There is a widespread opinion that there are no fundamental differences between the ways of depicting reality in folklore and in fiction. Both here and here reality is portrayed equally faithfully and truthfully. So, for example, M. M. Plisetsky, in his book devoted to the historicism of Russian epics, does not agree with those who claim that the epic depicts not the events of a particular era, but its aspirations.
Why, he asks, historical events are depicted, for example, in songs about the capture of Kazan, about Stepan Razin, why “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign” can correctly depict the Polovtsian campaign against the Russians, why L. N. Tolstoy in the novel “War and Peace” or A. N. Tolstoy in the novel “Peter the Great” could depict many historical figures and events, but the epic cannot do this? “Why is this not allowed for epics?” - exclaims the author. So, there is no fundamental difference in the depiction of reality between epics, historical songs, “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” and historical novels of the 19th-20th centuries.
This opinion, in which the author does not take into account either the artistic means of the genres of folklore and literature, or the social environment that creates art, or the centuries of historical development of the people, despite its obvious and somewhat primitive anti-historicity, is quite typical for a number of modern works. The same truthful depiction of reality as for epics is allowed even for fairy tales.
In fairy tales, for example, they look for reflections of those forms of class struggle that took place in the 19th century. Thus, E. A. Tudorovskaya writes the following about the fairy tale: “The primordial class enmity between the oppressor-serf owners and the oppressed people is truthfully shown.” But when it comes to examples, it turns out the following: “Baba Yaga, the “mistress” of the forest and animals, is portrayed as a real exploiter who oppresses her animal servants...”. According to E. A. Tudorovskaya, the class struggle in a fairy tale takes on “the appearance of fiction.” “This somewhat limits the realism of the fairy tale.”
Thus, a fairy tale is realistic, but it has one drawback: it is fiction, and this reduces and limits its realism. The logical consequence of such an opinion would be the statement that if there were no fiction in the fairy tale, it would be better.
Such curious opinions would not be worth mentioning if E. A. Tudorovskaya’s point of view were isolated. But others share it. Thus, V.P. Anikin writes: “Direct life socio-historical experience is the source of a truthful depiction of reality in oral creativity people." Anikin sees class struggle in fairy tales about animals.
He declares them allegories. “Social allegorism is the most important property folk tales about animals, and without this allegorical meaning the fairy tale would not be needed by the people.” Thus, the people do not need a fairy tale as such.
All that is needed is an allegorical social meaning. The author is trying to prove that the wolf is a “people's oppressor.” The bear also belongs to the same oppressors. In the realm of fairy tales, Koschey and other antagonists of the hero are classified as oppressors of the social order.
Fairness requires noting that V.P. Anikin’s book contains many correct observations. But in the years when this book was written, such concepts were considered to some extent mandatory and progressive.
We will not go into further polemics, but we will try to approach the question of how reality is depicted in folklore, what means it has for this, and what are the specific differences between folklore and realist literature, not through abstract speculation, but by studying the material itself.
We will see that folklore has specific laws of its poetics, different from the methods of professional artistic creativity. The question should be posed historically; However, before doing this, it is necessary to understand the picture of what is available today.
We will consider folklore monuments based on records of the 18th-20th centuries, moving aside historical study process of addition and development for the future. We will only consider Russian folklore. Such a descriptive study must be done before starting a historical-comparative study.
There are patterns that are common to all or many genres of folklore, and there are patterns that are specific only to individual genres. We will consider the issue of genres, not at all striving for an exhaustive description of them, but limiting ourselves to the framework of the problem of the relationship of folklore to reality.
We will begin our study with a fairy tale as a genre in which the question of attitude to reality is relatively simple. At the same time, it is the fairy tale that allows us to reveal some general laws narrative genres in general.
Speaking about a fairy tale, it is necessary to remember the statement of V.I. Lenin: “In every fairy tale there are elements of reality...”. The most cursory glance at the fairy tale is enough to verify the correctness of this statement. IN fairy tales There are fewer of these elements, but more of it in other types.
Animals such as fox, wolf, bear, hare, rooster, goat and others are precisely those animals with which the peasant deals; Men and women, old men and old women, stepmothers and stepdaughters, soldiers, gypsies, farm laborers, priests and landowners passed from life into fairy tales.
The fairy tale reflects both prehistoric reality and medieval customs and morals and social relations feudal times and capitalist times. All these elements of reality are carefully studied by Soviet and foreign science, and very significant literature already exists about them.
However, taking a closer look at Lenin's words, we see that Lenin does not at all claim that a fairy tale consists entirely of elements of reality. He only says that they “are” in her. As soon as we turn to the question of what these realistic men, women, soldiers or other characters are doing in a fairy tale, that is, we turn to the plots, we will immediately plunge into the world of the impossible and fictional.
Just take the pointer fairy tales Aarne-Andreev and open at least the “Novelistic Fairy Tales” section there to immediately make sure that this is so. Where in life are these jesters who deceive everyone in the world and are never defeated? Are there such cunning thieves in life who steal eggs from under a duck or a sheet from under a landowner and his wife? Are obstinate wives tamed in real life as in fairy tales, and are there such fools in the world who look down the barrel of a gun to see how the bullet will fly out? There is not a single plausible plot in a Russian fairy tale.
We will not go into details, but will focus on only one as a sample typical example. This is a tale about an ill-fated dead man. IN general outline things happen as follows. The fool accidentally kills his mother: she falls into a trap or falls into a hole that the fool dug in front of the house.
Sometimes, however, he kills her deliberately; She hides in the chest to find out what the fool is talking about with his family, and he knows it and fills the chest with boiling water. He puts the mother's corpse in the sleigh, gives her the hoop or bottom, comb and spindle, and rides off. The noble troika rushes towards us. He doesn't turn off the road and gets knocked over.
The fool shouts that they killed his mother, the royal goldsmith. They give him one hundred rubles as compensation. He moves on and now puts the corpse in the cellar with the priest; He gives his dead mother a jug of sour cream and a spoon. Popadya thinks she is a thief and hits her on the head with a stick. The fool again receives a hundred rubles in compensation. After this, he puts her in a boat and lowers it down the river. The boat runs into the fishermen's nets.
The fishermen hit the corpse with an oar, it falls into the water and drowns. The fool shouts that his mother has drowned. He also receives a hundred rubles from the fishermen. He comes home with the money and tells his brothers that he sold his mother in the city at the bazaar. The brothers kill their wives and take them to sell. The gendarmes take them to prison, and the brothers' property goes to the fool. With this property and the money he brought, he begins to live happily ever after.
There is another version of this tale, which, however, can be considered a different tale. Here things happen a little differently. A man's wife treats her lover. My husband is watching.
While she goes to the cellar for butter, her husband kills her lover and puts a pancake in his mouth so that they think he has choked. Then tricks begin with the corpse, which may partly coincide with the previous version, partly have a different form.
In this case, you need to get rid of the corpse in order to clear yourself of suspicion of murder. A man leans a corpse against the house where it is happening wedding feast, and starts swearing. The guests jump out, think that the man leaning against the wall was swearing, and hit him on the head. Seeing him dead, they get scared and, in order to get rid of the dead man, tie him to a horse and let him go.
The horse runs into the forest and spoils the hunter's traps. The hunter beats the dead man and thinks he has killed him. He puts the corpse in the boat, and the action ends, as in previous version: the ill-fated dead man falls into the water from a blow from a fisherman, and the corpse disappears.
If modern Soviet writer decided to write a story about how his mother was killed and how the killer then used the corpse to extort money, then no publishing house would have published such a story, and if it had been published, it would have caused justified indignation among readers.
Meanwhile, the fairy tale does not cause any indignation among the people, despite the fact that the peasants treat the dead with some special reverence. This tale is popular not only among Russians, but among many European peoples. It even reached the Indians of North America.
Why could such an outrageous story become popular? This became possible only because this fairy tale is a cheerful farce. Neither the narrator nor the listener relates the story to reality. A researcher can and should relate it to reality and determine which aspects of everyday life brought this plot to life, but this no longer belongs to the field artistic perception, but scientific. This is not reduced, limited or fairy-tale realism, it is not an allegory or a fable, it is a fairy tale.
We dwelled on this example in such detail because it is indicative and typical for the question of the relationship of a fairy tale to reality.
A fairy tale is a deliberate and poetic fiction. It is never presented as reality. “A fairy tale is a twist, a song is a story,” says the proverb. “The tale is beautiful, the song is beautiful.” Having finished the story, they say: “That’s the whole story, you can’t lie anymore.” IN modern language the word "fairy tale" is a synonym for the word "lie".
But what then attracts a fairy tale if the depiction of reality is not its goal? First of all, it attracts with the unusualness of its narrative. The discrepancy with reality, fiction as such, gives special pleasure.
In fables, reality is deliberately turned inside out, and this is their whole charm for the people. True, the extraordinary also occurs in fiction.
In romantic prose it is stronger (the novels of Walter Scott, Hugo), in realistic prose it is weaker (Chekhov). In literature, the extraordinary is depicted as possible, evoking emotions of horror, or admiration, or surprise, and we believe in the possibility of what is depicted.
In folk prose, the extraordinaryness is such that in fact it would be impossible in life. True, in everyday fairy tales in most cases there is no violation of the laws of nature. Everything that is being told, in fact, could have happened. But still, the events described are so extraordinary that they could never have happened in reality, and this is why they arouse interest.
V.Ya. Propp. Poetics of folklore - M., 1998
To artistically - expressive means paintings includecolor, stroke, line, spot, color and light contrast, coloring, shape, composition, texture.
Color. Every living and inanimate object has its own color. Just like color, lighting plays a huge role. The effects of color, location in space, air condition affect color. The beauty that we admire and love is the colorful richness of reality, or otherwise color.
The artist conveys with the help of color, color sensations, color combinations, harmony of cold and warm colors all the variety of moods and feelings. And to treat them - joy, anticipation, anxiety, sadness, tenderness.
Brushstroke in painting - a trace of a brush with paint left by an artist on canvas, paper, cardboard. The technique depends on the individual style of the artist; it is very diverse.
Line and spot – a clear outline of a specific object on the canvas with paint. A spot is a tonal, silhouette image of an object. For example, to better understand this expression, let’s look at a spot - a snowy spruce against the background of the distant sky. Or a hill in the dark night sky. It is easier to imagine a line by looking at any picture. Clear lines outline the shadow of one or another object, enhancing feelings of sadness or joy.
Color and light contrast in painting, an example is the sharply highlighting the light and dark relationships of spots and areas of the picture.
Color - a system of color tones, their combinations and relationships in a work of art.
Texture - the surface of the paint layer of a painting: glossy or matte, continuous or discontinuous, smooth or uneven.
Composition – the arrangement of all objects, elements and parts of the work in a certain system and sequence for a better disclosure of the artistic image.
Here we will look atshape and design (structure) of an object, we will see artistic and expressive means -tone, stroke, line.
The shape of objects is determined by outline, contour, silhouette. In simplified form - square, triangle, circle, rectangle. Each item in a simplified form is similar to geometric figure. For example, a ball is round, a TV is a rectangle, a clown’s carnival cap is a triangle.
Design (structure) of objects - the basis of the head start, the framework of the structure of objects. The design of each object is one or another geometric body. Geometric bodies - cylinder, ball, cone, parallelepiped, cube, pyramid. Very often, looking at an object, we see that it has several geometric bodies. In drawing there is a method of drawing, or it is more often called “draft”, when you draw its structure, design, which are not visible to our eyes.
Silhouette in fine art (graphic technique) is a type of graphic representation of an object. This is a monochromatic, flat image of an object. Usually silhouettes are drawn with ink on a light background, or with white on a black background, or a figure is cut out from dark or light paper and glued onto a sheet of a different tone.
Composition in fine graphics – the arrangement of all objects, elements and parts of the work in a certain system and sequence for a better disclosure of the artistic image. The composition is presented in a circle, square, oval, rectangle.
Expressive means of painting, the sequence of execution of a thematic composition, the artist pre-makessketches, studies, drawings, sketches,
thereby creating a picture.
He definitely creates it for someone, assuming that it will be read, listened to, taken away and appreciated. Art is dialogical; it is always an interaction between at least two people - the creator and the viewer. Capturing themes that concern him in artistic images, raising from the depths of his soul subtle experiences and impressions of something, the artist offers with his work themes for reflection, empathy or debate, and the role of the viewer is to understand, accept, and comprehend them. That is why the perception work of art- this is serious work associated with both mental and spiritual activity, sometimes requiring special preparation and special aesthetic, cultural and historical knowledge, then the work is revealed, its scope expands, demonstrating the full depth of the artist’s personality and worldview.
Kinds visual arts
The art of representation is the most ancient look creative activity of man, accompanying him for thousands of years. Even in prehistoric times he painted figures of animals, giving them magical power.
The main types of fine arts are painting, graphics and sculpture. In their creativity, artists use various materials and techniques, creating in a completely special way artistic images the surrounding world. Painting uses all the richness of colors and shades for this, graphics uses only the play of shadows and strict graphic lines, sculpture creates three-dimensional tangible images. Painting and sculpture, in turn, are divided into easel and monumental. Easel works are created on special machines or easels for intimate display at exhibitions or in museum halls, and monumental works paintings and sculptures decorate the facades or walls of buildings and city squares.
Types of fine art are also arts and crafts, which often acts as a synthesis of painting, graphics and sculpture. The art of decorating household items is sometimes distinguished by such invention and originality that it loses its utilitarian function. Household items created talented artists, occupy pride of place at exhibitions and in museum halls.
Painting
Painting still occupies one of the priority places in artistic creativity. This is an art that can do a lot. With the help of a brush and paints, it is able to convey most fully all the beauty and diversity visible world. Each image created by an artist is not only a reflection of external reality, it contains deeply internal content, feelings, emotions of the creator, his thoughts and experiences.
Color and light are the two main expressions in painting, but there are many techniques for performing work. oil gouache, pastel, tempera. Painting techniques also include mosaic and stained glass art.
Graphic arts
Graphics is a type of fine art that, compared to painting, does not strive to convey all the colorful fullness of the surrounding world; its language is more conventional and symbolic. A graphic image is a drawing created by a combination of lines, spots and strokes of predominantly one black color, sometimes with limited use of one or more additional colors - most often red.
VLASOVA Irina Lvovna, literature teacher
Theater Art and Technical College of Moscow
About some ways of depicting reality in the works of N.V. Gogol
His article about N.V. Gogol V. Nabokov begins like this: “Nikolai Gogol is the most unusual poet and prose writer that Russia has ever produced.”
Gogol often walked on the wrong side of the street that everyone else walked on, sometimes he put his right shoe on his left foot, and he arranged the furniture in his room in disarray. This “most unusual poet and prose writer” entered Russian literature “In the evenings on a farm near Dikanka,” and then decided to “show at least one side of the whole of Russia.”
He showed Russia not “from one side,” but absolutely. From Uncle Miny and Uncle Mitya to the bird-troika, from the village house where Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna lived, to the most mystical city of Russia, once founded in a swamp and human bones to those who “raised Russia on its hind legs with an iron bridle.”
“I just read Evenings near Dikanka,” wrote A.S. Pushkin to a friend. “They amazed me.” This is real gaiety, sincere, relaxed, without affectation, without stiffness.” When, shortly before Pushkin’s death, Gogol read him a draft of the first chapter of “Dead Souls,” he exclaimed: “God, how sad our Russia is!”
Portraying our sad Russia, the writer never ceases to amaze us. He burst into literature with the gaiety of “Evenings...”, where everything is so unusual: the devil is a vehicle, the witch is a charming woman. There they steal a month, the capricious lady demands the shoe from the royal foot. Dumplings and dumplings themselves are dipped in sour cream and jump into your mouth. I was truly surprised and surprised! There will also be a story “Taras Bulba”. In it, he fiercely executes his hero: Taras will not only die painfully, he will also see terrible death Ostap. The writer will never have anything like this again. Then he will pay attention to the conflict that his brilliant fellow writers explored before him - the conflict of the hero with the environment. The same one that is known precisely for the fact that it always eats up someone (how many times will we hear: “Wednesday has eaten up”!) But if Pushkin, Griboyedov, Lermontov were more interested in the hero, and Wednesday was represented by a series of guests at Famusov’s ball or at Tatyana Larina’s name day, in Pechorin’s murderous descriptions (“a drunken captain with a red face,” “a lady in a low neckline and with a wart on her neck,” “a countess, usually sweating in her bathroom at this hour”), then Gogol has all his interest is directed precisely to this environment. That environment where the bride is chosen according to the amount of movable and immovable property, knowledge French, by weight (well, just like a goose at the market!), where you can buy dead souls. To describe this very environment, the writer uses unique artistic media. Most often, his hero travels along the road (so beloved by Gogol the principle of “long, long journey»!) He goes and observes the life of the old-world village in which Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna lived; in the glorious city of Mirgorod, on central square where the famous puddle never dries up, along the banks of which several generations of Mirgorod residents grew up; in the provincial townNN, where one scoundrel decided to buy dead souls, and five scoundrels sold them (one even gave them as a gift!); in the city of St. Petersburg, where Pushkin had already noticed the devilry, in the city where “the demon himself lights the lights.”
In my opinion, in the writer’s work (except for “Evenings...” and “Taras Bulba”) two themes that are most important to him can be distinguished: provincial Russia and St. Petersburg. He paints a portrait of the city and its character so powerfully that his Petersburg no longer becomes so much a place of action as a hero of the story. A hero who interferes with the fate of a character, invades his life, changing it. The writer introduces his heroes to the reader, starting with a portrait. And he describes the city, starting from the main street. She is the face of the city, its calling card (like the nose, which, according to the writer, is the calling card of the face) And the reader probably wants to know what kind of city this is, where (as in the cityNN) you can buy dead souls. Or what kind of city is this, where sideburns and mustaches walk independently along the main street, where Major Kovalev’s nose “disappears for no reason, for no reason” and lives independently.
Pushkin noticed some strangeness in this, perhaps, the most mystical city of Russia in his time (it was this strangeness that drove poor Eugene, who challenged the Bronze Horseman himself, crazy). Then F.M. will tell you a lot of interesting things about this strangeness. Dostoevsky. He will show us this city as a city without people (“White Nights”). Here the hero lives among bridges, streets, pavements, houses, stone walls and communicates with them as with friends, with acquaintances. This strange world– his world, his and the City. For Dostoevsky, this city is a two-faced Janus, one side of which is beautiful (balls, beautiful women, the shine of diamonds), and the other is ugly. On this side they drink, steal, here the stairs are filled with slop, here children get sick and die, here crazy ideas are born. On the streets of this side of the city the most happening terrible tragedies. This strangeness will later be seen by A.A. Blok, whose hero finds himself in a vicious circle: “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy.” You can’t break out of this circle: “If you die, you’ll start over again, // And everything will repeat itself as before: // Night, the icy ripples of the canal, // Pharmacy, street, lantern.”
Charming and frightening, this City is approaching us: “And beyond the bridge it flies towards me // A horseman’s hand in an iron glove // And two hooves of his horse” (N.S. Gumilyov)
A.N. Tolstoy, in his novel “Sisters,” recalled a drunken sexton who, two centuries before the events he described, driving past, shouted: “Petersburg be empty!” So it went from then on: either the Bronze Horseman galloped along the pavements, then the nose of the unfortunate major went on a spree, then the deceased official raged in the wasteland like a ghost, tearing the greatcoats from the shoulders of passing influential persons. If Pushkin and Dostoevsky, Blok and Bely noted the amazing strangeness of this City, then Gogol understood everything to the end and told about it in such a way that everyone who wrote after him “... only more fully reveals the city of Gogol, and does not create some new image of it. It is no wonder that Petersburg revealed all its quirkiness when the most bizarre person in all of Russia began to walk along its streets, for that is what it is, Petersburg: a blurry reflection in a mirror...; pale gray nights instead of the usual black ones and black days - for example, the “black day” of a shabby official” (V. Nabokov)
In his article “St. Petersburg Notes of 1836” N.V. Gogol wrote: “It is difficult to grasp the general expression of St. Petersburg, because disunity reigns in this city: as if a huge stagecoach arrived at the tavern, in which each passenger sat closed the whole way and entered the common room only because there was no other place.” . On Nevsky Prospekt - the “universal communication of St. Petersburg” - there is a different picture. Here everyone has their own movement at their own time. Only the location of the action does not change - Nevsky Prospekt. Gogol had previously begun his description of any city with a description of its main street. And there was always some kind of catch in this description. Well, for example, the famous Mirgorod puddle. The writer dedicates a poem to this puddle and sings a hymn! All in superlatives, all exclamation marks! It's big, like a lake. It does not dry out in summer and does not freeze in winter. All the townspeople love her and are very proud of her. A few more touches (a pig lying in the center of a puddle, chickens pecking grain on the porch of a public place) - and here it is, a portrait of the city! Wow, a city whose main and, by the way, only attraction is an unforgettable puddle!
So Gogol begins his description of the “beauty of our capital” Nevsky Prospect with an obvious catch: “There is nothing better than Nevsky Prospect.” After such an enthusiastic exclamation there is a whole series of proofs: he is good because everyone loves him; they love it because everyone walks along it; they walk on it because it is good. “How clean its sidewalks are swept, and, God, how many feet have left their traces on it! And clumsy dirty boot a retired soldier, under whose weight the very granite seems to crack, and the miniature, light as smoke, shoe of a young lady..., and the rattling saber of a hopeful ensign, making a sharp scratch on it - everything takes out on him the power of strength and the power of weakness.” . Is it possible now, after reading the description of all kinds of traces and even scratches, to believe in the unimaginable purity of the “universal communication of St. Petersburg,” its “main beauty”? And what is the writer’s statement, which was subsequently unconfirmed by anything, that “a person met on Nevsky Prospect is less selfish than in Morskaya, Gorokhovaya, Liteinaya, Meshchanskaya and other streets.” N.V. Gogol paints Nevsky in different time days. The character of the city, its mood, its smell change every minute, it fascinates with this elusiveness, this changeability. Early in the morning “... all of St. Petersburg smells of hot, freshly baked bread and is filled with old women... making their raids on churches and compassionate passers-by.” Well, isn’t at least this phrase about old women worth a lot! Next, the writer comes to a conclusion (presumably based on close observation): he trudges along Nevsky Prospekt to work until 12 o’clock. the right people"or "a sleepy official will sneak into the department." “At 12 o’clock Nevsky Prospekt is a pedagogical prospect,” because it is “raided by tutors ... with their pets.” The old women who raid churches and the tutors who raid Nevsky Prospect will then be replaced by mustaches and sideburns. It turns out that sideburns “velvet, satin, black, like sable or coal” are the privilege of only one foreign board. Those serving in other departments, “to their greatest trouble (and why trouble, and even the greatest?) are destined to wear red hair.” This procession of mustaches and sideburns of all styles and colors is accompanied by the smells of “delicious perfumes and aromas.” And then, completely independently, “thousands of varieties of hats, dresses, scarves”, narrow waists, ladies’ sleeves march. And the inhabitants and smells here will change endlessly, the nature of the “universal communication of St. Petersburg” will change. But then comes that magical time when “... lamps give everything some kind of tempting, wonderful light.” Now Nevsky Prospekt consists of two parallel straight lines: Nevsky daytime and Nevsky night. The story is based on a comparison of two storylines. When describing the daytime Nevsky, Gogol turns to the principle of detail in the description: endless external signs (sideburns, mustaches, ranks, hats, boots, etc.) In the evening, when the lanterns are lit, the City fascinates, captures and sends the seeker in different directions beauty (artist Piskarev) and adventurer (Lieutenant Pirogov). Both of them are in for a complete fiasco. Only now the beauty seeker will die, and the adventure seeker will get off with a slight fright and will forget himself in the pastry shop, eating pies. And the evening mazurka will completely calm him down. There is a complete discrepancy between the tragic meaning and the ironic intonation in the description of these events. This is fully confirmed by the writer himself at the end of the story: “Oh, don’t believe this Nevsky Prospect!” “Everything is a deception, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems!.. He lies at all times, this Nevsky Prospekt, but most of all when the night falls on him in a condensed mass... and when the demon himself lights the lamps just so that show everything not in its real form.” So why be surprised in a city where “the demon himself lights the lights”? It is clear that this is where the strangest things should happen: the artist will give in to temptation and, for the sake of fame and wealth, will pledge his soul to the devil. What seems only at first glance to be “perfect nonsense”, but in fact an “extraordinarily strange incident” will happen: Major Kovalev’s nose turned out to be (how?) baked in dough, thrown into the Neva (under what circumstances?). Then, with the rank of state councilor, he traveled around St. Petersburg and was spotted in church. By the way, he flatly refused to have a close relationship with Major Kovalev! "I am on my own. Moreover, there cannot be any close relations between us. Judging by the buttons on your uniform, you should serve in the Senate, or at least in the Justice Department. I'm a scientist." Then, finally, the runaway nose returned to its rightful place, “between Major Kovalev’s two cheeks.” Nikolai Vasilyevich states quite authoritatively that such incidents are “rare, but they do happen.” And as evidence he writes: “But here the incident is completely obscured by fog, and absolutely nothing is known what happened next.” So here you go! Gogol is always like this. As soon as we get to the solution, he will definitely promise to tell you later or, even better, suddenly declare that it doesn’t matter now.
Gogol later excludes the theme of the major’s nightmare, suggested in the original version. Everything would be simple: the strange incident turned out to be simple strange dream. IN final version poor Kovalev pinched himself twice to make sure whether this was a dream or a terrible reality. Alas! Instead of “... a rather good and moderate nose, a very stupid, even and smooth place.” There is no life without a nose: you have to cover yourself with a scarf in public, you can’t get married, you can’t sniff tobacco, you can’t make a solid career! The nose is the “peak” of external dignity, and not “some little toe.” Nobody will see it (in the sense of a finger) in a boot. And this is the nose! “And why did he run out into the middle of his face?” – the writer once joked. Major Kovalev without a nose finds himself “outside the citizenship of the capital.” He is now completely outside of people. This makes him similar to the hero of the story “Notes of a Madman,” poor fellow Poprishchin, who “has no place in the world,” who speaks “in himself.” Life will drive him crazy. At the end of the story “Notes of a Madman,” we see Gogol’s beloved images of the troika, the road, and we hear the sound of a bell: “Give me a troika of horses as fast as a whirlwind!” ... ring my bell, soar, horses, and carry me from this world!”
“There is no place in the world” for the unfortunate Bashmachkin. He died, and “Petersburg was left without Akaki Akakievich, as if he had never been there.” Gogol explained to the reader why his hero was so unattractive (“short, somewhat pockmarked, somewhat blind, with a small bald spot on his forehead, with wrinkles on both sides of his cheeks...”): “What can we do! The St. Petersburg climate is to blame.” The beginning of the story is replete with an incredible amount of details: where was the bed of the woman in labor, who stood on right hand, who on the left, which of the relatives (up to the brother-in-law) wore boots, etc. Then only the main event is described - the choice of name. In the case of our hero, read “fate”. Choosing a name begins with total bad luck. According to the calendar, “the names were all like this”: Mokiy, Sossiy and Khozdazat, then Trifiliy, Dula and Varakhasiy. “Well, I see that apparently this is his fate. If so, it would be better for him to be called like his father. The father was Akaki, so let the son be Akaki.” The child was baptized and he began to cry. Let us note that he cried, not notifying the world, saying, I was born, love me, but “as if he had a presentiment that there would be a titular councilor.” This is simply a sentence: to be in this life, like his father, Akaki, and to be a titular adviser. There will be no other fate. You'll pay here! Then about fifty years falls out of the description. There is probably nothing to talk about - just rewriting of papers. They put papers on him, he took them, “looking only at the paper, without looking who gave it to him,” and copied them. So he lived among papers, letters, and rewriting. In some kind of little world of his own, outside of which nothing existed for him. In this little world, however, he lives quite happily: so, having peed to his heart’s content, he went to bed, “smiling at the thought of tomorrow: “Will God send you something to rewrite tomorrow?” In “The Overcoat,” Gogol describes three main events in the hero’s life: the choice of a name, the construction of a new overcoat, and death. The apotheosis of Akaki Akakievich’s entire life will be the overcoat. With this fateful decision - to sew a new overcoat - everything changed in his life. This period of Bashmachkin’s life is his spiritual rise. Before this, Akakiy Akakievich expressed himself “mostly in prepositions, adverbs, and, finally, in particles that absolutely do not have any meaning ... he even had the habit of not finishing the phrase at all, ... thinking that he had already said everything.” For Gogol, the speech characteristics of the hero are very important. Let's compare Bashmachkin's speech before and after the decision to sew an overcoat. “And here I come to you, Petrovich, that...” After making a decision, he completely changes. He “somehow became more alive, ... the doubt disappeared from his face.” Communication with letters is not enough for him; he is drawn to people. He became talkative: “He visited Petrovich to talk about the overcoat.” Why, he became a dreamer, he became daring and courageous: “Should I put a marten on my collar?” Well what! For him, the future overcoat is a friend of life, in general LIFE! Another. New overcoat - new life. This new life he is destined to live only one day. This whole day for him is “definitely the biggest solemn holiday.” On this day, he experienced everything that a person can experience in life: the joy of meetings, care, warmth, affection. He was in a team, among friends. He was in an apartment on the second floor, where the stairs were lit. He drank champagne. He was happy and happy people lose their vigilance. Drunk, either from two glasses of wine or from happiness, he finds himself in a vacant lot, where he is unceremoniously thrown out of his overcoat. “But the overcoat is mine,” only he heard. Thrown out of his overcoat - thrown out of life. He was shown to his place. Born a titular councilor, live as one. And he swung at his overcoat, even a general’s one. “And Petersburg was left without Akaki Akakievich, as if he had never been there.” At the end of the story, Bashmachkin will return as a ghost and will take revenge on significant persons, tearing off their greatcoats from their shoulders. He will calm down only after tearing off the overcoat from the boss who yelled at him: “apparently, the general’s overcoat was completely beyond his capabilities.”
The main work of the writer’s life will be “Dead Souls”. On June 28, 1836 he writes to V.A. Zhukovsky: “I swear, I will do something that an ordinary person does not do... This great turning point, great era of my life... If I complete this creation the way it needs to be done, then... what a huge, what an original plot! What a varied bunch! All Rus' will appear in it! This will be my first decent thing that will carry my name.” On May 21, 1842, “Dead Souls” was published.
The plot of the poem is three-layered: a biography of Chichikov, “landowner” chapters and a description of city officials.
The composition of the poem is interesting. The first chapter is an exposition. In it we get to know the cityNN, where Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov will buy dead souls. Here, in this city, useful contacts are made, a plot begins, and the actual movement of the plot will begin with the next chapter. From the second to the sixth chapter, Chichikov's trips to the landowners are described. Then the action develops more and more rapidly. And at the most seemingly inopportune moment, when, after the word “millionaire”, which was so intoxicating for Pavel Ivanovich, was uttered next to his name scary word“crook”, and the society hid, trying to figure out what would happen next, what if “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” would suddenly be told. But maybe Chichikov is that same captain? But the captain is “without an arm or a leg, and Chichikov ...”) In the last, eleventh chapter of the first volume, Gogol will tell the biography of the hero.
In the poem the writer is faithful to his in a creative manner. Getting to know the cityNNwill begin with a description of the main street. Meet the characters from a portrait. The most important role in revealing characters is played by speech and gastronomic characteristics. But more on that later.
Of the five visits, Chichikov planned two (to Manilov and Sobakevich). Later I learned about Plyushkin from Sobakevich and decided to go to him. I came to Korobochka by accident. Nozdryov dragged him to him almost by force. Then it is Korobochka (out of fear of selling himself short) and Nozdryov (out of his great love of spoiling his neighbor) who will blurt out about dead souls. Vladimir Nabokov, by the way, reproaches Chichikov, and not them: “It was stupid to demand dead souls from an old woman who was afraid of ghosts, it was unforgivable recklessness to offer such a dubious deal to the braggart and boor Nozdryov.”
Gogol in the “landowner” chapters uses a downright cinematic technique: he goes from close-up to detail. This image of the “material” world, the objective environment of the heroes is one of characteristic features writer's style. Things that surround a person help to better understand his character, his world. Therefore, probably, all the things surrounding Sobakevich seemed to say: “And I, too, Sobakevich!” or “And I also look very much like Sobakevich!” Great importance It also has gastronomic characteristics. Vladimir Nabokov believes that Sobakevich’s attitude to food “is colored by some kind of primitive poetry, and if a certain gastronomic rhythm can be found in his dinner, then the measure was set by Homer.” In the blink of an eye, he gnaws and gnaws half a side of lamb to the last bone, a huge piece of nanny (“mutton stomach stuffed with buckwheat porridge, brain and legs”) disappears in a matter of minutes, and then comes such a “trifle” as “a turkey as tall as a calf stuffed with all sorts of good things: eggs, rice, livers”; cheesecakes, “each of which was larger than a plate.” If Sobakevich serves mainly meat, then Korobochka serves more and more flour. “On the table there were already mushrooms, pies, skorodumki, shanishkas, spindles, pancakes, flatbreads with all sorts of toppings: topping with poppy seeds, topping with cottage cheese...” At Manilov’s they serve cabbage soup, and we also see Themistoclus gnawing a lamb bone. But for Nozdryov, “dinner, apparently, was not the main thing in life; ...some of it burned, some of it wasn’t cooked at all.” Aqua regia has been added to Madeira, and the mountain ash gives off “fuel in all its strength.” And from a special bottle (“burgagnon and champagne together”) Nozdryov for some reason “added it a little.” At Plyushkin’s, Chichikov will be offered a cracker from the Easter cake and a liqueur from “a decanter that was covered in dust, like a sweatshirt.”
returning to speech characteristics heroes, let us pay attention to how Manilov’s emptiness is revealed in his florid phrases. Korobochka's club-headed nature does not allow her to immediately understand the essence of the deal. “Do you really want to dig them out of the ground?” In Nozdryov’s speech the words scoundrel, scoundrel, and fetish are constantly heard. Two minutes later he already says “you” to Chichikov. Sobakevich is cool at first, but, an experienced swindler himself (he wrote in Chichikov’s woman!), he changes dramatically as soon as the conversation concerns the deal. He even becomes graceful, eloquent, “apparently, he was carried away; There were such streams of speeches that you just had to listen.” As for Plyushkin, well, what is worth just the phrase: “The people are painfully gluttonous, from idleness they have acquired the habit of cracking ...” In conversations with landowners, Chichikov also reveals himself. He simply disappears into his interlocutor. Either he just melts away like Manilov, or he desperately bargains with Sobakevich. He does not stand on ceremony with Korobochka - driven almost to despair by her stupidity, he slammed a chair on the floor and promised her the devil for the night. He is artistic, an excellent psychologist, smart, charming. It would be, as they say, atomic energy for peaceful purposes! But no. Gogol himself calls him “scoundrel -acquirer."
We can talk endlessly about Gogol’s ways of depicting characters and reality. This is truly our most unusual writer!
Concluding my rather superficial study, I will again turn to the thoughts of V. Nabokov: “It is difficult to say what fascinates me most in this famous explosion of eloquence that concludes the first part - whether the magic of his poetry or magic of a completely different kind, for Gogol faced a double task: to allow Chichikov to avoid fair punishment by escaping and at the same time to divert the reader’s attention from a much more unpleasant conclusion - no punishment within the limits of human law can overtake the messenger of Satan, hurrying home to hell ... "
Literature used in the work:
V. Nabokov "Lectures on Russian literature." Translation from English. M., Nezavisimaya Gazeta, 1996
N.V. Gogol "Petersburg Tales". “Soviet Russia”, M., 1978
N.V. Gogol "Dead Souls". “Soviet Russia”, M., 1978