Dramatic conflict in drama at the bottom. Dramaturgy M

Introduction

Today at beginning of XXI century, the figure of Maxim Gorky, like a century ago, attracts the attention of the general public. The personality and work of the writer are subjected to meticulous criticism, the facts of his biography are scrupulously examined, and the significance of individual works is overestimated. The desire to show Gorky “without makeup” is sometimes carried out in favor of a peculiar fashion for sensationalism, for the overthrow of previous ideals. However, even the most ardent opponents today have to admit that the name of Maxim Gorky cannot be erased from the history of social and cultural thought in Russia, from the context of the complex spiritual and aesthetic quests of all Russian literature of the late 19th and first decades of the 20th century. The artist's works became a reflection of his time - a turbulent era of wars and social cataclysms. It will not be considered a mistake to say that today the study of the work of Maxim Gorky begins almost anew. Objectively and impartially assessing the place and role of the artist in the literary process of the 20th century is the primary task of modern literary scholarship.

About Maxim Gorky and his creative heritage a lot has been written. Domestic Gorky studies are represented by such names as Yu.Yu. Yuzovsky, S.V. Kastorsky, B.A. Bialik, V.V. Novikov, A.A. Volkov, I.A. Gruzdev, B.V. Mikhailovsky, L.A. Spiridonova, A.B. Udodov, - authors basic research the artistic system of Gorky as a writer and playwright, his biography and personality. However, most of the monographs concerning the artist’s work were written before the 1970s, when in Soviet literary criticism the name of Gorky was invariably associated with the definition “ proletarian writer" and "the creator of socialist realism", and his works were considered mainly from the point of view of their reflection of social issues. After the 70s, interest in Gorky noticeably decreased: it seemed that it was impossible to add anything new to what had already been said.

At the end of the 80s - the beginning of the 90s there was a new wave of “hobby” for Gorky due to the publication of previously unknown materials concerning the life and work of the writer, and this interest was often more of a scandalous nature than the desire to objectively evaluate the “blank spots” in history Russian literature of the 20th century. The authors of numerous newspaper and magazine articles focused their attention on the issue of the relationship between Gorky and the official authorities after the 1917 revolution, as well as on the mystery of the writer’s death. Maxim Gorky was alternately called a victim of the “Kremlin conspiracy,” a mouthpiece of the official ideology, and an ardent opponent of Stalin. However, all these statements were poorly substantiated and were intended only for a one-day sensation. It's gratifying that in last years This negative trend has also been overcome. Today, the focus of researchers and critics is Gorky the artist, the humanistic problems of the work of the prose writer and playwright, his innovation and connection with the Russian classical realistic tradition. The last decade has been marked by the publication of a number of most interesting research concerning the personality and creativity of M. Gorky and his dramatic heritage. These could include the books by L.A. Spiridonova “M. Gorky: a dialogue with history” (Moscow, 1994) and “M. Gorky: a new view” (Moscow, 2004), L. Ya. Reznikov “The famous Maxim Gorky and the unknown" (Petrozavodsk, 1996), dissertations by M.A. Kabak “The theme of family in the works of M. Gorky: based on the material of drama of 1908-1916.” (Moscow 2005) and S.A Jesuitov “M. Gorky’s plays of the 1930s: text and context (St. Petersburg, 2007).

Thus,relevance This study is determined by the general task of modern literary criticism to find new approachesV studying the artistic heritage of Gorky, in particular, his dramaturgyas part of the “single text” of the artist’s work.

Purpose of the course work – to show the specifics of Gorky’s dramaturgy, its innovative character.

The goal defines the followingtasks :

Get acquainted with the literature on the problem;

Consider the stages of Gorky's dramaturgy;

Analyze in detail the plays “At the Lower Depths”, “Bourgeois”;

Show how this topic connected with the school curriculum.

Practical significance course work is that its materials can be used both at a university when teaching a systematic course on Russian literature of the 20th century, in special courses and special seminars on the works of M. Gorky, and at school in literature lessons and in extracurricular work on literature.

Work structure : the work consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, a list of references, including 29 sources, and a methodological appendix.

Chapter 1. Dramaturgy of M. Gorky and the poetics of the “new drama”

Both contemporaries, criticism, and literary criticism of the Soviet era often isolated Gorky from the innovative search for “new drama” and brought him closer to the playwrights of the Znanievites, who continued the traditions of Russian socio-psychological drama of the 19th century. However, Gorky not only wrote during the era of theater renewal at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, but he himself was one of the reformers.

Gorky's interest in theater appeared in the mid-90sXIXV. He turned to writing plays on the advice of Chekhov and the urgent request of the founders of the Moscow Art Theater K.S. Stanislavsky and V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko.

Gorky’s turn to drama is explained not only by this seemingly external, albeit with a deep inner meaning, impetus, but also by the nature of his own creativity, characterized by drama and dynamism.

All of M. Gorky’s dramatic work is usually divided into three periods: plays from the era of the first Russian revolution (“Bourgeois”, “At the Lower Depths”, “Summer Residents”, “Barbarians”, “Enemies” - 1901-1906); plays of the 1910s (“The Last”, “Cranks”, “Children”, “Vassa Zheleznova” in the first edition, “False Coin”, “Zykovs”, “Old Man”, “Yakov Bogomolov” - 1908-1915); plays Soviet period(“Egor Bulychov and others”, “Dostigaev and others”, “Somov and others”, “Vassa Zheleznova” in the second edition - 1921-1935). As O.V. rightly notes. Zhurchev, “if we consider the socio-historical reality reflected in the plays, their ideological orientation and pathos, elements of internal literary and philosophical polemics - with Chekhov, L. Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and others - of course, such periodization is quite natural and appropriate. But if we turn to Gorky’s ideological and artistic “cosmos”, to the undoubted unity of the dramatic structure of his works, we can see the repetition of conflicts, genres, plot collisions, author's techniques. The entire motley dramaturgy of the writer represents a kind of artistic whole, organized by a special, unique dramatic style, a special mood.” .
Gorky's plays are characterized by multiple conflicts and multiple plots, when during the action one plot unfolds after another, often symmetrical to the previous one, and storylines so independent that they can easily be removed from the play and create the content of their own. The characters begin to group not “along” the storyline and the main dramatic conflict, but, as it were, “across” it. Since the nature of the beginning must correspond to the nature of the denouement, “this dramatic parallelism builds a specifically Gorky constructive principle: group demarcation and clash of characters. The composition of the groups is changing, moving, unstable. Not only the heroes belonging to one group or another, but also their ideologies change places with ease. Stage character groups form their own plots, which can intertwine with each other, forming plot symmetry, so characteristic of the design of Gorky’s plays.” . Without taking into account the “symphonic” construction of Gorky’s plays, where there are diverse variations of the main motive, i.e. polyphony, they would be in danger of breaking up into separate, unrelated scenes, just like musical composition without a general idea, it will fall apart into separate musical episodes.
The tendency towards “symphonism”, the obvious non-stage nature, multi-character and multi-conflict nature of Gorky’s plays really have their explanation in the specific poetics of Gorky’s dramaturgy, it is in this that the general idea is contained - both artistic and ideological (worldview).
Starting point to define this general idea, Varvara’s remark from “Summer Residents” can serve: “Words excite us more than people” . Self-sufficient word, becomes for Gorky’s heroes not only and not so much a way of communication with each other and with the world, but, according to Zhurcheva, “thepeaceand at the same time a way of creating it with its own space-time coordinate system. Action is driven by “reasoning,” “discussion,” “thought,” and “word.” Now every character is not a character, a psychologically reliable type. The character is a worldview, an idea.” .
In the plays of M. Gorkythe nature of the existential conflict is revealed when the seemingly acute sociality at first glance dissolves in the thought of the tragedy of human existence in his eternal struggle with the finitude of life and the unknowability of existence. Gorky's hero is burdened by his existence, he is shocked by the meaninglessness of a hard-lived life and the inevitability of its collapse. Not only Gorky’s intellectuals in “The Bourgeois”, “Children of the Sun”, “Summer Residents”, “Barbarians” are tormented by their worthlessness, but also the so-called “people of labor”, and those who, in relation to Gorky’s work, are called “those who broke out of their class ": Antipa Zykov, Vassa Zheleznova, Egor Bulychev. No work, no most powerful resistance to life gives them the opportunity to resolve deep internal contradictions with themselves. Gorky’s heroes, on the one hand, glorify work, and on the other hand, they come to the idea that work is just one of the options for a person’s lack of freedom before the inexorable face of fate.
External dramatic conflict is most often of an everyday or social nature, and it is often overcome or removed long before the end of the play. The conflict is ideological, the conflict of ideas, philosophical systems characters is so global and cosmic that it is impossible to even try to resolve it within the framework of one play - this gives the events taking place “the character of the immanent tragedy of existence in general” .

Further, we can note the specificity of the genre definitions that Gorky gives to his plays: out of 18 plays, 8 are namedscenes, 1 – scenes from county life (“Barbarians”), 8 are not designated in any way and only 1 is represented asplay(“The Last”). According to O.V. Zhurcheva, “this reflected not only the author’s fear of introducing a certain trend with the help of a certain genre characteristic, but also an emphasis on the epic nature of what is depicted, its incompleteness, discreteness, and disconnection from a cause-and-effect, logical, temporal, historical chain. Genre designation"scenes" involves to a greater extent the use of montage, which always encourages the author to play with time and space.” .
As noted above, between 1900 and 1906 he wrote six plays. The ideological growth of the writer is clearly visible in them. Gorky's turn to a new genre for him - plays, as well as his turn to the great epic genre, testified to the expansion of his ideological and creative range. In 1902 the plays “Philistines”, “At the Depths” appeared, in 1904 - “Summer Residents”, in 1905 - “Children of the Sun”, in 1906 - “Enemies”, “Barbarians”. Thus, during the period of revolutionary upsurge, drama became the main genre of the writer.

Title of the play"Philistines" suggests that Gorky turned to the theme of philistinism. The writer always hated philistinism as a class and ethical phenomenon, as a class of owners, as a base structure of the human soul. The terrible power of philistinism lies in its possessive instincts, blind susceptibility to antiquity, conservatism of thinking, hatred of everything new.

The world of the philistines is an ugly world of money-grubbers, inexorably greedy and cruel, ugly and arrogant, saturated with lies, hypocrisy, and hypocrisy. The personification of this world is Vasily Bessemenov in the play. The world of the Bessemenovs is a world of greed and acquisitiveness. It’s “cramped and stuffy” here; the inhabitants of a rich house can spend hours arguing about insignificant things like who should bring the samovar, which sugar to buy - sawn or whole, which is better Fresh air or stuffiness. The old Bessemenovs embody inertia, petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness and backwardness, against which their children rebel.

The most active social force in the play is Neil, a representative of the revolutionary working class. Nile attracts with its progressive views, cheerfulness, optimism - the whole appearance of the future owner of the country.

New play Gorky"At the bottom" (1902) - was staged on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater in the same year as “The Bourgeois”, in 1902. The success of the play was explained not only by the fact that Gorky for the first time on stage showed people of the “bottom”, summed up the topic of tramping that previously worried him, but also spoke against inhumanity, humiliation of the human person. “At the Bottom” is crowded, and each character has his own life experience, his own social speech.

The play “At the Bottom” has a deep ideological and philosophical content. The playwright’s plan was by no means reduced to the task of depicting people of the “bottom”, crippled by the social system. This accusatory plan of the play is obvious, but at the same time the play is a passionate and excited debate about man, about various paths to human happiness.

What is the real truth of life? The characters in the play answer this question differently - Satin, Luka, Kostylev, Bubnov, Kleshch, Nastya, Actor and others. Some of them affirm and accept the “truth” in its immediate reality, reconciling with the existing vicious “schedule of life”, and in this case we have before us the base “truth of facts”; others affirm the truth of comforting lies.

After “At the Lower Depths” Gorky writes a play"Summer Residents" (1904), dedicated to the ideological stratification of the democratic intelligentsia. Part of her sought an active connection with the people, while part of her began to dream, after a hungry and restless youth, about rest and peace, while arguing that a peaceful evolution of a society that needed “benevolent people” and not rebels was necessary. This was one of the first works about the new - the split among the intelligentsia. In the play “Summer Residents,” the writer depicted the transition of the intelligentsia to serve in the camp of the bourgeoisie.

Gorky explained the idea of “Dachnikov” as follows: “I wanted to portray that part of the Russian intelligentsia that came out of the democratic strata and, having reached a certain height of social position, lost contact with the people related to it by blood, forgot about their interests, about the need to expand life for him."

Most of the characters in the play are “dacha residents essentially of their souls.” Varvara Basova says, having come to the bitter conclusion: “The intelligentsia is not us! We are something else. We are summer residents in our country... Some newcomers.”

Lawyer Basov came from the democratic strata. Formerly a commoner, he became a typical tradesman. Law practice gave him the opportunity to make considerable money from various frauds. He lives the wealthy life of a “summer resident” - a well-fed and self-satisfied everyman. He has no public interests, he is in no hurry and wants only one thing - peace of mind, enjoyment of material wealth. Basov is an enemy of any social upheaval, a staunch opponent of the revolution. Basov’s consumer philosophy is shared by his legal assistant Zamyslov.

The writer Shalimov also betrayed the covenants of his youth, his democratic past. He is not only now indifferent to the situation of the people from which he came, but is essentially hostile to them and has joined the camp of those who fought against democracy. When the doctor Marya Lvovna reminds Shalimov of what a writer should be like in Russia, he answers her rather cynically: “Oh, serious words again - have mercy! I'm tired of being serious... I don't want philosophy - I'm full. Let me live a plant life." He is forced to admit that he has lost sincerity, has ceased to understand life, does not see for whom to write, because he has “lost his reader,” he now views his writing as a means of livelihood: “but - you have to eat, which means you have to write.” The poetess Kaleria, spiritually devastated and broken, shows complete indifference to the democratic struggle of the masses. Kaleria belongs to that artistic intelligentsia who, according to Gorky, follows “the philistines into the dark corners of mystical and other philosophy, no matter where, just to hide.”

People without ideas and high social ideals- this is what the “dacha” intellectuals are, satirically denounced and harshly condemned in Gorky’s play. They are opposed by the democratic and revolutionary intelligentsia. Considering her “one of the most interesting spiritual phenomena of the world,” Gorky in “Dachners” sought to embody her in the image of Marya Lvovna. A doctor by profession, she sees her calling in working for the benefit of people, working in the interests of the people, their liberation, their better future. This attracts such intellectuals as Vlas, Varvara Mikhailovna, Sanya, and student Zimin to Marya Lvovna. They become spiritually close people to her. Marya Lvovna is not alone.

“Summer Residents”, like “Philistines”, is an ideological drama. The basis of the conflict in it is ideological differences, the struggle of worldviews. The socio-political plot also subordinated love conflicts, which in “Dachniki”, as in previous Gorky plays, were assigned a “service, secondary” role.

In his subsequent plays -"Children of the Sun" (the play was written in a cell in the Peter and Paul Fortress in 1905) and"Barbarians" (1906) - Gorky raises the same question about the attitude of the intelligentsia to the social demands of the time and to the people.

In “The Barbarians,” as in other plays, Gorky noted the “ideological shifts” of that part of the bourgeois intelligentsia, which, frightened and not understanding the revolution, sought self-justification and a way out of a painful life in abstract science, in the progress of technology, supposedly capable of rebuilding the world, in "art for art's sake". No, Gorky declared publicly, reality cannot be changed in these ways. Democratically minded student Stepan Lukin sees a different meaning in the industrial development of Russia than Cherkun; he understands that the development of industry unites the proletariat, intensifies the class struggle and ultimately brings the death of capitalism.

The plays of 1908-1916, created in the second dramatic period, unite family theme, which sounded especially sharp and polemical. As Yu.V. Yuzovsky notes, at the second stage of Gorky’s dramaturgy its character changes, even appearance: the open and direct clash of social groups, characteristic of the previous stage, gives way to indirect, hidden, so to speak, “underground” relationships (reflecting the time for which they were characteristic); crowd scenes with stage production large quantity characters are giving way to paintings limited by tighter and more intimate frameworks, with sharpened theoretical and philosophical problematics, which is again characteristic of that period of temporary lull in mass action.” . .

B.A. Byalik notes: “Although the beginning of M. Gorky’s work on “The Last” was separated by only one year from the creation of “Enemies,” there is a clear milestone between them, separating one period of Gorky’s dramaturgy from another. (...) There are no conflicts here that define the entire collision, such as the conflict between Nile and the Bessemenovs in “The Bourgeois,” two groups of intelligentsia hostile to each other in “Dachniki,” or two class camps in “Enemies.” In addition, B.A. Byalik, the only one of all researchers, identified several characteristic features, characteristic of the plays of the second dramaturgical cycle. The features of these plays, according to the researcher, are: a narrowing of the conflict, which is limited in the plays of 1908-1916. only intra-family conflict, as a consequence of this factor - enlargement of the psychological portraits of the characters; bringing the class struggle off stage, reflecting it only through the fates of the heroes; the appearance of motives and images of philosophical, almost symbolic meaning, the content of which goes beyond the framework of social and everyday motivations; lack of indications of specific historical time.

However, that “clear milestone”, which, according to B. Bialik, separated the play “Enemies” from the play “The Last”, turned into an almost blank “wall”. Plays written by the playwright from 1908 to 1916. and received the definition of “chamber”, “theoretical-philosophical”, are still practically unknown to a wide circle of viewers and readers: they were almost never staged in theaters, and were not included in collections of M. Gorky’s works (with the exception, of course, of multi-volume collected works) . . Meanwhile, this is perhaps the most interesting stage in the dramatic work of Maxim Gorky in the sense of the development of his skill: he not only returns to covering previous problems at the next life and creative “turn”, but is also actively looking for new ones genre forms, significantly changes the poetics of dramas.

According to the fair statement of M.A. Kabak, “the artistic originality of the plays “The Last”, “Eccentrics”, “Vassa Zheleznova”, “False Coin”, “Zykovs”, “Old Man” lies in the fact that, despite the presence in them all external attributes (closed space of the house, limited number of characters, “family” plot), they are not family dramas in the generally accepted sense. Designated by Gorky in most cases as “scenes,” the plays do not turn into “pictures” of family life and the morals of the merchants, philistines, or nobility. On the contrary, dramas contain a complex fusion of philosophical, symbolic, journalistic motifs and images; their conflict goes far beyond family relationships. In addition to external, plot-forming conflicts, the plays contain hidden, “subtextual” conflicts, which take these dramas from the concrete everyday sphere to the social and philosophical sphere.”

One of the main ideological clashes discussed in the plays—the conflict between “fathers and sons”—takes on an ontological character here. Either “fathers” become an obstacle on the path of children (“The Last”), or “children” become an obstacle on the path of parents (“Vassa Zheleznova”, “Zykovs”, “Old Man”). The path of both is doomed, because the older generation will sooner or later “leave the stage”, and the younger generation will not be able to become a worthy replacement for them. The reason is that the energy of the parents turns out to be either too great (“Vassa Zheleznova”, “Zykovs”, “Old Man”), or completely absent (“The Last Ones”). Gorky exposes the deep problem of Russia's social path, when the new generation is not able to take on the burden of their parents' activities. The inescapability of this conflict is emphasized by the fact that not a single play has an optimistic ending. All heroes equally end up “last”. Against this background, all their attempts to assert themselves or self-determinate, achieve the truth or find the meaning of life, increase capital or find a way to spend it look like “meaningless” and “useless” vanity. In disputes and conversations, the heroes continue to conduct an “eternal” search for truth, find out what is truth and lies, good and evil, thereby complementing Gorky’s “human comedy.”

The semantic ambiguity of the plays is due to the peculiarities of their poetics. Coming during the years of aesthetic debate about the “new drama” that took place at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, they became Gorky’s creative replica in this discussion. A wide range of subject, verbal and figurative symbolism, masterfully written dialogue, the architectonics of the plays created a special Gorky subtext, which allowed the playwright, despite the relatively uneventful external action, to put deep inner content into them, to say more than to show. In this, Maxim Gorky in many ways came close to modernist playwrights with their desire for psychologization, symbolization and genre creativity. According to the fair remark of M.A. Kabak, “switching the attention of Gorky the playwright from a group social portrait to a psychological portrait of a social group or an individual representative of a particular group, from direct worldview, ideological clashes - to indirect, internal conflicts, closing the conflict of plays on “small” problems compared to the breadth generalizations of his early dramas are not a retreat into “petty topics”, but, on the contrary, evidence of the artist’s skill, his creative maturity. During this period of dramatic creativity, Gorky’s ability to see the general in the particular, in the fate of the family - the fate of the class, in the fate of a person - the fate of a generation, was reflected.

Plays, written in the 1930s - “Somov and others", "EgorBulychovand others", "Dostigaev and others", as well as the second edition "Vassy Zheleznova" - united by social themes, which to one degree or another determines thempoeticsand ideological content, which predetermined their consideration as classical works socialistrealism.

In the plays of the 1930s, conventionally classified as "third period"dramatic creativity, Gorky scholars saw a single plan - to reflect, using the means of drama, the recent history of the country: the events of the February and October revolutions of 1917, the struggle political parties, preceding and accompanying them, and, above all, the gradual increase in the power and influence of the Bolshevik party against the background of " decay "liberal democratic movements and " decomposition "Russian bourgeoisie.

Yu.Yu. Yuzovsky points out that Bitter was going to create a whole cycle plays - " historical chronicles", representing "an extensive dramatic epic , reflecting the development of the socialist revolution and the creation of Soviet power." Yuzovsky believes that “we can talk about a conceived, although not fully realized, five-logy, connected by the community of characters moving from the play to play , whose individual destinies express the social destinies of classes in the revolution." The proposed five-logy should have included, in addition to the play "Egor Bulychov and others", covering the historical period from the end of the imperialist war to the eve of the February revolution, the unrealized play "Zvontsov and others"(time from the February Revolution to July), " Dostigaev and others" (from July to the eve of the October Revolution), unrealized play "Ryabinin and others"(the first months of the formation of Soviet power). Yuzovsky also includes the play “ Somov and others “, considering it the final part of a five-logy showing “the sabotage of representatives of the bourgeois intelligentsia, acting under the leadership of a foreign imperialist clique against the construction of socialism.”

A similar point of view is expressed by S.V. Kastorsky. Pointing out that Gorky’s original plan included, in addition to the completed plays of the cycle “Egor Bulychov and others», « Dostigaev and others", two more parts of the tetralogy (" Ryabinin and others", where "the main character was to become a remarkable Bolshevik revolutionary, whose character was already clearly outlined in drama “Dostigaev and Others”, and another play where the main role was to be played by Glafira ), Kastorsky, quite in the spirit of the times, states: “The great deeds accomplished by the Soviet people, who, under the leadership of the Communist Party, moved to the full-scale construction of socialism, brought to life this grandiose Gorky plan. People's writer Gorky decided in the dramatic genre artistically to illuminate the philosophy of the history of their socialist homeland.”

Gorky's appeal to drama, fifteen years after writing the play "Old man"(1915), which was never staged, is due to both external and internal reasons. The first includes pressure from Stalin, who sought to findGorkyobedient herald of his policy, primarily concerning the processes "pests"and the subsequent mass repressions of the late 1920s - early 1930s. "Internal"The reasons should be considered the writer's special attitude towards dramatic genres, largely due to the worldwide recognition that his play received"At the bottom».

Play « Somov and others » became Gorky's first attempt to combine in one work his experience as a world-famous writer-playwright with new principles for building the Soviet epic dramas. However, according to the fair remark of S.A. Jesuitova, “in this work Bitter deliberately weakened interest in the psychological component of his life characters , offering in return a declaration of their political positions, class affiliations and "class consciousness" Initial predetermination of the outcome, schematism plot and the characters of the characters, dividing them into “ positive" and "negative "with indispensable" exposure "the latter - all this deprived play Gorky about Somov that philosophical and psychological saturation, which was the key to the success of his best dramatic works such as plays "At the Bottom", " Egor Bulychov and others»».

Formed in the 1920s and in some cases successfully functioning in the Soviet drama , the new principles of constructing a dramatic work turned out to be alien to the nature of Gorky’s talent, mechanically combined with it, which ultimately led to creative defeat.

Play "Egor Bulychov and others" - one of the most outstanding works Gorky dramaturgy. Created in parallel with play about Somov, in many respects it turns out to be diametrically opposed.

The most important moments that predetermined the resounding success " Bulychova ", become close to my heart writer's theme, the figure of the main figure unusually attractive to him hero , turning to well-known time and life material, as well as refusing to follow artistic principles of construction that are alien to him dramas , return to the classics: principles psychologism , posing questions that are not only narrowly social, but also timeless, universal, and philosophical in nature.

It would be wrong to talk about play " Egor Bulychov and others"only as a socio-historical work or epic , although there are certainly sufficient reasons for this. In its inner essence "it is deep tragic philosophical drama, which has not only mythological, but also personal,autobiographical subtext."

"Dostigaev and others" - a play in the center of which - revolutionary events 1917. Deprived of a bright main character, with a center of gravity shifted from individual-personal and religious-philosophical problems to social and concrete-historical problems, this play turned out to be in many ways weaker than the previous one. The absence of a dominant core, which for " Bulychova " was the figure of the main character, was reflected in the plot and compositional features of the play "Dostigaev and others" Inner intimacy " Somov" and "Dostigaeva "affects the genre and stylistic features of these plays: "family-domestic in form, they include either ideologized political proclamations or openly farcical scenes. Disclosure psychological characteristics each individual character subordinated to a single task: depicting them as bearers of a certain “class psychology", which sharply limits the possibilities artistic research human nature."

The last play by M. Gorky, second edition "Vassy Zheleznova", is unique in the history of world drama, the creation of a new original work that has the same name, main character and similar plot line as an existing work by the same author.

The reason for the success of the second option "Vassy Zheleznova“There was, according to the Jesuit, “an exact coincidence of the theme of the new work with Gorky’s worldview during this period of his life.”

The central figure of the play in both the first and second versions is, of course, Vassa herself. Like " Egor Bulychov, Vassa "combines two intersecting and sometimes contrasting storylines: " family "and socio-historical, and, depending on public sentiments and priorities, in critical articles and theatrical practice, first one and then the other came to the fore.

Vassa’s murder of Zheleznov is only a statement of the fact of his final fall, his pernicious influence on the life of his family and daughters, which reaches its climax. To " unravel the affairs of the dissolute "Husband and brother, Vassa is ready to do anything. She is the only one who really cares not only about financial prosperity, but also about the reputation of the family and the future of the children. Not only the shipping company, but the whole house rests on it. She tries to manage and control the behavior of her daughters, to teach them how to survive in this cruel world. "Human woman“- this is what Lyudmila calls her mother, obviously feeling in her an unspent reserve of love and tenderness.

Motherhood is one of the most significant hypostases, outwardly uniting the two main heroines plays by Vassu and Rachel, but actually contrasting them with each other. Rachelle turns out to be untenable from the point of view of motherhood.

The appearance of Rachel in Vassa's house takes Vassa's conflict with the world to a new level. The play presents two " truth " One - Rachel's truth - has a transient socio-historical and abstract humanistic character. This is the truth of the destroyer, which contradicts the logic of the everyday life of an ordinary person. The second is the truth of Vassa Zheleznova. At first glance it seems harsh and distorted. But it's true real life, truly a creator who does not always follow straight paths, but steadily strives towards his goal.

Tragedy the position of Vassa, like Yegor Bulychov, in doom Herculean efforts, not understood and not supported by others. IN last play Gorky tragic the sound intensifies even more like death heroines , and the lack of full-fledged " heirs ”, capable of continuing and supporting her life’s work.

Our study of Gorky's plays allows us to talk about the coexistence in them of two plans, two levels of understanding of reality. First, " the upper" or "outer" layer of the plays "Somov and others", " Egor Bulychov and others», « Dostigaev and others", "Vassa Zheleznova "(second edition) is focused on the cultural, historical and socio-political realities of the Land of the Soviets in the early 1930s. The ideological and political accents in the assessment are clearly placed here historical events and the characters of the characters. Exactly this one, " external » layer gave groundsliterary scholarsand critics of the Soviet era see in Gorky chief ideologist Soviet literature, creator of socio-historical drama and political melodramas in the forms of family drama. However, an in-depth study poetic text structures and features " subtext "(historical, political, social, cultural, psychological, etc.) reveals other aspects of Gorky's dramaturgy: in his best plays the features of philosophical drama clearly appear (" Egor Bulychov "), psychological (" Vassa Zheleznova "), based onmythopoeticand folklore traditions.

Internal conflict between a politician and an artist, mythologized image and a living person, is the most important feature that determines the specifics of Gorky’s late artistic creativity.

Chapter 2. The character and originality of the plays “The Bourgeois” and “At the Lower Depths”

2.1 The play "Philistines" - a dispute between two principles, two ideologies

The play "The Bourgeois", created in 1901, reveals the dramatic heritage of M. Gorky.

The title of the play “Physticians” suggests that Gorky turned to the theme of philistinism. The writer always hated philistinism - as a class and ethical phenomenon, as a class of owners, as a base structure of the human soul. The terrible power of philistinism lies in its possessive instincts, blind susceptibility to antiquity, conservatism of thinking, hatred of everything new.

The world of the philistines is an ugly world of money-grubbers, inexorably greedy and cruel, ugly and arrogant, saturated with lies, hypocrisy, and hypocrisy. The personification of this world is Vasily Bessemenov in the play. This is a “model tradesman”, a “venerable mole”, who embodies petty stinginess, miserliness, wretchedness of thought, selfishness, indifference to the interests of society, senile grumbling at youth, and a cowardly fear of tomorrow. The singer Teterev speaks well about him in the play: “You are moderately smart, moderately stupid, moderately kind and moderately evil, moderately honest and mean, cowardly and brave... you are an exemplary tradesman! You have completely embodied vulgarity... that force that defeats even heroes and lives, lives and triumphs...”.

The world of the Bessemenovs is a world of greed and acquisitiveness. It’s “cramped and stuffy” here; the inhabitants of a rich house can spend hours arguing about insignificant things like who should bring the samovar, what kind of sugar to buy - sawn or whole, what is better than fresh air or stuffiness. The old Bessemenovs embody inertia, petty-bourgeois narrow-mindedness and backwardness, against which their children rebel.

At first glance, it seems that the younger generation of Bessemenovs is different from their fathers - they are smarter, more educated, they dream of freedom and independence. Peter took part in student unrest and was “a citizen for half an hour,” as Teterev says about him. Tatyana is a teacher and is also burdened by this life, even trying to commit suicide. She constantly moans and complains.

Some theater critics of the early 20th century considered the main plot core of Gorky’s play to be the “eternal” conflict between “fathers and sons.” It seems that everything is so: the elder Bessemenovs are ideologically opposed younger Peter, Tatyana, as well as Neil, Paul, Elena and other representatives of the youth. But, as B.A. rightly noted. Bialik, “such an interpretation of the play, although outwardly very convincing, came into direct conflict with its actual content”.

Native childrenThe Bessemenovs show some dissatisfaction with their parents, even quarrel with them. But upon careful examination, it turns out that, if not absolutely the same, then at least extremely close to them in essence, and “the main demarcation occurs not between representatives of two generations, but between bearers of two worldviews.

Tatyana debunks the younger Bessemenovs, depicts the illusory nature of their impulses, because, in the end, both of them, Peter and Tatyana, are unable to break with the bourgeois environment to which they belong. We must assume that over time they will follow the path of their “fathers,” only, perhaps, they will be even more dangerous and cunning. "Society? That's what I hate! - Bessemenov Jr. exclaims. All he wants is for no one to interfere with his life in peace, without the thought of any duty to people. “I was a citizen! I don't want... I don't have to obey the demands of society. I am a person. Personality is free...” Bessemenov Jr., like his father, is afraid of the future: “This life is beyond my strength! I feel its vulgarity, but I can’t change anything, I can’t contribute anything...", "...I say Russia - and I feel that for me this sound is empty."

Teterev, who refuses to recognize Peter as an “animate noun,” correctly predicts his future: after his father’s death, Peter will be the same tradesman, only more cunning and dexterous.

Thus, the rebellion of the children (Peter and Tatiana) against their father turned out to be imaginary. The revolt of declassed people - Teterev and Perchikhin, who recognize themselves as victims of the Bessemenovs, is also hopeless. Sincerely sympathizing with Nile and his comrades, Teterev, however, considers them ridiculous Don Quixotes. In an escalating conflict, he takes a position “above the fray”: “I am not related to either the accused or the victims. I am on my own. I am physical evidence of a crime."

The most active social force in the play is Neil, a representative of the revolutionary working class. Stanislavski considered him the main figure of the play. Nile attracts with its progressive views, cheerfulness, optimism - the whole appearance of the future owner of the country.

His attitude to work is that of a creator and transformer, tomorrow's master of the country. This is well revealed in a conversation with Tatyana: “... I really love forging. In front of you is a red, shapeless mass, evil... It is alive, elastic. And so you, with strong blows from the shoulder, make of her everything you need...”

It should be noted that many lines in the play, especially Neil's words, contain double meaning. What Neil says about the work of a blacksmith must be understood both literally and symbolically. After all, the shapeless and evil mass of metal is the life that Neil and his comrades are reforging, and these are the people they are raising. It is no coincidence that he says this to the teacher. The symbolism of Neil's statements is noticeable in many of his remarks. “There is no traffic schedule that would not change” - formally these are the words of the driver about the train schedule, but essentially these are the thoughts of a revolutionary about the need to change the “schedule of life.”

Next to Nile are the same simple, cheerful people in love with life - Polya, Shishkin, Tsvetaeva. The disadvantaged and those looking for a place in life are drawn to him - Teterev, Perchikhin, Elena Kravtsova.

So, the main conflict of the play is the clash of two worldviews, the confrontation of the proletarian with the world of owners. Attempts to interpret the play as a family drama, as a depiction of the discord between fathers and children, met with sharp rebuff from socialist criticism. Such an interpretation contradicted the author's intention.

The premiere of "Philistines" took place during the tour Art Theater in St. Petersburg, March 26, 1902. The play "The Bourgeois" occupies a special place in the work of the great writer, and in particular in his dramaturgy. The unusually capacious theme of philistinism as a class and ethical category, philistinism, corroding life with rust, was begun by Gorky in his early stories and summarized artistically and philosophically in the epic “The Life of Klim Samgin.” In the play "The Bourgeois" Gorky shows the clash of two opposing worldviews, two camps. Neither the petty bourgeois milieu exposed by Gorky in this play, nor reality itself provided the necessary material for an exhaustive reflection of the conflict between bourgeois-bourgeois and proletarian consciousness. But the true class meaning of the play lies at the heart of the mute hostility that reigns in the house of the tradesman Bessemenov.

2.2.Ideological and artistic originality and problems of the play “At the Depths”

In the 1900s, a severe economic crisis broke out in Russia.

After each crop failure, masses of ruined peasants wandered around the country in search of income. And factories and factories were closed. Thousands of workers and peasants found themselves homeless and without means of subsistence. Under the influence of severe economic oppression, a huge number of tramps appear who sink to the “bottom” of life.

The play “At the Lower Depths,” written in 1902, depicted the lives of these people. Gorky's play is an innovative literary work. At first the author wanted to call the play “The Bottom”, “At the Bottom of Life”, “Nochlezhka”, “Without the Sun”. In Gorky's play, the audience saw for the first time the unfamiliar world of the outcasts. World drama has never known such a harsh, merciless truth about the life of the lower social classes, about their hopeless fate. Gorky in this play showed terrifying pictures Russian reality, human vices, inhuman conditions of existence in Russia. The play sounds like a call to the people to seek truth and justice themselves.

But in the play we see not only a picture of the life of disadvantaged, unhappy people. “At the Bottom” is not so much an everyday play as a philosophical play, a play of reflection. The characters reflect on life and the truth, the author reflects, forcing the reader and viewer to think. At the center of the play is not only human destinies, but 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 and truth for the characters - people of the “bottom”, or life with illusions, in whatever diverse and bizarre forms they present.

The main theme of the play is the question of attitude towards a living person in the name of true humanity.

One of the striking features of the play is the presence in it of several at once to varying degrees. expressed conflicts. Thus, the presence of people from different walks of life among the heroes determines the development of social conflict. However, it is not very dynamic, since the owners of the shelter, the Kostylevs, social status not much higher than that of its inhabitants. But there is one more facet to the social conflict in the play: each of the night shelters carries a lot of contradictions related to their place in society, ideological views, the latter determines the philosophical conflict of the play.

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. Thieves, cheaters, beggars, cripples - everyone who was thrown out of life - gathered here. They 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 has been taken away, lost, erased and trampled into the dirt. People of the most varied character and social status gathered here. Each of them is endowed with its own individual characteristics. 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 Mite speaks of the hopelessness of his lot: “There is no work... no strength... That’s the truth! There is no refuge, there is no refuge! We need to breathe. ... That’s the truth!” .

All the inhabitants of the shelter were pushed by the “owners” to the bottom of life, but everything human in them was not trampled. These people, deprived of the right to life, doomed to a hopeless existence, degraded, retained a sense of self-worth. Vaska Pepel, a strong and broad-minded person, passionately dreams of a different life; Nastya, naive, touching and helpless, strives in illusions about pure and devoted love to hide from the dirt that surrounds her; The actor is a weak-willed alcoholic who, due to uselessness, has lost not only his place in life, but even his name, while at the same time he is a soft, lyrically minded romantic and a poet at heart. Fate has made Kleshch embittered and cruel, but still he stubbornly, painfully, and with honest work tries to get out of the “bottom.” Tatar is distinguished by honesty, Natasha is distinguished by spiritual purity and tenderness. 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 they could not take away their faith in the best. Gorky himself possessed this quality in abundance, and he endowed it with his heroes.

In the shelter, the famous words of Satin are heard, declaring the human right to personal freedom and human dignity: “Everything is in man, everything is for man! Only man exists, everything else is the work of his hands and his brain! Human! It's great! It sounds... proud! Human! We must respect the person! Don’t feel sorry... don’t humiliate him with pity... you must respect him!”

The philosophical conflict of the drama is the main one; it affects, to one degree or another, all the characters in the work. Its development is provoked by the appearance of the wanderer Luke in the shelter, who brings a new view of the world to the inhabitants of the “bottom”: “And everyone is people! No matter how you pretend, no matter how you boast, but you were born a man, you will die a man...”

Along with it, a new motive appears in the play: the possibility of consolation or exposure. With his appearance, the dispute about man, about truth and lies in his life, intensifies. But this dispute begins long before Luke appears and continues after his departure. Already at the very beginning of the play, Kvashnya consoles herself with the illusion that she is 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 among bitter people that Luka appears. It is this character of the play that causes the most heated debate and constitutes its dramatic nerve. After the appearance of Luke, three centers are identified in the subsequent dispute about man: Luke himself, Satin and Bubnov - the three main characters of the play.

Luke acts as a comforter. The deceiver Luke is humane in his own way, but his humanism is passively compassionate. Imbued with deep humanism, the play negatively answers the question of whether compassion for people should be carried to the point of a comforting deception.

Luke takes care of the dying Anna, takes pity on her, consoles her with the fact that in the next world, in paradise, there will be no torment and there is no need to cling to “earthly” life. The actor talks about the supposedly existing free hospital for alcoholics. Luka believes in the power of dreams: “A person can do anything... If only he wants to...” - and tries to plant a dream in the soul of every person. He advises the thief Vaska Pepl to go to Siberia and start life anew. The prostitute Nastya, at whose book fantasies everyone laughs, is consoled by Luka: “If you believe, you had real love... that means she was.” He instills illusions in the inhabitants of the shelter, and life experience His 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. The night shelters are drawn to him, warmed by rays of kindness and sympathy. The wanderer managed to plant and ignite a spark of hope and dreams in everyone’s heart. Luke treats them this way because, in his opinion, any individual is worthy of respect as a person. According to Luke, every person must be supported in trouble, even through “white lies.” Luke gives everyone the optimism that everyone so lacked - hope for a favorable future. Supporting his words about the benefits of pity with an example, Luke tells how he once felt sorry for the robbers, thereby saving them, because otherwise they would have killed him and themselves would have died in hard labor. Luke also tells a parable about the “righteous land” - about a poor man who believed in the existence of such a land, but, disappointed that the scientist did not have one on his map, hanged himself. With this, Luke wants to once again confirm how saving a lie is sometimes for people and how unnecessary and dangerous the truth can be for them. When Cinder calls on Natasha to leave with him, Luka advises her to remind Cinder often that he is a “good person.”

Fighting for a dream gives a person strength. Luka helps the dream, perhaps not yet realized, to form into a whole in order to rise from the bottom, as he tried to help the Actor and Ash, or to narcotically soften the pain caused by reality to such characters as Nastya and Anna. He resorts to lies as a verbal drug, as a painkiller.

During the ensuing fight, when Ash kills Kostylev and almost kills Vasilisa, Luka disappears in the confusion. In the last act, the night shelters remember him, saying different attitude to “comforting lies.”

Not a single hero was able to escape from the bottom to the surface: the Actor hanged himself, Ashes is in prison, Anna dies, everyone else is exhausted, disfigured by life to the last degree, so Luke’s action was reduced only to anesthesia of someone else’s pain.

Luke sincerely loved people, wanted good for them, but - alas - did not know the right paths to universal happiness. A sincere and disinterested lie is much more dangerous and harmful than a selfish and hypocritical lie.

After the departure of the wanderer Luke, the life of the night shelters became even harder. People are so broken that they have nothing to look forward to. And the hope dropped by Luke only opened their wounds. The wanderer beckoned, but did not show the way.

The play states: it is no longer possible to live like this!

The terrible fate of the inhabitants of the shelter becomes especially obvious if we compare it with what a person is called to. Under the dark and gloomy arches of the lodging house, among the pitiful and crippled, unfortunate and homeless vagabonds, the words about man, his calling, his strength and his beauty sound like a solemn hymn: “Man is the truth! Everything is in man, everything is for man! Only man exists, everything else is the work of his hands and his brain! Human! It's great! It sounds proud!” .

Proud words about what a person should be and what a person can be highlight even more sharply the picture of the actual situation of a person that the writer paints. And this contrast takes on a special meaning. Satin's monologue about man sounds somewhat unnatural in an atmosphere of impenetrable darkness, especially after Luke left, the Actor hanged himself, and Ashes was imprisoned. The writer himself felt this and explained it by the fact that the play must have a reasoner (an exponent of the author’s thoughts). That’s why Gorky puts his thoughts into the mouth of Satin, the most freedom-loving and fair character.

Satin expresses a general idea about a free person. He exposes the comforting lies of Elder Luke, who, seeing the torment of the disadvantaged, selflessly tries to help them, alleviate their suffering, and pacify them. Satin speaks out against the harmfulness of lies and the philosophy of slavish obedience and patience: “Whoever is weak in soul... and who lives on other people’s juices, those who need lies... Some people are supported by it, others hide behind it... Lies are the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of a free man." . Satin tells the actor that Luka “lied” about the free hospital. To Klesch, Anna’s husband, who sold all the tools to bury his wife, Satin advises “to do nothing” and “just burden the earth”: “Think about it - you won’t work, I won’t... hundreds more... thousands... that’s it! - understand? Everyone quits working!” . Despite the ironic attitude towards Luke, after his disappearance, Satin says that he was not a charlatan: “A man - that’s the truth! He understood it<…>He lied... but it was out of pity for you.” Although Satin states that “lies are the religion of slaves and masters,” but, according to him, Luke acted on him “like acid on an old dirty coin”; Satin pronounces a monologue about a person like highest value. In this monologue, Satin loudly sounds the demand for freedom and humane treatment of man: “We must respect man! Don’t feel sorry,...don’t humiliate him with pity,...you have to respect him!” . He is convinced that one should not reconcile a person with reality, but force reality itself to serve a person, therefore he raises the banner of the struggle for Man with a capital “P!”

The solution to the question of what needs to be done to change life and destroy the “bottom” is given in his speeches by Satin, whose image more fully highlights the harmfulness of Luke’s comforting sermons. Comforters are hated by Gorky, and in the image of Luke the writer exposed their inconsistency. Luke considers all people insignificant, pitiful, weak, incapable of actively fighting for their rights and in need of condolences and consolation. Luke is a sower of illusions, comforting fairy tales, which the desperate greedily grabbed weak people. Secretly, he is confident that a person’s real situation cannot be changed, so he approaches everyone with a comforting lie. And thus Gorky finds in the face of Satin an image that exposes Luke’s compassion and at the same time declares his opinion on the question he posed. Gorky is definitely against worthless lies and humiliating pity. In the words of Satin, Gorky stands for high truth, truth that inspires a person, opening up prospects for the struggle for happiness.

However, Satin’s protest against the existing order, in essence, comes down to preaching doing nothing; his psychology is not the psychology of a worker, not the psychology of a fighter, he is poisoned by the poison of individualism, and is in the grip of illusions about personal freedom at the bottom of life. Gorky does not idealize this image. Like other tramps, Satin is incapable of either socially useful work or revolutionary action; he is infected with anarchic sentiments. He has many vices, instilled in him by the shelter: he is a drunkard, a sharper, sometimes cruel and cynical, but still, what distinguishes him from other tramps is his intelligence, relative education and breadth of nature.

The writer gave Satin a lot of his thoughts, but the ideological content of the play is wider and deeper than the content of Satin’s monologues.

Bubnov, the third disputing party, believes that any person does not deserve respect: “people all live like chips floating on a river, building a house, and the chips go away.” Bubnov is a champion of the truth (“leave the whole truth as it is! Why be ashamed?”), like Satin, but his truth is akin to Luke’s “fictions,” since it does not encourage a person to rush forward, to look for a path to self-improvement. Like Satin and Baron, Bubnov can be called a strong person. He has been given a lot, but he has already lost himself. Unlike Satin, who understands that a strong man must fight for the truth, Bubnov lives, not paying attention to all nonsense. Regarding Luka, Bubnov states that people lie out of a desire to “touch up the soul,” but one should tell the truth without hesitation. Bubnov is characterized by wingless and somewhat cynical fatalism. He does not accept moral responsibility, stating that he has no conscience because he is “not rich.” It rests on the confrontation between the disputants philosophical issues plays. This dispute is a purely philosophical dispute, so it is not surprising that, as often happens in philosophy, it is impossible to give an unambiguous answer to the question: who is right? - or even: who is more right in this dispute? After writing the play, the author insisted that Luka is a cunning man who skillfully takes advantage of the misfortune of others. But it is difficult to convincingly confirm or refute this point of view, and the play “At the Bottom” remains a work that everyone can interpret in their own way.

So, in the play M. Gorky seeks to show that compassion and consolation are the worst enemy for the individual. That pity humiliates a person. It is clear from the play that Luke's compassion ultimately came to nothing. Gorky's position is clear - compassion for people, brought to the point of comforting deception, has a negative impact on society. Gorky exposes the inconsistency of Luke's image. But everything depends on the person himself. Luke gives them a chance, and to take advantage of it, to accept everything said not as consolation, but as an incentive to fight for the best - this is the business of each person. After all, if there were no compassion in the world, the whole earth would be filled with bitter and embittered people. After all, Luka’s appearance rallied the inhabitants of the shelter. The failure of Luke's image lies in the people around him. They're completely broken harsh life, and what they have left are only unrealizable dreams. But one cannot blame them for inaction either, since they do not have the means to realize their dreams. Which is better truth or compassion is a difficult question. It turns out that theoretically better truth. But sometimes the bitter truth breaks a person. Still, compassion makes people kinder and for some it is an outlet in a cruel world. It is impossible to answer the question posed unequivocally.

Conclusion

So, in this course work we set a goalshow the specifics of Gorky's dramaturgy, its innovative character.

We dwelled in more detail on the analysis of the plays “Philistines” and “At the Depths”.

In the play "The Bourgeois" Gorky shows the clash of two opposing worldviews, two camps. Neither the petty bourgeois milieu exposed by Gorky in this play, nor reality itself provided the necessary material for an exhaustive reflection of the conflict between bourgeois-bourgeois and proletarian consciousness. But the true class meaning of the play lies at the heart of the mute hostility that reigns in the house of the tradesman Bessemenov.

A detailed analysis of the play “At the Lower Depths” showed thatThe problem raised in the play cannot be solved unambiguously.

The play “At the Bottom” is imbued with an ardent and passionate appeal to love a person, to make this name truly sound proud. The play had a huge political resonance and called for a restructuring of society, which was throwing people “to the bottom.” A person cannot be happy while he is not free, while injustice dominates at every step. A person deserves happiness and freedom because he is a Human!

Now, in an era when we are again talking about humanism and mercy, when we call for “mercy for the fallen,” Gorky’s play takes on a different meaning. It's not only historical document, is not just an outstanding creation of the human mind, it is also a work that will again and again turn people’s eyes to the eternal problems of goodness, mercy, and social justice.

LITERATURE

List of sources

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Application

The play “At the Bottom” is based on a love affair that fits into two love triangles “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 of the characters are not involved in the development of the love plot, and he himself occupies a secondary position in relation to what Gorky portrays.

What comes first here is the social conflict between the masters of life, the Kostylevs, and the inhabitants of the shelter. And even more broadly between Russian reality and the fate 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 a radical change in 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 got drunk,
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

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

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

Luka feels sorry for the man: he consoles the dying Anna, he tells Ash about a wonderful life in Siberia, where he can do everything all over again, he tells the Actor about hospitals where he 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 stays by the bed 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 without reason 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”)

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The dramaturgy of M. Gorky occupies a special place in Russian drama. At the beginning of the 20th century, Gorky turned to the theater and became a successor to the traditions of Russian drama of the 19th century. He believed that the main purpose of drama was to depict “man and people”, the influence of fate on the formation of human personality. At the same time, Gorky's dramaturgy gravitates towards the genre of philosophical drama. These features of Gorky’s dramaturgy were reflected especially clearly in his second play “At the Lower Depths,” written in 1902.

In this play, Gorky tried to combine real human destinies and abstract philosophical concepts. Therefore, behind the external conflict of the play, an internal conflict can be traced, which is the main one in the action, allows you to more deeply understand the characters of the characters, and also helps the author to reveal the main meaning of the play. External conflict is associated with love triangle(Ashes - Natasha - Kostylevs). But this is only the background for the development of internal action based on philosophical conflict (Satin - Luke - roommates). It is the internal conflict that turns out to be the basis of dramatic action. And this conflict is largely based on the thoughts of the night shelters about Man. Why did this particular topic touch Gorky so much?

The writer was deeply concerned with thoughts about who Man is and what he should be. In his letter to Chekhov, he noted: “You have to be a monster of virtue to love, to feel sorry for, to help live the trashy midges with guts that we are. And yet I still feel sorry for people.” And at the same time, Gorky had an ineradicable faith in man, in the power of his spirit. “I don’t know anything better, more complex, more interesting than a person. He is everything." Reflections about man, about his essence, about the spirit and morality of man formed the basis for the internal conflict of the play “At the Bottom.”

The play captures, albeit partial, timid, the awakening of the human soul. Bubnov, quick to speak, reveals a common feature, speaking about himself and the other night shelters: “...everything has faded away, only one naked man remains.” Maybe it is precisely because of their “pronouncedness” that tramps gravitate towards some general concepts. The author writes about “reluctant philosophers,” about unhappy people in whom the dream for a brighter future is still alive. Kleshch wants to succeed through hard work, Nastya seeks salvation in love, Anna turns to God, Natasha is waiting for a hero. The awkward judgments of tramps contain answers to the most difficult questions about human nature, about his bitter fate with naive hopes for joy.
There is another type of hero in the play. Bubnov, Satin, Baron have come to terms with their position as cheaters and are indifferent to crimes. But it is they who deeply judge life and unconsciously yearn for will and truth. They contain a natural mind doomed to inaction.
The beginning of internal action begins with the appearance of Elder Luke at the end of Act II. Luka is an extraordinary person, he is smart, he has enormous experience and a keen interest in people: “I want to understand human affairs.” At the same time, he clearly sees not only delusions, but also the bright sides of humanity: “People? They will be found! They'll figure it out! We only need to help them, we need to respect them.” This is Luke's position. But he passively waits for good, looking indifferently at specific misfortunes. He is ready to accept any life option and adapt to it. The assistance he provides to some of the homeless shelters is also a kind of adaptation to their needs. Luka’s brief dialogues with the tramps are intertwined, repeated and give the play intense internal movement, people’s illusory hopes grow. But when their illusions collapse, the old man simply disappears unnoticed.

But the last action reveals all the consequences of the experience, since, as Satin puts it, Luke “leavened our roommates.” It is the fermentation of the lazy thoughts of tramps that interests Gorky most of all. Therefore, in the last action the question of Man is raised with particular force. It cannot be said, of course, that in the last act the heroes become different. They are simply all presented in a moment of brief painful reflection, which, however, will not change anything in their lives. But this in no way diminishes the meaning of their words, since they have been accumulating in their souls for a long time. This especially applies to Satin’s words about Man.

Satin correctly assessed Luke’s reconciliation with existence, but drew the opposite conclusions: “Everything is in Man, everything is for Man! There is only “Man, everything else is the work of his hands and his brain.” 14 although for Satin all his cohabitants are “dumb as bricks,” he defends their capabilities and human dignity.

Satin's speech about Man is a hymn to human capabilities. Saving lies only deepen illusions, and life will still bring out the disgusting truth, which will become even more unbearable and terrible. Therefore, according to Satin, one cannot live in lies and in the past. Against the compassionate humanism of Luke, Satin puts forward his truth about Man: “We must respect man! Don’t feel sorry, don’t humiliate him with pity.” He condemns Luke's comforting lies: "Lies are the religion of slaves and masters... Truth is the God of the free man." At the same time, Satin understands that these words do not specifically refer to the inhabitants of the shelter, since they are not able to fight for themselves and their dignity. For him, Man is all the people on earth.

This is the main humanistic moral meaning of the play. Life is sometimes so cruel to a person that it makes him humiliate and submit. But initially man was created as a tall and proud creature. He is the one who has the power to change the world.

Truth and lies... Two opposite poles, connected by an unbreakable thread. What is more necessary for a person? It's strange to ask such a question. After all, from childhood we are instilled with the concept of truth as positive quality, and about lies as negative....

She really might be too much for you... Luka In my opinion, leave the whole truth as it is! Bubnov. What is better: truth or compassion, truth or white lies? Many philosophers, thinkers, literary scholars, writers have tried and will try to answer this question...

A notable phenomenon of Russian literature at the beginning of the 20th century was Gorky’s play “At the Lower Depths”. What explained its exceptional success? The viewer was greatly impressed by the combination of extremely realistic depictions of people who have reached the last...

Gentlemen! If the holy world does not know how to find the way to truth, - Honor the madman who brings a golden dream to Humanity! As a writer, Gorky had his own view on the role and purpose of art, he assigned high tasks and goals to it. In his work, Gorky was looking for...

The revival of the name of Maxim Gorky after reconsidering the place of his work in Russian literature and renaming everything that bore the name of this writer must definitely happen. It seems that the most famous play from Gorky’s dramatic heritage, “At the Lower Depths,” will play a significant role in this. The genre of drama itself presupposes the relevance of the work in a society where there are many unresolved social problems, where people know what it’s like to spend the night and be homeless. M. Gorky's play “At the Lower Depths” is defined as a socio-philosophical drama. The drama of a work is determined by the presence in it of an acute conflict affecting a person’s relationship with the environment, with society. In addition, drama, as a rule, is characterized by a veiled author’s position. Although it may seem that the material of the play is too difficult to comprehend, the realism of the conflict and the absence of moralizing are the advantages of a truly dramatic work. Gorky's play contains all of the above. It is interesting that “At the Lower Depths” is perhaps Gorky’s only book where there is no open didacticism, where the reader himself is invited to make a choice between two “truths of life” - the positions of Luke and Satin.

Among the features of the play, we will mention the presence in it of several conflicts expressed to varying degrees. Thus, the presence of people from different walks of life among the heroes determines the development of social conflict. However, it is not very dynamic, since the owners of the Kostylev shelter have a social status that is not much higher than that of its inhabitants. But there is one more facet to the social conflict in the play: each of the night shelters carries a lot of contradictions related to their place in society, each hero has his own social conflict within himself, which threw them to the “bottom” of life.

The development of a love conflict is connected with the relationship between Vaska Ash and Natasha, into which the claims for love of Vasilisa and her husband interfere. Vaska Pepel, without the slightest doubt, leaves Vasilisa, who cheated on her husband with him, for the sake of a truly high feeling for Natasha. The heroine seems to return the thief Vaska to the true life values, a relationship with her certainly enriches his inner world and awakens dreams of an honest life. But the envy of the older sister prevents the successful outcome of this love story. The culmination is Vasilisa’s dirty and cruel revenge, and the denouement is the murder of Kostylev. Thus, the love conflict is resolved by the triumph of the disgusting Vasilisa and the defeat of two loving hearts. The author shows that there is no place for true feelings at the “bottom”.

The philosophical conflict in the drama is the main one; it affects all the heroes of the work to one degree or another. Its development is provoked by the appearance of the wanderer Luke in the shelter, who brings a new view of the world to the inhabitants of the “bottom”. Two life positions come into conflict: a white lie and the truth without embellishment. What turns out to be people need it more? Luke preaches pity and compassion, he instills hope for the possibility of a different, better life. Those heroes who believed him began to dream again, make plans, they had an incentive to live on. But the old man didn’t tell them about the difficulties that were inevitable on the path to a bright future. It seems to give impetus to the beginning of a new life, but the person must go further on his own, but will he have enough strength for this? Can illusions always become a support in difficulties? The antipodean hero Satin believes that pity humiliates a person; to live, a person needs the truth, no matter how cruel it may seem.

All philosophical thoughts in the play are expressed by the characters in direct dialogues and monologues. From Luke’s lips it sounds: “It’s true, it’s not always because of a person’s illness... you can’t always cure a soul with the truth...”. Satin says: “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters... Truth is the god of a free man!” Yes, exclamations that “only man exists, everything else is the work of his hands and his brain” are very attractive to us! Human! It's great! It sounds... proud! Human! We must respect the person!” Author's position in the dramatic is hidden. Gorky does not directly evaluate the words of his heroes. True, in his other prose work, “The Life of Klim Samgin,” the author says that we love people for the good that we have done to them, and we do not love for the evil that we have brought to them. When a person is deceived, they hide something from him, they, of course, bring harm to him, since they are deprived of the right to information and, therefore, to an objectively made choice. From this point of view, Luke’s philosophy cannot be salutary; his pity and compassion are not identical to love for a person. But Satin is powerless to help the inhabitants of the shelter, since he has nothing to respect even himself, in fact, he does not see a person in himself, his words are not supported by action. This is the common tragedy of all heroes. Words and dreams hang in the air, unable to find support in the people themselves.

At the end of the drama, one murder and one suicide occur. But the author does not pass judgment on any of the life philosophies underlying the play. Rather, one can feel a general regret about the passivity and weakness of people who find themselves at the “bottom”, see their own guilt in what happened and realize the futility of helping someone who is not ready for it. The ambiguity and diversity of the play are associated with the depth of the problems raised. You can’t see Luka as a stupid “crafty” old man who lies all the time, but you can’t idealize his compassionate love. At the same time, Satin, at first glance, pronounces his monologue as if in delirium, phrases pop up in his inflamed brain, which he picked up from different places. But with his enthusiasm he is trying to infect the people, to rouse them to revolution. Although the substitution of values is obvious in his words. And perhaps in this way Gorky warned us about the substitution of values that has eternally existed in the revolution, which is its tragedy.

True drama is always modern. The relevance of the play “At the Bottom” will never die, in my opinion, because when reading or watching it on stage we think about the eternal problems of choosing our path. The current pathos of the work, in my opinion, is associated with the attempt of our entire society to rise from the “bottom”, to understand why some manage to get out, while others do not. Unfortunately, not everyone succeeds in the positive desire to raise their head. And some people don’t even try. This is also a philosophy of life. Thus, the vitality of the drama “At the Bottom” is due to its truthfulness.

In an interview about the play “At the Lower Depths” in 1903, M. Gorky defined its meaning as follows: “The main question that I wanted to pose is what is better, truth or compassion? What is more needed? Is it necessary to take compassion to the point of using lies? This is not a subjective question, but a general philosophical one. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the debate about truth and comforting illusions was associated with a practical search for a way out for the disadvantaged, oppressed part of society. In the play, this debate takes on a special intensity, since we are talking about the fate of people […]
What is truth and what is lie? Humanity has been asking this question for hundreds of years. Truth and lies, good and evil always stand side by side, one simply does not exist without the other. The collision of these concepts is the basis of many world-famous literary works. Among them is M. Gorky’s social and philosophical play “At the Lower Depths”. Its essence lies in the collision of life positions and views of different people. The author asks a question characteristic of Russian literature about two types of humanism and its connection with […]
The drama opens with an exposition in which the main characters are already introduced, the main themes are formulated, and many problems are posed. Luke's appearance in the rooming house is the beginning of the play. From this point on, different life philosophies and aspirations begin to be tested. Luke's stories about the “righteous land” are the culmination, and the beginning of the denouement is the murder of Kostylev. The composition of the play is strictly subordinated to its ideological and thematic content. The basis of the plot movement is the testing of philosophy by life practice [...]
Name of the hero How he got to the bottom Peculiarities of speech, characteristic remarks What Bubnov dreams of In the past, he owned a dyeing workshop. Circumstances forced him to leave in order to survive, while his wife got along with the master. He claims that a person cannot change his destiny, so he floats with the flow, sinking to the bottom. Often displays cruelty, skepticism, lack of good qualities. "All people on earth are superfluous." It’s hard to say that Bubnov is dreaming of something, given [...]
Chekhov's tradition in Gorky's dramaturgy. Gorky said in an original way about Chekhov’s innovation, which “killed realism” (of traditional drama), raising images to a “spiritualized symbol.” This was how the author of “The Seagull” departed from acute collision characters, from a tense plot. Following Chekhov, Gorky sought to convey the leisurely pace of everyday, “eventless” life and highlight in it the “undercurrent” of the characters’ inner motivations. Naturally, Gorky understood the meaning of this “trend” in his own way. […]
The play “At the Lower Depths,” according to Gorky, was the result of “almost twenty years of observations of the world of “former people”.” The main philosophical problem of the play is the dispute about truth. Young Gorky, with his characteristic determination, took on very difficult topic, over which the best minds of humanity are still struggling. Unambiguous answers to the question “What is truth?” haven't found it yet. In the heated debates waged by M. Gorky’s heroes Luka, Bubnov, Satin, the uncertainty of the author himself, the inability to directly answer […]
In the early 900s Dramaturgy became the leading one in Gorky’s work: one after another the plays “The Bourgeois” (1901), “At the Lower Depths” (1902), “Summer Residents” (1904), “Children of the Sun” (1905), “Barbarians” (1905), “Enemies” (1906). The social and philosophical drama “At the Lower Depths” was conceived by Gorky back in 1900, first published in Munich in 1902, and on January 10, 1903 the play premiered in Berlin. The play was performed 300 times in a row, and in the spring of 1905 the 500th performance of the play was celebrated. In Russia “At the Lower Depths” was published by […]
The greatest achievement of civilization is not a wheel or a car, not a computer or an airplane. The greatest achievement of any civilization, any human community is language, that method of communication that makes a person human. Not a single animal communicates with its own kind using words, does not pass on records to future generations, does not build a complex non-existent world on paper with such plausibility that the reader believes in it and considers it real. Any language has endless possibilities for […]
Gorky's life was full of adventures and events, sharp turns and changes. My literary activity he began with a hymn to the madness of the brave and stories glorifying the man-fighter and his desire for freedom. The writer knew the world well ordinary people. After all, together with them he walked many miles along the roads of Russia, worked in ports, bakeries, with rich owners in the village, spent the night with them under open air, often falling asleep hungry. Gorky said that his wandering around Rus' was not caused by [...]
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The story “Old Woman Izergil” (1894) is one of the masterpieces early creativity M. Gorky. The composition of this work is more complex than the composition of the writer's other early stories. The story of Izergil, who has seen a lot in her life, is divided into three independent parts: the legend of Larra, Izergil’s story about her life, and the legend of Danko. At the same time, all three parts are united by a common idea, the author’s desire to reveal the value of human life. The legends about Larra and Danko reveal two concepts of life, two […]
The life of M. Gorky was unusually bright and seems truly legendary. Made her like this in the first place unbreakable bond writer with the people. The talent of a writer was combined with the talent of a revolutionary fighter. Contemporaries rightly considered the writer the head of the advanced forces of democratic literature. During the Soviet years, Gorky acted as a publicist, playwright and prose writer. In his stories he reflected the new direction in Russian life. The legends about Larra and Danko show two concepts of life, two ideas about it. One […]
Gorky's romantic stories include “Old Woman Izergil”, “Makar Chudra”, “The Girl and Death”, “Song of the Falcon” and others. The heroes in them are exceptional people. They are not afraid to tell the truth and live honestly. The gypsies in the writer’s romantic stories are full of wisdom and dignity. These illiterate people tell the intellectual hero deep symbolic parables about the meaning of life. The heroes Loiko Zobar and Rada in the story “Makar Chudra” oppose themselves to the crowd and live according to their own laws. More than anything else, they value [...]
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In the play “At the Lower Depths,” the essential features of Gorky’s dramaturgy were revealed with particular vividness. Gorky was a continuer of the best traditions classical drama, and especially the dramaturgy of Chekhov. But in the struggle for stage realism, he enriched Russian drama.

Bitter approved in dramaturgy new type socio-political drama. His innovation was evident both in the choice of dramatic conflict and in the method of depicting reality.

The main conflict underlying plays“At the bottom” is a contradiction between the people of the “bottom” and the orders that reduce a person to the tragic fate of a homeless tramp.

At the center of the play is a certain collective image of the human mass, which, however, is always individualized. Note that we see the same collective images of two hostile camps - capitalists and workers - in the play “Enemies”. The very names of Gorky’s plays are significant: “The Bourgeois”, “Summer Residents”, “Barbarians”, “The Last”. Thus, Gorky seeks to emphasize the socially generalized nature of his characters.

Conflict in Gorky's plays is always expressed not externally, not in complex intrigue, not in spectacular clashes, but in the internal movement of the play. The action develops slowly, without outwardly spectacular transitions. The severity of the dramatic conflict in Gorky has a distinctly social character. The center of gravity of his plays is in the clash of ideas, in the struggle of worldviews, social principles, and political views.

The strength of Gorky's dramaturgy lies in the fact that the writer depicts the hero in all his complexity. “It is necessary to find in each depicted unit, in addition to the general class one, that individual core that is most characteristic of it and ultimately determines it social behavior", wrote Gorky.

The social qualities of a person are presented in his plays not in an abstract, straightforwardly expressed form; a person is depicted in him with all his personal characteristics and properties. But behind the hero’s individual qualities we see his socio-political face in a sharp and clear light.

“A person for a play must be made in such a way that the meaning of his every phrase, every action is completely clear, so that he can be despised, hated and loved as if he were alive,” taught the great artist.

Expanding in his plays an acute struggle of worldviews and ideas, Gorky clearly defines his attitude to the events taking place. But a clear ideological assessment of the characters is expressed in the plays Gorky not in the author's direct judgments and comments. In his article “On Plays,” Gorky recalled that power artistic image in dramaturgy lies in its ability to reveal itself without direct authorial intervention.

“...The play requires that each unit acting in it be characterized in word and deed independently, without prompting from the author.”

Associated with this is the high skill speech characteristics in Gorky's dramaturgy. It is significant that in the play “At the Lower Depths” the writer completely abandoned the “tramp” jargon. But how beautifully the speech of the characters in the play conveys the diversity of their characters, moods, feelings and thoughts!

Bitter does not often use the form of an extended monologue. In his plays, dialogue predominates, a remark, sometimes said casually, but always extremely saturated with inner meaning. In your speech characteristics Bitter strived to ensure that the personality was characterized comprehensively: from the point of view of class, and from the point of view individual characteristics. He ensured that every remark, every word of the hero revealed his character with maximum expressiveness.

The essence of Luke and the Actor clearly emerges in the peculiarities of speech. Luke's character, his intelligence, slyness, meaningful evasiveness, affectionate insinuation, tendency to life generalizations, consolation are expressed in those aphorisms, jokes and proverbs with which he peppers his speech. “A person lives differently... as the heart is adjusted, so he lives. Today he is good, tomorrow he is evil.” “In my opinion, not a single flea is bad: all are black, all jump.”

In the Actor’s speech one hears the tragedy of a man who once knew a different life, and now has lost even his name. Her intonation has a declamatory tone; her vocabulary retains echoes of her former theatrical profession. “...On stage my name is Sverchkov-Zavolzhsky...” he says, “no one knows this, no one!” When the inhabitants of the shelter make fun of the Actor and convince him that he will not be able to escape from the shelter, the Actor exclaims: “Ignorants, savages... People without hearts! You will see - he will leave! etc. These fragmentary, incoherent phrases express the powerlessness of the deceased person.

Just as complex and expressive speech characteristic Barona. In the past, an aristocrat, and now a homeless tramp crippled by life, he combines in his speech the lordly arrogance and depression of a tramp knocked out of the rut of life. Hence the commanding tone in his remarks, hence the incoherent phrases of a confused person who does not understand the life of a person.

The language of Gorky's plays is rich in aphorisms, which in an extremely compressed and condensed form usually express a serious thought. In the play “At the Lower Depths,” the speech of Luka, Satin, and Bubnov is aphoristic. But how different are the inner meaning and tonality of these aphorisms! In Luke they are of an abstract, ambiguous nature, in Satin they are definite and pathetic: “Man - this sounds proud!”, “Lies are the religion of slaves and masters,” etc. Bubnov’s aphorisms are imbued with the spirit of extreme despair; He says to Nastya: “You are superfluous everywhere... and all the people on earth are superfluous...”

Thus, Gorky's plays enriched Russian and world drama with new content, brought new heroes to the stage, took a step forward in artistic development dramaturgy, revealing new possibilities for depicting a person in drama.

"AT THE BOTTOM"

The play contains, as it were, two parallel actions. The first is social and everyday and the second is philosophical. Both actions develop in parallel, without intertwining. There are, as it were, two planes in the play: external and internal.

External plan. In the rooming house, owned by Mikhail Ivanovich Kostylev (54 years old) and his wife Vasilisa Karpovna (26 years old), live, according to the author’s definition, “former people,” that is, people without a solid social status, as well as working but poor people. These are: Satin and Actor (both under 40 years old), Vaska Pepel, a thief (28 years old), Andrei Mitrich Kleshch, a mechanic (40 years old), his wife Anna (30 years old), Nastya, a prostitute (24 years old), Bubnov (45 years old) years old), Baron (33 years old), Alyoshka (20 years old), Tatar and Crooked Zob, hook makers (age not specified). Kvashnya, a dumpling seller (about 40 years old) and Medvedev, Vasilisa’s uncle, a policeman (50 years old), appear in the house. The relationship between them is very complicated, scandals often arise. Vasilisa is in love with Vaska and persuades him to kill her elderly husband in order to be the sole mistress (in the second half of the play, Vaska beats Kostylev and accidentally kills him; Vaska is arrested). Vaska is in love with Natalya, Vasilisa’s sister (20 years old); Out of jealousy, Vasilisa beats her sister mercilessly. Satin and Actor ( former actor provincial theaters named Sverchkov-Zavolzhsky) - completely degenerate people, drunkards, gamblers, Satin is also a sharper. The Baron is a former nobleman who squandered his entire fortune and is now one of the most pitiful people in the flophouse. Klesh tries to make money with his plumbing tools; his wife Anna falls ill and needs medication; at the end of the play, Anna dies, and Tick finally sinks to the bottom.

In the midst of drinking and scandals, the wanderer Luke appears in the shelter, feeling sorry for the people. He promises many an unrealizable bright future. He predicts happiness after death for Anna. He tells the actor about a free hospital for alcoholics. He advises Vaska and Natasha to leave home, etc. But at the most tense moment, Luka actually runs away, leaving behind hopeful people. This drives the actor to suicide. In the finale, the night shelters sing a song, and when Satin hears about the death of the Actor, he says with annoyance and bitterness: “Eh... He ruined the song... you fool!” Internal plan. In the play, two philosophical “truths” collide: Luke and Satine. The nochlezhka is a kind of symbol of humanity that finds itself in a dead end, which by the beginning of the 20th century. lost faith in God, but has not yet gained faith in herself. Hence the general feeling of hopelessness, lack of perspective, which, in particular, is expressed by Actor and Bubnov (a pessimistic reasoner) in the words: “What’s next” and “And the threads are rotten...” The world has become dilapidated, weakened, and is coming to an end. Satin prefers to accept this bitter truth and not lie to himself or people. He suggests to Mite that he stop working. If everyone stops working, what will happen? “They will die of hunger...” answers Kleshch, but in doing so he only reveals the meaningless essence of labor, which is aimed only at maintaining life, and not at bringing any meaning into it. Satin is a kind of radical existentialist, a person who accepts absurdity a universe in which “God died” (Nietzsche) and the Emptiness, Nothingness, was exposed. Luke has a different view of the world. He believes that it is precisely the terrible meaninglessness of life that should evoke special pity for a person. If a person needs a lie to continue living, then you need to lie to him and console him. Otherwise, the person will not be able to stand the “truth” and will die. So Luke tells a parable about a seeker of a righteous land and a scientist who, using a map, showed him that there is no righteous land. Offended man left and hanged himself (a parallel with the future death of the Actor). Luke is not just an ordinary wanderer, a comforter, but also a philosopher. In his opinion, a person is obliged to live despite the meaninglessness of life, because he does not know his future, he is only a wanderer in the universe, and even our earth is a wanderer in space. Luka and Satin are arguing. But Satin somewhat accepts Luke’s “truth.” In any case, it is the appearance of Luke that provokes Satin into his monologue about Man, which he pronounces, imitating the voice of his opponent (a fundamental remark in the play). Satin does not want to pity and console a person, but, by telling him the whole truth about the meaninglessness of life, to encourage him to self-respect and rebellion against the universe. A person, having realized the tragedy of his existence, should not despair, but, on the contrary, feel his worth. The whole meaning of the universe is in it alone. There is no other meaning (for example, Christian). “Man - that sounds proud!” “Everything is in man, everything is for man”