We must first distinguish the event that is told in the work, and the event of the story itself. This distinction, for the first time in Russian literary criticism, was proposed, apparently, by M.M. Bakhtin, has now become generally accepted. Someone told us (readers) about everything that happened to the heroes. Who exactly? Approximately such was the way of thinking that literary criticism followed in the study of the problem of the author. One of the first special works devoted to this problem was the study of the German scientist Wolfgang Kaiser: his work entitled "Who tells the novel?" came out at the beginning of the 20th century. And in modern literary criticism (not only in Russia), it is customary to designate different types of narration in German.

There are third-person narration (Erform, or, which is the same, Er-Erzhlung) and 1st-person narration (Icherzhlung). The one who narrates in the 3rd person, does not name himself (not personified), we will agree to designate the term narrator. The person who tells the story in the first person is called the narrator. (This use of terms has not yet become universal, but, perhaps, it is found among most researchers.) Let's consider these types in more detail.

Erform ("erform"), or "objective" narration, includes three varieties - depending on how tangible the "presence" of the author or characters is in them.

The original storytelling

Consider the beginning of M. Bulgakov's novel The White Guard.

“Great was the year and terrible year after the birth of Christ 1918, from the beginning of the second revolution. It was abundant in summer with the sun, and in winter with snow, and two stars stood especially high in the sky: the shepherd's star - evening Venus and red, trembling Mars.

We immediately understand both the accuracy and some conventionality of the definition of "objective" narrative. On the one hand, the narrator does not call himself (“I”), he is, as it were, dissolved in the text and as a person is not manifested (not personified). This property of epic works is the objectivity of what is depicted, when, according to Aristotle, "the work, as it were, sings itself." On the other hand, already in the very structure of phrases, inversion emphasizes, intonationally emphasizes evaluative words: “great”, “terrible”. In the context of the entire novel, it becomes clear that the mention of the Nativity of Christ, and the "shepherd" Venus (the star that led the shepherds to the birthplace of Christ), and the sky (with all the possible associations that this motif entails, for example, with the "War and the world" by L. Tolstoy) - all this is connected with the author's assessment of the events depicted in the novel, with the author's concept of the world. And we understand the conditionality of the definition of “objective” narrative: it was unconditional for Aristotle, but even for Hegel and Belinsky, although they built the system of literary genera no longer in antiquity, like Aristotle, but in the 19th century, but relied on the material of precisely ancient art . Meanwhile, the experience of the novel (namely, the novel is understood as the epic of modern and recent times) suggests that the author's subjectivity, the personal principle manifest themselves in epic works.

So, in the speech of the narrator, we clearly hear the author's voice, the author's assessment of the depicted. Why are we not entitled to identify the narrator with the author? This would be incorrect. The fact is that the narrator is the most important (in epic works), but not the only form of the author's consciousness. The author manifests himself not only in the narration, but also in many other aspects of the work: in the plot and composition, in the organization of time and space, in many other ways, up to the choice of means of small imagery ... Although, first of all, of course, in the narration itself. The narrator owns all those segments of the text that cannot be attributed to any of the characters.

But it is important to distinguish between the subject of speech (the speaker) and the subject of consciousness (the one whose consciousness is being expressed). It's not always the same. We can see in the narrative a kind of "diffusion" of the voices of the author and the characters.

Inventor, storyteller, storyteller, storyteller, storyteller, narrator, reteller, anecdote, storyteller, fabulist Dictionary of Russian synonyms. narrator narrator (outdated) Dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language. Practical guide. M.:… … Synonym dictionary

- [ask], narrator, husband. A person who says something. The narrator is silent. || A person who knows how to speak expressively. Gorbunov was a natural storyteller. || The person, the character of the work, on whose behalf it is conducted ... ... Explanatory Dictionary of Ushakov

NARRATOR, a, husband. The one who tells what. Good r. (a person who knows how to talk interestingly). The image of the narrator (in a tale in 2 meanings, in an artistic narration from whose n. person: the image of the one on whose behalf the story is being told). | wives… … Explanatory dictionary of Ozhegov

the narrator- the narrator. Pronounced [narrator] ... Dictionary of pronunciation and stress difficulties in modern Russian

the narrator- I. NARRATOR NARRATOR, narrator, narrator, colloquial interpreter II. story … Dictionary-thesaurus of synonyms of Russian speech

M. 1. The one who tells something. ott. Someone who can speak well. 2. The writer who owns the skill of the story. 3. An artist performing with oral stories. Explanatory Dictionary of Efremova. T. F. Efremova. 2000... Modern explanatory dictionary of the Russian language Efremova

Narrator, narrators, narrator, narrators, narrator, narrators, narrator, narrators, narrator, narrators, narrator, narrators (Source: "Full accentuated paradigm according to A. A. Zaliznyak") ... Forms of words

the narrator- See the image of the narrator... Dictionary of literary terms

the narrator- narrator, and ... Russian spelling dictionary

the narrator- see the image of the narrator ... Terminological dictionary-thesaurus on literary criticism

Books

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• Mobile narrator for smartphones DVD-box, . Studies have shown that the ability to use text-to-speech systems on mobile devices is an important factor that not only saves time, but also…

Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation

Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education

"Orenburg State Pedagogical University"

Faculty of Philology

Department of Literary Studies and Methods of Teaching Literature

COURSE WORK

BY DISCIPLINE

Title of training: 050100.62 Teacher education

Preparation profile: Russian language and literature

Form of study: part-time

Completed by a student

Botvinovskaya Yulia Vladimirovna

Course 2 group 201

Scientific adviser: Doctor of Philological Sciences, ProfessorSkibina Olga Mikhailovna

__________________ ______________

(mark) (signature)

"____" ______________ 201__

Orenburg, 2014

Table of contents

Introduction ………………………………………………………………………….3

Chapter I . Author - narrator - hero as a theoretical problem ……….6

1. Poetics of A.P. Chekhov ………………………………………..14

Chapter II ………………………………………………………………………23

1. A.P. Chekhov. Analysis of the "Little Trilogy" …………………………………………….23

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………..40

Bibliography …………………………………………………………………42

Conclusion ……………………………………………………………………..45

Bibliography ……………………………………

Introduction

The artistic talent of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov was formed in the era of deaf timelessness of the 80s, when a painful turning point was made in the worldview of the Russian intelligentsia. The ideas of revolutionary populism and the liberal theories opposing them, which until recently reigned supreme in the minds of the seventies, lost their living soul, froze, turned into schemes and dogmas, devoid of inspiring inner content. After the "March 1st catastrophe" in 1881 - the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya - a government reaction began in the country, accompanied by a crisis of both populist and liberal ideology. Chekhov did not have a chance to participate in any serious social movement. Another thing fell to his lot - to be a witness of a bitter hangover at a life feast that was noisy back in the 70s. “It seems that everyone was in love, fell out of love and are now looking for new hobbies” , - with sad irony, Chekhov determined the essence of the social life of his time.

All of Chekhov's work is a call for spiritual liberation and emancipation of man. The principled friends of the writer unanimously noted inner freedom as the main sign of his character. M. Gorky said to Chekhov: "You seem to be the first free and non-worshipping person I have ever seen." But a minor novelist, an acquaintance of Chekhov, wrote to him: “Among us, you are the only free and free person, and in soul, mind, and body, a free Cossack. We are all shackled in the routine, we will not break out of the yoke.

Unlike his predecessor writers, Chekhov is moving away from artistic preaching. The position of a person who knows the truth, or at least claims to know it, is alien to him. The author's voice in his works is hidden and almost imperceptible. “You can cry and moan over stories, you can suffer along with your heroes, but I think you need to do this in such a way that the reader does not notice. The more objective, the stronger the impression - Chekhov said about his writing style. “When I write,” he remarked, “I fully rely on the reader, believing that he himself will add the subjective elements missing in the story.” But one of the critics of the early twentieth century rightly wrote that Chekhov's reticence affects the reader more than grand words: "And when he was bashfully silent about something, he was silent so deeply, meaningfully, that he seemed to speak expressively."

Chekhov felt the exhaustion of those forms of life that old Russia was wearing out by the end of the 19th century, and was, like no one else, inwardly free from them. The more intently he peered into the life frozen in complacency and indifferent stupefaction, the sharper and more penetratingly, with the intuition of a brilliant artist, he felt the underground tremors of some other, new life, breaking through dead forms towards the light, with which Chekhov concluded a “spiritual union” . What it would be specifically, the writer did not know, but believed that it should be based on such a “general idea” that would not truncate the living fullness of being, but would embrace it like a vault of heaven: “A person needs not three arshins of earth, not a manor, but the whole globe, all nature, where in the open space he could show all the properties and characteristics of his free spirit.

Already in the early humorous stories, Chekhov considered various types of "false ideas" - stereotypes of life programs, standards by which all human behavior is built. But later the writer will find an exact and capacious formula for this phenomenon - a “case”.

Relevance course work is determined by the special role of Chekhov's little trilogy as one of the final works of Russian prose of the XIX century.

Object of study Chekhov's three stories are: "The Man in the Case", "Gooseberries", "On Love", which were published in the July and August issues of the journal "Russian Thought" for 1898, and subsequently included with some changes in the 12th volume of the second edition of the collected works of the writer, published in 1903. Primary attention is paid to the nature of the distance between the author and the narrators of the small trilogy.

Subject of study , in addition to the smallest trilogy and its cultural and historical background, is the literary material that prepares its appearance: prose cycles of the first third and second half of the 19th century, as well as "cyclo-rapid" trends in Chekhov's work (internal cycles and triadic structural formations within the framework of Chekhov's collections).

The purpose of the course work - to analyze a small trilogy against the backdrop of the literary tradition of the 19th century. and in the context of socio-political events contemporary to Chekhov, to link together the poetics and the meaning of a small trilogy, through the analysis of poetics to come to the restoration of the semantic features of the work lost by readers and researchers.

Chapter I . Author - narrator - hero as a theoretical problem.

The problem of the author has become, according to many modern researchers, the central one in literary criticism of the second half of the 20th century. This is also connected with the development of literature itself, which (especially starting from the era of romanticism) increasingly emphasizes the personal, individual nature of creativity, the most diverse forms of the author's "behavior" in the work appear. This is also connected with the development of literary science, which seeks to consider a literary work both as a special world, the result of the creative activity of the creator who created it, and as a kind of statement, a dialogue between the author and the reader. Depending on what the scientist’s attention is focused to a greater extent, they talk aboutthe image of the author in a literary workauthor's voice in relation tocharacter voices . The terminology associated with the entire range of problems that arise around the author has not yet become streamlined and generally accepted. Therefore, first of all, it is necessary to define the basic concepts, and then see how in practice, i.e. in a specific analysis (in each specific case) these terms "work".

M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin: "Each work of fiction, no worse than any scientific treatise, betrays its author with all his inner world."

F.M. Dostoevsky: “In mirror reflection, one cannot see how the mirror looks at the object, or, to put it better, it is clear that it does not look at all, but reflects passively, mechanically. A true artist cannot do this: in a picture, in a story, or in a piece of music, there will certainly be otsam; he will be reflected involuntarily, even against his will, will speak out with all his views, with his character, with the degree of his development.

The most detailed reflection on the author was left by L.N. Tolstoy. In the Preface to the Works of Guy de Maupassant, he argues as follows: “People who are little sensitive to art often think that a work of art is one whole because the same persons act in it, because everything is built on the same plot. or describes the life of one person. It's not fair. It only seems so to a superficial observer: the cement that binds every work of art into a single whole and therefore produces the illusion of a reflection of life is not a unity of persons and positions, but the unity of the author’s original moral attitude to the subject. ... In essence, when we read or contemplate a work of art by a new author, the main question that arises in our soul is always this: “Well, what kind of person are you? And how do you differ from all the people I know, and what can you tell me new about how we should look at our life? Whatever the artist depicts: saints, robbers, kings, lackeys - we are looking for and see only the soul of the artist himself. .

Here it is necessary to pay attention to two provisions that are especially important for us now. First: the unity and integrity of a literary work are directly related to the figure (image) of the author, moreover: he, the author, is the main guarantee of this unity (even, as we see, according to Tolstoy, to a greater extent than the heroes of the work and then what happens to them, i.e. the events that make up the plot of the work). And the second. We have the right to ask ourselves the question: but to what extent is it legitimate to talk about the author as a person (“well, what kind of person are you? ..”)? Looking ahead, let's say: probably to the same extent as we sometimes talk about the human properties of the hero - which, of course, is assumed (since we are dealing with a literary work as a special kind of reality), and at the same time we perfectly “remember” that this reality is of a special kind and that a person in life is not at all the same as an artistic image, even if it is the same person. It is in this sense that we can only imagine the author as a person, and more precisely, we are dealing here with the image of the author, the image created by the whole work as a whole and arising in the mind of the reader as a result of a "response" creative act - reading.

There are several meanings for the term "author".

The word "author" is used in literary criticism in several meanings. First of all, it means a writer - a real person. In other cases, it denotes a certain concept, a certain view of reality, the expression of which is the whole work. Finally, this word is used to refer to certain phenomena characteristic of certain genres and genera. .

Noted by B.O. Korman's triple use of the term can be supplemented and commented on. Most scholars separate the author in the first sense (it is also customary to call him a "real" or "biographical" author) and an author in the second sense. This, using a different terminology, is the author as an aesthetic category, or the image of the author. Sometimes they speak here about the "voice" of the author, considering such a definition more legitimate and definite than the "image of the author". Let's accept all theseterms as synonyms, in order to definitely and confidently separate a real, biographical author from thatartistic reality which is revealed to us in the work. As for the term “author” in the third meaning, the scientist here means that sometimes the narrator, narrator (in epic works) or lyrical hero (in lyrics) is called the author: this should be recognized as incorrect, and sometimes completely wrong.

To be convinced of this, you need to think about how the work is organized from the point of view of the narrative. Keeping in mind that the author's "presence" is not concentrated in one point of the work (the hero closest to the author, who serves as a "mouthpiece" of his ideas, a kind of alterego of the author; direct author's assessments of the depicted, etc.), but manifests itself in all levels of artistic structure (from the plot to the smallest "cells" - tropes), - keeping this in mind, let's see how the author's principle (author) manifests itself in the subjective organization of the work, i.e. in how it's structured in terms of storytelling. (It is clear that in this way we will be talking primarily about epic works. The forms of manifestation of the author in lyrics and drama will be discussed later.)

We must first distinguishthe event that is told in the work, and the event of the story itself . This distinction, for the first time in Russian literary criticism, was proposed, apparently, by M.M. Bakhtin, has now become generally accepted. Someone told us (readers) about everything that happened to the heroes. Who exactly? Approximately such was the way of thinking that literary criticism followed in the study of the problem of the author. One of the first special works devoted to this problem was the study of the German scientist Wolfgang Kaiser: his work entitled "Who tells the novel?" came out at the beginning of the 20th century. And in modern literary criticism (not only in Russia), it is customary to designate different types of narration in German.

Allocate third-person narration (Erform, or, what is the same,Er- Erzä hlung) and 1st person narration (Icherzä hlung). The one who narrates in the 3rd person, does not name himself (not personified), we will agree to designate the term narrator. The person who tells the story in the first person is called the narrator. (This use of terms has not yet become universal, but, perhaps, it is found among most researchers.) Let's consider these types in more detail.

1. Narrator . Probably, it was this form of narration that O. Mandelstam had in mind: it gave him, the poet writing prose, the most convenient and familiar, besides, of course, consistent with a specific artistic task, the opportunity to speak as openly and directly in the first person as possible. The most striking and well-known example of such a narrative is “Eugene Onegin”: the figure of the author-narrator organizes the entire novel, which is built as a conversation between the author and the reader, a story about how the novel is written (written), which, thanks to this, seems to be created before our eyes. at the reader. The author here also organizes relationships with the characters. Moreover, we understand the complexity of these relations with each of the characters largely due to the author’s peculiar speech “behavior”. The author's word is able to absorb the voices of the characters (in this case, the wordshero andcharacter used as synonyms). With each of them, the author enters into a relationship of dialogue, then polemics, then full sympathy and complicity. (Let's not forget that Onegin is the "good ... friend" of the author, they became friends at a certain time, they were going to go on a trip together" , i.e. The narrator takes some part in the plot. But we must also remember the conventions of such a game, for example: "Tatyana's letter is in front of me, / I cherish it sacredly." On the other hand, one should not identify the author as a literary image and with a real - biographical - author, no matter how tempting it may be (a hint of a southern exile and some other autobiographical features).

Bakhtin apparently spoke for the first time about this speech behavior of the author, about the dialogic relations between the author and the characters, in the articles "The Word in the Novel" and "From the Prehistory of the Novel Word". Here he showed that the image of a speaking person, his words are a characteristic feature of the novel as a genre, and that heteroglossia, "the artistic image of the language" , even the multitude of characters' languages ​​and the author's dialogical relations with them are actually the subject of depiction in the novel.

hero storyteller . This is the one who takes part in events and narrates about them; thus, apparently "absent" in the narrative, the author creates the illusion of the authenticity of everything that happens. It is no coincidence that the figure of the hero-narrator appears especially often in Russian prose since the second half of the 1930s.I10th century: this may also be explained by the increased attention of writers to the inner world of a person (the hero's confession, his story about himself). And at the same time, already at the end of the 1930s, when realistic prose was being formed, the hero - an eyewitness and participant in the events - was called upon to postulate the "plausibility" of the depicted. At the same time, in any case, the reader is close to the hero, sees him as if in close-up, without an intermediary in the person of the omniscient author. This is perhaps the most numerous group of works written in the mannerIcherzä hlung(if anyone would like to make such calculations). And this category includes works where the relationship between the author and the narrator can be very different: the proximity of the author and the narrator (as, for example, in Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter); complete “independence” of the narrator (one or more) from the author (as in “A Hero of Our Time”, where the author himself only owns the preface, which, strictly speaking, is not included in the text of the novel: it was not there at the first edition). It is possible to name in this series "The Captain's Daughter" by Pushkin, many other works. According to V.V. Vinogradova, "the narrator is the speech product of the writer, and the image of the narrator (who pretends to be the "author") is a form of literary "acting" of the writer" . It is no coincidence that the forms of narration in particular and the problem of the author in general are of interest not only to literary critics, but also to linguists, such as V.V. Vinogradov and many others.

A narrator who cannot be called a hero can also speak on behalf of the “I”: he does not take part in the events, but only tells about them.Storyteller who is not a hero , appears, however, as part of the artistic world: he, like the characters, is also the subject of the image. He, as a rule, is endowed with a name, a biography, and most importantly, his story characterizes not only the characters and events he tells about, but also himself. Such, for example, is Rudy Panko in Gogol's "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" - no less colorful figure than the characters involved in the action. And his very manner of narration can perfectly clarify the above statement about the event of narration: for the reader this is really an aesthetic experience, perhaps no less strong than the events themselves, which he speaks about and which occur to the characters. There is no doubt that for the author to create the image of Rudy Panka was a special artistic task. (From the above statement by Mandelstam it is clear that in general the choice of the form of narration is never accidental; another thing is that it is not always possible to get the author's interpretation of this or that case, but it is necessary to think about it every time.) Here is how Gogol's tale sounds:

“Yes, it happened and I forgot the most important thing: as you, gentlemen, go to me, then take the path straight along the high road to Dikanka. I deliberately put it on the first page so that they would get to our farm as soon as possible. About Dikanka, I think you have heard enough. And then to say that there the house is cleaner than some beekeeper's hut. And there is nothing to say about the garden: in your Petersburg, you will probably not find such a thing. Arriving in Dikanka, ask only the first boy you meet, grazing geese in a soiled shirt: “Where does the beekeeper Rudy Panko live?” - "And there!" - he will say, pointing his finger and, if you like, will lead you to the very farm. However, I ask you not to put your hands back too much and, as they say, to feint, because the roads through our farms are not as smooth as in front of your mansions.

The figure of the narrator makes it possible for a complex author's "game", and not only in a fairy tale narrative, for example, in M. Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarita", where the author plays with the "faces" of the narrator: he accentuates his omniscience, possession of complete knowledge about the characters and about everything that happened in Moscow (“Follow me, reader, and only behind me!”), then he puts on a mask of ignorance, bringing him closer to any of the passing characters (say, we didn’t see this, and what we didn’t see, that we don't know). As he wrote in the 1920s V.V. Vinogradov: “In a literary masquerade, a writer can freely, throughout one work of art, change stylistic masks” .

So, we can say that in a literary work, no matter how it is constructed from the point of view of the narration, we always find the author's "presence", but it is found to a greater or lesser extent and in different forms: in the narration from the 3rd person, the narrator is closest the author, in the tale the narrator is the most remote from him.

1. Poetics of A.P. Chekhov

Time, or rather timelessness,80sleft an imprint on the worldview of A.P. Chekhov.

The 1980s were an era of disappointment, an era of reassessment of values, an era of searching for new ways of developing Russia. Chekhov, on the other hand, did not look for any new ways, did not invent means of salvation. He simply loved this Russia, loved sincerely, with all its shortcomings and weaknesses, and painted life as it is, in its daily course.

Unlike his predecessors, the writer makes the hero of his works not some outstanding personality, but the most ordinary person. He is interested in the spiritual world of a person immersed in the flow of everyday life.

The main problem in the work of the mature Chekhov is to observe the process of awakening ordinary consciousness or the process of gradual moral degradation, the loss of true spiritual values ​​by a person. At the same time, it is not the thoughts of the hero that are important for the writer, but his emotions and experiences.

Chekhov does not give advice, does not teach anything and does not reveal the psychological state of his characters (which they themselves sometimes do not understand), but reproduces this state in such a way that the reader, imbued with the mood of the hero, puts himself in his place and feels with him. To create such a mood, the writer often uses the technique of improperly direct speech, which in his works replaced such a familiar internal monologue.

Chekhov does not invade the depths of the human subconscious, but indirectly reproduces the inner world of a person. This technique is called the method of hidden psychologism. Observing the daily inner life of a person, the writer comes to the conclusion that vague random mental movements, insignificant facts, gradually accumulating, can lead to a serious change in the human personality. His works depict what happened and always happens, what can happen to anyone, and a person is interesting to the writer precisely because of his ordinariness, his similarity to others.

The methods and principles of depicting the inner world of a person, which have developed in Chekhov's prose, are also developed by him in dramaturgy. He creates a "new drama", where the obligatory details of the classical drama are absent, but instead a special Chekhovian subtext or "undercurrent" appears. Its essence lies in the fact that a dynamic emotional life is hidden behind an outwardly frozen life. The action is not an external, understandable everyday conflict, but an internal, emotional, not always distinguishable. The main thing in Chekhov's drama is not the unity of the through action, but the unity of the emotional experiences and impressions of its characters.

Life, what surrounds a person in everyday life, everyday specifics that form his habits and character, the whole ordinary external way - this side of human life is discovered in literature by realism.

Enthusiastically, with pleasure, Pushkin described the patriarchal way of the Russian province; with slight irony, he discussed with the reader the daily routine, the furnishings of the office, the outfits and bottles on the dressing table of the "secular lion" Onegin ... This artistic discovery of Pushkin's realism was deeply comprehended by Gogol. In his work, everyday life appears animated, actively shaping a person and his destiny. The outside world becomes one of the main actors in Gogol's artistic method, a defining feature of his poetics. By the time Chekhov entered literature, Dostoevsky had brilliantly developed Gogol's tradition of actively influencing the outside world on man. Extremely detailed, to the smallest detail, recreated and studied in the work of Tolstoy, life made it possible for Chekhov to approach the problem of the relationship between the hero and the environment without prehistory, to immediately deal with the essence of these relationships. Life and being are inseparable in the artistic world of Chekhov. Life is a way of human life. Life is matter from which the hero cannot be separated at any moment of his existence.

Thus, the existence of Chekhov's heroes is initially materialistic: this materialism is predetermined not by convictions, but by real life itself.

And how did Chekhov see the real life of the end of the century? He tried to tell small, unpretentious stories - and a peculiar artistic principle was laid in his choice. He described private life - that was the artistic discovery. Under his pen, literature became a mirror of the moment, which matters only in the life and fate of one particular person. Chekhov avoids generalizations, seeing them as untrue and inaccurate; generalizations disgust his creative method. The life of each of the characters seems to the author himself a mystery that not only he, an outside observer, the narrator, but also the hero himself will have to unravel.

Chekhov's Russia consists of questions, of hundreds of solved and unsolved destinies. And only from all this multitude, from the totality of strokes, the outlines of the picture begin to appear.

Chekhov is indifferent to history. The plot with a pronounced intrigue does not interest him. "It is necessary to describe life even, smooth, as it really is" - such is the writer's credo. His plots are stories from the life of an ordinary person, into whose fate the writer peers intently.

The "great plot" of Chekhov's prose is a private moment of human life. "Why write this ... that someone got on a submarine and went to the North Pole to seek some kind of reconciliation with people, and at that time his beloved throws herself from the bell tower with a dramatic cry? All this is not true, in reality this does not happen. It is necessary it's easy to write: about how Pyotr Semenovich married Marya Ivanovna. That's all."

The short story genre allowed him to create a mosaic picture of the modern world. Chekhov's characters form a motley crowd, they are people of different destinies and different professions, they are occupied with various problems - from petty household concerns to serious philosophical questions. And the life of each hero is a special, separate feature of Russian life, but in sum, these features denote all the global problems of Russia at the end of the 19th century.

So, we come to one of the defining properties of Chekhov's poetics: one cannot judge the author's position, and even more so, the integral concept of the author's worldview by individual works. And although Chekhov never created the novel he dreamed of, and his stories practically do not add up to cycles, his entire creative heritage appears before us as an organic whole. And in this integrity is the key to understanding Chekhov. Only in the context of all his work is it possible to deeply comprehend each specific work.

The genre of the short story implies a special relationship to the word. Unlike a long narrative, where the reader's attention is focused on detailed descriptions, the framework of the story does not allow the slightest carelessness, requiring full dedication from each word. In Chekhov's stories, the word, as in a poem, is the only possible one. Long work in the newspaper, the school of feuilleton and reportage largely contributed to the improvement of Chekhov's style. His word is always the most informative. It was this virtuoso mastery of the word, the honed mastery of detail that allowed Chekhov not to indulge in lengthy authorial reasoning, but always clearly adhere to the role of the narrator: the word in his stories speaks for itself, it actively forms the reader's perception, appeals to living co-creation. Chekhov's objective manner is unusual for the Russian reader. Following the passionate outpourings of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, he always knew where the truth was and where the lie was, what was good and what was bad. Left alone with Chekhov's text, having lost the author's pointing finger, the reader was at a loss.

The inertia of misunderstanding, incorrect - in the opinion of the author himself - interpretation of Chekhov's work existed in Russian criticism almost always. This is true even today. A paradoxical story happened to "Darling". This story was understood in absolutely different ways by two such wise and subtle readers as Tolstoy and Gorky. It is significant that in their interpretation of "Darling" they were infinitely far not only from each other, but also from the opinion of the author himself.

Excellent comments V.Ya. Lakshin: "Tolstoy did not want to see in "Darling" those features of philistine life, into which Olenka seems to have grown and which causes Chekhov's ridicule. In Olenka Tolstoy was attracted by the "eternal" properties of the female type.<...>Tolstoy is inclined to regard Darushechka with her sacrificial love as a universal type of woman. For the sake of this, he tries not to notice Chekhov's irony, and accepts humanity, softness of humor as a sign of involuntary justification by the author of the heroine.<...>Quite differently than Tolstoy, another reader, Gorky, looked at Darling. In the heroine of Chekhov's story, he is antipathetic to slavish traits, her humiliation, the lack of human independence. “Here anxiously, like a gray mouse, “Darling” scurries - a sweet, meek woman who knows how to love so slavishly, knows how to love so much. What Tolstoy idealized and "blessed" in "Darling" - promiscuity of love, blind devotion and affection - Gorky could not accept with his ideals of a "proud" person.<...>Chekhov himself had no doubt that he wrote a humorous story<...>, counted on the fact that his heroine should make a somewhat pathetic and ridiculous impression.<...>Chekhov's Olenka is a timid, submissive creature, obedient to fate in everything. It is deprived of independence both in thoughts, and in opinions, and in studies. She has no personal interests, except for the interests of her husband-entrepreneur or her husband-timber trader. Olenka's life ideals are simple: peace, her husband's well-being, quiet family joys, "tea with rich bread and various jams..." ". A measured, prosperous existence always evoked a feeling of bitterness in Chekhov. In this respect, the life of Olenka, a kind and stupid woman, was no exception. There could be no demand from her in the sense of any ideals and aspirations.

In the story "Gooseberries", written almost simultaneously with "Darling", we read: "I am oppressed by silence and calmness, I am afraid to look at the windows, because for me now there is no more difficult sight than a happy family sitting around the table and drinking tea ". Chekhov sees such a window in the house where Olenka is in charge. In the tone in which this is all told, we will not hear malicious irony, dry mockery. The story of "Darling" rather evokes pity, compassion for a colorless and monotonous life, which can be told on several pages - it is so monosyllabic and meager. A soft, good-natured smile does not seem to leave the author's lips. He is not embittered and not gloomy, but perhaps saddened by the tragicomedy of human destinies. He wants to look into the soul of ordinary people, truthfully convey their needs, anxieties, small and big worries, and under all this to reveal the drama of the senselessness and emptiness of their lives, often not felt by the heroes. ".

Lakshin does not oppose his personal understanding of the story to the interpretations of Gorky and Tolstoy. He very subtly restores Chekhov's idea, the author's concept, analyzing "Darling" not in itself, but in the context of Chekhov's late work. Thus, we again come to the conclusion that a complete, adequate understanding of Chekhov is possible only when each of his works is perceived as an element of an integral creative system.

Chekhov's artistic manner is not instructive; he is sickened by the pathos of a preacher, a teacher of life. He acts as a witness, as a writer of everyday life. Chekhov chooses the position of the storyteller, and this returns Russian literature to the path of fiction, from which the philosophical searches of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy led her away. The drama of Russian life is obvious to Chekhov. The modern world feels like a dead end to them. And the external "arrangement" only emphasizes the internal trouble: this is a mechanical life, devoid of a creative idea. And without such an idea, without a higher meaning, even creative labor necessary for society becomes meaningless. That is why in Chekhov's later work the theme of "leaving" sounds: one can break out of a dead end, out of the hopelessness of a vicious circle (but, as a rule, into the unknown, as happens in the stories "The Lady with the Dog" and "The Bride"). The hero has a choice: either accept life, submit to it, dissolve, become a part of it and lose himself, or break all ties with everyday life, just get away from it, look for a worthy purpose of existence. This is the most important moment: Chekhov's hero is not allowed to remain himself within the framework of everyday life; having chosen the generally accepted path, he loses his face. This is what happens to Dr. Startsev, the hero of the story "Ionych". Having obeyed the flow of life, a series of everyday worries and thoughts, he comes to complete spiritual devastation, to an absolute loss of personality. Even the memory of his own recent past, of the only vivid feeling, the author does not leave him. The successful Ionych is not only soulless, but also insane, obsessed with the mania of senseless hoarding. Just as soulless are some of Chekhov's other heroes who did not dare to challenge their usual life: Belikov, Chimsha-Himalayan.

Life itself opposes man. So strong, prosperous, well-equipped and comfortable, it promises all the benefits, but in return it requires the rejection of oneself as a person. And therefore, the theme of "withdrawal", the denial of the established way of life, becomes the main one in the work of the late Chekhov.

We have already talked about the drama of teacher Nikitin. Having fulfilled all the desires of the hero, giving him the happiness that Nikitin so passionately dreamed of, Chekhov led him to a certain threshold, to the line, remaining beyond which, Nikitin would renounce his own face and become the same idol that Dr. Startsev became. And for the author it is infinitely important that the teacher Nikitin is able to step over the threshold, that the quiet, safe loss of himself is more terrible for him than the complete uncertainty of the break with his former life. What new life Nikitin will come to, what will be revealed to him beyond the threshold - we do not know, just as we do not know what, besides the joy of deliverance, the heroine of the story "The Bride" found. This is a separate topic for Chekhov, he almost does not touch it. The most important thing seems to him now is the very question of choosing a path, the problem of decision as such.

Only in the story "My Life" did Chekhov follow his "stepped over the threshold" hero. And he discovered that Mikhail Poloznev gained only one thing in his new life: the right to independently manage his own destiny, to answer only to his own conscience for his every step. The new, half-starved and homeless life of Misail gave the hero the main thing that was missing in the habitual path prepared for him by his father: a sense of self-worth, the unconditional significance of his own personality - not because he is obsessed with megalomania, but because every human personality is the highest, absolute value .

The problem of "leaving" in Chekhov's work is deeply connected with the theme of love. Love for his heroes is always a turning point, a path to another reality. Having fallen in love, a person inevitably interrupts the usual course of life, stops. This is a time of rethinking, self-awareness: even the quietest Belikov, having fallen in love, felt this breakthrough into other worlds, saw himself, thought about his own soul and personality. Having fallen in love, Chekhov's hero ceases to be a man without a face, one of the crowd. He suddenly discovers his own individuality - unique and inimitable. This is a person who has woken up, entered into a spiritual reality: "Love shows a person how he should be," Chekhov wrote.

But Chekhov's hero can be frightened by this abyss of his own soul that has opened up to him, frightened by the sudden transformation of the familiar and comfortable world into a complex and unknowable one. And then he will renounce love and himself, like Belikov, like Startsev. If the feeling that gripped the hero is truly strong, it transforms him, does not allow him to return to his usual track. Subtly, but unstoppable, there is a spiritual growth, a rebirth of the personality. So the cynic and bon vivant Gurov, having fallen in love with Anna Sergeevna, gradually turns into a thinking, suffering, tormented person. Gurov is unhappy, and Anna Sergeevna is also unhappy: they are doomed to live apart, to meet occasionally, furtively, like thieves, doomed to lie in the family, to hide from the whole world. But there is no way back for them: the souls of these people came to life and a return to the former unconscious existenceimpossible.

Chapter II . The organization of the narrative in the "Little Trilogy" by A.P. Chekhov

2.1. The ideological and compositional unity of the stories "The Man in the Case", "Gooseberries", "About Love" A.P. Chekhov. Analysis of the Little Trilogy.

In 1898, three stories were published in the Russian Thought magazine: "The Man in the Case", "Gooseberry", "About Love". The common numbering indicated that they constituted a single series. This series conceived by the author was not exhausted by three stories. In a letter to the publisher A.F. Marx dated September 28, 1894, Chekhov protested against the fact that the three stories mentioned were being typed in a printing house for collected works, pointing out that they belonged "to a series that is far from finished and which can only be included in volume XI or XII when it is given by the end of the whole series. The writer did not succeed in realizing his plan. But in an unfinished form, a series of stories is not a simple collection, but a cycle, a kind of trilogy, consisting of parts that are internally interconnected. Each of the three main characters - the teacher of the gymnasium Burkin, the veterinarian Ivan Ivanovich Chimsha-Gimalaysky, the landowner Alekhin - tells one story each; the first is about his acquaintance - the “man in the case”, the second is about his brother, who decided to “lock himself up for life in his own estate”, the third is about himself, about how he overlooked his love and happiness.

Attention has long been drawn to the commonality between the heroes of these three stories. The teacher who reduced the whole of existence to following instructions and rules, the official who subordinated life to the purchase of a gooseberry estate, the landowner who, being in love, allowed restraining considerations to so possess him that love itself perished - all three are connected by a hidden commonality.

Most often, this commonality is denoted by the concept of "case", which is associated with the understanding of life. Each of the three stories is essentially

narrates about “false ideas” that take possession of various people (the dream of a gooseberry can be called a case into which all human life is squeezed; the same case can be called those arguments about “sin and virtue in their current sense”, in which the heroes of the story “On

love" tried to hide their feeling). In each case, this is what would allow the hero to build a life according to a template, to have a single answer to everything.

possible life questions.

The constructive moment of the interconnection of independent artistic wholes here is the compositional principle of “a story within a story”, and the narrators (who, in turn, turn out to be heroes for the narrator) act as the through characters of the cycle.

If the meaning of the first part of the cycle was reduced to a sarcastic denunciation of "case", "Belikovism", then it would be possible to state that in this case there is essentially nothing for the literary critic to analyze. Didn't Burkin himself, outlining the history of the "man in a case", make the appropriate observations, generalizations, and conclusions? Does the character of Belikov need our additional assessment or reassessment?

In fact, the expressive-symbolic detailing of the image, which in other cases the researcher has to fix and reveal bit by bit, has already been implemented and interpreted by the narrator Burkin. At the same time, the aesthetic position of the sarcastically inclined Burkin coincides with the irony of the author in "The Death of an Official" or in the finale of "Ionych". But this time, Chekhov needed an intermediary, a character telling the story, endowed with a rather caricature appearance:

He was a small man, stout, completely bald, with a black beard almost to the waist. The caricature of this portrait is set off by the contrasting appearance of his interlocutor, turning them into a kind of “carnival couple”: a tall, thin old man with a long mustache.

Attention to the external appearance of the narrator, which is completely excessive for the story of Belikov's "case", forces us to assume that the author's position is irreducible to the one that Burkin quite definitely takes. “The subject of consciousness,” B.O. Korman wrote, “the closer to the author, the more he is dissolved in the text and not noticeable in it”; and vice versa, "the more the subject of consciousness becomes a certain personality with its own special way of speech, character, biography (not to mention appearance. - V. G.), the less it directly expresses the author's position."

The relative narrowness of the narrator's outlook consists, for example, in the fact that he easily and arrogantly separates himself from those of whom he speaks: ... and how many more such people are left in the case, how many more there will be! Meanwhile, the pathetic hymn to freedom, sounding from the lips of Burkin himself, unexpectedly betrays the limitedness, a kind of "case" of his own thinking:

No one wanted to discover this feeling of pleasure, a feeling similar to what we experienced a long time ago, even in childhood, when the elders left home, and we ran around the garden for an hour or two, enjoying complete freedom. Ah, freedom, freedom! Even a hint, even a faint hope of its possibility gives wings to the soul, doesn't it?

Such an infantile experience of freedom as a short-term permissiveness in the absence of elders, a timid expectation of only a hint of such a possibility explains Burkin's "case" reaction to the bitter generalizations of his interlocutor: - Well, you are from another opera, Ivan Ivanovich.<...>Let's sleep. (Note that the motif of sleep is a common allusion in Chekhov's texts to an inauthentic existence, while insomnia usually indicates the intensity of the hero's inner life.)

Focused on a thoughtful reader, the author's deepening of the meaning of the story told can be seen in the speeches of Ivan Ivanovich:

But is it that we live in a city in stuffiness, in cramped quarters, write unnecessary papers, play vint - isn't this a case? And the fact that we spend our whole lives among idlers, quarrelsome, stupid, idle women, talking and listening to various nonsense - isn't this a case?

But these words cannot serve as an exhaustive expression of the author's own position, since they are also put into the mouth of the character, the depicted subject of speech.

Ivan Ivanovich is also an intermediary, but not between the hero (Belikov) and the author, like Burkin, but between the hero and the reader. An attentive listener of the story about Belikov is, as it were, an image of the reader introduced into the work. It is no coincidence that he speaks on behalf of a certain “we”.

If Burkin, ironically distancing himself from Belikov, limited himself to a sarcastic interpretation of his story, then Ivan Ivanovich, including himself among the people burdened with "case", dramatizes the situation:

See and hear how they lie<...>endure insults, humiliations, do not dare to openly declare that you are on the side of honest, free people, and lie yourself, smile, and all this because of a piece of bread, because of a warm corner, because of some bureaucrat who is worth a penny price - no, it's impossible to live like this anymore!

However, Ivan Ivanovich is just one of the heroes of the work, fraught with a kind of “matryoshka effect”: Ivan Ivanych’s moral outlook is wider than Burkin’s sarcasm (which, in turn, is wider than Varenka’s humorous laughter at Belikov), but already the author’s moral norm. To identify this latter, it is necessary to focus on the "semantic context" that arises "at the boundaries of the individual components" of the cycle.

In The Gooseberry, the function of the narrator passes to Ivan Ivanovich, and he offers us a very dramatic picture of life. True, the hero of his story - Chimsha-Himalayan Jr. - replenishes a number of sarcastic Chekhov characters, but Ivan Ivanych's story turns into his personal confession: But it's not about him, but about me. I want to tell you what a change has taken place in me...

The story of the brother begins with a picture of their free, healthy childhood. The spiritual intimacy of the characters is emphasized, which does not completely disappear over the years. Immediately after the cartoonish Gogolian portrait of the landowner brother, ending with the words of the one who looks like he grunts into the blanket, follows: We hugged and wept with joy and sadness at the thought that we were once young, and now both are gray-haired, and it's time to die.

Ivan Ivanovich peers into the new character of Nikolai Ivanovich, as in a mirror: I also taught at dinner and on the hunt how to live, how to believe, how to rule the people, etc. That night, the narrator experiences a dramatic catharsis. Feeling himself the subject of a wide internal predestination of being (famous: A person needs not three arshins of earth, not a manor, but the whole globe, all nature, where in the open he could show all the properties and features of his free spirit ), Ivan Ivanovich, in the shameful contentment of his brother, sees the narrowness of the external reality of everyday life. He comprehends the inconsistency, the incompatibility of these parameters of human life.

In this experience, a kind of formula of Chekhov's drama is born: ... there is no strength to live, but meanwhile you need to live and want to live! (like Gurov, Anna Sergeevna from "The Lady with the Dog" and many other heroes of the writer).

The second "story within a story" requires little to no interpretation. The i dots are convincingly placed by Ivan Ivanych himself. Two-fifths of the text is devoted to framing this confessional story, which in no way allows us to fully identify the author's position with the final judgments of the narrator.

Apparently, there can be no talk of antagonism between the author and the narrator, however, not only the younger, but also the elder Chimsha-Himalayan shows a narrow moral outlook, proclaiming drama as the norm of life: There is no happiness, and there should not be... As a happy man, a heavy feeling, close to despair, took possession of me, - says Ivan Ivanovich. He does not fully realize that his brother's contentment is just an imaginary happiness of a purely "external" person, a degenerate pseudo-personality. The “existentialist” position of despair, taken by him himself, sensitively caught by Chekhov in the atmosphere of the era, leaves no room in life for a feeling of the joy of being.

Meanwhile, this kind of joy, at the behest of the author, constantly makes itself felt in the frame of the main story. Then the hunters are imbued with love for this field and think about how great, how beautiful this country is. Either Alekhin sincerely rejoices at the guests, and they are delighted with the beauty of the maid Pelageya. The elderly Ivan Ivanovich swims and dives in the rain among white lilies with boyish enthusiasm and delight. Alekhin, with visible pleasure, feels warmth, cleanliness, dry clothes, light shoes, rejoices in the conversation of the guests not about cereals, not about hay, not about tar.

Not only about Alekhine, but also about Burkin (and even about the author and reader, as if invisibly present), it is said: For some reason I wanted to talk and listen about elegant people, about women (in the mouth of Ivan Ivanovich, women are stupid and idle). A kind of formula for feeling the living joy of being, not obscured, not supplanted by the drama of confession, sounds: ... and the fact that the beautiful Pelageya now silently walked here was better than any stories.

Ivan Ivanovich rejects the joys of life from a rigidly moralistic position. However, in fact, do not any kind of joy serve as a kind of "case" of happy people, deaf to the suffering of those who are unhappy? Let's try to extract a reasonable Chekhov's answer to this question from the trilogy as a whole as a cyclic formation. In the meantime, let us note some features of the moral position of the narrator in The Gooseberry.

The dramatic maximalism of Ivan Ivanovich (for me now there is no more difficult sight than a happy family sitting around the table and drinking tea ) is not harmless to others. It carries not only a thirst for good, but also a subtle poison of despair. This is indicated, in particular, by the close connection at the level of focalization of the final situations of the first and second stories.

At the end of The Man in the Case, Burkin, having told the story of Belikov, quickly falls asleep, and Ivan Ivanovich, flustered and unable to speak, kept tossing and turning from side to side and sighing, and then got up, went outside again and, sitting at the door, lit a pipe. At the end of the Gooseberry, Chimsha-Gimalaysky, who relieved his soul with a confession of despair, hides with his head (like Belikov!) And falls asleep, after which the narrator remarks:

From his pipe, which lay on the table, there was a strong smell of tobacco fumes, and Burkin did not sleep for a long time and still could not understand where this heavy smell came from.

It is significant that the narrator, not demonstratively, but quite obviously, changes his position by the fact that this time he is awake with Burkin, and not with Ivan Ivanovich. It is also indicative that the heavy smell associated with the painful thoughts of the owner of the pipe, with his dramatic confession, poisons another smell that speaks of the simple joys of life - two phrases before the quoted ending it was reported: ... from their beds, wide, cool, which the beautiful Pelageya spread, smelled pleasantly of fresh linen.

It should also be noted that Ivan Ivanovich, having lost faith in personal happiness, loses confidence in the possibilities of the human personality in general, placing his hopes only on the unknown supra-personal beginning of being: ... and if there is a meaning and purpose in life, then this meaning and purpose are completely not in our happiness, but in something more reasonable and greater.

At the same time, the narrator clearly “distracts” from this thesis (which Tolstoy liked so much), noticing a certain inconsistency in communicative behavior: the hero said it as if he asked for it personally. There is no reproach in this remark, but it reveals the latent author's idea that any meaning is rooted in the personal being of a person. Chekhov, as the final text of the trilogy (and the general context of his work) shows, knows nothing more reasonable and great.

Alekhine's confession, which is the third story in the cycle, is very dramatic. The grain of this drama, as in the “Lady with a Dog” written a year later, is the unrealization of a personal secret: We were afraid of everything that could reveal our secret to ourselves (the word secret is found three more times in Alekhine's speech).

The framing of the story being told does not conflict with the aesthetic situation of a “story within a story”, as was the case in The Gooseberry, but there is a lot of contradictory content in the reasoning of the protagonist. The contradiction consists, for example, in the fact that, according to Alekhine (we emphasize: not the author!), it is necessary to explain each case separately, without trying to generalize, but Alekhine himself completes his story with just a generalization.

Having declared at the very beginning that questions of personal happiness are important in love (and thus indirectly entering into an argument with Ivan Ivanovich), Alekhine at the end of his monologue, like the narrator of the Gooseberry, states: I realized that when you love, then in your reasoning about this love, one must proceed from something higher, from something more important than happiness or unhappiness... And then he adds: ...or there is no need to reason at all, which discredits the highest as a source of reasoning.

Alekhine's entire inner life in his relationship with Anna Alekseevna is permeated with the usual for mature Chekhovian prose dramatic contradiction between the hero's personality and his character: I loved tenderly, deeply, but I reasoned... The first comes from the personality, the second - from the character as a way of adapting this personality to circumstances. The "case" of the sarcastic characters of the first two stories consists precisely in the absorption, suppression of the once living personality - the "shell" of character (it is no coincidence that both, at the will of the author, die).

The mismatch between Alekhine's character and his personality is manifested, for example, in the following: his work on the estate was in full swing, but, taking the most active part in it, he was bored and grimaced in disgust. But this mismatch in Chekhov's way indicates that the hero has a living human "I".

Therein lies his advantage (confirmed by Anna Alekseevna's love) over Luganovich, who hangs around respectable people, sluggish, unnecessary, with a submissive, indifferent expression, as if he had been brought here to be sold. Calling Luganovich a kind-hearted man, Alekhine accompanies this characterization with a paradoxical explanation: ... one of those simple-hearted people who hold firmly to the opinion that once a person has been put on trial, it means that he is guilty.

Luganovich's commitment to expressing opinions in a legal manner, on paper, clearly tells the reader of the trilogy that he is facing a "case" man - a variant of Belikov, who nevertheless decided to marry. But the narrator Alekhin himself does not realize this, characterizing Anna Alekseevna's husband as the sweetest person.

The author's hidden irony makes itself felt in the hero-narrator's commitment to the theme of sleep (Chekhov's dream is almost always allusively associated with spiritual death). Even in the previous story, Alekhine was very sleepy. Now he enthusiastically tells how he slept on the go, how at first, going to bed, he read at night, and later he did not have time to get to his bed and fell asleep in a barn, in a sleigh or somewhere in the forest lodge. Sessions of the district court seem to Alekhine a luxury after sleeping in a sleigh. At the same time, he complains to Anna Alekseevna that he sleeps badly in rainy weather.

On the whole, however, Alekhine's story is noticeably closer to the author's style of the mature Chekhov than the stories of Burkin and Chimshi-Gimalaysky. This closeness consists in "refusing the mission of teaching", in the fact that "Chekhov did not impose any postulate", and "moral exactingness addressed them primarily to himself"

These words are quite applicable to Alekhine, a narrator who individualizes his own love story as a separate case, while the first two narrators of the trilogy sharply condemn their characters, strongly generalize and generally “teach”:

Burkin is a teacher by profession, and Ivan Ivanovich preaches passionately (by the way, his pathetic exclamation: Do not let yourself be put to sleep!<...>don't stop doing good! - very inappropriately addressed to Alekhine, who had worked during the day, whose eyes were stuck together from fatigue).

And yet, there is no doubt some authorial detachment from the sleepy Alekhine, who did not delve into the meaning of Ivan Ivanovich's speech and only rejoiced at the conversation about something that had no direct relation to his life. It is also evident in relation to the other two narrators. And although in bringing all three stories to the reader there is a considerable share of the narrator's internal agreement with each of them, the life positions of the narrating characters are far from the realization of the moral norm of the author's consciousness.

In search of textual traces of this “clothed in silence” (Bakhtin) consciousness, let us pay attention to what unites all the characters of the cycle without exception. What they have in common in one way or another is the life position of a solitary existence, which, apparently, is the deepest meaning of the phenomenon of "case". A phrase from The Gooseberry is significant, bringing together within one frame the focalizations of all three narrators: Then all three sat in armchairs at different ends of the living room, and were silent.

Based on the analysis of relations in the triad "author - narrator - hero", a conclusion is made about the originality of Chekhov's artistry, which consists in displaying the process of aesthetic assimilation of reality in the interdependence of organic flow and qualitative transformation. The prerequisite for this process is the non-hierarchical relationship between art and life.

V.G. Korolenko said that during one of the meetings with him A.P. Chekhov said: “Do you know how I write my little stories? Here". He looked around the table, picked up the first thing that caught his eye - it turned out to be an ashtray, put it in front of me and said: “If you want, there will be a story tomorrow, the title is“ Ashtray ”. I think this pattern applies not only to early short stories.

Art does not correlate with life hierarchically, life flows organically into art. On the other hand, aesthetic reality is a qualitative transformation of life reality. Statement by B.G. Korolenko testifies that the objective world and the material word are that environment, that borderland, where this dual process of organic overflow and qualitative transformation unfolds - a process in the deployment of which one side paradoxically conditions the other, that is, only as a result of this organic overflow and a qualitative transformation of both things and words is possible.

In this light, the words of A.M. Gorky that A.P. Chekhov "mastered his own idea of ​​life and thus rose above it." This means that the writer's own worldview was embodied in the work objectively - it became the subject of artistic implementation and completion along with other objects and characters. And in relation to him, the author each time re-occupies, as M. Gorky writes, "the highest point of view." This explains the indeterminacy of the author's position, the ultimate implicitness of his presence, which almost all researchers talk about: after all, in this case, the author really is, as M.M. Bakhtin, “on a tangent” to the artistic world of the work, in everything and nowhere at the same time, being realized, first of all, in the creative effort of organic flow and qualitative transformation of life reality into art.

This also explains the originality of the heroes of Chekhov's stories. On the one hand, as M.M. Girshman, "... the hero, whose point of view organizes the narrative, just reveals his inability to genuine authorship" , is not able to comprehend his life as a whole, to see the connections between individual events. On the other hand, I.F. Annensky felt: “Chekhov’s people, gentlemen, although they are us, they are very strange people, and they were born that way, they are literary people. Their whole life, and even the justification for it, is all literature, which they give out or accurately take for life. From this follows a paradoxical way of existence of heroes: they, being in principle devoid of authorial abilities, being qualitatively different in relation to the author, at the same time live according to the laws of literature, in fact, their vital energy (and all of them, to one degree or another, are not are able to put their own lives in order, suffer because they do “exactly the wrong thing”) turns into a word, into a rhetorically delivered phrase, which, precisely because it is so well delivered, no longer requires an act to confirm it, it is valuable in itself . That is, the hero is not so much a self-sufficient completed character, not a person in life, but he lives primarily in the word and for the word, he is rather an instrument here, a means by which the word passes and is transformed into aesthetic reality. That is, in the innermost essence of the hero lies the need for a narrator.

Chekhov's little trilogy, which fits on thirty pages, carries a large, multifaceted theme of denying the contemporary writer's life order. Each story, in essence, tells of "false ideas" that take hold of various people. How is the reader led to the conclusion about the falsity of these very ideas? First of all, the plot. Within each of the stories told, there is a breakdown in life that results from following one or another of the chosen "general ideas." "Real life" triumphs, and rather cruelly, over any of the "cases" in which they try to imprison it. Only in the coffin did Belikov fully “reach his ideal”. At the cost of losing youth, health and, moreover, human appearance, Nikolai Ivanovich Chimsha-Gimalaysky achieves his goal. Alekhine needed to lose the woman he loved forever in order to understand “how unnecessary, petty and how tempting everything was” that he himself put in the way of his love.

Each story contributes to the theme of the "case", presents its own aspect of this theme.

So, the stories already told in themselves contain a conclusion-generalization, consisting in the denial of the forms of sheathing, templates, “shells” adopted by the heroes, in which they enclosed life. These negative generalizations are the first, most obvious and unambiguous group of conclusions to which the author of the “little trilogy” leads readers.

But the fact that the stories are placed within the framework of a general narrative, that the narrators give their own assessments of the stories - all this significantly complicates the final meaning of the cycle. The analysis is continued, Chekhov evaluates the conclusions that the characters-narrators draw from other people's or their own life lessons.

Using the example of three friends, Chekhov shows three different types of human assessments, three types of reactions to negative life phenomena that make up the essence of stories. There's nothing to be done, "how many more such people are left in the case, how many more there will be!" Burkin, the narrator of The Man in the Case, repeats twice.
“It’s impossible to live like this anymore”, something must be done, it is necessary to “jump over the ditch or build a bridge over it” - this is the reaction of Chimshi-Himalaisky, the narrator of “Gooseberry”. Having made a mistake, he “forever” parted with the hope of love, doomed himself “to spin like a squirrel in a wheel”, in his estate Alekhine, the narrator and hero of “About Love”.

Reactions, as we see, are essentially different, each of them is inseparable from the individuality of the responder and is conditioned by it. There is a possibility of misinterpretation: to absolutize any one of these reactions. Most often, Chekhov's intentions are seen in proclaiming the phrases spoken by the narrator of the second story, Chimsha-Himalayan. The motives for such an identification are understandable, but they are extraneous both in relation to the story and to the actual author's attitude. As usual in Chekhov's world, the author does not prove the preference for any one of these reactions, he only substantiates, individualizes each of them. And his conclusions are on a different plane than the conclusions of any of the heroes.

So, the story of Belikov is framed: it is not only told, but also commented on by Burkin and Ivan Ivanovich at a hunting halt. It would be very tempting to say that, having condemned Belikov and the “case”, Chekhov “proclaimed” through the listener of this story, Chimshi-Gimalaysky: “No, it’s impossible to live like this anymore!” But this phrase, no matter how attractive and spectacular it may look, is not the final conclusion and expression of the author's position in Chekhov's world. The words of the hero must be correlated with the replies of other characters or with his other statements and (most importantly) with deeds, with the text of the work as a whole.

Burkin, the narrator of The Man in the Case, concludes twice by saying that other Belikovs have always been and will be, there is no hope for a change for the better. And his listener Chimsha-Himalayan, an excited, radically minded person, draws a much bolder conclusion: “... it’s impossible to live like this anymore!” - and expands the interpretation of "case" so much that Burkin objects: "Well, you are from another opera!" From another "opera" or from the same - remains unanswered. The task of the author is not to proclaim this or that conclusion. Using the example of fellow hunters, Chekhov shows how differently people of different temperaments and characters react to life events that make up the essence of the story.

Chekhov has no heroes who can unconditionally be called the spokesmen of the author's views, the author's meaning of the work. This meaning is made up of something besides and on top of the statements of the characters. Chekhov, an artist-musician, actively uses such methods of musical composition as repetition, contrast, and the passage of a theme through different voice-instruments to express his thoughts. What we learn from the narrator, the gymnasium teacher Burkin, - a description of Belikov and the infection and disease he spreads - will be said again in a much sharper and more decisive tone. The teacher Kovalenko, who came from Ukraine, will call everything by its proper name - Belikov - “spider, viper, Judas”, the atmosphere in the gymnasium is “suffocating”, “it stinks of sourness, like in a police box ...” An already well-known theme is carried out as if on a different musical instrument, in a different key , in some way sharply clarifying this topic. As in the symphonies of Tchaikovsky, Chekhov's favorite composer, pathetic themes are in complex relationships with the themes that deny them and are subject to a complex author's intention.

Here Belikov died, the story about him is over - and around him is an endless and alien life that has just been told. The story, from which the narrator and the listener tend to draw unambiguous final conclusions, is included by the author in the panorama of endless life. In the frame of "The Man in the Case" Chekhov includes - in addition to the plot - indications of something without which the picture of the world is incomplete, the "real" life in which the characters live. In the description of the village sleeping under the moon, the words “quiet”, “quiet” are repeated three times. A special selection of words (“meek”, “sad ... affectionately and tenderly ... everything is fine”) was supposed to lead away from the ugliness of life to beauty, harmony, guessed in nature. Quiet, usually unnoticed beauty, evoking the dream that "evil is no longer on earth and everything is fine" - all this sets, like a tuning fork, the tone of the whole story and affects the reader directly, in addition to the plot. The author, as it were, points to signs of a norm that is absent in the deeds and ideas of his heroes.

In addition, the relativity of the conclusions of the heroes is clearly obvious: what is this “higher, more important than happiness or misfortune” or how is it not to stand over a moat, but “to jump over it or build a bridge over it”? These conclusions claim to be universally binding, but they reveal their relativity, abstractness and unacceptability for others. Therefore, the author denies them.

Chekhov himself does not accept any of the varieties of the case, he shows the impossibility of enclosing "real" life in any of the "shells". At the same time, the verbal solutions offered by the narrators also turn out to be imaginary: convincing and natural in relation to some situations, in others they seem to have come “from another opera”. The image of the "man with a hammer" is most applicable to Chekhov himself, who does not allow one to dwell on a single illusion.

Conclusion

Chekhov preferred to explore life not in the big and general phenomena of life, but in their particular expressions in the sphere of everyday life.

The "Little Trilogy" explores the three main institutions of social life, the three pillars on which it rests: the category of power - "The Man in the Case", the category of property - "Gooseberries", the category of the family - "About Love". Taken together, these three stories are Chekhov's refutation of the foundations of the social order existing in Russia.

Already in the early humorous stories, Chekhov considered various types of "false ideas" - stereotypical life programs, standards by which all human behavior is built. This time, the writer found an exact and capacious formula for this phenomenon - a “case”. What is it if not a case in which all Belikov's reactions to living life fit, this constant phrase of his "no matter what happens"? In each case, this is what allows the hero to build a life according to a pattern. And the patterns, stereotypes of thinking are different in all three cases. In "The Man in the Case" the case has a clearly socio-political coloring, because this is a "false idea", according to which the life of the whole country was built for an entire era. Other stories show the fettering power of the case even where, it would seem, every person is free: in "Gooseberries" we are talking about human life, squeezed into a dream of own estate with its own gooseberries, as in a case, and in the story "About Love "- about a feeling ruined by the fear of change, the usual ideas about sin and virtue.

What explains such an escape from real life? Why is a person likened to an animal, a snail or a hermit crab? Perhaps this desire to hide is connected with the nature of the era in the life of the whole country for a decade and a half. It was the Russia of the era of Alexander III, which had just receded into the past, but now and then reminds of itself. The reaction of Belikov, Chimshi-Gimalasky and Alekhine at that time wastypical : fear of terror, denunciations, prohibitions, slavish fear, voluntary, universal - made people withdraw into themselves, withdraw into themselves from the problems and anxieties of everyday life. But it no longer became life, but only existence, at the level of animals, like a snail or a hermit crab.

And the people of the “little trilogy” understand this. They are aware of the hopeless dead end of the "case" life. But their insights are a little late. The inertia of Belik's existence keeps their souls captive. Chekhov tests his heroes by action, and they do not stand the test: righteous words do not follow the turn of righteous deeds: their life does not change in any way, remaining "not forbidden circularly, but not completely resolved."

“Everything that they messed up, that they set up, what people blocked themselves with, everything needs to be thrown away in order to feel life, to enter into the original, simple attitude towards it” - with these words of Chekhov one can define the main pathos of the “little trilogy”

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Narrator (Marseille) in "The Quest"

Marcel is a wealthy Parisian, "the son of the ruler of the ministerial office", probably the only son of his parents, the favorite of his maternal grandmother. As a child, "when the Narrator-hero is about nine or ten years old", he spends summer holidays with his family in the provincial town of Combray, in his early youth he experiences a love for Gilberte Swann, and later a much stronger and more complex feeling for Albertine. The external appearance of Marseille is almost not presented to the reader, in the “Search” one can hardly find only a few insignificant evidence: in a Balbec hotel before a sea bath, the reader sees the young man through the eyes of de Charlus: “you are already ridiculous in a bathing suit with embroidered anchors”; he is not tall (the Duchess of Germany is taller than him); a year after Balbec, Albertine, who came to Marseille, looked at his face and expressed the wish that he “acquired a mustache”; later, after the death of Albertine, Marcel, in a conversation with Andre, will remark: “Here I saw myself in the mirror; I was struck by the similarities between me and Andre. If I hadn’t stopped shaving my mustache a long time ago and if only fluff remained from them, the resemblance would be almost complete. He inherits some of his character traits from his loved ones. When his friend Blok lied to him, the young Narrator did not believe, but he did not get angry either, “because I inherited the trait of my mother and grandmother: I did not resent even those who acted much worse, I never condemned anyone”; “I, who inherited some traits from my grandmother, did not expect anything from people and did not take offense at them - they attracted me to themselves with their very diversity”; "I inherited from my grandmother a complete lack of self-esteem - on the verge of lack of self-esteem." In his character, Marcel also reveals the traits of Aunt Leonia. At the same time, Marcel is “a young man with a sharp and complex feeling, but not at all sensual.”

Hero - Narrator - Author

The hero of "Search" is close, but not identical to the author. He, like Proust, belongs to a wealthy bourgeois family, although he is not the son of a famous doctor, but of an influential official. He has been in poor health since childhood, impressionable and artistically gifted, aspires to engage in literature, he, like Proust, is called Marcel, and he also once fought a duel. Almost all "Search" (with the exception of the inserted part "Swan's Love") unfolds through the plot of the hero's growing up and changes in time of his perception. The literary critic A.D.Mikhailov considers this story to be the first in importance among the main storylines of The Search: “we can consider the plot of Proust’s book from the point of view of the personal fate of the hero-narrator, first a boy, then a teenager, then, respectively, a young man, a man approaching the time of the first maturity, and at the end of the book - already an aging man, who sometimes does not immediately begin to recognize his former acquaintances. The fate of the hero as the main plot of the book is traced in "Search" in sufficient detail ... This is the central plot, the main one. Proust's biographer André Maurois formulates the plot of the hero of The Quest as a drama of "an extraordinarily intelligent and morbidly sensitive person who, from childhood, speculatively goes in search of happiness, tries to achieve it in all forms, but with implacable sobriety refuses to deceive himself, as most do of people. They accept love, glory, light at their imaginary price. Proust, refusing this, is forced to look for some kind of absolute. In expressing the idea of ​​this absolute, the author and the hero-narrator are inseparable: “... my daydreaming gave charm to everything that could lure it. And even in my sensuous impulses, always striving towards a single goal, centered around a single dream, I could discern an idea as the main motive power, an idea for which I would sacrifice my life and whose central point, as in the days of my daytime reflections with a book in Combray garden, was the idea of ​​perfection. But in other cases, the Hero, Narrator and Author coexist in the "Search" in more complex relationships:

The literary formation of the hero

"Marseille is an incredible Sherlock Holmes supremely happy in catching the fleeting gestures and fragmentary stories he sees and hears". In the first book of "Search" - at the moment of capturing the child's perception of the image of the Martinville bell towers - "Proust does the most curious thing: he confronts his current style with the style of his past. Marcel asks for papers and composes a description of these three bell towers, which the narrator reproduces. This is Marcel's first writing experience, charming, despite the fact that some comparisons, say, with flowers or with girls, are given a deliberate childishness. In the third book, he finds, corrects and sends an article describing the bell towers to Figaro, in the fifth he still hopes to find it printed, the article appears only in the sixth. The autobiographical content in the image of Marcel shows not so much an external biography as his internal "difficult, painful becoming a writer" . At first, the most difficult thing was to get moving, to overcome the inertia of established habits: “Oh, if I could at least start writing! But no matter what conditions I set to work ... with enthusiasm, methodically, with pleasure, refusing to go for a walk, postponing it, in order to later earn it as a reward, taking advantage of the fact that I feel good, or forced inactivity during an illness, my efforts were invariably crowned with a blank page, virgin whiteness ... I was just an instrument of habits not to work. At the end of The Search, the seriously ill Narrator, starting to work on the book he had conceived, admits: “Once I was young, everything was easy for me, and Bergott found my student notes “magnificent”. But, instead of working hard, I indulged in laziness, wasted myself in pleasures, exhausted myself with illnesses, worries, whims, and took up my work only on the eve of death, having no idea about the craft. And at the same time, he notes that laziness saved him "from excessive frivolity."

In film adaptations

• 4 actors by age Narrator (child: Georges Du Fresne, teen: Pierre Mignard, adult: Marcello Mazarello, aged: André Engel) - Raul Ruiz's Time Regained (1999):
• Misha Lesko - "In search of lost time"

The word "author" lat. austog - the subject of action, the founder, organizer, teacher and, in particular, the creator of the work) has several meanings in the field of art history. This is, firstly, the creator of a work of art as real face with a certain fate, biography, a complex of individual traits. Secondly, this author image, localized in a literary text, i.e. the image of a writer, painter, sculptor, director of himself. And finally, thirdly (which is especially important for us now), this is the artist-creator, present in his creation as a whole, immanent work. Author (in this meaning of the word) in a certain way gives and illuminates reality (being and its phenomena), comprehends and evaluates them, manifesting itself as subject artistic activity.

The author's subjectivity organizes the work and, one might say, gives rise to its artistic integrity. It is an integral, universal, most important facet of art (along with its proper aesthetic and cognitive principles). The “spirit of authorship” is not only present, but dominates in any form of artistic activity: both when a work has an individual creator, and in situations of group, collective creativity, and in those cases (now prevailing) when the author is named and when his name is withheld ( anonymity, pseudonym, hoax).

Bakhtin wrote that one should distinguish between the biographical author and the author as an aesthetic category. The author stands on the border of the world he creates as an active creator of it. The reader treats the author as a set of creative principles that must be implemented. And ideas about the author as a person are secondary.

Narrator- this is a conditional figure in the epic, a fictional intermediary between the author and the reader, the one who reports on everything that happens in the work, without himself participating in the events, being outside this figurative world. In his outlook, he is close to the author, but not identical to him. The narrator is not the only form of the author's consciousness. The author also manifests himself in the plot, composition, organization of time and space. While the narrator only tells. For example, in "A Hero of Our Time" the narrator is a literary officer. In The Captain's Daughter, Pyotr Grinev, as the "author" of the notes, is the narrator, and he, in his youth, is a character. The narrator should be distinguished from the narrator, who is entirely inside the work, he is also the subject of the image, associated with a certain socio-cultural and linguistic environment. Lermontovsky Maxim Maksimych, for example, is a storyteller. How the narrator is qualified and the subject of the tale, it does not matter whether he is a hero or not.

Character- this is a character (a person or a personified creature, sometimes a thing, a natural phenomenon) in the epic and drama, the subject of consciousness and partly the action in the lyrics They also talk about collective heroes: images of the Famus society, the image of the people in "War and Peace". Characters can be main and secondary, cross-cutting, episodic and off-stage. Sometimes their roles in the plot and content are far from the same. According to their characters and actions, they are divided into positive and negative.

Character- this is the subject of the objective world of the work, the fruit of the author's fiction. Compared to the author, the character is always limited, while the author is omnipresent.

The author invariably expresses (of course, in the language of artistic images, and not in direct conclusions) his attitude to the position, attitudes, value orientation of his character (hero - in the terminology of M.M. Bakhtin). At the same time, the image of the character (like all other parts of the verbal and artistic form) appears as the embodiment of the writer's concept, idea, i.e. as something whole within the framework of another, wider, proper artistic integrity (the work as such). He depends on this integrity, one might say, serves it according to the will of the author. With any serious mastery of the character sphere of the work, the reader inevitably penetrates into the spiritual world of the author: in the images of the characters he sees (first of all, by direct feeling) the creative will of the writer.

The attitude of the author to the hero can be predominantly either alienated or kindred, but not neutral. Writers have repeatedly spoken about the closeness or alienation of their characters. “I,” wrote Cervantes in the prologue to Don Quixote, “only I am considered the father of Don Quixote, in fact I am his stepfather, and I am not going to follow the beaten path and, as others do, beg you almost with tears in my eyes , dear reader, forgive my brainchild for its shortcomings, or look at them through your fingers.

In literary works, one way or another, there is a distance between the character and the author. It takes place even in the autobiographical genre, where the writer comprehends his own life experience from a certain time distance. The author can look at his hero as if from the bottom up (the lives of the saints), or, on the contrary, from the top down (works of accusatory satirical nature). But the most deeply rooted in literature (especially of the last centuries) is the situation of the essential equality of the writer and the character (which, of course, does not signify their identity). Pushkin persistently made it clear to the reader of "Eugene Onegin" that his hero belongs to the same circle as himself ("my good friend"). According to V.G. Rasputin, it is important "that the author does not feel superior to his heroes and does not make himself more experienced than them": "Only equality during work in the most wonderful way gives rise to living heroes, not puppet figures."

Literary characters, however, are able to separate from the works in which they were born and live in the minds of the public an independent life, not subject to the author's will. Such are Hamlet, Don Quixote, Tariof, Faust, Peer Gynt as a part of common European culture; for the Russian consciousness - Tatyana Larina (largely due to the interpretation of her image by Dostoevsky), Chatsky and Molchalin, Nozdrev and Manilov, Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova. In particular, famous characters A.S. Griboedova and N.V. Gogol in the 1870s–1880s "moved" into the works of M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and started a new life there. “If there can be novels and dramas from the lives of historical figures,” noted F. Sologub, “then there can be novels and dramas about Raskolnikov, about Eugene Onegin (170)<...>which are so close to us that we can sometimes tell about them such details that their creator did not have in mind.

Hyperbole and litote, their functions in literature. The concept of the grotesque.

Everything is in shambles.

Functions.

1. Already in the heroic folk epic, the strong hyperbolization of the combat actions of the heroes expresses the sublimely emotional affirmation of their national significance. (Dobrynushka began to push the Tatars away ... He grabbed the Tatar by the legs. He began to wave the Tatar, He began to beat the Tatars ...)
2. In the future, especially since the Renaissance, hyperbole, like other traditional types of verbal-objective expression, has become a means of expressing the actual artistic content. With particular force, it began to be used as a method of creative typification of comic characters in their humorous and satirical interpretation.

“He sat down at the table and, being phlegmatic by nature, began his dinner with a few dozen hams, smoked tongues and sausages, caviar and other appetizers that precede wine. At this time, four servants, one after another, continuously threw mustard into his mouth with full shoulder blades ... ”- this is how the life of the giant Gargantua is described. (Rable)

3. In works with romantic pathos, verbal-objective hyperbolism sometimes also becomes a device of representation. Such, for example, is the image of Hans the Icelander in the eponymous novel by Hugo, or the images of the serpent and the eagle in the introduction to Shelley's poem "The Rise of Islam", or the image of Prometheus in Bryusov's poetic "symphony" "Remembrance".

4. In works that glorify the heroism of popular uprisings, verbal-objective hyperbolism is an integral property of depiction. For example, in "Rebellion" by E. Verharn (translated by V. Bryusov):

Countless footsteps rising clatter Louder and louder in the ominous shadow On the road in days to come.

Hands are outstretched to the torn clouds, Where a menacing thunder suddenly rumbled, And lightning catches a break.

Examples of litotes: In A. S. Griboedov's comedy "Woe from Wit", Molchalin says:

Your spitz is a lovely spitz, no more than a thimble!
I stroked all of it; like silk wool!

N.V. Gogol often turned to litotes. For example, in the story “Nevsky Prospekt”: “such a small mouth that it can’t miss more than two pieces”, “waist, no thicker than a bottle neck”. Or here is a fragment from the story “The Overcoat”: “He took the overcoat out of the handkerchief in which he brought it; the handkerchief had just come from the laundress, he folded it up and put it in his pocket for use.

N. A. Nekrasov in "The Song of Yeryomushka": "You have to bow your head below a thin blade of grass." In the poem "Peasant Children" he used the folklore expression "a little man with a fingernail":

And marching importantly, in serenity,
A man is leading a horse by the bridle
In big boots, in a sheepskin coat,
Big gloves... and himself with a fingernail!

This trope has the meaning of understatement or deliberate mitigation. In litotes, on the basis of some common feature, two heterogeneous phenomena are compared, but this feature is represented in the phenomenon-means of comparison to a much lesser extent than in the phenomenon-object of comparison.

5. Literature as the art of the word. The place of literature among other arts. G.-E. Lessing on the Specifics of Literature as an Art.

The originality of each type of art is determined primarily by the material means of creating images in it. In this regard, it is natural to characterize literature as a verbal art: the material carrier of its imagery is human speech, the basis of which is one or another national language.

Literary literature combines two different arts: the art of fiction (manifested mainly in fictional prose, relatively easily translated into other languages) and the art of the word as such (which determines the appearance of poetry, which loses almost the most important thing in translations).

The actual verbal aspect of literature, in turn, is two-dimensional. Speech here appears, firstly, as a means of representation and as a way of evaluative illumination of extra-verbal reality; and secondly, as image subject- statements belonging to someone and someone characterizing them. Literature, in other words, is capable of recreating the speech activity of people, and this distinguishes it especially sharply from all other forms of art.

Word- the main element of literature, the connection between the material and the spiritual. The word is perceived as the sum of the meanings given to it by human culture. The word adapts to different types of thinking.

The essence of the word is contradictory.

External and ext. word forms: 1) understandable to everyone, solid composition, stable, unshakable manifestation - “body” 2) individually - “soul”. The outer and outer form form a unity.

Differences and unity of external. and ext. forms of the word, inconsistency of the word à the basis for constructing the text.

The word is material (a means of constructing phrases, text) and non-material (changeable content).

The word and its meaning depends on the usage.

The comparison is simple and detailed. A simple comparison is built on a comparison of the phenomena of life according to their similarity, like a metaphor. Expanded comparison - similarity is established in the absence of identity. Two members of the extended comparison are set, two mapped images. One is the main one, created by the development of the narrative or lyrical meditation, and the other is auxiliary (involved for comparison with the main one). The function of an extended comparison is to reveal a number of features of one phenomenon or to characterize a whole group of phenomena. Extended comparison

Comparison(from lat. comparatio) - a kind of trope, this is an artistic device, a figurative verbal expression in which one event (phenomenon) is compared with another, a similarity between two phenomena of life is established, one object or phenomenon is likened to another according to some common thing for them feature in order to identify new, important properties in the S. object. These phenomena themselves do not form a new concept, but are preserved as independent ones. Comparison includes three components: the subject of comparison (what is compared), the object of comparison (what is compared with) and the sign of comparison (common to the compared realities). For artistic speech, it is common to compare two different concepts in order to emphasize this or that side in one of them by this comparison.

Almost any figurative expression can be reduced to a comparison (cf. the gold of the leaves - the leaves are yellow, like gold, the reeds are dozing - the reeds are motionless, as if they are dozing). Unlike other tropes, comparison is always binomial: it names both compared objects (phenomena, qualities, actions). "Like a steppe scorched by fires, Grigory's life became black" (M. Sholokhov). "Neva tossed about like a sick person in her restless bed."

Comparison problem- to make the reader feel the written more vividly. Comparison helps to instill in the reader the author's attitude towards the subject of the main narrative by mentioning the compared object, which causes a similar attitude towards itself. Comparison is based not so much on the similarity of the compared objects themselves, but on the similarity of the author's attitude towards the compared objects.

Comparison Value as an act of artistic knowledge in that the convergence of different objects helps to reveal in the object of comparison, in addition to the main feature, also a number of additional features, which greatly enriches the artistic impression.

Along with simple comparisons, in which two phenomena have one common feature, are used extended comparisons, in which several characteristics serve as the basis for comparison. With the help of detailed comparisons, a whole range of lyrical experiences and reflections is conveyed. A detailed comparison is a figurative technique that compares two images (and not two objects, as in a simple comparison). One of them is the main one, the main one in meaning, the other is auxiliary, used for comparison with the main one.

Example: “Like a hawk floating in the sky, having given many circles with strong wings, suddenly stops flattened in one place and shoots from there with an arrow at a male quail screaming near the road, so Tarasov’s son, Ostap, suddenly flew into a cornet and immediately threw him " a rope around the neck "(Ya.-V. Gogol). Here Ostap is the main member, and the hawk is auxiliary.

The relationship between two members of a highly developed comparison can be different both in their cognitive meaning and in their place in the development of creative thought. Sometimes an auxiliary member of the comparison can receive, as it were, an independent value. That is, similarity is established in the absence of identity. Then the auxiliary member and syntactically can become the content of a separate sentence, no longer subordinate to another with the help of the conjunctions “as”, “as if”, “as if”, but only in the sense of the coordinating conjunction-adverb “so” associated with it. Grammatically, this is a "composed simile". Here is an example from Fet's lyrics:

Only you, poet, have a winged word sound

Grabs on the fly and fixes suddenly

And the dark delirium of the soul and herbs an indistinct smell;

So, for the boundless, leaving the meager valley,

An eagle flies beyond the clouds of Jupiter,

A sheaf of lightning carrying instantaneous in faithful paws.

And, as a lion attacks the calves and suddenly crushes

I haul a calf or a heifer grazing in a green grove, -

So both Priamids from the horses of Diomedes, who do not want,

Ruthlessly knocked down to dust and tore off the armor from the afflicted,

He gave the horses to the minnows, but they were driven to the stern of the ship. (Iliad)

The function of an extended comparison is to reveal a number of features of one phenomenon or to characterize a whole group of phenomena.

Comparisons are subdivided on the simple("Girl, black-haired and tender as night", A.M. Gorky) and complex("Die my verse, die like a private, like our nameless ones died during the assaults", V. Mayakovsky).

There are also:

• negative comparisons:

"Not two clouds converged in the sky, two daring knights converged" (A.S. Pushkin). From folklore, these comparisons passed into Russian poetry (“Not the wind, blowing from a height, touched the sheets on a moonlit night; you touched my soul - it is anxious, like sheets, it is like a harp, multi-stringed”, A.K. Tolstoy). In negative comparisons, one object is opposed to another. In a parallel depiction of two phenomena, the form of negation is both a way of comparing and a way of transferring meanings.

• indefinite comparisons, in which the highest assessment of what is described is given, without, however, receiving a specific figurative expression ("You can't tell, you can't describe what life is like when you hear your own artillery in a battle for someone else's fire", A.T. Tvardovsky). Indefinite comparisons also include the folklore stable turnover, neither in a fairy tale to say, nor to describe with a pen.

11. The concept of the literary process.

The literary process is the literary life of a certain country and era (in the totality of its phenomena and facts), and secondly, the centuries-old development of literature on a global, worldwide scale. In the second meaning, lit. The process is the subject of comparative historical literary criticism (Khalizev.) It is already possible to designate this term as a set of works for a certain period of time.

L.p. is not strictly unambiguous: literary memory is erased, some works disappear from it (ancient ones, for example). Some things leave our everyday reading (works of the 1810s). Entire layers of literature are forgotten (Radishchevites, although their work was very popular).

Literary creativity is subject to historical changes. But literary evolution takes place on a certain steady, stable basis. In the composition of culture there are individualized and dynamic phenomena - on the one hand, on the other hand - structures are universal, transtemporal, static, often referred to as a topic (place, space). Topoi (khalizev): types of emotional mood, moral and philosophical problems (good, evil, truth, beauty), eternal themes and an arsenal of artistic forms that always and everywhere find their use - constitute the foundation of continuity, without which lit. process is not possible.

There are moments of commonality and repetition in the development of the literatures of different countries. The stages of the literary process are habitually conceived as corresponding to those stages in the history of mankind that manifested themselves most fully in European countries, especially in Romanesque. When these views and ideals turn out to be “prerequisites” for the work of writers from different countries, then in their very work, in the content and form of works, there may also be certain similarities. This is how stadial communities arise in the literature of different peoples. On their basis, within their limits in different literatures, of course, at the same time, the national characteristics of the literatures of different peoples, their national originality, arising from the originality of the ideological and cultural development of this or that people, are manifested.

This is the basic regularity of world literary development.

Ancient and medieval literature was characterized by the prevalence of works with non-artistic functions (religious, ritual, informative, business), the widespread existence of anonymity, the predominance of oral creativity over writing. This literature was characterized by a lack of realism. Stage 1 World Literature- archaic period. There is no literary criticism, artistic and creative programs, so it is impossible to talk about the literary process here.

Then second stage, which lasted from ser. 1 thousand. BC. until the middle of the 18th century. Here is the traditionalism of artistic consciousness and "poetics of style and genre": writers focused on pre-made forms of speech that met the requirements of rhetoric and were dependent on genre canons. Two stages are distinguished here, the boundary of which was the Renaissance. On the second, literature moves from an impersonal to a personal beginning (although still within the framework of traditionalism), literature becomes more secular.

The third stage was the era after the Enlightenment and romanticism, the main thing here was "individual creative artistic consciousness." The "poetics of the author" dominates. Literature is extremely close to human being, the era of individual author's styles is coming. This took place in the romanticism and realism of the 19th century, in modernism. The examples cited show that, for all the stadial commonality, the literature of individual peoples not only differs in national originality, but also, arising in a class society, contains internal and artistic differences.

Factors that determine the boundaries of the casting process:

1. The work must have a material form.
2. literary clubs \ associations (writers who consider themselves close on any issues)

Writers act as a certain group, conquering part of the literary process. Literature is, as it were, "divided" between them. They issue manifestos expressing the general sentiments of a particular group, predicting the path along which the direction will go. Manifestos appear at the time of the formation of a literary group.

1. literary criticism of published works. The author should be noticed by literary criticism. For example, Gogol's first work, Hans Kbchelbecker, was destroyed by the author. As a result, he was removed from the literary process.
2. oral criticism \ discussion of works The work should attract public opinion. For example, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" caused a wide resonance in society, was nominated for the Lenin Prize. This indicates that the work has entered the literary process.
3. awarding prizes
4. journalism
5. unofficial distribution

As the literary process proceeds, various literary communities and trends arise. The literary direction is one of the factors of the literary process. One should speak about a literary trend only if the writers within it are aware of their commonality and determine their literary position.

Classicism dominated in the 18th century. With its strict canonicity, rhetoric.

In the 19th century (especially in its first third) the development of literature proceeded under the sign of romanticism, which opposed classicist and enlightenment rationalism. Initially romanticism established itself in Germany, having received a deep theoretical justification, and soon spread throughout the European continent and beyond. It was this artistic movement that marked a globally significant shift from traditionalism to the poetics of the author. Romanticism (in particular - German) is very heterogeneous. V.M. Zhirmunsky was the main figure in the romantic movement of the early 19th century. the scientist considered not two worlds and not the experience of a tragic discord with reality (in the spirit of Hoffmann and Heine), but the idea of ​​the spirituality of human existence, of its “permeation” with the divine principle.

Following romanticism, inheriting it, and in some ways challenging it, in the 19th century. a new literary and artistic community, denoted by the word realism. The essence of realism in relation to the literature of the last century (speaking of its best examples, the phrase "classical realism" is often used) and its place in the literary process are understood in different ways.

The essence of the classical realism of the last century lies in the wide development of the living connections of a person with his close environment. Realism (in contrast to romanticism with its powerful "Byronic branch") is inclined not to the exaltation and idealization of a hero alienated from reality. Reality was perceived by realist writers as imperiously demanding from a person responsible involvement in it.

In the XX century. other, new literary communities coexist and interact with traditional realism. This is, in particular, socialist realism, aggressively imposed by political power in the USSR, the countries of the socialist camp and spread even beyond their borders.

The literature of socialist realism usually relied on the forms of depicting life characteristic of classical realism, but in its essence it opposed the creative attitudes and attitudes of most writers of the 19th century. In the 1930s and later, the opposition of the two stages of the realistic method proposed by M. Gorky was persistently repeated and varied. This is, firstly, characteristic of the XIX century. critical realism, which, as it was believed, rejected the existing social being with its class antagonisms and, secondly, socialist realism, which asserted the newly emerging in the 20th century. reality, comprehended life in its revolutionary development towards socialism and communism.

At the forefront of literature and art in the XX century. advanced modernism, which manifested itself most clearly in poetry. The features of modernism are the maximum free self-disclosure of the authors, their persistent desire to update the artistic language, the focus more on the universal and cultural-historically distant than on close reality. In all this, modernism is closer to romanticism than to classical realism.

Modernism is extremely heterogeneous. He declared himself in a number of directions and schools, especially numerous at the beginning of the century, among which the first place (not only chronologically, but also in terms of the role he played in art and culture) rightfully belongs to symbolism especially French and Russian. It is not surprising that the literature that came to replace it is called post-symbolism, which has now become the subject of close attention of scientists (acmeism, futurism and other literary movements and schools).

As part of modernism, which largely determined the face of literature of the 20th century, it is legitimate to single out two trends that are closely related to each other, but at the same time are multidirectional: avant-garde, which survived its "peak" point in futurism, and (using the term of V. I. Tyupa) neotraditionalism, which is very difficult to separate from avant-garde: “The powerful opposition of these spiritual forces creates that productive tension of creative reflection, that field of gravity, in which, one way or another, all more or less significant phenomena of art of the 20th century are located. Such tension is often found within the works themselves, so it is hardly possible to draw an unambiguous line of demarcation between avant-garde and neotraditionalists. The essence of the artistic paradigm of our century, apparently, is in the incongruity and inseparability of the moments that form this confrontation. The author names T.S. Eliot, O.E. Mandelstam, A.A. Akhmatov, B.L. Pasternak, I.A. Brodsky.

Terms (just in case, if you don't want to - don't)): literary currents- this is the refraction in the work of writers and poets of certain social views (worldviews, ideologies), and directions- these are writers' groupings that arise on the basis of a common aesthetic views and certain programs of artistic activity (expressed in treatises, manifestos, slogans). Currents and directions in this sense of the words are facts of individual national literatures, but not of international communities.

International literary communities ( art systems, as I.F. called them Volkov) do not have a clear chronological framework: often in the same era, various literary and general artistic “trends” coexist, which seriously complicates their systematic, logically ordered consideration.

In recent years, the study of the literary process on a global scale has increasingly emerged as a development historical poetics. The subject of this scientific discipline, which exists as part of comparative historical literary criticism, is the evolution of verbal and artistic forms (with content), as well as the creative principles of writers: their aesthetic attitudes and artistic worldview.

Consideration of literature and its evolution in the aspect of style, understood very broadly, as a stable complex of formal artistic properties. International Literary Communities D.S. Likhachev is called "great styles", delimiting in their composition primary(gravitating towards simplicity and plausibility) and secondary(more decorative, formalized, conditional). The scientist considers the centuries-old literary process as a kind of oscillatory movement between primary (longer) and secondary (short-term) styles. He refers to the first. Romanesque style, Renaissance, classicism, realism; to the second - gothic, baroque, romanticism.

For a number of decades (starting from the 1930s), the term creative method as a characteristic of literature as knowledge (development) of social life. The successive currents and directions were considered as marked by a greater or lesser degree of presence in them. realism. So, I.F. Volkov analyzed artistic systems (371) mainly from the point of view of the creative method underlying them.

Epos as a literary genre.

In furs.

Reproducing life in the word, using all the possibilities of human speech, fiction surpasses all other forms of art in the versatility, diversity and richness of its content. The content is often called what is directly depicted in the work, what can be retold after reading it. But it is not exactly. If we have before us an epic or dramatic work, then we can retell what happened to the heroes, what happened to them. As a rule, it is generally impossible to retell what is depicted in a lyrical work. Therefore, it is necessary to distinguish between what is known in the work, and what is depicted in it. Characters are depicted, creatively created, fictional by the writer, endowed with all sorts of individual characteristics, placed in certain relationships. The general, essential features of life are known. Individual actions and experiences of characters and heroes serve as a way of expressing ideological and emotional understanding and emotional assessment of the general, essential in life. The emotional-generalizing thought of the writer expressed in the work is called an idea. In its cognition, the analysis of the work should also consist.

1. Subject- these are the phenomena of reality that are reflected in this work. Subject- the object of knowledge. The subject of the image in works of fiction can be a variety of phenomena of human life, the life of nature, the animal and plant world, as well as material culture (buildings, furnishings, types of cities, etc.). But the main subject of knowledge in fiction is the social characters of people both in their external manifestations, relationships, activities, and in their inner, spiritual life, in the state and development of their thoughts and experiences.
2. Issues- this is the ideological comprehension by the writer of those social characters that he depicted in the work. This comprehension lies in the fact that the writer singles out and enhances those properties, sides, relations of the characters depicted, which he, based on his ideological worldview, considers the most significant

The problematic, to an even greater extent than the subject matter, depends on the author's worldview. Therefore, the life of the same social environment can be understood differently by writers with different ideological worldviews. Gorky and Kuprin depicted the factory working environment in their works. However, in understanding her life, they are far from each other. Gorky in the novel "Mother", in the drama "Enemies" is interested in people in this environment who are politically minded and morally strong. Kuprin, in the story "Moloch", sees in the workers a faceless mass of exhausted, suffering, worthy of sympathy people.

13. Works of art, fiction in particular, always express ideological-emotional attitude writers to those social characters that they depict. It is precisely thanks to the expression of this assessment in images that literary works have such a strong effect on the thoughts, feelings, will of readers and listeners, on their entire inner world.

The attitude to life expressed in the work, or its ideological and emotional assessment, always depends on the writer's understanding of the characters he portrays and always thus follows from his worldview. The writer can express satisfaction with the life he perceives, sympathy for one or another of its properties, admiration for them, justification for them, in short, your ideological affirmation e life. Or he can express dissatisfaction with some other properties of life, their condemnation, the protest and indignation caused by them, in short, his ideological rejection of the characters portrayed. If a writer is dissatisfied with some life phenomena, then his assessment is an ideological denial. So, for example, Pushkin showed the free life of the gypsies in order to express his romantic admiration for civil liberty in general and deep dissatisfaction with the "bondage of stuffy cities." Ostrovsky portrayed the tyranny of merchants and landlords in order to condemn the entire Russian "dark kingdom" of his era.

All aspects of the ideological content of a work of art - themes, problems and ideological assessment - are in organic unity. Idea literary work is the unity of all aspects of its content; this is a figurative, emotional, generalizing thought of the writer, which determines the deep level of the content of the work and manifests itself both in the choice, and in the comprehension, and in the assessment of the characters.

Not always an artistic idea was perceived as the author's. In the early stages of the existence of literature, they were recognized as an expression objective truth having a divine origin. It was believed that the Muses brought inspiration to poets. Homer begins the Iliad: "Anger, Goddess, sing to Achilles, son of Peleus."

Literature and mythology.

Myth is a scientific form of knowledge in a mytho-poetic form. Mythology is not a phenomenon of the past, it is manifested in modern culture. The constant interaction of L. and m. proceeds directly, in the form of a "transfusion" of myth into literature, and indirectly: through the visual arts, rituals, folk festivals, religious mysteries, and in recent centuries - through the scientific concepts of mythology, aesthetic and philosophical teachings and folklore . The scientific concepts of folklore have a great influence on the processes of interaction between L. and M.

Myths are characteristic of ancient, partly ancient Russian literature.