Korolenko is the story of my contemporary. Autobiographical work “The History of My Contemporary”

Back in the mid-1890s, Korolenko, together with his closest friend and co-editor of “Russian Wealth” N. Fannensky, was planning a memoir and journalistic book “Ten Years in the Province,” which was not yet connected with the history of an entire generation of the 1870s . The epic plan was outlined in the fall of 1896 in Korolenko’s correspondence with P.F. Yakubovich. The latter sent the story “Youth” from Kurgan exile to the editorial office of “Russian Wealth” and expressed his dream of a “novel of our time.” Korolenko, in a response letter, supported the idea of “our novel,” which “played out with greater or less intensity among a whole generation,” when “the scene was filled with active populism,” and the epilogue of which is “remote places.” He believed, however, that on the path to such a novel there are not only insurmountable external obstacles in the form of censorship: we “ourselves cannot yet look back with sufficient calm and<...>"objectivity" Yakubovich, in turn, expressed hope that the person who will be able to “cope with all the difficulties” will be Korolenko himself: “You, exactly You You’ll write “our novel” after all.”

In 1905, when the censorship climate had softened significantly, Korolenko began an artistic chronicle of his generation. “I wanted, paying tribute to the topic of the day, to start with exile,” he wrote to his brother, but he overcame the temptation and started from childhood. However, the “first impression of existence” turned out to be a fire: “reflections of a crimson flame” “against the deep background of night darkness.” A picture that echoes the Russian reality of the “burning year.”

In an effort to determine the genre of his work, Korolenko resorted to various formulas: the work is “almost fictional, not dry memories”, “life impressions”, “illuminated by memories”, but not a biography, not a “public confession”, not “ own portrait”, at the same time, the story of one life, where “historical truth” is given preference over “artistic truth”. In the end, “The History of My Contemporary” absorbed all the main principles of Korolenko’s work - artistic and visual, memoir, lyrical, essay and journalistic. At the same time, the weight of the last two elements gradually increased, which corresponded to the general direction of the writer’s path.

Portraying the high spiritual image of his contemporary, Korolenko shares with the reader many anxieties and doubts. In 1916, he called the “young and hot” time of his populism “the crushed ashes of still recent hopes”: “After that old sharp experience, I am skeptical about “ready-made formulas”,” be it the formula of “folk” or “class” wisdom. He chose for himself a “partisan line” of action “from his own mind.”

The generation of the 1860s-1870s, which Korolenko called “his own”, entered the historical arena with “boiling wine of denial” in their heads, with a tendency to act “very radically and very naively”, dealing with all “junk” using the “Knock on head” method and to hell! Korolenko treated all kinds of “nihilists” and “subverters” aloofly, believing that something new can only be introduced if it is based on a higher moral principle.

However, in the life of the “nihilistic generation” Korolenko overheard the motive of exhaustion of denial, fatigue from enmity, and caught the desire of the young for “something that could reconcile with life - if not with reality, then at least with its possibilities.”

The shortest and most succinct review of “The History of My Contemporary” belongs to A.V. Amphiteatrov: “A fragrant book!” History has prepared a cruel epilogue for Korolenkov’s generation: “the dictatorship of the bayonet,” as the writer defined it in the last years of his life, “immediately moved us centuries back,” surpassing “the craziest dreams of the Tsarist retrogrades.”

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| collection website
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| Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko
| The story of my contemporary
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V. G. Korolenko. Collected works in ten volumes.
Volume five. The story of my contemporary M., GIHL, 1954
Preparation of text and notes by S. V. Korolenko
OCR Lovetskaya T. Yu.

In this book I try to recall and revive a number of pictures of the past half-century, as they were reflected in the soul of first a child, then a youth, then an adult. Early childhood and the first years of my youth coincided with the time of liberation. The middle of his life passed during a dark period, first of government and then of public reaction, and among the first movements of struggle. Now I see much of what my generation dreamed of and fought for, bursting into the arena of life in an alarming and stormy way. I think that many episodes from the times of my exile wanderings, events, meetings, thoughts and feelings of people of that time and that environment have not lost the interest of living reality itself. I would like to think that they will still retain their significance for the future. Our life fluctuates and trembles from the sharp clashes of new principles with outdated ones, and I hope to at least partially illuminate some elements of this struggle.
But earlier I wanted to draw the attention of readers to the first movements of the emerging and growing consciousness. I knew that it would be difficult for me to concentrate on these distant memories while the present was roaring with the sound of an approaching thunderstorm, but I had no idea how difficult it would be.
I am not writing the history of my time, but only the history of one life at this time, and I want the reader to first become familiar with the prism in which it was reflected... And this is only possible in a sequential story. Childhood and youth form the content of this first part.
One more note. These notes are not a biography, because I was not particularly concerned about the completeness of biographical information; not confession, because I do not believe in either the possibility or the usefulness of public confession; not a portrait, because it is difficult to draw your own portrait with guarantee of likeness. Every reflection differs from reality in that it is a reflection; the reflection is obviously incomplete - even more so. It always, so to speak, more clearly reflects the chosen motives, and therefore often, despite all the truthfulness, is more attractive, more interesting and, perhaps, purer than reality.
In my work I strove for the most complete historical truth, often sacrificing beautiful or bright features artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I have not encountered in reality, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen.

And yet I repeat: I am not trying to give a portrait of myself. Here the reader will find only features from the “history of my contemporary”, a person known to me closer than all other people of my time...

I remember myself early, but my first impressions are scattered, like brightly lit islands among colorless emptiness and fog.
The earliest of these memories is a strong visual impression of a fire. I might have been in my second year then, but I can still clearly see the flames above the roof of the barn in the yard, the strangely illuminated walls of a large stone house in the middle of the night and its flame-reflecting windows. I remember myself, wrapped up warmly, in someone’s arms, among a group of people standing on the porch. From this vague crowd, memory singles out the presence of the mother, while the father, lame, leaning on a stick, climbs the stairs of the stone house in the courtyard opposite, and it seems to me that he is walking into the fire. But that doesn't scare me. I am very interested in the firemen's helmets flashing like firebrands across the yard, then one fire barrel at the gate and a high school student entering the gate with a shortened leg and high heel. I didn’t seem to experience any fear or anxiety; I didn’t establish any connections between the phenomena. For the first time in my life, so much fire, fireman’s helmets and a high school student with a short leg fell into my eyes, and I carefully examined all these objects against the deep background of the darkness of the night. I don’t remember the sounds: the whole picture only silently shimmers in my memory with floating reflections of a crimson flame.
I then remember several completely insignificant cases when they held me in their arms, calmed my tears or amused me. It seems to me that I remember, but very vaguely, my first steps... As a child, my head was large, and when I fell, I often hit it on the floor. One time it was on the stairs. I was in great pain and cried loudly until my father consoled me with a special treatment. He beat the step of the stairs with a stick, and this gave me satisfaction. Probably I was then in a period of fetishism and imagined an evil and hostile will in the wooden board. And so they beat her for me, but she can’t even leave... Of course, these words very roughly translate my feelings at that time, but I clearly remember the board and the seemingly expression of her submission under the blows.
Subsequently, the same sensation was repeated in a more complex form. I was already somewhat larger. It was an unusually bright and warm moonlit evening. This is actually the first evening that I remember in my life. My parents had gone somewhere, my brothers must have been sleeping, the nanny had gone to the kitchen, and I was left with only one footman, who bore the dissonant nickname Gandylo. The door from the hallway to the courtyard was open, and from somewhere, from the moonlit distance, came the rumble of wheels along the paved street. And for the first time I also identified the rumble of the wheels in my mind as a special phenomenon, and for the first time I did not sleep for so long... I was scared - probably during the day they were talking about thieves. It seemed to me that our yard in the moonlight was very strange and that a “thief” would certainly enter through the open door from the yard. I seemed to know that the thief was a man, but at the same time he seemed to me not quite a man, but some kind of humanoid mysterious creature that would do me harm with just his sudden appearance. This made me suddenly cry loudly.
I don’t know by what logic, but the footman Gandylo again brought my father’s stick and took me out to the porch, where I, perhaps in connection with a previous episode of the same kind, began to firmly beat the step of the stairs. And this time it again brought satisfaction; My cowardice passed so much that a couple more times I fearlessly went out alone, without Gandyl, and again beat up an imaginary thief on the stairs, reveling in the peculiar feeling of my courage. The next morning, I enthusiastically told my mother that yesterday, when she was not there, a thief came to us, whom Gandyl and I soundly beat. The mother condescendingly agreed. I knew that there was no thief and that my mother knew it. But I loved my mother very much at that moment because she did not contradict me. It would be hard for me to give up that imaginary creature, which I at first feared, and then positively “felt”, under a strange moonlight, between my stick and the step of the stairs. It was not a visual hallucination, but there was some kind of rapture from one’s victory over fear...
Another island in my memory is the trip to Chisinau to visit my grandfather on my father’s side... From this trip I remember crossing the river (I think it was the Prut), when our stroller was installed on a raft and, smoothly swaying, separated from the shore, or the shore separated from it , – I haven’t distinguished this yet. At the same time, a detachment of soldiers was crossing the river, and, I remember, the soldiers were sailing in twos and threes on small square rafts, which, it seems, does not happen when crossing troops... I looked at them with curiosity, and they looked at our carriage and they said something incomprehensible to me... It seems that this crossing was in connection with the Sevastopol war...
That same evening, shortly after crossing the river, I experienced the first feeling of sharp disappointment and resentment... It was dark inside the spacious traveling carriage. I was sitting in the arms of someone in front, and suddenly my attention was attracted by a reddish dot that flashed and then faded in the corner, in the place where my father was sitting. I started laughing and reached out to her. Mother said something warning, but I so wanted to get to know an interesting object or creature better that I began to cry. Then my father moved a small red star towards me, gently hiding under the ashes. I reached out to her index finger right hand; for some time it did not give in, but then it suddenly flared up brighter, and a sharp bite suddenly burned me. I think that in terms of the power of impression this could now only be equaled by a strong and unexpected bite from a poisonous snake hiding, for example, in a bouquet of flowers. Ogonyok seemed to me deliberately cunning and evil. Two or three years later, when I remembered this episode, I ran to my mother, began to tell her and began to cry. These were again tears of resentment...
The first bath caused me a similar disappointment. The river made a charming impression on me: the small greenish waves of swell that burst under the walls of the bathhouse, and the way they played with sparkles, fragments of heavenly blue and bright pieces of a seemingly broken bathhouse, were new, strange and beautiful to me. All this seemed fun, lively, cheerful, attractive and friendly to me, and I begged my mother to quickly carry me into the water. And suddenly - an unexpected and sharp impression of either cold or burn... I cried loudly and struggled so much in my mother’s arms that she almost dropped me. This time my bathing did not take place. While my mother splashed in the water with a pleasure that was incomprehensible to me, I sat on the bench, sulking, looking at the crafty swell, which continued to play just as temptingly with fragments of the sky and the bathhouse, and was angry... At whom? It looks like it's on the river.
These were the first disappointments: I rushed towards nature with the confidence of ignorance, she responded with spontaneous dispassion, which seemed to me deliberately hostile...
Another one of those primary sensations when a natural phenomenon for the first time remains in consciousness isolated from the rest of the world, as special and sharply completed, with its basic properties. This is a memory of my first walk in pine forest. Here I was positively fascinated by the lingering noise of the forest tops, and I stopped rooted to the spot on the path. No one noticed this, and our entire society moved on. The path, several fathoms ahead, dropped steeply downwards, and I watched as at this break first the legs, then the torsos, then the heads of our company disappeared. I waited with an eerie feeling for the last bright white hat of Uncle Heinrich, the tallest of my mother’s brothers, to disappear, and finally I was left alone... I seem to have felt that “alone in the forest” is, in essence, scary, but, as if under a spell, he could neither move nor utter a sound and only listened to the quiet whistle, the ringing, the vague conversation and sighs of the forest, merging into a drawn-out, deep, endless and meaningful harmony, in which both the general hum and separate voices of living giants, and swaying, and quiet creaking of red trunks... All this seemed to penetrate me with an exciting powerful wave... I ceased to feel separate from this sea of life, and it was so strong that when they missed me and my mother’s brother returned behind me, then I stood in the same place and did not respond... An uncle approached me, in a light suit and straw hat, I saw exactly a stranger, an unfamiliar person in a dream...
Subsequently, this minute often arose in my soul, especially in hours of fatigue, as a prototype of deep but living peace... Nature tenderly beckoned the child at the beginning of his life with its endless, incomprehensible mystery, as if promising somewhere in infinity the depth of knowledge and the bliss of the solution ...
How, however, rudely our words express our feelings... In the soul there is also a lot of incomprehensible speech that cannot be expressed in rude words, like the speech of nature... And this is exactly where the soul and nature are one...
All these are disparate, separate impressions of semi-conscious existence, seemingly unconnected by anything other than personal sensation. The last of them is moving to a new apartment... And not even the move (I don’t remember it, just as I don’t remember the previous apartment), but again the first impression of the “new house”, of the “new yard and garden”. It all seemed like a new world to me, but it’s strange: then this memory falls out of my memory. I remembered about it only a few years later, and when I remembered, I was even surprised, because it seemed to me at that time that we lived in this house forever and that in general there were no major changes in the world. The main background of my impressions over several childhood years is an unconscious confidence in the complete completeness and immutability of everything that surrounded me. If I had a clear understanding of creation, I would probably say then that my father (whom I knew was lame) was created with a stick in his hand, that God created my grandmother precisely as a grandmother, that my mother was always just as beautiful a blue-eyed woman with a brown braid that even the barn behind the house appeared lopsided and with green lichen on the roof. It was a quiet, steady increase in vitality, smoothly carrying me away along with the surrounding world, and the shores of the vast outside world, along which one could notice movement, were not visible to me then... And I myself, it seemed, had always been the same boy with big head, and the older brother was slightly taller than me, and the younger one was shorter... And this mutual relationship was supposed to remain forever... We sometimes said: “when we are big,” or: “when we die,” but it was a stupid phrase, empty, no live content...
One morning my younger brother, who both fell asleep and got up before me, came up to my bed and said with a special expression in his voice:
- Get up, quickly... What will I show you!
- What's happened?
- You'll see. Hurry up, I won't wait.
And he went out into the yard again with the air of a serious man who did not want to waste time. I hastily dressed and followed him out. It turned out that some men unknown to us had completely destroyed our front porch. What remained of it was a pile of boards and various wooden rots, and the exit door strangely hung high above the ground. And most importantly, there was a gaping hole under the door deep wound made of peeling plaster, dark logs and piles... The impression was sharp, partly painful, but even more striking. The brother stood motionless, deeply interested, and followed with his eyes every movement of the carpenters. I joined his silent contemplation, and soon my sister joined us both. And so we stood for a long time, saying nothing and not moving. Three or four days later, a new porch was ready in place of the old one, and it positively seemed to me that the physiognomy of our house had completely changed. The new porch was clearly “attached”, while the old one seemed to be an organic part of our venerable integral house, like the nose or eyebrows of a person.
And most importantly, the first impression of the “wrong side” and the fact that under this smoothly planed and painted surface there are hidden damp, rotten piles and gaping voids was deposited in my soul...

According to family legend, our family descended from some Mirgorod Cossack colonel, who received armorial nobility from the Polish kings. After my grandfather's death, my father, who was traveling to the funeral, brought back an intricate seal that depicted a boat with two dog heads at the bow and stern and a battlemented tower in the middle. When one day we children asked what it was, my father replied that it was our “coat of arms” and that we had the right to seal our letters with it, while other people did not have this right. This thing is called in Polish rather strangely: “Korabl i Lodzia” (ark and boat), but what the meaning of this is, the father himself cannot explain to us; perhaps it doesn’t make any sense... But there is also a coat of arms, it’s called simply: “pchła na bęnbenku hopki tnie”, and it makes more sense, because the Cossacks and the gentry were severely bitten by fleas on campaigns... And, taking a pencil, he quickly sketched on paper a flea dancing on a drum, surrounding it with a shield, a sword and all the heraldic attributes. He drew decently, and we laughed. Thus, to the very first idea of our noble “Kleynods”, my father added a shade of ridicule, and it seems to me that he did this deliberately. My great-grandfather, according to my father, was a regimental clerk, my grandfather was a Russian official, like my father. It seems they never owned serf souls and lands... My father never sought to restore his hereditary noble rights, and when he died, we found ourselves “sons of a court councilor,” with the rights of a placeless serving nobility, without any real connections with the nobility, and, it seems, with any other environment.
The image of my father is preserved in my memory quite clearly: a man of average height, with a slight tendency to be overweight. As an official of the time, he shaved carefully; His facial features were delicate and beautiful: an aquiline nose, large brown eyes and lips with strongly curved upper lines. They said that in his youth he looked like Napoleon the First, especially when he put on a Napoleonic official cocked hat. But it was difficult for me to imagine Napoleon lame, and my father always walked with a stick and slightly dragged his left leg...
There was always an expression of some hidden sadness and concern on his face. Only occasionally did it clear up. Sometimes he would gather us in his office, let us play and crawl around, draw pictures, tell funny jokes and fairy tales. Probably, in the soul of this man there was a large reserve of complacency and laughter: he even gave his teachings a semi-humorous form, and at those moments we loved him very much. But these glimpses became less and less frequent over the years, the natural gaiety was increasingly overshadowed by melancholy and care. In the end, he was only enough to somehow survive our upbringing, and in more conscious years we no longer had any inner closeness with our father... So he went to his grave, little known to us, his children. And only long later, when the years of youthful carelessness had passed, I collected feature by feature that I could about his life, and the image of this deeply unhappy man came to life in my soul - both more dear and more familiar than before.

Full text of the dissertation abstract on the topic ""The History of My Contemporary" V.G. Korolenko: Artistic Originality"

As a manuscript

SAVELIEVA Elena Sergeevna

“THE HISTORY OF MY CONTEMPORARY” V. G. KOROLENKO: ARTISTIC ORIGINALITY

Krasnodar 2009,

The work was carried out at the Department of Literature and Teaching Methods of the Pedagogical Institute of Southern Federal University

Scientific supervisor: candidate philological sciences, assistant professor

Tukodyan Nvart Khazarosovna

Official opponents: Doctor of Philology, Professor

Prokurova Natalya Sergeevna Candidate of Philological Sciences Panaetov Oleg Grigorievich

Leading organization: Krasnodar State

University of Culture and Arts

The defense will take place ")[>> TsuTsR^SL 2009 at a meeting of the dissertation council D 212.101.04 at Kuban State University at the address: 350018, Krasnodar, st. Sormovskaya, 7, room. 309.

The dissertation can be found at scientific library Kuban State University (350040, Krasnodar, Stavropolskaya St., 149).

Scientific secretary of the dissertation council< 7 М.А.Шахбазян

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF WORK

Currently, in the literature there is a tendency to turn to the problems of classical literature. AND; Now, after many years, the works of writers who created the culture of the Russian people, laid the foundations of the modern Russian language, and participated in historical events. Undoubtedly, one of these writers is Vladimir Galakshyuvich Korolenko, a great humanist, fighter for justice and freedom, author of many artistic and journalistic works, in particular, the memoir-novel “The History of My Contemporary”.

Scientists' research in the field of classical works is carried out in two directions: firstly, these are attempts at a new interpretation of texts that have already become textbooks, studied by many generations of scientists, and secondly, the search for new classical works that have not yet received the attention of science. “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko, undoubtedly, is one of the works that is insufficiently covered in literary criticism: in the works of recent years, researchers have limited themselves to problem-chemical analysis or analysis of the genre specificity of individual works or cycles.

“The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko, being a highly moral work that reflects the essential features of the past, is modern in ideological orientation and should be featured in the reading circle modern reader, therefore, it seems promising to us to further study both the whole art of V. G. Korolenko’s creativity and his individual works in terms of the author’s worldview, moral evolution hero and narrative structure.

Nowadays, it is necessary to turn more often to works of classical literature for many reasons. So, firstly, many undeservedly ignored

literary critics and the public, the works raise problems that are not alien to modern times. Works with documentary elements help a person, by looking into the past and understanding the problems of past years, to understand his own time. Secondly, turning to “The History of My Contemporary” as a work of a major genre allows us to evaluate some trends of modern literary process. Thirdly, the works of the classics are highly ideological, and by reading them, a person increases his cultural level.

In this dissertation research, an attempt was made, based on classical works and the works of modern researchers: philologists, partly philosophers, teachers, linguists and cultural experts, to determine the place of “The History of My Contemporary” in Russian autobiographical literature and in the works of V. G. Korolenko, as well as explore the main features of the poetics of “The History of My Contemporary”.

Relevance of the dissertation. 1. The novel in question, “The History of My Contemporary,” is rightfully considered one of the pinnacle creations in Russian literature, but no special research has been carried out on this work. 2. Addressing this novel by V. G. Korolenko as a work with documentary elements allows, by looking into the past and understanding the problems of past years, to understand one’s own time both from the point of view of literary criticism and from the point of view of history.

The novelty of the dissertation. 1. In a dissertation research, the autobiographical novel-memoir “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko is subjected to such a comprehensive study for the first time. 2. Significantly new judgments about the specifics of this work as a kind of genre symbiosis. We define the genre of “Stories of My Contemporary” as an autobiographical memoir novel. Z. During the literary analysis of the work, we presented for the first time a classification of literary portraits of the novel, a number of significant conclusions were made,

concerning the architectonics of the work, the features of the image of the characters and the specifics of the chronotope.

The object of the study is the autobiographical novel-memoir “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko.

Purpose of the study. Having comprehended the theoretical aspects of the problem of the genre of a work with an autobiographical orientation, determine the place of “The History of My Contemporary” in the context of the work of V. G. Korolenko and consider the poetics of this memoir-novel.

To achieve this goal, it seems necessary to solve a number of problems:

4) consider the features of the genre of the work;

5) explore the system of images, the features of literary portraits of “The History of My Contemporary”, classify them;

6) study the chronotopic structure of the novel.

The theoretical and methodological basis of the dissertation research is the principles of cultural-historical and comparative-historical research methods, as well as the provisions and concepts developed in the works of M. M. Bakhtin, B. O. Korman, Yu. M. Lotman, D. S. Likhachev , G. O. Vinokura, V. V. Vinogradova, G. N. Pospelova, G. A. Beloy, B. M. Eikhenbaum, Yu. N. Tynyanova, L. Ya. Ginzburg, S. S. Averintseva, A G. Tartakovsky, N. A. Nikolina, A. B. Esin, I. O. Shaitanov and others.

The literary categories used are considered historically and theoretically, the history of the formation of the genre of artistic autobiography is traced, attempts are made to analyze the principles of creating images of heroes, to identify artistic means of expressing the author’s position in an autobiographical memoir novel.

When determining the place of “The History of My Contemporary” in the writer’s work, we studied the works of D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, N. D. Shakhovskaya, G. A. Vyaly, as well as dissertation research in recent years (G. Z. Gorbunova, Yu. G Gushchin, P. E. Lion, V. E. Tatarinova, A. V. Trukhanenko, etc.), dedicated to the work of V. G. Korolenko. The theoretical significance of the dissertation lies in the fact that the work represents a single study dedicated to the autobiographical novel-memoir “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko, determines its significance and artistic originality.

"The scientific and practical value of this dissertation research lies in the possibility of using its results when teaching university courses on the history of Russian literature of the second half of the 20th century, special courses on the works of V. G. Korolenko and writers of the sixties, as well as for further research of the works of V. G. Korolenko.

Main provisions submitted for defense:

1) “The History of My Contemporary” occupies a central position in the work of V. G. Korolenko due to the analytical form of the writer’s thinking, the specific ideological orientation of the work and its value paradigm.

2) “History” of my contemporary” V. G. Korolenko ---

autobiographical memoir-novel with characteristic features of this genre specific features: the fusion of various genres, the selection of images, methods of psychological depiction of heroes, the creation of a special chronotope.

Approbation. The main provisions of the dissertation research were the subject of discussion at meetings of the Department of Russian Literature and Teaching Methods of the Pedagogical Institute of the Southern Federal University, and are also reflected in 3 publications of the author and presented in 4 reports at conferences at various levels (international scientific conference^ “Conceptual problems of literature: fiction cognition", Rostov-on-Don, international scientific conference (correspondence) of the XXIII Chekhov readings in Taganrog, scientific conference - XI Sheshukov readings "Historiosophy in Russian literature of the 20th and 19th centuries: traditions and a new view." Moscow) with subsequent publication articles.

Structure and scope of the dissertation. The work consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and bibliography from 214 titles. When working with texts, we studied two collected works of V. G. Korolenko: in 9 volumes, 1914, and in 10 volumes, 1954. References in the text of the dissertation are based on the later collected works.

The total volume of the dissertation is 189 pages.

The introduction defines the subject, goals and objectives of the research, establishes the degree of knowledge of the problem, relevance, scientific novelty, research material, and also identifies a number of issues related to the problem of studying biographical literature in domestic literary criticism.

The first chapter of the dissertation research, “The History of My Contemporary” in the Context of the Epoch,” has four paragraphs.

In the first paragraph. “Prerequisites for the appearance of “The History of My Contemporary” in the works of V. G. Korolenko: analyticism as a form of thinking of the writer,” we consider novelistic thinking

the creator, which is a prerequisite for the creation of a work of a major genre. In developing this thesis, we rely on the judgments of V. Belinsky and M. Bakhtin about the syncretism of the novel genre, its versatility and ability to influence other genres (the concept of novelization of genres). Using the example of Korolenko’s stories and stories, we consider the formation of a big genre form in his work and we find in “The History of My Contemporary” the features of a complex genre symbiosis, a combination in the structure of the work of many genres: autobiography, memoirs, novel, diary, story, essay, article. Reading “The History of My Contemporary,” we can observe how the idea of certain works was born, their details were laid down, we see elements of intertextuality: “Having passed Tobolsk, our barge began to rise north along the Irtysh, and the wonderful views of the Volga and Kama replaced the dull ones for us banks of Siberian rivers with rare settlements. Here I surrendered to my memories and wrote an essay “The Unreal City,” in which, strongly imitating Uspensky, I described Glazov” (vol. 7, p. 159). In the work we found more than 65 references to the texts of stories, articles, letters of V. G. Korolenko. Thus, we conclude that “The History of My Contemporary” is the logical result of the entire work of V. G. Korolenko; it follows from previous works, simultaneously enclosing them. One cannot help but pay attention to the journalistic elements in all of Korolenko’s work. Almost every work has a subtitle that speaks of its genre or the place where it was written or the idea originated (“From a trip to Vetluga and Kerzhenets”, “From Siberian life”). The system of genres to which the author himself classifies his works seems to us extensive and diverse. We find here both generally accepted titles (short story, tale, essay) and rare variations of small genres (pictures, pages, excerpts). In addition to the above-mentioned genres of documentary prose, V. G. Korolenko has works belonging to allegorical genres (fairy tale, legend, fantasy), but most of his

In genre terms, Korolenko’s works are classified as documentary biographical prose (portrait, letter, memoirs, observations):

Korolenko’s work is characterized by a multi-stage cyclization system. The works are united according to the affiliation of the main characters to one or another social group, for example, cycles of essays (“Pavlovsk essays”, “At the Cossacks”, “In a hungry year”), cycles of stories “about tramps”, “about random people" There are also macrocycles that unite works by genre: essays, stories, lyrical miniatures, works of conventional genres (Siberian, children's). In addition, in Korolenko’s genre system one can distinguish Volga, American and Romanian macrocycles by theme.

The cycle is a step towards mastering the great novel form. The writer did not limit himself to partially developing the theme in one or two stories. He tried to express everything, to exhaust the topic to the end. One story led to another - and multiple cycles arose: Siberian, children's, “Pavlovsk Sketches”, cycles of essays “In the Hungry Year”, “Sorochinskaya Tragedy” and others.

This fact of cyclization of works undoubtedly speaks of V. G. Korolenko’s attraction to a large epic form. Thus, novelistic thinking determines the movement of genres in the writer’s work.

“The History of My Contemporary” is built from many essays and stories, united by the image of the main character - the author, presented by him in chronological order. At the same time, many of the components of the novel are unthinkable outside of it (they do not have an ending or beginning, their motives are tightly connected with the motives of other stories), but others can exist separately. Also in the novel we see elements of parallel construction (the division of characters into groups with diverse events occurring simultaneously). These parallels stem from the ideological views and value guidelines of the writer.

Second paragraph. “Korolenko’s historiosophical, value paradigm (orientation) in the embodiment of fate, choice, law.

human responsibility and the picture of the world,” is dedicated to the artistic and stylistic system of the writer’s concept and his moral and ethical program, reflected in “The History of My Contemporary” in comparison with some stories.

In the literary life of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, many qualitative changes took place associated with the process of renewal and transformation of already existing literary movements, the emergence and movement of new ones. The complication of the literary process (multiplicity of currents and directions, extraordinary mobility and rapid change of forms and styles, sharp polemics) is also due to the multi-structure characteristic of a huge country, the combination of elements of different historical stages, which is why there was an extraordinary complexity in the manifestation of socio-ideological conflicts. At the same time, there were such diverse, heterogeneous, sometimes opposing trends as the boundless aestheticism of adherents of “pure art” and the asceticism of the late Tolstoy, the desire of Chekhov and Korolenko to go beyond the circle of only literary work, the emergence of literature of the Gorky direction.

However, it is possible to identify a feature that unites these many-sided phenomena: in literature, as in life, the problem of man, his personality, dignity, and value is raised with particular force. The great merit of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Korolenko was that in their artistic model social existence depicted the people as the value center with which everything else was correlated.

The question of personality in literature cannot be considered without connection with the humanistic concept of the writer, with his “idea of man.”

“The fact of the matter is that there is no “man”, one and indivisible, just a man; there are Fedots, Ivans, poor people, rich people, beggars and kulaks, virtuous and vicious, caring and drunkards, living on a full allotment, and donors, with plots of one bast shoe, owners and workers... The fact of the matter is that we the people all seem to have the same face, and by the first peasant we judge all peasants” (vol. 9, p.

166). The writer portrays the people not as a homogeneous faceless mass, but embodies their destinies in specific, vivid artistic images.

The object of our attention is the problems of fate, freedom, in particular free choice, morality.

“Isn’t this our task to love this people?” - this is the problem posed by the author. Even having sunk to the bottom of life, dark, rude, people remain people, live as best they can, love, give birth to children, no matter how difficult their lot is. We see that, revealing this or that problem, Korolenko returns to it more than once in his subsequent works, and this feature again makes it possible to assert the novelism of V. G. Korolenko’s thinking.

The third paragraph of the first chapter is called “The ideological content of “The History of My Contemporary” and its compositional expression in the novel.” Based on philosophical and literary definitions ideas, ideology, aesthetic ideal, we see that they are closely related.

The Dictionary of Philosophical Terms defines an ideal as follows: “a model, something sublime, good and beautiful, the highest goal of aspiration” (p. 245).

In art, the aesthetic ideal is the artistic world that arises from the correlation of life as it is and as it should be, however, the ideal must be derived from reality, in to a greater extent rely on reality rather than on a fictional world.

Our thought in determining the ideological content is guided by the author’s understanding of the idea of his novel.

“Now I see much of what my generation dreamed of and fought for, bursting into the arena of life in an alarming and stormy way. I think that many episodes from the times of my exile wanderings, events, meetings, thoughts and feelings of people of that time and that environment have not lost the interest of living reality itself. I would like to think that they will still retain their significance for the future” (vol. 5, p. 7).

Depicting the events of the life of his “contemporary”, V. G. Korolenko unfolds before the reader a panorama of the life of society in the 1860s-1880s of the 19th century, including the event aspect (outstanding historical events that took place at that time), the socio-political aspect (changes in the status of many people, development of social revolutionary movement), literary-aesthetic aspect (the influence of literature on people and people on literature).

In the preface to “The History of My Contemporary,” V. G. Korolenko wrote: “There will be nothing here that I have not encountered in reality, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen” (vol. 5, p. 8). The autobiographical nature of this work did not prevent it from becoming a chronicle of an entire generation. D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky (141) argued that Korolenko’s memoirs can be placed next to L. N. Tolstoy’s “Childhood” and “Adolescence”, and the brightness of the reconstruction of the era, as well as the depth and significance of reflections, they resemble “The Past and Thoughts” » Herzen.

“History...” is a broad epic narrative about the dramatic, truly tragic fate of the generation of the 1870s. On foreground in the novel - thoughts about the people, about their capabilities. Korolenko draws attention to the overly bookish, abstract theoretical nature of the legacy of the “sixties”. Korolenko rejected “going to the people” and Narodnaya Volya terrorism as naive-utopian theories. The writer does not join any of the existing underground revolutionary organizations, seeing in them a sectarian character, revolutionaries without a people. Korolenko preferred to act openly, with the pen of a publicist and artist. His work, in particular “The History of My Contemporary,” represents a reflection of the writer’s political and social views.

Korolenko begins the story about himself from infancy. This technique corresponds to the canons of the genre and is used by the author to identify the sources of the formation of his personality, nature, and predispositions. In the first parts the author uses, of course,

the method of direct recollection, but given the hero’s young age and the often spontaneity and inaccuracy of his judgments, Korolenko sometimes has to introduce inserted episodes (for example, separated into separate chapters “My Father”, “Father and Mother”), narratives, colorful facts, dates and events that could not have been known to a little boy.

Another form of such explanations is a short episode that is not singled out compositionally, explaining the child’s feelings. Here an adult explains from the height of his years what he felt then and what, according to his current ideas, caused it. “During this painful period of my childhood life, the memory of God was very formless. With this word, somewhere in the depths of consciousness, an idea was born of something vast and completely bright, but impersonal. The closest thing would be to say that it seemed to me like a distant and huge spot of sunlight. But the light did not work at night, and the night was entirely in the power of a hostile, other world, which, together with darkness, was moving into the boundaries of ordinary life” (vol. 5, p. 45).

V. G. Korolenko also describes works of art that had a great influence on him (the book “Fomka from Sandomierz” by Jan Gregorovich, the historical theater play"Ursula, or Sigismund III"). Describing the process of his acquaintance with these works, the writer, relying on actually occurring events and his immediate impressions, gives a story with elements of analysis, determining their belonging to literary movements (book-sentimentalism, play-romanticism).

The individual’s striving for an emotionally anticipated universal ideal indicates a romantic current in a work written, undoubtedly, in the realistic tradition.

In the dissertation we consider the transformation of the ideal of V. G. Korolenko. When the writer was in childhood, it can be argued that his father had the traits of an ideal for him. However

Korolenko from the very early age it was inherent to look at everything from different sides, so he perfectly saw its ambiguous qualities or disadvantages. Having drawn attention to several false ideals (Theodor Negri, Vasily Veselitsky), we come to the conclusion that the image of Kliment Arkadyevich Timiryazev is closest to the ideal in the writer’s understanding.

When, already in the first days of exile, Korolenko concludes: “No, I will no longer go into the service of this state with the Livens and Valuevs at the top, with a network of petty, irresistible predation below. This is the decaying past... And I will go towards the unknown future,” we are convinced that the real ideal is the author himself. The minute when a person is visited by such a strong feeling is very important for his self-determination and the course of his entire life. later life. In “The History of My Contemporary” a feature clearly emerges that can be called programmatic: the author gives the personal, intimate the character of social value and interest. In the era reproduced by the writer, one can feel living people, living life and, above all, one’s own humane, righteous soul of the contemporary - and in the personal and one’s own, the socially valuable of the experience is refracted, and not the accidental and narrowly individualistic.

We analyze the features of the plot and construction of the plot in Korolenko, based on the author’s compositional decision. “The History of My Contemporary” is equipped with a detailed system of names of parts and chapters. This attraction to headings and subheadings is explained by the high journalistic nature of V. G. Korolenko’s works.

Intertextual headings (chapters) can be divided into several main groups related to the thematic range of the novel and its chronotopic structure. We distinguish the following groups:

1) A static description of the current situation in a particular place, as well as a description of a group of people: “Old students”, “Workers”, etc.

2) Individual portrait descriptions of specific personalities: “Father and Mother”, “Alexander Kapitonovich Malikov”.

3) Narration of events extended over time: “I find myself in a den of robbers”, “Arrival in Perm”.

"We carried out calculations and calculations that allow us to testify to the distribution of material in the novel, and concluded that the distribution of textual material in the novel reflects the real content of the life period being described. The author, dividing the “History...” into chapters in accordance with the periods of development of the hero, simultaneously identifies the dominants of each period (Childhood - development, description of the situation; student years, the first link is development, eventfulness; period of exile - portrait sketches, description of the situation.)

Also in this paragraph, we emphasize the connection between content and form, arguing that the division of a work into architectural parts (books, chapters) is subordinated to the author’s main idea: to reflect the story of his life in his time, therefore the main criterion for delimiting chapters is the importance of certain events for the author, their stages in his life, influence on his future fate.

Fourth paragraph. "The author's concept of the creative personality of V. G. Korolenko (hero and image of the author^", is dedicated to the author's concept of Korolenko's creative personality, lyrical expression. We use the term "author", meaning by it "a certain view of reality, the expression of which is the entire work" , using Bakhtin's definition. We consider the image of the author in his formation. “History...” covers the period 1854-1885, that is, the time from the early childhood of the writer until his arrival in Nizhny Novgorod as a thirty-three-year-old man. Developing the thesis about

the main idea of “The History of My Contemporary”, expressed in paragraph 1.3, concerning the creation of the image of the hero of the era of the 60-80s. XIX century, let us turn to the image of the author presented in the novel.

Korolenko.

In 1905, when Korolenko began work on the novel, he was 53 years old. Naturally, the views of the depicted young man and the mature man do not always coincide. At the beginning of the narrative, monologues, reflections, and lyrical digressions belonging to the author have greater weight; the proportion of incidents that happened directly to the child described is not very large.

In the works of the children's cycle, the specificity lies in a double view of what is happening: from the point of view of the main character or hero-storyteller in childhood and the adult narrator or hero-storyteller, with the adult only balancing the child’s ideas and conclusions and correcting some accents. In the first volume of “The History of My Contemporary”, consisting of five parts, which tell about the early childhood of the writer, about his studies at the boarding school of Mrs. Okrashevskaya, in the Zhytomyr and Rivne gymnasiums, this is exactly the image of the author. The reader perceives the work in two time plans, either transporting to the 50-60s of the 19th century and taking the position of a child, or rising to the author’s point of view on the events that took place then.

Such authorial returns from the events described to his own modern opinion continue throughout the novel. Let us note some of their features. In the first chapters, V. G. Korolenko, by right of seniority, expresses his opinion about the actions and thoughts of the child that the author once was, as a rule, in the form of a statement, explanation, assessment; the form of a maxim, morality, and aphorism is also acceptable. Author's intervention may be in the nature of reporting historical facts, introduced for the purpose of illuminating and

clarification of events that cannot be told by a child - There are also comments in the text from the first person, in which one can feel irony, fatherly mockery of the hero: “How long ago it was” and how stupid I was then... And how much smarter I am now that boy who put his ear to the telegraph poles or was proud of... what? The title of a little boarder... But now I’m already an “old high school student” and I’m going to new places for some new life...” (vol. 5, pp. 144-145).

In the chapters devoted to the description of his student time, the author expresses his attitude towards the actions of the hero differently. Irony is clearly felt in the narrative; it permeates the entire text, sometimes being inseparable from the hero’s own words. Often ironic thoughts are formalized in remarks in the first person: “I have developed an arrogant conviction that I am perhaps the smartest in this city. My standard was this: I can understand all the people flashing in front of me in this stream, swaying like water in a plate, from the barrier to the post office and back.<...>And they have no idea what thoughts about them and what dreams are wandering in my head” (vol. 6, p. 12). The character seems to be talking about his superiority over the people around him, but we can easily identify hidden meaning, put by the author into the hero’s mouth. The author does not hide his thoughts that actually arose in his youth, even if they run counter to his modern beliefs. The author further adds from the height of his life experience: “I was stupid. Subsequently, when I became smarter, I easily found people above me in the most remote corners of life” (vol. 6, p. 12).

Then the picture changes - the difference in views is reduced to a minimum and the share of events and actions of the hero increases. To directly address the reader, to express his point of view, Korolenko resorts to digressions in which he speaks about the hero in the third person. In subsequent chapters, the coincidence of the opinions of the hero and the author increases, so the author resorts less and less to irony and characterization of the hero’s actions. The author's digressions now pursue one goal: to make the narrative more coherent by introducing into the text

messages, reviews and generalizations about historical events that did not affect the hero personally, but are important for explaining further events. So, for example, without naming the source of the message, V.G. Korolenko speaks about the Chigirinsky case, about the assassination attempt on Solovyov - the events that occurred while the hero was under arrest in the Lithuanian castle. Thus, we see that the image of the author in “History...” changes and grows along with the writer. The text of the novel reflects the course of memory, the process of recollection, therefore there is a “double view” of what is happening: from the point of view of the hero and from the point of view of the author, although they are essentially the same person at different periods of his life.

The second chapter, “The Poetics of the History of My Contemporary,” is devoted to a comprehensive literary analysis of the work. It includes four paragraphs.

In the first paragraph. ""The History of My Contemporary" in the General Typology of Russian autobiographical literature" An attempt was made to determine the place of the autobiographical memoir novel in the general typology of Russian autobiographical literature. The problems of the genre nature of autobiographical fiction in modern literary criticism are among the complex and debatable. The main problems that are in the spotlight: the relationship between historical truth and artistic fiction, the documentary nature of autobiographical information, the role of the author in the artistic interpretation of the hero’s life and work, and others. These problems are due to the fact that the criteria for the genre and the range of its understanding are very wide. Obviously, the explanation for this must be sought in the synthetic nature of the genre, its constant evolution, interaction with other literary genres. We are considering “The History of My Contemporary” in comparison with other works of the major autobiographical genre. S. T. Aksakov, A. I. Herzen, L. N. Tolstoy, V. G. Korolenko, I. A. Bunin - all of them in their works talk in detail about the history of their family, about

relatives, about their origin. “The History of My Contemporary” is undoubtedly one of the great works of autobiographical literature. !

The second paragraph is “Genre specificity of “The History of My Contemporary”.” Considering “The History of My Contemporary”; we define the genre of this work as an autobiographical memoir novel. The autobiographical component undoubtedly comes first in “The History of My Contemporary”. The desire for factual accuracy and consistency can be easily seen in the text of the work; this is repeatedly emphasized by the author.

Having studied the history of the genre of Russian artistic biography from hagiographies to modern autobiographical novels, we argue that in the process of its development, autobiography was enriched by the traditions of other genres (in Russia): hagiography, educational novel, historical novel, biography, diary, literary portrait, etc.

We see that from the point of view of genre nature, “The History of My Contemporary” combines the characteristics of several genres, three of which are fundamental: autobiography, that is, a description of the facts of one’s life, memoirs (memoirs) - a description of the “work of the soul,” reflections, reasoning , relationships to surrounding events characteristic of the character being described at a certain period of his life, and a novel, main feature which is the absence of prohibitions on the depiction of anything.

In the third paragraph. “Literary portrait as part of the artistic originality of “The History of My Contemporary””, we consider the system of images of the work, the features of their implementation. We support the point of view of V. S. Barakhov, who considers a literary portrait in its three mutually related manifestations: 1) a literary portrait as a means of creating the image of a character in a novel, story, story; 2) literary portrait as an integral part, a component of a more complex genre structure; 3) literary portrait as an independent genre.

In our opinion, all these three types of literary portrait are reflected in Korolenko’s work. We will consider the first two manifestations based on the material of the memoir-novel “The History of My Contemporary”. Directly in the novel, the literary portrait acts, firstly, as an integral part, a component of a more complex genre structure, and, secondly, as a means of creating the image of a character in the novel. We are making an attempt to give a typology of the characters portrayed in “The History of My Contemporary”, highlighting portraits-stories and memories. The main differentiating factor underlying the division of portraits into stories and memories is the passage of time. If in a portrait-story time moves independently of the narrative or stops altogether, then in a memory the passages selected by the writer to characterize the character continue storyline. Also, regardless of the passage of time, we have singled out type portraits into a separate category. V. G. Korolenko creates galleries of images: officials, judges, teachers, students, exiles, political people, folk images: Pochinkovites, Glasovites, Amginites. In our study, we consider literary portraits of the writer’s parents, teachers, some representatives of petty officials, teachers (classifying them into “old”, “maniacs”, “chronographs” and “new”, based on the attitude of the author and borrowing his definitions), as well as teachers of higher educational institutions.

Portrait elements abound in the third book, which is dedicated to exile wanderings and at the same time tells about the places where the author visited exactly then (Berezovsky Pochinki, Vyshnevolotsk political prison, Perm, Tomsk, Krasnoyarsk, Yakutsk, Irkutsk). Thus, we see that “the portrait of a character predominates in chapters whose main goal is to create a picture of the life of a particular group, layer of people (landowners, court workers, teachers). All these paintings are given to us refracted through the prism of the author’s personality, respectively, each of them adds features to the image of a contemporary. ;

We consider it necessary to draw attention to another interesting feature of Korolenko’s narrative. The principle underlying his work in general and “The History of My Contemporary” in particular is the desire to reproduce. events from the point of view of “then perception”. We will talk about the problem of comparing time plans a little lower, but here we will highlight this technique insofar as it is a means of expressing the author’s subjectivity.

“Talking about past years, Korolenko always clearly distinguishes between his current position and the position of his autobiographical hero at this stage of his development. The author's point of view may complement or clarify the point of view of a “contemporary”, but it does not at all replace it. What is remarkable is that Korolenko never tries to hide his “back then” views and beliefs, even if they run counter to his modern thoughts. He can only allow himself to express his point of view about his former self. Describing the first year of study at the Technological Institute, talking about the fact that he had to starve, Korolenko says casually: “In essence, it was a slow death from hunger, only extended for for a long time“(vol. 6, p. 90), “But I was stupid then and didn’t notice it...” The author is not ashamed of even his most ridiculous, ridiculous mistakes and delusions, laughing at his susceptibility to literary motives and types. In an effort to find words “that would come closest to the phenomena of life” (vol. 5, p. 295), the “contemporary” even finds a definition for his suit of cheap fabric, sewn for a trip to the capital by a provincial tailor: “Leaving in On the fashion side, I felt dressed to the nines, “quite simply, but tastefully”” (vol. 6, p. 11). The author puts these words in quotation marks, showing that this is the definition chosen by a young man who wants to look good, while despising fashion and not having the means to do so. After a remark from ladies I know about the unsuitability of such a costume for the capital, Korolenko speaks about his feelings: “And I was left with a terrible melancholy of loneliness in my heart and an unpleasant consciousness,

that my “unfashionable, but simple and elegant” costume attracts ironic attention...” (vol. 6, p. 14). The author again puts the description of the costume in quotation marks. Of course, the person who wrote these lines no longer thinks so, and with these quotation marks he emphasizes the difference between himself and this young man, so young and naive.

In the same vein, the author recalls his youthful vivid impressions of being a student, reaching the point of enthusiasm. In “The History of My Contemporary,” a work undoubtedly based on real facts, there are passages that speak of obviously fictitious events. First of all, these are the dreams of the author. So the young man is carried away by his thoughts on a trip on a steam locomotive in the role of a “smart and strong” worker-machinist, seeing a third-year trainee, or experiences temporary admiration for the image of Lazovsky, “the dance class Mephistopheles, who creates scandals with such beautiful carelessness” (vol. 6, p. 63 ). Such passages are characteristic of the hero’s youth.

In the study, we also pay attention to the methods of psychological depiction of heroes using the example of the owner of the proofreading bureau Studensky.

So, the main component of “The History of My Contemporary” is artistic portraits people who helped the writer form his views and beliefs.

Fourth paragraph. “Features of the chronotope of “The History of My Contemporary”.” In the work we see several types of chronotopes interconnected and flowing into each other. The chronotope of an autobiographical memoir-novel has several components: calendar time (a variety of it is represented as biographical), event time (historical, everyday time, chronotope of the road, meetings), perceptual time (the author's chronotope). We give a brief description of the main types of chronotopes identified by Bakhtin (biographical, evental, historical, author's chronotope, everyday, road chronotope). The biographical chronotope predominates in the work under study. So

As the narrative is about a truly completed past, the author uses the techniques of prospection and retrospection, thus focusing attention on one or another stage of the hero’s life. Thus, V. G. Korolenko’s attention dwells for a long time on education, youth, the process of growing up as a “contemporary”.

The flow of biographical time stops, and we become acquainted with both the hero’s reading circle and his friends, thus falling into the spiritual atmosphere of entire generations.

* The hero’s reading range allows the author to more deeply imagine the formation of his worldview and his formation as a person. In “The History of My Contemporary” there is a chapter partially devoted to a work of fiction (“Fomka from Sandomierz” and the landowner Dechert”), in which the author shares his childhood immediate impressions of the first book he read in his life. However, children's perception of the book is clarified by the author's opinion. The essay “My First Acquaintance with Dickens,” supplementing Chapter XXIX of the first book, included by the author in the appendices, has a different chronotope structure. Here, undoubtedly, a lot of attention is paid to books and works of art, but their perception is given almost without stopping time. Perhaps this form was dictated by the specifics of the hero’s reading in that period: the writer’s older brother, trying to separate himself from the younger ones, did not allow Korolenko to read his books, only allowing him to change them in the library. The boy began to read on the go. “This manner gave the reading process itself a peculiar and, so to speak, gambling character” (vol. 5, p. 366). The writer notes that such a superficial reading did not allow him to understand the work in all its versatility, allowing him to note only the main characters and the main storyline. However, such shallow reading did not at all form in the hero a careless attitude towards the literary text in the future; on the contrary, having received the opportunity to read the books he wanted, the hero understands the value of this.

Events can be described as occurring in biographical time, following life events, or they can represent

are retrospectives, memories of events that took place in reality, but at the moment of time described in the text, had already ended. The course of action, its distribution in time is connected with the artistic goal set by the author. We have identified some differences in. reflection of the passage of time in “The History of My Contemporary” in passages related to various types of text (narration, description, reasoning). Having analyzed the various chapters of “The History of My Contemporary” from the point of view of the duration of the action in time, we see that the choice of speech means largely depends on the type of text. When choosing one or another means, V. G. Korolenko is guided by his communicative intentions.

In conclusion, the results of the research are summed up, the place of the autobiographical memoir-novel “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko in the history of Russian literature of the 20th century is determined, and ways of further research in this area are outlined.

The main provisions of the dissertation research are reflected in 9 publications of the author:

1. Savelyeva E. S. The concept of man in the work of V. G. Korolenko / E. S. Savelyeva // Epistemology of poetics: artistic semantics and genre syncretism. Intra-university collection of scientific works. Vol. 5. Rostov-on-Don, 2005. pp. 64-70.

2. Savelyeva E. S. Features of the manifestation of author’s subjectivity V. G. Korolenko in the aspect of genre / E. S. Savelyeva // Conceptual problems of literature: artistic cognition. G. Rostov-on-Don, 2006. pp. 198-201.

3. Savelyeva E. S. Portrait-substantive part of the novel-memory of V. G. Korolenko “The History of My Contemporary” and the means of creating an image / E. S. Savelyeva // Epistemology of poetics:

artistic semantics and genre syncretism. Intra-university collection of scientific works. Vol. 6. Rostov-on-Don, 2006. pp. 44-52.

4. Savelyeva E. S. The theme of childhood in the works of A. P. Chekhov and V. G. Korolenko / E. S. Savelyeva // Creativity of A. P. Chekhov. Collection of materials of the International Scientific Conference (correspondence) - XXIII Chekhov Readings in Taganrog. Taganrog, 2007. pp. 28-32.

5. Savelyeva E. S. The concept of man as an expression of historiosophical and aesthetic orientation V. G. Korolenko / E. S. Savelyeva // Historiosophy in Russian literature of the 20th and 19th centuries: traditions and a new view. Materials of the scientific conference - XI Sheshukov readings. Moscow, 2007. pp. 54-58.

6. Savelyeva E. S. Exiled wanderings of V. G. Korolenko - part of the ideological content of “The History of My Contemporary” / E. S. Savelyeva // Conceptual problems of literature: artistic cognition. Rostov-on-Don, 2007. P.274-277.

7. Savelyeva E. S. Features of the reflection of novelistic thinking in “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko / E. S. Savelyeva // Conceptual problems of literature: typology and syncretism of genres. - Rostov-on-Don, 2007. pp. 211-215.

*8. Savelyeva E. S. Psychologism and lyrical expression of images in “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko. Scientific and methodological journal "Bulletin of Kostroma State University named after N. A. Nekrasov." Main issue, No. 1, January-March, 2008. Volume 14). pp. 131-134.

9. Savelyeva E. S. Temporal organization of the autobiographical novel-memoir of V. G. Korolenko “The History of My Contemporary” / E. S. Savelyeva // Epistemology of poetics: artistic semantics and genre syncretism. - Intra-university collection of scientific works. Vol. 8. Rostov-on-Don, 2009. pp. 52-61.

Legend: * indicates work published in a publication recommended by the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation for the publication of basic materials of candidate dissertations.

Savelyeva E. S. “The History of My Contemporary” V. G. Korolenko: Artistic Originality: Abstract. day. ...cand. philologist, science: 01/10/01. Rostov n/d.: Southern Federal University, 2009.24 p.

Signed for publication on 05/08/2009. Format 60x84 1/16. Offset printing. Volume 1.5 conventional oven l. Circulation 100 copies. Order Ns fáí.

Publishing and printing department of Rostov State Pedagogical University 344082, Rostov-on-Don, st. B. Sadovaya, 33

Chapter 1 “The History of My Contemporary” in the context of the era

1. Prerequisites for the appearance of “The History of My Contemporary” in the works of V. G. Korolenko: analyticism as a form of thinking of the writer

2. Korolenko’s historiosophical, value paradigm (orientation) in the embodiment of fate, choice, law, human responsibility and the picture of the world

3. The ideological content of “The History of My Contemporary” and its compositional expression in the novel

Chapter 2 Poetics of “The Stories of My Contemporary”

1. “The History of My Contemporary” in the general typology of Russian autobiographical literature

2. Genre specificity of “The History of My Contemporary”

3. Literary portrait as part of the artistic originality of “The History of My Contemporary”

4. Features of the chronotope “Stories of my contemporary”

Introduction of the dissertation 2009, abstract on philology, Savelyeva, Elena Sergeevna

Currently, in the literature there is a tendency to turn to the problems of classical literature. And now, after many years, the works of writers who created the culture of the Russian people, laid the foundations of the modern Russian language, and participated in historical events are worthy of attention. Undoubtedly, one of these writers is Vladimir Galpktionovich Korolenko, a great humanist, fighter for justice and freedom, author of many artistic and journalistic works, in particular, the memoir-novel “The History of My Contemporary.”

Scientists' research in the field of classical works is carried out in two directions: firstly, these are attempts at a new interpretation of texts that have already become textbooks, studied by many generations of scientists, and secondly, the search for new classical works that have not yet received the attention of the spiders. “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko is undoubtedly one of the works that is insufficiently covered in literary criticism.

Relevance of this study. 1) The novel in question, “The History of My Contemporary,” is considered one of the pinnacle creations in Russian literature, but no special research has been carried out on this work. 2) This study allows us to clearly reflect the analysis of the characteristics of the author’s consciousness, the specifics of its manifestation; since, on the one hand, all scientists and researchers recognize the extreme activation of the author’s personality in autobiographical prose, on the other, this problem has rarely become the subject of special consideration. 3) Addressing this novel by V. G. Korolenko as a work with documentary elements allows, by looking into the past and understanding the problems of the past, to understand one’s own time both from the point of view of literary criticism and from the point of view of history.

The novelty of the dissertation. 1. In a dissertation research, the autobiographical novel-memoir “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko is subjected to such a comprehensive study for the first time. 2. Significantly new judgments about the specifics of this work as a kind of genre symbiosis. We define the genre of “Stories of My Contemporary” as an autobiographical memoir novel. 3. In the literary analysis of the work, we presented for the first time a classification of literary portraits of the novel, and made a number of significant conclusions regarding the architectonics of the work, the features of the image of the characters and the specifics of the chronotope.

The theoretical and methodological basis of the dissertation research is the principles of cultural-historical and comparative-historical research methods, as well as the provisions and concepts developed in the works of M. M. Bakhtin, B, O! Kormap, Yu. M. Lotman, D. S. Likhachev, G. O. Vinokura, V. V. Vshknrpdopya, G. I. Pospelova, G. A. Beloy, B. M. Eikhenbaum, Yu. II. Tynyanova, L. Ya. Ginzburg, S. S. Averyitsev, A. G. Tartakovsky, I. A. Nikolina, A. B. Esin, I. O. Shaitanov and others.

When determining the place of “The History of My Contemporary” in the writer’s work, we studied the works of D. P. Ovsyaiko-Kulikovsky (141), I. D. Shakhovskaya (210), A. V. Khrabrovitsky (196), G. A. Byaly (40 ), and also got acquainted with dissertation research in recent years, dedicated to creativity V. G. Korolenko. These are the works of G. Z. Gorbunova (“Korolenko and Dostoevsky” (56)), S. N. Guskov (“V, G, Korolenko and L. N. Tolstoy: the problem of the writer’s ethical position” (63)), Yu. G Gushchina (“Essay cycle by V. G. Korolenko “In the Hungry Year”: Creative history And genre originality"(64)), N. N. Gushchina (“V. G. Korolenko and literary populism (1870-1880s)” (65)), D. A* Zavelskaya (“Semantic and artistic unity of the text in I works V. G. Korolenko" (79)), I. V. Kochergina ("V. G. Korolenko and literary criticism and journalism of the late 19th century" (102)), P. E. Lyon ("Literary position of V. G. Korolenko" (109)), L. I. Skreminskaya ("West - East" - spiritual and creative quest V. G. Korolenko" (170)), V. R. Tagarinova ("Poetics of stories and essays by V. G * Korolenko" (180)), A. V. Trukhapenko ("Some stylistic features of stories and stories by V. G. Korolenko: (Principles of portraiture and coloristics as a means of expressing the author’s idea)” (184)), O. L. Fetiseiko (“The story “The Artist Alymov” and the unrealized plan of V. G. Korolenko “In a quarrel with a smaller brother”” (192) ).

Having analyzed the focus of these works, we see that the researchers limited themselves to problem-thematic analysis or analysis of the regional specificity of individual works or cycles.

The object of research is the autobiographical novel-memoir “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko.

The novel is recognized as the leading genre of literature in recent centuries. Despite the fact that this genre is the subject of deep thought by writers and attracts the close attention of literary scholars and critics, it still remains a mystery,

Hegel, comparing the novel with the traditional epic, wrote that the novel lacks the “originally poetic state of the world” inherent in the epic; there is a “conflict” between the poetry of the heart and the opposing prose of everyday relationships” and “prosaically ordered reality.” V. G. Belinsky , calling the novel an epic of private life, defined the subject of this genre as follows: “the fate of a private person,” “everyday life.” M. M. Bakhtin expressed similar thoughts in his work “Epic and Novel (On the Methodology of Researching the Novel)” (19). The scientist claims that “the hero of the novel is shown not as ready-made and unchanging, but as becoming, changing, educated by life,” he “combines both positive and negative traits, both low and high, both funny and serious “, The novel shows “live contact” of a person “with an unprepared, emerging modernity”, “more deeply, significantly, sensitively and quickly” than any other genre, “reflects the formation of reality itself.”

The genre of the novel arises and strengthens where there is interest in a person who in one way or another differs from the average image of a citizen, who breaks out of the framework and behavioral stereotypes accepted in society.

The synthetic genre nature of the novel is undeniable. This genre incorporates features of many other genres. “War and Peace” by L. N. Tolstoy, “ gone With the Wind" M. Mitchell, " Quiet Don"M. A. Sholokhov - in these works, which capture not only privacy people, but also events of national-historical history, there are features of an epic. Novels can also embody the meanings characteristic of a parable. According to O. A. Sedakova, “in the depths of a Russian novel there usually lies something similar to a parable” (167, 12). It is also impossible to deny the novel’s involvement in the traditions of hagiography - the hagiographic principle is clearly expressed in the works of Dostoevsky and Leskov.

As a genre prone to synthetics, the novel, in contrast to other, less complex genres (short story, essay, tale) that preceded it, operated in various limited areas of comprehension art world, turned out to be able to bring you closer!” literature with life in its diversity and complexity, inconsistency and richness. This genre is capable of not only combining with relaxed freedom the substantive principles of many genres, both serious and humorous, but also transforming their structural properties.

The most important feature of the novel is the author’s close attention to surrounding the heroes microenvironment in which they operate, live, and communicate. Without recreating the microenvironment, it is very difficult for a writer to reveal the inner world of a character. Novels, focused on a person's connections with a reality close to him and, as a rule, giving preference to internal action, have become a kind of center of literature. They seriously influenced all other genres, even transformed them. In the words of M. M. Bakhtin, the novelization of verbal art has occurred: when the novel comes into literature, other genres are sharply modified, “to a greater or lesser extent Romanized.”

The subject of study is the author, who is also the hero of this work, from the point of view of his role in art organization text, means of expressing the author's position and creating the image of the main character. And although logic requires us to consider the problem in the “author-hero” order, we first consider the problem of the hero, then the author, leaving the traditional order of concepts in the formulation of the topic.

One of the central problems of social thought, artistic creativity and culture has recently become spiritual formation a person, the changes taking place not only in his life, but also in his soul. Here internal action successfully competes with external action, and the consciousness of the hero in its diversity and complexity, with its endless dynamics and psychological nuances, comes to the fore.

The purpose of the dissertation research is to comprehend the theoretical aspects of the problem of the genre of a work with an autobiographical orientation, to determine the place of “The History of My Contemporary” in the context of the work of V. G. Korolenko and to consider the poetics of the memoir-novel.

To do this, the following tasks must be solved:

1) summarize and systematize literary works on the problems of artistic autobiographical literature;

2) comprehend the theoretical aspects of the stated problem;

3) determine the position of the novel “The History of My Contemporary” in the general typology of Russian autobiographical literature and in the works of V. G. Korolenko;

4) consider the features of the genre of the work being studied;

5) explore the system of images, the features of literary portraits of “The History of My Contemporary”, classify them;

6) study the chronotopic structure of the novel.

The structure of the work is determined by the nature of this dissertation research and is organized in accordance with its purpose and objectives. The dissertation consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, and a bibliography. When working with texts, we studied two collected works of V. G. Korolenko: in 9 volumes, 1914, and in 10 volumes, 1954. References in the text of the dissertation are based on the later collected works.

Conclusion of scientific work dissertation on the topic ""The History of My Contemporary" V.G. Korolenko: Artistic Originality"

Conclusions on Chapter 2:

1. Generalization, systematization and analysis of literary works on the problem of the genre nature of artistic autobiography give reason to believe that the genre of autobiography is modern stage its formation is complex, it has the features of confession, chronicle, memoir, and in Russian literature - hagiography, confession and sermon. The main stages in the evolution of the genre: ancient biographies, medieval lives, autobiographies of the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment, autobiographies of the 19th and 20th centuries. The main elements of the specificity of works of this genre are: 1) documentary (to varying degrees); 2) aesthetic significance; 3) identity of the author and narrator, 4) features of the chronotope (fundamentally retrospective organization of the narrative, the principle of double vision),

5) focus on recreating history individual life, 6) some features of poetics, etc.

2. After considering autobiographical genres, the genre of “Stories of My Contemporary” is defined by us as an autobiographical memoir novel. The synthesis of various genres in the autobiographical prose of V. G. Korolenko, in our opinion, most accurately confirms the stated thesis about the orientation of this author towards the great epic form and novelistic thinking.

3. An important part of “The History of My Contemporary”, which carries a significant semantic and organizing load for the narrative, are literary portraits that make up a broad, detailed picture of life in Russia in the 60-80s of the 19th century. In our research, we distinguish portraits-histories, portraits-memories and portraits-types. We base the classification on the passage of time in the portrait relative to the main narrative.

4. The chronotope of an autobiographical memoir-novel has several components: calendar time (a variety of it is represented as biographical), event time (historical, everyday time, chronotope of the road, meetings), perceptual time (the author’s chronotope). Having analyzed the various chapters of “The History of My Contemporary” from the point of view of the duration of the action in time, we see that the choice of speech means largely depends on the type of text. When choosing one or another means, V. G. Korolenko is guided by his communicative intentions. He achieves the greatest accuracy of description, expressiveness of narration and clarity of logical reasoning. When describing phenomena and objects in the text, imperfective verbs with the meaning of a repetitive and concrete procedural action predominate (example 1. 1 and 1. 2). A type of text such as a narrative is characterized by the use of perfective verbs with the meaning of instant action (example 2.5), or a process limited in time (2.6), when we are talking about isolated cases, or imperfective verbs with the meaning of permanent , ordinary action (2.2), when we are talking about ordinary and repeated events. In reasoning, the temporal structure depends to the greatest extent on the communicative intentions of the speaker and is subordinate to the general logical structure of the text.

Conclusion

The works of Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko, which have great weight in the Russian literary heritage, depict historical memory Russia, the spiritual creation of its best representatives, unbreakable connection generations.

The creative heritage of V. G. Korolenko is large and varied - here are rare variations of small genres (pictures, pages, excerpts), and allegorical (fairy tales, legends, fantasies), journalism and works belonging to the genres of documentary and documentary-biographical prose (portraits , letters, memoirs, observations, stories, essays, novellas). However, everywhere - both in journalism and in everyday life - a fiction writer, a prose writer with his own style is visible - in the traditions of the classics, but at the same time sharply modern, propagandistic, oratorical.

The autobiographical novel-memoir “The History of My Contemporary,” which is the pinnacle of the writer’s entire work, is a work of a complex genre that includes most of the above. That is why “The History of My Contemporary” is the final work of V. G. Korolenko.

The History of My Contemporary” occupies a central place in the work of V. G. Korolenko, absorbing everything he wrote before it and illuminating part of the author’s life framed by a wide panorama of the life of society in the 60-80s. XIX century.

At the center of the analyzed work is a creative personality. Fate outstanding personality has attracted the attention of writers throughout the history of literature. The image of the hero embodies aesthetic and social ideals artist. Ideals are a moving category, developing, like the person himself. The author's personality is an active principle.

In the novel under study, an artistic image of a creative personality is created. Even traditional methods of creating a hero’s image for biographical storytelling, such as a biographical element, portrait characteristics, and a system of leitmotifs, make it possible to accurately recreate the hero’s image, and psychological characteristics make it convincing and reliable. The author managed to show the complex interaction between a creative person and the environment through a biographical, cultural and historical context.

Literary portraits are an important part of “The History of My Contemporary.” We are creating a classification that divides the literary portraits of “The History of My Contemporary” into historical portraits, memory portraits and type portraits. We base the classification on the passage of time in the portrait relative to the main narrative.

Artistic time and artistic space are essential forms of creating the image of a hero. The basis of the plot is part of the hero’s life - from early childhood to his arrival in Nizhny Novgorod. We analyze the various chapters of “The History of My Contemporary” from the point of view of the duration of the action in time and come to the conclusion that the choice of speech means largely depends on the type of text. When choosing one or another means, V. G. Korolenko is guided by his communicative intentions. He achieves the greatest accuracy of description, expressiveness of narration and clarity of logical reasoning.

Nowadays, there is no doubt that it is necessary to turn more often to works of classical literature for many reasons. Many works that have been undeservedly overlooked by literary scholars and the public raise problems that are not alien to modern times. Works with documentary elements help a person, by looking into the past and understanding the problems of past years, to understand his own time. Turning to “The History of My Contemporary” as a work of a major genre allows us to evaluate some trends in the modern literary process. It is also important that the works of the classics are highly ideological, and by reading them, a person increases his cultural level.

Let us outline the range of problems for further research. Firstly, these are questions related to the national idea, very clearly expressed in “The History of My Contemporary.” Secondly, these are the problems of researching a national autobiographical novel written by representatives different cultures and nations, comparison of works by different authors.

Thus, we assert that “The History of My Contemporary” by V. G. Korolenko, being a highly moral work reflecting the essential features of the past, is modern in ideological orientation and should be present in the reading circle of the modern reader, and is also of interest to researchers of Russian literature of the turn of the 19th century -XX centuries.

List of scientific literature Savelyeva, Elena Sergeevna, dissertation on the topic "Russian literature"

1. Averin B.V. Personality and creativity of V.G. Korolenko // Collection. Op.: In 5 volumes. M., 1989. T. 1.S. 5-22.

2. Averin B.V. Novels of V.V. Nabokov in the context of Russian autobiographical prose and poetry: Author's abstract. dis. for the job application Doctoral degrees Philol. Sci. St. Petersburg, 1999. 32 p.

3. Averintsev S.S. Plutarch and ancient biography // Averintsev S.S. image of antiquity. St. Petersburg, 2004. pp. 225-479.

4. Azbukin V.N. Literary-critical activity of Russian writers of the 19th century: Textbook. allowance. Kazan, 1989. 228 p.

5. Allahverdov V. M. Psychology of art. Essay on secret emotional impact works of art. St. Petersburg, 2001. 201 p.

6. Andronikov I. L. Collection. cit.: In 3 vols. M., 1980. T. 2. P. 370-378.

7. Andronikova M.I. From prototype to image. On the problem of portraiture in literature and cinema. M., 1974. 200 p.

8. Arefieva I. T. Education of Russian Symbolist writers as a historical

Many years have passed since the reader of the first volume of “The History of My Contemporary” parted with its hero, and many events lay between this new past and present. This distance from the subject of the story has its disadvantages, but there are also good aspects. In the foggy distances, perhaps many details disappear that once came to the fore in a closer perspective. But the prospect itself is expanding. What is retained in memory appears on a wider horizon, in new relationships.

I finished the first volume in 1905, during the first explosions of the Russian revolution. Now that it has reached its turning points, I turn with particular interest the gaze of memory to the distant path of the past, “dusty and foggy,” on which the figure of “my contemporary” is visible. Perhaps the reader will want to look with some sympathy at this already familiar figure and at the same time think how many premonitions this generation had, whose conscious life began amid the struggle with the system that had finally passed, and ends among the ruins of this system, covering the horizon of the future. And how much more should this future capture from the collapse of old mistakes and difficult-to-eradicate habits!

Part one

First student years

I. In the pink mist

This mood began for me back in Rivne, on the morning when the postman handed me a package with a stamp Institute of Technology, addressed to my name. With my heart beating I opened it and took it out letterhead with my last name written at the top. The director of the Technological Institute, Ermakov, informed so-and-so that he had been accepted into the first year and was required to appear by August fifteenth.

When I looked around after that, it seemed to me that in those few minutes a whole day had passed: before the postman arrived it was yesterday, now a new today has arrived. I definitely slept through the night and woke up not only different, but a little bit in another world... This feeling came from thick gray paper with printed text and Ermakov’s signature. And when I rushed through the streets after that, it seemed to me that the houses, the fences, and the people I met also looked at me differently. After all, in fact, for the first time since the creation of the world, they too see... student so and so.

I did not part with the “notice” for several days. Sometimes, alone, I took it out and re-read it each time with new pleasure, as if it were not a dry official form, but a poem. And indeed - a poem: a break with the old world, a call for something new, desirable and bright... “Director Ermakov” is calling. In my imagination, this surname was associated with something very hard, almost granite (probably from the Siberian Ermak) and at the same time - unattainably sublime and intelligent. And this Ermakov is waiting for me on the fifteenth of August. He needs me to fulfill his high purpose...

The mood was stupid, and I, of course, realized that it was stupid: Ermakov’s very signature was printed. He doesn’t even sign such notices himself, but the office sends out hundreds of them. I knew this, but this knowledge did not change my mood. Knew I'm smart and felt stupidly. At the very time I was instilling in myself these sober truths, my mouth involuntarily opened to my ears. And I had to turn away so that people would not see this idiotic smile and would not guess from it that Ermakov was calling me, who personally needed me by the fifteenth of August...

With youthful egoism, I somehow did not take part in my mother’s worries about my equipment. She pawned her pension book somewhere, sold some things, asked for loans where she could, and finally saved something like two hundred rubles. After this there were long meetings with the tailor Shimko.

Tailor Shimko was a short, stocky Jew, with a wide face, on which thin lips and a pointed nose gave the impression of an almost gloomy comic. While father was alive, we always laughed at Shimk, sharpening our wit at his appearance and his supposed tricks. When my father died and my mother was left without funds, he came to her, critically examined the condition of our suits and said seriously:

Well, it's time to sew one overcoat and two uniforms.

You know, Shimko, that now I have no money, and I don’t know what else will happen,” the mother answered sadly.

Well,” Shimko objected, “you don’t have money, but you have children... Isn’t that money?..

And he worked for us again, without stuttering about payment deadlines and never haggling, as had happened before.

Now he has launched his activities in our apartment. Having inquired whether I wanted him to sew “according to the latest fashion,” and having learned that I despise the latest fashion, he even grunted with pleasure and gave full rein to his creative imagination. He soaked and steamed the materials, took measurements, cut, tried on, sewed, and finally I came out of his hands equipped, not particularly smartly, but cheaply. He sewed me a summer suit from some very durable and tough material with yellow miniature bouquets on a brown field. In addition, he sewed another coat. It seemed to me vaguely that the durable material with bouquets gives the idea more of upholstery than of a suit for the capital, and the coat resembles a Spanish cloak or almaviva...

But on this score I was unpretentious and carefree. Fashion aside, I felt dressed to the nines, “quite simply, but tastefully.”

Alas! Subsequently, this flight of creative imagination of honest Shimka gave me many bitter and unpleasant moments...

Suchkov, who had already lived in the capital for a year, came for the holidays, and, of course, I bombarded him with questions. For some reason he was stingy with his stories, but still I learned that the institute is not at all like a gymnasium, the professors are not at all like teachers, and the students are not gymnasium students. Complete freedom... No one monitors attendance at lectures... And there are wonderful personalities among the students. You might mistake someone else for a professor. And what disputes! About what subjects! You need to read and prepare a lot just to understand what we are talking about...

Casually and as if in passing, he told me that he stayed for various reasons in the first year, and that means we will go together again.

In the middle of these holidays I turned eighteen, but it seemed to me that I had far outgrown the little world around me. Here he is, all here, as if on a flat plate, worrying from prison to post office, familiar, prosaic and hateful. On one of my last evenings, when I was looking with a farewell glance at the public walking along the highway street, the face of the official Mikhalovsky, whom I once considered “ famous poet" He had a large cigar in his teeth, and its light flared up and illuminated a surprisingly uninteresting, flat face, with bulging, expressionless eyes. Just recently this man seemed to me surrounded by a poetic aura. And how many others seemed to be superior beings only because they were adults, and I was a boy. Now I have grown up, and the small little world has narrowed and diminished... The former smart people seemed either stupid or too ordinary... Who should I put on top now, before whom or what should I bow? Where are the people here who know and can indicate the highest in life, what the young soul strives for?.. Which of them even thinks about this highest, seeks it, yearns, dreams... No one, no one!

I developed an arrogant belief that I was perhaps the smartest in this city. My standard was this: I can understand all the people flashing before me in this stream, swaying like water in a plate, from the barrier to the post office and back. I know everything they know, everything anyone needs to know. And they have no idea what thoughts about them and what dreams are wandering in my head.

Current page: 1 (book has 28 pages in total)

Vladimir Galaktionovich Korolenko
The story of my contemporary. Book one

V. G. Korolenko. Collected works in ten volumes.

Volume five. The story of my contemporary M., GIHL, 1954

Preparation of text and notes by S. V. Korolenko

OCR Lovetskaya T. Yu.

From the author

But earlier I wanted to draw the attention of readers to the first movements of the emerging and growing consciousness. I knew that it would be difficult for me to concentrate on these distant memories while the present was roaring with the sound of an approaching thunderstorm, but I had no idea how difficult it would be.

I am not writing the history of my time, but only the history of one life at this time, and I want the reader to first become familiar with the prism in which it was reflected... And this is only possible in a sequential story. Childhood and youth form the content of this first part.

One more note. These notes are not a biography, because I was not particularly concerned about the completeness of biographical information; not confession, because I do not believe in either the possibility or the usefulness of public confession; not a portrait, because it is difficult to draw your own portrait with guarantee of likeness. Every reflection differs from reality in that it is a reflection; the reflection is obviously incomplete - even more so. It always, so to speak, more clearly reflects the chosen motives, and therefore often, despite all the truthfulness, is more attractive, more interesting and, perhaps, purer than reality.

In my work, I strived for the most complete historical truth, often sacrificing to it the beautiful or striking features of artistic truth. There will be nothing here that I have not encountered in reality, that I have not experienced, felt, or seen. And yet I repeat: I am not trying to give a portrait of myself. Here the reader will find only features from the “history of my contemporary”, a person known to me closer than all other people of my time... 1
The preface was written at the end of 1905 and preceded the first chapters of “The History of My Contemporary,” which appeared in the January book of “Modern Notes” in 1906.

Part one
Early childhood

I
First impressions of life

I remember myself early, but my first impressions are scattered, like brightly lit islands among colorless emptiness and fog.

The earliest of these memories is a strong visual impression of a fire. I could have gone into my second year then 2
I could have gone into my second year then– Vladimir Galaktionovich was born on July 15 (old style) 1853 in Zhitomir, Volyn province.

But I can still clearly see the flames above the roof of the barn in the yard, the strangely illuminated walls of a large stone house in the middle of the night and its windows gleaming with flames. I remember myself, wrapped up warmly, in someone’s arms, among a group of people standing on the porch. From this vague crowd, memory singles out the presence of the mother, while the father, lame, leaning on a stick, climbs the stairs of the stone house in the courtyard opposite, and it seems to me that he is walking into the fire. But that doesn't scare me. I am very interested in the firemen's helmets flashing like firebrands across the yard, then one fire barrel at the gate and a high school student entering the gate with a shortened leg and high heel. I didn’t seem to experience any fear or anxiety; I didn’t establish any connections between the phenomena. For the first time in my life, so much fire, fireman’s helmets and a high school student with a short leg fell into my eyes, and I carefully examined all these objects against the deep background of the darkness of the night. I don’t remember the sounds: the whole picture only silently shimmers in my memory with floating reflections of a crimson flame.

I then remember several completely insignificant cases when they held me in their arms, calmed my tears or amused me. It seems to me that I remember, but very vaguely, my first steps... As a child, my head was large, and when I fell, I often hit it on the floor. One time it was on the stairs. I was in great pain and cried loudly until my father consoled me with a special treatment. He beat the step of the stairs with a stick, and this gave me satisfaction. Probably I was then in a period of fetishism and imagined an evil and hostile will in the wooden board. And so they beat her for me, but she can’t even leave... Of course, these words very roughly translate my feelings at that time, but I clearly remember the board and the seemingly expression of her submission under the blows.

Subsequently, the same sensation was repeated in a more complex form. I was already somewhat larger. It was an unusually bright and warm moonlit evening. This is actually the first evening that I remember in my life. My parents had gone somewhere, my brothers must have been sleeping, the nanny had gone to the kitchen, and I was left with only one footman, who bore the dissonant nickname Gandylo. The door from the hallway to the courtyard was open, and from somewhere, from the moonlit distance, came the rumble of wheels along the paved street. And for the first time I also identified the rumble of the wheels in my mind as a special phenomenon, and for the first time I did not sleep for so long... I was scared - probably during the day they were talking about thieves. It seemed to me that our yard in the moonlight was very strange and that a “thief” would certainly enter through the open door from the yard. It was as if I knew that the thief was a man, but at the same time he seemed to me not quite a man, but some kind of humanoid mysterious creature that would do me harm just by his sudden appearance. This made me suddenly cry loudly.

I don’t know by what logic, but the footman Gandylo again brought my father’s stick and took me out to the porch, where I, perhaps in connection with a previous episode of the same kind, began to firmly beat the step of the stairs. And this time it again brought satisfaction; My cowardice passed so much that a couple more times I fearlessly went out alone, without Gandyl, and again beat up an imaginary thief on the stairs, reveling in the peculiar feeling of my courage. The next morning, I enthusiastically told my mother that yesterday, when she was not there, a thief came to us, whom Gandyl and I soundly beat. The mother condescendingly agreed. I knew that there was no thief and that my mother knew it. But I loved my mother very much at that moment because she did not contradict me. It would be hard for me to give up that imaginary creature, which I at first feared, and then positively “felt”, under a strange moonlight, between my stick and the step of the stairs. It was not a visual hallucination, but there was some kind of rapture from one’s victory over fear...

The trip to Chisinau to my paternal grandfather still remains an island in my memory... 3
...to my paternal grandfather...– Afanasy Yakovlevich Korolenko is the grandfather of Vladimir Galaktionovich. Born in 1787, died around 1860 in Bessarabia. Served in the customs department. He was married to a Polish woman, Eva Malska.

From this trip, I remember crossing a river (I think it was the Prut), when our carriage was installed on a raft and, smoothly swaying, separated from the shore, or the shore separated from it - I still did not distinguish this. At the same time, a detachment of soldiers was crossing the river, and, I remember, the soldiers were sailing in twos and threes on small square rafts, which, it seems, does not happen when crossing troops... I looked at them with curiosity, and they looked at our carriage and they said something incomprehensible to me... It seems that this crossing was in connection with the Sevastopol war... 4
...in connection with the Sevastopol War– Eastern (or Crimean) War of 1853–1856.

That same evening, shortly after crossing the river, I experienced the first feeling of sharp disappointment and resentment... It was dark inside the spacious traveling carriage. I was sitting in the arms of someone in front, and suddenly my attention was attracted by a reddish dot that flashed and then faded in the corner, in the place where my father was sitting. I started laughing and reached out to her. Mother said something warning, but I so wanted to get to know an interesting object or creature better that I began to cry. Then my father moved a small red star towards me, gently hiding under the ashes. I reached out to her with the index finger of my right hand; for some time it did not give in, but then it suddenly flared up brighter, and a sharp bite suddenly burned me. I think that in terms of the power of impression this could now only be equaled by a strong and unexpected bite from a poisonous snake hiding, for example, in a bouquet of flowers. Ogonyok seemed to me deliberately cunning and evil. Two or three years later, when I remembered this episode, I ran to my mother, began to tell her and began to cry. These were again tears of resentment...

The first bath caused me a similar disappointment. The river made a charming impression on me: the small greenish waves of swell that burst under the walls of the bathhouse, and the way they played with sparkles, fragments of heavenly blue and bright pieces of a seemingly broken bathhouse, were new, strange and beautiful to me. All this seemed fun, lively, cheerful, attractive and friendly to me, and I begged my mother to quickly carry me into the water. And suddenly - an unexpected and sharp impression of either cold or burn... I cried loudly and struggled so much in my mother’s arms that she almost dropped me. This time my bathing did not take place. While my mother splashed in the water with a pleasure that was incomprehensible to me, I sat on the bench, sulking, looking at the crafty swell, which continued to play just as temptingly with fragments of the sky and the bathhouse, and was angry... At whom? It looks like it's on the river.

These were the first disappointments: I rushed towards nature with the confidence of ignorance, she responded with spontaneous dispassion, which seemed to me deliberately hostile...

Another one of those primary sensations when a natural phenomenon for the first time remains in consciousness isolated from the rest of the world, as special and sharply completed, with its basic properties. This is a memory of my first walk in a pine forest. Here I was positively fascinated by the lingering noise of the forest tops, and I stopped rooted to the spot on the path. No one noticed this, and our entire society moved on. The path, several fathoms ahead, dropped steeply downwards, and I watched as at this break first the legs, then the torsos, then the heads of our company disappeared. I waited with an eerie feeling for Uncle Heinrich’s bright white hat to disappear last. 5
...uncle Henry– Genrikh Iosifovich Skurevich – lawyer, forensic investigator (“Uncle Genrikh” in the story “At Night”). Died in the early 70s.

The tallest of my mother’s brothers, and finally was left alone... I seem to have felt that “alone in the forest” was, in essence, scary, but, like someone under a spell, I could neither move nor utter a sound and only listened now a quiet whistle, now a ringing, now a vague conversation and sighs of the forest, merging into a drawn-out, deep, endless and meaningful harmony, which simultaneously captured the general hum, and the individual voices of living giants, and the swaying, and quiet creaking of red trunks... All this as if it was penetrating into me with a captivating mighty wave... I ceased to feel separate from this sea of life, and it was so strong that when they missed me and my mother’s brother returned for me, I stood in the same place and did not respond... Who approached my uncle, in a light suit and a straw hat, I saw like a stranger, an unfamiliar person in a dream...

Subsequently, this minute often arose in my soul, especially in hours of fatigue, as a prototype of deep but living peace... Nature tenderly beckoned the child at the beginning of his life with its endless, incomprehensible mystery, as if promising somewhere in infinity the depth of knowledge and the bliss of the solution ...

How, however, rudely our words express our feelings... In the soul there is also a lot of incomprehensible speech that cannot be expressed in rude words, like the speech of nature... And this is exactly where the soul and nature are one...

All these are disparate, separate impressions of semi-conscious existence, seemingly unconnected by anything other than personal sensation. The last of them is moving to a new apartment... And not even the move (I don’t remember it, just as I don’t remember the previous apartment), but again the first impression of the “new house”, of the “new yard and garden”. It all seemed like a new world to me, but it’s strange: then this memory falls out of my memory. I remembered about it only a few years later, and when I remembered, I was even surprised, because it seemed to me at that time that we lived in this house forever and that in general there were no major changes in the world. The main background of my impressions over several childhood years is an unconscious confidence in the complete completeness and immutability of everything that surrounded me. If I had a clear understanding of creation, I would probably say then that my father (whom I knew was lame) was created with a stick in his hand, that God created my grandmother precisely as a grandmother, that my mother was always just as beautiful a blue-eyed woman with a brown braid that even the barn behind the house appeared lopsided and with green lichen on the roof. It was a quiet, steady increase in vitality, smoothly carrying me away along with the surrounding world, and the shores of the outside vast world, along which one could notice movement, were not visible to me then... And I myself, it seemed, had always been the same boy with great head, and the older brother 6
…Older brother– Yulian Galaktionovich Korolenko. Born February 16, 1851, died November 25, 1904. He studied first at the Zhitomir and then at the Rivne gymnasium, but did not complete the course. In the mid-70s he moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked as a proofreader. He had acquaintances with participants in the populist movement and provided them with some services. On March 4, 1879, he was arrested along with his brothers and imprisoned in the Lithuanian Castle, but on May 11 of the same year he was released and left in St. Petersburg under the secret supervision of the police. Subsequently, he lived in Moscow, where for many years he worked as a proofreader for Russkie Vedomosti and delivered notes to this newspaper for the Moscow Chronicle department. Yulian Galaktionovich had literary abilities. IN early youth he was interested in writing poetry, translations and correspondent activities (see in this volume Chapter XXIX “My older brother is becoming a writer”). Together with Vladimir Galaktionovich (under the common signature Cor-o), he translated Michelet’s book “Loiseau” (“Bird”, published by N.V. Vernadsky, St. Petersburg, 1878). Vladimir Galaktionovich appreciated his brother’s literary abilities and subsequently tried to encourage him to more serious literary work. In one of his letters in 1886, V.G. wrote to his brother: “The question comes to me, why don’t you add literature to your studies...” “I still can’t forget that the first impulses of thought that directed me along this path, I received it from you, you walked in this direction ahead of me for a very long time, and I remember very well how some of your thoughts, your arguments in the heated “Kharaluga” disputes raised in me whole strings of new ideas. Your literary abilities are undeniable, and I think now you can still use them.” However, having left quite early literary hobbies, Yulian Galaktionovich never returned to them.

He was somewhat taller than me, and the youngest 7
…Jr– Illarion Galaktionovich Korolenko (his family nickname was “Pepper”, “Pepper”). Born October 21, 1854, died November 25, 1915. He studied at the Rivne real gymnasium, and then at the St. Petersburg construction school. In his youth he was engaged in proofreading work. He was preparing to “go among the people” and for this purpose he studied locksmithing. In 1879, at the same time as Vladimir Galaktionovich, he was arrested and deported to Glazov, Vyatka province, where he served administrative exile for five years. While living in Glazov, he was engaged in metalwork, working in a workshop he and a friend organized (see about this, book II “Stories of my contemporary”, chapter “Life in Glazov”). Upon returning from exile at the end of 1884, he lived in Nizhny Novgorod, working as a cashier at a steamship pier. Subsequently, he was an inspector at the Northern Insurance Company, and therefore traveled a lot. By the way, he lived in Astrakhan, was acquainted with N. G. Chernyshevsky, whom he helped in compiling an index to his translation “ General history» Weber. Through Illarion Galaktionovich, V.G. Korolenko met Chernyshevsky. He also lived in Siberia, where he had many connections among political exiles. Last years spent his life in the Caucasus, in Dzhankhot, near Gelendzhik. Vladimir Galaktionovich was especially friendly with his brother Illarion from a very early age; Subsequently, he tried to reflect his image in two stories dedicated to childhood memories - “At Night” and “Paradox”.

Below... And this mutual relationship was supposed to remain forever... We sometimes said: “when we are big,” or: “when we die,” but it was a stupid phrase, empty, without living content...

One morning my younger brother, who both fell asleep and got up before me, came to my bed and said with a special expression in his voice:

- Get up, quickly... What will I show you!

- What's happened?

- You'll see. Hurry up, I won't wait.

And he went out into the yard again with the air of a serious man who did not want to waste time. I hastily dressed and followed him out. It turned out that some men unknown to us had completely destroyed our front porch. What remained of it was a pile of boards and various wooden rots, and the exit door strangely hung high above the ground. And most importantly, under the door there was a deep wound made of peeling plaster, dark logs and piles... The impression was sharp, partly painful, but even more striking. The brother stood motionless, deeply interested, and followed with his eyes every movement of the carpenters. I joined his silent contemplation, and soon my sister joined us both 8
...my sister also joined.– V. G. Korolenko had two sisters. The eldest of them, Maria Galaktionovna (Vladimir Galaktionovich called her “Machine”), was born on October 7, 1856, died on April 8, 1917. She graduated from the Catherine Institute in Moscow, then studied obstetric courses in St. Petersburg. She married a student at the Military Surgical Academy, Nikolai Aleksandrovich Loshkarev, and in 1879 followed him into exile to Krasnoyarsk. Upon returning from exile, the Loshkarev family lived for several years in Nizhny Novgorod.
The second sister of V. G. Korolenko, Evelina Galaktionovna, was born on January 20, 1861, died in September 1905. She studied at the gymnasium and then completed obstetric courses in St. Petersburg. When in 1879 almost all members of the Korolenko family were sent into exile, Evelina Galaktionovna, in need of income, took up proofreading (a common job in the Korolenko family) and in 1882 married a fellow worker, Mikhail Efimovich Nikitin.

And so we stood for a long time, saying nothing and not moving. Three or four days later, a new porch was ready in place of the old one, and it positively seemed to me that the physiognomy of our house had completely changed. The new porch was clearly “attached”, while the old one seemed to be an organic part of our venerable integral house, like the nose or eyebrows of a person.

And most importantly, the first impression of the “wrong side” and the fact that under this smoothly planed and painted surface there are hidden damp, rotten piles and gaping voids was deposited in my soul...

II
My father 9
My father– Galaktion Afanasyevich Korolenko. Born on December 26, 1810 in the city of Letichev, Podolsk province. He died on July 31, 1868 in Rivne. Vladimir Galaktionovich reproduced some features of his father in the image of a judge in the story “In Bad Society.”

According to family legend, our family descended from some Mirgorod Cossack colonel 10
...Mirgorod Cossack colonel.– In the Korolenko family archive there is a copy of an ancient document, from which it is clear that the Mirgorod Cossack colonel mentioned here was called Ivan Korol. Lived in the 17th century.

Received coat of arms nobility from the Polish kings. After my grandfather's death, my father, who was traveling to the funeral, brought back an intricate seal that depicted a boat with two dog heads at the bow and stern and a battlemented tower in the middle. When one day we children asked what it was, my father replied that it was our “coat of arms” and that we had the right to seal our letters with it, while other people did not have this right. This thing is called in Polish rather strangely: “Korabl i Lodzia” (ark and boat), but what the meaning of this is, the father himself cannot explain to us; perhaps it doesn’t make any sense... But there is also a coat of arms, so it’s called more simply: “pchła na bęnbenku hopki tnie” 1
The flea dances on the drum.

And it makes more sense, because the Cossacks and the gentry were severely bitten by fleas during their campaigns... And, taking a pencil, he vividly sketched on paper a flea dancing on a drum, surrounding it with a shield, a sword and all the armorial attributes. He drew decently, and we laughed. Thus, to the very first idea of our noble “Kleynods”, my father added a shade of ridicule, and it seems to me that he did this deliberately. My great-grandfather, according to my father, was a regimental clerk, my grandfather was a Russian official, like my father. It seems they never owned serf souls and lands... My father never sought to restore his hereditary noble rights, and when he died, we found ourselves “sons of a court councilor”, with the rights of a placeless serving nobility, without any real connections with the nobility , yes, it seems, and with any other one.

The image of my father is preserved in my memory quite clearly: a man of average height, with a slight tendency to be overweight. As an official of the time, he shaved carefully; his facial features were delicate and beautiful: an aquiline nose, large brown eyes and lips with strongly curved upper lines 11
...with strongly curved top lines.– Not a single portrait of Galaktion Afanasyevich exists; According to family tradition, he was never photographed.

They said that in his youth he looked like Napoleon the First, especially when he put on a Napoleonic official cocked hat. But it was difficult for me to imagine Napoleon lame, and my father always walked with a stick and slightly dragged his left leg...

There was always an expression of some hidden sadness and concern on his face. Only occasionally did it clear up. Sometimes he would gather us in his office, let us play and crawl around, draw pictures, tell funny jokes and fairy tales. Probably, in the soul of this man there was a large reserve of complacency and laughter: he even gave his teachings a semi-humorous form, and at those moments we loved him very much. But these glimpses became less and less frequent over the years, the natural gaiety was increasingly overshadowed by melancholy and care. In the end, he was only enough to somehow survive our upbringing, and in more conscious years we no longer had any inner closeness with our father... So he went to his grave, little known to us, his children. And only long later, when the years of youthful carelessness had passed, I collected feature by feature that I could about his life, and the image of this deeply unhappy man came to life in my soul - both more dear and more familiar than before.

He was an official. The objective history of his life was therefore preserved in the “service records”. Born in 1810, in 1826 he became a scribe... Died in 1868 with the rank of court councilor... Here is a meager canvas, on which, however, the patterns of all human life were embroidered... Hopes, expectations, glimpses of happiness, disappointment... Among the yellowed papers, one remained , actually unnecessary later, but which my father saved as a memory. This is a semi-official letter from Prince Vasilchikov 12
Vasilchikov I.I. – Kiev, Volyn and Podolsk governor-general in 1852–1862.

Regarding the appointment of my father as a district judge in the city of Zhitomir. “This court,” writes Prince Vasilchikov, “on the occasion of the accession of a magistrate to it, taking on a more extensive, and therefore more important, range of actions, requires a presiding officer who, fully comprehending his purpose, would give the legal proceedings a satisfactory start.” 13
“...gave the legal proceedings a satisfactory start.”– City magistrates were judicial and administrative institutions whose court had jurisdiction over all criminal and civil cases that arose between merchants and bourgeois class. During the General Government of Prince. Vasilchikov, magistrates in all cities of the South-Western Territory, except Kyiv, were connected to district courts.

In these types, the prince chooses his father. At the end of the letter, the “nobleman” with great attention enters into the position of a modest official, as a family man, for whom the transfer is associated with inconvenience, but at the same time indicates that the new appointment opens up for him wide views for the future, and asks to come as soon as possible... The last lines were written by the author of the letter in his own hand, and the tone is imbued with respect. It was a modest, now forgotten, failed, but still a reform, and a brilliant nobleman, tyrant and satrap, like all noblemen of that time, who, however, was not devoid of some “good intentions and impulses,” invited a modest official to join his staff, in whom he recognized a new person for a new business...

It was... in 1849, and my father was offered the position of district judge in a provincial town. Twenty years later he died in the same position in a remote provincial town...

So, he was an obvious failure in his career...

For me there is no doubt that this is explained by his quixotic honesty.

Wednesday does not really value exceptions that he does not understand, and therefore worries... Each time at a new place of his father’s service, the same scenes were invariably repeated: “according to time-honored custom,” representatives of different urban classes came to his father with offerings. At first my father refused quite calmly. The next day, the deputations appeared with increased offerings, but the father greeted them rudely, and on the third he unceremoniously drove the “representatives” with a stick, and they crowded at the door with an expression of amazement and fear... Subsequently, having become acquainted with the activities of the father, everyone warmed to him deep respect. Everyone recognized, from the small merchant to the provincial authorities, that there was no such force that would force a judge to bend his soul against his conscience and the law, but... and at the same time they found that if the judge, in addition, accepted moderate “gratitudes,” then it would be clearer, simpler and in general “more human”...

Already during a fairly conscious period of my life, a rather striking episode of this kind occurred. In the district court there was a trial between a wealthy landowner, Count E -sky, and a poor relative, it seems, the widow of his brother. The landowner was a magnate with great connections, funds and influence, which he actively put to use. The widow conducted the process “under the law of poverty”, without paying stamp duties, and everyone predicted her failure, since the case was still complicated, and pressure was put on the court. Before the end of the matter, the count himself appeared with us: his carriage with coats of arms stopped at our modest house two or three times, and a lanky haiduk in livery stuck out at our rickety porch. The first two times the count behaved majestically, but cautiously, and his father only coldly and formally pushed away his approaches. But the third time he probably made a direct proposal. The father, suddenly flaring up, cursed the aristocrat with some indecent word and hit him with a stick. The count, red-faced and enraged, left his father with threats and quickly got into his carriage...

The widow also came to her father, although he did not particularly like these visits. A poor woman, in mourning and with tear-stained eyes, depressed and timid, came to her mother, told her something and cried. It seemed to the poor thing that she still had something to explain to the judge; Probably, these were all unnecessary trifles, which my father just shrugged off and uttered his usual phrase in such cases:

- A! Interpret the patient with the doctor!.. Everything will be done according to the law...

The trial was decided in favor of the widow, and everyone knew that she owed this solely to her father’s firmness... The Senate somehow unexpectedly quickly approved the decision, and the modest widow immediately became one of the richest landowners not only in the district, but, perhaps, in the province.

When she came to our apartment again, this time in a stroller, everyone had difficulty recognizing her as the former modest petitioner. Her mourning was over, she seemed even younger and beamed with joy and happiness. Her father received her very cordially, with the favor that we usually feel towards people who owe us a lot. But when she asked for a “private conversation,” she soon also left the office with a red face and tears in her eyes. The good woman knew that the change in her position depended entirely on the firmness, perhaps even some official heroism, of this modest, lame man... But she herself was unable to express her gratitude to him in any significant way...

This upset her, even offended her. The next day she came to our apartment, when my father was at work and my mother accidentally left the house, and brought various materials and goods with which she littered all the furniture in the living room. By the way, she called her sister and brought her a huge doll, beautifully dressed, with big blue eyes that closed when she was put to bed...

The mother was very frightened when she found all these gifts. When my father returned from court, one of the most violent outbreaks that I can only remember erupted in our apartment. He scolded the widow, threw materials on the floor, accused his mother, and calmed down only when a cart appeared in front of the entrance, onto which all the gifts were piled and sent back.

But here an unexpected difficulty arose. When the doll's turn came, the sister resolutely protested, and her protest took on such a dramatic character that after several attempts the father finally gave in, although with great displeasure.

“Through you, I became a bribe-taker,” he said angrily, leaving for his room.

Everyone looked at it then as a pointless eccentricity.

“Well, to whom, please tell me, is there harm from gratitude,” one virtuous defendant, “who did not take bribes,” told me, “think: after all, the matter is over, the person feels that he owes you everything, and goes with a grateful soul... And you almost dogs... For what?

I'm pretty sure my father never discussed this issue in terms of immediate harm or benefit. I guess that he entered life with high and probably unusual expectations for that time. But life buried him in a gray and dirty environment. And he valued, like the last shrine, this trait, which distinguished him not only from the crowd of notorious “bribe takers”, but also from among the virtuous people of the then golden mean... And the more difficult it was for him with his large and ever-growing family, the more sensitive he became and with exclusivity he fenced off his spiritual independence and pride...

At the same time, one feature later became a kind of psychological riddle for me: there was rampant bribery and lies all around (and that’s exactly what “stood” like a rotten swamp). The “officials” of the very court where my father served undoubtedly took left and right, and not only thanks, but also obvious “swag.” I remember how one “respected” gentleman, a good friend of our family, a lively and witty man, at one evening with us in a fairly large company, extremely vividly told how he once helped a Jewish smuggler evade responsibility and save a huge consignment of seized goods... The smugglers promised to enrich a petty official who was starting his career, but... he fulfilled their request before they fulfilled their promise... To settle the deal, he was given a meeting at night in some secluded place, where he waited until dawn... I very vividly remember a picture description of that night; the official waited for the Jew, like “a lover for his beloved.” He listened sensitively to the sounds of the night, he feverishly rose to meet every rustle... And the whole society followed with captivating attention the transitions from hope to disappointment in this bribery drama... When it turned out that the official had been deceived, the drama was resolved by general laughter, under which, however, , one could discern both indignation against the Jews and some sympathy for the deceived. My father was there, and my memory clearly paints the picture: a card table, lit by tallow candles, with four partners behind it. Among them is my father, and against him is the hero of a smuggled joke, accompanying every thrown card with witticisms. Father laughs merrily...

In general, he treated his environment with great complacency, protecting only a small circle over which he had direct influence from untruth. I remember several occasions when he came home from court deeply upset. One day, when his mother, looking with anxious sympathy into his upset face, handed him a plate of soup, he tried to eat, ate two or three spoons and pushed the plate away.

“I can’t,” he said.

- Is it over? – the mother asked quietly.

- Yes... hard labor...

- My God! – the mother said in fear. - What about you?

- A! “Interpret the patient with the doctor,” the father answered with irritation: “I!” I!.. What can I do!

But then he added more softly:

– I did what I could... The law is clear.

He did not have lunch that day and did not go to bed after lunch as usual, but walked around the office for a long time, tapping his stick as he went. When about two hours later my mother sent me into the office to see if he had fallen asleep, and if he was not asleep, to call me for tea, I found him on his knees in front of the bed. He fervently prayed to the image, and his entire somewhat corpulent body trembled... He wept bitterly.

But I am sure that these were tears of regret for the “victim of the law”, and not the corrosive consciousness of one’s guilt, as its weapon. In this regard, his conscience was always unshakably calm, and when I think about it now, the main difference in mood becomes clear to me honest people that generation with the mood of our days. He recognized himself as responsible only for his personal activities. The caustic feeling of guilt for social untruths was completely unfamiliar to him. God, the king and the law stood for him at a height inaccessible to criticism. God is omnipotent and just, but there are many triumphant scoundrels and suffering virtues on earth. This is part of the unknown plans of the Supreme Justice - and nothing more. The king and the law are also inaccessible to human judgment, and if sometimes, during some applications of the law, the heart turns in the chest with pity and compassion, this is a natural misfortune that is not subject to any generalizations. One dies from typhus, the other from the law. Unfortunate fate! The judge's job is to see that the law, once put into action, is applied correctly. But if this is not the case, if the corrupt bureaucratic environment distorts the law to please the powerful, he, the judge, will fight this within the court with all the means available to him. If he has to suffer for this, he will suffer, but in case number such and such, every line entered by his hand will be free from untruth. And in this form, the case will go beyond the district court to the Senate, and perhaps even higher. If the Senate agrees with his ideas, he will be sincerely happy for the right side. If senators are bribed by power and money, this is a matter of their conscience, and someday they will answer for this, if not before the king, then before God... That laws can be bad, this again lies on the king’s responsibility before God, - he, the judge is no more responsible for this than for the fact that sometimes thunder from the high sky kills an innocent child...