Shmelev "The Sun of the Dead" - analysis by A. Solzhenitsyn

The genre definition chosen by the writer for his work is epic- presupposes the monumentality of the form, the problems of national significance, the depiction of "substantial" (Hegel) events and historical collisions.

"The Sun of the Dead" by I.S. Shmelev is dedicated to the events of the Civil War in the Crimea and, unlike the traditional epic, is devoid of historical distance and monumentality of form. The narration is conducted in the first person, while the name of the narrator, as well as the details of his fate, remain unknown to the reader. The narrative is devoid of epic dispassion: it is permeated with direct assessments of the narrator, includes, for example, emotionally passionate appeals to various addressees, both intratextual and extratextual, see, for example: Then I found you, comrade of my work, an oak stump... Did you hear, old man, how homily and childishly we talked about where to put you... 1 - And you, proud London, keep your Westminster Abbey with a cross and fire! A foggy day will come- and you don't recognize yourself...

The action of the work takes place in the also remaining unnamed "little white town with an ancient, from the Genoese, tower." The space of the epic, it would seem, is extremely limited: ...this tiny town by the sea- it's just a speck on our boundless expanses, a poppy, a grain of sand... The text is built as a series of stories reflecting the specific impressions of the narrator, and does not have a clearly defined plot: There will be no end... Life knows no endings, beginnings...

Only the titles of sufficiently autonomous chapters single out individual links in the plot, indicate the end, “break”, exhaustion of one or another plot line outlined in the narrative, see, for example, such titles as “Playing with Death”, “Almond Ripe”, “The End of the Peacock ”, “The End of Bubik”, “The End of Tamarka”, “Three! end." The opinion of A. Amfiteatrov is indicative: “I don’t know: Literature whether "Sun of the Dead"? For a more terrible book is not written in Russian. Shmelev ... only tells day after day, step by step, the "epopee" of his Crimean, philistine existence in a famine year under Bolshevik oppression; - and ... scary! It's scary for a man! 2 At first glance, Shmelev's work can be perceived as a series of private documentary or semi-documentary evidence about the life in the Crimea of people caught in the elements of the revolution and the Civil War. Let us turn, however, to the key words of the text.

The most common words in the text of "Suns of the Dead" are the words Sun - 96 uses, die and its synonyms! (to die, die) - 117, kill - 69 and its synonyms (both general language and contextual) - 97 death - 36, stone and its derivatives - 68; desert (emptiness, wasteland)- 53, blood- 49 uses. Already the list of the most frequent words in the text determines the features of the picture of the world depicted in the "epopee": this is a world where death reigns. “What is the book of I.S. Shmelev? - wrote I. Lukash. - ABOUT of death Russian man and Russian land. ABOUT of death Russian herbs and animals, Russian gardens and the Russian sky. ABOUT of death Russian sun. ABOUT of death the whole universe, when Russia died, about the dead sun of the dead” 3 .

The repetition of the most frequent words in the work with the seme "death" (and they are supplemented in the text by the repetition of the word dead,rendered in the title position 4 , and the use of other words also related to the semantic field "death": coffin, grave, funeral, end etc.) determines integrity text, generalizes as much as possible what is depicted in it, correlates its various fragments and various storylines, aesthetically transforms everyday observations.

All the characters in Shmelev's epic are involved in Death. They either “die” (die, perish), or “go to kill”, cf.: Tossed his head, took a deep breath[Kulesh]... and died. Quietly died. This is how an outdated leaf falls. “I don't know how many people get killed in the Chicago massacres. Here the matter was simpler: they killed and buried. And even quite simply: filled up ravines. And even quite: simply, simply: thrown into the sea.

And the verb die, and verb kill are consistently used in the text in the forms of three tenses: present, past and future. Death rules in three time dimensions, and even children are subject to its power, usually symbolizing the future: - We... Koryak... will kill / We will kill with a stone! ..- shouted the jackdaw and shook his fist(chapter "On the Empty Road").

Death is personified in the text (see, for example: Death stands at the door, and will stand stubbornly until it takes everyone away. A pale shadow stands and waits!), and the combinability of verbs die And kill expands, as a result, their semantics becomes more complicated: “kill”, for example, time, thoughts, future, day. The sphere of compatibility of the epithet is also expanding. dead: so, the sea is drawn dead, a corner of the garden appears dead, see, for example: The Dead Sea is here... Eaten, drunk, beaten out - everything. Run out.

The semantic dominant of the text also determines the nature of individual author's neoplasms. mortal And day is death. Expressive-evaluative noun mortal serves as a symbol for the child: I saw a mortal, a native of another world - from the world of the Dead... He stood behind me, looked at me...mortal! It was a boy of ten or eight years old, with a large head on a stick-neck, with sunken cheeks, with eyes of fear. On his gray face, his whitish lips were dried to the gums, and his bluish teeth were exposed -grab. On the one hand, this word is based on a metaphorical motivation (“similar to death”), on the other hand, the neoplasm clearly has the semantics of “death cub”. The man of the future world, appearing in the final chapter of the story with the symbolic title "The End of the End", turns out to be a "mortal". The present of the narrator is estimated by him as a “day-death”: In the silence of the borndeath-day the calls-views are understandable and imperative for me. Compound neoplasm day-death is ambiguous and is characterized by semantic capacity: it is both the day of the reign of Death, and the day (life), turning into its opposite - death, and the day of remembrance of the dead.

The world of death depicted in Shmelev's "epopee" at the same time turns out to be the world of an expanding "emptiness". The keywords of the narrative, in addition to units of the semantic field "death", as already noted, include single-root lexical units wasteland - emptiness - desert, forming text word educational nest. Their connection and semantic closeness are emphasized by the author himself with the help of morphemic repetition, uniting, for example, adjacent paragraphs of one chapter, see the chapter “There, below”:

I'm walking past the Villa Rose. Everything - desert...

I'm going, I'm going. By the beach empty I'm going wasteland...[ 189 ]

The keywords of this semantic series denote the specific realities of the depicted space and at the same time express conceptual and factual information in the text as a whole. The World of Death becomes the world of the desert and the souls of the "empty".

The artistic space of the "Sun of the Dead" is dynamic: the emptiness intensifies in it gradually. In the first chapters of the narrative, the key words of this series still appear mainly in direct meanings, then they acquire a symbolic meaning. The spread of emptiness is emphasized in the author's characteristics: for example, the chapter "The End of the Peacock" ends with the phrase More and more emptiness in the chapter "There, below" already all - desert.

"Desert" ("emptiness") is connected in the text with the image of time. The past is evaluated by the narrator as a struggle with the "wasteland", with the "stone". See for example: I want to go back in time, when people got along with the sun, created gardens in the desert. The present is depicted as the return of the desert and the rejection of historical progress: I hear the roars of animal lifeancient cave the life that these mountains have known, which has returned again. In the triumphant "ancient" world, the returned world of the "cave ancestors", the expanding desert is adjacent to the "dense" forests, where Baba Yaga rolls and rolls in her iron mortar, drives with a pole, sweeps the trail with a broom ... with an iron broom. Noise-torkaet through the forests, sweeps. Sweeping with an iron broom. The motive of returning to the "cave" pagan times determines the appearance of mythological images, however, these mythological images are projected onto the modern Shmelev era: mythological image Baba Yaga's "iron broom" transforms into a clichéd political metaphor place (enemies) with an iron broom: The black word "iron broom" buzzes in my head? Where does this cursed word come from? Who said it?.. "Place the Crimea with an iron broom"... I'm painfully wanting to understand where it comes from?

The opposition into which the keyword "desert" enters: "desert" (emptiness) - "living life" - is thus supplemented by the opposition "iron (source of death, death) - life". These oppositions interact: "iron force", the enemy of the natural, natural beginning, dooms the world to emptiness, threatens life, the sun.

In the epic, the key word stone, also associated with the expanding desert motif. Word stone, firstly, it regularly appears in the text in its direct meaning as a designation of the details of the Crimean landscape, see, for example: Legs beatabout the stones scratching along the steeps; A lame red-haired horse hobbles along the peacock wasteland, behind a beam ... Smells hotstone, withered tumbleweed. More steps: againstone... Secondly, in the word stone, the semantics of which in the text is gradually expanding, the seme "dispassion" is updated: The sun laughs despite the suffering of people, the stone smiles; compare: The mountains look at him... I see their secret smile - the smile of a stone.

The text also takes into account the general language figurative meaning of words stone, stone in contexts describing torment, hunger and death, they express such meanings as "insensitivity" and "cruelty". Traditional metaphor stone heart supplemented by an individual author's comparison: souls are empty and dry, like weathered stone.

Keyword stone converges in the text with the word desert and serves as a means of deploying the motive to fight against it. The victory of culture over chaos and "cave savagery" is also a victory over "stone", in the world depicted by Shmelev everything "runs wild, year after year leaves into stone." Thus, the stone also appears in the text as a symbol of savagery, decline, and the death of moral principles. This conceptually significant word is opposed to the lexical units "fire", "light".

Keyword stone metaphorized throughout the text. One of the metaphors is connected with the image of the narrator and emphasizes the uselessness and helplessness of a person in the terrible world of death and loss of the soul: I... Who is this - me?! Stone lying under the sun. With eyes, with ears - a stone.

Word stone, as we can see, it is characterized by semantic diffuseness, overlap and interaction of different meanings. Used as a symbol, it reaches a high degree of generalization: Animals, people - all the same, with human faces, fight, laugh, cry. Pull out of the stone - again into the stone(chapter "The Righteous Ascetic"). At the same time, the symbolic word stone is ambivalent: the stone in the text is not only a sign of savagery, loss of compassion, mercy and dignity, but also a sign of salvation. "Stone" can be "clear", "fertile": I gratefully look at the mountains covered in a hot haze.They are (highlighted by I.S. Shmelev. - N.N.) is already there now! Blessed stone! .. At least six lives were recaptured!

So the keyword stone has conceptual significance and expresses various opposing meanings in the text of the Sun of the Dead: the hardness and reliability of the stone can serve as an antithesis to destruction, decline, savagery, cruelty and death. However, it is the latter meanings that dominate the semantic composition of the "epopee". In one of its last chapters, a combined image appears dark stone: the combination of just such components actualizes in the first of them the semes "gloom", "destruction", "savagery", while in the next paragraph of the text the keyword-symbol reappears desert:stone scored Fire. Millions of years of trampling! Billions of laborgobbled up in one day / What forces is a miracle? By the forcesstone-darkness. I see it, I know. There is no Blue Kasteli: black night-desert...

The key word, as we can see, is a lexical unit, the different meanings of which are simultaneously realized in the text, while its derivational and associative links are necessarily updated in it.

A special place in the semantic structure of the text is occupied by the keyword Sun, placed in the position of the title and included in an oxymoron combination with the word the dead. First of all, it appears in its direct meaning, but for the organization of the text, “meaning increments”, its semantic transformations, are more important. The sun in Shmelev's epic is personified: in metaphors that include this keyword, anthropomorphic characteristics are regularly used (sun deceives, laughs, remembers and etc.). The sun, on the one hand, is a source of light, heat and, accordingly, life, on the other hand, it, like a stone, dispassionately looks at the torment of people (note the parallel laugh sun - smile stone).

The movement of the sun determines the countdown in the "epopee", see image sun clock. The passage of time is perceived by the characters of the "Sun of the Dead" through the change of day and night, through sunsets and sunrises. The return of the "ancient" Chaos is associated with the establishment of cyclic time in the world, the embodiment of which is the "sun".

The sun is depicted in the "epic" and as a divine eye looking at the world, it is a symbol of divine light, ideas about the highest values lost in the "cave" life are associated with it: I can't turn to stone yet! Since childhood, I've been used to looking forSun of Truth (highlighted by I.S. Shmelev. - N.N.). Where are you,Unknown? Which face is yours?(chapter "The Wolf's Lair"). In a decaying world, where the mountains and the sea are only a "screen of hell", the sun remains the only focus of the memory of everything that was on earth: The sun looks closely, remembers: Baba Yaga rushes in her mortar, drives with a pestle, sweeps the trail with a broom ... The sun is all fairy talesremembers... Takes in. The time "will come - read(chapter "About Baba Yaga"). As we see, the plan of the future is connected with the image of the sun.

Keyword Sun, serving as a symbol of light, in Shmelev's "epopee", however, it acquires opposite meanings: the sun can lose its traditional attribute - gold - SCH be characterized by metaphors tin, tin. The source of heat in the world of death turns out to be cold and empty, cf.: Well, show your eyes... The sun! And in them the sun ... only completely different - cold and empty. This is the sun of death. Like tin foil- your eyes, and the sun in them is tin, an empty sun(chapter "What kill- - vat go "); And now the sun will peep out for a moment and splash out with a pale tin ... truly- sun of the dead! The farthest are crying(chapter "Bread with blood"). The image of the "fading" sun, the sun "leaving", "going to sunset", in the last chapters of the narrative is associated with the theme of death, which has taken possession of the wild world.

So, the image of the sun in Shmelev's epic, like the image of a stone, is ambivalent. The opposition of the meanings expressed by it distinguishes between two key phrases used in the text: sun of death And sun of the dead(title of work). "Sun of death" - the sun is "cold", "empty", "tin", the sun, "laughing" at the suffering of people and foreshadowing new deaths with the beginning of the day, finally, this is the sun that "extinguishes", leaving the land returned to Chaos; "The Sun of the Dead" is the divine eye, the source of light and life, preserving pa-. mourn for the departed. It is no coincidence that in the last chapter of the work the narrator refers to the Creed: Spring... With golden springs, warm rains, in thunderstorms, won't it unlock the bowels of the earth, won't it resurrect the Dead?Tea of the Resurrection of the Dead! I believe in miracles! Great Resurrection- yes it will!(chapter "The End"). As the philosopher I. Ilyin noted, “the title "Sun of the Dead" - seemingly everyday, Crimean, historical - is fraught with religious depth: for it points to the Lord, living in heaven, sending people both life and death, - and people, who have lost it and become dead all over the world" 1 .

So, the keywords, as we see, express in the text not only meaningful, but also content-conceptual and content-subtext information 2 . They reflect the individual-author's vision of the described realities and phenomena and single out "substantial" categories. In the text of The Sun of the Dead, the key words form a series of “supporting” signs of an axiological (evaluative) nature, connected by conditional relations, transforming the everyday plan of the narrative and serving as the key to the metaphorical plan of the work: the world depicted by Shmelev is a world of death and cruel violence, approaching as a result to “ ancient cave life, disintegrating and turning into “emptiness” and “stone”, while the signs of dying, emptiness and “stoneness” also extend to the souls of people who have fallen away from God. The inevitability of God's judgment is connected in the text with a key image - the symbol of the Sun.

The keywords of a literary text are often characterized by cultural significance: these units are associated with traditional symbols, refer to mythological, biblical images, evoke historical and cultural associations in the reader, and create a wide intertextual “space” in the work. This feature of the keywords is clearly manifested in the "Sun of the Dead", where they are symbolically associated with mythologems or actualize their correlation with biblical images. Thus, the use of the keyword in the text Sun relies on its symbolic meanings in the Holy Scriptures, in which the light of the sun, which makes everything clear and open, serves as a symbol of retribution and righteous punishment, while the true sun, “the true light, of which the sun we see serves only a faint reflection, is the Eternal Word, the Lord, Christ. .. he is Sun of Truth(Mal. IV, 2), true light (John, I, 9)» 3 . The “setting” of the sun symbolizes the wrath of God and the punishment for sins, suffering and disasters. The righteous, revived by the word of God, will one day shine, like a sun. All noted meanings associated with the symbolic use of the word Sun in the Holy Scriptures, are significant for the text of the "Sun of the Dead" and are updated in it.

The connection with biblical images is also important for characterizing the image of the author: the sun in Holy Scripture is a stable attribute of the bearer of the Word of God. The narrator, passionately denouncing the power of "iron", violence and mortification of the soul, thereby draws closer to the biblical prophet (see references-predictions, references-invectives penetrating the text).

The use of the keyword stone reflects the interaction of biblical and Slavic mythological symbolism. In the Holy Scriptures, a stone (a wordless stone) is an allegory of the hardening of the heart, and "heaps" of stones are a symbol of punishment for sins. In Slavic mythology, stone, one of the primary elements of the world, is a symbol of "dead" nature, and the appearance of large stones, boulders is also often explained by the "petrification" of people punished for sins. The motif of "petrification", as already noted, varies in the text of Shmelev's epic: the souls of people turn into stone, the stone displaces living space.

Keywords can also refer to the texts of literary works. So, it is possible that Shmelev's image of the sun correlates with the motives and images of Dostoevsky's prose, which had a huge influence on the writer. The image of the sun, associated in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky with the motive of involvement in the universe, simultaneously interacts with the motive of death. In the story “The Meek One”, for example, the sun, which “lives the universe”, dispassionately illuminates the hero’s tragedy and is perceived by him as a “dead man” - “the image of the sun expands the framework of the narrative to universal scales” 1: They say the sun is the life of the universe. The sun will rise and - look at him, isn't he a dead man? .. 2 The "reflexes" of this context are noticeable in Shmelev's "epopee". Key words, thus, include the "Sun of the Dead" in a dialogue with other works, actualize allusions and reminiscences.

Key words in the text of "The Sun of the Dead" are highlighted by repetitions of different types: lexical, synonymous, morphemic, syntactic. In a number of chapters, the intensity of repetitions is so high that, on their basis, particular leitmotifs of individual compositional parts of the work arise (see, for example, the chapters "Desert", "What they go to kill"). The key words in Shmelev's epic are in some cases highlighted by the author graphically. They consistently occupy strong positions of the text (the title of the work, the titles of individual chapters, their beginning or end). Different ways of highlighting key words in the text in their interaction focus the reader's attention on its cross-cutting images and signs that are important for understanding the "epopee".

A native Muscovite, Shmelev, ended up in the Crimea in 1918, having arrived with his wife to S.N. Sergeev-Tsensky. There, in Alushta, the only son of the writer, Sergei, was demobilized from the front. The time was incomprehensible; in all likelihood, the Shmelevs simply decided to wait out the Bolsheviks (then many left for the South of Russia). Crimea was under the Germans; in total, six governments have changed on the peninsula during the years of the civil war. Shmelev could observe the delights of democracy, and the kingdom of white generals, and the comings and goings of Soviet power. The writer's son was mobilized into the White Army, served in Turkestan, then, sick with tuberculosis, in the Alushta commandant's office. The Shmelevs did not want to leave Russia in 1920 together with the Wrangelites. The Soviet authorities promised amnesty to all those who remained; this promise was not kept, and the Crimea entered the history of the civil war as the "All-Russian cemetery" of Russian officers.

Shmelev's son was shot in January 1921, in Feodosia, where he (himself!) Appeared for registration, but his parents remained in obscurity for a long time, tormented and suspecting the worst. Shmelev busied himself, wrote letters, hoping that his son had been sent to the north. Together with his wife, they survived a terrible famine in the Crimea, got out to Moscow, then, in November 1922, to Germany, and two months later to France. It was there that the writer finally became convinced of the death of his son: the doctor, who was sitting with the young man in the cellars of Feodosia and subsequently escaped, found the Shmelevs and told about everything. It was then that Ivan Sergeevich decided not to return to Russia. After everything experienced, Shmelev became unrecognizable. He turned into a bent, gray-haired old man - from a lively, always cheerful, hot, whose voice once hummed low, like that of a disturbed bumblebee. Now he spoke in a barely audible, muffled voice. Deep wrinkles, sunken eyes, reminded me of a medieval martyr or a Shakespearean hero.

The death of his son, his brutal murder turned the mind of Shmelev, he seriously and consistently converted to Orthodoxy. The short story "The Sun of the Dead" can be called the epic of the civil war, or rather, even the epic of the countless atrocities and massacres of the new government. The name is a metaphor for a revolution that brings with it the light of death. The Europeans called this cruel evidence of the Crimean tragedy and the tragedy of Russia reflected in it like in a drop of water -

"The Apocalypse of Our Time" Such a comparison speaks of the understanding by Europeans of how terrible the reality depicted by the author is.

For the first time, "The Sun of the Dead" was published in 1923, in the emigrant collection "Window", and in 1924 it was published as a separate book. Translations into French, German, English, and a number of other languages immediately followed, which was a rarity for a Russian émigré writer, and even unknown in Europe.

Shmelev, depicting the Crimean events, said in the epic "The Sun of the Dead": "I have no God: the blue sky is empty." We will find this terrible emptiness of a man who has lost faith in everything among writers both in Soviet Russia and in exile. Creased, destroyed the former harmonious order of life; she showed her bestial face; and the hero struggles in a boundary situation between life and death, reality and madness, hope and despair. A special poetics distinguishes all these works: the poetics of delirium. With broken, short phrases, the disappearance of logical connections, a shift in time and space.

The "Sun of the Dead" describes the months that Shmelev lived in the Crimea under the "Red Terror" after the defeat of the White Army, and reflects all his hatred towards the Soviet government and the Red Army.

The narrator, an elderly intellectual who remained in the Crimea after the evacuation of the Volunteer Army of General Wrangel, reveals to us the fate of the inhabitants of the peninsula, torn apart by hunger and fear. In this book, which is essentially a diary, the author describes how hunger gradually destroys everything human that is in a person - first feelings, then will. And little by little everything dies under the rays of the "laughing sun".

This novel is a merciless evidence not only of the slow death of people and animals, but also, mainly, of moral loneliness, human misfortune, the destruction of all living and spiritual things in a humiliated, enslaved people. Shmelev exposes in his book all the countless wounds of the Russian people, who became both a victim and an executioner.

Thirty-five chapters of the epic "The Sun of the Dead" - as Shmelev calls his work - are saturated with unquenchable love and heartbreaking pain for torn to pieces by Russia. This amazing book, an autobiographical and historical document, a painful farewell to the whole bygone world, a doomed and destroyed civilization, reflects the horror of the loneliness of this era abandoned by God, worthy of the Greek tragedy and the horrors of Dante. The power of suffering, reminiscent of many literary critics of Dostoevsky, empathy and sympathy for any suffering, wherever it reigns, finds its most complete expression in The Sun of the Dead. The inhumanity of the Red Guard is the main motif of these pages: and, as Marcel Proust said about completely different historical events, that this indifference to suffering is a monstrous and indispensable form of cruelty. The straightforwardness and realism with which the ugliness and perversions of the Soviet regime are described should make even the most callous reader tremble with horror.

Occasionally, a lyrical poet appears in Shmelev, but his lyricism is, if I may say so, the groans of the agonizing homeland written and described in his blood. Shmelev's "Sun of the Dead" is not only, though above all, an indispensable historical document, as Thomas Mann defined it, but also an epic work of the great writer, translated into twelve languages. It is also necessary to understand that this book has become for the newly minted Soviet criticism something like a symbol of all Russian emigre literature, as evidenced, among other things, by the acrimonious article by critic Nikolai Smirnov “The Sun of the Dead. Notes on emigrant literature. For the majority of Russian exiles, this novel became the cry of all tormented humanity and perishing civilization.

It is not surprising that this tragic epic, a real prayer and requiem for Russia, was appreciated not only by Thomas Mann, but also by such diverse writers as Gerhart Hauptmann, Selma Lagerlöf and Rudyard Kipling; and it is also not surprising that in 1931 Thomas Mann nominated Shmelev as a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

When you read Shmelev's works written in exile, the first thing that strikes you is the author's desire, faithful to the memory of his lost homeland, to regain and revive Russia - the best in it, which is hidden behind its so different faces.

General destruction and death became the main component in the reality described by the author-narrator in the epic "The Sun of the Dead". The subject of the story is the tragic events of the civil war in the Crimea. The most terrible years for himself - 1918-1922 - the writer lived in a space, as if fate and history intended for experiences and absolutely tragic lives. In a fatal way, fate created conditions for the author of the epic that deepened the images born by him. These images were born not by the prophetic power of the writer, in order to predict the irreparable and warn against it. They are the result of what really happened on his gases, he observed. They are his own tragedy, unspoken and unspoken on the pages of the book.

The global problem of the "Sun of the Dead" - man and the world - became aggravated by the fact that the Crimean peninsula, which in itself is a space of ancient, mythological content and has a complex mythopoetic history that somehow finds similarities with the epic, became in the work a fragment of this peace. This is a space open to the sky, washed by the sea; which left itself to the steppe expanses, fanned either by dry, fragrant, or piercing icy winds; a space that covered itself with the stone of the mountains and cut through its body with dry wrinkles of beams and hollows, hiding and hiding and writhing with grief and doing evil. This space was created by nature and the universe in order to serve as a backdrop for a tragedy.

The theme of destruction is reflected at all levels of the text of the epic: at the level of vocabulary - in the use of verbs of the lexical-semantic group of the destructive effect on the object and the verbs of destruction; in syntagmatics, where a person, household items, nature act as an object of destructive influence. In terms of plot development, the disclosure of the theme of destruction and death is complemented by the moment of “personal meeting with the world”, “direct experience of it” by characters of different social status: a narrator and a nanny, a roofer and a professor, a young writer and a postman. These “reciprocity, mutual orientation, complementarity of various horizons, understandings and assessments” were the projection of the epic worldview onto the epic content.

At the level of development of the plot, the theme of destruction finds expression in how one by one the characters die, disappear; animals and people die of hunger; houses and things belonging to the dead are destroyed. As subjects that produce and bring destruction and death, there are “those who go to kill” or “renewers of life”. But the state of annihilation, destruction cannot continue indefinitely. It must end with the destruction of the destroyers, for it is said: “Whoever leads into captivity will himself go into captivity; whoever kills with the sword must be killed with the sword."

The focus of the epic is on those who are being destroyed. “Tumbling”, “swaying” from physical and moral weakness, they walk in horror from a new life, regardless of whether they were waiting for new times or were captured by them. Faced not with everyday life, but with being, they do not find themselves in time, they do not see the future. This is the narrator himself, the mother of a large family Tanya, a former architect, the mother of a death baby, a former teacher, a former mistress. Others (an eccentric doctor, for example) “death on the edge” do not leave without criticism and analysis either themselves in their previous life, or what they thought was the main thing in that life. The main action of the time they are now living out is the killing and destruction by the "renewers" of the remnants of the former life.

The presence of all these characters within the framework of the narrative duration, which is defined by the author as the time of the unfolding of the narrative, does not change anything in the characters of the epic as individuals. As such, they have developed outside of it, and in it only one thing is added to their lives - the fact of their dying, their disappearance. It's not even death. It's just a disappearance. As if their whole previous life had no meaning; as if none of them had a purpose. It all comes down to the image of waiting for this disappearance:

“On a rainy winter morning, when the sun was covered with clouds, tens of thousands of human lives were dumped in the cellars of the Crimea and were waiting for their murder. And above them those who go to kill drank and slept” (CM:27).

“There, in the town, there is a basement... people are dumped there, with green faces, with fixed eyes, in which there is melancholy and death” (CM:63).

“And you, mothers and fathers who defended the homeland ... may your eyes not see executioners, bright-eyed, dressed in the clothes of your children, and daughters raped by murderers, giving themselves caresses for stolen outfits! ...” (SM: 72).

“Glorious Europeans, enthusiastic connoisseurs of “daring”!

Leave your venerable offices /.../: you will see living souls covered in blood, thrown like rubbish...” (CM:77).

"Mother's daughter" Anyuta was no longer living in the world when "The Sun of the Dead" was written. But in his Crimean existence, the narrator saw her like this:

“She stands barefoot /.../ She is shaking from the horror that she foresees. She has already known everything, little one, which millions of people who have departed could not know. And now it is everywhere...” (SM:163).

As the subject of action in statements with the semantics of destruction and annihilation, a clearly maintained tendency is indicated: the subjects are indicated in summary. These are “those who go to kill”, “these”, “they”, “renewers of life”:

- “they came to the town, those who go to kill”;

- “here they are ... how the people are twisted ...”;

- “Do they say on the radio: “we kill old women, old people, children” ...?”

Sentences characterized by an integral plurality of the subject participate in creating an atmosphere of uncertainty and, as a result, unreality: “And so they killed, at night. During the day ... slept. They slept, while others, in the cellars, waited ... ".

The resulting destruction is often presented in the text of the epic by sentences with passive constructions, where the subject producing the destruction is not named. The action itself is expressed by a brief passive participle. Such a statement acquires the meaning not of an active influence, but of an experienced "passive" state. The subject in such a sentence is a real object, which all the more in a passive construction looks like an object of influence, in this case an object of destruction or death:

“Abandoned, forgotten gardens. Vineyards are devastated. The dachas are depopulated. The owners fled and were killed, driven into the ground ... ”(SM: 12).

“The covers have been torn from human souls. Ripped off - impregnated body crosses. Birthly eyes are torn to shreds /.../, the last caressing words are trampled by boots into the night mud...” (SM: 68).

In a situation of chaos of the civil war, natural phenomena also acquire destructive power: “the back wall was washed away by the rains”; “iron was lifted by a storm”; "The sun has burnt everything out." The forces of nature at all times acted unpredictably, according to their own laws, showing individual properties: rains wash away roads, dig wrinkles; the wind blows, blows, drives. These actions are spontaneous, but not chaotic. The actions of subjects - characters that produce destruction, on the contrary, are unpredictable, chaotic. There are few destroyers whose names are named: Bela Kun, Fyodor Lyagun, Shura Sokol, Comrade Deryaba, Grishka Ragulin. The bulk of the destroyers are unidentified, non-personalized. But the mass can - together or one by one - kill, and stab, and pull, and scatter, and drink. This makes it possible to qualify the actions of this mass not as the actions of a thinking, choosing personality, but as the actions of a submissive, herd personality. Therefore, the author removes the concept of MAN from the destroyers. And in that “detached” phraseological unit, the author denies them animation, linking parts of the phraseological unit with the union “what” - “those that go to kill”.

At the level of vocabulary, the motive of destruction finds expression in the verbs of the destructive effect on the object: knock out, kill, cut off, devastate, gouge, knock out, drink up, tear up, etc. Contained in these verbs is the meaning of an unusual change in the object, when its structural integrity is violated, leading to the impossibility of recovery, correlates the verbs of destructive action with other verbs of destructive influence: verbs of destruction (kill, burn, shoot) and verbs of damage (pick, wound, scratch).

The most numerous and semantically diverse grouping of verbs of a destructive effect on an object is the subgroup “to divide into parts, pieces”:

“to chop, not to think, but /.../ thoughts - to tear through the thickets, scatter, scatter”;

“I’ll cut everything down; I cut down the sign with a blow; I cut down oak kutyuks ";

“they kicked out the doctor in five minutes, threw the bees out of the hive, suppressed them, ate honey”;

"I'll tear out the liver!...";

“(a dog) gnaws out the tongue and lips of Lyarva (a dead cow)”;

“Odaryuk set to work on the frames, took off the doors, tore off the linoleum”;

“the teachers and the wife were stabbed to death with daggers.”

The verbs of this semantic group, which have a sign of high intensity of action, also indicate that part of the subject's energy is spent on rage, on the desire not only to destroy, but also to destroy the object:

“the new owner, bewildered, broke the windows, tore out the beams ... drank and poured deep cellars, swam in blood and wine ...”;

“... and here they take away salt, turn to the walls, catch cats in traps, rot and shoot in the basements ...”;

"the first Bolsheviks smashed and killed under a frenzied hand";

“they can now without trial, without a cross ... They beat the people!”;

“And on the check? I'll take you to waste in two minutes!

The specificity of this text is that the verbs of other lexico-semantic groups are translated into the center of the seme of destruction, for the main meaning of which the meaning of destruction is peripheral. This is another element of the intensification of the idea of destruction, its expansion:

The verb "to dispel":

“Where are you, suffering soul, my dear? What is scattered there, over the worlds that have died out?!” (CM:66);

“Cows are scattered by the wind. The farm is down. Her neighbors are pulling her away” (CM:78);

The verb "lower" in the meaning of "sell" in conjunction with the verbs "drink-eat" in the meaning of "live on the proceeds from the sale of money" takes on the meaning - "destroy" the object:

“Odaryuk /.../ lowered the master’s furniture, beds, dishes, and washbasins of the boarding house /.../ We drank and ate at the dachas

/.../ And Odaruk set to work on the frames...” (SM:68);

- “Misha and Kolyuk fled to the mountains /.../ Otherwise, Koryak would have tormented them too” (SM: 96);

The verb “to pay” in the meaning of “to be killed, destroyed” due to the mistake itself made: “- Now they sat on your neck! You paid too!.. and pay! Vaughn and Nikolai paid, and Kulesh, and ...

On the Volga already ... millions ... paid! (SM:133);

The verb “drink” in the combination “drink all the juices” in the meaning of “torment a person”, “destroy his soul”: “Tanya is not afraid of stones, forests and storms. She is afraid: they will drag her into the forest, they will laugh to their fill, they will drink all the wine, they will drink it all ... - go, merry one! (SM:135). “Laugh” means “mock”, “mock enough”, “destroy the soul”.

In direct contact with the fate of man, a thing is described in the Sun of the Dead. The description of a thing through the perception of a character actualizes its momentary, changeable states that are inaccessible to an observer who does not belong to “this” world - the thing appears in its inclusion in the fluid stream of being. The names of things become signs of the objective world, the significations of which are death or destruction, when people kill for an overcoat - a bullet in the back of the head, for a portrait of a deceased husband; for leggings - they shoot:

“... they took an old man with a handbag. They took off a worn-out Cossack overcoat in the basement, took off the torn underwear, and - in the back of the head /.../ They got down to business: do not go for tomatoes in an overcoat! (SM:36);

“They killed an ancient old woman in Yalta? /.../ Why the old woman? And she kept a portrait of her late husband on the table - a general ... ”(SM: 122);

"like a bottle, they shot, for a prize - for leggings" a sick young junker who returned from the German front.

Confiscating things, killing because of things is one of the most common and powerful details of the story. The result of this “withdrawal”, “beating”, “breaking”, “killing” and other destructive actions was a new space, about which it is said: “The revolution overturned space, and the horizontals became verticals”. A new, impoverished space has appeared. Forcibly intruding into the space of life, external factors began their destructive work for the glory of non-existence. The consciousness of man, going into the hell of suffering, clearly saw this impoverishment, the drying up of life, saw what was gone, what was not. And, peering into the now empty sea distance, the narrator's consciousness stopped at every smallest detail of this departed and destroyed former living space. Syntactically, this gradual departure, its alleged observability in the chapter "Desert" was expressed by the narrator with the repeatedly repeated particle "ni". If the repeating one serves to enhance the enumeration of what is available, then the repeating one, as if before our eyes, removes one after another the brilliance, aroma and strength of a bygone life:

“Neither a copper-faced Tartar, with pregnant baskets on his hips /.../ Nor a noisy Armenian rogue from Kutaisi, an Oriental man, with Caucasian belts and cloths /.../; no Italians with “obomarche”, no dusty feet, sweaty photographers running “with a cheerful face” /.../ No phaetons in crimson pleated, with white canopies /.../ No strong Turks /.../ No ladies’ umbrellas /.../, neither a human bronze /.../, nor a Tatar old man /.../” (SM:13-14).

This is an endless enumeration of the deceased and those who have passed away - as a kind of "enumeration, catalogue, litany", as an echo of the genre of cosmological texts: a genre that passes "through the entire history of literature and culture," flashing "with special brightness" in frontier periods, in particular, concerning the change of cultures ... ".

The loss of every thing, in most cases, is the loss of a part of oneself in a person. Things in the house are not just the sum of objects that are together: “Every time you look at your surroundings, every time you touch things, you should be aware that you are communicating with God, that God is before you and reveals Himself to you, surrounds you with Himself; you see His mystery and read His thoughts.

With such an understanding of a thing, its withdrawal from the human world meant the destruction of this world not only at the everyday level, but also at the ontological level. A special actualization is inherent in things in the tragic periods of being. It is precisely “in fatal moments” that the dual nature of things is revealed with particular obviousness, and both the kinship with things, and their emasculation and uselessness are acutely felt. “The code of things becomes one of the ways to describe post-revolutionary Russia: the death of the world, its merciless destruction and annihilation begins with the death of things, i.e. from the destruction of the house as the center and focus of the human microcosm.” Home is something that is always with a person, his unforgettable. The problem of man and the home is the problem of the pre-standing of human existence in the face of a historical situation. The house is a border that protects, saves from adversity. If trouble comes to the house, it does not leave it. The narrator's house is destroyed from the inside, where every corner reminds of who lived in it before, but who will never cross the threshold of the house:

“I can't there. I can still read at night by the stove. And in the daytime I keep walking...” (SM: 144).

In the "swirling" space, in the ruined house, objects left their usual places. The opposition "top-bottom" is broken. The invisible bottom, as the foundation of the structure, becomes a receptacle for what the top supported by this foundation does not imply: above - the shepherd's house near the church, the bottom of this house is a prison, not household supplies in the basement - people awaiting death.

Burlap, which should be "down" - on the floor, takes place "above", on the professor's neck; roofing iron makes the opposite movement: from the top, from the roof - down: “A scarecrow-doctor, with burlap around his neck, instead of a scarf /.../ The shoes on the doctor are made of a rope rug, pierced by a wire from an electric bell, and the sole is made of .. .roofing iron!” (SM:38,39).

The doctor buried his wife. Her coffin, her last corner, was her favorite square cabinet in her previous life. He also changed his position in space: vertical - as a closet, to horizontal

As a coffin: “A trihedral is both simpler and symbolic: three are one /.../ here it’s its own, and it even smells like your favorite jam!...” - the doctor “jokes” (SM: 40).

In the new, destroyed space, man ceased to be the master not only of his own life. Birds and pets became a draw:

“Peacock /.../ Mine once. Now - no one, like this dacha. There are no one's dogs, there are people - no one's. So the peacock is nobody's" (SM: 7).

Tamarka is a Simmental, in the past she was a nurse. Now there are tears in her glassy eyes, “hungry saliva stretches and sags towards the prickly azhina.” The description of the death of a black horse is full of amazing strength, beauty and sadness: “I was standing at the edge. He stood for days and nights, was afraid to lie down. He fastened himself, legs apart /.../, met the north-east with his head. And before my eyes, he collapsed on all four legs - he broke. He moved his feet and stretched...” (SM:34). A cow, a horse - the main support of rural Russia - is dying before our eyes, unable to change anything of the former owner.

The semantics of death is reinforced by the mythology of the horse in world and Slavic culture: the horse was an attribute of some deities; on Greek and Christian gravestones, the deceased was depicted sitting on a horse. The death of the horse, the mediator between the earth and the sky, can be perceived as a tragic allegory that the sky has turned away from the Earth and will not give rest to the dead.

One of the stages of physical and moral destruction was hunger. The birds are starving: the peacock is now “at work /.../ No acorns have been born; there will be nothing on the wild rose /.../” (SM: 8).

The doctor is starving, but even in the chaos of a new life he keeps records of starvation and made a “discovery”: “you can conquer the whole world with hunger if you enter it into the system” (CM:51).

Children are starving and dying: “Mom sent... give us... a little one is dying, shouting... Give me grits for porridge...” (SM:67).

At the dump, “children and old women rummage through the remains of the cannibals, looking for sausage skin, gnawed lamb bone, herring head, potato peel ...” (SM: 144).

Two children of the woman met by the narrator at the Tatar cemetery have already died, and one - "handsome", according to his mother, "mortal" - the narrator said about him, "a boy of ten or eight years old, with a large head on a stick-neck, with sunken cheeks, with eyes of fear. (SM:175). “Those who go to kill” “confiscated” life, starved children, that future, about which they spoke loudly, for the sake of which they put on leather jackets and took revolvers.

The destruction of life is also conveyed by the description of the appearance of people and animals. In these descriptions, there are adjectives formed from verbs with the semantics of destruction, desolation, and verbs of movement, representing the movement of a person in a state of extreme fatigue:

“You will see one thing on the coast road - a barefoot, filthy woman hobbles, with a tattered herbal bag, - an empty bottle and three potatoes, - with a tense face without thought, stupefied with adversity /.../

An elderly Tatar walks behind a donkey, - rolls with a pack of firewood, - gloomy, torn, in a red sheepskin hat; he twitches at the blind dacha, with the grate turned inside out, at the horse bones by the felled cypress...” (CM:14).

The picture of destruction is painted in the "Sun of the Dead" and sounds. These are the sounds, modes and melodies of the orchestra of a bygone life, when “wonderful stones sang, iron sang in the seas, gardens sang, vineyards gathered dreams /.../ And the sound of the wind, and the rustle of grass, and inaudible music on the mountains, beginning with a pink ray of the sun /.../". These are also the sounds of a new, changed space: “And then a wonderful orchestra went astray /.../ The torn tin cans came to life: they rattle - roll in the dark, howl, whistle, and hum, knock on stones. Sad, eerie are the dead cries of devastated life...” (SM: 85,86,148).

From a former life, the narrator “hears” not only the sounds of a well-ordered orchestra, but also the smells of a long-forgotten one:

“I hear, I hear so dazzlingly, I hear! - the viscous and spicy spirit of bakeries, I see both dark and black loaves on carts, on shelves ... the intoxicating aroma of rye dough ... I hear the fractional crunch of knives, wide, moistened, cutting into bread ... I see teeth, teeth , mouths chewing with contented smacking... strained throats, absorbing spasms...” (SM:69). Here, details succeed each other in a clear rhythm, like changing close-ups of a well-rhythmically organized documentary. These details-frames are reminiscent of the famous films of Dziga Vertov, who depicted the history of the Soviet five-year plans with their rhythm and time flying forward. Cinematic expressiveness, montage of the image, and, indeed, not only the visible, but also the audible world, justify the sensual inversions of Ivan Sergeevich Shmelev, who in the early twenties of the last century peered into words and listened to sounds. In the "sounds and signs" of the destruction of great Russia.

Bibliography

1. Kvashina L.P. The World and the Word of the "Captain's Daughter" // Moscow Pushkinist. III. M.: Heritage, 1996. - 244, 257

2. Trubetskoy E.N. Meaning of life. M.: Respublika, 1995. - 432.

3. Ivan Shmelev. The sun of the dead. Moscow. "Patriot". 1991. - 179 pages. Further - SM and page.

4. Chudakov A.P. The problem of a holistic analysis of the artistic system. (On two models of the writer's world) // Slavic Literature, VII International Congress of Slavists. M.: Nauka, 1973. - 558.

5. Toporov V.N. Myth. Ritual. Symbol. Image. Research in the field of mythopoetic. M.: Ed. group "Progress" - "Culture", 1995. - 623. P. 497.

6. Tsivyan T.V. On the semantics and poetics of things. (A few examples from Russian prose of the 20th century) // AEQUINOX, MCMCII. M .: Book Garden, Carte blance, 1993. - 212-227.

7. Ivanov V.V. Collected Op. T.II. Brussels, 1974. p. 806. Cit. Quoted from: Toporov V.N. Thing in anthropocentric perspective // AEQUINOX, MCMXCIII, 1993. -p.83.

8. Tsivyan. Op.cit., pp. 214,216,217.

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Course work

Analysis of symbolism in the book by I.S. Shmelev "Sun of the Dead"

Content

Introduction
ChapterI. Spiritual realism by Ivan Shmelev
ChapterII. Symbolic images and motifs in I. Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"
Conclusion
List of used literature

Introduction

Shmelev Ivan Sergeevich (1873 - 1950) - an outstanding Russian writer and publicist. A prominent representative of the conservative Christian trend in Russian literature, he was one of the most famous and popular writers in Russia at the beginning of the century. After his son, a Russian officer, whose grave Shmelev despaired of finding, was shot by the Bolsheviks in the Crimea in 1920, the writer emigrated in 1922. In exile, he became one of the spiritual leaders of the Russian emigration. Shmelev was highly valued by I. Ilyin, I. Kuprin, B. Zaitsev, K. Balmont, G. Struve. Archbishop Seraphim of Chicago and Detroit (who knew Shmelev from the missionary monastery of the Monk Job of Pochaev in the Carpathians) wrote about him this way: "The Lord gave Shmelev to continue the cherished work of Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky - to show the humbly-hidden Orthodox Russia, the Russian soul, sealed by God's finger" .

He could not live without the living Russian word, without reading Russian. Shmelev constantly wrote about Russia, about the Russian person, about the Russian soul, touched upon the issues of monasticism and eldership. For Shmelev, the theme of Russia was not only the main one, but also the only one. That is why Shmelev, perhaps more sharply than any other of the Russian writers abroad, took everything that was connected with Russia so close to his heart. According to Balmont, only Shmelev "truly burns with the unquenchable fire of sacrifice and re-creation - in images - of true Russia."

Shmelev did a lot to bring back to Russia the memory of himself, the memory of long-forgotten customs and rituals, of the inexhaustible riches of the Russian language, of Holy Russia. "My life is all open, and what I have written is my passport. I have been a Russian writer for more than half a century and I know what his duty is."

Abroad, I. Shmelev published more than twenty books, over the years, memories of the past took center stage in Shmelev's work - "Praying Man", 1931, "Summer of the Lord", 1933-48. Abroad, world recognition also comes to him. So, Thomas Mann, giving an assessment of the story "The Inexhaustible Chalice" in one of his letters to Shmelev (1926), wrote excitedly "about the purity and sad beauty, the richness of the content of the work" and concluded that Shmelev remains on top both in love and in anger "Russian epic".

Today there is not just a return - the resurrection of Shmelev the writer, who until recently was included by some professors and philologists in the category of naturalists, wingless writers of everyday life. Shmelev's phenomenon is perhaps the most amazing in the entire returned world of Russian literature of our century.

The relevance of the study lies in establishing the form of expression of the author's consciousness in the post-revolutionary prose of I.S. Shmelev's epic "The Sun of the Dead".

The object of the study is the epic novel "The Sun of the Dead".

The subject of the research is symbolic motifs and images in the book by I.S. Shmelev "Sun of the Dead".

The purpose of the work is to reveal the symbolism of motives and images in the book by I.S. Shmelev "The Sun of the Dead" and their analysis.

The methodology of the work consists of the principles of functioning in the writer's work of the categories of genre and style, as well as literary theories that form the main approaches to the study of the author's problem (M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Vinogradov, L.Ya. Ginzburg, Osmina E.A., B. O. Korman, V. B. Kataev, N. T. Rymar, V. P. Skobelev, A. M. Bulanov, S. V. Perevalova).

Chapter I. Spiritual realism of Ivan Shmelev

1.1 Religious and moral foundations of the writer's artistic world

For many reasons, the properties of the objective and the subjective, the religious aspects of Russian classical literature were hardly touched upon by its numerous researchers and critics of the Soviet era. Meanwhile, philosophical, ethical, aesthetic, social, political problems, thoroughly traced in the development of the literary process, are nevertheless secondary in relation to the most important thing in Russian literature - its Orthodox worldview, the nature of the reflection of reality. It was Orthodoxy that influenced a person's close attention to his spiritual essence, to the inner self-deepening reflected in literature. This is, in general, the basis of the Russian way of being in the world. I.V. Kireevsky wrote about it this way: “Western man sought by the development of external means to alleviate the severity of internal shortcomings. And this could be determined only by the Orthodox worldview.

The history of Russian literature as a scientific discipline, which coincides in its main value coordinates with the axiology of the object of its description, is just beginning to be created. Monograph A.M. Lyubomudrov is a serious step in this direction.

Creativity of their favorite authors - Boris Zaitsev and Ivan Shmelev - A.M. Lyubomudrov studies consistently, purposefully, and the results of his research have already become the property of literary criticism. The choice of the names of these writers is understandable, standing out from the general mass of writers of the Russian emigration, which demonstrated sufficient indifference to Orthodoxy. It was Shmelev and Zaitsev who defended the traditional values of Russian culture, opposed with their position, with their books, the "new religious consciousness" that had been developing since the time of the "Silver Age".

I would like to emphasize the significance and value of the author's theoretical developments. So, in the introduction by A.M. Lyubomudrov objects to overly broad interpretations of the concepts "Christian" and "Orthodox" and is himself a supporter of the extremely strict, narrow, but precise use of these terms. In the same way, it seems methodologically correct to determine the "Orthodoxy" of a work not on the basis of its subject matter, but precisely on the basis of the worldview, the worldview of the artist, and A.M. Lyubomudrov quite rightly emphasizes this. After all, the religiosity of literature is not manifested in a simple connection with church life, just as it is not in exclusive attention to the plots of Holy Scripture.

The author demonstrates a deep familiarity with the problems of Orthodox anthropology, eschatology, and soteriology. This is evidenced by numerous references both to the Holy Scriptures and to the Holy Fathers, including those of the New Age: we meet the names of Saints Theophan the Recluse, Ignatius (Bryanchaninov), Hilarion (Troitsky), St. Justin (Popovich) and others. Without taking into account and understanding this Orthodox ideological context, any study of the work of writers like Shmelev and Zaitsev will be completely incomplete, distorting the very essence of their creative and ideological orientations. After all, religious dogmas, which are presented to many as something far from life, scholastic-abstract, the subject of meaningless theological disputes, in fact, have a decisive effect on a person’s worldview, his awareness of his place in being, on his method of thinking. Moreover, religious dogmas shaped the character of the nation, the political and economic identity of its history.

In relation to the literary process of the 19th-20th centuries, the “highest” achievement of one or another national literature was habitually indicated as its orientation towards realism. As a result, “there was a need” to single out different typological varieties of realism. “Theory of Literature” “realism is considered in detail critical, socialist, peasant, neorealism, hyperrealism, photorealism, magical, psychological, intellectual th”

A.M. Lyubomudrov proposes to allocate more “ spiritual realism". Starts with a definition: “ spiritual realism - artistic perception and display

the real presence of the Creator in the world.” That is, it should be understood that this is a certain “higher” type of “realism”, “the basis of which is not this or that horizontal connection of phenomena, but the spiritual vertical.” And this “vertical” orientation, for example, differs from “socialist realism” , who, "as is well known, was guided by the principle of depicting life in its revolutionary development."

As for the concept of "spiritual realism", then, indeed, science has not yet proposed any better term for a certain range of literary and artistic phenomena (sometimes one has to come across works in which all classics are included in the category of "spiritual realism", which, of course, blurs these boundaries). The concept of spiritual realism proposed by A.M. Lyubomudrov, looks absolutely convincing.

Such are the author's observations on the style of B. Zaitsev of the emigrant period or conclusions about the main sources and semantic nodes of the book "Reverend Sergius of Radonezh". The same can be said about the author's reasoning on Shmelev's novel "The Ways of Heaven" - about the type of the churched character, about internal spiritual warfare, or his proof that the basis of the characters was not the psychologism familiar to the classics, but Orthodox anthropology - all these observations already entered scientific circulation.

religious writer Shmelev symbolism

The monograph is a conclusive demonstration of the fact that the prose of two artists, not similar to each other, really expressed precisely the Orthodox type of worldview and worldview, while A.M. Lyubomudrov explores the forms and nuances of the uniquely personal artistic expression of this ideological content.

Successful and original are the comparisons of both writers with the classics of Russian literature of the 19th century, primarily with Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Chekhov. These parallels help to reveal new features of the creativity of these artists as well.

He categorically refuses to attribute Shmelev's early works to "spiritual realism" - because the "truth of life" in them is violated by the introduction of "abstract-humanistic" paintings.

The author's assertion that in "The Summer of the Lord" Shmelev recreates a "foreign" faith, which he himself does not possess in full, is debatable. The childish faith of the protagonist of the book is the author's own faith, although he looks at it from a distance of several decades. In general, it seems that the author is wrong to deny Shmelev the fullness of faith until the mid-30s. Here the concepts of faith and churching are mixed. Wouldn't it be better to say about the discrepancy between one and the other at a certain period in the writer's life? The remark of A.M. Lyubomudrov about the closeness in this respect between Shmelev and Gogol. One could also add a comparison with Dostoevsky, whose churching took place later than he gained faith.

The artistic idea of Shmelev about a certain duality of the nature of Darinka, the heroine of "The Ways of Heaven", requires additional comprehension. On the one hand, the correctness of the researcher regarding the reduction of the image of Darinka to the level of the soul can be confirmed. On the other hand, everything can also be explained from the standpoint of Christian anthropology, which indicates in man the connection of the image of God with the original sinful damage of nature, that is, earthly and heavenly (this is precisely the metaphorical device indicated by Shmelev).

The study of the religious aspect in the work of I.S. Shmelev is of particular importance, since the "author's image" of the writer is filled with features of the God-seeking spirit, which, more than all other features, distinguish him from other "author's images". Religious motifs, catholicity, symbols, thematic "spots" (light, joy, movement) are the subject of close attention of the scientist. L.E. Zaitseva in her work "Religious motives in the late works of I.S. Shmelev (1927-1947)" singles out inter-genre connections for research.

The power of Shmelev's word lies in the formal adherence to the canon of religious literature, using the most marked motives for the Orthodox tradition, and in the special filling of the text with the sensations of a child's consciousness, which illogically, contrary to adult philosophy and God-seeking, perceives the world of faith. In the last period, Shmelev's texts - original lives, tales - exclude aestheticism as the foundation of creativity in favor of iconography, stylistic excesses and "cultural burden" are relegated to the background in favor of ... spiritual reality, which, according to the writer, surpasses any most sophisticated artistic fiction.

1.2 The history of the creation of the epic "The Sun of the Dead"

"The Apocalypse of Our Time" Such a comparison speaks of the understanding by Europeans of how terrible the reality depicted by the author is.

For the first time, "The Sun of the Dead" was published in 1923, in the emigrant collection "Window", and in 1924 it was published as a separate book. Translations into French, German, English, and a number of other languages immediately followed, which was a rarity for a Russian émigré writer, and even unknown in Europe.

Chapter II. Symbolic images and motifs in I. Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"

2.1 Poetics of Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"

The epic "Sun of the Dead" is a neo-realistic creation. The categorical system of the new aesthetics outweighs in it a similar system of traditional realism. Leaving classical realism already in the first period of creativity, I.S. Shmelev embodies the principles of the new art in the program work of the second period. According to T.T. Davydova, "Shmelev enriched his creative method with the achievements of symbolism, impressionism, expressionism, primitivism, that is, he created a new realism." .

The author's version of the genre designation is unexpected, but fair. "An epic worldview is thinking about being on the largest scale ... through the most concrete values." This is "the thirst for universal universal coverage and understanding of being." The most "anti-Bolshevik" work in all the work of I.S. Shmelev called the epic of A.G. Sokolov. A modern researcher in an afterword to the first publication in the writer's homeland defined the work as a story. "... this is primarily a novel documentary, ... but at the same time it is also a lyrical confession, permeated with motifs and melodies of crying and prayer," wrote A.I. Pavlovsky in the article "Two Russias and a United Russia". The same feature was seen in the form of the work by one of the first reviewers of the epic: "The Sun of the Dead" - crying. The prophet Jeremiah wept over a certain city. Ivan Shmelev in "The Sun of the Dead" lifted up his lament for cities and regions, for the whole people ... ". E.A. Osminina in the article "Song of the Song of Death" regards the form of the work as a diary. However, the author's version of the genre designation, for all its unexpectedness, is the most convincing, since "the subject of the epic is not an action (fate), but more broadly - an event, that is, being in its entirety", - writes G. D. Grachev. The author seeks to embrace all being in its unstoppable movement towards death. This is an epic movement , the "stream of life" reflects the author's consciousness in a naturalistic-mythopoetic way. In the 1920s, the epic narrative form was an effective way for Russian writers to convey the author's impression of collapse. Observance of the canons (for example, in the epic of M.A. ) made it possible to create samples of a large-scale chronotope. I. S. Shmelev, avoiding the general experience, creates a fantastic space. It is not filled with long years of artistic action and a large number of heroes. nevertheless, the author is right in the genre designation.

A novel - a panorama has no plot. The absence of plot breaks led to the work of only one spring of action - the internal psychological experiences of the hero-narrator. They also tie individual chapters together. The hero-narrator in the epic is an unnamed writer.

The absence of plot breaks (excluding plot micro-explosions within the chapters-essays) led to the work of only one spring of action - the internal psychological experiences of the narrator. They also tie the individual chapters together. The hero-narrator is "a medium through which prose itself appears." The hero-narrator in the epic "The Sun of the Dead" is that "formal-genre mask" (M.M. Bakhtin), with the help of which "the author simultaneously hides and reveals himself" (N.K. Bonetskaya).

The artistic time of the work, without breaking, lasts sixteen months. However, it is not homogeneous and does not have a uniform speed. A single common time is divided and connected in different ways. There are separate personal chronologies. The individual simultaneous times of the narrator on the one hand and other actors on the other hand are combined into one current time. The time of the event, as it were, turns into space, since the images of emptiness, drowsiness, silence, solar heat, inferno enhance the unity of time and space in the epic, sometimes visually slowing down the passage of time, thickening the image of total death.

The epic action has no beginning. In the first chapter, the narrative begins from the middle of the suffering of all nature. The last chapter does not draw the end of them. The epic - a frame from the slowly flowing chronicle of dying - is a segment of the greatest concentration of deaths, a segment of fatal "ends".

The main layers of the temporal aspect of the artistic world of the epic are in the events of the historical process, in the temporal life of each character, in the correlation of temporal events with eternity, in the events of church holidays (Transfiguration, Christmas) mentioned in the work.

The space of the text is conveyed through the space of characters: there are many of them, but their nomination is peculiar. A proper name is always "tied" to a profession or social position, which has now become unnecessary or shaky (Dr. Mikhail Vasilievich, the postman Drozd, Pashka the fisherman, the son of a nanny, Anyuta, mother's daughter, mistress, teacher Pribytko). The space is also outlined by the geographical realities of Crimea: mountains, sea, coast - the horizontal frames of the artistic square. The sky, the sun, the stars are marks on the vertical axis that do not let the perceiving eye pass beyond the limits of the earth's visibility. The chronotope, "the existing relationship of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in the work" (M. Bakhtin), in the epic "The Sun of the Dead" plays a dominant role together with super-images. If the space (Circle, Russia) fits into the scheme and has a name in it, then time invisibly permeates the scheme, "revives" it.

2.2 Symbolic images and motifs

Symbolic images and motifs are varied. They obey the "triple classification" of I.B. Rodnyanskaya, who considers the symbolic image and motive depending on its objectivity, on semantic generalization, on structure (i.e., the relationship between subject and semantic plans). The dominant role is played by super-images that make up the scheme-framework of the entire work, which resembles a graphic representation of a triangle inscribed in a circle. The circle is an artistic space containing not only the geography of the Crimean town, but also the scale of all of Russia. This is also a philosophical-cosmic circle, which includes the entire universe. In the epic, he turns into a "circle of hell", covered in blood, into a circle-loop, into a circle-tangle. "Circle of Hell" - the epic's super-image - captivated and swirled the narrator: "... I'm looking, I'm looking ... Black, inescapable, - walks with me. It won't leave until death". Understatement, metaphorical semi-matter ("black walks") create a subtext, causing an implicit reader to emotional response and guess about the tragedy. In the same chapter, a distraught old woman who has lost her husband and son is "circling". The parallelism of destinies emphasizes the typicality of the situation.

A circle - Symbolizes infinity, perfection and completeness. This geometric figure serves to display the continuity of the development of the universe, time, life, their unity. The circle is a solar symbol, which is due not only to the shape, but also to the circular nature of the daily and annual movement of the sun. This figure is associated with protection (a magic circle, outlined for protection from evil spirits, is used in various traditions). The circle is one of the forms of space creation. Various architectural structures are round in plan, settlements are built in the form of a circle. In most traditions, the cosmos, as an ordered space of life, appears as a ball, graphically depicted by means of a circle. The symbolism of the circle also reflects the idea of the cyclical nature of time (the Russian word "time" can be traced to the root with the meaning "that which rotates"; the zodiac, the personification of the year, is the "circle of animals"). Due to the fact that the circle is traditionally associated with the sun and is regarded as the most perfect of the figures, superior to others, dominating them, the supreme deity is also represented as a circle. In Zen Buddhism, where there is no concept of God, the circle becomes a symbol of enlightenment as an absolute. The Chinese yang-yin symbol, which looks like a circle divided in half by a wavy line, symbolizes the interaction of the interpenetration of the two principles of being. In Dante, the Trinity is embodied in the image of three equal circles of different colors. One of them (God the Son) was, as it were, a reflection of the other (God the Father), like a rainbow born of a rainbow, and the third (God the Spirit) seemed to be a flame born of both of these circles (according to the teaching of Catholicism, the Holy Spirit comes from the Father and Son). In this context, the symbolism of the circle was established when the idea of supreme power on earth was fixed (ball-power, ring).

At the apex point of the triangle there are superimages of the sun, sky, and stars. "Sun of the Dead" - summer, hot, Crimean - over dying people and animals. “This sun deceives with its brilliance. He sings that there will be many more wonderful days, now the velvet season is coming. Although the author explains towards the end that the “sun of the dead” is said about the pale, half-winter Crimean. (And he also sees the “tin sun of the dead” in the indifferent eyes of distant Europeans. By 1923 he already felt it there, abroad.) The image of the sun , the dominant one, who determined the oxymoron title of the book, in its various guises "floods" the space of the epic. The frequency of mentioning the sun in the epic testifies to the author's goal to create an image - a conductor of the idea of the universal unity of Death and Resurrection. The sun - the most ancient cosmic symbol, known to all peoples, means life, the source of life, light. Such characteristics as supremacy, life-creation, activity, heroic principle, omniscience are associated with solar symbolism. The solar cult is most developed in the Egyptian, Indo-European, Mesoamerican traditions. The image of a solar deity moving in a chariot drawn by four white horses has been preserved in Indo-Iranian, Greco-Roman, and Scandinavian mythology. Solar deities and divine personifications of the sun are endowed with the attributes of omniscience and omniscience, as well as supreme power. The all-seeing eye of the solar deity embodies the guarantee of justice. It sees everything and knows everything - this is one of the most important qualities of the solar deity. In Christianity, the sun becomes a symbol of God and the word of God - life-bearing and imperishable; the bearers of the word of God have it as their emblem; clothed in the sun, the true church is shown (Rev. 12). Like the sun, the righteous one shines (according to the tradition representing holiness, the spirit in the form of light). In the first part of the epic, the sun is mentioned 58 times (life is slowly moving towards the end, it is still illuminated by the sun and incinerated by it). The second part, chapters 17-28, is a story about the survival of the not yet dead. Winter, desert, darkness take over. The sun overcomes the darkness only 13 times, drawn by the author more often in metalogical images. In chapters 23-25, concluding, ascending to the "end of ends", the sun appears even less often - 9 times. But his special activity is noted in the last lines of the epic, fixing a clear movement towards the Renaissance.

The coming collapse is also associated with the sun. Under it, in the mornings, afternoons, evenings, the living goes into oblivion, and the "eye" of the sun sees off life: "I look beyond the beam: on the balcony the Peacock no longer meets the sun." "And how many big ones now, who knew the sun, and who leave in the darkness!" . But the sun, which carries the widest range of meanings in the epic, most often narrows down to the semantic unit "sign of departure": "The sun laughs at the Dead", "The streak runs, runs ... and goes out. Truly - the sun of the dead!" "This is the sun of death."

The sun-symbol unites all super-images of the epic into one scheme-frame. "Animated" by the author, it "revives" all the other symbolic peaks of the epic: "- I will live in the rocks. The sun, and the stars, and the sea ...".

Images of eternal cosmic nature: ( stars- the image is multi-valued. It is a symbol of eternity, light, high aspirations, ideals. In various traditions, it was believed that each person has his own star, which is born and dies with him (or that the soul of a person comes from the star and then returns to it, a similar idea is present in Plato). The star is associated with the night, but also embodies the forces of the spirit that oppose the forces of darkness. It also acts as a symbol of divine majesty. In Sumerian cuneiform, the sign denoting a star acquired the meanings of "sky", "God".

The symbolic aspects of the image are associated with the idea of multiplicity (the stars in the sky are a symbol of an immense multitude) and organization, order, because the stars have their own order and destiny in the constellations. Separate constellations and stars of the "physical" sky are endowed with their own meaning. The air element of the sky determines the fact that it is thought of as the soul, the breath of the world. Possessing the properties of inaccessibility, vastness, in the mythological consciousness it is endowed with incomprehensibility, omniscience, greatness. As a rule, the deity of heaven is the supreme god. In the Indo-European tradition, the supreme deity is expressed by the stem deiuo, meaning "clear daytime sky"; hence the ancient Indian Dyaus, Greek Zeus, Roman Jupiter as Dyaus Pitar, Sky-father, etc. The idea of the supreme ruler goes back to the symbolism of the sky. Usually personifies the male, fertilizing principle (an exception is Egyptian mythology), is perceived as a source of life-giving moisture and heat. In the cosmogonic ideas of many peoples, the motives for the separation of heaven from earth and the marriage of heaven with earth are reflected. In Egyptian mythology, the sky goddess Nut marries the earth god Geb. In Chinese mythology, heaven and earth appear as the father and mother of all people: at the same time, the sky gave birth to men, and the earth - to women (from where the idea of the two principles of nature and the idea that a woman should be subject to a man, like the earth to heaven) subsequently came from. In Greek mythology, Uranus-sky is ashamed of her monstrous children (titans, cyclops and hecatoncheires) and keeps them in mother earth.

Every divine being is presented as heavenly. This is why the gods of Sumer radiated strong light, and why later cultures adopted the concept of light as an expression of supreme greatness. The royal tiara and throne, according to the Sumerians, were lowered from the sky. In Chinese mythology, the sky (tian) appears as the embodiment of a certain higher principle that controls everything that happens on earth, the emperor himself rules according to the "mandate of Heaven".

Heaven acts as an image of paradise, imperishable, unchanging, true, surpassing all conceivable oppositions of the absolute. The multi-level sky (an image common in all mythological traditions) acts as a reflection of ideas about the hierarchy of divine (sacred) forces. The number of celestial spheres usually varies in accordance with the numerical symbolism of a particular tradition) attracting the eye of the producing consciousness, - raise the work to a height above the world, where everyday life intersects - and philosophical descriptions, where ideological blocks are melted: suffering and the cosmos are one, but also far from each other . A moment of extermination on a small point of the earth is nothing in comparison with the eternity of the world: "We are silent. We look at the stars, at the sea." ; "I went out under the sky, looked at the stars ...". Castel is golden thicker than gray stone more … Sky- in a new autumn brilliance ... At night - black from stars… In the morning, eaglets begin to play in the sky. AND sea became much darker. More often dolphin splashes flash on it, jagged wheels…" ?

At the points of the other two corners - the image of the sea and stone.

Sea- Means the original waters, chaos, formlessness, material existence, endless movement. This is the source of all life, containing all potentialities, the sum of all possibilities in a manifested form, the incomprehensible Great Mother. It also symbolizes the sea of life to be crossed. The two seas, fresh and salty (bitter), are Heaven and Earth, Upper and Lower Waters, which were originally one; the salty sea is exoteric knowledge, the fresh sea is esoteric. In the Sumero-Semitic tradition, the Akkadian primordial waters were associated with wisdom. All life arose from fresh water - Apsu, and from salt water - Tiamat, symbolizing the power of the waters, the female principle and the blind forces of chaos. The Taoists identify the sea with Tao, primordial and inexhaustible, inspiring all creation without being exhausted (Zhuanzi). In Russian fairy tales, living (fresh sea) and dead (salty sea) water was used.

Having turned into an image-motive in Russian literature, I.S. The Shmeleva Sea acquires special features. The image-motive of the Russian sea is always a participant in human destiny, often stands above a person. In the epic, this feature is brought to the highest degree. Having swallowed human labor, the sea freezes in inactivity: "The Dead Sea is here: the merry ships do not like it. Eaten, drunk, knocked out - everything. Dried out." A different sea (the sea ate, the sea is dead) - there is one sea, and therefore even more active. E.A. Osminina in the article "Song of the Song of Death" expresses the idea of creating I.S. Shmelev of the myth about the Kingdom of the Dead. Ancient Cimmeria (now the Crimean land near the Kerch Strait) has risen from the ashes and requires new victims. Victims are brought into pits, ditches, ravines, the sea. "I'm looking at the sea.

And now the sun will peep out for a moment and splash out with a pale tin. Truly - the sun of the dead! ". Window to the realm of death - the Crimean Sea:" It was not invented: there is Hell! Here it is and its deceptive circle ... - the sea, the mountains ... - the screen is wonderful.

Stones, rocks are an integral part of the coastal Crimean landscape. Their role in a work of art can be limited to a decorative function, since the stage on which the action unfolds is a mountainous part of the Alushta region: “Every morning I notice how spots creep higher, and there is more gray stone ... Strong, fragrant bitterness sips from the mountains, mountain autumn wine - wormwood stone ". Mentions in the epic about the gray stone are numerous. The "gray frame of the stone" of all events in the work plays the role of the main background that sets the emotive tone. Stone - I is a symbol of higher, absolute being, symbolizes stability, constancy, strength. Stones have long been used in magic and healing, it was believed that they bring good luck. The stone is one of the symbols of mother earth. In Greek myth, Deucalion and Pyrrha throw stones over their heads - "the bones of the mother" (earth). The opinion is also associated with stones that they accumulate earthly energy; for this reason, the stones were endowed with magical powers and used in various rituals, they also served as talismans. At the archaic stages of the cult, the sacredness of stones is associated with the idea that the souls of ancestors are embodied in them. So, for example, the Bible mentions those who say to the stone: "You gave birth to me." In India and Indonesia, stones are considered as the seat of the spirits of the dead. A similar idea reflects the custom, common in various cultures, to place stones carved in the form of a column near the tombs. Thus, we can talk about the emergence of the idea that eternity, which is not achievable in life, is achieved in death through the incarnation of the soul in stone. In the Middle Ages in Russia, one of the most worthy deeds was to rebuild a wooden church into a stone church (in this case, additional connotations also arise: a stone is opposed to a tree, fragile and unproductive, and acts as an image of wealth, power and power).

The stone lives in the epic with a varied life. The metaphor (reification) reaches its highest strength in the words of the hero-narrator about the immensity of the depersonalization of a person in front of the vastness of the new power: "... I ... Who is this - I ?! A stone lying under the sun. With eyes. With ears - a stone. Wait to be kicked foot. There is nowhere to go from here ... ". Stone-darkness, desert-darkness, winter-darkness, absorbing into their images all the chilling horror felt by the transmitting consciousness, hang over the space of the epic, relentlessly follow the acting figures of the work. Stone at I.S. Shmelev is mythologized. By changing his face, he turns from a messenger of death into a savior. "Blessed stone! ... Even though six lives were recaptured! ... Stones will cover the brave." The theme of God, complexly carried out by I.S. Shmelev through the faces of Mohammed, Buddha, Christ, in one of the middle chapters touches the "dead" stone so far. With the name of Buddha in the mouth of the doctor, he comes to life: "A wise stone - and I will go into it! I pray to the mountains, their purity and Buddha in them!" .

The eye is a special image of the epic. Eye, eye of God: a symbol of vision, physical or spiritual vision, as well as observation, in combination with Light - insight. The eye personifies all the solar gods, who have the fertilizing power of the sun, which is embodied in the god-king. Plato called the eye the main solar instrument. On the one hand, it is a mystical eye, light, illumination, knowledge, mind, vigilance, protection, stability and purposefulness, but on the other hand, the limitation of the visible. In ancient Greece, the eye symbolizes Apollo, the observer of the heavens, the Sun, which is also the eye of Zeus (Jupiter). Plato believed that the soul has an eye, and the Truth is visible to it alone.

The author sees an eye for every object (animate, inanimate) included in the displayed system, and the life of these eyes is the life of the image as a whole. The eyes of the slain people are eyes that change in grimaces of torment. The system of epithets and comparisons makes every mention of the human look tragically peculiar: "He pleaded with words, with eyes that were difficult to look into the eyes ..."; "She tortures me with her eyes rounded with anxiety"; "...eyes melting with tears!" ; "... with fading eyes he will look at the garden ..."; "... looks with strained, bloody eyes. He tortures them"; "... his eyes filled with glassy fear...";

Sits yellow, with sunken eyes - a mountain bird ". A generalizing meaning is given to the phrase - the result in the "dead part" of the book, composed of enumerations of deaths: "Thousands of hungry eyes, thousands of tenacious hands stretch through the mountains for a pood of bread ..."?

The eyes of those "who go to kill" are determined by epithets from antithetical-positive, which creates the effect of increasing hostility towards the depicted image ("clear-eyed executioners" [ 2; dreamy, to the point of spirituality! Something like that - not of this world! "[ 2; p.122], to directly negative ones, revealing the author's position of rejection of the new government: "... dull-eyed, high-cheeked thick necks ..."; "... looked around his living eyes - strangers…"; "Mikhelson, by last name…eyes are green, angry, like those of a snake…"; "…eyes are heavy, like lead, in a blood-oil film, well-fed…"[2; p.48]; "...eyes are sharp , with a gimlet, tacky hands ... ".

The animal and plant worlds, dying next to man, are also watching. The power of this mute look is majestic, which is achieved by the author's utmost attention to the nature of color, form, the nature of the phenomenon: the Cow looks with "glass eyes, blue from the sky and the windy sea". "Your eyes are like a tin film, and the sun is tin in them..." - about a chicken[2; p.42].

Blood, according to E.A. Osminin, as a word, in the poem "is devoid of its physiological, naturalistic connotation". However, the range of meanings of this lexeme is so wide that the aspects excluded by the researcher are also strong in it. The image that fills the entire space of the vicious circle of the frame-scheme, as it were, "floods" the whole of Russia, which is this circle. The topographical point - the holiday village - grows in this scheme to the size of the entire doomed country: "I strain my imagination, I look around the whole of Russia ... ... Blood is gushing everywhere ...". Blood - Universal symbol; endowed with a cult status. Blood among many peoples was understood as a receptacle of life force, an intangible principle (something similar to the soul, if the latter concept was not developed). In the Bible, the soul is identified with blood: "For the soul of every body is its blood, it is its soul" (Lev.17), which was the reason for the prohibition on eating blood and unblooded meat. Initially, blood is a symbol of life; this idea is associated with such rituals of archaic cultures as smearing with blood (or red paint symbolizing it) the foreheads of seriously ill patients, women in labor and newborn babies. Everything is cleansed by the blood, and without shed blood there is no forgiveness, the Bible says. Blood is closely associated with sacrifice, the purpose of which is to appease formidable forces and eliminate the threat of punishment. The payment in blood for the development of new spaces of being and the acquisition of new degrees of freedom acts as an attribute of the existence of people throughout their history. The superimage of blood in the epic goes back to the apocalyptic symbol of the end of the world. Just as in the Apocalypse the earth is saturated with the blood of the prophets and saints and all those killed, so in the epic Russia is drenched in people's blood: "Wherever you look, you can't get away from the blood ... Isn't it getting out of the earth, playing in the vineyards? Soon it will paint over everything in the dying on the hills forests".

Death, contrary to the semantics of the title, does not become the epic's superimage. The image of death is dissolved in every semantic segment of the work, but the word "death" is mentioned extremely rarely. In the scene of the last meeting of the hero-narrator with the writer Shishkin, the premonition of death is conveyed by the narrator in a way "from the opposite": the strengthening of the subjective sensation is achieved by an external rejection of this sensation: "And I do not feel that death looks into his joyful eyes, wants to play again" . The personification, with its inherent simplicity, in the best way at the end of the work turns death from a passive image, from a phenomenon generated by other objects, into an aggressive image and a self-acting phenomenon: "Death stands at the door and will stand, stubbornly, until it takes everyone away." Death - It acts as an image of a change in the current state of being, transformation of forms and processes, as well as liberation from something. Death in the symbolic tradition is associated with the moon, dying and reborn; with night, sleep (in Greek mythology, Thanatos appears as the child of Nikta, night, and the brother of Hypnos, sleep); with the element of earth, which accepts everything that exists; with the property of invisibility (Hades - formless); with white, black and green colors. In various mythologies, death is described as the result of the fall of the first ancestors, as a punishment for humanity. Widely known

the allegory of death depicts it in the form of an old woman or a skeleton with a scythe, but it is the latter that sets the possibility of getting out of the one-sided understanding of death as the end of life: the cut grass grows again even more magnificent, the cut ear will be born with many new ones. Death is involved in the process of constant rebirth of nature: burial is sowing, the underworld is the womb of the earth, the god of the underworld is the guardian and ruler of the wealth of the earth (such is Hades, who gives Persephone a pomegranate - a symbol of prosperity and fertility), In European languages, the name of the deity of the underworld is denoted by the word indicating wealth; the deity of the dead was traditionally represented as the owner of countless treasures. Death can be regarded as an accomplishment, a fulfillment of fate: only one who has completed his earthly journey is considered to have escaped his destiny (in the ancient Egyptian "Harper's Song" the deceased is designated as a person "in his place"). Unlike the gods, man is mortal, and it is the finiteness of his existence that gives the specificity of his life as a complete whole.

The image of death was actively used in the mystical tradition, in Sufism the concept of death acts as a symbol of the rejection of personal individuality and comprehension of the absolute. Death, the shedding of the outer Self, only means the actual birth, the acquisition by the spirit of true being: "Choose death and tear the veil. But not such a death as to descend into the grave, but a death leading to spiritual renewal in order to enter the Light" (J. Rumi). Death as a way out of this world is not given to man as an object of knowledge: "Look behind the lowered curtain of darkness. Our powerless minds are incapable. At the moment when the veil falls from the eyes, we turn into incorporeal dust, we turn into nothing" (Khayyam). Death is a threshold situation, located on the borders of individual existence; She's out of class. It acts as a phenomenon that is forcibly and dangerously restrained, since it can break out at any moment, and therefore, in various traditions, contact with death was perceived as a defilement. Man has an inherent attraction to destruction and self-destruction (manifested mainly, although not exclusively, in the form of war), he is tempted by the subtle charm of death. Her presence sharpens the perception of life: so the ancient Egyptians erected a skeleton in the banquet halls, which was supposed to remind of the inevitability of death and stimulate the enjoyment of the joys of this world. There are many ways to convey the concept of "death" in the epic: from enlightened-ordinary expressions containing an elementary comparison ("Quietly died. This is how an obsolete leaf falls"), to allegorical ones.

The revival of Russia is possible only "on a religious basis, on a highly moral basis - the Gospel teaching of active love," writes I.S. Shmelev in the article "The Ways of the Dead and the Living" (1925). The Russian Orthodox cross is a special symbolic image-motif in the epic. The image of the Cross, which arose in the imagination of the hero from the tangles of branches of a bushy hornbeam, is a special unit in the epic. "... the Cross will hum - howl - the very nature of life - in the empty Blue Beam". The personification, which combines in one image mute nature (tree), animated nature (hoot-howl), Christian faith (the shape of a cross), leaves a number of Orthodox attributes that fill the epic, and becomes a symbol. The detail, the bottle on this cross, carries a different symbolic meaning: the bottle is a sign of desecration by the new power of faith, shrines, and spirit. The cross in various cultures symbolizes the highest sacred values: life, fertility, immortality. The cross can be considered as a cosmic symbol: its crossbar symbolizes the horizon, the vertical stand - the axis of the world; the ends of the cross represent the four cardinal directions. The cross is a common image in the Western tradition, equally due to both the influence of Christianity and the original meaning of the symbol. It plays an important role in religious and magical rituals; widely used in emblematics; many insignia (orders, medals) are in the form of a cross. The cross can act as a personal sign, a signature; as an amulet, a talisman; as an image of death and a sign of cancellation, deletion.

As well as everything that is event-realistically described by Shmelev, always has the character of a symbol. Unusual in the narrative is that animals and birds are described in more detail than people in a situation of fighting starvation. ( bird - a widespread symbol of the spirit and soul in the ancient world, which retained this meaning in Christian symbolism. The bird is often depicted in the hands of the Infant Jesus or tied to a rope. Most often, this is a goldfinch associated with Christ by the legend that he acquired his red spot at the moment when he flew to Christ rising to Golgotha and sat on his head. When the goldfinch removed the thorn thorn from Christ's eyebrow, a drop of the Savior's blood splashed on him. Birds created on the fifth day of the creation of the world are patronized by Francis of Assisi (circa 1182-1226). The bird is a symbol of air and an attribute of Juno when it personifies air, as well as an attribute of one of the five senses - touch. In the allegorical images of Spring, the captured and tamed birds sit in a cage. In many religious traditions, birds are the link between heaven and earth. The image of the head of a deity or a person against the background of a bird has ancient traditions: the Egyptian god Thoth appeared in the form of an ibis, and kneeling believers were depicted with a feather on their heads, which testified to the transmission of instructions from above. The Roman Cupid (Cupid) was also winged. So, a peacock with his “desert cry” became a really colorful animalistic character. The so often mentioned chickens are also significant in the plot. It is they who, no matter how he protects, guards and almost cherishes their owner, are potential victims of real vultures. The old pear, “hollow and crooked, blooms and dries for years, protects the hens from birds of prey. everything is waiting for change. There is no change coming. And she, stubborn, waits and waits, pours, blooms and dries. Hawks lurk on it. Crows like to swing in a storm” [С.14]. It scares off Lyalya with a wild cry of predators. “How many people trembled over them, covered them up when they went to take away the "surpluses" ... They covered them. And now they are afraid of hawks, winged vultures” [С.37]. The same unfortunate chickens are the longed-for “retreat” of two-legged “vultures”: “Behind the hill below live “uncles” who love to eat ... And they love to eat chickens! No matter how they come for you, to take away the “surplus”… And the hawk is already guarded along the beams” [S.36. ] Further, in the context, everyday reality and its allegorical equivalent merge in a symbolic picture: “Now I know well how chickens tremble, how they hide under the wild rose, under the walls, squeeze into cypress trees - they stand trembling, stretching and retracting their necks, shuddering with frightened pupils. I know well how people are afraid of people - are they people? - how they poke their heads into the cracks (who: chicken people?). The hawks will be forgiven: this is their daily bread. We eat the leaf and tremble before the hawks! The winged vultures are frightened by the voice of Lyalya, and those that go to kill are not frightened by the eyes of a child "[S.38]. Thus, the peacock, chickens from the realm of everyday life move into the sphere of allegorical depiction. Through the animalistic theme, a symbol expressive in its associative richness is implied , revealing the very essence of Shmelev's ideas about the time of total fear in which his characters live.

The listed images-motives can be classified as individual (according to the system of I.B. Rodnyanskaya). "Individual images are created by the original, sometimes bizarre imagination of the artist and express the measure of his originality, originality" .

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Shmelev "The Sun of the Dead" - analysis by A. Solzhenitsyn

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Introduction

The relevance of the study lies in establishing the form of expression of the author's consciousness in the post-revolutionary prose of I.S. Shmelev's epic "The Sun of the Dead".

The object of the study is the epic novel "The Sun of the Dead".

The subject of the research is symbolic motifs and images in the book by I.S. Shmelev "Sun of the Dead".

The purpose of the work is to reveal the symbolism of motives and images in the book by I.S. Shmelev "The Sun of the Dead" and their analysis.

Chapter I. Spiritual realism of Ivan Shmelev

1.1 Religious and moral foundations of the writer's artistic world

The history of Russian literature as a scientific discipline, which coincides in its main value coordinates with the axiology of the object of its description, is just beginning to be created. Monograph A.M. Lyubomudrov is a serious step in this direction.

A.M. Lyubomudrov proposes to allocate more “ spiritual realism". Starts with a definition: “ spiritual realism - artistic perception and display

1.2 The history of the creation of the epic "The Sun of the Dead"

"The Apocalypse of Our Time" Such a comparison speaks of the understanding by Europeans of how terrible the reality depicted by the author is.

Chapter II. Symbolic images and motifs in I. Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"

2.1 Poetics of Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"

A novel - a panorama has no plot. The absence of plot breaks led to the work of only one spring of action - the internal psychological experiences of the hero-narrator. They also tie individual chapters together. The hero-narrator in the epic is an unnamed writer.

The main layers of the temporal aspect of the artistic world of the epic are in the events of the historical process, in the temporal life of each character, in the correlation of temporal events with eternity, in the events of church holidays (Transfiguration, Christmas) mentioned in the work.

2.2 Symbolic images and motifs

The sun-symbol unites all super-images of the epic into one scheme-frame. "Animated" by the author, it "revives" all the other symbolic peaks of the epic: "- I will live in the rocks. The sun, and the stars, and the sea ...".

At the points of the other two corners - the image of the sea and stone.

And now the sun will peep out for a moment and splash out with a pale tin. Truly - the sun of the dead! ". Window to the realm of death - the Crimean Sea:" It was not invented: there is Hell! Here it is and its deceptive circle ... - the sea, the mountains ... - the screen is wonderful.

Sits yellow, with sunken eyes - a mountain bird ". A generalizing meaning is given to the phrase - the result in the "dead part" of the book, composed of enumerations of deaths: "Thousands of hungry eyes, thousands of tenacious hands stretch through the mountains for a pood of bread ..."?

The listed images-motives can be classified as individual (according to the system of I.B. Rodnyanskaya). "Individual images are created by the original, sometimes bizarre imagination of the artist and express the measure of his originality, originality" .

Similar Documents

Women's Portal Flero

Send your good work in the knowledge base is simple. Use the form below

Introduction

The relevance of the study lies in establishing the form of expression of the author's consciousness in the post-revolutionary prose of I.S. Shmelev's epic "The Sun of the Dead".

The object of the study is the epic novel "The Sun of the Dead".

The subject of the research is symbolic motifs and images in the book by I.S. Shmelev "Sun of the Dead".

The purpose of the work is to reveal the symbolism of motives and images in the book by I.S. Shmelev "The Sun of the Dead" and their analysis.

Chapter I. Spiritual realism of Ivan Shmelev

1.1 Religious and moral foundations of the writer's artistic world

The history of Russian literature as a scientific discipline, which coincides in its main value coordinates with the axiology of the object of its description, is just beginning to be created. Monograph A.M. Lyubomudrov is a serious step in this direction.

A.M. Lyubomudrov proposes to allocate more “ spiritual realism". Starts with a definition: “ spiritual realism - artistic perception and display

1.2 The history of the creation of the epic "The Sun of the Dead"

"The Apocalypse of Our Time" Such a comparison speaks of the understanding by Europeans of how terrible the reality depicted by the author is.

Chapter II. Symbolic images and motifs in I. Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"

2.1 Poetics of Shmelev's book "The Sun of the Dead"

A novel - a panorama has no plot. The absence of plot breaks led to the work of only one spring of action - the internal psychological experiences of the hero-narrator. They also tie individual chapters together. The hero-narrator in the epic is an unnamed writer.

The main layers of the temporal aspect of the artistic world of the epic are in the events of the historical process, in the temporal life of each character, in the correlation of temporal events with eternity, in the events of church holidays (Transfiguration, Christmas) mentioned in the work.

2.2 Symbolic images and motifs

The sun-symbol unites all super-images of the epic into one scheme-frame. "Animated" by the author, it "revives" all the other symbolic peaks of the epic: "- I will live in the rocks. The sun, and the stars, and the sea ...".

At the points of the other two corners - the image of the sea and stone.

And now the sun will peep out for a moment and splash out with a pale tin. Truly - the sun of the dead! ". Window to the realm of death - the Crimean Sea:" It was not invented: there is Hell! Here it is and its deceptive circle ... - the sea, the mountains ... - the screen is wonderful.

Sits yellow, with sunken eyes - a mountain bird ". A generalizing meaning is given to the phrase - the result in the "dead part" of the book, composed of enumerations of deaths: "Thousands of hungry eyes, thousands of tenacious hands stretch through the mountains for a pood of bread ..."?

The listed images-motives can be classified as individual (according to the system of I.B. Rodnyanskaya). "Individual images are created by the original, sometimes bizarre imagination of the artist and express the measure of his originality, originality" .

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