Who lives well in Rus'? Who can live well in Rus'? Main storyline

20.06.2020

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov

Who can live well in Rus'?

PART ONE

In what year - calculate
Guess what land?
On the sidewalk
Seven men came together:
Seven temporarily obliged,
A tightened province,
Terpigoreva County,
Empty parish,
From adjacent villages:
Zaplatova, Dyryavina,
Razutova, Znobishina,
Gorelova, Neelova -
There is also a poor harvest,
They came together and argued:
Who has fun?
Free in Rus'?

Roman said: to the landowner,
Demyan said: to the official,
Luke said: ass.
To the fat-bellied merchant! -
The Gubin brothers said,
Ivan and Metrodor.
Old man Pakhom pushed
And he said, looking at the ground:
To the noble boyar,
To the sovereign minister.
And Prov said: to the king...

The guy's a bull: he'll get in trouble
What a whim in the head -
Stake her from there
You can’t knock them out: they resist,
Everyone stands on their own!
Is this the kind of argument they started?
What do passers-by think?
You know, the kids found the treasure
And they share among themselves...
Each one in his own way
Left the house before noon:
That path led to the forge,
He went to the village of Ivankovo
Call Father Prokofy
Baptize the child.
Groin honeycomb
Carried to the market in Velikoye,
And the two Gubina brothers
So easy with a halter
Catch a stubborn horse
They went to their own herd.
It's high time for everyone
Return on your own way -
They're walking side by side!
They walk as if they are being chased
Behind them are gray wolves,
What's further is quick.
They go - they reproach!
They scream - they won’t come to their senses!
But time doesn’t wait.

They didn’t notice the dispute
As the red sun set,
How evening came.
I'd probably kiss you all night
So they went - where, not knowing,
If only they met a woman,
Gnarled Durandiha,
She didn’t shout: “Reverends!
Where are you looking at night?
Have you decided to go?..”

She asked, she laughed,
Whipped, witch, gelding
And she rode off at a gallop...

“Where?..” - they looked at each other
Our men are here
They stand, silent, looking down...
The night has long since passed,
The stars lit up frequently
In the high skies
The moon has surfaced, the shadows are black
The road was cut
To zealous walkers.
Oh shadows! black shadows!
Who won't you catch up with?
Who won't you overtake?
Only you, black shadows,
You can't catch it - you can't hug it!

To the forest, to the path-path
Pakhom looked, remained silent,
I looked - my mind scattered
And finally he said:

"Well! goblin nice joke
He played a joke on us!
No way, after all, we are almost
We've gone thirty versts!
Now tossing and turning home -
We're tired - we won't get there,
Let's sit down - there's nothing to do.
Let's rest until the sun!..”

Blaming the trouble on the devil,
Under the forest along the path
The men sat down.
They lit a fire, formed a formation,
Two people ran for vodka,
And the others as long as
The glass was made
The birch bark has been touched.
The vodka arrived soon.
The snack has arrived -
The men are feasting!

They drank three kosushki,
We ate and argued
Again: who has fun living?
Free in Rus'?
Roman shouts: to the landowner,
Demyan shouts: to the official,
Luka shouts: ass;
Kupchina fat-bellied, -
The Gubin brothers are shouting,
Ivan and Mitrodor;
Pakhom shouts: to the brightest
To the noble boyar,
To the sovereign minister,
And Prov shouts: to the king!

It took more than before
Perky men,
They swear obscenely,
No wonder they grab it
In each other's hair...

Look - they've already grabbed it!
Roman is pushing Pakhomushka,
Demyan pushes Luka.
And the two Gubina brothers
They iron the hefty Prov, -
And everyone shouts his own!

A booming echo woke up,
Let's go for a walk,
Let's go scream and shout
As if to tease
Stubborn men.
To the king! - can be heard to the right,
To the left responds:
Ass! ass! ass!
The whole forest was in commotion
With flying birds
Swift-footed beasts
And creeping reptiles, -
And a groan, and a roar, and a roar!

First of all, little gray bunny
From a nearby bush
Suddenly he jumped out, as if disheveled,
And he ran away!
Small jackdaws are behind him
Birch trees were raised at the top
A nasty, sharp squeak.
And then there’s the warbler
Tiny chick with fright
Fell from the nest;
The warbler chirps and cries,
Where is the chick? – he won’t find it!
Then the old cuckoo
I woke up and thought
Someone to cuckoo;
Accepted ten times
Yes, I got lost every time
And started again...
Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo!
The bread will begin to spike,
You'll choke on an ear of corn -
You won't cuckoo!
Seven eagle owls flew together,
Admiring the carnage
From seven big trees,
They're laughing, night owls!
And their eyes are yellow
They burn like burning wax
Fourteen candles!
And the raven, a smart bird,
Arrived, sitting on a tree
Right by the fire.
Sits and prays to the devil,
To be slapped to death
Which one!
Cow with a bell
That I've been off since the evening
From the herd, I heard a little
Human voices -
She came to the fire and stared
Eyes on the men
I listened to crazy speeches
And began, my heart,
Moo, moo, moo!

The stupid cow moos
Small jackdaws squeak.
The boys are screaming,
And the echo echoes everyone.
He has only one concern -
Teasing honest people
Scare the boys and women!
Nobody saw him
And everyone has heard,
Without a body - but it lives,
Without a tongue - screams!

Owl - Zamoskvoretskaya
The princess immediately mooed,
Flies over the peasants
Crashing on the ground,
It’s about the bushes with the wing...

The fox herself is cunning,
Out of womanish curiosity,
Snuck up on the men
I listened, I listened
And she walked away, thinking:
“And the devil won’t understand them!”
Indeed: the debaters themselves
They hardly knew, they remembered -
What are they making noise about...

Having bruised my sides quite a bit
To each other, we came to our senses
Finally, the peasants
They drank from a puddle,
Washed, freshened up,
Sleep began to tilt them...
Meanwhile, the tiny chick,
Little by little, half a seedling,
Flying low,
I got close to the fire.

Pakhomushka caught him,
He brought it to the fire and looked at it
And he said: “Little bird,
And the marigold is awesome!
I breathe and you'll roll off your palm,
If I sneeze, you'll roll into the fire,
If I click, you'll roll around dead
But you, little bird,
Stronger than a man!
The wings will soon get stronger,
Bye bye! wherever you want
That's where you'll fly!
Oh, you little birdie!
Give us your wings
We'll fly around the whole kingdom,
Let's see, let's explore,
Let's ask around and find out:
Who lives happily?
Is it at ease in Rus'?

“You wouldn’t even need wings,
If only we had some bread
Half a pound a day, -
And so we would Mother Rus'
They tried it on with their feet!” -
Said the gloomy Prov.

“Yes, a bucket of vodka,” -
They added eagerly
Before vodka, the Gubin brothers,
Ivan and Metrodor.

“Yes, in the morning there would be cucumbers
Ten of salty ones,” -
The men were joking.
“And at noon I would like a jug
Cold kvass."

“And in the evening, have a cup of tea
Have some hot tea..."

While they were talking,
The warbler whirled and whirled
Above them: listened to everything
And she sat down by the fire.
Chiviknula, jumped up
And in a human voice
Pahomu says:

“Let the chick go free!
For a chick for a small one
I will give a large ransom."

- What will you give? -
“I’ll give you some bread
Half a pound a day
I'll give you a bucket of vodka,
I'll give you some cucumbers in the morning,
And at noon, sour kvass,
And in the evening, tea!”

- And where, little birdie, -
The Gubin brothers asked,
You will find wine and bread
Are you like seven men? -

“If you find it, you will find it yourself.
And I, little birdie,
I'll tell you how to find it."

- Tell! -
"Walk through the forest,
Against pillar thirty
Just a mile away:
Come to the clearing,
They are standing in that clearing
Two old pine trees
Under these pine trees
The box is buried.
Get her, -
That magic box:
It contains a self-assembled tablecloth,
Whenever you wish,
He will feed you and give you something to drink!
Just say quietly:
"Hey! self-assembled tablecloth!
Treat the men!”
According to your wishes,
At my command,
Everything will appear immediately.
Now let the chick go!”
Womb - then ask,
And you can ask for vodka
Exactly a bucket a day.
If you ask more,
And once and twice - it will be fulfilled
At your request,
And the third time there will be trouble!
And the warbler flew away
With your birth chick,
And the men in single file
We reached for the road
Look for pillar thirty.
Found it! - They walk silently
Straightforward, straight forward
Through the dense forest,
Every step counts.
And how they measured the mile,
We saw a clearing -
They are standing in that clearing
Two old pine trees...
The peasants dug around
Got that box
Opened and found
That tablecloth is self-assembled!
They found it and cried out at once:
“Hey, self-assembled tablecloth!
Treat the men!”
Lo and behold, the tablecloth unfolded,
Where did they come from?
Two hefty arms
They put a bucket of wine,
They piled up a mountain of bread
And they hid again.
“Why are there no cucumbers?”
“Why is there no hot tea?”
“Why is there no cold kvass?”
Everything appeared suddenly...
The peasants got loose
They sat down by the tablecloth.
There's a feast here!
Kissing for joy
They promise each other
Don't fight in vain,
But the matter is really controversial
According to reason, according to God,
On the honor of the story -
Don't toss and turn in the houses,
Don't see your wives
Not with the little guys
Not with old people,
As long as the matter is moot
No solution will be found
Until they find out
No matter what for certain:
Who lives happily?
Free in Rus'?
Having made such a vow,
In the morning like dead
The men fell asleep...

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Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov
Who can live well in Rus'?

* * *

Yu. Lebedev
Russian Odyssey

In the “Diary of a Writer” for 1877, F. M. Dostoevsky noticed characteristic feature, which appeared among the Russian people of the post-reform period - “this is a multitude, an extraordinary modern multitude of new people, a new root of Russian people, who need truth, one truth without conditional lies, and who, in order to achieve this truth, will give everything decisively.” Dostoevsky saw in them “the advancing future Russia.”

At the very beginning of the 20th century, another writer, V. G. Korolenko, made a discovery that struck him from a summer trip to the Urals: “At the very time when in the centers and at the heights of our culture they were talking about Nansen, about Andre’s bold attempt to penetrate hot-air balloon to the North Pole - in the distant Ural villages there was talk of the Belovodsk kingdom and preparations were being made for their own religious and scientific expedition.” Among ordinary Cossacks, the conviction spread and strengthened that “somewhere out there, “beyond the bad weather,” “beyond the valleys, beyond the mountains, beyond the wide seas,” there exists a “blessed country,” in which, by the providence of God and the accidents of history, it has been preserved and flourishes throughout integrity is the complete and complete formula of grace. This is a real fairy-tale country of all centuries and peoples, colored only by the Old Believer mood. In it, planted by the Apostle Thomas, true faith blooms, with churches, bishops, patriarchs and pious kings... This kingdom knows neither theft, nor murder, nor self-interest, since true faith gives birth there to true piety.”

It turns out that back in the late 1860s, the Don Cossacks corresponded with the Ural Cossacks, collected quite a significant amount and equipped the Cossack Varsonofy Baryshnikov and two comrades to search for this promised land. Baryshnikov set off through Constantinople to Asia Minor, then to the Malabar coast, and finally to the East Indies... The expedition returned with disappointing news: it failed to find Belovodye. Thirty years later, in 1898, the dream of the Belovodsk kingdom flares up with renewed vigor, funds are found, and a new pilgrimage is organized. On May 30, 1898, a “deputation” of Cossacks boarded a ship departing from Odessa for Constantinople.

“From this day, in fact, the foreign journey of the deputies of the Urals to the Belovodsk kingdom began, and among the international crowd of merchants, military men, scientists, tourists, diplomats traveling around the world out of curiosity or in search of money, fame and pleasure, three natives, as it were, got mixed up from another world, looking for ways to the fabulous Belovodsk kingdom.” Korolenko described in detail all the vicissitudes of this unusual journey, in which, despite all the curiosity and strangeness of the conceived enterprise, the same Russia of honest people, noted by Dostoevsky, “who need only the truth”, who have “an unshakable desire for honesty and truth”, appeared. indestructible, and for the word of truth each of them will give his life and all his advantages.”

By the end of the 19th century, not only the top of Russian society was drawn into the great spiritual pilgrimage, all of Russia, all of its people, rushed to it. “These Russian homeless wanderers,” Dostoevsky noted in a speech about Pushkin, “continue their wanderings to this day and, it seems, will not disappear for a long time.” For a long time, “for the Russian wanderer needs precisely universal happiness in order to calm down - he will not be reconciled cheaper.”

“There was approximately the following case: I knew one person who believed in a righteous land,” said another wanderer in our literature, Luke, from M. Gorky’s play “At the Depths.” “There must, he said, be a righteous country in the world... in that land, they say, special people inhabit... good people! They respect each other, they simply help each other... and everything is nice and good with them! And so the man kept getting ready to go... to look for this righteous land. He was poor, he lived poorly... and when things were so difficult for him that he could even lie down and die, he did not lose his spirit, and everything happened, he just grinned and said: “Nothing!” I'll be patient! A few more - I’ll wait... and then I’ll give up this whole life and - I’ll go to the righteous land...” He had only one joy - this land... And to this place - it was in Siberia - they sent an exiled scientist... with books, with plans he, a scientist, with all sorts of things... The man says to the scientist: “Show me, do me a favor, where the righteous land lies and how to get there?” Now it was the scientist who opened his books, laid out his plans... he looked and looked - no nowhere is there a righteous land! “Everything is true, all the lands are shown, but the righteous one is not!”

The man doesn’t believe... There must be, he says... look better! Otherwise, he says, your books and plans are of no use if there is no righteous land... The scientist is offended. My plans, he says, are the most faithful, but there is no righteous land at all. Well, then the man got angry - how could that be? Lived, lived, endured, endured and believed everything - there is! but according to plans it turns out - no! Robbery!.. And he says to the scientist: “Oh, you... such a bastard!” You are a scoundrel, not a scientist...” Yes, in his ear - once! Moreover!.. ( After a pause.) And after that he went home and hanged himself!”

The 1860s marked a sharp historical turning point in the destinies of Russia, which henceforth broke with the legal, “stay-at-home” existence and the whole world, all the people set off on a long path of spiritual quest, marked by ups and downs, fatal temptations and deviations, but the righteous path lies precisely in passion , in the sincerity of his inescapable desire to find the truth. And perhaps for the first time, Nekrasov’s poetry responded to this deep process, which covered not only the “tops”, but also the very “bottoms” of society.

1

The poet began work on the grandiose plan of a “people's book” in 1863, and ended up mortally ill in 1877, with a bitter awareness of the incompleteness and incompleteness of his plan: “One thing I deeply regret is that I did not finish my poem “To whom in Rus' to live well". It “should have included all the experience given to Nikolai Alekseevich by studying the people, all the information about them accumulated “by word of mouth” over twenty years,” recalled G. I. Uspensky about conversations with Nekrasov.

However, the question of the “incompleteness” of “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is very controversial and problematic. Firstly, the poet’s own confessions are subjectively exaggerated. It is known that a writer always has a feeling of dissatisfaction, and the larger the idea, the more acute it is. Dostoevsky wrote about The Brothers Karamazov: “I myself think that not even one tenth of it was possible to express what I wanted.” But on this basis, do we dare to consider Dostoevsky’s novel a fragment of an unrealized plan? It’s the same with “Who Lives Well in Rus'.”

Secondly, the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was conceived as an epic, that is, a work of art depicting with the maximum degree of completeness and objectivity an entire era in the life of the people. Since folk life is limitless and inexhaustible in its countless manifestations, the epic in any of its varieties (poem-epic, novel-epic) is characterized by incompleteness and incompleteness. This is its specific difference from other forms of poetic art.

"This tricky song
He will sing to the end of the word,
Who is the whole earth, baptized Rus',
It will go from end to end."
Her Christ-pleaser himself
He hasn’t finished singing - he’s sleeping in eternal sleep -

This is how Nekrasov expressed his understanding of the epic plan in the poem “Peddlers.” The epic can be continued indefinitely, but it is also possible to put an end to some high segment of its path.

Until now, researchers of Nekrasov’s work are arguing about the sequence of arrangement of parts of “Who Lives Well in Rus',” since the dying poet did not have time to make final orders in this regard.

It is noteworthy that this dispute itself involuntarily confirms the epic nature of “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” The composition of this work is built according to the laws of classical epic: it consists of separate, relatively autonomous parts and chapters. Outwardly, these parts are connected by the theme of the road: seven truth-seekers wander through Rus', trying to resolve the question that haunts them: who can live well in Rus'? In the “Prologue” there seems to be a clear outline of the journey - a meeting with a landowner, an official, a merchant, a minister and a tsar. However, the epic lacks a clear and unambiguous sense of purpose. Nekrasov does not force the action and is in no hurry to bring it to an all-resolving conclusion. As an epic artist, he strives to completely recreate life, to reveal all the diversity folk characters, all the indirectness, all the winding of folk paths, paths and roads.

The world in the epic narrative appears as it is - disordered and unexpected, devoid of rectilinear motion. The author of the epic allows for “digressions, trips into the past, leaps somewhere sideways, to the side.” According to the definition of the modern literary theorist G.D. Gachev, “the epic is like a child walking through the cabinet of curiosities of the universe. One character, or a building, or a thought caught his attention - and the author, forgetting about everything, plunges into it; then he was distracted by another - and he gave himself up to him just as completely. But this is not just a compositional principle, not just the specificity of the plot in the epic... Anyone who, while narrating, makes “digressions”, lingers on this or that subject for an unexpectedly long time; the one who succumbs to the temptation to describe both this and that and is choked with greed, sinning against the pace of the narrative, thereby speaks of the wastefulness, the abundance of being, that he (being) has nowhere to rush. In other words: it expresses the idea that being reigns over the principle of time (while the dramatic form, on the contrary, emphasizes the power of time - it is not for nothing that a seemingly only “formal” demand for the unity of time was born there).

The fairy-tale motifs introduced into the epic “Who Lives Well in Rus'” allow Nekrasov to freely and easily deal with time and space, easily transfer the action from one end of Russia to the other, slow down or speed up time according to fairy-tale laws. What unites the epic is not the external plot, not the movement towards an unambiguous result, but the internal plot: slowly, step by step, the contradictory but irreversible growth of national self-awareness, which has not yet come to a conclusion, is still on the difficult roads of quest, becomes clear. In this sense, the plot-compositional looseness of the poem is not accidental: it expresses through its disorganization the variegation and diversity of people’s life, which thinks about itself differently, evaluates its place in the world and its purpose differently.

In an effort to recreate the moving panorama of folk life in its entirety, Nekrasov also uses all the wealth of oral folk art. But the folklore element in the epic also expresses the gradual growth of national self-awareness: the fairy-tale motifs of the “Prologue” are replaced by the epic epic, then by lyrical folk songs in “Peasant Woman” and, finally, by the songs of Grisha Dobrosklonov in “A Feast for the Whole World”, striving to become folk and already partially accepted and understood by the people. The men listen to his songs, sometimes nod in agreement, but they have not yet heard the last song, “Rus”: he has not yet sung it to them. And therefore the ending of the poem is open to the future, not resolved.

If only our wanderers could be under one roof,
If only they could know what was happening to Grisha.

But the wanderers did not hear the song “Rus”, which means they did not yet understand what the “embodiment of people’s happiness” was. It turns out that Nekrasov did not finish his song not only because death got in the way. People’s life itself did not finish singing his songs in those years. More than a hundred years have passed since then, and the song begun by the great poet about the Russian peasantry is still being sung. In “The Feast,” only a glimpse of the future happiness is outlined, which the poet dreams of, realizing how many roads lie ahead before its real embodiment. The incompleteness of “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is fundamental and artistically significant as a sign of a folk epic.

“Who Lives Well in Rus'” both as a whole and in each of its parts resembles a peasant lay gathering, which is the most complete expression of democratic people's self-government. At such a gathering, residents of one village or several villages included in the “world” resolved all issues of common worldly life. The gathering had nothing in common with a modern meeting. The chairman leading the discussion was absent. Each community member, at will, entered into a conversation or skirmish, defending his point of view. Instead of voting, the principle of general consent was in effect. The dissatisfied were convinced or retreated, and during the discussion a “worldly verdict” matured. If there was no general agreement, the meeting was postponed to the next day. Gradually, during heated debates, a unanimous opinion matured, agreement was sought and found.

A contributor to Nekrasov’s “Domestic Notes”, the populist writer N. N. Zlatovratsky described the original peasant life this way: “This is the second day that we have had gathering after gathering. You look out the window, now at one end, now at the other end of the village, there are crowds of owners, old people, children: some are sitting, others are standing in front of them, with their hands behind their backs and listening carefully to someone. This someone waves his arms, bends his whole body, shouts something very convincingly, falls silent for a few minutes and then starts convincing again. But suddenly they object to him, they object somehow at once, their voices rise higher and higher, they shout at the top of their lungs, as befits such a vast hall as the surrounding meadows and fields, everyone speaks, without being embarrassed by anyone or anything, as befits a free a gathering of equal persons. Not the slightest sign of formality. Foreman Maxim Maksimych himself stands somewhere on the side, like the most invisible member of our community... Here everything goes straight, everything becomes an edge; if anyone, out of cowardice or calculation, decides to get away with silence, he will mercilessly be brought to light clean water. And there are very few of these faint-hearted people at especially important gatherings. I saw the most meek, most unrequited men who<…>at gatherings, in moments of general excitement, they were completely transformed and<…>they gained such courage that they managed to outdo the obviously brave men. At the moments of its apogee, the gathering becomes simply an open mutual confession and mutual exposure, a manifestation of the widest publicity.”

Nekrasov’s entire epic poem is a flaring up worldly gathering that is gradually gaining strength. It reaches its peak in the final "Feast for the Whole World." However, a general “worldly verdict” is still not passed. Only the path to it is outlined, many initial obstacles have been removed, and on many points a movement towards general agreement has been identified. But there is no conclusion, life has not stopped, gatherings have not stopped, the epic is open to the future. For Nekrasov, the process itself is important here; it is important that the peasantry not only thought about the meaning of life, but also set out on a difficult, long path of truth-seeking. Let's try to take a closer look at it, moving from “Prologue. Part one" to "The Peasant Woman", "The Last One" and "A Feast for the Whole World".

2

In the "Prologue" the meeting of seven men is narrated as a great epic event.

In what year - calculate
Guess what land?
On the sidewalk
Seven men came together...

This is how epic and fairy-tale heroes came together for a battle or a feast of honor. Time and space acquire an epic scope in the poem: the action is carried out throughout Rus'. The tightened province, Terpigorev district, Pustoporozhnaya volost, the villages of Zaplatovo, Dyryavino, Razutovo, Znobishino, Gorelovo, Neelovo, Neurozhaina can be attributed to any of the Russian provinces, districts, volosts and villages. The general sign of post-reform ruin is captured. And the question itself, which excited the men, concerns all of Russia - peasant, noble, merchant. Therefore, the quarrel that arose between them is not an ordinary event, but great debate. In the soul of every grain grower, with his own private destiny, with his own everyday interests, a question arose that concerns everyone, the entire people's world.

Each one in his own way
Left the house before noon:
That path led to the forge,
He went to the village of Ivankovo
Call Father Prokofy
Baptize the child.
Groin honeycomb
Carried to the market in Velikoye,
And the two Gubina brothers
So easy with a halter
Catch a stubborn horse
They went to their own herd.
It's high time for everyone
Return on your own way -
They're walking side by side!

Each man had his own path, and suddenly they found a common path: the question of happiness united the people. And therefore, before us are no longer ordinary men with their own individual destiny and personal interests, but guardians for the entire peasant world, truth-seekers. The number “seven” is magical in folklore. Seven Wanderers– an image of great epic proportions. The fairy-tale flavor of the “Prologue” raises the narrative above everyday life, above peasant life and gives the action an epic universality.

The fairy-tale atmosphere in the Prologue has many meanings. Giving events a national sound, it also turns into a convenient method for the poet to characterize national self-consciousness. Let us note that Nekrasov plays with the fairy tale. In general, his treatment of folklore is more free and relaxed compared to the poems “Peddlers” and “Frost, Red Nose.” Yes, and he treats the people differently, often makes fun of the peasants, provokes readers, paradoxically sharpens the people’s view of things, and laughs at the limitations of the peasant worldview. The intonation structure of the narrative in “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is very flexible and rich: there is the author’s good-natured smile, and condescension, and slight irony, and a bitter joke, and lyrical regret, and grief, and reflection, and an appeal. The intonation and stylistic polyphony of the narrative in its own way reflects the new phase of folk life. Before us is the post-reform peasantry, which has broken with the immovable patriarchal existence, with the age-old everyday and spiritual settled life. This is already a wandering Rus' with awakened self-awareness, noisy, discordant, prickly and unyielding, prone to quarrels and disputes. And the author does not stand aside from her, but turns into an equal participant in her life. He either rises above the disputants, then becomes imbued with sympathy for one of the disputing parties, then becomes touched, then becomes indignant. Just as Rus' lives in disputes, in search of truth, so the author is in an intense dialogue with her.

In the literature about “Who Lives Well in Rus'” one can find the statement that the dispute between the seven wanderers that opens the poem corresponds to the original compositional plan, from which the poet subsequently retreated. Already in the first part there was a deviation from the planned plot, and instead of meeting with the rich and noble, truth-seekers began to interview the crowd.

But this deviation immediately occurs at the “upper” level. For some reason, instead of the landowner and the official whom the men had designated for questioning, a meeting takes place with a priest. Is this a coincidence?

Let us note first of all that the “formula” of the dispute proclaimed by the men signifies not so much the original plan as the level of national self-awareness that manifests itself in this dispute. And Nekrasov cannot help but show the reader its limitations: men understand happiness in a primitive way and reduce it to a well-fed life and material security. What is it worth, for example, such a candidate for the role of a lucky man, as the “merchant” is proclaimed, and even a “fat-bellied one”! And behind the argument between the men - who lives happily and freely in Rus'? - immediately, but still gradually, muffled, another, much more significant and important question, which makes up the soul of the epic poem, - how to understand human happiness, where to look for it and what does it consist of?

In the final chapter, “A Feast for the Whole World,” through the mouth of Grisha Dobrosklonov, the following assessment is given of the current state of people’s life: “The Russian people are gathering their strength and learning to be citizens.”

In fact, this formula contains the main pathos of the poem. It is important for Nekrasov to show how the forces that unite them are maturing among the people and what civic orientation they are acquiring. The intent of the poem is by no means to force the wanderers to carry out successive meetings according to the program they have planned. Much more important here is a completely different question: what is happiness in the eternal, Orthodox Christian understanding and are the Russian people capable of combining peasant “politics” with Christian morality?

Therefore, folklore motifs in the Prologue play a dual role. On the one hand, the poet uses them to give the beginning of the work a high epic sound, and on the other hand, to emphasize the limited consciousness of the disputants, who deviate in their idea of happiness from the righteous to the evil paths. Let us remember that Nekrasov spoke about this more than once for a long time, for example, in one of the versions of “Song to Eremushka,” created back in 1859.

Pleasures change
Living does not mean drinking and eating.
There are better aspirations in the world,
There is a nobler good.
Despise the evil ways:
There is debauchery and vanity.
Honor the covenants that are forever right
And learn them from Christ.

These same two paths, sung over Russia by the angel of mercy in “A Feast for the Whole World,” are now opening up before the Russian people, who are celebrating a funeral service and are faced with a choice.

In the middle of the world
For a free heart
There are two ways.
Weigh the proud strength,
Weigh your strong will:
Which way to go?

This song sounds over Russia, coming to life from the lips of the messenger of the Creator himself, and the fate of the people will directly depend on which path the wanderers take after long wanderings and meanderings along Russian country roads.

For now, the poet is pleased only by the very desire of the people to seek the truth. And the direction of these searches, the temptation of wealth at the very beginning of the journey, cannot but cause bitter irony. Therefore, the fairy-tale plot of the “Prologue” is also characterized by the low level of peasant consciousness, spontaneous, vague, with difficulty making its way to universal issues. The people's thought has not yet acquired clarity and clarity; it is still fused with nature and is sometimes expressed not so much in words as in action, in deed: instead of thinking, fists are used.

Men still live by the fairy-tale formula: “go there - I don’t know where, bring that - I don’t know what.”

They walk as if they are being chased
Behind them are gray wolves,
What's further is quick.
…
I would probably kiss you the night
So they went - where, not knowing...

Is this why the disturbing, demonic element grows in the Prologue? “The woman you meet,” “the clumsy Durandiha,” turns into a laughing witch in front of the men’s eyes. And Pakhom wanders his mind for a long time, trying to understand what happened to him and his companions, until he comes to the conclusion that the “goblin played a nice joke” on them.

The poem makes a comic comparison of a men's argument with a bullfight in a peasant herd. And the cow, which had gotten lost in the evening, came to the fire, fixed its eyes on the men,

I listened to crazy speeches
And began, my heart,
Moo, moo, moo!

Nature responds to the destructiveness of the dispute, which develops into a serious fight, and in the person of not so much good as its sinister forces, representatives of folk demonology, classified as forest evil spirits. Seven eagle owls flock to watch the arguing wanderers: from seven large trees “the midnight owls laugh.”

And the raven, a smart bird,
Arrived, sitting on a tree
Right by the fire,
Sits and prays to the devil,
To be slapped to death
Which one!

The commotion grows, spreads, covers the entire forest, and it seems that the “forest spirit” itself laughs, laughs at the men, responds to their squabble and massacre with malicious intentions.

A booming echo woke up,
Let's go for a walk,
Let's go scream and shout
As if to tease
Stubborn men.

Of course, the author's irony in the Prologue is good-natured and condescending. The poet does not want to judge men harshly for the wretchedness and extreme limitations of their ideas about happiness and a happy person. He knows that this limitation is associated with the harsh everyday life of a peasant, with such material deprivations in which suffering itself sometimes takes on unspiritual, ugly and perverted forms. This happens whenever the people are deprived of their daily bread. Let us remember the song “Hungry” heard in “The Feast”:

The man is standing -
It's swaying
A man is coming -
Can't breathe!
From its bark
It's unraveled
Melancholy-trouble
Exhausted...

3

And in order to highlight the limitations of the peasant understanding of happiness, Nekrasov brings the wanderers together in the first part of the epic poem not with a landowner or an official, but with a priest. The priest, a spiritual person, closest to the people in his way of life, and due to his duty called upon to guard a thousand-year-old national shrine, very accurately compresses the vague ideas about happiness for the wanderers themselves into a capacious formula.

– What do you think is happiness?
Peace, wealth, honor -
Isn't that right, dear friends? -
They said: “Yes”...

Of course, the priest himself ironically distances himself from this formula: “This, dear friends, is happiness according to you!” And then, with visual convincingness, he refutes with all his life experience the naivety of each hypostasis of this triune formula: neither “peace”, nor “wealth”, nor “honor” can be placed as the basis of a truly human, Christian understanding happiness.

The priest's story makes men think about a lot. The common, ironically condescending assessment of the clergy here reveals itself to be untrue. According to the laws of epic storytelling, the poet trustingly surrenders to the priest’s story, which is constructed in such a way that behind the personal life of one priest, the life of the entire clergy rises and stands tall. The poet is in no hurry, does not rush with the development of the action, giving the hero full opportunity to express everything that lies in his soul. Behind the life of the priest, the life of all of Russia in its past and present, in its different classes, is revealed on the pages of the epic poem. Here are dramatic changes in the noble estates: the old patriarchal-noble Rus', which lived sedentarily and was close to the people in morals and customs, is becoming a thing of the past. The post-reform waste of life and the ruin of the nobles destroyed its centuries-old foundations and destroyed the old attachment to the family village nest. “Like the Jewish tribe,” the landowners scattered throughout the world, adopting new habits that were far from Russian moral traditions and legends.

In the priest’s story, a “great chain” unfolds before the eyes of savvy men, in which all the links are firmly connected: if you touch one, it will respond in the other. The drama of the Russian nobility brings with it drama into the life of the clergy. To the same extent, this drama is aggravated by the post-reform impoverishment of the peasant.

Our villages are poor,
And the peasants in them are sick
Yes, women are sad
Nurses, drinkers,
Slaves, pilgrims
And eternal workers,
Lord give them strength!

The clergy cannot be at peace when the people, their drinker and breadwinner, are in poverty. And the point here is not only the material impoverishment of the peasantry and nobility, which entails the impoverishment of the clergy. The priest's main problem lies elsewhere. The man’s misfortunes bring deep moral suffering to sensitive people from the clergy: “It’s hard to live on pennies with such labor!”

It happens to the sick
You will come: not dying,
The peasant family is scary
At that hour when she has to
Lose your breadwinner!
Give a farewell message to the deceased
And support in the remaining
You try your best
The spirit is cheerful! And here to you
The old woman, the mother of the dead man,
Look, he's reaching out with the bony one,
Calloused hand.
The soul will turn over,
How they jingle in this little hand
Two copper coins!

The priest’s confession speaks not only about the suffering that is associated with social “disorders” in a country that is in a deep national crisis. These “disorders” that lie on the surface of life must be eliminated; a righteous social struggle against them is possible and even necessary. But there are also other, deeper contradictions associated with the imperfection of human nature itself. It is these contradictions that reveal the vanity and slyness of people who strive to present life as sheer pleasure, as a thoughtless intoxication with wealth, ambition, and complacency that turns into indifference to one’s neighbor. The priest in his confession deals a crushing blow to those who profess such morality. Talking about parting words to the sick and dying, the priest speaks about the impossibility of peace of mind on this earth for a person who is not indifferent to his neighbor:

Go where you are called!
You go unconditionally.
And even if only the bones
Alone broke, -
No! gets wet every time,
The soul will hurt.
Don't believe it, Orthodox Christians,
There is a limit to habit:
No heart can bear
Without any trepidation
Death rattle
Funeral lament
Orphan's sadness!
Amen!.. Now think,
What's the peace like?..

It turns out that a person completely free from suffering, living “freely, happily” is a stupid, indifferent person, morally defective. Life is not a holiday, but hard work, not only physical, but also spiritual, requiring self-denial from a person. After all, Nekrasov himself affirmed the same ideal in the poem “In Memory of Dobrolyubov,” the ideal of high citizenship, surrendering to which it is impossible not to sacrifice oneself, not to consciously reject “worldly pleasures.” Is this why the priest looked down when he heard the question of the peasants, which was far from the Christian truth of life - “is the priest’s life sweet” - and with the dignity of an Orthodox minister addressed the wanderers:

... Orthodox!
It is a sin to grumble against God,
I bear my cross with patience...

And his whole story is, in fact, an example of how every person who is ready to lay down his life “for his friends” can bear the cross.

The lesson taught to the wanderers by the priest has not yet benefited them, but nevertheless brought confusion into the peasant consciousness. The men unitedly took up arms against Luka:

- What, did you take it? stubborn head!
Country club!
That's where the argument gets into!
"Nobles of the bell -
The priests live like princes."
…
Well, here's what you've praised
A priest's life!

The author’s irony is not accidental, because with the same success it was possible to “finish” not only Luka, but also each of them separately and all of them together. The peasant scolding here is again followed by the shadow of Nekrasov, who laughs at the limitations of the people’s original ideas about happiness. And it is no coincidence that after meeting with the priest, the behavior and way of thinking of the wanderers changes significantly. They become more and more active in dialogues, and intervene more and more energetically in life. And the attention of wanderers is increasingly beginning to be captured not by the world of masters, but by the people’s environment.

An unfinished poem in which Nekrasov formulated another eternal Russian question and put folklore at the service of revolutionary democracy.

comments: Mikhail Makeev

What is this book about?

Serfdom in Russia has been abolished. Seven "temporarily obliged" After the Peasant Reform, this was the name given to peasants who had not yet bought the land from the landowner, and therefore were obliged to pay quitrent or corvee for it. ⁠ (that is, in fact not yet free) peasants (“The tightened province, / Terpigoreva County, / Empty volost, / From adjacent villages: / Zaplatova, Dyryavina, / Razutova, Znobishina, / Gorelova, Neyolova - / Unharvest also”) start an argument about someone who “lives cheerfully and freely in Rus'.” To resolve this issue, they go on a journey in search of a happy person. Along the way, the whole of peasant Russia appears to them: they meet priests and soldiers, righteous people and drunkards, a landowner who does not know about the abolition of serfdom, and the future people's intercessor, composing a hymn to the “poor and abundant, downtrodden and omnipotent” Mother Rus'.

Nikolay Nekrasov. Lithograph by Peter Borel. 1860s

When was it written?

Exactly when the idea for the poem arose has not been established. There is evidence Gabriel Potanin Gavriil Nikitich Potanin (1823-1911) - writer. He served as a teacher in Simbirsk. He became famous thanks to the novel “The Old Ages, the Young Grows,” published in Sovremennik in 1861. Nekrasov helped Potanin move to St. Petersburg and get a job. In the early 1870s, relations with Nekrasov deteriorated, and the writer returned to Simbirsk. In his declining years, Potanin wrote enthusiastic memoirs about Nekrasov, although some episodes in them do not correspond to the facts. ⁠ , who supposedly in the fall of 1860 saw a manuscript (draft?) of a poem on Nekrasov’s table. However, Potanin cannot be completely trusted. Nekrasov himself dated the first part of the poem to 1865: apparently, it was largely completed by the end of that year. With interruptions (which sometimes lasted for several years), Nekrasov worked on “Who Lives Well in Rus'” until the end of his life. The poem remained unfinished. The poet made changes to the last of the written parts, “A Feast for the Whole World,” until March 1877, that is, almost until his death. Shortly before his death, Nekrasov regretted that he would not have time to complete the poem: “...If only three or four more years of life. This is a thing that can only have its meaning as a whole. And the further you write, the more clearly you imagine the further course of the poem, new characters, pictures.” Based on the poet’s sketches, it is possible to reconstruct the concept of several unwritten chapters: for example, the meeting of the heroes with an official, for which the men had to come to St. Petersburg.

The great chain has broken,
Torn and splintered:
One way for the master,
Others don't care!..

Nikolay Nekrasov

How is it written?

“Who Lives Well in Rus'” is stylized after Russian folklore. This is a kind of encyclopedia or “complete collection” of genres folk poetry- from small (proverbs, sayings, riddles, etc. - it is estimated that there are more than a hundred such inclusions in the poem) to the largest (epic, fairy tale, legend, historical song Lyric epic folklore genre telling about historical events. For example, songs about Ermak, Pugachev or the capture of Kazan. ⁠ ). In the part “Peasant Woman,” the most “folklorized” in the poem, there are direct, only slightly adapted borrowings from folk songs. Nekrasov's language is full of diminutive suffixes, typical of the rhythm of folk poetry 1 Chukovsky K.I. Nekrasov’s Mastery // Chukovsky K.I. Collected Works in 15 volumes. T. 10: Nekrasov’s Mastery. Articles. M.: Terra, 2012. pp. 515-524. ⁠ , and the images often go back to her formulas: “The ears are already full. / There are chiseled pillars, / Gilded heads...,” “Only you, black shadows, / You can’t be caught, you can’t be hugged!”

However, in most cases, Nekrasov does not so much copy or quote folklore texts as he is inspired by folk poetry, creating an original work in the “folk spirit.” According to Korney Chukovsky, Nekrasov could even “modify” neutral folklore images so “that they could serve the goals of the revolutionary struggle" 2 Chukovsky K.I. Nekrasov’s Mastery // Chukovsky K.I. Collected Works in 15 volumes. T. 10: Nekrasov’s Mastery. Articles. M.: Terra, 2012. pp. 398-399. ⁠ - despite the fact that this opinion itself looks biased, it is true in the sense that folklore for Nekrasov was a material, and not an end in itself: he, one might say, edited folklore, combined elements of different texts, while achieving an authentic sound and verified logic.

Typical fairy tale fiction plays an important role in the plot of the poem: magical helpers According to Vladimir Propp, a magical assistant is one of the key elements of a fairy tale; it helps the main character achieve the main goal. ⁠ (warbler bird) and magic remedies The outcome of a fairy tale often depends on whether the hero has some kind of magical remedy. As a rule, in a fairy tale there is also a figure of a donor (for example, Baba Yaga), thanks to whom the hero receives a means. Vladimir Propp writes about this in his book “Morphology of a Fairy Tale.” ⁠ (a self-assembled tablecloth), as well as peasant household items endowed with magical properties (overcoats that do not wear out, “baby shoes” that do not rot, bast shoes that do not “break”, shirts in which fleas “do not breed”). All this is necessary so that wanderers, leaving their wives and “little children” at home, can travel without being distracted by worries about clothing and food. The very number of wanderers - seven - speaks of a connection with Russian folklore, in which seven is a special, sacred and at the same time rather “auspicious” number.

The composition of the poem is free: while traveling around Rus', seven men witness numerous colorful scenes, meet a variety of its inhabitants (mainly peasants like themselves, but also representatives of other social strata- landowners, priests, servants, lackeys). The answers to the main question of the poem are put together into short stories (there are many of them in the first part: in the chapters “Rural Fair”, “Drunken Night” and “Happy”), and sometimes turn into independent plots: for example, such an inserted story occupies most of the fragment “ Peasant Woman,” a long story dedicated to the life of Yermil Girin. This is how a kaleidoscopic picture of life in Russia develops in the era of the Peasant Reform (Nekrasov called his poem “the epic of modern peasant life”).

The poem is written mostly in white iambic trimeter. Focusing on folk verse, Nekrasov randomly alternates dactylic Rhyme with stress on the third syllable from the end. ⁠ ending with male Rhyme with stress on the last syllable. ⁠ - this creates a feeling of free, flowing speech:

Yes, no matter how I ran them,
And the betrothed appeared,
There's a stranger on the mountain!
Philip Korchagin - St. Petersburg resident,
Stove maker by skill.
The mother cried:
"Like a fish in a blue sea
You scurry! like a nightingale
You'll fly out of the nest!
Someone else's side
Not sprinkled with sugar
Not drizzled with honey!”

However, in “Who in Rus'...” there are fragments written in a variety of sizes, both in blank and in rhymed verse. For example, the song “Hungry”: “A man is standing - / Swaying, / A man is walking - / Can’t breathe! // From the bark / It dissolved, / Melancholy-trouble / Tormented” - or the famous hymn “Rus”, written by seminarian Grisha Dobrosklonov:

The army is rising -
Uncountable,
The strength in her will affect
Indestructible!
You're miserable too
You are also abundant
You're downtrodden
You are omnipotent
Mother Rus'!..

Reaper. Photo from the album “Types of Podolsk Province”. 1866

Peasants at lunch. Photo from the album “Types of Podolsk Province”. 1866

What influenced her?

First of all, the Peasant Reform of 1861. It caused mixed reactions in the circle to which Nekrasov belonged. Many of his employees and like-minded people reacted sharply to it negatively, including the leading critic of Sovremennik, Nikolai Chernyshevsky, who assessed the reform as unfair to the peasants and committed “in favor” of the landowners. Nekrasov himself was reserved about the reform, but significantly more optimistic. The poet saw in it not only injustice towards the people, the “sower and guardian” of the land, who now had to buy this land from the landowner, but also new opportunities. In a letter to Turgenev dated April 5, 1861, Nekrasov wrote: “We now have a curious time - but the real deal and his whole fate lie ahead.” Apparently, the general feeling is well expressed in the short poem “Freedom” written at the same time:

Motherland! across your plains
I have never driven with such a feeling!
I see a child in the arms of my mother,
The heart is agitated by the thought of the beloved:
In good times a child was born,
God be merciful! you won't recognize tears!
Since childhood, I have not been intimidated by anyone, I am free,
Choose the job you're good for,
If you want, you will remain a man forever,
If you can do it, you will soar into the sky like an eagle!
There are many mistakes in these fantasies:
The human mind is subtle and flexible,
I know, in place of serf networks
People have come up with many other
Yes!.. but it’s easier for people to untangle them.
Muse! Welcome freedom with hope!

In any case, Nekrasov had no doubt that people’s life was changing radically. And it was precisely the spectacle of change, along with reflections on whether the Russian peasant was ready to take advantage of freedom, that in many ways became the impetus for writing the poem.

Of the literary and linguistic influences, the first is folklore, with the help of which people talk about their lives, worries and hopes. Interest in folklore was characteristic of many Russian poets of the first half of the 19th century; Most likely, Nekrasov’s immediate predecessor should be considered Alexei Koltsov, the author of popular poems imitating the style of folk poetry. Nekrasov himself became interested in folklore back in the mid-1840s (for example, in the poem “Ogorodnik”), but the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” became the culmination of this interest. Nekrasov collected folk oral literature on his own for several decades, but also used collections of folk poetry published by professional folklorists. Thus, Nekrasov was greatly impressed by the first volume of “Lamentations of the Northern Territory,” collected Elpidifor Barsov Elpidifor Vasilievich Barsov (1836-1917) - ethnographer. Author of the three-volume work “Lamentations of the Northern Territory”. Researcher of ancient Russian writing and owner of one of the best paleographic collections of his time. In 1914, he donated it to the Historical Museum. ⁠ (mostly it included screams and lamentations recorded from Irina Fedosova Irina Andreevna Fedosova (1827-1899) - folk storyteller. Originally from Karelia. She gained fame as a mourner. At the end of the 1860s, for several years, Elpidifor Barsov recorded her lamentations, which were included in the ethnographic study “Lamentations of the Northern Territory.” In total, about 30 thousand of its texts were recorded by different ethnographers. Fedosova performed in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Nizhny Novgorod, and had many fans. ⁠ ), as well as the third and fourth parts of “Songs Collected P. N. Rybnikov Pavel Nikolaevich Rybnikov (1831-1885) - ethnographer. Graduate of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow University. He studied the schism and the Old Believers in the Chernigov province, was suspected of participating in the revolutionary circle of “vertepniks”, after which he was exiled to Petrozavodsk. In 1860, Rybnikov undertook a trip to the Russian North, where he collected and recorded unique local folklore. Based on the results of the trip, he published the book “Songs Collected by P. N. Rybnikov,” which became famous not only in Russia, but also abroad. ⁠ " The poet used both of these books mainly in the part “Peasant Woman” to create the image of Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina. Many of the stories told by the characters in the poem were heard by Nekrasov from people familiar with folk life (for example, from the famous lawyer Anatoly Koni Anatoly Fedorovich Koni (1844-1927) - lawyer and writer. He served as a prosecutor, was the chairman of the St. Petersburg District Court, and an honorary judge of the St. Petersburg and Peterhof districts. Presided over by Koni, the jury acquitted Vera Zasulich, who shot the St. Petersburg mayor Trepov. Based on Kony’s memories of one of the cases, Leo Tolstoy wrote the novel “Resurrection.” After the revolution, he lectured on criminal proceedings and wrote a commentary on the Criminal Code of the RSFSR of 1922. Author of the books “On the Path of Life”, “Court Speeches”, “Fathers and Sons of Judicial Reform”. ⁠ ), possibly from peasant hunters. “No matter how you spice up the story of an old serviceman, no matter how wittily you distort the words, such a story will still not be a real soldier’s story if you yourself have never heard a soldier’s story,” Nekrasov wrote back in 1845; the folklore layer in the poem is based on deep personal knowledge of folk traditions 3 Chukovsky K. I. Lenin about Nekrasov // Chukovsky K. I. People and books. M.: GIHL, 1960. P. 380-386. ⁠ .

The “travel” plot, convenient for large-scale depiction of national life, was used, for example, by Nikolai Gogol in. Gogol is one of the writers whom Nekrasov awarded his highest praise: “the people’s defender” (the second such writer is Belinsky, whose books, according to Nekrasov’s dream, a man will one day “carry from the market” along with Gogol’s, and in his drafts Nekrasov also calls Pushkin).

Grigory Myasoedov. The zemstvo is having lunch. 1872 State Tretyakov Gallery

The poem was published in parts as it was created. "Prologue" was published in No. 1 "Contemporary" Literary magazine (1836-1866), founded by Pushkin. Since 1847, Sovremennik was led by Nekrasov and Panaev, later Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov joined the editorial staff. In the 60s, an ideological split occurred in Sovremennik: the editors came to understand the need for a peasant revolution, while many of the magazine’s authors (Turgenev, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Druzhinin) advocated slower and more gradual reforms. Five years after the abolition of serfdom, Sovremennik closed by personal order of Alexander II. ⁠ for 1866, and from 1869 the poem was published in separate chapters in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski.

“A Feast for the Whole World” was not published during Nekrasov’s lifetime: its text, greatly distorted for censorship reasons, was included in the November (11th) issue of “Notes of the Fatherland” for 1876, but was cut out from there by censorship; publication planned in 1877 was also cancelled, citing the "ill health of the author". This fragment was first published separately in 1879 in an illegal edition of the St. Petersburg Free Printing House, and a legally incomplete version of “The Feast” was published in Otechestvennye Zapiski only in 1881.

The first separate publication, “Who Lives Well in Rus',” appeared in 1880 year 4 “Who Lives Well in Rus'”: Poem by N. A. Nekrasov. SPb.: Type. M. Stasyulevich, 1880. ⁠ , however, in addition to the first part, as well as “The Peasant Woman” and “The Last One,” it included only a short fragment “Grishin’s Song”). Apparently, the first complete publication of “Who Lives Well in Rus'” should be considered the one-volume edition of “Poems by N. A. Nekrasov”, published Mikhail Stasyulevich Mikhail Matveevich Stasyulevich (1826-1911) - historian and publicist. Professor of history at St. Petersburg University, specialist in the history of Ancient Greece and the Western European Middle Ages. In 1861 he resigned in protest against the suppression of student protests. Author of the three-volume work “History of the Middle Ages, in its sources and modern writers.” From 1866 to 1908 he was editor of the journal "Bulletin of Europe". ⁠ in 1881; however, here too “A Feast for the Whole World” is presented in a distorted form.

Since 1869, the poem was published in separate chapters in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski

Cover of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” Printing house of M. M. Stasyulevich, 1880

How was she received?

As new parts of the poem were published, critics met them mostly negatively. Victor Burenin Viktor Petrovich Burenin (1841-1926) - literary critic, publicist, playwright. In his youth, he was friends with the amnestied Decembrists and radical democrats (he helped Nekrasov with collecting materials for the poem “Russian Women”), and published in Herzen’s “Bell.” From 1876 until the revolution, he worked for Suvorin’s Novoye Vremya, a conservative right-wing publication. Due to frequent attacks and rudeness in his articles, Burenin gradually acquired a scandalous reputation - he was sued several times for libel. They said that it was Burenin’s harsh article that brought the poet Semyon Nadson to death - after reading the accusations that he was only pretending to be sick, Nadson felt worse and soon died. ⁠ believed that the chapters of the first part “are weak and prosaic in general, constantly smack of vulgarity and only in places represent some dignity" 5 St. Petersburg Gazette. 1873, March 10. No. 68. ⁠ , Vasily Avseenko Vasily Grigorievich Avseenko (1842-1913) - writer, publicist. He taught general history at Kiev University, was co-editor of the newspaper “Kievlyanin”, and head of the governor’s office. After moving to St. Petersburg in 1869, he served in the Ministry of Public Education, published critical articles in “Russian Bulletin”, “Russian Word”, “Zarya”. From 1883 to 1896 he published the St. Petersburg Gazette. He wrote fiction: the novels “Evil Spirit”, “Milky Way”, “Gnashing of Teeth” and others. ⁠ called “Who Lives Well in Rus'” “long and watery thing" 6 Russian thought. 1872, May 13. No. 122. ⁠ and even considered it “among the most unsuccessful works” Nekrasova 7 Russian thought. 1873, February 21. No. 49. ⁠ . Burenin greeted “The Last One” more favorably, in which he saw “artistic truth combined with modern social thought" 8 St. Petersburg Gazette. 1873. No. 68. ⁠ . However, both Burenin and Avseenko, who had a sharply negative attitude towards “The Last One,” denied the topicality and relevance of this part: they accused Nekrasov of “exposing serfdom exactly 12 years after it cancellations" 9 Russian Bulletin. 1874. No. 7. P. 454. ⁠ . “Peasant Woman” was scolded for “false, made-up populism" 10 Burenin; St. Petersburg Gazette. 1874. No. 10. ⁠ , big stretches, rudeness, cacophony 11 Son of the Fatherland. 1874. No. 30. ⁠ . It is characteristic that, attacking specific places in the poem, critics often did not even suspect that it was here that Nekrasov was using an authentic folklore text.

Friendly criticism noted in the poem a sincere feeling of sympathy for the common man, “love for the “unfortunate Russian people” and the poet’s sympathy for his suffering" 12 Radiance. 1873. No. 17. ⁠. Generally hostile to Nekrasov Evgeniy Markov Evgeny Lvovich Markov (1835-1903) - writer, critic, ethnographer. He served as a teacher in Tula, then as director of the Simferopol gymnasium. Collaborated with the magazines “Domestic Notes”, “Delo”, “Bulletin of Europe”. Author of the novels “Black Earth Fields” (1876), “Seashore” (1880), travel notes “Sketches of the Crimea” (1872), “Sketches of the Caucasus” (1887), “Travel to Serbia and Montenegro” (1903). ⁠ wrote about “The Peasant Woman”: “Speech best places his best poems sometimes it sounds like the characteristic melody of a real Russian song, sometimes it strikes with the laconic wisdom of Russian proverbs" 13 Voice. 1878. No. 46. ⁠.

There were also downright enthusiastic reviews: critic Prokofy Grigoriev called “Who is Good in Rus'” “in terms of the power of genius, the mass of life contained in it, unprecedented in the literature of any people poem" 14 The library is cheap and public. 1875. No. 4. P. 5. ⁠ .

Probably the most insightful of his contemporaries was the poet (and one of the creators of Kozma Prutkov) Alexey Zhemchuzhnikov Alexey Mikhailovich Zhemchuzhnikov (1821-1908) - poet, satirist. He served in the Ministry of Justice and the State Chancellery, and retired in 1858. Together with his brothers Vladimir and Alexander and his cousin Alexei Tolstoy, he created the literary pseudonym Kozma Prutkov. Author of several books of poetry. ⁠ : he highly appreciated the scale of Nekrasov’s plan and singled out “Who Lives Well in Rus'” among the poet’s works. In a private letter to Nekrasov dated March 25, 1870 from Wiesbaden, Zhemchuzhnikov wrote: “This poem is a major thing, and, in my opinion, among your works it occupies a place in the forefront. The main idea is very happy; The frame is extensive, like a frame. You can fit so much in it.”

Victor Burenin. 1910s. The critic Burenin believed that the first parts of the poem “smack of vulgarity”

Alexey Zhemchuzhnikov. 1900 The poet Zhemchuzhnikov, on the contrary, believed that the poem “is a capital thing”

answer Lev Oborin

The modern status of “Who Lives Well in Rus'” as Nekrasov’s most important work did not emerge immediately. One of the first critics to make an effort was Sergey Andreevsky Sergei Arkadyevich Andreevsky (1848-1918) - poet, critic, lawyer. He worked under the supervision of lawyer Anatoly Koni, was a famous court speaker, the book with his defensive speeches went through several editions. At the age of 30, Andreevsky began writing and translating poetry. He published the first translation into Russian of Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Raven". Since the late 1880s, he worked on critical sketches about the works of Baratynsky, Lermontov, Turgenev, Nekrasov. ⁠ , whose articles about the poet had a significant impact on the perception of subsequent critics. In the article “Degeneration of Rhyme” (1900), Andreevsky declared the poem one of Nekrasov’s highest achievements.

Further canonization of the poem is connected not only with the work of critics and critics (primarily Korney Chukovsky and Vladislava Evgenieva-Maksimova Vladislav Evgenievich Evgeniev-Maksimov (1883-1955) - literary critic. He worked as a teacher at the Tsarskoye Selo real school, and was fired for organizing a literary evening at which Nekrasov’s “The Railway” was read. Later he worked in independent public educational institutions. He created a Nekrasov exhibition, on the basis of which the Nekrasov museum-apartment in St. Petersburg was formed. Since 1934 he taught at Leningrad University. Participated in the preparation of the complete works of Nekrasov. ⁠ ), but also with the fact that the civil, revolutionary pathos was clearly heard in the poem: “Every peasant / has a soul like a black cloud - / angry, menacing, - and it would be necessary / for thunder to thunder from there, / to rain bloody rains...” The censorship fate of the poem only strengthened the feeling that Nekrasov was proposing a direct revolutionary program and opposed liberal half-measures, and the figure of Grisha Dobrosklonov, the future revolutionary, was being molded to answer the central question of the poem - an answer that Nekrasov never finally gave. The poem was still popular in circles Narodnaya Volya "People's Will" is a revolutionary organization that emerged in 1879. The registered participants included about 500 people. The Narodnaya Volya campaigned among the peasants, issued proclamations, organized demonstrations, including carrying out terrorist activities - they organized the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. For participation in the activities of Narodnaya Volya, 89 people were sentenced to death. ⁠ , was confiscated from revolutionaries along with illegal literature. The name of Nekrasov appears in the texts of the main theoreticians of Russian Marxism - Lenin and Plekhanov Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov (1856-1918) - philosopher, politician. He headed the populist organization “Land and Freedom” and the secret society “Black Redistribution”. In 1880 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he founded the Union of Russian Social Democrats Abroad. After the Second Congress of the RSDLP, Plekhanov disagreed with Lenin and headed the Menshevik party. Returned to Russia in 1917, supported the Provisional Government and condemned October Revolution. Plekhanov died a year and a half after returning from an exacerbation of tuberculosis. ⁠ . In the memoirs of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin appears as a real connoisseur of Nekrasov’s poems. Lenin’s articles are peppered with Nekrasov’s quotes: in particular, in 1912, Lenin recalls lines about that “desired time” when a man “Brings Belinsky and Gogol / From the market,” and states that this time has finally come, and in 1918 he puts the lines from the song by Grisha Dobrosklonov (“You are both wretched, you are also abundant...”) as the epigraph to the article “ the main task our days" 15 Chukovsky K. I. Lenin about Nekrasov // Chukovsky K. I. People and books. M.: GIHL, 1960. ⁠ . Plekhanov, the main specialist in aesthetics among Marxists, wrote a long article about him on the 25th anniversary of Nekrasov’s death. A significant fragment in it is dedicated to “Who Lives Well in Rus'”: Plekhanov reflects on how Nekrasov would have reacted to a popular uprising, and comes to the conclusion that it seemed “completely unthinkable” to him. Plekhanov associated the pessimistic mood of the poem with the general decline revolutionary movement in the late 1870s: Nekrasov did not live to see the speech of the new generation of revolutionaries, “and having learned and understood these people, new to Rus', he, perhaps, would have written a new, inspired "song", Not "hungry" and not "salty", A combat, - the Russian "Marseillaise", in which the sounds would still be heard "to sweep", but the sounds "sadness" would be replaced by sounds of joyful confidence in victory.” Despite this, in Marxist literary criticism there was no doubt that Nekrasov in “Who is in Rus'...” was the herald of the revolution - accordingly, his poem was given a high place in the post-revolutionary literary canon. It remains behind the poem today: the current study of Nekrasov’s work in school cannot be imagined without a detailed analysis of “Who Lives Well in Rus'.”

From the archives of the Gogol Center. Photo by Ira Polyarnaya

The play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center. Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. 2015

From the archives of the Gogol Center. Photo by Ira Polyarnaya

The play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center. Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. 2015

From the archives of the Gogol Center. Photo by Ira Polyarnaya

Why do men go in search of a happy man?

On the one hand, we have a convention: the men begin an argument that leads to an epically described fight, and then it occurs to them to go around all of Rus' until they find an answer - a typical fairy-tale quest, the folklore of which is enhanced by the appearance of a magical warbler bird and self-assembled tablecloths (almost the only fantastic elements in Nekrasov’s poem, which is generally realistic: even seemingly speaking place names like Gorelov and Neelov had very real correspondences).

On the other hand, whatever the motives for the trip, we still need to figure out what exactly the wanderers wanted to know and why they chose such interlocutors. The very concept of happiness is very broad and ambiguous. Perhaps the wanderers do not just want to find out who is happy with simple and understandable happiness - as it seems to them. Maybe they are also trying to find out what happiness is, what types of happiness there are, what happiness is happy people. And they actually encounter a whole gallery of people who consider themselves happy - and a whole range of varieties of happiness.

Finally, on the third hand, one should not exaggerate the fabulous beginning of Nekrasov’s dispute: disputes on important topics in the post-reform peasant environment really did occur - this was associated with the beginning of the movement of liberated peasants to the cities, and in general with the bubbling of new ideas in Russia. Soviet literary critic Vasily Bazanov associated the heroes of “Who Lives Well in Rus'” with the emergence of “a new type of peasant - a passionate debater, a loudmouth, a “glib talker" 16 Comments // Nekrasov N. A. Complete collection works and letters: In 15 vols. T. 5: P. 605; see: Bazanov. ⁠ .

Great Russians. Drawing by L. Belyankin from the album “Russian Peoples. Part 1. European Russia" 1894

What kind of happiness can be seen in Nekrasov’s poem?

It is clear that such happiness is based on the principle “it could be worse,” but these examples allow wanderers to clarify their idea of happiness. Not only must it be durable, it gradually emerges as its own, specific one. Of course, wealth is also important: in return for their “Tightened province, / Terpigorev County, / Empty volost,” the men are looking for “An unscarred province, / Ungutted volost, / Empty village.” But this is not the contentment of a well-fed slave, not prosperity in the lordly manner. The happiness of a footman, who spent his whole life licking plates of truffles and fell ill with the “lord’s disease” (which is called “by the way!”) is not “people’s happiness”; it is unacceptable for a peasant. “Correct” happiness lies in something else. The series of happy people in the first part of the poem is crowned by the image mayor The manager of the landowner's estate, supervised the peasants. ⁠ Ermila Girina: he, as the peasants think, is happy because he enjoys the respect and love of the people for his honesty, nobility and justice towards the peasants. But the hero himself is absent - he is sitting in prison (for what - it remains not entirely clear; apparently, he refused to suppress the popular rebellion) - and his candidacy disappears.

When faced with failures, wanderers do not lose interest in their question, expanding the boundaries of ideas about happiness. The stories they learn teach them something. For example, from a conversation with the village priest, the peasants learn that he is almost as unhappy as the peasants. The peasants’ ideas about the priest’s happiness (“Pop’s porridge with butter, / Pop’s pie with filling, / Pop’s cabbage soup with smelt!”) turn out to be incorrect: it is impossible to achieve any income from serving the disadvantaged (“The peasant himself is in need, / And would be glad to give, nothing..."),
and the reputation of the “priests” among the people is unimportant - they laugh at them, they compose “jokey tales, / And obscene songs, / And all sorts of blasphemy” about them. Even the master is unhappy, remembering with longing the former, pre-reform time:

I will have mercy on whomever I want,
I'll execute whoever I want.
The law is my desire!
The fist is my police!
The blow is sparkling,
The blow is tooth-breaking,
Hit the cheekbone!..

Finally, the poem contains the amazing story of the Last One - Prince Utyatin, who is living out his days, who was lied to that the tsar canceled the reform and returned serfdom: his former serf owners play a comedy, pretending that everything remains as before. This story, which Nekrasov’s critics considered a nonsense, fantastic anecdote, actually had precedents; they could have been known to Nekrasov. The plot of “The Last One” also warns against longing for the past (it was terrible, you should not try to restore it, even if the present does not live up to rosy hopes) and against voluntary slavery (even if it is a make-believe slavery, there will be no promised reward for it: heirs, in whose interests this performance was played out, the former serfs will certainly be deceived). One must not look for happiness in the serfdom past: then only the master and his faithful lackey Ipat were happy, whom the prince once accidentally ran over with a sleigh, and then nevertheless “nearby, unworthy, / With his special princely / In a sleigh, he brought home” (talking about At this, Ipat invariably cried with emotion).

Can a woman be happy in Rus'?

“Not everything is between men / Find the happy one, / Let’s touch the women!” - the wanderers realize at some point. The fragment “Peasant Woman” takes the question of happiness to a new plane: how to achieve happiness? The main character of the fragment Matryona Timofeevna Korchagin, whose story is filled mainly with losses and suffering (the difficult situation in her husband’s house, the loss of her son, Physical punishment, constant hardships and deprivations), nevertheless, not without reason, appears as a possible lucky one:

And in the village of Klin:
Kholmogory cow,
Not a woman! kinder
And smoother - there is no woman.
You ask Korchagina
Matryona Timofeev,
She is also the governor's wife...

She changed her destiny: she saved her husband, achieved respect and, in fact, leadership in the family. This “stately woman, / Wide and dense” enjoys unprecedented authority for a “woman” in her village. It is not without reason to believe that this female image in the poem shows that the path, if not to happiness, then to changing a bitter fate lies through a strong, decisive act. This idea becomes clear if you look at Matryona’s antipode in “The Peasant Woman”: this is grandfather Savely, “the hero of the Holy Russian.” He pronounces a famous monologue, a kind of hymn to patience, the colossal ability for which makes the Russian peasant a real hero:

Hands are twisted in chains,
Feet forged with iron,
Back...dense forests
We walked along it and broke down.
What about the breasts? Elijah the prophet
It rattles and rolls around
On a chariot of fire...
The hero endures everything!

Matryona is not at all impressed by this apology for patience:

“You're joking, grandpa! —
I said. - So and so
The mighty hero,
Tea, the mice will eat you!”

Later, the old man Savely (through whose fault Matryona’s son died) tells her: “Be patient, many-armed one! / Be patient, long-suffering one! / We can’t find the truth”; Of course, this thought disgusts her, and she is always looking for justice. For Nekrasov, the intention itself is more important than the result: Matryona Korchagina is not happy, but she has what in other circumstances can become the foundation of happiness - courage, intransigence, strong will. However, neither Matryona nor the peasant women of her day will experience these other circumstances - for happiness, she tells the wanderers,

Go to the official
To the noble boyar,
Go to the king
Don't touch women,
Here is God! you pass with nothing
To the grave!

Podolyanka. Photo from the album “Types of Podolsk Province”. 1886

Three poor old women. Photo from the album “Types of Podolsk Province”. 1886

What is the special role of the fragment “A Feast for the Whole World”?

To replace the question of what happiness is and whether there is already happiness in Rus' happy man(or a group of people), another question comes: how to change the situation of the Russian peasant? This is the reason for the unusual nature of the most recent fragment of the poem, “A Feast for the Whole World.”

Even at a superficial glance, this part is different from the rest. First of all, it is as if the movement has finally stopped: the wanderers no longer walk through Rus', they remain in the Bolshiye Vakhlaki tree at a feast on the occasion of the death of the Last One - they participate in a kind of commemoration according to serfdom. Secondly, here the wanderers do not meet anyone new - all the characters are the same whom we have already seen in the fragment “The Last One”. We already know that there is no point in looking for the lucky one among them (and for those who appear in this fragment for the first time, the wanderers do not even try to ask the question that worries them). It seems that the pursuit of happiness and the lucky person has either been stopped or postponed, and the plot of the poem has undergone a change that was not provided for in its original program.

The search for happiness and the happy is replaced by discussion, conversation. For the first time in the poem, its peasant characters not only tell their stories, but themselves begin to look for the reasons for their situation, their difficult life. Before this, only one character from the people was shown as a kind of “people's intellectual” - Yakim Nagoy, a lover of “pictures” (that is, paintings hung on the walls for children’s education and for his own joy) and a person capable of intelligently and unexpectedly competently explaining the true the reasons and real dimensions of popular drunkenness: he says that “we are great people / In work and in revelry,” and explains that wine is a kind of substitute for popular anger: “Every peasant / Has a soul like a black cloud - / Angry, formidable, - and it would be necessary / Thunder to thunder from there, / Bloody rains to pour, / And it all ends in wine. / A little glass ran through my veins - / And the kind / Peasant soul laughed!” (This is a “theory”, as if justifying the unsightly practice shown in a few lines earlier.) In the last fragment of the poem, such a reflective subject is the whole “world”, a kind of spontaneous folk meeting.

At the same time, the discussion, deep and serious, is still conducted in the same folklore forms, in the form of parables and legends. Take, for example, the question of who is to blame for the suffering of the people. The blame, of course, is first laid on the nobles, the landowners, whose cruelty obviously exceeds any popular misdeed and crime. It is illustrated by the famous song “About Two Great Sinners.” Its hero, the robber Kudeyar, in whom his conscience has awakened, becomes a schema-monk; in a vision, a certain saint appears to him and says that in order to atone for his sins, Kudeyar must cut down “with the same knife that he robbed” the centuries-old oak tree. This work takes many years, and one day Kudeyar sees the local rich landowner, Mr. Glukhovsky, who boasts of his debauchery and declares that his conscience does not torment him:

“You have to live, old man, in my opinion:
How many slaves do I destroy?
I torment, torture and hang,
I wish I could see how I’m sleeping!”
A miracle happened to the hermit:
I felt furious anger
He rushed to Pan Glukhovsky,
The knife stuck into his heart!
Just now pan bloody
I fell my head on the saddle,
A huge tree collapsed,
The echo shook the whole forest.
The tree collapsed and rolled down
The monk is off the burden of sins!..
Let us pray to the Lord God:
Have mercy on us, dark slaves!

Landowner sin is contrasted with popular holiness (in this part, images of “God’s people” appear, whose feat is not in serving God, but in helping peasants in difficult times for them). However, the idea also arises here that the people themselves are partly to blame for their situation. A great sin (much more terrible than the landowner's) lies with the headman Gleb: his owner, the old “widower amiral,” before his death set his peasants free, but Gleb sold the free land to his heirs and thereby left his brothers in serfdom (written "Koltsov's" verse song "Peasant Sin"). The abolition of serfdom itself is described as an event of catastrophic proportions: “The great chain broke” and hit “One end on the master, / The other on the peasant!..”

It is no longer the author, but his peasant characters who are trying to understand whether their lives are changing for the better after the end of serfdom. Here the main burden lies on the elder Vlas, who feels like a kind of leader of the people's world: on his shoulders is a great responsibility for the future. It is he who, turning into the “voice of the people,” either expresses the hope that it will be easier for the liberated peasants to achieve a better life, or becomes despondent, realizing that serfdom is deeply rooted in the souls of the peasants. Helps Vlas dispel serious doubts new character, introducing into the work both already familiar and completely new notes. This is a young seminarian named Grigory Dobrosklonov, the son of a peasant woman and a poor sexton:

Although Dobrolyubov also came from the clergy, Grigory Dobrosklonov does not have much personal resemblance to him. Nekrasov did not achieve it: already in Nekrasov’s lyrical poetry, the image of Dobrolyubov separated from a specific person and became a generalized image of a revolutionary-lover of the people, ready to give his life for the people’s happiness. In “Who Lives Well in Rus'” the populist type seems to be added to it. This movement, which arose already at the end of the 1860s, largely inherited the ideas, views and principles of the revolutionaries of the 60s, but at the same time differed from them. The leaders of this movement (some of them, like Mikhailovsky Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky (1842-1904) - publicist, literary critic. From 1868 he published in Otechestvennye zapiski, and in 1877 he became one of the editors of the magazine. At the end of the 1870s, he became close to the People's Will organization and was expelled from St. Petersburg several times for connections with revolutionaries. Mikhailovsky considered the goal of progress to increase the level of consciousness in society, and criticized Marxism and Tolstoyism. By the end of his life he had become a well-known public intellectual and a cult figure among the populists. ⁠ And Lavrov Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov (1823-1900) - sociologist, philosopher. One of the main ideologists of populism. He was a member of the revolutionary society "Land and Freedom". After his arrest he was sent into exile, where he wrote his most famous work— “Historical Letters.” In 1870 he fled abroad: he participated in the Paris Commune and edited the magazine “Forward”. Author of poems for the song “Working Marseillaise,” which was used as an anthem in the first months after the February Revolution. ⁠ , collaborated in Nekrasov’s journal Otechestvennye zapiski) proclaimed the idea of duty to the people. According to these ideas, the “thinking minority” owes its opportunities, the benefits of civilization and culture to the people’s labor - that huge mass of peasants who, while creating material wealth, do not use them themselves, continuing to vegetate in poverty, without access to enlightenment, education, which could to help them change their lives for the better. Young people, brought up not only on the articles of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, but also by Lavrov, Mikhailovsky, Bervi-Flerovsky Vasily Vasilyevich Bervi-Flerovsky (real name - Wilhelm Vilhelmovich Bervi; 1829-1918) - sociologist, publicist. One of the main ideologists of populism. In 1861, he was arrested in the “case of the Tver peace mediators” and sent into exile, first to Astrakhan and then to Siberia. He wrote the revolutionary proclamation “On the Martyr Nicholas.” Collaborated with the magazines “Delo”, “Slovo” and “Otechestvennye zapiski”. He was highly respected by young revolutionaries. ⁠ , sought to repay this debt to the people. One of these attempts was the famous “going to the people,” undertaken by these people in the summer of 1874 at the call of their ideologists. Young people went to the villages not just to propagate revolutionary ideas, but to help the people, to open their eyes to the reasons for their difficult situation, to give them useful knowledge (and excerpts from Nekrasov’s poem could push them to this). The failure that ended this peculiar feat only intensified the sense of sacrifice that guided the young people - many of them paid for their impulse with heavy and lengthy punishments.

Dobrosklonov does not imagine his happiness except through overcoming someone else’s, people’s grief. His connection with the people is blood: Grisha’s mother was a peasant. However, if Dobrosklonov embodies the author’s, Nekrasov’s concept of happiness, which became the fruit of the poet’s thoughts, this does not mean that he completes the poem: it remains questionable whether the peasants will be able to understand such happiness and recognize a person like Grisha as a truly lucky person, especially in the event that “the loud name / of the people’s protector, / Consumption and Siberia” are really awaiting him (lines that Nekrasov deleted from the poem, possibly for censorship reasons). We remember that the candidacy of mayor Yermil Girin for the role of the real lucky one disappears precisely when it turns out that “he is sitting in prison.”

In the finale, when Grisha Dobrosklonov composes his ecstatic hymn to Mother Rus', Nekrasov declares: “Our wanderers would be under their own roof, / If only they could know what was happening to Grisha.” Perhaps the self-awareness of the young man who composed the “divine” song about Rus' is the main approach to happiness in the poem; it probably coincided with the feelings of the real author of the anthem - Nekrasov himself. But despite this, the question of people's happiness, happiness in the understanding of the people themselves remains open in the poem.

"drunk" 17 Bee. 1878. No. 2. ⁠: “Not finding a happy person in Rus', the wandering men return to their seven villages... These villages are “adjacent”, and from each there is a path to the tavern. It’s at this tavern that they meet a drunk man... and with him over a glass they find out who has a good life.” Writer Alexander Shklyarevsky Alexander Andreevich Shklyarevsky (1837-1883) - writer. He served as a parish teacher. He gained fame as the author of crime detective stories. Author of the books “Stories of a Forensic Investigator”, “Corners of the Slum World”, “Murder Without a Trace”, “Is She Suicide?” and many others. ⁠ recalled that the supposed answer to the central question of the poem sounded like "no one" 18 A week. 1880. No. 48. P. 773-774. ⁠ , - in this case, this question is rhetorical and only a disappointing answer can be given. This evidence deserves attention, but the dispute about Nekrasov’s plan has not yet been resolved.

From the very beginning, a strange thing is striking: if the peasants could really assume that representatives of the upper classes (landowner, official, priest, merchant, minister, tsar) were happy, why did they begin to look for the happy among their fellows? After all, as the literary critic Boris Bukhshtab noted, “there was no need for the peasants to leave their Razutovs, Gorelovs, Neelovs to find out if they were happy.” peasants" 19 Bukhstab B. Ya. N. A. Nekrasov. Problems of creativity. L.: Sov. pis., 1989. P.115. ⁠ . According to Bukhshtab, there was an initial plan for the poem, according to which Nekrasov wanted to show the happiness of the “upper classes” of society against the backdrop of popular grief. However, he underwent a change, since a different understanding of happiness came to the fore - from happiness as personal and egoistic contentment, Nekrasov moves on to the idea of the impossibility of being happy when grief and unhappiness reign around.

Fate had in store for him
The path is glorious, the name is loud
People's Defender,
Consumption and Siberia...

In some editions, these lines are included in the main text of the poem as a victim of self-censorship, but there is no basis for an unambiguous conclusion about this (as in many other cases). The “censorship” version of the exclusion of these famous lines has been repeatedly disputed by philologists. As a result, in the latest academic collected works Nekrasova 20 Nekrasov N. A. Complete works and letters: In 15 volumes. Works of fiction. Volumes 1-10. Criticism. Journalism. Letters. T. 11-15. L., St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1981-2000. ⁠ - the most authoritative edition of Nekrasov’s texts - they are published in the section “Other editions and variants”.

Another question that has not yet been resolved is in what order the completed fragments should be printed. There is no doubt that “Who Lives Well in Rus'” should open with “Prologue” and “Part One”. Variations are possible with the three subsequent fragments. From 1880 to 1920, in all editions, fragments of the poem were printed in the order in which Nekrasov created and published them (or prepared them for publication): 1. “Part One.” 2. “The Last One.” 3. "Peasant Woman". 4. “A feast for the whole world.” In 1920, Korney Chukovsky, who prepared the first Soviet collected works of Nekrasov, changed the order, based on the author's instructions in the manuscripts: Nekrasov indicated in the notes where this or that fragment should be included. The order in Chukovsky’s edition is as follows: 1. “Part One.” 2. “The Last One.” 3. “A feast for the whole world.” 4. "Peasant Woman". This order is based, among other things, on the agricultural calendar cycle: according to it, the action of “The Peasant Woman” should take place two months after “The Last One” and “A Feast for the Whole World.”

Chukovsky’s decision was criticized: it turned out that if “The Peasant Woman” ends the entire poem, this gives it an overly gloomy meaning. In this version, it ended (broke off) on a pessimistic note - with the story of the “holy old woman”: “The keys to women’s happiness, / From our free will / Abandoned, lost / From God himself!” The poem, thus, lost the historical optimism inherent in Nekrasov (as was traditionally believed in Soviet times), faith in a better future for the people. Chukovsky accepted the criticism and in 1922 published, in violation of the chronology of the author’s work on the text, fragments in a different order: 1. “Part One.” 2. "Peasant Woman". 3. “The Last One.” 4. “A feast for the whole world.” Now the poem found a semblance of completion on an optimistic note - Grisha Dobrosklonov experiences real euphoria at the finale of “A Feast for the Whole World”:

He heard the immense strength in his chest,
The sounds of grace delighted his ears,
The radiant sounds of the noble hymn -
He sang the embodiment of people's happiness!..

The poem was published in this form until 1965, but discussions among literary scholars continued. In the last academic collection of Nekrasov’s works, it was decided to return to the order in which “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was published before 1920 of the year 21

Centuries change, but the name of the poet N. Nekrasov - this knight of the spirit - remains unforgettable. In his work, Nekrasov revealed many aspects of Russian life, spoke about the grief of the peasants, and made one feel that under the yoke of need and darkness, heroic forces that had not yet developed were hidden.

The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is the core work of N.A. Nekrasov. It is about peasant truth, about “old” and “new”, about “slaves” and “free”, about “rebellion” and “patience”.

What is the history of the creation of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”? The 60s of the 19th century are characterized by increased political reaction. Nekrasov had to defend the Sovremennik magazine and the course that the publication followed. The struggle for the purity of the chosen direction required the activation of Nekrasov’s muse. One of the main lines that Nekrasov adhered to, and which met the tasks of that time, was popular, peasant. The work on the work “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is the main tribute to the peasant theme.

The creative tasks that Nekrasov faced when creating the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” should be considered in the focus of literary and public life 60-70s XIX century. After all, the poem was created not in one year, but more than ten years, and the moods that possessed Nekrasov in the early 60s changed, just as life itself changed. The writing of the poem began in 1863. By that time, Emperor Alexander II had already signed a manifesto on the abolition of serfdom.

Work on the poem was preceded by years of collecting creative material bit by bit. The author decided not just to write a work of art, but a work accessible and understandable to ordinary people, a kind of “people's book”, which shows with utmost completeness an entire era in the life of the people.

What is the genre uniqueness of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”? Literary experts identify this work by Nekrasov as an “epic poem.” This definition goes back to the opinion of Nekrasov’s contemporaries. An epic is a major work of fiction of an epic nature. The genre of “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a lyric-epic work. It combines epic principles with lyrical and dramatic ones. The dramatic element generally permeates many of Nekrasov’s works; the poet’s passion for drama is reflected in his poetic work.

The compositional form of the work “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is quite unique. Composition is the construction, arrangement of all elements work of art. Compositionally, the poem is structured according to the laws of classical epic: it is a collection of relatively autonomous parts and chapters. The unifying motif is the road motif: seven men (seven is the most mysterious and magical number) trying to find an answer to a question that is essentially philosophical: who can live well in Rus'? Nekrasov does not lead us to something climax in the poem, does not push towards the final event and does not activate the action. His task, as a major epic artist, is to reflect aspects of Russian life, to paint the image of the people, to show the diversity of people's roads, directions, paths. This creative work of Nekrasov is a large lyric-epic form. There are many characters involved and many storylines unfold.

The main idea of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is that the people deserve happiness and it makes sense to fight for happiness. The poet was sure of this, and with his entire work he presented evidence of this. The happiness of one individual is not enough, this is not a solution to the problem. The poem calls for thoughts about the embodiment of happiness for the whole people, about a “Feast for the whole world.”

The poem begins with a “Prologue”, in which the author tells how seven men from different villages met on a highway. A dispute arose between them about who would live better in Rus'. Each of those arguing expressed his opinion, and no one wanted to give in. As a result, the debaters decided to go on a journey to find out first-hand who lives in Rus' and how they live and to find out which of them was right in this dispute. From the warbler bird, the wanderers learned where the magic self-assembled tablecloth was located, which would feed and water them in long journey. Having found a self-assembled tablecloth and convinced of its magical abilities, seven men set off on a long journey.

In the chapters of the first part of the poem, seven wanderers met people from different classes on their way: a priest, peasants at a rural fair, a landowner, and asked them the question - how happy are they? Neither the priest nor the landowner thought that their life was full of happiness. They complained that after the abolition of serfdom, their life worsened. Fun reigned at the rural fair, but when the wanderers began to find out from the people leaving after the fair how happy each of them was, it turned out that only a few of them could be called truly happy.

In the chapters of the second part, united by the title “The Last One,” the wanderers meet the peasants of the village of Bolshie Vakhlaki, living in a rather strange situation. Despite the abolition of serfdom, they portrayed serfs in the presence of the landowner, as in the old days. The old landowner was sensitive to the reform of 1861 and his sons, fearing to be left without an inheritance, persuaded the peasants to play serfs until the old man died. At the end of this part of the poem it is said that after the death of the old prince, his heirs deceived the peasants and started a lawsuit with them, not wanting to give up valuable meadows.

After communicating with the Vakhlak men, the travelers decided to look for happy people among the women. In the chapters from the third part of the poem, under the general title “Peasant Woman,” they met with a resident of the village of Klin, Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina, who was popularly nicknamed “the governor’s wife.” Matryona Timofeevna told them without concealment her entire long-suffering life. At the end of her story, Matryona advised wanderers not to look for happy people among Russian women, telling them a parable that the keys to women's happiness are lost, and no one is able to find them.

The wandering of seven men, seeking happiness throughout Rus', continues, and they end up at a feast thrown by the residents of the village of Valakhchina. This part of the poem was called “A Feast for the Whole World.” At this feast, seven wanderers come to the realization that the question for which they set out on a campaign across Rus' occupies not only them, but the entire Russian people.

IN last chapter The author of the poem gives the floor to the younger generation. One of the participants in the folk feast, the son of the parish sexton, Grigory Dobrosklonov, unable to sleep after heated arguments, goes to wander around his native expanses and the song “Rus” is born in his head, which became the ideological finale of the poem:

"You and the wretched one,
You are also abundant
You're downtrodden
You are omnipotent
Mother Rus'!

Returning home and telling his brother this song, Grigory tries to fall asleep, but his imagination continues to work and a new song is born. If the seven wanderers had been able to find out what this new song was about, they could have returned home with a light heart, for the goal of the journey would have been achieved, since Grisha’s new song was about the embodiment of people’s happiness.

Regarding the issues of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” we can say the following: two levels of issues (conflict) emerge in the poem – socio-historical (the results of the peasant reform) – the conflict grows in the first part and persists in the second, and deep, philosophical (salt national character), which appears in the second and dominates the third part. Problems raised by Nekrasov in the poem
(the chains of slavery have been removed, but whether the peasant’s lot has been eased, whether the oppression of the peasants has stopped, whether the contradictions in society have been eliminated, whether the people are happy) - will not be resolved for a long period.

When analyzing N.A. Nekrasov’s poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” it is important to say that the main poetic meter of this work is unrhymed iambic trimeter. Moreover, at the end of the line after the stressed syllable there are two unstressed syllables (dactylic clause). In some places in the work, Nekrasov also uses iambic tetrameter. This choice of poetic size was determined by the need to present the text in a folklore style, but while preserving the classical literary canons of that time. The folk songs included in the poem, as well as the songs of Grigory Dobrosklonov, are written using three-syllable meters.

Nekrasov strove to ensure that the language of the poem was understandable to ordinary Russian people. Therefore, he refused to use the vocabulary of classical poetry of that time, saturating the work with words of common speech: “village”, “breveshko”, “idle dance”, “fairground” and many others. This made it possible to make the poem understandable to any peasant.

In the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” Nekrasov uses numerous means of artistic expression. These include such epithets as “red sun”, “black shadows”, “poor people”, “free heart”, “calm conscience”, “indestructible force”. There are also comparisons in the poem: “jumped out as if disheveled”, “yellow eyes burn like... fourteen candles!”, “like the men fell asleep like those killed,” “rainy clouds like milk cows.”

Metaphors found in the poem: “the earth lies”, “spring... friendly”, “the warbler is crying”, “a stormy village”, “the boyars are cypress-bearing”.

Metonymy - “the whole road became silent”, “the crowded square became silent”, “When a man... Belinsky and Gogol are carried away from the market.”

In the poem there was a place for such means of artistic expression as irony: “... a tale about a holy fool: he hiccups, I think!” and sarcasm: “The proud pig: itched about the master’s porch!”

There are also stylistic figures in the poem. These include appeals: “Well, uncle!”, “Wait!”, “Come, what you desire!..”, “Oh people, Russian people!” and exclamations: “Choo! horse snoring!”, “At least not this bread!”, “Eh! Eh!”, “At least swallow a feather!”

Folklore expressions - at the fair, apparently and invisibly.

The language of the poem is unique, decorated with sayings, sayings, dialects, and “common” words: “mlada-mladashenka,” “tselkovenky,” “beep.”

I remember the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” because, despite the difficult times in which it was created and which it describes, a positive, life-affirming beginning is visible in it. The people deserve happiness - this is the main theorem proven by Nekrasov. The poem helps people understand, become better, fight for their happiness. Nekrasov is a thinker, a person with a unique social instinct. He touched the depths of people's life, pulled out from its depths a scattering of original Russian characters. Nekrasov was able to show the fullness of human experiences. He sought to comprehend the full depth of human existence.

Nekrasov solved his creative problems in an unconventional way. His work is imbued with the ideas of humanism.

Year of writing:

1877

Reading time:

Description of the work:

The well-known poem Who Lives Well in Rus' was written in 1877 by the Russian writer Nikolai Nekrasov. It took many years to create it - Nekrasov worked on the poem from 1863-1877. It is interesting that Nekrasov had some ideas and thoughts back in the 50s. He thought of capturing in the poem Who Lives Well in Rus' as much as possible everything he knew about the people and heard from people’s mouths.

Read below summary poem Who Lives Well in Rus'.

One day, seven men - recent serfs, and now temporarily obliged "from adjacent villages - Zaplatova, Dyryavina, Razutova, Znobishina, Gorelova, Neyolova, Neurozhaika, etc." meet on the main road. Instead of going their own way, the men start an argument about who lives happily and freely in Rus'. Each of them judges in his own way who is the main lucky person in Rus': a landowner, an official, a priest, a merchant, a noble boyar, a minister of sovereigns or a tsar.

While arguing, they do not notice that they have taken a detour of thirty miles. Seeing that it is too late to return home, the men make a fire and continue the argument over vodka - which, of course, little by little develops into a fight. But a fight does not help resolve the issue that worries the men.

The solution is found unexpectedly: one of the men, Pakhom, catches a warbler chick, and in order to free the chick, the warbler tells the men where they can find a self-assembled tablecloth. Now the men are provided with bread, vodka, cucumbers, kvass, tea - in a word, everything they need for a long journey. And besides, a self-assembled tablecloth will repair and wash their clothes! Having received all these benefits, the men make a vow to find out “who lives happily and freely in Rus'.”

The first possible “lucky person” they meet along the way turns out to be a priest. (It was not right for the soldiers and beggars they met to ask about happiness!) But the priest’s answer to the question of whether his life is sweet disappoints the men. They agree with the priest that happiness lies in peace, wealth and honor. But the priest does not possess any of these benefits. In the haymaking, in the harvest, in the dead of autumn night, in the bitter frost, he must go to where there are the sick, the dying and those being born. And every time his soul hurts at the sight of funeral sobs and orphan sadness - so much so that his hand does not rise to take copper coins - a pitiful reward for the demand. The landowners, who previously lived in family estates and got married here, baptized children, buried the dead, are now scattered not only throughout Rus', but also in distant foreign lands; there is no hope for their retribution. Well, the men themselves know how much respect the priest deserves: they feel embarrassed when the priest reproaches him for obscene songs and insults towards priests.

Realizing that the Russian priest is not one of the lucky ones, the men go to a holiday fair in the trading village of Kuzminskoye to ask people about happiness. In a rich and dirty village there are two churches, a tightly boarded house with the sign “school”, a paramedic’s hut, a dirty hotel. But most of all in the village there are drinking establishments, in each of which they barely have time to cope with thirsty people. Old man Vavila cannot buy goatskin shoes for his granddaughter because he drank himself to a penny. It’s good that Pavlusha Veretennikov, a lover of Russian songs, whom everyone calls “master” for some reason, buys him the treasured gift.

Male wanderers watch the farcical Petrushka, watch how the ladies stock up on books - but not Belinsky and Gogol, but portraits of unknown fat generals and works about “my lord stupid”. They also see how a busy trading day ends: widespread drunkenness, fights on the way home. However, the men are indignant at Pavlusha Veretennikov’s attempt to measure the peasant against the master’s standard. In their opinion, it is impossible for a sober person to live in Rus': he will not withstand either backbreaking labor or peasant misfortune; without drinking, bloody rain would pour out of the angry peasant soul. These words are confirmed by Yakim Nagoy from the village of Bosovo - one of those who “works until they die, drinks until they die.” Yakim believes that only pigs walk on the earth and never see the sky. During the fire, he himself did not save the money he had accumulated throughout his life, but the useless and beloved pictures hanging in the hut; he is sure that with the cessation of drunkenness, great sadness will come to Rus'.

Male wanderers do not lose hope of finding people who live well in Rus'. But even for the promise of giving free water to the lucky ones, they fail to find them. For the sake of free booze, both the overworked worker, the paralyzed former servant who spent forty years licking the master’s plates with the best French truffle, and even ragged beggars are ready to declare themselves lucky.

Finally, someone tells them the story of Yermil Girin, the mayor in the estate of Prince Yurlov, who earned universal respect for his justice and honesty. When Girin needed money to buy the mill, the men lent it to him without even requiring a receipt. But Yermil is now unhappy: after the peasant revolt, he is in prison.

The ruddy sixty-year-old landowner Gavrila Obolt-Obolduev tells the wandering peasants about the misfortune that befell the nobles after the peasant reform. He remembers how in the old days everything amused the master: villages, forests, fields, serf actors, musicians, hunters, who completely belonged to him. Obolt-Obolduev talks with emotion about how on the twelve holidays he invited his serfs to pray in the master's house - despite the fact that after this he had to drive the women away from the entire estate to wash the floors.

And although the peasants themselves know that life in serfdom was far from the idyll depicted by Obolduev, they still understand: the great chain of serfdom, having broken, hit both the master, who was immediately deprived of his usual way of life, and the peasant.

Desperate to find someone happy among the men, the wanderers decide to ask the women. The surrounding peasants remember that Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina lives in the village of Klin, whom everyone considers lucky. But Matryona herself thinks differently. In confirmation, she tells the wanderers the story of her life.

Before her marriage, Matryona lived in a teetotal and wealthy peasant family. She married a stove-maker from a foreign village, Philip Korchagin. But the only happy night for her was that night when the groom persuaded Matryona to marry him; then the usual hopeless life of a village woman began. True, her husband loved her and beat her only once, but soon he went to work in St. Petersburg, and Matryona was forced to endure insults in her father-in-law’s family. The only one who felt sorry for Matryona was grandfather Savely, who was living out his life in the family after hard labor, where he ended up for the murder of the hated German manager. Savely told Matryona what Russian heroism is: it is impossible to defeat a peasant, because he “bends, but does not break.”

The birth of Demushka's first child brightened Matryona's life. But soon her mother-in-law forbade her to take the child into the field, and the old grandfather Savely did not keep an eye on the baby and fed him to pigs. In front of Matryona's eyes, judges who had arrived from the city performed an autopsy on her child. Matryona could not forget her firstborn, although after that she had five sons. One of them, the shepherd boy Fedot, once allowed a she-wolf to carry away a sheep. Matryona accepted the punishment assigned to her son. Then, being pregnant with her son Liodor, she was forced to go to the city to seek justice: her husband, bypassing the laws, was taken into the army. Matryona was then helped by the governor Elena Alexandrovna, for whom the whole family is now praying.

By all peasant standards, Matryona Korchagina’s life can be considered happy. But it is impossible to tell about the invisible spiritual storm that passed through this woman - just like about unpaid mortal grievances, and about the blood of the firstborn. Matryona Timofeevna is convinced that a Russian peasant woman cannot be happy at all, because the keys to her happiness and free will are lost to God himself.

At the height of haymaking, wanderers come to the Volga. Here they witness a strange scene. A noble family swims to the shore in three boats. The mowers, having just sat down to rest, immediately jump up to show the old master their zeal. It turns out that the peasants of the village of Vakhlachina help the heirs hide the abolition of serfdom from the crazy landowner Utyatin. The relatives of the Last-Duckling promise the men floodplain meadows for this. But after the long-awaited death of the Last One, the heirs forget their promises, and the whole peasant performance turns out to be in vain.

Here, near the village of Vakhlachina, wanderers listen to peasant songs - corvée, hunger, soldier, salty - and stories about serfdom. One of these stories is about the exemplary slave Yakov the Faithful. Yakov's only joy was pleasing his master, the small landowner Polivanov. Tyrant Polivanov, in gratitude, hit Yakov in the teeth with his heel, which aroused even greater love in the lackey’s soul. As Polivanov grew older, his legs became weak, and Yakov began to follow him like a child. But when Yakov’s nephew, Grisha, decided to marry the beautiful serf Arisha, Polivanov, out of jealousy, gave the guy as a recruit. Yakov started drinking, but soon returned to the master. And yet he managed to take revenge on Polivanov - the only way available to him, the lackey. Having taken the master into the forest, Yakov hanged himself right above him on a pine tree. Polivanov spent the night under the corpse of his faithful servant, driving away birds and wolves with groans of horror.

Another story - about two great sinners - is told to the men by God's wanderer Jonah Lyapushkin. The Lord awakened the conscience of the chieftain of the robbers Kudeyar. The robber atoned for his sins for a long time, but all of them were forgiven him only after he, in a surge of anger, killed the cruel Pan Glukhovsky.

The wandering men also listen to the story of another sinner - Gleb the elder, who for money hid the last will of the late widower admiral, who decided to free his peasants.

But it is not only wandering men who think about the people’s happiness. The sexton’s son, seminarian Grisha Dobrosklonov, lives on Vakhlachin. In his heart, love for his late mother merged with love for all of Vakhlachina. For fifteen years Grisha knew for sure who he was ready to give his life to, for whom he was ready to die. He thinks of all the mysterious Rus' as a wretched, abundant, powerful and powerless mother, and expects that the indestructible power that he feels in his own soul will still be reflected in it. Such strong souls as Grisha Dobrosklonov’s are called by the angel of mercy to an honest path. Fate is preparing for Grisha “a glorious path, a great name for the people’s intercessor, consumption and Siberia.”

If the wandering men knew what was happening in the soul of Grisha Dobrosklonov, they would probably understand that they could already return to their native shelter, because the goal of their journey had been achieved.

Who lives well in Rus'? Who can live well in Rus'? Main storyline

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov Who can live well in Rus'?

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Yu. LebedevRussian Odyssey

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comments: Mikhail Makeev

answer Lev Oborin

The play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center. Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. 2015

The play “Who Lives Well in Rus'” at the Gogol Center. Directed by Kirill Serebrennikov. 2015

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov
Who can live well in Rus'?

Yu. Lebedev
Russian Odyssey