Synopsis of Russian literature of the 20th century. Russian literature of the 20th century: general characteristics

Fiction of St. Petersburg stories on the example of the story "The Nose"

While working on The Nose, Gogol remade the ending of the story: initially, the fantastic nature of the events described in it was motivated by Major Kovalev's dream. The change in ending was most likely caused by an appearance in The Northern Bee, No. 192 of August 27, 1834, signed “R. M." reviews of Pushkin's story, which criticized as extremely outdated the motivation of fantasy by sleep, used in The Undertaker. Reworking the end of The Nose, Gogol took into account the remark of R. M." and at the same time parodied his review. When published, the story suffered significantly from censorship: Kovalev's meeting with Nos was moved from the Kazan Cathedral to Gostiny Dvor, a number of sharp satirical statements were eliminated. In the collected works of Gogol in 1842, "The Nose" was placed in the third volume, among other stories related to the St. Petersburg theme.

The question of choosing between real and unreal explanations of what is happening, usual for science fiction of the 1930s, is removed by Gogol long before the finale, because long before the end of the story, all possible "exculpatory" motivations for the incredible incidents depicted in it are removed. All natural explanations fall away one by one: the hero becomes convinced that he is not sleeping, that he is not delirious, that he is not drunk. When possibilities of this kind are exhausted, the search for an explanation of the supernatural begins. It is soon found: “... Kovalev, having considered all the circumstances, assumed almost the closest thing to the truth that the fault of this should be none other than the staff officer Podtochina, who wanted him to marry her daughter. He himself liked to drag her along, but he avoided the final butchering. When the staff officer told him bluntly that she wanted to marry her off to him, he slowly set off with his compliments ... And therefore the staff officer, probably out of revenge, decided to spoil him and hired some witch-women for this. ..” However, some time later, Kovalev becomes convinced of the falsity of his assumption, refuses it, and the events that form the plot remain without any explanation. They have to be perceived according to the principle: unbelievable, but true. And we have to consider the possibility of the incredible as a property of actual reality itself.

Thus, the boundaries separating the fantastic and the real, and in Gogol, are blurred. But they disappear in a different way than in Pushkin: a grotesque world is created, where the violation of the connections, forms, patterns familiar to the reader's gaze is called upon to make visible the deep essence of the depicted.

The fact is that the author of the St. Petersburg stories sees the main sign of modernity in a sharp divergence between the essence of people's social existence and its tangible realities, accessible to ordinary observation and description. “Everything is a lie, everything is a dream, everything is not what it seems” - this is one of the culminating ideas of the St. Petersburg cycle. For Gogol, it is obvious that truth can be revealed only beyond the limits of "appearance", beyond the limits of those illusions by which modern man blinded. Hence it follows: all deceptive appearances modern life must be destroyed, deformed or displaced in the mind of a person - only under this condition will its true, invisible essence be revealed to him. The fiction of the "Nose" just brings us closer to this truth of a higher order - through all the mirages of superficial external truth.

Such a view immediately reveals the unnaturalness of the prevailing social order. It has been noted more than once that in the grotesque world of The Nose, where chaos and absurdity reign, the social relations inherent in everyday life. At any, even the most discouraging turns of action, the hierarchy of ranks and ranks is indestructible, the power of the police is unshakable, the laws of bureaucratic and philistine psychology, its usual skills and prejudices, are unshakable. Police officer who just turned out to be a witness incredible transformations nose, continues as if nothing had happened to take bribes and "exhort in the teeth" of a passing peasant. Kovalev himself, talking with his nose running away from him in the Kazan Cathedral, involuntarily assumes the tone usual for an official’s conversation. middle class With. big bosses (after all, in terms of uniform and regalia, the nose is three ranks higher than Kovalev). In other words, the realities of the bureaucratic system quite organically enter the realm of the absurd: this is how their underlying relationship is revealed.

But that is not all. The satirical effect is clearly complicated in the story by glimpses of universal tragedy, discoveries that carry a universal meaning. In a similar spirit, the imposture of the nose, which escaped from Kovalev's physiognomy, in order to act in the role of a state adviser, can be accepted. The reader can see in this transformation the realization of the secret dreams of the hero Kovalev himself, no doubt, he is thinking about this rank and in his subconscious already seems to have it (recall that he strangely claims the position of vice-governor or even governor, for a collegiate assessor too high ). In other words, the flight of the nose can be understood as a "discord between dreams and essentiality", as a breakthrough of dreams beyond the limits of ordinary existence accessible to the average person. In the same categories, the return of the nose to "its" place can be comprehended: I. Zolotussky successfully compared this fantastic turn of the plot with the "surrender of a dream" 47 . And in the interval between the plot and the denouement, comically reduced, but essentially tragic questions burst into the consciousness of the hero: about human dignity, about the meaning human existence. The theme of the double, which is extremely important for romanticism, enters into the history of Kovalev (after all, this is precisely the role of the nose - the state adviser). This theme is parodic rethought here, but retains a lively connection with the original sources. Hence the possibility of instant contact between the absurd story of Kovalev and the tragically serious meaning of duality - the theme of Chamisso, Hoffmann, Andersen.

Hint to be involved in the plot" evil spirits"is peculiarly supported by the whole absurdly chaotic atmosphere of the story. And in the complex internal unity of Gogol's stories about St. Petersburg, it enters into an associative roll call with the theme of "disorder of nature", saturated with a formidable apocalyptic meaning. Current state world seems to the author of the St. Petersburg novels to be a crisis and, moreover, fraught with the possibility of a catastrophe. In the 1930s, the nature of the impending social cataclysm was still not entirely clear to Gogol (he would try to define the essence of the forthcoming 1940s in his journalism). But, apparently, the most suitable for expressing this mysterious essence seemed to him mythological representations about the end of the world.

However, even this formidable warning does not exhaust the meaning of the story. Against the background of the sudden transformation of the cosmos into chaos, the reaction of people caught in such a transformation is important. It is she who is the main subject of the author's attention. A catastrophic situation does not lead the "average" person to rebellion, insight, or death; it does not change anything at all in the usual pattern of behavior and experience of those who encounter it. Therefore, in The Nose, the denunciation of society and its constituent people is no longer complicated by hope. The pathos of the story is purely satirical, but Gogol's satire acquires here a truly philosophical, metaphysical depth.

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is a completely unique writer, unlike other Russian masters of the word. There is a lot of amazing and surprising in his work: the funny is intertwined with the tragic, the fantastic with the real.

Reading the works of Gogol, each time you are convinced that the basis of his works is comic. This is a carnival, when everyone puts on masks, shows unusual properties, changes places, and everything is mixed up.

In the story "The Overcoat" Gogol tells the story of the difficult life of the "little man" Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, whose life is subject to tradition and is pleased with the automatism of his life. Comic and tragic, real and fantastic intertwined in this work. The story of his birth, the choice of the name of the hero causes a smile. He got the position of an official, whom no one ever respected, did not notice. Only when his colleagues pestered him too much did he ask: “Leave me, why are you offending me?” The author writes with bitterness about how much inhumanity there is in man, how much ferocious rudeness and refined, cruel secularism are hidden. Bashmachkin's poverty causes, of course, sympathy, but the purpose of his life (to acquire a new overcoat) is too insignificant for a person. And then a happy day came: Akaky Akakievich's dream came true. The colorless and resigned "little man", whose life is reduced to the performance of a position, in a new overcoat felt like a hero, even received an invitation to visit a colleague official, where he was going to celebrate a joyful event. How little a person needs to be happy!

The theft of the overcoat turned into flour for the hero. He tried to find protection from the authorities, but "a significant person stamped his foot" - and Bashmachkin was thrown out. The callousness of a high-ranking official is disgusting.

Protected by no one, Akaky Akakievich dies. A creature, dear to no one, of no interest to anyone, disappeared and disappeared. Gogol portrayed retribution in a fantastic way. Fantastic ending story is justified by the attitude of the writer to his offended "brother".

The dead Bashmachkin appeared to a "significant person" on the street and took off his overcoat. This incident somehow softened the despotic temper of the boss, he even began to say to his subordinates less often: “How dare you, do you understand who is in front of you?” Gogol either sympathizes with his hero, or condemns him for the baseness of his goals, for his dumbness and slavish obedience.

In the story "The Overcoat" I did not immediately accurately determine what was reality and what was fiction. The poverty, wretchedness of the life of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin is brought by the author to absurdity and fantasy (walking along the street, he stepped very carefully on stones and slabs, almost did not touch them), as well as the ability of the “little man” to see characters in letters, and in street - a country with people - letters and words. In contrast, a few days of noisy life after the death of Bashmachkin - an obvious unreality - can always be an exorbitant fantasy and fear of one of the departmental officials, significant person and Kolomna watchman. Every separate character- this is true, and the totality of them, the society they form and the adventures that follow from this, is their fantastic and implausible side.

In the "Overcoat", if we talk about fooling associated with something unreal, there are rumors about the noisy life of Akaky Akakievich after death. Climax leading to the denouement, in one case to the material death of Bashmachkin, and in the other case to the disappearance of his ghost, is the robbery scene. This scene is repeated twice. In both cases, the overcoat is taken away, but one robbery is completely real, and the other is connected with mysticism. In the "Overcoat" the world of things has great value in the development of the plot, they can be said to be personified, personified. The most unusual occurrences are connected with things. In the "Overcoat" outerwear, an overcoat, becomes the ultimate dream. For Bashmachkin, this is not only a wardrobe detail, but also an object of love. The new overcoat was the last dream to keep warm in the cold world of St. Petersburg - this symbol of the eternal hellish cold. The overcoat gives rise to conflict, the tragic grotesque develops into fantasy. In the "Overcoat" the heroes of the work do not have own face, but things and material values ​​are animated. The general tone in The Overcoat is not very optimistic, despite the fact that Gogol's irony is also present in the scene of Akaky Akakievich's baptism.

In the work "The Overcoat" there are scenes everywhere everyday life, laughter through tears, the comic are found here only with the advent of science fiction

ki. The world of things and incidents related to them are a bright addition to their spiritual life. The overcoat for Bashmachkin is his world, love, dream, the meaning of life. Bashmachkin could not bear the theft of his overcoat, the futility of his dream. And the mild-mannered petty official, who has spiritual strength and opposes the soullessness of society, dies.

Elements of the unreal, the unusual are present in almost all of Gogol's works. Hyperbole, grotesque, "veiled" and explicit fiction helped the writer to make the viewer and reader laugh, and laughter, according to Gogol, can cure all diseases in society - both the people and individuals.

Review

In the essay about the hero of the story "The Overcoat" the theme is fully and purposefully revealed, it is shown how reality and fantasy are intricately intertwined in the story of the unfortunate " little man» Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, for whom new overcoat was the last dream to warm up in the cold world of St. Petersburg - a symbol of the eternal hellish cold. The material is strictly selected, the text of the story is correctly used, its most significant facts, revealing the role of fantasy in a work of art. There are clear logical connections in the work.

One of the most common and
leading to the biggest
disasters of temptations
there is a temptation to say:
"Everyone does it."

L.N. Tolstoy

Lesson Objectives:

Tutorial:

• to teach to analyze the text through subject details;
• to consolidate students' ideas about the plot, composition, episode, grotesque.

Developing:

• develop the ability to determine the boundaries of the episode;
• find causal relationships between episodes;
• develop verbal communication skills.

Educational:

• develop a sense of responsibility for their actions.

Brief information about the release of the story by N.V. Gogol's "The Nose" (1836).

In the 20-30s. In the nineteenth century, the theme of the “nose” gained unexpected popularity. Impromptu and feuilletons, stories and vaudevilles, panegyrics and lyrical opuses were dedicated to the nose. Not only third-rate journalists wrote about the nose, but even famous writers, such as Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, N.V. Gogol. The imaginary lightness of the "Nose" created him a reputation as the most mysterious work Gogol.

Today's lesson is an attempt to unravel what idea the writer encrypted in the story of Major Kovalev's unfortunate nose.

1) Who is Kovalev?

2) For what purpose did Kovalev come to Petersburg?

3) What is the portrait of Kovalev?

4) Why did Kovalev walk along Nevsky Prospekt every day and pay visits to his acquaintances?

5) Why, being a collegiate assessor, does he call himself a major?

6) Name the details that convince the reader of the reality of what is happening:

• name the time of action (March 25th - the loss of the nose, April 7th - the return of the nose);
• name the location (St. Petersburg is the capital of the Russian state. Kovalev lives on Sadovaya Street. The barber lives on Voznesensky Prospekt. The meeting with the Nose took place in the Kazan Cathedral. Nevsky Prospekt of the capital is a kind of stage on which everyone plays his role);
• name the hero of the story (Kovalev is a small employee who dreams of a vice-governor's position).

7) Why did Gogol need to convince everyone of the reality of what is happening? (Kovalev himself does not see anything fantastic in what happened - neither pain, nor blood when losing his nose. And we, the readers, also perceive fantasy as reality. Bringing the situation to the point of absurdity, Gogol expands the scope of the story that happened “in the northern capital of our vast state”, to the history of the whole of Russia, and not only. Philosophical meaning story addressed to posterity.

What does N.V. Gogol warn us about? What mask do we wear in society? What are we hiding underneath? Does the inner content of a person correspond to his actions?

Group I of students works with questions on the card.

1. How do others react to the misfortune that happened to Kovalev?
2. Who did Kovalyov first turn to about the loss of his nose? Why not see a doctor?
3. Why do you think so many people are involved in this story?

II group of students:

1. Tell me about the ads in the newspaper.
2. What is their absurdity?
3. Why, do you think, does Gogol digress from the main plot and set out in detail the content of these announcements?

III group of students:

1. What is the composition of the story?
2. Why does the narrative begin with chapter I, in which the story of the barber Ivan Yakovlevich is conveyed?
3. What inconsistencies in the behavior of the barber did you find?
4. What does Ivan Yakovlevich have in common with Kovalev?
5. Why does Ivan Yakovlevich have no last name?

1. Did Kovalev's behavior change after the loss of his nose and after his return?
2. How do you understand the phraseological unit “Stay with the nose”?
3. What does the author do to destroy the mask of "decency" of the society he depicts?
4. What does Gogol warn us about?
5. Why does the author create a grotesque situation?
6. Why did Gogol introduce a fantastic plot into a completely realistic narrative?

Creating a grotesque situation, N.V. Gogol shows the usual in unusual light, something that everyone is used to and does not notice - takes off the mask from the ugly phenomena of reality.

Calls on the reader to look into his soul and answer, first of all, to himself, whether his behavior, his mental warehouse, corresponds to generally accepted norms of morality and morality.

Kovalev is not who he claims to be: he is not a real major, does not correspond to a vice-governor's position, is insincere with his acquaintances. He becomes honest, active, ready to cry only when trouble happens to him, when he loses his nose.

And when the nose returned, its former mask returned: former habits, former acquaintances. It took the intervention of evil spirits to tear off the mask from him, to reveal his true face.

All the heroes have a mask: a barber, a private bailiff, a doctor, a district police chief - all of Russia ... Under external decency lies indifference, deceit, rudeness, bribery, servility, vanity, flattery, envy. To tear the mask from the vices of society is the task of N.V. Gogol.

What does the author do to destroy this conventionality, to tear off the mask of “decency” from society? He, too… puts on the Mask. The mask of a naive and ingenuous narrator, surprised at what happened, even at the end of the story reproaching himself for the fact that such an absurdity became the subject of his narration. And this technique allows N.V. Gogol to satirically describe the vices of contemporary Russia.

What is the main idea encoded in the story "The Nose"? What does Gogol warn us about? What literary device helps to create an unusual situation for Gogol? Grotesque is an artistic technique with which the author depicts people and events in a fantastically exaggerated, ugly comic form.

2009 is the year when all literary country will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great writer.

This work has been prepared primarily to help students and is literary analysis works, which reveal the basic concepts of the topic.

The relevance of the topic is demonstrated by the choice of works by the great Russian science fiction writer.

This work is dedicated to the works of N.V. Gogol - "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", "Nose", "Portrait". To understand Gogol's method of presenting a text, where fantastic plots and images play the main role, it is necessary to analyze the structure of the work.

The choice of texts is based on the principle of "school program +", that is, to school curriculum a small number of texts is added, necessary for general humanitarian development

This work is based on sections from the book by Yu. V. Mann "Gogol's Poetics".

The purpose of the work: to understand, see the complexity and versatility of the writer, to identify and analyze the features of poetics and various forms fantastic in works.

In addition to materials devoted to Gogol's work, the work contains a kind of literary glossary: ​​for the convenience of the student, the main terms and concepts are highlighted for each work.

I would like to hope that our work will help students explore works from the point of view of a fantastic worldview.

Fiction in literature is the depiction of implausible phenomena, the introduction of fictitious images that do not coincide with reality, a clearly felt violation of natural forms, causal relationships, and laws of nature by artists.

The term fantasy comes from the word "fantasy" (in Greek mythology Phantasus - a deity that causes illusions, apparent images, the brother of the god of dreams Morpheus).

All the works of N.V. Gogol, in which fantasy is present in one way or another, are divided into two types. The division depends on what time the action of the work belongs to - to the present or the past.

In works about the “past” (five stories from “Evenings” - “The Missing Letter”, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “The Night Before Christmas”, “ Terrible revenge”,“ Enchanted Place ”, as well as“ Viy ”), fiction has common features.

Higher powers openly intervene in the plot. In all cases, these are images in which an unreal evil principle is personified: the devil or people who entered into a criminal conspiracy with him. Fantastic events are reported either by the author-narrator or by a character acting as a narrator (but sometimes based on a legend or on the testimony of ancestors - "eyewitnesses": grandfather, "my grandfather's aunt").

In all these texts there is no fantastic backstory. It is not needed, since the action is homogeneous both in temporal captivity (the past) and in relation to fantasy (not collected in any one time period, but distributed over the course of the work).

The development of Gogol's fiction is characterized by the fact that the writer pushed the carrier of fiction into the past, leaving his influence, "trace" in the modern time plan.

In Gogol's fiction there is:

1. Alogism in the narrator's speech. (“Portrait” - “First of all, he took up finishing the eyes”, “as if an impure feeling led the artist’s hand”, “You just didn’t hit him in the eyebrow, but climbed into his very eyes. So eyes never looked into life like they looking at you", etc.).

2. Strange-unusual in terms of the depicted. The strange intervention of an animal in action, the revival of objects. (“Nose” - the nose is a living character, “Portrait” - “looked at him, leaning out from behind the set canvas, someone's convulsively distorted face. Two terrible eyes stared directly at him, as if preparing to devour him; there was a threatening command to be silent")

3. Unusual names and the names of the characters. (Solokha, Khoma Brut and others; "Portrait" - in the first edition - Chertkov, in subsequent editions - Chatrkov).

Let us pay attention, first of all, to the fact that in the story such concepts as “line” and “border” quite often appear. The semantics of the name Chertkov includes not only associations with the bearer of unreal (not existing in reality) power, with the devil, but also with the trait as in artistic sense(stroke, stroke), and in a wider one (border, limit).

This may be the boundary of age, separating youth and maturity from withering and old age, separating artistic creativity from mechanical labor.

Under the surname already Chartkov lies a lie, idealization, adaptation to the tastes and whims of his rich and noble customers; work without inner and creative insight, without an ideal; there is a self-exaltation of a hero who destroys his spiritual purity, and at the same time his talent.

4. Involuntary movements and grimaces of characters.

In folk demonology, involuntary movements are often caused by a supernatural force.

The story "The Nose" is the most important link in the development of Gogol's fiction. The carrier of the fantastic has been removed, but the fantastic remains; the romantic mystery is parodied, but the mystique remains.

In The Nose, the function of the “rumor form” is changed, which now does not serve as a means of veiled fantasy, it operates against the backdrop of a fantastic incident presented as reliable.

In "Portrait", as in "Sorochinsky Fair" and in "May Night", the fantastic is presented in such a way that supernatural forces in their "tangible" appearance (witches, devils, etc.) are relegated to the back, "yesterday's" plan.

In today's time plan, only a fantastic reflection or some fantastic remnant is preserved - a tangible result of strange events that took place in reality: “He saw how the wonderful image of the deceased Petromichaly went into the frame of a portrait”

Only this portrait passes into reality, and personified fantastic images are eliminated. All strange events are reported in a tone of some uncertainty. Chertkov, after the appearance of the portrait in his room, began to assure himself that the portrait was sent by the owner, who found out his address, but this version, in turn, is undermined by the narrator's remark: “In short, he began to give all those flat explanations that we use when we want, so that what happened will certainly happen the way we think” (but that it did not happen “the way” that Chertkov thought, is definitely not reported).

Chartkov’s vision of a wonderful old man is given in the form of half-sleep-half-awake: “he fell into a dream, but into some kind of half-oblivion, into that painful state when with one eye we see the oncoming dreams of dreams, and with the other - in an obscure cloud surrounding objects.” It would seem that the fact that it was a dream is finally confirmed by the phrase: "Chartkov was convinced that his imagination presented him in a dream with the creation of his own indignant thoughts."

But here a tangible “residue” of the dream is discovered - money (as in “May Night” - a letter from a lady), which, in turn, is given a real everyday motivation (in “the frame was a box covered with a thin board”).

Along with the dream, such forms of veiled (implicit) fantasy are generously introduced into the narrative, such as coincidences, the hypnotizing effect of one character (here, a portrait) on another.

Simultaneously with the introduction of veiled fantasy, the real-psychological plan of Chertkov the artist emerges. His fatigue, need, bad inclinations, thirst for quick success are noted. A parallelism is created between the fantastic and the real-psychological concept of the image. Everything that happens can be interpreted both as a fatal influence of the portrait on the artist, and as his personal surrender to forces hostile to art.

In the "Portrait" the epithet "hellish" is applied several times to Chertkov's actions and plans: "the most infernal intention that a person has ever harbored was revived in his soul"; " hellish thought flashed in the artist's head "Here this epithet was correlated with Petromichaly, a personified image of an unreal evil force ("The victims of this hellish spirit will be countless," it is said about her in the second part).

So, in his searches in the field of fantasy, N.V. Gogol develops the described principle of parallelism between the fantastic and the real. Gogol's priority was prosaic-everyday, folklore-comic fiction.

We see that the writer, introducing in parallel with the “terrible” comic treatment of “devilry”, realized the pan-European artistic trend, and the devil from “The Night Before Christmas”, blowing on burned fingers, dragging after Solokha and constantly getting into trouble.

In the “Portrait” the religious painter says: “For a long time the Antichrist has wanted to be born, but he cannot, because he must be born in a supernatural way; but in our world everything is arranged by the Almighty in such a way that everything happens in a natural order.

But our earth is dust before the Creator. According to his laws, it must be destroyed, and every day the laws of nature will become weaker and, from that, the boundaries that hold the supernatural more criminal.

With the words of a religious painter about the loosening of world laws, Chertkov’s impressions of the portrait completely coincide. "What is this"? he thought to himself. - "Art or supernatural what kind of magic that looked past the laws of nature?"

The divine in Gogol's concept is natural, it is a world that develops naturally.

On the contrary, the demonic is the supernatural, the world getting out of the rut.

By the middle of the 1930s, the science fiction writer especially clearly perceives the demonic not as evil in general, but as alogism, as "a disorder of nature."

The role of fantastic backstory is played by the story of the artist's son.

Some of the fantastic events are presented in the form of rumors, but some are covered by the introspection of the narrator, who reports miraculous events as if they had actually taken place.

The fantastic and the real often go into one another, especially in art, because it does not simply depict life, but reveals, objectifying what is happening in the human soul.

Fantastic story by Gogol - "The Nose". First of all, we note that the fantastic must not and cannot give illusions here. Not for a minute will we imagine ourselves in the position of Major Kovalev, who had a completely smooth place where his nose should have been. However, it would be a big mistake to think that the fantastic is used here in the sense of an allegory or an allusion in a fable or some modern pamphlet, in a literary caricature. It serves neither teaching nor denunciation here, and the author's aims were purely artistic, as we shall see in further analysis.

tone and general character fantastic in the story "The Nose" - comic. Fantastic details should reinforce the funny.

There is a very common opinion that "The Nose" is a joke, a kind of game of the author's fantasy and author's wit. It is incorrect, because in the story one can see a very definite artistic purpose- make people feel the vulgarity around them.

“Every poet, to a greater or lesser extent, is a teacher and a preacher. If a writer doesn't care and doesn't want people to feel the same as him, want the same as him, and see good and evil where he is, he is not a poet, although perhaps a very skillful writer. "(Innokenty Annensky "On the forms of the fantastic in Gogol").

Therefore, the thought of the poet and the images of his poetry are inseparable from his feeling, desire, his ideal. Gogol, drawing Major Kovalev, could not act with his hero as with a beetle, which the entomologist will describe, draw: look at it, study it, classify it. He expressed in his face his animated attitude towards vulgarity, as to a well-known social phenomenon, with which every person must reckon.

Vulgarity is pettiness. Vulgarity has only one thought about itself, because it is stupid and narrow and sees and understands nothing but itself. Vulgarity is selfish and selfish in all forms; she has both ambition, and fanaberia (arrogance), and swagger, but there is neither pride nor courage, and nothing noble at all.

Vulgarity has no kindness, no ideal aspirations, no art, no god. Vulgarity is formless, colorless, elusive. It is a muddy life sediment in every environment, in almost every person. The poet feels all the terrible burden of hopeless vulgarity in the environment and in himself.

"Fantastic is that drop of aniline that stains the cells of organic tissue under a microscope - thanks to the extraordinary position of the hero, we better see and understand what kind of person he was." (Innokenty Annensky "On the forms of the fantastic in Gogol").

Kovalev is not an evil or kind person - all his thoughts are focused on his own person. This person is very insignificant, and now he is trying in every possible way to enlarge and embellish her. "Ask, darling, Major Kovalev." "Major" sounds prettier than "college assessor". He does not have an order, but he buys an order ribbon, wherever possible, he mentions his secular successes and acquaintance with the family of a staff officer and a state adviser. He is very busy with his appearance - all his "interests" revolve around a hat, hairstyle, clean-shaven cheeks. He is also proud of his rank.

Now imagine that Major Kovalev would have been disfigured by smallpox, that a piece of cornice would have broken his nose while he was looking at pictures in the mirror glass or at another moment of his idle existence. Wouldn't anyone be laughing? And if there were no laughter, what would be the attitude towards vulgarity in the story. Or imagine that Major Kovalev's nose would disappear without a trace, so that he would not return to his place, but would continue to travel around Russia, posing as a state adviser. Major Kovalev's life would have been ruined: he would have become both an unhappy and useless harmful person, he would have become embittered, he would have beaten his servant, he would have found fault with everyone, and perhaps even started to lie and gossip. Or imagine that Gogol would have portrayed Major Kovalev as corrected when his nose returned to him - a lie would be added to the fantasticness. And here the fantastic only intensified the manifestation of reality, colored the vulgarity and increased the ridiculous.

The detail of the imposture of the nose, which pretends to be a state councilor, is extremely characteristic. For a Caucasian collegiate assessor, the rank of state councilor is something extraordinarily high, enviable and offensive in its unattainability, and suddenly this rank goes to Major Kovalev's nose, and not to the major himself, the rightful owner of the nose.

Here, in fantastic forms, a very close to us and the most ordinary phenomenon is drawn. The Greeks made a goddess out of him - Rumor, the daughter of Zeus, and we call him Gossip.

Gossip is condensed lies; each adds and jumps a little, and the lie grows like a snowball, sometimes threatening to turn into a snow avalanche. Often no one is guilty of gossip separately, but the environment is always guilty: better than Major Kovalev and Lieutenant Pirogov, gossip shows that pettiness, empty thinking and vulgarity have accumulated in this environment. Gossip is the real substratum of the fantastic.

In general, the strength of the fantastic in the story "The Nose" is based on its artistic truth, on its graceful interlacing with the real into a living bright whole.

In conclusion of the analysis, one can define the form of the fantastic in "The Nose" as everyday.

And from this side, Gogol could not choose a better, more vivid way of expression than the fantastic.

We will take Viy as a representative of another form of the fantastic in Gogol. The main psychological motive of this story is fear. Fear is twofold: fear of the strong and fear of the mysterious - mystical fear. So here it is precisely mystical fear that is depicted. The author's goal, as he himself says in a note, is to tell the legend he heard about Wii as simply as possible. Tradition is indeed conveyed simply, but if you analyze this story, which develops so naturally and freely, you will see the complex mental work and see how immeasurably far it is from tradition. A poetic creation is like a flower: simple in appearance, but in reality it is infinitely more complicated than any steam locomotive or chronometer.

The poet had, first of all, to make the reader feel that mystical fear, which served as the psychic basis of the legend. The phenomenon of death, the idea of ​​life after the grave, has always been especially willingly colored by fantasy. The thought and imagination of several thousand generations rushed intently and hopelessly into eternal questions about life and death, and this intent and hopeless work left in the human soul one powerful feeling - the fear of death and the dead. This feeling, while remaining the same in its essence, changes infinitely in the forms and groupings of those representations with which it is associated. We must be led into the realm, if not the one that produced the tradition (its roots often run too deep), then at least the one that sustains and nourishes it. Gogol points at the end of the story to the ruins, the memory of the death of Khoma Brutus. Probably, these decayed and mysterious ruins, overgrown with forest and weeds, were precisely the impetus that prompted the fantasy to produce a legend about Viya in this form.

The first part of the story seems to constitute an episode in the story. But this is only apparently - in fact, it is an organic part of the story.

Here we can see the environment in which the tradition was supported and flourished.

This Wednesday is bursa. Bursa is a peculiar status in statu *, the Cossacks on the school bench, always starving, physically strong, with courage, tempered by a rod, terribly indifferent to everything except physical strength and pleasures: scholastic, incomprehensible science, sometimes in the form of some unbearable appendage to existence, sometimes transferring into the metaphysical and mysterious world.

On the other hand, the bursak is close to the people's environment: his mind is often full of naive ideas about nature and superstitions under the bark of learning; romantic vacation wanderings further maintain the connection with nature, with the common people and the legend.

Khoma Brut believes in devilry, but he is still a scientist.

The monk, who had seen witches and unclean spirits all his life, taught him spells. His fantasy was brought up under the influence of various images of hellish torments, diabolical temptations, painful visions of ascetics and ascetics. In the midst of naive mythical legends among the people, he, book man, introduces a book element - a written tradition.

Here we see a manifestation of that primordial interaction of literacy and nature, which created the motley world of our folk literature.

What kind of person is Khoma Brut? Gogol liked to portray average ordinary people what is this philosopher.

Homa Brut is strong, indifferent, careless, likes to eat well and drinks cheerfully and good-naturedly. He is a direct person: his tricks, when, for example, he wants to take time off from his business or run away, are rather naive. He lies without even trying; there is no expansiveness in him - he is too lazy even for that. N.V. Gogol, with rare skill, placed this indifferent person at the center of fears: it took a lot of horrors for them to finish off Khoma Brut, and the poet could unfold the whole terrible chain of devilry in front of his hero.

* State within the state (lat.).

The greatest mastery of N. V. Gogol was expressed in the gradualness with which the mysterious is told to us in the story: it began with a semi-comic ride on a witch and, by correct development, reached a terrible denouement-death strong man because of fear. The writer makes us go through step by step with Homa all the stages of development of this feeling. At the same time, N.V. Gogol had a choice of two ways: he could go analytically - to talk about the state of mind of the hero, or synthetically - to speak in images. He chose the second way: state of mind he objectified his hero, and left the analytical work to the reader.

From this came the necessary weaving of the fantastic into the real.

Starting from the moment when the centurion sent for Khoma to Kyiv, even comic scene(for example, in a britzka) are sad, then there is a scene with a stubborn centurion, his terrible curses, the beauty of the dead, the talk of the servants, the road to the church, the locked church, the lawn in front of it, flooded with the moon, vain efforts to encourage oneself, which only develop a feeling of fear more strongly, Khoma's morbid curiosity, the dead woman wag her finger. Our tense feeling rests somewhat during the day. Evening - heavy forebodings, night - new horrors. It seems to us that all the horrors have already been exhausted, but the writer finds new colors, that is, not new colors - he thickens the old ones. And at the same time, no caricature, no artistic lies. Fear is replaced by horror, horror - confusion and longing, confusion - numbness. The boundary between myself and those around me is lost, and it seems to Khoma that it is not he who speaks the spell, but the dead one. Khoma's death is the necessary end of the story; if for a moment imagine his awakening from a drunken dream, then everything will disappear artistic value story.

In "Viya" the fantastic developed on the basis of the mystical - hence its special intensity. characteristic feature Mystical in N.V. Gogol in general is the major tone of his supernatural creatures - the witch and the sorcerer - vengeful and evil beings.

Thus, the first stage in the development of Gogol's fiction is characterized by the fact that the writer pushed the carrier of fiction into the past, leaving his influence, "trace" in the modern time plan.

The writer, parodying the poetics of a romantic mystery, refused to give any explanation of what was happening.

Reading the works of N.V. Gogol, you involuntarily show your imagination, ignoring its boundaries between the possible and the impossible.

Turning to the work of N.V. Gogol, one can be a priori sure that we will find in it many elements of fantasy. After all, if the latter defined an integer type folk culture, then, as emphasized by M. Bakhtin, its influence extends over many eras, almost up to our time.