Satirical depiction of landowners in the poem by N. A
The crowning achievement of N. A. Nekrasov’s work is the folk epic poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” In this monumental work, the poet sought to show as fully as possible the main features of contemporary Russian reality and to reveal the deep contradictions between the interests of the people and the exploitative essence of the ruling classes, and above all the local nobility, which in the 20-70s of the 19th century had already completely outlived its usefulness as an advanced class and began to hinder the further development of the country.
In a dispute between men
About “who lives cheerfully and freely in Rus',” the landowner was declared the first contender for the right to call himself happy. However, Nekrasov significantly expanded the plot framework outlined by the plot of the work, as a result of which the image of the landowner appears in the poem only in the fifth chapter, which is called “The Landowner”.
For the first time, the landowner appears before the reader as the peasants saw him: “Some kind of gentleman, round, mustachioed, pot-bellied, with a cigar in his mouth.” With the help of diminutive forms, Nekrasov conveys the condescending, contemptuous attitude of men towards the former owner of living souls.
The following author's description of the appearance of the landowner Obolt-Obolduev (Nekrasov uses the device of the meaning of the surname) and his own story about his “noble” origin further enhances the ironic tone of the narrative.
The basis of Obolduev’s satirical image is a striking contrast between the significance of life, nobility, learning and patriotism, which he ascribes to himself with “dignity,” and the actual insignificance of existence, extreme ignorance, emptiness of thoughts, baseness of feelings. Sad about the pre-reform time dear to his heart, with “all luxury”, endless holidays, hunting and drunken revelry, Obolt-Obolduev takes on the absurd pose of a son of the fatherland, a father of the peasantry, caring about the future of Russia. But let us remember his confession: “I littered the people’s treasury.” He makes ridiculous “patriotic” speeches: “Mother Rus' willingly lost its knightly, warlike, majestic appearance.” Obolt-Obolduev's enthusiastic story about landowner life under serfdom is perceived by the reader as an unconscious self-exposure of the insignificance and meaninglessness of the existence of former serf owners.
For all his comedy, Obolt-Obolduev is not so harmlessly funny. In the past, a convinced serf owner, even after the reform he hopes, as before, to “live by the labor of others,” which is what he sees as the purpose of his life.
But still, the times of such landowners are gone. Both the serf owners and the peasants themselves feel this. Although Obolt-Obolduev speaks to the men in a condescending and patronizing tone, he still has to endure the unequivocal mockery of the peasants. Nekrasov also feels this: Obolt-Obolduev is simply unworthy of the author’s hatred and deserves only contempt and unkind ridicule.
But if Nekrasov speaks of Obolt-Obolduev with irony, then the image of another landowner in the poem - Prince Utyatin - is depicted in the chapter “The Last One” with obvious sarcasm. The very title of the chapter is symbolic, in which the author, sharply sarcastically using to some extent the technique of hyperbolization, tells the story of a tyrant - the “last man” who does not want to part with the serfdom of landowner Rus'.
If Obolt-Obolduev still feels that there is no return to the old ways, then the old man Utyatin, who has lost his mind, even in whose appearance there is little human left, over the years of lordship and despotic power has become so imbued with the conviction that he is “by the grace of God” a master who “has the family is written to watch over the stupid peasantry,” that peasant reform seems to this despot to be something unnatural. That is why it did not take much effort for his relatives to assure him that “the landowners were ordered to turn back the peasants.”
Talking about the wild antics of the “last man” - the last serf owner Utyatin (which seem especially wild in the changed conditions), Nekrasov warns of the need for a decisive and final eradication of all remnants of serfdom. After all, it was they, preserved in the minds of not only former slaves, that ultimately destroyed the “unyielding” peasant Agap Petrov: “If it weren’t for such an opportunity, Agap would not have died.” Indeed, unlike Obolt-Obolduev, Prince Utyatin, even after serfdom, remained virtually the master of life (“It is known that it was not self-interest, but arrogance that cut him off, he lost the Mote”). Wanderers are also afraid of duckling: “Yes, the master is stupid: sue later...” And although the Posledysh himself - the “foolish landowner,” as the peasants call him - is more funny than scary, by the end of the chapter Nekrasov reminds the reader that the peasant reform did not bring true liberation to the people and real power still remains in the hands of the nobility. The prince's heirs shamelessly deceive the peasants, who ultimately lose their water meadows.
The entire work is imbued with a feeling of the inevitable death of the autocratic system. The support of this system - the landowners - are depicted in the poem as the “last-born”, living out their days. The ferocious Shalashnikov has long been gone, Prince Utyatin died as a “landowner,” and the insignificant Obolt-Obolduev has no future. The picture of an empty manor’s estate, which is being taken away brick by brick by servants (chapter “Peasant Woman”), has a symbolic character.
Thus, in the poem we contrast two worlds, two spheres of life: the world of the landowners and the world of the peasantry. Nekrasov, with the help of satirical images of landowners, leads readers to the conclusion that the happiness of the people is possible without Obolt-Obolduev and the Utyatins and only when the people themselves become the true masters of their lives.
A satirical depiction of landowners. In the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” Nekrasov, as if on behalf of millions of peasants, acted as an angry denouncer of the socio-political system of Russia and pronounced a severe sentence on it. The poet painfully experienced the submissiveness of the people, their downtroddenness, darkness.
Nekrasov looks at the landowners through the eyes of the peasants, without any idealization or sympathy, drawing their images.
Nekrasov satirically and angrily talks about the parasitic life of landowners in the recent past, when the landowner's chest breathed freely and easily.
The master, who owned “baptized property,” was the sovereign king in his estate, where everything “submitted” to him:
There is no contradiction in anyone,
I will have mercy on whomever I want,
I'll execute whoever I want.
The landowner Obolt-Obolduev remembers the past. In conditions of complete impunity and uncontrolled arbitrariness, the rules of behavior of landowners, their habits and views took shape:
Law is my desire!
The fist is my police!
The blow is sparkling,
The blow is tooth-breaking,
Hit the cheekbones!..
The abolition of serfdom hit “the master with one end, / the peasant with the other.” The master cannot and does not want to adapt to the living conditions of growing capitalism - the desolation of the estates and the ruin of the masters becomes inevitable.
Without any regret, the poet speaks about how the manor’s houses are being dismantled “brick by brick.” Nekrasov’s satirical attitude towards bars is also reflected in the surnames with which he gives them: Obolt-Obolduev, Utyatin (“Last One”). The image of Prince Utyatin, the Last One, is especially expressive in the poem. This is a gentleman who “has been weird and foolish all his life.” He remained a cruel despot-serf owner even after 1861.
Completely unaware of his peasants, the Posledysh gives absurd orders for the estate, orders “the widow Terentyeva to marry Gavrila Zhokhov, to repair the hut again, so that they can live in it, be fruitful and rule the tax!”
The men greet this order with laughter, since “that widow is nearly seventy, and the groom is six years old!”
The Posledysh appoints a deaf-mute fool as a watchman, and orders the shepherds to quiet the herd so that the cows do not wake up the master with their mooing.
Not only are the Last One’s orders absurd, he himself is even more absurd and strange, stubbornly refusing to come to terms with the abolition of serfdom. His appearance is also caricatured:
Nose beak like a hawk's
The mustache is gray, long and - different eyes:
One healthy one glows,
And the left one is cloudy, cloudy,
Like a tin penny!
The landowner Shalashnikov, who “used military force” to subjugate his own peasants, is also shown to be a cruel tyrant-oppressor.
Savely says that the German manager Vogel is even more cruel. Under him, “hard labor came to the Korezh peasant - he ruined him to the bone!”
The men and the master are irreconcilable, eternal enemies. “Praise the grass in the haystack, and the master in the coffin,” says the poet. As long as gentlemen exist, there is no and cannot be happiness for the peasant - this is the conclusion to which Nekrasov leads the reader of the poem with iron consistency.
By reflecting on what a person should be and what true human happiness should consist of, the first four chapters psychologically prepare the reader for a meeting with Gavrila Afanasyevich Obolt-Obolduev. In the chapter “The Landowner,” which returns the development of the plot to the narrative scheme outlined by the “Prologue,” in sharp contrast with the high moral ideals of the people (the image of Yermil), the life of one of those who turned Russian villages into Razutovo and Neelovo, did not give a peasant to sigh (“Nedykhanyev Uyezd”), saw in him a working animal, a “horse.”
As we remember, already in the 40s, the landowner and the peasant appeared to Nekrasov as two polar quantities, antagonists, whose interests were incompatible. In “Who Lives Well in Rus',” he pitted landowner and peasant Rus' against each other and, with his authorial will, forced Obolt to “confess” to the peasants, talk about his life, submitting it to the people’s judgment.
The satirically drawn image of a landowner - a lover of hound hunting - runs through many of Nekrasov’s works of the 40s (the vaudeville “You Can’t Hide an Awl in a Sack...”, “The Moneylender”, the poems “Hound Hunt”, “Motherland”). It has long been established that the image of the “gloomy ignoramus” in “Motherland” goes back to the real personality of the poet’s father. Alexey Sergeevich Nekrasov was a very typical and colorful figure of the era of serfdom, and researchers (A.V. Popov, V.A. Arkhipov, A.F. Tarasov) are increasingly discerning the features of his appearance in the stingy, gloomy, rude hero of “Hound Hunt” ", and in the image of Gavrila Afanasyevich Obolt-Obolduev. Bolta has in common with A.S. Nekrasov the fist method of dealing with serfs, a passion for hunting, and noble ambition. But, as you know, the type is never equal to the prototype. Obolt-Obolduev is a landowner, an image that synthesizes the traits observed by Nekrasov not only in his father, but also in other landowners of the post-reform era.
The image of Obolt is drawn satirically. This determines the author’s choice of the hero’s surname, the features of his portrait characteristics, the meaning and tone of the landowner’s story. The author's work on the hero's name is very interesting. In the Vladimir province there were landowners, the Abolduevs and the Obolduevs. In Nekrasov’s time, the word “stun” meant: “ignorant, uncouth, blockhead.” This satirical shade in the real surname of an old noble family attracted the attention of Nekrasov. And then the poet, again using the actual surnames of Yaroslavl nobles, imbues the surname Obolduev with additional satirical meaning: Brykovo-Obalduev (= an idiot with a temper), Dolgovo-Obalduev (= a ruined idiot) and, finally, modeled after real double surnames - Obolt -Obolduev (= twice a blockhead, for “blockhead” is a synonym for the word “blockhead”).
The image of the landowner Gavrila Afanasyevich Obolt-Obolduev is built by the author on identifying the constant discrepancy between what the hero thinks about himself, what meaning he puts into his words, and the impression he and his story make on listeners - men and the reader. And this impression of insignificance, insignificance, complacency, swagger and comicality of the hero is created by the very first lines depicting Obolt’s appearance. “Some round gentleman appeared before the wanderers. / Mustachioed, pot-bellied,” “ruddy. / Portentous, stocky.” In his mouth he had not a cigar, but a “cigarette”; he pulled out not a pistol, but a “pistol”, the same as the master himself, “plump.” In this context, the mention of the “valiant tricks” takes on an ironic connotation, especially since the hero is clearly not a brave dozen: when he saw the men, he “freaked out” and “pulled out a pistol”
And the six-barreled barrel
He brought it to the wanderers:
- Don `t move! If you move,
Robbers! robbers!
I'll put it on the spot!..
Obolt's belligerent cowardice is so dissonant with the intentions of the truth-seekers that it involuntarily causes them to laugh.
The talk is funny. It’s funny when he talks with pathos about the “exploits” of his ancestors, who amused the empress with bears, tried to set fire to Moscow and rob the treasury, when he boasts about his “family tree.” It’s funny when, forgetting about the “glass of sherry”, “jumping up from the Persian carpet”, in front of seven keen observers, in the excitement of the hunt, waves his arms, jumps up, shouts in a wild voice “Hey! hoo-hoo! a-tu!”, imagining that he was poisoning a fox.
But Obolt-Obolduev is not only funny to men. Internal hostility and distrust of the landowner are evident in every word, in every remark of the wanderers. They do not believe the “honest, noble” word, opposing it to the “Christian” one, since the word
Noblesse with abuse,
With a push and a punch,
It is hateful for a peasant who is beginning to realize his human and civil rights.
The remarks exchanged between the landowner and the peasants reveal mutual contempt and mockery, poorly hidden in Obolt:
Sit down, GENTLEMEN!...
Please sit down, CITIZENS! —
hidden in sly irony - among men. With ironic remarks they expose the absurdity of Obolt’s class arrogance:
Bone white, bone black,
And look, they are so different...
They evaluate the “exploits” of his ancestors:
Quite a few of them are staggering
Scoundrels and now...
According to the proverb “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree”, Gavrilo Afanasyevich himself is assessed:
And you're like an apple
Are you coming out of that tree?
The hidden, but every now and then erupting hostility of the peasants towards the landowner is justified by the whole meaning of his story about the free life in pre-reform times, when the landowners in Rus' lived “like Christ in the bosom.”
The basis of the feeling of happiness in life for Obolt is the consciousness of owning property: “your villages,” “your forests,” “your fields,” “your fat turkeys,” “your juicy liqueurs,” “your actors, music,” each grass whispers the word “ yours." This self-satisfied rapture in one’s happiness is not only insignificant in comparison with the “concern” of truth-seekers, but is infinitely cynical, because it is asserted “from a position of strength”:
There is no contradiction in anyone,
I will have mercy on whomever I want,
I'll execute whoever I want.
And although Obolt immediately tries to present his relationship with the serfs in patriarchal and idyllic tones (joint prayers in the manor house, the celebration of Christ on Easter), the men, not believing a single word of his, ironically think:
You knocked them down with a stake, or what?
Praying in the manor's house?
In front of those who are straining themselves from immeasurable labor (“the peasant navel is cracking”), Obolt swaggeringly declares his inability and unwillingness to work, his contempt for work:
Noble classes
We don't learn how to work...
I smoked God's heaven...
But the “landowner’s chest” breathed “freely and easily” during the times of serfdom, until “the great chain broke”... At the moment of meeting with the truth-seekers, Obolt-Obolduev was filled with bitterness:
And everything went! everything is over!
Chu! Death knell!..
...Through life according to the landowners
They're calling!..
Gavrila Afanasyevich notices the changes that have occurred in the public life of Russia. This is the decline of the landowner’s economy (“the estates are being transferred,” “the beautiful house of the landowner has been dismantled brick by brick,” “the fields are unfinished,” the peasant’s “robber” ax sounds in the manor’s forest), this is also the growth of bourgeois entrepreneurship (“drinking houses are springing up”) . But most of all, Obolt-Obolduev is angered by the men who do not have the same respect, who “play pranks” in the landowners’ forests, or even worse - they rise to revolt. The landowner perceives these changes with a feeling of bitter hostility, since they are associated with the destruction of patriarchal landowner Rus', so dear to his heart.
With all the certainty of the satirical coloring of the image, Obolt, however, is not a mask, but a living person. The author does not deprive his story of subjective lyricism. Gavrila Afanasyevich almost inspiredly paints pictures of hound hunting and family life in “noble nests.” In his speech, pictures of Russian nature appear, high vocabulary and lyrical images appear:
Oh mother, oh homeland!
We are not sad about ourselves,
I feel sorry for you, dear.
Obolt repeats the words twice: “We are not sad about ourselves.” He, in the frustration of his feelings, perhaps really believes that he is sad not about himself, but about the fate of his homeland. But too often in the landowner’s speech the pronouns “I” and “mine” were heard for one to believe for even a minute in his filial love for the Motherland. Oboltu-Obolduev is bitter for himself, he is crying because the broken chain of serfdom has hit him too, the reform heralded the beginning of the end of the landowners.
Marx once wrote that “humanity laughingly says goodbye to its past, to obsolete forms of life.” Obolt precisely embodies those obsolete forms of life to which Russia was saying goodbye. And although Gavrila Afanasyevich is going through difficult moments, his subjective drama is not an objective historical drama. And Nekrasov, whose gaze is directed towards the Russia of the future, teaches laughing to part with the ghosts of the past, which is served by the satirical and humorous coloring of the chapter “The Landowner”.
In the dispute between men about “who lives happily and freely in Rus',” the first contender for the title of happy is the landowner. The poet of the revolutionary struggle, who painfully experienced the obedience of the people, their darkness and downtroddenness, decides to look at the happiness of the landowners through the eyes of the enslaved peasants themselves.
Here is a portrait of the first landowner:
... round,
Mustachioed, pot-bellied,
With a cigar in his mouth.
...ruddy,
Stately, planted,
Sixty years old;
The mustache is gray, long,
Well done...
The round and rosy-cheeked Obolt-Obolduev, who ended his story-memoir with suffering sobs, is not at all harmless for all his comicality. In the chapter “The Landowner,” the author of the poem was able to satirically show the brave skills of this dignified despot. At the same time, Obolt-Obolduev exposes himself not only at the moment of regrets about the days gone by, when “the landowner’s chest breathed freely and easily”: ... I will have mercy on whomever I want,
I'll execute whoever I want.
Law is my desire!
The fist is my police!
The blow is sparkling,
The blow is tooth-breaking.
Hit the cheekbone!..
Obolt-Obolduev is no less scary in his enthusiastically absurd pose of a patriot caring about the future of Russia.
We are not sad about ourselves,
We are sorry that you, Mother Rus',
Lost with pleasure
Your knightly, warlike,
Majestic view!
Russia is not foreign.
Our feelings are delicate,
We are proud!
Noble classes
We don't learn how to work.
We have a bad official
And he won’t sweep the floors...
Obvious ignorance, embezzlement, emptiness of thoughts, baseness of Obolt-Obolduev’s feelings, his ability to live only on the labor of others against the backdrop of talk about the benefits for Russia, that “the fields are unfinished, the crops are not sown, there is no trace of order!”, allow the peasants to do sympathetically mocking conclusion:
The great chain has broken,
It tore and splintered:
One way for the master,
Others don't care!..
No less expressive is the image of another landowner with the same “speaking” surname - Prince Utyatin-Last One. The attitude of the author of the poem towards this character is already felt in the caricatured description of his appearance:
Nose beak like a hawk's
Mustache is gray and long
And - different eyes:
One healthy one glows,
And the left one is cloudy, cloudy,
Like a tin penny!
The very title of the chapter about this out-of-mind old landowner is also symbolic - “The Last One.” Presented in the poem with great sarcasm, the master, who “has been acting weird and fooling around all his life,” is ready to accept on faith and for his own pleasure the performance that his former slaves are performing for him for a reward. The very idea of any peasant reform is so beyond Utyatin’s head that his relatives and heirs have no difficulty in assuring him that “the landowners were ordered to turn back the peasants.” That’s why the mayor’s words sound like sweet music to him, perceived without realizing their sarcastic essence:
It's destined for you
Watch out for the stupid peasantry
And we have to work, obey,
Pray for the gentlemen!
Now the order is new,
And he's still fooling around...
What are the last truly wild orders of this “foolish landowner”, which the people are making fun of: to “marry Gavrila Zhokhov to the widow Terentyeva, to fix the hut anew, so that they can live in it, be fruitful and rule the tax!”, while “that widow - under seventy, and the groom is six years old!”; a deaf-mute fool is appointed guard of the landowner's estate; The shepherds were ordered to quiet the cows so that they would not wake the master with their mooing.
But it is not at all the foolish heirs of Prince Utyatin who shamelessly deceive the peasants, depriving them of the water meadows promised to them. So, essentially, nothing changes between the nobles and peasants: some have power and wealth, others have nothing but poverty and lawlessness.
In the chapter “Savely, the hero of the Holy Russian” there is an image of another landowner-serf-owner, the cruel Shalashnikov, “using military force” subduing the peasants, extorting rent from them:
Shalashnikov tore excellently.
Judging by the story about him, this inhuman beast of a landowner could not do anything else. That’s why “I didn’t get such great income.”
Looking at Obolt-Obolduev, Prince Utyatin, and the hard-hearted Shalashnikov, the reader understands that if happiness is possible in Rus', it is only without such “divine grace” gentlemen who do not want to part with the serfdom of landowner Rus'.
The satirical nature of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is confirmed by the symbolic picture of an empty manor’s estate, which the servants are taking away brick by brick. It is consonant with the author’s idea that the various “last-born” depicted in the poem are living out their days, just as, according to Nekrasov, the autocratic structure of Russia, which gave birth to such serf-owners, is also living out its days.
