Turgenev's novels. The artistic mastery of Turgenev the prose writer as assessed by modern literary critics Preparation for the lesson

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Logutova Nadezhda Vasilievna. Poetics of space and time of novels by I. S. Turgenev: dissertation... Candidate of Philological Sciences: 10.01.01.- Kostroma, 2002.- 201 p.: ill. RSL OD, 61 03-10/134-9

Introduction

Chapter I. Motifs of “shelter” and “wandering” in I. S. Turgenev’s novels “Rudin” and “Noble Nest” 23

1.1. The poetics of space and time in the novel by I.S. Turgeneva "Rudin" 23

1.2. Poetry of the “estate chronotope” in I.S. Turgenev’s novel “The Noble Gneedo” 41

Chapter II. Space and time in the novels of I. S. Turgenev of the late 1850s - early 1860s . 76

2.1. I. Turgenev's novel "On the Eve" in the context of the problem of space and time 76

2.2. Philosophy of space and time in I.S. Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” 103

Chapter III. The evolution of the chronotope in the late novels of I.S. Turgenev 128

3.1. Features of the chronotopic structure of I.S. Turgenev’s novel “Smoke” 128

3.2. The space-time continuum of I.S. Turgenev’s novel “Nov” 149

Bibliography 184

Introduction to the work

The work of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev is one of the most significant phenomena of Russian literature of the 19th century. The genres of Turgenev's prose are diverse and have an unusually wide artistic range (essays, short stories, novellas, essays, prose poems, literary critical journalism), but above all he is a great novelist, one of the creators of the Russian classical novel.

A distinctive feature of Turgenev the novelist is the desire to convey the inner world of a person captured by the mental, spiritual movement of his era. This is how the uniqueness of the creative personality of I.S. Turgenev and his closest contemporaries were assessed: “The entire literary activity of Turgenev can be defined as a long, continuous and poetically explained register of ideals that walked on Russian soil” (P.V. Annenkov), and researchers of the XX c.: “Every novel by Turgenev was a clear and unambiguous response to some specific demand of our time” (M.M. Bakhtin)2.

And in this regard, I would like to note one fundamental point. I.S. Turgenev always perceived the “current moment” as a “historical moment,” hence the organically inherent relationship in his worldview between the completeness and immediacy of the perception of modernity and the understanding of historical development as a whole as a continuous change of generations, social sentiments, and ideas. And at any period of historical time, I.S. Turgenev was interested in the characters not of armchair thinkers, but of ascetics, martyrs, who sacrificed for the sake of their ideals not only comfort and career, but also happiness, and even life itself.

It seemed as if the very spacious landscape of Russia in the 19th century. gave rise to a corresponding intellectual and spiritual landscape, where one can find anything but regularity, cold rationalism, and complacency.

One hundred and fifty years of exceptionally intensive historical development separate us from the time of the creation of Turgenev’s novels.

Now, at the turn of the 20th-21st centuries, in the era of “revaluation of values”, when narrow positivism and practicalism of thought were primarily in demand, in relation to Turgenev the formula “our contemporary”, often applied to classic writers, is far from indisputable. The work of I.S. Turgenev, rather, is intended to help us, being outside our modern times, to understand ourselves as living in a great historical time.

Contrary to the widespread prejudice, “high literature,” to which the novels of I. S. Turgenev undoubtedly belong, is by no means some kind of fossil. The life of literary classics is full of endless dynamics; its existence in great historical time is associated with a constant enrichment of meaning. Constituting a reason and incentive for dialogue between different eras, it is addressed primarily to people involved in culture in its broad spatial and temporal perspective.

I.S. Turgenev had the exceptional ability to “bow before every beautiful and powerful manifestation of the universal human spirit”3. The opposition, which even now constitutes an insoluble, tragic knot in our history - the opposition of Western civilization and Russian identity - in his work turns into harmony, into a harmonious and inseparable whole. For I.S. Turgenev, the national and the world, nature and society, the phenomena of individual consciousness and the constants of universal existence are equally significant.

All this is reflected in the space-time continuum of I. S. Turgenev’s novels. The poetics of space and time is the most important means of organizing the semantic centers of Turgenev’s novel at all levels of his artistic system.

Degree of development of the problem

In literature, unlike natural science and philosophy, the categories of space and time, on the one hand, exist as “ready-made”, “pre-found”, on the other hand, they are distinguished by exceptional multivariance. The originality of space-time poetics manifests itself both at the level of literary movements, literary genres and genres, and at the level of individual artistic thinking.

The phenomena of this series were extensively and successfully studied by M.M. Bakhtin, who introduced the now widespread term “chronotope” to designate typological spatio-temporal models.

“We will call the essential interconnection of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, a chronotope (which literally means “time-space”),” wrote M.M. Bakhtin. “What is important to us is the expression in it of the inseparability of space and time (time as fourth dimension of space).We understand chronotope as a formal-content category of literature...

In the literary and artistic chronotope there is a merging of spatial and temporal signs into a meaningful and concrete whole. Time here thickens, becomes denser, becomes artistically visible, while space intensifies, is drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time. This intersection of rows and merging of signs characterizes the artistic chronotope"4.

According to M.M. Bakhtin, the chronotope is one of the criteria for the typology of literary genres and genres: “The chronotope in literature has significant genre significance. We can directly say that the genre and genre varieties are determined precisely by the chronotope, and in literature the leading principle in the chronotope is time ".

Speaking about the genre of the novel, M.M. Bakhtin noted, in particular, “a radical change in the time coordinates of the literary image in the novel”, “a new zone for constructing a literary image in the novel, namely the zone of maximum contact with the present (modernity) in its incompleteness”6. A very important conclusion follows from this: “One of the main internal themes of the novel is precisely the theme of the hero’s inadequacy of his fate and his position... The very zone of contact with the incomplete present and, therefore, with the future creates the need for such a discrepancy between a person and himself. there are always unrealized potentials and unfulfilled demands..."

This conclusion, in our opinion, is very important for the researcher of Turgenev’s novels, the plot conflict of which is based on the inadequacy of the spiritual potential of the heroes to the circumstances in which they are placed by contemporary reality. Hence the impossibility of identity of consciousness with the surrounding being, the feeling of time as a turning point, as a transition from one era to another.

The peculiarity of Turgenev's historicism is, firstly, an objective approach to all phenomena of the historical process, and secondly, a deep and subtle understanding of history (past and modern), culture (philosophical and literary) not only of Russia, but also of the West. Many critics and literary scholars associated and associate all this with I.S. Turgenev’s belonging to the “Pushkin” type of Russian writers.

The first in this series should be called D.S. Merezhkovsky, who considered I.S. Turgenev as a successor to the traditions and covenants of “another great and no less indigenous Russian man” - Pushkin. “They say Turgenev is a Westerner,” wrote D.S. Merezhkovsky. “But what does Westernizer mean? This is just a dirty word for the Slavophiles. If Peter, Pushkin are truly Russian people... in the glorious, true sense of the word, then Turgenev - the same truly Russian person as Peter and Pushkin. He continues their work: he does not nail down, like our old and new “Easterners,” but cuts a window from Russia to Europe, does not separate, but connects Russia with Europe. Pushkin gave the Russian measure to everything European, Turgenev gives everything Russian a European measure."8

In the 1930s L.V. Pumpyansky in his famous work “Turgenev and the West” considered I.S. Turgenev as the greatest, after A.S. Pushkin, Europeanist in Russian literature, which, in turn, accelerated the powerful influence he had on all literature peace. I.S. Turgenev, in the opinion of L.V. Pumpyansky, understood like no one else: “... in order to influence world culture, Russian culture itself must take shape along the great paths of world education,” and therefore “Turgenev’s admiration for Pushkin is connected (among other things) and with this uniformity of both writers in resolving the issue of Russian and world, of Russia, Europe, and the world"9.

If we talk about research in recent years, the topic “Pushkin and Turgenev” received, in our opinion, an interesting interpretation in the work of A.K. Kotlov “The Work of I.S. Turgenev 1850 - early 1860s and the Pushkin Tradition.” The main conclusion that the researcher comes to is the statement of the typological similarity of the artistic worlds of A.S. Pushkin and I.S. Turgenev, resulting from the conscious and purposeful development by I.S. Turgenev of Pushkin’s artistic heritage. Motifs of the space-time continuum of Pushkin's poems "The Cart of Life", "Again I Visited...", "Am I Wandering Along the Noisy Streets...", "Funeral Song of Iakinf Maglanovich" (cycle "Songs of the Western Slavs"), arising in Turgenev's novels, confirm the rootedness of the images of Pushkin's poetry in Turgenev's artistic thinking.

Summarizing what has been said, we can conclude that A.S. Pushkin and I.S. Turgenev are united, first of all, by a dialectical approach to the phenomena of historical and natural reality. Moreover, the dialectical nature of I.S. Turgenev’s thinking is most clearly manifested, in our opinion, precisely in his novelism.

Stendhal's definition of literary creativity is widely known: “you walk along the high road, shouldering a mirror,” which reflects either “the azure of the sky, or dirty puddles and potholes.” It has long become customary to reveal this formula as a substantiation of the artistic principles of realism, as a statement of the idea of ​​​​determination of the creative process.

Modern French researcher J.-L. Bori interprets this formula as a definition of the specifics of the novel as a genre, the main purpose of which is to correctly reflect the movement, dynamics of life, in other words, the interaction of space and time. The “mirror” of the novel is not set at a fixed point relative to nature and society, but, as it were, constantly changes the angles of its reflection. °

In Turgenev’s novels, artistic time reflects, first of all, movement, changes, unexpected turns in the public mood, in the destinies of individuals, and artistic space in all its guises - natural, everyday - is a kind of symphony, designed primarily to, like music, convey the atmosphere of life, changing the mood and spiritual state of the characters.

A.I. Batyuto, Yu.V. Lebedev, V.M. Markovich in their works constantly focus on the correlation between the “transitory” and the “eternal” in the artistic thinking of I.S. Turgenev, which primarily determines the nature of the space-time continuum.

A special role belongs to the natural space, around which the thoughts and experiences of the characters are united. In his understanding of nature, I.S. Turgenev is equally far from primitive natural-philosophical sensationalism and narrow aestheticism. Natural space is always filled with all the complexity of meaning and knowledge. I.S. Turgenev fully realized the synthesizing abilities of the landscape, which contains a holistic expressive assessment of what is depicted.

The functions of landscape in the artistic world of I.S. Turgenev were studied in the works of S.M. Ayupov, A.I. Batyuto, G.A. Byaly, B.I. Bursov, L.A. Gerasimenko, P.I. Grazhis, I M. Grevs, G. B. Kurlyandskaya, Yu. V. Lebedev, V. M. Markovich, N. N. Mostovskaya, V. A. Nedzvetsky, L. V. Pumpyansky, P. G. Pustovoit, N. D. .Tamarchenko, V.Fisher, A.G.Tseitlin, S.E.Shatalov.

From researchers and critics of the late XIX - early XX centuries. Let's name M.O. Gershenzon, D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, D.S. Merezhkovsky.

M.O. Gershenzon noted the deep connection of Turgenev's psychologism with spatial symbolism, which was reflected in the characteristics of the heroes through their attitude to space - open and closed, earthly and airy.

D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, emphasizing the special atmosphere of lyricism in the novels of I.S. Turgenev (which he successfully called the “rhythm of ideas”)11, wrote that this lyricism is imbued with the tragic view of the writer on the eternal antagonism of the thinking human personality and the natural elements, indifferent to the value of individual existence. Perhaps D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky was the first to see elements of a philosophical meta-genre in Turgenev’s novelism, although this term itself was used in literary criticism in the 19th century. didn't exist yet.

D.S. Merezhkovsky (by the way, who also considered I.S. Turgenev one of the greatest representatives of the philosophy of skepticism in world literature) interpreted the poetics of his artistic space as a desire to embody fleeting states, difficult-to-express experiences. D.S. Merezhkovsky characterizes the stylistic techniques of Turgenev the landscape painter with the term “impressionism.”

D.S. Merezhkovsky’s point of view, however, did not receive further development.

A number of modern researchers (P.I. Grazhis, G.B. Kurlyandskaya), analyzing the originality of Turgenev’s artistic method, point to the connection between I.S. Turgenev’s poetics and the traditions of romanticism, which is also manifested in the forms of existence of the categories of space and time.

In this regard, the “estate chronotope”, which embodies the poetry and beauty of the fading world of Russian noble culture, is of particular interest.

“The Turgenev estate is an idyll, degenerating into an elegy before our eyes,” notes V. Shchukin in his work “On two cultural models of the Russian noble estate,” dedicated to a comparative analysis of the “estate chronotope” of the novels by I. A. Goncharov and I. S. .Turgenev.

V. Shchukin characterizes the space-time continuum of the novel “The Noble Nest” as a para-European version of the “estate chronotope”, which reflects the Europeanization of the Russian cultural elite of the 18th-19th centuries, which formed a certain set of ethical and aesthetic norms:

“Turgenev’s estates have their roots not in pre-Petrine times, but in the 18th century - in the era of the decisive transformation of traditional Russian culture in a Western way... The fact that in Turgenev’s “nests” there are red corners with icons and lamps and that they live in them not only freethinkers and deists, but also religiously minded people - Glafira Petrovna, Marfa Timofeevna, Liza ("The Noble Nest") - do not at all contradict what is asserted. Orthodox icons, prayers and holidays belong not to Asian, but to European culture, because they in their own way they oppose the idea of ​​complete subordination of a person’s personal will to the forces of nature and the spontaneity of collective existence.They are as organic to post-Petrine Russia as linden alleys or selfless faith in reason.

Thus, the Turgenev estate embodies the European, civilized beginning in Russian culture of the New Age"12.

Close attention of Turgenev scholars was paid to the problems of the connection between the philosophical subtext and the artistic structure of I. S. Turgenev’s novels, as well as to the study of the role of everyday space and retrospective “prehistory” in them.

The problem of the connection between Turgenev’s chronotope and the writer’s philosophical views received, in our opinion, the most complete coverage in the famous work of A.I. Batyuto “Turgenev the Novelist”. The researcher focuses on the space-time continuum of the novel “Fathers and Sons”, but the conceptual approach of A.I. Batyuto itself covers a much wider range of issues, in particular, the genesis of the writer’s “chronotopic thinking” in general.

According to A.I. Batyuto, “the plot and the nature of plot development in most of Turgenev’s novels are naturally in harmony with the philosophical idea of ​​​​the instantaneity of human life (“only a reddish spark in the silent ocean of eternity”): they are distinguished by their transience, a rapid plot in time and an unexpected denouement ...".

“In Turgenev,” writes A.I. Batyuto, “the idea of ​​the novel and its artistic embodiment are significant, but the plot itself and especially the “platform” on which its rapid implementation takes place are not distinguished by their scale and deep immersion in the atmosphere of everyday life. existences that are so inherent in the novelism of his contemporaries - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Goncharov and others. The circle of characters in his novel is relatively small, the main action is spatially limited (let us remember in this regard Bazarov’s and Pascal’s definition: “a narrow place”, “a corner of the vast world” All these properties and signs of Turgenev's novel structure are undoubtedly determined not only by the aesthetic, but also by the deep philosophical views of the writer..."13.

Unlike A.I. Batyuto, B.I. Bursov associated the originality of Turgenev’s chronotope primarily with the typology of characters.

“The completeness of the picture is not of paramount importance for him (Turgenev - N.L.) ... The hero of each of his new novels is a new step in the development of an advanced Russian person,” wrote B.I. Bursov in his book “Leo Tolstoy and the Russian novel"14.

And later, in his famous work “The National Identity of Russian Literature,” the researcher summed up his observations of the style of Turgenev the novelist: “In Turgenev’s novel, the formation of the Russian highly intellectual hero was completed. The same Rudin is devoted only to the idea and is occupied only with the idea. This is in his kind of a knight errant, over whom the power of everyday life is powerless, and he proudly and at the same time bitterly calls himself a tumbleweed,

Turgenev's novel soars above everyday life, only lightly touching it. On the one hand, everyday life has no power over the hero, and on the other hand, the hero, due to the peculiarities of his inner nature, does not care about the real circumstances of life... his tragic collision as a thinker is in the gap between the ideal and nature, as he understands it and something else... The absence of detailed descriptions of everyday life is one of the reasons for the brevity of Turgenev the novelist."

A.G. Tseitlin takes a different position in his study “The Mastery of Turgenev the Novelist.” Domestic space, according to A.G. Tseitlin, plays a significant role in the novels of I.S. Turgenev. “Pushkin developed the art of extremely concise and expressive everyday details. This art was developed and deepened by Lermontov and Turgenev”16. A.G. Tseitlin studied the evolution of “domestic space”

I.S. Turgenev using the examples of the novels “Rudin”, “The Noble Nest”, “Fathers and Sons”. The observations and assessments of A.G. Tseitlin, in our opinion, still remain relevant for the study of the space-time continuum of Turgenev’s novel.

A.G. Tseitlin pays no less attention to the function of “retrospective prehistory” in the novels of I.S. Turgenev.

Analyzing “The Noble Nest”, A.G. Tseitlin especially emphasized the artistic expediency of including “retrospective prehistory” and the order in which they follow into the novel. Why, for example, is Lisa's backstory placed before the novel's denouement? “Why didn’t Turgenev preface this story about Lisa and Agafya with the development of the action the way he did with Lavretsky? Firstly, because it was not connected with the centuries-old history of the noble family, and secondly, because there are two such prehistory, coming one after another, even if in different places in the novel, would inevitably create the impression of... monotony"17.

For the researcher, the unity and integrity of the artistic time of Turgenev’s novel are obvious. "Backgrounds", framing the central plot, are subordinated to one artistic concept, thanks to which the beautiful love story is highlighted and outlined in the general narrative flow of the work.

As is known, the most important artistic function of Turgenev’s “prehistory” was not immediately understood by literary criticism.

Moreover, in the literature about I.S. Turgenev, the author’s self-assessment of the novel “The Noble Nest” is often quoted: “Whoever needs a novel in the epic sense of the word does not need me... no matter what I write, I will come up with a series of sketches.” .

This is I.S. Turgenev’s answer to I.A. Goncharov, who, as you know, characterized the “Noble Nest” as “...pictures, silhouettes, flashing sketches, full of life, and not the essence, not the connection and not the integrity of the taken circle of life ...". I. A. Goncharov calls the backstories of the characters “cooling intervals” that weaken the reader’s interest in the plot of the work.

The reason for all this, according to I.A. Goncharov, is that the visual talent of I.S. Turgenev is, first of all, “gentle and faithful drawing and sounds”, it is “lyre and lyre”, and not a panoramic and detailed reflection of life, characteristic of the novel genre.

The critic M. de Poulet also assessed the architectonics of “The Noble Nest” negatively, to whom various kinds of “extensions” to the main plot seemed “superfluous”, “uselessly lengthening the story” and “weakening the power of impression.”

The controversy surrounding "The Noble Nest", in our opinion, reflects the essence of different approaches to assessing the artistic functions of "retrospective prehistory" in the novels of I.S. Turgenev.

Comparing in his “Etudes about Turgenev” the two most extensive “digressions” in the novel “The Noble Nest” - about Lavretsky and his ancestors, and about Lisa, D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky believes that Lisa’s backstory was introduced into the novel “in the interests of artistry ": firstly, "the reader, still in the grip of the strong artistic effects of the previous (thirty-fourth - N.L.) chapter... pauses with tenderness and love over the image of Lisa - and something childishly touching, something infantilely pure, innocent, holy fills his soul,” and secondly, the thirty-fifth chapter “serves as a kind of rest, necessary for the artistic perception of the sad and gloomy motifs of subsequent chapters.” And the history of Lavretsky, according to the scientist, was introduced “not in the interests of artistry, but with the aim of making the figure of Lavretsky completely understandable and clear in all details - to explain its significance as a cultural type that personifies one of the moments in the development of Russian society”22.

In V. Fisher’s work “Turgenev’s Tale and Novel,” the “inserted elements” of the novel, in particular “Lavretsky’s genealogy,” are interpreted as the main elements of the work, which actually “create a social novel.”

M.K. Clement, repeating the well-known thought of A.A. Grigoriev about the Slavophile essence of Lavretsky’s image, comments on the pathos of his “extensive prehistory”: “... Lavretsky’s genealogy, depicting four generations of a noble family, is built in accordance with the Slavophile concept of what followed as a result of the assimilation of Western culture, the separation of the “educational class” from its native soil and the inorganic nature of the very assimilation of a foreign culture.” However, the researcher does not correlate “Lavretsky’s prehistory” with the novel’s whole, and, therefore, does not determine its aesthetic function in the context of the entire novel24.

In the 1950s in domestic criticism, retrospective episodes in I. S. Turgenev’s novel received mainly sociological interpretation. A.N. Menzorova in her work “I.S. Turgenev’s Novel “The Noble Nest” (ideas and images)” defined the semantics of the hero’s pedigree as follows: “Using the example of a number of generations... Turgenev traces how the nobility gradually loses its sense of closeness to Russia and unity with the people, which is why the characters become smaller, and the process of spiritual impoverishment of the nobility occurs"25.

The same position is adhered to by S.Ya. Proskurin in his article “Insert Elements” of I.S. Turgenev’s Novels: “The most important purpose of retreats into the past is that Turgenev reveals in them the formation of the main characters - Lavretsky and Lisa, their upbringing”26 .

The analysis of “retrospective prehistory” in the novelism of I.S. Turgenev is devoted to the work of S.E. Shatalov “Digressions into the past and their functions in the plot-compositional structure of the novel “The Noble Nest.” The researcher emphasizes the key role of deviations in the artistic structure of Turgenev’s novel: “It becomes It is obvious that systematic retreats into the past are a certain “technique” intended to express some essential aspect of the writer’s intention.”

S.E. Shatalov identifies the following functions of deviations.

Firstly, “digressions clearly contribute to generalization and typification: with their help, the writer deepens the idea of ​​the heroes of the novel as well-defined types of noble society. They become one of the means of typification, and in this purpose is one of their functions.”

Secondly, they foreshadow the motives of the characters’ behavior and predict their fates.

And, finally, with their help, the framework of the family-everyday romance is expanded, an epic stream is introduced. This is their new function, which can conventionally be called a means of “epicization” of the narrative or “panoramic” image: the writer “in one volume, within the same framework, skillfully combines the present and the past. The past comes through in the present; the present is guessed, echoed in episodes from the past. .. By digressions into the past, an epic element is introduced into the novel, the narrative of private history is transformed into a universal one, concerning the destinies of an entire class...”

A significant milestone in the study of artistic time in Turgenev’s novels was the work of L.A. Gerasimenko “Time as a genre-forming factor and its embodiment in the novels of I.S. Turgenev.” According to the researcher, the poetics of Turgenev’s novel meets the challenges of artistic embodiment of quick, “flying” moments of history: “In Turgenev’s novel we are faced with the novelistic poetics of artistic time, corresponding to its original genre nature. The type of Turgenev’s novel was associated with the writer’s acute sense of transition, instability of Russian life. Turgenev realizes the inadequacy of the traditional form of the epic novel for capturing the “turning moments” of history"28.

L.A. Gerasimenko pays special attention to the ways of achieving epic scale in the novels of I.S. Turgenev: “In his small, concentrated novel, Turgenev achieved an epic sound using special, specific means for him. The epic breadth and volumetric depth in his novel were achieved through numerous "extensions": biographical digressions into the past, projections into the future (in epilogues) - precisely those additional structural elements that seemed to the author's contemporary critics to be "superfluous", "uselessly lengthening the story" and "weakening the power of impression". But it was they who had the epic meaningful meaning and contributed to the "germination" of the story into a novel. This structure of the novel corresponded to Turgenev's method of depicting artistic time in its intermittent flow and in switching time plans - from the present to the past and from the present to the future"29.

Our brief review allows us to conclude: the problem of connecting the artistic nature of Turgenev’s chronotope with the philosophical views of the writer, the study of the functions of the landscape, as well as the role of extra-plot episodes in the organization of the plot, composition and figurative system of Turgenev’s novel - all this refers to the undoubted achievements of Russian literary criticism.

The relevance of this dissertation is determined by the urgent need for a generalized study of the space-time continuum of I.S. Turgenev’s novels.

Turgenev's novel is a unique phenomenon in the art of words. Until now, he attracts the attention of literary critics not only for his psychological development of characters and prose poetry, but also for his deep philosophical aestheticism, which combines the author’s perception of man, nature, and culture.

In the Russian philosophical tradition there is a concept - “whole knowledge”. This is knowledge that combines logic and intuition, insight and rational thought. At the ideal point of this integral knowledge, religion, philosophy, science and art come together. I.V. Kireevsky, V.S. Solovyov, A.F. Losev thought about integral knowledge. According to I.V. Kireevsky, the basic principle, which constitutes the main advantage of the Russian mind and character, is integrity, when at a certain stage of moral development the mind rises to the level of “spiritual vision”, comprehension of the “inner meaning” of the world, the greatest secret of which is the emergence out of chaos and disunity the highest harmony30.

I.S. Turgenev, with his artistic intuition, came close to this idea, although the writer’s worldview is more complex and contradictory than any philosophical system. He considered the tragedy of disunity to be the eternal law of human life, while his aesthetics strives for objectivity and harmony.

It should be especially noted the enduring significance of Turgenev's historicism, which combines a deep understanding of the features of real time and the desire for high ethical ideals. Convincing yourself of this does not mean returning to something outdated. The forward movement of ideas - this is how our science moves - is not always embodied in the discovery of a completely new, unknown, sometimes it is necessary to strengthen ourselves in something old, known, but due to circumstances has gone into the shadows, and sometimes tendentiously painted over.

Turgenev's novel preserves in our memory what is worthy of continuity, what is necessary for the spiritual experience of the nation.

Man and the universe, man in all the diversity of his connections with nature, man in his historical conditioning - all these problems are directly related to the poetics of space and time in Turgenev's novel. Chronotopic images include us in a complex world, the artistic multidimensionality of which also presupposes the multidimensionality of the author’s interpretation of reality.

Our study of the novels of I.S. Turgenev precisely from this angle can have a certain significance both in terms of a more detailed study of the creative heritage of one of the leading Russian writers of the 19th century, and in terms of further methodological development of various typological varieties of artistic space and time in literature and art.

The scientific novelty of this work lies in the fact that for the first time, on such a large and wide material, the features of the artistic space and time of Turgenev’s novel are analyzed, the main trends of their evolution are identified and comprehended.

We are conducting a systematic analysis of the space-time continuum of both the early novels of I.S. Turgenev and the later ones - “Smoke” and “Novel”, which were practically not considered in the space-time aspect. The chronotopes that are traditional and stable for the artistic universe of Turgenev’s novel, and the chronotopes that arise only in the late novels of I.S. Turgenev and reflect the writer’s interest in new social realities are analyzed.

The subject of this study is the space-time continuum of Turgenev's novels and its individual elements, identified at different levels of the narrative.

The purpose of the proposed dissertation research is to create the first generalizing work, chronologically and systematically, taking into account etymological and typological aspects, tracing on specific material the existence and development of the categories of space and time in the novels of I.S. Turgenev.

Systematize the approaches of various researchers to the problem of studying the space-time continuum of Turgenev’s novel;

Explore the artistic functions of landscape, everyday space, objective realities in the formation of the space-time continuum of I. S. Turgenev’s novels;

To identify the interdependence of epic and lyrical, artistic-visual and philosophical-analytical methods of depicting space and time in the novels of I.S. Turgenev;

To trace the evolution of the chronotopic structure associated with the artistic development of new social realities, which significantly expanded the content range of Turgenev’s novel.

Practical significance of the work.

The results of the study can be used when teaching general courses on the history of Russian literature of the 19th century; in the work of seminars dedicated to the work of Turgenev the novelist; in the work of special seminars on the problems of the typology of the chronotope of the Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century.

Approbation of work.

The dissertation author made reports at the International Scientific Seminar "Lengua y espacio" (Salamanca, 1999); at a special seminar at the University of Havana on the problems of studying the poetics of fiction (Havana, 1999).

The main provisions of the dissertation are reflected in the following publications:

1. Las rutas de don Quijote en las novelas de Ivan Turguenev II Universiade de La Habana. - La Habana, 1998. - No. 249. - P.46-54.

2. El espacio y el tiempo en la novela "Rudin" de Ivan Turguenev II Universidad de La Habana. Complementarios. - La Habana, 1999. - P.25-34.

3. Poetics of space and time in I.S. Turgenev’s story “Three Meetings” // Classics. Literary and artistic almanac. -M., 1998.-P.21-27.

4. Space and time in the novels of I.S. Turgenev. - M., 2001.-164 p.

The structure of the dissertation consists of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography. The main content of the work is presented on 182 pages. The total volume of the dissertation is 200 pages, including 18 pages of a list of references containing 280 titles.

The poetics of space and time in the novel by I.S. Turgenev "Rudin"

The structure of space and time of the novel "Rudin" is determined by the nature of the spiritual search of the main character of the novel - Dmitry Nikolaevich Rudin, a bright, extraordinary personality representing the era of the 1840s.

The very first appearance of Rudin in the estate of Daria Mikhailovna Lasunskaya leaves the impression of complete surprise and some kind of uncontrollable swiftness: the footman announces “Dmitry Nikolaevich Rudin”31 and in the peaceful, measured world of the provincial noble estate a man appears who brings with him the light of European culture and , himself possessing the gift of extraordinary receptivity to everything beautiful and lofty, infects his listeners and interlocutors with this: “All of Rudin’s thoughts seemed turned to the future; this gave them something swift and youthful... Standing at the window, not looking at anyone in especially, he spoke - and, inspired by general sympathy and attention, the proximity of young women, the beauty of the night, carried away by the flow of his own sensations, he rose to eloquence, to poetry... The very sound of his voice, concentrated and quiet, increased his charm; it seemed that he with his lips he spoke something higher, something unexpected for him..."32.

For Rudin, it is necessary to understand what gives “eternal meaning to the temporary life of a person,” and he inspiredly expounds to the guests of Daria Mikhailovna Lasunskaya the ancient Scandinavian legend about the king and his warriors, who settled down to rest “in a dark and long barn, around a fire... Suddenly a small bird flies into open doors and flies out into others. The king notices that this bird is like a person in the world: it flew from the darkness and flew into the darkness, and did not stay long in the warmth and light... Exactly, our life is fast and insignificant, but everything is great is accomplished through people. The consciousness of being an instrument of those higher powers should replace all other joys for a person: in death itself he will find his life, his nest..."34.

The goal of a person is to search for the meaning of life, and not to search for pleasures and easy roads. The best of Turgenev's heroes will go towards this goal, which is why I. S. Turgenev's novels never end with a happy ending - the price for truth, for love, for freedom is too high.

In I. S. Turgenev’s first novel, the symbolic “super meanings” of the Scandinavian legend form the basis not only of the plot and composition of the novel, but also the basis of its chronotope, its space-time continuum.

Rudin is a man of his era, the era of the 40s. XIX century, when German classical philosophy for the educated part of Russian society was the subject of heated debate, the ideological basis for the search for truth and a way out of the impasse of official ideology. Rudin was completely immersed in German poetry, in the German romantic and philosophical world...”35. Having heard F. Schubert’s ballad “The Forest King” in Lasunskaya’s house, Rudin exclaims: “This music and this night reminded me of my student time in Germany: our gatherings, our serenades..."

It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was Germany that brought the hearts of Rudin and Natalya Lasunskaya closer together. For Rudin, German literature, associated with youth, full of romantic dreams and bold hopes, naturally became the first subject of conversation with an impressionable and enthusiastic girl. The content of these conversations is conveyed by I.S. Turgenev with that sincere lyrical intonation, which leaves no doubt that Rudin’s German impressions are personally close to the author of the novel: “What sweet moments Natalya experienced when, in the garden, on the bench, in the light, through shadow of an ash tree, Rudin will begin to read to her Goethe’s “Faust,” Hoffmann or “Letters” of Bettina, or Novalis, constantly stopping and interpreting what seemed dark to her... and carried her along with him to those forbidden countries"37 .

But, according to Rudin, “poetry is not only in verses: it is poured everywhere, it is all around us... Look at these trees, this sky breathes beauty and life from everywhere

The novel's landscapes, full of spiritual lyricism and conveying shades of the deepest inner experiences, confirm the thoughts and feelings of Turgenev's heroes. When Rudin is waiting for Natalya to arrive, “not a single leaf moved; the upper branches of the lilacs and acacias seemed to be listening to something and stretching out in the warm air. The house was darkening nearby; the illuminated long windows were drawn on it with spots of reddish light. Evening was meek; but a restrained, passionate sigh was felt in this silence." Let’s compare: “the branches seemed to be listening” and “Rudin stood with his arms crossed on his chest and listened with intense attention”40. Nature is anthropomorphic, it acts as a lyrical parallel to the moods of the heroes, and internally corresponds to their expectations of approaching happiness.

One of Turgenev’s best landscapes, of course, is the picture of rain in the seventh chapter of the novel: “The day was a hot, bright, radiant day, despite the occasional rain. Low, smoky clouds rushed smoothly across the clear sky, without blocking the sun, and at times dropped fields, strong streams of sudden and instantaneous downpour. Large, sparkling drops fell quickly, with a kind of dry noise, like diamonds; the sun played through their flickering net; the grass, recently agitated by the wind, did not move, greedily absorbing moisture; the irrigated trees trembled languidly with all their leaves; the birds did not stop singing, and it was gratifying to listen to their chatty chirping with the fresh hum and murmur of the running rain. The dusty roads smoked and were slightly mottled under the sharp blows of the clean spray. But then the cloud flew by, the breeze fluttered, the grass began to shimmer with emerald and gold ... Sticking to each other, the leaves of the trees showed through... A strong smell rose from everywhere...".

Poetry of the “estate chronotope” in I. S. Turgenev’s novel “The Noble Gneedo”

The image of a noble estate took a strong position in Russian literature of the 19th century, becoming almost end-to-end, appearing on the pages of the works of Russian writers until the first third of the 20th century ("The Life of Arsenyev" by I.A. Bunin, "The Life of Klim Samgin" by M. Gorky) .

The image of a noble estate in Russian literature is semantically multifunctional. On the one hand, this is the focus of the greatest spiritual and natural values, and on the other hand, it is the center of centuries-old patriarchal backwardness, which was perceived as the greatest evil.

In “Poshekhon Antiquity” by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, the social space of a noble estate is characterized by such definitions as “framework”, “pool”, “tightly enclosed muirya”, “village outskirts”, that is, a closed and vicious circle.

The unit of time in Poshekhonye is one day: grandfather's day, Auntie Slastena's day, Strunnikov's day - a day that has absorbed years. Time seemed to stand still and life stood still. A person in Poshekhon time and space fatally becomes a “Poshekhon citizen”, living exclusively by “uterine” interests. This is a frozen, distorted semblance of space and time, not illuminated by a single ray of consciousness69.

The estate world of I.S. Turgenev is completely different. The opinion of most researchers about I.S. Turgenev as a writer who poeticized the life of a noble estate is absolutely correct. The writer understood and felt the “estate” origins of Russian noble culture, the “estate” way of life, the poetic attitude that was determined by the “estate” life of the 16th-19th centuries.

Noble privileges, noble freedom from everyday worries, which make it possible to immerse oneself in an atmosphere of free contemplation of nature, the merging of cultural and natural principles, one might even say, into an atmosphere of idyll, turn into a special subtlety, a special poetry, a special spiritual sublimity.

The literature of sentimentalism, which for the first time accepted the “natural feeling” of a person as the main value of culture, opened the tradition of “taking” the hero beyond the boundaries of society - and above all into the sphere of nature and love. This technique becomes one of the most important components of the artistic system of “The Noble Nest”: natural life appears in it as isolated from the “big” space and opposed to the urban, secular world with its depravity and disastrousness.

“Idyllic life and its events are inseparable from this specific spatial corner, where fathers and grandfathers lived, children and grandchildren will live. This spatial little world is limited and self-sufficient, not significantly connected with other places, with the rest of the world. But localized in this limited spatial In the world, the series of life of generations can be indefinitely long. The unity of the life of generations (in general, the lives of people) in an idyll in most cases is essentially determined by the unity of place, the age-old attachment of the life of generations to one place, from which this life in all its events is not separated. Unity of the place of life of generations weakens and softens all temporary boundaries between individual lives and between different phases of the same life. The unity of place brings together and merges the cradle and grave (the same corner, the same land), childhood and old age (the same grove, river, the same linden trees , the same house), the life of different generations who lived in the same place, in the same conditions, who saw the same thing. This softening of all facets of time, determined by the unity of the place, significantly contributes to the creation of the cyclical rhythm of time characteristic of the idyll.

Finally, the third feature of the idyll, closely related to the first, is the combination of human life with the life of nature, the unity of their rhythm, a common language for natural phenomena and events of human life."70

But the work of I.S. Turgenev is also imbued with a tragic feeling of the irreversibility of the flow of historical time, carrying away entire layers of national culture, inseparable from the natural space of Russia. Therefore, behind the poetics of light, elegiac lyricism lies a complex psychological atmosphere, where the image of home, the family nest is inextricably linked with feelings of bitterness, sadness and loneliness.

This world, created by grandfathers and great-grandfathers, deeply connected with the spiritual memory of generations, is destroyed primarily by the bearers of individualistic consciousness. Yes, the dialectical nature of the world also manifests itself as a constant duel between the individual and the environment, but in this case we are not talking about the self-affirmation of an independently thinking, independent individual, but about the destructive power of the ideas of vulgar liberalism, with the adherents of which the “incorrigible” Westerner I.S. Turgenev had nothing to do with it.

I.S. Turgenev was the first to introduce the concept of “noble nest” into Russian literature. The semantics of this phrase gives rise to a number of associations: it is usually associated with a person’s young years, the initial stage of his world knowledge; correlated with it are the concepts of family, awareness of one’s place in this family, the atmosphere that reigns in it, understanding of the relationship between a person and the social and natural world around him. If the word “estate” is neutral in its expressive connotation, then “nest” has a bright connotation: “nest” is an unconditional carrier of certain positive emotions, it is warm, soft, cozy, created by your ancestors only for you, it beckons you like it beckons a bird , who returns to her native land after a long flight.

Therefore, the “noble nest” is not just a topos, it is a complex, dynamic and, moreover, anthropomorphic image. An important feature of its chronos is the constant memory of the past, the living presence of tradition, which is reminiscent of portraits and graves of ancestors, old furniture, a library, a park, and family legends. The space is filled with objects symbolizing the past: generation after generation leave their mark on the appearance of the estate.

I. Turgenev's novel "On the Eve" in the context of the problem of space and time

In contrast to the “local” title of the novel “The Noble Nest,” the novel “On the Eve” has a “temporary” title, which reflects not only the direct, plot content of the novel (Insarov dies on the eve of the fight for the independence of his homeland), but also the views of I. S. Turgenev on the problem of personality and history.

The bearers of historical progress in the novels of I.S. Turgenev are often illuminated by the light of doom, not because their activities are premature or their very aspirations are fruitless, but because I.S. Turgenev places even the most advanced personality under the sign of the idea of ​​​​infinity of progress. Next to the charm of novelty, freshness, and courage, there is always the awareness of the temporary limitations of the most daring idea. This temporary limitation is revealed as soon as a person fulfills his mission, this is seen by the next generation, torn out of moral indifference, but very soon realizing that the crest of a new wave is a step towards emerging conservatism, traditionalism of a different kind.

The heroes of I.S. Turgenev are “on the eve” not because they are inactive, but because every day is the “eve” of another day, and no one is so tragically affected by the speed and inexorability of historical development as on the “children of fate” bearers of the ideals of the time.

If we turn directly to the plot of the novel, it should be noted that the traditional exact dating of the events taking place in the novels of I.S. Turgenev and the indication of the location of action is preserved in “On the Eve”, but, unlike “Rudin” and “The Noble Nest”, the events develop not in the 1840s, but in the 1850s (the dating of the beginning of the novel, as is known, has a socio-historical justification - the beginning of the war between Russia and Turkey in the summer of 1853).

The appearance of "On the Eve" meant a certain evolution of Turgenev's novel. Readers and critics immediately noticed how the importance of socio-political problems in it sharply increased. The degree of topicality of what is depicted, the direct involvement of the plot and problems of the novel in a given moment of the era has increased just as sharply.

Of course, the issues of “Rudin” and “Noble Nest” were also directly related to pressing contemporary social issues. For example, to the question of the place and role of the noble intelligentsia in the conditions of the “transitional” era, about the social productivity of the moral values ​​​​created by the noble culture.

However, the artistic study of such issues was associated with an assessment of social situations, types, and relationships that were already irretrievably a thing of the past. The author's retrospective position had not only its own artistic meaning: what was depicted was essentially perceived as something already completed, allowing and even presupposing final generalizations. The easier and more natural the universal-philosophical scale entered into the artistic structure of the novel and a “double perspective” appeared, reuniting the concrete historical with the universal and eternal.

In "On the Eve" the situation is fundamentally different. True, the novelist here formally maintains his traditional distance of several years between the time of the events depicted and the time of the momentary story about them (the action of “On the Eve” is dated to 1853-1854 and is separated from the time of the appearance of the novel by such an important historical milestone as the Crimean War with all its socio-political consequences). However, such distancing is largely conditional. The story of the Bulgarian Katranov, which served as the main source of the plot of “On the Eve,” has indeed already become a thing of the past.

But a relatively long-standing incident provided material for posing problems that were relevant precisely in the pre-reform years; images that were perceived as “snatched from life,” types that young people imitated and who themselves created life, entered the consciousness of contemporaries. The perception of what was depicted turned out to be “distant”; the “spite of the day” sounded in the novel easily acquired current meaning for its readers.

Another feature of the new novel was that its heroes initially appeared as people for whom many of the universal problems that had previously tormented human consciousness with their intractability (and most of all philosophical or religious problems) no longer existed. Elena and Insarov acted as heralds of some new life, perhaps bringing liberation from the burden of these traditional problems. Their aspirations and spiritual qualities expressed themselves in the unique atmosphere of the current moment - the eve of approaching profound changes, the nature and consequences of which were not yet clear to anyone.

It would seem that the traditional role of the universal semantic plan should also have become a thing of the past - along with the people and themes for which this plan was so important to characterize. But it was then that it was discovered that access to universal categories became for I.S. Turgenev the main principle of understanding the material. “The evil of the day”, the quests and destinies of people who were completely devoted to this “the evil of the day” and who seemed to have excluded everything metaphysical from their lives, were almost demonstratively correlated with eternal questions, with the insoluble fundamental contradictions of being and spirit. In the novel "On the Eve" such a correlation turns out to be a kind of test for modern ideals, social types, moral decisions, etc.

Correlation with unsolvable metaphysical collisions also reveals the insufficiency of the ideals that the new era has put forward. The inconclusiveness of the solutions it has found is revealed, and thus the possibility of going beyond its horizons.

In his article “When will the real day come?” N.A. Dobrolyubov very accurately noted that “the essence of the story does not at all consist in presenting to us a model of civil, i.e. public valor,” since Turgenev “would not be able to write a heroic epic,” which “of all “ "Iliad" and "Odyssey" he assigns to himself only the story of Ulysses' stay on the island of Calypsa, and does not extend beyond that."149 Let us add: thanks to such “narrowing”, the spatio-temporal limitation of the action, the philosophical depth of the novel manifests itself more clearly and impressively.

Features of the chronotopic structure of I.S. Turgenev’s novel “Smoke”

The action of the novel “Smoke” begins on August 10, 1862 at four o’clock in the afternoon in the very center of Europe - in Baden-Baden, where “the weather was lovely; everything around - green trees, bright houses of a cozy city, wavy mountains - everything is festive, full spread out like a bowl under the rays of a benevolent sun; everything smiled somehow blindly, trustingly and sweetly...

The time inherent in Baden is “everyday” time, where there are no events, but only repeating “occurrences”. Time is devoid of forward movement; it moves in narrow circles of the day, week, month. The signs of this everyday cyclical time have merged with space: decorous streets, clubs, secular salons, music thundering in pavilions. Time here is eventless and therefore seems almost stopped.

Baden's "external chronotope" serves as a contrasting background for the "internal", event-significant time series associated exclusively with the theme of Russia.

In the 1860s. Baden and Heidelberg, located not far from it, were the traditional residence of both the Russian aristocracy and the radical Russian intelligentsia. It is characteristic that the fates of the heroes of I. S. Turgenev’s previous novels - “On the Eve” and “Fathers and Sons” - are connected with Baden-Baden and Heidelberg. Bersenev leaves for Heidelberg. Kukshina strives to go to Heidelberg and ultimately achieves this: “And Kukshina ended up abroad. She is now in Heidelberg and is no longer studying natural sciences, but architecture, in which, according to her, she discovered new laws

Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, who passionately loved Princess R., it was in Baden that “somehow he got along with her again as before; it seemed that she had never loved him so passionately... but a month later it was all over; the fire flared up in the last once and gone forever"

The motif of a fatal passion capable of destroying human life (the power of the past will constantly haunt Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov) from an episodic backstory in “Fathers and Sons” turns into the central storyline of the novel “Smoke”.

The main character - Grigory Mikhailovich Litvinov - appears in the second chapter of the novel, and the author gives only a laconic summary of his biography: studies at Moscow University ("did not finish the course due to circumstances... the reader will learn about them later"), the Crimean War, service "in elections." After living in the village, Litvinov “became addicted to farming... and went abroad to study agronomy and technology, to learn the ABCs. He spent more than four years in Mecklenburg, Silesia, Karlsruhe, traveled to Belgium, to England, worked conscientiously, acquired knowledge: it was not easy for him; but he withstood the test to the end, and now, confident in himself, in his future, in the benefit that he will bring to his fellow countrymen, perhaps even to the entire region, he is going to return to his homeland... That’s why Litvinov is so calm and simple, that’s why he looks around so self-confidently, that his life lies clearly before him, that his fate has been determined and that he is proud of this fate and rejoices in it as the work of his own hands.”281

Around Litvinov is a motley crowd of his compatriots; Bambaev “always penniless and always delighted with something... wandered around screaming, but without purpose, across the face of our much-tolerable mother earth”; the idol of the Russian emigration Gubarev “drove up from Heidelberg yesterday”; Matryona Sukhanchikova has been traveling from region to region for the second year already

“Gubarev’s Circle” at first may seem to be the focus of the search for a new “Russian idea”, but devoid of real dynamic soil, this search quickly degenerates into a motionless and inert “inner” religion of a closed world, which bears the stamp of immaturity of restless epigonic thought, grinding, adventurism.

When Litvinov openly admits that he does not yet have any political convictions, he deserves a contemptuous description from Gubarev - “one of the immature.” For Gubarev, to lag behind political fashion means to lag behind the times. But the meaning and significance of the historical changes taking place in post-reform Russia are incomprehensible to neither Gubarev, nor Bambaev, nor Voroshilov.

Litvinov, who finally escaped from the whirlpool of political gossip and senseless chatter, when “midnight had long struck,” could not get rid of painful impressions for a long time, because “the faces he saw, the speeches he heard kept spinning and spinning, strangely intertwined and entangled in his hot, aching head from tobacco smoke

Here, for the first time in the text of the novel, the word “smoke” appears, so far only as a definition of a specific reality (“tobacco smoke”). But already in this passage its metaphorical potential also appears: “smoke” as time, which “is in a hurry, rushing somewhere... achieving nothing”

While working on the novel “Smoke,” I.S. Turgenev attached special importance to the image of Potugin, who is an opponent of both the “Gubarev circle” and the “St. Petersburg generals,” and to a certain extent, Litvinov himself.

In a famous letter to D.I. Pisarev dated May 23 (June 4), 1867, I.S. Turgenev wrote that the hero of the novel, from the point of view of which the current state of Russia is assessed, is not Litvinov, but Potugin, and that he (I .S. Turgenev - N.L.) chose for himself “not such a low hill”, since “from the height of European civilization you can still survey the whole of Russia. Perhaps this face is dear to me alone; but I am glad that it appeared ... I am glad that now I have managed to put the word “civilization” on my banner... “287.

In creating the image of Potugin, the writer first of all sought to prove that the Westernizing position is characteristic precisely of the democratic part of Russian society. This is also evidenced by Potugin’s origins. Potugin is presented in the novel not only as a commoner, but also as a person from a spiritual background, which, according to I.S. Turgenev, determined the deeply “Russian roots” of his hero. Subsequently, in his “Memoirs of Belinsky” (1869), I.S. Turgenev will return to this thought: Belinsky’s behavior was “purely Russian, Moscow; it is not for nothing that unalloyed blood flowed in his veins - belonging to our Great Russian clergy, for so many centuries inaccessible to the influence of a foreign breed "288.

Potugin admits: “I am a Westerner, I am devoted to Europe; that is, to put it more precisely, I am devoted to education, that very education that we now so sweetly make fun of - civilization - yes, yes, this word is even better - and I love it with all my heart, and I believe in it, and I have no other faith and will not have it...!”

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution

higher professional education

"KUBAN STATE UNIVERSITY"

(FSBEI HPE "KubSU")

Department of History of Russian Literature, Literary Theory and Criticism

GRADUATE QUALIFICATION (DIPLOMA) WORK

ARTISTIC SKILLS OF TURGENEV-PROSE WRITER IN THE EVALUATION OF MODERN LITERARY SCIENTISTS

I've done the work

A.A. Terenkova

Krasnodar 2013

Introduction

Review of scientific literature on the topic

The significance of I. S. Turgenev in the history of Russian and world literature

2.1 About the creative method of I.S. Turgenev

2 Formation of the writer’s aesthetic views

Features of the Turgenev style

1 Objectivity of narration

2 Dialogue

3 Features of plot construction

4 Psychological implications

5 Time in the works of I.S. Turgenev

6 Turgenev characters

7 The role of the portrait

8 Turgenev landscape

9 Artistic language I.S. Turgenev

9.1 Musicality of Turgenev’s prose

9.2 Lexico-semantic features

9.4 Poetry of prose

Genre originality of I. S. Turgenev’s prose

Conclusion

List of sources used

Turgenev literature genre prose

Introduction

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev is one of the writers who made a significant contribution to the development of Russian literature. The real picture of modern life depicted in his works is imbued with deep humanism, faith in the creative and moral forces of his native people, in the progressive development of Russian society.

Turgenev knew and loved his readers; his work answered the questions that worried them and posed new, important social and moral problems for them. At the same time, among his literary contemporaries, Turgenev acquired the meaning of “a writer for writers.” His works opened up new perspectives for literature, he was looked upon as a master, an authoritative person in matters of art, and he felt responsible for his destinies. Turgenev considered participation in literature, work on words, and the artistic development of the Russian literary language as his duty. The aesthetic and moral beauty of the characters depicted, the clarity and classical simplicity of the style, the poetic musicality of I. S. Turgenev’s prose should resonate with renewed vigor for the modern reader. Acquaintance with Turgenev's work can awaken the best aesthetic and moral feelings in a young reader. Realizing this, the authors of many school programs widely include the works of I. S. Turgenev in the literature curriculum. A modern schoolchild should, over the course of several years, read stories from the series “Notes of a Hunter,” stories about love (“Asya,” “First Love,” “Spring Waters”), and one of the novels (“Rudin,” “Fathers and Sons.” ", "Noble Nest" - optional), and prose poems. All authors of the programs pay great attention not only to the content side of Turgenev’s creativity, but also to the peculiarities of Turgenev’s poetics and style. Thus, in the program edited by M. B. Ladygin, it is proposed to consider “peculiarities of typification in the novels of I. S. Turgenev,” “the originality of Turgenev’s psychologism,” “peculiarities of the writer’s realism,” “the aesthetic and ethical positions of the writer.” A.G. Kutuzov, the author of another school curriculum on literature, invites the teacher and students to reflect on the following questions: “The originality of composition and the function of nature in Turgenev’s novels”, “aestheticization of landscape”, “proseization of style”, “following Pushkin’s tradition”, “ romantic subjectivism", "portrait characteristics of characters".

Many of the questions proposed by modern programs, due to their novelty for the school course, can cause difficulties for a literature teacher. The purpose of this thesis is to systematize the material accumulated by our literary criticism on the artistic originality and skill of I. S. Turgenev the prose writer. The material selected, adapted for school and presented in the work will help the teacher prepare lessons on studying the works of I. S. Turgenev at the proper theoretical and literary level. The purpose of the work determines the structure of the thesis essay. The first chapter provides an overview of literary studies of the 60-90s of the 20th century. The second chapter examines the issue of the formation of the aesthetic views of I. S. Turgenev, offers judgments from critics that determine the originality of the author’s artistic method, presents reviews of Russian and foreign writers and literary scholars about the role and significance of Turgenev in the history of world literature. The third chapter is devoted directly to the originality of Turgenev's style. The chapter contains many subsections that present both literary and linguistic aspects of the writer’s stylistic manner. The fourth chapter shows the genre originality of Turgenev's prose. The conclusion is given in the form of specific conclusions that can be used by the teacher as thesis for lessons on the artistic skill of the writer. When selecting the necessary material, we focused on the most authoritative and interesting, in our opinion, sources.

1. Review of scientific literature on the topic

Until now, in literary scholarship there is no consensus on significant issues in Turgen studies, for example, on the genre specificity of his works.

Throughout the entire period of studying Turgenev’s heritage, such aspects as the language of artistic works and the role of landscape were taken into account, but they are perceived from different points of view.

The Turgenevian theory that has emerged to date is rich in interesting observations, subtle remarks and correct conclusions. The scientific and critical literature about Turgenev is dominated by the desire to comprehend his legacy at different levels. Thus, the originality of Turgenev’s prose was and is being determined in terms of genre, characterology or stylistics. Turgenev’s creative and personal contacts with Russian or foreign artists have been and continue to be considered, which makes it possible to significantly clarify his place in the world literary process. However, researchers recognize the need to synthesize accumulated observations. This seems very important, because now, probably, none of the Turgenev scholars doubt that Turgenev’s style is characterized by a special fusion of visual and expressive means; their relationship forms those “incrementations of poetic meaning” or “additional content”, as V.V. Vinogradov wrote about.

In this regard, a number of studies can be named in which the authors turn to Turgenev’s work as a whole, taking as a basis any of its aspects.

Thus, S. E. Shatalov in the book “The Artistic World of Turgenev” highlights the following aspect: the artistic world of I. S. Turgenev in its ideological and aesthetic integrity and its embodiment in specific visual means. The author’s desire to imagine Turgenev’s artistic world as a whole arose from the need for a modern, deeper and more accurate reading of his legacy. The author traces the main stages of the creative process, starting with the socio-political and historical conditions in which the idea of ​​a particular work was born, and ending with the artistic means with the help of which the writer’s idea received a unique existence. The book is devoted to the consideration of the artistic features of Turgenev's heritage in their totality and interrelation. This explains the specificity of the study, which we consider justified: the work analyzes not individual works, but large thematic blocks, while works of art serve as illustrative material. S. E. Shatalov’s contribution to the study of Turgenev’s psychologism seems significant, which he considers in comparison and contrast with other writers, primarily with Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. We also consider the chapter “The Artistic World of I. S. Turgenev’s Later Stories” to be very important, since this period of his work was distinguished by great complexity and caused reproaches from many critics of the 19th century and especially the Soviet period for what Turgenev sees and depicts in Russian life not what they thought was necessary, and not as they thought it should be.

The monograph by G. A. Byaly “Russian realism. From Turgenev to Chekhov” is the result of many years of study of Russian realistic literature of the 19th century. The author focuses on the work of I. S. Turgenev, the specifics and historical role of his realism, and Turgenev’s artistic method correlates with the art of other masters of Russian realistic prose. The peculiarity of the critic’s research method is its two-pronged nature: Byaly’s attention is attracted by the artistic individuality of a particular writer, he is looking for the key to the unique features of Turgenev’s thinking, path and fate, and at the same time, the researcher’s work is permeated with the desire to understand the general patterns and dynamics of the development of Russian realism. Both tasks are inextricably linked: creative individuality and era turn out to be values ​​for Byaly that mutually clarify each other.

V. V. Golubkov in the book “The Artistic Mastery of I. S. Turgenev” analyzes in detail a number of the writer’s works: some stories from “Notes of a Hunter”, “Mumu”, the novels “Rudin”, "Fathers and Sons". In his analysis, he pays special attention to the characters, social environment, lyricism, character speech and other elements of the text. However, despite the fact that he rightly considers Turgenev one of the best writers, the critic reproaches him for the fact that “in the era of the flared-up revolutionary movement, he parted ways with the revolutionary democrats and took the path of reformism, “gradualism.” And further: “Turgenev’s reformism influenced the nature of his literary work: false ideas prevented him from truthfully and deeply assessing what was new that the development of the revolutionary movement brought with it, and could not but affect the writer’s artistic skill.” We do not consider it possible to agree with the thesis about the limitations of Turgenev’s socio-political views. If we accept the opinion of V.V. Golubkov, we must admit that in the second half of the 60s and 70s the writer’s artistic skills “were significantly weakened.”

Thus, the researcher’s ideological view of Turgenev’s social position and creativity cannot be accepted by us. In V.V. Chicherin’s work “Turgenev, His Style,” the author aims to reveal the essence of Turgenev’s style, to understand what is unique about it, comparing it with the styles of other writers of his era, finding out what they have in common and what is the opposite. In this regard, Chicherin explores the role of the author in the work, the functions of the narrator, pays great attention to the originality of the epithet, the traditions of Pushkin’s prose and Turgenev’s discoveries in it, the peculiarities of poetic language, and the imagery of Turgenev’s word. He strongly argues for Turgenev's philosophical perception of nature, emphasizes the dialogical nature of Turgenev's style, notes the features in the structure of the novel's image, and also emphasizes the role of artistic time in the work. It is worth mentioning the genre opposition he puts forward between Turgenev’s essay, short story, story and novel. The critic notes that Turgenev's novel is an original variety of this genre. The literary critic’s arguments about the musicality of Turgenev’s prose seemed most interesting. It is difficult to disagree with Chicherin’s conclusion that the basis of the architectonics of everything created by Turgenev is “simple and clear lines.”

S. V. Protopopov in his work “Notes on the prose of I. S. Turgenev in the 40-50s” expresses many valuable comments for us regarding Turgenev’s work in general and this period in particular. The researcher is interested in the formation of the writer's political views and social views, as well as his aesthetic ideals. He notes the versatility of Turgenev's artistic method, emphasizing that his realistic method includes multi-style components. The researcher compares Turgenev’s artistic style to painting, observing the colorfulness of the drawing and the play of colors. In addition, he talks about the realistic basis of the landscape, notes the importance of light in the works of Turgenev.

The book by P. G. Pustovoit “Turgenev - the Artist of the Word” provides a study of Turgenev’s creative method, his artistic manner and style. The author traces romantic tendencies in Turgenev's work, studies the features of his satire and lyrics. Primary attention is paid to the skill of Turgenev's portrait, techniques for creating images, dialogues, composition and the genre of the novel and story.

For us, the most significant are the researcher’s comments regarding Turgenev’s satire combined with subtle lyricism. Pustovoit devotes a separate chapter to the novelist’s creative laboratory, depicting the artist’s process of working on the creation of a novel.

A. G. Tseitlin in the book “The Skill of Turgenev the Novelist” shows how I. S. Turgenev worked to create the images of his heroes, how the era, environment, all surrounding conditions were reflected in his novels - culture, life and nature, what are the characteristic features development of action in his novels. The linguistic and stylistic features of Turgenev's novels are analyzed in detail. The first two chapters contain an analysis of the main features of the socio-psychological novel by Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol - Turgenev's predecessors and teachers, and also talk about Turgenev's path to the genre of the novel. The researcher believes that it is possible to understand the style of Turgenev’s novel only in the historical perspective of the development of this genre. Tseitlin's study of Turgenev's influence on the further development of the Soviet novel deserves attention as a promising aspect of Turgenev studies.

S. M. Petrov in the book “I. S. Turgenev: The Creative Path” consistently traces how Turgenev’s talent developed from the beginning of his creative activity to the last years of his life, how his works were created and what place they occupy in the history of Russian literature. Special chapters are devoted to "Notes of a Hunter" and Turgenev's novels.

Fundamental to S. M. Petrov is the ideological and thematic analysis of works, attention to images, critical responses; the author explores Turgenev’s creative aspirations in connection with the socio-political situation in the country.

It is very valuable for the researcher that the book contains a detailed alphabetical index of names; this makes it possible to trace Turgenev’s creative path surrounded by a variety of artists and public figures.

A. I. Batyuto in the book “The Work of I. S. Turgenev and the Critical-Aesthetic Thought of His Time” traces the critical-aesthetic and other influences on the work of Turgenev by Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, Annenkov, Dobrolyubov, illustrating them with examples of Turgenev’s works. Most of the book is devoted to the topic “Turgenev - Belinsky”, because, according to the researcher, Belinsky’s influence on Turgenev was exceptional in its significance.

However, it should be noted that Batyuto, unlike other critics, raises the question not about the unilateral influence of Belinsky - Turgenev, but also about counter-similar influences from Turgenev. Therefore, he considers it necessary to replace the word “influence” with the definition of “correspondence,” which most accurately expresses the relationship between Belinsky’s worldview and aesthetics and Turgenev’s work.

Yu. V. Lebedev's book "Turgenev" is dedicated to the life path and spiritual quest of the great Russian writer. This biography was written taking into account new, previously unknown facts of the writer’s life and work, which sometimes cast unexpected light on Turgenev’s personality and allow a deeper understanding of his world.

The book is not just a chronological series of events in Turgenev's life. The researcher weaves into the outline of the writer’s life path not only information about the moment of creation of a given text in the author’s life, but also dwells on the consideration of his individual works.

2. The meaning of I.S. Turgenev in the history of Russian and world literature

As S. E. Shatalov notes: “The name of I. S. Turgenev for a whole century aroused passionate debate in Russian and foreign criticism. Already his contemporaries realized the enormous social significance of the works he created. Not always agreeing with his assessment of events and figures of Russian life , often denying in the harshest form the legitimacy of his literary position, his concept of the socio-historical development of Russia, public figures of the 1850-1870s could not help but recognize the amazing ability of Turgenev’s talent - his amazing ability to combine the so-called topic of the day with generalizations of the broadest truly universal human order and give them an artistically perfect form and aesthetic persuasiveness."

Turgenev had a strong impact on the world literary process. “He played a colossal role in turning most of the French to Russia and thereby contributed to the future rapprochement between Russia and France,” admits Charles Corbet. It has been repeatedly noted that Turgenev was the first of the Russian writers to convince Western readers and critics of the global significance of Russian literature of the 19th century. The greatest artists of France, England and America did not hide the fact that at certain moments in their creative development they turned to Turgenev as their master, mastered his legacy and went through the school of mastery under his influence.

At the beginning of the 20th century, it seemed to some critics that Turgenev as an artist was a thing of the past, that Dostoevsky, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov and Gorky seemed to have pushed him away from the first rank of world writers and now his creative achievements seemed to have faded. These prophecies did not come true. Lewis Sinclair said otherwise: “He has been a little forgotten, but his time will come.”

And it really came. The reader remembered Turgenev in connection with new issues of modern social life. Millions of copies of his works testify to the ever-increasing interest in the Russian classic. Emphasizes the importance of the creativity of Turgenev and P. G. Pustovoit: “Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev inherited the best poetic traditions of his predecessors - Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol. His exceptional ability to convey the deep inner experiences of a person, his “living sympathy for nature, a subtle understanding of its beauty” ( A. Grigoriev), “the extraordinary subtlety of taste, tenderness, a kind of tremulous grace, spilled on every page and reminiscent of morning dew” (Melchior de Vogüe), and finally, the all-conquering musicality of his phrases - all this gave rise to the unique harmony of his creations. The palette of the great novelist is distinguished not by brightness, but by the softness and transparency of colors."

2.1 About the creative method of I. S. Turgenev

Many literary scholars study the creative method of I. S. Turgenev, his principles of artistic representation. Thus, V.V. Perkhin notes: “In the early 1840s, Turgenev took the position of romantic individualism. They characterize his poetic work, including the famous poem “The Crowd,” dedicated to V.G. Belinsky, with whom Turgenev was especially close became close in the summer of 1844. The years 1843-1844 were a time when adherence to the principles of romanticism was combined with their gradual overcoming, as evidenced by the appearance in the spring of 1843 of the poem “Parasha”, as well as articles on “William Tell” by Schiller and “Faust” by Goethe ".

At the beginning of January 1845, Turgenev wrote to his friend A. A. Bakunin: “... I have recently lived no longer in fantasy, as before, but in a more real way, and therefore I had no time to think about what in many respects - became a thing of the past for me." We encounter similar thoughts in the article about Goethe: every person in his youth experienced an era of “genius”, enthusiastic self-confidence; such an era of “dreamy and uncertain impulses is repeated in the development of everyone, but only he deserves the name of a person who can get out of this magic circle and go forward.” S. V. Protopopov writes about the versatility of Turgenev’s method: “Turgenev’s realistic method, which took shape in the 40-50s, was a very complex phenomenon. Echoes of sentimentalism and romanticism are clearly visible in it. Color combinations that vaguely resemble the palette of impressionism are also visible in the coloring. All these "Components of different styles are not a random admixture. The differently perceived properties of living life create an integral realistic image."

The lyrical and sentimental coloring of the narrative is explained not only by the inclinations and predilections of the writer himself, but also by the originality of the inner life of Turgenev’s hero - a man of the cultural stratum - by the development of a love theme, which occupies an important place in the development of the plot, and by the diverse role of the landscape. This is expressed in the sentimental-melancholy mood of individual descriptions and episodes, in the selection of lexical means. But feelings and moods, as a rule, do not sin against artistic truth.

The first half of the 40s, writes L.P. Grossman, “was marked for Turgenev by the struggle of two methods in his work - dying romanticism and growing realism.” Grossman's conclusion is confirmed by other researchers (G. A. Byaly, S. M. Petrov, etc.). Judging by the general direction of their works, the conversation is not about the complete “withering away” of romanticism, but about the struggle against it as a literary movement and a certain type of worldview. Romanticism, in the eyes of Turgenev, is, first of all, indifference to social issues, the “apotheosis of personality,” pomposity and pretentiousness...

Turgenev's romance bears the imprint of Zhukovsky's sentimental melancholy. But the author of “Notes of a Hunter” was impressed by the “power of Byronic lyricism,” which in his mind merged with the power of “criticism and humor.” These two “piercing forces” helped the artist to poetize the bright feelings and ideals of the Russian people." P. G. Pustovoit also highlights the romantic principle in Turgenev’s work, noting that it “having appeared in Turgenev’s early works, did not disappear from his work until the last days of his life writer." During the era of the dominance of romanticism, it manifested itself in the figurative system of reflecting reality, in the creation of romantic heroes. When romanticism as a movement ceased to be dominant, Turgenev came out with a debunking of romantic heroes ("Conversation", "Andrei Kolosov", "Three Portraits", "The Diary of an Extra Man"), but did not abandon romance as an elevated attitude of man to the world, from the romantic perception of nature ("Three Meetings", "Singers", "Bezhin Meadow"). Romance as a poetic, idealizing principle began to wedge itself into his realistic works, emotionally coloring them and becoming the basis of Turgenev's lyricism.This is also noted in the last period of the writer's work, where we are faced with romantic themes, and with romantic heroes, and with a romantic background...

A.V. Chicherin considers Turgenev’s realism among Russian and foreign writers of this direction: “Critical realism united all the most outstanding writers of the middle and second 19th centuries.” And Turgenev’s literary style has a lot in common not only with Goncharov, Pisemsky, L. Tolstoy, even Dostoevsky, but also with Merimee, Stendhal, Dickens, especially Flaubert, and even that same Balzac, whom he quite resolutely did not recognize.

This is common in this kind of interest in private life, when everything private receives social, historical significance, the deeply individual is combined with the typical, when the novel becomes concretely comprehended by the philosophy of the author’s contemporary life... The reader climbs into the depths of people’s personal lives, sees their strength, their weakness, their noble impulses, their vices. This is not a disguise. This, moreover, is not exaltation. This is the ability, through these images, to understand the most characteristic of what happens in real life.

Writers of this period and this movement, the researcher notes, are characterized by poetic accuracy, which includes factual accuracy. A careful study of any object penetrating a novel becomes a kind of cult for Flaubert and Zola. But Turgenev is also extremely accurate in depicting time, place, details of everyday life, and costume. If the beginning of the events of “Fathers and Sons” is dated May 20, 1859, then not only the state of spring and winter crops is noted in the landscape, exactly what happens at this time, but also the relationship in the village of the landowner with the peasants, with the civilian clerk, the very attempt to create farm - all this is connected with the pre-reform situation in the village...

Also, especially for Russian realists, Turgenev’s contemporaries, the struggle against the “phrase” as one of the relics of both classicism and romanticism, one of the manifestations of literaryism is very characteristic...

Turgenev’s opposition to the “phrase” goes very far. It is reflected in the inner essence of the images he created. Everything natural, directly coming from human nature, from his insides, is not only attractive, but also beautiful: the assertive, convinced nihilism of Bazarov, and the bright poetic dreaminess of Nikolai Petrovich, and the passionate patriotism of Insarov, and the unshakable faith of Lisa.

True values ​​in man and in nature, according to Turgenev, are the same. This is clarity, an all-conquering, tirelessly flowing light and that purity of rhythm, which is equally reflected in the swaying of branches and in the movement of a person, expressing his inner essence. This clarity is not shown in a purified form; on the contrary, the internal struggle, the eclipse of living feelings, the play of light and shadow... the revelation of beauty in man and nature does not dull, but intensifies criticism."

Already in Turgenev’s earliest letters, the idea of ​​a clear, harmonious personality is revealed - “his bright mind, warm heart, all the charm of his soul... He so deeply, so sincerely recognized and loved the holiness of life... In these words about the recently deceased N.V. Stankevich is the first manifestation of this constant basic feeling, the source of Turgenev's creativity... And his poetic nature, the landscape in his stories and novels entirely flows from this ideal of harmonious humanity.

Turgenev dedicated his work to the elevation of man, affirming the ideas of nobility, humanism, humanity, and kindness. Here is what M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin said about Turgenev: “Turgenev was a highly developed, convinced man who never left the soil of universal human ideals. He carried these ideals into Russian life with that conscious constancy, which constitutes his main and invaluable service to the Russian people.” society. In this sense, he is a direct successor of Pushkin and does not know any other rivals in Russian literature. So if Pushkin had every reason to say about himself that he awakened “good feelings,” Turgenev could say the same about himself. not some conventional “good feelings”, but those simple, universally accessible “good feelings”, which are based on a deep faith in the triumph of light, goodness and moral beauty."

The relationship between Turgenev and Dostoevsky was very complex, this is explained by the fact that they were too different both as writers and as people. However, in one of his articles, he directly places Turgenev among the great Russian writers: “Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky, Gogol - everything that our literature is proud of... And later, in the 1870s, when it had already arisen between polemic between two writers, Dostoevsky says regarding journalists’ attacks on Turgenev: “How many Turgenevs will be born, tell me?”

2.2 Formation of the writer’s aesthetic views

In connection with the study of Turgenev's works, researchers are interested in the personality of the author, his ideals, values, social views, which found their creative embodiment in works of art.

Thus, S.V. Protopopov writes: “The views of I.S. Turgenev were formed under the influence of public life and progressive thought. Loving Russia, he was acutely aware of the disorder and glaring contradictions of reality.”

Turgenev's democratic tendencies were manifested in the formulation of topical problems, in the development of the "spirit of denial and criticism", in the feeling of the new, in the attraction to the bright beginnings of life and in the tireless defense of the "holy of holies" of art - its truth and beauty.

The influence of V. G. Belinsky and his entourage, communication with N. G. Chernyshevsky and N. A. Dobrolyubov forced, as M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin aptly noted, to “rework” himself. Of course, one cannot overestimate the influence of the ideas of revolutionary democracy on Turgenev, but it is unacceptable to go to the other extreme and see in him only a liberal master, indifferent to the needs of the people.

Even in his old age, Turgenev called himself a man of the 40s, a liberal of the old style.

In P. G. Pustovoit we encounter the argument that by the time the novel “Rudin” appeared in print, an ideological divergence with the editors of the Sovremennik magazine was already emerging. The magazine's pronounced democratic tendency and Chernyshevsky's and Dobrolyubov's sharp criticism of Russian liberalism could not but lead to a split in Sovremennik, which reflected the clash of two historical forces fighting for a new Russia - liberals and revolutionary democrats.

In the 50s, a number of articles and reviews appeared in Sovremennik, defending the principles of materialist philosophy and exposing the groundlessness and flabbyness of Russian liberalism; Satirical literature ("Spark", "Whistle") is becoming widespread.

Turgenev does not like these new trends, and he seeks to oppose them with something else, purely aesthetic. He writes a number of stories that were to some extent the antithesis of the Gogol direction of literature (for example, in a letter to V.P. Botkin on June 17, 1855, Turgenev writes: “... I am the first to know, ou e soulier de Gogol blesse (where the boot presses Gogol). - After all, it was Druzhinin who referred to me, speaking about one writer who would like a counterbalance to the Gogol trend... it’s all true”). Turgenev covered mainly intimate psychological topics in them. Most of them touch upon the problems of happiness and duty and bring to the fore the motive of the impossibility of personal happiness for a deeply and subtly feeling person in the conditions of Russian reality ("Quiet", 1854; "Faust", 1856; "Asya", 1858; "First Love" ", 1860).

S. V. Protopopov, reflecting on Turgenev’s aesthetics, notes that Turgenev, focusing on the intellectual, moral essence of his favorite heroes, on their connection with the natural world, barely touches on the details of everyday life and household items. That is why the living, realistic figures of peasants - truth-seekers, and especially the images of "Turgenev's girls", seem as if airy, completely translucent. With all his creativity he affirms the beauty in man. This reflected the influence of the spontaneous optimistic romance of the people. But there was another source of beauty. Influenced by the romance of the people. But there was another source of beauty. Under the influence of Hegel's aesthetics, Turgenev repeatedly expressed the idea of ​​the eternal and absolute meaning of beauty. In a letter to P. Viardot dated September 9, 1850, there are the following lines: “Beautiful is the only immortal thing, and as long as even the slightest remnant of its material manifestation continues to exist, its immortality remains. Beautiful is spread everywhere, its influence extends even above death. But nowhere does it shine with such force as in human individuality; here it speaks most of all to the mind."

Turgenev built his ideal of beauty on an earthly, real basis, alien to everything supernatural and mystical. “I can’t stand the sky,” he wrote to P. Viardot in 1848, “but life, reality, its whims, its accidents, its habits, its fleeting beauty... I adore all this. As for me, I am chained to the earth I would prefer to contemplate the hurried movements of a duck, which scratches the back of its head with a wet paw on the edge of a puddle, or the long shiny drops of water slowly falling from the muzzle of a motionless cow, which has just drunk in a pond, into which it has entered knee-deep, to all that are cherubs... can be seen in heaven." This recognition of Turgenev, as S. M. Petrov noted, is, in its materialistic basis, akin to the position of V. G. Belinsky.

Turgenev’s heroes are also obsessed with love for the “this-worldly”, for the truly human. “I,” says N.N. (“Asya”), “was occupied exclusively by people... faces, living, human faces - people’s speeches, their movements, laughter - that’s what I couldn’t do without... It amused me to watch people ... yes, I didn’t even observe them - I looked at them with some kind of joyful curiosity."

Turgenev expressed his creative principles in the following words: “To accurately and powerfully reproduce the truth, the reality of life, is the highest happiness for a writer, even if this truth does not coincide with his own sympathies.” The writer, he argued, needs to learn from nature and achieve simplicity and clarity of outline, definiteness and rigor of the drawing. In "Modern Notes" Turgenev wrote about the work of I. Vitali: "... all his figures are alive, humanly beautiful... He is highly gifted with a sense of proportion and balance; his artistic vision is clear and true, like nature itself." The sense of “truth and simplicity”, “measure and balance” was characteristic of Turgenev himself.

He spoke sharply about works that, as he put it, “smell of literature,” “rattle with all the thunder of rhetoric,” and persistently promoted Belinsky’s thesis that the perfect truth of life is combined with the simplicity of fiction in a truly artistic work.”

Nature, said the creator of “Notes of a Hunter,” reveals its secrets to those who look at it “not from some exclusive point of view,” but the way it should be looked at: “clearly, simply and with full participation.” This means that a real artist observes “smartly, conscientiously and subtly.” “Try to understand and express what happens even in a bird that falls silent before the rain, and you will see how difficult it is,” says Turgenev. Many years later, in a letter to E.V.A. (1878), he poses a similar problem: “... you will hardly believe that it is truthful and simple to tell how, for example, a drunken man beat his wife, is far more sophisticated, than to compose a whole treatise on the women's issue."

3. Features of the Turgenev style

Many literary scholars, in particular A. B. Chicherin, make Turgenev’s style as a whole the subject of study. In his work “Turgenev, His Style” he highlights the following: “The styles of authors, very distant in space and sometimes in time, are closely connected, then emerge from each other, or are somehow related to each other. And vice versa. Quite often Yes, side by side two writers of the same nationality, the same time, the same social class within the style, from their starting positions will contradict each other like obstinate and intractable twins. So... Turgenev, walking in the same ranks with Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Pisemsky, Goncharov, in the very "The root of his style was opposite to each of them. From the traditions of Pushkin, Turgenev extracted completely different melodies than Dostoevsky - harmonic and clear melodies. He carried and carries into the future something completely different from his great contemporaries, the principle of reverent responsiveness and Mozartian purity of sound." .

Chicherin asks the question: “What is the essence of Turgenev’s style?” .

“Will I be given simple, clear lines?..” This thought worried Turgenev on the day of his thirty-fourth birthday, November 9, 1852, when he, aware of his age, what had been created and everything that would need to be created, experienced a deep need to “bow forever with the old manner”, “to take a different path”, “to find her”, I would like to breathe into myself with all my might “the austere and youthful beauty of Pushkin’s spirit”.

The ideal of simple and clear lines was contradicted by many things, almost everything, in Turgenev’s contemporary literature.

Seeing in Tyutchev's poetry an extension of the Pushkin era, Turgenev establishes his own measure of poetic value: “the proportionality of talent with itself,” “its correspondence with the life of the author,” this is what “in its full development constitutes the distinctive signs of great talents.” Only those works that “were not invented, but grew on their own” are real works of art." You can carve any figurine from a chopped, dried piece of wood; but a fresh leaf cannot grow on that branch, a fragrant flower cannot open on it... Woe a writer who wants to make a dead toy out of his living talent, who will be seduced by the cheap triumph of a virtuoso, his cheap power over his vulgarized inspiration."

This theory elevates the role of the author very highly and in some way reduces it to nothing. In the author, in the life of his spirit, in his innermost being is the source of true creativity. Works of art are as much a living part of the author as his heart, like his hand.

No prosthetics in art are possible or acceptable. At the same time, the subject of art is man, society, nature. These are powerful and full-fledged objects. Turgenev constantly testified that only from what he sees is his image born, from the image comes an idea. No way back. Therefore, the author, as a person, is in the power of poetic truth, and poetic truth is a combination of objective reality and the life of his mind and heart, independent of the author’s will.

3.1 Narrator's objectivity

In Turgenev's novels and stories there is no that searching, thinking, doubting, affirming author whom the Russian reader loves so much in the novels of Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy (in the novels of Hugo, Dickens and Balzac). The author in Turgenev's novels and stories is not so much reflected in the idea as in the narrative style itself, in its full correspondence with the objective truth and with himself, that is, with the poetic world of the author. This does not mean at all that Turgenev’s works are “unprincipled.” Their ideological nature, by its nature, belongs more to life itself, free from the previously known intentions of the author. He was much more interested and delighted in the new type of people he discovered by the integrity, the internal composure of this phenomenon (in its extreme, figurative expression); agreement or disagreement with the thoughts and behavior of such a character did not matter to the author. This is what caused confusion and discord in criticism.

In Turgenev's stories, the narrators are constant versions of this self-eliminating character. In "First Love" there is reverent, subtle lyricism in the image of Voldemar, remembering himself as a teenager. But even in this case, the true hidden action of the story misses the narrator.

The author is merciless towards this group of his heroes, and at the same time there is a deeply penetrating connection between him and them. In the final lines, in the later feeling, in the consciousness of everything that they have experienced and seen, they rise to its bright openness, its clarity, full of love understanding of people and life.

Detachment from the main action gives eyewitnesses of events a character of interested, anxious, lyrical objectivity. Everything touches them, touches them to the quick, and yet life passes them by. In Turgenev's novels there is no such intermediate link - an elderly man who is aware of his irreparable mistakes, who sees that everything truly beautiful once existed and has melted away, leaving a trace in his memory that is indelible, alluring and mournful. And the author is almost invisible in the novels.

“The novelist knows everything” is Thackeray’s formula, remarkable in its categoricalness. In Turgenev, the novelist sees first and foremost, and he has no doubt at all that his vision does not deceive him. But the ultimate meaning of what he sees usually seems a mystery to him. And he is not so much concerned with solving the riddle as with delving into it, revealing all its shades, and clearly understanding the mystery of phenomena.

3.2 Dialogue

Turgenev's entire style is dialogical. In it, the author constantly looks back at himself, doubts about the word he has spoken, and therefore he prefers to speak not from himself, but from the narrator in stories, on behalf of the heroes in novels, regarding every word as characteristic, and not as a true word.

Therefore, dialogue in its pure form is the main instrument in the orchestra of Turgenev’s novel. If the action of the novel is predominantly influenced by circumstances and conflicts of private life, then deep ideological contradictions are revealed in the dialogue. Everyone speaks in their own way, even down to the manner of pronunciation of individual words, because they think in their own way, contrary to their interlocutor. And at the same time, this individual thinking is socially typical: many other people think this way.

The author is attracted not by the rightness of this or that interlocutor, but by the conviction of those arguing, their ability to take extreme positions in their views and in life and go to the end, the ability to express their worldview in the living Russian word.

3.3 Features of plot construction

S. V. Protopopov notes: “The most complex social phenomena in Turgenev’s concise, laconic novel are refracted and reflected in the individual fate of the hero, in the peculiarities of his worldview and feelings. The writer refuses a broad historical panorama with many characters and detailed descriptions of their life path. Hence the simplicity of the plot of his novels, reflecting the deep processes of life."

Maupassant recalled the last years of Turgenev’s life: “Despite his age, his almost completed career, he had the most progressive views on literature, rejecting outdated forms of the novel with dramatic and scientific combinations, demanding that they reproduce life - nothing but life, without intrigue and intricate adventures."

Continuing this thought, V. Shklovsky wrote: “The plots of Turgenev’s works were distinguished not only by the lack of intrigue and intricate adventures. Their main difference was that the “ideal” arises in Turgenev’s works as a result of the analysis of types that the writer placed in certain relationships with each other ".

A.V. Chicherin also notes about the plot: “The plot of Turgenev’s story and novel is precisely to establish such a very life situation in which a person’s personality would be revealed in all its depth. Without a plot, therefore, there is no image, no style. And the plot needs to be complicated, at least double, so that concentrations and explosions are formed in the steep intersection of multidirectional lines.

If in the story “First Love” everything was limited to those experiences of Voldemar that occupy the first chapters, the image of Zinaida, full of charm, would be devoid of tragic depth. The structure of a tense, complicated plot reflects the ability to see connections, contradictions, and lead the reader into the depths of characters, into the depths of life.

The first links of plot formation in Turgenev's novel are in the nested structure of the image, which requires background stories."

S. E. Shatalov also draws attention to this: “Turgenev preferred to depict already formed characters... From this follows the conclusion: the disclosure of fully developed characters was Turgenev’s leading creative attitude. One can consider a distinctive feature of his artistic world to be the writer’s desire to tell a story about how fully developed people enter into relationships, and showing how their characters determine these relationships and at the same time reveal themselves in their being.

What has been said does not mean that Turgenev allegedly did not take into account the prehistory of the decisive conflict or that he was not interested in the very process of that transformation of character, when some stable traits in the flow of life impressions seem to differ, and instead, from the sediment of everyday impressions, others are formed, and as a result, a person not only according to his spiritual characteristics, but outwardly he changes dramatically and actually becomes a different person.

On the contrary, Turgenev always took into account such a background. His own confessions and numerous testimonies of his contemporaries convince us that in a number of cases he was not at all able to begin the final phase of creative work, to present his own plan in a holistic, coherent narrative, until he fully understood (in a special kind of “forms”, in detailed characteristics, in diaries on behalf of the hero), in what way and what traits of the hero’s nature were formed in the past.

3.4 Psychological implications

As S.V. Protopopov notes, “in Turgenev’s poetics there is no direct and immediate reproduction of the psychological process in all its complexity and fluidity. It shows primarily the results of the character’s intellectual and moral activity.”

Tolstoy, focusing on the direct depiction of spiritual life, seems to light a lantern inside a person, which illuminates the nooks and crannies of the inner world, the joys and bitterness of a working, truth-seeking soul. Turgenev chooses a simpler method. He depicts a person at the most important and decisive moment of his life, when feelings and thoughts are extremely heightened and naked. “At this moment,” Yu. Schmidt noted, “he directs a bright beam of light, while everything else moves into the shadows. He does not resort to a microscope, his eye remains at the proper distance; thus the proportions are not disturbed.”

In dramatic works of the 40s, and then in stories and novels, the writer introduced the so-called subtext. This second, hidden psychological plan of action, which was continued in Chekhov’s dramaturgy, reproduced the unspoken “thrill of feelings” and created an intimate lyrical situation in which the moral strength and beauty of the common man was clearly felt. “Inner action” is most clearly revealed in the origin and development of love. She is discerned behind words and actions in a hidden “languor of happiness”, in spiritual anxiety. Such, for example, is the scene in “On the Eve”, which conveys a hidden, intimate “conversation” without words between Elena and Insarov in the presence of all members of the Stakhov family.

The originality of the novelist’s manner is aptly defined by his contemporary S. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky: “Turgenev does not give us such solid figures, as if carved from one piece, that look at us from the pages of Tolstoy.

His art is more like the art of a painter or composer than the art of a sculptor. It has more color, a deeper perspective, a more varied alternation of light and shadow, and more completeness in depicting the spiritual side of man. Tolstoy's characters stand before us to such an extent alive and concrete that it seems that you recognize them when meeting them on the street; Turgenev's characters give the impression as if in front of you lie their sincere confessions and private correspondence, revealing all the secrets of their inner being."

From all that has been said, a uniquely original feature of Turgenev’s prose follows - the reproduction of changeable, instantaneous signs in the external world and in the experiences of the heroes, which made it possible to convey the fullness and fluidity of living life using simple techniques.

With finely selected characteristic details, Turgenev shows how this or that object changes, how the plot situation develops, how an instant transformation of the entire person takes place.

For Turgenev, the main and almost the only goal is to depict the inner life of a person. As an artist, he is distinguished by his interest in the details of the movement of character, not only under the determining influence of the environment, but also as a result of the rather stable independent internal development of the characters, their moral quests, thoughts about the meaning of existence, etc.

The conclusion of Yu. G. Nigmatullina seems very correct: “On the one hand,” writes the researcher, “Turgenev strives to clarify the socio-historical patterns and national identity of the people, which determines the character of a person, his social value, to identify in the fate of each person “imposed by history, development man." This is how the image of a Russian public figure appears (Rudin, Bazarov, Solomin, etc.). On the other hand, Turgenev speaks of the power over a person of ahistorical, elemental "eternal" mysteries of love and death, he is aware of "the accomplishment of some eternal, unchanging, but deaf and dumb laws over oneself."

V. D. Panteleev also writes about this: “I. S. Turgenev’s view of the human personality as a multi-layered development (and not socially unidirectional) gives us the key to understanding and explaining the uniqueness of the writer’s psychologism. The two most general layers in this most complex human formation - this is natural and socio-historical... Since Turgenev attached great importance to the irrational deep forces of nature, their inexplicable mysterious influence on the fate of a person, so, naturally, he did not strive to explore the human psyche in all the details and subtle movements, as he does, for example. ", Tolstoy. For Turgenev, the mysterious, the completely unknowable cannot be denoted by an exact word. Therefore, the writer does not record psychological processes, their origin, development, but their symptoms."

S. E. Shatalov considers another distinctive feature of Turgenev’s psychologism to be the persistent search for an ennobling principle in the artist’s contemporary Russian people, which was characteristic of Turgenev’s entire creative path. He looked for in people what elevates them above the prose of everyday life and brings them closer to humane universal ideals.

5 Time in Turgenev’s works

Place and time - the exact scale of Turgenev's stories and novels. Time establishes clear, but often only implied, connections between the private lives of society.

“Turgenev is a virtuoso master of that game with time, which manifests itself in a new way in the 20th century novel,” Chicherin emphasizes. While Dostoevsky piles up events in one day that cannot fit into one day, and thereby prepares shocks and explosions, while Tolstoy leads the wave of time broadly and smoothly, pouring incidents of private life into events of history, mixing both, Turgenev revels in the poetry of time , as well as the fluttering of light in the foliage. In the flickering of time, be it a few minutes, when Voldemar, stretching the yarn, admires Zinaida, or the distance of eight years, through the prism of which Lavretsky sees the most beautiful days of his life, in this very flow of eternally flowing, eternally breaking off and in the memory of abiding time, something is reflected poetic and beautiful. Time does not obscure or undermine the feeling; in time it becomes washed and clarified. In the final chords of Turgenev's novels and stories, a retreat in time gives the author that clarity of vision, that purified impartiality, which presents both characters and events in a completely new form. Turgenev's play with time is natural, internally necessary, it is part of the “simple and clear lines” of his prose, it enriches and elevates it.

3.6 Turgenev characters

Turgenev created a huge number of characters. Almost all the main types of Russian life were represented in his artistic world, although not in the proportions that they had in reality. There is a certain discrepancy between Turgenev’s characterology and plotology - the first is much richer and more complete than the second. Unlike writers who preferred to depict everyday life, unlike those artists of the “natural school”, for whom character occupied, in essence, an official position and looked like a kind of imprint of social circumstances, Turgenev refused to depict a person only as a passive product of certain social relations. His attention was mainly focused on depicting the characters of people who realized disunity with their environment or who asserted through a variety of means their rejection of the environment from which they emerged. Turgenev fundamentally rejected the opinion that something that had not yet taken shape, that had not become familiar in many variants, that had not been repeated dozens of times, was not a type: unlike Goncharov, he sought to elevate into a type precisely what was being born, barely visible in Russian life.

The clergy found a weak reflection in Turgenev’s prose; in Turgenev’s novels, characters from the clergy get the role of a kind of living circumstances: they are present where their absence seemed like a violation of credibility, but they do not receive any individual and typical signs.

An equally insignificant place in Turgenev’s artistic world is occupied by characters from the merchant class. They never play the leading role, and mentions of them are always brief and orient the reader to what is socially typical in the nature of such characters.

Such strata of Russian society as factory workers, artisans, artisans, petty bourgeois, and urban lower classes are also incompletely represented. Only in the novel “New” is an outline of the factory given, the factory workers are described, and mention is made of the workers’ circles that were created by the populists. Nevertheless, even in Novi, characters from these social strata remain in the background; in Turgenev’s prose, a person from the urban lower classes never became the hero of a work whose fate would be associated with the disclosure of important social issues.

Russian bureaucracy is more widely represented, although officials also did not occupy the position of the main characters. Turgenev's official is almost always a nobleman, the owner of an acquired or inherited estate, he is always somehow connected with the estate nobility.

The raznochintsy are insignificantly represented in Turgenev's prose of the 40-50s, as, indeed, in Russian literature of that time - and this reflected the true state of things in Russian life: the raznochintsy had not yet played a noticeable role and could not attract attention. In Turgenev's prose there is a relatively small number of characters - commoners, but in a number of cases they play a primary role. The raznochinets - intellectual is naturally located at the center of figurative relationships in almost all of Turgenev's novels. His role is so significant that without him Turgenev’s novel would be impossible.

For all the complexity of Turgenev’s attitude towards the nobility, it remained in his eyes the only class at that time that was able to understand Russian reality as a whole. Its best representatives, according to Turgenev, had access to awareness - albeit in a different mediation of the laws of existence. It was they who could pose questions to themselves and society about the place and role of an individual in life, about the purpose of a person, his moral duty, prospects for cultural development and the historical destinies of Russia.

Without forgetting the fundamental difference between the position of the democrat-enlightenment Turgenev and the position of revolutionary democrats specifically regarding the issue of maintaining or abolishing the leading role of the Russian nobility, we must admit that Turgenev, in general, quite rightfully linked the solution to the hero’s ideological and artistic problem with a certain part of the nobility . The heroes of his works are always either “cultured” nobles, or people who have become “noble”, one way or another “immersed” in this environment, partially related to it and, in any case, speaking the same language with it, understanding its moral quests and taking these quests closely to the heart.

3.7 The role of the portrait

A particularly important role in revealing character in Turgenev’s prose is played by the description of the character’s appearance. The structure of the image in Turgenev's stories and novels is based on a static and dynamic portrait, on living speech, dialogical, monologue, internal speech, on the image of a person in action. The speech forms of Turgenev's prose give rise to a dynamic portrait, when a living individual rhythm, and in it a living image, is revealed in movement, gesture, smile, intonation, and details of costume. Along with this, Turgenev often appears in a static portrait.

It is noteworthy that a number of researchers drew attention to the fact that in Turgenev’s portrait a detail of appearance is almost always a sign of an internal state or character trait, a constant sign of the character’s nature. A.G. sought to emphasize the most significant features of Turgenev’s portrait. Tseitlin, in particular, noted: “Turgenev’s portrait is realistic, he depicts a person’s appearance in its natural connection with character, in certain socio-historical circumstances. And therefore his portrait is always typical.” In essence, the same can be said about the portrait of many realist writers. S.E. Shatalov, comparing Turgenev's portrait with portraits of other writers, highlights the special qualities of Turgenev's portrait. Turgenev's portrait, becoming saturated with psychologism in the process of evolution of Turgenev's style and in some cases acquiring a "scattered" structure, like Tolstoy's portrait, in general, develops in the direction of increasing concentration and fusion with other means of characterization; at the same time, it does not lose its main role in revealing the character and individual mental state, but, on the contrary, subordinates to itself the elements of psychological, speech and other characteristics. In Turgenev’s special synthetic characteristics, portrait detail takes first place, as a result of which they take on the form of essay-portraits that exhaustively define the character and his prevailing mental states. The process of mental life is reproduced by a successive series of similar sketches-portraits, a kind of change of static frames, shifted in a special way relative to each other; in most cases, subsequent “frames” are less developed, sometimes limited to a set of some external and internal details, without developing into a portrait essay.

Shatalov also writes about the speech characteristics of the character: “Direct speech characterizes the speaker in two ways, by the content itself, the subject of speech and his individual expression, speech manner.”

It is necessary to take into account not only what the characters are talking about (the choice of the subject of speech - high, low, vulgar - characterizes them), but also the degree of comprehension and understanding by them of the subject of conversation, their attitude towards it, the phonetic structure of speech and its lexical composition (all this belongs to determines belonging to a certain social, professional or dialect environment, erudition, etc.), the intonation of remarks and monologues with a predominant tone - derogatory, interrogative, cutesy, authoritative, etc. (how the hero’s life position and type of attitude are manifested). Finally, it is necessary to take into account those resources of personal manifestation that are at the disposal of the hero - irony, surprise, indignation, a tendency to paradoxical conclusions, lyricism or, on the contrary, a misanthropic mood bordering on a tragic worldview.

About the vast majority of Turgenev’s characters, one can form a fairly complete and correct idea based on their speech characteristics alone. In a number of cases, their entire personality is revealed in direct speech, the speech characteristics turn out to be exhaustive and for a visible impression of the image of the hero, only portrait details are missing, which, however, in such cases turn out to be less significant for revealing the personality and are in undoubted figurative subordination to the speech characteristics.

3.8 Turgenev landscape

Researchers pay great attention to Turgenev's landscape. P. G. Pustovoit writes: “Turgenev, who subtly feels and understands the beauty of nature, is attracted not by its bright and catchy colors, but by shades, subtle halftones. His heroes declare their love in the pale light of the moon, under the barely noticeable rustling of leaves.

Turgenev's landscape is endowed with deep perspective, is distinguished by rich chiaroscuro, dynamism and correlates with the subjective state of the author and his heroes. With absolute reliability of the description, nature in Turgenev is poeticized due to the lyricism inherent in the author. Turgenev inherited from Pushkin an amazing ability to extract poetry from any prosaic phenomenon and fact: everything that at first glance may seem gray and banal, under Turgenev’s pen acquires lyrical coloring and relief painting."

G. A. Byaly notes that nature acts as the focus of those natural forces that surround a person, often suppress him with their immutability and power, often revive him and captivate him with the same power and beauty. Turgenev's hero realizes himself in connection with nature; Therefore, the landscape is associated with the image of mental life, it accompanies it, directly or in contrast.

A.V. Chicherin shows the realism of Turgenev’s landscape: “Nature has been very fully and subtly studied, very objectively. With few exceptions, this is a realistic depiction of nature; Turgenev’s scrupulous accuracy has been repeatedly noted, who does not call a tree a tree, but certainly elm, birch, oak, alder , knows and loves to name every bird, every flower. Turgenev has a loving and vitally concrete sense of nature, the ability to feel it both in general and especially in its individual manifestations. How deep and touching the words of his suicide letter to Polonsky sound: “When will you in Spassky, bow from me to the house, the garden, my young oak - bow to the homeland, which I will probably never see again." Nearby were "my young oak, the homeland..." And this expressed Turgenev’s poetic thinking. He thinks in images of nature, they lead him to his goal: “Here, under the window, a stocky burdock climbs out of the thick grass, above it the dawn stretches out its juicy stem, the tears of the Virgin Mary throw up their pink curls even higher...” Why this abundance of quiet life? And here: "... the sun rolls quietly across the calm sky and the clouds quietly float across it; it seems that they know where and why they are floating." Here, “at the bottom of the river,” in this silence, everything makes sense: both the burdock and the clouds know what Lavretsky did not know in his fussy and passionate life, what the people around him did not know.

Nature in Turgenev’s novel knows about the past, about the present and about the future, she knows, the author constantly talks with her, and they alone know that she told him that he is her.

S.V. Protopopov also wrote about Turgenev’s landscape: “Turgenev said that he passionately loves nature, especially in its living manifestations... In the Russian landscape, in contrast to the landscape of Western Europe, Turgenev constantly emphasizes simplicity, modesty and even mediocrity. But, warmed by the warmth of feeling, lyrical emotion, pictures of native nature appear in all their boundless breadth, expanse and beauty. These qualities, according to the writer, affect the character of the Russian man - a man of broad soul and high nobility. Nature reflects his joyful feelings of a young, simmering life , answers his silent and secret impulses.

For Turgenev, light is not a character, but one of the means by which a diverse vision of the world is achieved. It is curious that many characters, gifted, like their author, with a “heartfelt sense of nature” (Iv. Ivanov), are drawn to the light, which enlivens and spiritualizes everything on earth. Natalya, having read Rudin’s letter, remembered her childhood, “When, when walking in the evening, she always tried to walk towards the bright edge of the sky, where the dawn was burning, and not towards the dark. Darkness now stood in front of her, and she turned her back to the light...". The peasant woman’s daughter also takes care of the bright and beautiful: “The boat set sail and rushed along the fast river... “You drove into the moon pillar, you broke it,” Asya shouted to me. I lowered my eyes, the waves swayed around the boat, turning black.” .

A view was established on the philosophical perception of nature in Turgenev’s work, especially clearly expressed in an early article by N. K. Gudz: “The images of nature reveal hopeless pessimism, beautiful, indifferent, meaningless nature, alien to man.” This statement can be supported by many references to works from different years, but it is one-sided. In nature, Turgenev sees a chaotic struggle between the joyful and the sorrowful, the ugly and the beautiful, the tough and the kind, the senseless and the reasonable. Each member of the antinomy is expressed with extreme force, in this there is breadth, uncertainty, sliding. And yet, the fullness of lyrical, unquenchable light creates gradations in the images of nature from simply joyful to illuminating and meaningful life.

3.9 Artistic language of I. S. Turgenev

For the vast majority of Turgenev scholars, the object of close study is the language of Turgenev’s works. P. G. Pustovoit emphasizes: “The contribution that Turgenev made to the treasury of the Russian literary language is truly great. Having excellent command of the entire palette of the national language, Turgenev never artificially imitated the folk dialect. Revealing his understanding of the national writer, he noted: “In our eyes he deserves this name who, whether due to a special gift of nature, or as a result of a troubled and varied life... was completely imbued with the essence of his people, their language, their way of life." Turgenev undoubtedly was such a writer, he always drew his strength from true great love to his homeland, in ardent faith in the Russian people, in deep affection for his native nature... Turgenev loved the Russian language, preferred it to all other languages ​​of the world and knew how to make excellent use of its inexhaustible riches." He perceives the Russian language primarily as a creation of the people and therefore as an expression of the indigenous properties of the people's character. Moreover, language, from Turgenev’s point of view, reflects not only the present, but also the future properties of the people, its potential qualities and capabilities. "Although he<русский язык>“does not have the boneless flexibility of the French language,” wrote Turgenev, “for expressing many and the best thoughts, it is surprisingly good in its honest simplicity and free power.”

To those who were skeptical about the fate of Russia, Turgenev said: “And I, perhaps, would doubt them - but the language? Where will the skeptics put our flexible, enchanting, magical language? - believe me , Gentlemen, a people who have such a language are a great people!"

How stable Turgenev’s attitude towards the Russian language was, not only as a reflection of the best properties of the Russian national character, but also as a guarantee of the great future of the Russian people, is evidenced by his famous prose poem “The Russian Language”. For him, the Russian language is something much more important than a means of expressing thoughts, than a “simple lever”; language is a national treasure, hence Turgenev’s characteristic call to protect the Russian language - “Take care of our language, our beautiful Russian language, this treasure, this heritage passed on to us by our predecessors, in whose brow Pushkin again shines!” - treat this with respect a powerful instrument; in the hands of skilled people it is capable of performing miracles! . The language of literature developed by Russian writers led by Pushkin was for Turgenev inextricably linked with the national language. Therefore, he resolutely rejected attempts to create some kind of special language for literature in isolation from the language of the entire people. “Create a language!! - he exclaimed, create a sea, it spread all around with boundless and bottomless waves; our job as writers is to direct part of these waves into our channel, to our mill!” .

"A wide range of numerous speech means that Turgenev used: tongue-tied speech, vulgarisms, foreign vocabulary, skillfully interspersed into the narrative and dialogues, colloquial folklore elements, self-exposing tirades of heroes, numerous types of repetitions, rhetorical questions and exclamations; intersecting narrative plans, escalation pronouns playing the role of an amplifier, as well as the use of semantic antitheses - all this according to the conclusion of P. G. Pustovoit - gives grounds to assert that Turgenev multiplied and developed the stylistic richness of Russian artistic speech."

In the book by Yu. T. Listrova, dedicated to foreign system vocabulary in Russian fiction of the 19th century, we find the following remark: “In his artistic works, I. S. Turgenev avoided the use of words of foreign origin, he used the original vocabulary wealth of the Russian language in all its diversity; in At the same time, the Russian Western writer, as he called himself, did not stand aside from the tradition that had developed and consolidated under the pen of the brilliant A. S. Pushkin of introducing foreign linguistic phenomena into the language of works of art and using them for certain artistic purposes. - French, German, English, Italian, etc. - and Western European culture gave Turgenev ample opportunities to develop and enrich this tradition."

3.9.1 Musicality of Turgenev’s prose

A. V. Chicherin emphasizes the musicality of Turgenev’s prose: “His prose sounds like music...” - these words of P. A. Kropotkin express the basic impression that remains with every reader of “Notes of a Hunter” or “The Noble Nest.”

True, all literary prose can be musical. Its own powerful music, although not without squealing and creaking, sounds from the pages of “The Teenager” or “Demons.” The music of “War and Peace” comes in wide, rough, exciting waves. The polished strong syllable of "Madame Bovary" is smoothly musical. Yet the musicality of Turgenev's prose is the most tangible, obvious and complete.

His prose comes close to real music, perhaps not so much of Beethoven, which Kropotkin talks about further, but of Mozart, with whom Turgenev himself compared his work in a letter to Herzen dated May 22, 1867. He considered Mozart unusually “graceful,” apparently equally admiring his gentle harmony and his unbridled tragic impulses. Musicality is both in the plastic, balanced rhythm of the sounds of speech themselves and in the sound range that is depicted in this speech. But this is the most natural, unconstrained prose, prose not laced with rhythm, but completely free in its movement."

Yes, everyone who said (most convincingly A.G. Tseitlin in the book “The Mastery of Turgenev the Novelist”) was right that none of Pushkin’s followers followed his prose as directly as Turgenev. "The guests were arriving at the dacha." This is how Pushkin energetically wanted to begin one of his novels. "The guests have long left." This is how Turgenev begins the most subtle, most skillful of his stories. Pushkin's beginning. Only partly. Less active. Not forward - to what will be, but back - to what was. Pushkin's conciseness, grace, naturalness. Prose created by the hand of a poet. But softer, more elegiac, more diverse, and often more sarcastic. This is "First Love".

3.9.2 Lexico-semantic features

Turgenev's epithet has particularly plot-forming power. In the aggregate of epithets - the internal rhythm of the depicted person and the features of a dynamic, constantly emerging portrait. The internal rhythm of the person depicted is reflected in two ways: in the subtle plasticity of the phrases themselves and in the depiction of the life rhythm of a given character in a story or novel.

Turgenev rarely uses one epithet, and the most characteristic of his style is a double epithet or an epithet with the transition of one characteristic into another: “golden-blue eyes”, “sweetish-insolent grin”, “something obsessively hateful”. This transition of signs is often found in Turgenev’s letters: “The sky is bluish-white... the streets are littered with white-gray snow.” Or - a comparison of two separate, but internally interdependent epithets: “persistent, power-hungry, “ashamed, enraged ... and noisy samovar”, “through the friendly, annoyingly plaintive buzz of flies ...”, “wet, dark earth” and even “dark- blond hair."

There is often such power in an epithet or in their combination that they absorb the whole character or, in concentrated form, the idea of ​​the work as a whole. The word “nihilist” contains the entire novel “Fathers and Sons,” and “the little men met, all worn out,” denotes its background.

The property of an epithet in all cases is not to rationally determine one “main” character trait, not at all, but to lead one into a complex labyrinth of personality, fate, and ideas. The epithet does not simplify or rationalize, but, on the contrary, although it is a clot, it contains shades and leads to a complete understanding of the poetic image. The special epicness, the atmosphere of the epithet, in Turgenev’s style is reflected in the fact that not only in adjectives, participles, adverbs, but also in verbs, the main thing is the clearly expressed flavor in them. The verb often means not an action, but a property; it brings out the poetic essence of the subject. “Darkness poured... Everything around quickly turned black and died down... The stars flickered and began to move...” "... everything in the house was sad... the dishes were falling out of my hands... glances constantly slid past my son... he trudged back to his closet..."

Verbs can be so descriptive that a portrait is built on them: “The tan did not stick to her, and the heat, from which she could not protect herself, slightly blushed her cheeks and ears and, pouring quiet laziness into her whole body, was reflected ...” etc. .P.

In the description of Bazarov’s departure, even the seemingly effective expressions “the bell rang and the wheels started turning” have an emotionally qualitative character. This is the sad last impression of the remaining parents.

This is not an exclusive feature of Turgenev. Verbs, like any word in poetic speech, can be figurative and emotional. But in Turgenev’s prose the noted phenomenon is very significant and clear.

S.V. Protopopov also speaks about this: “The desire to convey the mobility and variability of a phenomenon increased the role of the verb. Capturing the subtlest, sometimes vague and unclear shades, in turn, caused the intensification of adjectives. Those descriptions in which the verb acts as an “ally” " of the adjective, they are distinguished by expressiveness and expressiveness: "The bays are close-knit, small, lively, black-eyed, black-legged, they burn and tuck in; just whistle and they’re gone.” And here’s another picture: “... the morning was beginning. It had not yet turned red anywhere, but it had already turned white in the east... The pale gray sky became lighter, colder, and blue; the stars blinked with faint light and then disappeared; the earth became damp, the leaves began to sweat, in some places living sounds and voices began to be heard, the liquid early breeze had already begun to wander and flutter over the earth. My body responded to him with a light, cheerful trembling."

3.9.3 Color of Turgenev’s drawing

“We, realists, value color,” Turgenev wrote in 1847. The colorfulness of the drawing was dear to him not only for its purely pictorial side, but also as a component of the artistic system, with the help of which the experiences of the characters and the development of the plot situation were expressively shaded or accentuated.

The criticism noted that he paints not in oils, but in watercolors. Thus, S. V. Protopopov concludes: “Avoiding, as a rule, bright, sharp colors, the artist strives to capture barely noticeable shades, instantaneous play of halftones. The coloring of objects is determined by their own color, the color of neighboring objects, the transparency of the air, the reverent play of chiaroscuro He subtly conveys color relationships and interactions of colors.

But he is disgusted by false brilliance and beauty, when “the brightness of the colors and the sharpness of the lines only tease, but there is nothing behind the descriptions...”. A. Grigoriev also wrote that Turgenev “catches subtle shades, follows nature in its subtle phenomena.” He shows a separate leaf on a blue patch of transparent sky. The reader clearly sees how the semicircle of the moon “glimmered with gold through the black mesh of the weeping birch”; “the stars disappeared into some kind of light smoke”; The Rhine lay “all silver, between green banks, in one place it burned with the crimson gold of sunset.” Amazing in its simplicity and expressiveness is an excerpt from the essay “Living Relics”: “... how good it was in the free air, under the clear sky, where the larks fluttered, from where the silver beads of their sonorous voices rained down. On their wings they probably carried away drops of dew, and their songs seemed watered with dew."

F. M. Dostoevsky is characterized by “severe Rembrandt colors” with a predominance of dark, cold tones. Turgenev has a predominantly rainbow, optimistic coloring with light, warm tones. There are no sharp contrasts in his drawing. It was precisely such subtle combinations and play of colors that corresponded to the artistic system, recreating the changeable “evil of the day”, its contradictions, reflected in the individual destinies of the heroes.”

3.9.4 Poetry of prose

G. A. Byaly notes the poetry of Turgenev’s prose. “Throughout his entire work,” he writes, “Turgenev consciously brought prose closer to poetry, established a balance between them. His position on the issue of the relationship between verse and prose is noticeably different from Pushkin’s. Just as Pushkin sought to separate prose from verse, to find his own for prose laws, to establish in prose “the charm of naked simplicity”, to free it from lyricism and make it an instrument of logical thought - so Turgenev strove for the opposite: for prose that has all the possibilities of poetic speech, for harmoniously ordered, lyrical prose that combines the accuracy of logical thought with the complexity of poetic mood - in a word, he ultimately strove for poems in prose. The difference in the relationship between verse and prose in Pushkin and Turgenev turned out to be a difference in the stages of Russian literary speech. Pushkin created a new literary language, cared about the crystallization of its elements; Turgenev disposed of all the wealth acquired as a result of the Pushkin reform, organized and formalized it; he did not imitate Pushkin, but developed his achievements."

A. G. Tseitlin said very correctly about the choice of words, about the persistent power of the word, about the end-to-end poetic terminology in Turgenev’s prose. And very subtly M.A. Shelyakin felt and showed the stylistic role of particles (yes, yes, then, a, and...), which give a special naturalness and, like a living sigh, warm the speech of the characters and the author.

P. G. Pustovoit concludes about Turgenev’s language: “Turgenev’s contribution to the development of the Russian literary language was not only highly appreciated, but also creatively used by writers who continued his line in Russian literature. Such major literary artists as Korolenko, Chekhov, Bunin, Paustovsky , relying on Turgenev’s poetics, enriched the Russian literary language with new means of imagery, among which vocabulary and phraseology, melody and rhythm played a significant role.

This continuity of the classics has yet to be studied by both literary scholars and linguists."

4. Genre originality of I.S.’s prose Turgenev

A. V. Chicherin is interested in the genre specificity of Turgenev’s works. He notes: “Although Turgenev himself in his letters constantly called “The Noble Nest” or “On the Eve” either a story or a big story, throughout his work there are very clear contrasts between an essay, a short story, a story and a novel. The essays are “Lgov”, “Forest and steppe", "Trip to Polesie" are works of art in which living impressions of people and nature do not lead to the creation of a plot. The transition from sketch to story occurs in the crystallization of the plot. "Bezhin Meadow" has the same features of an essay as " Lgov". But the hunter’s long wanderings build up anticipation. The meeting with the boys guarding the herd is not just a “sketch”, but a “plot” meeting, resolving the reader’s expectations. Their stories are secondary plots, skillfully, poetically completing the structure of a complicated or general plot. Therefore, the characters of boys acquire not only a social, but also a complete individual coloring.Therefore, the hunter, with his reverent responsiveness to childhood experiences, to a lively childish word, is perceived especially sympathetically and fully.

Turgenev's stories are action-packed. Each of them is based on one event, which splits into many episodes that make up this event. The double plot of “Spring Waters” and “First Love” does not violate the integrity and unity of the event. It is only revealed to the end in this double plot. In "Spring Waters" both plots are open, presented in the same close-up. In "First Love" the second plot is disguised, secretive. But in both cases, the tragedy of the story is created at the sharp intersection of plots. The social criticism of the stories is often very sharp, all in the types created by the author. Social criticism of novels, moreover, also lies in problems, the solution to which is given by the entire structure of the images of the plot.

The germination of a story into a novel can be seen in the same way as crystallization in the outline of a story. Try to isolate the main close-up of Turgenev's first novel. Rudin appears at the Lasunskaya estate. Everyone is fascinated, especially Natalya. She is ready to take a decisive step, but... the scene at Avdyukhin's pond. The failure of the imaginary hero, the gap. It would be a story. The composition becomes more complicated: Lezhnev’s story about Rudin, about Pokorsky, then: “About two years have passed...”, “Several more years have passed...”, and finally, a later addition: “On the sultry afternoon of June 26, 1848, in Paris... “Each time, in a far-flung perspective, the same character is explored and probed from different angles. And it turns out that these are not extensions, this is, all together, the structure not of a story, but of an extremely compressed, concentrated novel... Turgenev, in his first novel, achieves amazing naturalness, diversity, and versatile depiction of characters.

The compositional ramifications of the novel, in comparison with the story, are caused by significant reasons. In the novel, the images of the main characters are problematic and contain the key to understanding the history of society. The ramifications of the novel are penetration into those areas of life that formed or participated in the formation of characters. Therefore, backstories are not so much part of the effective plot as part of the idea of ​​the novel.

Turgenev's novel is an original variety of this genre. Although it is closer to the Western European novel (especially George Sand and Flaubert) than the novels of Pisemsky, Dostoevsky and Leo Tolstoy, it has its own - one of a kind - structure. Social ideology, even political topicality, is combined with extraordinary musical elegance of form. The ability to guess and highlight a specific social problem and clarity of characters is combined with special conciseness with an exhaustive completeness of disclosure of images and ideas. An acutely ideological novel becomes a pronounced poetic masterpiece. The ideal of “beautiful proportions” (Baratynsky) - the goal and measure of Pushkin’s era - remained alive, developing and whole only in Turgenev’s novel.”

L. I. Matyushenko has his own view on the relationship between the genres of the story and the novel in Turgenev’s works. He believes that there is a certain pattern in the fact that Turgenev’s novels are written in the manner of objective narration, and almost all of his stories are in the first person (diary, memoirs, correspondence, confession). A “secret psychologist” in his novels, Turgenev acts as an “overt” psychologist in his stories. Based on these characteristics, one can unmistakably decide on the attribution of his work to the genre of a story or novel."

S. E. Shatalov emphasizes: “Turgenev should undoubtedly be classified as one of the writers for whom the mental life of a person is the main object of observation and study. His work is entirely within the mainstream of psychological realism.”

G. A. Byaly, concluding his work on Turgenev’s realism, makes the following conclusion: “Let us remember Turgenev’s wonderful words: “Only the present, powerfully expressed by characters and talents, becomes the undying past.” Turgenev proved the validity of these words with all his activities. Developing topical topics of his time, he created the image of a great country, full of inexhaustible possibilities and moral forces - a country where simple farmers, despite centuries of oppression, preserved the best human traits, where educated people, shunning narrowly personal goals, strove to achieve national and social goals, sometimes finding their way gropingly, in the midst of darkness, where progressive figures, “central figures” made up a whole galaxy of people of intelligence and talent, “in whose brow Pushkin shines.”

This image of Russia, painted by the great realist, has enriched the artistic consciousness of all mankind. The characters and types created by Turgenev, the incomparable pictures of Russian life and Russian nature, went far beyond the framework of his era: they became our undying past and, in this sense, our living present."

Conclusion

The study of various aspects of I. S. Turgenev’s artistic skill allows us to draw the following conclusions and generalizations.

Turgenev's creative method was ambiguous throughout his career. Turgenev's achievement is a realistic method, enriched with a romantic attitude, lyrical and sentimental coloring of the narrative, as well as color combinations that vaguely resemble the palette of impressionism.

Turgenev's remarkable quality as a great realist lies in his art of capturing new, emerging social phenomena, which are far from being consolidated, but are already growing and developing.

Turgenev's work is entirely within the mainstream of psychological realism, because for him the main goal is to depict the inner life of a person.

A distinctive feature of Turgenev's psychologism should be considered that persistent search for an ennobling principle in Russian people and the affirmation of the beautiful in man, which were characteristic of his entire creative path.

An extremely important role in the psychological analysis of Turgenev is played by lyricism, in general by the emotional coloring of the narrative, which gives his artistic world a predominantly elegiac tone.

Turgenev's satire is present both in the lyrical prose of his early works and poems, and in subsequent realistic works. He often allows himself to be ironic over the base manifestations of everyday life and sometimes even reaches the point of outright sarcasm, but his satire is distinguished by the fact that in Turgenev’s works there is almost no grotesque, satirical elements are usually skillfully interspersed into the narrative (and harmoniously alternate with lyrical scenes, heartfelt author’s digressions and landscape sketches).

Researchers compare the musicality of Turgenev's prose with Mozart's purity of sound, with its gentle harmony and unbridled tragic impulses.

Turgenev consciously brings prose closer to poetry, strives for prose that has all the possibilities of poetic speech, for harmoniously ordered, lyrical prose, combining the accuracy of logical thought with the complexity of poetic mood - in a word, he strives, ultimately, for poems in prose.

Turgenev's novel is a distinctive variety of this genre: a sharply ideological novel becomes a pronounced poetic masterpiece.

The most complex social phenomena in Turgenev's concise, laconic, concentrated novel are refracted and reflected in the individual fate of the hero, in the peculiarities of his worldview and feelings. Hence the simplicity of the plot of his novels, reflecting the deep processes of life.

Dialogue in its pure form is the main instrument in the orchestra of Turgenev's novel. The author is attracted not by the rightness of one or another interlocutor, but by the conviction of those arguing, their ability to take extreme positions in their views and in life and go to the end, the ability to express their worldview in the living Russian word.

The plot of Turgenev's story and novel is to establish such a very life situation in which a person's personality would be revealed in all its depth. And the plot needs to be complicated, at least double, so that concentrations and explosions are formed in the steep intersection of multidirectional lines.

Turgenev refuses to portray a person only as a passive product of certain social relations. His attention is mainly focused on depicting the characters of people who have realized their separation from their environment.

Turgenev created a huge number of characters. Almost all the main types of Russian life were represented in his artistic world, although not in the proportions that they had in reality. The characters he created give a more complete, deep and versatile idea of ​​Russian life than the plots and conflicts of his works.

Turgenev does not evaluate his heroes; agreement or disagreement with the thoughts and behavior of the character does not matter to him; in the new type of people he discovered, he is fascinated and admired by the integrity, the internal composure of this phenomenon. This is Turgenev’s artistic objectivity, his poetic truth - a combination of objective reality and the life of his mind and heart, independent of the will of the author. Only from what the author sees is his image born, from the image comes an idea. In no case is it the other way around.

Turgenev's style is dialogical. In it, the author constantly looks back at himself, doubts about the word he has spoken, and therefore he prefers to speak not from himself, but from the narrator in stories, on behalf of the heroes in novels, regarding every word as characteristic, and not as a true word.

The structure of the image in Turgenev's stories and novels is based on a static and dynamic portrait, on living speech, dialogic, monologue, internal speech, on the image of a person in action, and the climax of the narrative usually coincides with the center of human life itself.

Turgenev's portrait develops in the direction of increasing concentration and fusion with other means of characterization, as a result of which it takes on the appearance of an essay-portrait. The process of mental life is reproduced by a successive series of similar essays and portraits.

Turgenev rarely uses one epithet, and the most characteristic of his style is a multi-compound (at least double) epithet or an epithet with a transition from one feature to another (iridescent). There is often such power in an epithet or in their combination that they absorb the whole character or, in concentrated form, the idea of ​​the work as a whole.

Turgenev has a loving and vitally concrete sense of nature, the ability to understand it both as a whole and especially in its individual manifestations. In nature, Turgenev sees a chaotic struggle between the joyful and the sorrowful, the ugly and the beautiful, the senseless and the reasonable.

Turgenev revels in the poetry of time. In the flickering of time, in this very flow of eternally flowing, eternally breaking off and in the memory of abiding time, something poetic and beautiful is reflected. At the end of Turgenev's novels and stories, a retreat in time gives the author that clarity of vision, that purified impartiality, which presents both characters and events in a completely new form.

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Features of Turgenev's novels:

It is small in volume.

The action unfolds without long delays or retreats, without complications with side plots, and ends in a short time. It is usually timed at a specific time.

The biography of the characters, standing outside the chronological framework of the plot, is woven into the course of the narrative, sometimes in detail and in detail (Lavretsky), sometimes briefly, fluently and incidentally, and the reader learns little about Rudin’s past, even less about the past of Insarov, Bazarov. In its general constructive form, Turgenev’s novel is like a “series of sketches” that organically merge into a single theme, which is revealed in the image of the central character. The hero of Turgenev's novel, who appears before the reader as a fully formed person, is a typical and best ideological representative of a certain social group (advanced nobility or commoners). He strives to find and implement the depot of his life, to fulfill his social duty. But he always fails. The conditions of Russian socio-political life doom him to failure. Rudin ends his life as a homeless wanderer, dying as an accidental victim of a revolution in a foreign land.

Many heroes of Turgenev's novels were united by a fiery, genuine love for their homeland. But inevitable failure in life awaited them all. Turgenev's hero is a loser not only in public affairs. He is a loser in love too.

The ideological face of Turgenev's hero most often appears in disputes. Turgenev's novels are filled with controversy. Hence the particularly important compositional meaning in the novel of dialogue-argument. And this feature is by no means accidental. The Rudins and Lavretskys, people of the forties, grew up among Moscow circles, where the ideological debater was a typical, historically characteristic figure (the nightly dispute between Lavretsky and Mikhalevich, for example, is very typical). With no less acuteness, ideological disputes were conducted, turning into journal polemics, between “fathers” and “sons,” that is, between nobles and commoners. In “Fathers and Sons” they are reflected in the disputes between Kirsanov and Bazarov.

One of the characteristic elements in Turgenev's novel is the landscape. Its compositional role is varied. Sometimes it seems to frame the action, giving an idea only of where and when this action takes place. Sometimes the background of the landscape matches the mood and experience of the hero, “corresponds” to him. Sometimes the landscape is drawn by Turgenev not in consonance, but in contrast with the mood and experience of the hero.

The flowers on Bazarov’s grave “speak” not only of the great, “eternal” peace of “indifferent” nature - “they also speak of eternal reconciliation and endless life.”

The lyrical element plays a significant role in Turgenev's novels. Especially the epilogues of his novels - Rudin, The Noble Nest, Fathers and Sons - are imbued with deep lyricism.

In Rudin we recognize a familiar type of “extra person.” He talks a lot and passionately, but is unable to find something to do, a point of application of his strength. Everyone notices his penchant for beautiful phrases and beautiful poses. But he turns out to be incapable of action: he was afraid to even answer the call of love. Natasha, a charming example of an integral and thinking Turgenev girl, reveals herself to be a much more decisive person. The hero's weakness is disappointing. However, Rudin has much more remarkable traits of a romantic, an ardent truth-seeker, a person who is capable of sacrificing his life for his ideals. Death on the barricades completely justifies Rudin in the eyes of the reader.

The plot development of the novel "Rudin" is distinguished by laconicism, accuracy and simplicity. The action takes place in a short period of time. For the first time, the main character, Dmitry Nikolaevich Rudin, appears on the estate of the rich lady Daria Mikhailovna Lasunskaya. A meeting with him becomes an event that attracts the most interested attention of the inhabitants and guests of the estate. New relationships are formed that are dramatically interrupted. Two months later, the development of the plot continues and again fits into less than two days. Dmitry Rudin declares his love to Natalya Lasunskaya, the daughter of the owner of the estate. This meeting is tracked down by the resident Pandalevsky and reports it to his mother. The erupted scandal makes it necessary to have a second date at Avdyukhin's pond. The meeting ends with the lovers breaking up. That same evening the hero leaves.

In the background, in parallel, another love story unfolds in the novel. The neighboring landowner Lezhnev, Rudin's university friend, declares his love and receives the consent of the young widow Lipina. Thus, all events take place within four days!

The composition includes elements designed to reveal the character and historical significance of the image of Rudin. This is a kind of prologue, the first day of the story. During this day, the appearance of the main character is carefully prepared. The novel does not end with Rudin’s separation from Natalya Lasunskaya. It is followed by two epilogues. They answer the question of what happened to the hero next, how his fate turned out. We will meet with Rudin twice more - in the Russian outback and in Paris. The hero still wanders around Russia, from one postal station to another. His noble impulses are fruitless; he is superfluous in the modern order of things. In the second epilogue, Rudin heroically dies on a barricade during the Parisian uprising of 1848. The choice of the main character between the two novelists is also fundamentally different. We can call Goncharov's characters sons of our century. Most of them are ordinary people, influenced by the era, like Peter and Alexander Aduev. The best of them dare to resist the dictates of time (Oblomov, Raisky). This happens, as a rule, within the confines of personal existence. On the contrary, Turgenev, following Lermontov, is looking for a hero of his time. One can say about the central character of Turgenev’s novels that he influences the era, leads, captivating his contemporaries with his ideas and passionate sermons. His fate is extraordinary, and his death is symbolic. The writer looked for such people, personifying the spiritual quest of an entire generation, every decade. One might say that this was the pathos of Turgenev’s novelistic work. Dobrolyubov admitted that “if Mr. Turgenev touched upon any issue,” then soon it “will appear sharply and clearly before the eyes of everyone.”

Exposition of the novel. The first, expositional chapter, at first glance, has little to do with the further development of the action. And Rudin does not appear in it yet. One fine summer morning, landowner Lipina hurries to the village. She is driven by a noble desire - to visit a sick old peasant woman. Alexandra Pavlovna did not forget to take tea and sugar, and in case of danger she intends to take them to the hospital. She visits a peasant woman from a village that is not even her own. Worried about the future fate of her little granddaughter, the patient bitterly says: “Our gentlemen are far away...” The old woman is sincerely grateful to Lipina for her kindness, for her promise to take care of the girl. Another thing is that it’s too late to take the old lady to the hospital. “It’s all the same to die... Where can she go to the hospital! They will lift her up and she will die!” - notes a neighboring peasant.

Nowhere else in the novel does Turgenev touch on the fate of the peasants. But the picture of the fortress village is imprinted in the reader’s mind. Meanwhile, Turgenev's noble heroes have nothing in common with Fonvizin's characters. They do not have the rough features of the Prostakovs and Skotinins, or even the narrow-mindedness of the inhabitants of the lordly Oblomovka. These are educated carriers of a refined culture. They have a strong moral sense. They are aware of the need to help the peasants and take care of the welfare of their serfs. They take practical steps and philanthropic attempts on their estate. But the reader has already seen that this is not enough. What should you do? In response to this question, the main character appears in the novel.

"Noble Nest"

I. S. Turgenev’s reflections on the fate of the best among the Russian nobility lie at the heart of the novel “The Noble Nest” (1858).

In this novel, the noble environment is presented in almost all its states - from a provincial small estate to the ruling elite. Turgenev condemns everything in noble morality at its very core. How unanimously in the house of Marya Dmitrievna Kalitina and in the whole “society” they condemn Varvara Pavlovna Lavretskaya for her foreign adventures, how they feel sorry for Lavretsky and, it seems, are about to be ready to help him. But as soon as Varvara Pavlovna appeared and cast the spell of her stereotyped-cocotte charm, everyone - both Maria Dmitrievna and the entire provincial elite - were delighted with her. This is a depraved creature, pernicious and distorted by the same noble morality, quite to the taste of the highest noble circles.

Panshin, who embodies “exemplary” noble morality, is presented by the author without sarcastic pressure. One can understand Lisa, who for a long time could not properly determine her attitude towards Panshin and essentially did not resist Marya Dmitrievna’s intention to marry her to Panshin. He is courteous, tactful, moderately educated, knows how to hold a conversation, he is even interested in art: he paints - but always paints the same landscape - he composes music and poetry. True, his talent is superficial; strong and deep experiences are simply inaccessible to him. The true artist Lemm saw this, but Lisa, perhaps, only vaguely guessed about it. And who knows what Lisa’s fate would have been like if not for the dispute. In the composition of Turgenev's novels, ideological disputes always play a huge role. Usually, in a dispute, either the beginning of a romance is formed, or the struggle of the parties reaches a climactic intensity. In “The Noble Nest” the dispute between Panshin and Lavretsky about the people is important. Turgenev later noted that this was a dispute between a Westerner and a Slavophile. This author's description cannot be taken literally. The fact is that Panshin is a Westerner of a special, official kind, and Lavretsky is not an orthodox Slavophile. In his attitude towards the people, Lavretsky is most similar to Turgenev: he does not try to give the character of the Russian people some simple, easily memorized definition. Like Turgenev, he believes that before inventing and imposing recipes for organizing the people’s life, it is necessary to understand the character of the people, their morality, their true ideals. And at that moment when Lavretsky develops these thoughts, Lisa’s love for Lavretsky is born.

Turgenev never tired of developing the idea that love, by its very deepest nature, is a spontaneous feeling and any attempts to rationally interpret it are most often simply tactless. But the love of most of his heroines almost always merges with altruistic aspirations. They give their hearts to people who are selfless, generous and kind. Selfishness for them, as well as for Turgenev, is the most unacceptable human quality.

Perhaps, in no other novel did Turgenev so persistently pursue the idea that in the best people from the nobility all their good qualities are in one way or another, directly or indirectly connected with folk morality. Lavretsky went through the school of his father’s pedagogical quirks, endured the burden of love from a wayward, selfish and vain woman and yet did not lose his humanity. Turgenev directly informs the reader that Lavretsky owes his mental fortitude to the fact that peasant blood flows in his veins, that in childhood he was influenced by his peasant mother.

In Lisa’s character, in her entire worldview, the beginning of folk morality is expressed even more clearly. With all her behavior, her calm grace, she, perhaps, most of all Turgenev’s heroines resembles Tatyana Larina. But in her personality there is one quality that is only outlined in Tatiana, but which will become the main distinguishing feature of the type of Russian women who are usually called “Turgenevsky”. This property is dedication, readiness for self-sacrifice. Liza’s fate contains Turgenev’s verdict on a society that kills everything pure that is born in it.

“Nest” is a house, a symbol of a family where the connection between generations is not interrupted. In Turgenev's novel, this connection is broken, which symbolizes the destruction and death of family estates under the influence of serfdom. We can see the result of this, for example, in N. A. Nekrasov’s poem “The Forgotten Village.”

Criticism: the novel was a resounding success, like Turgenev had never had before.

1. Mikhalevich and Lavretsky comparative images

The predecessors of Turgenev's social novel in Russian literature were Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin", Lermontov's "Hero of Our Time" and "Who is to Blame?" Herzen. What are its features? It is small in volume. The action unfolds without long delays or retreats, without complications with side plots, and ends in a short time. It is usually timed at a specific time. Thus, the plot events in “Fathers and Sons” begin on May 20, 1859, in “On the Eve” - in the summer of 1853, in “Smoke” - on August 10, 1862. The biography of the characters, standing outside the chronological framework of the plot, is woven into the course The narratives are sometimes detailed and detailed (Lavretsky), sometimes brief, fluent and incidental, and the reader learns little about Rudin’s past, and even less about the past of Insarov and Bazarov. In its general constructive form, Turgenev’s novel is like a “series of sketches” that organically merge into a single theme, which is revealed in the image of the central character. The hero of Turgenev's novel, who appears before the reader as a fully formed person, is a typical and best ideological representative of a certain social group (advanced nobility or commoners). He strives to find and implement the depot of his life, to fulfill his social duty. But he always fails. The conditions of Russian socio-political life doom him to failure. Rudin ends his life as a homeless wanderer, dying as an accidental victim of a revolution in a foreign land. Lavretsky, whose best years of his life were “spent on a woman’s love,” resigns himself and calms down. After long wanderings, he arrived at his desolate Vasilyevskoye estate and waits for him to be “sobered up by boredom ... and prepared to slowly build a depot,” that is, .e. good management. He is still “waiting for something, mourning the past and listening to the surrounding silence... But the outcome of his life has already been summed up. Leaving, flowing away, lonely, useless - this is the elegy of the life of the dying Lavretsky, who did not find an answer for himself what to do in life. But the commoner Insarov, who knows what to do, the “liberator” of his homeland, dies on the way to his chain. In a distant churchyard, Bazarov, a rebellious man with a fiery heart, found his peace. He wanted to “break things,” “get things done,” “mess with people,” but he, the “giant,” only managed to “die decently.”

Many heroes of Turgenev's novels were united by a fiery, genuine love for their homeland. But inevitable failure in life awaited them all. Turgenev's hero is a failure not only in public affairs. He is a loser in love too. The ideological face of Turgenev's hero most often appears in disputes. Turgenev's novels are filled with controversy. Hence the particularly important compositional significance in the novel of dialogue-argument. And this feature is by no means accidental. The Rudins and Lavretskys, people of the forties, grew up among Moscow circles, where the ideological debater was a typical, historically characteristic figure (the nightly dispute between Lavretsky and Mikhalevich, for example, is very typical). With no less acuteness, ideological disputes were conducted, turning into journal polemics, between “fathers” and “sons,” that is, between nobles and commoners. In “Fathers and Sons” they are reflected in the disputes between Kirsanov and Bazarov.

One of the characteristic elements in Turgenev's novel is the landscape. Its compositional role is varied. Sometimes it seems to frame the action, giving an idea only of where and when this action takes place. Sometimes the background of the landscape matches the mood and experience of the hero, “corresponds” to him. Sometimes the landscape is drawn by Turgenev not in consonance, but in contrast with the mood and experience of the hero. The “indescribable charm” of Venice, with “this silvery tenderness of the air, this flying away and close distance, this wondrous consonance of the most graceful outlines and melting colors,” contrasts with what the dying Insarov and Elena, depressed by grief, are experiencing.

Very often Turgenev shows how deeply and powerfully nature acts on his hero, being the source of his moods, feelings, and thoughts. Lavretsky is traveling along a country road in a tarantass to his estate. The picture of an evening day puts Nikolai Petrovich in a dreamy mood, awakens sad memories in him and gives support to the idea that (contrary to Bazarov) “one can sympathize with nature.” “Sympathizing,” Nikolai Petrovich submits to her charm, “favorite poems” are remembered to him, his soul calms down, and he thinks: “How good, my God!” The pacifying power of nature, “speaking” to man, is revealed in the thoughts of Turgenev himself - in the last lines of “Fathers and Sons”. The flowers on Bazarov’s grave “speak” not only of the great, “eternal” peace of “indifferent” nature - “they also speak of eternal reconciliation and endless life.” The lyrical element plays a significant role in Turgenev's novels. Especially the epilogues of his novels - Rudin, The Noble Nest, Fathers and Sons - are imbued with deep lyricism.

Studying the biography of a writer makes it possible to reveal the richness of the writer’s artistic world and enter his creative laboratory.

During the lessons, it is necessary to create a special emotional and moral atmosphere that evokes empathy and co-reflection with the author and literary characters. Therefore, it is important to think through not only the logic of presentation of the material, but also the very forms of emotional impact on students.

The first lessons are devoted to the biography of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev and a review of his work; the task is given to read stories from the collection “Notes of a Hunter”, the novels “Rudin”, “Fathers and Sons”.

Before reading and discussing the works, at the beginning of studying the section, you can conduct a composition lesson. The task is set to penetrate into the world of man and writer, to understand the relationship with his contemporaries and the genre uniqueness of Turgenev’s work.

In order to imagine the atmosphere of communication between Turgenev’s contemporaries, it is necessary to find not only interesting stories and memories of the writer, but also to present them in a “lightweight” form for oral retelling. Many details of the story and individual expressions have to be changed, so the script does not contain direct quotes everywhere.

Memoirs of contemporaries in a stage performance allow students to delve deeper into the essence of assessments and reflections on the life and work of the writer. Here the “live” speech of contemporaries is heard and their immediate image is created.

Preparation for the lesson:

• Together with the students, a lesson script is drawn up and roles are assigned;
• the task is given to imagine the atmosphere of the meeting and conversation of contemporaries about Turgenev, create an interesting story about him, read lyric poems and prose poems;
• Small groups of students work on the production together with the teacher;
• portraits of I.S. on the board Turgenev, next to a table with books and literature about him, there is a stage area where readers and reciters talk about Turgenev and fragments from the novels “Rudin” and “Fathers and Sons” are staged;
• musical works were selected to accompany the production itself.

Composition lesson script

Teacher. Today we will try to penetrate the world of Turgenev - the man and the writer, reveal his joys and sorrows, and get acquainted with the memories of Turgenev. Let's listen to what his contemporaries are saying: P.A. Kropotkin, Guy de Maupassant, P.V. Annenkov, A. Fet.

One of Turgenev’s favorite musical works is playing - Glinka’s “Waltz-Fantasy”.

Reader 1(P.A. Kropotkin). Turgenev's appearance is well known. He was very handsome: tall, strongly built, with soft gray curls. His eyes shone with intelligence and were not without a humorous sparkle, and his manners were distinguished by that simplicity and lack of affectation that are characteristic of the best Russian writers.

Reader 2(Guy de Maupassant). I saw Ivan Turgenev for the first time at Gustave Flaubert. The door opened. The giant entered. A giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale. He had long gray hair, thick gray eyebrows and a large gray beard, shimmering with silver, and in this sparkling snowy whiteness - a kind, calm face with slightly large features. Turgenev was tall, broad-shouldered, densely built, but not obese, a real colossus with the movements of a child, timid and cautious.

Reader 1(P.A. Kropotkin). Turgenev’s conversation was especially remarkable. He spoke, as he wrote, in images. Wanting to develop an idea, he explained it with some kind of scene, conveyed in such an artistic form, as if it had been taken from his story.

Reader 2(Guy de Maupassant). Turgenev's voice sounded very soft and a little sluggish... He spoke wonderfully, imparting artistic value and peculiar entertainment to the most insignificant fact, but he was loved not so much for his sublime mind as for some touching naivety and the ability to be surprised at everything.

Reader 3(P.V. Annenkov). After 1850, Turgenev's living room became a gathering place for people from all classes of society. Here met the heroes of secular salons, attracted by his reputation as a fashionable writer, literary figures who were preparing themselves to become leaders of public opinion, famous artists and actresses who were under the irresistible effect of his beautiful figure and high understanding of art...

No one noticed the melancholy shade in Turgenev’s life, and yet he was an unhappy man in his own eyes: he lacked the female love and affection that he had been looking for from an early age. The call and search for the ideal woman helped him create that Olympus, which he populated with noble female creatures, great in their simplicity and in their aspirations. Turgenev himself suffered that he could not defeat the female soul and control it: he could only torment her.

It is remarkable that the real and best qualities of his heart were revealed with the greatest strength in the village. Every time Turgenev left Petersburg, he calmed down. There was no one to shine in front of then, no one to invent scenes for and think about staging them. The village played in his life the very role that was later played by his frequent absences abroad - it determined with precision what he should think and do.

Reader 4(A. Fet). In those days there was an abundance of swamp game, and if Turgenev and I went to his estate Topki, the main goal was to hunt, and not to sort out economic matters. The next day of our arrival, Turgenev, sensing that the peasants would come to him, was painfully tormented by the impending need to go out to their porch.

I watched this scene from the window. Handsome and apparently wealthy peasants surrounded the porch on which Turgenev stood. Some guy asked for more land. Before Ivan Sergeevich had time to promise the land, similar needs arose for everyone, and the matter ended with the distribution of all the master's land. Turgenev’s uncle later said: “Really, gentlemen writers, are you all so stupid? You went to Topki and distributed all the land to the peasants, and now the same Ivan writes to me: “Uncle, how can I sell Topki?” What to sell when all the land remained distributed to the peasants?

Teacher. Communication with men was not in vain for Turgenev. He reflected his observations in the essay “Khor and Kalinich”, published in the Sovremennik magazine. When the magazine issue reached the reader, everyone started talking about the author’s talent. Success prompted Turgenev to continue working on his essays. The book was soon translated into French. There were a lot of enthusiastic responses to it.

Reader 5(J. Sand). What a masterful painting!.. This is a new world into which you allowed us to penetrate: not a single historical monument can reveal Russia better than these images, so well studied by you, and this life, so well seen by you.

Teacher. Many people believe that the life of writers associated with literary work flows calmly and serenely. This does not apply to Turgenev, who had difficult relationships with his “fellow writers.” He did not get along with I.A. Goncharov, broke off relations with N.A. Nekrasov. But one of the facts seems the most surprising in the life of I.S. Turgenev and L.N. Tolstoy. A quarrel occurred between the two great writers, which separated them for seventeen long years.

Student 1. The quarrel occurred over Turgenev's daughter, Polina. Born from a “slave,” the girl immediately found herself out of place. She was torn away from her mother early. She knew her father little. Although he spared nothing for her, he taught, educated, hired governesses - this was considered a “duty”. All worries about her are not warmed by anything. In essence, he has no use for her.

Little Polina began to be jealous of her father towards Polina Viardot. This annoyed him. Turgenev said about his daughter that she did not like music, poetry, nature, or dogs. In general, he and Polina have little in common.

Student 2. In the spring of 1861, Tolstoy visited Turgenev. They decided to go to Fet. An argument broke out between Turgenev and Tolstoy in the dining room. It all started with Fet’s wife asking Turgenev about his daughter. He began to praise her new governess, who took care of the girl and forced her to take the poor people’s linen home, mend it, and give it back to the darned ones.

Tolstoy asked ironically:

And do you think this is good?

Of course, this brings the benefactor closer to the urgent need,” Turgenev replied.

A severe stubbornness arose in Tolstoy, associated with disrespect for his interlocutor.

But I think that a dressed-up girl holding dirty rags on her knees is playing an insincere, theatrical scene.

Student 1. His tone was unbearable. Whether Turgenev loved or did not love his daughter is his business. Tolstoy laughed at poor Polina, and at his father. Turgenev could not bear this.

After the exclamation:

I ask you not to talk about this!

And Tolstoy's answer:

Why shouldn’t I say what I am convinced of!

Turgenev shouted in complete rage:

So I will silence you with an insult!

He grabbed his head with his hands and quickly left the room, but a second later he returned and apologized to the hostess.

Student 2. Two of the best Russian writers quarreled for seventeen years, exchanged insulting letters, it almost came to a duel... Because of what? Polina stood between them. Turgenev outwardly turned out to be wrong, but his internal position was much better - he boiled, said unnecessary things and apologized. Tolstoy did not evoke sympathy. He offered Turgenev a duel “with guns” so that it would certainly end properly. But Turgenev agreed to a duel only on European terms. Then Tolstoy wrote him a rude letter, and noted in his diary: “He is a complete scoundrel, but I think that over time I will not be able to stand it and will forgive him.”

Teacher. This strange story happened. Both writers were very worried and regretted what happened...

Turgenev tried his hand at different genres. He wrote the plays “The Freeloader”, “Breakfast at the Leader”, “A Month in the Country”.

The young actress Savina staged “A Month in the Country” in her benefit performance. The performance was a huge success. “Savina was triumphant. She opened the play. She brought Turgenev to the public: the reflection of his glory fell on her too.”

Reader 6(M.G. Savina). The play was performed - and it created a sensation. Soon the writer came to Russia and was greeted enthusiastically. I was invited to see Ivan Sergeev.

I was overcome with such excitement that I almost decided not to go. I remember that something warm, sweet, and familiar was wafted from the entire heroic figure of Turgenev. He was such a handsome, elegant “grandfather” that I immediately got used to it and started talking like an ordinary mortal.

I was in my twenty-fifth year, I had heard so often about my “cuteness” that I was convinced of it myself, but to hear the word “clever” from Turgenev! was happiness. I didn't say anything about his writings! This thought completely poisoned the entire impression. An hour later, Turgenev’s friend appeared and said that Turgenev especially liked that I had not mentioned his works. “It’s so corny and so boring.”

Beethoven's piano sonata sounds.

Teacher. Turgenev's poetic work is little known. Meanwhile, the writer began his literary career with lyrical works. The author himself spoke very reservedly about his poems, believing that he did not have the gift of a poet. But the poems did not leave his contemporaries indifferent. Even Fet once said that he “admired the poems... of Turgenev.” Admiration for nature, a subtle understanding of its essence, a sense of its mystery - all this can be found in the poem “Autumn”.

Reader 7. Poem "Autumn".

How sadly I love autumn.
On a foggy, quiet day I walk
I often go into the forest and sit there -
I look at the white sky
Yes, to the tops of dark pines.
I love, biting a sour leaf,
Lounging with a lazy smile,
Dream of doing whimsical
Yes, listen to the woodpeckers’ thin whistle.
The grass has all withered... cold,
A calm shine is spread over her...
And sadness quiet and free
I surrender with all my soul...
What won't I remember? Which
Will my dreams not visit me?
And the pines bend as if they were alive,
And they make such thoughtful noise...
And, like a flock of huge birds,
Suddenly the wind blows
And in tangled and dark branches
He makes some noise impatiently.

Teacher. In the summer of 1855, in Spassky, Turgenev finished the novel “Rudin,” according to Boris Zaitsev, “a thing in a sense, a debut and brilliant.” Turgenev put a lot of himself into the main character - Rudin. The novel, as expected, was read by friends, advised, praised, and “pointed out the shortcomings.” Now you will see a small scene from this novel: an explanation by Natalya Lasunskaya and Rudin.

Mozart's sonata-fantasy sounds.

Teacher. The writer in his declining years expressed the accumulated observations and thoughts, the joys and sufferings he experienced in a cycle of prose poems. In Russian literature they remain unsurpassed examples of poetic miniatures.

Turgenev's poems were translated into European languages ​​with the help of Pauline Viardot. The writer did not expect that readers would perceive them with interest and sympathy. Some works were set to music.

The title of the prose poem is “We will fight again!” evokes a joyful, cheerful feeling. You immediately imagine the kind smile of a man to whom all living things are dear, you feel the playful affection in his words about the sparrow: “Conqueror - and that’s it!”

Reader 8. Prose poem “We will fight again!”

What an insignificant little thing can sometimes transform the whole person!
Full of thought, I was walking along the high road one day.
Heavy forebodings oppressed my chest; despondency took possession of me.
I raised my head... In front of me, between two rows of tall poplars, the road stretched into the distance like an arrow.
And across it, across this very road, ten steps from me, all gilded by the bright summer sun, a whole family of sparrows was jumping in single file, jumping briskly, funny, arrogantly!
One of them, in particular, kept pushing himself sideways, sideways, with his goiter bulging and chirping impudently, as if the devil were not his brother! Conqueror - and that's it!
Meanwhile, high in the sky a hawk was circling, which, perhaps, was destined to devour this very conqueror.
I looked, laughed, shook myself - and the sad thoughts immediately flew away: I felt courage, daring, a desire for life.
And let my hawk circle above me...
- We'll fight again, damn it!

Teacher. Prose poems are an unusual phenomenon in terms of genre. Lyricism, brevity, and emotionality of the narrative bring them closer to lyric poetry. However, unlike lyric poetry, feelings are expressed in prosaic form. The poem “Enemy and Friend” solves moral and ethical problems - hostile and friendly relations between people, responsibility for the life of another person.

Reader 9. Prose poem "Enemy and Friend".

The prisoner, condemned to eternal imprisonment, broke out of prison and began to run headlong... A chase was hot on his heels.
He ran with all his might... His pursuers began to fall behind.
But here in front of him is a river with steep banks, a narrow but deep river... And he doesn’t know how to swim!
A thin rotten board is thrown from one bank to the other. The fugitive had already raised his foot towards her... But it so happened that right there near the river stood: his best friend and his most cruel enemy.
The enemy said nothing and only crossed his arms; but the friend shouted at the top of his lungs:
- Have mercy! What are you doing? Come to your senses, you madman! Don't you see that the board is completely rotten? She will break under your weight - and you will inevitably die!
- But there is no other crossing... but can you hear the chase? - the unfortunate man groaned desperately and stepped on the board.
- I won’t allow it!.. No, I won’t allow you to die! - the zealous friend cried out and snatched the board from under the fugitive’s feet. He instantly fell into the stormy waves and drowned.
The enemy laughed smugly - and walked away; and the friend sat down on the bank and began to cry bitterly for his poor... poor friend!
However, he did not think of blaming himself for his death... not for a moment.
- Didn't listen to me! Didn't listen! - he whispered sadly.
- But by the way! - he said finally. - After all, he had to languish in a terrible prison all his life! At least he's not suffering now! Now he feels better! You know, such a lot has befallen him!
- But it’s still a pity, for humanity!
And the kind soul continued to weep inconsolably for her ill-fated friend.

Teacher. The novel “Fathers and Sons” occupies a special place in Turgenev’s work. This novel caused many different opinions and statements. The word “nihilist” was immediately picked up by thousands of voices. The author of the work experienced painful impressions. He noticed “coldness that reached the point of indignation” in many close people, and received congratulations from enemies. It is difficult to imagine what was going on in the author’s soul. But he explained to readers in the article “About “Fathers and Sons,” noting that “a rather interesting collection of letters and other documents has been compiled.” Watch the scene of Bazarov’s declaration of love from the novel “Fathers and Sons.”

Dvorak's "Melody" sounds.

Teacher. All his life Turgenev strove for happiness, caught love and did not catch up. As we know, love for Pauline Viardot did not bring him happiness.

Reader 10. The last summer in Bougival was terrible both for Turgenev and for Pauline Viardot, who looked after him. And at the hour of his death, when he hardly recognized anyone anymore, he said to the same Polina:

Here is the queen of queens!

So he praised Pauline Viardot, the only woman he loved all his life.

Turgenev died on August 22, 1833. There were no traces of suffering left on his face, but in addition to the beauty that appeared in him in a new way, what was surprising was the expression of what was missing during life: will, strength...

Some time passed, and Pauline Viardot wrote in one of her letters to Ludwig Pietsch that a man who had made up the whole world for her had passed away. An emptiness has formed around, and no one will ever be able to fill it: “Only now I realized what this person meant to me.”

F. Chopin's nocturne sounds.

Literature

1. Zaitsev B.K. Life of Turgenev / Distant. - M., 1991.

2. Pustovoit P.G. Roman I.S. Turgenev “Fathers and Sons”: Commentary: Book. for the teacher. - M., 1991.

3. Russian literature: 10th grade. Reader on historical-lit. materials (compiled by I.E. Kaplan, M.G. Pinaev). - M., 1993.

4. Turgenev I.S. Literary and everyday memories. - M., 1987.

5. Shestakova L.L. The poetic heritage of I.S. Turgenev. Triptych “Variations” / Russian language at school. - 1993. - No. 2.