Genre originality of Buddenbrooks. T. Mann's place in the history of German literature

“In the evenings, Voshchev lay with his eyes open and yearned for the future, when everything would become generally known and placed in a stingy feeling of happiness.”

A. Platonov. "Pit"

A. Platonov’s story “The Pit” was written in the “year of the great turning point” (1929-1930), when the Russian peasantry was completely ruined and driven into collective farms. And the author spoke here about all the absurdities and criminal excesses of collectivization, which still resonate painfully to this day. Platonov defended the honor of Russian literature: after all, at that time works were published that glorified collectivization (for example, “Virgin Soil Upturned” by M. Sholokhov). Platonov was the only one who was not afraid to go to the end, to the point of logical absurdity, showing where Russia, the USSR, and the path of building a “new life” led.

Let's see how the plot of the story develops. Reduced “due to the growth of weakness in him and thoughtfulness amid the general pace of work,” Voshchev is nailed to the construction of a foundation pit for “the only common proletarian house,” where future people will achieve final happiness. There is no end in sight to this digging - the pit is ever expanding to accommodate all the workers of the cities. And what about the village workers, who, due to the burden of existence, stocked up on coffins just in case? In the countryside, the analogue of universal happiness should be collective farms, where the poor and repentant middle peasants can enter. Platonov shows how, before joining a collective farm, people ask each other for forgiveness. After all, there is nothing further to be ashamed of. You can take away goods and bread from your neighbors, and the neighbors themselves - the kulaks - put everyone on a strong raft and send them down the river, perhaps to certain death: “The kulaks looked from the raft in one direction - at Zhachev; people wanted to notice their homeland forever and the last, happy person on it." Who is this happy man? A legless invalid, embittered and cruel, no longer able to dream or build, but still capable of destroying. And the middle peasants and the poor first cry for a long time before the onset of a happy life, and then just as wildly and terribly have fun. Black fat flies are hovering over the village - the peasants are slaughtering their livestock so as not to take it to the collective farm. And then those who are stronger are driven to build the same pit: “The collective farm followed him and continually dug the ground; all the poor and middle-aged men worked with such zeal, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit.”

This is how scary the foundation of a new life is laid. Platonov writes about hunger, poverty and human deaths with the meager bitterness of an eyewitness: this is how the survivors of those burned over the years spoke about torture and executions Patriotic War villages Platonov’s children are the starting point, the moral measure of everything: “...This weak body, abandoned without kinship among people, will someday feel the warming flow of the meaning of life, and its mind will see a time similar to the first primordial day.” This is what the sad philosopher Voshchev thinks about the orphan Nastya, warmed by the builders. This girl is a wayward animal, already speaking in terrible slogans, but reaching out to goodness and human warmth with all the strength of her unspoiled heart. Her death, the children’s bones that lay at the bottom of the pit, are the last proof that no bright future will be built: “Voshchev stood in bewilderment over this quiet child, he no longer knew where communism would be in the world now if he "No, first in a child's feeling and in a convinced impression? Why does he now need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement?"

Platonov's heroes talk a lot about future happiness, but have a poor idea of ​​it: the material life around them is too meager and sad (hunger, cold, poverty of the barracks). People build an incomprehensible house that no one needs. They are led by engineer Prushevsky, who designed the house as a social order. The engineer is a fragment of a past life who is trying to find a new meaning of existence among the workers. It seems to him that they know what they live and work for. But that's not true. Neither the wretched opportunist Kozlov, nor the bookish Safonov, nor the rudely strong and in his own way fair Chickman know this and do not really think about it: the main thing is to work, and the party will think, issuing directives through an activist who fulfills and exceeds them with bad zeal.

Only Voshchev thinks about life. His thoughts are the search for that harmony in nature and human relationships, which is unlikely to be realized in the house of universal happiness. Moreover, the foundation pit, having absorbed the ravine and neighboring fields, continues to grow in depth and breadth, turning not into the foundation of the future, but into a terrible pit, into a mass grave that deceived people dig for themselves. Each of them individually has character, is drawn to goodness, and is capable of pity. But all together they are a herd going to the slaughter, trampling those who get in their way. And for some reason it seems that the palace in which the carefully selected proletarians will be settled will ominously resemble a semi-camp.

Andrei Platonov does not just feel sorry for his heroes. Even in the most unpleasant of them, such as the rural activist or the well-fed bureaucrat Pashkin, he knows how to see the sprouts of humanity and thought. The writer believes that if something goes into the future, if something sheds light into it, then these are precisely those grains of pain and shame, those attempts to think about what is happening that shape the human soul. It is impossible to build a bright future by destroying the connection with the past - centuries-old village culture, traditions of life and work.

The common proletarian house is not just erected in an empty place, no, in a place where everything living and sentient is uprooted and falls into a hole. Therefore, A. Platonov’s story ends with the sad scene of the funeral of the girl Nastya - the funeral of our future.

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1. What problem forms the basis of all the work of A. Platonov? A. Fathers and sons B. The struggle for freedom C. The essence of life D. Intelligentsia and revolution 2. What is the concept of nature in the works of A. Platonov? A. Harmonious world B. Beautiful and furious world C. Revelry of the elements 3. In which works of A. Platonov do dystopian features appear? A. “The Hidden Man” B. “The Pit” C. “Chevengur” D. “City of Grads” 4. What is the main and constant conflict of all of A. Platonov’s prose? A. The contradiction between living nature and inanimate machines B. Between man and
The surname of the main character of "The Pit" Voshchev immediately attracts the reader's attention. Grammatically, this is a typically Russian surname ending in -ev. Lexically - a conglomerate of heterogeneous meanings guessed by ear. Perhaps, phonetically, the surname Voshchev is connected with the words “in general” (in the colloquial version - “finally”) or “in vain.” It is interesting that both “meanings” of the hero’s surname are realized in the story. Voshchev is looking for the meaning of common existence (“I’m not afraid of my life, it’s not a mystery to me”), but his own
The description of events in the novels and other works of A. Platonov does not lend itself to unambiguous assessments at all; it is difficult to equate it with something already known in literature. Platonov is a special and “original” writer. Only towards the end of the twentieth century, after Platonov’s repeated return to the reader and the persistent study of his work by literary scholars, especially intensive since the mid-1980s, did it become possible to understand the scale of the genius of this writer and thinker, to realize his unique contribution to the literature of the twentieth century. Platonov
One word of truth will conquer the whole world. Popular proverb When creating a completely “non-classical” picture of the utopian world in the story “The Pit,” Platonov was guided by classic themes and motives that helped him depict the absurd reality even more vividly. The main character of the story, Voshchev, is a person who knows how to think and critically evaluate what is happening to him and around him. Through his eyes we observe the events, in the center of which is the digging of a foundation pit for the future “House of Happiness” of the proletarians, we see how consciousness changes
A. Platonov (Klimentov Andrey Platonovich) belongs to the generation that entered literature with the revolution. the main problem his creativity is the problem of the essence of life and the purpose of man on earth. The basis of the writer’s early work is the theme of the relationship between man and nature. Platonov’s nature is a “beautiful and furious world.” Her duality is that she is defenseless, fragile in front of a person (story " Unknown flower"), but is also hostile to man: it is a riot of elements that threatens man with hunger, cold, and death.
We need the greatest effort of all our strength... stern determination!.. And they come to us with the propaganda of humanism! As if there is anything more truly human in the world than the class hatred of the proletariat... Plato’s “nihilistic” criticism of the state is in complete harmony with both his “humanism” and with his opposition of the city to the countryside that runs through the entire story - the peasantry, they say, is everything produces, and above him... - well-fed townspeople, with leather bags under their arms! "Youth" nihilism turns out to be an obvious weapon
The writing fate of A.P. Platonov was tragic: his view of the world, his style, the harsh truth of life in his works initially met with misunderstanding, and starting from the late 20s led to persecution, political vilification in the press and bans. In the late 20s and 30s he reached the pinnacle of his creativity in the novel “Chevengur”, the stories “The Pit”, “The Juvenile Sea” and others. But they did not see the light of day during the author’s lifetime and, miraculously preserved in

The beginning of the way. "Buddenbrooks"

In the 1980s, when Thomas Mann and his older brother Heinrich were children, the reading public Western Europe I was just beginning to become widely acquainted with Russian literature. Crime and Punishment first appeared in German translation in 1882, “War and Peace” - in 1885.

In the nineties, when the Mann brothers - each in their own way - took their first steps in literature, the names of the greatest Russian novelists were already known to everyone in the West educated person. Books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, as well as Gogol, Goncharov, Turgenev appeared one after another, causing lively responses in the press.

All or almost all major German writers who entered conscious life at the end of the 19th or beginning of the 20th century knew Russian literature, were keenly interested in it, and studied from it in one form or another. Gerhart Hauptmann wrote his first famous realistic plays under the direct influence of Tolstoy's The Power of Darkness. Bernhard Kellerman in the novel “Der Tor” (“The Fool” or “The Idiot”) created the image of a strange and beautiful-hearted preacher, in many ways close to Prince Myshkin. Rainer Maria Rilke was drawn to Russian culture, tried to write poetry in Russian, visited Tolstoy in Yasnaya Polyana. Leonhard Frank, who during the First World War created one of the first books of anti-militarist prose, “The Good Man,” considered Dostoevsky his teacher. However, we can safely say that Thomas Mann surpassed everyone in the depth of perception of Russian classical literature and in the completeness of his spiritual connections with it. German writers of his generation.

Heinrich Mann, to whom Russian literature was much less close than to his brother, wrote in his book of memoirs “Review of the Century” several vivid pages about how the books of Russian writers were perceived in Western European countries at the end of the last century. Heinrich Mann talks here about the interaction between literature and the liberation movement in Russia. “The October Revolution, like any genuine, deep revolution, is the realization of what has been accumulated in literature over the course of a century.” It was this hidden connection, according to G. Mann, that determined moral strength Russian literature, its “irreconcilable truthfulness”.

Russian literature of the 19th century, writes Heinrich Mann, “is an event of incredible importance and such educational power that we, accustomed to the phenomena of decline and breakdown, can hardly believe that we were its contemporaries... How was Dostoevsky read, how was Tolstoy read?

They were read with awe. They were read - and the eyes opened wider to perceive all this abundance of images, all this abundance of thought, and tears flowed as a response. These novels, from Pushkin to Gorky, link by link in an impeccably welded chain, taught us to more deeply understand man, his weaknesses, his formidable power, his unfulfilled calling - and they were accepted as teaching.”

In another chapter of the same book, Heinrich Mann recalls how differently his and his brother Thomas' years of literary apprenticeship passed. “When my brother entered the twenties of his life, he was committed to Russian masters, and for me a good half of my existence was determined by French literature. We both learned to write in German - that’s why, I think.”

Heinrich and Thomas Mann both occupied an extremely important place in the history of their national culture.

Both of them raised the art of German realistic prose to great heights and laid the foundations German novel XX century: this became their common cause, one might even say a common creative feat. And at the same time, they were very different in their spiritual make-up - this was reflected in the choice of those artistic traditions which they followed. Heinrich Mann gravitated towards satire and at the same time towards a concrete social study of reality: he found a lot of value for himself in Voltaire, Balzac, and Zola. Thomas Mann, as an artist, felt a penchant for psychological and philosophical prose; This is partly where his increased interest in the masters of the Russian novel stemmed.

Heinrich Mann surpassed his brother in political radicalism; already in his youth he broke away from the burgher environment, its traditional views and morals. Thomas Mann for a long time remained closely associated with this environment. However, Russian literature early became a support for him in his critical understanding of reality.

Thomas Mann's early stories - "Disappointment", "Little Mister Friedemann", "Luischen", "Pagliacci", "Tobias Mindernickel" - studies on the theme of human suffering. They contain people who are offended by fate, physically or spiritually damaged, internally alienated from the world around them. From the very first creative steps, the young writer was attracted by acute psychological collisions: with their help, he revealed the hidden tragedy of bourgeois, bourgeois existence.

Already in the sketch story “Disappointment” (1896), a kind of “anti-hero” appears - an elderly lonely man: in a conversation with a casual acquaintance, he pours out his disgust for life, for society, for the “lofty words” with which people deceive each other. This is a timid, still largely inept variation on the theme of Dostoevsky's story “The Underground Man.”

A more clearly defined figure of the “anti-hero” appears in the story “Pagliacco” (1897). It is written in the first person, in that confessional manner that was first tried by Dostoevsky (in world literature of the 20th century, this manner was widely developed, but for the West at the end of the 19th century it was still completely new). The closeness to Dostoevsky’s intonation is obvious here, starting from the very first page: “I prepared myself a clean notebook to tell my “story” in it; for what purpose, exactly? Perhaps to do something at all? Perhaps - out of a tendency to delve into psychology and to console oneself with the knowledge of the inevitability of everything that has been experienced? Inevitability is so gratifying! Or perhaps - to enjoy at least a few minutes of some kind of superiority over oneself and some semblance of indifference? For indifference, I know, would be a kind of happiness...” (7, 41–42). In the “clown’s” story about himself, buffoonery is combined with genuine anger, uncertainty with narcissism, arrogance with humiliation: before us is the image of a split, torn consciousness.

At the same time, it is obvious that there is a difference between the paradoxical philosopher in Dostoevsky and the young angry burgher in Thomas Mann's story. The “clown’s” horizons, the entire range of his experiences, compared to the tragic hero of “Notes from Underground”, are incomparably narrower. However, the story breathes with sincere hostility towards the world of successful “large-scale businessmen”: the restless “clown”, one way or another, is spiritually much higher than the environment from which he voluntarily broke away.

On the threshold of the new century, Thomas Mann was working on the novel “Buddenbrooks,” which was published in 1901. The book was originally conceived as the story of a burgher family, built on the material of household traditions - a novel about older relatives, nothing more. The aspiring writer could not imagine that this book would mark the beginning of his worldwide fame, and that Nobel Prize(he received it in 1929) will be awarded to him precisely as the author of “Buddenbrooks”.

Many years later, in the essay "My Time," Thomas Mann testified: "I actually wrote a novel about own family... But in fact, I myself did not realize that, by talking about the disintegration of one burgher family, I heralded much deeper processes of decay and dying, the beginning of a much more significant cultural and socio-historical breakdown.”

Schopenhauer's pessimistic philosophy suggested to a young writer the thought of decay and dying as an inevitable fatal law of existence. But the sobriety of the artist’s vision of life encouraged him to paint the decline of the Buddenbrooks family in the light of the specific destinies of the bourgeois, proprietary way of life, determined by the laws of history.

The question before us is: how did Russian literature - and in particular and especially Tolstoy, to whom Thomas Mann, as we remember, directly referred - help the birth of "Buddenbrooks", one of the wonderful books of the 20th century?

In his 1947 article “On a Chapter from Buddenbrooks,” Thomas Mann recalls how he relied in his work on the experience of writers from other countries and not only Russians. "The influences that shaped this book as work of art, came from everywhere: from France, England, Russia, from the Scandinavian North - the young author absorbed them greedily, with the zealous zeal of a student, feeling that he could not do without them in his work on a work that was psychological in its innermost thoughts and intentions, because it sought to convey the psychology of those who were tired of living, to depict the complication of spiritual life and the heightened sensitivity to beauty that accompanies biological decline.” And - on the same page - T. Mann clarifies his thought: “...under my pen there arose a social-critical novel hidden under the guise of a family chronicle...” (9, 195). The motif of “biological decline” is ultimately overshadowed in Buddenbrooks by a larger social-critical theme.

It is worth considering another important testimony of Thomas Mann - from his book “Reflections of an Apolitical” (1918). There, the memory of “Buddenbrooks” pops up for an unexpected reason - in connection with the name of Nietzsche. Thomas Mann treated this philosopher, so influential in Kaiser Germany, with great respect and highly valued his literary gift (what dangers for humanity were inherent in Nietzsche’s ideas - Thomas Mann clearly saw much later). However, in “Reflections of an Apolitical” T. Mann dissociates himself from Nietzsche at least partially. He claims that he never, even in his youth, shared the cult of brute force and aestheticization of “brutal instincts” coming from Nietzsche. Against - artistic references for him there were works generated by “highly moral, sacrificial and Christian-conscious natures.” Here it is called " Last Judgment Michelangelo, and then the novel Anna Karenina, “which gave me strength when I wrote Buddenbrooks.”

We have the right to assume that Tolstoy’s work - both with its realism and its moral pathos - could “give strength” to the young Thomas Mann in his - not yet fully conscious - opposition to the reactionary philosophical teachings. But what is the more specific, directly artistic connection between this novel and “Buddenbrooks”?

Working on a story about the fate of one burgher family, Thomas Mann studied the rich experience of European " family romance" In this regard, he should have been attracted to Anna Karenina, a novel in which Tolstoy, according to in my own words, loved the “family thought.” He should have been attracted by the fact that in Anna Karenina the history of personal destinies, personal relationships of the heroes is inextricably linked with the history of society - and contains a strong charge of social criticism directed against the very foundations of the proprietary way of life.

Thomas Mann did not feel inclined towards satirical grotesquery, sharp sharpening of characters and situations. The closer he should have found Tolstoy's method of depiction - impeccably reliable and at the same time uncompromisingly sober. In "Buddenbrooks" he - like the author of "Anna Karenina" - depicts that class, that social environment, which is vitally close to him. He loves his Buddenbrooks, he himself is their flesh. But at the same time, he is unpleasantly frank. Each of the main characters of the story is depicted in the “fluidity” of living inconsistency, the interweaving of good and bad. The Buddenbrook clan has its own cultural and moral foundations, its own strong ideas about decency and honesty, about what is possible and what is not. However, the novelist calmly, gently, without pressure, but essentially mercilessly demonstrates the underside of this Buddenbrookean morality - the latent antagonism that corrodes the relationships of parents and children, brothers and sisters, those common manifestations of selfishness, hypocrisy, self-interest that flow from the very essence of bourgeoisism. proprietary relations.

In T. Mann's novel, the action begins in 1835 and continues until the end of the 19th century - four generations of Buddenbrooks pass before the reader. However, with the greatest author's attention close-up the fate of the third generation is outlined - Thomas, Christian, Tony. The decline of their lives occurred in the years that followed the reunification of Germany. In the first years of the Hohenzollern Empire, as in post-reform Russia, everything “was turned upside down and is just getting back into shape.” No matter how different the social situations depicted in “Anna Karenina” and in the last parts of “Buddenbrooks” are, both there and here we're talking about about the rapid breakdown of old social foundations. Tolstoy recreated the collapse of patriarchal-landlord Russia; Thomas Mann, using the material of his national reality, showed the collapse of the ancient foundations of the German patriarchal-burgher way of life. That fatigue of life, the feeling of doom from which Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, and then his fragile and gifted son Hanno, suffer, are explained not in some metaphysical laws of everyday life, but in the laws of German and world history.

Thomas Mann masterfully conveys in the last parts of the novel the atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty in which his characters live. Through the fates of his heroes, he senses and reproduces not only the collapse of the old burghers, the trading “patriciate” of the North German cities, but also something much more significant: the fragility of the rule of the bourgeoisie, the owners, the precariousness of the foundations on which capitalist society is built.

Several times, powerfully and forcefully, the theme of death arises in Buddenbrooks. And here the creative connection between Thomas Mann and Tolstoy is very noticeable. Here we can recall not only “Anna Karenina” (and, in particular, the paintings of the dying of Nikolai Levin), but also “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”. Telling about last weeks the life of Senator Thomas Buddenbrook, T. Mann reveals the spiritual drama of this intelligent and energetic bourgeois; who, in the face of imminent death, faces new, painfully difficult questions about the meaning of existence, and doubts grow about whether he lived his life correctly.

However, the content of “Buddenbrooks” is in no way reduced to the theme of dying and decay, or to satirical motifs, which in some places, no matter how imperceptibly, are interspersed into the narrative. The artistic charm and originality of "Buddenbrooks" is to a large extent based on the fact that the author is mentally attached to his characters, to their way of life, their family traditions. With all his sobriety and irony, with all the social criticism that forms the ideological basis of the novel, the writer draws the passing Buddenbrook’s little world with sympathy and restrained sadness, “from the inside.”

“Buddenbrooks” showed the young novelist’s amazing ability to depict people and the circumstances of their lives clearly, visibly, with great artistic plasticity, in an abundance of aptly captured details. And in the colorfulness of everyday episodes, genre scenes, interiors, in precision and richness psychological characteristics, in the realistic full-bloodedness of the general family-group portrait of the Buddenbrooks, connected by a common family resemblance and yet so dissimilar to each other in many ways - all this reflected the original and mature talent of Thomas Mann and, at the same time, his ability to creatively perceive the traditions of the classics of the Russian novel, primarily Tolstoy.