Gogol's style in his works. Artistic world of gogol

The Place of N. V. Gogol's Creativity in Russian Literature of the 19th Century Gogol and Pushkin.
The early romantic work of the writer. "Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka",
Mirgorod. The connection of these works with folklore and reliance on the traditions of Russian literature. Fantasy and reality in his works.

In the first half of the 19th century, many great poets and writers lived and worked in Russia. However, in Russian literature it is generally accepted that the "Gogol" period of Russian literature begins in the 40s of the 19th century. This formulation was proposed by Chernyshevsky. He attributes to Gogol the merit of firmly introducing satirical - or, as it would be more fair to call it, critical - direction into Russian fine literature. Another merit is the foundation of a new school of writers.

Gogol's creations, which exposed social vices Tsarist Russia, constituted one of the most important links in the formation of Russian critical realism.
Never before in Russia did the gaze of a satirist penetrate so deeply into the everyday, into the everyday side. social life society. Gogol's comedy is the comedy of the established, daily, habit-formed, the comedy of petty life, to which the satirist gave a huge generalizing meaning.
After the satire of classicism, Gogol's work was one of the milestones of the new realistic literature. The significance of Gogol for Russian literature was enormous. With the advent of Gogol, literature turned to Russian life, to the Russian people; began to strive for originality, nationality, from the rhetorical strove to become natural, natural. In no other Russian writer has this aspiration achieved such success as in Gogol.
To do this, it was necessary to pay attention to the crowd, to the masses, to portray ordinary people, and unpleasant people were only an exception to the general rule. This great merit from Gogol. In doing so, he completely changed the view of art itself.

Gogol's influence on Russian literature was enormous. Not only all young talents rushed to the path indicated by him, but also some writers, who had already gained fame, went along this path, leaving their former one.

They spoke about their admiration for Gogol and about their connections with his work.
Nekrasov, Turgenev, Goncharov, Herzen, and in the 20th century we observe the influence
Gogol on Mayakovsky. Akhmatov, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov and others.

Chernyshevsky claimed that Pushkin was the father of Russian poetry, and
Gogol is the father of Russian prose literature.

Of course, in Pushkin's prose works, which represent pictures alien to the Russian world, there are no doubts that there are Russian elements.
But how to prove that, for example, the poems "Mozart and Salieri", "The Stone Guest",
"The Miserly Knight" could only be written by a Russian poet? But is it possible to ask such a question in relation to Gogol? Of course not. Only a Russian writer can depict Russian reality with such amazing fidelity.

Gogol does not decorate, does not soften anything due to love for ideals or some pre-accepted ideas, or habitual predilections, as, for example, Pushkin in "Onegin" idealized the landowner's life. However, they have many common points in their works, the influence of Pushkin on Gogol is evident. For example, a letter from a stranger to Chichikov is a parody copy of the letter
Tatyana to Onegin, and the scene of Chichikov and Korobochka is the same copy of the scene of the meeting of Herman and the Countess. Pushkin and Gogol were friends. Pushkin highly appreciated the work of Gogol. He recommends to the public the books of Gogol, who since the time of "Evenings ..." has been constantly developing and improving. With nobility and generosity, with true generosity, which marks genius,
Pushkin gave Gogol the plots of two of his largest works: "The Government Inspector" and
"Dead Souls", and Gogol was always grateful to Pushkin, considered him his best teacher, reverently bowed to his memory.

However, these were already his mature works. And if we talk about his early work, then we can mention the first surviving work of the high school student Gogol - the poem "Hanz Küchelgarten" (1827), which is characterized primarily by romantic pathos, expressing the illusion of reorganization inner world person. But the author's ironic attitude towards the main character, who is unable to realize his romantic dreams by his actions, does not tear the poem away from the comical element of style, which soon, thanks to the brilliant embodiment in "Evenings ...", introduced Gogol to great literature. The poem "Gantz ...", as well as some of the stories that came out after it, as well as "The Overcoat" and others, were not successful.

Exit in 1831 - 1832. in light of both parts of "Evenings ...", which caused an open, enthusiastic review of the poet, were also not accepted by conservative criticism, which refused to recognize the creative success of the young writer.
Like Pushkin, Belinsky supported Gogol. He not only welcomed the emergence of a new talent, but also identified its peculiar features:

1) artistic synthesis of the sublime and the comic

2) optimistic pathos

3) the all-encompassing reproduction of the "funny" in Russian life.

In "Evenings ..." Gogol's discovery was that he discovered the naturalness of life in the lives of people who stood closest to the origins of folk life. It was here that Gogol was looking for evidence (criteria) of the true and valuable, and therefore subsequently the endless variants of the human "game" - from Khlestakovism to the fantastic cult of rank - became the main objects of Gogol's satire.

In "Evenings ..." - a holiday of the national spirit. Proof of this is the image of the "publisher" beekeeper Rudy Pank, in whose intonation there is always irony. This is the laughter, where there is as much innocence as natural wisdom.

In the work, the pathos of folk and national feelings, expressed with exceptional penetration, becomes close, generally accessible to any reader at any historical time.

Let us recall the famous beginning of one of the chapters of May Night: “Do you know Ukrainian night.. Take a look at her ... "

For a century and a half now, Russian and European readers have been staring at the young heroes of the Sorochinskaya Fair, Paraska and Grinko, singing tender and naive songs to each other in full view of the entire crowd. It is impossible to break away from the folklore tale of Foma Grigorievich in "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala".

In the second part of "Evenings ..." the theme of the liberation struggle sounds, which is more clearly expressed in "Terrible Revenge". The second part is inspired by romance, especially in the descriptions of the landscape. To complete the picture of Ukrainian life, Gogol needed in "Evenings ..." such a story as "Ivan Fedorovich
Shponka and his aunt", the pathos of which, in essence, was born also by folk thinking.

After "Evenings ..." comes the next masterpiece of his creations, the book
"Mirgorod" (1835). The stories here are thematically very independent, which also affected their genres: heroic epic"Taras Bulba" and a moralistic story about Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich. But the author's thought is the same: the thought of the possibilities human spirit, about the happiness of living according to the laws of a high house that unites people and about the misfortune, absurdity, meaninglessness of existence. The stories reflected completely opposite results of human development. The question was posed sharply, which spoke of Gogol's passionate desire to see society free from such inconsistencies.

Creating "Evenings ..." and "Mirgorod" Gogol could not do without folklore, thanks to which we, reading Gogol's stories, penetrate deeper and understand the life of certain people described in them.

Constantly living in St. Petersburg, in letters to his mother, he asks him to write more folk songs, curious surnames, nicknames, legends and information about how weddings, carols are held, how boys and girls dress for festivities, fortune telling.

If we talk about fantasy and reality in the works of Gogol, then for the first time we meet with these elements in "Evenings ...".

"Evenings..." were written due to the fact that the Russian public showed interest in Ukraine during this period: its customs, way of life, literature, folklore. And so, Gogol decides to respond to the need for Ukrainian themes with his works of art.

"In "Evenings..." the characters are dominated by religious fantasy, pagan and Christian beliefs... In stories about recent events, about the present, demonic forces are perceived as superstition.
The attitude of the author himself to supernatural phenomena is ironic...
Magical fantasy is displayed by Gogol not mystically, but more or less humanized ... "

Devils, mermaids, witches are given quite real, certain human properties. So, the devil from the story "The Night Before Christmas"
"in front - a perfect German", and "behind - a provincial attorney in uniform."
And, courting Solokha, he whispered in her ear "the same thing that is usually whispered to the entire female race."

Fiction, woven into real life by the writer, acquires in
"Evenings ..." "the charm of the naive folk imagination and, undoubtedly, serves to poeticize folk life." But at the same time, Gogol's Christian outlook is gradually changing (growing). More fully than in other works, it is expressed in the story "Terrible Revenge". Here, in the image of a sorcerer, the power of the devil is personified. But this terrible force is opposed by the Orthodox religion.

With the supremacy of the satirical principle of representation, Gogol especially often turns to fantasy and the technique of "extreme contrast" in Petersburg Tales. He was convinced that "the true effect lies in the sharp opposite." But fantasy is more or less subordinated to realism here.

Deepening the display in the story "The Nose" of the absurdity of human relationships under "despotic-bureaucratic subordination", Gogol skillfully uses fantasy.

In the story "The Overcoat", the intimidated, downtrodden Bashmachkin shows his dissatisfaction with significant persons who rudely belittled and insulted him, in a state of unconsciousness, in delirium. But the author, being on the side of the hero, defending him, makes a protest in the fantastic continuation of the story.

“Gogol outlined a real motivation in a fantastic conclusion to the story. A significant person who mortally frightened Akaky Akakievich was driving along an unlit street after drinking champagne from a friend, and to him, in fear, the thief could seem to be anyone, even a dead man.”

Enriching realism with the achievements of romanticism, enlightened absolutism, creating in his work a fusion of satire and lyric "analysis of reality and dreams of a wonderful person and the future of the country", he raised critical realism to a new higher level compared to his world predecessors.

Gogol and the religious quest of his time. Christian position of the writer.
"Reflections on the Divine Liturgy".

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was a peculiar person. His character was controversial. He was often strange, withdrawn, silent, unsociable, gloomy, sometimes he acted inexplicably eccentric, and sometimes, on the contrary, he was simple and cheerful. Some people portrayed Gogol as a carefree merry fellow, mischievous and eccentric, while others portrayed him as a mystic, a martyr. Christian faith. Gogol was a deeply religious person, but this religiosity did not appear in him immediately.

Gogol dreamed of being useful to mankind. And this dream appeared in his youth. He said: “I just thought that I would curry favor and all this would be delivered by the state service. Because of this, my passion to serve was very strong in my youth.” He also said: “The thought of service never disappeared from me.” We can say that his whole life was a service, a service to Russia, a service to humanity. But in order to serve, in order to be able to do this, in his own words, one must “better know the nature of man in general and the thought of man in general.” “From now on, man and the soul of man have become, more than ever, the subject of observation. I stopped everything modern for a while ... ”Gogol re-read a lot of books, books of legislators, soul-searchers and observers of human nature. He was occupied with everything that only expressed the knowledge of people and the human soul, from the confession of a secular person to the confession of a monk. “... and on this road, insensibly, almost without knowing how, I came to Christ, seeing that in him is the key to the soul of man and that no one from the knowers of the soul has yet ascended to that height of spiritual knowledge on which he stood.” So Gogol came to God. In his "Author's Confession" he said that he used to believe in God, but "it was somehow dark and unclear."

Gogol showed his Christian position in his book Selected passages from correspondence with friends. Starting to work on this book in 1846,
Gogol was deeply convinced that he was visited by a divine revelation.
Soon, a year later, he finished work on the book. In it, he only partially used his actual letters of 1843-1846, and wrote most of the articles in the form of letters again. What is the Christian position
Gogol? That every person in the world must serve, that every person must become a Christian. And, most importantly, each person must look into his soul, know it, analyze it, because "having found the key to your soul, you will find the key to the souls of other people." Gogol said that the supreme instance of everything is the church and the solution of the questions of life is in it.

In the chapter “A few words about our church and clergy”, Gogol says that the Orthodox Church is unknown to the Russian people. He expresses deep regret about this. In the chapter “The Christian Goes Forward,” Gogol states that “there is no completed course for the Christian; he is an eternal student and a student to the very grave. That is, for believers, the teaching never ends. They are constantly evolving. IN " bright resurrection» Gogol tells about the feast of the resurrection of Christ, that this holiday will be celebrated primarily in Russia, by the Russian people. And he explains why: “We are still melted metal, not molded into a national form; it is still possible for us to throw away, push away from us what is indecent for us and bring into ourselves everything that is no longer possible for other peoples who have received a form and hardened in it.

Belinsky very clearly showed the religious quests of Gogol's time in a letter to Nikolai Vasilyevich: “Don't you know that our clergy is in general contempt of Russian society and the Russian people? About whom does the Russian people tell an obscene tale? About the priest, the priest, the priest's daughter and the priest's worker. Who does the Russian people call:
"Foolish breed, koluhans, stallions"? Popov. Isn't the priest in Rus' for all Russians a representative of gluttony, avarice, cringing, shamelessness? And it's like you don't know all this. Strange. Do you think the Russian people are the most religious in the world? Lie".

This short passage traces the idea that Russian Christians were untrue, that the rites were performed only formally. There were rumors among the people about theft in the circles of the clergy, and this really happened. It was difficult to gain the confidence of the people, brazenly deceiving and robbing them.

In Gogol's time, the church was furiously persecuted, but responded to this with calmness and indifference. This fact is emphasized in a letter to Mr. And P.T ... mu and Gogol himself. He says: “Why do you want our clergy, hitherto distinguished by the calmness so fitting for it, to join the ranks of European loudmouths and start, like them, to print reckless pamphlets?” Gogol himself said that in order to defend the church in this rainy time, it was necessary to know it yourself first. At that time, few people knew the church at all. But the clergy were not idle. And Gogol was sure and asserted that somewhere in the depths of the monasteries and in the silence of the cells, irrefutable writings were being prepared in defense of our church. The church acted slowly, slowly, thinking over all actions, praying and educating themselves. Some said that the church was lifeless, but they were not telling the truth, because the church is life.
But that lie was deduced logically and formed by the correct conclusion, but the truth is hidden in the fact that we are lifeless, not the church. Gogol also said that defending the Russian church in his time was tantamount to dropping it, and that there is only one propaganda for everyone - life, and only life should people defend the church. WITH philosophical point According to Gogol, we must proclaim the truth on the side of the church with good deeds and purity of souls.
There were rumors in Gogol's time that the clergy were completely excluded from touching life. But this absurdity did not have a significant grain of truth.
The clergy were limited in their contact with the people. "The priests became bad, that they became too secular." At the time of Gogol, the situation of the church was difficult, but there was no such situation from which the Christian church would not have found a way out.

Petersburg stories and their meaning. Nevsky Avenue.

The combination of humor and drama, and sometimes tragedy, is very characteristic of the cycle of Gogol's stories, which are usually called "Petersburg stories". These include "Nevsky Prospekt", "Nose", "Portrait", "Notes of a Madman" and
"Overcoat".

Petersburg at the beginning of the 19th century was one of the most beautiful and richest cities in Europe. His majestic and austere beauty was sung in The Bronze Horseman
Pushkin, reflecting the duplicity of St. Petersburg. N.V. Gogol develops and deepens this theme in his St. Petersburg stories. In them, we see both the city of the owners of “luxurious chambers”, and the city of miserable shacks, in which poor officials, artisans, and impoverished artists settled. And the writer shows these two Petersburgs in complex relationships, as if pushing them against each other.

In the spirit of merciless satire, Gogol depicts people of higher circles metropolitan society. And the story "Nevsky Prospekt" before the reader appears a crowd of officials with their wives, taking a pre-dinner walk. And we will not meet human faces there, but we will see “whiskers ... passed with unusual and amazing art under a tie, velvet, satin whiskers, black like sable or coal ...”, we will meet mustaches “no pen, no brush can be depicted”, we will see thousands varieties of hats, dresses. Before us is a parade of toilets, hairstyles, artificial smiles, which testifies to how small and empty these people are, seeking to impress not with their human qualities, but only the sophistication of appearance.

Behind the outward elegance and brilliance of the life of the highest circles of bureaucratic society, something base, soulless, ugly is hidden. The author says:
“Oh, do not believe this Nevsky Prospekt! I always wrap my cloak tightly around myself when I walk on it, and try not to look at all at the objects I meet. Everything is a lie, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems!”

But on this Nevsky Prospekt, illuminated by the ghostly, mysterious light of lanterns, the brilliance of mirrored glasses of luxurious carriages rushing past with a noise, we see a young modest man among the smugly elegant crowd. This is the artist Piskarev. He is trusting, pure, he is in love with beauty and looks for it everywhere. Gogol depicts Piskarev's meeting with a young beauty.
She takes him to her house, which turns out to be a dirty hangout. Here the same god-like officials who walk along Nevsky Prospekt with such virtuous faces are drinking.

The young artist was deceived in his hopes. His pure feelings are ridiculed and trampled upon. Piskarev does not withstand a collision with cruel and dirty reality and dies.

In the story "Notes of a Madman" Gogol depicts tragic fate a man suffocated in the empty dead world of the power of ranks and gold. The people around him treat the petty official Poprishchin with contempt, because he "does not have a penny for his soul", because he is "zero, nothing else." Poprishchin was instructed to go to the office of the director of the department to repair feathers. The world of luxury in which the director's family lives delights and overwhelms the little official. But all this charm of the luxurious life of the nobility is gradually fading for Poprishchin, because he is treated in the general's house as an inanimate object. And a protest against social injustice awakens in his mind. He dreams of becoming a general himself, but only to make all these pompous people bow their heads before him, "just to see how they will writhe ..."

Poprishchin goes crazy. It seems to him that he is reading the correspondence of lap dogs, which tell him about the life of the general, his daughter. In fact, these are all the thoughts of Poprishchin himself, who began to understand how empty and meaningless life is, how insignificant the ideals of this higher bureaucratic world are.
The main concern of the general is whether or not they will give him an order, to whom he will marry his daughter, to a chamber junker or a general.

Poprishchin imagines himself the king of Spain. This painful idea arises in the hero of the story as a result of the constant humiliation of his human dignity. Poprishchina is taken to an insane asylum. He is treated cruelly, inhumanly there, the guards beat him with sticks. The story ends with Poprishchin's monologue, full of despair and awareness of his defenselessness: “Save me! take me!.. Mother, save your poor son! look how they torment him!” And in these words, not only the voice of the lonely patient Poprishchin sounds. This is also the cry of the soul of a simple worker, oppressed, disenfranchised in the Russian autocratic-feudal state.

The story "The Nose" is closely connected with the story "Notes of a Madman". Outwardly, it can give the impression of some kind of funny fairy tale. But, as is often the case with Gogol, a fairy tale, when read carefully, turns into a reality, and laughter
- bitterness and sadness. The story "The Nose" deepens the satirical depiction of representatives of the highest bureaucratic environment.

Collegiate assessor Kovalev, who came to St. Petersburg with the intention of making a career and marrying a rich bride, one morning, looking at himself in the mirror, found on his face "instead of a nose a smooth place." Kovalev, in desperation, rushes to search for his missing nose. After all, without a nose you will not appear in an official institution, in a secular society, you will not walk along
Nevsky prospect. All hopes of success are shattered. Meanwhile, it becomes known that Kovalev's nose appears everywhere in the city, rides in a carriage, wears a uniform embroidered with gold, a hat with a plume, has already surpassed his master in the ranks. He is a state councillor.

The idea of ​​a fantastic story becomes especially tangible and clear.
Gogol laughs angrily at the wild customs of the bureaucratic world, where not a person is valued, but rank.

The story "Portrait" depicts the dramatic story of the talented artist Chartkov, who could not resist the temptations of imaginary happiness.
Mysterious, mysterious case makes him the owner of a whole pile of gold coins. Almost maddened, Chertkov sat in front of the gold and mentally drew two paths that this thousand gold coins opened before him. One is to live modestly, go to Italy, devote himself to the study of the works of great masters, spend his youth in hard work, improve your skills as a painter. Another way is to acquire a rich apartment, luxurious furnishings, advertise yourself as a portrait painter in the newspapers and thereby attract customers. This last path promised him wealth and fame. Chartkov thought that this would be not only an easy path in life, but also a direct and easy path in art.

However, gold played a detrimental role in his life. It opened the way for him to the world of lies and hypocrisy, thoughtless and empty existence. And in art, Chartkov also begins to lie: "He willingly agreed to everything." In his portraits, he retreated from the truth of life, flattered everyone.

Both wealth and fame came to Chartkov. He believed that this fame is real, and not bought for money, that his superficial judgments about art are absolute truth itself. But one day Chartkov, as an honorary member of the Academy of Arts, was invited to an exhibition of a new painting. Its author was former comrade Chartkova, who selflessly devoted his whole life to art. He worked without thinking about success in society or fame. Chartkov had already prepared phrases in which he was going to criticize something in the picture, to praise something.

However, when Chartkov saw the picture, he was shocked. He had to admit that this is a real work of art. Chartkov could not lie and be hypocritical, "... speech died on his lips, tears and sobs escaped discordantly in response, and he ran out of the hall like a madman." Chartkov finally realized that he had long since died both as a person and as an artist. But this consciousness aroused in him a furious rage towards everything living and beautiful. Chartkov goes mad and dies in terrible agony.

In his story, the great Russian writer expressed deep thoughts that art can develop freely, be truthful and be the greatest good for people only if its creators are free from the desire to please tastes and needs. higher strata societies will be free from the corrupting power of money.

"The Overcoat" is a work that completes the cycle of St. Petersburg stories. N.V. Gogol completed work on it in 1841 after traveling around Europe and a long stay in Italy. In this work, the writer develops the theme of persecution, the humiliation of a worker in bureaucratic world.

The central character of the "Overcoat" is the smallest employee of the office, the copyist of papers Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin. Gogol shows to what extent a person is crippled, spiritually devastated by the world of departments, departments, where the dead form of circulars and relations dominate, where the essence of the matter is of no interest to anyone. Bashmachkin is over 50 years old. He spent almost his entire life in the world of government papers and not only got used to this meaningless work of correspondence, but also fell in love with it. Bashmachkin even had especially favorite letters. When he reached them, “he was not himself: he laughed, and winked, and helped with his lips ...”

So, receiving a beggarly salary, without a family, without friends, without any desires and aspirations, Bashmachkin lived for decades. His miserable poverty, downtroddenness, and unrequited obedience aroused contempt among his colleagues, who allowed themselves mocking jokes that humiliated his human dignity.

So already in the exposition of the story, the theme of protecting the common man, humiliated and hunted in the world of social inequality, social injustice, begins to sound. Akaki Akakievich is forced to order a new overcoat. And in order to raise money for a new overcoat, Bashmachkin has to starve in the evenings, refuse tea, do not burn candles, but sit in the dark or ask the hostess to let him into the light in her room. But the very process of thinking about how and what kind of overcoat to sew, the troubles associated with buying materials, trying on, etc., give Akaky Akakievich a joy that he has never experienced. For the first time in Bashmachkin's life, something of his own appeared, some kind of human desire arose.

Finally the overcoat is sewn. And here again the base morals of Bashmachkin's colleagues are manifested. Those who previously did not consider him a person, now, having seen him in a new overcoat, have dramatically changed their attitude towards him. So Gogol ironically over people who are able to feel respect for the overcoat, but are not able to respect the person.

However, the first joyful evening in Bashmachkin's life turns into misfortune for him. He was robbed, thieves stole a new overcoat. All attempts
Akaky Akakievich to find help from people does not give a result. In the bureaucratic world, people are deaf to the suffering of the common man. Even the general, who in the story is called a "significant person", not only did not listen to the request
Bashmachkin, but even shouted at him.

Bashmachkin died: “A creature disappeared and disappeared, protected by no one, dear to no one, not interesting to anyone ...”

But the story of the poor official does not end there. We learn that Akaky Akakievich, who was dying in a fever, in his delirium scolded “His Excellency” so much that the old housewife, who was sitting at the bedside of the patient, became frightened. Thus, just before his death, anger woke up in the soul of the downtrodden Bashmachkin against the people who killed him.

Petersburg stories are very similar in their fantasticness to
Mirgorod. Here and there phantasmagoria plays a significant role. But in the cycle of stories "Mirgorod" there is more folk than in St. Petersburg stories.

The general meaning of the image of Chichikov. "Gogol's ... laughter visible to the world through tears invisible to the world." Narrator image. Literary controversy around the poem.

“... not handsome, but not bad-looking, neither too fat nor too thin; it’s impossible to say that it’s old, but it’s not so that it’s too young “- this is how the author introduces the reader to the central character of the poem for the first time
Chichikov. Even as a child, Chichikov received instructions from his father on how to break into people: “most of all please teachers and bosses ... hang out with those who are richer so that they can be useful to you on occasion ... and most of all, take care and save a penny, this thing is more reliable than anything in the world ... You will do everything and break everything in the world with a penny. This covenant of the father and put
Chichikov has been the basis of his relationships with people since his school days. To save a penny as a means to achieve material well-being and a prominent position in society became the main goal of his whole life. “Irresistible strength of character”, “quickness, insight and insight”, all his ability to charm a person, Chichikov puts into play to achieve what he wants. Having quickly guessed the person, he knows how to approach everyone in a special way, subtly calculating his moves and adapting the manner of address and the very tone of speech to the character of the landowner.

The writer reveals the image of Chichikov gradually, as stories about his adventures. In each chapter we learn something new about him, and, finally, we see both his appearance and his inner world.

Gogol skillfully, in one phrase, gives him a complete description: “
It is most fair to call him the owner-acquirer", and then the author speaks of him simply and sharply: "Scoundrel".

It is no coincidence that Gogol singles him out from a number of other characters in the poem, talking about the past of the hero and giving his character in the development of the work.
According to the plan, the author was going to "lead Chichikov through the temptation of possessiveness, through life's dirt and vileness to moral revival." It was with people who were not completely dead, who had at least some purpose, that the author tried to connect his hopes for the revival of Russia. But
Gogol understood the impossibility of realizing the original idea; perhaps that is why the history of the second and third volumes of the poem is known to us.

In terms of the amount of sarcasm and criticism poured out on the heads of embezzlers, sycophants, bribe-takers, Gogol is not surpassed. All readers know
, which is characteristic of him, like no other, and an increase in the sharpness of the critical image of reality, and a sharply satirical orientation of creativity. Gogol's works, deeply revealing social contradictions, breathe an irreconcilable hatred for the world of vulgarity, self-interest and the pursuit of profit, for that feudal-serf system that oppressed the people, distorted the character of a person, his nature.

Revealing everything bad, Gogol believed in the triumph of justice, which will win as soon as people realize the fatality of the "bad", and in order to realize,
Gogol ridicules everything contemptible, insignificant. Laughter helps him accomplish this task. Not that laughter that is generated by temporary irritability or a bad character, not that light laughter that serves for idle entertainment, but that which "comes all out of the bright nature of man", at the bottom of which lies "its eternally beating spring".

The judgment of history, the contemptuous laughter of descendants - this, according to Gogol, will serve as retribution to this vulgar, indifferent world, which can not change anything in itself even in the face of the obvious threat of its senseless death.

Gogol's artistic creativity, which embodied in bright, finished types everything negative, everything dark, vulgar and morally wretched, which Russia was so rich in, was for the people of the 40s an inexhaustible source of mental and moral excitement. Dark Gogol types (Sobakevichi,
Manilovs, Nozdrevs, Chichikovs) were a source of light for them, for they were able to extract from these images the hidden thought of the poet, his poetic and human sorrow; his "invisible, unknown to the world tears", turned into
"visible laughter" were both visible and understandable to them. Great Tribulation the artist went from heart to heart. This helps us to feel the truly "Gogolian" way of narration: the tone of the narrator is mocking, ironic; he mercilessly castigates the vices depicted in Dead Souls. But at the same time, there are lyrical digressions in the work, which depict the silhouettes of Russian peasants, Russian nature, the Russian language, the road, the troika, far ... In these numerous lyrical digressions, we clearly see the position of the author, his attitude to the depicted, all-penetrating his love for his country.

"Rus, Rus! I see you, from my wonderful far away I see you... Why do you look like that, and why does everything that is in you turn eyes full of expectation on me? .. "

“... and it appears twenty times more menacing through that night sky, and, far trembling with leaves in the sky, going deeper into the unbreakable darkness, the harsh tops of the trees are indignant at this tinsel shine, illuminating their roots from below.
“The breadth of the plot and the saturation of the work with lyrical passages, which allow the writer to reveal his attitude to the depicted in a variety of ways, inspired Gogol to call Dead Souls not a novel, but a poem.

A stormy discussion was launched around the poem, during which two critical writers spoke especially brightly and passionately: Belinsky and Aksakov

In "Dead Souls" Aksakov saw elements of the epic, characteristic of the Homeric era of contemplation of the world - wise, calm, reconciled.

Both critics sharply condemned the work for atheism. From Belinsky's letter
Gogol: “... And at that time the great writer ... comes with a book in which, in the name of Christ and the church, he teaches the barbarian landowner to make more money from the peasants, scolding them with “unwashed snouts”!

The preacher of the whip, the apostle of ignorance, the champion of obscurantism and obscurantism - what are you doing? .. Why did you mix Christ here? love Russia, rejoice with me at the fall of your book.”

According to Belinsky, with his book Gogol did not contribute to the development of the self-consciousness of the Russian people: “She (Russia) needs not sermons, not prayers, but the awakening in the people of a sense of human dignity, lost for so many centuries in mud and manure, - rights and laws that are not consistent with the teachings of the church, but with common sense and justice, and strict, if possible, their implementation ... ”- this is what Belinsky stated in his letter to Gogol.

Only the most loyal critics praised the poem.

"Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (1847). High humanistic, universal ideals of the writer. Belinsky's assessment.

At the beginning of the 19th century, writing was for the writer not only a means of communicating with relatives or friends, but also a kind of literary genre. This genre has been widely developed in Russia. At first glance, careless - in order to give the reader the impression of casual chatter - they are actually written according to a carefully considered plan, saturated with poetic quotations, aphorisms, sometimes rewritten several times.

Gogol's letters (which have come down to us (1350) - an extensive and important part of his literary heritage. Reflecting all the stages of Gogol's spiritual evolution, the letters constitute an indispensable source for the writer's biography, they most fully acquaint us with the movement of his ideas, with his judgments on the most various issues life and literature, paint a picture of his relationship with contemporary writers, the history of his ideological and aesthetic development. In the letters we are confronted not only by Gogol the man and the thinker, but also
Gogol is an artist with all the diversity of his characteristic moods, with all the multitude of creative searches. Letters of different spiritual tonality
Gogol are no less diverse in their genres. Among them are lyrical letters-outpourings, and short cheerful friendly notes, and playful letters-descriptions in which the art of Gogol the satirist and humorist sparkles and shimmers with all his inherent colors, and upbeat, solemn letters-sermons preparing "Selected passages from correspondence with friends.

Gogol's letters have a dual meaning: literary and artistic and biographical. "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" includes the most interesting part of Gogol's epistolary heritage, represented by all its styles and genres.

In Gogol's letters - with all the outward diversity of their content - the writer's attention is always focused on his personal and author's fate.
The book reflected the painful mental processes that exhausted and weakened the writer, and above all his doubts about the reality, the educational function of fiction. At the same time, the book objectively reflected the general crisis in the country, where not harmony of estates and classes reigns, but abuse and quarrel: "The nobles are like cats and dogs among themselves."

The idea of ​​the book refers to the spring of 1845, to the period of a protracted attack of illness and mental depression of the writer. From the preface we learn that, being near death, he wrote a will, which is the first part of the book.
The will does not contain any personal, family details, it consists of an intimate conversation between the author and Russia, i.e. the author speaks and punishes, and Russia listens to him and promises to fulfill.

The testament was permeated with religious and mystical moods, and the pretentious preaching tone of the appeal to compatriots corresponded to the general pathos and ideological concept of "Selected Places".

Letters follow the preface and testament. In these letters, the author portrays himself as if having seen the light due to his illness, filled with the spirit of love, meekness, and especially humility ... Their content corresponds to this spirit: these are not letters, but rather strict and sometimes formidable admonitions from the teacher to the students ... He teaches, instructs, advises, rebukes, forgives, etc. Everyone turns to him with questions, and he leaves no one unanswered. He himself says: “Everything, with some kind of instinct, turned to me, demanding help and advice: “Recently, I even happened to receive letters from people who were almost completely unfamiliar to me, and give answers to them that I would not have been able to give before. . And by the way, I'm no smarter than anyone."
He himself recognizes himself as something like a country priest or even the pope of his Catholic world. In his book, he argued that the Orthodox Church and the Russian clergy are one of the saving principles not only for Russia, but also for Europe. Even about the Russian autocracy, he began to say that it has a popular character. He began to justify the enslavement of the peasants.

The advice and teachings of "Correspondence" were so far in their content from what Gogol's previous creations carried, and Belinsky immediately responded to them. He publishes an article in Sovremennik about "Selected Places" immediately after the publication of the book, almost hastily, feeling the need to immediately answer its author. Gogol's self-flagellation seems unforgivable to Belinsky, who calls all his previous works "rash and immature", the naive assurances from the lips of the author of "The Inspector General" that bribery in Russia would decrease if the wives of officials vying with each other did not strive to shine in the world are ridiculous. Advice "regarding the village court and reprisals" and attempts to teach the landowner to swear at the peasants look wild.
"educational" purposes". "What is it? Where are we?" - asks Belinsky, and it seems that these exclamations of despair forced Gogol to object to Belinsky in a letter written (on June 20, 1847 and which provoked Belinsky's answer. The letter to Gogol occupies a very special place in Belinsky's legacy, and indeed in the entire history of Russian social thought. Since the letter was not intended for publication, in it the critic could express himself with complete frankness.In it, Belinsky preaches the need for
Russia, the destruction of serfdom and autocracy, for the enlightenment of the people.
He rejects Gogol's view of the Russian people as a fundamentally religious people and ridicules the belief in the saving and enlightening role of the clergy. At the risk of intensifying Gogol's dislike for him and not knowing how deep the roots of the main ideas of Correspondence are, Belinsky is trying to return Gogol to his former path.

"Letter to Gogol" was Belinsky's true political and literary testament. In it, with a certain clarity and frankness, with sizzling passion and profound lyricism, he developed his views on the historical fate of the Russian people and literature, on serfdom and religion. “Here it is a question,” he wrote, “not about my or your personality, but about a subject that is much higher than not only me, but even you, it is about truth, about Russian society, about Russia.” Belinsky emphasizes that the future of Russia, the fate of the Russian people, lies in resolving urgent issues related to the struggle against serfdom. "The most vital, modern national questions in Russia now: the abolition of serfdom, the abolition of corporal punishment, etc."

In a response letter to Belinsky, acknowledging in part the failure of his book, for his part, he reproached the critic for being one-sided and intolerant of other people's opinions, for ignoring religious and moral issues. It seems to Gogol that his mistake is not in the very direction of the book, but in the fact that he hastened to publish it, was not ready for this task, and therefore wrote much in it hastily, insufficiently deep and thoughtfully, and wants to understand the mistakes he made. In the author's confession, Gogol says: “And what is most remarkable, which has not happened, perhaps hitherto in no literature, is not the book, but the author, which has become the subject of talk and criticism.
Every word was scrutinized suspiciously and incredulously, and everyone vied with each other in a hurry to declare the source from which it came. That terrible anatomy was performed over the living body of a still living person, from which one throws one into a cold sweat ... Never before have I neglected advice, opinions, judgments and reproaches, being sure, the further, more, that if you only destroy those ticklish strings in yourself who are capable of getting irritated and angry ... As a result, I heard three different opinions: first, that the book is a product of the unheard-of pride of a person who imagines that he has become above all his readers, has the right to the attention of all of Russia and can transform the whole society; secondly, that this book is the creation of a kind man, but a person who has fallen into charm and seduction, whose head is spinning from praise, from self-pleasure with his own virtues; thirdly, that the book is the work of a Christian who looks at things from the right point of view and puts every thing in its rightful place ... Almost to the face of the author they began to say that he had lost his mind, that there was nothing new in his book, what is new in it, then a lie. Be that as it may, it contains my own confession; in it there is an outpouring of both my soul and my heart.

But, despite the "Correspondence", Gogol remained for Belinsky the great Russian realist, who, together with Pushkin and Griboyedov, put an end to
"in a false manner to portray Russian reality."

The role of Gogol's work in the literary process of the 19th-20th century. Gogol and our modernity. Popularity of Gogol in Lithuania, translations into Lithuanian.

The policy of Nicholas 1 in the period after the uprising of December 14, 1825 is the frankly shameless policy of the executioner. Describing it, Herzen wrote:
"The first years following 1825 were terrible ... People were seized by deep despair and general despondency." In an atmosphere of suspicion, espionage became the "zeitgeist" and covert surveillance became a mania. But even during this period, Herzen recalls, “great work was being done within the state - deaf and silent work, but active and continuous; discontent grew everywhere.

Literature is divided, as it were, into two directions: protective and oppositional. And the period from the 40s of the 19th century in literature is considered to be
"Gogol" period of Russian literature. As the scientist, writer and critic Chernyshevsky wrote, “Gogol should be considered the father of Russian prose literature, just as Pushkin is the father of Russian poetry ...”

The significance of Gogol for Russian literature is enormous. "With the advent of Gogol, our literature turned exclusively to Russian life, to Russian reality." (Belinsky). According to Chernyshevsky, Gogol was the founder of "... a satirical - or, as it would be more fair to call it, a critical direction."

critical realism. Along with reactionary and progressive romanticism, the leading trend in Russian literature began to lean towards realism.
Critical realism seeks to reflect reality comprehensively: in the great and the small, the extraordinary and the everyday, the beautiful and the ugly.
Representatives of this direction turn their attention to the unprivileged, working strata of the population. The understanding of the purpose of the writer is changing. The author acts as a teacher, citizen, researcher, analyst of the life he depicts. The main task is to criticize the essential aspects of the despotic policy of the state, to expose the ulcers of the surrounding reality.

Realism attracted more and more new writers. Lermontov,
Koltsov, Gogol finally consolidated the position of realism.

Gogol's services to the Russian people, to Russian literature are immeasurable and immortal. Developing the realistic principles of Pushkin, Gogol turns to everyday life. He denounces the autocratic-feudal system in The Inspector General and the first volume of Dead Souls, sympathetically portrays the "little people" in Petersburg Tales.
Big influence had Gogol on the work of Dostoevsky, Nekrasov,
Turgenev, Goncharov, Herzen, Saltykov-Shchedrin.

Gogol raised critical realism to a new, higher level, and became one of the greatest representatives of critical realism.

His works are increasingly attracting Western European readers and literary scholars. Thus, in Lithuania, K. Jaunius, a major Lithuanian linguist in the future, wrote a work based on the analysis of N.
V. Gogol. However, some researchers of Gogol are interested in the objective properties of his original work, which is closely connected with reality; others seek to prove his dependence on Western European writers.

As early as the 1930s, translations of Gogol's works appeared in German, Czech, and other languages. In 1845, a collection of short stories was published in Paris.
Gogol on French, who played an important role in familiarizing the world community with the work of the writer. At the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th century. Gogol's works are translated into Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and other languages. In the middle of the 20th century, Gogol's world fame increased. At the same time, in countries with strong remnants of feudalism (Eastern, etc.), the Inspector General enjoys the greatest popularity, the text of which is often adapted to local conditions, saturated with new everyday material.

Gogol's influence was experienced by writers from different countries: Karavelov, Neruda,
Tuwim, Louis Xin.

Gogol's powerful influence was experienced not only by the Russian theater.
Thus, the interpretation of Gogol by the Lithuanian director Nekroshus ("The Nose") causes a lot of heated debate. Speaking of the Russian theater, one cannot help but recall that Gogol's plays entered the repertoire of the Russian stage as early as the 1940s. Also, Gogol's work served as material for the creation of outstanding musical works, such as operas by Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky,
Lysenko.

Bibliography.

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From the Pushkin era to the Gogol period in the history of Russian literature. Becoming a writer (1809-1830). Gogol entered Russian literature of the golden age, when it had already reached its peak. To win over readers and become on a par with Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Griboyedov, it was not enough to have a huge talent. I had to suffer my own theme, create my own unique picture of life.

The struggle of impersonal reality for the human soul, the attempt of evil on it, became a through theme of Gogol's creativity. Evil has a truly diabolical ability to change masks. In one era it seems demonically powerful, in another it pretends to be gray and inconspicuous. But if the struggle stops, humanity will face spiritual death. Literature is the field of this battle, the writer is able to influence its outcome.

Gogol's literary weapon in the romantic struggle for the fate of the world was soul-purifying laughter "through invisible tears, unknown to the world." His laughter does not just satirically castigate social vices and does not just make the reader condescendingly, with humor, treat natural human shortcomings and small weaknesses. It can be joyful, and sad, and tragic, and carefree, and caustic, and kind. He washes away everything superficial, everything vulgar from life, returns it to the radiant foundation laid in every thing, in every living being by God. And you have to pay the highest price for it - the price of the boundless pain that the writer passes through his heart. (It was precisely in this that Gogol was in many respects close to the late German romanticists, primarily to Hoffmann.) last years life and work, Gogol will increasingly resort to lyrical preaching, directly addressing the reader, trying to inspire him with “good thoughts” and show him the way to correction.

Ultimately, Gogol, as a writer, came close to the line that separates the literature of the new time from religious service. Art for the late Gogol is no longer so much "a deceit that elevates us" as a direct mouthpiece of truth, an echo of Divine truth. Why, then, was he unable to complete his great romance"Dead souls", the super-task of which was the "correction" of all of Russia? Why did Gogol's last years pass under the sign of the most severe creative and spiritual crisis? An exhaustive answer to these questions is simply impossible. There is a secret human life, the secret of the soul, the secret of the writer's path, which every person, every artist takes with him. But you can and should think about them. Just don't be in a hurry. First, let us recall how Gogol's personal fate and creative biography developed.

The estate of the Ukrainian landowners Gogol-Yanovsky was located in a fertile region covered with historical legends - in the Poltava region. From the very first years of his life, Gogol absorbed two national cultures - Ukrainian and Russian. He loved Little Russian folklore, knew well the work of Little Russian writers. For example, Ivan Kotlyarevsky, the author of a comic adaptation of Virgil's epic poem "Aeneid":

Aeneas was a troublesome lad
And the lad, even where a Cossack,
On tricks nimble, unlucky,
He eclipsed the note revelers.
When Troy in a formidable battle
Compared to a heap of dung
He grabbed the knapsack and gave it a pull;
Taking the Trojans with you,
skinhead bastards,
And he showed his heels to the Greeks ...

Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, wrote in his spare time. Mother, Maria Ivanovna, nee Kosyarovskaya, raised her six children in a strictly religious spirit. The young Gogol knew the Bible well and was especially keenly aware of the prophecies of the Apocalypse (the final book of the New Testament) about the last times of mankind, the coming of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment. Subsequently, these childhood experiences will echo in his disturbing and exciting prose.

From 1821 to 1828 Gogol studied at the newly opened Gymnasium of Higher Sciences in the city of Nizhyn. It was a good gymnasium: the teachers, together with the students, staged school plays; Gogol painted scenery, played serious and comic roles. And yet, an active character, carefully concealed ambition did not give Gogol peace. He dreamed of a state career, wanted to become a lawyer (“Injustice, the greatest misfortune in the world, tore my heart,” he wrote to P.P. Kosyarovsky in 1827) and, naturally, thought about moving to St. Petersburg.

Ho the northern capital of the great empire quickly cooled the southern ardor of the young provincial. It was not possible to settle down for a profitable service; there was not enough money; his literary debut - the semi-student poetic idyll "Hanz Kühelgarten", published under the pseudonym V. Alov, aroused friendly ridicule from the capital's critics. In a gloomy mood, the twenty-year-old writer burns copies of the unsold edition, as bridges are burned behind them. Suddenly leaves St. Petersburg abroad, to Germany. Returns just as suddenly. Trying to be an actor. Until, finally, he enters the clerical service.

From now on, this convulsiveness of actions, nervous overstrain will precede bursts of creative activity (and later, as if to replace it). Already in 1830, the first Gogol story "Bisavryuk, or Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" was published, which marked the beginning of the brilliant cycle "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" (1831-1832).

"Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka". Tales published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank ”(1829-1831). Gogol's stories from Little Russian life, sometimes scary, sometimes frivolous, very colorful and melodious, appeared just in time. “Everyone rejoiced at this vivid description of a singing and dancing tribe,” wrote Pushkin, who supported Gogol until his death in 1837. (Even the plots of the two main Gogol's works, the comedy "The Inspector General" and the novel "Dead Souls" were generously presented to their author by Pushkin.)

Gogol attributed the authorship of the stories of the cycle to Rudy Pank, a simpleton and joker. At the same time, invisible characters-narrators seem to be hidden in the texts of the stories. This is the sexton Foma Grigoryevich, who believes in his terrible stories, inherited from his grandfather (and to him, in due time, from his grandfather's aunt). And some "pea panich". He loves Dikanka, but he was brought up on "books" (Foma Grigoryevich considers him a "Muscovite"). And Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka from Gadyach...

All of them, with the exception of the well-read "pea panich", are naive. And Rudy Panko, with each new story, reveals less and less innocence and more and more literary slyness. In addition, the image of the provincially cheerful, folk and semi-fairytale Dikanka is shaded in the Evenings cycle by the image of the grandiose, regal (but also semi-fairytale) Petersburg. Only a beekeeper, who grew up here, knows everyone, is connected with everyone, can truly tell about the life of Dikanka from the inside. A metropolitan writer, some kind of "pea panich", is beyond his power. And vice versa, only a serious writer can tell about the "big" world, about St. Petersburg, - well-read, involved in "high" culture. So it turns out that Panko is not so much a “full-fledged” character, like Pushkin’s Belkin, as a literary mask of Gogol himself, who felt himself equally a Petersburger and a native of Dikanka (the estate under that name, which belonged to Count Kochubey, was located nearby from Vasilevka).

Russian literature was waiting for the appearance of just such a romantic writer, capable of recreating a vivid local color, preserving in prose the free breath of his small homeland, a fresh sense of the province, but at the same time striving to fit the image of the outskirts into a vast cultural context. Most readers immediately realized that Gogol was not limited to “literary painting”, colorful details of Ukrainian life, “tasty” Little Russian words and phrases. His goal is to depict Dikanka both realistically and fantastically, as a small universe, from where one can see in all directions of the world.

Gogol's cycle "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" you have already studied. Ho now, with an in-depth repetition, let's try to rediscover it for ourselves. Let's re-read two stories from "Evenings ...", which in their style seem polar, opposite in everything - "The Night Before Christmas" and "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and His Aunt".

As it should be in a story that is directly related to the folklore tradition and shrouded in a fairy-tale atmosphere, the main character of The Night Before Christmas, blacksmith Vakula, must defeat evil spirits, turn the devil-enemy into a magical helper.

All the heroes of the cycle live and act in different eras. Some (like Petrus from the story "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala") - in a terrible and majestic antiquity, when evil reigned supreme over the world. Others (like Vakula) in the conditional golden age of Catherine the Great, on the eve of the abolition of the Zaporozhian freemen, when magic was no longer as formidable as in mythological times. Witches and demons are sometimes simply ridiculous. The devil, on which Vakula travels, is “completely German in front”, with a narrow, fidgety muzzle, a round snout, and thin legs. He looks more like a "nimble dandy with a tail" than a devil. And what is funny can no longer be scary.

In addition, Vakula does not come into contact with evil spirits ever, namely on the night before Christmas. In the semi-folklore world of "Evenings ...", the closer to Christmas and Easter, the more active the evil - and the weaker it is. The eve of Christmas gives evil spirits the last chance to "play pranks", and it also puts a limit to these "pranks", for everywhere they are already caroling and glorifying Christ.

It is no coincidence that an episode with the Cossacks-Cossacks, who arrived in St. Petersburg to Catherine II, appears in the plot of the story. The fact is that soon after this meeting, the Empress will abolish the Zaporozhian Sich. That is, the romantic era will end, not only the mythical antiquity, to which the heroes of the “terrible” stories of the cycle belong (“Terrible Revenge”, “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”), will cease to exist, but also the legendary past to which cheerful and lucky heroes like Vakula belong . The path to a fearless but boring modernity is open. The little child of the blacksmith and Oksana is destined to live in a world where adventures like those that befell Vakula will no longer be possible, because the old days will finally move from reality to the realm of Rudy Panka's fables...

It is in this era that Ivan Fedorovich Shponka falls to live - the main character of the story told to the narrator Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka from Gadyach. Because of his bad memory, the simple-hearted narrator writes down the plot, but (recall Belkin's Tale again) his old woman exhausts half the notebook into pies, so that the narration breaks off in the middle. This break in the storyline sharply enhances the impression of randomness, inappropriateness, coming from the story, about a worthless hero, so unlike the rest - the bright, colorful characters of "Evenings ...".

The story about Ivan Fedorovich is based on the method of a deceived expectation. The reader of "Evenings ..." has already managed to get used to certain regularities of the plot (everyday scene often ends in a fantastic outcome; fantasy is reduced to the level of a household detail). He expects the same from the story "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt", intuitively bringing it closer to The Night Before Christmas.

In vain. The only event throughout the story that goes beyond the ordinary is Ivan Fedorovich's dream. Having fallen in love with the younger of the two sisters of his neighbor Storchenko, Shponka thinks with horror: what is a wife? And really, having married, he will no longer be alone, but there will always be two of them? The dream he had that night is terrible. Then a goose-faced wife appears to him; then there are several wives, and they are everywhere - in a hat, in a pocket; then the aunt is no longer an aunt, but the bell tower, Shponka himself is the bell, and the rope with which they drag him to the bell tower is the wife; then the merchant offers him to buy fashionable matter - "wife". But sleep is allowed to nothing - the manuscript of the story is cut off.

Creating the image of Ivan Fedorovich, Gogol outlines a new type of hero, who will soon be at the center of his artistic world. This is a hero torn from a semi-fabulous time and placed in a modern space, in a shredded era. He is not connected with anything but everyday life - neither with good nor with evil. And, oddly enough, this complete “falling out” of modern man from the whole world, this final “liberation” from the power of the fears of hoary antiquity, this separation from Dikanka (Ivan Fedorovich has nothing to do with her!) make him in a new way. defenseless from evil. It can freely invade the "empty" consciousness of the hero (remember horrible dream Dowels) and shake it to the ground.

Tiny Dikanka in the image of Gogol is truly universal. If the healthy and natural principle of public life has been preserved in it, it means that it has not disappeared from the world as a whole. And vice versa, if it imperceptibly, gradually began to disintegrate ancient ties, if every day it becomes a little less fabulous, a little more prosaic, insipid - all the more this applies to everything around.

The second cycle of stories "Mirgorod" Tales, which serve as a continuation of "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" (1832-1834). Taras Bulba. Success could well turn the head of a young writer. Ho Gogol did not stop there and continued to search for new themes, plots, heroes. He tried to study Ukrainian folklore as an ethnographer, even tried to take the chair of general history at Kiev University, but his mobile and very nervous nature excluded the possibility of unhurried office work. Moreover, secretly from his closest friends, he has already begun work on the next prose cycle. Later, this cycle would be called "Mirgorod", but initially the "Mirgorod" stories appeared in the collection "Arabesques" along with several works, which in 1842 Gogol would unite in the cycle of "Petersburg stories".

The clash of terrible antiquity with boring (but no less terrible) modernity becomes here the main artistic principle. There are two parts in the Mirgorod cycle, each with two stories, one of them from the Gogol era, the other from the legendary past. Stories from the "Gogol" era are close in style to the "natural" manner of "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt", stories from the legendary past are written in the same romantically upbeat spirit as "Terrible Revenge" or "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" . The composition of the cycle is also verified to the millimeter. The first part opens with a "modern" story ("Old World Landowners"), and ends with a "legendary" one ("Taras Bulba"). The second opens with the "legendary" ("Viy"), and ends with the "modern" ("The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich"). As if time, having described a circle, returns to the same point - to the point of complete disappearance of meaning.

Let us dwell in more detail on only one, "legendary", mustard gas well-known to you story "Taras Bulba". Having understood how it works, we will understand how other stories of Mirgorod are arranged.

There is such a literary concept - artistic time. That is, the time that is depicted by the writer. It is both similar and unlike real historical time; it can flow faster or slower than real time, it can swap past, present and future, or combine them into a bizarre whole. For example, the hero acts in the present, but suddenly remembers the past, and we sort of move into the past. Or the author uses the present tense form to tell about long-standing events - and an unexpected effect of shifting chronological boundaries arises. Or, as in the case of Taras Bulba, the writer places the heroes acting simultaneously, as if in different historical eras.

The action of Gogol's story seems to be attributed to the time of the Union of Brest in 1596, when a religious union between the Orthodox and Catholics was forcibly concluded on the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian kingdom of the Commonwealth, in which the Orthodox retained the language and "external" rites of their worship, but passed into submission to the pope Roman and were required to profess all the basic provisions (dogmas) of the Catholic Church. However, if you carefully read it, you will notice that the plot covers the events of Ukrainian history of the 15th, 16th and even the middle of the 17th centuries. The narrator seems to be trying once again to remind the reader that everything energetic, everything strong and impressive is already in the past, and now Mirgorod boredom has settled in the vastness of the Uk-Rayna, as well as in the vastness of the whole world. Therefore, when exactly the events took place is not so important. The main thing is that for a very long time.

It is not for nothing that the story, which is stylized as a heroic epic about the legendary times of the Little Russian "chivalry", contrasts different stages of human history. The Cossacks, living according to the laws of the epic, do not yet know statehood, it is strong in its disorder, wild freemen. And the Polish nobility, which had already united into a state “where there are kings, princes and everything that is best in noble chivalry,” forgot what true brotherhood is.

Taras Bulba is a real epic hero. He, from the point of view of the narrator, is always right and in everything. Even when he acts like an ordinary robber: in the scene of a Jewish pogrom or beating babies, committing violence against women and the elderly. The narrator wants to become like a folk storyteller, majestic and objective. Therefore, he portrays even the unseemly actions of Taras Bulba as epic deeds, consecrated by the power of the hero and not subject to ethical assessment. Moreover, in the episodes in which Taras participates, the narrator deliberately dissolves his point of view in the point of view of the title character. This is fully consistent with the idea - to portray the ideal, self-sufficient hero of Slavic antiquity, when other customs reigned, other ideas about good and evil, and when the world has not yet been mastered by vulgar everyday life, which, like swamp duckweed, is covered with current life.

But the time in which the immaculately correct Cossack Taras Bulba fell to live is no longer completely epic. Many Cossacks, unlike Taras, his worthy heir Ostap and loyal associates, like Dmitro Tovkach, succumbed to the pernicious Polish influence, calmed down, reconciled with evil, “got mad”, got used to luxury and bliss. The Cossacks not only conclude a peace treaty with the Turks, but also swear by their faith that they will be faithful to the treaty with the infidels! Later, once again returning to the Sich after being seriously wounded, Taras does not recognize his "spiritual fatherland" at all. Old comrades will die, only hints will remain of the glorious past. The next “holy war” against the Catholics, which he will raise after the execution of Ostap in Warsaw, will be as much revenge for his son as a desperate attempt to save the partnership from decay, to return the “abusive meaning” of the Zaporozhian existence.

But Bulba, the bearer of the true Cossack tradition, does not want to put up with this: life without war, without heroism, without glory and robbery is meaningless: “So what do we live on, what the hell do we live on, explain it to me!” And at the first opportunity, he raises the Cossacks on a campaign in the Polish southwest to fight against the union.

For Taras, this is not just a war. This is a kind of bloody confession of faith in the Holy Fatherland, in fellowship, to which he relates as a believer relates to the Creed. No wonder the Cossacks in the truest sense of the word join the mystical "partnership" with wine and bread during their endless feasts. In the scene before the Battle of Dubnov, Taras rolls out a barrel of old wine and "participates" it to the Cossacks, who will have a glorious death, leading straight to eternal life: "Sit down, Kukubenko, at my right hand! Christ will tell him. - You did not betray the partnership ... "

At the same time, Orthodoxy itself for Taras Bulba (as, indeed, for all the Cossacks in the image of Gogol) is not so much a church teaching as a kind of religious password: “Hello! What, do you believe in Christ? - “I believe!” ... “Well, cross yourself!” ... "Well, well ... go to the one you know the smoke."

In a merciless campaign against the "distrust" the sons of Taras are maturing. But here Taras is destined to find out that his youngest son, overly sensitive Andriy, crushed by the charms of the beautiful polka, goes over to the side of the enemy. If up to this point Taras's goal was revenge for the outraged faith, then from now on he is an avenger for treason, he is a formidable judge to his son. No one, nothing will force him to leave the walls of the besieged fortress until retribution is done. And it is being completed. Andriy is ambushed, and the sternly just father, having commanded his son to get off his horse, executes him: “I gave birth to you, I will kill you!”

Ho, let's re-read completely different scenes related to the image of Andriy. It would seem that he is in no way inferior to Ostap: powerful, a fathom tall, brave, good-looking, infinitely brave in battle, lucky. However, a slight shadow constantly falls on his image. In the very first scene of the story - the scene of the return - he too easily lets Taras ridicule himself. (While Ostap, the “correct” son, goes fist-to-hand with his father.) In addition, Andriy hugs his mother too warmly. In the stylized epic world of Taras Bulba, a real Cossack should put his friend higher than a “woman”, and his family feelings should be much weaker than a sense of brotherhood, camaraderie.

Andriy is too human, too refined, too sincere to be a good Cossack and a real epic hero. During the very first - Kyiv yet - meeting with a beautiful Polish woman, a beauty, white as snow and piercingly black-eyed, he allows her to make fun of herself. The Polka puts an earring on the lip of the uninvited guest, puts on a muslin chemise, that is, she dresses him as a woman. This is not just a game, not just a mockery of a capricious Polish beauty over a Ukrainian lad who crept into her room through the chimney. (Which in itself is indicative and casts a dubious demonic shadow on the hero.) But this is also a kind of ritual of dressing a man into a woman. Anyone who agreed to play such a game, who betrayed his “male” Cossack nature, is doomed sooner or later to betray faith, fatherland, comradeship in the militarized world of Gogol's story.

And the next step away from the Zaporizhzhya Cossacks (and therefore, away from the epic in the direction of love story) the changeling hero does very soon. A few days after the date, he accidentally sees his beloved in the church. That is, in the midst of religious hostility between the Orthodox and Catholics, on the eve of the union, because of which the Sich will soon rise to war against Poland, Andriy enters the Catholic church. Therefore, beauty for him is already higher than truth and more precious than faith.

It is not surprising, therefore, that in the end he falls out of the great Cossack unity, camaraderie. Having learned from the emaciated servant of the Polish beauty that everything in the besieged city has been eaten, up to mice, Andriy immediately responds to the plea of ​​his beloved for help. But the daughter of the enemy cannot, should not be of interest to a real Cossack even as a concubine. Pulling a bag of bread out from under Ostap's head, Andriy goes to the enemy side.

This transition is described by the author as a transition from the world of life to the otherworldly realm of death. Just as Andriy once entered the polka's room through an "unclean", demonic chimney, so now he descends underground - into a secret tunnel, a kind of hell. The first time it happened at night, during the power of darkness, and now Andriy is sneaking to the underground passage in the false light of the moon. The dungeon itself, within the walls of which the coffins of Catholic monks stand, is compared with the Kyiv caves, where the righteous monks performed their deed of prayer. Only if the path through the Kyiv caves symbolizes the road through death to eternal life, then this dungeon leads from life to death. The Madonna depicted on the Catholic icon is seductively similar to Andriy's beloved. Are such subtle experiences, such details, such plot twists possible in a traditional epic? Of course no; the narrator chooses a completely different genre for the story about Andria, as we have already said, this genre is a novel.

In Dubno, too, everything is painted in dead tones. Ho Andriy does not seem to notice this. Amid decay, the beauty of the polka, her wonderful, “irresistibly victorious pallor”, her pearly tears (“why did ferocious fate enchant the heart to the enemy?”) Seems especially bright, especially mysterious, especially attracting. There is something deadly in this beauty: it is not for nothing that the narrator finally compares her to a beautiful statue. That is, with a statue devoid of life.

But the narrator - no matter how close his position is to Taras's epic-solid position - himself falls under the spell of the polka. Condemning Andrii ideologically, he describes in such detail and so expressively the sensual perfection of the beauty that, imperceptibly for himself, he turns from an epic storyteller into a novelist for a while.

To finally verify this, let's compare the scene of the death of Andriy, who rushes towards death like a real novel hero - in fluttering white and gold clothes, with the name of his beloved on his lips, and the episode of Ostap's execution.

The younger brother goes to the enemy voluntarily - the older one is captured. The younger one, at the moment of death, invokes an alien, feminine name, trembling with horror; the elder silently endures terrible torment and mourns only that none of his relatives, his own, are around. He turns his dying cry to his father (not knowing that he is standing in the square): “Father! where are you? Do you hear? This cry echoes the words of the cross of Christ: “My God! My God! why did you leave me? (Gospel of Matthew, chapter 27, verse 46) and “Father! into your hands I commend my spirit!” (Gospel of Luke, chapter 23, verse 46). The fact that Ostap is about to break bones at that very moment should also evoke the gospel episode in the reader’s memory: “... soldiers came, and the legs of the first were broken, and of the other, who was crucified with Him. Ho, having come to Jesus, as they saw Him already dead, they did not break His legs” (Gospel of John, 19, 32-33).

Taras himself remains true to the same epic beauty of courage, and hence camaraderie. His path to death runs through the all-cleansing fiery element (he must burn at the stake). And it is not for nothing that this death gives him the last joy: from his “frontal” elevation on the top of the cliff, from the height of his “Olympic Golgotha”, Taras sees how the Cossack brothers are escaping from the Polish pursuit (and even manages to shout to warn them of the danger). And most importantly, he witnesses the death of the brother of the hated Polish woman, who seduced Andriy with her fatal beauty.

This was the end of the first edition of the story. In the second edition (1842), Gogol put an epic monologue into the mouth of Taras Bulba: “- Farewell, comrades! - he shouted to them [the Cossacks] from above. - Remember me... What the hell, damn Poles! ...Wait, the time will come, the time will come, you will know what the Orthodox faith is! Even now peoples far and near are sensing: their tsar is rising from the Russian land, and there will be no power in the world that would not submit to him! .. "

The last words of the Cossacks who died in the battle for Dubno were a glorification of the Fatherland and the Orthodox faith. Andriy's last word was about the Polish lady. Ostap's last cry was addressed to his father. The last word of Taras Bulba turns into a prophetic praise of Russian power, which nothing can overcome, into a prophecy about the coming rise of the Russian land. The Sich does not perish, but retreats into the mythological depths of history in order to give way to a new, higher manifestation of the Slavs - the Russian kingdom.

These prophetic and seemingly optimistic words were not a tribute to the ideology of the “official nationality” of the era of Nicholas I, that is, the concept on which the entire domestic policy of Russia in the 1830s was oriented and the essence of which was expressed by the formula “Orthodoxy - Autocracy - Nationality”. They had to connect the particular theme of the story with the general context of Mirgorod. And in this context, the final "imperial" prophecy of the romantic hero sounds hysterical and almost hopeless than the finale of the first edition sounded. Everything came true: the Russian kingdom rose, but in the end it suffered the same fate that once fell to the lot of the Sich. It lost its greatness, drowned in the Mirgorod puddle, which is mockingly described in the preface to "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich quarreled."

And the story itself about two Mirgorod landowners, Ivan Ivanovich Pererepenko and Ivan Nikiforovich Dovgochkhun, almost indistinguishable from each other, turns into a tragicomic epilogue of the sublime life story and exploits of Taras Bulba. The less distinguishable the heroes of the story are, the more detailed they are compared in the introductory chapter by the ingenuous Mirgorod narrator, whose intonation and style are sharply opposed to the author's. Ivan Ivanovich has a nice bekesha with smushkas; in the heat, he lies under a canopy in one shirt; has no children, "but" his girl Gapka has them. Ivan Nikiforovich, extremely pleasant in communication, never married. Ivan Ivanovich is thin and tall; Ivan Nikiforovich is lower, "but" thicker. Senseless formulas of comparison (“Ivan Ivanovich is somewhat timid in nature. Ivan Nikiforovich, on the contrary, has trousers in<...>wide folds") parody the classic antique book of biographies of great people - Plutarch's Parallel Lives. The shredded characters themselves, in turn, parody historical heroes. And their quarrel parodies serious battles - both those fought by Taras Bulba and those fought by "our king" in the era to which the events of the story are dated. (The quarrel takes place on July 10, 1810, two years after the conclusion of the Treaty of Tilsit in 1808 and two years before the Patriotic War.) It is no coincidence that the quarrel has a purely “military” reason - a gun that Ivan Ivanovich is trying in vain to exchange for a pig and two bags oats. The bargaining ends with Ivan Ivanovich comparing Ivan Nikiforovich with a fool, Ivan Nikiforovich calling Ivan Ivanovich a gander, and the characters, like the heroes of an ancient tragedy, freeze in a silent scene, so that after it they start a battle not for life, but for death - for the death of the soul.

The ordinary life of Mirgorod is so motionless and empty, so plotless that Ivan Ivanovich, before his quarrel with Ivan Nikiforovich, even compiled a “chronicle” of the melons eaten: this melon was eaten on such and such a date ... such and such participated. Now both sides of the conflict, and the townsfolk, and especially the city authorities feel themselves participants in truly historic events. Everything - any detail, even an insignificant story about Ivan Ivanovich's brown pig, who stole Ivan Nikiforovich's court petition - grows into an epicly extensive episode about the visit of the lame mayor to Ivan Ivanovich.

Ultimately, everything in the story points to the root cause of the terrible reduction of the Mirgorod people: they have lost the religious meaning of life. Arriving in Mirgorod after twelve years of absence, the author (who does not coincide with the narrator) sees autumn mud and boredom around him (in church language this word is a synonym for sinful despondency). The aged heroes whom the author meets in the church “harmonize” with the appearance of the city and who think not about prayer, not about life, but only about the success of their lawsuits.

Romanticism and naturalism in the artistic world of Gogol. "Petersburg Tales". In full accordance with the new sense of life, Gogol changes his style. In those stories of "Mirgorod", which were built on modern material, he followed the principle: "The more ordinary the subject, the higher the poet needs to be in order to extract the extraordinary from it and so that this extraordinary is, by the way, perfect truth." And in the stories from the legendary past, he continued to adhere to the "sweeping", upbeat, fantastic style. And the more impressive, powerful this past seemed, the more petty, insignificant modern life looked.

Let's try to express this idea differently, in the language of literary criticism. In a slightly more complex language, but more precise.

“Evenings on a Farm...” was created according to the laws of romantic prose. According to the laws that many Russian prose writers of the 1930s followed. For example, a literary comrade of Gogol, the same admirer of Hoffmann, German and French romantics, Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky.

The heroes of his philosophical short stories Beethoven's Last Quartet (1831), The Improviser (1833) were poets, artists, musicians who received their great gift in exchange for worldly peace. Any mistake on this path, any manifestation of distrust in the mysterious, unpredictable nature of creativity turns into a tragedy.

On the contrary, the heroines of Odoevsky's secular stories "Princess Mimi", "Princess Zizi" (both 1834) are too ordinary, their souls belong without a trace to a dead, inhuman light. Ho and here the story trails lead the characters to disaster. Princess Mimi spreads a false rumor about a love affair between the Baroness Dauertal and Granitsky - "a fine stately young man." Gossip sets in motion an inexorable mechanism of mutual destruction; the result is two deaths, broken destinies.

Finally, in Odoevsky's fantastic stories The Sylphide (1837) and The Salamander (1841), the characters come into contact with another, invisible life, with the realm of natural spirits. And this often ends badly for them: the "one-dimensional" world either expels the "spirit seers" from its limits, or subjugates them to itself, to its "worldly views".

It was in this romantic vein that the early Gogol developed. Only in the story about Ivan Fedorovich Shponka did he begin to master the principles of a naturalistic, that is, life-like, emphatically everyday depiction of reality. In the stories from the Mirgorod cycle, everything is somewhat different. Art world From now on, Gogol cannot be reduced to one thing - either to romanticism or to naturalism. The writer uses the narrative techniques of either romantic poetics or natural school- depending on the artistic task that he is solving at the present moment. And this means that from now on, no literary system can completely exhaust his plan, accommodate the images created by his all-encompassing genius. What used to be the main method of artistic representation becomes one of several artistic devices that the writer keeps ready, as the master keeps a set of various tools ready.

The final combination of two artistic systems, romantic and naturalistic, took place in the cycle, later called "Petersburg Tales", which was created by the writer in 1835-1840. Grotesque and everyday life, extreme fantasy and attention to the smallest realities - all this is equally present in the stories "The Nose", "Nevsky Prospekt", "Portrait", "Notes of a Madman", "The Overcoat". Fantasy is immersed here in the very thick of everyday life. The heroes of the cycle are the strange inhabitants of the northern capital, a bureaucratic city in which everything is a lie, everything is a deceit, everything fluctuates in the false light of flickering lanterns. Let's take a closer look at two stories from this series - "Nose" And "Overcoat" .

The plot of The Nose is improbable to the point of absurdity: Gogol had eliminated in advance the possibility of a rational explanation for the adventures that befell his hero. It would seem that the nose of Major Kovalev could well be cut off by the barber Ivan Yakovlevich, who finds this nose baked in bread. Moreover, Ivan Yakovlevich is a drunkard. But he shaves the major on Sundays and Wednesdays, but the case takes place on Friday, and for the whole quarter (that is, Thursday) his nose sat on Kovalev's face! Why, after two weeks, the nose “wishes” to suddenly return to its original place, is also unknown. And this absurdity of the situation sharply sets off the social meaning of the plot collision.

The narrator draws the reader's attention to the fact that Kovalev is not just a major. He is a collegiate assessor, that is, a civil rank of the 8th class. According to the Table of Ranks, this rank corresponded to the military rank of major, but in practice it was valued lower. Major Kovalev is a collegiate assessor of the "second freshness". By ordering to call himself a major, he deliberately exaggerates his bureaucratic status, because all his thoughts are aimed at taking a higher place in the service hierarchy. He is, in essence, not a person, but a bureaucratic function, a part that has supplanted the whole. And the nose of Major Kovalev, who arbitrarily left his face to become a state councilor, only grotesquely continues the life path of its owner. A part of the body that has become whole symbolizes the bureaucratic world order, in which a person, before becoming someone, loses face.

But the narrow social meaning of the story is opened up into an immense religious and universal context. Let's pay attention to the "little things" that sometimes play a decisive role in a work of art. On what date does Kovalev discover that his nose is missing? March 25. But this is the day of the Annunciation, one of the main (twelfth) Orthodox holidays. Where does the barber Ivan Yakovlevich live? On Voznesensky avenue. On which bridge does Major Kovalev meet the orange seller? On the Resurrection. Meanwhile, Resurrection (Easter) and Ascension are also the twelfth holidays. But the actual religious meaning of these holidays in the world depicted by Gogol is lost. Despite the Annunciation, in one of the main cathedrals of the capital, where Major Kovalev follows his nose, there are few people; the church, too, has become one of the bureaucratic fictions, a presence (or rather "absent") place. Only the disappearance of the nose is capable of crushing the heart of a formal Christian, which, like the majority, Major Kovalev is depicted.

The protagonist of another story of the St. Petersburg cycle, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, also has a clear social “registration”. He is "the eternal titular adviser". That is, a state official of the 9th class, who does not have the right to acquire personal nobility (if he was not born a nobleman); in military service, this rank corresponds to the rank of captain. " little man with a bald spot on his forehead”, for a little over fifty years, serves as a scribe of papers “in one department”.

And yet this is a completely different type, a different image. Kovalev himself strives for bureaucratic impersonality, he himself reduces his life to a set of service characteristics. Akaky Akakievich did not lose face for the simple reason that he had practically nothing to lose. He is impersonal from birth, he is a victim of social circumstances. His name, Akaki, in Greek means "gentle". However, the etymological meaning of the name is completely hidden behind its "indecent" sound, meaningless to them. Just as “indecent” are the names that supposedly came across in the holy calendar to mother Akaky Akakievich before his baptism (Mokiy, Sossy, Khozdazat, Trifilly, Dula, Varakhisy, Pavsikaky). Gogol rhymes the "unworthy" sound of names with the insignificance of the hero. His surname is also meaningless, which, as the narrator ironically remarks, came from a shoe, although all the ancestors of Akaky Akakievich and even his brother-in-law (despite the fact that the hero is not married) wore boots.

Akaky Akakievich is doomed to life in an impersonal society, so the whole story about him is based on formulas like “one day”, “one official”, “one significant person”. In this society, the hierarchy of values ​​has been lost, so the speech of the narrator, who almost does not coincide with the author, is syntactically illogical, overloaded with “superfluous” and similar words: “His name was: Akaky Akakievich. It may seem to the reader a little strange and sought-after, but we can assure you that no one was looking for him, and that such circumstances happened by themselves that it was impossible to give another name, and this is exactly how it happened.

However, the tongue-tied narrator cannot be compared with the hero's tongue-tied tongue: Akaky Akakievich speaks practically with prepositions and adverbs. So he belongs to a different literary and social type than Major Kovalev - the type " little man”, which occupied Russian writers of the 1830-1840s. (Remember, for example, Samson Vyrin from Belkin's Tales or poor Yevgeny from Pushkin's The Bronze Horseman.) their contemporaries, impoverished, seem to fall out of the historical process, become defenseless before fate.

The fate of the "little man" is hopeless. He cannot, does not have the strength to rise above the circumstances of life. And only after death, from a social victim, Akaki Akakievich turns into a mystical avenger. In the dead silence of the Petersburg night, he rips off the overcoats from officials, not recognizing the bureaucratic difference in ranks and acting both behind the Kalinkin bridge (in the poor part of the capital) and in the rich part of the city.

But it is not for nothing that in the story about the “posthumous existence” of the “little man” there are both horror and comedy. The author sees no real way out of the impasse. After all, social insignificance inexorably leads to the insignificance of the individual himself. Akaky Akakiyevich had no predilections and aspirations, except for a passion for senseless rewriting of departmental papers, except for a love of dead letters. No family, no rest, no fun. Its only positive quality is determined by a negative concept: Akaky Akakievich, in full agreement with the etymology of his name, is harmless. He does not respond to the constant ridicule of fellow officials, only occasionally begging them in the style of Poprishchin, the hero of the Notes of a Madman: “Leave me, why are you offending me?”

Of course, the gentleness of Akaky Akakievich has a certain, albeit unrevealed, unrealized spiritual power. It is not for nothing that a “side” episode was introduced into the story with “one young man”, who suddenly heard a “biblical” exclamation in the pitiful words of the offended Akaky Akakievich: “I am your brother” - and changed his life.

So social motives are suddenly intertwined with religious ones. The description of the icy winter wind that torments St. Petersburg officials and eventually kills Akaky Akakievich is connected with the theme of poverty and humiliation of the “little man”. But the St. Petersburg winter acquires in the image of Gogol the metaphysical features of the eternal, hellish, godless cold, in which the souls of people are frozen, and the soul of Akaky Akakievich above all.

The very attitude of Akaky Akakievich to the coveted overcoat is both social and religious. The dream of a new overcoat nourishes him spiritually, turns for him into an "eternal idea of ​​a future overcoat", into an ideal image of a thing. The day when Petrovich brings renewal becomes for Akaky Akakievich “the most solemn in life” (note the incorrect stylistic construction: either “the most” or “the most solemn”). Such a formula likens this day to Easter, "a celebration of celebrations." Saying goodbye to the dead hero, the author notices: before the end of his life, a bright guest flashed to him in the form of an overcoat. It was customary to call an angel a bright guest.

The life catastrophe of the hero is predetermined by the bureaucratically impersonal, indifferent social world order, at the same time by the religious emptiness of reality, which Akaki Akakievich belongs to.

Comedy "Inspector General": philosophical overtones and "insignificant hero". In 1836, Gogol made his debut as a playwright with the comedy The Inspector General.

By this time, the Russian comedy tradition was fully developed. (Remember our conversation about the fact that lyrics and drama quickly and easily adapt to changes in the literary situation.) The first viewers of The Inspector General knew by heart many moralizing comedies of the Enlightenment, from Fonvizin to Krylov. Of course, they also had in their memory the caustic verse comedies of the playwright of the early 19th century Alexander Shakhovsky, in whose comedic characters the public easily guessed the features real people, prototypes. A stable set of comedic situations formed; the authors masterfully varied them, "twisting" a new cheerful plot. Comedy characters had recognizable and unchanging features, since a system of theatrical roles was developed a long time ago. For example, the role of a false groom: blinded by love, a stupid hero in vain claims the hand of the main character and does not notice that everyone is making fun of him. And the reasoning hero, like Fonvizin's Starodum, was generally exempted from comedy duty, he was not so much a participant in funny adventures as a mocking judge, a kind of representative of the author's (and the audience's) interests on the theater stage ...

So it was much easier for Gogol to make his debut in the genre of comedy than in the genre of a story. And at the same time much more difficult. Not without reason, after a more than successful premiere, Gogol could not recover for a long time. He was literally shocked by the general misunderstanding of the essence of comedy, he believed that the audience, like the heroes of The Inspector General, did not know what they were laughing at. What was the matter? Habit is second nature, not only in life, but also in art; it is difficult to make the viewer cry where he used to laugh, or think about what he used to perceive thoughtlessly. Gogol had to overcome the stereotype of the viewer's perception. The actors (especially the performers of the role of Khlestakov) did not understand Gogol's intention, they introduced a vaudeville principle into the comedy. Trying to explain to the public what the essence of his creation is, Gogol writes, in addition to The Inspector General, the play Theatrical Departure after the Presentation of a New Comedy (1836), then returns to this topic for ten years, creates several articles. The most important of them is "Forewarning for those who would like to play properly" The Government Inspector "(1846).

If even experienced actors failed to comprehend the author's intention, what was to be expected from the main part of the audience? Few people thought why Gogol closed the action of the comedy in the narrow confines of the county town, from which "if you ride for three years, you won't reach any state." But such a "middle" city was supposed to serve as a symbol provincial Russia at all. Moreover, later in the dramaturgical “Decoupling of the Inspector General” (1846), Gogol gave an even broader, even more allegorical interpretation of his comedy. The city is a metaphor human soul, the characters personify the passions that overcome the human heart, Khlestakov portrays a windy secular conscience, and the “real” auditor, who appears in the finale, is the court of conscience waiting for the person behind the coffin. This means that everything that happens in this "prefabricated city" (such is Gogol's formula) applies both to Russia, mired in bribery and extortion, and to humanity as a whole.

But isn't it strange that in the center of the symbolic plot of The Government Inspector stands a completely insignificant, worthless hero? Khlestakov is not a bright adventurer, not a clever swindler who wants to deceive thieving officials, but a stupid fanfaron. He reacts to what is happening, as a rule, out of place. It is not his fault (and certainly not his merit) that everyone around wants to be deceived and try to find a deep hidden meaning in his rash remarks.

For Gogol, there was not the slightest contradiction in all this. The funnier the situations that Khlestakov finds himself in, the sadder the author's "bright" laughter through invisible, unknown to the world tears, which Gogol considered the only positive face of comedy. It’s funny when Khlestakov, after a “fat-bellied bottle” with provincial Madeira, from replica to replica, raises himself higher and higher up the hierarchical ladder: they wanted to make him a collegiate assessor, here “once” the soldiers mistook him for the commander in chief, and now to him couriers are rushing, “thirty-five thousand one couriers” with a request to take over the management of the department ... “I am everywhere, everywhere ... Tomorrow they will make me into a field march ...” But what seems ridiculous, at the same time infinitely tragic. The lies and boasting of Khlestakov do not resemble the empty chatter of the fanfaron Repetilov from the comedy Woe from Wit, or the carelessly excited lies of Nozdryov from Dead Souls, or the fantasies of some vaudeville naughty. By cheating, he overcomes the limitations of his social life, becomes a significant personality, destroys social barriers, which in real life he will never overcome.

In that phantasmagoric world that is created in Khlestakov's false imagination, an insignificant official is promoted to field marshal, an impersonal copyist becomes a famous writer. Khlestakov seemed to jump out of his social ranks and rush up the social ladder. If it weren’t for the censorship “limiters”, he would never stop at the field marshalship and would certainly imagine himself a sovereign, as Poprishchin, another Gogol official, does (A Madman’s Notes). Poprishchina frees his madness from social constraint, Khlestakov - his lies. At some point, he looks around from this unthinkable height at his real self and suddenly speaks with boundless contempt about his current situation: “... and there is already an official for writing, a kind of rat, with only a pen - tr, tr ... went to write ".

Meanwhile, many heroes of The Inspector General want to change their class-bureaucratic status, to rise above petty fate. So, Bobchinsky has one and only “lowest request” to Khlestakov: “... when you go to Petersburg, tell all the different nobles there: senators and admirals ... if the sovereign has to, then tell the sovereign that, they say Your Imperial Majesty, Pyotr Ivanovich Bobchinsky lives in such and such a city. Thus, he also, in essence, wants to "elevate" himself to the highest officials of the empire. But since he is not endowed with a bold Khlestakov's imagination, he timidly begs to "transfer" at least one of his own names through class barriers and consecrate his insignificant sound with the sovereign's "divine" hearing.

With the help of Khlestakov and the Governor, he hopes to change his life. After the departure of the imaginary auditor, he seems to continue to play the "Khlestakov" role - the role of a liar and a dreamer. Thinking about the benefits of kinship with an "important person", he mentally promotes himself to the generals and instantly gets used to the new image ("Damn it, it's nice to be a general!"). Khlestakov, imagining himself the head of a department, is ready to despise his current fellow scribe, a paper official. And the Governor, imagining himself a general, immediately begins to despise the governor: “The cavalry will be hung over your shoulder. ... you go somewhere - courier and adjutants will jump forward everywhere: “Horses!” ... You dine at the governor's, and there - stop, mayor! Heh, heh, heh! (Fills and dies with laughter.) That's what, canal, it's tempting! An unexpected discovery: Khlestakov is "not an auditor at all", offends the Gorodnichy to the depths of his soul. He is really “killed, killed, completely killed”, “stabbed to death”. The mayor is thrown off the top of the social ladder, which he has already mentally climbed. And, having experienced an incredible, humiliating shock, the Governor - for the first time in his life! - for a moment he sees, although he himself believes that he is blind: “I don’t see anything. I see some kind of pig snouts instead of faces, but nothing else. Such is the city he rules, such is he himself. And at the peak of the shame experienced, he suddenly rises to a real tragedy, exclaiming: “Who are you laughing at? laugh at yourself." And he does not realize that in this purifying laughter of a person over himself, over his passion, over his sin, the author sees a way out of the comedy's semantic conflicts.

Ho this is just one moment from the life of the Governor. And Khlestakov, largely due to his carelessness, his inspired lies, is much more daring. His stupid prowess, even though it was “in the wrong direction”, “directed at the wrong place”, allowed Gogol from the very beginning to consider Khlestakov “a type of much scattered in Russian characters”. In him, in his social behavior, the hidden desires of the officials of the county town are collected, summarized, realized; the main socio-psychological and philosophical problems of the play are connected with it. This makes it the plot center of comedy. V. G. Belinsky, who called the main character Gorodnichiy, and considered the subject of the play a satirical exposure of the bureaucracy, later recognized Gogol's arguments.

Foreign travel. On the way to Dead Souls. The comedy is very funny. And at the same time very sad. After all, vice triumphs without anyone's visible efforts, by itself. Simply because he completely captured the souls of people. And the famous denouement of the "Inspector General", when the participants in the events learn about the arrival of the "real" auditor and freeze in a silent scene, does not at all indicate that the vice is punished. Because - who knows how the visiting auditor will behave? On the other hand, this silent scene generally translated the meaning of the comedy into another plane - the religious one. She reminded us of the coming Last Judgment, when our true conscience wakes up in each of us, appears to the soul, like some kind of heavenly auditor, and exposes the deeds of a false, lulled, lulled conscience.

Once again, Gogol's creative upsurge was followed by a crisis. And again, having decided that no one understood his comedy and that the great idea fell victim to universal vulgarity, he suddenly went abroad, to Germany. Then he moved to Switzerland and here he continued his interrupted work on a new work, which was supposed to reflect "all Rus', albeit from one side." This work was destined to become Gogol's pinnacle creation, his literary triumph and at the same time his most bitter defeat.

Not just a novel was conceived, but (according to Gogol's definition) a "small epic" from modern life, but in the spirit of the ancient Greek epic of Homer and the medieval epic poem by Dante "The Divine Comedy". That is why Gogol gave his new prose creation, which he called "Dead Souls", the subtitle "Poem". This genre designation indicated that the pathos lyrical beginning would permeate the entire space of the epic work and intensify from chapter to chapter, from book to book. It was from book to book, because the subtitle referred to the idea as a whole, and the essay was conceived in three plot-independent parts.

How the hero of the "Divine Comedy" climbs the spiritual ladder from hell to purgatory, and from purgatory to heaven, like heroes " human comedy» Balzac's are constantly moving in circles of social hell, so the heroes of "Dead Souls" had to step by step get out of the darkness of the fall, purifying themselves and saving their souls. The first volume of Gogol's poem corresponded to Dante's hell. The author (and the reader along with him) seemed to take the characters by surprise, showing their vices with laughter. And only from time to time his lyrical voice soared upwards, under the dome of the majestic novel vault, sounded solemnly and at the same time sincerely. In the second volume, the author intended to talk about the purification of heroes through suffering and repentance. And in the third - to give them a plot chance to show their best qualities, to become role models. For Gogol, who believed in his special spiritual vocation, such an ending was fundamentally important. He hoped to teach the whole of Russia a lesson, to show the way to salvation. Moreover, after the death of Pushkin in 1837, Gogol interpreted his work on "Dead Souls" as a "sacred testament" of the great poet, as his last will, which must be fulfilled.

Gogol lived at that time in Paris; later, after long trips around Europe, he moved to Rome. The Eternal City, which marked the beginning of Christian civilization, made an indelible impression on the Russian writer. He, yearning in St. Petersburg, in "northern Rome", for the southern sun, warmth, energy, experienced in Rome an upsurge of spiritual and physical strength. From here, as from a beautiful far away, he returned in thought and heart to Russia. And the image of the beloved Fatherland was freed from everything random, petty, overly detailed, it grew to a worldwide scale. This most accurately corresponded to Gogol's artistic principles and coincided with his novelistic concept.

Returning briefly to Moscow (1839) and reading some chapters of the poem in the homes of his closest friends, Gogol realized that he was destined for complete success. And he hurried to Rome, where he worked so nicely. But at the end of the summer in Vienna, where he stayed on literary business, Gogol for the first time was overtaken by an attack of a serious nervous illness, which from now on would haunt him to the very grave. As if the soul could not stand those unbearable obligations to the world that the writer assumed: not just to create artistic image Russia and literary types contemporaries. And not even just to teach society a moral lesson. Ho, having accomplished his literary feat, mystically save the Fatherland, give him a spiritual recipe for correction.

What famous work of world literature was Gogol guided by when plotting a novel in three volumes? What path did the main characters of "Dead Souls" have to go from the first volume to the third?

"Judge of the Contemporaries". "Selected places from correspondence with friends." No wonder the style of Gogol's letters changed in the early 1940s: “My work is great, my feat is saving; I am dead to everything petty." They are more like the letters of the apostles, the first disciples of Christ, than the letters of an ordinary (even if brilliantly gifted) writer. One of his friends called Gogol "a judge of his contemporaries" who speaks to his neighbors "like a man whose hand is filled with decrees that arrange their fate according to their will and against their will." A little later, this inspired and at the same time very painful state will be reflected in Gogol's main nonfiction book, Selected passages from correspondence with friends. The book, conceived in 1844-1845, consisted of fiery moral and religious sermons and teachings on a variety of issues: from embezzlement to the proper organization of family life. (Moreover, Gogol himself had no family.) She testified that the author of Dead Souls finally believed in his chosen one, became a "teacher of life."

However, by the time Selected Places... was published and caused a storm of the most contradictory responses in criticism, Gogol managed to publish the first volume of Dead Souls (1842). True, without the insert "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin", which was banned by censorship, with numerous amendments and under a different name: "The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls." Such a title lowered Gogol's intention and referred the reader to the tradition of adventurous and moralistic novel. The main theme of the poem turned out to be not the spiritual mortification of mankind, but the amusing adventures of the charming rogue Chichikov.

But the other was much worse. Gogol, who again went abroad for three years in 1842, could not cope with his overly ambitious plan, which exceeded the measure of ordinary human strength, and after another attack nervous illness and spiritual crisis in the summer of 1845 burned the manuscript of the second volume.

Later, in Four Letters to Different Persons About Dead Souls (the letters were included in the book Selected Places...), he explained this "act of burning" by the fact that in the second volume "ways and roads" were not clearly indicated. to the ideal." Of course, the real reasons were deeper and more varied. There is a sharp deterioration in health, and a deep contradiction between the "ideal" idea and the real nature of Gogol's talent, his tendency to depict the dark sides of life ... But the main thing - we can repeat it again and again - was the overwhelming task, which literally crushed Gogol's talent . Gogol, in the most direct and terrible sense of the word, overstrained himself.

Torture by Silence (1842-1852). The public, with the exception of the closest friends, did not notice this anguish. After all, Gogol's books continued to be published. In 1843 his Works were published in 4 volumes. Here, for the first time, the story “The Overcoat” was published, where the writer spoke with such piercing power about the fate of the “little man” that the story literally turned the literary consciousness of a whole generation of Russian writers upside down. The great Russian novelist Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky, who made his debut during these years, would later say that they all came from Gogol's The Overcoat. In the same collected works for the first time saw the light of the comedy "Marriage", "Gamblers", a play-afterword to the "Inspector General" "Theatrical journey ...". Ho, not everyone knew that "The Overcoat" was started back in 1836, and "Marriage" - in 1833, that is, before the "Inspector General". And after the first volume of Dead Souls, Gogol did not create new works of art.

"Selected Places ...", as well as the "Author's Confession", begun in 1847, and published only posthumously, were written instead of the "small epic" promised to the public. In essence, the last decade of Gogol's life turned into an incessant torture by silence. How intensely and joyfully he worked in the first ten years of his writing (1831-1841), how painfully he suffered from creative non-incarnation in the second decade (1842-1852). As if life demanded that he pay an unthinkable price for the brilliant insights that visited him in the 1830s.

Continuing to wander along the roads of Europe, living either in Naples, then in Germany, then again in Naples, in 1848 Gogol makes a pilgrimage to holy places, prays in Jerusalem at the Holy Sepulcher, asks Christ to help "gather all our strength for the work of creation, we cherished..." Only then does he return to his beloved homeland. And he does not leave him until the end of his life.

Outwardly, he is active, sometimes even cheerful; met in Odessa with young writers who consider themselves his followers - Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, Ivan Alexandrovich Goncharov, Dmitry Vasilyevich Grigorovich. In December, he communicates with the novice playwright Alexander Nikolayevich Ostrovsky. Gogol is finally trying to arrange his family life and proposes to A. M. Vielgorskaya. The offer was followed by a refusal, which wounded Gogol in the very heart and once again reminded him of worldly loneliness. About the very loneliness that he sought to overcome with the help of creativity, becoming an absentee interlocutor, friend, and sometimes mentor of thousands of readers.

In 1851, he read to his friends the first six or seven chapters of the rewritten (more precisely, rewritten) second volume of Dead Souls. On January 1, 1852, he even informs one of them that the novel is over. But the latent internal dissatisfaction with the results of many years of work imperceptibly grew and was ready to break through at any moment, as water breaks through a dam during a flood. The crisis again broke out suddenly and entailed catastrophic consequences.

Upon learning of the death of the sister of the poet Nikolai Mikhailovich Yazykov, his close friend and a like-minded person, the shocked Gogol foresees his own imminent death. And in the face of impending death, which sums up everything that man has done on earth, he re-examines the manuscript of the second volume, is horrified and after a conversation with his confessor, Fr. Matvey Konstantinovsky again burns what was written. (Only draft versions of the first five chapters survive.)

Gogol regarded the creative failure as the collapse of his entire life, fell into a severe depression. Ten days after the burning of the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls, Gogol died, as if his own life had been burned in the flames of this fire...

Thousands of people came to say goodbye to the great Russian writer. After the funeral service, performed in the university church of St. Tatyana, professors and students of Moscow University carried the coffin in their arms to the burial place. A monument was erected over the grave of the writer with words from the biblical book of the prophet Jeremiah. Ends and beginnings closed, the epitaph became an epigraph to all of Gogol's work: "I will laugh at my bitter word."

The writer's work is such a mystery that it is hardly possible to solve it, especially the work of such complex and rich natures as Gogol was.

It is all the more difficult to unravel Gogol's spiritual life because he was one of those people who do not like to speak out and not only jealously guard their best aspirations and plans to themselves, but sometimes even avert their eyes from their true goals and views in a mystifying way. This feature of Gogol is so great that even his intimate letters to people close to him do not always correctly determine his real thoughts and acquire the character of persuasiveness only when, in terms of the feelings and opinions expressed in them, they partly coincide with other Gogol's notes, partly with direct evidence from people, who knew him personally. But the surest way to recognize the identity of such a secretive person as Gogol is, of course, to approach him at a time when he is not aware of your presence and, so to speak, to overhear what he says in private.

But where did Gogol really remain himself? When could one take him by surprise and hear the sincere and fundamental note of his voice? I believe that most of the time he was himself in his writings; his colossal talent took possession of him irrevocably and made him involuntarily, here and there, directly surrender to his passion, in the words of Shakespeare, “to cling to a dream”1). Yes, and Gogol himself tells us this way to solve the riddle. When he was nineteen years old, after leaving the Nizhyn Lyceum, he wrote to his mother: “Do you believe that I inwardly laughed at myself along with you! Here they call me a humble man, the beginning of meekness and patience. In one place I am the most quiet, modest, courteous, in another - gloomy, thoughtful, uncouth, etc., in the third - chatty and annoying to the extreme, in others I am smart, in others I am stupid. Honor me in any way you like, but only from my real career will you know my real character. One has to be especially careful in judging Gogol's ignorance, which, although it cannot be denied and impossible not to point out, but which somehow disappears from our eyes as soon as we come into contact with his gift of insight and his amazing, so to speak, eye of life. . He himself brilliantly illuminated this issue of his illiteracy in the story "Portrait". One painter is defined here as follows: “He was a remarkable man in many respects. He was an artist, of which there are few - one of those miracles that only Rus' alone spews from its unopened womb, a self-taught artist who himself found in his soul, without teachers and schools, rules and laws, carried away only by one thirst for improvement and walking, reasons, perhaps unknown to him, only one path indicated from the soul; one of those self-born miracles that contemporaries often honor with the insulting word “ignorant” and which, not cooling off from the blasphemy of their own failures, receive only new zeal and strength and already go far in their souls from those works for which they received the title of ignorant. With a high inner instinct, he felt the presence of thought in every object. In these words, much is applicable to Gogol himself, who mainly sought in himself both forces and various ways for expressing these forces.

Before offering general attention to the various aspects of his life and the development of his work, I allow myself to make one reservation. Everyone knows that in the character of this man there were many qualities that unpleasantly struck those who met him in life: his whims, and arrogance, and the obsessive tone of teaching, and cunning, sometimes combined with searching - all this repelled him very much. many; but I will not dwell at all on these, if you will, dark features of Gogol. I will not ask myself: was he a good man or a bad man? The rules of ordinary morality are too narrow to cover such a complex, sometimes sick and depressed, sometimes highly inspired existence as the inner life of this peculiar person presents us. I am trying not to appreciate his morality, but only to try to explain how Gogol developed and what methods of creativity he discovered in connection with his personality.

There is, fortunately, one document which, in many respects, inspires serious confidence in judging Gogol's development as a writer. This document is his own "Author's Confession". He inspires confidence, because the accuracy of the information told here is confirmed by many people who knew Gogol, and his own note in a letter to Pletnev (June 10, 1847), where he writes about this confession: “I only pray to God that He give me strength to state everything simply and truthfully. In this “Author's Confession” there is one valuable remark: “From early youth,” writes Gogol, “I had one road which I am walking. I was only secretive because I wasn't stupid - that's all." With this remark, Gogol destroys the assumptions about some kind of turn in his personal development, which is often seen in his "Correspondence with Friends".

This exposure of Gogol is so important that for all the reliability of the document, let's try not to believe him in this case. Is it really true that Gogol remained true to himself even in the last part of his life? Let's try to trace this according to the information we have about his life. Let us first focus our attention on his morbid daydreaming, religiosity and sadness, leaving aside his real aspirations for the time being. From what age do these qualities, which distinguished him in adulthood, become noticeable in him? Let's start from childhood. We all know that in his youth and early youth he was a man of irrepressible gaiety. And it was true; so it seemed to everyone, so it seemed at times and himself, but look what was hidden behind this cheerfulness. As a child, he could sometimes hear some strange voices coming from nowhere and calling him by name; those voices had an amazing effect on him. In the story "Old World Landowners" he recalls this. “I confess that I have always been afraid of this mysterious call. I remember that as a child I often heard it: sometimes suddenly someone would clearly pronounce my name. The day was usually at this time the clearest and sunniest; not a single leaf in the garden moved on a tree; the silence was dead... I usually then ran with the greatest fear and taking a breath from the garden, and only then calmed down when I came across some person, the sight of which drove out this terrible heart desert. If such incidents that seized the child were not as frequent as he himself says about it, then in any case they do not already prove at this age the great vitality in the boy, but rather the exorbitant development of the imagination, which overwhelmingly influenced, according to apparently a weak organism.

His religious feeling received vitality and strength in early childhood and then did not leave him all his life. And it is extremely curious that for the first time it spoke in him and directed his thoughts to the objects of faith under the influence of his same fiery imagination: having described in a letter to his mother (October 2, 1833) the pampering with which he was surrounded, he writes about his childhood: I remember I didn't feel much, I looked at everything as if it were things made to please me... I went to church because I was ordered or carried... I was baptized because I saw that everyone is baptized. But once - I vividly, as now, remember this incident - I asked you to tell me about the Last Judgment, and you told me, a child, so well, so clearly, so touchingly about the blessings that await people for a virtuous life, and they described the eternal torments of sinners so strikingly, so terribly, that it shocked me and awakened all sensitivity in me, it inspired and subsequently produced the highest thoughts in me. One can really believe that this story about the Last Judgment, touching and terrible, laid in Gogol from these years that fiery attitude towards religion, which can be seen constantly in his correspondence with his mother from Nizhyn, and from St. Petersburg, and from abroad. , and from Moscow - from everywhere and at any age. In one of his letters (1829), for example, at the age of twenty, he tells his mother that he “feels a just punishment heavy Hand of the Almighty”, and at the end of the letter he adds: “In tenderness I acknowledged the invisible Hand that cares for me, and blessed so wonderfully assigned to me the way”.

Much was written and said at one time about Gogol's arrogant hypocrisy, which was revealed unexpectedly to everyone with the publication of his correspondence, but the materials for his biography, collected and published since then, clearly convince him that the prophetic and demanding tone in matters of morality for him was not news at all. Re-read his letters to his relatives, to his mother and sisters, with whom even in his youth he felt not constrained, as with those high-ranking officials (with whom he ceased to be shy only later), re-read - and you will see a curious picture of precisely those contradictory moods. , which suddenly showed up for everyone at the end of his life. These moods did not exactly form, but only showed up by that time, because they had existed before, but remained an intimate secret of the writer himself. In these early letters to his relatives, especially to his mother, he either showers them terribly haughtily with his instructions, sometimes on a religious, sometimes on an everyday lining, and sometimes even goes so far as to recommend that they read only his letters and nothing more, or, touched by their objections, with genuine sadness and even some self-flagellation, he seeks to make amends for the offense inflicted. And besides, this tendency to sadness in general began to manifest itself in him even in his early youth. True, when he was seventeen years old, he wrote to his mother: unraveled the science of a cheerful, happy life, I was surprised how people, greedy for happiness, immediately run away from him, having met him. But with all this, he himself recalls in the “Author's Confession”: “The reason for the cheerfulness that was noticed in the first works of mine that appeared in print was a certain spiritual need. I was subjected to fits of melancholy, inexplicable to me, which, perhaps, was due to my morbid condition. To entertain myself I came up with everything funny that I could think of ... "

Yes, he did not escape these sad notes even in those works of his youth, the irrepressible and completely unconstrained gaiety of which remains striking to this day, and it is curious that the sad remarks in these stories of his are not all particular, but a broad and vivid pessimistic generalization, throwing light on some features of the basic worldview of man. Although in the story about Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich he pours out one after another inimitable everyday anecdotes from provincial life, he ends the story in a way that a completely cheerful person would never have ended: “Again the same field, pitted in places, black, in places turning green, wet jackdaws and crows, monotonous rain, a tearful sky without a gap ... Boring in this world, gentlemen!

If we think that the sad ending of the anecdote about these two neighbors could lead Gogol to this reflection and that it is an accident that naturally accompanies such a denouement, then how can we explain, if not a personal trait of a person, the end of the story “Sorochinsky Fair”? After all, this story is really a village fair - noisy, colorful, cheerful, culminating in a happy wedding, where both the old and the young set off and dance, and in the village street everything rushed and danced at the blow of the musician's bow. But, having barely described the cheerful picture, Gogol imperceptibly passes to the following remark: “Thunder, laughter, songs were heard quieter and quieter. The bow was dying, weakening and losing indistinct sounds in the density of the air. There was still a stomping sound somewhere, something like the murmur of a distant sea, and soon everything became empty and muffled.

Is it not so that joy, a beautiful and fickle guest, flies away from us, and in vain does a lonely sound think to express joy? In his own echo, he already hears sadness and the desert, and wildly listens to him. Is it not so that the frisky friends of a stormy and free youth one by one, one by one, are lost in the world and finally leave one of their old brothers? Bored left! And the heart becomes heavy and sad, there is nothing to help it.”

There are many such examples of sad lyricism in Gogol's writings. You can’t collect them all, but remember, for example, Gogol’s remark in the first volume of Dead Souls about Chichikov’s fleeting meeting with the governor’s daughter, who quickly disappeared from his eyes in her magnificent carriage. This disappearance of the governor's daughter involuntarily makes Gogol exclaim that "brilliant joy" is disappearing from our lives in exactly the same way. What is this sadness of Gogol? Compassion for people? Civic anguish? May be so; but above all, as the whole tone of his lyrical digressions convinces us, this is personal dissatisfaction, a deep biographical trait, this is sadness about oneself. No wonder his faithful friend Pushkin, who was killed before Gogol began to grow old, already called him "the great melancholic."

In one of the letters I have already cited, you may have noticed that Gogol refuses to consider himself a dreamer. But was it really so? Why does Gogol love the legend so much? old beautiful and terrible legend? Why did he so vividly describe the May night and the round dance of mermaids playing kites in the moonlight? Where did he dig up his “Wii” and all the terrible visions that accompany this story? Why did he become interested in Terrible Vengeance in the fantasy of a giant horseman who “with a terrible hand” grabbed the sorcerer and lifted him into the air over a bottomless abyss in the Carpathian mountains? Let us recall, by the way, how Gogol admired the dream of the “poor son of the desert” and what a poetic dream of the birth of Christianity arose before his dreamy and distant gaze. I will not talk about his enthusiasm for the heroic life, which you will find in the story "Taras Bulba", in the story "Opage" 2).

How deeply he experienced all this life of the past, surrounded by a halo of legend, can be judged by his own terminology: he writes about Little Russian thoughts and songs, for example, to Pogodin: “Little Russian songs with me: I breathe and do not inhale the frame”. About the songs collected by Mr. Sakharov 3), he writes what he wants sound like their sounds. This is an appeal to national antiquity, folk tradition and the heroic legend makes us recognize in Gogol purely romantic properties. His contemporaries, the romantics of the 1940s, who were well acquainted with Western poetry of this kind, more than we were struck by the similarity of Gogol's works with the works of Western romantics. In the journal Teleskop, for example, in 1831 (No. 20, p. 653), the great similarity between "Evenings on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" and Tiek's story "Spells of Love" was pointed out 4). Gogol, who read very little in general, especially Western literature, was fond of English writer, the then favorite of the Russian public - this romantic writer and painter of Scottish antiquity - Walter Scott.

In order to be even more convinced of Gogol's lively inclination to dream, we need only go abroad with him and see how he spends his time there. We can make these observations by skimming through the pages of the story "Rome", in which people who knew him personally, including Annenkov 5), who understood Gogol very subtly, see a lot of autobiographical. In this unfinished passage, which tells how the Roman prince is experiencing impressions both from the nature of Italy and from the creations of its art - temples, palaces and paintings, Gogol involuntarily betrays his own feelings experienced in the same places and on the same occasions. “In Genoa, the prince remembered that he had not been in church for many years ... He entered quietly and knelt in silence at the magnificent marble columns and prayed for a long time, not knowing why ... Oh! how many feelings then crowded together in his chest! ..

Dreams took possession of the prince with particular force when contemplating some marvelous Italian landscape, beginning to darken and become covered in dusk in the last minutes of the evening. Here is how this prince is described, at one of such moments admiring Rome from the hill at the onset of evening: “The sun was sinking lower to the earth; rosier and hotter became its brilliance on the whole architectural mass; the city became even more alive and closer, the pinns became even darker; the mountains became even bluer and more phosphorescent; even more solemnly and better ready to go out the heavenly air ... God! what a view! The prince, embraced by him, forgot himself, and the beauty of Annunziata, and the mysterious fate of his people, and everything that is in the world.

Annenkov, who lived with Gogol in Rome, saw more than once how, for half a day, he lay on the arcade of an old Roman water pipe, looking at the blue sky or at the dead and magnificent Roman Campagna; sometimes he spent whole hours among the dense vegetation, somewhere in the thicket, and from there rushed “ sharp, unmoving eyes into the dark greenery that ran in bunches over the rocks, and remained motionless for hours, with inflamed cheeks”. What was he thinking about at that time? Didn't he live this time with the same dreams as his Roman prince? It can be thought that his southern, fiery fantasy more than once, in the midst of these contemplations, made him see not the objects on which he fixed his eyes, but some of his own golden dreams, and what at those moments he could say together with the author of Faust :

And again reality darkens before me,

And again I live my favorite dream 6).

No wonder Gogol was so fond of Gothic architecture, no wonder he chose nothing other than the Middle Ages for his course of lectures on history.

So, the ability to break away from reality, to be carried away into one's own dreams and to give oneself to one's thoughts with fervor and passion, is the fundamental feature of this famous realist of ours. It provided a fertile ground for gradually and irrevocably surrendering to the inflamed imagination of a stubborn and intolerant sectarian. “So after for long years and works, and experiments, and reflections, apparently going forward, - writes Gogol, - I came to what I already thought about during my childhood". This gradual fascination of Gogol with questions of narrow morality was noted by Russian criticism even before the appearance of Correspondence with Friends.

Already in the first volume of Dead Souls, Belinsky saw with amazing insight unkind signs, he was afraid of ominous omens for the talent of this beloved writer. But even if Gogol himself was strengthened in these views, why did he publish his intimate correspondence with friends?

Referring to himself, his words are so contradictory that they positively exclude each other. Then he says he wants to release “a picky book, which would make everyone startle”, adding: “Believe that a Russian person, until you make him angry, you will not make him speak. He will still lie on his side and demand that the author regale him with something reconciling with life. He writes what he wanted with this book reconcile people with life, then, falling into a completely different tone, he writes to Zhukovsky that, after the publication of this book, he “woke up, as if after some kind of dream, feeling, like a delinquent schoolboy, that screwed up more than he intended”, So what swung in this book with such Khlestakov that he did not have the courage to look into it”. People who met him before the publication of this book saw him often thoughtful and, as it were, already more determined and focused. But no matter what views Gogol came to in this book, the saddest thing about this correspondence is that with it Gogol renounced his talent, was ready to see in it a sinful desire. How could this happen? And what actually happened? Who left whom? Did Gogol abandon his talent, or did Gogol leave his talent? In fact, both things happened. Suffering more and more from various tormenting ailments, which doctors even found it difficult to determine, and gradually coming to an age when people can do less and less without a definite world outlook, he began to build this world outlook with all his passion. Belonging to those people who cannot joke with ideas, he began to greedily destroy in himself everything that could contradict these ideas that were becoming more and more determined in him, and in this hard work he did not have at all the most important help for clarifying these ideas to himself: he had no knowledge, he was really ignorant. “At school,” he says to himself, “I received a rather poor upbringing, and therefore it is not surprising that the idea of ​​learning came to me in adulthood. I started with such initial books, that he was ashamed even to show and hid all his activities.

Pushkin was no longer alive at that time, and new friends, in his own words, pushed him on this path. And the path was filled with painful and tearing contradictions with oneself. He - neither more nor less - so greedily and ardently wanted to know the soul of a person at once and entered into such a tragic struggle with himself, which sometimes made him completely exhausted. In 1849 he writes: “I am all suffered, I just sick in mind and body everything was so shaken”, and in the “Author’s Confession” he remarks: “It’s probably harder for me than for anyone else to give up writing, when this was the only subject of all my thoughts, when I left everything else, all the best lures of life, and, like a monk, he severed ties with everything that is dear to a person on earth, then, in order not to think about anything else, except for his work.

How Gogol loved his talent, how he revered it, is best seen from a few touching words of his, written in his youth, during the full flowering of this talent. Here is what he wrote then, referring to his genius. “Oh, don’t be separated from me! live on earth with me at least two hours every day, like my beautiful brother! I will! I will! Life boils in me. My work will be inspired. Above them, a deity inaccessible to the earth will winnow. I will! oh, kiss and bless me!"

But if mystical ideas, which were not at all new to him, more and more convinced him to nevertheless make this break with his talent, then the talent itself began to weaken towards the end of his life; and he noticed this weakening of his impressionability already in the first volume of Dead Souls. He writes here: “Before, a long time ago, in those years of my youth, in the years of my irretrievably flashed childhood, it was fun for me to drive up to a familiar place for the first time; it doesn’t matter whether it was a village, a poor provincial town, a village, a suburb - a child’s curious look revealed a lot of curious things in him. Having immediately described the freshness of his then imagination, he continues: my chilled gaze is uncomfortable, it is not funny to me, and what in previous years would have awakened a living movement in the face, laughter and incessant speeches, now slips by, and an indifferent silence preserves my motionless lips. Oh my youth! oh, my freshness!..” These were his first forebodings, which made him already aware of the approach of a sad denouement.

Read Tikhonravov's notes 7) to the II and III volumes of Gogol's works, and you will see that this is a real mournful leaf of terrible suffering, where there was no return, where every day both life and talent run away from him with such implacability that nothing can hold on, no effort, as in famous painting Repin cannot be held back by the Terrible that life that escapes through his fingers, cannot be held back ... no matter how frantically and gently he squeezes the head of his dear, but dying son in his convulsive arms.

Gogol made similar efforts. “I tried,” he writes already in 1826, “to act contrary to circumstances and this order, not drawn from me. “ I I tried several times to write as before, as I wrote in my youth, that is, anyhow, wherever my pen leads; but nothing came out on paper. My efforts, - he writes in the "Author's confession", - almost always ended in illness, suffering, and, finally, in such seizures, as a result of which it was necessary to put off for a long time everything busy. What was I to do? Was it my fault... as if there were two springs in the age of man!”

He felt very well that an abyss was opening up under him, and he could only cry out in despair for help, which no one was able to give him, he only heard, unexpectedly for himself, from all sides condemnation and indignation at the last thing that came out from under him. pen. In the last chapter of Notes of a Madman, Poprishchin writes: “No, I no longer have the strength to endure... God! what are they doing to me! They don't listen, they don't see, they don't listen to me! What do they want from me, poor guy? What can I give them? I dont have anything... Help me! take me!.. Further, further, so that nothing, nothing could be seen ... There the sky swirls before me; an asterisk flickers in the distance; the forest is rushing with dark trees and a moon; on one side the sea, on the other Italy; and the Russian huts are visible. Does my house turn blue in the distance? Is my mother sitting in front of the window? Mother, save your poor son! He has no place in the world! they chase him! Mother, have pity about your sick child."

In this prayer, something akin to the author himself can really be seen. And why, in fact, is the petty bureaucrat Poprishchin, who never left St. Petersburg, this unsuccessful pretender to the Spanish throne, why did he suddenly combine in his tragic impulse both the Russian countryside and dear, dear to Gogol Italy?

Gogol died in 1852; The nearest reason for his death, the doctors could not determine. Three days before his death, he stopped eating. He burned and melted from some inner fire that devoured him... Such is the tragic side of the life of this extraordinary man.

And now, from these sad impressions, let's move on to those of his properties that were the greatest happiness and joy in his life, to his ability to create, let's move on to characterizing his colossal brilliant talent. In this case, we will follow his own words, spoken in the first volume of Dead Souls: “On the road! on the road! Away with the wrinkle that has crept over the forehead and the stern twilight of the face! At once and suddenly we will plunge into life, with all its soundless chirps and bells, and see what Chichikov is doing.

If, wanting to define Gogol's talent, we want to listen to his own definitions, we will fall into great perplexity. For example, here are two of his opinions. In one place of the "Author's Confession" he says: "I never did not create anything in the imagination and did not have this property. The only thing that came out well for me was what I took from reality, from data known to me. Guess the person I could only when I imagined the smallest details of his appearance. I never wrote portrait in the sense of a simple copy. I created portrait, but created it due to consideration, not imagination”. And a little higher he writes that “ invented entirely funny faces and characters, mentally put them in the most ridiculous situations, without caring at all about why this is, for what and to whom what benefit will come of it. True, the last words refer to his earlier works, in any case they show that the ability of unconstrained imagination existed in him and even on such a scale that, in his own words, many readers were left in “perplexity to decide how an intelligent person could come in the head such nonsense. Where did Gogol's vivid imagination disappear to in the heyday of his work? And how to understand it I created out of consideration, not imagination.

In order to approach the truth in resolving this issue, again, let us not take his word for it, but begin to observe him himself at a time when, speaking about other subjects, he accidentally blurts out, without noticing it, about himself; Let us listen along the way to the voice of contemporaries who knew him and take a closer look at his creations. In embarking on similar face-to-face confrontations of human opinions and feelings, let us keep in mind that there is no such creativity in the world that would not be combined from the work of thought and fantasy constantly passing one into the other, and that the source of some kind of rich fantasy, even and for “The Drowned Bell” 8), there is always real fact. Let us first turn to that period of his life when, so to speak, he was on the border between the unaccountable joy of youth and the imminent transition to a more mature age.

In 1835, at the time when The Inspector General had already begun to be prepared, Gogol wrote to his mother: “Literature is completely is not a consequence of the mind, but a consequence of feeling, in the same way as music and painting.” And how much at that very time fantasy simply overcame him, with the force of a hallucination presenting vivid pictures to him against his own will, you can judge from his letter to Pogodin, which also refers to this period of his life. Informing in this letter that he cannot continue the planned comedy under censorship conditions, Gogol writes: “So, I cannot take up the comedy. I'll take up history - the stage is moving in front of me, applause is noisy, faces are protruding from the boxes, from the district, from the chairs and baring their teeth, and history to hell. In one of his letters from the same period, he remarks that he has “ a hundred different beginnings and not a single story, not even a single excerpt complete”, which could hardly be a person without an ardent imagination. And according to Tikhonravov, who patiently compared all kinds of sheets, half-sheets, shreds, shreds of drafts left after Gogol, this was precisely his manner of writing. “He wrote his great works not in sequence of chapters or scenes, but without any order.” A feature that hardly shows that a person works with logic, and does not create with imagination. And how far from the only example of where Gogol's fantasy could take him is the picturesque rendering of the complaint of a beautiful Polish woman in the story "Taras Bulba" (1842). Gogol writes that the Pole woman “pulled back her long hair, which had fallen over her eyes, and poured herself all over in pitiful speeches, pronouncing them in a quiet, quiet voice, just as the wind, having risen in a beautiful evening, suddenly runs through the thick thicket of the driving reed: they rustle, resound and rush suddenly depressingly subtle sounds, and the stopped traveler catches them with incomprehensible sadness, not sensing either the fading evening, or the rushing cheerful songs of the people wandering from field work and stubble, or the distant rumble of a cart passing somewhere. Looking through these lines, you involuntarily ask yourself the question: how, if not by a flight of fiery fantasy, could Gogol be transported from the “quiet complaints” of a Pole to the “rattling of a cart”? What consideration can cause a person to come to such a surprise? No wonder Gogol, later recalling the flowering of his talent, said that he wrote "sometimes at random, wherever the pen leads."

For all that, the same studies of Tikhonravov and Shenrok 9) testify that Gogol constantly reworked his creations; yes, it is easy for anyone to be convinced of this by skimming through the table of contents to his works, in which at every step you will meet: “initial edition”, “later edition”, “additional chapters”, etc. In the period, for example, from 1839 to 1842, he worked in fits and starts new edition"Taras Bulba" and at the same time reworked "Portrait", "Inspector", "Marriage", "Gamblers" and composed "Theatrical Journey" and the last chapters of the first volume of "Dead Souls". That's all true, but look how he accidentally blurts out about such properties of this processing, which only say that he is in the heat of inspiration. Here is what he writes from Vienna in 1840: “I began to feel some kind of cheerfulness of youth ... I felt that thoughts were moving in my head, like an awakened swarm of bees; my imagination becomes sensitive. Oh, what a joy it was, if you only knew! The plot, which of late I lazily kept in my head, not daring even to take it up, unfolded before me in such majesty that everything in me felt sweet thrill, and I, forgetting everything, suddenly moved to that world, in which he had not been for a long time, and at the same moment sat down to work, forgetting that it was not at all suitable while drinking water, and it was here calmness of the head and thoughts was required. It can be seen that the former beekeeper, Rudy Panko, has not forgotten his habit - “always throwing in something new.”

Be that as it may, however, Gogol was right when he spoke about the participation of considerations in his work, and it is worth considering what these considerations of his were aimed at. According to the memoirs of Berg 10), Gogol gave him the following advice on how to compose: “First you need to sketch everything as you have to, even badly, waterily, but absolutely everything and forget about this notebook. Then in a month, in two, sometimes more (this will affect itself) to get what was written and re-read it; you will see that much is wrong, much is superfluous, and something is missing. Make corrections and notes in the margins - and throw the notebook again. With a new revision of it - new notes in the margins, and where there is not enough space - take a separate piece and stick it on the side. When everything is written in this way, take and copy the notebook with your own hand. Here new insights will come by themselves, cuts, additions, syllable cleansing. And put the notebook down again. Travel, have fun, do nothing, or at least write something else. An hour will come, an abandoned notebook will be remembered: take it, re-read it, correct it in the same way and, when it is dirty again, copy it with your own hand.

So, giving advice to a friend, Gogol revealed to us the methods of his own work. These are completely the techniques of the painter. Imagine an artist in his studio. His whole room is filled with sketches; these sketches are pinned to the wall, hung on the stove, lying on the floor and on the sofa. Here you will find the corner of the hut, and the sunset, and the tense muscle of a person, and the movement of a human face. The artist is standing in front of the painting he has begun, which should combine these scattered everyday impressions, somehow brought to the shreds of the canvas. Sometimes, in thought, he examines his sketches, and then he goes to the easel, puts paint on the canvas in one place, in another, and, now approaching the picture, now stepping back from it a step or two, he squints one eye, as if wanting to concentrate, and looking closely at this picture. If at that moment satisfaction flickers on his face, then this is a sure sign that life has begun to play in the picture. The artist in these moments, of course, thinks, but the consideration of his special property: there is also the ability to see what the other does not see, and a passionate desire, and an unconscious sense of taste, and a simple eye. Gogol also had his own sketches, from which he subsequently took the tones and colors, the whole color of his works. His notebook, fortunately preserved, gives us an excellent collection of such sketches. What is not in it! You remember, of course, all sorts of things lying on Plyushkin's desk - and "an old book bound in leather with a red edge," and "a lemon, all dried up," and "a broken arm of an armchair," and "a glass with some kind of liquid and three flies, covered with a letter”... If you, not knowing who owns Gogol’s book, began to leaf through it, you would have to change your assumptions about its owner several times, until, having reached the last page, you would decide after all the diversity of the impressions received, that such a book could belong to only one person - a living and observant artist. Here you will find inscribed the names of bird calls, and the technical expressions of arable farming and catching pigeons; scroll dog names and will accept with the remark: “We have not yet spoken about greyhounds”; card names; folk “bends”, in the sense of offensive witticism; an endless list of various dishes, such as “mash”, “malt”, etc., characteristic of different classes; enumeration of the prosecutor's bribes and next to it - a list of Golokhvast stallions with all their signs; samples of the business language of official paper; a list of typical nicknames, next to a hot review of the theater. Here you will read a detailed description folk custom and the ceremony, and questions to Khomyakov about the peasants, or a note, a sketch from nature under a fresh impression, like this: “Hung on a mountain slope living picture: a bunch of trees along with huts hiding under their shadow, a pond, a wattle fence and a path, on which a cart was pounding. Sayings, proverbs and cries of peddlers are also written down right there, and, finally, to the horror for your puritanical feelings, you will stumble here on some pages about well-aimed, true, but unprintable words. Life itself entered this book in its full and angular integrity. Among all this kaleidoscopic variegation, remarks of a religious nature flicker.

Has it ever happened to you on the street, having driven away personal worries and anxieties for a few minutes, breaking away, so to speak, from yourself, look around and peer with fresh attention into that phantasmagoria of a lively and rapid change of impressions in which we bathe every day? It is this air of the street, its vague movement, discordant sounds and the rapid turn of feelings and shocks that emanates from Gogol's notebook. From time to time you open it, and as if a window suddenly flew open:

And noise broke into the room,

And the blessing of the nearby temple,

And the voice of the people, and the sound of the wheel 11).

People who knew Gogol noted his enormous ability to peer into life. Turgenev, who listened to his lectures and later met with him, said that Gogol had " constant insight facial expression". Annenkov remembers about the observation that has grown to his face. In Gogol himself you will find the expression: hawk-eye of the observer.

He was distinguished by an extraordinary art of inquiring and questioning; he collected his living material everywhere; his letters to relatives and friends are full of questions about common acquaintances and even strangers, about how they dress, spend time, do they have any sayings and the like, and at the same time he always asks to tell him everything, to “the very last insect ". He terribly valued his own immediate impression of life and paid little attention to other people's generalizations. He moved away from those people who always have ready-made definitions for various occasions, and constantly laughed at them, “on the contrary, he could spend whole hours with any horse breeder, with a manufacturer, with a craftsman who expounds the deepest subtleties of the game of grandmas.” In The Old World Landowners, Gogol involuntarily spoke about this in the words: “I don’t like reasoning when they remain just reasoning.” Gogol was afraid of visitors like fire and loved such attitudes towards people who would not demand anything from him, and he himself, according to the testimony of the engraver Jordan 12), “could take what he needed and what was worth it, with his full hand, without giving himself anything ". Moreover, while collecting the information he needed, he sometimes thought little about the means. Remember how the men talked about Plyushkin going for a morning walk? “There the fisherman went hunting!” Remember that “after him there was no need to sweep the street, and what if a woman, somehow gaping at the well, forgot the bucket, he dragged the bucket too”? Gogol did exactly the same thing. In 1835, starting the first drafts of Dead Souls, he was looking for “a good call-to-letter with whom he could get along briefly”, and later he tried to get extracts from cases, memorandums, instructing Prokopovich 13) to ask I. G. for such papers. Pashchenka 14), who, according to him, “may kidnap from his own justice." In what way and from where the plot of "Dead Souls" was "borrowed" You can judge by Pushkin's jolly remark: "You have to be more careful with this Little Russian: he robs me so that you can't even shout." Gogol wrote: "Even Bulgarin's critics do me good, because, as a German, I take a spit out of all rubbish."

Thanks to his amazing ability to remember every little thing, Gogol firmly kept all this colorful and colorful everyday material in his head and used it widely and skillfully. His considerations, which he mentions, were that inner work of the artist, which consists much more of the movement of images and feelings than of logical, abstract thinking and analysis. Those parts of his letters, where he mentions facts and does not make his own definitions of himself, eloquently say that this one is really so: either he asks a friend to include in his story some saying that he suddenly heard and apt, then he writes, that he continues to work, that is, to throw chaos on paper, from which the creation of "Dead Souls" must come. The very manuscripts that remained after Gogol prove that his processing of what was thrown, often rashly, onto paper was a manifestation of the subtle taste of the artist, who hated vulgarity, caricature and farce and removed from his first sketches everything that violated his sense of proportion, and sometimes added to already written new features snatched from life. It was a constant desire to write in such a way as to answer in the affirmative to the question posed in Dead Souls: “Does this look like the truth?” Let's also not forget that in the story "Rome" the Roman prince often spent long hours peering at the paintings of the greatest artists, "staring a silent gaze and with the gaze entering deeper with the soul into the secrets of the brush, seeing invisibly in the beauty of spiritual thoughts. For it elevates the art of man highly, giving nobility and marvelous beauty to the movements of the soul.” This love of beauty was not noticed by those of his contemporaries who were ready to see in him only an anecdote and a dangerous libelist.

But no matter how much art elevated Gogol, no matter how it raised him above his weaknesses, it never took him completely off the ground, and his sensitive ear was always open to the slightest sounds coming from the street. The recollection of one trustworthy contemporary of his, Annenkov, who wrote down some chapters of Dead Souls after Gogol, has been preserved. This reminiscence truly depicts how Gogol, in the midst of sublime pathos, freely deviated for some worldly impression, subtly experienced it or made a sly remark, and again immediately proceeded to his inspired exposition. This was in Rome. Annenkov lived with Gogol in the same apartment and wrote down the chapters of Dead Souls under his dictation. Here's how it happened. “Gogol,” says Annenkov, “closed the inner shutters of the windows more strongly from the irresistible southern sun, I sat down at a round table, and Nikolai Vasilyevich, spreading out a notebook in front of him on the same table, further away, all went into it and began to dictate measuredly, solemnly. .. It was like a calm, properly poured inspiration, which is usually generated by a deep contemplation of an object. Nikolai Vasilyevich waited patiently for my last word and continued new period the same voice, imbued with concentrated feeling and thought. The excellent tone of this poetic dictation was so true in itself that it could not be weakened or changed in any way. Often the roar of an Italian donkey was piercingly heard in the room, then a blow of a stick was heard on its sides and an angry cry of a woman: └Ecco, ladrone!“ 15) - Gogol stopped, said, smiling: └How softened, scoundrel!“, and again began the second half phrases with the same force and strength with which its first half poured out from him. When Annenkov, under the influence of what Gogol dictated to him, leaned back in his chair and, unable to restrain himself, burst into laughter, Gogol looked at him coolly, but smiled affectionately and only said: “Try not to laugh, Jules!” This was the nickname given by Gogol to Annenkov. And having dictated “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin,” Gogol himself began to laugh along with Annenkov and several times slyly asked: “What is the story about Captain Kopeikin?”

After especially successful chapters, Gogol's calmness, which he maintained during dictation, sometimes broke through, and he gave himself over to the most noisy gaiety. Having finished dictating the sixth chapter of “Dead Souls”, for example, he called Annenkov for a walk, turned into a back alley, “here he began to sing a wild little Russian song and suddenly started just dancing and began to twist such things with an umbrella in the air that no more than two minutes the handle of the umbrella remained in his hands, and the rest flew to the side. He quickly picked up the broken part and continued the song.”

Gogol's purely artistic work is sometimes expressed in the fact that he was able to fully experience their comic situations and antics with his heroes, he himself sometimes laughed at the moments of creating his stories and comedies. This ability to be transported into a fictitious position and into an imaginary character was also manifested in his life in a tremendous ability to represent in the faces of any familiar, unfamiliar person, and some imaginary story was always added to imitation, in which what was imagined and guessed the person acted completely in accordance with his character. His contemporaries tell many anecdotes, how in this way he managed to tease, then to make people laugh, then to have a calming effect on people. This ability made him an indispensable reader of his own works. Turgenev, who was once present when Gogol was reading The Inspector General, conveys this recollection as follows: “He struck me with the extreme simplicity and restraint of manner, some important and at the same time naive sincerity, which, as if it didn’t matter whether there were listeners and what he think. It seemed that Gogol's only concern was how to delve into the subject, new to him, and how to more accurately convey his own impression. The effect was extraordinary, especially in comic, humorous meters; it was impossible not to laugh - a good, healthy laugh; and the culprit of all this fun continued, not embarrassed by the general gaiety and, as if inwardly marveling at it, more and more immersed in the matter itself, and only occasionally on the lips and around the eyes did the craftsman’s sly smile tremble.

Taking into account all these properties of Gogol, we will not be far from the truth if we say that his talent was direct and that when Gogol speaks of a deep reflection on his works, we believe him, but we understand this term in his mouth not in the sense consistent logical conclusions, but in the sense of constant artistic persistent guessing of true combinations, characters and human properties; we have the right to understand it in this way, especially since the very term guessing the truth belongs to him. His requirements for art were thus primarily reduced to truth, to measure and to beauty.

He aptly grasped all these aspects of artistic activity with a much more direct feeling. , than inference. He would hardly, for example, be able to accurately answer the question of what false classicism is. But the falsity and affectation of Russian imitations of French comedy, when compared with some living image from his notebook, immediately caught his eye and caused simply laughter. “Isn't it funny,” he writes, for example, “that a Russian judge, who is extremely numerous in vaudeville, begins to sing a couplet in an ordinary conversation? In the French theater we forgive these tricks against naturalness, because we know that the French judge is a dancer and composes couplets, plays well on the flageolet 16), maybe even draws in albums. But if our judge begins to do all this and is clothed with such a rough appearance with which he is usually presented in our vaudevilles, then ... The judge is forced to sing! Yes, if our district judge sings, then the audience will hear such a roar that, surely, they will not show themselves in the theater another time.

This ability to feel truth and naturalness tore Gogol from his fantastic dreams of youth and made him a great representative of realism, but his great demands for spiritual life, his eternal self-deepening gave him a special lofty quality to realism. His writings are not a record of life, not a page recorded in a clinic, and not a dead, albeit accurate, photograph. He himself remarks that he never wrote a simple copy a c painted portraits, and for this, in his words, he “needed guess the person. Once he had obtained the truth, he jealously guarded himself from the dashing eye: he contemplated it for a long time and nurtured it in the very recesses of his soul, and when inspiration visited him, he shared this wealth with us, leaving the imprint of his spiritual life on it. You will recall that in the painting that amazed Chartkov at the exhibition, “it was visible”, according to Gogol, “the power of creation, already contained in the soul of the artist himself... It was evident how everything extracted from the world, the artist enclosed in his soul, and from there, from the spiritual spring, directed him one consonant solemn song. Tikhonravov, who had the opportunity to peer into Gogol's activities, points out that with these words he "explains his view of the process of artistic creativity". This is where these “pearls of creation” came from, into which, under his inspired hand, our “sometimes bitter worldly road” turned.

Repeating the reproaches that were made to him for his invariable choice of supposedly completely undesirable plots, Gogol wrote: “Why, then, flaunt the poverty of our life and our sad imperfection, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote back streets of the state? What is to be done if a writer is already of such a quality, and he himself has already fallen ill with his imperfection, and his talent is already arranged in such a way as to portray to him the poverty of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote corners of the state. Only a person capable of deeply sympathizing with the suffering of another could fall ill with such a strange disease. This disease has a very simple name - it is called the ability to sympathize with people. Remember that young man in the story “The Overcoat” who, recalling the clerical tricks of officials over poor Akaky Akakievich, “many times,” says Gogol, “shuddered later in his lifetime, seeing how much ferocious rudeness is hidden in refined, educated secularism and - God! - even in that person whom the world recognizes as noble and honest. With this appeal to humanity, with his love for beauty and enormous moral demands on life, Gogol, with all his realism, adjoins that cultural period of Russian life to which his time has referred him: he is a magnificent variety of idealists of the 40s; and one of the notable representatives of precisely these idealists of the 1940s, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, well understood the lining of Dead Souls when he said that they “have words of reconciliation, there are forebodings and hopes of a full and solemn future, but ... that it is a poem deeply suffered.”

As for whether Gogol can be called the head of realism in Russian literature, there is a lot of debate about this, and I think they argue because the very question of this cannot be raised. If you look at the literary process as a permanent complex development, in which each phenomenon grows naturally from a whole series of complex antecedents, then is it possible to isolate any writer and put him at the head of others. Here we can talk about only one question: with the name of which author was associated in the eyes of the majority of Russian readers and writers the idea of ​​realism? Gogol was undoubtedly such a bone of contention in the 30s and 40s, and it can be argued that the debate about realism became especially fierce with the appearance of his works, although he was not the founder of this trend, but only a brilliant successor to the work of Fonvizin, Griboedov, Pushkin, and most importantly - the entire growth of the cultural successes of Russian society.

With all this, one feature of Gogol is highly characteristic of him: no matter how keen an observer of Russian customs he was, he had little interest in social issues in the definite form in which Russian life put forward them. The Roman prince I have already quoted more than once (read - Gogol) saw, “how magazine reading of huge sheets absorbed the whole day (Frenchman) and did not leave an hour for practical life; like every Frenchman was brought up by this strange whirlwind of bookish, typographically moving politics and warmly and ardently took all interests to heart, becoming fiercely against his opponents, not yet knowing in the face either his own interests or opponents ... and the word politics disgusted finally strongly Italian. He gave up all reading and devoted himself entirely to artistic creativity. Gogol also read very little... His lack of interest in public life is explained not only by his personal characteristics, but also simply by the lack of knowledge that could deepen the significance of these issues before him. As soon as Gogol tries to speak out on this subject, immediately his speech sounds like some kind of absurd, screaming dissonance. Here is what he writes, for example, to Belinsky in response to his famous letter: “If only you could define what is meant by the name of European civilization! Here and phalanstery 17), and red ones, and all sorts, and everyone is ready to eat each other”. It is obvious that for Gogol all these phalanstery And all sorts seemed very vague. As an example of his still relatively mild response to such a cultured people as the Germans, it is worth reading his letter to Balabina 18) dated May 20, 1839, in which Gogol says: “And can you say that every German is a Schiller. I agree that he is Schiller, but only the Schiller that you can learn about if you ever have the patience to read my story └Nevsky Prospekt.

In order to get an idea of ​​the naivety of Gogol's judgment in everything that concerns social relations, one must read his article on estates in the state. His ignorance sometimes resulted in an amazing self-confidence of opinion. It cost him nothing, for example, to write: “I have confidence that if I wait to read my plan, then in the eyes of Uvarov he will distinguish me from the crowd sluggish professors that fill the universities.” It cost him nothing to assert with aplomb that he would write a multi-volume magnificent general history, but in this respect life severely punished him not with a multi-volume general history, but with a brief history of his professorship. Gogol was, in essence, a stranger to everything that had anything to do with politics, and he was right when he called himself a man. non-state, but it is curious how even in these cases, where he could only grope and constantly stumble, it is curious how his talent for observation to the external manifestation of life, including social life, saved him. Although in reality he did not belong to either the Slavophiles or the Westernizers and, probably, not reading their polemical articles, he at the same time unusually skillfully captured the typical features of the then Moscow and St. Petersburg journalism, although, of course, he rarely held in his hands the periodicals of that time, I only skimmed through them and judged them by almost the same titles. Here is how he joked about these magazines: “In Moscow they talk about Kant, Schelling, and so on, in St. Petersburg magazines they talk about the public and good intentions ... In Moscow, magazines go along with the century, but extremely behind books; in St. Petersburg, magazines do not keep pace with the century, but they come out neatly. Writers live in Moscow, they make money in St. Petersburg.” In order to quite clearly imagine the ambiguity of Gogol's social worldview, it is worth comparing him with another satirist, however, a satirist of our time - with Saltykov!

But no matter how great were the gaps in Gogol's social education, his writings were destined to play a big role in the development of Russian self-consciousness. When you express any general thought to reinforce it, to make it clear, you always need a concrete example. The persuasiveness and brightness of an example largely depends on two reasons: firstly, on its universal recognition, and secondly, on whether it embraces life broadly or narrowly. In science, for greater persuasiveness, they collect a huge amount of facts and often prove thoughts with the results of statistical calculations. But where can you find the statistics of morals?.. How to calculate and express with what figures the spiritual movements of a person? In the realm of the moral life of man, the only statistical result is the artistic type so far true to reality: it immediately gives you both a generalization of life and a prime example. Gogol gave us a vivid and absolutely correct depiction of a widespread fact, and, moreover, one that everyone looked at closely and therefore noticed little; he refreshed general attention to this fact, although the social meaning of this fact remained unclear to him. And when he proposed in this way to Russian society to look in the mirror, different people reacted differently to this examination of themselves.

Those who knew “whose meat the cat ate” were very annoyed, and the “Inspector General”, although they were very excited, was not approved by them. One contemporary explained the failure of the first performance in this way, saying that a performance that ridiculed bribery could not really arouse sympathy in such an auditorium where half the audience was giving, and half taker.

Those who did not know “whose meat the cat ate”, looking into Gogol’s mirror, laughed innocently and heartily, recognizing their good friends every now and then, but rejoicing only similarity and not understanding the bitter side of the matter.

Finally, the third, who were in the minority, immediately noticed the reverse side of the coin and actively began to interpret the meaning of the fact for themselves, using the social terminology that Gogol so aptly put into circulation. Regarding the "Inspector" in "Molva" at that time it was written: "The names of the characters from the └Inspector" turned the next day into their own names: Khlestakovs, Anna Andreevna, Marya Antonovna, city residents, Strawberries, Tyapkins-Lyapkins went hand in hand with Famusov , Molchalin, Chatsky, Prostakov. And all this happened so soon, even before the performance. Look: they, these gentlemen and ladies, are walking along Tverskoy Boulevard, in the park, around the city, and everywhere, wherever there are a dozen people, between them, probably, one comes out of Gogol's comedy ... ”To this, understandable to everyone and for Our famous critic of the 40s, Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky, relied on all convincing social terminology, and, firmly standing on this first step created by Gogol, he led the Russian person much higher along the path of social self-consciousness.

So it happened, as a surprise to Gogol, that he, who was closest to official patriotism, contributed with his writings to the awakening of a different feeling for the homeland, conscious, much higher and connected with the information that came from the unkind to him European enlightenment. In an unexpected way for himself, he supported a man who undoubtedly did not share his convictions, the well-known Westerner Chaadaev, who, just in the year of the publication of The Government Inspector, in 1836, wrote: “I do not know how to love my fatherland with eyes closed, with bowed head and with closed lips ... I find that it is possible to be useful to the fatherland only under the condition of seeing it clearly; I think that the time of blind cupids has passed, that now we are primarily indebted to our fatherland for the truth. I love my fatherland the way Peter the Great taught me to love it.” These words of Chaadaev define Gogol's social significance very precisely. Gogol really unleashed the eyes of his readers. But in order to do this, even talent was not enough; it was necessary to contain within oneself a stable moral personality, so that amidst all the literary and non-literary temptations and attacks, one would steadily move along a guessed direction. It takes courage to use talent.

Among the most intricate and contradictory oddities of Gogol's character, in him stubbornly and powerfully retained its inviolability and strength, something indefinable, which was the most intimate and powerful side of his existence. He rarely let anyone into these "holy holies", sometimes gave the impression of a mysterious person, and already school comrades, masters in the matter of nicknames, called him the Mysterious Karla. Gogol knew the price of his innermost and lofty poetic aspirations and loved them very much. In 1835, he wrote: “Peace be with you, my heavenly guests, who brought divine moments to me in my cramped apartment, close to the attic! Nobody knows you, I again lower you to the bottom of my soul!..”

And there, at the bottom of this soul, a good light burned. There brightly sparkled cheerful laughter, did not fade away living feeling beauty, compassion for people was constantly glimmering and sadness inseparable from it - this is the true foundations of humor.

Published on: Alferov A. D. Features of Gogol's work and the meaning of his poetry
for Russian self-consciousness ( public lecture). M.: T-vo I. D. Sytin, 1901. S. 5–39.

Alexander Danilovich Alferov (1862–1919) - literary critic and methodologist, author of a number of textbooks and teaching aids on the history of Russian literature. He was a consistent supporter of the philological study mother tongue, relied on the methodology of F. I. Buslaev. “Essays on the History of Modern Russian Literature of the 19th Century” (1915) by Alferov were written in a genre close to the essay. They were missing detailed analysis works, a presentation of the biography and creative path of the writer. The author sought to give the opportunity to feel in the writer that "there is a peculiarity in him, and leaving the rest to an independent personal impression." Popular at the beginning of the 20th century were the anthologies “Pre-Petrine Literature and Folk Poetry” (1906) and “Russian Literature of the 18th Century” (1907), prepared by Alferov together with A. E. Gruzinsky, as well as their “Collection of Questions on the History of Russian Literature” ( 1900), reprinted several times.

A. D. Alferov was a member of the Cadets, but political activities did not work. In August 1919, A.S. (Alexandra Samsonovna, wife of A.D. Alferov) and A.D. Alferovs were arrested by the Cheka in the school colony Bolshevo, near Moscow, taken to Lubyanka and shot without trial.

1) Macbeth. Action 1st. Scene 3. (“... why did I so involuntarily / Cling to a dream with a terrible temptation ...”). Per. A. I. Kroneberg.

2) Nizhyn Colonel Stepan Ostranitsa, called in some historical sources hetman. In 1830-1832, Gogol worked on a historical novel about the heroic struggle of the Cossacks with Poland for national independence in the 17th century and the campaign of Ostrany. Two of them were published by the author himself in the second part of "Arabesques" ("Prisoner. An excerpt from a historical novel"). Information about the campaign of Stepan Ostranitsy and his execution in 1638, Gogol drew from the handwritten source "History of the Rus", which he also referred to in his work on "Taras Bulba". Separate motifs of the unfinished novel were then reflected in Taras Bulba.

3) Ivan Petrovich Sakharov - Russian ethnographer-folklorist, archaeologist and paleographer. Born August 29 (September 10), 1807 in Tula, in the family of a priest. Graduated from the Tula Theological Seminary. In 1835 he graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University. In the same year, I. P. Sakharov began to publish. His first works were articles on archeology and ethnography. He began to collect songs, rituals and traditions. In 1836, I. P. Sakharov published “Tales of the Russian people about the family life of their ancestors”, in three volumes. Then a two-volume book of songs of the Russian people (1838–1839), “Russian folk tales” (1841) and other works (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki).

4) This refers to “Liebeszauber”, a story by Ludwig Tieck, published in Russian translation under the title “Spells of Love” (1830. “Galatea”, No. 10–11). There was also an earlier translation of L. Tik's story called "Witchcraft" ("Slavyanin", 1827).

5) Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (June 19 (July 1), 1813, according to other sources June 18 (30), 1812, Moscow - March 8 (20), 1887, Dresden) - Russian literary critic, literary historian and memoirist. He made his debut in print with essays "Letters from abroad" in the journal "Notes of the Fatherland" in 1841.

Annenkov went down in history as the founder of Pushkin studies, the author of the first critically prepared collected works of Pushkin (1855-1857) and the first extensive biography of Pushkin - “Materials for the Biography of Pushkin” (1855), later, collecting new materials and having the opportunity to publish under more liberal censorship conditions many old, published the book "Pushkin in the Alexander era" (1881; 1998). For the most recent publications, see: Annenkov P.V.. Literary Memories. M., 1983; 1989; Paris letters. M., 1983; 1984; Critical essays. Comp., prepared. text, intro. st., notes d. philol. Sciences I. N. Sukhikh. SPb., 2000.

6) Faust. Dedication. Per. N. Kholodkovsky.

7) Tikhonravov Nikolai Savvich (1832-1893) - historian of Russian literature. He specialized in the history of ancient Russian literature and literature of the 18th century; along with this, he studied a lot of Gogol's work. He edited the edition of Gogol's Works (5 volumes, Moscow, 1889–1890). It not only gives a corrected and supplemented text, the result of many years of the most careful study, but at the same time, in extensive “notes” by the editor, it presents a detailed picture of the history of this text, the history of each work and of Gogol’s entire literary activity, in connection with the history of inner development of the writer.

8) Gerhard Hauptmann. Sunken bell (“Die versunkene Glocke”). Dramatic tale in verse.

9) Vladimir Ivanovich Shenrok - historian of literature, almost all of Shenrok's literary and scientific activities are devoted to the study of Gogol. Books: “Index to Gogol's Letters”, M., 1888; "Gogol's student years". M., 1898). All of Shenrock's works on Gogol are combined in Materials for Gogol's Biography (4 vols., Moscow, 1892–1898).

10) Nikolai Vasilyevich Berg (1823-1884) - poet, translator, journalist. The work of N. Berg “The village of Zakharovo” (1851) is one of the first to tell about the places associated with A. S. Pushkin. Peru Berg owns "Notes on the siege of Sevastopol" (1858), "My wanderings in the wide world" (1863), memories of meetings with Gogol, Nekrasov, Turgenev.

11) “Spring! the first frame is exposed - / And the noise burst into the room, / And the blessing of the nearby temple, / And the voice of the people, and the sound of the wheel ”( Apollo Maykov. 1854 ).

12) Fyodor Ivanov Jordan (1800-1883). He often met with Gogol in Rome, about which he spoke in his memoirs (“Notes of the rector and professor of the Academy of Arts Fyodor Ivanovich Jordan”, M., 1918). After Gogol's death, Jordan, according to the writer's will, engraved his portrait by F. Moller for "The Works and Letters of N. Gogol" (St. Petersburg, 1857. Vol. I).

13) Nikolai Yakovlevich Prokopovich - Gogol's classmate at the Nizhyn gymnasium, one of his closest friends.

14) Timofei Grigorievich Pashchenko, together with his brother Ivan Grigorievich, were Gogol's junior schoolmates in the Nizhyn “Gymnasium of Higher Sciences”.

15) Here (to you), robber! ( it.).

16) Flageolet (fr. flageolet , reduce. from the old flageol - flute)- old flute of high register, flute.

17) Phalanster - in the teachings of Charles Fourier's utopian socialism, a palace of a special type, which is the center of life of the phalanx - a self-sufficient commune of 1600-1800 people working together for mutual benefit. Fourier himself, due to lack of financial support, was never able to found a single phalanstery, but some of his followers succeeded.

18) Marya Petrovna Balabina - a student of N.V. Gogol. At the beginning of 1831, P. A. Pletnev recommended the financially constrained Gogol to the Balabin family as a home teacher.

Publication prepared M. Raitsina

Composition

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

The originality of Gogol was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the county landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the "little man", a resident of St. Petersburg corners.

Gogol was a brilliant satirist who scourged the "vulgarity of a vulgar person", exposing to the utmost the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.

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

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

The goals of a vivid satirical depiction of heroes are served by Gogol's careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. So, for example, portraits of the heroes of "Dead Souls" were created. These details in Gogol are mostly everyday: things, clothes, housing of heroes. If in Gogol's romantic stories emphatically picturesque landscapes are given, giving the work a certain elation of tone, then in his realistic works, especially in "Dead Souls", the landscape is one of the means of depicting types, characteristics of heroes. Theme, social orientation and ideological coverage of the phenomena of life and the characters of people determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the folk collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings ...", in "Taras Bulba ”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to live colloquial (in everyday paintings and scenes of “Evenings ...” or in narratives about bureaucratic landowner Russia).

The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common language, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries.

Gogol loved and subtly felt folk colloquial speech, skillfully applied all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of social life.

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

The strength of Gogol the stylist is in his humor. In his articles on Dead Souls, Belinsky showed that Gogol's humor "consists in opposition to the ideal of life with the reality of life." He wrote: "Humor is the most powerful tool of the spirit of negation, which destroys the old and prepares the new."

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

The originality of Gogol was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the county landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the "little man", a resident of St. Petersburg corners.

Gogol was a brilliant satirist who scourged "the vulgarity of a vulgar man", exposing to the utmost the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.

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

Deep insight into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of his contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of the word, to draw images of a huge generalizing power.

The goals of a vivid satirical depiction of heroes in Gogol are a careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. So, for example, portraits of the heroes of "Dead Souls" were created. These details in Gogol are mostly everyday: things, clothes, housing of heroes. If in Gogol's romantic stories emphatically picturesque landscapes are given, giving the work a certain elation of tone, then in his realistic works, especially in Dead Souls, the landscape is one of the means of depicting types, characterizing heroes.

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

The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common language, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. material from the site

Gogol loved and subtly felt folk colloquial speech, skillfully applied all its shades to characterize his heroes and the phenomena of social life.

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

The strength of Gogol the stylist is in his humor. In his articles on Dead Souls, Belinsky showed that Gogol's humor "consists in opposition to the ideal of life with the reality of life." He wrote: "Humor is the most powerful tool of the spirit of negation, which destroys the old and prepares the new."