Techniques for creating comic relief in satirical stories by Mikhail Zoshchenko. Mikhail Zoshchenko: stories and feuilletons of different years The twenties through the eyes of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s heroes

Plan
1. The rise of Zoshchenko
2. Reasons for the success of Zoshchenko’s works among readers:
a) a rich biography as a source of knowledge of life;
b) the reader’s language is the writer’s language;
c) optimism helps you survive
3. The place of Mikhail Zoshchenko’s work in Russian literature
There is hardly a person who has not read a single work by Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the 20-30s, he actively collaborated in satirical magazines (“Behemoth”, “Smekhach”, “Cannon”, “The Inspector General” and others). And even then his reputation as a famous satirist was established. Under the pen of Zoshchenko, all the sad aspects of life, instead of the expected sadness or fear, cause laughter. The author himself claimed that in his stories “there is not a drop of fiction. Everything here is the naked truth.”
However, despite the resounding success among readers, the work of this writer turned out to be incompatible with the tenets of socialist realism. The notorious resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the late forties, along with other writers, journalists, and composers, accused Zoshchenko of lack of ideas and propaganda of petty bourgeois ideology.
Mikhail Mikhailovich's letter to Stalin (“I have never been an anti-Soviet person... I have never been a literary scoundrel or a low person”) remained unanswered. In 1946, he was expelled from the Writers' Union, and over the next ten years not a single book of his was published!
Zoshchenko’s good name was restored only during Khrushchev’s “thaw”.
How can one explain the unprecedented fame of this satirist?
We should start with the fact that the writer’s biography itself had a huge influence on his work. He accomplished a lot. Battalion commander, head of post and telegraph, border guard, regimental adjutant, criminal investigation agent, rabbit and chicken breeding instructor, shoemaker, assistant accountant... And this is still an incomplete list of who this man was and what he did before he sat down at the writing desk.
He saw many people who had to live in an era of great social and political change. He spoke to them in their language, they were his teachers.
Zoshchenko was a conscientious and sensitive person, he was tormented by pain for others, and the writer considered himself called to serve the “poor” (as he would later call him) man. This “poor” man personified an entire human layer of Russia at that time. Before his eyes, the revolution tried to heal the country's war wounds and realize lofty dreams. And the “poor” person at this time was forced (instead of creative work in the name of realizing this dream) to spend energy and time fighting minor everyday troubles.
Moreover: he is so busy with this that he cannot even throw off the heavy burden of the past. To open the eyes of a “poor” person, to help him - this is what the writer saw as his task.
It is very important that, in addition to a deep knowledge of the life of his hero, the writer masterfully speaks his language. Reading these stories syllable by syllable, the beginning reader is absolutely sure that the author is his own. And the place where the events unfold is so familiar and familiar (a bathhouse, a tram, a communal kitchen, a post office, a hospital). And the story itself (a fight in a communal apartment over a hedgehog (“Nervous People”), bath problems with paper numbers (“Bathhouse”), which a naked man has “nowhere to put,” a glass cracked at a funeral in the story of the same name and tea that “smells like a mop”) is also close to the audience.
As for the simple, sometimes even primitive language of his works, here is how the satirist himself wrote about it in 1929: They usually think that I distort the “beautiful Russian language”, that for the sake of laughter I take words not in the meaning given to them by life that I deliberately write in broken language in order to make the most respectable audience laugh. This is not true. I distort almost nothing. I write in the language that the street now speaks and thinks. I did this not for the sake of curiosity and not in order to more accurately copy our life. I did this in order to fill, at least temporarily, the colossal gap that occurred between literature and the street.”
Mikhail Zoshchenko's stories are kept in the spirit of the language and character of the hero on whose behalf the story is told. This technique helps to naturally penetrate into the inner world of the hero, to show the essence of his nature.
And one more significant circumstance that influenced the success of Zoshchenko’s satire. This writer seemed to be a very cheerful and never despondent person. No problems could make his hero a pessimist. He doesn't care about anything. And the fact that one citizen disgraced him with the help of cakes in front of the entire theater audience (“Aristocrat”). And the fact that “due to the crisis” he had to live with his “young wife”, child and mother-in-law in the bathroom. And the fact that I had to travel in the same compartment in a company of crazy psychos. And again nothing! Despite such constant, numerous and most often unexpected problems, it is written cheerfully.
This laughter brightened up difficult lives for readers and gave them hope that everything would be fine.
But Zoshchenko himself was a follower of the Gogol direction in literature. He believed that one should not laugh at his stories, but cry. Behind the apparent simplicity of the story, its jokes and oddities, there is always a serious problem. The writer always had a lot of them.
Zoshchenko was keenly aware of the most important issues of the time. Thus, his numerous stories about the housing crisis (“Nervous People”, “Kolpak” and others) appeared exactly at the right moment. The same can be said about the topics he raised about bureaucracy, bribery, eradication of illiteracy... In a word, about almost everything that people encountered in everyday life.
The word “everyday life” is closely associated with the concept of “everyman”. There is an opinion that Zoshchenko’s satire ridiculed the average person. That the writer created unsightly images of ordinary people to help the revolution.
In fact, Zoshchenko did not ridicule the man himself, but the philistine traits in him. With his stories, the satirist called not to fight these people, but to help them get rid of their shortcomings. And also to alleviate their everyday problems and concerns, why strictly ask those whose indifference and abuse of power undermine people’s faith in a bright future.
All Zoshchenko’s works have another amazing feature: they can be used to study the history of our country. With a keen sense of time, the writer was able to capture not just the problems that worried his contemporaries, but also the very spirit of the era.
This, perhaps, explains the difficulty of translating his stories into other languages. The foreign reader is so unprepared to perceive the life described by Zoshchenko that he often evaluates it as a genre of some kind of social fiction. In fact, how can one explain to a person unfamiliar with Russian realities the essence of, say, the story “A Case History”? Only a compatriot who knows first-hand about these problems is able to understand how a sign “Issuing corpses from 3 to 4” can hang in the emergency room. Or comprehend the nurse’s phrase “Even though the patient is sick, he also notices all sorts of subtleties. Probably, he says, you won’t recover because you’re poking your nose into everything.” Or take into account the tirade of the doctor himself (“This is, he says, the first time I’ve seen such a fastidious patient. And he, impudently, doesn’t like it, and it’s not good for him... No, I like it better when patients come to us in an unconscious state. According at least then everything is to their taste, they are happy with everything and do not enter into scientific disputes with us”).
The caustic grotesquery of this work emphasizes the incongruity of the existing situation: the humiliation of human dignity is becoming common within the walls of the most humane medical institution! And words, and actions, and attitude towards patients - everything here infringes on human dignity. And this is done mechanically, thoughtlessly - simply because it’s the way it is, it’s in the order of things, they’re so used to it: “Knowing my character, they no longer argued with me and tried to agree with me in everything. Only after bathing did they give me huge underwear that was too big for my height. I thought that out of spite they deliberately gave me such a set that didn’t measure up, but then I saw that this was a normal occurrence for them. Their little patients, as a rule, wore large shirts, and the big ones wore small ones. And even my kit turned out to be better than others. On my shirt, the hospital stamp was on the sleeve and did not spoil the general appearance, but on other patients the stamps were on the back and on the chest, and this morally humiliated human dignity.”
Most often, the satirical works of this writer are constructed as simple and artless narratives of the hero about one or another episode from life. The story is similar to an essay, a report in which the author did not invent anything, but simply, having noticed this or that episode, pedantically told about it with the diligence of an attentive and ironic journalist. That is why Zoshchenko's stories, unlike the action-packed short stories of O'Henry or Arkady Averchenko, are built not on an unexpected turn of events, but on revealing unforeseen aspects of character.
Mikhail Zoshchenko left a rich literary heritage. More than 130 books were published during his lifetime. These are more than a thousand stories, feuilletons, novels, plays, scripts... But, in addition to his books, Zoshchenko left behind a more extensive “legacy”, laying (along with his contemporaries - Mikhail Bulgakov, Arkady Bukhov, Arkady Averchenko, Mikhail Koltsov and many others) the basics of the Russian satirical story genre. And the widespread development of this direction is confirmed today.
Thus, “Zoshchenkovsky’s hero” found an undoubted continuation in the image of the narrator - a “lumpen intellectual” in “Moscow-Petushki” by Venedikt Erofeev, in the prose of Yuz Aleshkovsky, E. Popov, V. Pietsukh. In all of these writers, the traits of an “intellectual” and a “hard worker”, the language of the cultural layer and the common people, collide in the structure of the narrator.
Continuing the analysis of Zoshchenko's traditions in literature and art, one cannot help but turn to the work of Vladimir Vysotsky (in his songs the image of the hero-storyteller of songs is promising).
Equally obvious analogies can be traced when analyzing the work of Mikhail Zhvanetsky. It overlaps with Zoshchenkov’s in many ways. Let us first note the similarity of aphoristic constructions, citing several phrases as evidence: “In general, art is falling.” “Therefore, if anyone wants to be well understood here, he must say goodbye to world fame.” “It’s very surprising how some people don’t like living.” “We must adequately respond to the well-founded, although groundless, complaints of foreigners - why are your people gloomy.” “They say that money is stronger than anything in the world. Nonsense. Nonsense". “A person of weak mind can criticize our life.”
The odd phrases belong to Zoshchenko, the even ones to Zhvanetsky (which, as you can see, is revealed not without effort). Zhvanetsky continued Zoshchenko’s work on the rehabilitation of the “common man” with his ordinary everyday interests, his natural weaknesses, his common sense, his ability to laugh not only at others, but also at himself.
...Reading the works of Zoshchenko, reflecting on them, we, of course, remember Gogol and Saltykov-Shchedrin. Laughter through tears is in the tradition of Russian classical satire. Behind the cheerful text of his stories there is always a voice of doubt and anxiety. Zoshchenko always believed in the future of his people, valued them and worried about them.
Analysis of the poem by Robert Rozhdestvensky
"The Ballad of Talent, God and the Devil"
Robert Rozhdestvensky entered literature together with a group of talented peers, among whom E. Yevtushenko, B. Akhmadulina, A. Voznesensky stood out. Readers were primarily captivated by the civic and moral pathos of these varied lyrics, which affirm the personality of the creative person at the center of the Universe.
Analyzing “The Ballad of Talent, God and the Devil,” we see that the very first lines of the work pose an important question: “Everyone says: “His talent is from God!” What if it's from the devil? What then?..”
From the very first stanzas, the image of talent appears before us in two ways. This is both talent - in the sense of unusual human abilities and qualities, and talent as the person himself, endowed with such a gift. Moreover, at first the poet describes his hero in a completely everyday and prosaic way: “... And talent lived. Sick. Ridiculous. Frowning". These short, abrupt sentences, each consisting of a single adjective, have enormous potential for emotional impact on the reader: the strength of tension when moving from one sentence to another increases more and more.
In the “everyday” characteristics and descriptions of the everyday life of the talent, any sublimity is completely absent: “The talent got up, scratching himself sleepily. I found my lost identity. And he needed a jar of cucumber pickle more than nectar.” And since all this clearly happens in the morning, the reader is intrigued: what has the person been doing so far? It turns out that after listening to the devil’s monologue (“Listen, mediocrity! Who needs your poems now?! After all, you, like everyone else, will drown in the hellish abyss. Relax!..”), he simply goes “to the tavern. And relaxes!”
In subsequent stanzas, the poet again and again uses a technique that is already familiar to us, using the word in several meanings and thereby significantly increasing the emotional tension: “He drank with inspiration! He drank so much that the devil looked and was touched. Talent talentedly ruined itself!..” This linguistic device, based on the combination of seemingly paradoxically incompatible words in meaning and style (talentedly ruined) creates vivid and strong images for the reader, allows them to be made as painfully tragic as possible.
The tension is growing. The second half of “Ballad...” is permeated with bitter pathos and hope. It tells how the talent worked - “Evil, fierce. Dipping the pen into my own pain.” This theme, consistently developing further, sounds on an increasingly poignant note: “Now he was a god! And he was a devil! And this means: he was himself.”
Tensions reach their climax. Here is the answer to the eternal question: is talent from God or from the devil? True talent is both its own god and its own devil. Once again, the combination of opposites gives us the opportunity to look at the world with different eyes, to see it not in unambiguous categories of “white - black”, but in all its many colors.
After this culmination, the author again “descends” to the earth, to the images of the spectators who observed the process of creation. Both God and the devil are attributed here with completely human, and, moreover, unexpected actions. This is how they reacted to the success of the talent: “God was baptized. And God cursed. “How could he write such a thing?!” ...And he still couldn’t do that.”
How everyday and simple the last line sounds! There are no stylistic excesses, the vocabulary is the most colloquial. But in this simplicity lies the power with which the poet expresses the main idea of ​​the work: true talent can control everything. The phrase is spoken as if in a quiet voice, but he is so confident in the justice of what was said that there is no need for pathos, loudness, or declamation. Everything seems to go without saying, and this is the great truth...
The truth of war in the works of Yu. Bondarev
The theme of war is inexhaustible. More and more new works are appearing, which again and again force us to return to the fiery events of more than fifty years ago and see in the heroes of the Great Patriotic War what we have not yet sufficiently understood and appreciated. At the turn of the fifties and sixties, a whole galaxy of names well known to readers today appeared: V. Bogomolov, A. Ananyev, V. Bykov, A. Adamovich, Yu. Bondarev...
The work of Yuri Bondarev has always been dramatic and dramatic. The most tragic event of the twentieth century - the war against fascism, the inescapable memory of it - permeates his books: “Battalions Ask for Fire”, “Silence”, “Hot Snow”, “The Shore”. Yuri Vasilyevich belongs to the generation for which the Great Patriotic War became the first baptism of life, a harsh school of youth.
The basis of Yuri Bondarev’s creativity was the theme of the high humanism of the Soviet soldier, his vital responsibility for our present day. The story “Battalions Ask for Fire” was published in 1957. This book, as well as the subsequent ones, seemingly logical continuations of it (“Last Salvos,” “Silence” and “Two”) brought the author wide fame and recognition from readers.
In “Battalions...” Yuri Bondarev managed to find his own current in the broad literary stream. The author does not strive for a comprehensive description of the picture of the war - he bases the work on a specific combat episode, one of many on the battlefields, and populates his story with very specific people, privates and officers of the great army.
Bondarev's image of war is menacing and cruel. And the events described in the story “Battalions Ask for Fire” are deeply tragic. The pages of the story are full of high humanism, love and trust in people. It was here that Yuri Bondarev began to develop the theme of mass heroism of the Soviet people; later it received its most complete embodiment in the story “Hot Snow.” Here the author spoke about the last days of the Battle of Stalingrad, about the people who stood in the way of the Nazis to their death.
In 1962, Bondarev’s new novel “Silence” was published, and soon its sequel, the novel “Two,” was published. The hero of “Silence” Sergei Vokhmintsev has just returned from the front. But he cannot erase the echoes of recent battles from his memory. He judges the actions and words of people by the highest standard - the measure of front-line friendship, military camaraderie. In these difficult circumstances, in the struggle to establish justice, the hero’s civic position becomes stronger. Let us recall the works of Western authors (Remarque, Hemingway) - in this literature the motif of the alienation of yesterday's soldier from the life of today's society, the motif of the destruction of ideals, is constantly heard. Bondarev's position on this issue gives no reason for doubt. At first, it’s also not easy for his hero to get into a peaceful rut. But it was not in vain that Vokhmintsev went through the harsh school of life. He again and again, like the heroes of other books by this writer, asserts: the truth, no matter how bitter it may be, is always the same.

There is hardly a person who has not read a single work by Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the 20-30s, he actively collaborated in satirical magazines (“Behemoth”, “Smekhach”, “Cannon”, “The Inspector General” and others). And even then his reputation as a famous satirist was established. Under the pen of Zoshchenko, all the sad aspects of life cause laughter instead of the expected sadness or fear. The author himself claimed that in his stories “there is not a drop of fiction. Everything here is the naked truth.”

However, despite the resounding success among readers, the work of this writer turned out to be incompatible with the tenets of socialist realism. The notorious resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the late forties, along with other writers, journalists, and composers, accused Zoshchenko of lack of ideas and propaganda of petty bourgeois ideology.

Mikhail Mikhailovich's letter to Stalin (“I have never been an anti-Soviet person... I have never been a literary scoundrel or a low person”) remained unanswered. In 1946, he was expelled from the Writers' Union, and over the next ten years not a single book of his was published.

Zoshchenko’s good name was restored only during Khrushchev’s “thaw”.

How can one explain the unprecedented fame of this satirist?

We should start with the fact that the writer’s biography itself had a huge influence on his work. He accomplished a lot. Battalion commander, head of post and telegraph, border guard, regimental adjutant, criminal investigation agent, rabbit and chicken breeding instructor, shoemaker, assistant accountant. And this is not a complete list of who this man was and what he did before he sat down at the writing table.

He saw many people who had to live in an era of great social and political change. He spoke to them in their language, they were his teachers.

Zoshchenko was a conscientious and sensitive person, he was tormented by pain for others, and the writer considered himself called to serve the “poor” (as he later calls him) man. This “poor” man personifies an entire human layer of Russia at that time.

The writer made the “poor” person not only the object, but, more importantly, the subject of the story. The hero of Zoshchenko’s stories was the most ordinary man in the street, a representative of the urban lower classes, not familiar with the heights of Russian culture, but at the same time brought to the forefront of life by the course of history, suddenly becoming everything from nothing. Zoshchenko practically became an exponent of the structure of feelings, life principles and mindsets of this social environment. It was her speech that sounded from the pages of Zoshchenkov’s stories.

These citizens of the new revolutionary Russia quite quickly mastered revolutionary phraseology, but were never able to overcome the inertia of previous habits and ideas. It was these “little people” who made up the majority of the country’s population who were enthusiastic about the task assigned to them of destroying the bad old, but who did not know how to start building a good new one or who understood this construction primarily as satisfying their own needs that were infringed before the revolution - it was these people who did not stand out in any way became the subject of Zoshchenko’s primary attention.

Interest in this type of hero, new to literature, led, in turn, to the search for an appropriate style of writing, easily accessible, and, moreover, “native” to the reader. Reading these stories syllable by syllable, the novice reader is absolutely sure that the author is his own.

And the place where the events unfold is so familiar and familiar (a bathhouse, a tram, a communal kitchen, a post office, a hospital). And the story itself (a fight in a communal apartment over a hedgehog (“Nervous People”), bath problems with paper numbers (“Bathhouse”), which a naked man has “nowhere to put,” a glass cracked at a funeral in the story of the same name and tea that “smells like a mop”) is also close to the audience.

Hence the increased attention to skaz, which soon became an indispensable feature of the artist’s individual style.

“I never wrote how birds sing in the forest,” Zoshchenko recalled. - I went through formal training. New tasks and a new reader forced me to turn to new forms. It was not out of aesthetic needs that I took the forms with which you see me. The new content dictated to me exactly the form in which it would be most beneficial for me to present the content.” Almost all critics who wrote about Zoshchenko noted his fabulous style, masterfully reproducing the language of the modern street.” Here is what Zoshchenko himself wrote in 1929: “They usually think that I distort the “beautiful Russian language”, that for the sake of laughter I take words in a meaning other than the meaning given to them in life, that I deliberately write in broken language in order to make the most venerable the public. It's right. I distort almost nothing. I write in the language that the street now speaks and thinks. I did this not for the sake of curiosity and not in order to more accurately copy our life. I did this in order to fill, at least temporarily, the gap that occurred between literature and the street.

Zoshchenko's stories are kept in the spirit of the language and character of the hero on whose behalf the story is told. This technique helps to naturally penetrate into the inner world of the hero, to show the essence of his nature.

In order to present the central character of Zoshchenko's stories in full growth, it is necessary to compose his portrait from those sometimes small and almost never specially emphasized dashes and touches that are scattered throughout individual stories. When comparing them, connections are revealed between seemingly distant works. Zoshchenko’s big theme with its own cross-cutting character is revealed not in any one work, but in the entire work of the satirist, as if in parts.

This is how, for example, the story is told about how the narrator, Nikolai Ivanovich, a friend, suffered unjustly (the story “A Regrettable Incident”).

He once took a ticket to the cinema. True, I was a little drunk at the time. But you have to understand that it was Saturday afternoon. Nikolai Ivanovich sits in the front row and calmly watches a movie. “Only, maybe he looked at one inscription and suddenly went to Riga. That’s why it’s very warm in the hall, the audience is breathing, and the darkness has a beneficial effect on the psyche.

Our Nikolai Ivanovich went to Riga, everything is decorous - nobly - he doesn’t bother anyone, he can’t grab the screen with his hands, he doesn’t unscrew the light bulbs, but he sits and quietly goes to Riga ... "

The hero also behaves “noble” further. Even with the cashier who refuses to return his money for an unwatched film, he is extremely polite. “If someone else were in Nikolai Ivanovich’s place, he would have dragged the cashier out of the cash register by the hair and returned his pure ones. And Nikolai Ivanovich is a quiet and cultured man, only maybe he shoved the cashier.”

As a result, Nikolai Ivanovich was taken to the police station and was fined three rubles.

The hero of Zoshchenkov's stories has very definite and firm views on life. Confident in the infallibility of his own views and actions, he is perplexed and surprised every time he gets into trouble. But at the same time, he never allows himself to be openly indignant and indignant: he is too passive for this. That is why Zoshchenko refused to directly oppose his own views to the hero’s views and chose a much more complex and difficult path of exposing the narrator indirectly, by the very method of his portrayal. The attention he constantly paid to honing the “technique” of writing is indicative: in the conditions of everyday magazine and newspaper work, when he had to write several stories and feuilletons a week and when the topics of most of them were determined by the editorial assignment, its role increased especially noticeably.

That is why an analysis of the artistic originality of Zoshchenko’s work will be incomplete without talking about the main features of this “technique”, individual techniques for achieving a comic effect and the artistic functions of these techniques directly in the text of the works. Of course, the task is not at all to show that Zoshchenko, like many other writers working in the field of satire, used the technique of unexpected resolution of the plot situation, and the technique of “playing out” details, and numerous ways of achieving purely linguistic, sometimes “linguistic” comedy ... All these techniques, as well as many others, were known long before Zoshchenko.

The peculiarities of Zoshchenko’s use of them are, first of all, that he transformed the techniques of the comic in general into techniques of the comic within his own system, in this case skaz.

The tale, by its very nature, is dual. Skaz - 1) A method of narration focused on the reproduction of live, oral speech, imitation of an improvisational story that is born before the eyes of the reader. A tale is always “alien” speech, a narrative mask behind which you need to see the author’s face. Zoshchenko's plot also carries a double burden. From the author's point of view, it is important primarily as a means of revealing characters. From the point of view of the narrator - in itself, as a real incident from life. This is exactly how the episode of visiting the theater in the company of an “aristocrat”, and the story of the cracked glass, and the incident with the unwatched movie are described. The author's point of view is hidden inside the tale. At the same time, the narrator's point of view is deliberately “protruded.” That is why, in terms of their external, “primary” perception, events are depicted each time as a completely specific story, a participant or witness of which the hero was and for the authenticity of which, as well as for the truthfulness of the sanctified, he is ready to vouch.

For all its specificity, the hero’s story almost always acts as a particular illustration on a general theme.

“For some reason, citizens, there are a lot of thieves these days. There is a rod all around indiscriminately. It’s impossible to find a person right now from whom nothing was stolen.

My suitcase was also recently taken away before reaching Zhmerinka...” this is how the story “Thieves” begins. “What is this, citizens, happening on the family front? Husbands have to work in uniform. Especially those whose, you know, wife is busy with advanced issues.

Just now, you know what a boring story. Come home. I enter the apartment. For example, I knock on my own door, but they don’t open...” - this is the beginning of the story “The Husband.” It is easy to see that there is a general pattern. The story about how the hero was robbed is preceded by discussions about theft in general. The story of a husband who does not know what to do in front of a closed door is preceded by discussions about the situation on the “family front” in general. Each time this narrator tries to elevate a single fact to the rank of widespread and, from his point of view, completely normal phenomena; by this he immediately strives to set the listener (reader) to a very definite perception of the fact. But the futility of such attempts is obvious as one gets acquainted directly with the events themselves. The listener has a feeling of inconsistency, incommensurability between the general reasoning preceding the story and the particular case and, as a consequence of this, a very definite, negative attitude towards the narrator’s claims to the infallibility of judgments.

When reading Zoshchenko’s stories, it is striking that the narrator, be it an “average person” (“Wonderful Rest”) or a “non-party tradesman” (“Husband”). Mostly completely serious. But on the other hand, the contours of the events passed through his consciousness are involuntarily exaggerated and shifted.

Thus, irony, by establishing a distance between the author and the narrator, destroys the illusion of the identity of their views. At the same time, plot irony is each time complemented by linguistic irony.

In his memoirs about Zoshchenko, K. Chukovsky wrote about the language of the characters in Zoshchenko’s stories: “The illogicality, tongue-tiedness, clumsiness, and impotence of this bourgeois jargon is also reflected, according to Zoshchenko’s observations, in the idiotic repetitions of the same word, stuck in wretched minds. It is necessary, for example, for Zoshchenko’s tradesman to tell his readers that one woman was traveling to the city of Novorossiysk, he conducts his story like this: “... and, by the way, she is riding in this carriage, among others, such a general (!) little woman. Such a young woman with a child.

She has a child in her arms. So she goes with him. She goes with him to Novorossiysk..."

The word Novorossiysk is repeated five times, and the word goes (are going) nine times, and the narrator cannot get rid of his poor little thought, which has been stuck in his head for a long time. If Chukovsky, citing Zoshchenkov’s quotation, draws attention to the narrator’s tongue-tiedness, then Stanislav Rassadin believes that a system is visible behind this tongue-tiedness. Zoshchenko is not at all busy with the shorthand recording of train vocabulary. The hero-narrator needs a repetitive phrase about Novorossiysk to the point of stupefaction because he needs a pole walking through an unfamiliar swamp along a narrow road. And the narrator uses this support in the same way as they use a pole - he pushes off from it. Moves forward with pushes.

Zoshchenkov's character is not able to immediately and completely convey his feeling. His unsteady thought does not mark time, no, but makes its way forward with great difficulty and uncertainty, stopping for corrections, clarifications and digressions.”

All Zoshchenko’s works have another amazing feature: they can be used to study the history of our country. With a keen sense of time, the writer was able to capture not just the problems that worried his contemporaries, but also the very spirit of the era.

This perhaps explains the difficulty of translating his stories into other languages. The foreign reader is so unprepared to perceive the life described by Zoshchenko that he often evaluates it as a genre of some kind of social fiction. Indeed, how can one explain to a person unfamiliar with Russian realities the essence of, say, the story “Case History.” Only a compatriot who knows first-hand about these problems is able to understand how a sign “Issuing corpses from 3 to 4” can hang in the emergency room.

CONCLUSION

Following life, reality in the choice of characters and themes of his works, moving away from his noble, officer past and from the literary continuation of this past in his own writings, Zoshchenko purposefully followed the path of a people's writer. At the same time, observing the mass of people newly emerging in public life, he did not idealize this people, but paid tribute to them with his satire. However, he could not take the position of an author-mentor, portraying and condemning people from the outside; he could not find himself in a lordly position over the people, no matter how they appeared before his eyes. This is how Zoshchenko’s true democracy manifested itself. And so the need arose to invent our own form of satire, unprecedented in literature. Zoshchenko’s talent and human kindness were brilliantly expressed in this literary discovery, where he seemed to identify himself, the author, with these people he ridiculed. And now, without separating himself from this people, he received the fullest right to ridicule them, to subject them to his merciless satire.

This approach to exposing reality is not new. Here is an excerpt from a brilliant article by the famous film director G. Kozintsev, “The Folk Art of Charlie Chaplin”, written half a century ago: “... only one character in King Lear sees a ripening plague through the imaginary calm of the state. This character is a buffoon.

What kings, generals, statesmen see about what they see. He is the only person who can tell the truth. He has the right to speak because he tells the truth with a joke. He's wearing a jester costume!

Having put on this “suit”, this mask of a comic character, Zoshchenko was able to speak about the “plague” that he deeply saw and felt around him. It was not his fault that he was not heard and understood. The eyes of society were then obscured by the red color of banners, flags, slogans, and the ears were filled with the bravura brass of the orchestras...

Truly: there is no prophet in his own country. But the widespread superficial understanding of his work made it possible for two decades of an open, public life for both Zoshchenko’s stories and an outwardly prosperous existence for himself.

This cannot be said about the works of M. Bulgakov and his fate as a writer.

M.A. Bulgakov stands out among the undeservedly forgotten, “banned” writers. However, time, which previously seemed to work against Bulgakov, dooming him to oblivion, seemed to turn its face towards him, marking the rapid growth of literary recognition.

Interest in Bulgakov's work in our time is much higher than in previous years. How can this phenomenon be explained? Probably because the world of formalism, soulless democracy, self-interest, immoral businessmen and careerists is opposed by Bulgakov to the world of eternal values: historical truth, creative search, conscience. When Bulgakov’s story “Fatal Eggs,” not the writer’s first satirical work, was published in 1925, one of the critics remarked: “Bulgakov wants to become a satirist of our era.”

Now, perhaps, no one will deny that Bulgakov became a satirist of our era. And the most outstanding one too. And this despite the fact that he did not want to become one at all. The era itself made him a satirist. By the nature of his talent he was a lyricist. Everything he wrote went through his heart. Every image he created carries his love or hatred, admiration or bitterness, tenderness or regret. When you read Bulgakov's books, you inevitably become infected with these feelings of his. With satire, he only “snarls” at all the bad things that were born and multiplied before his eyes, from which he himself more than once had to fight off and which threatened the people and the country with serious troubles. He was disgusted by bureaucratic forms of managing people and the life of society as a whole, and bureaucracy was taking ever deeper roots in all spheres of social life.

He could not stand violence - neither against himself nor against other people. And over the time of war communism, it was used more and more widely and was primarily directed against the breadwinner of the country - the peasant - and against the intelligentsia, which he considered the best part of the people.

He saw the main misfortune of his “backward country” in lack of culture and ignorance, and both, with the destruction of the intelligentsia, despite the “cultural revolution” and the elimination of illiteracy, did not decrease, but, on the contrary, penetrated into the state apparatus and into those layers societies which, by all accounts, should have constituted his intellectual milieu.

And he rushed into battle to defend that “reasonable, good, eternal” that the best minds and souls of the Russian intelligentsia sowed in their time and that was now discarded and trampled underfoot in the name of the so-called class interests of the proletariat.

Bulgakov had his own creative interest in these battles. They kindled his imagination and sharpened his pen. And even the fact that criticism responded to the thin sword of his satire with a cudgel did not deprive him of either humor or courage. But he never entered into such fights out of pure passion, as often happened with satirists and humorists. He was invariably guided by anxiety and pain for that good and eternal thing that was lost by people and the country along the path along which they did not walk of their own free will. That is why, in the tenth year of his work, in the conditions of flourishing Stalinism, his works were banned. But for the same reason, when six decades later it was returned to readers, it turned out that these works not only were not outdated, but turned out to be more topical than many, many modern works written on the most pressing topic of the day.

Bulgakov's creative world is fantastically rich, diverse, and full of all kinds of surprises. Not a single one of his novels, not a single story or play fits into the patterns we are accustomed to.

They are perceived and interpreted differently by different people. Each attentive reader has his own Bulgakov. Let everyone who enters Bulgakov's world take at least a small share of his wealth. They are inexhaustible and now, thank God, they are open to everyone.

It is not easy to identify signs of the new, to embody the content of life in memorable artistic images. Is it easier to reveal negative trends, to show not only what we still, by inertia, call remnants of the past, but also the shortcomings of our own growth? In a word, what has received the figurative name of “bait.”

In the hierarchy of modern literary genres and genres, especially if you look at them from a historical perspective, satirical genres are destined for a place somewhere at the bottom. They are assigned a subordinate role, a very modest one, close to a gradually disappearing value. How else? A time will come when only remnants will remain, and then they will not exist. What's a satirist to do? Faith is as noble as it is naive. With this approach, the law of unity and struggle of opposites is violated, the dialectical position on the negation of negation is consigned to oblivion. For internal opposites are a property of the structure of any object or process.

The nature of the connection and interaction between opposites is revealed in its own way by the art of satire.

The hope for the quick extinction of satire will apparently have to wait. Satire is an organic property of any great art, and it is immortal. The growth of material well-being, as is known, does not automatically entail an increase in moral dignity. Sometimes the relationship can be reversed. After all, there is a test of poverty, and there is a test of satiety. In our time, conflicts arise that are no less acute than in the 20s and 30s, when the struggle was between class opponents.

Nowadays these are not antagonistic contradictions, but the intensity and severity of their manifestation is not much less, especially when it comes to the struggle of high morality and intelligence with lack of spirituality, of ethical and aesthetic values ​​with vulgarity, no longer covered by polished wardrobes, but by references to Kafka or surrealism.

Tarasevich Valentina

Among the masters of Soviet satire and humor, a special place belongs to Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958). His works still attract the attention of readers. After the writer's death, his stories, feuilletons, novellas, and comedies were published about twenty times with a circulation of several million copies.

Mikhail Zoshchenko perfected the style of comic tale, which had rich traditions in Russian literature. He created an original style of lyrical and ironic storytelling in stories of the 20s-30s.

Zoshchenko's humor attracts with its spontaneity and non-triviality.

In his works, Zoshchenko, unlike modern satirical writers, never humiliated his hero, but, on the contrary, tried to help a person get rid of vices. Zoshchenko's laughter is not laughter for the sake of laughter, but laughter for the sake of moral cleansing. This is precisely what attracts us to the work of M.M. Zoshchenko.

How does a writer manage to create a comic effect in his works? What techniques does he use?

This work is an attempt to answer these questions and analyze the linguistic means of comedy.

Thus, purpose My work was to identify the role of linguistic means of creating the comic in the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko.

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Regional scientific and practical conference for high school students

“Into the world of search, into the world of creativity, into the world of science”

Techniques for creating comics

in satirical stories

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Municipal educational institution "Ikei Secondary School"

Tarasevich Valentina.

Head: teacher of Russian language and literature Gapeevtseva E.A.

2013

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………3

Chapter I. 1.1 Zoshchenko is a master of the comic………………………………………………………………...….6

1.2 Hero Zoshchenko……………………………………………………………………………….7

Chapter II. Language means of the comic in the works of M. Zoshchenko……………….….7

2.1. Classification of speech comic means……………………………………….………7

2.2. Means of comedy in the works of Zoshchenko………………………………………….…9

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...15

List of references………………………………………………………...16

Appendix 1. Survey results…………………………………………….…….17

Appendix 2. Techniques for creating comic……………………………………….……..18

Introduction

The origins of satire lie in ancient times. Satire can be found in works of Sanskrit literature and Chinese literature. In ancient Greece, satire reflected intense political struggle.

As a special literary form, satire was first formed among the Romans, where the name itself appeared (Latin satira, from satura - an accusatory genre in ancient Roman literature of an entertaining and didactic nature, combining prose and poetry).

In Russia, satire first appears in folk oral literature (fairy tales, proverbs, songs of guslars, folk dramas). Examples of satire are also known in ancient Russian literature (“The Prayer of Daniil the Zatochnik”). The aggravation of social struggle in the 17th century puts forward satire as a powerful accusatory weapon against the clergy ("Kalyazin Petition"), bribery of judges ("Shemyakin Court", "The Tale of Ruff Ershovich"), etc. Satire in Russia in the 18th century, as in Western Europe , develops within the framework of classicism and takes on a moralizing character (satires by A.D. Kantemir), develops in the form of a fable (V.V. Kapnist, I.I. Khemnitser), comedy (“The Minor” by D.I. Fonvizin, “The Yabeda” V.V. Kapnista). Satirical journalism is widely developed (N.I. Novikov, I.A. Krylov, etc.). Satire reached its greatest flowering in the 19th century, in the literature of critical realism. The main direction of Russian social satire of the 19th century was given by A.S. Griboyedov (1795-1829) in the comedy “Woe from Wit” and N.V. Gogol (1809-1852) in the comedy “The Inspector General” and in “Dead Souls”, exposing the basic foundations of landowner and bureaucratic Russia. The fables of I.A. are imbued with satirical pathos. Krylov, a few poems and prose works by A.S. Pushkin, poetry by M.Yu. Lermontova, N.P. Ogarev, Ukrainian poet T.G. Shevchenko, dramaturgy by A.N. Ostrovsky. Russian satirical literature was enriched with new features in the second half of the 19th century in the works of writers - revolutionary democrats: N.A. Nekrasova (1821-1877) (poems “The Moral Man”), N.A. Dobrolyubov, as well as poets of the 60s, grouped around the satirical magazine Iskra. Inspired by love for the people and high ethical principles, satire was a powerful factor in the development of the Russian liberation movement. Satire reaches unsurpassed political acuteness in the work of the great Russian satirist - revolutionary democrat M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), who exposed bourgeois-landlord Russia and bourgeois Europe, the arbitrariness and stupidity of the authorities, the bureaucratic apparatus, the excesses of the serf owners, etc. (“Messrs. Golovlevs”, “The History of a City”, “Modern Idyll”, “Fairy Tales”, etc.). In the 80s, during the era of reactions, satire reached great strength and depth in the stories of A.P. Chekhov (1860-1904). Revolutionary satire, persecuted by censorship, sounds passionately in the pamphlets of M. Gorky (1868-1936), directed against imperialism and bourgeois pseudo-democracy ("American Essays", "My Interviews"), in the stream of satirical leaflets and magazines of 1905-1906, in the feuilletons of the Bolshevik newspaper "Pravda". After the Great October Socialist Revolution, Soviet satire was aimed at fighting the class enemy, bureaucracy, and capitalist remnants in people's minds.

Among the masters of Soviet satire and humor, a special place belongs to Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958). His works still attract the attention of readers. After the writer's death, his stories, feuilletons, novellas, and comedies were published about twenty times with a circulation of several million copies.

Mikhail Zoshchenko perfected the style of comic tale, which had rich traditions in Russian literature. He created an original style of lyrical and ironic storytelling in stories of the 20s-30s.

Zoshchenko's humor attracts with its spontaneity and non-triviality.

In his works, Zoshchenko, unlike modern satirical writers, never humiliated his hero, but on the contrary tried to help a person get rid of vices. Zoshchenko's laughter is not laughter for the sake of laughter, but laughter for the sake of moral cleansing. This is precisely what attracts us to the work of M.M. Zoshchenko.

How does a writer manage to create a comic effect in his works? What techniques does he use?

This work is an attempt to answer these questions and analyze the linguistic means of comedy.

Thus, the goal My work was to identify the role of linguistic means of creating the comic in the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko.

To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:

Study the linguistic means of comics.

Analyze the linguistic features of Zoshchenko’s stories.

Find out what role comic devices play in the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko.

Hypothesis our research work:

To create a comic effect, Mikhail Zoshchenko uses special linguistic means in his stories.

I was prompted to do research on this topic by my interest in the work of Mikhail Zoshchenko, in the nature of the comic, and simply in new discoveries. In addition, the survey revealed that many of my peers do not know the theory of the techniques of creating comics, they find it difficult to name the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, although they like to read humorous and satirical literary works. (Annex 1)

Thus, despite relevance topic, it has an undeniable novelty for the students of our school. Novelty The results obtained is that, within the framework of a small study, we tried to identify the most striking and frequently used techniques for creating the comic, used by Mikhail Zoshchenko in his satirical stories.

Research methods: sociological (survey - questioning, non-survey - analysis of documents, observation, comparison, counting, analysis and synthesis.), theoretical (linguistic, literary criticism). The choice of research methods is optimal, as it corresponds to the specifics of the work.

Chapter I. Zoshchenko - master of the comic

Mikhail Zoshchenko perfected the style of comic tale, which had rich traditions in Russian literature. He created an original style - a lyrical and ironic narrative in stories of the 20s-30s. and the cycle of “Sentimental Stories”.

The work of Mikhail Zoshchenko is a unique phenomenon in Russian Soviet literature. The writer, in his own way, saw some of the characteristic processes of contemporary reality, brought out under the blinding light of satire a gallery of characters who gave rise to the common concept of “Zoshchenko’s hero.” Being at the origins of Soviet satirical and humorous prose, he became the creator of an original comic novella, which continued the traditions of Gogol, Leskov, and early Chekhov in new historical conditions. Finally, Zoshchenko created his own, completely unique artistic style.

Developing the original form of his own story, he drew from all these sources, although the Gogol-Chekhov tradition was closest to him.

Zoshchenko would not be himself if not for his writing style. It was a language unknown to literature, and therefore did not have its own spelling. His language breaks, scooping up and hyperbolizing all the painting and improbability of street speech, the infestation of “storm-ravaged everyday life.”

Zoshchenko is endowed with absolute pitch and a brilliant memory. Over the years spent in the midst of poor people, he managed to penetrate the secret of their conversational structure, with its characteristic vulgarisms, incorrect grammatical forms and syntactic structures, managed to adopt the intonation of their speech, their expressions, turns of phrase, words - he studied this language to the subtleties and from the very first steps in literature I began to use it easily and naturally. In his language one could easily encounter such expressions as “plitoir”, “okromya”, “creepy”, “this”, “in it”, “brunette”, “dragged”, “for the bite”, “why cry”, “ this poodle”, “a dumb animal”, “at the stove”, etc.

But Zoshchenko is a writer not only of a comic style, but also of comic situations. Not only his language is comical, but also the place where the story of the next story unfolded: a wake, a communal apartment, a hospital - everything is so familiar, personal, everyday familiar. And the story itself: a fight in a communal apartment over a hedgehog in short supply, a row at a wake over a broken glass.

Some phrases from the writer’s works have remained in Russian literature as aphorisms: “as if the atmosphere suddenly smelled on me”, “they will pick you up like a stick and throw you away for their dear ones, even though they are their own relatives”, “the second lieutenant is wow, but a bastard”, “ causing disturbances."

Zoshchenko, while writing his stories, chuckled himself. So much so that later, when I read stories to my friends, I never laughed. He sat gloomy, gloomy, as if not understanding what there was to laugh about. Having laughed while working on the story, he later perceived it with melancholy and sadness. I perceived it as the other side of the coin. If you listen carefully to his laughter, it is not difficult to discern that the carefree and humorous notes are only a background for the notes of pain and bitterness.

1.2. Hero Zoshchenko

Zoshchenko's hero is an everyman, a man with poor morals and a primitive outlook on life. This man in the street personified an entire human layer of the Russia of that time. Zoshchenko, in many of his works, tried to emphasize that this man in the street often spent all his strength fighting all sorts of minor everyday troubles, instead of actually doing something for the good of society. But the writer did not ridicule the man himself, but the philistine traits in him. “I combine these characteristic, often shaded features in one hero, and then the hero becomes familiar to us and seen somewhere,” Zoshchenko wrote.

With his stories, Zoshchenko seemed to be calling not to fight people who bear philistine traits, but to help them get rid of these traits.

In satirical stories, the characters are less rude and uncouth than in humorous short stories. The author is interested, first of all, in the spiritual world, the system of thinking of an outwardly cultured, but even more so essentially disgusting, bourgeois.

Chapter II. Language means of the comic in the works of M. Zoshchenko

2.1. Classification of means of speech comedy

All comic means can be divided into several groups, among which are those formed by phonetic means; means formed by lexical means (tropes and the use of vernacular, borrowings, etc.); means formed by morphological means (incorrect use of case forms, gender, etc.); means formed by syntactic means (use of stylistic figures: parallelism, ellipsis, repetitions, gradation, etc.) (Appendix 2)

Phonetic means include, for example, the use of spelling irregularities, which helps authors give a capacious portrait of the narrator or hero.

Stylistic figures include anaphora, epiphora, parallelism, antithesis, gradation, inversion, rhetorical questions and appeals, polyunion and non-union, silence, etc.

Syntactic means - default, rhetorical questions, gradation, parallelism and antithesis.

Lexical means include all tropes as figurative and expressive means, as well as puns, paradoxes, ironies, and alogisms.

These are epithets - “words that define an object or action and emphasize some characteristic property or quality in them.”

Comparisons are the comparison of two phenomena in order to explain one of them with the help of the other.

Metaphors are words or expressions that are used figuratively based on the similarity in some respect of two objects or phenomena.

To create a comic effect, hyperboles and litotes are often used - figurative expressions containing an exorbitant exaggeration (or understatement) of size, strength, meaning, etc.

Irony also refers to lexical means. Irony is “the use of a word or expression in the opposite sense to its literal meaning for the purpose of ridicule.”

In addition, lexical means also include allegory, personification, periphrasis, etc. All of these means are paths.

However, only tropes do not completely determine the lexical means of creating comedy. This should also include the use of colloquial, special (professional), borrowed or dialect vocabulary. The author builds the entire monologue and the entire comic situation on the special vocabulary used by thieves in law, but at the same time it is familiar to most of the population: “there is no need to shaggy grandma,” “there will be no will for a century,” etc.

We include the so-called grammatical, or rather morphological, means in cases where the author deliberately incorrectly uses grammatical categories in order to create comedy.

Use of colloquial forms such as evony, ikhny, etc. can also be classified as grammatical means, although in the full sense these are lexico-grammatical means.

Pun [fr. calembour] - a play on words based on deliberate or involuntary ambiguity generated by homonymy or similarity of sound and causing a comic effect, for example: “I’m rushing, exactly like that; // But I’m moving forward, and you’re rushing while sitting” (K. Prutkov)

Alogism (from a - negative prefix and Greek logismos - reason) - 1) denial of logical thinking as a means of achieving truth; irrationalism, mysticism, fideism oppose logic to intuition, faith or revelation - 2) in stylistics, a deliberate violation of logical connections in speech for the purpose of stylistic (including comic) effect.

Paradox, - a, m. (book). - 1. A strange statement that diverges from generally accepted opinion, as well as an opinion that contradicts (sometimes only at first glance) common sense. Speak in paradoxes. 2. A phenomenon that seems incredible and unexpected, adj. paradoxical.

2.2. Means of comedy in the works of Zoshchenko

Having examined the comic in the works of Zoshchenko, in the work we will dwell on the most striking, in our opinion, means of the comic, such as puns, alogism, redundancy of speech (tautology, pleonasm), the use of words in an unusual meaning (the use of colloquial forms, incorrect use of grammatical forms, the creation an unusual synonymous series, a clash of colloquial, scientific and foreign vocabulary), since they are the most commonly used.

2.2.1. Pun as a means of creating comedy

Among the favorite speech devices of Zoshchenko the stylist is a pun, a play on words based on homonymy and polysemy of words.

In the “Dictionary of the Russian Language” by S.I. Ozhegov the following definition is given: “A pun is a joke based on the comic use of words that sound similar but have different meanings.” In the “Dictionary of Foreign Words” edited by I.V. Lekhin and Professor F.N. Petrov we read: “A pun is a play on words based on their sound similarity with different meanings.”

In a pun, laughter occurs when the more general meaning of a word is replaced in our minds by its literal meaning. In creating a pun, the main role is played by the ability to find and apply the specific and literal meaning of a word and replace it with the more general and broader meaning that the interlocutor has in mind. This skill requires a certain talent, which Zoshchenko possessed. In order to create puns, he uses the convergence and collision of literal and figurative meanings more often than the convergence and collision of several meanings of a word.

“Here you are, citizens, asking me, was I an actor? Well, there was. He played in theaters. Touched this art.”

In this example, taken from the story “Actor,” the narrator, using the word touched, uses it in a figurative, metaphorical meaning, i.e. “I was involved in the world of art.” At the same time, touching also has the meaning of incomplete action.

Zoshchenko’s puns often show duality in understanding the meaning.

“I was right at the same point with this family. And he was like a member of the family” (“Great Society History”, 1922).

“At least I am an unilluminated person” (“Great Society History”, 1922).

In the speech of the narrator Zoshchenko, there are numerous cases of replacing the expected word with another, consonant, but distant in meaning.

So, instead of the expected “family member”, the narrator says a member of the family name, “unenlightened person” - a person not illuminated, etc.

2.2.2. Alogism as a means of creating comedy

The main feature of Zoshchenko’s technique for creating verbal comedy is alogism. The basis of alogism as a stylistic device and a means of creating a comic is the lack of logical expediency in the use of various elements of speech, from speech to grammatical constructions; verbal comic alogism arises as a result of a discrepancy between the logic of the narrator and the logic of the reader.

In “Administrative Delight” (1927), antonyms create discord, for example:

“But the fact is that [a pig] has wandered in and is clearly disturbing the public order.”

Disorder and order are words with opposite meanings. In addition to the substitution of the word, the compatibility of the verb violate with nouns is broken here. According to the norms of the Russian literary language, one can “violate” rules, order, or other norms.

“Now we’ll draw up an act and move the matter downhill.”

Obviously, in the story “The Watchman” (1930) we mean not downhill (i.e. “down”), but uphill (“forward, improve the situation”). The antonymic substitution in - under creates a comic effect.

Discord and discord also arise due to the use of non-literary forms of words. For example, in the story “The Groom” (1923):

“And here, my brothers, my woman is dying. Today she, let's say, has collapsed, but tomorrow she feels worse. The brandite is thrown around and falls from the stove.”

Brandit is a non-literary form of the verb "to rave". In general, it should be noted that there are many non-literary forms in Zoshchenko’s stories: brandite instead of “delirious” (“The Groom”, 1923), they are starving instead of starving (“Devil’s Man”, 1922), let’s lie down instead of “lying down” (“Bad Place”, 1921), cunning instead of cunning (“Bad Place”), by the way instead of by the way (“Motherhood and Infancy”, 1929), I ask instead of ask (“Great Society Story”), hello instead of hello (“Victoria Kazimirovna”), whole instead of whole (“Velikosvetskaya history"), skeleton instead of skeleton ("Victoria Kazimirovna"), flow instead of flow ("Great History").

“We spent a whole year with him just wonderfully.”

“And he walks all in white, like some kind of skeleton.”

“My hands are already mutilated - the blood is flowing, and now it stings.”

2.2.3. Redundancy of speech as a means of creating comedy

The speech of the narrator's hero in Zoshchenko's comic tale contains a lot of unnecessary things; it suffers from tautology and pleonasms.

Tautology - (Greek tautología, from tauto - the same and lógos - word), 1) repetition of the same or similar words, for example, “clearer than clear,” “cries, filled with tears.” In poetic speech, especially in oral folk art, tautology is used to enhance the emotional impact. Tautology is a type of pleonasm.

Pleonasm - (from the Greek pleonasmós - excess), verbosity, the use of words that are unnecessary not only for semantic completeness, but usually also for stylistic expressiveness. It is classified as a stylistic “figure of addition”, but is considered as an extreme, turning into a “flaw of style”; the border of this transition is unsteady and is determined by the sense of proportion and taste of the era. Pleonasm is common in colloquial speech (“I saw it with my own eyes”), where it, like other addition figures, serves as one of the forms of natural redundancy of speech. The tautological nature of the language of the narrator-hero Zoshchenko can be judged by the following examples:

“In a word, she was a poetic person who could smell flowers and nasturtiums all day long” (“Lady with Flowers”, 1930)

“And I committed a criminal offense” (“High Society History”, 1922)

“The old prince, Your Excellency, was killed to death, and the lovely Pole Victoria Kazimirovna was dismissed from the estate” (“Great Society History”, 1922)

“The bastard almost strangled him by the throat” (“A minor incident from his personal life”, 1927)

“And the diver, Comrade Filippov, fell deeply and too much in love with her” (“The Story of a Student and a Diver”)

2.2.4. Using words with unusual meanings

Non-literary words create comic effects, and the heroes are perceived by readers as uneducated ordinary people. It is language that gives a picture of the hero’s social status. This replacement of a literary standardized word form with a non-literary, dialectal one is used by Zoshchenko to show that the narrator, who criticizes others for ignorance, is ignorant himself. For example:

“Her boy is a sucking mammal” (“High Society History”, 1922)

“I haven’t seen you, son of a bitch, for seven years... Yes, I’m you, you brat...” (“You don’t need to have relatives”)

Often, comparing Soviet with foreign leads to the inclusion of foreign words and even entire sentences in foreign languages. Particularly effective in this regard is the alternation of Russian and foreign words and phrases with the same meaning, for example:

“The German kicked his head, they say, bite-dritte, please take it away, what are we talking about, it’s a pity or something” (“Product Quality”, 1927).

“Put on a new blues tunic” (“Victoria Kazimirovna”)

Or the use of foreign words in the Russian context:

“It’s either lorigan or rose” (“Product Quality”, 1927).

The use of words in an unusual meaning makes the reader laugh; the creation of a synonymous series that is unusual for the reader serves as a means of creating a comic effect. So, for example, Zoshchenko, violating the normative literary language, creates synonymous series, such as a printed organ - a newspaper ("Cannibal", 1938), a photographic card - face - muzzle - physiognomy ("Guests", 1926), inclusions in a common network - connection electricity ("The Last Story"), a child - an object - a shibzdik ("Incident", "Happy Childhood"), front, hind legs - arms, legs ("The Story of a Student and a Diver"), a woman - a young woman ("An Incident" ).

“Instead of tearing up the printed organ, you would have taken it and reported it to the editor.”

“It was later discovered that he had been cheated on his photographic card, and he walked around with gumboil for three weeks.”

“And, by the way, she’s riding in this carriage, among others, such a little woman. Such a young woman with a child.”

“Some kind of idiot, about ten years old, is sitting there.” ("Happy childhood")

2.2.5. Paradox as a means of creating comedy

Paradox - (Greek parádoxos - “contrary to common opinion”) - an expression in which the conclusion does not coincide with the premise and does not follow from it, but, on the contrary, contradicts it, giving an unexpected and unusual interpretation of it (for example, “I will believe what anything, as long as it is completely incredible" - O. Wilde). The paradox is characterized by brevity and completeness, bringing it closer to an aphorism, emphasized sharpness of the formulation, bringing it closer to a play on words, a pun, and, finally, unusual content, contrary to the generally accepted interpretation of this problem, which is affected by the paradox. Example: “All smart people are fools, and only fools are smart.” At first glance, such judgments are meaningless, but some meaning can be found in them; it may even seem that some particularly subtle thoughts are encrypted through paradox. The master of such paradoxes was Mikhail Zoshchenko.

For example: “Yes, wonderful beauty,” said Vasya, looking with some amazement at the peeling plaster of the house. - Indeed, very beautiful...”

2.2.6. Irony as a means of creating comedy

Irony is very close to paradox. Determining it is not very difficult. If, in paradox, concepts that exclude each other are united despite their incompatibility, then in irony, one concept is expressed in words, but another concept, opposite to it, is implied (but not expressed in words). The positive is expressed in words, but the negative opposite is understood. In this way, irony allegorically reveals the shortcomings of the one (or what) they are talking about. It represents one of the types of ridicule, and this is also what determines its comedy.

By the fact that a disadvantage is indicated through its opposite advantage, this disadvantage is highlighted and emphasized. Irony is especially expressive in oral speech, when its means is a special mocking intonation.

It happens that the situation itself forces you to understand a word or phrase in a sense that is directly opposite to the generally known one. The pompous expression “the audience is over” when applied to the watchman emphasizes the absurdity and comicality of the situation being described: “Then the watchman finished his water, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and closed his eyes, wanting to show that the audience was over” (“Night Incident”)

“Now, he says, all my ambition has been crushed into blood.” ("Patient")

2.2.7. A clash of different styles

The speech of the narrator in Zoshchenko's works is divided into separate lexical units belonging to different styles. The clash of different styles in the same text speaks of a certain person who is illiterate, impudent and funny. At the same time, it is interesting to note that Zoshchenko managed to create stories and novellas in which almost incompatible, even mutually exclusive lexical series can exist very close to each other, they can literally coexist in one phrase or a character’s remark. This allows the author to freely maneuver the text and provides the opportunity to sharply, unexpectedly turn the narrative in a different direction. For example:

“They make a lot of noise, but the German is certainly quiet, and it was as if the atmosphere suddenly hit me.” ("High Society History")

“The prince, Your Excellency, just vomited a little, jumped to his feet, shook my hand, was delighted.” ("High Society History")

“There’s one without a hat, a long-maned fellow, but not a priest.” (“A minor incident from my personal life”)

Conclusion

Over more than three decades of work in literature, Zoshchenko has come a long and difficult way. There were undoubted successes and even genuine discoveries along this path that promoted him to the ranks of the greatest masters of Soviet literature. There were also equally undeniable miscalculations. Today it is very clear that the satirist’s creativity flourished in the 20s - 30s. But it is equally obvious that Zoshchenko’s best works from these seemingly distant years are still close and dear to the reader. Dear because the laughter of the great master of Russian literature today remains our faithful ally in the struggle for a person free from the heavy burden of the past, from the self-interest and petty calculations of the acquirer.

In the course of our work, we came to the following conclusions:

Verbal means of creating a comic, namely alogism, stylistic substitutions and displacements, a clash of several styles, often even in one sentence, are a fairly productive comic means and are based on the principle of emotional-style contrast.

The narrator Zoshchenko is the very subject of satire; he betrays his squalor, sometimes naivety, sometimes simple-mindedness, sometimes petty-bourgeois pettiness, without realizing it, as if absolutely involuntarily and therefore incredibly funny.

Zoshchenko's satire is not a call to fight people who bear philistine traits, but a call to fight these traits.

Zoshchenko's laughter is laughter through tears.

List of used literature

1. Alexandrova, Z.E. Dictionary of synonyms Russian. language /Ed. L.A. Cheshko. / Z.E. Alexandrova. - 5th ed., stereotype. M.: Rus.yaz., 1986. 600 p.
2. Zoshchenko M.M. Works: In 5 volumes. M.: Enlightenment, 1993.
3. Zoshchenko M.M. Dear Citizens: Parodies. Stories. Feuilletons. Satirical notes. Letters to the writer. One-act plays. M., 1991. (From the press archive).
4. Mikhail Zoshchenko. Materials for a creative biography: Book 1 / Rep. ed. ON THE. Groznova. M.: Education, 1997.
5. Ozhegov, S.I. and Shvedova, N.Yu. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. / S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova // Russian Academy of Sciences Instrument of the Russian language; Russian Cultural Foundation. M: Az Ltd., 1992. 960 p.
6. Chukovsky K. From memories. - Sat. "Mikhail Zoshchenko in the memoirs of his contemporaries." M.: Enlightenment, pp. 36-37.
7. www.zoschenko.info
8. en.wikipedia.org

Appendix 1. Survey results

A total of 68 people took part in the survey.

Question No. 1.

Yes - 98%.

No - 2%.

Question No. 2.

What techniques for creating comics do you know?

Comparison - 8 people.

Metaphor - 10 people.

Epithets - 10 people.

Hyperbole - 12 people.

Allegory - 2 people.

Discrepancy - 3 people.

Surprise - 8 people.

Irony - 21 people.

Question #3

What stories by M. Zoshchenko have you read?

Glass - 24 people. Galosh - 36 people. Incident on the Volga - 8 people. Stupid story - 12 people. Stories about Lelya and Minka - 11 people. .Meeting - 7 people.

Appendix 2. Techniques for creating a comic

Mikhail Zoshchenko is the creator of countless stories, plays, and film scripts, and is incredibly adored by readers. However, his true popularity was given to him by small humorous stories published in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers - in Literary Week, Izvestia, Ogonyok, Krokodil and some others.

Zoshchenko's humorous stories were included in his various books. In new combinations, each time they forced us to look at ourselves in a new way: sometimes they appeared as a cycle of stories about darkness and ignorance, and sometimes as stories about small acquirers. Often they were about those who were left out of history. But they were always perceived as sharply satirical stories.

Russian satirical writers in the 20s were particularly bold and frank in their statements. All of them were heirs of Russian realism of the 19th century. The name of Mikhail Zoshchenko is on a par with such names in Russian literature as A. Tolstoy, Ilya Ilf and Evgeniy Petrov, M. Bulgakov, A. Platonov.

The popularity of M. Zoshchenko in the 20s could be the envy of any venerable writer in Russia. But his fate later developed harshly: Zhdanov’s criticism, and then a long oblivion, after which the “discovery” of this wonderful writer for the Russian reader again followed. Zoshchenko began to be mentioned as an author who wrote for the entertainment of the public. Now we know well that Zoshchenko was a talented and serious writer of his time. It seems to me that for every reader Zoshchenko reveals his own special facet. It is known that many were perplexed when "Adventures of the Monkey" incurred the wrath of Soviet cultural officials. But the Bolsheviks, in my opinion, had already developed a sense of their antipodes. A. A. Zhdanov, criticizing and destroying Zoshchenko, who ridiculed the stupidity and stupidity of Soviet life, against his own will, recognized in him a great artist who posed a danger to the existing system. Zoshchenko did not directly, not directly, ridicule the cult of Bolshevik ideas, but with a sad smile protested against any violence against the individual. It is also known that in his prefaces to the editions of “Sentimental Stories”, with the proposed misunderstanding and distortion of his work, he wrote: “Against the general background of enormous scale and ideas, these stories are about small, weak people and ordinary people, this book about a miserable passing life is really , one must assume, will sound to some critics like some kind of shrill flute, some kind of sentimental offensive tripe.” It seems to me that Zoshchenko, by saying this, was defending himself from future attacks on his work.

One of the most significant, in my opinion, stories in this book is “What the Nightingale Sang About.” The author himself said about this story that it is “... perhaps the least sentimental of sentimental stories.” Or again: “And that in this work of vivacity, perhaps some may find there is not enough vivacity, this is not true. There is vivacity here. Not over the top, of course, but there is.” I believe that they could not accept such cheerfulness as the satirical writer offered to the clergy without irritation. The story “What the Nightingale Sang About” begins with the words: “But” they will laugh at us in three hundred years! It’s strange, they will say, how the little people lived. Some will say they had money, passports. Some acts of civil status and square meters of living space..."

It is clear that the writer with such thoughts dreamed of a world more worthy for man. His moral ideals were aimed at the future. It seems to me that Zoshchenko acutely felt the callousness of human relationships, the vulgarity of the life around him. This is evident from the way he reveals the theme of the human personality in a small story about “true love and genuine awe of feelings,” about “absolutely extraordinary love.” Tormented by thoughts about a future better life, the writer often doubts and asks the question: “Will it be wonderful?” And then he draws the simplest, most common version of such a future: “Perhaps everything will be free, for nothing. Let’s say, they will sell some fur coats or mufflers in Gostiny Dvor for nothing.” Next, the writer begins to create the image of the hero. His hero is the simplest person, and his name is ordinary - Vasily Bylinkin. The reader expects that the author will now begin to make fun of his hero, but no, the author seriously talks about Bylinkin’s love for Liza Rundukova. All actions that accelerate the gap between lovers, despite their ridiculousness (the culprit is a chest of drawers not given to the bride’s mother), I believe, are still a serious family drama. For Russian satirical writers, in general, drama and comedy exist side by side. Zoshchenko seems to be telling us that while people like Vasily Bylinkin, when asked: “What is the nightingale singing about?” - they will answer: “He wants to eat, that’s why he sings,” - we won’t see a worthy future. Zoshchenko does not idealize our past either. To be convinced of this, just read the Blue Book. The writer knows how much vulgar and cruel humanity has left behind, so that one can immediately free oneself from this legacy. But I believe that the combined efforts of the satirical writers of the 20s and 30s, in particular those whom I named at the beginning of my essay, have significantly brought our society closer to a more dignified life.

The same thing happened with the heroes of Zoshchenko’s stories: to a modern reader they may seem unreal, completely invented. However, Zoshchenko, with his keen sense of justice and hatred of the militant philistinism, never deviated from the real vision of the world. Who is Zoshchenko's satirical hero? What is its place in modern society? Who is the object of mockery, contemptuous laughter?

Thus, using the example of some of his stories, one can establish the themes of the writer’s satire. In "Hard Times" the main character is a dense, uneducated man with a violent, primordial judgment about freedom and rights. When he is forbidden to bring a horse into the store, which absolutely needs a fitting of a collar, he complains: “What a time. The horse is not allowed into the store... But just now we were sitting in the pub - and for the life of us. No one said a word. The manager I even personally laughed sincerely... What a time.”

Russian satirical writers in the 1920s were particularly bold and frank in their statements. All of them were heirs of Russian realism of the 19th century.

The popularity of M. Zoshchenko in the 20s could be the envy of any venerable writer in Russia. But his fate later developed harshly: Zhdanov’s criticism, and then a long oblivion, after which the “discovery” of this wonderful writer for the Russian reader again followed. Zoshchenko began to be mentioned as a writer who wrote for the entertainment of the public. It is known that many were perplexed when “Adventures of the Monkey” incurred the wrath of Soviet cultural officials. But the Bolsheviks had already developed a sense of their antipodes. A. A. Zhdanov, criticizing and destroying Zoshchenko, who ridiculed the stupidity and stupidity of Soviet life, against his own will, guessed in him a great artist who poses a danger to the existing system. Zoshchenko did not directly, not directly, ridicule cult of Bolshevik ideas, and with a sad smile protested against any violence against the individual. It is also known that in his prefaces to the editions of “Sentimental Stories”, with the proposed misunderstanding and distortion of his work, he wrote: “Against the general background of enormous scale and ideas, these stories are about small, weak people and ordinary people, this book about a miserable passing life is really , one must assume, will sound to some critics like some kind of shrill flute, some kind of sentimental offensive tripe.”

One of the most significant stories in this book is “What the Nightingale Sang About.” The author himself said about this story that it is “... perhaps the least sentimental of sentimental stories.” Or again: “And what may seem to some to be a little invigorating in this essay is not true. There is vivacity here. Not over the top, of course, but there is.”

“But” they will laugh at us in three hundred years! It’s strange, they will say, how the little people lived. Some will say they had money, passports. Some acts of civil status and square meters of living space..."

His moral ideals were aimed at the future. Zoshchenko felt acutely callousness of human relationships, the vulgarity of the life around him. This is evident from the way he reveals the theme of human personality in a small story about “true love and genuine awe of feelings,” about “absolutely extraordinary love.” Tormented by thoughts about a future better life, the writer often doubts and asks the question: “Will it be wonderful?” And then he draws the simplest, most common version of such a future: “Maybe everything will be free, for nothing. Let’s say they’ll sell some fur coats or mufflers in Gostiny Dvor for nothing.” Next, the writer begins to create the image of the hero. His hero is the simplest person, and his name is ordinary - Vasily Bylinkin. The reader expects that the author will now begin to make fun of his hero, but no, the author seriously talks about Bylinkin’s love for Liza Rundukova. All actions that accelerate the gap between lovers, despite their ridiculousness (the culprit is a chest of drawers not given to the bride's mother) are a serious family drama. For Russian satirical writers, in general, drama and comedy exist side by side. Zoshchenko seems to be telling us that while people like Vasily Bylinkin, when asked: “What is the nightingale singing about?” - they will answer: “He wants to eat, that’s why he sings,” - we will not see a worthy future. Zoshchenko does not idealize our past either. To be convinced of this, just read the Blue Book. The writer knows how much vulgar and cruel humanity has left behind, so that one can immediately free oneself from this legacy. True fame was brought to him by the small humorous stories that he published in various magazines and newspapers - in Literary Week, Izvestia, Ogonyok, Krokodil and many others.

Zoshchenko's humorous stories were included in his various books. In new combinations, each time they forced us to look at ourselves in a new way: sometimes they appeared as a cycle of stories about darkness and ignorance, and sometimes - like stories about small acquirers. Often they were about those who were left out of history. But they were always perceived as sharply satirical stories.

Years have passed, things have changed living conditions our lives, but even the absence of those numerous everyday details in which the characters in the stories existed did not weaken the power of Zoshchenko’s satire. It’s just that earlier the terrible and disgusting details of everyday life were perceived only as a cartoon, but today they have acquired the features of the grotesque and phantasmagoria.

The same thing happened with the heroes of Zoshchenko’s stories: to a modern reader they may seem unreal, completely invented. However, Zoshchenko, with his keen sense of justice and hatred for militant philistinism, never strayed from the real vision of the world.

Even using the example of several stories, one can determine the objects of the writer’s satire. In Hard Times, the main character is a dark, ignorant man with a wild, primitive idea of ​​​​freedom and rights. When he is not allowed to bring a horse into the store, which definitely needs to be fitted with a collar, he complains: “What a time. Horse to the store "They don't allow it... And just now we were sitting with her in a beer hall - and at least not a word. No one said a word. The manager even personally laughed sincerely... What a time."

A related character appears in the story “Point of View.” This is Yegorka, who, when asked whether there are many “conscious women,” declares that there are “not enough of them at all.” Or rather, he remembered one: “And that one is unknown how... (Maybe it will end.” The most conscious turns out to be a woman who, on the advice of some healer, took six unknown pills and is now near death.

In the story “The Capital Thing,” the main character, Leshka Konovalov, is a thief posing as an experienced person. [At a meeting in the village, he was considered a worthy candidate for the position of chairman: after all, he had just arrived from the city (“... I spent two years in the city”). Everyone takes him for [a sort of “metropolitan thing” - no one knows what he did there. However, Leshka’s monologue gives him away: “You can talk... Why not say it when I know everything... I know the decree or whatever the order and note are. Or, for example, the code... I know everything. For two years, maybe, I was rubbing myself... It used to be that I was sitting in a cell, and they were running towards you. Explain, they say, Lesha, what kind of note and decree this is.”

It is interesting that not only Lesha, who served two years in Kresty, but also many other heroes of Zoshchenko’s stories are in complete confidence that they know absolutely everything and can judge everything. Savagery, obscurantism, primitiveness, some kind of militant ignorance- these are their main features.

However, the main object of Zoshchenko’s satire was a phenomenon that, from his point of view, posed the greatest danger to society. This blatant, triumphant philistinism. It appears in Zoshchenko’s work in such an unsightly form that the reader clearly feels the need to immediately combat this phenomenon. Zoshchenko shows it comprehensively: both from the economic side, and from the point of view of morality, and even from the position of simple bourgeois philosophy.

The true hero Zoshchenko appears before us in all his glory in the story “The Groom”. This is Yegorka Basov, who has suffered a great misfortune: his wife has died. What a bad time! “It was, of course, a hot time - here you can mow, carry here, and collect bread.” What words does his wife hear from him before his death? “Well... thank you, Katerina Vasilievna, you cut me without a knife. They decided to die at the wrong time. Be patient... until the fall, and die in the fall.” As soon as his wife died, Yegorka went to woo another woman. And what, again a misfire! It turns out that this woman is lame, which means she is an inferior housewife. And he takes her back, but doesn’t take her home, but dumps her property somewhere halfway. The main character of the story is not just a man crushed by poverty and need. This is a person with the psychology of an outright scoundrel. He is completely devoid of elementary human qualities and is primitive to the last degree. The features of a tradesman in this image are raised to a universal scale.

And here is a story on the philosophical topic “Happiness”. The hero is asked if there was happiness in his life. Not everyone will be able to answer this question. But Ivan Fomich Testov knows for sure that in his life “there was definitely happiness.” What was it? And the fact is that Ivan Fomich managed to install mirror glass in the tavern at a high price and drink the money he received. And not only! He even “made some purchases: he bought a silver ring and warm insoles.” The silver ring is clearly a tribute to aesthetics. Apparently, from satiety - it’s impossible to drink and eat everything. The hero does not know whether this happiness is big or small, but he is sure that it is happiness, and he will “remember it for the rest of his life.”

In the story “A Rich Life,” a bookbinder wins five thousand on a gold loan. In theory, “happiness” suddenly fell on him, like Ivan Fomich Testov. But if he fully “enjoyed” the gift of fate, then in this case the money brings discord into the family of the protagonist. There is a quarrel with relatives, the owner himself is afraid to leave the yard - he is guarding the firewood, and his wife is addicted to playing lotto. And yet the artisan dreams: “What is this all about... Will there be a new raffle soon? It would be nice for me to win a thousand for good measure..." Such is the fate limited and petty person- dreaming about something that still won’t bring you joy, and not even guessing why.

Among his heroes it is easy to meet ignorant talker-demagogues who consider themselves the guardians of some ideology, and “connoisseurs of art” who, as a rule, demand that their ticket money be returned to them, and most importantly, the endless, indestructible and all-conquering “terry” philistines. The accuracy and sharpness of each phrase is amazing. “I write about philistinism. Yes, we don’t have philistinism as a class, but for the most part I make a collective type. Each of us has certain traits of a tradesman, an owner, and a money-grubber. I combine these characteristic, often shaded features in one hero, and then this hero becomes familiar to us and seen somewhere.”

Among the literary heroes of prose of the 20s, the characters in M. Zoshchenko's stories occupy a special place. An infinite number of small people, often poorly educated, not burdened with the burden of culture, but who realized themselves as “hegemons” in the new society. M. Zoshchenko insisted on the right to write about “an individual insignificant person.” It was the “little people” of modern times, who make up the majority of the country’s population, who were enthusiastic about the task of destroying the “bad” old and building the “good” new. Critics did not want to “recognize” a new person in M. Zoshchenko’s heroes. Regarding these characters, they either talked about the anecdotal refraction of the “old”, or about the writer’s conscious emphasis on everything that prevents the Soviet person from becoming “new”. Sometimes they reproached that he brought out not so much a “social type, but a primitively thinking and feeling person in general.” Among the critics there were also those who accused Zoshchenko of contempt for the “new man born of the revolution.” The far-fetched nature of the heroes was beyond doubt. I really didn’t want to connect them with a new life. Zoshchenko's characters are immersed in everyday life.

Zoshchenko’s military past (he volunteered for the front at the very beginning of the war, commanded a company, then a battalion, was awarded four times for bravery, was wounded, poisoned with poisonous gases, which resulted in a heart defect) was partly reflected in the stories of Nazar Ilyich, Mr. Sinebryukhov (A High Society Story).