Narrative device in Andreev's story the giant. L.N. Andreev “Bite”: description, characters, analysis of the story

Giant

Leonid Andreev

Here came a giant, a big, big giant. So big, so big. Here he comes, he comes. Such a funny giant. His hands are thick, huge, and his fingers are spread out, and his legs are also huge, thick, like trees, so thick. So he came... and fell! You see, he took it and fell! I caught my foot on a step and fell! Such a stupid giant, so funny - he got caught and fell! He opened his mouth - and lay there, and lay there, as funny as a chimney sweep. Why did you come here, giant? Go, get out of here, giant! Dodik is so sweet, so nice, so nice; he snuggled so quietly close to his mother, to her heart - to her heart - so sweet, so nice. He has such good eyes, sweet eyes, clear, pure, and everyone loves him so much. And his nose is so good, and his lips, and he doesn’t play pranks. It was before that he played pranks - ran - shouted - rode a horse. You know, giant, Dodik has a horse, a good horse, big with a tail, and Dodik sits on it and rides, rides far, far to the river, rides into the forest. And in the river there are fish, do you know, giant, what kind of fish there are? No, you don’t know, giant, you’re stupid, but Dodik knows: such small, pretty fish. The sun is shining on the water, and they are playing, so small, so cute, so fast. Yes, stupid giant, but you don’t know.

What a funny giant! Came and fell! That's funny! I was walking up the stairs, once again, caught on the threshold and fell. Such a stupid giant! Don’t come to us, giant, no one invited you, stupid giant. It was before that Dodik was naughty and ran around - but now he is so nice, so sweet, and his mother loves him so tenderly. He loves so much - he loves more than everyone else, more than himself, more life. He is her sunshine, he is her happiness, he is her joy. Now he is small, very small, and his life is short, and then he will grow up big, like a giant, he will have a big beard and mustache, big, big, and his life will be big, bright, beautiful. He will be kind, and smart, and strong, like a giant, so strong, so smart, and everyone will love him, and everyone will look at him and rejoice. There will be grief in his life, all people have grief, but there will also be great, bright joys like the sun. He will enter the beautiful and intelligent world, and the blue sky will shine above his head, and the birds will sing their songs to him, and the water will gently murmur. And he will look and say: “How good it is in the world, how good it is in the world...”

Here... Here... Here... This can't be. I hold you tightly, I hold you tenderly, tenderly, my boy. Aren't you scared that it's so dark here? Look, there's light in the windows. This is a lantern on the street, standing there and shining, so funny. And I shined a little light here, such a cute lantern. I said to myself: “Let me shine a little light there, otherwise it’s so dark there, it’s so dark.” Such a long funny lantern. And tomorrow it will shine - tomorrow. My God, tomorrow!

Yes Yes Yes. Giant. Of course of course. Such a big, big giant. More lanterns, more bell towers, and such a funny one came and fell! Oh, stupid giant, how come you didn’t notice the steps! “I was looking up, I can’t see below,” says the giant in a bass voice, you know, in such a thick, thick voice. “I was looking up!” “You better look down, stupid giant, and then you’ll see.” Here is my dear Dodik, sweet and so smart, he will grow even bigger than you. And so he will walk - right through the city, right through the forests and mountains. He will be so strong and brave, he will not be afraid of anything - nothing. He approached the river and stepped over. Everyone was looking, their mouths were open, they were so funny, but he stepped over. And his life will be so big, and bright, and beautiful, and the sun will shine, dear dear sun. It comes out in the morning and it’s shining, so cute... My God!

Here... Here the giant came and fell. So funny - funny - funny!

This is what a mother said over her dying child late at night. She carried it around the dark room and spoke, and the lantern shone through the window, and in the next room her father listened to her words and cried.

Andreev discovered in literature completely new world, fanned by the breath of rebellious elements, anxious thoughts, philosophical thoughts, tireless creative quests. Man and the fate that rules over him - this problem has always worried me. At the beginning of the century, at a time of general spiritual awakening, philosophical awareness of the possibilities of the individual and their limitations by history, the social structure of reality, and the biological laws of life was the need of the time. It was the writer’s tragic worldview that stimulated his interest in eternal secrets existence, to the origins of the imperfection of human life. It was not without reason that A. Blok considered the leading motive of Andreev’s work to be the fatal, insurmountable separation of people, powerless in their loneliness to understand not only others, but also their own personality.

But although life seemed to Andreev tragic in its fundamentals, the preaching of resigned humility before the omnipotence of fate did not captivate him. The most insightful contemporaries of the writer felt in his frantic “screams” at the sight of human suffering an attempt to break the “circle of iron destiny”, to affirm the individual will of man in his tragic single combat with the indifferent, blind forces of the universe. A heightened sense of life forced Andreev to constantly suffer from the feeling and knowledge of impending death; Moreover, the uncompromising truth about the mortality of all things intensified the sense of life in him and his heroes, giving him greater tension and spirituality. In Andreev’s works, death turned out to be both a tragedy and a test of the value of what was lived; it acted as the natural completion of life, as the height from which the wise and hidden essence of existence is most deeply comprehended.

In embodying the large and serious social and philosophical themes put forward by the era, Andreev did not want to follow the beaten path. Both in prose and in drama, he defended his right to experiment, to free creative search, based on the fact that “form was and is only the boundary of content, it is determined by it, it naturally follows from it.” A staunch opponent of any dogma, any attempts to reduce living work art, worldview or the writer’s method to schemes, to a set of ossified formulations, Andreev practically implemented the idea of freely combining the most different in nature aesthetic principles. In his works, along with the techniques of traditional realistic artistic writing, there are various types of grotesque, symbolization, and conventionally metaphorical imagery; he developed a whole system of means of universal psychological analysis and other original forms that allowed him to expressively embody his understanding of the Russian socio-historical reality of the beginning of the century, his ideas about the boundaries of the unknown and irrational, “fatal” and free in the world and man.

Andreev's early stories, imbued with the ideas of democracy and humanism, continue realistic literary traditions and are largely focused on artistic experience Dickens, Dostoevsky. The psychology of the hero - an ordinary, ordinary person - is revealed in them through a fact, an incident of everyday life. The core that forms the plot of the work is a touching Easter or Christmas story, helping to identify the human, natural principle in some and the inhuman in others. Carriers moral principle the “humiliated and insulted” perform: children immersed in the poverty of a joyless city life (“Petka at the Dacha”, “Alyosha the Fool”), poor suffering people like the hard-working peasant Kostylin (“In Saburov”), mill driver Alexei Stepanovich (“On river"), the old blacksmith Merkulov ("Spring Promises"). Next to them, drunkards, tramps, thieves, prostitutes, even policemen and gendarmes appear as heroes, ruined by life, but who have not completely lost the living fire of their souls (“Bargamot and Garaska”, “Brawler”, “At the Station”). The condition for their humanity is non-involvement in the mechanism of social violence, alienation from the rules of an unjust social order.

Often early stories Andreev's works end with the triumph of virtue, philanthropy or law and order. Thus, in the story “From the Life of Staff Captain Kablukov,” his hero, a drunken captain, suddenly feels a surge of extraordinary pity for his thieving orderly, since he never suspected his “bitter domestic need.” Looking at his “painful face,” the rude officer forgives the orderly all his sins.

The same theme of reconciliation of the weak, defenseless with the stronger is heard in the stories “Bargamot and Garaska”, “On the River”. However, Andreev often casts doubt on the triumph of good beginnings. Referring to the story "Bargamot and Garaska", Gorky noted that in author's narration Andreev’s “clever smile of distrust of the fact”, which falls outside the framework of the beautiful Easter story, is noticeable.

Nevertheless, the stories, entirely in the realistic tradition, did not occupy any significant place in the writer’s tragic work. Striving towards general philosophical problems, Andreev, due to the nature of his artistic individuality, was not inclined to expand the stock of life observations, but relied entirely on intuition, which was exceptionally subtle and acute for him. It is characteristic that even in early real-life stories, the author’s inclination to develop the fundamental problems of the human spirit, the desire to discern through everyday life its essence hidden from external gaze, makes its way. Great importance in Andreev’s work there are philosophical and psychological stories, novellas, plays, where everyday content fades into the background, where interest is focused on identifying not a particular case, but general patterns human existence. But both in living concrete paintings and in philosophical and psychological abstraction, Andreev strove for one goal: to reveal the contradictions of social existence, public consciousness, to pose deep questions of the philosophy of life, on the understanding of which depended intellectual development modern man.

The theme of a person’s relationship with fate, submission or disobedience to it, is revealed ambiguously in Andreev’s philosophical and psychological works. If writers XIX centuries, the personality of a heroic nature was often brought to the fore, entering into combat with the environment, with social evil, even with one’s own passions (such as Griboyedov’s Chatsky, Turgenev’s Bazarov, many of Dostoevsky’s heroes), then Andreev, although he does not completely abandon this tradition, all however, it focuses primarily on identifying the tragic in the everyday life of an ordinary person. And it turns out that the environment, society, history, nature, the universe itself - all this inevitably, fatally predetermines his fate.

In such stories by Andreev as “At the Window”, “In the Basement”, “ Grand slam", "Angel" and others, the heroes experience fear and horror of life, feel the imperious, overwhelming force of fate, which they cannot resist. “At the window”, “In the basement”, in the hairdresser’s (“Petka at the Dacha”), in the hospital ward (“Once upon a time”) - this is the closed space in which the heroes exist. It takes on an expanded meaning and becomes a symbol of the spiritual death of man. The small closet of the poor official Andrei Nikolaevich, in which his everyday life proceeds monotonously (“At the Window”), throughout the story is compared either to a coffin, the lid of which is about to slam shut, or to a grave that will soon be covered with earth, or to a fortress, in which they die, hiding from life. The author's conclusion is twofold: the pathetic existence of the failed hero is worthy of both contempt and compassion for the lost soul of a person.

But, showing the physical death of a person in an unequal struggle with the higher forces of the universe, Andreev simultaneously affirms the enduring value of earthly, real life, consisting of intoxication with its joys, in love, in self-sacrifice. Fate almost always disarms a person, dooms him to torment - and the more stubborn must be the struggle for his earthly happiness, for the happiness of new generations following him.

This idea is embodied in the figurative and artistic structure of the story “Once upon a time,” where the worldviews of two heroes are contrasted - the unfortunate merchant Kosheverov, indifferent to everything around him, and the happy deacon Speransky, sparkling with love of life. Both are seriously ill and are living out their last days in a general hospital ward. But if the aimlessness of his earthly existence is revealed to Kosheverov, then approaching death once again reveals to Speransky the highest meaning of life. He doesn't think about his incurable disease, communicates vividly with other patients, with doctors and students, nurses and nurses, hears the cries of sparrows outside the window, rejoices in the shine of the sun, worries about his wife, children - they all live in him, and he continues to live in them.

Andreev also has more active heroes, ready to measure their strength against what is hostile to man in the world around him. True, the rebellious beginning in them is directed not so much against the fatal “circle of iron destiny” as against social injustice and imperfection human mind, human relations. This is the hero of “The Story of Sergei Petrovich”: a mediocre, “invisible student with a flat, ordinary face”, he, under the influence of F. Nietzsche’s idea of a “superman”, rebels against vulgar everyday life - he commits suicide, which turns out to be not only a step of despair, but also an act indignation, the triumph of the winner. This is Doctor Kerzhentsev (story “Thought”), who forced himself to throw away the generally accepted moral norms of society and commit terrible crime for the sake of personal self-affirmation, the victory of independent thought. Such is the hero of the story “The Life of Basil of Thebes,” a village priest, a fanatic of the faith, renouncing his only spiritual wealth, which is not able to alleviate human suffering.

These and other Andreev’s heroes, who boldly challenge all established, customary social institutions, are for the most part militant individualists, convinced of their own chosenness. But they, too, are ultimately unable to achieve the desired spiritual freedom, to find a new effective philosophy of life. Doctor Kerzhentsev, who committed the senseless murder of his friend, cannot understand whether he was pretending to be crazy at that moment or really went crazy, and eventually ends up in a psychiatric hospital. And the rebellion of the priest - Father Vasily not only does not bring him peace of mind, but completely destroys him inner world, having no other moral support other than faith in God, irrevocably leads him to death. The fatal mysteries of life and death that worried Andreev remained unsolvable for him. And the more acutely the writer experienced the futility of his tireless attempts to look “beyond good and evil,” the more tragic ideas about life and man became stronger in his mind.

The close attention that Andreev paid, according to V. G. Korolenko, to the issues of “the human spirit in its search for its connection with infinity in general and with infinite justice in particular,” determined the distinctive qualities of his creative manner. He compensated for his departure from the depiction of specific pictures of real everyday life by strengthening the symbolic sound of his works, infectious and violent expression, increased emotional coloring, and attempts to penetrate into the secrets of the human psyche. IN this kind forms - with sharp contrasts, grotesquely emphasized expressiveness, angularity general outlines- the originality of Andreev’s artistic thinking was embodied with the greatest completeness.

It is noteworthy that Andreev was able to reveal this or that topic, which had an unambiguous meaning in his mind, in different artistic and stylistic forms. In works that are conventionally allegorical, grotesque, abstracted from specific realities, the writer strived for maximum emotional intensity in conveying hysterical and rebellious human suffering. In such stories by Andreev of the first half of the 1900s as “The Wall”, “Alarm”, “Lies”, “The Abyss”, “Red Laughter”, this or that philosophical mood, experience, feeling is revealed in a “pure”, naked form , the narrative unfolds outside the signs of a certain time, the characters are often not called by name, and are devoid of any individual traits.

In “Alarm,” the frantic calls of the alarm bell and the ominous reflections of the burning earth evoke an acute sense of anxiety and inevitable catastrophe. For the writer, the circumstances of the occurrence of a village fire do not matter. His artistic purpose- to express the premonition of an impending thunderstorm, the uncontrollability of the fiery element, the death throes of “the heart of the most long-suffering earth.” The increase in suffering and horror in the symbolic sounds of the copper bell becomes almost physically perceptible. The syntactic structure of the phrases is expressive, laconic and at the same time distinguished by a multi-colored artistic palette: “The sounds were clear and precise and flew with insane speed, like a swarm of hot stones. They did not circle in the air like doves of the quiet evening bell, they did not split in him with a caressing wave of solemn good news, they flew straight, like menacing heralds of disaster, which has no time to look back, and its eyes are widened with horror.”

A different mood dominates the story “The Wall” - a dark allegorical phantasmagoria. Gathered in a fetid valley at the foot of a huge wall cutting the sky, thousands of people - “lepers” - are trying to break through this wall, but, convinced of the futility of their efforts and sacrifices, they helplessly retreat back. And “Red Laughter,” written in 1904, at the height of the Russo-Japanese War, is, in fact, one piercing and desperate cry of “madness and horror,” emotionally expressing the writer’s protest against a war in which rivers of human blood flow .

Andreev paints a picture of the fratricidal massacre in short, incoherent passages from the “found manuscript”; individual isolated episodes have neither beginning nor end. The hero's fragile consciousness cannot withstand the spectacle of brutal bloodshed and easily succumbs to the nightmare of madness. In his suppressed perception, the surrounding nature, even the sky and the sun, turn the color of blood. A blazing crimson sun and people groping, knee-deep in blood - this is how the story begins with an eerie picture. “Everything around is filled with a quiet red color,” “red reflections on the road surface” - these and similar phrases are heard throughout the entire narrative, leaving the impression of a paradoxical mixture of delirium and reality. “A bloody mess,” a land that “screams” and throws out “rows of pale pink corpses” from its depths, “a muddy bloody nightmare” - this is the background against which it grows symbolic image Red laughter, an image of senseless and criminal bloodshed. What comes to the fore is not the reflection of events, but the artist’s emotional, subjective attitude towards them, deliberately exaggerated and exaggerated.

Over time, Andreev's penchant for the abstract artistic thinking- even while maintaining the real plot basis - is indicated with complete clarity. In the allegory story “It Was So” (1905), Andreev views the social revolution not as a struggle of antagonistic class forces, but as a philosophical and psychological phenomenon. The alternation of popular freedom and despotism is likened in the story to the rhythmic swing of the pendulum of an ancient tower clock. “Having reached the top of its swing, the pendulum said: “So it was!” He fell, rose to a new peak and added: “So it will be!” So it was - so it will be! So it was - so it will be! The writer affirms the idea that the fight against tyranny is natural and natural, although he does not believe in the possibility of a “physical” victory of the revolution - he is talking only about revolution in the spiritual sense.

And in “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men” - one of best works Andreeva, a writer, paying tribute to the courage of her heroes - revolutionary terrorists, revealing the greatness of their spirit on the eve of execution, focuses mainly on the psychological “game” with the thought of death, with the theme of non-existence. Finding themselves outside the prison gates and already knowing about the death sentence, Andreev’s characters lose interest in the outside world and are left alone with the “unsolved great mystery” - “to go from life to death.”

“Conventional” way of implementation artistic content, the focus not on the everyday, but on the “existential” largely explains the writer’s frequent appeal to biblical stories, rethought in philosophical and psychological terms. The motifs of these plots are used in “The Life of Basil of Thebes”, in the stories “Eleazar”, “Son of Man”, in the story “Judas Iscariot”, in the dramas “Anatema”, “Samson in Chains”, and the novel “The Diary of Satan”. Thus, in the story “Judas Iscariot,” paradoxically interpreting the gospel story, Andreev portrays the apostles, disciples of Christ, as cowardly and pathetic ordinary people who curry favor with the teacher. Judas becomes their accuser. Forced to admit the inevitability of Christ's death and his own, he hopes that the crucifixion-resurrection will awaken the consciousness of people, return them to eternal moral truths, and that thereby they will be justified and gain great spiritual meaning the torment of the Savior and his, Judas, suffering.

It is impossible to imagine Andreev’s artistic world without his dramaturgy, innovative in content and form. The plays “Human Life”, “Tsar Famine”, “Anatema”, “Ocean” give generalized pictures of human life, human history, other large-scale moral and philosophical problems and phenomena.

In contrast to the theater of direct emotional experience, Andreev creates his own theater of philosophical thought, neglecting life-likeness and striving to give a “broad synthesis,” “generalization of entire stripes of life.” Tendency towards “rudeness, angularity, even seemingly vulgar caricature”, grotesque satirical imagery, “depsychologization” and “deindividualization” of characters devoid of everyday concreteness, bringing one enlarged character trait to the extreme degree of development while cutting off “trifles and secondary things”, sharp stylistic contrast - all this was required by the writer in order from the very beginning to destroy the illusion of the reality of what was happening on stage and to freely express the philosophical idea that worried him.

In later dramatic works Andreev’s attention moves to a more “earthly” sphere of the individual’s relationship with the outside world. The writer advocates for the theater of “pure psychism”, the theater of the “soul”, in which, in his conviction, there should be a triumph of complete psychological truth, a triumph of truly tragic art. Gravitating toward philosophical and psychological tragedy, he returns to realistic imagery, focuses on understanding the depths of a person’s spiritual life, and touches upon civil and social manifestations of personality.

True, only in a few plays (in particular, in the “poem of loneliness” “Dog Waltz”) Andreev managed to come close to the ideal expression of his requirements for a new drama. In most of his plays of the 1910s, he tends to compromise artistic solutions: he brings psychological theater closer to symbolic drama, saturates everyday stories additional philosophical load, gives symbolism and ambiguous generality to ordinary psychological details in order to raise the image of everyday life to the level of tragic perception. In Andreev’s latest lyrical-dramatic “confessional works” (“The One Who Gets Slaps,” “Requiem,” “Dog Waltz”), the mental tragedy a writer who was never able to come close to resolving the fundamental contradictions of life and therefore felt endlessly alone in the world around him.

In September 1901, the St. Petersburg publishing house “Znanie”, headed by M. Gorky, published the first volume of “Stories” by L. Andreev. To the ten works selected by M. Gorky for the book, the description that L. Andreev gave himself in a letter to I. Chukovsky dated July 1902 is quite applicable: “It is true that I am a philosopher, although for the most part completely unconscious (this happens); It was also correctly and wittily noted that “I replaced the typicality of people with the typicality of situations.” The latter is especially characteristic. Perhaps, to the detriment of artistry, which certainly requires strict and lively individualization, I sometimes deliberately shy away from depicting characters. It doesn’t matter to me who “he” is the hero of my stories... for all living things have the same soul, all living things suffer the same suffering and in great indifference and equality merge together before the formidable forces of life.”

In one of best stories L. ( This material will help you write competently on the topic Biography of Leonid Andreev. Story. Part 2.. The summary does not make it possible to understand the whole meaning of the work, so this material will be useful for a deep understanding of the work of writers and poets, as well as their novels, stories, stories, plays, poems.) Andreev, from those included in the first volume of his works, “In Once Upon a Time” (1901), - the dying merchant Kosheverov and the young student equally suffer from the disorder of life. However, in democratically minded circles of readers, the pessimistic notes in the works of Leonid Andreev did not give rise to pessimistic sentiments, for the revolutionary explosion of 1905 was not far off. And although in the stories of Leonid Andreev, in the words of M. Gorky, “one bare mood” prevailed, which should have been “grabbed with the spark of the public”, the democratic reader in his own way perceived the second reality of the works of Leonid Andreev. The “fatal force” crushing his “frail” heroes, in the specific conditions of the Russian liberation movement, was perceived as the oppression of the tsarist autocracy. And L. Andreev himself was sensitive to changes in the surrounding life and public sentiment. The problem of life and death, again touched upon by him in “Once upon a time,” finds a generally optimistic solution. The death of the merchant Kosheverov is only an episode in the flow of ever-renewing life. It is noteworthy that L. Andreev, on the advice of M. Gorky, ends “Stories” with the short story “Into the Dark Distance.” This is the writer’s first attempt to create the image of a contemporary hero, breaking with the musty world of everyday philistine existence and embarking on the path of revolutionary struggle. Clearly behind the times and having little knowledge of the life of professional revolutionaries, L. Andreev, when creating the image of his Nikolai Barsukov, mainly relied on his ideas about the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries of the 80s at the time of their rise among the people. The hero of the story is endowed with a halo of sacrifice, martyrdom for the hungry and disadvantaged. IN further image Barsukova will be developed by the writer in the novel “Sashka Zhegulev” (1911). And yet, the appearance of such works as “Into the dark distance in the work of Leonid Andreev on the eve of the revolution of 1905 was a promising and promising beginning.

In 1903 L. Andreev graduated big story"The Life of Vasily of Fiveysky". Having chosen him as the hero of a rural priest, the author was very far from intending to depict the life of the rural clergy in the story. Joking that he saw “living” priests only twice - at a wedding and at a funeral, L. Andreev largely replaced the “typicality of people” in “The Life of Basil of Thebes” with the “typicality of situations.” The author goes from the “essence” of the image, which he has determined in advance, to “everyday life,” which, in turn, is given to him not in its objective completeness and integrity, but is composed of individual, carefully selected features. There is no doubt that L. Andreev was least of all interested in the village priest Vasily Fiveysky as social type. For the writer, this was the most suitable model to implement creative idea works - to show the tragedy of a person who lost his old faith, but never found a new, true one. Essentially, in “The Life of Vasily Fiveysky” Leonid Andreev, in a somewhat mystified form, depicts the tragedy of the thought of a Russian intellectual looking for ways to reach the people. At a time when ferment was gripping ever wider sections of the population of Russia, when behind thousands of “scattered, hostile truths” about life, “the outlines of one great, all-resolving truth” began to emerge - the truth of the coming Revolution, Leonid Andreev’s story acquired a topical public resonance. “A big and deep thing,” - this is what M. Gorky said about “The Life of Vasily of Fiveysky”. The darkness of consciousness, not fertilized by thought, and therefore devoid of intelligence, is embodied by L. Andreev in the image of the antagonist - the son of Vasily of Thebes - a degenerate, by the way, bearing the name of his father. The illness of Vasily Fiveysky Jr. receives such a broad interpretation in the story that the abstract, symbolic content of this image completely destroys its original realistic structure from within. A continuation of the evolution of the image of the priest Vasily of Fiveysky will be the anarchist Savva from the drama of the same name by L. Andreev (1906), who tries, however unsuccessfully, to instill his personal disbelief in God into the dark, exalted crowd, frantically expecting a miracle. On the other hand, the image of Vasily Fiveysky the son, written in an expressionistic manner, will open a gallery of images-“entities” in the symbolic works of Leonid Andreev. In the story “The Life of Vasily Fiveysky” the second, “essential” reality with its close-ups, with romantic elation and pathos, is directly and declaratively opposed to realistic verisimilitude.

In general, it should be noted that the relationship between the two realities in Leonid Andreev is very complex. Sometimes they seem to overlap one another. Thus, in the story “The Thief,” the first reality is a story borrowed by the writer from the incidents section of newspapers, which hardly stood out among similar ones so that the reader’s attention would linger on it. Fleeing from persecution, the thief jumps out of the carriage of an oncoming train and falls under the wheels of an oncoming train. And L. Andreev chooses this concrete, even everyday fact from reality as an illustration of the problem of human alienation that troubled him. Rejected by “pure” society, the thief Yurasov, who was tried three times for theft, defends himself from reality by trying to escape from it into the world of his fantasy, clearly inspired by reading bourgeois novels. The collision of the imaginary and the real in the story is conveyed by juxtaposing two musical themes. The imaginary is a sensitive novel addressed to his beloved, who hums Yurasov, standing on the platform of the carriage, and the real is the rollicking tavern song “My pop-eyed Malanya,” escaping from the throats of drunkards at the station. Conflicts and contrasts of social reality in L. Andreev’s “second reality” drown in the stream of consciousness of the lonely and yearning soul of the hero of the story. Yurasov's desperate attempts to escape from his pursuers, and the sound of the train wheels, and the landscapes rushing past the windows of the carriage, and the three lanterns of the oncoming train - all this is blurred, loses its concrete outlines and turns into a nightmare dream of Yurasov's soul. Moving away from his pursuers, moving from car to car, he approaches his death in ignorance.

Under the story “La Marseillaise” there is the author’s date “August 1903.” These are embodied in artistic images impressions about real events, remaining outside of his story. From the contents of “La Marseillaise? You can get the most approximate idea of the time and place of action. The second reality of Leonid Andreev in this case does not pretend to interpret some events, but to recreate two diametrically opposed worldviews. Behind the abstract characters of “La Marseillaise” one can guess not the France of the period french revolution, but Russian reality, the struggle of social forces on the eve of the assault on the autocracy, the images of characters express not types or characters, but phenomena. The generalized, bold, strong-willed “We” of the revolutionaries (the narrator counts himself among them) is opposed to the flabby, pathetic and cowardly “I” of the petty bourgeois. If we approach the Marseillaise as realistic work, then the content of the story may even cause some confusion. In fact, what feat did the common man, a nonentity with the soul of a hare and the shameless patience of a “draft animal”, accomplish when he was put in a prison cell with the revolutionaries? Why do the revolutionaries at first despise him, and at the end of the story they call him comrade and sing “La Marseillaise” over his coffin? The second reality of the story answers this question. The whole point, it turns out,

The fact is that the little bourgeois everyman renounces his favorite philosophy, captured in his “favorite little books,” and, above all, his bourgeois “essence” (cowardice and satiety). The allegorical and general are realized in the specific. Shocked by the fortitude of the revolutionaries, the bourgeoisie in the Marseillaise joined the hunger strike they declared. Of course, there is no reason to identify the hero of the story with its author. And yet, it seems appropriate to us to quote lines from L. Andreev’s letter to the writer E. L. Bernstein dated September 1905: “You are right: I am a cruel philistine. I need a good dinner, and a nap after dinner, and much more, which Gorky, who denies philistinism not only in his thoughts, but also in his life, does well without; but I’m not capable of disgusting, I’m not capable of lying either...”1.

L. Andreev’s realistic story “No Forgiveness” (1903), which led to new repressions by the authorities on the newspaper “Courier” and subsequently the cessation of publication of the newspaper, is also dedicated to exposing the intellectual philistinism.

The Russo-Japanese War of 1904 brought to life the famous story by L. Andreev “Red Laughter”. A writer who had never seen war could know about the events on Far East only according to newspaper reports and the stories of a few eyewitnesses who returned from the theater of military operations. IN fiction, dedicated to the war, L. Andreev considered the story of Vs. to be the closest to himself on the topic. Garshin "Four Days". The rough sketches and preparations preserved in L. Andreev’s archive allow us to conclude that, perceiving any war as “madness and horror,” the writer experienced insurmountable difficulties when he tried to solve the task set for himself by means realistic art. All information available to L. Andreev about Russian-Japanese war experienced by Andreev the artist was transformed creative imagination the writer into frightening visions of the “madness and horror” of any war. However, these visionary paintings in Red Laughter were still based on real facts of the Russian-Japanese War, which ended up in the Russian press. In this sense, the comparisons of “Red Laughter” with essays and reports of war correspondents in the newspaper “ Russian word"and especially in the official publication of the War Ministry "Russian Invalid". Leonid Andreev lacked only the central collective image, which could unite all his vision paintings. This became the image of the Red Laughter, although its origin was not directly related to the war. In the summer of 1904, L. Andreev rented a dacha in the Crimea near Yalta. Here he began the initial version of the future "Red Laughter", entitled simply "War". Work proceeded from with great difficulty, what was written did not satisfy the author. And... the beauty of the southern coast of Crimea was very disturbing, so “inappropriate” and irritating to L. Andreev, whose attention was focused on the events unfolding in the Far East. At the beginning of August, an explosion occurred during construction work near L. Andreev’s dacha, and a seriously wounded worker was carried past the writer on a stretcher, whose entire face was covered in blood. This is how the image of the Red Laughter was found. The next day L. Andreev said to a literary acquaintance: “Yesterday I was at war. And I wrote a story, a big story from the war... Everything is already ready in my head.” L. Andreev intended to release “Red Laughter” separate publication and illustrate it with etchings by F. Goya “The Horrors of War”. For various reasons, mainly censorship, this publication did not materialize. “Red Laughter” appeared in the third Collection of the Knowledge Society, edited by M. Gorky. The impression the story made on readers was, as one would expect, deafening, although short-lived. The story hit my nerves, but real truth about the war still turned out to be more significant, and therefore scarier than the pictures“madness and horror” created by L. Andreev the pacifist. However, to deny the important public importance"Red Laughter" would be unfair, and among works of art about the Russian-Japanese War (“At the War” by V. Veresaev and others), L. Andreev’s story was a significant acquisition of all Russian literature.

During the revolution of 1905, Leonid Andreev spoke with ardent sympathy and enthusiasm about the “heroic struggle of the people for their freedom.” The highest achievement The whole of the writer’s work was the image of the revolutionary worker Treich, created by him in the play “To the Stars,” somewhat reminiscent of Nile in M. Gorky’s “The Bourgeois.” However, even then L. Andreev expressed doubt that the people’s struggle would be crowned with victory. In the defeat of the first Russian bourgeois-democratic revolution, the writer saw confirmation of his most gloomy forecasts. The temporary triumph of political reaction was perceived by him as proof of the indestructibility of the evil force dominating the whole world and the individual. In the midst of the bloody Stolypin “pacification”, Leonid Andreev settled in the small Finnish village of Vammelsu on the Black River. Here he builds himself a house with a high tower, which newspaper reporters dubbed the villa “White Night.” In the writer’s huge office, terrible monsters, copied by L. Andreev from F. Goya’s etchings, looked out from the walls. The play-allegory “Black Masks”, which he created in 1908, is permeated with spiritual turmoil and inescapable melancholy. But the writer did not reconcile himself with the political reaction. L. Andreev reads his works at evenings held with the aim of replenishing the illegal monetary fund in favor of former prisoners of Shlisselburg. “Among the gallows and prisons,” he pointedly refuses the invitation to participate in the official celebrations on the occasion of the opening of the monument to N.V. Gogol in Moscow in 1909.

After L. Andreev’s story “Darkness” (1907), which was rightly condemned by the democratic public, he created “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men” (1908), written under the impression that the writer was shocked by the news of the execution of a group of revolutionaries who were preparing an assassination attempt on the Tsar’s minister Shcheglovitov and betrayed by the provocateur E. Azef. With the leader of the terrorist group, the talented astronomer Vs. Lebedintsev (Werner's prototype), L. Andreev was familiar. L Andreev's heroes are revolutionaries, people of enormous courage and spiritual purity, convinced of the rightness of their cause. However, even in this story, transferring the conflict from the political to the moral and ethical level, Andreev did not reveal the essence of the revolutionaries’ cause. The writer dedicated “The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men” to L. Tolstoy and allowed its free reprint in Russia and abroad. Also in 1908, Leonid Andreev’s story “Ivan Ivanovich” was published, resurrecting one of the episodes of the December armed uprising in Moscow in 1905. But along with these works, L. Andreev creates others in which flawed, decadent tendencies take over. October revolution Leonid Andreev did not understand and did not accept, although shortly before his death he confessed to his eldest son Vadim: “Everything that we are used to, that seemed unshakable and solid to us, is turned inside out, and a new truth appears, the truth of the other side.” This is the “truth of the other side” - the truth socialist revolution did not become Leonid Andreev’s truth, but some echoes of it are palpable in the writer’s thoughts about the future of Russia. “Perhaps this is how it should be,” he wrote in one of his letters in 1918, “so that an old house Russia, musty, stinking, bug-infested, built according to the Old Testament plan, fell to the ground and thus made it possible to erect a new one majestic building, spacious and bright." In the same letter, L. Andreev expresses confidence that “the Russian people... will bring true freedom not only to themselves, but to the whole world” 2. These lines were written at a time when Leonid Andreev was working on his last work - which remained unfinished a novel-pamphlet on imperialist Europe and America on the eve of the First World War - “The Diary of Satan”, in which he pronounced the last and final verdict on the “satanic” world of private property...

If homework on the topic of: » Biography of Leonid Andreev. Story. Part 2. – artistic analysis. Andreev Leonid Nikolaevich If you find it useful, we will be grateful if you post a link to this message on your page on your social network.

Leonid Andreev's story “Biteer” is about compassion and a person’s responsibility for those he has tamed. Subsequently, this idea was formulated and presented to the world in the form of an aphorism by another master of words, French writer A. de Saint-Exupéry. The author of the story calls to feel the pain of the suffering living soul of a homeless dog.

History of creation and description of the story

The story of a stray dog is told by an outside observer. Kusaka grew up and became an adult dog despite the ruthless circumstances in which she found herself. The dog has no home and is always hungry. But the main thing that haunts her is the cruelty of people, strong people who have the opportunity to offend a weak animal. Kusaka dreams of affection and one day she dares to accept it, but as a result she gets hit in the stomach with a boot. She doesn't trust anyone anymore. One day, finding himself in the garden of someone else's dacha, the dog bites a girl who wants to pet her. This is how she meets a family of summer residents and becomes “her” dog here.

A kind attitude and daily food change not only the life, but also the character of a homeless animal. Kusaka becomes affectionate, guards the dacha and amuses the new owners with his funny joy. However, autumn comes, the girl Lelya and her family leave for the city, leaving her four-legged friend at an abandoned dacha. The story ends with the sad howl of the homeless and no longer needed Kusaka.

Main characters

L. Andreev wrote that, having done the main character In the story of the dog, he wanted to convey to the reader the idea that “all living things have the same soul,” which means they suffer equally and need compassion and love. Kusaka has a loyal heart, knows how to be grateful, is responsive to affection and is capable of love.

Another heroine of the story, the girl Lelya, on the contrary, does not value fidelity; her love is selfish and fickle. The girl could be better, she has good moral inclinations. But her upbringing is occupied by adults, for whom well-being and tranquility are more important than such “little things” as compassion and responsibility for the weak being who has trusted them.

Story Analysis

In a letter to K. Chukovsky, Leonid Andreev writes that the works included in the collection are united by one idea: to show that “all living things suffer the same suffering.” Among the heroes of the stories there are people of different classes and even a stray dog, but, as part of the “living”, they are all united by “great impersonality and equality” and are equally forced to confront the “enormous forces of life.”

The writer shows the difference between pity, mixed with momentary emotions, and real, living and active compassion. The selfishness of the girl and her family is obvious: they are glad that they were able to shelter a homeless animal. But this joy is not based on responsibility and largely comes from the considerations that a dog brightens up the country life of summer residents with its inept and unbridled display of joy. It is not surprising that pity for a homeless animal easily turns into indifference at the mere thought of the personal inconvenience of a dog living in a city house.

The story seems like it could become a story with good ending. Like those in Christmas stories. But L. Andreev aims to awaken the conscience of people, to show the cruelty of indifference to the suffering of a weak being. The writer wants a person to accept the pain of someone else’s soul as his own. Only then will he himself become kinder, closer to his high calling - to be human.

What a funny giant! Came and fell! That's funny! I was walking up the stairs, once again, caught on the threshold and fell. Such a stupid giant! Don’t come to us, giant, no one invited you, stupid giant. It was before that Dodik was naughty and ran around - but now he is so nice, so sweet, and his mother loves him so tenderly. He loves so much - he loves more than anyone, more than himself, more than life. He is her sunshine, he is her happiness, he is her joy. Now he is small, very small, and his life is short, and then he will grow up big, like a giant, he will have a big beard and mustache, big, big, and his life will be big, bright, beautiful. He will be kind, and smart, and strong, like a giant, so strong, so smart, and everyone will love him, and everyone will look at him and rejoice. There will be grief in his life, all people have grief, but there will also be great, bright joys like the sun. He will enter the beautiful and intelligent world, and the blue sky will shine above his head, and the birds will sing their songs to him, and the water will gently murmur. And he will look and say: “How good it is in the world, how good it is in the world...”

Here... Here the giant came and fell. So funny - funny - funny!