Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism, opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man,” who extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, and events public importance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
For bright purposes satirical image Gogol's heroes are served by a careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in romantic stories Gogol gives emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain elation of tone, but in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characterizing heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Go-gol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer are - folk group and “existents” - determined the main features of the writer’s speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in “Evenings ...", in “Taras Bulba”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls” ), then it becomes close to live conversational (in everyday paintings and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of vernacular speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than his predecessors and contemporaries. Material from the site
Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of social life.
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
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On this page there is material on the following topics:
- Gogol's nose artistic features
- characteristics of Gogol's works
- features of N.V. Gogol’s work. essay
- report features of creative talent n. V. Gogol
- peculiarity of Gogol's creative talent
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he soon turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the beneficial influence of Pushkin. But he was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
This social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, Gogol’s plot serves only as a pretext for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The names of Khlestakov, Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and others became household names. Even the minor characters depicted by Gogol on the pages of his works (for example, in “Dead Souls”): Pelageya, the serf girl Korobochka, or Ivan Antonovich, the “jug’s snout,” have great power of generalization and typicality. Gogol emphasizes one or two of his most significant features in the character of the hero. Often he exaggerates them, which makes the image even more vivid and prominent.
The purposes of a vivid, satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, the hero’s home.
If Gogol’s romantic stories contain emphatically picturesque landscapes, giving the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech.
The two worlds depicted by Gogol - the people’s collective and the “existents” - determined the main features of the writer’s speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in “Evenings”, in “Taras Bulba”, in lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings” or when the story is told about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of folk speech and skillfully used all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena. public life.
1) the periodic structure of a phrase, when many sentences are connected into one whole (“Taras saw how vague the Cossack ranks became and how despondency, indecent for the brave, began to quietly embrace the Cossack heads, but was silent: he wanted to give time to everything, so that they would get used to despondency brought on by farewell to his comrades, and meanwhile in the silence he was preparing to wake them all up at once and suddenly, whooping like a Cossack, so that again and with greater force than before, cheerfulness would return to everyone’s soul, which only the Slavic breed, the wide one, is capable of. a mighty rock is to others as the sea is to shallow rivers");
2) the introduction of lyrical dialogues and monologues (for example, the conversation between Levko and Ganna in the first chapter of “May Night”, monologues - appeals to the Cossacks of Koshevoy, Taras Bulba, Bovdyug in “Taras Bulba”);
3) an abundance of exclamatory and interrogative sentences (for example, in the description of the Ukrainian night in “May Night”);
4) emotional epithets that convey the power of the author’s inspiration, born of love for native nature (description of a day at the Sorochinskaya Fair) or for a folk group (“Taras Bulba”).
Gogol uses everyday speech in different ways. In early works (in “Evenings”) its bearer is the narrator. The author puts into his mouth both vernacular words (everyday words and phrases), and such appeals to listeners that are of a familiar, good-natured nature, characteristic of this environment: “By God, I’m already tired of telling! What are you thinking?
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. Gogol's humor - “laughter through tears” - was determined by the contradictions of the Russian reality of his time, mainly by the contradictions between the people and the anti-people essence of the noble state. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposite of the ideal
life with the reality of life." He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
The writer’s work is such a mystery that it is hardly possible to solve it, especially the work of such complex and rich natures as Gogol was.
It is all the more difficult to unravel Gogol’s spiritual life because he was one of those people who do not like to speak out and not only jealously guard their best aspirations and plans to themselves, but sometimes even mystically avert their eyes from their true goals and views. This feature of Gogol is so great that even his intimate letters to people close to him do not always correctly determine his real thoughts and receive the character of persuasiveness only when, in terms of the feelings and opinions expressed in them, they coincide partly with other notes of Gogol, partly with the direct testimony of people, who knew him personally. But the surest way to recognize the personality of such a secretive person as Gogol is, of course, to approach him at a time when he does not know about your presence and, so to speak, overhear what he says in private.
But where did Gogol truly remain himself? When would it be possible to take him by surprise and hear the sincere and fundamental note of his voice? I believe that most often he was himself in his works; his colossal talent took possession of him irrevocably and forced him involuntarily, here and there, to directly surrender to his passion, in the words of Shakespeare, “to cling to a dream”1). And Gogol himself tells us this path to solve the riddle. When he was nineteen years old, upon leaving the Nezhin Lyceum, he wrote to his mother: “Do you believe that I internally laughed at myself with you! Here I am called humble, the beginning of meekness and patience. In one place I am the most quiet, modest, courteous, in another I am gloomy, thoughtful, uncouth, etc., in a third I am talkative and extremely annoying, in others I am smart, in others I am stupid. Honor me as you please, but only from my present career will you recognize my real character.” We have to be especially careful in judging Gogol’s ignorance, which, although one cannot deny and cannot help but point out, but which disappears somewhere from our eyes as soon as we come into contact with his gift of insight and his amazing, so to speak, eye for life . He himself brilliantly illuminated this issue of his illiteracy in the story “Portrait”. One painter is defined here as follows: “He was a remarkable man in many respects. He was an artist, of which there are few - one of those miracles that only Rus' spews from its untapped womb, a self-taught artist who found in his soul, without teachers or school, rules and laws, carried away only by the thirst for improvement and walked according to reasons, perhaps unknown to himself, only indicated from the soul along the way; one of those natural miracles that contemporaries often honor an offensive word“ignorants” and who, without cooling down from the blasphemy of their own failures, only receive new zeal and strength and are already moving far in their souls from those works for which they received the title of ignorant. With a high inner instinct he felt the presence of thought in every object.” In these words, much is applicable to Gogol himself, who mainly sought both strengths and different ways to express these forces within himself.
Before bringing to general attention various aspects of his life and the development of his work, I allow myself to make one reservation. Everyone knows that in the character of this man there were many properties that unpleasantly struck those who met him in life: his whims, and arrogance, and the obsessive tone of teaching, and cunning, sometimes combined with seeking - all this repelled him very much. many; but I will not dwell at all on these, if you like, dark features of Gogol. I will not ask the question: was he a good or a bad person? The rules of ordinary morality are too narrow to cover such a complex, sometimes sick and depressed, sometimes highly inspired existence as the inner life of this peculiar man presents to us. I do not strive to value his morality, but only to try to explain how Gogol developed and what creative techniques he discovered in connection with his personality.
There is, fortunately, one document that in many respects inspires serious confidence in judging the development of Gogol as a writer. This document is his own “Author's Confession”. He inspires confidence because the accuracy of the information told here is confirmed by many people who knew Gogol, and by his own note in a letter to Pletnev (June 10, 1847), where he writes about this confession: “I only pray to God that He will give me strength to state everything simply and truthfully.” This “Author's Confession” contains one valuable remark: “From early youth,” Gogol writes, “I had one road, which I'm walking on. I was only secretive because I was not stupid - that’s all.” With this remark, Gogol destroys assumptions about some kind of turn in his personal development, which is often seen in his “Correspondence with Friends.”
This exposure of Gogol is so important that, despite all the reliability of the document, let us try not to believe it in this case. Is it really true that Gogol remained true to himself even in the last part of his life? Let's try to trace this based on the information we have about his life. Let us first focus our attention on his painful daydreaming, religiosity and sadness, leaving aside his real aspirations for now. From what age do these properties that distinguished him in adulthood become noticeable in him? Let's start with childhood. We all know that in his youth and early youth he was a man of uncontrollable gaiety. And it was true; it seemed so to everyone, so it seemed at times himself, but look what was hidden behind this cheerfulness. As a child, he could already sometimes hear some strange voices, coming from somewhere unknown and calling him by name; these voices had an amazing effect on him. In the story “Old World Landowners” he recalls this. “I confess that I was always afraid of this mysterious call. I remember that as a child I often heard it: sometimes suddenly someone would clearly pronounce my name. The day was usually the clearest and sunny at this time; Not a single leaf in the garden on the tree moved; the silence was dead... I usually ran then with the greatest fear and caught my breath from the garden, and then I only calmed down when some person came towards me, the sight of whom drove away this terrible desert of the heart.” If such cases that captivated the child were not as frequent as he himself says, then in any case they do not prove, even at this age, great vitality in the boy, but rather the exorbitant development of the imagination, which had an overwhelming effect on, -apparently a weak organism.
His religious feeling gained vitality and strength in early childhood and did not leave him throughout his life. And in highest degree It is curious that for the first time it spoke in him and directed his thought to objects of faith under the influence of his same fiery imagination: having described in a letter to his mother (October 2, 1833) the pampering with which he was surrounded, he writes about his childhood: “I remember, I I didn’t feel anything strongly, I looked at everything as if they were things created to please me... I went to church because they ordered me or carried me... I was baptized because I saw that everyone was baptizing. But once - I remember this incident vividly, as if now - I asked you to tell me about Last Judgment, and you told me, a child, so well, so clearly, so touchingly about the benefits that await people for a virtuous life, and so strikingly, so horribly described the eternal torment of sinners, that it shocked me and awakened all the sensitivity in me, this seeded and subsequently produced in me the highest thoughts.” One can really believe that this story about the Last Judgment, touching and terrible, instilled in Gogol from these years that fiery attitude towards religion, which can be constantly seen in his correspondence with his mother from Nezhin, and from St. Petersburg, and from abroad , and from Moscow - from everywhere and at any age. In one of his letters (1829), for example, at the age of twenty, he tells his mother that he “feels a fair punishment has fallen upon him.” the heavy Hand of the Almighty”, and at the end of the letter he adds: “I am moved recognized the invisible Hand who cares for me, and blessed so wonderfully the path assigned to me”.
Much was written and said in its time about Gogol’s arrogant hypocrisy, which was revealed unexpectedly to everyone with the publication of his correspondence, but the materials for his biography, collected and published since then, clearly convince that he himself had a prophetic and demanding tone in matters of morality not news at all. Re-read his letters to his family, to his mother and sisters, with whom even in his youth he felt not embarrassed, as with those high-ranking officials (with whom he ceased to be embarrassed only later), re-read - and a curious picture of precisely those contradictory moods will appear before you , which suddenly appeared to everyone at the end of his life. These moods were not formed, but only revealed by this time, because they existed before, but remained an intimate secret of the writer himself. In these early letters to his relatives, especially to his mother, he either showers them with terribly superior instructions, sometimes on a religious, sometimes on an everyday basis, and sometimes even goes so far as to recommend that they read only his letters and nothing more, or, touched by their objections, with genuine sadness and even some self-flagellation, he strives to make amends for the insult. Moreover, this tendency towards sadness generally began to manifest itself in him in his early youth. True, as a seventeen-year-old boy he writes to his mother: “Often in hours of thoughtfulness, when others seemed sad to me, when they saw or wanted to see in me signs of sentimental reverie, I unraveled the science of a cheerful, happy life, I was surprised how people, greedy for happiness, immediately run away from him when they meet him.” But with all this, he himself recalls in the “Author's Confession”: “The reason for the gaiety that was noticed in my first works that appeared in print was a certain spiritual need. I was overcome by fits of melancholy, inexplicable to me, which came perhaps from my painful condition. To entertain myself, I came up with everything funny that I could think of...”
Yes, he did not avoid these sad notes even in those works of his youth, the uncontrollable and completely unconstrained gaiety of which remains amazing to this day, and it is curious that the sad remarks in these stories of his all represent not a particularity, but a broad and bright pessimistic generalization, throwing light on some features of the basic worldview of man. Although in the story about Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich he pours out one after another inimitable everyday anecdotes from provincial life, he ends the story in a way that a completely cheerful person would never have finished it: “Again the same field, in places pitted, black, in others green, wet jackdaws and crows, monotonous rain, tearful sky without clearing... It’s boring in this world, gentlemen!”
If we think that the sad ending of the anecdote about these two neighbors could have led Gogol to this reflection and that it is an accident that naturally accompanies such a denouement, then how can we explain, if not a personal trait of a person, the ending of the story “Sorochinskaya Fair”? After all, this story is really a village fair - noisy, colorful, cheerful, ending happy wedding, where both the old and the young began to dance, and on the village street everything rushed and danced at the blow of the musician’s bow. But, having barely described the cheerful picture, Gogol imperceptibly moves on to the following remark: “Thunder, laughter, songs were heard quieter and quieter. The bow was dying, weakening and losing its unclear sounds in the thick air. There was also a sound of stamping somewhere, something similar to the murmur of a distant sea, and soon everything became empty and dull.
Isn’t it also true that joy, a beautiful and fickle guest, flies away from us, and in vain does a lonely sound think to express joy? In his own echo he already hears sadness and desert and wildly listens to it. Isn’t it so that the playful friends of a stormy and free youth, one after another, get lost around the world and finally leave one of their old brothers? Bored left! And the heart becomes heavy and sad, there is nothing to help it.”
There are many such examples of sad lyricism scattered throughout Gogol’s works. It’s impossible to collect them all, but remember, for example, Gogol’s remark in the first volume of Dead Souls about Chichikov’s fleeting meeting with the governor’s daughter, who quickly disappeared from his eyes in her magnificent carriage. This disappearance of the governor’s daughter involuntarily makes Gogol exclaim that “brilliant joy” disappears from our lives in the same way. What is this sadness of Gogol? Compassion for people? Civic ennui? May be so; but above all, as the whole tone of his lyrical digressions convinces us, this is personal dissatisfaction, a deep biographical trait, this is sadness about oneself. No wonder his faithful friend Pushkin, who was killed before Gogol began to grow old, already called him “the great melancholic.”
In one of the letters I have already cited, you may have noticed that Gogol refuses to consider himself a dreamer. But was this really so? Why does Gogol love the legend so much? old beautiful and terrible legend? Why did he so vividly describe the May night and the round dance of mermaids playing kites in the moonlight? Where did he dig up his “Viy” and the whole bunch of terrible visions accompanying this story? Why did he become interested in the “Terrible Vengeance” fantasy about a giant horseman who “with a terrible hand” grabbed the sorcerer and lifted him into the air over a bottomless abyss in the Carpathian Mountains? Let us remember, by the way, how Gogol admired the dream of the “poor son of the desert” and what poetic dream of the birth of Christianity appeared before his dreamy and far-penetrating gaze. I will not talk about his passion for the heroic life, which you will find in the story “Taras Bulba”, in the story “Ostranitsa” 2).
How deeply he experienced this entire life of the past, surrounded by a halo of legend, can be judged by his own terminology: about Little Russian thoughts and songs he writes, for example, to Pogodin: “Little Russian songs with me: I breathe and can’t get enough of the bed”. About the songs collected by Mr. Sakharov 3), he writes what he wants sound enough their sounds. This is an appeal to national antiquity, folk legend and the heroic legend forces us to recognize purely romantic properties in Gogol. His contemporaries, the romantics of the 40s, who were well acquainted with Western poetry of this kind, were more striking than we were by the similarity of Gogol’s works with the works of Western romantics. In the magazine “Telescope”, for example, in 1831 (No. 20, p. 653) the great similarity between “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” and Tick’s story “The Spell of Love” 4) was pointed out. Gogol, who read very little in general, and Western literature in particular, was interested in English writer, the then favorite of the Russian public - this romantic writer and painter of Scottish antiquity - Walter Scott.
In order to be even more convinced of Gogol’s living inclination to dream, we only have to go abroad with him and see how he spends his time there. We can make these observations by skimming the pages of the story “Rome,” in which people who knew him personally, and among them Annenkov 5), who understood Gogol very subtly, see a lot of autobiography. In this unfinished passage, which tells how the Roman prince experiences impressions both from the nature of Italy and from the creations of its art - temples, palaces and paintings, Gogol involuntarily betrays his own feelings, experienced in the same places and on the same occasions. “In Genoa, the prince remembered that he had not been to church for many years... He quietly entered and knelt in silence at the magnificent marble columns and prayed for a long time, without knowing why... Oh! how many feelings then crowded together in his chest!..”
Dreams took possession of the prince with particular force when contemplating some wondrous Italian landscape that began to darken and become covered in darkness in the last minutes of the evening. This is how this prince is described, in one of these moments admiring Rome from a hill as evening fell: “The sun was sinking lower to the ground; its shine on the entire architectural mass became redder and hotter; The city became even livelier and closer, the pinnas became even darker; The mountains became even bluer and more phosphorescent; The heavenly air is even more solemn and better prepared to go out... God! what a view! The prince, embraced by him, forgot himself, and the beauty of Annunziata, and the mysterious fate of his people, and everything that is in the world.”
Annenkov, who lived with Gogol in Rome, more than once saw him, for half a day, lying on the arcade of an ancient Roman aqueduct, looking at the blue sky or at the dead and magnificent Roman Campania; sometimes he spent whole hours among dense vegetation, somewhere in the thicket, and from there he directed “ keen, motionless eyes into the dark greenery that ran down the rocks in clumps, and remained motionless for hours, with sore cheeks”. What was he thinking about at that time? Was he really living during this time with the same dreams as his Roman prince? One might think that his southern, fiery fantasy more than once, among these contemplations, forced him to see not the objects into which he fixed his gaze, but some of his own golden dreams, and that at these moments he could say together with the author of “Faust” :
And again reality darkens before me,
And again I am living my favorite dream 6).
It is not for nothing that Gogol loved Gothic architecture so much; it is not for nothing that he chose nothing other than the Middle Ages for his course of lectures on history.
So, the ability to break away from reality, to be carried away into one’s own dreams and to surrender to one’s thoughts with ardor and passion is the fundamental feature of this famous realist of ours. It provided fertile ground for gradually and irrevocably surrendering to the inflamed imagination of a stubborn and intolerant sectarian. “So, after many years and labors, and experiments, and reflections, apparently moving forward,” writes Gogol, “ I came to what I had already thought about during my childhood" This gradual fascination of Gogol with questions of narrow morality was noted by Russian criticism even before the appearance of “Correspondence with Friends.”
Belinsky already in the first volume of “Dead Souls” saw with amazing insight evil signs, and was afraid of ominous omens for the talent of this beloved writer. But even if Gogol himself was strengthened in these views, why did he publish his intimate correspondence with friends?
If we refer to him himself, then his words are so contradictory that they positively exclude each other. Then he says that he wants to publish “bullying book, which would make everyone perk up,” adding: “Believe me, unless you make a Russian person angry, you won’t force him to speak. He will still lie on his side and demand that the author treat him with something that will reconcile him with life.” He writes what he wanted with this book reconcile people with life, then, falling into a completely different tone, he writes to Zhukovsky that, after the publication of this book, he “woke up, as if after some kind of dream, feeling, like a guilty schoolboy, that did more than he intended”, So what has swung such a Khlestakov in this book that he doesn’t have the courage to look into it”. People who met him before the publication of this book saw him often thoughtful and, as it were, more determined and focused. But no matter what views Gogol came to in this book, the saddest thing in this correspondence is that with it Gogol renounced his talent, was ready to see in it a sinful desire. How could this happen? And what actually happened? Who left whom? Did Gogol abandon his talent, or did his talent leave Gogol? In essence, both happened. Suffering more and more from various painful ailments, which doctors found it difficult even to determine, and gradually reaching an age when people can do less and less without a certain worldview, he began to build this worldview with all his passion. Belonging to those people who cannot joke with ideas, he began to greedily destroy in himself everything that could possibly contradict these ideas that were increasingly taking shape in him, and in this difficult work he did not have the most important help for clarifying these ideas for himself: he had no knowledge, he was truly ignorant. “At school,” he says to himself, “I received a rather bad upbringing, and therefore it is no wonder that the idea of studying came to me in adulthood. I started with such initial books, that he was ashamed to even show it and hid all his activities.”
Pushkin was no longer alive at that time, and his new friends, in his own words, pushed him on this path. And the path was full of painful and tearing contradictions with oneself. He - no more and no less - so greedily and ardently wanted to immediately know the soul of a person and entered into such a tragic struggle with himself, which sometimes forced him to become completely exhausted. In 1849 he writes: “I am all suffered I just sick in both soul and body, so everyone was shaken,” and in “The Author’s Confession” he notes: “It was probably harder for me than for anyone else to give up writing, when it was the only subject of all my thoughts, when I left everything else, all the best lures of life, and, like a monk, he broke ties with everything that is dear to man on earth, so as not to think about anything else except his work.”
How Gogol loved his talent, how he revered it, is best seen from several touching words of his, written in his youth, during the full flowering of this talent. This is what he wrote then, turning to his genius. “Oh, don’t be separated from me! live on earth with me for at least two hours every day, like my wonderful brother! I'll do it! I'll do it! Life is boiling inside me. My works will be inspired. A deity inaccessible to the earth will waft over them. I'll do it! oh, kiss and bless me!”
But if mystical ideas, which were completely new to him, increasingly convinced him to make this break with his talent, then the talent itself began to weaken towards the end of his life; and he noticed this weakening of his impressionability already in the first volume of Dead Souls. He writes here: “Before, long ago, in those summers of my youth, in the years of my irrevocably flashed childhood, it was fun for me to drive up to a familiar place for the first time; it doesn’t matter whether it was a village, a poor provincial town, a village, a settlement - a child’s curious gaze revealed a lot of curious things in him.” Having immediately characterized the freshness of his imagination at that time, he continues: “Now I indifferently drive up to any unfamiliar village and indifferently look at the vulgar appearance; It’s unpleasant to my chilled gaze, it’s not funny to me, and what would have awakened in previous years a lively movement in the face, laughter and silent speech, now slides past, and an indifferent silence guards my motionless lips. Oh my youth! oh, my freshness!..” These were the first premonitions for him, which made him already understand the approach of a sad denouement.
Read Tikhonravov's notes 7) to volumes II and III of Gogol's works, and you will see that this is a real mournful sheet of terrible suffering, where there was no return, where every day both life and talent are running away from it with such inexorability that there is nothing to hold on, with no effort, as in the famous painting by Repin, Ivan the Terrible cannot hold on to the life that is running away through his fingers, cannot hold on... no matter how frantically and tenderly he squeezes the head of his dear but dying son in his convulsive embrace.
Gogol made similar efforts. “I tried,” he writes already in 1826, “to act in defiance of circumstances and this order, which was not drawn up from me. “ I I tried several times to write as before, as I wrote in my youth, that is, at random, wherever my pen leads; but nothing flowed onto the paper. “My efforts,” he writes in the “Author’s Confession,” “almost always ended in illness, suffering, and, finally, such attacks as a result of which I had to put off everything I was doing for a long time. What was I supposed to do? Was it my fault... as if there were two springs in human age!”
He felt very well that an abyss was opening up beneath him, and could only scream in despair for help, which no one was able to provide him; he only heard, unexpectedly for himself, from all sides condemnation and indignation at the last thing that had come out from under him. pen. In the last chapter of “Notes of a Madman,” Poprishchin writes: “No, I no longer have the strength to endure... God! what are they doing to me!.. They don't listen, don't see, don't listen to me! What do they want from me, poor thing? What can I give them? I dont have anything... Help me! take me!.. Further, further, so that nothing, nothing can be seen... There the sky swirls in front of me; a star flashes in the distance; the forest rushes with dark trees and the moon; on one side the sea, on the other Italy; Over there you can see Russian huts. Is my house turning blue in the distance? Is my mother sitting in front of the window? Mother, save your poor son!.. He has no place in the world! they're chasing him! Mother, have pity about your sick child.”
In this plea one can really sense something akin to the author himself. And why, in fact, did the petty clerical official Poprishchin, who never left St. Petersburg, this unsuccessful contender for the Spanish throne, why did he so surprisingly combine in his tragic impulse both the Russian village and dear, dear Italy to Gogol?
Gogol died in 1852; Doctors could not determine the immediate cause of his death. Three days before his death, he stopped eating. He burned and melted from some kind of internal fire that was devouring him... Such is the tragic side of the life of this extraordinary man.
And now, from these sad impressions, let’s move on to those qualities of his that were the greatest happiness and joy in his life, to his ability to create, let’s move on to the characteristics of his colossal brilliant talent. In this case, we will follow his own words, spoken in the first volume of “Dead Souls”: “On the road! on the road! Away with the wrinkle that has appeared on the forehead and the stern gloom of the face! Let’s suddenly plunge into life, with all its silent chatter and bells, and see what Chichikov is doing.”
If, wanting to determine Gogol's talent, we want to listen to his own definitions, we will fall into great perplexity. As an example, I will give two of his opinions. In one place in the “Author's Confession” he says: “I never did not create anything in the imagination and did not have this property. The only thing that worked out well for me was what I took from reality, from the data known to me. Guess the person I could only when I imagined the smallest details of his appearance. I never wrote portrait in the sense of a simple copy. I created portrait, but created it due to consideration, not imagination”. And a little higher he writes that “ made it up entirely funny faces and characters, mentally put them in the most ridiculous situations, not at all caring about why it was, what it was for and who would benefit from it.” True, the last words refer to his earlier works; in any case, they show that the ability of unconstrained imagination existed in him, and even to such an extent that, in his own words, many readers were “perplexed to decide how a smart person could come up with such nonsense comes into my head.” Where did Gogol’s vivid imagination disappear at the height of his creativity? And how to understand it I created as a result of consideration, not imagination.
In order to get closer to the truth in resolving this issue, we again will not take his word for it, but will begin to observe him himself at a time when, speaking about other subjects, he accidentally blurts out, without noticing it, about himself; Let's listen along the way to the voice of his contemporaries who knew him and look more closely at his creations. When approaching such head-to-head discussions of human opinions and feelings, let us keep in mind that there is no such creativity in the world that would not be combined from the work of thought and fantasy constantly passing into each other, and that the source of some rich fantasy, even and for “The Sunken Bell” 8), there is always a real fact. Let us first turn to that period of his life when he, so to speak, was on the border between the unaccountable joy of youth and the imminent transition to a more mature age.
In 1835, at a time when “The Inspector General” had already begun to be prepared, Gogol wrote to his mother: “Literature in general is not a consequence of the mind, but a consequence of feeling, in the same way as music and painting.” And how much at that very time his fantasy simply overpowered him, with the force of hallucination presenting him against his own will bright pictures, you can judge by his letter to Pogodin, which also dates back to this period of his life. Informing in this letter that he cannot continue the planned comedy due to censorship conditions, Gogol writes: “So, I cannot begin the comedy. I’ll get down to history - the stage moves in front of me, applause is noisy, faces stick out of boxes, from the barn, from armchairs and bare their teeth, and to hell with history.” In one of his letters from the same period, he notes that he “ a hundred different beginnings and not a single story, not even a single excerpt full”, which could hardly have been possible for a person without a fervent imagination. And according to the testimony of Tikhonravov, who patiently compared all kinds of sheets, half-sheets, shreds, scraps of drafts left after Gogol, this was precisely his manner of writing. “He wrote his large works not in a sequence of chapters or scenes, but without any order.” A trait that hardly shows that a person works with logic and does not create with imagination. And far from the only example of where Gogol’s imagination could take him is the picturesque rendering of the complaint of a beautiful Polish woman in the story “Taras Bulba” (1842). Gogol writes that the Pole “pulled back the eyes that were long hair her braids and all poured out in pitiful speeches, uttering them in a quiet, quiet voice, just as the wind, having risen on a beautiful evening, suddenly runs through a thick thicket of reeds: sadly thin sounds rustle, sound and rush, and catches them with incomprehensible sadness a stopped traveler, not feeling either the fading evening, or the rushing cheerful songs of the people wandering from field work and reaping, or the distant rumble of a passing cart somewhere.” Running your eyes over these lines, you involuntarily ask yourself the question: in what way, if not by a flight of fiery fantasy, could Gogol be transported from the “quiet complaints” of the Polish woman to the “rattling cart”? What consideration could make a person come to such a surprise? It is not for nothing that Gogol, later recalling the flowering of his talent, said that he wrote “sometimes at random, wherever the pen led.”
With all this, the same studies by Tikhonravov and Shenrok 9) testify that Gogol constantly reworked his creations; Yes, it’s easy for anyone to be convinced of this by skimming the table of contents of his works, in which at every step you will find: “initial edition”, “later edition”, “additional chapters”, etc. In the period, for example, from 1839 to In 1842, in fits and starts, he worked on a new edition of “Taras Bulba” and at the same time revised “Portrait”, “The Inspector General”, “Marriage”, “Players” and composed “ Theater crossing” and the last chapters of the first volume of “Dead Souls”. This is all true, but look how he himself accidentally lets slip about such properties of this processing, which only indicate that he is in the heat of inspiration. Here is what he writes from Vienna in 1840: “I began to feel some kind of vigor of youth... I felt that thoughts were moving in my head, like an awakened swarm of bees; my imagination becomes sensitive. Oh, what a joy it was if you only knew! The plot, which Lately I lazily held it in my head, not daring even to take it up, it unfolded before me in such greatness that everything in me felt sweet trembling, and I, having forgotten everything, suddenly moved to that world, which I had not been to for a long time, and at that very moment I sat down to work, forgetting that this was not at all suitable while drinking water, and it was then that I needed peace of mind and thoughts.” Apparently, the former beekeeper Rudy Panko has not forgotten his habit - “always throwing something new into something new.”
Be that as it may, however, Gogol was right even when he spoke about the participation of considerations in his work, and it is worth considering what these considerations of his were directed towards. According to Berg's memoirs 10), Gogol gave him the following advice on writing techniques: “First you need to sketch out everything as necessary, even poorly, waterily, but absolutely everything and forget about this notebook. Then, after a month, two, sometimes more (this will tell itself) take out what you have written and re-read it; you will see that a lot is wrong, a lot is superfluous, and something is missing. Make corrections and notes in the margins - and throw the notebook again. With a new revision of it - new notes in the margins, and where there is not enough space - take a separate scrap and stick it to the side. When everything is written in this way, take and rewrite the notebook with your own hand. Here new insights will appear on their own, cuts, additions, syllable cleansing. And put the notebook down again. Travel, have fun, do nothing, or at least write something else. The hour will come, you will remember the abandoned notebook: take it, re-read it, correct it in the same way and, when it is scribbled again, rewrite it with your own hand.”
So, giving advice to a friend, Gogol revealed to us the techniques own work . These are absolutely the techniques of a painter. Imagine an artist in his studio. His whole room is filled with sketches; These sketches are pinned to the wall, hung on the stove, lying on the floor and on the sofa. Here you will find a corner of a hut, a sunset, a tense human muscle, and the movement of a human face. The artist stands in front of the painting he has begun, which must combine in itself these scattered everyday impressions, somehow recorded on scraps of canvas. Sometimes, in thought, he looks at his sketches, and then goes to the easel, puts paint on the canvas in one place, in another, and, now approaching the picture, now retreating from it a step or two, squints one eye, as if wanting to concentrate, and looks closely at this picture. If at that moment there is a flicker of satisfaction on his face, then this is a sure sign that life has begun to play in the picture. The artist at these moments, of course, thinks, but the reasoning is of a special nature: there is the ability to see what another does not see, and a passionate desire, and an unconscious sense of taste, and a simple eye. Gogol also had his own sketches, from which he later took the tones and colors, the entire coloring of his works. His notebook, fortunately preserved, gives us an excellent collection of such sketches. What’s missing in it! You remember, of course, what all sorts of things lay on Plyushkin’s desk - and “an old book bound in leather with a red edge,” and “a lemon, all dried up,” and “a broken arm of a chair,” and “a glass with some kind of liquid and three flies, covered with a letter”... If you, not knowing who Gogol’s book belongs to, began to leaf through it, you would have to change your assumptions about its owner several times, until, having reached the last page, you would decide after of all the diversity of impressions received, that such a book could belong to only one person - a living and observant artist. Here you will find written down the names of bird calls, and technical expressions for arable farming, and catching pigeons; a list of dog names and accepts with the remark: “no word has been given about greyhounds yet”; names of cards; folk “bending”, in the sense of offensive wit; an endless list of various dishes, such as “zatirukha”, “malt”, etc., characteristic of different classes; a list of the prosecutor's bribes and next to it a list of golokhvastov's stallions with all their signs; samples of business language of government papers; a list of typical nicknames, next to a glowing review of the theater. Here you will read a careful description of folk customs and rituals, and questions to Khomyakov about the peasants, or a note, a sketch from life under a fresh impression, like this: “Hanging on a mountain slope living picture: a bunch of trees along with huts hiding under their shadow, a pond, a fence and a road along which the cart was knocking.” Sayings, proverbs and cries of peddlers are also written down here, and, finally, to the horror of your Puritan feelings, you will stumble here on some pages over well-aimed, true, but unprintable words. Life itself entered this book in its complete and angular integrity. Among all this kaleidoscopic diversity, remarks of a religious nature flash.
Has it ever happened to you on the street, having driven away your personal worries and anxieties for a few minutes, breaking away, so to speak, from yourself, to look back and peer with fresh attention at that phantasmagoria of a living and rapid change of impressions in which we bathe every day? This air of the street, its vague movement, discordant sounds and rapid turnover of feelings and impulses emanates from Gogol’s notebook. At times you open it, and it’s as if a window suddenly opens:
And noise burst into the room, -
And the good news of the nearby temple,
And the talk of the people, and the sound of the wheel 11).
People who knew Gogol noted his enormous ability to peer into life. Turgenev, who listened to his lectures and later met with him, said that Gogol had “ constant insight facial expression". Annenkov remembers about the observation that has grown into his face. In Gogol himself you will find the expression: hawk-eyed observer.
He was different extraordinary art to find out and question; he collected his living material everywhere; his letters to family and friends are full of questions about mutual acquaintances and even strangers, about how they dress, spend their time, whether they have any sayings and the like, and at the same time he always asks to tell him everything, down to “the very last bug.” " He greatly valued his own direct impressions of life and paid little attention to other people's generalizations. He moved away from those people who always had ready-made definitions for different occasions in life, and constantly laughed at them, “on the contrary, he could spend whole hours with any horse breeder, with a manufacturer, with a craftsman, expounding the deepest subtleties of the game of grandmas.” In “Old World Landowners,” Gogol involuntarily spoke about this in the words: “I don’t like reasoning when it remains only reasoning.” Gogol was afraid of visitors like fire and loved such relationships with people that would not demand anything from him, and he himself, according to the engraver Jordan 12), “could take what he needed and what was worth it with his full hand, without giving anything himself " Moreover, while collecting the information he needed, he sometimes thought little about the means. Remember how the men talked about Plyushkin going for a morning walk? “The fisherman has gone hunting!” Do you remember that “after him there was no need to sweep the street and that if a woman, somehow lazy at the well, forgot her bucket, he would drag the bucket away too”? Gogol did exactly the same thing. In 1835, when starting the first drafts of “Dead Souls,” he was looking for “a good sneaker with whom he could get along briefly,” and later he tried to get extracts from cases, memos, instructing Prokopovich 13) to ask I.G. for similar papers. Paschenka 14), who, in his words, “can kidnap from your justice." What path and where did the plot of “Dead Souls” come from? "borrowed" you can judge by Pushkin’s cheerful remark: “You have to be careful with this Little Russian: he robs me so much that you can’t even shout.” Gogol wrote: “Even Bulgarin’s critics are useful to me, because I, as a German, take the chaff off all rubbish.”
Thanks to his amazing ability to remember every little detail, Gogol held all this motley and colorful everyday material firmly in his head and used it widely and skillfully. His considerations that he mentions were the inner work of the artist, which consists much more of the movement of images and feelings than of logical, abstract thinking and analysis. Those parts of his letters where he mentions facts and does not own definitions himself, eloquently say that this is really so: either he asks a friend to include in his story some proverb that he unexpectedly heard and is apt, then he writes that he continues to work, that is, to sketch out on paper the chaos from which he should the creation of “Dead Souls” occurs. The very manuscripts left after Gogol prove that his treatment of what was thrown, often rashly, onto paper was a manifestation of the subtle taste of the artist, who hated vulgarity, caricature and farce and removed from his first sketches everything that violated his sense of proportion, and sometimes added to already written with new features snatched from life. It was a constant desire to write in such a way as to answer affirmatively to oneself the question posed in “Dead Souls”: “Does this look like the truth?” Let us also not forget that in the story “Rome” the Roman prince often spent long hours peering at the paintings greatest artists, “looking at the silent gaze and together with the gaze entering deeper into the soul into the secrets of the brush, seeing invisibly in the beauty of spiritual thoughts. For the art of man highly exalts, giving nobility and wonderful beauty to the movements of the soul.” This love of beauty was not noticed by those of his contemporaries who were ready to see in him only an anecdote and a dangerous lampoon.
But no matter how art elevated Gogol, no matter how it raised him above his weaknesses, it never completely lifted him from the ground, and his sensitive ear was always open to the slightest sounds coming from the street. The memory of one trustworthy contemporary of his, Annenkov, who wrote down some chapters of “Dead Souls” for Gogol, has been preserved. This recollection truthfully depicts how Gogol, amid sublime pathos, freely deviated for some everyday impression, subtly experienced it or made a sly remark, and again immediately moved on to his inspired presentation. This happened in Rome. Annenkov lived with Gogol in the same apartment and wrote down the chapters of “Dead Souls” from his dictation. Here's how it happened. “Gogol,” says Annenkov, “closed the inner window shutters tighter from the irresistible southern sun, I sat down at round table, and Nikolai Vasilyevich, having laid out a notebook in front of him on the same table, further away, completely immersed himself in it and began to dictate measuredly, solemnly... It was like a calm, correctly diffused inspiration, which is usually generated by deep contemplation of a subject. Nikolai Vasilyevich waited patiently for my last word and continued the new period with the same voice, imbued with concentrated feeling and thought. The excellent tone of this poetic dictation was so true in itself that it could not be weakened or changed by anything. Often the braying of an Italian donkey was heard piercingly in the room, then the blow of a stick on its sides and the angry cry of a woman were heard: “Ecco, ladrone!” 15) - Gogol stopped, said, smiling: “How soft you are, you scoundrel!”, and again began the second half phrases with the same strength and strength with which the first half poured out from him.” When Annenkov, under the influence of what Gogol was dictating to him, leaned back in his chair and, unable to restrain himself, burst into laughter, Gogol looked at him coolly, but smiled affectionately and only said: “Try not to laugh, Jules!” This was the nickname given by Gogol to Annenkov. And having dictated “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin,” Gogol himself began to laugh along with Annenkov and several times slyly asked: “What is the story of Captain Kopeikin?”
After particularly successful chapters, Gogol’s calmness, which he maintained during dictation, sometimes broke through, and he completely surrendered to the most noisy gaiety. Having dictated the sixth chapter of “Dead Souls,” for example, he called Annenkov for a walk, turned into a back alley, “here he began to sing a riotous Little Russian song and suddenly just started dancing and began to twist such things in the air with his umbrella that no more than two minutes later the handle of the umbrella remained in his hands, and the rest flew to the side. He quickly picked up the broken piece and continued the song.”
Gogol’s purely artistic creativity is sometimes expressed in the fact that he was able to fully experience with his heroes their comic situations and antics; he himself sometimes laughed at the moments of creating his stories and comedies. This ability to be transferred to an imaginary situation and an imaginary character manifested itself in his life in the enormous ability to imagine in the faces of any familiar or unfamiliar person, and the imitation was always accompanied by some kind of immediately invented story, in which the imagined and guessed the face acted completely in accordance with its character. His contemporaries tell many anecdotes about how in this way he was able to tease, then make people laugh, or have a calming effect on people. This ability made him an indispensable reader own works. Turgenev, who was once present when Gogol read “The Inspector General,” conveys this memory as follows: “He struck me with the extreme simplicity and restraint of his manner, with some important and at the same time naive sincerity, which seemed not to care whether there were listeners here and what he thinks. It seemed that Gogol was only concerned with how to delve into the subject, which was new to him, and how to more accurately convey his own impression. The effect was extraordinary, especially in comic and humorous meters; it was impossible not to laugh - a good, healthy laugh; and the creator of all this fun continued, not embarrassed by the general gaiety and, as if inwardly marveling at it, to immerse himself more and more in the matter itself, and only occasionally the master’s sly smile trembled slightly on his lips and near his eyes.”
Taking into account all these properties of Gogol, we will not be far from the truth if we say that his talent was immediate and that when Gogol speaks about his deep reflection on his works, we will believe him, but we will understand this term in his mouth not in the sense consistent logical conclusions, but in the sense of constant artistic persistent guessing of true combinations, characters and human properties; we have the right to understand it this way, especially since the term itself guessing truth belongs to himself. His requirements for art were thus primarily reduced to truth, measure and beauty.
He accurately grasped all these aspects of artistic activity with a much more direct feeling. , than by inference. He could hardly, for example, accurately answer the question of what false classicism is. But the falseness and affectation of Russian imitations French comedy when compared with some living image from his notebook, they immediately caught his eye and simply caused him to laugh. “Isn’t it funny,” he writes, for example, “that a Russian judge, of whom there are extremely many in vaudeville, begins to sing a verse in an ordinary conversation? In the French theater we forgive these antics against naturalness, for we know that the French judge, a dancer, composes verses, plays the harmonic well, 16), maybe even draws in albums. But if our judge begins to do all this and is clothed with such a rough appearance with which he is usually shown in our vaudevilles, then... The judge is forced to sing! Yes, if our district judge starts singing, the audience will hear such a roar that they will probably not show up in the theater next time.”
This ability to feel truth and naturalness tore Gogol away from his fantastic dreams of youth and developed him into a great representative of realism, but his great demands for spiritual life, his eternal self-deepening gave his realism a special high quality. His writings are not a record of life, not a page written in a clinic, and not a dead, albeit accurate, photograph. He himself notes that he never wrote simple copy and with created portraits and for this, in his words, he “needed guess the person." Once he had acquired the truth, he jealously kept to himself from the dashing eye: he contemplated and nurtured it for a long time in the very recesses of his soul, and when inspiration came to him, he shared this wealth with us, leaving the stamp of his spiritual life on it. You will remember that in the painting that amazed Chartkov at the exhibition, “it was visible,” according to Gogol, “the power of creation, already contained in the soul of the artist himself... It was clear how the artist enclosed everything extracted from the world into his soul and from there, from the spiritual spring, directed him with one consonant solemn song.” Tikhonravov, who had the opportunity to take a close look at Gogol’s work, points out that with these words he “explains his view of the process of artistic creation.” This is where these “pearls of creation” came from, into which our “sometimes bitter life’s road” turned under his inspired hand.
Repeating the reproaches that were made to him for his constant choice of allegedly completely undesirable subjects, Gogol wrote: “Why flaunt the poverty of our life and our sad imperfection, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote corners of the state? What can we do if the writer is already of this quality, he is already sick with his own imperfections, and his talent is already structured in such a way that he can portray to him the poverty of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote corners of the state.” Only a person capable of deeply sympathizing with the suffering of another could fall ill with such a strange disease. This disease has a very simple name - it is called the ability to sympathize with people. Remember that young man in the story “The Overcoat,” who, remembering the clerical tricks of officials over poor Akaki Akakievich, “many times,” says Gogol, “later shuddered throughout his life, seeing how much ferocious rudeness was hidden in refined, educated secularism and - God! - even in that person whom the world recognizes as noble and honest.” With this appeal to humanity, with his love of beauty and enormous moral demands on life, Gogol, with all his realism, joins that cultural period Russian life, to which his time has assigned him: he is a magnificent variety of idealists of the 40s; and one of the notable representatives of precisely these idealists of the 40s, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, well understood the background of “Dead Souls” when he said that in them “there are words of reconciliation, there are forebodings and hopes of a future full and solemn, but... what this is a poem deeply suffered.”
As for whether Gogol can be called the head of realism in Russian literature, there is a lot of debate about this, and, I think, they argue because the question itself cannot be raised. If you look at literary process as a constant complex development, in which each phenomenon grows naturally from a whole series of complex previous ones, is it possible to isolate any writer and place him at the head of others. Here we can talk about only one question: with the name of which author is the idea of realism associated in the eyes of the majority of Russian readers and writers? Gogol was undoubtedly such a bone of contention in the 30s and 40s, and it can be argued that the debate about realism became especially fierce with the appearance of his works, although he was not the founder of this movement, but only a brilliant successor to the work of Fonvizin, Griboyedov, Pushkin, and most importantly - the entire growth of cultural successes of Russian society.
With all this, one of his features is highly characteristic of Gogol: no matter how keen an observer of Russian morals he was, he had little interest in social issues in the specific form in which Russian life put them forward. The Roman prince (read Gogol) who I have quoted more than once saw “how magazine reading of huge sheets absorbed the whole day (of the Frenchman) and left no hour for practical life; how every Frenchman was brought up by this strange whirlwind of bookish, typographically moving politics and ardently and ardently took all interests to heart, becoming ferocious against his opponents, not yet knowing either his own interests or those of his opponents... and the word politics disgusted finally very Italian. He gave up all reading and devoted himself entirely to artistic creation.” Gogol also read very little... His lack of interest in public life is explained not only by his personal characteristics, but also by simply a lack of knowledge that could deepen the meaning of these issues to him. As soon as Gogol tries to speak out on this subject, his speech immediately sounds like some kind of ridiculous, screaming dissonance. This is what he writes, for example, to Belinsky in response to his famous letter: “If only you could define what should be understood by the name European civilization! Here and phalansteries 17), and red, and all sorts, and everyone is ready to eat each other”. Apparently, for Gogol all these phalansteries And all sorts of seemed very vague. As an example of his still relatively mild opinion of such a cultured people as the Germans, it is worth reading his letter to Balabina 18) dated May 20, 1839, in which Gogol says: “And can you say that every German is a Schiller. I agree that he is Schiller, but only the Schiller you can find out about if you ever have the patience to read my story “Nevsky Prospekt.”
In order to get an idea of the naivety of Gogol’s judgment in everything that concerns social relations, you need to read his article on classes in the state. From ignorance sometimes resulted his amazing self-confidence of opinion. It didn’t cost him anything, for example, to write: “I have the confidence that if I wait to read my plan, then in Uvarov’s eyes he will distinguish me from the crowd sluggish professors with whom the universities are filled.” It didn’t cost him anything to assert with aplomb that he would write a multi-volume, magnificent universal history, but in this regard, life cruelly punished him not with a multi-volume general history, but a brief history of his professorship. Gogol was, in essence, a stranger to everything that had anything to do with politics, and he was right when he called himself a man non-state, but it is curious how even in these cases, where he could only grope and constantly stumble, it is curious how his talent for observation in the external manifestation of life, including social life, saved him. Not actually belonging to either the Slavophiles or the Westerners and, probably, not having read their polemical articles, he at the same time unusually skillfully grasped the typical features of the then Moscow and St. Petersburg journalism, although, of course, he rarely held the periodicals of that time in his hands, I just skimmed through them and judged them almost by their titles alone. This is how he joked about these magazines: “In Moscow they talk about Kant, Schelling, etc., in St. Petersburg magazines they talk about the public and good intentions... In Moscow, magazines go along with the century, but are extremely behind books; In St. Petersburg, magazines do not keep up with the times, but they come out neatly. Writers live in Moscow and make money in St. Petersburg.” In order to quite clearly imagine the obscurity of Gogol’s social worldview, it is worth comparing him with another satirist, however, a satirist of our time - with Saltykov!
But no matter how great the gaps in Gogol’s social education were, his works were destined to play a role big role in the development of Russian self-awareness. When you express a general idea to support it, to make it clearer, you always need a specific example. The persuasiveness and vividness of an example depends a lot on two reasons: firstly, on its universal recognition, and secondly, on whether it broadly or narrowly embraces life. In science, for greater persuasiveness, they collect a huge amount of facts and often prove their thoughts using the results of statistical calculations. But where will you find statistics on morals?.. How to calculate and what numbers to express emotional movements person? In the field of human moral life, the only statistical result is an artistic type that is still true to reality: it immediately gives you both a generalization of life and shining example. Gogol gave us a vivid and completely correct image of a widespread fact, and, moreover, one that everyone looked closely at and therefore noticed little; he brought this fact back to everyone's attention, although social meaning This fact remained unclear to him. And when he thus invited Russian society to look in the mirror, different people reacted differently to this examination of themselves.
Those who knew “whose meat the cat ate” were very annoyed, and “The Inspector General,” although it greatly excited them, was not approved by them. One contemporary explained the failure of the first performance, saying that a performance ridiculing bribery could not really arouse sympathy in such a auditorium where half the audience was giving, and half taker.
Those who did not know “whose meat the cat ate,” looking in Gogol’s mirror, laughed innocently and heartily, recognizing every now and then their good friends, but rejoicing only similarity and not understanding the bitter side of the matter.
Finally, the third, who were in the minority, immediately noticed the other side of the coin and actively began to interpret for themselves the meaning of the fact, using the social terminology that Gogol so aptly put into circulation. Regarding “The Inspector General” in “Rumor” at that time it was written: “The names of the characters from “The Inspector General” turned into their own names the next day: the Khlestakovs, Anna Andreevnas, Marya Antonovnas, mayors, Zemlyaniki, Tyapkins-Lyapkins went arm in arm with Famusov , Molchalin, Chatsky, Prostakov. And all this happened so quickly, even before the performance. Look: they, these gentlemen and madams, are walking along Tverskoy Boulevard, in the park, around the city, and everywhere, wherever there are a dozen people, among them, probably, one comes out of Gogol’s comedy...” To this, everyone understands and for Our famous critic of the 40s, Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky, relied on all convincing social terminology, and, firmly standing on this first step created by Gogol, he led Russian people much higher along the path of social self-awareness.
So it happened as a surprise for Gogol that he, who stood closest to official patriotism, contributed with his writings to the awakening of a different feeling for his homeland, conscious, much higher and connected with the information that came from the European enlightenment that was unkind to him. In a way that was unexpected for himself, he supported a man who undoubtedly did not share his convictions, the famous Westerner Chaadaev, who, just in the year of publication of “The Inspector General,” in 1836, wrote: “I do not know how to love my fatherland with my eyes closed, with my head bowed.” and with closed lips... I find that one can be useful to the fatherland only under the condition of seeing it clearly; I think that the time of blind cupids has passed, that now we first of all owe the truth to our fatherland. I love my fatherland as Peter the Great taught me to love it.” These words of Chaadaev very accurately define the social significance of Gogol. Gogol really opened the eyes of his readers. But in order to do this, even talent was not enough; it was necessary to contain within oneself a stable moral personality in order to, among all the literary and non-literary temptations and attacks, steadily follow the once guessed direction. You need to have the courage to use your talent.
Among the most confusing and contradictory oddities of Gogol’s character, something indefinable that stubbornly and powerfully retained its integrity and strength in him, which constituted the most intimate and powerful side of his existence. He rarely allowed anyone into this “holy of holies” of his, sometimes he gave the impression of a mysterious person, and his school friends, masters of nicknames, called him the Mysterious Karla. Gogol knew the value of his innermost and lofty poetic aspirations and loved them very much. In 1835, he wrote: “Peace be with you, my heavenly guests, who brought divine moments to me in my cramped apartment close to the attic! Nobody knows you, I’m lowering you to the bottom of my soul again!..”
And there, at the bottom of this soul, a good fire burned. Cheerful laughter sparkled brightly there, a living sense of beauty did not fade away, compassion for people constantly glimmered and sadness inseparable from it - this is the true foundations of humor.
Published by: Alferov A. D. Features of Gogol's creativity and the meaning of his poetry
for Russian self-awareness (public lecture). M.: T-vo I. D. Sytina, 1901. P. 5–39.
Alexander Danilovich Alferov (1862–1919) - literary critic and methodologist, author of a number of textbooks and teaching aids on the history of Russian literature. Was a consistent supporter of philological study native language, relied on the methodology of F.I. Buslaev. “Essays on the history of modern Russian literature of the 19th century century” (1915) by Alferov are written in a genre similar to essays. They lacked detailed analyzes of the works, a presentation of the biography and creative path of the writer. The author sought to give the opportunity to feel in the writer what “is unique in him, and leave the rest to independent personal impression.” Popular at the beginning of the 20th century were the anthologies “Pre-Petrine Literature and Folk Poetry” (1906) and “Russian Literature of the 18th Century” (1907), prepared by Alferov together with A. E. Gruzinsky, as well as their “Collection of Questions on the History of Russian Literature” ( 1900), reprinted several times.
A.D. Alferov was a member of the Cadet Party, but was not involved in political activities. In August 1919, A. S. (Alexandra Samsonovna, wife of A. D. Alferov) and A. D. Alferov were arrested by the Cheka in the Bolshevo school colony, near Moscow, taken to Lubyanka and shot without trial.
1) “Macbeth”. Action 1st. Scene 3. (“...why did I so involuntarily / Cling to a dream with a terrible temptation...”). Per. A. I. Kroneberg.
2) Nezhinsky Colonel Stepan Ostranitsa, called in some historical sources hetman. In 1830–1832, Gogol worked on a historical novel about the heroic struggle of the Cossacks with Poland for national independence in the 17th century and the Ostranitsa campaign. Two of them were published by the author himself in the second part of “Arabesque” (“Prisoner. Excerpt from a historical novel”). Gogol gleaned information about Stepan Ostranitsa’s campaign and his execution in 1638 from the handwritten source “History of the Rus,” which he also consulted in his work on “Taras Bulba.” Certain motifs of the unfinished novel were then reflected in Taras Bulba.
3) Ivan Petrovich Sakharov - Russian ethnographer-folklorist, archaeologist and paleographer. Born on August 29 (September 10), 1807 in Tula, in the family of a priest. Graduated from the Tula Theological Seminary. In 1835 he graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University. In the same year, I.P. Sakharov began publishing. His first works were articles on archeology and ethnography. He began collecting songs, rituals and legends. In 1836, I.P. Sakharov published “Tales of the Russian people about the family life of their ancestors”, in three volumes. Then a two-volume book of songs of the Russian people (1838–1839), “Russians folk tales” (1841) and other works (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki).
4) This refers to “Liebeszauber”, a story by Ludwig Tieck, published in Russian translation under the title “Spells of Love” (1830. “Galatea”. No. 10–11). There was also an earlier translation of L. Tick’s story called “Witchcraft” (“Slav”. 1827).
5) Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov (June 19 (July 1), 1813, according to other sources June 18 (30), 1812, Moscow - March 8 (20), 1887, Dresden) - Russian literary critic, literary historian and memoirist. He made his debut in print with the essays “Letters from Abroad” in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski in 1841.
Annenkov went down in history as the founder of Pushkin studies, the author of the first critically prepared collection of Pushkin's works (1855–1857) and the first extensive biography of Pushkin - “Materials for the biography of Pushkin” (1855), later, having collected new materials and having the opportunity to publish under more liberal censorship conditions many are old, published the book “Pushkin in the Alexander era” (1881; 1998). For the most recent publications, see: Annenkov P. V.. Literary Memoirs. M., 1983; 1989; Paris letters. M., 1983; 1984; Critical Essays. Comp., prepared. text, intro. art., notes d. philol. Sciences I. N. Sukhikh. St. Petersburg, 2000.
6) “Faust”. Dedication. Per. N. Kholodkovsky.
7) Tikhonravov Nikolai Savvich (1832–1893) - historian of Russian literature. Majored in history ancient Russian literature And literature XVIII century; Along with this, he did a lot of studying Gogol's work. Under his editorship, the edition of “Gogol’s Works” was published (5 volumes, Moscow, 1889–1890). It not only provides a corrected and expanded text, the result of many years and the most careful study, but at the same time, in the editor’s extensive “notes,” it presents detailed picture the history of this text, the history of each work and all of Gogol’s literary activity, in connection with the history of the writer’s internal development.
8) Gerhard Hauptmann. The sunken bell (“Die versunkene Glocke”). Dramatic tale in verse.
9) Vladimir Ivanovich Shenrok is a literary historian; almost all of Shenrok’s literary and scientific activities are devoted to the study of Gogol. Books: “Index to Gogol’s letters”, M., 1888; “Gogol’s student years.” M., 1898). All of Shenrock’s works on Gogol are combined in “Materials for the biography of Gogol” (4 vols., Moscow, 1892–1898).
10) Nikolai Vasilyevich Berg (1823–1884) - poet, translator, journalist. N. Berg’s work “The Village of Zakharovo” (1851) is one of the first to tell about places associated with A.S. Pushkin. Berg's pen includes “Notes on the Siege of Sevastopol” (1858), “My Wanderings Around the World” (1863), and memories of meetings with Gogol, Nekrasov, Turgenev.
11) “Spring! the first frame is exposed - / And noise burst into the room, / And the good news of the nearby temple, / And the talk of the people, and the sound of the wheel” ( Apollo Maykov. 1854 ).
12) Fyodor Ivanov Jordan (1800–1883). He often met with Gogol in Rome, which he described in his memoirs (“Notes of the rector and professor of the Academy of Arts Fyodor Ivanovich Jordan.” M., 1918). After Gogol’s death, Jordan, according to the writer’s will, engraved his portrait by F. Moller for “Works and Letters of N. Gogol” (St. Petersburg, 1857. Vol. I).
13) Nikolai Yakovlevich Prokopovich - Gogol’s classmate at the Nizhyn gymnasium, one of his closest friends.
14) Timofey Grigorievich Pashchenko, together with his brother Ivan Grigorievich, were Gogol’s younger classmates at the Nezhin “gymnasium of higher sciences”.
15) Here (to you), robber! ( it.).
16) Flajolet (fr. flageolet , will reduce. from old french flageol - flute)- antique high-register flute, pipe.
17) Phalanster - in the teachings of utopian socialism of Charles Fourier, a palace of a special type, which is the center of life of the phalanx - a self-sufficient commune of 1600-1800 people working together for mutual benefit. Fourier himself, due to lack of financial support, was never able to found a single phalanstery, but some of his followers succeeded.
18) Balabina Marya Petrovna - student of N.V. Gogol. At the beginning of 1831, P. A. Pletnev recommended the financially constrained Gogol to the Balabin family as a home teacher.
Publication prepared M. Raitsina
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The purposes of a vivid satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” the landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes. Subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and the characters of people determined the originality of Gogol’s literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings...", in "Taras Bulba ”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then becomes close to live conversational (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life.
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
Will the time come (Come, the desired one!). When will the people not carry Blucher and my foolish lord, Belinsky and Gogol from the market? N. Nekrasov The work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol goes far beyond national and historical boundaries. His works...
Gogol is a great realist writer, whose work is firmly entrenched in Russian classical literature. His originality lies in the fact that he was one of the first to give a broad picture of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia. In his poem "The Dead...
Although the concept of genre is constantly changing and becoming more complex, genre can be understood as a historically developing type literary work, which has certain characteristics. Based on these features, the main idea of the work becomes clear, and we approximately...
Feeding his chest with hatred, Arming his lips with satire, he passes thorny path With your punishing lyre. They curse him from all sides, And only when they see his corpse, How much he did, they will understand, And how he loved - while hating! ON THE....
My God, how sad our Russia is! A. S. Pushkin. There is no doubt that Gogol’s laughter originated long before Gogol: in Fonvizin’s comedy, in Krylov’s fables, in Pushkin’s epigrams, in representatives Famusov society at Griboedov's. What did Gogol laugh at?...
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature. Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg. Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality. Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types. Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power. The purposes of a vivid satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” the landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes. Subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and the characters of people determined the originality of Gogol’s literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings ...", in "Taras Bulba", in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia). The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life. The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters. Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
