What genre is it good for someone to live well in Rus'? About the genre and style of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”
The idea for the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” arose in the early 1860s. Nekrasov continued to work on the poem until the end of his life, but never managed to complete it. Therefore, when publishing the poem, serious difficulties arose - the sequence of chapters remained unclear, the author's intention could only be approximately guessed. Researchers of Nekrasov’s work settled on three main options for the arrangement of chapters in the poem. The first was based on the sequence of seasons in the poem and the author’s notes and proposed the following order: “Prologue and first part” - “Last child” - “Feast for the whole world” - “Peasant woman”. The second swapped the chapters “A Feast for the Whole World” and “The Peasant Woman.” With this arrangement, the concept of the poem looked more optimistic - from serfdom to funerals “on the support”, from satirical pathos to pathetic. The third and most common version - most likely, it was the one you came across when reading the poem ("Prologue and first part" - "Peasant Woman" - "Lastly" - "Feast for the whole world") - also had its own logic. The feast organized on the occasion of the death of the Last One smoothly turns into a “feast for the whole world”: according to the content of the chapters “The Last One” and “Feast for the whole world” are very closely related. In the chapter “A Feast for the Whole World,” there is finally a truly happy person.
We will rely on the third option, simply because it was the one that became generally accepted when the poem was published, but at the same time we will remember that the poem remained unfinished and we are dealing with a reconstruction, and not the actual author’s intention.
Nekrasov himself called his work “an epic of modern peasant life.” Epic is one of the most ancient literary genres. The first and most famous epic, which all authors turning to this genre were guided by, is Homer's Iliad. Homer gives an extremely broad cross-section of the life of the Greeks at a decisive moment for the nation, the period of the ten-year war between the Greeks and the Trojans - at a turning point, the people, like the individual, reveal themselves more clearly. With the simplicity of a Greek commoner, Homer does not miss even the smallest details of the life and military way of life of his heroes. The listed features have become genre-forming; we can easily find them in any epic, including in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” including.
Nekrasov tries to touch all facets of people's life, pays attention to the most insignificant details of people's life; The action of the poem is timed to coincide with the culminating moment for the Russian peasantry - the period that came after the abolition of serfdom in 1861.
The compositional core of the epic was the journey of seven men, which made it possible to extremely expand the boundaries of the artistic space of the poem. The seven wanderers are, as it were, one whole; they are poorly distinguishable from each other; whether they speak in turn or in chorus, their lines flow together. They are only eyes and ears. Unlike the poem “Frost, Red Nose,” in “Who Lives Well in Rus',” Nekrasov tries to be completely invisible, hide behind the canopy and show the people’s point of view on what is happening. Sometimes, for example, in the famous passage about Belinsky and Gogol, which the peasant has not yet carried from the market, the author’s voice still breaks through, but this is one of the few exceptions.
The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is the pinnacle of N. A. Nekrasov’s creativity. He himself called it “his favorite child.” Nekrasov devoted many years of tireless work to his poem, putting into it all the information about the Russian people, accumulated, as the poet said, “by word of mouth” for twenty years. In no other work of Russian literature have the
The same is true of the characters, habits, views, hopes of the Russian people, as in this poem.
The plot of the poem is very close to the folk tale about the search for happiness and truth. The poem opens with a “Prologue” - the most rich chapter in folklore elements. It is in it that the main problem of the poem is constant: “who lives cheerfully, at ease in Rus'.” The heroes of the poem, seven (one of the traditional significant numbers) men, go to the “Unworn province, Ungutted volost, Izbytkova village.” The seven men who argued in the “Prologue” are endowed with the best qualities of the people’s character: pain for their people, selflessness, and a burning interest in the main issues of life. They are interested in the basic question of what is truth and what is happiness.
The description of what the truth-seekers saw during their wanderings in Rus', the stories about themselves of the imaginary “happy” ones to whom the peasants turned, constitutes the main content of the poem.
The composition of the work is built according to the laws of classical epic: it consists of separate parts and chapters. Outwardly, these parts are connected by the theme of the road: seven truth-seekers wander around Rus', trying to resolve the question that haunts them: who can live well in Rus'? And here one of the most important motifs of Russian folklore sounds - the motif of wandering. Even the heroes of Russian fairy tales went to look for common happiness, to find out whether it even exists - peasant happiness. The very nature of the poem is also combined with a Russian fairy tale. The journey of the Nekrasov peasants is, in essence, a spiritual journey.
The first chapter of “Pop” opens with the image of a “wide path.” This is one of the important poetic symbols of Russian literature, which embodies the idea of movement, striving forward. This is an image of not only the life, but also the spiritual path of a person.
The meeting with the priest in the first chapter of the first part of the poem shows that the peasants do not have their own peasant understanding of happiness. The men do not yet understand that the question of who is happier - the priest, the landowner, the merchant or the tsar - reveals the limitations of their ideas about happiness. These ideas come down only to material interest. It is no coincidence that the priest proclaims the formula for happiness, and the peasants passively agree. “Peace, wealth, honor” - this is the priest’s formula for happiness. But his story makes men think about a lot. The life of the priest reveals the life of Russia in its past and present, in its different classes. Like the laity, among priests only the highest clergy live well. But the clergy cannot be happy when the people, their breadwinner, are unhappy. All this indicates a deep crisis that has gripped the entire country.
In the next chapter, “Country Fair,” the main character is the crowd, wide and diverse. Nekrasov creates paintings in which the people themselves speak, talk about themselves, revealing the best and most unsightly features of their lives.
creates pictures in which the people themselves speak, talk about themselves, revealing the best and most unsightly features of their lives. But in everything: both in beauty and in ugliness, the people are not pitiful and petty, but large, significant, generous and
In the next chapter, “Drunken Night,” the festive feast reaches its climax. From the depths of the folk world emerges a strong peasant character, Yakim Nagoy. He appears as a symbol of working peasant life: “There are splinters at the eyes, at the mouth, like cracks in dry earth.” For the first time in Russian literature, Nekrasov creates a realistic portrait of a peasant worker. Defending the sense of peasant pride through labor, Yakim sees social injustice towards the people.
You work alone
And the work is almost over,
Look, there are three shareholders standing:
God, king and lord!
In the image of Yakim, the author shows the emergence of spiritual needs among the peasants. “Spiritual bread is higher than earthly bread.”
In the chapter “Happy” the entire peasant kingdom is involved in a dialogue, in a dispute about happiness. In their miserable life, even a tiny bit of luck already seems like happiness. But at the end of the chapter there is a story about a happy man. This story about Ermil Girin moves the action of the epic forward and marks a higher level of the people's idea of happiness. Like Yakim, Yermil is endowed with a keen sense of Christian conscience and honor. It would be given that he has “everything that is needed for happiness: peace of mind, money, and honor.” But at a critical moment in his life, Yermil sacrifices this happiness for the sake of the people’s truth and ends up in prison.
In the fifth chapter of the first part, “The Landowner,” the wanderers treat the masters with obvious irony. They already understand that noble “honor” is worth little. The wanderers spoke to the master as boldly and uninhibitedly as Yakim Nagoy. The landowner Obolt-Obolduev is most astonished by the fact that former serfs shouldered the burden of the historical question “Who can live well in Rus'?” As in the case with the priest, the story of the landowner and about the landowner is not just an accusation. It is also about a general catastrophic crisis that engulfs everyone. Therefore, in subsequent parts of the poem, Nekrasov leaves the intended plot scheme and artistically explores the life and poetry of the people.
In the chapter “Peasant Woman,” Matryona Timofeevna appears before the wanderers, embodying the best qualities of the Russian female character. Harsh conditions honed a special female character - independent, accustomed to relying on her own strength everywhere and in everything.
The theme of spiritual slavery is central to the chapter “The Last One.” A terrible “comedy” is played out by the characters in this chapter. For the sake of the half-mad Prince Utyatin, they agreed to pretend that serfdom had not been abolished. This proves that no reform makes yesterday’s slaves free, spiritually valuable people.
The chapter “A Feast for the Whole World” is a continuation of “The Last One.” This depicts a fundamentally different state of the world. This is people's Rus' that has already woken up and spoken at once. New heroes are drawn into the festive feast of spiritual awakening. The whole people sings songs of liberation, judges the past, evaluates the present, and begins to think about the future.
liberation, judges the past, evaluates the present, and begins to think about the future. Sometimes these songs are contrasting to each other. For example, the story “About the exemplary slave - Yakov the Faithful” and the legend “About two great sinners”. Yakov takes revenge on the master for all the bullying in a servile manner, committing suicide in front of his eyes. The robber Kudeyar atones for his sins, murders and violence not with humility, but with the murder of the villain - Pan Glukhovsky. Thus, popular morality justifies righteous anger against the oppressors and even violence against them.
According to the original plan, the peasants had to make sure that it was impossible to find a happy person in Rus'. But he appeared in life - “a new hero of a new era,” a democrat commoner. The author introduces a new face into the poem - the people's intercessor Grisha Dobrosklonov, who sees his happiness in serving the people. Despite the fact that Grisha’s personal fate was difficult (“Fate had prepared for him a glorious path, a great name for the people’s intercessor, consumption and Siberia”), he believes in a bright future for the people as a result of the struggle. And as if in response to the growth of popular consciousness, the songs of Grisha begin to sound, knowing that people's happiness can only be achieved as a result of a nationwide struggle for the “Unflogged province, Ungutted volost, Izbytkovo village.”
The poem, conceived about the people and for the people, becomes an accusatory act against the landowners.
Nekrasov began working on the poem in 1863, when “Frost, Red Nose” was written, and continued until his death. But if the poem “Frost...” can be compared with a tragedy, the content of which is the death of a person in a heroic struggle against elements beyond his control, then “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is an epic where an individual person finds the meaning and happiness of his existence in unity with the world of people and the world as God's creation. Nekrasov is interested in the holistic image of the people, and the individual images highlighted in the poem are given as episodic, the history of their lives only temporarily surfaces on the surface of the epic stream. Therefore, Nekrasov’s poem can be called “ folk epic", and its poetic form emphasizes its kinship with the folk epic. Nekrasov’s epic is “molded” from various folklore genres: fairy tales, tales, riddles, proverbs, spiritual poems, work and ritual songs, drawn-out lyric songs, parables, etc.
Nekrasov's epic had a clear social task. In this sense, his work is quite topical and relevant. In the 60-70s, the movement of “going to the people” began, the practice of “small deeds”, when the Russian intelligentsia voluntarily went to villages, organized schools and hospitals, tried to rebuild the life and work of peasants, and lead them on the path of education and culture. At the same time, interest in peasant culture itself is increasing: Russian folklore is being collected and systematized (the image of such a collector, Pavlusha Veretennikov, is in the poem). But the surest way to study the situation of the people was statistics, a science that at that time received the most rapid development. In addition, these people: teachers, doctors, statisticians, land surveyors, agronomists, folklorists - left us a series of wonderful essays about the life and everyday life of post-reform Russia. Nekrasov also makes a sociological cross-section of village life in his poem: almost all types of the Russian rural population pass before us, from the beggar to the landowner. Nekrasov is trying to see what happened to peasant Russia as a result of the reform of 1861, which upended the entire habitual way of life. In what ways has Rus' remained the same Russia, what is irretrievably gone, what has appeared, what is eternal and what is transitory in the life of the people?
It is generally accepted that with his poem Nekrasov answers the question he posed in one of his poems: “The people have been liberated, but are the people happy? “In fact, this is a rhetorical question. It is clear that he is unhappy, and then there is no need to write a poem. But the question that became the title: “Who can live well in Rus'? “—translates Nekrasov’s quest from the philosophical and sociological areas to the ethical area. If not the people, then who is living well?
To answer the main question, “strange” people, i.e. wanderers, set off on the road - seven men. But these people are strange in the usual sense. A peasant is a sedentary person, tied to the land, for whom there are no vacations or weekends, whose life obeys only the rhythm of nature. And they set off to wander, and even when - at the most difficult time! But this strangeness of theirs is a reflection of the revolution that all peasant Rus' is experiencing. All of it has moved, started from its place, all of it is in motion, like spring streams, now transparent, clean, now muddy, carrying winter debris, now calm and majestic, now seething and unpredictable.
Therefore, the composition of the poem is based on motives of the road and search. They allow you to walk throughout Rus' and see it in its entirety. But how to show all of Rus'? The author uses the technique of panoramic image, when the image is created by a series of generalized pictures, crowd scenes, from which individual persons and episodes are selected.
Nekrasov called “Who Lives Well in Rus'” a poem. However, in terms of genre, it was not similar to any of the famous Russian poems. “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is a folk heroic poem. Nekrasov combined the features of three genres: a “peasant” poem depicting the life of a peasant, a satirical review depicting the enemies of the people, and a heroic revolutionary poem revealing images of fighters for the people’s happiness. Nekrasov strives to merge these three lines of his artistic creativity in the poem.
The first line is most fully represented in the poem. The depiction of folk.life is encyclopedic. The most complete reflection of this trait is given precisely in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” The second and third lines, due to the incompleteness of the poem, are not superior to his other works.
In other works, Nekrasov managed to show himself more clearly both as a satirist and as a poet of the heroic epic. In the poem “Contemporaries,” he masterfully “brands and castigates the people’s enemy” - the capitalists and the pack of those who served the owners of money and those in power. The images of revolutionary fighters are more developed and more emotionally depicted in his poem “Russian Women”. The revolutionary solution to the pressing issues of our time in the conditions of censorship terror could not receive a more complete artistic expression even under the pen of Nekrasov.
Nekrasov’s ideological and, on this basis, emotional attitude to reality determined, within the framework of the new genre, the use of various techniques and means inherent not only in epic, but also in lyrical and dramatic genres. Here both a calm epic story and various songs (historical, social, everyday, propaganda, satirical, intimate lyrical) are organically merged; here, in a synthetic unity, legends, lamentations, fantasy fairy tales, beliefs, metaphorical ideas characteristic of a person of religious perception, and lively, realistic dialogue, proverbs, sayings inherent in a materialistic worldview appeared; here is caustic satire, disguised in allegory, in omissions, in allegorical form. The wide coverage of reality required the introduction into the framework of the main event of a large number of independently developed episodes, necessary as links in a single artistic chain.
In terms of genre, “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is in many ways closer to a prose narrative than to the lyric-epic poems characteristic of Russian literature in the first half of the 20th century.
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“My favorite child,” Nekrasov wrote in his manuscript about the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.” Later, in one of his letters to the journalist P. Bezobrazov, the poet himself defined the genre of the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'”: “This will be an epic of modern peasant life.”
And here the modern reader will immediately have many questions, because when we hear the word epic, we are reminded of large-scale works, for example, the epics of Homer or the multi-volume works of Tolstoy. But does even an unfinished work have the right to be called an epic?
First, let’s figure out what is meant by the concept of “epic”. The problematic of the epic genre involves consideration of the life not of an individual hero, but of an entire people. Any significant events in the history of this people are selected to depict. Most often, such a moment is war. However, at the time Nekrasov created the poem, there is no war going on in Russia, and the poem itself does not mention military actions. And yet, in 1861, another event, no less significant for people’s life, took place in Russia: the abolition of serfdom. It causes a wave of controversy in high circles, as well as confusion and a complete restructuring of life among the peasants. It is to this turning point that Nekrasov devotes his epic poem.
The genre of the work “Who Lives Well in Rus'” required the author to comply with certain criteria, first of all, scale. The task of showing the life of an entire people is not at all easy, and it was this that influenced Nekrasov’s choice of a plot with travel as the main plot-forming element. Travel is a common motif in Russian literature. It was addressed by both Gogol in “Dead Souls” and Radishchev (“Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow”), even in the Middle Ages there was a popular genre of “walking” - “Walking across Three Seas.” This technique allows the work to depict a full-fledged picture of folk life, with all its customs, joys and sorrows. In this case, the main plot fades into the background, and the narrative breaks up into many separate kaleidoscopic parts, from which at the same time a three-dimensional picture of life gradually emerges. The peasants' stories about their destinies give way to lingering lyrical songs, the reader gets acquainted with a rural fair, sees folk festivals, elections, learns about attitudes towards women, grieves with the beggar and has fun with the drunk.
It is characteristic that parts sometimes deviate so strongly from each other in the plot that they can be swapped without harm to the composition of the work. This at one time caused long disputes over the correct arrangement of the chapters of the poem (Nekrasov did not leave clear instructions on this).
At the same time, such a “patchwork” of the work is compensated by the internal continuous development of the plot - one of the prerequisites for the epic genre. The people's soul, sometimes very contradictory, sometimes despairing under the weight of troubles and yet not completely broken, moreover, constantly dreaming of happiness - this is what the poet shows the reader.
Among the features of the genre “Who Lives Well in Rus'” can also be mentioned the huge layer of folklore elements included in the text of the poem, from directly introduced songs, proverbs, sayings to implicit references to one or another epic, the use of phrases like “Savely, the Russian hero.” Here Nekrasov’s love for the common people is clearly visible, his sincere interest in the topic - it’s not for nothing that it took so many years (more than 10) to collect material for the poem! Let us note that the inclusion of folklore elements in the text is also considered a sign of an epic - this makes it possible to more fully depict the features of the people’s character and way of life.
The genre peculiarity of the poem is also considered to be its bizarre combination of historical facts with fairy-tale motifs. In the beginning, written according to all the laws of fairy tales, seven (magic number) peasants set off on their journey. The beginning of their journey is accompanied by miracles - a warbler speaks to them, and they find a self-assembled tablecloth in the forest. But their further path will not follow a fairy tale.
The skillful combination of a fairy-tale, unburdensome plot with serious political problems of post-reform Rus' favorably distinguished Nekrasov’s work immediately after the publication of parts of the poem: it looked interesting against the backdrop of monotonous pamphlets and at the same time made one think. This also allowed the epic poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” not to lose its interest for the reader today.
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