Fatalism essay. The ideological and compositional role of the chapter “Fatalist” and its place in the plot sequence in the novel “A Hero of Our Time”

March 26 2016

The problem of fate has appeared more than once on the pages of Lermontov’s novel. In “Bel” Maxim Maksimych spoke about Pechorin: “After all, there are, really, such people who are destined in their nature for various extraordinary things to happen to them.” In “Taman” he asks himself: “...why did fate throw him into the peaceful circle of smugglers?” In “Princess Mary” Pechorin wrote in his diary: “... fate somehow always led me to the denouement of other people’s dramas...

What purpose did fate have for this?” To be honest, after reading “Princess Mary” from “Our Time,” I thought it was finished. After all, everything that could happen has already happened.

All we need is an epilogue. And suddenly I see - “Fatalist”. And then - another episode from the life of Pechorin. This means that I decided to give one more riddle or, conversely, a solution to the image of my hero.

The main “triangle” of the story is Vulich – Pechorin – Fate. The theme is belief or disbelief in the predestination of human life. Hence the name – “Fatalist”.

Why is the main person in the story not Pechorin? Here is most of the story about officer Vulich. Its characteristics given by the author are very important for understanding: “...

he was brave, spoke little but sharply, ... drank almost no wine at all... There was only one passion that he did not conceal: a passion for the game.” very interesting, Vulich attracts us with his passion and mysterious behavior. So he offers to “try it for yourself” to see if there is a destiny, and asks: “Who wants it?”

“Pechorin “jokingly” offered his bet. “I affirm that there is no predestination,” I said.” Why did Pechorin enter this game? He must certainly participate in everything, especially since Vulich attracts Pechorin with his strength and mystery.

Passions ran high. Here Vulich “silently went into the major’s bedroom, took the pistol off the nail,” “cocked the hammer and poured gunpowder on the shelf.” What do you want to do? Listen, this is crazy! - they shouted to him. Nobody wants to take part in this bet, even indirectly.

As always, Pechorin is observant and sees what others do not see: “... it seemed to me that I read the seal of death on his pale face. You are going to die today! – I told him. He answered slowly and calmly: “Maybe yes, maybe no”... Then we read: “I’m tired of this long ceremony.” Isn't it too cruel?

Moreover, Pechorin egged Vulich on: “...either shoot yourself, or...let’s go to sleep.” Vulich won the bet. The gun misfired.

It was possible to disperse calmly. But Pechorin is not like that. He continues the game: “...

why did it seem to me that you must certainly die today...” Why does he need this? After all, Pechorin played with someone else's life. Is there destiny? What influences a person?

Our hero asked himself such questions as he returned home through deserted alleys. He thought about his ancestors, about his generation, living “without convictions and pride, without pleasure and fear...” Each phrase of Pechorin’s last confession, made by him in “Fatalist,” reveals another facet of him spiritual tragedy. He admits: “In my first youth I was a dreamer... but what is left of that for me?

Only fatigue... and a vague memory... In this vain struggle, I exhausted both the heat of my soul and the constancy of my will...” It is difficult to understand Pechorin.

He is the embodiment of contradictions. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that Pechorin has a lot in common with Lermontov himself. Some kind of seal of doom was left on his whole life. The empty world in which Lermontov spent his youth, departments, regiments - there was no life anywhere. What is life?

This is freedom of thought and activity. Neither Lermontov nor Pechorin had it. What remains for these people? Fatigue, “a bitter smile at oneself.”

Before his death, Vulich said: “He’s right!” Pechorin correctly predicted him imminent death. Now, obviously, he must believe in fate. An analysis of further events will help us dispel doubts.

Our hero's fate is at stake. It was necessary to neutralize the “stupefied” Cossack who killed Vulich. Pechorin plays with life again, this time with his own.

And not recklessly, like Vulich, but for the sake of saving people. Well, did Pechorin believe in fate this time? He miraculously survived.

Undoubtedly, there is faith in “fatum,” but there is also disbelief in the predestination of life. all rights reserved 2001-2005 I think that Pechorin is a fatalist, but a strange one. He wants to manage his own life. The lines involuntarily come to mind: And he, the rebellious one, asks for a storm... I think these words correctly express the essence of not only Lermontov, but also his hero Pechorin.

Undoubtedly, the story “Fatalist” has a huge artistic value. It is divided, so to speak, into two large episodes. The first ended happily for Vulich, the second - with death.

The role of landscape in the work is very important role. Let us remember the scene when Pechorin was returning home in sad loneliness “... the moon, full and red, like the glow of a fire, began to appear from behind the jagged horizon of houses...” The description of a beautiful summer night emphasizes the hero’s state. The lexical side of the story “Fatalist” is thought out to the smallest detail.

For example, the use a short word“without” becomes tragic in Lermontov. After all, it defines the essence of the Pechorin generation: “without convictions,” “without pleasure,” “without struggle,” “without glory.” There is another such “word”: “ni”. “We are not capable of...sacrifices for the good of humanity, nor...even for our own happiness...”, having “neither hopes nor...pleasure...” And Lermontov’s vocabulary also determines the class of people.

For example, this is what officers say: “gentlemen”, “designated”, “predetermined”, “reason”. Ordinary people express themselves differently: “sinned,” “aunt,” “damned.” Great writers requires us to re-read them. You can see something you didn't notice before.

Having once again leafed through the pages of the story “Fatalist”, in particular, the scene of the bet between Vulich and Pechorin, I thought about how the two concepts are connected in the work: “fatalism” and “bet”. In S.I. Ozhegov’s dictionary we read: “A bet is a dispute with the condition of fulfilling some obligation if you lose.” And fatalism is explained as a mystical belief in an inevitable fate. I was surprised at how words so different in lexical coloring turned out to be very close in Lermontov’s work and how talentedly he developed events around these concepts, making “fatalism” and “bet” either close friends or blood enemies.

Let us summarize all of the above in this chapter of our work:
1. In the twentieth century, there remain two opposing points of view regarding the understanding of Pechorin’s personality: Pechorin is an antisocial nature and Pechorin as true hero works and eras; Pechorin is a demon who brings evil to people, sowing evil around himself, or a gifted person who does not find his place in life, suffers and is tormented.
2. Soviet criticism believed that Pechorin was a victim of the public and the social environment.
3. Some modern researchers prove the general inhumanity of the character, regardless of social conditions, associated with the wrong direction of one’s mental strength, mind and knowledge, which is confirmed by the following provisions.
4. Pechorin is not capable of friendship, he is characterized by selfishness, he has no real affection for anyone; He strives to bring every life situation that entails to conflict.
5. Bela Pechorin forcibly pulls her out of her natural environment and with his selfishness leads her to death.
6. His soul is not able to sympathize with another soul, to tune in unison with the mood of others. Free from friendship, which constrains with its moral traces and connections, Pechorin is repulsed by the simple-minded kindness of Maxim Maksimych. The author again condemns Pechorin for his selfish attitude towards others; in this situation, Maxim Maksimych turns out to be right.
7. Out of pure curiosity, the hero interferes in the life of smugglers and almost ends up getting killed, because he was not prepared for such a situation.
8. Pechorin destroys Mary’s love, mercilessly kills Grushnitsky, accompanying all this with prudence and composure.
9. Pechorin’s life convinces us that human free will turns into individualism. Where an individual, by his own arbitrariness, decides the destinies of other people, there is not and cannot be equality and true happiness.

The chapter “Fatalist” concludes Lermontov’s novel “A Hero of Our Time.” At the same time, it is the last one in Pechorin’s Journal. Chronologically, the events of this chapter occur after Pechorin visited Taman, Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, after the episode with Bela, but before the hero’s meeting with Maxim Maksimovich in Vladikavkaz. Why does Lermontov place the chapter “Fatalist” at the end of the novel?

The peculiar core of the analyzed episode is the bet between Lieutenant Vulich and Pechorin. Main character served in one Cossack village, “the officers gathered with each other in turns, and played cards in the evenings.” On one of these evenings the bet happened. After sitting for a long game card game the officers talked about fate and predestination. Suddenly, Lieutenant Vulich suggests checking “whether a person can arbitrarily dispose of his life, or whether everyone... is assigned a fatal moment in advance.” Nobody except Pechorin enters into a bet. Vulich loaded the pistol, pulled the trigger and shot himself in the forehead... The pistol misfired. Thus, the lieutenant proved that already destined fate still exists.

The theme of predestination and the player who tempts fate was developed before Lermontov by Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin (“Shot” and “ Queen of Spades"). And in the novel “A Hero of Our Time” before the chapter “Fatalist,” the theme of fate arose more than once. Maxim Maksimovich speaks about Pechorin in “Bel”: “After all, there are, really, such people who are destined in their nature for various extraordinary things to happen to them.” In the chapter “Taman” Pechorin asks himself: “And why did fate throw me into a peaceful circle? honest smugglers?. In “Princess Mary”: “...fate somehow always led me to the outcome of other people’s dramas...what purpose did fate have for this?”

The main philosophical aspect of the novel is the struggle between personality and fate. In the chapter “Fatalist,” Lermontov asks the most important, pressing question: to what extent is a person himself the builder of his life? The answer to this question will be able to explain to Pechorin his own soul and destiny, and will also reveal the most important moment– the author’s solution to the image. We will understand who, according to Lermontov, Pechorin: the victim or the culprit?

The whole story is divided into three episodes: the bet with Vulich, Pechorin’s reasoning about predestination and the death of Vulich, as well as the capture scene. Let's see how Pechorin changes as the episodes progress. At the beginning we learn that he does not believe in fate at all, which is why he agrees to the bet. But why does he allow himself to play with someone else’s life, not his own, with impunity? Grigory Alexandrovich shows himself to be a hopeless cynic: “Everyone dispersed, accusing me of selfishness, as if I had made a bet with a man who wanted to shoot himself, and without me he seemed unable to find an opportunity!” Despite the fact that Vulich provided Pechorin with evidence of the existence of fate, the latter continues to doubt: “... I felt funny when I remembered that there were once wise people who thought that the heavenly bodies take part in our insignificant disputes over a piece of land or for some some fictitious rights!..” Another proof of the existence of fate for the hero should have been the death of Vulich. Indeed, during the bet, it seemed to Pechorin that he “read the seal of death on the pale face” of the lieutenant, and at 4 o’clock in the morning the officers brought the news that Vulich had been killed under strange circumstances: hacked to death by a drunken Cossack. But this circumstance did not convince Pechorin; he says that instinct told him “on... his changed face the mark of imminent death.” Then Pechorin decides to try his luck himself and helps capture the killer Vulich, who locked himself in an empty hut. He successfully captures the criminal, but is never convinced that his fate is destined from above: “After all this, how can one not become a fatalist? ... how often do we mistake a deception of feelings or a lapse of reason for a belief.”

It is amazing how subtly and accurately Pechorin’s last confession reveals another facet of his spiritual tragedy. Pechorin admits to himself that terrible vice: disbelief. And it’s not just about religious faith, no. The hero does not believe in anything: neither in death, nor in love, nor in truth, nor in lies. “And we... wandering the earth without convictions and pride, without pleasure and fear... we are no longer capable of making great sacrifices, either for the good of humanity, or even for our own happiness, because we know its impossibility, and we indifferently move from doubt to doubt, as our ancestors rushed from one error to another, having, like them, neither hope nor even that vague, although true, pleasure that the soul encounters in every struggle with people and fate.” The worst thing is that Pechorin does not believe in life, and, therefore, does not love it. “In my first youth I was a dreamer: I loved to caress alternately gloomy and rosy images... But what was left of that? - just fatigue... I have exhausted both the heat of the soul and the constancy of the will necessary for real life...”

Amazing episode, which reveals to us Lermontov’s attitude to the fate of Pechorin, is the capture scene. In fact, only here, at the end of the story and the entire novel, does Grigory Alexandrovich commit an act that benefits people. This act, as the last ray of hope that Pechorin will again feel a taste for life, he will find his happiness in helping others, will use his composure in situations when a common person can't pull himself together. “I like to doubt everything: this is a disposition of character - on the contrary, as for me, I always move forward more boldly when I don’t know what awaits me.” But we learn all this only at the end of the novel, when we already know that there is no hope left, that Pechorin died without revealing his powerful talents. Here is the author's answer. Man is the master of his own destiny. And there is always a chance to take the reins into your own hands. The solution to Pechorin's image is simple. Surprisingly, he, who does not believe in fate, always imagined himself and his lack of demand in this life as the tricks of evil Fortune. But that's not true. Lermontov in last chapter of his novel answers us that Pechorin himself is to blame for his fate and this is a disease of the time. It is this theme and this lesson that the classic taught us that makes the novel “A Hero of Our Time” a book for all ages and for all times.

The first four stories of the novel show how the protagonist’s character is conditioned by the social environment. Pechorin's moral character was formed under the influence of life circumstances. In the story “Fatalist,” which ideologically closes the novel, the question of whether a critical thinking person to show his will and fight the vices of the society to which he belongs.

If we accept the point of view of fatalists, who claim that the world is ruled by an unknown and inevitable force (fate, destiny, fate), then the struggle is impossible and therefore meaningless. But does fate exist?

The first two episodes of the story “Fatalist” leave no doubt that predestination (fate, fate) exists. Pechorin “like Vulich... decided to try his luck.” Having emerged victorious from a mortal battle with a criminal, he doubted the existence of predestination, for he remained alive not by the will of fate. He was saved from what seemed like an inevitable death by cool reason, strict calculation and courage.

Pechorin likes to doubt everything. Therefore, he refrains from making straightforward judgments about whether predestination exists or not. However, from all the events depicted in the story, the hero draws far-reaching conclusions: under any circumstances, no matter what, you need to act, show your will and determination: “As for me, I always move forward more boldly when I don’t know, what awaits me."

Pechorin's strong-willed nature draws him to activity, to struggle. But the hero is not yet morally ready to rebel against reality, against the foundations of secular society that have developed over centuries. Material from the site

When Pechorin “with the severity of a judge and a citizen” evaluates his actions, he himself comes to the sad conclusion: “In this vain struggle, I exhausted both the heat of my soul and the constancy of will necessary for real life.” An even more bitter and merciless confession is contained in the note he made before the duel with Grushnitsky: “Why did I live? For what purpose was I born? And it’s true, it existed, and it’s true that I had a high purpose, because I feel immense strength in my soul; but I did not guess this purpose. I was carried away by the lures of empty and ungrateful passions; From their furnace I came out hard and cold, like iron, but I lost forever the ardor of noble aspirations for a better color of life...”

The aimlessness of existence, spiritual emptiness lead to the fact that he becomes " extra person" in society.

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Lermontov worked on his novel throughout 1838. The novel was published only two years later. In “Hero of Our Time,” the poet continues to develop the same idea that formed the basis of the “Duma” poems, namely: why people with enormous life potential and energy, do not find worthy use for it? By describing the life of Pechorin, the main character of the novel, Lermontov tries to illuminate this issue.

“The Fatalist” is the fifth part of the novel “A Hero of Our Time”, at the same time, like the other four parts, it is quite like independent work. The image of the main character is the unifying link of these parts. All characters united around him.

If in the first two parts - “Bela”, “Maksim Maksimych” - Maksim Maksimych and the author himself talk about the hero, then the next three parts, including “Fatalist”, are Pechorin’s diary. As such, they help to understand the reasons for the hero’s actions. If in four parts the author shows social environment as a sculptor of character and moral character Pechorin, then in “Fatalist” Lermontov is interested in whether a critically thinking person, well aware of the shortcomings of his society, can rebel against them. From the point of view of fatalists, this is useless, because it is impossible to avoid what is destined to be, because the world is ruled by fate, or fate.

Initially, the hero also thought so, especially after the death of Vulich. He recklessly strives to try his luck, believing that what is written in his family cannot be avoided. But every time, emerging victorious from the most dangerous situations thanks to my mind, sober calculation and fearlessness, he began to doubt whether it was fate? Or maybe it doesn’t exist at all? Since Pechorin’s nature is characterized by skepticism, pushing him to doubt everything, he cannot come to a final conclusion on this matter. But he is sure of only one thing: whether destiny exists or not, a person in all situations must show willpower and determination.

The author, at every opportunity, focuses on how Pechorin is always disdainful secular society and is alienated from it, he is bored there. He is an active nature, and in the society to which he belongs, all activity is aimed at petty intrigues and idle talk, external pomposity. In this society there is no real selfless love, no friendship, no normal relationships between people. But is he ready to rebel against such a society? Apparently not, otherwise he wouldn’t have run away from him. His struggle is petty, as it manifests itself when meeting individual representatives of the world, and therefore has no future. Later, the hero himself understands this, admitting that in this struggle he exhausted all his mental strength necessary for real life. By real life he means a life spent in noble service to society.

Pechorin is a representative younger generation 30s of the XIX century. Through him, Lermontov condemns this generation for their inability to serve high goals.