Characteristics of the theme of the village in Russian literature. The theme of the Russian village and city in the literature of Gogol, Dostoevsky, Grigorovich and Turgenev

1. The image and fate of the village in Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries.

The life of the Russian village has long been the subject of depiction in Russian literature. The theme of the village appears at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries in the works of N.M. Karamzin (Tale " Poor Lisa") and A.N. Radishchev ("Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow"). It should immediately be noted that the theme of the village in the 19th century was identical to the theme of the life of the entire people; the concepts of "peasantry" and "people" were perceived as identical natural, and talk about the fate of the peasant in fiction- meant talking about the fate of the entire Russian people.
In the first half of the 19th century, A.S. Pushkin artistically explored the issue of the relationship between the aristocracy and the lower classes (the stories “The Captain's Daughter” and “Dubrovsky”, as well as “The History of the Village of Goryukhin”). N.V. Gogol embodies his ideas about the beauty, strength and ability to work of the Russian people in the wonderful images of serfs from the poem “Dead Souls”; at the same time, the image of the city is assessed in literature as an image of the untruth of Russian life, as an image of a place where it is impossible to live. The image of St. Petersburg, depicted on the pages of Gogol’s “Petersburg Tales” (the image of a city where a cruel wind blows on a person from all four sides at once), - this image is developed in the novels of F. M. Dostoevsky. It is impossible to live in Dostoevsky’s Petersburg: you can only die or commit crimes in it.
L.N. Tolstoy proudly called himself “the lawyer of the 100 million agricultural people.” The Russian peasant has always been a bearer for L. Tolstoy higher truth, which consisted in the total, spiritual wisdom of the people. It is no coincidence that he titled one of his articles, written while working at the Yasnaya Polyana school: “Who should learn to write from whom - peasant children from us or from peasant children.” Platon Karataev from the epic novel "War and Peace" became the personification of "everything good, round and Russian", the embodiment of the swarm principle, which, according to Tolstoy, expresses the main features of the thinking of the Russian peasant. It is known that a biologically self-sufficient unit is the entire swarm of bees, and not an individual bee; so the people, in the understanding of Leo Tolstoy, continue their historical life thanks to the law of people's life developed over centuries: to be like everyone else! And this law is learned best heroes"War and Peace" - Prince Andrey, Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostova.
Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, mourning the heavy peasant life, asked the people a question that contained the answer: “What worse would your lot be, If only you had endured less?” Narodnik writers (Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Reshetnikov) and the democratic revolutionaries of the 1860s - 80s called on the people to change their destiny, to resolutely protest against poverty and lawlessness.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, who knew very well and passionately loved the peasant and his difficult lot, deeply revealed the reason for the plight of the people in his stories “The Village” (1910) and “Sukhodol” (1911). The wonderful writer, however, did not turn a blind eye to the peasant’s own shortcomings - his reluctance to learn anything, inertia, that is, reluctance to any changes, sometimes bestial cruelty and greed.
Another great representative of Russian critical realism, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, was close to this position. In his stories “Men” (1897) and “In the Ravine” (1900), he admitted that the troubles of the peasantry were his own fault.
In the second half of the 19th century, the social picture of Russian society changed; after the abolition of serfdom (1861), streams of peasants flocked to the city. An urban proletariat is emerging, increasingly losing its genetic connection with the countryside. (Note that Leo Tolstoy, for example, considered the “factory worker” to be only a spoiled peasant, divorced from his age-old folk roots).
Great humanist twentieth century, Maxim Gorky, was very wary of the peasantry. This attitude was clearly manifested both in his early romantic stories (for example, in the story “Chelkash”) and in the cycle of stories “Across Rus',” and especially fully developed in the cycle of journalistic articles “Untimely Thoughts” (1917-18). Men from the village of Krasnovidovo near Kazan set fire to the house in which the popular educator Mikhail Romas lives with his associates (among them young Alyosha Peshkov) in the story “My Universities” (1923). Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that he considers the peasantry to be a completely anti-revolutionary class and metaphorically represents it in the image of a huge fresh swamp, in which a handful of the revolutionary-minded proletariat can dissolve without a trace.
After 1917, the ratio of city and countryside changed polarity. Now, in literature, as well as in the political life of the country, supporters of a new, technical, Western-oriented Russia are gaining the upper hand. The drama of the division of human destinies, the destinies of people, was imprinted in the work of one of the finest lyricists of the twentieth century - Sergei Yesenin. In his poems recent years- “Leaving Rus'”, “Soviet Rus'”, “Letter to the Motherland”, in the poem “Anna Snegina” and many others Yesenin poses the question: who am I with? His sweet childhood is connected with the "old times", patriarchal Russia, and life demonstrates superior force new, “steel” Russia. The words of another very deep and sincere writer, Vasily Shukshin, are very suitable for Yesenin: “I remind myself of a man,” said Shukshin, “who stands with one foot on the shore and the other in a boat. And it’s impossible to swim, and it’s impossible to walk.” ". A severe crisis caused by the impossibility of choosing between the two parts of one’s soul, the halves of the split Russian peasant life, claimed Yesenin’s life in 1925.
In the literature of the 1920s and 30s, the village appears as an object of social tutelage on the part of the city, as some kind of “sponsored person” who needs to be brought up to one’s level - brought up patiently, condescendingly. The people as the keeper of the eternal secret, especially as the God-bearing people in literature and the political consciousness of society, ceases to exist.
The topic of collectivization arose in modern Russian literature almost simultaneously with the events of collectivization itself. The most famous writers of those years devoted their pens to depicting the socialist restructuring of the countryside: Fyodor Panferov’s novels “Bruski” (1928-37), Alexander Tvardovsky’s poem “The Path to Socialism” and especially “The Country of Ant” (1936), famous novel Mikhail Sholokhov's "Virgin Land Upturned" (book 1 - 1932, book 2 - 1959) - all these texts strongly affirm the need for a transition to domestic Agriculture on the path of collectivization, socialization of property and labor. And these were even the best of the novels, stories and poems, paintings, performances and films that glorified collectivization. Meanwhile, in the “victorious” year of 1936, the country produced, for example, exactly half as much meat as in 1918, when the country was engulfed in the flames of civil war. A terrible famine struck the most fertile Ukraine in 1932-33.
A modern researcher of literature on the topic of collectivization, Yuri Dvorya-shin, testifies: “In the atmosphere of a general attack on the countryside in the 30s, to some writers the very idea of ​​​​remaking the peasantry because of its supposed underdevelopment and insignificance from the point of view of the future seemed unrealistic , and therefore insufficient. At that time, even such revelations that reached readers, for example, from the pages of Panferov’s “Whetstones” did not seem wild: “At times he (Kirill Zhdarkin, the main character of the novel - A.T. ) it seemed - to remake a peasant who was accustomed to his piece of land - the greatest nonsense, nonsense, an empty fantasy; it must simply be used, as oxen are used for a tractor, in order to raise a new generation on the bones of this small owner - the people of the coming era."
However, the moral and humanistic aspect in covering the events of our time, the events of collectivization, has not disappeared from the field of view of the most thoughtful and honest writers. Such works as the stories of Ivan Makarov “The Island”, “Fortel Mortel”, Ivan Kataev “Milk” and some others reflected the writers’ understanding of the complexity and ambiguity of the relationship between the universal and the class in social transformations.
New peasant poets - Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Klychkov, Pyotr Oreshin, Aleksey Shiryaevets - were destroyed because in their poems they dared to mourn the fate of their native villages, the entire Russian peasantry.
It was precisely because of the depiction of the devastation beginning in the village - as well as throughout the country - that he incurred the first wave of cruel criticism. great writer twentieth century Andrei Platonovich Platonov. His story “The Doubting Makar” and the poor peasant chronicle “For Future Use,” written in 1929-30, metaphorically and covertly depicted the emerging kingdom of Soviet absurdity.
In modern Russian literature, many stories and novels are devoted to the topic of collectivization: “On the Irtysh” and “The Commission” by Sergei Zalygin (1960s), “Farewell, Gyulsary!” Chingiz Aitmatova; in the eighties, literature gained the opportunity to talk about blind spots Soviet history more freely, and the novels of Vasily Belov "Eves" and "The Year of the Great Turning Point" (not yet finished), "Men and Women" by Boris Mozhaev, "Ravines" by Sergei Antonov, the tetralogy of Fyodor Abramov "Pryasliny" ("Two Winters and Three Summers", "Crossroads", "Brothers and Sisters", "Home"). The tragic story “Everything Flows” by Vasily Grossman, which had never seen the light of day, is being published... Many films and theatrical productions are devoted to this topic, and society has gained the opportunity to access documentary evidence of the era. However, it is precisely under these conditions that the courage of those writers who were able to capture this cruel era “from the inside” becomes increasingly clear and obvious. We will devote our article to the study of the theme of collectivization in Andrei Platonov’s story “The Pit” (1929-30).

2. The dying village is a symbol of the death of the Russian peasantry in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”.

If we consider everything written by Andrei Platonov as one book, then its first chapter will be works dedicated to the Leninist revolution. "Chevengur", as if in a lens, collects all the themes, plots, heroes of this chapter, develops and deepens them. main topic the second chapter is the Stalinist revolution, the era of the “great turning point”, the time of the second “great leap”. Lenin believed in the possibility of an immediate leap “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.” This mirage attracts the Chevengur apostles. Stalin ordered the country to jump a second time: from an “agrarian country” to an “industrial country,” from backward Russia to communist Russia. Platonov reflects on this time in “The Doubting Makar”, in the stories “The Pit”, “For Future Use”, “The Juvenile Sea”, in the essays “Che-Che-O”, in the plays “Fourteen Red Huts” and “Hurdy Organ”. The story “Jan” will be a philosophical summing up. The chapter will close in 1934.
The story "Pit" can be considered as a continuation of "Chevengur": a utopia is being built again. The foundation is being laid for a happy future, a foundation is being dug for a “common home for the proletariat.” Once again it is being built by dreamers, “fools”, reminiscent of the heroes of the novel. But ten years have passed since Chevengur’s death. The novel told about the construction of communism in one district, the story - about the construction of socialism in one country. Platonov writes “The Pit” in December 1929 - April 1930. These dates determine the plot of the story: December 27, 1929 Stalin announced the transition to a policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, March 2, 1930 Stalin in The article “Dizziness from Success” was briefly delayed by the mad rush to complete collectivization.
The heroes of "Chevengur" have aged ten years, their situation has changed, but they continue to believe, continuing to express doubts.
"The Pit" is the most capacious of Platonov's works. The writer abandoned the slow epic narrative, which in “Chevengur” conveyed the dead immobility of the achieved goal. The feverish running is fortunately conveyed in “The Pit” very concisely, in a short space of one hundred pages. Never again will Platonov succeed in such a complete merging of the real and concrete socio-historical background and ontological subtext.
The story consists of two chronotopes: urban and rural: two different spaces- city and countryside - are united by one time, the time of running towards socialism. The socialist project, it is called the Plan, is carried out in city and countryside under the leadership of one Organization. Platonov gives a symbolic meaning to real events strictly defined by time and space, turning “The Pit” into the only adequate depiction in literature of events, the significance of which in the history of the country and people exceeds the significance of the October Revolution.
The socialist project in the city consists of the construction of a single building, “where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle.” The socialist project in the village consists of creating a collective farm and eliminating the kulaks. The implementation of these projects brings builders and managers into action. Platonov depicts the structure of Soviet society that emerged in the late 20s.
The peculiarity of Platonov’s heroes is that they long for happiness, paradise on earth, which, however, is not like the “paradise” of leader Pashkin. They do not believe that “happiness will come from materialism,” as Voshchev is assured at the factory committee. Individuals who believe in “materialism,” such as Prokofy Dvanov or Kozlov, easily get their “share.” Happiness remains incomprehensible for those who see it not as the satisfaction of base needs, but as the achievement of another, higher stage of existence.
The metaphysical, existential melancholy of Plato's heroes seems to the writer to be evidence of the powerful possibilities inherent in man. In every person, Platonov emphasizes, choosing his heroes of the people occupying the lowest position in society. The fundamental difference between "Chevengur" and "Pit", the difference caused by the difference between 1921 and 1930, is that during the years of the Leninist revolution there was still the opportunity to interpret the idea, to independently choose ways to achieve "paradise", during the years of the Stalinist revolution " "fools" obsessed with the idea of ​​happiness have no choice: they go to utopia the way their leaders show them.
A comparison of the paths to “paradise”, to a communist utopia, shows that in both the first and second cases the same path is chosen. In "Chevengur" the apostles of the new faith exterminated the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois and stopped working. In the "Pit" carriers new faith, proletarians, perform two functions: work and kill enemies. Their work, however, is imaginary; it is meaningless, because it is the fulfillment of paper plans. Digging the ground, digging a pit, a hole in the ground, under the foundation of the future all-proletarian house, the workers act in an unreal world.
They return to real world when they are invited to take part in the killing of enemies.
All citizens of the USSR were notified of the beginning of “complete collectivization.” The land doctor Safronov is not talking about a dream, he says: “according to the plenum” we are “obligated... to liquidate no less as a class...” Safronov sets out the directive of the “plenum” - meaning the plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which met in April 1929 - to the girl Nastya. With childish naivety, Nastya reveals the meaning of the plenum directives. "Who will you stay with?" - she asks Safronov. “With tasks, with a firm line of further activities,” he answers. “This means,” the girl sums up, “kill all the bad people, otherwise there are very few good ones.” The excavator finds this conclusion quite class-based and clear: “It was monarchism that indiscriminately needed people for war, but we only have one class of roads.” He ominously adds: “Yes, we will soon cleanse our class of the unconscious element.” "According to the plenum", the only way construction new world, “general proletarian house” - the extermination of all classes except one, the worker, and then the purge of this only surviving class. Nastya does logical conclusion: “Then there will be only the most important people.”
The village appears in the city chronotope unnoticed, carefully, and explodes with a terrible metaphor: men come to the city for coffins. Where a foundation pit is being dug for a “common proletarian house,” peasants from neighboring village they stacked the coffins for future use. One of the walkers behind the coffins, “an unknown man with yellow eyes,” recalls the recent past: “His melancholy mind imagined a village in the rye, and the wind rushed over it and quietly turned a wooden mill, grinding its daily, peaceful bread. He lived like this in recent times. , feeling fullness in his stomach and family happiness in his soul; and no matter how many years he looked from the village into the distance and into the future, he saw at the end of the plain only the radiance of the sky and the earth, and above him he had sufficient light of the sun and stars. The man remembers a happy life: family happiness in his soul, fullness in his stomach, confidence in the future and in the universe. Simple peasant happiness perished, the world collapsed. Death has come for everyone: one hundred coffins have been prepared for all residents of the village, including children. The girl Nastya, looking at the men dragging the coffins into the village, asks a dangerously naive question: “Were they bourgeois?” Honest Chiklin replies: “No, baby. They live in straw huts, sow bread and eat with us.” “Why do they need coffins then?” the girl asked inexorably and logically. “Only the bourgeoisie should die, but the poor should not!” Platonov writes: “The diggers remained silent, not yet aware of the data to speak.”
The village depicted by the writer in the second half of the story is a village during the collectivization period, a village at the moment Last Judgment. Comparing the collectivization described by Platonov with the classic Soviet novel about collectivization, “Virgin Soil Upturned” by Sholokhov, we see that both writers used the same elements: worker activists organizing a collective farm, stratification among the peasants - some join the collective farm, others refuse, - dispossession as a form of permitted robbery, the destruction of livestock by peasants, the liquidation of kulaks. Sholokhov put together from these elements a narrative about a measure necessary in the interests of the state and the poor, bringing joy and happiness to all those who agree with it. Platonov, giving the elements of collectivization the apocalyptic form of the Last Judgment, depicts the grotesque situation of building a new world, about which neither those who build it have any idea - driving those who agree into the collective farm, exterminating those who disagree - nor those for whom it - supposedly - under construction.
The contrast between an idyllic memory of a calm happy village and the apocalypse of collectivization are presented as successive scenes of death and destruction. “Cry, grandma, cry harder,” says the “comrade activist”, the organizer of the collective farm, to the peasant woman, “this sun of a new life has risen and the light hurts your dark eyes.”
The cutting light of the “sun of new life” is merciless: without hiding a single detail, it illuminates the nightmarishly monstrous image of the construction of a utopia. Platonov uses only one surreal detail: a bear takes an active part in the dispossession of kulaks - he indicates the huts of the kulaks and subkulak members. Joseph Brodsky writes: “If Dostoevsky can be considered the first writer of the absurd for Captain Lebyadkin’s poems about the cockroach, then Platonov can be considered the first serious surrealist for the scene with the hammer bear in “The Pit.” The scene with the bear does not appear by chance in the story. Even in “Chevengur,” the builders of utopia believed that with the advent of communism, the liberation of animals would occur. In the “year of the great turning point,” the bear is freed and joins the proletariat. But the atmosphere of surrealism is not created by the proletarian bear. Impression bad dream, obsessions are created by the normal behavior of people who calmly, as if naturally, perform abnormal, unnatural actions.
They kill Kozlov and Safronov, who came to the village to help build the collective farm, without looking, without asking, Chiklin kills a peasant who happened to be at hand, they kill, putting on a raft that descends into the ocean, all the peasants who did not want to enter the collective farm, the peasants they kill livestock, not wanting to give it to the collective farm. Collectivization is portrayed by the writer as collective suicide. Peasants, by killing livestock, killing workers who came to agitate them, destroying trees, joining a collective farm or refusing to do so, destroy their own flesh.
Platonov does not want the reader to have any doubts about the meaning of what is happening. He introduces a generalizing image of the Russian peasantry: “The old plowman Ivan Semenovich Kretinin kissed young trees in his garden and crushed them from the soil by the roots, and his woman wailed over the bare branches. “Don’t cry, old woman,” said Kretinin, “you’re on a collective farm.” You’ll become a peasant’s slave, and these trees are my flesh, and let her suffer now, she’s bored of being socialized into captivity!” The peasant agrees rather to socialize the flesh of his wife than his trees, which he feels with his flesh. Platonov turns to a religious symbol: “...in that short time they ate beef like a sacrament - no one wanted to eat it, but it was necessary to hide the flesh of the native slaughter in one’s body and save it there from socialization.”
The village is divided into organized and unorganized: organized - peasants who agree to give up their flesh into captivity, to go to the collective farm, having first killed the cattle, which they spare more than themselves, unorganized - peasants who refuse to go to the collective farm, preferring to die.
The extermination of the “unorganized” - putting men, women and children on a raft lowered into the sea - is a repetition of the scene of the murder of the “bourgeois” and “semi-bourgeois” in “Cheven-gur”: Utopia necessarily requires sacrifice, the elimination of the “unclean”. There are, however, differences in the massacres of 1921 and 1930. In 1921, the Chevengur apostols killed, poisoned by the Idea, out of internal necessity - like medieval chiliasts. In 1930, the murder took place on a direct order from above, based on another instruction from the region: “... it’s time to get going,” the activist declares, “we have the fourteenth plenum in our region!” In 1930 there is no such connection between victim and executioner as existed between the apostles and their victims. Saying goodbye to life, the “disorganized” ask the activist only one thing: “Turn away from us for a short time, let us not see you.” The murdered “bourgeois” died alone, holding the executioner’s hand as the last thread connecting them to life. The “kulaks” sent to death acquire spiritual strength from their neighbors, to whom they say goodbye in a Christian way: having confessed their sins and received forgiveness. Everyone kisses, and the kiss gives birth to “new relatives”: “After kissing, people bowed to the ground - each to everyone and stood on their feet, free and empty at heart.” The ancient ritual gives people going to death freedom and cleanses the heart. “We lived fiercely, but we end according to our conscience,” one peasant remarks to another.
The “unorganized”, doomed to death by the next plenum, die “according to their conscience”, in accordance with the Christian faith. But without a priest, although in the village in which the collective farm is being organized, there is both a church and a priest.
"The pit" can be studied from many points of view: as a model of the "new story", as best example"Platonic language" as a historical source. The exceptional value of the story as a historical source lies in the fact that the writer managed, in a very small area - 100 pages, one city and one village - to depict the whole variety of social groups and strata that took part - active or passive - in collectivization . Platonov does not introduce new themes into the story, but brings to the boiling point all the problems that are dear and important to him, expressing them sharply, openly and mercilessly.
Religion - the Christian faith and the pseudo-religion of utopia that replaces it - is depicted in “The Pit” more clearly than in other works of the writer.
There is a church in the village: “Near the church, old forgotten grass grew, and there were no paths or other human traces of passage, which means people have not prayed in the temple for a long time.” People do not pray - because it is prohibited. The believers are watched over by a former priest who “dissociated himself from his soul and cut his hair into a foxtrot.” He lists everyone who comes to church on the sheet: “And those sheets with the designation of a person who has made the sign of a hand-made cross, or who has bowed his body before the heavenly power, or who has performed another act of veneration of the sub-kulak saints, those sheets of paper every midnight I personally accompany you to a fellow activist.”
At night the priest commits his betrayal. At night, after the raft with those condemned to death has been sent, an activist, a priest of the new faith, organizes a rejoicing: dancing to the radio for the “organized.” This is a monstrous dance among the dead and dying - a thanksgiving prayer for the survivors. The men dance at night, enchanted, as if in a dream: “... An unclear moon appeared in the distant sky, empty of whirlwinds and clouds - in a sky that was so deserted that it allowed for eternal freedom, and so eerie that friendship was needed for freedom ". Under this deserted and eerie sky, the men are triumphant, rejoicing, still believing that they will be able to please “our mother, the Socialist-Revolutionary,” who “is wise like a girl,” but will calm down and become “a humble woman.”
The writer knows that these hopes are vain and ridiculous. “Liquidated!?” says one of the dispossessed navvies to the navvie Chiklin. “Look, today I’m gone, and tomorrow you won’t be. So it will turn out that one of your main people will come to socialism.” The nature of the utopia under construction could raise doubts in 1921. Ten years later there is no longer any doubt: the “kingdom-state” is not “wisdom like a girl”, it acts according to a solid plan. “You will make a collective farm out of the entire republic, and the entire republic will be an individual farm!” - there the dispossessed man determines the character of the socialist utopia. These words amaze the excavator Chiklin with their accuracy; hearing them, he rushes to the door of the house and opens it, “so that freedom can be seen.” Platonov creates a striking metaphor that reveals the feelings of a worker who understands that socialism is becoming a “single-personal economy”, that “one ... main person will come to socialism.” “...He also once hit the locked prison door, not understanding his captivity, and screamed from the grinding force of his heart.” Feeling in his heart the closing doors of the prison, the worker Chiklin, consoling himself, finds only one objection: “We can appoint a tsar when it is useful to us, and we can knock him down with one swing...” Chiklin, saying “we,” means the working class . But these are only fragments of the old confidence in the meaning and role of the proletariat.
The hope that the Chevengur apostles carried within themselves, the hope of becoming subjects of history instead of objects, perished. “What kind of face am I to you?” says Chiklin. “I’m nobody: our party is our face!”
The Party is the “face”, the embodiment of the working class; “the main man” is the embodiment of socialism and the party - these are the elements of the socialist utopia, which is being built in feverish haste in town and countryside. It bears little resemblance to the dream of its apostles, but the writer, noting the differences, emphasizes the inextricable connection between dream and realization. With childish naivety, Nastya points out this connection. In a letter from the city to the collective farm, she writes to Chiklin, having learned about the murder of her acquaintances: “Eliminate the kulaks as a class. Long live Lenin, Kozlov and Safronov!” inextricably welded together by the “great dreamer,” as Lenin called H.G. Wells, and the fulfillers of his dreams, the Kozlovs and Safronovs, who died and killed out of love for those distant. Lenin died, but his work lives on. And for the sake of this cause, the peasants are destroyed and the workers themselves die. The party continues the work of Lenin.
The party is represented on the collective farm by an activist, he is also called “comrade activist.” In the gallery of Plato's bureaucrats, he occupies a special place: the activist directly leads the organization of mass murder. 15 years will pass after the writing of “The Pit”, and the expression “murderer at a desk” will appear. Outwardly, the activist does not look like polished SS men; he reads papers not at a desk, but at the kitchen table. But both his function and the motives for his behavior are the same as those of the organizers of Hitler’s concentration camps, the extermination of Jews and all other “unorganized” and harmful to Hitler’s utopia.
The activist is, first of all, a man of paper: “He read each new directive with the curiosity of future pleasure...” Paper gives him pleasure for many reasons: it is a source of “enthusiasm for future action”, it introduces him to “a whole body living in the contentment of glory before his eyes devoted, convinced masses." The paper makes him tremble with fear: it’s easy to make a mistake - run ahead or end up behind. But strict adherence to directives clearly labeled and “imaged” globes on stamps,” allowed the activist to leave “the common, guided life” and become “an assistant of the avant-garde and immediately have all the benefits of the future.” The working class and the poor peasantry are still building the future, but a member of the avant-garde, an activist, is already it has, having left the “guided" life for the “guided” one. Looking at the “image of globes” on the stamps, he strengthens in his service to the directives, for he is convinced that “all Earth, all his softness will soon fall into clear, iron hands." He does not want to be left "without influence on the universal body of the earth." Platonov concludes the portrait of the "murderer at the desk": "And with the stinginess of assured happiness, the activist stroked his exhausted loads on the chest." Happiness is guaranteed to an activist who feels like an assistant of an iron hand, which is "part of a whole body living in the contentment of glory in front of the devoted, convinced masses." The whole body with iron hands is an idol that crushed the dreams of the Chevengur apostles left for those who survived, the only way fortunately - to become a helper. “The whole body”, “the whole scale” leaves no other place for the “private” Makars, Chiklins...
The activist carries out his difficult, dangerous work with pleasure - the danger threatens primarily from the Higher Authority, which sends out directives - because he feels himself in the future, feels like a participant in a cause that affects the "universal body of the earth." He firmly expects to receive his “share” after the “softness” of the globe is in “iron hands.” The activist explains the essence of this ideology to the “brooding” seeker of truth Voshchev. “Is the truth due to the proletariat?” - asked Voshchev. “The proletariat is supposed to have a movement,” the activist said, “and whatever comes along, it’s all his: be it the truth, be it the kulak’s looted jacket, everything will go into the organized cauldron, you won’t know anything.” The truth and the “looted jacket” are dumped together into a common pot, the distribution from which will be made by those who are already “in the future”: activists, the Pashkins. An activist is a generalized image of a party leader on a collective farm. Platonov does not give him a name, he calls him an activist, highlighting the main characteristic of the party representative on the collective farm.
Activist - acts: organizes a collective farm, organizes dispossession of kulaks, organizes the liquidation of kulaks, conducts ideological work. All party representatives, collective farm organizers - from Davydov from “Virgin Soil Upturned” to Mitya, the representative from “On the Irtysh” - are kept in the activists from “Kotlovan”. Sholokhov in 1932, portraying a positive hero, Zalygin in 1964, portraying an obedient servant of the directive, added only psychological details to the “activist” Platonov. The main thing is that the essence of the character was open and mercilessly revealed by the author of "The Pit".
An activist is a generalized image of a fanatic in the church period of utopia: a voluptuous thirst to be among the leaders who have already come into the future and are pulling those led with them, a thirst to be among the winners allows him to become both a worker in relation to the higher and a ruthless master in relation to the lower. After sobering up, Lev Kopelev, who participated in the organization of collective farms in the era, spoke about the happiness of being together with the winners, to be with the future, about the sweet intoxication in which the “activists” acted, seduced by utopia, its “truth” or its “jacket”. which Platonov talks about.
Andrei Platonov was the first to present genocide in literature as a necessary element in the construction of a socialist utopia, the first to explain the mechanism of genocide. The writer shows that the initial - necessary and obligatory - condition of genocide is the transformation of a person into an abstraction, depriving him of the name of a person, branding him with a negative sign - “bourgeois”, “semi-bourgeois”, “fist”, “sub-kulak”, “pest”. The activist, having created a “special side column” called “a list of the kulak liquidated to death, as a class, by the proletariat, according to the property-escheat remainder,” enters into it “instead of people... signs of existence...” They explain to the “unorganized” that “there is no soul in them , but there is only one property mood.” The future confirmed the tragic insight of the writer: Soviet studies of the collectivization era provide accurate data regarding the losses of large and small livestock, but even approximate figures for human losses are not reported. In the “side column” of the peasantry liquidated to death, instead of people, “signs of existence” and “property mood” are recorded.
The only writer of his time, Platonov understood the inexorable nature of the mechanism of genocide, which devoured those who set it in motion. The organizer of the collective farm "General Line", the liquidator of the kulaks, the activist becomes a victim of a change in the general line. The next directive coming to the collective farm accuses it of “running into the leftist swamp of right-wing opportunism.” Platonov leaves no doubt about the origin of the new directive and the new general line: everything changed after the publication of Stalin’s article “Dizziness from Success,” in which the blame for the madness of “complete collectivization” was placed on local party leaders and activists. But the exact dating of the events only emphasizes their nightmarishly delusional character. The reality is nightmarish, and everyone lives in delirium. And they die in delirium. Kind, looking after the girl Nastya like a mother, Chiklin easily and thoughtlessly kills the activist with one blow, just as he had previously killed a man without thinking.
The writer expresses boundless despair: people who live by feelings turn out to be few better than people living by the mind. Feelings and instinct turn out to be insufficient protection against clever people. In "Chevengur" the apostles, waiting in the steppe for beggars, greet them with a flag on which is written: "Poor comrades"! You have made every convenience and thing in the world, and now you have destroyed it and want best friend to a friend. For this reason, comrades are acquired in Chevengur from the roads they pass." In "The Pit" the inscription on the flag heralds a new era in which all previous dreams are condemned and discarded: "For the party, for loyalty to it, for the shock work that breaks through the doors to the future for the proletariat ".
The elements have been tamed, the future is locked and entry into it is allowed only as a reward “for hard work”, with a pass issued by the Party guarding the door. Loyalty to the party becomes the highest virtue. The activist dies because he was mistaken in believing that loyalty to the directive would guarantee him a pass to “happiness and at least in the future... a district post.” Those who remained faithful to the Idea are dying, those who thought it was enough to be faithful to the Directive are dying. They die, killing millions of people and thereby fulfilling their role. The Apostles, who believe in the Idea, interfere with the realized utopia, because they consider the interpretation of the Idea to be their right; obedient servants of the directive interfere, because they believe that blind obedience gives them some kind of rights. Their elimination turns Utopia, Socialism into a “single-person economy” in which power belongs to the “main man”.
The real and therefore fantastic world depicted by Platonov becomes similar to the fantastic, and therefore similar to the real, world of the United State depicted by Zamyatin.
In a victorious utopia there is no room for another utopia. The last hope for the possibility of merging the two utopias is fading. "Prushevsky! Will the people of higher science be able to resurrect the dead people back?" - asks Zhachev. And he hears in response a monosyllabic and unequivocal: “No.” The hope of a disabled person sounds bitterly: “Marxism can do everything. Why then does Lenin lie in Moscow intact. He is waiting for science - he wants to be resurrected.” Lenin wants to be resurrected, but he cannot. And he is not needed where his utopia has won.
Platonov returns to the theme in the finale of "The Pit" deceased child, which in “Chevengur” meant the collapse of hope for the fulfillment of a dream, disappointment in communism. In “Chevengur” the nameless child of a nameless beggar woman, invited with other “others” to the city of the Sun, was dying. In “The Pit” the girl Nastya, an unfortunate orphan of non-proletarian origin, dies, who was taken in and loved by the diggers, who saw the future in her. “Now I don’t believe in anything,” Zhachev declares after Nastya's death. Voshchev stands in bewilderment over the girl’s corpse, not knowing, “Where will communism be in the world now?” He asks himself: “Why... now do we need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement?”
To express the oppressive hopeless feeling of loss of faith, Platonov, as usual, uses religious symbolism. Zhachev says his “I don’t believe in anything now!” in "It's the morning of the second day." On the second day, God separates the water from the firmament, the earth from the sky. The day of Nastya’s death, the birthday of the collective farm and the liquidation of the “unorganized,” is, for Platonov, the “second day,” when reality is separated from dreams, when dreams, hope and faith die, a terrible reality remains.
Chiklin spends fifteen hours digging a “special grave” for Nastya so that “it is deep... and so that the child will never be disturbed by the noise of life from the surface of the earth.” Chiklin buries faith and hope. And at this time, all the workers and all the collective farmers begin to dig a pit, larger than the size planned for the construction of a house, into which “every person from a barracks and a clay hut” can move in. Platonov concludes: “all the poor and middle-aged men worked with such zeal for life, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit.”
The pit of the “common proletarian house” turns out to be an abyss. The abyss becomes a temple of socialist utopia. This cathedral is not erected on the ground and does not reach out to the sky, it is directed into the depths of the earth, into a hole whose digging has no end.

3. “Here there is neither subtracting nor adding - this is how it was on earth...” The role of literature in understanding the events of the collectivization period.

Even at the height of the events of collectivization, not all writers were fascinated by the scale with which the collapse of the traditional foundations of the Russian village was carried out. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak reported in one of his letters to a loved one: “In the early 30s, a movement was born among writers, which consisted of trips to collective farms to collect materials about new village. I wanted to be like everyone else, and went on such a trip with a project to write a book. Words cannot express what I saw. It was a misfortune so inhuman, so unimaginable, a catastrophe so terrible that it, so to speak, became abstract and inaccessible to rational perception. I got sick. Whole year I couldn't write."
Among the works of literature that raised questions about the relationship between class and universal humanity in the events of collectivization, special mention should be made of the texts of Andrei Platonov: the novel “Chevengur”, the stories “The Pit” (1929-30) and “The Juvenile Sea” (1932). Their humanistic meaning and philosophical depth appeared before the readers of the 80s in all their completeness and significance. Unfortunately, the participation in the literary process of these works, which reflected tragic fates Russian peasantry was reduced to a minimum due to the impossibility or direct prohibition of publication. And yet, despite this circumstance, A. Platonov’s influence on the literature and spiritual life of the people was not completely interrupted.
Modern literature and history get to deep meaning happened in the 20-30s terrible tragedy peasantry - largely thanks to the civil feat of the courageous man and great writer Andrei Platonovich Platonov.

NOTES

Dvoryashin Yu.A. M.A. Sholokhov and Russian prose of the 20-30s about the fate of the peasantry. - Novosibirsk, 1992. - P. 11.
The writer returns to the Stalinist revolution in a play written in 1937-1938, during the era of the next “Great Leap Forward”.
Andrey Platonov. Pit. Bilingual edition with a foreword by Joseph Brodsky. - Michigan: Ardis, 1973, p.179.
The dates are in the manuscript.
I. Stalin. Essays. T. 1, p.169.
Andrey Platonov. Pit // "Grani", No. 70, 1969, p.178.
Ibid., p.222.
Ibid., p.217.
Ibid., p.222.
Ibid., p.239.
Ibid., p.165.
Andrey Platonov. Chevengur. YMCA-Press, Paris, 1972, p.248.
Ibid., p.249.
Andrey Platonov. Pit. Page 245.
Ibid., p.247.
Ibid., pp. 250, 251.
Ibid., p.242.
Ibid., p.243.
Ibid., p.261.
Ibid., p.258.
Ibid., p.258.
Ibid., p.259.
Ibid., p.259.
Ibid., p.236.
Ibid., pp. 228, 229.
Ibid., page 233.
Ibid., pp. 264, 265.
Ibid., p.245.
Ibid., p.273.
Andrey Platonov. Chevengur. p.222.
Andrey Platonov. Pit. Page 268.
Ibid., p.266.
Ibid., pp. 283, 284.
Quote by: Savelzon I.V. From the history of Russian literature. M.A. Bulgakov. A.P. Platonov: Teaching aid. - Orenburg, 1997.

The theme of the Russian village in modern literature (Based on the story by V. Belov “A Habitual Business”)

Modern society is well aware of the value and necessity of the agricultural industry. However, there are many problems in the village, there are many of them now, and there were not much fewer before. Therefore, countryside writers are especially popular and respected in Russia. Vasily Belov can safely be called a leader among this group of writers. His work “A Business as Usual” is an important milestone in modern literature on a rural theme. In the story we see the life and fate of a simple village worker Ivan Afrikanovich Drynov and his wife Katerina.

Belov treats his heroes with great respect. These are people dear and close to his heart, they are part of his own soul, they reflect his personal attitude to life. Ivan Afrikanovich - a simple peasant, an ordinary collective farmer, burdened big family. The author does not endow his hero with any special qualities or talents. And he’s not a fool for drinking, as they say, and before work he’s “evil,” and has an easy-going character. His neighbors and fellow villagers love him. Ivan Afrikanovich visited the front and has military awards. He argues with his superiors and is indignant when he is unfairly robbed. He is looking for new ways to earn money to feed his large family, although to no avail. But his active nature yearns useful application strength Ivan Afrikanovich is never sad for no reason and cheerful for no reason. When he gets lucky, he is happy and open to the whole world of people and nature around him. A poetic character, vitality, integrity - these are the main qualities of this person. But the character of Ivan Afrikanovich is revealed to the reader gradually; Belov’s hero is more multifaceted and deep than it seems at the beginning of the story. Describing the everyday life of the village, the author shows the unfair and even criminal attitude of society towards the village worker. The hero does not have any “documentation”, except for the “milk book”, where he records how much milk he donated from his cow. But the author invites the reader to look carefully not at the documentary data of his hero, but at the spiritual qualities of this simple Russian man, a native resident of the village, which is why, I believe, the description of the love and harmonious life of Ivan Afrikinovich and Katerina occupies such a large place in the story. The whole story seems to glorify the great love of these original Russian people. The author describes this love with extraordinary lyricism and artistic mastery. The reader is shocked by the scene of Ivan Afrikanovich’s farewell to his dead wife. In his simple words about the injustice of death, which took his loved one away from him ahead of time, there is only pain that tears involuntarily well up in his eyes: “Don’t be offended, Katerina. I haven’t been, I haven’t visited you, this or that. I brought you some mountain ash. You used to love picking rowan trees in the fall.... Yes. Look, girl, look how it turned out... I was a fool, I took care of you poorly, you know it yourself... Here I am now... Like I’m walking on fire, I’m walking on you, forgive me. ... "

These simple words convey great moral strength and genuine grief of loss. I noticed that Ivan Afrikanovich feels death like a peasant dear person: “It’s like walking on fire...” That is, the earth for him merges into one image with Katerina buried in it.

Of course, the strength and significance of Belov’s story lies not only in the description of these touching relationships between the two loving friend people's friend. The author, in my opinion, set himself the task of showing in all the truthful details the life of his contemporary village. But what we have before us is not just a description of everyday life, but an identification of the meaning of life, the meaning of work on earth in general. So, the peasant Ivan Afrikanovich Drynov is a simple and at the same time complex man. He seems to be like everyone else in the village and at the same time very different from everyone else. It is significant that Ivan Afrikanovich and his fellow countrymen perceive this way. I believe that the author is trying to create an image of an ideal villager of that time. Show that, despite negative social and everyday conditions, the soul of the people remains pure. It’s not for nothing that no everyday dirt sticks to Belov’s hero, even when he himself has messed up in something. For example, he looks funny in the story of Mishka’s matchmaking; the next morning all the village women are gossiping about this incident. But they only laugh at Mishka, and they feel sorry for Ivan Afrikanovich. It is clear that Ivan Afrikanovich is for his fellow countrymen a kind of mirror that reflects them best feelings and dignity. He makes them happy and sets an example of goodness. The strength of his love and devotion to Katerina has a beneficial effect on the rest of the villagers. He is worldly wise and morally pure. This is, in my opinion, the main thing in his image and distinguishes him from other peasants. As the talented Russian poet Anatoly Peredreev said:

And we didn’t make a city,

And the village was lost forever...

In order not to fall into such dramatic “scissors”, we must carefully study the world that the writer Vasily Belov opens before us. His "Business as Usual" plays important role in the townspeople’s understanding of the problems of the village, the character of the Russian peasant man. Without mutual understanding between the city and the village there cannot be normal life in the country.

The theme of the village in modern literature (based on the story by V. Belov A Habitual Business)

Jan 26 2011

“Once Sasha saw a portrait in his father’s office...” It happened to me almost the same as with the hero of Nekrasov’s poem “Grandfather.” Only I saw a portrait of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather in my grandmother Vera’s room. She lives in Saratov, and previously came to us herself. And this summer we visited her. She told me for a long time about her parents. I was surprised to learn that my great-grandfather Emelyan was a savvy and businesslike man. He fought in the imperialist army, then in the Red Army in the civilian army. He returned to his Andreevka. Took over the farm. He and his brothers decided to build a mill. Emelyan and Aksinya built a new, good-quality house. And suddenly collectivization. My ancestors were still very far from riches, but they were included in the lists of kulaks anyway. Emelyan was warned in time. And, handing over their small children to relatives, abandoning everything they had acquired through hard work, they fled with their great-grandmother lightly. First to Saratov, then to Central Asia, then to Stalingrad. Emelyan worked at a sawmill and managed the house. But for many years they trembled at the appearance of any official. My grandmother also told me about how the “kulaks” from the village were thrown into the snow in a wild field in the middle of winter, how the “poor” divided their property, how the village became poor.

Preparing for this essay, remembering what I read about collectivization, I suddenly realized how typical the fate of my ancestors was. Is it not similar ordeals that the poet’s brother Ivan Tvardovsky talks about in his “Pages of Experience”?

Or the “Roundup” by Vasily Bykov that I remember. My great-grandfather was “lucky”: he survived and remained free. Millions were unlucky. They were taken to Solovki and the Northern Urals, to logging sites and mines. There the living envied the dead. Such is the fate of the main story of Khvedor Rovba. Having received the allotment, this participant in the civil war, like Sholokhov’s Titus Borodin, “clung to the farm.” The peasant is getting rich, but those in power don’t like it. Khvedor is subject to such taxes that he is unable to pay them. For non-payment, Rovba, his wife Gannulya and their ten-year-old daughter Olenka are taken to the North to a camp. From inhuman conditions First the wife dies, then the daughter. Having become orphaned and buried his loved ones, Khvedor flees to his homeland with a false certificate in someone else’s name. His impulse is both deeply understandable and inexplicable. After all, it was in those parts that “people posed the greatest danger to him in the fields, villages, and on the roads,” “and now he feared meeting his own people most of all.”

This feeling of homeland is very strong in our peasants. It is very opportune here to talk about another literary character from A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle” - Spiridon. This one seems to have included all the twists and turns of our history. He was a worker, after the revolution he became a peasant. I visited the Greens, then the Whites, and ended up with the Reds. He started a strong farm, but everything was burned in a fire. That is why he avoided dispossession. He himself accepted the rank of commissar and dispossessed them. But he gave bad orders (he was sick of what was going on in the village). For “negligence” I ended up in a camp for the first time. He dug channels, then he became a guard himself. After his term he lived a happy life with his family. During the war he fell into occupation, farmed on his own, involuntarily became a partisan, then he and his family ended up in Germany. So social upheavals tossed people around like chips in a storm.

Spiridon had two attachments: to his family and to his homeland. It was for the sake of the children that he ended up in the camp a second time. He returned from captivity, knowing in advance that arrest could not be avoided. “I didn’t believe a penny in their (that is, Soviet) leaflets, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to get away from prison, he confessed to prisoner Nerzhin, “but I thought that all the blame would be placed on me, and what does the children have to do with it?” If they put me in prison, let the children live. But these plagues decided in their own way - and theirs took my head too.” This is how the best human feelings were trampled out.

Spiridon remained alive. The fate of Khvedor turned out differently. The raid drives him into a swamp, where he dies, perceiving death as deliverance. It’s scary to read about people who were doomed to death from hunger, or from overwork, or from despair.

The books of V. Belov, B. Mozhaev, A. Platonov, the stories of V. Astafiev and the works of other writers visibly and honestly show the era of the “great turning point in the countryside,” dispossession, and the tragedy of our peasantry. The village was split along the lines of poor and kulak, but even more along moral lines. In B. Mozhaev’s novel “Men and Women” we clearly see such a contrast. For one of the leaders of collectivization, Vozvyshaev, there are no people, there are only class enemies and those whom the authorities declare as bearers of a new society. It costs him nothing to kick people out of the house and send them to who knows where. These are fists, not people! Local activist Zenin argues similarly. When Prokop Aldonin was dispossessed, he had a heart attack. A doctor’s help is needed, but Zenin is calm, muttering “through his teeth”: “He’s gone crazy with greed.” After a while, Sanka comes running to Zenin:

• He's great! Dead - ah!...My fathers! What have we done?
• Nothing special. One less class enemy, Zenin calmly objects.

Andrei Borodin perceives what is happening differently. At first, he internally resists the lawlessness, but is not yet able to speak against it. He is only hiding from activist meetings. But then he speaks out openly. As one would expect, he is declared “the defender of the exploiting class” and is put in cold storage.

A difficult fate befell our peasant. Much is still unknown, for example, the number of victims of the famine in Ukraine and the Volga region in 1933. Some historians believe that the famine of the early thirties was chosen as one of the most effective methods the fight against the peasantry, who did not want to accept collectivization and turn into powerless day laborers. Is it so? Historians will return to this topic again and again. And the writers will have their say.

Literature gives us the opportunity to see what the life of collective farmers has become. Let's turn to famous story A. Solzhenitsyn " Matrenin Dvor" It takes place in 1956. The details noted by the author are more eloquent than long arguments. “She didn’t announce what for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unpeeled potato, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley - then in battle - as the cheapest one, they fattened the pigs and took them in bags).” Matryona's fate is a bitter, typical fate of a Russian peasant woman. She lost her husband and six children. “There was a lot of injustice with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but not because she didn’t work at a factory - she wasn’t entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner.” But my husband had been gone for fifteen years, and obtaining these certificates was troublesome. “These efforts were made more difficult by the fact that the social security service from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was an hour’s walk to the north. They drove her from office to office for two months... Each passage is a day.”

This story is a pain for the souls of people crippled by greed, accustomed to taking property from living owners. Likewise, Matryona’s relatives demand that part of her house (the upper room) be dismantled, without waiting for her to die. Everything ends tragically. The broken room is taken out on a tractor. But at the crossing the tractor gets stuck. A fast train crashes into him. Matryona and two other people die. It’s scary to read about those whose greed has consumed all their feelings. “His daughter was losing her mind, his son-in-law was on trial, own home his son was lying, killed by him, on the same street - the woman he had killed, whom he had once loved,” but Thaddeus only came for a short time to stand at the coffins. “His high forehead was overshadowed by a heavy thought, but this thought was to save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of Matryona’s sisters.”

In the works of V. Belov, V. Rasputin, V. Lipatov, we read about the difficult life of our peasants in the 60s and 70s, about the destruction of nature, abandoned villages. But in them we meet the same simple and pure people like Matryona. These are the true roots of our people, these are the righteous, without whom, “according to the proverb, a village does not stand.” Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.”

Events that took place almost sixty years ago today cause controversy, struggle, anger and pain as if they happened yesterday. This is because we all, even children, feel our origins in that time. After all, almost everyone’s great-grandfather, grandfather, or even father plowed the land. By reading about that time, we learn more about our ancestors, which means we understand ourselves better. Isn’t that why today many, as in the song, “dream of the village,” and many dream of their own farm.

The theme of the village is revealed in many works of contemporary writers. Writers of this direction strive for deep psychologism in the depiction of characters. to the use of local sayings, dialects, regional words.

The Russian village has always been the focus of attention of our writers. In books about modern processes in the village, we're talking about not so much about the socio-economic side of life. How much about the spiritual life of the collective farm peasantry, about moral and psychological conflicts.

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The theme of the village in the works of modern writers.

AKHTYAMOVA FIRAYA KAYUMOVNA, MBOU "NOVO-ARYSHSKAYA SOSH" RYBNO-SLOBODSKY MUNICIPAL DISTRICT, RT.

The term "village prose" included in scientific circulation and the criticism remains controversial. First of all, by “village prose” we mean a special creative community, that is, these are primarily works united by a common theme, the formulation of moral, philosophical and social problems. They are characterized by the image of an inconspicuous hero-worker, endowed with life wisdom and great moral content. Writers of this direction strive for deep psychologism in depicting characters, for the use of local sayings, dialects, and regional words. On this basis, their interest in the historical and cultural traditions of the Russian people, in the topic of continuity of generations, grows. True, when using this term in articles and studies, the authors always emphasize that it carries an element of convention, that they use it in a narrow sense.

Fiction about the village, about the peasant man and his problems over the course of 70 years of formation and development was marked by several stages: 1. In the 20s, there were works in literature that argued with each other about the paths of the peasantry, about the land. In the works of I. Volnov, L. Seifullina, V. Ivanov, B. Pilnyak, A. Neverov, L. Leonov, the reality of the village way of life was recreated from different ideological and social positions. 2. In the 30-50s, strict control over artistic creativity already prevailed. The works “Whetstones” by F. Panferov, “Steel Ribs” by A. Makarov, “Girls” by N. Kochin, “Virgin Soil Upturned” by M. Sholokhov reflected negative trends in the literary process of the 30-50s. 3. After the exposure of Stalin’s personality cult and its consequences, there is an intensification literary life in the country. This period is characterized by artistic diversity. Artists are aware of their right to freedom of creative thought, to historical truth.

Many contemporary writers did not ignore the fate of the Russian village in their work. Some admired the rural nature and “learned to find bliss in the truth,” others saw true position peasants and called the village poor, and its huts - gray. IN Soviet time The theme of the fate of the Russian village has become almost the leading one, and the question of the great turning point is still relevant today. Collectivization forced writers to put pen to paper.

The Russian village has always been the focus of attention of our writers. In books that talk about modern processes in the countryside, we are talking not so much about the socio-economic side of today's existence, but about the spiritual life of the collective farm peasantry, about moral and psychological conflicts.

In the story “On the Other Side,” V. Potanin talks about what the village has become. Old village disappears. People were drawn to cities not because of a good life, but to make ends meet. Only if in the village any work was a pleasure because almost all rural crafts were familiar to the villager from early childhood, then in the city work is clearly divided into popular and non-prestigious.

Venya Kitasov, the main character of V. Potanin's story, came to the city to earn money. But in this regard he was unlucky. Having got a job as a construction worker, Venya was always running errands. Either he has to unload bricks, or he has to throw down long and damp boards and carry them. There was so much work that there was no time to smoke. That's why Venya decided to leave there and join the circus. But work in the circus did not bring him either moral satisfaction or material support. The future of Potanin's hero seems hopeless. All the people living in the village are convinced that they can no longer live like this. Significant changes were needed. But the writer understands that for now there is no hope for any changes. That's why the story ends in fire. The real reason the fire at Venya's house remained unknown.

Everyone knows F. Abramov’s novel “Brothers and Sisters.” The stories “Pelageya” and “Alka” occupy an important place in the writer’s work. In them the writer talks about the sorrows and joys of people living in a distant northern village.

Alka was born into a family of hardworking collective farmers, but her father was often ill and earned little money. Pelageya, Alka’s mother, manages to get a job in the bakery of the timber industry enterprise. She got this advantageous position not entirely honestly, but she treated her duties conscientiously. Prosperity came to her house. Alka grew up without a moral ideal, she was used to only taking and not giving anything to people. Neither her family nor her school taught her to work in a team. They sighed about some other, beautiful, easy life in the city. In the city, Alka got a job in a restaurant. Extra money, dubious friends, parties among colleagues - Alka considered all this to be real cultural life. Soon her father and mother die. She could arrive only a week after the funeral of her parents, since with the opening of navigation she sailed as a barmaid on one of the prominent passenger ships on the Northern Dvina. Having resolved all matters with the “inheritance,” she “boarded up the house, laid farewell wreaths with bright paper flowers on the graves of her father and mother, and by evening she was already shaking on the district bus.” She did not want to miss out on a profitable and fun place on the ship.

Thus, without even suspecting it, Alka exchanged real life for miserable existence.

So, the village of F. Abramov and V. Potanin is opposed to the city. Everyday peasant labor makes a person whole and highly moral.

Each person has his own small homeland, that land that is the Universe and everything that Matera became for the heroes of the story by Valentin Rasputin. From love to small homeland All books by V.G. take their origins. Rasputin. In the story “Farewell to Matera” one can easily read the fate of the writer’s native village, Atalanka, which fell into a flood zone during the construction of the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station.

Matera is both an island and a village of the same name. Russian peasants inhabited this place for three hundred years. Life goes on slowly, without haste, on this island, and over those more than three hundred years, Matera has made many people happy. She accepted everyone, became a mother to everyone and carefully fed her children, and the children responded to her with love. And the residents of Matera did not need comfortable houses with heating, or a kitchen with a gas stove. They did not see happiness in this. If only I had the opportunity to touch my native land, light the stove, drink tea from a samovar, live my whole life next to the graves of my parents, and when the turn comes, lie next to them. But Matera leaves, the soul of this world leaves.

They decided to build a powerful power plant on the river. The island fell into a flood zone. The entire village must be relocated to a new settlement on the banks of the Angara. But this prospect did not please the old people. Grandma Daria’s soul was bleeding, because she was not the only one who grew up in Matera. This is the homeland of her ancestors, and Daria herself considered herself the keeper of the traditions of her people. She sincerely believes that “they only gave Matera to us to keep... so that we could take good care of her and feed her.”

And the Mothers stand up to defend their homeland, try to save their village, their history.

A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matrenin’s Dvor” is also characteristic of this. At the center of the story is the fate of a village woman.

Russia is rich not only in endless expanses, fertile lands, orchards, but also extraordinary people, righteous people, gifted with pure, divine energy. They look at us with clear, deep eyes, as if they are looking into our souls, so much so that you can’t hide anything from them. The righteous sacrifice many of life's delights for the sake of purity of soul, and joyfully help those around them to overcome all adversity with dignity, emerge victorious from the struggle with themselves, and become spiritually cleansed. And no matter what they say about them, no matter how much one is surprised at their unpretentiousness, there will always be a place for such people on Russian soil, for they preach the truth.

"Matryonin's Dvor" is a story about the mercilessness of human fate, evil fate, the stupidity of the Soviet post-Stalin order, about life ordinary people, far from the bustle and rush of the city, - about life in a socialist state.

Thus, the image of a man of the people, his philosophy, spiritual world villages, orientation towards folk word- all this unites such different writers as F. Abramov, V. Belov, M. Alekseev, B. Mozhaev, V. Shukshin, V. Rasputin, V. Likhonosov, E. Nosov, V. Krupin and others.

Russian literature has always been significant in that, like no other literature in the world, it dealt with issues of morality, questions about the meaning of life and death, and posed global problems. IN " village prose“issues of morality are associated with the preservation of everything valuable in rural traditions: centuries-old national life, the way of life of the village, folk morality and folk moral principles.

Separate for the first time image of the city Pushkin introduces it into Russian literature in the poem “The Bronze Horseman”. Later, Gogol continued his tradition: in the stories “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” the image of St. Petersburg appears - filled with imperial beauty, coldness and slight infernality. Gogol shows that such a majestic city simply cannot be friendly towards its inhabitants.

Dostoevsky in his novel “Crime and Punishment” approaches the description of St. Petersburg differently: since his novel is about people of the bottom living in tenement houses, he shows the poor and dirty areas of the capital of the empire.

Instead of majestic Senate Square Sennaya Square (in the slum area) is described, instead of gallant ladies and gentlemen - alcoholics and prostitutes, instead of noble houses - tiny rooms.

It is implied that in such a city people a priori cannot be happy: Petersburg is either deceitful and cold, or just as abandoned and poor. Literature needs a worthy confrontation with the image of the city. Thus, writers begin to turn their attention to village image.

The village as the embodiment of a moral ideal in Russian prose and poetry

One of the first authors of this direction was Grigorovich. He wrote the story “The Village,” based on childhood memories. The plot is based on the story of an orphan girl who was married against her will, and she eventually committed suicide because... I couldn’t live in my husband’s house.

1847 story “Anton the Miserable.” The main character lives very poorly, that’s why he was called that. He goes to the city to sell a horse (the most valuable thing for a peasant!), thereby abandoning any hopes for the future. And his horse is stolen. And everything turns out very bad and sad.

In his stories, Grigorovich describes the same time of year, autumn. Those. it's almost constant rain, porridge underfoot, low dark sky... in general, complete depression. And the mood of the stories is the same: troubles, misfortunes, hardships and anxiety... there is no perspective, no horizon, sheer hopelessness and hopelessness. The people living there are as dull and gray as the surrounding landscape. There are no children in the stories, therefore, there is no indication (hope) for any future.

He also wrote novels about peasant life, which were not successful. He also wrote quite detailed memoirs, from which one can create an impression of his contemporaries and his friends. Grigorovich never managed to go beyond the natural school, as a result of which he did not take a decent place in the history of literature, unlike Turgenev, who later replaced naturalism with realism, also describing the inner world of the heroes.

Turgenev's image of a village

In the collection of stories "Notes of a Hunter" Turgenev creates a complete image peasant soul, contrasting and at the same time harmonious. The real Russian character, in his opinion, combines the natural principle, heroic strength and sensitivity.

Turgenev admires such beauty and sincerity of the Russian people. He believes in the people and loves them, proves that everything bad in an ordinary Russian person is due only to the difficulties of his life (even after the abolition of serfdom). However, the heroes of "Notes of a Hunter" can maintain spiritual strength and wealth even in difficult conditions.