The works of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin can safely be placed on a par with the works of the greatest masters of Russian psychological prose - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. Alas, the writer was not given the opportunity to live a long life; the biography of V. M. Garshin ends at number 33. The writer was born in February 1855 and died in March 1888. His death turned out to be as fatal and tragic as his entire worldview, expressed in short and poignant stories. Acutely feeling the inescapability of evil in the world, the writer created works of amazing depth of psychological drawing, experienced them with his heart and mind and could not protect himself from the monstrous disharmony reigning in the social and moral life of people. Heredity, a special character, the drama experienced in childhood, an acute sense of personal guilt and responsibility for the injustices happening in reality - everything led to madness, the end of which, rushing into a flight of stairs, was set by V. M. Garshin himself.
Brief biography of the writer. Childhood impressions
He was born in Ukraine, in the Yekaterinoslav province, on an estate with the cute name Pleasant Valley. The father of the future writer was an officer, a participant. His mother had progressive views, spoke several languages, read a lot and, undoubtedly, managed to instill in her son the nihilistic sentiments characteristic of the sixties of the 19th century. The woman boldly broke with her family, having become passionately interested in the revolutionary Zavadsky, who lived in the family as a teacher of the older children. Of course, this event pierced the small heart of five-year-old Vsevolod like a “knife”. Partly because of this, the biography of V. M. Garshin is not without gloomy colors. The mother, who was in conflict with the father over the right to raise her son, took him to St. Petersburg and enrolled him in a gymnasium. Ten years later, Garshin entered the Mining Institute, but did not receive a diploma, since his studies were interrupted by the Russian-Turkish War of 1877.
War experience
On the very first day, the student signed up as a volunteer and in one of the first battles fearlessly rushed into the attack, receiving a minor wound in the leg. Garshin received the rank of officer, but did not return to the battlefield. The impressionable young man was shocked by the images of war; he could not come to terms with the fact that people were blindly and mercilessly exterminating each other. He did not return to the institute, where he began to study mining: the young man was powerfully attracted to literature. For some time he attended lectures as a volunteer at the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg University, and then began to write stories. Anti-war sentiments and the shock he experienced resulted in works that instantly made the aspiring writer famous and desirable in many editorial offices of that time.
Suicide
The writer’s mental illness developed in parallel with his creativity and social activities. He was treated in a psychiatric clinic. But soon after this (the biography of V. M. Garshin mentions this bright event) his life was illuminated by love. The writer regarded his marriage to the aspiring physician Nadezhda Zolotilova as the best years of his life. By 1887, the writer’s illness was aggravated by the fact that he was forced to leave the service. In March 1888, Garshin was going to the Caucasus. Things were already packed and a time had been set. After a night tormented by insomnia, Vsevolod Mikhailovich suddenly went out onto the landing, went down one flight below and rushed down from a height of four floors. The literary images of suicide that burned the soul in his short stories were embodied in a terrifying and irreparable way. The writer was taken to hospital with serious injuries, and six days later he died. The message about V. M. Garshin, about his tragic death, created great public excitement.
People from all walks of life and classes gathered to say goodbye to the writer on the “Literary Bridge” of the Volkovsky Cemetery in St. Petersburg (now a necropolis museum). The poet Pleshcheev wrote a lyrical obituary, in which he expressed acute pain that Garshin, a man of great pure soul, is no longer among the living. The literary heritage of the prose writer still disturbs the souls of readers and is the subject of research by philologists.
Creativity of V. M. Garshin. Anti-militarist theme
A lively interest in the inner world of a person surrounded by unmerciful reality is the central theme in Garshin’s works. The sincerity and empathy in the author’s prose undoubtedly feeds from the source of great Russian literature, which, since the book “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum,” has demonstrated a deep interest in the “dialectics of the soul.”
Garshin the narrator first appeared before the reading public with the work “Four Days.” The soldier lay with broken legs on the battlefield for so long until his fellow soldiers found him. The story is told in the first person and resembles the stream of consciousness of a person exhausted by pain, hunger, fear and loneliness. He hears groans, but realizes with horror that it is he himself who is groaning. Near him, the corpse of the enemy he killed is decomposing. Looking at this picture, the hero is horrified by the face on which the skin has burst, the grin of the skull is terribly exposed - the face of war! Other stories breathe similar anti-war pathos: “The Coward,” “The Orderly and the Officer,” “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov.”
Thirst for harmony
With the utmost frankness, the heroine of the story “The Incident” appears before the reader, earning a living with her body. The narrative is constructed in the same manner of confession and merciless introspection characteristic of Garshin. A woman who has met her “support”, a man who unwittingly put her on the path of choosing between a “impudent, rouged cocotte” and a “legitimate wife and... noble parent,” is trying to change her fate. Such an understanding of the theme of the harlot appears, perhaps, for the first time in Russian literature of the 19th century. In the story “Artists,” Garshin embodied with renewed vigor the idea of Gogol, who firmly believed that the emotional shock produced by art could change people for the better. In the short story “Meeting,” the author shows how the cynical conviction that all means are good to achieve well-being takes possession of the minds of seemingly the best representatives of the generation.
Happiness is in a sacrificial act
The story “Red Flower” is a special event that marks the creative biography of V. M. Garshin. It tells the story of a madman who is convinced that the “bloody” flower in the hospital garden contains all the untruths and cruelty of the world, and the hero’s mission is to destroy it. Having completed the deed, the hero dies, and his dead, brightened face expresses “proud happiness.” According to the writer, a person is not able to defeat the world’s evil, but high honor is given to those people who cannot put up with this and are ready to sacrifice their lives to overcome it.
All of Vsevolod Garshin's works - essays and short stories - fit into just one volume, but the shock that his prose produced in the hearts of thoughtful readers is incredibly great.
The main stages of Garshin's life and work. Russian writer, critic. Born on February 2 (14), 1855 in the estate of Pleasant Valley, Bakhmut district, Ekaterinoslav province. in a family of nobles who trace their ancestry back to the Golden Horde Murza Gorshi. His father was an officer and took part in the Crimean War of 1853–1856. Her mother, the daughter of a naval officer, took part in the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s. Man's helplessness in the face of the elements of evil, emphasized by tragic endings, became the main theme not only of the military, but also of Garshin's later stories. For example, the story The Incident (1878) is a street scene in which the writer shows the hypocrisy of society and the savagery of the crowd in condemning a prostitute. Even when portraying people of art, artists, Garshin did not find a solution to his painful spiritual search. The story The Artists (1879) is imbued with pessimistic thoughts about the uselessness of real art. His hero, the talented artist Ryabinin, gives up painting and goes to the village to teach peasant children. In the story Attalea princeps (1880), Garshin expressed his worldview in symbolic form. A freedom-loving palm tree, in an effort to escape from a glass greenhouse, breaks through the roof and dies. Having a romantic attitude towards reality, Garshin tried to break the vicious circle of life's issues, but his painful psyche and complex character returned the writer to a state of despair and hopelessness. This condition was aggravated by the events taking place in Russia. In February 1880, revolutionary terrorist I.O. Mlodetsky made an attempt on the life of the head of the Supreme Administrative Commission, Count M.T. Loris-Melikov. Garshin, as a famous writer, obtained an audience with the count to ask for pardon for the criminal in the name of mercy and civil peace. The writer convinced the high dignitary that the execution of the terrorist would only lengthen the chain of useless deaths in the struggle between the government and the revolutionaries. After Mlodetsky’s execution, Garshin’s manic-depressive psychosis worsened. Traveling through the Tula and Oryol provinces did not help. The writer was placed in Oryol, and then in Kharkov and St. Petersburg psychiatric hospitals. After a relative recovery, Garshin did not return to creativity for a long time. In 1882, his collection of Stories was published, which caused heated debate among critics. Garshin was condemned for the pessimism and gloomy tone of his works. The populists used the writer’s work to use his example to show how a modern intellectual is tormented and tormented by remorse. In August-September 1882, at the invitation of I.S. Turgenev, Garshin lived and worked on the story From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov (1883) in Spassky-Lutovinovo. In the winter of 1883, Garshin married medical student N.M. Zolotilova and entered the service as secretary of the office of the Congress of Railway Representatives. The writer spent a lot of mental energy on the story The Red Flower (1883), in which the hero, at the cost of his own life, destroys all the evil concentrated, as his fevered imagination imagines, in three poppy flowers growing in the hospital yard. In subsequent years, Garshin sought to simplify his narrative style. Stories appeared written in the spirit of Tolstoy's folk stories - The Tale of the Proud Haggai (1886), The Signal (1887). The children's fairy tale The Frog Traveler (1887) became the writer's last work. Garshin died in St. Petersburg on March 24 (April 5), 1888.
Garshin “Red Flower” and “Artists”. His allegorical story “The Red Flower” became a textbook. a mentally ill person in a psychiatric hospital fights the world's evil in the form of dazzling red poppies in the hospital flower bed. Characteristic of Garshin (and this is by no means only an autobiographical moment) is the depiction of a hero on the verge of madness. The point is not so much the illness, but the fact that the writer’s person is unable to cope with the inescapability of evil in the world. Contemporaries appreciated the heroism of Garshin's characters: they try to resist evil, despite their own weakness. It is madness that turns out to be the beginning of rebellion, since, according to Garshin, it is impossible to rationally comprehend evil: the person himself is drawn into it - and not only by social forces, but also, no less, and perhaps more important, by internal forces. He himself is partly a bearer of evil - sometimes contrary to his own ideas about himself. The irrational in a person’s soul makes him unpredictable; the outburst of this uncontrollable element is not only a rebellion against evil, but also evil itself. Garshin loved painting, wrote articles about it, supporting the Wanderers. He gravitated towards painting and prose - not only making artists his heroes ("Artists", "Nadezhda Nikolaevna"), but also masterfully mastering verbal plasticity. He contrasted pure art, which Garshin almost identified with handicraft, with realistic art, which was closer to him, rooting for the people. Art that can touch the soul and disturb it. From art, he, a romantic at heart, demands a shock effect in order to amaze the “clean, sleek, hateful crowd” (Ryabinin’s words from the story “Artists”).
Garshin “Coward” and “Four Days”. In Garshin's writings, a person is in a state of mental turmoil. In the first story, “Four Days,” written in a hospital and reflecting the writer’s own impressions, the hero is wounded in battle and awaits death, while the corpse of the Turk he killed is decomposing nearby. This scene was often compared to the scene from War and Peace, where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, wounded in the Battle of Austerlitz, looks at the sky. Garshin’s hero also looks at the sky, but his questions are not abstractly philosophical, but completely earthly: why war? why was he forced to kill this man, towards whom he had no hostile feelings and, in fact, innocent of anything? This work clearly expresses a protest against war, against the extermination of man by man. A number of stories are dedicated to the same motif: “The Orderly and the Officer”, “The Ayaslyar Case”, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov” and “The Coward”; the hero of the latter suffers from heavy reflection and oscillations between the desire to “sacrifice himself for the people” and the fear of unnecessary and meaningless death. Garshin’s military theme is passed through the crucible of conscience, through the soul, confused before the incomprehensibility of this unknown, premeditated and unnecessary massacre. Meanwhile, the Russian-Turkish War of 1877 was started with the noble goal of helping our Slavic brothers get rid of the Turkish yoke. Garshin is not concerned about political motives, but about existential questions. The character does not want to kill other people, does not want to go to war (the story “Coward”). Nevertheless, he, obeying the general impulse and considering it his duty, signs up as a volunteer and dies. The meaninglessness of this death haunts the author. But what is significant is that this absurdity is not isolated in the general structure of existence. In the same story, “Coward”, a medical student dies of gangrene that began with a toothache. These two events are parallel, and it is in their artistic conjunction that one of Garshin’s main questions is highlighted - about the nature of evil. This question tormented the writer all his life. It is no coincidence that his hero, a reflective intellectual, protests against world injustice, embodied in certain faceless forces that lead a person to death and destruction, including self-destruction. Exactly a specific person. Personality. Face. the realism of Garshin's manner. His work is characterized by precision of observation and definite expression of thought. He has few metaphors and comparisons; instead, he uses simple designations of objects and facts. A short, polished phrase, without subordinate clauses in descriptions. "Hot. The sun is burning. The wounded man opens his eyes and sees bushes, a high sky” (“Four Days”).
The works of V. M. Garshin have been known to modern readers since their school years. His fairy tales for children are considered examples of world fiction.
The writer's childhood
In 1855 in a noble family. The place of birth was the estate of his parents in the Ekaterinoslav province. Father and mother come from military families. My father himself was an officer who participated in the Crimean War. Mother was active in social and political activities, being a participant in the revolutionary democratic movement.
In his childhood, the future writer had to endure a difficult psychological drama. It was the result of a difficult relationship between the boy’s parents. Family life ended with their divorce and the departure of their mother.
Until the age of nine, the child lived with his father on the family estate, and then moved to his mother in St. Petersburg, where he began studying at the gymnasium. It is believed that it was she who instilled in the child a love of literature. She herself was fluent in French and German. The mother's natural desire was to give her son a good education. Communication with her contributed to the early development of the child’s consciousness. The formation of such character traits as a high sense of duty, citizenship, and the ability to have a subtle sense of the surrounding world is also the merit of the mother.
Student years. Beginning of literary activity
After successfully completing his studies at the gymnasium, the young man enters the Mining Institute, where his literary career begins. opens with a satirical essay about the life of provincials. The essay is based on real events that the young writer could personally observe at the time when he lived on his parents’ estate.
During his student years, Garshin was keenly interested in the works of the Itinerant artists. It is for this reason that he publishes many articles devoted to their work.
Military service
The events taking place in the country could not ignore the young man. Considering himself a hereditary military man, Garshin takes part in the war that was declared by Russia against Turkey. In one of the battles, a young man was wounded in the leg and sent to the hospital for treatment.
Even here, the list of Garshin’s works continues to grow. The story "Four Days", which was published in "Notes of the Fatherland", was written while undergoing treatment in a military hospital. After this publication, the name of the young writer became known in literary circles, and he became widely known.
After being wounded, Garshin was given a year's leave, and then retired from military service. Despite this, the distinguished military man was promoted to officer.
Literary activity
After the events described, V. M. Garshin had the opportunity to return to St. Petersburg, where he was very warmly received in intellectual circles. He was patronized by such famous writers as M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, G. I. Uspensky and others.
As a volunteer, the young writer continued his education at St. Petersburg University. From that moment on, the list of Garshin's works continued to grow steadily, which indicated his undoubted literary gift.
Features of the writer's literary creativity
The works of V. M. Garshin amazed readers with the nakedness of feelings that the writer so skillfully described in his stories and essays. No one had any doubt that the hero of this or that work and its author were one and the same person.
This idea was strengthened in the minds of readers also because the list of Garshin’s works began to be replenished with works that took the form of diary entries. In them, the narration was told in the first person, the feelings of the hero, his most intimate spiritual secrets and experiences were extremely exposed. All this undoubtedly pointed to the subtle spiritual qualities of the author himself. Proof of all that has been said can be found in such works as “The Coward,” “The Incident,” “The Artists,” and many other stories.
The events he experienced, the complexity of his character, and the peculiarities of his mental organization led to the fact that V. M. Garshin developed a disease that needed to be treated. To do this, he was repeatedly placed in psychiatric hospitals, where he was able to achieve only relative recovery. In connection with these events, the writer’s literary activity was suspended for some time. During a difficult period of his life, Garshin continued to be supported by friends and loved ones.
Garshin's works for children
The list of works that today are called diamonds began to appear when the writer decided to simplify the language of the narrative. The example was the stories of L.N. Tolstoy, written specifically for young readers.
Garshin's works for children, the list of which is not so long, are distinguished by simplicity of presentation, clear fascination, and novelty of the characters' characters and their actions. After reading fairy tales, the reader always has the opportunity to speculate, argue, and draw certain conclusions. All this helps a person move forward in his development.
It should be noted that Garshin’s fairy tales are interesting not only to young readers, but also to their parents. An adult is surprised to discover that the fairy tale has captured him, revealing some new aspects of human relationships, a different outlook on life. In total, there are five known works of the writer that are intended for children's reading: “The Tale of Proud Haggai”, “About the Toad and the Rose”, “Attalea princeps”, “That which did not exist”. The fairy tale “The Frog Traveler” is the writer’s last work. It has rightfully become a favorite children's work among many generations of readers.
Garshin's fairy tales are studied in literature classes in elementary and high school. They are included in all current school curricula and textbooks.
Books containing the works of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin are reprinted in numerous editions and are released in the form of audio recordings. Animated films, filmstrips, and performances were created based on his creations.
/Nikolai Konstantinovich Mikhailovsky (1842-1904). About Vsevolod Garshin/
"Incident"- a story about how Ivan Ivanovich fell in love and committed suicide. He fell in love with Nadezhda Nikolaevna, a street woman who had once seen better times, studied, passed exams, remembered Pushkin and Lermontov, and so on. Misfortune pushed her onto a muddy road and she got stuck in the mud. Ivan Ivanovich offers her his love, his home, his life, but she is afraid to impose these correct bonds on herself, it seems to her that Ivan Ivanovich, despite all his love, will not forget her terrible past and that there is no return for her. Ivan Ivanovich, after some, but too weak, attempts to dissuade her, seems to agree with her, because he shoots himself.
This same motif, only in a much more complex and intricate plot, is repeated in “Nadezhda Nikolaevna.” This Nadezhda Nikolaevna, like the first one who appears in “The Incident,” is a cocotte. She, too, encounters fresh, sincere love, she is overcome by the same doubts and hesitations, but she is already inclined towards complete rebirth, when the bullet of a jealous former lover and some special weapon of the one who calls her to a new life, ends this romance with two deaths.
"Meeting". Old comrades Vasily Petrovich and Nikolai Konstantinovich, who have long lost sight of each other, unexpectedly meet. Vasily Petrovich once dreamed “of a professorship, of journalism, of a big name, but he was not enough for all this, and he puts up with the role of a gymnasium teacher. He puts up with it, but treats the new role ahead of him as an impeccably honest person: he will be an exemplary teacher, will sow the seeds of goodness and truth, in the hope that someday in his old age he will see in his students the embodiment of his own youthful dreams. But then he meets with his old comrade Nikolai Konstantinovich. This is a completely different bird. of this building, he warms his hands so skillfully that, with an empty salary, he lives in even unlikely luxury (he has an aquarium in his apartment, in some respects rivaling the one in Berlin). On the contrary, he reveals all his cards and with the impudence of a man. theoretically convinced of the legitimacy of swinishness, he also tries to convert Vasily Petrovich to his faith. It cannot be said that his argumentation is distinguished by irresistible force, but Vasily Petrovich parries his arguments even weaker. So in the end, although Nikolai Konstantinovich’s disgusting behavior is fully revealed, at the same time his shameless and joyless prophecy is firmly imprinted in the reader’s mind: “Three quarters of your students will turn out like me, and one quarter will turn out like you, that is, a well-intentioned brat."
"Artists". The artist Dedov is a representative of pure art. He loves art for its own sake and thinks that introducing into it burning everyday motives that disturb the peace of mind means dragging art through the mud. He thinks (strange thought!) that just as in music dissonances, ear-piercing, unpleasant sounds are not permissible, so in painting, in art in general there is no place for unpleasant subjects. But he gives and goes safely to the doors leading to the temple of glory, orders and Olympic peace of mind. The artist Ryabinin is not like that. He is, apparently, more talented than Dedov, but he did not create an idol for himself out of pure art; he is also interested in other things. Having almost accidentally come across one scene from the life of factory workers, or, rather, even just one figure, he began to paint it and experienced so much during this work, he became so involved in the situation of his subject that he stopped painting when he finished the picture. He was drawn somewhere else, to another job, with an irresistible force. For the first time he entered a teachers' seminary. What happened to him next is unknown, but the author certifies that Ryabinin “did not succeed”...
As you can see, a whole series of misfortunes and whole prospects of hopelessness: good intentions remain intentions, and what the author apparently sympathizes with remains behind the flag.<...>
