The piece on the bottom is what it gave me. Analysis “At the Bottom” (Gorky Maxim)

M. GORKY. "AT THE BOTTOM"

(Analysis experience)

Gorky’s drama “At the Lower Depths” (1902), created immediately after a series of romantic works of the 90s, full of rebellion against the psychology of humility, obedience, and “humanism of compassion,” amazes with the abundance of disturbing questions, hidden and overt discussions about man’s place in the world, about the truth of dreams and the truth of reality, about the limits of human freedom and the degrading power of circumstances. In the finale, the drama turns - and this is an indicator of its saturation with philosophical and ethical problems - into a kind of “trial” of the inhabitants of the shelter over the one who excited them, who “leavened” everyone, put them in a state of fermentation, “beckoned” (“but he himself did not lead the way”) said") - Elder Luke. True, one of Luke’s unexpected defenders, Satin, stopped this trial and interrupted the flow of accusations: “It’s true that he... didn’t love, he’s an old man”; “The old man is stupid”; “was... like crumbs for the toothless”... But what did this stop, the ban mean, if the banter himself suddenly brought up for discussion in the new edition all the same questions about truth, the “god of a free man” and lies - “the religion of slaves and masters.”

It is necessary to dwell on the most pressing, fateful issues that sound in the drama in a certain sequence, certainly taking into account Gorky’s difficult, changeable attitude towards his own play, its complex and innovative dramatic structure, and its language.

How is Gorky’s drama “At the Lower Depths” (1902), undoubtedly the most important link in the writer’s entire philosophical and artistic system, read now? Is it possible to separate, say, the wanderer Luka, the real hero of a wonderful play, from Luka, who appears in some of Gorky’s speeches of the 30s regarding this “harmful” hero? The contrasts between the beginning of life's journey - a canonized petrel and apostle of the revolution, a conflict-free and supposedly ideal friend of Lenin and the end - a prisoner in a gilded cage of honors and awards are so deep and dramatic that some modern researchers of M. Gorky's work sincerely suggest that at the end of life “the author betrayed his hero,” called him a “harmful old man,” thereby supporting his most disgusting heroes. Maybe we should only believe the Moscow Art Theater actors (Moskvin, Luzhsky, etc.), who wrote that “Gorky, reading Luka’s words addressed to Anna, wiped away his tears,” that “Gorky sympathized with Luka more than anyone else.”.

According to other modern interpreters of the dispute about man in the play “At the Depths,” Gorky initially prepared in it the victory of the “atheistic concept formulated by Satin,” the victory of those for whom “blessed are the strong in spirit” (and not the “poor in spirit”), he laughed at faith in God, Luke's consolation. He allegedly deliberately led “supporters of the religious view into a logical impasse,” convincing viewers that “Orthodoxy has exhausted itself and must be replaced by a new religion. For the “proletarian writer” this religion is communism.”.

In our opinion, in the first case, the position of the late Gorky is essentially narrowed to the Baron’s opinion about the “harmfulness” and cowardice of Luke: “Disappeared from the police... like smoke from a fire... The old man is a charlatan.” In the second and in many others, in addition to simplifying Gorky’s worldview at the turn of the century, in the interpretation of the main conflict of the play, the entire complex structure of the play disappears - with the relationships of the characters, their alienation and at the same time interconnectedness. Such a remarkable discovery of Gorky the playwright in the play “At the Lower Depths” is disappearing, such as polyphony (not a dialogue, not a monologue, but a polylogue), when speakers hear and respond to each other, “hooking” those around them without entering into a direct exchange of remarks. Thinking and talking about their own things, they nevertheless intrude on other people’s complaints, worries, and unwittingly evaluate the hopes of their neighbors in the shelter.

The Moscow Art Theater, led in 1902 by the bright theater reformers K. S. Stanislavsky and V. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, did not accidentally choose this play (and defended it in a dispute with censorship): it needed a kind of tough, non-sentimental “anti-theater” Gorky with an unexpected stage (“basement, like a cave”), a theater that rejected the traditional chamber, “ceiling” play with artificial scenery, with eternal reasoners, simpletons, “villains.”

1. The system of characters and parallel storylines in the play “At the Bottom”.

In our opinion, it is from this side that one should begin, of course, by checking students’ knowledge of the text of the play, their understanding of philosophical and ethical issues, the abundance of conflicts, disputes, declarations caused by the appearance of Luke in the night shelter and his involuntary spiritual and moral “healing” of its inhabitants.

The world of the play “At the Bottom” is, as they say, a combinatorial world, and by the nature of its architectonics the play belongs to the dramaturgy of a centrifugal, spreading composition. It can be called, like Gorky’s other plays (“Summer Residents”, “Yegor Bulychev and Others”), “scenes”. But despite all this combinatory nature, even the “labyrinthine” construction and the “uncoveredness” of all the characters by a single plot, each of the characters is extremely expressive thanks to language. There are no aphorisms at all, it cannot be said that it is Gorky who says in the play: “In the carriage of the past, you won’t go anywhere,” etc. After all, aphorisms or folded speeches in the rhyme of the cap-maker Bubnov (“Such a life that, as you got up in the morning, so for howling”, “People all live... like chips floating on a river”, etc.) differ from the no less figurative speeches of the same Luke (“There are people, and there are others - people”; “What you believe in is and there is"). And they differ even more from the thunderous words of Satin: the latter are associated with the cult of the human creator, with the idea, important for Gorky, of the central place in the world of an extraordinary, “cosmocratic” person.

Take a close look at the gathering place of orphans, unfortunates, marginalized people (people from the margins of life), gathered in the cramped area of ​​the basement-cave in the first act. Or to the “wasteland” - “a courtyard place littered with various rubbish and overgrown with weeds” - in act three. You will make an interesting discovery: this site is, in essence, divided into cells, into microspaces, holes, in which “former” people live separately and even alienated, deprived of business, of the past, living with their misfortune, even close to tragedy. Here is the room behind a thin partition in which the thief Vaska Pepel lives, selling stolen goods to the owner of the shelter Kostylev, the former lover of his wife Vasilisa, who dreams of leaving here with Natalya, the sister of the owner. The triangle Ash - Vasilisa - Natalya has an independent meaning in the play. But for all the drama of the struggle within it - Vasilisa incites Ash to take revenge on her husband, slyly promises to give him money - for many other inhabitants of the shelter, the outcome of this struggle is not so important.

Anna and the locksmith Kleshch, perhaps blaming himself for cruelty to his wife, have their own drama - an unhappy life lived, dying in the basement. The drama in the drama is the relationship between the merchant Kvashnya and the policeman Abram Medvedev, the constant “mocking” of each other by the prostitute Nastya, who dreamed of the fatal Gaston or Raoul, and the Baron, remembering his noble grandfather. The Baron, however, says to the “scoundrel” Nastya, who ridicules his dreams: “I am no match for you! You... are scum." But as soon as she runs away, not wanting to listen to him, he looks for her (“Run away... where? I’ll go and see... where is she?”). In a certain sense, the hidden interconnection of these disparate human cells, the unity of the poor fellows, even those fighting and ridiculing each other, can be defined in the words of Nastya: “Oh, you unfortunate one! After all, you... you live on me, like a worm lives on an apple!”

The most detached, withdrawn in sadness, in evil pessimism, like the cap-holder Bubnov, without wanting to, enter into an argument, into a conversation about the secret with others, supporting the polylogue (polylogue) of the play. Think about this discovery of Gorky in connection with the episode from the first act, when Natasha, Tick and Ash, are talking at the bedside of the sick Anna, hoping to connect her fate with Ash. Bubnov, who bought the thread, examines his product:

Natasha. You should treat her more kindly now... after all, it won’t be long now.
Mite. I know…
Natasha. You know... It's not enough to know, you - understand. After all, dying is scary...
Ash. But I’m not afraid...
Natasha. How!.. Bravery...
Bubnov(whistles) . And the threads are rotten...

Ash’s remark, Bubnov’s gloomy remark about threads, as if destroying the “unsewn” union of Natasha and Ash, are not directly related to the conversation between Natasha and Kleshch about Anna. All this creates very complex relationships in the entire system of characters, connections between what was said once before and what is being said right now, giving rise to a roll call, the superposition of one dialogue on another.

There is another quality of being that unites these marginalized people. No, this, of course, is not a social opposition of the oppressed to the “pious” exploiter Kostylev, who every now and then raises wages, charges half a ruble (“and the victim will burn in front of the holy icon”). The dispute between “masters” and “slaves” in the play is not stated loudly: the distorted fates of the characters, tramps, and “cinders” speak louder about the social and moral troubles of the world. What binds the heroes together - and this is mentioned twice in the play (even after Luke’s appearance and disappearance) - is some kind of irresistible, gloomy power of the real cycle of events happening to the inhabitants of the shelter.

Gorky rejected the original titles of the play - “Without the Sun”, “Nochlezhka”, “The Bottom”, “At the Bottom of Life”. The decisive word on the choice of the name “At the Lower Depths” belonged to L.N. Andreev. But the theme of sunless life in the play remained - in the song that arises and is born in the souls of people who have lost faith in the dream, in the truth. “Tighten up, darling!” - Bubnov will say. And the words of the song sound:

This impression of a sunless life, of some kind of general defeat of humanity and goodness, is strengthened by Anna’s exclamation, looking around the gloomy morning basement (“Every single day... let me at least die in peace!”), and Luka’s completely sad chant (“In the middle of the night... there's no way to see the road").

All parallel developing private dramas and conflicts ultimately converge in this hopeless “darkness.” The darkness is somehow thick, non-dispersing, primordial. Her darkness is not brightened even by the deaths that follow one after another - Anna, Kostylev, Actor. None of the deaths "finish" the plays. Life for the inhabitants of the shelter is absurd, an eyeless, stupid “press” for all bright hopes; in the nature of this “press” there is no feeling of saturation.

Take a look from this point of view at the semantic system of the remarks of, say, an Actor - he is all in anticipation of death, like a helpless moth by the fire. The Actor’s constant efforts to remember something from past roles - but he most often remembers Hamlet (“Ophelia! Oh... remember me in your prayers!”), King Lear, or a line from Pushkin (“... our nets brought in a dead man”). “The semantic core of all these literary reminiscences is departure from life, death: “The plot path of the Actor is thus set at the very beginning of the work, and by those artistic means that determine his profession.”.

1. What unites the lonely inhabitants of the shelter, the “former people”? Can the main conflict of the play be considered only a social confrontation?
2. What is the traditionality, dating back to A. N. Ostrovsky, of the conflict in the love triangle of Vasilisa - Vaska Pepel - Natalya and what is the Chekhovian novelty of many dramas in different “cells” of the basement-cave?
3. Which of the inhabitants of the shelter is a dreamer, a dreamer, inclined to believe Luke’s consolations, and who is a skeptic, an “insensitive” lover of truth?
4. What are monologue, dialogue and polylogue? What is their role in the play? How does polylogue, polyphony, make up for the gaps in communication between characters?
5. Why do the play contain two themes that are opposite in meaning: on the one hand, the song “The Sun Rises and Sets,” and on the other, Beranger’s poems about the feat of a madman who will bring a golden dream to humanity?

2. “Which is better - pity or truth,” or a debate about truth and dreams?

The appearance of the wanderer Luke in the shelter, his unexpectedly active role in the debate about the nature of man, his right to happiness, to a dream - disputes that turned everyone into “reluctant philosophers”, dramatically changed the entire situation in the shelter. Vasilisa and her husband also run in here, tracking down Vaska Pepel, pushing him to commit a crime; the shoemaker Alyoshka also invades here from the street with an accordion with a spontaneous protest (“And for me, a good man, to be commanded by my comrade... a drunkard, I don’t want! "), but this intrigue, we repeat, does not captivate everyone, although Luka, hiding on the stove, overhearing the conversation between Ash and Vasilisa (“free me from my husband”), saves Vaska from a “mistake” (“as if, they say, the guy is then I wasn’t mistaken... I didn’t strangle the old man”), and later even Satin, saving Ash, who still kills Kostylev, is drawn briefly, impulsively into this intrigue: “I also hit the old man three times... How much does he need! Call me as a witness, Vaska..."

And yet, the main dispute, which strengthened both the division and unity of the characters in the shelter, takes place outside of this traditional intrigue (Gorky will develop it in the play “Vassa Zheleznova”). Luke, who brought notes of compassion and sympathy into the basement, justified the right of the Actor, Nastya, Anna to dreams, to prayer, without meaning to, outlined a real, explosive division of everyone into two camps: “dreamers” and “skeptics”, bearers of “evil” truth, melancholy, hopelessness, chained to this truth like a chain. He excited both of them, stirred up unextinguished hopes in some and embittered others. Notice how the Actor “added”, elevated, say, Luke’s simple advice about going to a hospital for alcoholics: “An excellent hospital... Marble... marble floor! Light... cleanliness, food... everything for free! And marble floor, yes!” How sensitively Ashes listens to Luka, instantly changing his idea of ​​Siberia! At first he sees only hard labor, the ace of diamonds on his back, the “long Siberian path” in shackles, and then:

Luke. And the good side is Siberia! The golden side. He who has strength and intelligence is like a cucumber in a greenhouse!
Ash. Old man. Why are you lying?
Luke. Ass?
Ash. I'm deaf! Why are you lying, I say?
Luke. What am I lying about?
Ash. In everything... It’s good there, it’s good here... because you’re lying! For what?

And even to Satin, a rationalist, closed from everyone, who despises his fellow swindler Baron, Luka finds some kind of key of his own: “You are so brave... Konstantin... not stupid... And suddenly... You endure life easily.”

Maybe Luka even forces the skeptic Bubnov, who previously did not spare Anna (“noise is no obstacle to death”), to throw his last trump cards into the game, into the argument. Bubnov reproaches Nastya: “She’s used to touching up her face... so she wants to touch up her soul... it puts a blush on her soul.” But he aims at the main illusionist - Luka: he embellished the souls of Anna, Actor, Ash, even Satin. He “fermented” all the inhabitants, if not with the will to rebel, with courage, then with some kind of deep dreaminess. Perhaps the determination of Ash, who took revenge on everyone at once - Kostylev, Vasilisa, and Medvedev, this kind of desperate protest, was ultimately born of Luka, his golden fairy tale about Siberia?

The most amazing, mysterious thing about Luka is the energy of self-propulsion: independent both from the court of the inhabitants of the shelter and from Gorky himself! He could no longer connect with Luke either his previous romantic calls to seek heroism (“there is always room for exploits in life”), or his reproaches to blind people depressed by the current dull life:

True, there is also something uncontrollable, “wrong” with the image of Luka - especially in the atmosphere of 1902-1903, i.e., the preparation for the revolution of 1905! - both Gorky and the Moscow Art Theater felt it. After all, according to the memoirs of I.M. Moskvin, in the production on December 18, 1902, Luka appeared as a noble comforter, almost a savior of many desperate inhabitants of the shelter. Some critics, however, saw in Luke... “Danko, to whom only real features were given,” “an exponent of the highest truth,” and found elements of Luke’s exaltation in Beranger’s poems, which the Actor, staggering, shouts:

But this was violence against the image, interpreting it in the spirit of the day. Meanwhile, K. S. Stanislavsky, one of the directors of the play, outlined the path of “decreasing” the hero in the director’s notebooks. He warned I.M. Moskvin against idealizing the wanderer, the comforter, the sower of “golden dreams”: “he looks slyly,” “slyly smiling,” “ingratiatingly, softly,” “slipped,” “it’s clear that he’s lying,” “sentimentally touching.” lies”, “Luka the cunning”, etc. In a number of subsequent productions of the play “At the Lower Depths” - especially in the 1968 production by the Sovremennik Theater (director - G. Volchek and performer of the role of Luke - I. Kvasha) - again the old man’s shock at how much grief, misfortune, and torment there is in the world, how childishly helpless people, almost children, are in the face of evil was revealed extremely clearly.

It is very curious that K. S. Stanislavsky himself, who played the role of Satin, failed to reduce the image of Luke with the help of elevating Satin in the same production in 1902. The text of this outwardly winning role (in psychological terms, still a bit empty) is oversaturated, sprinkled with garlands of aphorisms. Everyone knows them: “You can’t go anywhere in the carriage of the past”, “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters!”, “Man! It's great! It sounds proud!” etc. All this clearly came into the play, on the one hand, from romantic fairy tales, songs, legends of Gorky the Petrel... And on the other? From Gorky’s new beliefs of the 1900s about the greatness of reason, about Man, equal to God with his will to re-create the world, from the poem “Man” (1903). These monologues foreshadowed Gorky - an opponent of the “idiocy of village life” and Russian passivity.

K. S. Stanislavsky, a witness to the rapid rise and rise of the writer, initially came to the erroneous thought: in the role of Satin, one must “clearly present to the public the successful phrases of the role,” “catch words,” “one must imagine, and not live on stage.” It was difficult not to fall into this mistake, into betrayal of the aesthetics of the Moscow Art Theater, which was later corrected: all of Satin’s monologues about the greatness of Man, his hands and brain were word for word similar to the rhetoric of Gorky’s romantic poem “Man”. I. Annensky, seeing the rise of Satin, the transformation of man into a new deity, turned to Gorky: “Oh, look, Satin - Gorky, won’t a person be scared, and most importantly, won’t he be immensely bored realizing that he is - everything and that everything is for him and only for him?” (From the review “Drama at the Bottom”).

Questions for independent analysis of the play

1. Why is Luke’s vital conclusion about the righteous land so attractive: “if you believe, it is”?
2. Can we say that Luka actively opposes Gorky’s former romantic heroes, those who could boldly say about themselves “we are born with the sun in our blood”?
3. Why was it so difficult for the Moscow Art Theater actors and the director of “At the Lower Depths” K. S. Stanislavsky to reduce the greatness of Luka’s kindness and compassion?

3. Satin and Luke - antipodes or kindred spirits?

Which of them is the more inspired comforter? The easy way of contrasting heroes walking through the entire character series of the play, drawn involuntarily into the central event of the play (Vaska Ash’s murder of the owner of the flophouse, Kostylev), is a largely deceptive path. And not because Luke was the first, as we noticed, to feel: the tireless joker, the mockingbird Satin, who sometimes speaks cruel, cynical words (“I’ll give you advice: don’t do anything! Just burden the earth!”), not a hypocrite who deceives himself himself, and also a sufferer. “You are cheerful, Kostyantin... pleasant!” - says Luka, softly, unpersistently asking him about the path with which he “went crazy.” Luka feels that both of them are comforters, having nothing at their disposal except words and considerable life experience. Only their words of consolation are different. In Luke lives a righteous man, a bearer of ideas of compassion, while in Satin there are many embedded ideas of the future technocratic, intellectual renewal of humanity, ideas about the greatness of the human mind.

Seeming antipodes, Satin and Luke, behave almost identically in many cases. Both Luka and Satin are trying to save Vaska Pepel and Natasha, seeing what an insidious intrigue was planned by Vasilisa, Ash’s mistress, Kostylev’s wife. Even after Luke’s departure, a departure usually interpreted as the flight of a liar, a sower of illusions, as his collapse (although the old man did not promise anyone to stay here!), it is Satin who passionately defends him: “Dubier... keep silent about the old man! ( Calm down. ) You, Baron, are the worst of all! You don’t understand anything... And you’re lying! The old man is not a charlatan!”

Perhaps now, without smoothing over the opposition of many motives of consolation (the theme of Luke) and the odic, rhetorical praise of man (the theme of Satin), one should see in the heroes the dual, contradictory, rebellious soul of Gorky of those years, not yet shackled by dogmas? Later - already in the play “Enemies” (1907), especially in the story “Mother” (1906), this spirit of quest, doubt, and “Hamletism” that saves talent will not be in Gorky. But there will be no life, no multidimensionality of the heroes. As, indeed, the polyphony of passions.

The play “At the Lower Depths” captured the turning point in Gorky’s entire fate. He, as if afraid to lag behind the revolution, from its militant, categorical laws, generously scatters remarks condemning Luke throughout the text. The play partly builds a whole line of condemnation, even ridicule of Luke.

Gorky's talent resisted the schematic division of heroes into “positive” and “negative.” Now it is quite obvious that such a scathing judgment is not justified by anything: “People of the bottom first of all lose their name, and this circumstance becomes one of the leitmotifs of the play. All the inhabitants of the shelter once had it... Everyone who has lost their name is dead.”. Is this true in a wonderful play? Even the choice of names for the characters, their original meaning is not very simple. The name Luke, of course, is associated with the word “evil one.” But it also means something completely different: “light.” The name Constantine, given to Satin, means “constant”, in this case a stable reasoner, who, even mimicking the Actor (“organism... Organon”), remembers: organon translated from Greek means “organ of knowledge”, “reasonableness”. It is not the body that is poisoned by alcohol, but the organ of knowledge, the source of intelligence, that is damaged. Other names are equally significant: Vasilisa (“reigning”), Nastya (“resurrected”), Natalya (“consoled”).

The construction of the play, extremely compressed, often turning into a polyphonic chorus, the entire basement area divided into human cells, parallel developing conflicts that unite the characters in pairs and triangles, made it possible to pull together many of the drama’s contradictions into an amazing whole. And these springs, the “clockwork” of the play, have not been relaxed to this day. Each act ends, for example, with the death of Anna, Kostylev, Actor (it was he who “ruined the song”), but not one of the deaths carries a cleansing catharsis. The reader and viewer will probably never fully figure out: does the fate of the heroes in the play move entirely along an inclined plane, does only evil triumph, does the “shipwreck” continue? Or something else is happening in this hold - the affirmation of new values, the rising of the sun (remember the song “The Sun Rises and Sets,” heard in the play).

Concluding the analysis of the verbal matter of the play, its replicas, pay attention to the aphorism, the abundance of everyday formulas, speech gestures, to the dotted line of leitmotifs that speak of the legitimacy of the “dream”, “faith”, and the high destiny of man. It should be emphasized that Gorky seemed to be afraid of cold coinage, the external shine of phrases. In any episode of the play, as signals of a difficult ascent to the truth, which is not given from above, ellipses, pauses, a kind of failures, breakthroughs in the chain of communication, flash. There is anguish of speech in Satin’s monologues, in Kleshch’s tongue-tied protests, and in Bubnov’s difficult speech production. All this speaks of how difficult the path of the heroes of the shelter and Gorky himself was to sober truth and to a life-enlightening dream.

Questions for independent analysis of the play

1. Luke and Satin: antipodes or kindred spirits? Why does Satin unexpectedly defend Luka (“The old man is not a charlatan!”) at the trial of the inhabitants of the shelter after the old man left?
2. How is the hidden meaning of the name Luka (“bright”) revealed in the wanderer’s relationship with Vaska Ash and Natalya, Actor and Anna, Bubnov and Satin? What are the features of Gorky’s psychologism, embodied in fairy tales, parables, edifying parables, and in Luke’s figurative speech?
3. Are Satin’s monologues about man, about truth - the god of a free man, a transitional link from the former romantic beliefs of Gorky (the images of Danko and Sokol) to the future worship of reason and scientific knowledge?
4. Is the etymology of the names reflected in the behavior of the characters in the play: Luka (“bright”), Nastya (“resurrected”), Vasilisa (“royal”), Konstantin (“constant”)
5. Why were a series of aphoristic statements and rhyming remarks as the most important feature of the style of “At the Lower Depths” inevitable? What is new about the aphoristic style in debates about Truth and Man at the turn of the 20th century?

Analysis of the first act of A. M. Gorky’s drama “At the Lower Depths.”

Gorky's play “At the Lower Depths” excited society with its appearance. Her first performance caused a shock: were real homeless people on stage instead of actors?

The action of the play in a cave-like basement attracts attention not only with the unusual characters, but also with its polyphony of voices. It is only at the first moment, when the reader or viewer sees the “heavy stone vaults” of the ceiling, “Bubnov’s bunks”, “a wide bed covered with a dirty chintz canopy” that it seems that the faces here are all the same - gray, gloomy, dirty.

But then the heroes started talking, and...

-...I say, - a free woman, her own mistress... (Kvashnya)

Who beat me yesterday? Why were they beaten? (Satin)

It's harmful for me to breathe dust. My body is poisoned by alcohol. (Actor)

What different voices! What different people! What different interests! The exposition of the first act is a discordant choir of characters who seem to not hear each other. Indeed, everyone lives in this basement the way they want, everyone is concerned with their own problems (for some it is a problem of freedom, for others it is a problem of punishment, for others it is a problem of health, survival in the current conditions).

But here the first turning point of the action - the dispute between Satin and the actor. In response to the actor’s words: “The doctor told me: your body, he says, is completely poisoned with alcohol,” Satin , smiling, pronounces the completely incomprehensible word “organon”, and then adds “sycambre” to the Actor.

What is this? A play on words? Nonsense? No, this is the diagnosis that Satin gave to society. Organon is a violation of all rational foundations of life. This means that it is not the Actor’s body that is poisoned, but human life, the life of society, that is poisoned and perverted.

Sicambre translated into Russian means “savage”. Of course, only a savage (according to Satin) may not understand this truth.

There is also a third “incomprehensible” word in this debate - “macrobiotics”. (The meaning of this concept is known: the book of the German doctor, honorary member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences Hufeland was called “The Art of Extending Human Life,” 1797). The “recipe” for prolonging human life, which the Actor offers: “If the body is poisoned,... it means that sweeping the floor is harmful for me... breathing dust...” evokes a clearly negative assessment from Satin. It is in response to this statement by the Actor that Satin mockingly says:

"Macrobiotics...ha!"

So, the thought is indicated: life in a shelter is absurd and wild, because its very rational foundations are poisoned. This is understandable to Satin, but the hero, apparently, does not know the recipes for treating the basics of life. The line “Macrobiotics... ha!” can be interpreted differently: what is the point of thinking about the art of prolongation such life. The turning point of the first scene attracts attention not only because the reader determines the dominant thought about the foundations of life, it is also important because it gives an idea of ​​the level of intelligence of the roommates in the person of Satin. AND the idea that there are smart, knowledgeable people in the shelter is amazing.

Let's also pay attention to how Satin presents his beliefs. It would be quite understandable if the night shelter beaten the day before directly spoke about the abnormal state of society that forces people to behave inhumanely. But for some reason he utters completely incomprehensible words. This is clearly not a demonstration of knowledge of foreign language vocabulary. What then? The answer that suggests itself makes you think about the moral qualities of Satin. Maybe he spares the Actor’s pride, knowing about his heightened emotionality? Maybe he is generally not inclined to offend a person, even one who does not know much? In both cases we are convinced of Satin’s delicacy and tact. Isn’t it strange that such qualities exist in a “bottom” person?!

Another point that cannot be ignored: quite recently we saw: “Satin has just woken up, lies on his bunk and growls” (remark for Act 1), now, talking with the Actor, Satin smiles. What caused such a sudden change in mood? Perhaps Satin is interested in the course of the argument, perhaps he feels in himself the strength (both intellectual and spiritual) that distinguishes him favorably from the Actor, who recognizes his own weakness, but perhaps this is not a smile of superiority over the Actor, but a kind, compassionate smile towards a person in need of support. No matter how we evaluate Satin’s smile, it turns out that real human feelings live in him, be it pride from realizing his own importance, be it compassion for the Actor and the desire to support him. This discovery is all the more surprising because the first impression of the roar of voices of the night shelters, not listening, insulting each other, was not in favor of these people. (“You’re a red goat!” /Kvashnya – Kvashnya/; “Be silent, old dog” /Kvashnya – Kvashnya/, etc.).

After an argument between Satin and Actor, the tone of the conversation changes sharply. Let's listen to what the heroes are talking about now:

I love incomprehensible, rare words... There are very good books and many interesting words... (Satin)

I was a furrier... I had my own establishment... My hands were so yellow - from the paint... I really thought that I wouldn’t wash them until my death... But here they are... My hands are just dirty... Yes! (Bubnov)

Education is nonsense, the main thing is talent. And talent is faith in yourself, in your strength. (Actor)

Job? Make the work enjoyable for me - maybe I will work, yes! (Satin)

What kind of people are they? Ragged, golden company...People! I am a working man... I’m ashamed to look at them... (Tick)

Do you have a conscience? (Ash)

What are the heroes of the “bottom” thinking and thinking about? Yes, about the same things that any person thinks about: about love, about faith in one’s strength, about work, about the joys and sorrows of life, about good and evil, about honor and conscience.

The first discovery, the first amazement associated with what I read from Gorky - here it is: people of the “bottom” are ordinary people, they are not villains, they are not monsters, they are not scoundrels. They are the same people as us, they just live in different conditions. Maybe it was this discovery that shocked the first viewers of the play and is shocking more and more new readers?! May be…

If Gorky had completed the first act with this polylogue, our conclusion would have been correct, but the playwright introduces a new person. Luka appears “with a stick in his hand, a knapsack over his shoulders, a bowler hat and a kettle at his belt.” Who is he, the man who greets everyone: “Good health, honest people!”

Who is he, the man who claims: “I don’t care!” I respect swindlers too, in my opinion, not a single flea is bad: they’re all black, they all jump...” (?) Reflecting on the question of who Luka is, we think, first of all, that the playwright gives his hero a strange Name. Luke- this is holy, this is the same biblical hero?

(Let us turn to the Biblical Encyclopedia. Let us take an interest in what is said there about Luke: “Luke the Evangelist is the writer of the third Gospel and the book of the Acts of the Apostles. He is not named at all as the writer of the last book, but the general and continuous tradition of the Church from the very beginning attributed to him the compilation of the said book of the New Testament. According to the testimony of Eusenius and Jerome, Luke was a native of the city of Antioch. The Apostle Paul calls him beloved doctor. His thorough acquaintance with Jewish customs, way of thinking, phraseology make it somewhat probable that he was at first a proselyte, a foreigner who accepted the Jewish faith, although on the other hand, from his classical style, the purity and correctness of the Greek language in his Gospel, one can rather conclude that that he came not from the Jewish, but from the Greek race. We do not know what prompted him to accept Christianity, but we know that after his conversion, having become deeply attached to the Apostle Paul, he devoted his entire subsequent life to serving Christ. There is an ancient legend that Luke was one of the 70 disciples sent by the Lord to every city and place where you yourself wanted to go(Luke X, 1). Another ancient legend says that he was also a painter and attributes to him the drawing of the icons of the Savior and the Mother of God, the latter of which is still kept in the Great Assumption Cathedral in Moscow. Regarding the manner of his activities upon entering the apostolic ministry, we find precise and definite information described by him himself in the book of Acts. They think that in his touching Gospel narrative about the appearance of the risen Lord, the two disciples who went to Emmanus under another disciple, whose name is not mentioned, are, of course, Luke himself (chap. XIV). It is not known for certain when Luke joined the Apostle Paul and became his companion and collaborator. Maybe it was in 43 or 44 AD. Then he accompanied the apostle to Rome until the time of his first imprisonment there and remained with him. And during the second bond of the Apostle, shortly before his death, he was also with him, while all the others left the Apostle; This is why Paul’s words at the end of II Timothy are so moving: “Damas left me, loving the present age, and went to Thessalonica, Crescent to Galatea, Titus to Dalmatia. Only Luke is with me." After the death of the Apostle Paul, nothing is known from the Holy Scriptures about the subsequent life of Luke. There is a tradition that he preached the Gospel in Italy, Macedonia and Greece and even in Africa and died peacefully at the age of 80. According to another legend, he died a martyr’s death under Domitian, in Achaia, and for lack of a cross was hanged on an olive tree.”

Based on these ideas about Luke, we can say that Luke is a healer of hearts, a wanderer, a bearer of Christian morality, a teacher of lost souls in many ways reminiscent of the Evangelist Luke.

At the same time, another question arises: maybe Luke is a crafty, two-faced person? Or maybe Luke is “luminous” (after all, this is how this name is translated)?

It is very difficult to answer these questions unambiguously, because even the playwright himself sometimes saw in his hero a saint, sometimes a liar, sometimes a comforter.

Luke's first words are alarming: he is so indifferent towards people that they are all the same to him?!(“Everyone is black, everyone is jumping”) Or maybe he is so wise that he sees in everyone just a Human?!(“Good health, honest people!”). Cinder is right when he calls Luka "entertaining." Indeed, he is humanly interesting, ambiguous, wise in an old man’s way: “It always turns out like this: a person thinks to himself - I’m doing well! Grab – and people are unhappy!”

Yes, people may be unhappy that the “old man” sees their secret desires and understands more than the heroes themselves (remember Luke’s conversations with Ash); people may also be dissatisfied with the fact that Luke speaks so convincingly and so wisely that his words are difficult to dispute: “How many different people on earth are in charge... and they frighten each other with all sorts of fears, but there is still no order in life and no purity...”.

Luka’s first step in the shelter is the desire to “place”: “Well, at least I’ll place the litter here. Where is your broom? The subtext of the phrase is obvious: Luka appears in the basement to make people's lives cleaner. But this is one part of the truth. Gorky is philosophical, so there is another part of the truth: maybe Luka appears, raises dust (excites people, makes them worry, become concerned about their existence) and disappears. (After all, the verb “place” also has this meaning. Otherwise, one would have to say “sweep”, “sweep”).

Already at his first appearance, Luke formulates several basic principles of his attitude towards life:

1) – They pieces of paper- everyone is like that - they're all no good.

2) - And everything is people! No matter how you pretend, no matter how you wobble, if you were born a man, you will die a man...

3) –And All I see people are becoming smarter more and more interesting...And Even though they live worse and worse, they want everything better... Stubborn!

4) – A is it possible for a person that way throw? He- whatever it is – and always worth the price!

Now, reflecting on some of the provisions of Luke’s life truth, we can approach the moment of truth: in a terrible, unrighteous life there is one value and one truth that cannot be disputed. This truth is man himself. Luke declares this upon his appearance.

The playwright thought about the problem of man for many years. Probably, the appearance of Luke in the first act of the play “At the Bottom” is the climax of this action not only because the hero outlines one of the main problems of the play - how to treat a person; Luke's appearance is the most striking moment also because rays of thought stretch from him to the next actions of the drama.

“There is no man without a name,” - the Actor’s discovery in the second act;

“Man is the truth,” is Satin’s final confession. Such confessions are phenomena of the same order.

The epiphany of the heroes in the finale of the play, the optimistic sound of “At the Bottom” became possible, including because Luke appeared in the play, acting on the dark world like “acid” on a rusty coin, highlighting both the best and worst aspects of life. Of course, Luka’s activities are diverse, many of the actions and words of this hero can be interpreted in exactly the opposite way, but this is quite natural, because man is a living phenomenon, changing and changing the world around him. No matter what you say Luke, no matter how he argues for this or that position, he wisely, humanly, sometimes with a grin, sometimes with a sly, sometimes seriously, leads the reader to the understanding that there is a Man in the world, and everything else is the work of his hands, his mind, conscience. It is this understanding that is valuable in Gorky’s hero, who appeared among people who had lost faith and disappeared when that HUMAN GRAIN, which for the time being had been dormant, hatched in people, woke up, and came to life. With the appearance of Luke, the life of the shelters takes on new, human dimensions.

The first act of the play has been read. The relationships between the characters and the personal characteristics of the night shelters are examined, and the compositional features of this important action for the play are revealed. Along with the intermediate conclusions that we made during the analysis, it is probably worth making a general conclusion about the sound of the first action.

Let's ask ourselves, What role does the first act play in the context of the drama? This question can be answered in different ways: firstly, it outlines the themes that will be heard throughout the entire play; secondly, here are formulated (still very approximately) the principles of attitude towards a person, which will be developed by both Luke and Satin during the course of the drama; thirdly, and this is especially important, already in the first act of the play, in the arrangement of characters, in their words, we see the writer’s attitude towards MAN, we feel that The main thing in the play is the author’s view of man, his role and place in the world. From this point of view, it is interesting to turn to Gorky’s confession, voiced in the article “On Plays”: “The historical man, the one who created everything in 5-6 thousand years what we call culture, in which a huge amount of his energy is embodied and which is a grandiose superstructure over nature, much more hostile than friendly to him - this man, as an artistic image, is a most excellent creature! But a modern writer and playwright deals with an everyday person who has been brought up for centuries in conditions of class struggle, is deeply infected with zoological individualism and in general is an extremely motley figure, very complex, contradictory... we must show it to oneself in all the beauty of its confusion and fragmentation, with all the “contradictions of the heart and mind.”

Already the first act of the drama “At the Bottom” realizes this task, which is why we cannot unambiguously interpret not a single character, not a single remark, not a single action of the heroes. The historical layer that interested the writer is also obvious in the first act: if we take into account the historical roots of Luke, the reader can trace the path of Man from the very beginning to the contemporary moment of the playwright, to the beginning of the 20th century. Another layer is obvious in the first act - the social and moral one: Gorky considers Man in all the diversity of his manifestations: from the saint to the one who finds himself “at the bottom” of life.

M. Gorky's play “At the Depths” is an innovative literary work. At its center is not so much human destinies as a clash of ideas, a dispute about man, about the meaning of life. The core of this dispute is the problem of truth and lies, the perception of life as it really is, with all its hopelessness for the characters - people of the “bottom”, or life with illusions, no matter how diverse and bizarre forms they appear. Already at the very beginning of the play, Kvashnya consoles herself with the illusion that she is a free woman, and Nastya with dreams of a great feeling, borrowing it from the book “Fatal Love.”

And from the very beginning, the fatal truth bursts into this world of illusions. It is no coincidence that Kvashnya throws out his remark, turning to Kleshch: “You can’t stand the truth!” In the Kostylevo shelter, freedom turns out to be illusory - having sunk to the “bottom”, people have not left life, it overtakes them. These people are cruel to each other, life has made them that way. And this cruelty is manifested primarily in the persistence with which they destroy the illusions of other people, for example, Nastya, the dying Anna, Kleshch with his hope of getting out of the shelter, starting a new life, the Baron, whose entire wealth consists of memories of the past greatness of the family and to whom Nastya throws out in bitterness: “You’re lying, this didn’t happen!” Among these people, embittered by life, the wanderer Luke appears. And with his appearance, the already begun dispute about man, about truth and lies in his life, intensifies. Let's take a closer look at the image of Luke.

First of all, we note that it is this character of the play that causes the most heated debate and constitutes its dramaturgical nerve.

Luke consoles people. How can we console these former barons, actors, a working man who has lost his job, a dying woman who has nothing good to remember about her life, a hereditary thief, thrown out of life, who have sunk to the bottom of its life? And Luke resorts to lies as a verbal drug, as a painkiller. He instills illusions in the inhabitants of the shelter, and his life experience is such that he subtly feels people, knows what is most important to each of them. And he unmistakably presses the main lever of the human personality, promising Anna peace and rest in the next world, free hospitals for alcoholics for the Actor, and a free life in Siberia for Vaska Ash. Why is Luka lying? Readers and critics have asked themselves this question more than once when reflecting on Gorky’s play.

For a long time, the image of Luke was assessed in literary criticism as unequivocally negative. Luka was accused of lying for selfish reasons, that he was indifferent to the people he deceived, and finally, that at the time of the crime he disappeared from the shelter. But the main accusation that was brought against Luke concerned his position, his attitude towards man. He preaches pity and mercy, which in previous years were considered something superfluous, even suspicious, a kind of manifestation of conciliation, a retreat from the position of fighting the class enemy (and they saw an infinite number of enemies around them), mercy was declared “intellectual softness”, which is unacceptable in conditions of a clash between two worlds. Another thing that was not accepted in Luke’s position was that he did not call people to struggle, to revolutionary action, to a radical change in life. All this in ancient years was considered harmful and alien to the person of the new society, the fighter for a bright future.

However, Luke is not just a comforter, he philosophically substantiates his position. One of the ideological centers of the play is the wanderer's story about how he saved two escaped convicts. The main idea of ​​Gorky’s character here is that it is not violence, not prison, but only goodness that can save a person and teach goodness: “A person can teach goodness... While a person believed, he lived, but he lost faith and hanged himself.” The author's position in the drama is expressed, in particular, by the plot. The last event of the play - the death of the Actor - confirms these words of Luke.

It is generally accepted that Luke’s main opponent in the dispute about truth is Satin. This seems to be the case, because it is he who utters the aphorism: “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters... Truth is the god of a free man!” However, it is Satin who not only stands up for the old man, forbidding him to speak ill of him, but also pronounces his famous monologue about the man, bringing Luke’s ideas to life.
(It is not Satin who really argues with Luke, but the author of the play himself. It is Gorky who shows that a saving lie did not save anyone, that it is impossible to live forever in captivity of illusions, and the way out of them and insight is always tragic. But the main thing is that a person living in the world of a comforting dream, a lulling deception, he comes to terms with his wretched, hopeless real life. This leads him to the point that he agrees to endure - this motive is heard in the play more than once, for example in the words of Anna: “If there is no torment there... here you can you can be patient... you can!" or in the parable about the righteous land - a man lived poorly, but endured in the hope of finding another life someday. This is the kind of reconciliation with life that M. Gorky does not accept. The writer’s dispute with Luke is in many ways a dispute with himself It was not for nothing that contemporaries recalled that in his human qualities M. Gorky was in many ways close to this wanderer-comforter. It was not for nothing that already in the post-revolutionary period he wrote the film script “On the Way to the Bottom”, where, under the influence of ideological dogmas, he exposed Luka and showed him as a kulak , a criminal and immoral person.

A very complex work was created by Maxim Gorky. “At the Bottom,” the summary of which cannot be conveyed in a few phrases, prompts philosophical reflections on life and its meaning. Carefully written images offer the reader their point of view, but, as always, it is up to him to decide.

The plot of the famous play

Analysis of “At the Lower Depths” (Gorky M.) is impossible without knowledge of the plot of the play. A common thread running through the entire work is the debate about human capabilities and man himself. The action takes place in the Kostylevs' shelter - a place that seems to be forgotten by God, cut off from the civilized world of people. Every inhabitant here has long ago lost professional, social, public, spiritual, and family ties. Almost all of them consider their situation abnormal, hence the reluctance to know anything about their neighbors, a certain bitterness, and vices. Finding themselves at the very bottom, the characters have their own position in life and know only their own truth. Can anything save them, or are they lost souls to society?

“At the Lower Depths” (Gorky): heroes of the work and their characters

In the debate going on throughout the play, three life positions are especially important: Luka, Bubnova, Satina. They all have different fates, and their names are also symbolic.

Luke is considered the most difficult way. It is his character that prompts reflection on what is better - compassion or truth. And is it possible to use lies in the name of compassion, as this character does? A thorough analysis of “At the Lower Depths” (Gorky) shows that Luka personifies precisely this positive quality. He eases Anna's death throes and gives hope to Actor and Ash. However, the disappearance of the hero leads others to a catastrophe that might not have happened.

Bubnov is a fatalist by nature. He believes that a person is not able to change anything, and his fate is determined from above by the will of God, circumstances and laws. This hero is indifferent to others, to their suffering, and also to himself. He floats with the flow and doesn't even try to get ashore. Thus, the author emphasizes the danger of such a credo.

When analyzing “At the Bottom” (Gorky), it is worth paying attention to Satin, who is firmly convinced that man is the master of his destiny, and everything is the work of his hands.

However, while preaching noble ideals, he himself is a cheater, despises others, and longs to live without working. Smart, educated, strong, this character could get out of the quagmire, but does not want to do so. His free man, who, in the words of Satin himself, “sounds proud,” becomes the ideologist of evil.

Instead of a conclusion

It is worth considering that Satin and Luka are paired and similar heroes. Their names are symbolic and non-random. The first is associated with the devil, Satan. The second, despite the biblical origin of the name, also serves the evil one. Concluding the analysis of “At the Lower Depths” (Gorky), I would like to note that the author wanted to convey to us that truth can save the world, but compassion is no less important. The reader must choose the position that will be correct for him. However, the question about a person and his capabilities still remains open.

] The central image of early Gorky is a proud and strong personality who embodies the idea of ​​freedom . Therefore, Danko, who sacrifices himself for the sake of people, is on a par with the drunkard and thief Chelkash, who does not perform any feats for the sake of anyone. “Strength is virtue,” Nietzsche said, and for Gorky, the beauty of a person lies in strength and feat, even aimless ones: a strong person has the right to be “beyond good and evil”, to be outside of ethical principles, like Chelkash, and a feat, from this point of view, is resistance to the general flow of life.
After a series of romantic works of the 90s, full of rebellious ideas, Gorky created a play that became, perhaps, the most important link in the entire philosophical and artistic system of the writer - the drama “At the Lower Depths” (1902). Let's see what heroes inhabit the “bottom” and how they live.

II. Conversation on the content of the play “At the Depths”
- How is the scene of action depicted in the play?
(The location of the action is described in the author's remarks. In the first act it is “a cave-like basement”, “heavy, stone vaults, smoke-stained, with crumbling plaster”. It is important that the writer gives instructions on how the scene is lit: "from the viewer and from top to bottom" the light reaches the night shelters from the basement window, as if searching for people among the basement inhabitants. Thin partitions screen off Ash's room.
“Everywhere along the walls there are bunks”. Apart from Kvashnya, Baron and Nastya, who live in the kitchen, no one has their own corner. Everything is on display in front of each other, a secluded place is only on the stove and behind the chintz canopy separating the dying Anna’s bed from the others (by this she is already, as it were, separated from life). There is dirt everywhere: "dirty chintz canopy", unpainted and dirty tables, benches, stools, tattered cardboards, pieces of oilcloth, rags.
Third act takes place in an early spring evening in a vacant lot, “a yard littered with various rubbish and overgrown with weeds”. Let's pay attention to the coloring of this place: the dark wall of a barn or stable “gray, covered with remains of plaster” the wall of the bunkhouse, the red wall of the brick firewall blocking the sky, the reddish light of the setting sun, the black branches of the elderberry without buds.
In the setting of the fourth act, significant changes occur: the partitions of Ash’s former room are broken, the Tick’s anvil has disappeared. The action takes place at night, and light from the outside world no longer penetrates into the basement - the scene is illuminated by a lamp standing in the middle of the table. However, the last “act” of the drama takes place in a vacant lot - there the Actor hanged himself.)

- What kind of people are the inhabitants of the shelter?
(People who have sunk to the bottom of life end up in a shelter. This is the last refuge for tramps, marginalized people, “former people”. All social strata of society are here: the bankrupt nobleman Baron, the owner of the shelter Kostylev, the policeman Medvedev, the mechanic Kleshch, the cap maker Bubnov, the merchant Kvashnya , the sharper Satin, the prostitute Nastya, the thief Ashes. Everyone is equalized by the position of the dregs of society. Very young (shoemaker Alyoshka is 20 years old) and not very old people live here (the oldest, Bubnov, is 45 years old). However, their lives are almost over. Dying Anna introduces herself we are an old woman, and she, it turns out, is 30 years old.
Many night shelters do not even have names, only nicknames remain, expressively describing their bearers. The appearance of the dumpling seller Kvashnya, the character of Kleshch, and the Baron’s ambition are clear. The actor once bore the sonorous surname Sverchkov-Zadunaisky, but now there are almost no memories left - “I forgot everything.”)

- What is the subject of the image in the play?
(The subject of the drama “At the Bottom” is the consciousness of people thrown as a result of deep social processes to the “bottom” of life).

- What is the conflict of the drama?
(Social conflict has several levels in the play. The social poles are clearly indicated: on one, the owner of the shelter, Kostylev, and the policeman Medvedev, who supports his power, on the other, the essentially powerless roomies. Thus it is obvious conflict between government and disenfranchised people. This conflict hardly develops, because Kostylev and Medvedev are not so far from the inhabitants of the shelter.
Each of the night shelters experienced in the past your social conflict , as a result of which he found himself in a humiliating position.)
Reference:
A sharp conflict situation, playing out in front of the audience, is the most important feature of drama as a type of literature.

- What brought its inhabitants - Satin, Baron, Kleshch, Bubnov, Actor, Nastya, Ash - to the shelter? What is the backstory of these characters?
(Satin fell “to the bottom” after serving time in prison for murder: “I killed a scoundrel in passion and irritation... because of my own sister”; Baron went broke; Mite lost my job: “I’m a working person... I’ve been working since I was little”; Bubnov he left home out of harm’s way so as not to kill his wife and her lover, although he himself admits that he is “lazy” and also a heavy drunkard, “he would drink away the workshop”; Actor he drank himself to death, “drank away his soul... died”; fate Ashes was predetermined already at his birth: “I have been a thief since I was a child... everyone always told me: Vaska is a thief, Vaska’s son is a thief!”
The Baron talks in more detail about the stages of his fall (act four): “It seems to me that all my life I’ve only been changing clothes... but why? I don't understand! I studied and wore the uniform of a noble institute... and what did I study? I don’t remember... I got married, put on a tailcoat, then a robe... and took a nasty wife and - why? I don’t understand... I lived through everything that happened - I wore some kind of gray jacket and red trousers... and how did I go broke? I didn’t notice... I served in the government chamber... uniform, cap with a cockade... squandered government money - they put a prisoner’s robe on me... then I put on this... And everything... like in a dream. .. A? That's funny? Each stage of the thirty-three-year-old Baron’s life seems to be marked by a certain costume. These changes of clothes symbolize a gradual decline in social status, and nothing stands behind these “changes of clothes”; life passed “like in a dream.”)

- How is social conflict interconnected with dramaturgical conflict?
(The social conflict is taken off stage, pushed into the past; it does not become the basis of the dramatic conflict. We observe only the result of off-stage conflicts.)

- What kind of conflicts, other than social ones, are highlighted in the play?
(The play has traditional love conflict . It is determined by the relationships between Vaska Pepla, Vasilisa, the wife of the owner of the shelter, Kostylev and Natasha, Vasilisa’s sister.
Exposition of this conflict- a conversation between the shelters, from which it is clear that Kostylev is looking for his wife Vasilisa in the shelter, who is cheating on him with Vaska Ash.
The origin of this conflict- the appearance of Natasha in the shelter, for whose sake Ashes leaves Vasilisa.
During development of love conflict it becomes clear that the relationship with Natasha revives Ash, he wants to leave with her and start a new life.
Climax of the conflict taken off stage: at the end of the third act, we learn from Kvashnya’s words that “they boiled the girl’s legs with boiling water” - Vasilisa knocked over the samovar and scalded Natasha’s legs.
The murder of Kostylev by Vaska Ash turns out to be tragic outcome of a love conflict. Natasha stops believing Ash: “She’s at the same time! Damn you! You both…")

- What is unique about a love conflict?
(Love conflict becomes the brink of social conflict . It shows that anti-human conditions cripple a person, and even love does not save a person, but leads to tragedy: to death, injury, murder, hard labor. As a result, Vasilisa alone achieves all her goals: she takes revenge on her former lover Ash and her rival sister Natasha, gets rid of her unloved and disgusted husband and becomes the sole mistress of the shelter. There is nothing human left in Vasilisa, and this shows the monstrosity of the social conditions that disfigured both the inhabitants of the shelter and its owners. The night shelters are not directly involved in this conflict, they are only third-party spectators.)

III. Teacher's final words
The conflict in which all the heroes participate is of a different kind. Gorky depicts the consciousness of people at the “bottom”. The plot unfolds not so much in external action - in everyday life, but in the dialogues of the characters. Exactly the conversations of the night shelters determine development of dramatic conflict . The action is transferred to a non-event series. This is typical for the genre philosophical drama .
So, the genre of the play can be defined as a socio-philosophical drama .

Additional material for teachers
To record at the beginning of the lesson, you can offer the following: plan for analyzing a dramatic work:
1. Time of creation and publication of the play.
2. The place occupied in the playwright’s work.
3. The theme of the play and the reflection of certain life material in it.
4. Characters and their grouping.
5. The conflict of a dramatic work, its originality, the degree of novelty and acuteness, its deepening.
6. Development of dramatic action and its phases. Exposition, plot, twists and turns, climax, denouement.
7. Composition of the play. The role and significance of each act.
8. Dramatic characters and their connection with action.
9. Speech characteristics of the characters. The connection between character and words.
10. The role of dialogues and monologues in the play. Word and action.
11. Identification of the author's position. The role of stage directions in drama.
12. Genre and specific uniqueness of the play. Correspondence of the genre to the author's predilections and preferences.
13. Comedy means (if it's a comedy).
14. Tragic flavor (in the case of analyzing a tragedy).
15. Correlation of the play with the aesthetic positions of the author and his views on the theater. The purpose of the play for a specific stage.
16. Theatrical interpretation of drama at the time of its creation and subsequently. The best acting ensembles, outstanding directorial decisions, memorable embodiments of individual roles.
17. The play and its dramatic traditions.

Homework
Identify Luke's role in the play. Write down his statements about people, about life, about truth, about faith.

Lesson 2. “What you believe in is what it is.” The role of Luka in the drama “At the Bottom”
The purpose of the lesson: create a problematic situation and encourage students to express their own point of view on the image of Luke and his life position.
Methodical techniques: discussion, analytical conversation.

During the classes
I. Analytical conversation
Let us turn to the extra-event series of the drama and see how the conflict develops here.

- How do the inhabitants of the shelter perceive their situation before Luka appears?
(IN exposition we see people, in essence, resigned to their humiliating situation. The night shelters sluggishly, habitually squabble, and the Actor says to Satin: “One day they will completely kill you... to death...” “And you are a fool,” Satin snaps. "Why?" - the Actor is surprised. “Because you can’t kill twice.”
These words of Satin show his attitude towards the existence that they all lead in the shelter. This is not life, they are all already dead. Everything seems clear.
But the Actor’s response is interesting: “I don’t understand... Why not?” Perhaps it is the Actor, who has died more than once on stage, who understands the horror of the situation more deeply than others. After all, it is he who commits suicide at the end of the play.)

- What is the meaning of using past tense in the self-characteristics of the heroes?
(People feel "former":
“Satin. I was educated person"(the paradox is that the past tense is impossible in this case).
“Bubnov. I'm a furrier was ».
Bubnov pronounces a philosophical maxim: “It turns out - don’t paint yourself how you look on the outside, everything will be erased... everything will be erased, Yes!")

- Which of the characters contrasts itself with the others?
(Only one The tick hasn't calmed down yet with your fate. He separates himself from the rest of the night shelters: “What kind of people are they? Ragged, golden company... people! I’m a working man... I’m ashamed to look at them... I’ve been working since I was little... Do you think I won’t break out of here? I’ll get out... I’ll rip off the skin, and I’ll get out... Just wait a minute... my wife will die...”
Kleshch's dream of a different life is associated with the liberation that his wife's death will bring him. He does not feel the enormity of his statement. And the dream will turn out to be imaginary.)

- Which scene is the beginning of the conflict?
(The beginning of the conflict is the appearance of Luke. He immediately announces his views on life: “I don’t care! I respect swindlers too, in my opinion, not a single flea is bad: all are black, all jump... that’s how it is.” And one more thing: “For an old man, where it’s warm, there’s a homeland...”
Luka turns out to be in the center of attention of guests: “What an interesting little old man you brought, Natasha...” - and the entire development of the plot is concentrated on him.)

- How does Luka behave with each of the inhabitants of the shelter?
(Luka quickly finds an approach to the shelters: “I’ll look at you, brothers - your life - oh-oh!..”
He feels sorry for Alyoshka: “Eh, guy, you’re confused...”
He does not respond to rudeness, skillfully avoids questions that are unpleasant for him, and is ready to sweep the floor instead of the bunkhouses.
Luka becomes necessary for Anna, he takes pity on her: “Is it possible to abandon a person like that?”
Luka skillfully flatters Medvedev, calling him “under,” and he immediately falls for this bait.)

- What do we know about Luke?
(Luka says practically nothing about himself, we only learn: “They crushed a lot, that’s why he’s soft...”)

- How does Luka affect night shelters?
(In each of the shelters, Luke sees a person, reveals their bright sides, the essence of personality , and it produces life revolution heroes.
It turns out that the prostitute Nastya dreams of beautiful and bright love;
the drunken Actor receives hope for a cure for alcoholism - Luke tells him: “A man can do anything, if only he wants to...”;
The thief Vaska Pepel plans to leave for Siberia and start a new life there with Natasha, becoming a strong master.
Luke gives Anna consolation: “Nothing, dear! You - hope... That means you will die, and you will be at peace... you won’t need anything else, and there’s nothing to be afraid of! Silence, peace - lie down!”
Luke reveals the good in every person and instills faith in the best.)

- Did Luka lie to the night shelters?
(There may be different opinions on this matter.
Luke selflessly tries to help people, instill in them faith in himself, and awaken the best sides of nature.
He sincerely wishes well shows real ways to achieve a new, better life . After all, there really are hospitals for alcoholics, Siberia really is the “golden side”, and not just a place of exile and hard labor.
As for the afterlife with which he beckons Anna, the question is more complicated; it is a matter of faith and religious belief.
What did he lie about? When Luka convinces Nastya that he believes in her feelings, in her love: “If you believe, you had true love... that means you had it! Was!" - he only helps her find the strength for life, for real, not fictitious love.)

- How do the inhabitants of the shelter react to Luke’s words?
(The lodgers are at first incredulous of Luka’s words: “Why are you lying all the time?” Luka doesn’t deny this, he answers the question with a question: “And... what do you really desperately need... think about it! She really can , butt for you..."
Even to a direct question about God, Luke answers evasively: “If you believe, he is; If you don’t believe it, no... What you believe in is what it is...")

- What groups can the characters of the play be divided into?
(The characters in the play can be divided into "believers" and "non-believers" .
Anna believes in God, Tatar believes in Allah, Nastya believes in “fatal” love, Baron believes in his past, perhaps invented. Kleshch no longer believes in anything, and Bubnov never believed in anything.)

- What is the sacred meaning of the name “Luke”?
(Name "Luke" double meaning: this name reminds Evangelist Luke, means "light", and at the same time associated with the word "sly"(euphemism for "crap").)

- What is the author’s position in relation to Luke?
(The author's position is expressed in the development of the plot.
After Luke left everything is not happening at all as Luke convinced and as the heroes expected .
Vaska Pepel does end up in Siberia, but only to hard labor, for the murder of Kostylev, and not as a free settler.
The actor, who has lost faith in himself and in his strength, exactly repeats the fate of the hero of Luke's parable about the righteous land. Luke, having told a parable about a man who, having lost faith in the existence of a righteous land, hanged himself, believes that a person should not be deprived of dreams, hopes, even imaginary ones. Gorky, showing the fate of the Actor, assures the reader and viewer that it is false hope that can lead a person to suicide .)
Gorky himself wrote about his plan: “ The main question I wanted to pose is what is better, truth or compassion. What is more necessary? Is it necessary to take compassion to the point of using lies, like Luke? This is not a subjective question, but a general philosophical one.”

- Gorky contrasts not truth and lies, but truth and compassion. How justified is this opposition?
(Discussion.)

- What is the significance of Luke’s influence on the shelters?
(All the characters agree that Luke instilled in them false hope . But he didn’t promise to lift them from the bottom of life, he simply showed their own capabilities, showed that there is a way out, and now everything depends on them.)

- How strong is the self-confidence awakened by Luka?
(This faith did not have time to take hold in the minds of the night shelters; it turned out to be fragile and lifeless; with the disappearance of Luka, hope fades away)

- What is the reason for the rapid decline of faith?
(Maybe it's in the weaknesses of the heroes themselves , in their inability and unwillingness to do at least something to implement new plans. Dissatisfaction with reality and a sharply negative attitude towards it are combined with a complete unwillingness to undertake anything to change this reality.)

- How does Luke explain the failures of the life of the night shelters?
(Luke explains failures in the lives of homeless shelters due to external circumstances , does not at all blame the heroes themselves for their failed lives. That’s why she was so drawn to him and became so disappointed, having lost external support with Luka’s departure.)

II. Teacher's final words
Gorky does not accept passive consciousness, whose ideologist he considers Luka.
According to the writer, it can only reconcile a person with the outside world, but will not encourage him to change this world.
Although Gorky does not accept Luka’s position, this image seems to be out of the author’s control.
According to the memoirs of I.M. Moskvin, in the 1902 production, Luka appeared as a noble comforter, almost a savior of many desperate inhabitants of the shelter. Some critics saw in Luke “Danko, to whom only real features were given,” “an exponent of the highest truth,” and found elements of Luke’s exaltation in Beranger’s poems, which the Actor shouts:
Gentlemen! If the truth is holy
The world doesn't know how to find a way -
Honor the madman who inspires
A golden dream for humanity!
K. S. Stanislavsky, one of the directors of the play, planned path "decrease" hero.“Luka is cunning”, “looking slyly”, “slyly smiling”, “ingratiatingly, softly”, “it’s clear that he’s lying.”
Luke is a living image precisely because he is contradictory and ambiguous.

Homework
Find out how the issue of truth is resolved in the play. Find statements from different characters about the truth.

Lesson 3. The question of truth in Gorky’s drama “At the Depths”
The purpose of the lesson: identify the positions of the characters in the play and the author’s position in relation to the issue of truth.
Methodical techniques: analytical conversation, discussion.

During the classes
I. The teacher's word
The philosophical question that Gorky himself posed: What is better - truth or compassion? The question of truth is multifaceted. Each person understands the truth in his own way, still keeping in mind some final, highest truth. Let's see how truth and lies relate in the drama “At the Bottom.”

II. Working with a dictionary
- What do the characters in the play mean by “truth”?
(Discussion. This word is ambiguous. We advise you to look in an explanatory dictionary and find out the meaning of the word “truth”.

Teacher's comment:
You can select two levels of "truth".
One is " private truth which the hero defends, assures everyone, and above all himself, of the existence of extraordinary, bright love. The Baron is in the existence of his prosperous past. Kleshch truthfully calls his situation, which turned out to be hopeless even after the death of his wife: “There is no work... no strength! That's the truth! Shelter... there is no shelter! You have to breathe... here it is, the truth!” For Vasilisa, the “truth” is that she is “tired” of Vaska Ash, that she mocks her sister: “I’m not bragging - I’m telling the truth.” Such a “private” truth is at the level of fact: it was - it wasn’t.
Another level of "truth" "worldview"- in Luke's remarks. Luke's "truth" and his "lies" are expressed by the formula: “What you believe in is what it is.”

III. Conversation
- Is the truth necessary at all?
(Discussion.)

- Which character's position contrasts with Luke's position?
(Luke’s position, compromise, consoling, Bubnov's position is opposed .
This is the darkest figure in the play. Bubnov enters into the argument implicitly, as if talking to myself , supporting the polyphony (polylogue) of the play.
Act 1, scene at the bedside of dying Anna:
Natasha (to the tick). If only you could treat her more kindly now... it won't be long...
Mite. I know...
Natasha. You know... It's not enough to know, you - understand. After all, dying is scary...
Ash. But I'm not afraid...
Natasha. How!.. Bravery...
Bubnov (whistles). And the threads are rotten...
This phrase is repeated several times throughout the play, as if