1. Features of the genre

Situations of this kind in works further determine their genre identity.

IN early period In his work, Gogol created a number of romantic short stories from Ukrainian folk life. These are, in particular, “The Night Before Christmas”, “May Night”, “Sorochinskaya Fair”. Here, love affairs serve for the main characters (for Vakula and Oksana, Levka and Ganna, Gritska and Parasy) as a kind of test of their characters and experiences and lead them, in the fight against obstacles, not only to external victory over everything that interfered with their happiness , but also to the internal overcoming of their own doubts, disagreements, selfishness, etc.

In other words, plot conflicts in these works develop the characters of the main characters in their clashes with the social environment. This is a characteristic feature of the short story genre, as well as the novel genre, which is distinguished by broader prospects for the development of characters and, hence, greater detail of motivations.

Then Gogol wrote "Taras Bulba", a heroic story. In it, the military actions of a number of heroes (Taras, Ostap and others) serve as a test not for their social and everyday character, but for their national character - their moral fortitude and devotion to the ideals of the national struggle. Thus, their military actions expressed the historical formation of the entire nationality, the entire Ukrainian people.

In the same and subsequent years, Gogol made attempts to develop other heroic plots, both in the epic genre (the unclear and contradictory in its composition "Hetman") and in the dramatic ("The Shaved Mustache", "Alfred"), but none of them didn't finish it.

Having turned to a critical depiction of his modernity, Gogol naturally turned to other genres. The modernity of reactionary Nicholas Russia, especially from an abstract civil-moralistic point of view, did not show anything heroic. And the writer could only dream of the coming Russian “heroism” or, at the end of his work, vainly call for “heroism” on Russian landowners and officials.

But Gogol now basically abandoned the genre of short story and novel. The overwhelming majority of his new, realistic plots, including the plot of “Dead Souls,” are based on neither a novelistic nor a novelistic situation. Gogol now turned to another narrative genre, which has its own characteristic features.

Unfortunately, to designate this genre, our science has not yet adopted any a certain name, and this makes it very difficult to consider Gogol’s epic works. However, one circumstance can come to our aid here. This is because works of the same genre in the dramatic genre have long had a firmly established name: comedy. And this allows us to reason by analogy.

Gogol began to harbor dramatic ideas early, and all of his completed works of this kind were comedies 1 .

Subjects Gogol's comedies amaze with the activity and speed of events, the severity and undivided dominance of intrigue. And yet this is typical comedy intrigue. They develop themselves very quickly and actively, but at the same time they do not develop the characters of the heroes who act in them. They only reveal the already established characteristics of these characters. In the purposefulness of their movement, they reveal, on the contrary, their social inertia - the inability of the heroes to make decisive changes in their lives (Podkolesin), their moral ossification and unrepentance (the mayor and his friends), their tendency to self-deception, to accepting what is desired or imagined as existing (officials and auditor), etc.

All this is typical for comedy in general. It always, with the help of certain incidents and conflicts, more or less effective, exposes and evaluates the state of society in one or another part of it, in one or another aspect of its life, a state that in most cases is subject to ideological negation due to its objective properties .

A comparison of Gogol's comedies with most of his realistic stories 2 leads to the conclusion that in his narrative works he depicted similar situations. The course of events, naturally, tends to develop more slowly here, and the narrative is often interspersed with descriptive characteristics. But the meaning of intrigue and the entire development of the action here is basically the same as in a comedy.

A long quarrel over the word “gander” did not change anything in the character of the proud neighbor-landowners; on the contrary, she revealed all the baseness of their stubborn and stupid pride and thereby all the comicality of their situation, arising from the very essence of their local existence. A love affair with a bourgeois woman did not reveal any changes in the views and state of mind of the complacent official from Nevsky Prospekt. On the contrary, the denouement of this affair, for all its offensiveness, showed all his moral limitations and inertia, which could have been assumed in him in advance.

The acquaintance of the landowners with Chichikov and their participation in the deal with him only more sharply and deeply emphasizes the peculiarity of the character of each of them, and Nozdryov’s drunken chatter at the governor’s ball, which is the climax in the plot of “Dead Souls,” does not change anything in the state of the heroes; and “just a nice lady,” despite her obvious personal interest in Chichikov, goes to “revolt the city” in “her own direction” along with her friend, etc.

All these plots, like the plots of comedies, do not show the character of the characters in development, but only reveal and humorously or satirically deny their established characteristics. All these are not novelistic or romantic stories by Gogol. All these are stories that, in their own way, genre originality identical to comedies. And if one or the other of them could be remade in a dramatic way for production on stage, it would become a comedy there, not a drama, not a vaudeville, not a tragedy. So "Dead Souls", dramatized by M. Bulgakov and presented by Moskovsky Art Theater them. A. M. Gorky in 1932 on stage, became a comedy. It was a comedy from the Russian bureaucratic and noble life of the era of the decline of the serfdom system. They could, however, be called that even without alteration for the stage, just as Balzac called a group of his novels " A human comedy"for the broad picture of the national life of France that was painted in all of them taken together.

Revealing with the help of their plots the state of society in one or another of its layers, from one side or another, stories of this kind, like comedies, naturally evaluate it differently. From this point of view, they can receive different designations. Thus, Gogol’s story “The Old Sad Landowners,” according to the writer’s original plan, contains a sentimental affirmation of the patriarchal nature of landowner life and, despite the fact that it is also mixed with a humorous denial of this life, can still be called an idyllic story. In “The Tale of How He Quarreled...” humor reigns supreme in the depiction of the main characters; This is a humorous story. In St. Petersburg stories, the nature of laughter changes along with the change in theme. Among them, the story "The Nose" in particular is a grotesque satirical story. Corresponding differences exist in Gogol's dramaturgy - between the humorous comedy "Marriage" and satirical comedy"Inspector".

Gogol's predominant interest in comedies and stories of the same genre follows, as is clear in connection with everything said above, from his worldview, from his civil-moralistic point of view on the life depicted. In terms of genre, Gogol continued the traditions outlined in the works of Fonvizin, Kapnist, Krylov, who in their comedies, satirical essays, and fables revealed similar trends. But with Gogol, creative realism, which had already been outlined or even dominated among the above-mentioned writers, reached its peak, and not only in the typification of life, but also in the completeness of its artistic expression.

However, in Gogol’s work these genre interests were only predominant, but not exclusive. In the St. Petersburg stories, which contain urban motifs and were the most innovative of all the cycles of Gogol’s works, he also outlined other genre possibilities. Here the writer not only satirically denounced the metropolitan bureaucratic strata that were adjacent to the ruling reactionary circles. Here he also depicted those who were victims of their cold bureaucratic arrogance or their monetary temptations - the poor workers of the capital, petty officials and artists.

Gogol showed their attempts to defend their human dignity, he showed them in an unequal struggle with the difficult circumstances of their lives, in a clash with their superiors, with “society”, in their inevitable defeat in these clashes. All this led him to the fact that he to some extent reflected their social character in development - in the transition from a state of downtroddenness to dissatisfaction, despair, protest. In other words, he created a number of novelistic plots here. The very contradictions of metropolitan life, realistically realized by the writer, led him, contrary to the premises of his civic-moralistic worldview, to create an everyday realistic novel. This is the first story line in Nevsky Prospekt, dedicated to Piskarev. The first part of the “Portrait” is the same, if we ignore those fantastic motifs that embody there (and rather unsuccessfully) the author’s programmatic aesthetic constructions. This applies to a greater extent to “Notes of a Madman” and especially to “The Overcoat”.

However, Gogol was not sufficiently aware of all these novelistic situations and did not ideologically and creatively use the rich possibilities that could have opened up to him here. He resolves these situations realistically, showing the weakness of his heroes and the inevitability of their defeat in the typical circumstances of mercantile-bureaucratic St. Petersburg. But he does not sufficiently develop the motives for their social protest. In "Nevsky Prospect" and "Notes of a Madman" he shows this protest in an abstract psychological sense, without translating it into everyday plot relationships or into ideological relationships. In "Portrait" and "Overcoat" he leads his heroes to protest shortly or even at the very moment of their death. But the very development of everyday novelistic plots from the life of the democratic lower classes of a big city was a huge creative discovery of the writer, his contribution to the emerging artistic culture Russian democracy.

Notes

1 (These were comedies in the narrow, proper sense of the word, different from vaudeville comedies, which are, so to speak, stage novels.)

2 (We use the name “story” in a broad sense, meaning by it any narrative prose work more or less significant size, in contrast to the small form of narrative prose - “story” and, on the other hand, from narrative in poetic form - “poem”. Among the stories, with this understanding, there may be works of different genres.)

Gogol began his creative activity like a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism, opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.

Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.

Gogol was a brilliant satirist, who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man,” who extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.

Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of public importance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.

Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.

For bright purposes satirical image Gogol's heroes are served by a careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. So, for example, portraits of heroes were created “ Dead souls" These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in Gogol’s romantic stories the picturesque landscapes, giving the work a certain elation of tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characterizing characters.

The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Go-gol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings...", in "Taras Bulba ”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then becomes close to live conversational (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).

The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of vernacular speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than his predecessors and contemporaries. Material from the site

Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of social life.

The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.

Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”

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• peculiarity of Gogol's creative talent

Gogol's language, the principles of his stylistics, his satirical manner had an undeniable influence on the development of the Russian literary and artistic language since the mid-30s. Thanks to Gogol’s genius, the style of everyday speech was freed from “conventional constraints and literary cliches,” Vinogradov emphasizes.

Gogol’s extraordinary, surprisingly natural language and his humor had an intoxicating effect, notes Vinogradov. Absolutely appeared in Rus' new language, distinguished by its simplicity and accuracy, strength and closeness to nature; figures of speech invented by Gogol quickly came into general use, Vinogradov continues. Great writer enriched the Russian language with new phraseological units and words that originated from the names of Gogol’s heroes.

Vinogradov claims that Gogol saw his main purpose in “bringing the language closer together fiction with live and tag colloquial speech people."

One of the characteristic features of Gogol's style was Gogol's ability to skillfully mix Russian and Ukrainian speech, high style and jargon, clerical, landowner, hunting, lackey, gambling, petty bourgeois, the language of kitchen workers and artisans, interspersing archaisms and neologisms in the speech, like characters, and in the author's speech.

Vinogradov notes that the genre of Gogol’s earliest prose is in the style of the Karamzin school and is distinguished by a high, serious, pathetic narrative style. Gogol, understanding the value of Ukrainian folklore, really wanted to become a “genuine national writer"and tried to involve a diverse oral folk speech into the Russian literary and artistic narrative system.

The writer connected the authenticity of the reality he conveyed with the degree of proficiency in the class, estate, and professional style of the language and dialect of the latter. As a result, Gogol's narrative language acquires several stylistic and linguistic planes and becomes very heterogeneous. gogol literature speech

Russian reality is conveyed through the corresponding language environment. At the same time, all existing semantic and expressive shades of official business language are revealed, which, when ironically describing the discrepancy between the conventional semantics of social clerical language and the actual essence of phenomena, appear quite sharply.

Gogol's vernacular style is intertwined with clerical and business style. V. Vinogradov finds that Gogol sought to introduce into the literary language the vernacular of different strata of society (small and middle nobility, urban intelligentsia and bureaucrats) and, by mixing them with the literary and book language, to find a new Russian literary language.

As a business official language in Gogol’s works, Vinogradov points to the interweaving of clerical and colloquial bureaucratic speech. In “Notes of a Madman” and in “The Nose,” Gogol uses clerical business style and colloquial official speech much more than other styles of vernacular.

Official business language ties together the various dialects and styles of Gogol, who simultaneously attempts to expose and remove all unnecessary hypocritical and false forms of expression. Sometimes Gogol, to show the conventionality of a concept, resorted to an ironic description of the content put by society into a particular word. For example: “In a word, they were what is called happy”; “There was nothing else on this secluded or, as we say, beautiful square.”

Gogol believed that the literary and book language of the upper classes was painfully affected by borrowings from foreign, “foreign” languages, impossible to find foreign words, which could describe Russian life with the same accuracy as Russian words; as a result, some foreign words were used in a distorted sense, some were assigned a different meaning, while some original Russian words disappeared irrevocably from use.

Vinogradov points out that Gogol closely connects the secular narrative language with the Europeanized Russian-French salon language, not only denied and parodied it, but also openly contrasted his narrative style with the linguistic norms that corresponded to the salon-lady language. In addition, Gogol also struggled with the mixed half-French, half-popular Russian language of romanticism. Gogol contrasts the romantic style with a realistic style, reflecting reality more fully and believably. According to Vinogradov, Gogol shows the confrontation between the style of romantic language and everyday life, which only naturalistic language can describe. “A mixture of solemn bookish with colloquial, with vernacular is formed. The syntactic forms of the former romantic style are preserved, but the phraseology and structure of symbols and comparisons sharply deviate from romantic semantics.” The romantic style of narration does not disappear completely from Gogol’s language; it is mixed with a new semantic system.

As for the national scientific language - a language that, according to Gogol, is intended to be universal, national-democratic, devoid of class limitations, the writer, as Vinogradov notes, was against abuse philosophical language. Gogol saw the peculiarity of the Russian scientific language in its adequacy, accuracy, brevity and objectivity, in the absence of the need to embellish it. Gogol saw the significance and strength of the Russian scientific language in the uniqueness of the very nature of the Russian language, writes Vinogradov, the writer believed that there was no language similar to Russian. Gogol saw the sources of the Russian scientific language in Church Slavonic, peasant and the language of folk poetry.

Gogol sought to include in his language the professional speech of not only the nobility, but also the bourgeois class. Attaching great importance to the peasant language, Gogol replenishes his lexicon, writing down the names, terminology and phraseology of accessories and parts of a peasant costume, equipment and household utensils of a peasant hut, arable farming, laundry, beekeeping, forestry and gardening, weaving, fishing, traditional medicine, that is, everything related to the peasant language and its dialects. The language of crafts and technical specialties was also interesting to the writer, notes Vinogradov, as was the language of noble life, hobbies and entertainment. Hunting, gambling, military dialects and jargon attracted Gogol's close attention.

Gogol especially closely observed the administrative language, its style and rhetoric, Vinogradov emphasizes.

IN oral speech Gogol was interested, first of all, in the vocabulary, phraseology and syntax of noble-peasant vernacular, the spoken language of the urban intelligentsia and the bureaucratic language, Vinogradov points out.

In the opinion of V. Vinogradov, Gogol's interest in the professional language and dialects of merchants is characteristic.

Gogol sought to find ways to reform the relationship between the literary language of his day and the professional language of the church. He introduced church symbols and phraseology into literary speech, notes Vinogradov. Gogol believed that introducing elements of church language into literary language would bring life to the ossified and deceitful business and bureaucratic language. .

Features of the narration in N.V. Gogol’s story “The Overcoat”

FEATURES OF THE NARRATOR IN N.V.’S STORY GOGOL
"OVERCOAT"
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION 3
1. Historical background 4
2. Features of revealing the idea of ​​the story 5
3. Characteristic features of the narrative 6
4. The image of a “significant person” in the story 9
CONCLUSION 12
REFERENCES 13
INTRODUCTION
Among the remarkable figures of Russian and world culture, a place of honor belongs to Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. A brilliant master of the poetic word, he created great works that captivate with the depth and truthfulness of his images, the power of creative generalization of life, and artistic perfection.
It is known that the works of great writers, in terms of the depth of content and the meaning of artistic images, go far beyond the boundaries of the historical time when they appeared. The largest artistic creations live for centuries and millennia, arousing the interest of many generations of readers, giving them aesthetic pleasure. This happens because creative generalizations outstanding artists words illuminate universal human problems and help people of different historical periods understand many very dissimilar phenomena of life.
Each new era judges a writer in its own way, perceiving in his work artistic principles that are close to it. The historical existence of literary phenomena is highly complex. Here, periods of widespread interest in a writer and his works are often followed by decades and even centuries of declining or fading interest in them. With all this, over time there is a process of gradual disclosure of the artistic potential of classical creations. In the emergence of this potential a vital role belongs to the talent, individuality of the artist, his connections with reality. That is why clarifying the writer’s place in the movement of life, in the development of society and literature is very important not only for understanding his originality, but also for clarifying the fate of his work. Ignoring the historical approach to the artistic heritage gives rise to subjectivism, all kinds of arbitrary judgments and “concepts”.
1. Historical background
The idea of ​​the “Overcoat” first appeared to Gogol in 1834 under the impression of a clerical anecdote about a poor official who, at the cost of incredible efforts, realized his long-standing dream of buying a hunting rifle and lost this rifle on his first hunt. Everyone laughed at the joke, P. V. Annenkov says in his memoirs. But in Gogol this story caused a completely different reaction. He listened to her and bowed his head thoughtfully. This anecdote sank deeply into the writer’s soul, and it served as an impetus for the creation of one best works Gogol.
Work on "The Overcoat" began in 1839 abroad and was roughly completed in the spring of 1841. The story was originally called "The Tale of an Official Stealing an Overcoat."
"The Overcoat" occupies a special place in the cycle of St. Petersburg stories. The story of an unhappy official overwhelmed by poverty, popular in the 30s, was embodied by Gogol in a work of art, which Herzen called “colossal.”
With his story, Gogol first of all distanced himself from the development of a plot about a poor official, characteristic of reactionary writers of the 30s, who was a target for ridicule and vulgar ridicule. The polemical address was indicated by Gogol quite clearly: Bashmachkin “was what is called the eternal titular adviser, on whom, as you know, various writers have worked hard and sharpened their wits, having the commendable habit of leaning on those who cannot bite.”
2. Features of revealing the idea of ​​the story
“The Overcoat,” like Gogol’s other stories about a humiliated man, is in continuity with Pushkin’s “The Station Agent.” Relying on creative experience Pushkin, Gogol created deeply original artistic generalizations in his St. Petersburg stories. Author's Spotlight" Stationmaster"was a depiction of sharp clashes between a "little" man and nobles, strongmen of the world this, clashes that resulted in the collapse of the hero’s happiness. Gogol reflected more widely social inequality“little” people, showing not only their defenselessness, but also the harsh struggle for everyday existence. The depiction of the life fate of Gogol's heroes inextricably merges with the disclosure of constant social oppression, which, dooming the “little” person to suffering, mercilessly disfigures him, erasing living human individuality.
The deep drama with which “The Overcoat” is imbued is revealed, on the one hand, in the depiction ordinary and-s the other is in showing the hero's "shocks". The development of the plot in the story is primarily based on this internal conflict. "This is how it went peaceful life a man who, with a salary of four hundred, knew how to be satisfied with his lot, and would have lived, perhaps, to a very old age, if there had not been various disasters scattered along the road of life not only to titular, but even secret, real, court and all kinds of advisers.” The story about the acquisition of an overcoat is everyday life revealed in its dramatic tension. An ordinary, ordinary phenomenon appears in the form of a “disaster”; an insignificant event, as if in focus, concentrates a reflection of the essential aspects of reality.
The tension and drama of these clashes make the ending of the story organic, into which the author introduces fantasy. Fiction in "The Overcoat" is a necessary element in revealing the main idea of ​​the story.
3. Characteristic features of the narrative
"The Overcoat" is one of those works in which the writer resorts to the technique of narration on behalf of the narrator. But the narrator in “The Overcoat” is not at all like Rudy Panka, who brings with him a special, sharply expressed manner of narration; He also doesn’t look like the narrator from the story about a quarrel, who is distinguished by his bright “characteristics.” In "The Overcoat" the narrator is not highlighted, but at the same time this image is clearly felt in the story. “Unfortunately, we cannot say where exactly the official who invited us lived; our memory is beginning to fail us greatly, and everything that is in St. Petersburg, all the streets and houses, have merged and mixed up so much in our heads that it is very difficult to get anything decent from there. form". While retaining the features of some external simplicity, the narrator in “The Overcoat” is far from the “spontaneity” of narrators belonging to the patriarchal world.
"The Overcoat" was by no means written in the techniques of skaz; nevertheless, in a number of places Gogol subtly notes language features narrator: “... Akaki Akakievich was born against the night, if memory serves, on March 23... Mother was still lying on the bed opposite the doors, and right hand stood the godfather, an excellent man, Ivan Ivanovich Eroshkin, who served as the head of the Senate, and the godfather, the wife of a quarterly officer, a woman of rare virtues, Arina Semyonovna Belobryushkova"; "in such a state, Petrovich usually very willingly gave in and agreed, every time he even bowed and thanked. Then, however, the wife came, crying that her husband was drunk and therefore took it cheaply; but sometimes you add one kopeck, and it’s in the bag.”
The image of the narrator carries clearly expressed sympathy for an ignorant, simple person. Along with this, the writer, in individual episodes of the narrative, expresses in a direct, immediate form his attitude towards the hero of the work. This determines the lyric pathetic flow of the story, which is revealed both in the words about cruel “inhumanity” and in the reflections in connection with the death of Akaki Akakievich (“the creature disappeared and hid itself”).
In creating "The Overcoat", Gogol relied on his enormous creative achievements in the use of wealth vernacular. Unlike a number of his other works, the writer in this story almost did not turn to a picturesque and concrete description of everyday life, the “environment” of the hero, which made it possible to clearly outline his psychological appearance. The most important creative task that Gogol set for himself in “The Overcoat” was, first of all, to clearly show the microscopic world of the humiliated hero, and then to characterize the relationship of the depressed person with the social world around him. Consistently carrying out this creative task, Gogol achieved amazing concentration of verbal expression, extraordinary accuracy of the artistic word. “There, in this copying, he saw his own diverse and pleasant world. Pleasure was expressed on his face;
He had some favorite letters, which if he got to me, he was not himself: he laughed, and winked, and helped with his lips, so that in his face, it seemed, one could read every letter that his pen wrote."
The richness and accuracy of Gogol's metaphor is an integral feature of the description of the hero's actions and the events of his life. “Akaky Akakievich began to feel for some time that he was somehow feeling a particularly strong pain in his back and shoulder, despite the fact that he was trying to run across the legal space as quickly as possible. He finally thought whether there were any sins in his overcoat Having examined it carefully at home, he discovered that in two or three places, namely on the back and on the shoulders, it had become like a sickle." An aptly found word, an expressive metaphor very often seems to sum up an entire narrative episode. “He returned home in the happiest mood, took off his overcoat and hung it carefully on the wall, once again admiring the cloth and lining, and then deliberately pulled out, for comparison, his old hood, which had completely fallen apart. He looked at it and even laughed himself : such a far difference! And for a long time afterwards at dinner he kept grinning, as soon as the situation in which the hood was located came to his mind.”
Characterizing real place hero in public life, his attitude to reality, the writer widely uses the technique of internal comparisons, which becomes an organizing principle in the construction of the sentence itself, in the selection of its lexical composition. “If they had given him rewards in proportion to his zeal, he, to his amazement, might even have ended up as a state councilor; but he, as his comrades’ wits put it, earned a buckle in his buttonhole and acquired hemorrhoids in his lower back.”
Internal comparisons in narrative speech"Overcoats" are distinguished by great diversity; they are built on the collision of the imaginary and the real, the sublime and the prosaic. “Fire sometimes appeared in his eyes, the most daring and courageous thoughts even flashed in his head: should he just put a marten on his collar.” Or: “Thanks to the generous assistance of the St. Petersburg climate, the disease spread faster than could have been expected, and when the doctor appeared, he, having felt the pulse, could not find anything to do except prescribe a poultice, only so that the patient would not be left without beneficial medical assistance
The use of internal comparisons in the structure of a sentence or a whole group of sentences is often combined with emphasizing, “playing on” one stressed word. “If Akakiy Akakievich looked at anything, he saw his clean, even handwriting lines written out on everything, and only if, out of nowhere, a horse’s muzzle was placed on his shoulder and blew a whole wind into his cheek with its nostrils, then he only noticed that he is not in the middle of the line, but rather in the middle of the street."
4. The image of a “significant person” in the story
Gogol brilliantly uses the “play” of words to expressly characterize heroes, social phenomena, and reality. In this sense, the disclosure of various semantic shades of the word “significant”, which appears in the description of a “significant person,” is very interesting. “You need to know that one significant person recently became a significant person, and before that time he was an insignificant person. However, his place even now was not considered significant in comparison with others, even more significant. But there will always be a circle of people for whom the insignificant is in in the eyes of others there is already something significant. However, he tried to enhance the significance by many other means.” Comparison in different connections“significant” with “insignificant” gives an ironic character to the story about a high-ranking person.
For satirical purposes, Gogol with great skill combines seemingly mutually exclusive semantic meanings of words and achieves a remarkable effect. “The police made an order to catch the dead man, at any cost, alive or dead, and punish him, as an example in another, most severe way.” The constant formula of the zealots of order about the capture and punishment of the guilty appears here in its comic absurdity.
The image of a “significant person” shows the cruelty of representatives of government and the law. Drawing the insults to which Akaki Akakievich was subjected to in the department, Gogol showed “how much inhumanity there is in a person, how much ferocious rudeness is hidden in refined and educated secularism.”
Gogol creates a satirically generalized type of person - a representative of the bureaucratic power of Russia. His position is not significant, it is the boss in general. The way it behaves with Bashmachkin is how all “significant persons” behave.
The general's scene is ideological culmination stories. Here the social tragedy is shown most powerfully." little man"in the conditions of autocratic Russia.
It is characteristic that Gogol does not even give a name to this hero of his. Unlike Bashmachkin and Petrovich, the “significant person” is depicted in satirical colors: “The techniques and customs of the significant person were solid and majestic, but not polysyllabic. The main basis of his system was severity. “Severity, severity and severity,” he usually said and at the last word he usually looked very significantly into the face of the one to whom he was speaking... His ordinary conversation with inferiors was stern and consisted of almost three phrases: “How dare you? Do you know who you are talking to? Do you understand who is standing in front of you?"
In his relations with “inferiors”, in his social practice, a “significant person” expresses the prevailing “norms”; his personal qualities do not play any significant role in this. "He was in the shower a kind person, good with his comrades, helpful...", "but as soon as he happened to be in a society where there were people at least one rank lower than him, there he was simply out of hand."
The personification of brute and cruel force, the “significant person” cares only about the inviolability of the “foundations”, that there is not even a hint of free thoughts. Bashmachkin’s appeal to a “significant person” for help provokes the anger of a high-ranking person. When Bashmachkin timidly remarks: “...I dared to trouble your Excellency because the secretaries of that... are unreliable people...” - a storm of indignation falls on him. “What, what, what?” said a significant person. “Where did you get such a spirit? Where did you get such thoughts? What kind of riot has spread among young people against their bosses and superiors!”
The very strong impression this scolding makes on Bashmachkin causes complete satisfaction of the “significant person.” He is intoxicated by the thought “that his word can even deprive a person of his feelings.”
Scenes depicting a “significant person” expand and generalize the impact of the social order, which predetermined the course of Akaki Akakievich’s entire life and led to his death. One of the editions of “The Overcoat” contains the following lines: “And we, however, completely ignored main reason of all misfortune, namely a significant person." There is no doubt that this passage was modified by the writer under the pressure of censorship requirements; in the printed text it acquired a different edition. "But we, however, completely left one significant person, who, in fact, is hardly was not the reason for the fantastic direction, however, a completely true story."
Bashmachkin's meeting with a "significant person" is shown in "The Overcoat" as a clash not with a bad person, but with the "usual" order, with the constant practice of "those in power." Bashmachkin suffers not from the inhumanity of individual people, but from the lack of rights into which he is placed by his social position. Portraying a “little” man in “The Overcoat,” Gogol acted as a great humanist. His humanism was not abstract and contemplative, but effective, social in nature. The writer defended the rights of those people who are deprived of them in society. The words “I am your brother” were a reflection of the ideas of social justice and social equality.
Akaki Akakievich is depicted as a man who dutifully carries his heavy cross in life, without raising his voice of protest against the cruelties of society. Bashmachkin is a victim who is not aware of the tragedy of his situation and does not think about the possibility of a different life. In the original edition of the epilogue of the story, the writer bitterly noted Bashmachkin’s submission to fate and resignation. “The creature disappeared and hid, not protected by anyone and not dear to anyone, not interesting to anyone, not even turning the gaze of a natural observer on itself and only obediently suffering clerical ridicule and never uttering a murmur about its fate in its entire life and not knowing “Is there a better fate in the world?”
The “humility” of the hero of “The Overcoat” did not at all mean Gogol’s reconciliation with reality. By showing the hero as an uncomplaining victim of society, the writer expressed his bold protest against the social order.
CONCLUSION
Based on the principles of realism and democratic humanism, Gogol's artistic works had a huge influence on the development of public consciousness and spiritual culture in Russia and other countries. His work was a significant effective factor in the growth of advanced social thought
Gogol's literary activity was characterized by ideological and creative contradictions, especially strong in last period his life. These contradictions have often been used and are used in our time in order to interpret Gogol’s life and literary path, his artistic heritage in the spirit of outright conservatism. However, this kind of interpretation comes into irreconcilable conflict with the truth. The main direction of Gogol’s creative activity had as its source not the false views that were somehow reflected in his works, but the progressive, liberating ideas so clearly expressed in them. It was not prejudices and misconceptions that determined the content, the essence creative creatures writer, and their deep life truth, the wonderful artistic discoveries made by him.
Gogol's realistic masterpieces represent a major contribution to the treasury of Russian and world literature. The artistic generalizations created by the writer have become the property of all progressive humanity and arouse the keen interest of readers different nationalities. Gogol boldly asserted new creative principles that had a wide influence on literature and received their further development in the works of outstanding Russian writers and writers from other countries.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Mashinsky S. Art world Gogol. M.: "Enlightenment", 1971
2. N.V. Gogol: History and modernity: To the 175th anniversary of his birth / Comp. V.V. Kozhinov, E.I. Osetrov, P.G. Palamarchuk. - M.: Sov. Russia, 1985.
3. Khrapchenko M. B. Nikolai Gogol. Literary path. The greatness of the writer. - M. Sovremennik, 1984.

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Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he soon turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the beneficial influence of Pushkin. But he was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.

Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.

Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.

This social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, Gogol’s plot serves only as a pretext for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.

Deep insight into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol to genius artist words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.

The names of Khlestakov, Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and others became household names. Even the minor characters depicted by Gogol on the pages of his works (for example, in “Dead Souls”): Pelageya, the serf girl Korobochka, or Ivan Antonovich, the “jug’s snout,” have great power of generalization and typicality. Gogol emphasizes one or two of his most significant features in the character of the hero. Often he exaggerates them, which makes the image even more vivid and prominent.

The purposes of a bright, satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, the hero’s home.

If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.

The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech.

The two worlds depicted by Gogol - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings", in "Taras Bulba", in lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings” or when the story is told about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).

The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of folk speech and skillfully used all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life.

1) periodic structure phrases when many sentences are connected into one whole (“Taras saw how vague the Cossack ranks had become and how despondency, indecent for the brave, began to quietly embrace the Cossack heads, but was silent: he wanted to give time to everything so that they would get used to the despondency brought on by farewell with his comrades, and meanwhile in the silence he was preparing at once and suddenly to wake them all up, whooping like a Cossack, so that again and with greater strength than before, cheerfulness would return to everyone’s soul, which only the Slavic breed is capable of, a broad, powerful breed before others , that the sea is in front of shallow rivers");

2) the introduction of lyrical dialogues and monologues (for example, the conversation between Levko and Ganna in the first chapter of “May Night”, monologues - appeals to the Cossacks of Koshevoy, Taras Bulba, Bovdyug in “Taras Bulba”);

3) an abundance of exclamatory and interrogative sentences (for example, in the description of the Ukrainian night in “May Night”);

4) emotional epithets that convey the power of the author’s inspiration, born of love for native nature(description of the day at the Sorochinskaya Fair) or to the folk group (Taras Bulba).

Gogol uses everyday speech in different ways. IN early works(in “Evenings”) its bearer is the narrator. The author puts into his mouth both vernacular words (everyday words and phrases), and such appeals to listeners that are of a familiar, good-natured nature, characteristic of this environment: “By God, I’m already tired of telling! What are you thinking

The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.

Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. Gogol's humor - “laughter through tears” - was determined by the contradictions of the Russian reality of his time, mainly by the contradictions between the people and the anti-people essence of the noble state. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposite of the ideal

life with the reality of life." He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”