Complete description of Plyushkin's dead souls. The image and characteristics of Plyushkin in the poem Dead Souls by Gogol essay

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The image of Plyushkin from Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls” is described in a manner unusual for the author - basically, Gogol widely uses elements of humor to characterize his characters. There is no humor left for Plyushkin - a realistic description of a stingy landowner and the consequences of his activities - this is what Nikolai Vasilyevich offers.

Symbolism of the surname

Gogol did not neglect symbolism in his works. Very often the names and surnames of the heroes of his works are symbolic. By contrasting the characteristics of the hero or synonymy, they help reveal certain characteristics of the character.

Basically, revealing symbolism does not require specific knowledge - the answer always lies on the surface. The same trend is observed in the case of Plyushkin.

The word “Plyushkin” means a person distinguished by extraordinary stinginess and greed. The goal of his life becomes the accumulation of a certain wealth (both in the form of finances and in the form of products or raw materials) without a specific goal.

In other words, he saves for the sake of saving. The accumulated goods, as a rule, are not sold anywhere and are used with minimum consumption.

This designation fully corresponds to Plyushkin’s description.

Appearance and condition of the suit

Plyushkin is endowed with effeminate features in the poem. He has an oblong and excessive thin face. Plyushkin did not have distinctive facial features. Nikolai Vasilyevich claims that his face was not much different from the faces of other old men with emaciated faces.

Distinctive feature Plyushkin's appearance had an excessively long chin. The landowner had to cover it with a handkerchief to avoid being spat on. The image was complemented by small eyes. They had not yet lost their liveliness and looked like small animals. Plyushkin never shaved; his growing beard did not look the most attractive and resembled a horse comb.

Plyushkin had no teeth.

Plyushkin's suit wants to look better. To be honest, it is impossible to call his clothes a suit - they have such a worn and strange look that they resemble the rags of a tramp. Usually Plyushkin is dressed in an incomprehensible dress, similar to a woman's hood. His hat was also borrowed from a woman’s wardrobe - it was a classic cap of courtyard women.

The condition of the suit was simply terrible. When Chichikov saw Plyushkin for the first time, he could not determine his gender for a long time - Plyushkin by his behavior and appearance very much like a housekeeper. After the identity of the strange housekeeper was established, Chichikov came to the conclusion that Plyushkin did not look like a landowner at all - if he were near the church, he could easily be mistaken for a beggar.

Plyushkin's family and his past

Plyushkin was not always such a person; when he was young, his appearance and character were completely different from those of today.

Several years ago Plyushkin was not alone. He was a man living quite happily in marriage. His wife definitely had a positive influence on the landowner. After the birth of children, Plyushkin’s life also changed pleasantly, but this did not last long - soon his wife died, leaving Plyushkin with three children - two girls and a boy.

Plyushkin had a hard time coping with the loss of his wife, it was difficult for him to cope with the blues, so he moved more and more away from his usual rhythm of life.

We invite you to familiarize yourself with Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol’s poem “Dead Souls”.

A picky and quarrelsome character contributed to the final discord - the eldest daughter and son left their father’s house without their father’s blessing. The youngest daughter died some time later. The eldest daughter, despite her father’s difficult character, tries to maintain a relationship with him and even brings his children to stay with him. Contact with my son was lost long ago. The old man does not know how his fate turned out and whether he is alive.

Personality characteristics

Plyushkin is a man of difficult character. It is likely that certain inclinations for the development of certain qualities were laid down in him earlier, but under the influence family life and personal well-being, they did not acquire such a characteristic appearance.

Plyushkin was overcome by anxiety - his care and concern had long gone beyond the acceptable limit and became some kind of obsessive thought. After the death of his wife and daughter, he finally became hardened in soul - the concepts of sympathy and love for his neighbors are alien to him.

This tendency is observed not only in relation to people who are strangers in terms of kinship, but also to close relatives.

The landowner leads a solitary life, he hardly communicates with his neighbors, he has no friends. Plyushkin likes to spend time alone, he is seduced by the ascetic way of life, the arrival of guests is associated with something unpleasant for him. He doesn’t understand why people visit each other and considers it a waste of time - many useful things can be done during this time period.

It is impossible to find anyone who wants to make friends with Plyushkin - everyone shuns the eccentric old man.

Plyushkin lives without a specific goal in life. Because of his stinginess and pettiness, he was able to accumulate significant capital, but does not plan to somehow use the accumulated money and raw materials - Plyushkin likes the process of accumulation itself.

Despite significant financial reserves, Plyushkin lives very poorly - he regrets spending money not only on his family and friends, but also on himself - his clothes have long since turned into rags, the house is leaky, but Plyushkin sees no point in improving anything - his and so everything suits me.

Plyushkin loves to complain and be poor. It seems to him that he doesn’t have enough of everything - he doesn’t have enough food, there’s too little land, and he can’t even find an extra tuft of hay on the farm. In reality, everything is different - its food reserves are so large that they become unusable right in the storage facilities.

The second thing in life that brings pleasure to Plyushkin’s life is quarrels and scandals - he is always dissatisfied with something and likes to express his dissatisfaction in the most unsightly form. Plyushkin is too picky and impossible to please.

Plyushkin himself does not notice his shortcomings; he believes that in fact everyone treats him with bias and cannot appreciate his kindness and care.

Plyushkin's estate

No matter how much Plyushkin complained about his busyness with the estate, it is worth admitting that as a landowner Plyushkin was not the best and most talented.

His large estate is not much different from an abandoned place. The gates and the fence along the garden were extremely thin - in some places the fence had collapsed, and no one was in a hurry to fill the resulting holes.

On the territory of his village were there before two churches, but now they are in disrepair.
Plyushkin's house is in terrible condition - it probably hasn't been renovated for many years. From the street, the house looked uninhabited - the windows in the estate were boarded up, only a few could be opened. Mold appeared in some places and the tree was overgrown with moss.

The inside of the house doesn't look any better - it's always dark and cold. The only room into which natural light penetrates is Plyushkin’s room.

The whole house is like a garbage dump - Plyushkin never throws anything away. He thinks that these things may still be useful to him.

In Plyushkin's office there is also chaos and disorder. There is a broken chair that can no longer be repaired, a clock that doesn’t work. There is a dump in the corner of the room - it is difficult to make out what is in the pile. What stands out from the general heap is the sole from old shoes and a broken shovel handle.

It seemed like the rooms had never been cleaned - there were cobwebs and dust everywhere. There was also no order on Plyushkin's desk - papers lay mixed with garbage there.

Attitude towards serfs

Plyushkin is in possession of large number serfs - about 1000 people. Of course, caring for and adjusting the work of so many people requires certain strength and skills. However, there is no need to talk about the positive achievements of Plyushkin’s activities.

Plyushkin treats his peasants unkindly and cruelly. They are not much different in appearance from their owner - their clothes are torn, their houses are dilapidated, and the people themselves are immensely skinny and hungry. From time to time, one of Plyushkin’s serfs decides to escape, because the life of a fugitive becomes more attractive than that of the serf Plyushkin. Plyushkin sells Chichikov about 200 “dead souls” - this is the number of people who died and serfs who escaped from him over several years. Compared to " dead souls"The rest of the landowners, the number of peasants sold to Chichikov looks terrifying.

We invite you to read the story “The Overcoat” by Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol.

Peasant houses look even worse than a landowner's estate. In the village it is impossible to find a single house with a whole roof - rain and snow freely penetrate into the home. There are no windows in the houses either - the holes in the windows are filled with rags or old clothes.

Plyushkin speaks extremely disapprovingly of his serfs - in his eyes they are lazy and slackers, but in fact this is slander - Plyushkin's serfs work hard and honestly. They sow grain, grind flour, dry fish, make fabrics, and make various household items from wood, in particular dishes.

According to Plyushkin, his serfs are the most thieving and inept - they do everything somehow, without diligence, and, moreover, they constantly rob their master. In fact, everything is not so: Plyushkin intimidated his peasants so much that they are ready to die from cold and hunger, but will not take anything from storage facilities his landowner.

Thus, the image of Plyushkin embodied the qualities of a greedy and stingy person. Plyushkin is incapable of feeling affection for people or at least sympathy - he is absolutely hostile to everyone. He considers himself a good master, but in reality this is self-deception. Plyushkin does not care about his serfs, he starves them, undeservedly accuses them of theft and laziness.

Characteristics of Plyushkin in the poem “Dead Souls”: description of appearance and character

The gallery of “dead souls” ends in the poem with Plyushkin. Origins this image we find it in the comedies of Plautus, Moliere, and in the prose of Balzac. However, at the same time, Gogol’s hero is a product of Russian life. “In an environment of general extravagance and ruin... in the society of the Petukhovs, Khlobuevs, Chichikovs and Manilovs... a suspicious and intelligent person... should involuntarily be seized by fear for his well-being. And so stinginess naturally becomes the mania into which his frightened suspiciousness develops... Plyushkin is a Russian miser, a miser out of fear for the future, in the organization of which the Russian person is so helpless,” notes the pre-revolutionary critic.

Plyushkin's main traits are stinginess, greed, thirst for accumulation and enrichment, wariness and suspicion. These features are masterfully conveyed in the portrait of the hero, in the landscape, in the description of the situation and in the dialogues.

Plyushkin's appearance is very expressive. “His face was nothing special; it was almost the same as that of many thin old men, one chin only protruded very far forward, so that he had to cover it with a handkerchief every time so as not to spit; the small eyes had not yet gone out and ran from under their high eyebrows, like mice, when, sticking their sharp muzzles out of the dark holes, their ears alert and their noses blinking, they look out to see if the cat is hiding somewhere...” Plyushkin’s outfit is noteworthy - greasy and a torn robe, rags wrapped around the neck... S. Shevyrev admired this portrait. “Plyushkin appears to us so vividly, as if we remember him in a painting by Albert Durer in the Doria Gallery...” the critic wrote.

Small running eyes, similar to mice, indicate Plyushkin’s wariness and suspicion, generated by fear for his property. His rags resemble the clothes of a beggar, but not of a landowner with more than a thousand souls.

The motif of poverty continues to develop in the description of the landowner's village. In all the village buildings, “some kind of special dilapidation” is noticeable; the huts are made of old and dark logs, the roofs look like a sieve, and there is no glass in the windows. Plyushkin’s own house looks like “some kind of decrepit invalid.” In some places it is one floor, in others it is two, there is green mold on the fence and gates, a “naked plaster lattice” can be seen through the decrepit walls, only two of the windows are open, the rest are closed or boarded up. The “beggarly appearance” here metaphorically conveys the spiritual poverty of the hero, the severe limitation of his worldview by a pathological passion for hoarding.

Behind the house stretches a garden, equally overgrown and decayed, which, however, is “quite picturesque in its picturesque desolation.” “The connected tops of trees growing in freedom lay on the celestial horizon like green clouds and irregular flutter-leaved domes. A colossal white birch trunk... rose from this green thicket and rounded in the air like... a sparkling marble column... In places, green thickets, illuminated by the sun, diverged...” A dazzling white marble birch trunk, green thickets, bright, sparkling sun - in the brightness of its colors and the presence of lighting effects, this landscape contrasts with the description interior decoration a landowner's house, recreating the atmosphere of lifelessness, death, and grave.

Entering Plyushkin's house, Chichikov immediately finds himself in darkness. “He stepped into the dark, wide hallway, from which a cold breath blew, as if from a cellar. From the hallway he found himself in a room, also dark, slightly illuminated by the light coming out from under a wide crack located at the bottom of the door.” Further, Gogol develops the motif of death and lifelessness outlined here. In another room of the landowner (where Chichikov ends up) there is a broken chair, “a clock with a stopped pendulum, to which the spider has already attached its web”; a chandelier in a canvas bag, thanks to the layer of dust, looking “like a silk cocoon in which a worm sits.” On the walls, Pavel Ivanovich notices several paintings, but their subjects are quite definite - a battle with screaming soldiers and drowning horses, a still life with a “duck hanging head down.”

In the corner of the room, a huge pile of old rubbish is piled on the floor; through a huge layer of dust, Chichikov notices a piece of a wooden shovel and an old boot sole. This picture is symbolic. According to I.P. Zolotussky, the Plyushkin pile is “a tombstone above the materialist ideal.” The researcher notes that every time Chichikov meets one of the landowners, he makes an “examination of his ideals.” Plyushkin in in this case“represents” state, wealth. In fact, this is the most important thing that Chichikov strives for. It is financial independence that opens the way for him to comfort, happiness, well-being, etc. All this is inextricably fused in Pavel Ivanovich’s mind with home, family, family ties, “heirs,” and respect in society.

Plyushkin takes the opposite route in the poem. The hero seems to be revealing to us the other side of Chichikov’s ideal - we see that the landowner’s house is completely neglected, he has no family, he has severed all friendly and family ties, and there is not a hint of respect in the reviews of other landowners about him.

But Plyushkin was once a thrifty owner, he was married, and “a neighbor stopped by to have lunch with him” and learn housekeeping from him. And everything was no worse with him than with others: a “friendly and talkative hostess”, famous for her hospitality, two pretty daughters, “blond and fresh as roses”, a son, a “broken boy”, and even a French teacher. But his “good mistress” and his youngest daughter died, the eldest ran away with the captain, “the time has come for his son to serve,” and Plyushkin was left alone. Gogol carefully traces this process of decay human personality, the development in the hero of his pathological passion.

The lonely life of a landowner, widowhood, “gray hair in his coarse hair,” dryness and rationalism of character (“human feelings...were not deep in him”) - all this provided “well-fed food for stinginess.” Indulging in his vice, Plyushkin gradually ruined his entire household. Thus, his hay and bread rotted, flour in the cellars turned into stone, canvases and materials “turned to dust.”

Plyushkin's passion for hoarding became truly pathological: every day he walked the streets of his village and collected everything that came to hand: an old sole, a woman's rag, an iron nail, a clay shard. There was so much in the landowner’s yard: “barrels, crosses, tubs, lagoons, jugs with and without stigmas, twins, baskets...”. “If someone had looked into his work yard, where there was a stock of all sorts of wood and utensils that had never been used, he would have wondered if he had ended up in Moscow at the wood chip yard, where efficient mothers-in-law and mother-in-law go every day. ..make your household supplies...,” writes Gogol.

Submitting to the thirst for profit and enrichment, the hero gradually lost all human feelings: he ceased to be interested in the lives of his children and grandchildren, quarreled with his neighbors, and drove away all the guests.

The character of the hero in the poem is entirely consistent with his speech. As V.V. Litvinov notes, Plyushkin’s speech is “one continuous grumbling”: complaints about others - about relatives, peasants and abuse with his servants.

In the scene of buying and selling dead souls, Plyushkin, like Sobakevich, begins to bargain with Chichikov. However, if Sobakevich, not caring about the moral side of the issue, probably guesses the essence of Chichikov’s scam, then Plyushkin does not even think about it. Having heard that he could make a “profit,” the landowner seemed to forget about everything: he “waited,” “his hands trembled,” he “took the money from Chichikov in both hands and carried it to the office with the same caution as if would be carrying some liquid, every minute afraid of spilling it.” Thus, the moral side of the issue leaves him by itself - it simply fades under the pressure of the “surging feelings” of the hero.

It is these “feelings” that take the landowner out of the category of “indifferent”. Belinsky considered Plyushkin a “comical person,” disgusting and disgusting, denying him the significance of his feelings. However, in the context of the author’s creative intent, presented in the poem life story hero given character seems the most difficult among Gogol's landowners. It was Plyushkin (together with Chichikov), according to Gogol’s plan, who was supposed to appear morally reborn in the third volume of the poem.

Plyushkin Stepan - the fifth, and last, of the “series” of landowners to whom Chichikov turns with an offer to sell him dead souls. In the peculiar negative hierarchy of landowner types derived in the poem, this stingy old man (he is in his seventh decade) occupies both the lowest and the highest level at the same time. His image personifies the complete death of the human soul, the almost complete death of a strong and bright personality, completely consumed by the passion of stinginess - but precisely for this reason, capable of resurrection and transformation. (Below P., of the characters in the poem, only Chichikov himself “fell”, but for him the author’s plan preserved the possibility of an even more grandiose “correction.”)

This dual, “negative-positive” nature of P.’s image is indicated in advance by the ending of the 5th chapter; Having learned from Sobakevich that a stingy landowner lives next door, whose peasants are “dying like flies,” Chichikov tries to find out the way to him from a passing peasant; he doesn’t know any P., but guesses who he’s talking about: “Ah, the patched one!” This nickname is humiliating, but the author (in accordance with the through-line technique of “Dead Souls”) immediately moves from satire to lyrical pathos; admiring the accuracy folk word, gives praise to the Russian mind and, as it were, moves from the space of a morally descriptive novel into the space of an epic poem “like the Iliad.”

But the closer Chichikov is to P.’s house, the more alarming the author’s intonation; suddenly - and as if out of the blue - the author compares himself as a child with his present self, his then enthusiasm with the current “coolness” of his gaze. “Oh my youth! oh my freshness! It is clear that this passage applies equally to the author - and to the “dead” hero, whom the reader will meet. And this involuntary rapprochement of the “unpleasant” character with the author in advance removes the image of P. from that series of “literary and theatrical” misers, with an eye on whom he was written, distinguishes him from the stingy characters of picaresque novels, and from the greedy landowners of moral descriptive epics, and from Harpagon from Molière’s comedy “The Miser” (Harpagon has the same hole as P., below his back), bringing, on the contrary, closer to the Baron from “ The Stingy Knight"Pushkin and Balzac's Gobsek.

The description of Plyushkin's estate allegorically depicts desolation - and at the same time the “cluttering” of his soul, which “does not grow rich in God.” The entrance is dilapidated - the logs are pressed in like piano keys; Everywhere there is a special disrepair, the roofs are like a sieve; the windows are covered with rags. At Sobakevich’s they were boarded up at least for the sake of economy, but here they were boarded up solely because of “devastation.” From behind the huts one can see huge piles of stale bread, the color of which is similar to scorched brick. As in a dark, “through the looking glass” world, everything here is lifeless - even the two churches that should form the semantic center of the landscape. One of them, wooden, was empty; the other, stone, was all cracked. A little later image the empty temple will be metaphorically echoed in the words of P., who regrets that the priest will not say a “word” against the universal love of money: “You cannot resist the word of God!” (Traditional for Gogol is the motif of a “dead” attitude towards the Word of Life.) The master’s house, “this strange castle,” is located in the middle of a cabbage garden. The “Plyushkinsky” space cannot be captured with a single glance, it seems to fall apart into details and fragments - first one part will be revealed to Chichikov’s gaze, then another; even the house is in some places one floor, in others two. Symmetry, integrity, balance began to disappear already in the description of Sobakevich’s estate; here this “process” goes in breadth and depth. All this reflects the “segmented” consciousness of the owner, who forgot about the main thing and focused on the tertiary. For a long time he no longer knows how much, where and what is produced on his vast and ruined farm, but he keeps an eye on the level of the old liqueur in the decanter to see if anyone has drunk.
The desolation “benefited” only the Plyushkino garden, which, starting near the manor’s house, disappears into the field. Everything else perished, became dead, as in a Gothic novel, which is reminiscent of the comparison of Plyushkin’s house with a castle. It’s like Noah’s Ark, inside of which there was a flood (it’s no coincidence that almost all the details of the description, like in the Ark, have their own “pair” - there are two churches, two belvederes, two windows, one of which, however, is covered with a triangle of blue sugar paper ; P. had two blond daughters, etc.). The dilapidation of his world is akin to the dilapidation of the “antediluvian” world, which perished from passions. And P. himself is the failed “forefather” Noah, who from a zealous owner degenerated into a hoarder and lost any certainty of appearance and position.

Having met P. on the way to the house, Chichikov cannot understand who is in front of him - a woman or a man, a housekeeper or a housekeeper, “rarely shaving beard"? Having learned that this “housekeeper” is a rich landowner, the owner of 1000 souls (“Ehwa! And I’m the owner!”), Chichikov cannot get out of his stupor for twenty minutes. Portrait of P. (long chin, which has to be covered with a handkerchief so as not to spit; small, not yet extinguished eyes run from under high eyebrows like mice; a greasy robe has turned into yuft; a rag on the neck instead of a handkerchief) also indicates a complete “loss of "A hero from the image of a rich landowner. But all this is not for the sake of “exposure,” but only for the sake of recalling the norm of “wise stinginess” from which P. was tragically separated and to which he can still return.

Previously, before the “fall,” P.’s gaze, like a hardworking spider, “ran busily, but efficiently, along all ends of its economic web”; Now the spider entwines the pendulum of the stopped clock. Even the silver pocket watch that P. is going to give - but never gives - to Chichikov in gratitude for “getting rid of” dead souls, and they are “spoiled.” A toothpick, which the owner may have used to pick his teeth even before the French invasion, also reminds us of a bygone time (and not just stinginess).

It seems that, having described the circle, the narrative returned to the point from which it began - the first of the “Chichikovsky” landowners, Manilov, lives just as outside of time as the last of them, P. But there is no time in Manilov’s world and never has was; he has lost nothing - he has nothing to return. P. had everything. This is the only hero of the poem, besides Chichikov himself, who has a biography, has a past; The present can do without the past, but without the past there is no path to the future. Before the death of his wife, P. was a zealous, experienced landowner; my daughters and son had a French teacher and madame; however, after this, P. developed a widower “complex”; he became more suspicious and stingier. He took the next step away from the path of life determined for him by God after the secret flight of his eldest daughter, Alexandra Stepanovna, with the captain and the unauthorized assignment of his son to military service. (Even before the “flight” he considered the military to be gamblers and wasteful people, but now he is completely hostile to military service.) The youngest daughter died; son lost at cards; P.'s soul became completely hardened; “The wolf hunger of stinginess” took possession of him. Even the buyers refused to deal with him - because he is a “demon”, not a person.

The return of the “prodigal daughter,” whose life with the captain’s captain turned out to be not particularly satisfying (an obvious plot parody of the ending of Pushkin’s “ Stationmaster"), reconciles P. with her, but does not relieve him of his destructive greed. After playing with his grandson, P. didn’t give Alexandra Stepanovna anything, but he dried the Easter cake she gave her on his second visit and is now trying to treat Chichikov to this cracker. (The detail is also not accidental; Easter cake is an Easter “meal”; Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection; by drying the cake, P. symbolically confirmed that his soul had become dead; but in itself the fact that a piece of cake, albeit moldy, is always kept by him , is associatively connected with the theme of the possible “Easter” revival of his soul.)

Clever Chichikov, having guessed the substitution that occurred in P., “retools” his usual opening speech accordingly; just as in P. “virtue” is supplanted by “economy”, and “rare qualities of the soul” by “order”, so they are replaced in Chichikov’s “attack” to theme of the dead shower. But the fact of the matter is that greed was not able to take possession of P.’s heart to the last limit. Having completed the deed of sale (Chichikov convinces the owner that he is ready to take on the tax costs of the dead “for your pleasure”; the economic P.’s list of the dead is already ready, unknown to what need), P. ponders who could reassure her in the city on his behalf, and remembers that the Chairman was his school friend. And this memory (the course of the author’s thoughts at the beginning of the chapter is completely repeated here) suddenly revives the hero: “... on this wooden face<...>expressed<...>a pale reflection of feeling." Naturally, this is a random and momentary glimpse of life.

Therefore, when Chichikov, not only having acquired 120 dead souls, but also having bought runaways for 27 kopecks. for the soul, leaves P., the author describes a twilight landscape in which the shadow and light are “completely mixed” - as in the unfortunate soul of P.

DEAD SOULS (Poem, 1835-1841 - vol. 1; published 1842) Plyushkin Stepan- the fifth, and last, of the “series” of landowners to whom Chichikov turns with an offer to sell him dead souls. In the peculiar negative hierarchy of landowner types derived in the poem, this stingy old man (he is in his seventh decade) occupies both the lowest and the highest level at the same time. His image personifies the complete death of the human soul, the almost complete death of a strong and bright personality, completely consumed by the passion of stinginess - but precisely for this reason, capable of resurrection and transformation.

(Below P., of the characters in the poem, only Chichikov himself “fell”, but for him the author’s plan preserved the possibility of an even more grandiose “correction.”)

This dual, “negative-positive” nature of P.’s image is indicated in advance by the ending of the 5th chapter; Having learned from Sobakevich that a stingy landowner lives next door, whose peasants are “dying like flies,” Chichikov tries to find out the way to him from a passing peasant; he doesn’t know any P., but guesses who he’s talking about: “Ah, the patched one!” This nickname is humiliating, but the author (in accordance with the through-line technique of “Dead Souls”) instantly moves from satire to lyrical pathos; admiring the accuracy of the folk word, he praises the Russian mind and, as it were, moves from the space of a morally descriptive novel into the space of an epic poem “like the Iliad.” But the closer Chichikov is to P.’s house, the more alarming the author’s intonation; suddenly - and as if for no reason for this reason, the author compares himself as a child with his present self, his then enthusiasm with the current “coolness” of his gaze.

"Oh my youth! oh my freshness!" It is clear that this passage applies equally to the author - and to the “dead” hero, whom the reader will meet.

And this involuntary rapprochement of the “unpleasant” character with the author in advance removes the image of P. from that series of “literary and theatrical” misers, with an eye on whom he was written, distinguishes him from the stingy characters of picaresque novels, and from the greedy landowners of moral descriptive epics, and from Harpagon from Molière's comedy "The Miser" (Harpagon's is the same as P.

A hole below the back), bringing closer, on the contrary, to the Baron from Pushkin’s “The Miserly Knight” and Balzac’s Gobsek. The description of Plyushkin's estate allegorically depicts desolation - and at the same time the "cluttering" of his soul, which "is not growing rich in God." The entrance is dilapidated - the logs are pressed in like piano keys; Everywhere there is a special disrepair, the roofs are like a sieve; the windows are covered with rags. At Sobakevich's they were boarded up, at least for the sake of economy, but here they were boarded up solely because of “devastation.” From behind the huts one can see huge piles of stale bread, the color of which is similar to scorched brick. As in a dark, “looking-glass” world, everything here is lifeless - even the two churches, which should form the semantic center of the landscape.

One of them, wooden, was empty; the other, stone, was all cracked. A little later, the image of an empty temple will be metaphorically echoed in the words of P., who regrets that the priest will not say a “word” against the universal love of money: “You cannot resist the word of God!” (Traditional for Gogol is the motif of a “dead” attitude towards the Word of Life.)

The master's house, “this strange castle,” is located in the middle of a cabbage garden. The “Plyushkinsky” space cannot be captured with a single glance, it seems to fall apart into details and fragments - first one part will be revealed to Chichikov’s gaze, then another; even the house is in some places one floor, in others two. Symmetry, integrity, balance began to disappear already in the description of Sobakevich’s estate; here this “process” goes in breadth and depth. All this reflects the “segmented” nature of the owner’s consciousness, who has forgotten about the main thing and focused on the tertiary. For a long time he no longer knows how much, where and what is produced on his vast and ruined farm, but he keeps an eye on the level of the old liqueur in the decanter to see if anyone has drunk. The desolation “benefited” only Plyushkin’s garden, which, starting near the manor’s house, disappears into the field. Everything else perished, became dead, as in a Gothic novel, which is reminiscent of the comparison of Plyushkin’s house with a castle.

It’s like Noah’s Ark, inside of which there was a flood (it’s no coincidence that almost all the details of the description, like in the Ark, have their own “pair” - there are two churches, two belvederes, two windows, one of which, however, is covered with a triangle of blue sugar paper ; P. had two blond daughters, etc.). The dilapidation of his world is akin to the dilapidation of the “antediluvian” world, which perished from passions. And P. himself is the failed “forefather” Noah, who from a zealous owner degenerated into a hoarder and lost any certainty of appearance and position.

Having met P. on the way to the house, Chichikov cannot understand who is in front of him - a woman or a man, a housekeeper or a housekeeper who “rarely shaves her beard”? Having learned that this “housekeeper” is a rich landowner, the owner of 1000 souls (“Ehwa! And I’m the owner!”), Chichikov cannot get out of his stupor for twenty minutes.

Portrait of Plyushkin(a long chin, which has to be covered with a handkerchief so as not to spit; small, not yet extinguished eyes run from under high eyebrows like mice; a greasy robe has turned into yuft; a rag on the neck instead of a handkerchief) also indicates the hero’s complete “loss” from image of a rich landowner. But all this is not for the sake of “exposure,” but only for the sake of reminding of the norm of “wise stinginess” from which P. was tragically separated and to which he can still return.

Previously, before the “fall,” P.’s gaze, like a hardworking spider, “ran busily, but efficiently, along all ends of its economic web”; Now the spider entwines the pendulum of the stopped clock. Even the silver pocket watch that P. is going to give - but never gives - to Chichikov in gratitude for “getting rid of” dead souls, and they are “spoiled.” A toothpick, which the owner may have used to pick his teeth even before the French invasion, also reminds us of a bygone time (and not just stinginess). It seems that, having described the circle, the narrative returned to the point from which it began - the first of the “Chichikovsky” landowners, Manilov, lives just as outside of time as the last of them, P. But there is no time in Manilov’s world and never has was; he has lost nothing - he has nothing to return.

P. had everything. This is the only hero of the poem, besides Chichikov himself, who has a biography, has a past; The present can do without the past, but without the past there is no path to the future. Before the death of his wife P.

was a zealous, experienced landowner; my daughters and son had a French teacher and madame; however, after this, P. developed a widower “complex”, he became more suspicious and stingy. He took the next step away from the path of life determined for him by God after the secret flight of his eldest daughter, Alexandra Stepanovna, with the captain and the unauthorized assignment of his son to military service. (Even before the “flight” he considered the military to be gamblers and wasteful people, but now he is completely hostile to military service.) The youngest daughter died; son lost at cards; soul P.

became completely hardened; “The wolf hunger of stinginess” took possession of him. Even the buyers refused to deal with him - because he is a “demon”, not a person. The return of the “prodigal daughter,” whose life with the captain’s captain turned out to be not particularly satisfying (an obvious plot parody of the ending of Pushkin’s “The Station Agent”), reconciles P. with her, but does not relieve him of his destructive greed.

After playing with his grandson, P. didn’t give Alexandra Stepanovna anything, but he dried the Easter cake she gave her on his second visit and is now trying to treat Chichikov to this cracker. (The detail is also not accidental; Easter cake is an Easter “meal”; Easter is the celebration of the Resurrection; by drying the cake, P. symbolically confirmed that his soul was dead; but in itself the fact that a piece of cake, albeit moldy, is always kept by him , is associatively connected with the theme of the possible “Easter” revival of his soul.) Clever Chichikov, having guessed the substitution that occurred in P., “retools” his usual opening speech accordingly; just as in P. “virtue” is replaced by “economy”, and “rare qualities of the soul” by “order”, so they are replaced in Chichikov’s “attack” to the theme of dead souls. But the fact of the matter is that greed was not able to take possession of P.’s heart to the last limit. Having completed the deed of sale (Chichikov convinces the owner that he is ready to take on the tax costs of the dead “for your pleasure”; the economic P.’s list of the dead is already ready, unknown to what need),

P. ponders who could reassure her in the city on his behalf, and remembers that the Chairman was his school friend.

And this memory (the course of the author’s thoughts at the beginning of the chapter is completely repeated here) suddenly revives the hero: “... on this wooden face<...>expressed<...>a pale reflection of a feeling." Naturally, this is a random and momentary glimpse of life. Therefore, when Chichikov, not only having acquired 120 dead souls, but also having bought runaways for 27 kopecks per soul, leaves P., the author describes a twilight landscape in which the shadow “completely mixed up” with the light - as in the unfortunate soul of P.

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One of the most bright characters Gogol, literary hero, whose name has long become a household name, a character who is remembered by everyone who read “Dead Souls” - landowner Stepan Plyushkin. His memorable figure closes the gallery of images of landowners presented by Gogol in the poem. Plyushkin, who even gave his name to the official disease (Plyushkin syndrome, or pathological hoarding), is essentially a very rich man who has led his vast economy to complete decline, and huge amount serfs - to poverty and a miserable existence.

This fifth and final companion of Chichikov is a shining example how dead it can become human soul. Therefore, the title of the poem is very symbolic: it not only directly indicates that we are talking about " dead souls" - as the dead serfs were called, but also about the pitiful, deprived human qualities, the devastated souls of landowners and officials.

Characteristics of the hero

("Plyushkin", artist Alexander Agin, 1846-47)

Gogol begins the reader’s acquaintance with the landowner Plyushkin with a description of the surroundings of the estate. Everything indicates desolation, insufficient funding and the absence of a strong hand of the owner: dilapidated houses with leaky roofs and windows without glass. The sad landscape is enlivened by the owner's garden, although neglected, but described in much more positive colors: clean, tidy, filled with air, with a “regular sparkling marble column.” However, Plyushkin’s home again evokes melancholy, around there is desolation, despondency and mountains of useless, but extremely necessary for the old man, rubbish.

Being the richest landowner in the province (the number of serfs reached 1000), Plyushkin lived in extreme poverty, eating scraps and dried crackers, which did not cause him the slightest discomfort. He was extremely suspicious; everyone around him seemed treacherous and unreliable, even his own children. Only the passion for hoarding was important for Plyushkin; he collected everything he could get his hands on on the street and dragged it into the house.

("Chichikov at Plyushkin's", artist Alexander Agin, 1846-47)

Unlike other characters, Plyushkin's life story is given in full. The author introduces the reader to a young landowner, talking about a good family, his beloved wife and three children. Neighbors even came to the zealous owner to learn from him. But my wife died eldest daughter she ran away with a military man, her son joined the army, which his father did not approve of, and the youngest daughter also died. And gradually the respected landowner turned into a person whose entire life is subordinated to accumulation for the sake of the accumulation process itself. All other human feelings, which had not previously been bright, faded away in him completely.

It is interesting that some professors of psychiatry mentioned that Gogol very clearly and at the same time artistically described a typical case of senile dementia. Others, for example, psychiatrist Ya.F. Kaplan, deny this possibility, saying that psychopathological traits do not appear sufficiently in Plyushkin, and Gogol simply illuminated the state of old age, which he encountered everywhere.

The image of the hero in the work

Stepan Plyushkin himself is described as a creature dressed in unkempt rags, looking like a woman from afar, but the stubble on his face still made it clear that the main character was a representative of the stronger sex. Given the general amorphousness of this figure, the writer focuses attention on individual facial features: a protruding chin, a hooked nose, lack of teeth, eyes expressing suspicion.

Gogol - great master words - with bright strokes shows us a gradual but irreversible change in human personality. A person, in whose eyes intelligence shone in previous years, gradually turns into a pitiful miser who has lost all his best feelings and emotions. The main goal of the writer is to show how terrible the coming old age can be, how small human weaknesses can turn into pathological traits under certain life circumstances.

If the writer simply wanted to portray a pathological miser, he would not go into details of his youth, a description of the circumstances that led to his current state. The author himself tells us that Stepan Plyushkin is the future of the fiery young man in old age, that unsightly portrait, upon seeing which the young man would recoil in horror.

("Peasants at Plyushkin", artist Alexander Agin, 1846-47)

However, Gogol leaves a small chance for this hero: when the writer conceived the third volume of the work, he planned to leave Plyushkin - the only landowner Chichikov met - in an updated, morally revived form. Describing the landowner’s appearance, Nikolai Vasilyevich separately singles out the old man’s eyes: “the little eyes had not yet gone out and ran from under his high eyebrows, like mice...”. And the eyes, as we know, are the mirror of the human soul. In addition, Plyushkin, seemingly having lost all human feelings, suddenly decides to give Chichikov a gold watch. True, this impulse immediately fades away, and the old man decides to include the watch in the deed of gift, so that after death at least someone will remember him with a kind word.

Thus, if Stepan Plyushkin had not lost his wife, his life could have turned out quite well, and his old age would not have turned into such a deplorable existence. The image of Plyushkin completes the gallery of portraits of degraded landowners and very accurately describes the lowest level to which a person can slide in his lonely old age.