What is typical for prose? Prose genres

The 1830s are the heyday of Pushkin’s prose. Among the prose works at this time, the following were written: “Stories of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin, published by A.P.” , “Dubrovsky”, “The Queen of Spades”, “The Captain’s Daughter”, “Egyptian Nights”, “Kirdzhali”. There were many other significant plans in Pushkin’s plans.

"Belkin's Tales" (1830)- Pushkin’s first completed prose works, consisting of five stories: “The Shot”, “The Blizzard”, “The Undertaker”, “The Station Agent”, “The Young Lady-Peasant”. They are preceded by a preface “From the publisher”, internally connected with “The history of the village of Goryukhino” .

In the preface “From the Publisher,” Pushkin took on the role of publisher and publisher of Belkin’s Tales, signing his initials “A.P.” The authorship of the stories was attributed to the provincial landowner Ivan Petrovich Belkin. I.P. Belkin, in turn, put on paper the stories that other people told him. Publisher A.P. reported in a note: “In fact, in the manuscript of Mr. Belkin, above each story, the author’s hand is inscribed: I heard from such and such person(rank or rank and capital letters of the first and last name). We write out for curious researchers: “The Caretaker” was told to him by the titular adviser A.G.N., “The Shot” - by Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P., “The Undertaker” - by the clerk B.V., “Blizzard” and “The Young Lady” - girl K.I.T.” Thus, Pushkin creates the illusion of the actual existence of I.P.’s manuscript. Belkin with his notes, attributes authorship to him and seems to document that the stories are not the fruit of Belkin’s own invention, but actually happened stories that were told to the narrator by people who actually existed and were known to him. Having indicated the connection between the narrators and the content of the stories (the girl K.I.T. told two love stories, Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. - a story from military life, clerk B.V. - from the life of artisans, titular adviser A.G.N. . - a story about an official, the caretaker of a postal station), Pushkin motivated the nature of the narrative and its very style. It was as if he had removed himself from the narrative in advance, transferring the author's functions to people from the provinces, who talked about different aspects of provincial life. At the same time, the stories are united by the figure of Belkin, who was a military man, then retired and settled in his village, visited the city on business and stopped at postal stations. I.P. Belkin thus brings together all the storytellers and retells their stories. This arrangement explains why the individual style that makes it possible to distinguish the stories of, for example, the girl K.I.T., from the story of Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. does not appear. Belkin's authorship is motivated in the preface by the fact that a retired landowner, trying his pen at leisure or out of boredom, and being moderately impressionable, could actually hear about the incidents, remember them and write them down. Belkin's type was, as it were, put forward by life itself. Pushkin invented Belkin to give him a word. Here is found that synthesis of literature and reality, which during the period creative maturity Pushkin became one of his literary aspirations.

It is also psychologically certain that Belkin is attracted to spicy stories, stories and incidents, anecdotes, as they would say in the old days. All stories belong to people of the same level of worldview. Belkin as a storyteller is spiritually close to them. It was very important for Pushkin that the story be told not by the author, not from the position of high critical consciousness, but from the point of view of an ordinary person, amazed at the events, but not giving himself a clear account of their meaning. Therefore, for Belkin, all stories, on the one hand, go beyond the boundaries of his usual interests and feel extraordinary, on the other hand, they highlight the spiritual immobility of his existence.

The events that Belkin narrates look truly “romantic” in his eyes: they have everything - duels, unexpected accidents, happy love, death, secret passions, cross-dressing adventures and fantastic visions. Belkin is attracted by a bright, varied life, which stands out sharply from the everyday life in which he is immersed. Extraordinary events took place in the destinies of the heroes; Belkin himself did not experience anything like this, but the desire for romance lived in him.

Entrusting the role of the main narrator to Belkin, Pushkin, however, is not removed from the narrative. What seems extraordinary to Belkin, Pushkin reduces to the most ordinary prose of life. And vice versa: the most ordinary plots turn out to be full of poetry and conceal unforeseen turns in the destinies of the heroes. Thus, the narrow boundaries of Belkin’s view are expanded immeasurably. So, for example, Belkin’s poverty of imagination acquires a special semantic content. Even in his imagination, Ivan Petrovich does not escape from the nearest villages - Goryukhino, Nenaradovo, and the towns located near them. But for Pushkin, such a disadvantage also contains dignity: wherever you look, in provinces, districts, villages, everywhere life proceeds the same way. The exceptional cases told by Belkin become typical thanks to Pushkin's intervention.

Due to the fact that the presence of Belkin and Pushkin is revealed in the stories, their originality clearly appears. The stories can be considered a “Belkin cycle”, because it is impossible to read the stories without taking into account the figure of Belkin. This allowed V.I. Tyupe following M.M. Bakhtin put forward the idea of ​​double authorship and two-voice speech. Pushkin’s attention was drawn to the double authorship, since the full title of the work is “Tales of the Deceased Ivan Petrovich Belkin, published by A.P.” . But it must be borne in mind that the concept of “double authorship” is metaphorical, since there is still only one author.

This is the artistic and narrative concept of the cycle. The author’s face peeks out from under Belkin’s mask: “One gets the impression of a parodic opposition of Belkin’s stories to established norms and forms of literary reproduction.<…>...the composition of each story is permeated with literary allusions, thanks to which in the structure of the narrative there is a continuous transposition of everyday life into literature and vice versa, a parodic destruction of literary images by reflections of real reality. This is a bifurcation artistic reality, closely associated with epigraphs, that is, with the image of the publisher, puts contrasting touches on the image of Belkin, from whom the mask of a semi-intelligent landowner falls away, and instead of it appears the witty and ironic face of a writer who destroys the old literary forms of sentimental-romantic styles and embroiders on the old literary canvas new bright realistic patterns."

Thus, Pushkin's cycle is permeated with irony and parody. Through parody and ironic interpretation of sentimental, romantic and moralizing subjects, Pushkin moved towards realistic art.

At the same time, as E.M. wrote. Meletinsky, in Pushkin, the “situations”, “plots” and “characters” played out by the heroes are perceived through literary clichés by other characters and narrators. This “literature in everyday life” constitutes the most important prerequisite for realism.

At the same time, E.M. Meletinsky notes: “In Pushkin’s short stories, as a rule, one unheard-of event is depicted, and the denouement is the result of sharp, specifically novelistic turns, a number of which are carried out in violation of the expected traditional patterns. This event is covered from different sides and points of view by “narrators-characters”. Moreover, the central episode is quite sharply contrasted with the initial and final ones. In this sense, “Belkin’s Tales” is characterized by a three-part composition, subtly noted by Van der Eng.<…>...the character unfolds and reveals itself strictly within the framework of the main action, without going beyond this framework, which again helps to preserve the specificity of the genre. Fate and the game of chance are given the specific place required by the novella.”

In connection with the combination of stories into one cycle, here, as in the case of “small tragedies,” the question arises about the genre formation of the cycle. Researchers are inclined to believe that the cycle of “Belkin’s Tales” is close to the novel and consider it an artistic whole of the “novelized type,” although some go further, declaring it a “sketch of a novel” or even a “novel.” EAT. Meletinsky believes that the cliches played by Pushkin relate more to the tradition of the story and novel, rather than to the specifically novelistic tradition. “But their very use by Pushkin, albeit with irony,” adds the scientist, “is characteristic of a short story that tends to concentrate various narrative techniques...” As a whole, the cycle is a genre formation close to the novel, and individual stories are typical short stories, and “the overcoming of sentimental-romantic cliches is accompanied by Pushkin’s strengthening of the specificity of the short story.”

If the cycle is a single whole, then it should be based on one artistic idea, and the placement of stories within the cycle should provide each story and the entire cycle with additional meaningful meanings compared to the meaning of individual stories taken in isolation. IN AND. Tyupa believes that the unifying artistic idea of ​​“Belkin’s Tales” is the popular print story of the prodigal son: “the sequence of stories that make up the cycle corresponds to the same four-phase (i.e. temptation, wandering, repentance and return - VC.) model revealed by German “pictures”. In this structure, “The Shot” corresponds to the phase of isolation (the hero, like the narrator, is prone to solitude); “the motives of temptation, wandering, false and not false partnerships (in love and friendships) organize the plot of “The Blizzard””; “The Undertaker” implements the “fabulity module”, occupying a central place in the cycle and performing the function of an interlude before “The Station Agent” with its cemetery finale on destroyed stations"; The “young lady-peasant” takes on the function of the final plot phase. However, there is, of course, no direct transfer of the plot of popular prints into the composition of Belkin’s Tales. Therefore, the idea of ​​V.I. Tyupy looks artificial. It has not yet been possible to identify the meaningful meaning of the placement of stories and the dependence of each story on the entire cycle.

The genre of stories was studied much more successfully. N.Ya. Berkovsky insisted on their novelistic character: “Individual initiative and its victories are the usual content of the short story. “Belkin's Tales” are five unique short stories. Never before or after Pushkin have novels been written in Russia so formally accurate, so true to the rules poetics of this genre." At the same time, Pushkin’s stories, in their internal meaning, “are the opposite of what was a classical short story in the West in classical times.” The difference between Western and Russian, Pushkin, N.Ya. Berkovsky sees that in the latter the folk-epic tendency prevailed, while the epic tendency and European novella little consistent with each other.

The genre core of the short stories is, as shown by V.I. Tyupa, legend(legend, legend) parable And joke .

Legend"models role-playing picture of the world. This is an immutable and indisputable world order, where everyone whose life is worthy of telling is assigned a certain role: fate(or debt)." The word in the legend is role-playing and impersonal. The narrator (“speaker”), like the characters, only conveys someone else’s text. The narrator and characters are performers of the text, not creators; they speak not on their own behalf, not on their own behalf, but on behalf of some common whole, expressing what is universal, choral, knowledge, “praise” or “blasphemy”. The story is “pre-monological”.

Modeled picture of the world parable, on the contrary, it implies “the responsibility of the free choice..." In this case, the picture of the world appears value-based (good - bad, moral - immoral) polarized, imperative, since the character carries with him and asserts a certain common moral law which constitutes the deep knowledge and moralizing “wisdom” of parable edification. The parable tells not about extraordinary events or private life, but about what happens every day and constantly, about natural events. The characters in the parable are not objects of aesthetic observation, but subjects of “ethical choice.” The speaker of the parable must be convinced, and that is belief gives rise to a teaching tone. In the parable, the word is monological, authoritarian and imperative.

Joke opposes both the eventfulness of the legend and the parable. An anecdote in its original meaning is funny, conveying not necessarily something funny, but certainly something curious, entertaining, unexpected, unique, incredible. An anecdote does not recognize any world order, therefore an anecdote rejects any orderliness of life, not considering rituality as the norm. Life appears in an anecdote as a game of chance, a coincidence of circumstances or different beliefs of people colliding. An anecdote is an attribute of private adventurous behavior in an adventurous picture of the world. The anecdote does not claim to be reliable knowledge and represents opinion, which may or may not be accepted. Acceptance or rejection of an opinion depends on the skill of the storyteller. The word in a joke is situational, conditioned by the situation and dialogized, since it is directed towards the listener, it is proactive and personally colored.

Legend, parable And joke- three important structural components of Pushkin’s short stories, which vary in different combinations in Belkin’s Tales. The nature of the mixture of these genres in each short story determines its originality.

"Shot". The story is an example of classical compositional harmony (in the first part the narrator talks about Silvio and an incident that happened in the days of his youth, then Silvio talks about his fight with Count B***; in the second part the narrator talks about Count B***, and then Count B*** - about Silvio; in conclusion, on behalf of the narrator, “rumor” (“they say”) about Silvio’s fate is conveyed). The hero of the story and the characters are illuminated from different angles. They are seen through the eyes of each other and strangers. The writer sees in Silvio a mysterious romantic and demonic face. He describes it, thickening romantic colors. Pushkin's point of view is revealed through the parodic use of romantic stylistics and by discrediting Silvio's actions.

To understand the story, it is essential that the narrator, already an adult, is transported to his youth and appears at first as a romantically inclined young officer. In his mature years, having retired and settled in a poor village, he looks somewhat differently at the reckless prowess, mischievous youth and wild days of officer youth (he calls the count a “rake,” whereas according to previous concepts this characteristic would have been inapplicable to him). However, when telling stories, he still uses a bookish-romantic style. Significantly big changes took place in the count: in his youth he was careless, did not value life, but in adulthood he learned true life values– love, family happiness, responsibility for a being close to him. Only Silvio remained true to himself from the beginning to the end of the story. He is an avenger by nature, hiding under the guise of a romantic, mysterious person.

The content of Silvio's life is revenge of a special kind. Murder is not part of his plans: Silvio dreams of “killing” human dignity and honor in the imaginary offender, enjoying the fear of death on the face of Count B*** and for this purpose takes advantage of the enemy’s momentary weakness, forcing him to fire a second (illegal) shot. However, his impression of the count’s stained conscience is wrong: although the count violated the rules of duel and honor, he is morally justified because, worrying not for himself, but for the person dear to him (“I counted the seconds... I thought about her...”), he sought to speed up shot. The graph rises above conventional representations of the environment.

After Silvio has convinced himself that he has taken full revenge, his life becomes meaningless and he has no choice but to seek death. Attempts to heroize the romantic personality, the “romantic avenger” turned out to be untenable. For the sake of a shot, for the sake of the insignificant goal of humiliating another person and imaginary self-affirmation, Silvio ruins his own life, wasting it in vain for the sake of petty passion.

If Belkin portrays Silvio as a romantic, then Pushkin decisively denies the avenger such a title: Silvio is not a romantic at all, but a completely prosaic loser avenger who only pretends to be a romantic, reproducing romantic behavior. From this point of view, Silvio is a reader of romantic literature who “literally embodies literature in his life until the bitter ending.” Indeed, the death of Silvio is clearly correlated with the romantic and heroic death of Byron in Greece, but only in order to discredit the imaginary heroic death of Silvio (Pushkin’s view was manifested in this).

The story ends with the following words: “They say that Silvio, during the indignation of Alexander Ypsilanti, led a detachment of etherists and was killed in the battle of Skulany.” However, the narrator admits that he had no news of Silvio’s death. In addition, in the story “Kirdzhali” Pushkin wrote that in the battle of Skulany, “700 people of Arnauts, Albanians, Greeks, Bulgars and all sorts of rabble…” acted against the Turks. Silvio was apparently stabbed to death, as not a single shot was fired in this battle. The death of Silvio is deliberately deprived by Pushkin of a heroic aura, and the romantic literary hero is interpreted as an ordinary avenger-loser with a low and evil soul.

Belkin the narrator sought to heroize Silvio, Pushkin the author insisted on the purely literary, bookish-romance character of the character. In other words, heroism and romance were not related to Silvio's character, but to Belkin's narrative efforts.

A strong romantic beginning and an equally strong desire to overcome it left an imprint on the entire story: Silvio’s social status is replaced by demonic prestige and ostentatious generosity, and the carelessness and superiority of the natural lucky count rises above his social origin. Only later, in the central episode, Silvio’s social disadvantage and the count’s social superiority are revealed. But neither Silvio nor the count in Belkin’s narrative take off their romantic masks or abandon romantic clichés, just as Silvio’s refusal to shoot does not mean a renunciation of revenge, but seems to be a typical romantic gesture, meaning accomplished revenge (“I won’t,” answered Silvio, “I am satisfied: I saw your confusion, your timidity; I made you shoot at me, that’s enough for me. You will remember me. I betray you to your conscience”).

"Blizzard". In this story, as in other stories, the plots and stylistic clichés of sentimental-romantic works are parodied (“ Poor Lisa", "Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter" by Karamzin, Byron, Walter Scott, Bestuzhev-Marlinsky, "Lenora" by Burger, "Svetlana" by Zhukovsky, "The Ghost Groom" by Washington Irving). Although the heroes wait for the resolution of conflicts according to literary schemes and canons, the conflicts end differently, since life makes amendments to them. “Van der Eng sees in The Blizzard six variants of a sentimental plot rejected by life and chance: a secret marriage of lovers against the will of their parents due to the poverty of the groom and with subsequent forgiveness, the heroine’s painful farewell to home, the death of her lover and either the heroine’s suicide or his eternal mourning by her, etc., etc.” .

“Blizzard” is based on the adventurous and anecdotal nature of the plot, “the game of love and chance” (I went to get married to one, but got married to another, wanted to marry one, but married another, a fan’s declaration of love to a woman who is de jure his wife, vain resistance to parents and their “evil” will, naive resistance to social obstacles and an equally naive desire to destroy social barriers), as was the case in French and Russian comedies, as well as another game - patterns and accidents. And then it comes in new tradition- the tradition of the parable. The plot mixes adventure, anecdote and parable.

In “The Blizzard,” all the events are so closely and skillfully intertwined that the story is considered an example of the genre, an ideal short story.

The plot is tied to confusion, a misunderstanding, and this misunderstanding is double: first, the heroine marries not the lover she has chosen, but an unfamiliar man, but then, being married, she does not recognize her betrothed, who has already become her husband, in the new chosen one. In other words, Marya Gavrilovna, having read French novels, did not notice that Vladimir was not her betrothed and mistakenly recognized him as the chosen one of her heart, and in Burmin, an unknown man, she, on the contrary, did not recognize her true chosen one. However, life corrects the mistake of Marya Gavrilovna and Burmin, who cannot believe, even being married, legally wife and husband, that they are destined for each other. Random separation and random unification are explained by the play of the elements. A blizzard, symbolizing the elements, whimsically and capriciously destroys the happiness of some lovers and just as whimsically and capriciously unites others. The elements, by their own will, give birth to order. In this sense, the blizzard performs the function of fate. The main event is described from three sides, but the narrative of the trip to church contains a mystery that remains so for the participants themselves. It is explained only before the final denouement. Two love stories converge towards the central event. At the same time, from an unhappy story comes a happy one.

Pushkin skillfully constructs a story, giving happiness to sweet and ordinary people who have matured during a period of trials and realized responsibility for their personal fate and for the fate of another person. At the same time, another thought is heard in “The Blizzard”: real life relationships are “embroidered” not according to the outline of bookish sentimental-romantic relationships, but taking into account personal desires and the quite tangible “general order of things”, in accordance with the prevailing foundations, morals, property position and psychology. Here the motive of the elements - fate - blizzard - chance gives way to the same motive as a pattern: Marya Gavrilovna, the daughter of wealthy parents, is more appropriate to be the wife of the rich Colonel Burmin. Chance is an instant instrument of Providence, the “game of life,” its smile or grimace, a sign of its unintentionality, a manifestation of fate. It also contains the moral justification of the story: in the story, chance not only encircled and completed the novelistic plot, but also “spoke out” in favor of the structure of all existence.

"Undertaker". Unlike other stories, “The Undertaker” is full of philosophical content and is characterized by fantasy, invading the life of artisans. At the same time, “low” life is interpreted in a philosophical and fantastic way: as a result of the artisans drinking, Adrian Prokhorov embarks on “philosophical” reflections and sees a “vision” filled with fantastic events. At the same time, the plot is similar to the structure of the parable of the Prodigal Son and is anecdotal. It also reveals a ritual journey to " afterworld”, which Adrian Prokhorov commits in his sleep. Relocations of Hadrian - first in new house, and then (in a dream) to the “underworld”, to the dead and, finally, the return from sleep and, accordingly, from the kingdom of the dead to the world of the living - are conceptualized as a process of acquiring new life stimuli. In this regard, the undertaker moves from a gloomy and gloomy mood to a bright and joyful one, to an awareness of family happiness and the true joys of life.

Adrian's housewarming is not only real, but also symbolic. Pushkin plays with hidden associative meanings associated with the ideas of life and death (housewarming in a figurative sense - death, relocation to another world). The undertaker's occupation defines him special treatment to life and death. In his craft, he is in direct contact with them: alive, he prepares “houses” (coffins, dominas) for the dead, his clients turn out to be the dead, he is constantly busy thinking about how not to miss out on income and not miss the death of a still living person. This problematic is expressed in references to literary works (Shakespeare, Walter Scott), where undertakers are depicted as philosophers. Philosophical motives with an ironic overtone arise in Adrian Prokhorov's conversation with Gottlieb Schultz and at the latter's party. There, the watchman Yurko offers Adrian an ambiguous toast - to drink to the health of his clients. Yurko seems to connect two worlds - the living and the dead. Yurko's proposal prompts Adrian to invite the dead to his world, for whom he made coffins and whom he escorted to last way. Fiction, realistically grounded (“dream”), is saturated with philosophical and everyday content and demonstrates the violation of the world order in the simple-minded consciousness of Adrian Prokhorov, the distortion of everyday and Orthodox ways.

Ultimately, the world of the dead does not become his own for the hero. The undertaker regains his bright consciousness and calls on his daughters, finding peace and embracing the values ​​of family life.

Order is being restored again in Adrian Prokhorov's world. His new state of mind comes into some conflict with the previous one. “Out of respect for the truth,” the story says, “we cannot follow their example (i.e., Shakespeare and Walter Scott, who portrayed grave diggers as cheerful and playful people - VC.) and we are forced to admit that the disposition of our undertaker was completely consistent with his gloomy craft. Adrian Prokhorov was gloomy and thoughtful." Now the mood of the joyful undertaker is different: he is not, as usual, in gloomy anticipation of someone’s death, but becomes cheerful, justifying the opinion of Shakespeare and Walter Scott about undertakers. Literature and life are closing in the same way that the points of view of Belkin and Pushkin are approaching each other, although they do not coincide: the new Adrian corresponds to the book images that Shakespeare and Walter Scott painted, but this does not happen because the undertaker lives according to artificial and fictitious sentimental-romantic norms, as Belkin would like, but as a result of a happy awakening and familiarization with the bright and living joy of life, as Pushkin portrays.

"Stationmaster" The plot of the story is based on contradiction. Usually the fate of a poor girl from the lower strata of society, who fell in love with a noble gentleman, was unenviable and sad. Having enjoyed her, the lover threw her out into the street. In literature, similar stories were developed in a sentimental and moralizing spirit. Vyrin, however, knows about such stories from life. He also knows pictures of the Prodigal Son, where a restless young man first goes off, blessed by his father and rewarded with money, then squanders his fortune with shameless women and the penniless beggar returns to his father, who receives him with joy and forgives him. Literary subjects and popular prints with the story of the prodigal son suggested two outcomes: a tragic one, deviating from the canon (the death of the hero), and a happy, canonical one (newfound peace of mind for both the prodigal son and the old father).

The plot of “The Station Agent” is developed in a different vein: instead of repenting and returning the prodigal daughter to her father, the father goes to look for his daughter. Dunya is happy with Minsky and, although she feels guilty before her father, she does not think about returning to him, and only after his death she comes to Vyrin’s grave. The caretaker does not believe in Dunya’s possible happiness outside her father’s house, which allows him to call it "blind" or "blind caretaker" .

The reason for the punning oxymoron was the following words of the narrator, to which he did not attach due importance, but which, of course, were emphasized by Pushkin: “The poor caretaker did not understand... how blindness came over him...”. Indeed, caretaker Vyrin saw with his own eyes that Dunya did not need saving, that she lived in luxury and felt like the mistress of the situation. Contrary to Vyrin’s true feelings, who wants his daughter’s happiness, it turns out that the caretaker does not rejoice at happiness, but would rather rejoice at misfortune, since it would justify his darkest and at the same time most natural expectations.

This consideration led V. Schmid to the rash conclusion that the caretaker’s grief is not “the misfortune that threatens his beloved daughter, but her happiness, which he witnesses.” However, the caretaker’s trouble is that he does not see Dunya’s happiness, although he does not want anything other than the happiness of his daughter, but sees only her future misfortune, which constantly stands before his eyes. Imaginary misfortune became real, and real happiness became fictitious.

In this regard, the image of Vyrin is doubled and represents a fusion of the comic and tragic. In fact, isn’t it funny that the caretaker invented Dunya’s future misfortune and, in accordance with his false belief, doomed himself to drunkenness and death? “The Station Agent” brought “so many journalistic tears from literary critics over the unfortunate lot of the notorious little man,” wrote one of the researchers.

Nowadays this comic version of “The Station Agent” decisively prevails. Researchers, starting with Van der Eng, laugh in every possible way, “blaming” Samson Vyrin. The hero, in their opinion, “thinks and behaves not so much like a father, but like a lover, or, more precisely, like a rival of his daughter’s lover.”

So, we are no longer talking about the love of a father for his daughter, but about the love of a lover for his mistress, where father and daughter turn out to be lovers. But in Pushkin’s text there is no basis for such an understanding. Meanwhile, V. Schmid believes that Vyrin, deep down in his soul, is a “blind jealous” and “envious”, reminiscent of an older brother from the Gospel parable, and not a venerable old father. “...Vyrin is neither the unselfish, generous father from the parable of the prodigal son, nor the good shepherd (meaning the Gospel of John - V.K.)... Vyrin is not the person who could give her happiness...” He unsuccessfully resists Minsky in the struggle for possession of Dunya. V.N. went the furthest in this direction. Turbin, who directly declared Vyrin to be his daughter’s lover.

For some reason, researchers think that Vyrin’s love is feigned, that there is more selfishness, pride, and concern for herself than for her daughter. In reality this is, of course, not the case. The caretaker truly loves his daughter dearly and is proud of her. Because of this love, he is afraid for her, lest some misfortune happen to her. The “blinding” of the caretaker lies in the fact that he cannot believe in Dunya’s happiness, because what happened to her is fragile and disastrous.

If this is so, then what does jealousy and envy have to do with it? Who, one wonders, is Vyrin jealous of – Minsky or Dunya? There is no talk of any envy in the story. Vyrin cannot envy Minsky, if only for the reason that he sees in him a rake who seduced his daughter and is planning to throw her out into the street sooner or later. Vyrin also cannot envy Duna and her new position, because she already unhappy. Maybe Vyrin is jealous of Minsky because Dunya went to him and did not stay with her father, which she preferred to Minsky’s father? Of course, the caretaker is annoyed and offended that his daughter acted with him not according to custom, not in a Christian way and not in a family way. But there is no envy, jealousy, or real rivalry here - such feelings are called differently. In addition, Vyrin understands that he cannot even be an involuntary rival of Minsky - they are separated by a huge social distance. He is ready, however, to forget all the insults inflicted on him, forgive his daughter and accept her into his home. Thus, in conjunction with the comic content, there is also a tragic one, and the image of Vyrin is illuminated not only by a comic, but also by a tragic light.

Dunya is not without selfishness and spiritual coldness, who, sacrificing her father for the sake of a new life, feels guilty before the caretaker. The transition from one social layer to another and the disintegration of patriarchal ties seem to Pushkin both natural and extremely contradictory: finding happiness in a new family does not cancel the tragedy concerning the previous foundations and human life itself. With the loss of Dunya, Vyrin no longer needed his own life. The happy ending does not cancel Vyrin’s tragedy.

Not last role the motive of socially unequal love plays in it. The social change does not cause any damage to the heroine’s personal fate - Dunya’s life is going well. However, this social shift is paid for by the social and moral humiliation of her father as he tries to win back his daughter. The turning point of the novella turns out to be ambiguous, and the starting and ending points of the aesthetic space are shrouded in patriarchal idyll (exposition) and melancholic elegy (finale). From this it is clear where the movement of Pushkin’s thought is directed.

In this regard, it is necessary to determine what is random in the story and what is natural. In the relationship between Dunya’s private fate and the general, human (“young fools”), the fate of the caretaker’s daughter seems accidental and happy, and the general fate – unhappy and disastrous. Vyrin (like Belkin) looks at Dunya’s fate from the point of view of a common share, a common experience. Without noticing the particular case and not taking it into account, he subsumes the particular case under the general rule, and the picture receives a distorted illumination. Pushkin sees both a happy special case and an unfortunate typical experience. However, none of them undermines or cancels the other. The success of a particular fate is decided in light comic tones, the general unenviable fate - in melancholic and tragic colors. The tragedy - the death of the caretaker - is softened by the scene of Dunya’s reconciliation with her father, when she visited his grave, silently repented and asked for forgiveness (“She lay down here and lay there for a long time”).

In the relationship between the random and the natural, one law applies: as soon as the social principle intervenes in the destinies of people, in their universal human connections, reality becomes fraught with tragedy, and, vice versa: as they move away from social factors and approach universal human ones, people become happier and happier. Minsky destroys the patriarchal idyll of the caretaker’s house, and Vyrin, wanting to restore it, seeks to destroy the family happiness of Dunya and Minsky, also playing the role of a social outrager, invading another social circle with his low social status. But as soon as social inequality is eliminated, the heroes (as people) again find peace and happiness. However, tragedy awaits the heroes and hangs over them: the idyll is fragile, unsteady and relative, ready to immediately turn into tragedy. Dunya's happiness requires the death of her father, and her father's happiness means the death of Dunya's family happiness. The tragic principle is invisibly diffused in life itself, and even if it does not appear outward, it exists in the atmosphere, in consciousness. This principle entered into the soul of Samson Vyrin and led him to death.

Therefore, the German moralizing pictures depicting the episodes of the Gospel parable come true, but in a special way: Dunya returns, but not to her home and not to her living father, but to his grave; her repentance occurs not during the life of her parent, but after his death. Pushkin reinterprets the parable, avoids happy ending, as in Marmontel’s story “Loretta,” and an unhappy love story (“Poor Liza” by Karamzin), which confirms Vyrin’s rightness. In the minds of the caretaker, two literary traditions coexist - the gospel parable and moral stories with a happy ending.

Pushkin's story, without breaking with traditions, updates literary schemes. In The Station Agent there is no strict relationship between social inequality and the tragedy of the heroes, but the idyll with its successful final picture is also excluded. Chance and pattern are equal in their rights: not only life corrects literature, but also literature, describing life, is capable of conveying the truth to reality - Vyrin remained true to his life experience and the tradition that insisted on a tragic resolution to the conflict.

"The young lady-peasant." This story sums up the entire cycle. Here Pushkin’s artistic method with its masks and disguises, the play of chance and patterns, literature and life, is revealed openly, nakedly, catchily.

The story is based on the love secrets and disguises of two young people - Alexei Berestov and Liza Muromskaya, who first belong to warring and then reconciled families. The Berestovs and the Muromskys seem to gravitate toward different national traditions: Berestov is a Russophile, Muromsky is an Anglomaniac, but belonging to them does not play a fundamental role. Both landowners are ordinary Russians, and their special preference for one or another culture, their own or someone else’s, is a superficial fad arising from hopeless provincial boredom and caprice. In this way, an ironic rethinking of book concepts is introduced (the name of the heroine is associated with N.M. Karamzin’s story “Poor Liza” and with its imitations; the war of Berestov and Muromsky parodies the war of the Montague and Capulet families in Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo and Juliet”). The ironic transformation also concerns other details: Alexei Berestov has a dog named Sbogar (the name of the hero of the novel “Jean Sbogar” by C. Nodier); Nastya, Lisa’s maid, was “a much more significant person than any confidante in the French tragedy,” etc. Significant details characterize the life of the provincial nobility, not alien to enlightenment and touched by the corruption of affectation and coquetry.

Hidden behind imitative masks are quite healthy, cheerful characters. Sentimental and romantic makeup is thickly applied not only to the characters, but also to the plot itself. The mysteries of Alexei correspond to the antics of Lisa, who dresses first in a peasant dress in order to get to know the young master better, and then in a French aristocrat from the time of Louis XIV, so as not to be recognized by Alexei. Under the guise of a peasant woman, Liza took a liking to Alexey and she herself felt a heartfelt attraction to the young master. All external obstacles are easily overcome, comic dramatic collisions dissipate when real life conditions require the fulfillment of the will of the parents, contrary to the seemingly feelings of the children. Pushkin laughs at the sentimental and romantic tricks of the characters and, washing off the makeup, reveals their real faces, shining with youth, health, filled with the light of a joyful acceptance of life.

In “The Peasant Young Lady,” various situations from other stories are repeated and played out in a new way. For example, the motif of social inequality as an obstacle to the union of lovers, found in “The Blizzard” and in “The Station Agent.” At the same time, in “The Peasant Young Lady,” the social barrier increases in comparison with “The Snowstorm” and even with “The Station Agent,” and the father’s resistance is depicted as stronger (Muromsky’s personal enmity with Berestov), ​​but the artificiality, the imaginaryness of the social barrier also increases and then completely disappears. Resistance to the will of the parents is not necessary: ​​their enmity turns into opposite feelings, and the fathers of Lisa and Alexei experience spiritual affection for each other.

The heroes play different roles, but are in an unequal position: Lisa knows everything about Alexey, while Lisa is shrouded in mystery for Alexey. The intrigue rests on the fact that Alexey has long been unraveled by Liza, but he still has to unravel Liza.

Each character doubles and even triples: Lisa as a “peasant woman”, an unapproachable simpering coquette of old times and a dark-skinned “young lady”, Alexey as the master’s “valet”, as a “gloomy and mysterious Byronic heartthrob-wanderer”, “traveling” through the surrounding forests , and a kind, passionate fellow with a pure heart, a mad spoiler. If in “The Snowstorm” Marya Gavrilovna has two contenders for her hand, then in “The Peasant Young Lady” there is only one, but Lisa herself appears in two forms and deliberately plays two roles, parodying both sentimental and romantic stories, and historical moralizing stories. At the same time, Lisa’s parody is subjected to a new parody of Pushkin. “The Peasant Young Lady” is a parody of parodies. From this it is clear that the comic component in “The Young Peasant Lady” is greatly intensified and condensed. In addition, unlike the heroine of “The Snowstorm”, with whom fate plays, Liza Muromskaya is not a plaything of fate: she herself creates circumstances, episodes, incidents and does everything to get to know the young master and lure him into her love network.

Unlike “The Station Agent,” it is in the story “The Peasant Young Lady” that the reunion of children and parents occurs, and the general world order cheerfully triumphs. In the last story, Belkin and Pushkin, as two authors, also unite: Belkin does not strive for literary quality and creates a simple and life-like ending that does not require adherence to literary rules (“Readers will save me from the unnecessary obligation to describe the denouement”), and therefore Pushkin does not need to correct Belkin and remove layer by layer of book dust from his simple-minded, but pretending to be sentimental, romantic and moralizing (already pretty shabby) literary narrative.

In addition to Belkin's Tales, Pushkin created several other major works in the 1830s, including two completed stories (The Queen of Spades and Kirdzhali) and one unfinished story (Egyptian Nights).

"Queen of Spades". This philosophical and psychological story has long been recognized as Pushkin’s masterpiece. The plot of the story, as follows from those recorded by P.I. Bartenev words P.V. Nashchokin, who was told by Pushkin himself, is based on a real case. Grandson of Princess N.P. Golitsyn Prince S.G. Golitsyn (“Firs”) told Pushkin that, having once lost, he came to his grandmother to ask for money. She did not give him the money, but named three cards assigned to her in Paris by Saint-Germain. “Try it,” she said. S.G. Golitsyn bet on the named N.P. Golitsyn's card and won back. Further development The story is fictitious.

The plot of the story is based on the game of chance and necessity, regularity. In this regard, each hero is associated with a specific theme: Hermann (last name, not first name!) - with the theme of social dissatisfaction, Countess Anna Fedotovna - with the theme of fate, Lizaveta Ivanovna - with the theme of social humility, Tomsky - with the theme of undeserved happiness. Thus, Tomsky, who plays an insignificant role in the plot, bears a significant semantic load: an empty, insignificant socialite who does not have a clearly defined face, he embodies random happiness, which he does not deserve in any way. He is chosen by fate, and does not choose fate, unlike Hermann, who strives to conquer fortune. Luck pursues Tomsky, just as it pursues the countess and her entire family. At the end of the story it is reported that Tomsky marries Princess Polina and is promoted to captain. Consequently, he falls under the influence of social automatism, where random luck becomes a secret pattern, regardless of any personal merit.

The chosenness of fate also concerns the old countess, Anna Fedotovna, whose image is directly related to the theme of fate. Anna Fedotovna personifies fate, which is emphasized by its connection with life and death. It is at their intersection. Alive, she seems outdated and dead, and the dead one comes to life, at least in Hermann’s imagination. While still young, she received the nickname “Moscow Venus” in Paris, that is, her beauty had features of coldness, deadness and petrification, like a famous sculpture. Her image is inserted into the frame of mythological associations welded to life and death (Saint Germain, whom she met in Paris and who told her the secret of the three cards, was called the Eternal Jew, Ahasfer). Her portrait, which Hermann looks at, is motionless. However, the Countess, being between life and death, is capable of “demonically” coming to life under the influence of fear (under Hermann’s pistol) and memories (under the name of the late Chaplitsky). If during her life she was involved in death (“her cold selfishness” means that she has outlived her time and is alien to the present time), then after her death she comes to life in Hermann’s mind and appears to him as his vision, informing him that she visited the hero not according to of your own free will. What this will is - evil or good - is unknown. In the story there are indications of demonic power (the secret of the cards was revealed to the Countess Saint-Germain, who was involved in the demonic world), of demonic cunning (once the dead countess “looked mockingly at Hermann,” “squinting with one eye,” another time the hero saw in the card “a peak ladies" to the old countess, who "squinted and grinned"), to good will ("I forgive you my death, so that you marry my pupil Lizaveta Ivanovna...") and to mystical revenge, since Hermann did not fulfill the conditions set by the countess . In the map that suddenly came to life, fate was symbolically displayed, and various faces of the countess appeared in it - the “Moscow Venus” (the young countess from a historical anecdote), a decrepit old woman (from a social story about a poor pupil), a winking corpse (from a “horror novel” or "scary" ballads).

Through Tomsky's story about the countess and secular adventurer Saint-Germain, Hermann, provoked by a historical anecdote, is also connected with the theme of fate. He tempts fate, hoping to master the secret pattern of a happy accident. In other words, he strives to exclude chance for himself and turn card success into a natural one, and therefore, subjugate his fate. However, entering the “zone” of chance, he dies, and his death becomes as random as it is natural.

Hermann concentrates reason, prudence, a strong will that can suppress ambition, strong passions and a fiery imagination. He is a "player" at heart. Playing cards symbolizes playing with fate. The “perverse” meaning of the card game is clearly revealed for Hermann in his game with Chekalinsky, when he became the owner of the secret of three cards. Hermann's prudence and rationality, emphasized by his German origin, surname and profession as a military engineer, conflict with passions and fiery imagination. The will, which restrains passions and imagination, ultimately turns out to be disgraced, since Hermann, regardless of his own efforts, falls under the power of circumstances and becomes himself an instrument of someone else’s, incomprehensible and incomprehensible secret force, which turns him into a pathetic toy. Initially, he seems to skillfully use his “virtues”—calculation, moderation, and hard work—to achieve success. But at the same time he is attracted by some force, to which he involuntarily submits, and, against his will, he finds himself at the countess’s house, and in his head the premeditated and strict arithmetic is replaced by mysterious game numbers. So calculation is either supplanted by imagination, then replaced by strong passions, then it no longer becomes an instrument in Hermann’s plan, but an instrument of mystery, which uses the hero for purposes unknown to him. In the same way, the imagination begins to free itself from the control of reason and will, and Hermann is already making plans in his mind, thanks to which he could snatch the secret of the three cards from the countess. At first, his calculation comes true: he appears under the windows of Lizaveta Ivanovna, then achieves her smile, exchanges letters with her and, finally, receives consent to a love date. However, the meeting with the Countess, despite Hermann’s persuasion and threats, does not lead to success: none of the incantatory formulas of the “agreement” proposed by the hero has any effect on the Countess. Anna Fedotovna is dying of fear. The calculation turned out to be in vain, and the wild imagination turned into emptiness.

From this moment one period of Hermann’s life ends and another begins. On the one hand, he draws a line under his adventurous plan: he ends love adventure with Lizaveta Ivanovna, admitting that she was never the heroine of his novel, but only an instrument of his ambitious and selfish plans; decides to ask for forgiveness from the dead countess, but not for ethical reasons, but because of selfish gain - to protect himself in the future from the harmful influence of the old woman. On the other hand, the secret of the three cards still dominates his consciousness, and Hermann cannot get rid of the obsession, that is, put an end to his life. Having suffered defeat when meeting the old woman, he does not resign himself. But now from an unsuccessful adventurer and hero of a social story, abandoning his beloved, he turns into a shredded character in a fantasy story, in whose consciousness reality is mixed with visions and even replaced by them. And these visions again return Hermann to the adventurous road. But the mind is already betraying the hero, and the irrational principle is growing and increasing its impact on him. The line between the real and the rational turns out to be blurred, and Hermann remains in the obvious gap between bright consciousness and its loss. Therefore, all of Hermann’s visions (the appearance of a dead old woman, the secret of three cards she shared, the conditions put forward by the late Anna Fedotovna, including the demand to marry Lizaveta Ivanovna) are the fruits of a clouded mind, emanating as if from other world. Tomsky’s story resurfaces in Hermann’s memory. The difference, however, is that the idea of ​​three cards, finally mastering him, was expressed in increasingly greater signs of madness (a slender girl - three of hearts, a pot-bellied man - an ace, and an ace in a dream - a spider, etc.). Having learned the secret of three cards from the world of fantasy, from the irrational world, Hermann is sure that he has excluded the chance from his life, that he cannot lose, that the pattern of success is within his control. But again, an incident helps him test his omnipotence - the arrival of the famous Chekalinsky from Moscow to St. Petersburg. Hermann again sees in this a certain finger of fate, that is, a manifestation of the same necessity, which seems to be favorable to him. The fundamental character traits come to life in him again - prudence, composure, will, but now they play not on his side, but against him. Being completely confident in luck, in the fact that he had subjugated the chance to himself, Hermann suddenly “turned upside down” and received another card from the deck. Psychologically, this is quite understandable: those who believe too much in their own infallibility and in their success are often careless and inattentive. The most paradoxical thing is that the pattern has not been shaken: the ace won. But the omnipotence of chance, this “god-inventor,” has not been abolished. Hermann thought that he had excluded chance from his fate as a player, and he punished him. In the scene last game Hermann and Chekalinsky card game symbolized a duel with fate. Chekalinsky felt this, but Hermann did not, because he believed that fate was in his power, and he was its ruler. Chekalinsky was in awe of fate, Hermann was calm. In a philosophical sense, he was understood by Pushkin as a subverter of the fundamental foundations of existence: the world rests on a moving balance of regularity and chance. Neither one nor the other can be taken away or destroyed. Any attempts to reshape the world order (not social, not social, but existential) are fraught with disaster. This does not mean that fate is equally favorable to all people, that it rewards everyone according to their deserts and evenly, fairly distributes successes and failures. Tomsky belongs to the “chosen”, successful heroes. Hermann - to the “unchosen”, to the losers. However, rebellion against the laws of existence, where necessity is as omnipotent as chance, leads to collapse. Having ruled out chance, Hermann still went crazy because of the case through which the pattern emerged. His idea is to destroy fundamentals the world created from above is truly insane. The social meaning of the story also intersects with this idea.

Social order is not equal to the world order, but the action of the laws of necessity and chance is also inherent in it. If changes in social and personal fate affect the fundamental world order, as in the case of Hermann, then they end in failure. If, as in the fate of Lizaveta Ivanovna, they do not threaten the laws of existence, then they can be crowned with success. Lizaveta Ivanovna is a most unfortunate creature, a “domestic martyr” who occupies an unenviable position in the social world. She is lonely, humiliated, although she deserves happiness. She wants to escape from her social fate and is waiting for any “deliverer”, hoping with his help to change her fate. However, she did not pin her hope solely on Hermann. He turned up to her, and she became his unwitting accomplice. At the same time, Lizaveta Ivanovna does not make calculated plans. She trusts life, and the condition for a change in social status for her still remains a feeling of love. This humility before life protects Lizaveta Ivanovna from the power of demonic forces. She sincerely repents of her mistake regarding Hermann and suffers, acutely experiencing her involuntary guilt in the death of the Countess. It is her that Pushkin rewards with happiness, without hiding the irony. Lizaveta Ivanovna repeats the fate of her benefactor: with her “a poor relative is being brought up.” But this irony relates rather not to the fate of Lizaveta Ivanovna, but to the social world, the development of which takes place in a circle. The social world itself is not becoming happier, although individual participants in social history, who went through involuntary sins, suffering and repentance, were awarded personal happiness and well-being.

As for Hermann, he, unlike Lizaveta Ivanovna, is dissatisfied with the social order and rebels both against it and against the laws of existence. Pushkin compares him to Napoleon and Mephistopheles, pointing to the intersection of philosophical and social rebellion. The game of cards, symbolizing a game with fate, became smaller and lowered in its content. Napoleon's wars were a challenge to humanity, countries and peoples. Napoleonic claims were all-European and even universal in nature. Mephistopheles entered into a proud confrontation with God. For Hermann, the current Napoleon and Mephistopheles, this scale is too high and burdensome. New hero Concentrating his efforts on money, he is only able to scare the dead old woman to death. However, he plays with fate with the same passion, with the same mercilessness, with the same contempt for humanity and God, as was characteristic of Napoleon and Mephistopheles. Like them, he does not accept God’s world in its laws, does not take into account people in general and each person individually. For him, people are instruments for satisfying ambitious, selfish and selfish desires. Thus, in the ordinary and ordinary person of the new bourgeois consciousness, Pushkin saw the same Napoleonic and Mephistophelian principles, but removed from them the aura of “heroism” and romantic fearlessness. The content of passions shrank and shrank, but did not cease to threaten humanity. This means that the social order is still fraught with disasters and cataclysms, and that Pushkin had a distrust of universal happiness in the foreseeable future. But he does not deprive the world of all hope. This is confirmed not only by the fate of Lizaveta Ivanovna, but also indirectly - by contradiction - by the collapse of Hermann, whose ideas lead to the destruction of the individual.

Hero of the story "Kirdzhali"- a real historical figure. Pushkin learned about it while he was living in the south, in Chisinau. The name of Kirdzhali was then covered in legend; there were rumors about the battle of Skulany, where Kirdzhali allegedly behaved heroically. Wounded, he managed to escape from the pursuit of the Turks and appear in Chisinau. But he was given by the Russians to the Turks (the transfer act was carried out by Pushkin’s acquaintance, official M.I. Lex). At the time when Pushkin began writing the story (1834), his views on the uprising and on Kirdzhali changed: he called the troops who fought near Skulany “rabble” and robbers, and Kirdzhali himself was also a robber, but not without attractive features - courage , resourcefulness.

In a word, the image of Kirdzhali in the story is dual - he is both a folk hero and a robber. To this end, Pushkin combines fiction with documentary. He cannot sin against the “touching truth” and at the same time takes into account the popular, legendary opinion about Kirdzhali. The fairy tale is connected with reality. So, 10 years after the death of Kirdzhali (1824), Pushkin, contrary to the facts, portrays Kirdzhali as alive (“Kirdzhali is now robbing near Iasi”) and writes about Kirdzhali as alive, asking: “What is Kirdzhali like?” Thus, Pushkin, according to folklore tradition, sees in Kirdzhali not only a robber, but also folk hero with its undying vitality and mighty strength.

A year after writing “Kirdzhali,” Pushkin began writing the story "Egyptian Nights". Pushkin’s idea arose in connection with the record of the Roman historian Aurelius Victor (IV century AD) about the Queen of Egypt Cleopatra (69–30 BC), who sold her nights to lovers at the cost of their lives. The impression was so strong that Pushkin immediately wrote a fragment of “Cleopatra”, beginning with the words:

She enlivened her magnificent feast...

Pushkin repeatedly began to implement the plan that captivated him. In particular, the “Egyptian anecdote” was to become part of a novel from Roman life, and then be used in a story that opened with the words “We spent the evening at the dacha.” Initially, Pushkin intended to process the plot in lyrical and lyric-epic form (poem, long poem, long poem), but then he leaned towards prose. The first prose embodiment of Cleopatra’s theme was the sketch “The guests were arriving at the dacha...”.

Pushkin's plan concerned only one feature in the history of the queen - the condition of Cleopatra and the reality-unreality of this condition in modern circumstances. In the final version, the image of the Improviser appears - a link between antiquity and modernity. His invasion of the plan was connected, firstly, with Pushkin’s desire to depict the morals of high society St. Petersburg, and secondly, it reflected reality: in Moscow and St. Petersburg, performances by visiting improvisers became fashionable, and Pushkin himself was present at one session with his friend D.F. . Fikelmon, granddaughters M.I. Kutuzova. Max Langerschwartz performed there on May 24, 1834. Adam Mickiewicz, with whom Pushkin was friendly when the Polish poet was in St. Petersburg (1826), also possessed the talent of an improviser. Pushkin was so excited by Mickiewicz’s art that he threw himself on his neck. This event left a mark on Pushkin’s memory: A.A. Akhmatova noticed that the appearance of the Improviser in “Egyptian Nights” has an undoubted resemblance to the appearance of Mickiewicz. D.F. could have had an indirect influence on the figure of the Improviser. Fikelmon, who witnessed the seance of the Italian Tomasso Striga. One of the themes of the improvisation is “The Death of Cleopatra.”

The idea of ​​the story “Egyptian Nights” was based on the contrast of a bright, passionate and cruel antiquity with an insignificant and almost lifeless, reminiscent of Egyptian mummies, but outwardly decent society of people observing decency and taste. This duality also applies to the Italian improviser - an inspired author of oral works performed on commissioned themes, and a petty, obsequious, selfish person, ready to humiliate himself for the sake of money.

The significance of Pushkin’s idea and the perfection of its expression have long created the story’s reputation as one of the masterpieces of Pushkin’s genius, and some literary scholars (M.L. Hoffman) wrote about “Egyptian Nights” as the pinnacle of Pushkin’s work.

Two novels created by Pushkin, “Dubrovsky” and “The Captain’s Daughter,” also date back to the 1830s. Both of them are connected with Pushkin’s thought about the deep crack that lay between the people and the nobility. Pushkin, as a statesman, saw in this split a true tragedy of national history. He was interested in the question: Under what conditions is it possible to reconcile the people and the nobility, establish agreement between them, how strong can their union be and what consequences for the fate of the country should be expected from it? The poet believed that only the union of the people and the nobility could lead to good changes and transformations along the path of freedom, enlightenment and culture. Therefore, the decisive role should be assigned to the nobility as an educated stratum, the “mind” of the nation, which should rely on the people’s power, on the “body” of the nation. However, the nobility is heterogeneous. The farthest from the people are the “young” nobility, who were close to power after Catherine’s coup of 1762, when many old aristocratic families fell and decayed, as well as the “new” nobility - the current servants of the tsar, greedy for ranks, awards and estates. Closest to the people are the old aristocratic nobility, the former boyars, now ruined and having lost influence at court, but retaining direct patriarchal ties with the serfs of their remaining estates. Consequently, only this layer of nobles can enter into an alliance with the peasants, and only with this layer of nobles will the peasants enter into an alliance. Their union may also be based on the fact that both are offended by the supreme power and the recently promoted nobility. Their interests may coincide.

"Dubrovsky" (1832–1833). The plot of this novel (the title does not belong to Pushkin and was given by the publishers after the name of the main character) was based on a story by P.V. Nashchokin, about which there is a note from Pushkin’s biographer P.I. Barteneva: “The novel “Dubrovsky” was inspired by Nashchokin. He told Pushkin about one Belarusian poor nobleman named Ostrovsky (as the novel was originally called), who had a lawsuit with a neighbor for land, was forced out of the estate and, left with only peasants, began to rob, first the clerks, then others. Nashchokin saw this Ostrovsky in prison.” The nature of this story was confirmed by Pushkin’s Pskov impressions (the case of the Nizhny Novgorod landowner Dubrovsky, Kryukov and Muratov, the morals of Petrovsky’s owner P.A. Hannibal). The real facts corresponded to Pushkin’s intention to place an impoverished and landless nobleman at the head of the rebellious peasants.

The monolinearity of the original plan was overcome during the work on the novel. The plan did not include Dubrovsky’s father and the history of his friendship with Troekurov, there was no discord between lovers, the figure of Vereisky, very important for the idea of ​​stratification of the nobility (aristocratic and poor “romantics” - arty and rich upstarts - “cynics”). In addition, in the plan, Dubrovsky falls victim to the betrayal of the postilion, and not to social circumstances. The plan outlines the story of an exceptional personality, daring and successful, offended by a rich landowner, by the court and avenging himself. In the text that has come down to us, Pushkin, on the contrary, emphasized the typicality and ordinariness of Dubrovsky, with whom an event characteristic of the era happened. Dubrovsky in the story, as V.G. rightly wrote. Marantzman, “is not an exceptional person, accidentally thrown into a whirlpool of adventurous events. The fate of the hero is determined by social life, the era, which is given in a ramified and multifaceted way.” Dubrovsky and his peasants, as in Ostrovsky’s life, found no other way out than robbery, the robbery of offenders and rich noble landowners.

Researchers found in the novel traces of the influence of Western and partly Russian romantic literature with a “robber” theme (“The Robbers” by Schiller, “Rinaldo Rinaldini” by Vulpius, “Poor Wilhelm” by G. Stein, “Jean Sbogar” by C. Nodier) “Rob Roy” by Walter Scott, “A Night Romance” by A. Radcliffe, “Fra-Devil” by R. Zotov, “The Corsair” by Byron). However, when mentioning these works and their characters in the text of the novel, Pushkin everywhere insists on the literary nature of these characters.

The novel takes place in the 1820s. The novel presents two generations - fathers and sons. The life history of the fathers is compared with the destinies of the children. The story of the fathers’ friendship is “the prelude to the children’s tragedy.” Initially, Pushkin named the exact date that separated the fathers: “The glorious year 1762 separated them for a long time. Troekurov, a relative of Princess Dashkova, went up the hill.” These words mean a lot. Both Dubrovsky and Troekurov are people of Catherine’s era, who began their service together and strived to make a good career. 1762 is the year of Catherine’s coup, when Catherine II overthrew her husband, Peter III, from the throne and began to rule Russia. Dubrovsky remained faithful to Emperor Peter III, as the ancestor (Lev Alexandrovich Pushkin) of Pushkin himself, about whom the poet wrote in “My Genealogy”:

My grandfather, when the rebellion arose

In the middle of the Peterhof courtyard,

Like Minich, he remained faithful

The Fall of the Third Peter.

The Orlovs were honored then,

And my grandfather is in the fortress, in quarantine.

And our harsh family was pacified...

Troekurov, on the contrary, sided with Catherine II, who brought closer not only the supporter of the coup, Princess Dashkova, but also her relatives. Since then, the career of Dubrovsky, who did not betray his oath, began to decline, and the career of Troekurov, who betrayed his oath, began to rise. Therefore, gain in social position and material terms was paid for by betrayal and the moral decline of a person, and loss was paid for by loyalty to duty and moral integrity.

Troekurov belonged to that new serving noble nobility, which, for the sake of ranks, ranks, titles, estates and awards, knew no ethical barriers. Dubrovsky - to that ancient aristocracy that valued honor, dignity, and duty above any personal gain. Consequently, the reason for the disengagement lies in the circumstances, but for these circumstances to manifest themselves, people with low moral immunity are needed.

A lot of time has passed since Dubrovsky and Troekurov separated. They met again when both were out of work. Personally, Troekurov and Dubrovsky did not become each other’s enemies. On the contrary, they are connected by friendship and mutual affection, but these strong human feelings are not able to first prevent a quarrel, and then reconcile people who are at different levels of the social ladder, just as their children who love each other, Masha Troekurova and Vladimir, cannot hope for a common fate Dubrovsky.

This tragic idea of ​​the novel about the social and moral stratification of people from the nobility and the social enmity of the nobility and the people is embodied in the completion of all plot lines. It gives rise to internal drama, which is expressed in the contrasts of the composition: friendship is opposed by the court scene, Vladimir’s meeting with his native nest is accompanied by the death of his father, struck down by misfortunes and a fatal illness, the silence of the funeral is disturbed by the menacing glow of a fire, the holiday in Pokrovskoye ends with a robbery, love - with flight, wedding is a battle. Vladimir Dubrovsky inexorably loses everything: in the first volume, his patrimony is taken away from him, he is deprived of his parental home and position in society. In the second volume, Vereisky takes away his love, and the state takes away his robber will. Social laws everywhere defeat human feelings and affections, but people cannot help but resist circumstances if they believe in humane ideals and want to save face. Thus, human feelings enter into a tragic duel with the laws of society, valid for everyone.

To rise above the laws of society, you need to get out from under their power. Pushkin's heroes strive to arrange their destiny in their own way, but they fail. Vladimir Dubrovsky experiences three options for his lot in life: a wasteful and ambitious guards officer, a modest and courageous Desforge, a formidable and honest robber. The goal of such attempts is to change your destiny. But it is not possible to change fate, because the hero’s place in society is fixed forever - to be the son of an ancient nobleman with the same qualities that his father had - poverty and honesty. However, these qualities, in a certain sense, are opposite to each other and to the position of the hero: in the society where Vladimir Dubrovsky lives, one cannot afford such a combination, because it is immediately cruelly punished, as in the case of the elder Dubrovsky. Wealth and dishonor (Troekurov), wealth and cynicism (Vereisky) - these are the inseparable pairs that characterize the social organism. Maintaining honesty in poverty is too great a luxury. Poverty obliges you to be flexible, moderate your pride and forget about honor. All Vladimir’s attempts to defend his right to be poor and honest end in disaster, because the hero’s spiritual qualities are incompatible with his social and social position. So Dubrovsky, by the will of circumstances, and not by the will of Pushkin, turns out to be a romantic hero who, due to his human qualities constantly drawn into conflict with the established order of things, striving to rise above it. A heroic element is revealed in Dubrovsky, but the contradiction lies in the fact that the old nobleman dreams not of exploits, but of simple and quiet family happiness, of a family idyll. He does not understand that this is precisely what is not given to him, just as it was not given to either poor ensign Vladimir from The Snowstorm or poor Evgeniy from The Bronze Horseman.

Marya Kirillovna is internally related to Dubrovsky. She, an “ardent dreamer,” saw in Vladimir a romantic hero and hoped for the power of feelings. She believed, like the heroine of “The Blizzard,” that she could soften her father’s heart. She naively believed that she would touch the soul of Prince Vereisky, awakening in him a “feeling of generosity,” but he remained indifferent and indifferent to the words of the bride. He lives by cold calculation and rushes the wedding. Social, property and other external circumstances are not on Masha’s side, and she, like Vladimir Dubrovsky, is forced to give up her position. Her conflict with the order of things is complicated internal drama, associated with a typical upbringing that spoils the soul of a rich noble girl. Her inherent aristocratic prejudices inspired her that courage, honor, dignity, courage are inherent only in the upper class. It is easier to cross the line in a relationship between a rich aristocratic young lady and a poor teacher than to connect life with a robber rejected from society. The boundaries defined by life are stronger than the most ardent feelings. The heroes also understand this: Masha firmly and decisively rejects Dubrovsky’s help.

The same tragic situation occurs in folk scenes. The nobleman stands at the head of the revolt of the peasants, who are devoted to him and carry out his orders. But the goals of Dubrovsky and the peasants are different, because the peasants ultimately hate all nobles and officials, although the peasants are not devoid of humane feelings. They are ready to take revenge on landowners and officials in any way, even if it means living by robbery and robbery, that is, committing a forced crime. And Dubrovsky understands this. He and the peasants lost their place in a society that threw them out and doomed them to be outcasts.

Although the peasants are determined to sacrifice themselves and go to the end, neither their good feelings for Dubrovsky nor his good feelings for the peasants change the tragic outcome of events. The order of things was restored by government troops, Dubrovsky left the gang. The union of the nobility and peasantry was possible only on short term and reflected the failure of hopes for a joint opposition to the government. The tragic questions of life that arose in Pushkin's novel were not resolved. Probably as a result of this, Pushkin refrained from publishing the novel, hoping to find positive answers to the burning problems of life that worried him.

"The Captain's Daughter" (1833–1836). In this novel, Pushkin returned to those collisions, to those conflicts that worried him in Dubrovsky, but resolved them differently.

Now at the center of the novel is a popular movement, a popular revolt, led by a real historical figure - Emelyan Pugachev. The nobleman Pyotr Grinev was involved in this historical movement by force of circumstances. If in “Dubrovsky” a nobleman becomes the head of peasant indignation, then in “The Captain’s Daughter” the leader of the people’s war turns out to be a man from the people - the Cossack Pugachev. There is no alliance between the nobles and the rebel Cossacks, peasants, and foreigners; Grinev and Pugachev are social enemies. They are in different camps, but fate brings them together from time to time, and they treat each other with respect and trust. First, Grinev, preventing Pugachev from freezing in the Orenburg steppes, warmed his soul with a hare sheepskin coat, then Pugachev saved Grinev from execution and helped him in matters of the heart. So, fictional historical figures are placed by Pushkin in the real historical painting, became participants in a powerful popular movement and history makers.

Pushkin made extensive use historical sources, archival documents and visited the places of the Pugachev rebellion, visiting the Volga region, Kazan, Orenburg, Uralsk. He made his narrative extremely reliable by composing documents similar to the present ones, and including in them quotations from authentic papers, for example, from Pugachev’s appeals, considering them amazing examples of popular eloquence.

Testimonies from his acquaintances about the Pugachev uprising also played a significant role in Pushkin’s work on The Captain’s Daughter. Poet I.I. Dmitriev told Pushkin about the execution of Pugachev in Moscow, fabulist I.A. Krylov - about the war and besieged Orenburg (his father, a captain, fought on the side of government troops, and he and his mother were in Orenburg), merchant L.F. Krupenikov - about being in Pugachev captivity. Pushkin heard and wrote down legends, songs, stories from old-timers of those places where the uprising swept.

Before the historical movement captured and swirled the fictional heroes of the story into a terrible storm of cruel events, Pushkin vividly and lovingly describes the life of the Grinev family, the hapless Beaupré, the faithful and devoted Savelich, captain Mironov, his wife Vasilisa Egorovna, daughter Masha and the entire population of the dilapidated fortress. The simple, inconspicuous life of these families with their ancient patriarchal way of life is also Russian history, happening invisible to prying eyes. It is done quietly, “at home.” Therefore, it must be described in the same way. Walter Scott served as an example of such an image for Pushkin. Pushkin admired his ability to present history through everyday life, customs, and family legends.

A little time passed after Pushkin left the novel “Dubrovsky” (1833) and finished the novel “The Captain’s Daughter” (1836). However, much has changed in Pushkin’s historical and artistic views on Russian history. Between "Dubrovsky" and "The Captain's Daughter" Pushkin wrote "The History of Pugachev" which helped him form the people’s opinion about Pugachev and better imagine the severity of the problem “nobility - people”, the causes of social and other contradictions that divided the nation and hindered its unity.

In Dubrovsky, Pushkin still nurtured the illusions that dissipated as the novel progressed towards the end, according to which union and peace were possible between the ancient aristocratic nobility and the people. However, Pushkin's heroes did not want to submit to this artistic logic: on the one hand, they, regardless of the will of the author, turned into romantic characters, which was not foreseen by Pushkin, on the other, their fates became more and more tragic. At the time of the creation of “Dubrovsky,” Pushkin did not find a national and universal positive idea that could unite peasants and nobles, and did not find a way to overcome the tragedy.

In "The Captain's Daughter" such an idea was found. There, a path was outlined for overcoming tragedy in the future, in the course of the historical development of mankind. But before, in “The History of Pugachev” (“Notes on the Rebellion”), Pushkin wrote words that indicated the inevitability of a split of the nation into two irreconcilable camps: “All the black people were for Pugachev. The clergy were kind to him, not only priests and monks, but also archimandrites and bishops. One nobility was openly on the side of the government. Pugachev and his accomplices first wanted to win over the nobles to their side, but their benefits were too opposite.”

All Pushkin's illusions are relative possible world between the nobles and peasants collapsed, the tragic situation was revealed with even greater clarity than it was before. And the more clearly and responsibly the task arose to find a positive answer resolving the tragic contradiction. To this end, Pushkin masterfully organizes the plot. The novel, the core of which is the love story of Masha Mironova and Pyotr Grinev, has turned into a broad historical narrative. This principle - from private destinies to the historical destinies of the people - permeates the plot of "The Captain's Daughter", and it can easily be seen in every significant episode.

“The Captain's Daughter” has become a truly historical work, rich in modern social content. The heroes and minor characters in Pushkin's work are multifaceted characters. Pushkin does not have only positive or only negative characters. Each person appears as a living person with his inherent good and bad traits, which are manifested primarily in actions. Fictional characters are associated with historical figures and are included in a historical movement. It was the course of history that determined the actions of the heroes, forging their difficult fate.

Thanks to the principle of historicism (the unstoppable movement of history, directed towards infinity, containing many trends and opening new horizons), neither Pushkin nor his heroes succumb to despondency in the darkest circumstances, and do not lose faith in either personal or general happiness. Pushkin finds the ideal in reality and imagines its implementation in the course of historical process. He dreams that in the future there will be no social divisions and social discord. This will become possible when humanism and humanity become the basis of state policy.

Pushkin's heroes appear in the novel from two sides: as people, that is, in their universal and national qualities, and as characters playing social roles, i.e. in their social and public functions.

Grinev is both an ardent young man who received a patriarchal home education, and an ordinary teenager who gradually becomes an adult and courageous warrior, and a nobleman, an officer, “the Tsar’s servant,” faithful to the laws of honor; Pugachev is also an ordinary man, not alien to natural feelings, in the spirit folk traditions protecting an orphan, and a cruel leader of a peasant revolt, hating nobles and officials; Catherine II is both an elderly lady with a dog, walking in the park, ready to help an orphan if she was treated unfairly and offended, and an autocratic autocrat, mercilessly suppressing the rebellion and administering harsh justice; Captain Mironov is a kind, inconspicuous and flexible man, under the command of his wife, and an officer devoted to the empress, without hesitation resorting to torture and committing reprisals against the rebels.

In each character, Pushkin reveals the truly human and social. Each camp has its own social truth, and both of these truths are irreconcilable. But each camp also has its own humanity. If social truths separate people, then humanity unites them. Where the social and moral laws of any camp operate, humanity shrinks and disappears.

Pushkin depicts several episodes where first Grinev tries to rescue Masha Mironova, his bride, from Pugachev’s captivity and from the hands of Shvabrin, then Masha Mironova seeks to justify Grinev in the eyes of the empress, the government and the court. In those scenes where the heroes are within the scope of the social and moral laws of their camp, they do not meet with understanding of their simple human feelings. But as soon as the social and moral laws of even a camp hostile to the heroes recede into the background, Pushkin’s heroes can count on goodwill and sympathy.

If temporarily Pugachev the man, with his pitiful soul, sympathizing with the offended orphan, had not prevailed over Pugachev, the leader of the rebellion, then Grinev and Masha Mironova would certainly have died. But if in Catherine II, during her meeting with Masha Mironova, human feeling had not prevailed instead of social gain, then Grinev would not have been saved, freed from trial, and the union of lovers would have been postponed or not taken place at all. Therefore, the happiness of the heroes depends on how much people are able to remain human, how humane they are. This especially applies to those who have power, on whom the fate of their subordinates depends.

The human, says Pushkin, is higher than the social. It is not for nothing that his heroes, due to their deep humanity, do not fit into the play of social forces. Pushkin finds an expressive formula to designate, on the one hand, social laws, and on the other, humanity.

In contemporary society, there is a gap, a contradiction between social laws and humanity: what corresponds social interests of one class or another, suffers from insufficient humanity or kills it. When Catherine II asks Masha Mironova: “You are an orphan: are you probably complaining about injustice and insult?”, the heroine replies: “No way, sir.” I came to ask for mercy, not justice." Mercy, for which Masha Mironova came is humanity, and justice– social codes and rules adopted and operating in society.

According to Pushkin, both camps - the nobles and the peasants - are not humane enough, but for humanity to win, there is no need to move from one camp to another. Need to rise above social conditions, interests and prejudices, rise above them and remember that a person’s rank is immeasurably higher than all other ranks, titles and ranks. For Pushkin it is quite enough that the heroes are within their environment, within their class, following their moral and cultural tradition, will maintain honor, dignity and be true to universal human values. Grinev and Captain Mironov remained devoted to the code of noble honor and oath, Savelich to the foundations of peasant morality. Humanity can become the property of all people and all classes.

Pushkin, however, is not a utopian; he does not portray things as if the cases he described had become the norm. On the contrary, they did not become a reality, but their triumph, albeit in the distant future, is possible. Pushkin turns to those times, continuing the important theme of mercy and justice in his work, when humanity becomes the law human existence. In the present tense, a sad note sounds, making an amendment to the bright history of Pushkin’s heroes - as soon as big events leave the historical scene, the cute characters of the novel become unnoticed, getting lost in the flow of life. They touched historical life only for a short time. However, sadness does not wash away Pushkin’s confidence in the course of history, in the victory of humanity.

In The Captain's Daughter, Pushkin found a convincing artistic solution to the contradictions of reality and all of existence that confronted him.

The measure of humanity has become, along with historicism, beauty and perfection of form, an integral and recognizable feature of Pushkin. universal(it is also called ontological, bearing in mind the universal human, existential quality of creativity, which determines the aesthetic originality of Pushkin’s mature works and himself as an artist) realism, which absorbed both the strict logic of classicism and the free play of imagination introduced into literature by romanticism.

Pushkin acted as the culmination of an entire era of literary development in Russia and the initiator new era art of words. His main artistic aspirations were synthesis of basic artistic directions- classicism, enlightenment, sentimentalism and romanticism and the establishment on this foundation of universal, or ontological, realism, which he called “true romanticism”, the destruction of genre thinking and the transition to thinking in styles, which subsequently ensured the dominance of a branched system of individual styles, as well as the creation of a single national literary language, the creation of perfect genre forms from the lyric poem to the novel, which became genre models for Russians writers of the 19th century century, and the renewal of Russian critical thought in the spirit of the achievements of European philosophy and aesthetics.

PROSE is the antonym of verse and poetry, formally - ordinary speech, not divided into selected commensurate segments - poetry, in terms of emotional and semantic - something mundane, ordinary, mediocre. In fact, the dominant form in the literature of the last two, and in Western Europe - three centuries.

Back in the 19th century. all fiction, including prose, was called poetry. Nowadays only poetic literature is called poetry.

The ancient Greeks believed that poetry uses a special speech, decorated according to the rules set out by its theory - poetics. Verse was one of the elements of this decoration, the difference between the speech of poetry and everyday speech. Decorated speech, but according to different rules - not poetics, but rhetoric - distinguished oratory (the Russian word “eloquence” literally conveys this feature of it), as well as historiography, geographical descriptions and philosophical works. The ancient novel, as the least “correct”, stood lowest in this hierarchy, was not taken seriously and was not recognized as a special layer of literature - prose. In the Middle Ages, religious literature was too separated from secular, artistic literature itself, for the prose in both to be perceived as something unified. Medieval entertaining and even edifying works in prose were considered incomparable with poetry as such, which was still poetic. The greatest novel of the Renaissance - “Gargantua and Pantagruel” by Francois Rabelais (1494-1553) - belonged more to grassroots literature associated with folk laughter culture than to official literature. M. Cervantes created his “Don Quixote” (1605, 1615) as a parody novel, but the implementation of the plan turned out to be much more serious and significant. In fact this is the first prose novel(the chivalric romances parodied in it were mostly poetic), which was recognized as a work of high literature and influenced the rise of the Western European novel more than a century later - in the 18th century.

In Russia, untranslated novels appear late, from 1763. high literature they did not belong; a serious person should have read the odes. In the Pushkin era, foreign novels of the 18th century. young provincial noblewomen like Tatyana Larina were keen on them, and an even more undemanding public was interested in domestic ones. But sentimentalist N.M. Karamzin in the 1790s. had already introduced prose into high literature - in the neutral and unregulated genre of the story, which, like the novel, was not included in the system of recognized classic genres, but also not burdened, like it, with unprofitable associations. Karamzin's stories became poetry in prose. A.S. Even in 1822, Pushkin wrote in a note about prose: “The question is, whose prose is the best in our literature? - Answer: Karamzin.” Ho added: “This is still not great praise...” On September 1 of the same year, in a letter he advised Prince P.A. Vyazemsky to seriously engage in prose. “They are tending to summer to prose...” - Pushkin noted, anticipating his poems in the sixth chapter of “Eugene Onegin”: “They are tending to summer to harsh prose, / They are driving summer to the naughty rhyme...” Author romantic stories A.A. In letters of 1825, he twice called on Bestuzhev (Marlinsky) to take up the novel, as later N.V. Gogol - move from stories to great work. And although he himself made his debut in prose in print only in 1831, simultaneously with Gogol (“Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”) and, like him, anonymously - “Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin,” thanks primarily to the two of them in the 1830s gg. An epochal turning point has occurred in Russian literature, which has already occurred in the West: from predominantly poetic it becomes predominantly prosaic. This process ended in the early 1840s, when “A Hero of Our Time” (1840) by Lermontov (who had extensive plans in prose) and “ Dead Souls” (1842) Gogol. Nekrasov then “proseized” the style of verse poetry.

Poems regained their leadership for a relatively long period only at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. (“Silver Age” - in contrast to Pushkin’s “golden”), and then only in modernism. The modernists were opposed by strong realist prose writers: M. Gorky, I.A. Bunin,

A.I. Kuprin, I.S. Shmelev, A.N. Tolstoy and others; for their part, symbolists D.S. Merezhkovsky, Fedor Sologub, V.Ya. Bryusov and Andrei Bely, in addition to poetry, created fundamentally new prose. True, both in the Silver Age (N.S. Gumilyov) and much later (I.A. Brodsky) some poets placed poetry much higher than prose. However, in the classics XIX-XX centuries, both Russian and Western, there are more prose writers than poets. Poems were almost completely squeezed out of drama and epic, even from lyric epic: in the second half of the 20th century. the only Russian poem of the classical level is Akhmatova’s “Poem without a Hero,” which is predominantly lyrical and began by the author back in 1940. Poems remained mainly for lyricism, and modern lyric poetry by the end of the century, as in the West, had lost a mass, even a wide readership, remained for a few fans. Instead of a theoretically clear division of the types of literature - epic, lyricism, drama - a vague but familiar one was fixed in the language: prose, poetry, drama (although lyrical miniatures in prose, strained poems and completely ridiculous dramas in verse are still being created).

The triumphant victory of prose is natural. Poetic speech is frankly conventional. Already L.N. Tolstoy considered it completely artificial, although he admired the lyrics of Tyutchev and Fet. In a small space of a lyrical work that is intense in thought and feeling, poems look more natural than in lengthy texts. The verse has a lot of additional expressive means compared to prose, but these “supports” are archaic in origin. In many countries of the West and East modern poetry uses almost exclusively free verse (free verse), which has no meter or rhyme.

Prose has its structural advantages. Much less capable than verse of influencing the reader “musically,” it is more free in the choice of semantic nuances, shades of speech, and in the transmission of “voices.” different people. “Diversity”, according to M.M. Bakhtin, prose is inherent to a greater extent than poetry (see: Artistic speech). The form of prose is similar to other properties of both the content and form of modern literature. “In prose there is unity crystallizing from diversity. In poetry, on the contrary, there is diversity developing from a clearly declared and directly expressed unity.” But for a modern person, unambiguous clarity and “head-on” statements in art are akin to banality. Literature of the 19th and even more of the 20th centuries. prefers as a basic principle a complex and dynamic unity, a unity of dynamic diversity. This also applies to poetry. By and large, one pattern determines the unity of femininity and masculinity in the poems of A.A. Akhmatova, tragedy and mockery in the prose of A.P. Platonov’s seemingly completely incompatible plot and content layers - satirical, demonic, “evangelical” and the love connecting them - in “The Master and Margarita” by M.A. Bulgakov, novel and epic in “Quiet Don” by M.A. Sholokhov, the absurdity and touching character of the story by V.M. Shukshin “Weirdo”, etc. Given this complexity of literature, prose reveals its own complexity compared to poetry. That's why Yu.M. Lotman built the following sequence from simple to complex: “ Speaking- song (text + motive) - “classical poetry” - literary prose.” With a developed culture of speech, the “assimilation” of literary language to everyday language is more difficult than the clear, straightforward “dissimilarity” that poetic speech originally was. Thus, it is more difficult for a student to draw to draw a life that is similar than that which is dissimilar. Thus, realism demanded more experience from humanity than pre-realist movements in art.

One should not think that only verse has rhythm. Spoken speech is quite rhythmic, like normal human movements - it is regulated by the rhythm of breathing. Rhythm is the regularity of some repetitions in time. Of course, the rhythm of ordinary prose is not as orderly as that of poetry, it is unstable and unpredictable. There is more rhythmic (in Turgenev) and less rhythmic (in Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy) prose, but it is never completely unordered. Syntactically prominent short sections of text do not differ greatly in length; they often begin or end rhythmically in the same way two or more times in a row. The phrase about the girls at the beginning of Gorky’s “Old Woman Izergil” is noticeably rhythmic: “Their hair, / silky and black, / was loose, / the wind, warm and light, / playing with it, / jingled with the coins / woven into it.” The syntagmas here are short and commensurate. Of the seven syntagmas, the first four and sixth begin with stressed syllables, the first three and sixth end with two unstressed (“dactylic” endings), inside the phrase the same way - with one unstressed syllable - two adjacent syntagmas end: “wind, warm and light” (all three words are rhythmically identical, consist of two syllables and are stressed on the first) and “playing with them” (both words end with one unstressed syllable). The only, last syntagma ends with an accent, which energetically ends the entire phrase.

The writer can also play on rhythmic contrasts. In Bunin’s story “Mr. from San Francisco,” the fourth paragraph (“It was the end of November...”) contains three phrases. The first is small, it consists of the words “but they sailed quite safely.” The next one is huge, half a page, describing the pastime on the famous “Atlantis”. In fact, it consists of many phrases, separated, however, not by a period, but mainly by a semicolon. They are like sea waves, lapping one another continuously. Thus, everything that is discussed is practically equalized: the structure of the ship, the daily routine, the activities of passengers - everything, living and inanimate. The final part of the gigantic phrase is “at seven they announced with trumpet signals what was the main goal of this entire existence, its crown...” Only here the writer makes a pause, expressed by an accent. And finally the last, final phrase, short, but as if equated with the previous one, so information-rich: “And then the gentleman from San Francisco hurried to his rich cabin to get dressed.” This “equation” enhances the subtle irony about the “crown” of this entire existence, that is, of course, dinner, although it is not deliberately named, but only implied. It is no coincidence that Bunin later described in such detail his hero’s preparation for dinner and his dressing in a hotel in Capri: “And then he again began to prepare, as if for a crown...” Even the word “crown” is repeated. After the gong (analogous to the “trumpet signals” on Atlantis), the gentleman goes to the reading room to wait for his not quite ready wife and daughter. There he suffers a blow from which he dies. Instead of the “crown” of existence there is non-existence. So rhythm, rhythm disruptions, and similar rhythmic semantic “roll calls” (with some reservations we can also talk about the rhythm of imagery) contribute to the merging of all elements of the text into a harmonious artistic whole.

Sometimes, since the end of the 18th century, and most of all in the first third of the 20th century, writers even metrize prose: they introduce the same sequence of stresses into syntagmas as in syllabic-tonic verses, but do not divide the text into poetic lines, boundaries between syntagmas remain unpredictable. Andrei Bely tried to make metered prose almost a universal form; he used it not only in novels, but also in articles and memoirs, which greatly irritated many readers. In modern literature, metrized prose is used in some lyrical miniatures and as separate inserts in larger works. When in a continuous text the rhythmic pauses are constant and the metered segments are equal in length, the sound of such a text is indistinguishable from a poetic text, like Gorky’s “Songs about the Falcon and the Petrel.”

Origin

Despite the apparent obviousness, there is no clear distinction between the concepts of prose and poetry. There are works that do not have rhythm, but are divided into lines and relate to poetry, and vice versa, written in rhyme and with rhythm, but related to prose (see Rhythmic prose).

Story

In number literary genres, traditionally classified as prose, include:

see also

• Intellectual prose
• Poetic prose

Notes

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See what “Prose” is in other dictionaries:

Prose writer... Russian word stress

URL: http://proza.ru ... Wikipedia

See Poetry and Prose. Literary encyclopedia. At 11 vol.; M.: Publishing House of the Communist Academy, Soviet Encyclopedia, Fiction. Edited by V. M. Fritsche, A. V. Lunacharsky. 1929 1939 … Literary encyclopedia

- (lat.). 1) a simple way of expression, simple speech, not measured, as opposed to poetry, verses. 2) boring, ordinary, everyday, everyday, in contrast to the ideal, the highest. Dictionary of foreign words included in the Russian language.... ... Dictionary of foreign words of the Russian language

- (vital, everyday, life); everyday life, fiction, everyday life, everyday life, everyday trifles Dictionary of Russian synonyms. prose see everyday life Dictionary of synonyms of the Russian language. Practical guide. M.: Russian I... Synonym dictionary

PROSE, prose, many. no, female (lat. prosa). 1. Non-poetry literature; ant. poetry. Write in prose. “There are inscriptions above them both in prose and verse.” Pushkin. Modern prose. Pushkin's prose. || All practical, not fiction(obsolete).… … Ushakov's Explanatory Dictionary

Art * Author * Library * Newspaper * Painting * Book * Literature * Fashion * Music * Poetry * Prose * Public * Dance * Theater * Fantasy Prose Some novels are too bad to be worth printing... But it happens that others... Consolidated encyclopedia of aphorisms

prose- y, w. prose f. , lat. prosa. 1. Speech that is not rhythmically organized. ALS 1. Drunk men and excrement of various animals are found in nature; but I would not want to read a living description of them, either in poetry or in prose. 1787. A. A. Petrov to Karamzin. //… Historical Dictionary of Gallicisms of the Russian Language

- (Latin prosa), spoken or written speech without division into commensurate segments of poetry. Unlike poetry, it relies on the correlation of syntactic units (paragraphs, periods, sentences, columns). Initially, business,... ... Modern encyclopedia

Prose(lat. prōsa) - oral or written speech without division into commensurate segments - poetry; in contrast to poetry, its rhythm is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic structures (periods, sentences).

So what is this - prose

It would seem that this is such a simple concept that everyone knows. But this is precisely where the difficulty of describing it lies. It’s easier to define what poetry is. Poetic speech is subject to strict laws and rules.

1. It is a clear rhythm or meter. Like in a march: one - two, one - two, or like in a dance: one - two - three, one - two - three.
2. Although an optional condition: Rhyme, that is, words that are consonant in their pronunciation. For example, love is a carrot or prose is a rose, etc.
3. A certain number of stanzas. Two stanzas are a couplet, four are a quatrain, there are eight stanzas, as well as various combinations of them.

Everything else is written or oral speech that does not obey these laws is prose. In it, words flow like a full-flowing river, smoothly, freely and independently, obeying only the thoughts and imagination of the author. Prose is a description in simple accessible language of everything that is around.

There is such a thing as the prose of life. These are everyday, mundane events that happen in people's lives. Writers who describe these events in their works. Writers are called prose writers. You don't have to look far for examples.

All world classical literature, and not only classical literature. F.M. Dostoevsky, L.N. Tolstoy. M. Gorky, N.V. Gogol are great prose writers. Open any of their books, and you will immediately understand what prose is, if you didn’t already know it.

But there are still people in the wide, vast expanses of our Motherland who seriously believe that prose writers are the kind of people who write about ZAEK. Some consider them illiterate and uneducated, others, on the contrary, are original and creative. The choice is yours.

So what is prose? Look carefully, here is an example of a simple prose work. This article. And if someone still doesn’t understand what prose is, then read it again.

Prose(Latin prōsa) is speech without division into commensurate segments, the rhythm of which is based on the approximate correlation of syntactic structures. It is also non-poetic literature.

Unlike poetry, prose does not have significant restrictions on rhythm and rhyme. It provides authors, as M. M. Bakhtin noted, with wider “opportunities for linguistic diversity, the combination in the same text of different manners of thinking and speaking: in prosaic artistry (most fully manifested in the novel).” Prose, in particular, is many times superior to poetry in genre diversity.

A copywriter needs to be able to create both prose and poetic works. Knowledge of poetry enriches the language of a prose writer. As K. Paustovsky noted:

“Poetry has one amazing property. She returns the word to its original virgin freshness.”

Types and genres of literature

All literary and artistic works can be combined into three large groups, called literary genera and including both poetic and prose texts:

- epic,

– drama,

- lyrics.

Lyroepic is also distinguished as a separate genus and some intergeneric and extrageneric forms are distinguished.

Although there is a division into genders, there can be “generic intersection” in literary works. So, there may be an epic poem, a lyrical story, a dramatic story, etc.

In each of literary families includes works of a certain genre.

Literary genres are groups of works collected according to formal and content characteristics. We can also say that a genre is a historically emerging and developing type work of art, having a certain set of stable properties (size, speech structures, principles of construction, etc.). Genres provide continuity and stability in literary development.

Over time, some genres die out and are replaced by others. Also, “remaining” genres can become both more and less popular - both among authors and among readers. The formation or change of literary genres is influenced by historical reality. For example, at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the detective novel, the police novel, the science fiction novel, and the ladies' (“pink”) novel developed powerfully.

Classification of genres is not an easy task, because different genres can have the same properties.

Historically, genres were divided into two groups: “high” and “low”. So, in the early literary times the lives of saints were classified as “high,” and works of entertainment as “low.” During the period of classicism, a strict hierarchy of genres was established: high ones are ode, tragedy, epic, low ones are comedy, satire, fable. Later, fairy tales and novels began to be classified as “high” ones.

Today they talk about high literature (strict, truly artistic, “literary top”), and about mass literature (“trivial”, “popular”, “consumer”, “paraliterature”, “contemporary literature”, “literary bottom”). The first is intended for people who are reflective, educated, and knowledgeable about art. The second is for the undemanding majority of readers, for a person “not familiar (or little familiar) with artistic culture, who does not have developed taste, who is unwilling or unable to think independently and appreciate works of art, who seeks mainly entertainment in printed materials.” Mass literature is characterized by schematism, the use of stereotypes, clichés, and “authorlessness.” But popular literature compensates for its shortcomings with dynamically developing action and an abundance of incredible incidents.

Classical literature and fiction are also distinguished. Classic literature is those works that are the pinnacles of creativity and which modern authors should emulate.

As they say, a classic is something that is written with the tastes of future generations in mind.

Fiction (from the French belles lettres - fine literature) is usually called non-classical narrative prose, which belongs to mass literature, but is not at the very bottom. In other words, fiction is the middle mass literature, located between the classics and pulp fiction.

A copywriter must have a good understanding of the specifics of the types and genres of literary works. For example, mixing or substituting genres can easily “kill” a text for a reader who expects one thing and gets another (instead of “comedy” - “drama”, instead of “action” - “melodrama”, etc.). However, a thoughtful mixture of genres can also work effectively for a certain text. The final result will depend on the literacy and skill of the copywriter. He must know the “laws of the genre.”

More detailed information on this topic can be found in the books of A. Nazaikin