite real system of dividing people into two clearly unequal categories has been established. On the one hand, “they say, we are, but, they say, you are.” But in fact, the author claims, “you are us, and we are partly you.” The ending sounds sad and warning: “There is, we would say, some kind of incongruity here.”

This incongruity, which has already reached a grotesque degree, is exposed with caustic sarcasm in the story “A Case History” (1936). Here the life and customs of a certain special hospital are described, in which visitors are greeted on the wall by a cheerful poster: “Issuing corpses from 3 to 4,” and a paramedic admonishes a patient who does not like this announcement with the words: “If, he says, you If you get better, which is unlikely, then criticize.”

In the 20s, it seemed to many that the damned legacy of the past could be put to rest quite quickly. M. Zoshchenko neither then nor a decade later shared these complacent illusions. The satirist saw the amazing tenacity of all kinds of social weeds and did not at all underestimate the abilities of the tradesman and the average person to mimicry and opportunism.

However, in the 30s, new prerequisites arose for the solution of the eternal question of human happiness, conditioned by gigantic socialist transformations and the cultural revolution. This has a significant impact on the nature and direction of the writer’s work.

Zoshchenko appears to have teaching intonations that were not there before. The satirist not only and even not so much ridicules and castigates, but patiently teaches, explains, interprets, appealing to the mind and conscience of the reader. High and pure didactics were embodied with particular perfection in a cycle of touching and affectionate stories for children, written in 1937 - 1938.

In the comic novella and feuilleton of the second half of the 30s, sad humor increasingly gives way to instructiveness, and irony to lyrical-philosophical intonation ("Forced Landing", "Wake", "Drunk Man", "Bathhouse and People", "Meeting" , “On the tram”, etc.). Take, for example, the story “On the Tram” (1937). This is not even a novella, but simply a street scene, a genre sketch, which in past years could easily have become an arena for funny and funny situations, thickly seasoned with comic salt of witticisms. Suffice it to recall “On live bait”, “Galoshes”, etc.

Now the writer’s anger and joy rarely burst out. More than before, he declares the artist’s high moral position, clearly revealed in the key places of the plot - where issues of honor, dignity, and duty are particularly important and dear to the writer’s heart.

Defending the concept of active good, M. Zoshchenko pays more and more attention to positive characters, bolder and more often introduces images of positive heroes into the satirical and humorous story. And not just in the role of extras, standards frozen in their virtue, but characters actively acting and fighting (“Funny Game”, “Modern Times”, “Lights” big city", "Debt of Honor").

Previously, the development of Zoshchenko’s comic plot consisted of incessant contradictions that arose between the ironic “yes” and the real “no”. The contrast between high and low, bad and good, comic and tragic was revealed by the reader himself as he delved deeper into the satirical text of the narrative. The author sometimes obscured these contrasts, not clearly differentiating the speech and function of the narrator and his own position.

The story and feuilleton of the 30s are built by Zoshchenko on different compositional principles, not because such an important component of the short story of previous years as the hero-storyteller disappears. Now to the characters satirical works not only the higher author’s position begins to resist, but also the very environment in which the heroes find themselves. This social confrontation ultimately moves the internal springs of the plot. Observing how the honor and dignity of a person is trampled underfoot by all sorts of bureaucrats, red tape workers, and bureaucrats, the writer raises his voice in his defense. No, as a rule, he does not give an angry rebuke, but in his preferred sad-ironic style of narration, major intonations arise, and the firm conviction of an optimist is revealed.

Zoshchenko’s trip to the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1933) became a memorable milestone for him not only because there he saw with his own eyes how people, much worse than those who were the main characters in his works of the 20s, were degenerated under the conditions of a gigantic construction site . The prospects for the future path were revealed to the writer in a new way, because the direct study of socialist innovation gave a lot to resolve such fundamental issues for the satirist as man and society, the historical doom of the past, the inevitability and inevitability of the triumph of the lofty and beautiful. Social update native land It also promised a moral revival of the individual, returning not only to the individual, but, as it were, to the entire planet its long-lost youth.

As a result of the trip, the story “The Story of One Life” (1934) appears, telling about how a thief, “who went through a harsh school of re-education,” became a man. This story was favorably received by M. Gorky.

New times break into not only Zoshchenko’s essays, short stories and small feuilletons, but also onto the pages of his great prose. The former idea of the vitality and indestructibility of philistinism is being replaced by a growing confidence in the victory of new human relations. The writer moved from general skepticism at the sight of seemingly invincible vulgarity to criticism of the old in the new and to the search for a positive hero. This is how a chain of stories of the 30s is gradually built up from “Youth Restored” (1933) through “The Blue Book” (1935) to “Retribution” (1936). In these works, negation and affirmation, pathos and irony, lyricism and satire, heroic and comic merged in a bizarre fusion.

In "Youth Restored" the author is especially interested in the interrelationship between sociological and biological, class-political and universal aspects. If previously the teaching tone appeared only in the finale of small feuilletons, now the features of didactics and preaching permeate the entire fabric of the work. Persuasion and suggestion gradually begin to crowd out the means of satirical ridicule and imperceptibly come to the fore, determining the very movement of the plot.

Compositionally, “Youth Restored” falls into three unequal parts. The first part is a series of short stories that precede the main content of the story and present in an unpretentiously funny form the author’s views on the possibility of returning youth. The last two short stories, as Zoshchenko himself noted, even “make you think about the need to learn to control yourself and your extremely complex body.”

Then follows the actual fictional part, dedicated to the story of how the elderly astronomy professor Volosatov regained his lost youth. And finally, the previous most extensive part concludes - scientific comments on the plot-narrative section of the work.

The genre uniqueness of Zoshchenko’s large prose paintings is undeniable. If “Youth Restored” could still be called a story with some degree of convention, then the other works of the lyrical-satirical trilogy (“Blue Book”, “Before Sunrise”, 1943) have tried and tested genre definitions - “novel”, “story”, “ memoirs" etc. - they didn’t come any more. Implementing his theoretical principles, which amounted to a synthesis of documentary and artistic genres, Zoshchenko created large works at the intersection of fiction and journalism in the 30s and 40s.

Although in the Blue Book general principles the combination of satirical and didactic, pathos and irony, touching and funny remained the same, much has changed compared to the previous book. So, for example, the method of active authorial intervention in the course of the narrative remains, but no longer in the form of scientific comments, but in a different form: each main section of the Blue Book is preceded by an introduction and ends with an afterword. Reworking his old short stories for this book, Zoshchenko not only frees them from the fantastic manner and half-criminal jargon, but also generously introduces an element of teaching. Many stories have introductory or concluding lines of a clearly didactic nature.

The general tone of "Blue Book" also changes in comparison with "Youth Restored" towards further clarification of the background. Here the author still acts primarily as a satirist and humorist, but in the book there is “more joy and hope than ridicule, and less irony than real, heartfelt and tender affection for people.”

There is no plot similarity between these works. At the same time, it is no coincidence that the writer called The Blue Book the second part of the trilogy. Got it here further development the theme of humanism, the problem of genuine and imaginary human happiness. This gives integrity to the heterogeneous historical and modern material and imparts internal grace and unity to the narrative.

In "Youth Restored" for the first time Zoshchenko sounded with great force the motif of the historical doom of the legacy of the old world, no matter how unshakable and tenacious it may seem at first. From this angle, the satirist’s primary task was redefined: “to beat out of people all the rubbish that has accumulated over thousands of years.”

Deepening social historicism is the achievement of the author of the Blue Book. The reader is presented with a kind of comic parade of the age-old values of a proprietary society, their poverty and squalor are shown against the backdrop of the ideals and achievements that the socialist revolution demonstrates to the world. Zoshchenko historically surveys the distant and relatively close past of humanity, the moral norms generated by the morality of owners. In accordance with this plan, the book is divided into five main sections: “Money”, “Love”, “Cunning”, “Failures” and “Amazing Events”.

In each of the first four sections, Zoshchenko takes the reader through different centuries and countries. So, for example, in “Money” the satirist tells how in Ancient Rome the praetorians traded for the throne of the emperor, how popes absolved sins for money, how His Serene Highness Prince Menshikov finally stole, coveting the chervonets that the St. Petersburg merchants presented to Peter I on his name day. The satirist, in a comically reduced manner, retells the events of world history associated with the constant triumph of the golden calf, he says about the blood and dirt that has stuck to money over the years.

Zoshchenko uses the material of a historical anecdote to make from it not only a murderous satirical sketch of the knights of profit, but also a parable, that is, to lead a contemporary to comprehend the genesis of those vices of the past that have been preserved in the bourgeois and ordinary people of our days.

Historical excursions of Zoshchenko have an accurate and verified address. The satirist, remembering emperors and kings, princes and dukes, takes aim at home-grown grabbers and burners, whom he talks about in comic short stories.

History and modernity are tied here in a tight knot. Events of the past are reflected in comic novels today, as in a series of crooked mirrors. Using their effect, the satirist projects the false grandeur of the past onto the screen new era, which is why both the past and the absurdities that still remain in life take on a particularly stupid and unsightly appearance.

A number of responses to the Blue Book correctly noted the fundamental innovation of this writer’s work. “Zoshchenko saw in the past,” wrote A. Dymshits, “not only the prototypes of modern philistines, but also saw in it the sprouts of our revolution, which he spoke about with great lyricism in the best section of the Blue Book in all respects - its fifth section -” Amazing events." The pathetic and lyrical fifth section, crowning the book as a whole, gave it a sublime character.

The heroic-romantic and educational principle became more and more boldly and decisively asserted in Zoshchenko’s prose in the second half of the 30s. The writer develops the artistic principles of “Youth Restored” and “The Blue Book” in a series of new novellas and short stories.

In 1936, three stories were completed: “The Black Prince”, “The Talisman (The Sixth Story by I.P. Belkin)”, which is a brilliant stylization of Pushkin’s prose in form and content, and “Retribution”. In "Retribution" the writer moved from trying to concisely talk about the best people of the revolution to detailing their lives and activities.

The completion of the heroic and educational-didactic line in Zoshchenko’s work of the 30s are two cycles of stories - stories for children and stories about Lenin (1939). Now we know how natural and organic the appearance of these works was for the artist. But at one time they created a sensation among readers and critics, who saw the popular humorist from an unexpected side to many.

In 1940, Detizdat published a book of stories for children, “The Most Important Thing.” Here we are not talking about choosing a profession, not about “who to be,” because for Zoshchenko the main thing is what to be. The theme of the formation of high morality is the same as in works for adults, but it is revealed in relation to the children's level of perception and thinking. The writer teaches children to be brave and strong, smart and kind. With a gentle and cheerful smile, he talks about animals, recalls episodes from his childhood ("Christmas Tree", "Grandma's Gift"), being able to extract from everywhere moral lesson and convey it to the young reader in an extremely simple and intelligible form.

Zoshchenko approached the Leninist theme for about twenty years. The first and, perhaps, the only test of strength was “The Story of How Semyon Semenovich Kurochkin Met Lenin,” written back in the first half of the 20s, which was then reprinted under the title “Historical Story.” The writer returned to this topic only at the end of the 30s, enriched by the experience of developing historical and revolutionary issues, having experienced a significant change in worldview and creativity.

Zoshchenko wrote sixteen stories about Lenin (twelve of them were published in 1939). They reveal the traits of Lenin's character. But in general, the book of short stories recreates the earthly and charming image of a leader who embodied all the best that revolutionary Russia put forward.

Zoshchenko also intended stories about Lenin for children. Therefore, from the many components of Lenin’s personality, the main thing was carefully selected, that which is accessible to the young consciousness and without which the idea of Lenin is unthinkable. The artistic form of stories is also subject to this task.

Although the main provisions of this book were inspired by the memoirs of Gorky and Mayakovsky’s poem about Lenin, their specific implementation was innovative, and therefore Zoshchenko’s short stories were perceived by critics and readers as a discovery.

During the Great Patriotic War, Mikhail Zoshchenko lived in Alma-Ata. The tragedy of blockaded Leningrad, the menacing attacks near Moscow, the great battle on the Volga, the battle on the Kursk Bulge - all this was deeply felt in the unobscured city on the slopes of Ala-Tau. In an effort to contribute to the common cause of defeating the enemy, Zoshchenko writes a lot on front-line topics. Here we should name film scripts for short films, small satirical plays("The Cuckoo and the Crows" and "The Fritz's Pipe" - 1942), a number of short stories "From the Stories of Soldiers" and humoresques published in "Ogonyok", "Crocodile", "Red Army Soldier", the film story "Soldier's Happiness".

During the same period, the writer continued to work on his largest work of the war years - the final part of the trilogy, the idea of which arose back in the 30s. In the article “About my trilogy” M. Zoshchenko wrote:

“Now I’m thinking of starting a new book, which will be the last in my trilogy, begun by “Youth Recovered” and continued by “The Blue Book”. All these three books, although not united by a single plot, are connected by an internal idea.” Revealing the content of the new work, the writer noted that “the last book of the trilogy is conceived to be much more complex; it will have a slightly different approach to all the material than in “Youth Restored” and “The Blue Book”, and the issues that I touched on in the previous two books will be completed in a special chapter of the new book.

This book will bear little resemblance to ordinary fiction. It will be more of a treatise, philosophical and journalistic, than fiction." The story "Before Sunrise" (1943) is indeed "little like" ordinary prose. Elements of a philosophical-journalistic treatise and essay memoir literature presented here with greater completeness than in the previous books of the trilogy. But the fundamental difference between the third part lies elsewhere. The story “Before Sunrise” does not continue, but in many ways revises the principles developed by the writer before. The gap between intentions and creative result led the author to ideological and artistic failure.

The miscalculation was that the writer focused his attention on the gloom, melancholy, and obsession with fear, and thereby began to move back from the major and optimism of the first parts of the trilogy. The place of bright lyrics was taken by a gloomy and sometimes simply boring narrative, only occasionally illuminated by the semblance of a faint smile. In the story “Before Sunrise” Zoshchenko made another miscalculation, completely freeing his narrative from humor, seriously turning to medicine and physiology for help in understanding social problems.

In the war and post-war years, M. Zoshchenko did not create works that significantly deepened his own achievements the previous time. His humor has faded and weakened significantly. Much of what was written during the stormy years of the war was received with gratitude by the reader and had a positive response in critical articles and reviews. Yu. German spoke about the difficult voyage of our warships in the Arctic Ocean during the Great Patriotic War. There were enemy mines all around, a thick red fog hung over. The sailors' mood is far from positive. But then one of the officers began to read Zoshchenko’s “Rogulka” (1943), which had just been published in a front-line newspaper.

"The people at the table began to laugh. At first they smiled, then someone snorted, then the laughter became general, endemic. People, who had hitherto turned to the portholes every minute, literally cried with laughter: the menacing mine suddenly turned into a funny and stupid flyer. Laughter conquered fatigue.. . laughter turned out stronger than that a psychic attack that had been going on for four days."

This story was placed on a board where the numbers of the marching combat leaflet were posted, and then went around all the ships of the Northern Fleet.

In the feuilletons, stories, dramatic scenes, and scripts created by M. Zoshchenko in 1941-1945, on the one hand, the theme of pre-war satirical and humorous creativity is continued (stories and feuilletons about the negative phenomena of life in the rear), on the other hand (and the majority of such works) - the theme of a struggling and victorious people is developed.

A special place in Zoshchenko’s work belongs to the book of partisan stories. In the partisan cycle, the writer again turned to the peasant, village theme - almost a quarter of a century after he wrote the first stories about peasants. This meeting with the same theme in a new historical era brought both creative excitement and difficulties. The author was not able to overcome all of them (the narrative sometimes takes on a somewhat conventionally literary character, with book-correct speech coming from the lips of the characters), but he still accomplished the main task. What we have before us is really not a collection of short stories, but a book with a coherent plot.

In the 50s, M. Zoshchenko created a number of stories and feuilletons, a cycle of “Literary Anecdotes”, and devoted a lot of time and energy to translations. The translation of the book by the Finnish writer M. Lassila “Behind the Matches” is especially remarkable for its high skill.

When you think about the main thing in Zoshchenko’s work, the words of his colleague in literature come to mind. Speaking at the discussion of the Blue Book, V. Sayanov classified Zoshchenko as one of the most democratic writers and linguists:

“Zoshchenko’s stories are democratic not only in language, but also in their characters. It is no coincidence that other humor writers have not and will not be able to take the plot of Zoshchenko’s stories. They lack Zoshchenko’s great internal ideological positions. Zoshchenko is as democratic in prose as Mayakovsky was democratic in poetry."

Gorky’s assessments are of fundamental importance for characterizing M. Zoshchenko’s contribution to Soviet satirical and humorous literature. M. Gorky closely followed the development of the artist’s talent, suggested themes for some of his works, and invariably supported his searches in new genres and directions. For example, M. Gorky saw the “hidden significance” of the story “The Lilac is Blooming,” energetically supported the innovative book “Letters to a Writer,” and briefly analyzed the “Blue Book,” specially noting:

“In this work, your unique talent is revealed even more confidently and brightly than in your previous ones.

The originality of the book will probably not immediately be appreciated as highly as it deserves, but this should not discourage you" (p. 166).

M. Gorky especially highly appreciated the comic art of the writer: “Your qualities as a satirist are obvious, the sense of irony is very sharp, and the lyricism accompanies it in an extremely original way. I don’t know of such a ratio of irony and lyricism in anyone’s literature” (p. 159).

Zoshchenko's works had great value not only for the development of satirical and humorous literature in the 20-30s. His work became a significant social phenomenon, the moral authority of satire and its role in social and moral education thanks to Zoshchenko increased enormously.

Mikhail Zoshchenko managed to convey the originality of the nature of a man in a transitional time, unusually brightly, sometimes in sad-ironic, sometimes in lyrical-humorous lighting, showed how the historical breakdown of his character took place. Paving his path, he set an example for many young writers trying their hand in the complex and difficult art of convicting with laughter.