What issues are discussed by the residents of the shelter. Heroes of the play "At the Lower Depths" by Gorky: characteristics, images and destinies

The city shelter is one of the important symbols in the play “At the Lower Depths” by Alexei Maksimovich Gorky. The author creates the plot of the work using this image.

Nochlezhka is the social “bottom” of society, where, by the will of fate, Vaska Pepel and Actor, Bubnov and Kleshch, Luka and Satin ended up...

The action of the play takes place in the Kostylevsky basement. The author sets himself the goal of showing the process survival“former” people, while drawing them collective portrait. Will these people be able to change their lifestyle?

Gorky introduces Luka into his work, who gives the characters hope for the possibility of life changes. However, it will not even be able to influence the residents of the shelter .

Exposition dramatic work plays an important role in the development of actions. M. Gorky describes the interior of the room where representatives of the social “bottom” live: “A basement that looks like a cave.” Reading the preface, I imagine a damp, dark, small room. How do the heroes manage to exist in such conditions?

I believe that the shelter symbolizes not only the homeless shelter, but also the very group of urban lower strata of society. Previously, some characters had good lives. The actor performed in the theater. Satin “danced superbly, played on stage, loved to make people laugh...”. But life hit me him, and they were forced to take shelter in the Kostylevs’ basement. The prison put an end to Satin's work. Alcohol ruined the Actor...

It turns out that city ​​flophouse became a refuge for people trapped in difficult circumstances. Its representatives are characterized by laziness, aloofness, and inaction. In the beginning, the characters don’t want to sweep the floor. The actor constantly lies on the stove. I think homeless people have no meaning in life. This is precisely their tragedy.

So, the idea of ​​the play by A.M. Gorky builds around the inhabitants of the Kostylevsky basement, where ruined destinies find their refuge.

Larisa Alexandrova ©

M. Gorky's drama "At the Lower Depths" was written in 1902. The characters in this play are people who, as a result, social processes that took place at the turn of the century, found themselves thrown to the very bottom of life.

Social conflict is present in the play primarily in the form of a confrontation between the owners of the shelter, the Kostylevs, and its inhabitants. Kostylev appears in the eyes of the night shelters as a rich man who thinks only about money and strives to ask for as much as possible for a place. At the same time, Kostylev pretends to be a pious person and firmly believes that he will use the extra money received from the inhabitants of the shelter for a good cause. “I’ll throw fifty dollars on you, pour oil into the lamp... and my sacrifice will burn in front of the holy icon...” he insinuatingly says to Kleshch. However, the shelters themselves are kinder and more responsive than Kostylev: The actor helps dying Anna, Vaska Pepel sincerely loves Natalya. And Kostylev is sure that “kindness of heart” cannot be equated with money under any circumstances, which he explains to the Actor: “Kindness is above all good things. And your debt to me is indeed a debt! So you have to reimburse me..."

Vasilisa, Kostylev’s wife and owner of the shelter, loves to show her superiority over the shelter. Allegedly keeping order in the rooms, she threatens to call the orderlies, who will “come and impose a fine,” and after that she will kick out all the inhabitants of the shelter. But her superiority and power are imaginary, which, after her angry tirade, Bubnov reminds her of: “How will you live?”

Thus, there is practically no difference between the owners of the shelter and their guests. Kostylev buys a stolen watch from the thief Vaska Pepel; his wife Vasilisa had an affair with the same Vaska. Therefore, the conflict between the Kostylevs and the night shelters has not so much a social basis as moral basis: after all, Kostylev and his wife are people without heart and conscience. Vasilisa persuades Vaska Pepel to kill Kostylev, who, according to her, is torturing her and her sister. Ash condemns her: “...you have no soul, woman.”

Policeman Medvedev, uncle of Vasilisa and Natalya, also does not at all look like a stern representative of the law. He complains about his hectic service, regrets that he has to constantly separate fighters: “If only we would let them beat each other freely, as much as each one wants... they would fight less, because they would remember the beatings longer.” He comes to play checkers with his roommate Bubnov, and proposes to the dumpling seller Kvashnya to marry him. In the play “At the Bottom” they are erased social differences between all the characters. The concept of the bottom expands and covers all characters, and not just the inhabitants of the shelter.

Each of the heroes who found themselves at the bottom experienced their own conflict with society in the past. Drunkenness brings the actor to the shelter; he admits that he “drank away his soul.” Because of this, the Actor loses faith in himself and his talent. Only with the arrival of Luka, a wonderful old man at the shelter, who manages to restore faith in the future to many of the shelter’s residents, does the Actor remember his name “from the stage”: Sverchkov-Zavolzhsky. However, in the shelter he has no name, just as he has no past or future. Although the Actor constantly quotes lines from immortal plays, he misinterprets their words, adapts them to nightlife: “I’ll get drunk like... forty thousand drunkards...” (modified line from Hamlet). The Actor commits suicide in his life, not being able to able to resist the oppressive and sucking, depersonalizing reality of the bottom of life.

Occasionally he remembers his past life sharper Bubnov. Previously, he was a furrier, “he had his own establishment.” His wife “contacted” the master, a “dodgeman,” as Bubnov himself admitted, and a big fighter. Bubnov planned to kill his wife, but left in time, escaping from hard labor. But Bubnov does not blame Bubnov for the fact that he now has to lead such a lifestyle. treacherous wife, and myself: my binges and laziness. He looks in surprise at his hands, which he thought would never wash off the yellow paint, and sees that now they are just dirty. If earlier his hands were the hallmark of his profession, now he belongs entirely to the faceless brotherhood of the night shelters, as he himself says: “It turns out that on the outside, no matter how you paint yourself, everything will be erased... everything will be erased, yes!”

Satin, when he was a boy, worked at the telegraph office. The baron was a real aristocrat, he studied, “wore the uniform of a noble institute,” and then went to prison for embezzlement. The whole life of the baron appears before the readers as a change of several costumes, several masks: from a noble uniform, robe, cap with a cockade to a prisoner's robe and the clothes of a rooming house.

Together with these heroes, under the same roof live the sharper Satin, the thief Ash, the walking girl Nastya, the market cook Kvashnya, Tatar. However, in the shelter, the social differences between them are erased, they all become just people. As Bubnov notes: “... everything faded away, one naked man remained...” The social conflicts that determined their fate remain in the past, excluded from the main action of the play. We see only the result of social unrest that has had such a tragic impact on people’s lives.

However, the very title of the play “At the Bottom” suggests the presence of social tension. After all, if there is a bottom to life, there must be something above this bottom; there must also be a rapid flow of light, bright, joyful life. The night shelters do not hope to ever find such a life. All of them, with the exception of the Tick, are turned to the past or immersed in worries about the present. But the Tick is also filled not so much with hope as with impotent anger. It seems to him that he lives in a dirty shelter only for the sake of Anna, his dying wife, but after her death nothing changes. The faith of the inhabitants of the shelter in the possibility of a new life is restored by Luka, the “crafty old man,” but it turns out to be fragile and quickly fades away.

“At the Bottom” is not just a social, but a socio-philosophical drama. What makes a person human, what helps and hinders him to live, to gain human dignity - the author of the play “At the Bottom” seeks answers to these questions. Thus, the main subject of depiction in the play is the thoughts and feelings of the night shelters in all their contradictions. Gorky shows that for those who, by the will of fate, have found themselves at the very bottom of life, their situation does not seem tragic, unbearable, hopeless. The fact that their environment, the oppressive atmosphere of the flophouse, pushes people to theft, drunkenness, and murder, seems to its inhabitants to be a normal course of life. But the author's point of view differs from the position of his heroes. It shows that the inhuman conditions of the bottom lead to impoverishment spiritual world In a person, even such a sublime feeling as love leads to hatred, fight, murder, hard labor. Among the inhabitants of the shelter, only Satin “awakens” to life and pronounces a furious monologue about the greatness of man. However, the speech of this hero is only the first step towards changing the consciousness of people who have fallen to the bottom of life, the first attempt to overcome social conditions, putting pressure on a free person.

The play “At the Depths” is the result of A. M. Gorky’s twenty-year observations of the world “ former people" The writer himself was only ten years old when he had to go “to the people.” He observed the life of the very “bottom” of society, and when he began to write, these childhood and youthful impressions were reflected in his works. At first, M. Gorky even idealized homeless tramps, because it seemed to him that these people, deprived of property, were different from ordinary people. They are not greedy, they do not hoard money, and therefore they are free. Later, in the play “At the Lower Depths,” written in 1902, M. Gorky abandoned any idealization and romanticization of the world of “former people.”

The play “At the Lower Depths” depicts Kostylev’s shelter, where people live who are deprived of everything. Many of them do not even have a name left, and they are known by nicknames: Actor, Kleshch, Tatar, Baron. The inhabitants of the “bottom” came from a variety of classes in what was then Russia. Baron is a former aristocrat, Bubnov is an artisan, Satin is an intellectual, a former telegraph employee. There are also those in the play who have never known another life. This is Nastya and the “thief, son of a thief” Vaska Pepel.

It is known that official propaganda justified the existence of the “bottom.” It was believed that people fall to the “bottom” due to their vices, the inhabitants of the shelters are natural waste human society. M. Gorky shows that these people, even in inhuman conditions preserved “pearls of moral qualities.” Kind, gentle, sympathetic Actor, hardworking Tick, who dreams of getting out of the “bottom” through honest work. How much heroic strength and nobility from the hereditary thief Vaska Pepel! Poor, hungry Nastya dreams not of satiety and well-being, but of sacrificial, pure and selfless love. And the reader gets the impression that people themselves are not to blame for their fall. Under other circumstances, they could become worthy members of society. The fate of the people of the “bottom,” as M. Gorky describes them, is an indictment of the social structure of Russia at that time.

By drawing images of night shelters, M. Gorky not only answers the question: “Who is to blame?” He poses and solves an even more significant question: “What to do?” What will help a person gain decent life? The main characters of the play, Luka and Satin, answer this question differently.

Luke is a wanderer an old man, which does not appear in the play right away. The viewer and reader have already looked at the “bottom” of life and are horrified by human suffering. And then Luka appears, who knows how to find gentle, comforting words for everyone, reconciling a person with reality. He tells the actor about a free hospital where they can help him; He persuades Anna to be patient and not be afraid of death, because then “there will be no pain.” He defends Nastya when he says that he believes her stories about “ fatal love" He advises Vaska Pepl to go to Siberia to the “free lands”. And the unfortunate people reached out to Luke. Even Vaska Pepel, who didn’t really believe Luka’s stories, says: “Lie, nothing... There are few pleasant things in the world, brother...”

Further events of the play show that Luke’s comforting lie, although it softened morals in the shelter, could not really help anyone. The fate of the night shelters is truly tragic: the Actor hanged himself, Anna died, even harder than before, Nastya, whom no one believes anymore; Vaska Pepel will most likely end up in Siberia, but not to the “free lands”, but to hard labor.

And Luka himself disappears at the most decisive moment, when people cannot be helped with words, but only real deeds are needed.

Although many storylines the plays are exhausted in the third act, M. Gorky also writes the fourth act, which, as many years of practice of staging the play on many stages around the world has shown, is perceived as the most important. Once upon a time, even A.P. Chekhov doubted the theatricality of this act. But the audience's tension always reached its climax in the fourth act, where no events take place, but where Satine pronounces his famous monologues about truth and lies.

Satin is not at all positive hero plays, but this probably couldn’t happen in a play about tramps. But Satin, who retained many good human qualities, became an exponent of M. Gorky’s ideas in this play. The biography of Satin is noteworthy, who “killed a scoundrel in passion and irritation”, defending the honor of his sister, and after prison he “has no way.” And this man, who has experienced a lot in life, claims that people do not need lies. “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters,” it helps some to justify their dominance, and others to come to terms with lawlessness and oppression. But those who are free and “do not eat other people’s things” do not need lies. "Truth is God" free man! There is no need to humiliate a person with lies, a person should always know true position business Only then will he be able to overcome circumstances. This philosophical content the play, especially clearly expressed in the last act, was especially dear to the viewer and reader.

M. Gorky's play “At the Depths” was written on the eve of the first Russian revolution, and in those troubled days it affirmed the beauty and greatness of a free person. “Man – that sounds proud!” It was a storm-petal play that foreshadowed the storm and called the storm.

The poem “Vasily Terkin” has a subtitle: “A Book about a Fighter.” And indeed, A. Tvardovsky writes about the army private, about the one who stands at the lowest level of the army hierarchy, who bears the main responsibility...

The distinctive feature of the play is that most of characters do not play a role in the development of the dramatic intrigue of Kostyleva - Natasha - Ashes.

If desired, it would be possible to simulate a dramatic situation in which all the characters would become active participants in the main storyline.

The characters of the play are united not so much by action, but, initially, by their place of residence and way of life. All of them are night shelters, although from different social backgrounds.

Social differences are fundamentally important for the characters themselves and form the subject of their conversations, but for the author more important aspect philosophical, and he skillfully minimizes social contradictions between your characters.

The person in the world of the play turns out to be superfluous, thrown beyond the threshold of life. Bubnov to Nastya: “You are superfluous everywhere... And all the people on earth are superfluous.”

The characters can be divided into two groups: “wolves” and “sheep”, which evoke sympathy and antipathy in the reader; “believers” and “non-believers”; workers and parasites. But these differences are important to the author rather in order to individualize each character. These are just different variations of the same thing main topic- Themes of “truth”: for some, the truth is the repulsive reality of their lives, for others it is a dream of a better fate.

In the first act, the image of Luke “falls out” from the general ensemble of characters. He is the only one without bitterness and aggressiveness. Luka treats people differently than the inhabitants of the shelter, and talks to them differently. For Luke, the conviction that everyone is human, everyone is equal, is the initial one. For him, each individual is a source of a special quality unknown to the world.

Luke is not so much a hero as a “catalyst” of those internal spiritual processes that barely glimmered in the seemingly hopeless inhabitants of the shelter. With his appearance in the soul of each of these characters, a glimmer of hope arises for the opportunity to escape “from the bottom.”

None of the heroes manages to make their awakened dream come true. At the end of the play, the tragic tension intensifies. Once again, each character contributes to the overall main motive. With the arrival of Luka, Kleshch and Tatar thaw. The tick repairs Alyosha's accordion for nothing.

A glimmer of love for people was born in him, and with it the joy of own existence. beauty free life"at the bottom". The message about the death of the Actor is sobering. It makes the night shelters think again: can truth exist without a dream? Is a person able to get up from his knees if his dream is trampled by the people around him, trampled by the “evil” truth? Is it possible to love the heroes of this play and if so, why? When we read or watch the play, many of the inhabitants of Kostylev’s prison arouse our sympathy and even sympathy. I feel sorry for them, and it seems that without kind pity they cannot survive. Although, in addition to pity, you need your own willpower. The action of the play “At the Bottom” takes place in a gloomy, semi-dark basement, like a cave, with a vaulted, low ceiling that presses on people with its stone weight, where it is dark, there is no space and it is difficult to breathe. The furnishings in this basement are also wretched: instead of chairs there are dirty stumps of wood, a roughly knocked together table, and bunks along the walls. The gloomy life of the Kostylevo doss house is depicted by Gorky as the embodiment of social evil. The characters in the play live in squalor, dirt and poverty. In a damp basement there live people who have been thrown out of life due to the conditions prevailing in society. And in this oppressive, gloomy and hopeless environment, thieves, cheaters, beggars, hungry, crippled, humiliated and insulted, thrown out of life gathered. The heroes are different in their habits, life behavior, past fate, but equally hungry, exhausted and useless to anyone: the former aristocrat Baron, the drunken Actor, former intellectual Satin, mechanic-craftsman Kleshch, fallen woman Nastya, thief Vaska. They have nothing, everything is taken away, lost, erased and trampled into the dirt. People of all kinds have gathered here and social status. Each of them is endowed with their own individual traits. Worker Mite, living in hope of a return to honest work. Ashes, thirsty right life. An actor absorbed in memories of his former glory, Nastya, passionately yearning for the real one, Great love. They all deserve a better fate. All the more tragic is their situation now. The people living in this basement are tragic victims of an ugly and cruel order, in which a person ceases to be human and is doomed to drag out a miserable existence. Gorky does not give a detailed account of the biographies of the characters in the play, but the many features that he reproduces perfectly reveal the author’s intention. In a few words the tragedy of Anna’s life’s fate is depicted. “I don’t remember when I was full,” she says. “I was shaking over every piece of bread... I was trembling all my life... I was tormented... so as not to eat anything else... I walked around in rags all my life... all my miserable life...” Worker Kleshch speaks about the hopelessness of his lot: “There is no work... no strength.... That's true! There is no refuge, there is no refuge! We need to breathe. ... That’s the truth!” The motley gallery of characters are victims of the capitalist order, even here, at the very bottom of life, exhausted and completely destitute, they serve as objects of exploitation, even here the owners, the philistine owners, did not stop at any crime and are trying to squeeze a few pennies out of them. All characters are sharply divided into two main groups: homeless tramps and shelter owners, small owners, and burghers. The figure of the hostel owner Kostylev, one of the “masters of life,” is disgusting. Hypocritical and cowardly, he seeks to cover up his predatory lusts with unctuous religious speeches. His wife Vasilisa is equally disgusting with her immorality. She has the same greed, cruelty and bourgeois owner, making her way to her well-being at any cost. Its own inexorable wolf laws apply here.

The bourgeois owners, who have lost everything human, are contrasted with the homeless tramps. The composition of the shelters is motley: they came to the “bottom” in different ways, each lived their own lives, they are different in character, in beliefs, and in the strength of their desire to break out of the basement. But whatever they are, they stand on their own moral qualities immeasurably higher than the owners of the shelter.

Here there are “kings” and ruled, exploiters and exploited, masters and workers. The laws of society pursue a person from birth to death, from royal palaces to stinking dosshouses. Only with the latter everything is much more naked, and the relationships are wilder. And this is an indictment of the system and society! Life is here for normal person worse than hard labor. It pushes people to commit crimes, callousness, and inhumanity. The fate of all these people and the very existence of the “bottom” proves the illegality of the capitalist system and serves as an exposure and formidable accusation of the bourgeois world.

During the action, swearing is heard from the stage, fights occur, the characters talk about their misfortunes and the misfortunes of other people - the play shows the most terrible aspects of life. But, despite this, the atmosphere of the play, the mood that it evokes in the audience, and with which they leave the theater, is optimistic. The viewer and the person see among these dregs of society people who are disfigured, but with a sense of their own dignity, capable of living a different life.

Gorky with all decisiveness reveals in the play the powerlessness of tramps, their unsuitability for the task of rebuilding Russia. Everyone from the shelter lives with hopes, but cannot do anything or change their deplorable situation due to a tragic combination of circumstances.

“They are organically incapable of revolting for the sake of freedom of labor,” Gorky later said about the characters in the play. Moreover, the participation in the uprising of people like the inhabitants of the shelter would be discrediting the very idea of ​​socialist labor, and not the anarchic revelry of desperate people who had lost faith in the life of people.

In the play “At the Bottom” with great strength and unsurpassed artistic skill shows those terrible living conditions that push her to the “bottom”, into the “pit”. And then the person ceases to be a person. Are these really the people who live in Kostylev’s disgusting flophouse? They have lost everything human, even lost the appearance of a person, and turned into pitiful, useless creatures.

Of course, in many ways they themselves are to blame for what happened to them: they did not have enough firmness or the ability to fight fate, the desire to work, to overcome difficulties. But social conditions are also to blame. This was an era of rapid enrichment for some and impoverishment for others, an era when the remnants of centuries-old foundations were crumbling. In every ruined fate we see a fusion of public and personal problems.

From the very beginning of the play, much sounds like Gorky’s argument with himself, with his previous idealization of tramps. In the Kostylevo shelter, freedom turns out to be illusory: having sunk to the “bottom”, people have not escaped from life, it overtakes them. And Gorky’s former desire is to consider tramps, lumpen people, people rejected from the normal human life, first of all, the good - also recedes into the background. These people are cruel to each other, life has made them that way. And this cruelty is manifested, first of all, 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 new life, the Baron, whose entire property consists of memories of the past greatness of the family and to whom Nastya throws the remark in exasperation: “You’re lying, this didn’t happen!”

The inhabitants of the “bottom” are thrown out of life due to the conditions prevailing in society.

Man is left to his own devices. If he stumbles, gets out of line, he is threatened with “the bottom”, inevitable moral, and often physical death.

But these are people who knew another life. And therefore Natasha is full of passionate dreams, Nastya thinks about bright feelings, the sick and dejected Actor believes in her dream. All they have left in life is faith. “We don't have a name! Even dogs have nicknames, but we don’t!” - the Actor exclaims bitterly. And in this exclamation there is an unbearable resentment of a person thrown overboard of life. Everything was taken away from them, from these forgotten people, but could not take away faith in the best. Gorky himself possessed this quality in abundance, and he endowed it with his heroes.

Based on the play “At the Bottom” love affair, fitting into two love triangle“Ashes - Vasilisa-Natasha”, “Ashes-Vasilisa-Kostylev”. Its development leads to the fact that Ash kills Kostylev and ends up in prison, Natasha, crippled by Vasilisa, ends up in the hospital, and Vasilisa becomes the sovereign mistress of the shelter.

But the originality of the play is that it is not love that is decisive. Most heroes are not involved in development love story, and he himself occupies a secondary position, as it were, in relation to what Gorky portrays.

The first place here is social conflict between the masters of life, the Kostylevs, and the inhabitants of the shelter. And even more broadly between Russian reality and the fates of people who found themselves thrown out of active life to the bottom.

The social conflict of the work was perceived by contemporaries as a call for revolution, for radical change life. It was the conflict of the play that made it revolutionary - this clash between reality and the lives of the people of the shelter. But the most interesting thing is that even now the play has not lost its modern (universal) sound, the accents of the modern viewer and reader have simply changed.

The figurative system of the play in resolving the conflict “At the Bottom”

The inhabitants of the shelter are representatives of two lives, vagabonds who have been thrown to the bottom by society and who are not needed by society.

Gorky shows that people find themselves at the bottom in different ways:

• Satin - after prison,
• The actor drank himself to death
• Tick ​​due to wife's illness,
• The Baron went broke
• Ash because he is a hereditary thief.

The reasons that led people to this state have not lost their relevance. Thus, the reasons for the conflict between these people and reality are different.

The inhabitants of the shelter have different attitudes towards their situation, towards the fact that reality itself is such that it pushes them to the bottom and keeps them there. Some have come to terms with reality:

• Bubnov

(“A person is a thing, you are superfluous everywhere... and all people are superfluous...”),

(“We must live according to the law”),

• Natasha (dreams replace real life),
• Baron (life replaced by memories of the past).

Others have a hard time experiencing their condition, hope or dream of changing it (Natasha, Ashes, Actor).

But neither the first nor the second know how to escape from here. Modern reading The play allows us to say that a person’s attitude to his position determines his attitude to reality.

Therefore, the third group of heroes is very important - Satin and Luka - they are the ones who seem to know what to do. The meaning of the images of Satin and Luke is that another

one conflict is the conflict between truth and compassion, between truth and white lies.

The humanitarian component of the conflict in Gorky's play

Luke is one of central characters, with his appearance in the shelter, begin internal changes. According to the author, this character is rather negative

(“fanaticism of virtue”, “crafty old man”).

Luke takes pity on the man: he consoles the dying Anna, he tells Ash about wonderful life in Siberia, where you can do everything all over again, he tells the Actor about hospitals where you can recover from alcoholism. Gorky himself is sure that

“You shouldn’t feel sorry for a person.” The writer believes that “pity humiliates a person.”

However, it is Luke who influences people, it is he who makes them take a fresh look at their situation. It was he who last minute remains at the bedside of dying Anna. Consequently, the author’s rather unambiguous attitude towards the character does not make the image of Luke unambiguous, but defines its multidimensionality.

Satin stands out among others both in his attitude to life and his statements about it. His monologues about man and truth are Gorky’s credo. The image of this hero is ambiguous. He can be considered as a person provoking, for example, Ash to kill Kostylev. A person who deliberately refuses to do anything, whose monologues contradict his behavior. But you can consider his position from the point of view of Stoic philosophy: he consciously refuses to work for this society, which threw him to the sidelines of life, he despises it

(“Work? For what? To be well-fed?... Man is higher! Man is higher than satiety!”).

Thus, Satin is not unambiguous in the work.

The conflict in the play “At the Bottom” between compassion and truth is formally resolved in favor of truth: Luka’s consolations did not make the lives of the inhabitants of the shelter better (the Actor commits suicide, Ash goes to prison, Natasha goes to the hospital, Luka himself disappears). A person must know the truth about himself, says Gorky, then he can change this life. But the question posed by the writer remains a question, since the images of the characters do not provide an unambiguous solution, which is why the play has not lost its relevance.

The conflict between the inhabitants of the shelter and reality is also ambiguously resolved. On the one hand, as already mentioned, the very attitude of people determines their condition, their life path. On the other hand, the masters of life (Kostylev and Vasilisa) are the type of exploiters who are alien to humanity, their thoughts are aimed at profit, they benefit from the existing system. In the images of the Kostylevs, Gorky condemns the existing system. It is not for nothing that contemporaries accept the play as a call to change the existing system. Thus, according to Gorky, you need to change your life - then the person will change. The resolution of the conflict between the inhabitants of the shelter and reality is taken out of the work by the author.

The unusual plot for its time (the life of a flophouse) and the universal conflict in the play “At the Lower Depths,” with the author’s clear and definite position, give an ambiguous interpretation of the work and make it relevant for any time.

Materials are published with the personal permission of the author - Ph.D. O.A. Mazneva (see “Our Library”)