“Candide” (1759) is Voltaire’s best philosophical story. It is built according to the usual principle for Voltaire. A morally intact person who treats people with trust is faced with scary world full of evil and deceit. Candide enters life knowing nothing about its inhuman laws. All of Candide’s misfortunes are not predetermined by his character - he is a victim of circumstances and false upbringing. Teacher Pangloss taught him to optimistically perceive any blows of fate. Candide is by no means the darling of life - unlike Zadiga, he is only an illegitimate scion of a noble family, he has no wealth. At the slightest violation of the class hierarchy, caused by a suddenly awakened feeling for Cunegonde, he is expelled from the castle without any means of subsistence. Candide wanders around the world, having no other protection from injustice other than excellent health and a philosophy of optimism.
Voltaire's hero cannot get used to the idea that a person has no power to control his own destiny. Forcibly recruited into the Bulgarian (Prussian) army, Candide once allowed himself the luxury of taking a walk outside the barracks. As a punishment for such self-will, he had to, Voltaire venomously notes, “make a choice in the name of God’s gift called freedom” to either walk thirty-six times under sticks or receive twelve bullets in the forehead at once.
"Candide", like other works of Voltaire, is imbued with a feeling of ardent protest against violence against the individual. The story ridicules the “enlightened” monarchical regime of the Prussian king Frederick II, where a person can freely either die or be tortured. He has no other way. In depicting Candide's ordeal among the Bulgarians, Voltaire did not invent facts. He simply copied a lot from life, in particular the execution of Candide.
Voltaire strongly condemns wars waged in the interests of the ruling circles and completely alien and incomprehensible to the people. Candide unwittingly finds himself a witness and participant in the bloody massacre. Voltaire is especially outraged by the atrocities against civilians. Drawing a terrible picture of the world, Voltaire destroys the philosophy of optimism. Its guide, Pangloss, believes that “the more misfortunes, the higher the general prosperity.” The consequence of any evil, in his opinion, is good and therefore one must look to the future with hope. Pangloss's own life eloquently refutes his optimistic beliefs. When meeting him in Holland, Candide sees in front of him a tramp covered with boils, coughing and spitting out a tooth with every effort.
Voltaire wittily ridicules the church, which seeks the reasons for the imperfection of the world in the sinfulness of people. She even explained the occurrence of the Lisbon earthquake, which Pangloss and Candide witnessed, by the widespread spread of heresy.
Having experienced all the bitterness of humiliation, Candide gradually begins to see clearly. Doubt about the goodness of Providence creeps into him. “Well, if this is the best of all worlds, then what are the rest? ...Oh dear Pangloss, my greatest philosopher in the world! What it was like for me to see you hanged for unknown reasons! Oh, Cunegonde, pearl of maidens, was it really necessary for you to have your stomach cut open!” Voltaire approaches the assessment of certain philosophical concepts from the point of view of life and the interests of the human person. In his opinion, a society where murder and war are legalized cannot be recognized as reasonable.
Cunegonde's life is a terrible indictment of the dominant social system. The theme of man's absolute insecurity, his lack of rights under feudal statehood runs like a red thread throughout the story. What kind of tests does Cunegonde not pass? She is raped and forced to become the captain's mistress, who sells her to the Jew Issachar. Then she is the object of the inquisitor’s sexual desires, etc. The life story of the old woman, a former beauty, the daughter of the Pope and the Princess of Palestrine, is also tragic. She confirms Voltaire’s thought that Cunegonde’s life is not an exception, but a completely typical phenomenon. In all corners of the globe, people are suffering; they are not protected from lawlessness.
The writer strives to reveal the full depth of the madness of contemporary life, in which the most incredible, fantastic cases are possible. It is here that convention, which occupies a large place in Candide and other philosophical stories, has its roots. Conditionals artistic image in Voltaire's work arose on the basis of real life. They do not contain the unhealthy, religious fiction that was common in the literature of the 17th and 18th centuries. Voltaire's conditional is a form of sharpening unusual, but quite possible life situations. The adventures of Cunegonde and the old woman seem incredible, but at the same time they are typical. Voltaire, unlike Rabelais and Swift, does not resort to deformation of reality. He essentially has no giants, midgets, or talking, intelligent horses. His stories feature ordinary people. And Voltaire’s convention is associated primarily with the exaggeration of unreasonable sides public relations. In order to emphasize the unreasonableness of life as sharply and clearly as possible, he makes his heroes experience fabulous adventures. Moreover, the blows of fate in Voltaire’s stories are experienced equally by representatives of all social strata- both crowned princes and commoners, such as Pangloss or the poor scientist Martin.
Voltaire views life not so much from the perspective of an enslaved, disadvantaged people, but from a universal human point of view. In Chapter 26 of Candide, Voltaire gathered six former or failed European monarchs under the roof of a hotel in Venice. The situation, initially perceived as a carnival masquerade, gradually reveals its real outlines. For all its fabulousness, it is quite vital. The kings depicted by Voltaire actually existed and, due to a number of circumstances, were forced to leave the throne. The convention allowed by the writer was only that he brought all the unlucky rulers into one place in order to emphasize, in close-up, with the utmost concentration of thought, his thesis about the insecurity of individuals even of high social rank in the modern world. True, Voltaire, through the mouth of Martin, declares that “there are millions of people in the world much more worthy of regret than King Charles Edward, Emperor Ivan and Sultan Akhmet.”
The story's criticism receives its most complete expression in Martin's hopeless pessimism, although Voltaire does not fully share the beliefs of his hero. Martin really only sees the dark side. He is especially critical of people. Human society seems to him to be a crowd of individualists, full of hatred and enmity towards each other. “I have not seen a city that would not wish the destruction of a neighboring city, I have not seen a family that would not wish trouble for another family. Everywhere the weak hate the strong and at the same time grovel before them; The strong treat the weak like a herd from which three skins are torn off.”
Martin sees no way out: hawks will always torment pigeons - this is the law of nature. Candide objects to him, pointing out that man, unlike animals, is endowed with free will and, therefore, can arrange life according to his ideal. However, with his narrative logic, Voltaire refutes Candide’s naive optimism.
Candide searches for Cunegonde with extraordinary persistence. His persistence seems to be rewarded. In Turkey, he meets Cunegonde, who from a magnificent beauty has turned into a wrinkled old woman with caric, watery eyes. Candide marries her only out of a desire to annoy her brother the Baron, who stubbornly opposes this marriage. Pangloss in the finale of the story is also only some semblance of a person. He “admitted that he always suffered terribly” and only out of stubbornness did not part with the theory of the best of all worlds.
Voltaire in Candide is not limited to depicting one European life. Fate brings the main character to America. The situation here is no better than in the Old World: the lawlessness of the colonialists, the menial work of missionaries who penetrated the jungles of Paraguay. Voltaire by no means idealizes the life of Indian tribes. On the contrary, he specifically leads Candide and his servant Cacambo to the Aurellon Indians to ridicule Rousseau, who poeticized existence primitive peoples. Orelions are cannibals. True, their cannibalistic passions played out primarily because they mistook Candide and his companions for Jesuits.
Criticizing the social order of Europe and America, Voltaire in Candide depicts the utopian country of Eldorado. Everything here is fantastically beautiful: an abundance of gold and precious stones, fountains of rose water, the absence of prisons, etc. Even the pavement stones here smell of cloves and cinnamon. Voltaire treats Eldorado with slight irony. He himself does not believe in the existence of such an ideal region. No wonder Candide and Cacambo ended up there completely by accident. No one knows the path to it and, therefore, it is completely impossible to achieve it. Thus the general pessimistic view of the world remains. Martin successfully proves that “there is very little virtue and very little happiness on earth, with the possible exception of El Dorado, where no one can go.”
The countless riches taken by the hero from America are also fragile. They are literally “melting” every day. The gullible Candide is deceived at every step, his illusions are destroyed. Instead of the object of his youthful love, as a result of all his wanderings, he receives a grumpy old woman, instead of the treasures of Eldorado, he only has a small farm. What to do? Logically speaking, from the gloomy picture painted by Voltaire, a conclusion is possible: if the world is so bad, then it is necessary to change it. But the writer does not make such a radical conclusion. Obviously, the reason is the vagueness of his social ideal. Sarcasticly ridiculing modern society, Voltaire cannot oppose anything to him, except for utopia. He does not offer any real ways to transform reality. In the story “The Princess of Babylon,” written after “Candide,” a new version of Eldorado is given - the country of the Gangarides, where everyone is equal, rich, and peace-loving. But again there is no way here: the heroine arrives at this fairy kingdom on the vultures.
The contradictory nature of Voltaire's worldview undoubtedly makes itself felt in the ending of Candide. The writer gives two answers to the question “What to do?”, and both do not contain a clear call to change reality. The Turkish dervish, to whom Candide’s friends came for advice, believes that it is impossible to judge whether the world is bad or good based on the nature of life of such an insignificant grain of sand in the system of the universe as a person: “When the Sultan sends a ship to Egypt, he does not care about whether it will be good or bad for the ship rats.” Of course, Voltaire cannot accept such a philosophy. For him, the criterion for assessing existing things was precisely the human personality, its happiness. The old Turkish man believes that one should not rack one's brains over socio-political issues. It is better to live without thinking, working. This man's way of life becomes the life credo of the entire small community of losers. “Let us work without reasoning,” said Martin, “this is the only way to make life bearable. The whole small community accepted this good intention, and everyone began to do what they could.”
Summary:
Candide, a pure and sincere young man, is brought up in a poor castle of a poor but vain Westphalian baron along with his son and daughter. Their home teacher, Dr. Pangloss, a home-grown metaphysical philosopher, taught the children that they lived in the best of worlds, where everything had a cause and effect, and events tended to a happy ending.
Candide's misfortunes and incredible journey begin when he is expelled from the castle for his infatuation with the baron's beautiful daughter Cunegonde.
In order not to die of hunger, Candide is recruited into the Bulgarian army, where he is whipped half to death. He barely escapes death in a terrible battle and flees to Holland. There he meets his philosophy teacher, dying of syphilis. He is treated out of mercy, and he conveys to Candide the terrible news about the extermination of the baron's family by the Bulgarians. For the first time, Candide questions the optimistic philosophy of his teacher, he is so shocked by his experience and the terrible news. Friends are sailing to Portugal, and as soon as they set foot on the shore, a terrible earthquake begins. Wounded, they fall into the hands of the Inquisition for preaching about the necessity of free will for man, and the philosopher must be burned at the stake so that this will help pacify the earthquake. Candida is whipped with rods and left to die in the street. An unfamiliar old woman picks him up, nurses him and invites him to a luxurious palace, where his beloved Cunegonde meets him. It turned out that she miraculously survived and was resold by the Bulgarians to a wealthy Portuguese Jew, who was forced to share her with the Grand Inquisitor himself. Suddenly a Jew, Cunegonde’s owner, appears at the door. Candide kills first him, and then the Grand Inquisitor. All three decide to flee, but on the way a monk steals jewelry from Cunegonde, given to her by the Grand Inquisitor. They barely get to the port and there they board a ship sailing to Buenos Aires. There, the first thing they do is look for the governor to get married, but the governor decides that such a beautiful girl should belong to him, and makes her an offer, which she is not averse to accepting. At the same moment, the old woman sees through the window how the monk who robbed them gets off the ship that has approached the harbor and tries to sell the jewelry to the jeweler, but he recognizes them as the property of the Grand Inquisitor. Already on the gallows, the thief admits to the theft and describes our heroes in detail. Candida's servant Cacambo persuades him to flee immediately, not without reason believing that the women will somehow get out. They are sent to the possessions of the Jesuits in Paraguay, who in Europe profess Christian kings, and here they conquer the land from them. In the so-called father colonel, Candide recognizes the baron, Cunegonde’s brother. He also miraculously survived the massacre in the castle and, by a whim of fate, ended up among the Jesuits. Having learned about Candide's desire to marry his sister, the baron tries to kill the low-born insolent, but he himself falls wounded. Candide and Cacambo flee and are captured by the wild Oreilons, who, thinking that their friends are servants of the Jesuits, are going to eat them. Candide proves that he just killed the colonel's father and again escapes death. So life once again confirmed the rightness of Cacambo, who believed that a crime in one world can be beneficial in another.
On the way from the oreilons, Candide and Cacambo, having lost their way, end up in the legendary land of Eldorado, about which wonderful fables circulated in Europe, that gold there is valued no more than sand. Eldorado was surrounded by inaccessible rocks, so no one could penetrate there, and the inhabitants themselves never left their country. Thus they retained their original moral purity and bliss. Everyone seemed to live in contentment and gaiety; people worked peacefully, there were no prisons or crimes in the country. In prayers, no one begged for benefits from the Almighty, but only thanked Him for what they already had. No one acted under compulsion: there was no tendency towards tyranny both in the state and in the characters of the people. When meeting the monarch of the country, guests usually kissed him on both cheeks. The king persuades Candide to stay in his country, since it is better to live where you like. But the friends really wanted to appear rich people in their homeland, and also to connect with Cunegonde. The king, at their request, gives his friends one hundred sheep loaded with gold and gems. An amazing machine takes them over the mountains, and they leave the blessed land, where in fact everything happens for the better, and which they will always regret.
As they move from the borders of El Dorado to the city of Suriname, all but two of the sheep die. In Suriname, they learn that in Buenos Aires they are still wanted for the murder of the Grand Inquisitor, and Cunegonde has become the favorite concubine of the governor. It is decided that Cacambo alone will go there to ransom the beauty, and Candide will go to the free republic of Venice and will wait for them there. Almost all of his treasures are stolen by a rogue merchant, and the judge also punishes him with a fine. After these incidents, the baseness of the human soul once again plunges Candide into horror. Therefore, the young man decides to choose the most unfortunate person, offended by fate, as his traveling companion. He considered Martin to be such, who after the troubles he experienced became a deep pessimist. They sail together to France, and on the way Martin convinces Candide that it is in the nature of man to lie, kill and betray his neighbor, and everywhere people are equally unhappy and suffer from injustices.
In Paris, Candide becomes acquainted with local morals and customs. Both of these disappoint him greatly, and Martin only becomes more entrenched in the philosophy of pessimism. Candide is immediately surrounded by scammers, who use flattery and deceit to extract money from him. Everyone takes advantage of the young man’s incredible gullibility, which he retained despite all the misfortunes. He tells one rogue about his love for the beautiful Cunegonde and his plan to meet her in Venice. In response to his sweet frankness, a trap is set for Candide, he faces prison, but, having bribed the guards, his friends escape on a ship sailing to England. On the English coast they observe the completely senseless execution of an innocent admiral. From England, Candide finally ends up in Venice, thinking only about meeting his beloved Cunegonde. But there he finds not her, but a new example of human sorrows - a maid from his native castle. Her life leads to prostitution, and Candide wants to help her with money, although the philosopher Martin predicts that nothing will come of it. As a result, they meet her in an even more distressed state. The realization that suffering is inevitable for everyone forces Candide to look for a person who is alien to sadness. One noble Venetian was considered such. But, having visited this man, Candide is convinced that happiness for him lies in criticism and dissatisfaction with others, as well as in the denial of any beauty. Finally he discovers his Cacambo in the most pitiful situation. He says that, having paid a huge ransom for Cunegonde, they were attacked by pirates, and they sold Cunegonde into service in Constantinople. To make matters worse, she lost all her beauty. Candide decides that, as a man of honor, he must still find his beloved, and goes to Constantinople. But on the ship, among the slaves, he recognizes Doctor Pangloss and the baron who was stabbed to death with his own hands. They miraculously escaped death, and fate brought them together as slaves on a ship in complex ways. Candide immediately redeems them and gives the remaining money for Cunegonde, the old woman and the small farm.
Although Cunegonde became very ugly, she insisted on marrying Candide. The small community had no choice but to live and work on the farm. Life was truly painful. Nobody wanted to work, the boredom was terrible, and all that was left was to philosophize endlessly. They debated which was preferable: to subject themselves to as many terrible trials and vicissitudes of fate as those they had experienced, or to condemn themselves to the terrible boredom of an inactive life. Nobody knew a decent answer. Pangloss lost faith in optimism, but Martin, on the contrary, became convinced that people everywhere were equally miserable, and endured difficulties with humility. But then they meet a man who lives a secluded life on his farm and is quite happy with his lot. He says that any ambition and pride are disastrous and sinful, and that only work, for which all people were created, can save from the greatest evil: boredom, vice and need. Working in his garden without idle talk is how Candide makes a saving decision. The community works hard and the land rewards them richly. “You need to cultivate your garden,” Candide never tires of reminding them.
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"Candide" is a tragicomedy. Tragedy is in wars, evil, diseases, oppression and tyranny, in intolerance and blind superstition, stupidity, robberies, disasters (like the Lisbon earthquake) faced by Candide and his teacher Pangloss (an image that transparently hints at Leibniz). The comic effect lies in the explanations that Pangloss, and sometimes Candide, try to give to human misfortunes.
The pinnacle of the cycle and Voltaire’s work in general was the story “Candide, or Optimism.” The impetus for its creation was the famous Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755, when the flourishing city was destroyed and many people died. This event renewed the controversy surrounding the position of the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz: “Everything is good.” Voltaire himself earlier shared Leibniz's optimism, but in Candide an optimistic outlook on life becomes a sign of inexperience and social illiteracy.
Outwardly, the story is structured as a biography of the main character, a story of all kinds of disasters and misfortunes that befall Candide in his wanderings around the world. At the beginning of the story, Candide is expelled from the castle of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronck because he dared to fall in love with the baron’s daughter, the beautiful Cunegonde. He ends up as a mercenary in the Bulgarian army, where he is driven through the ranks thirty-six times and only manages to escape during a battle in which thirty thousand souls were killed; then he survives a storm, a shipwreck and an earthquake in Lisbon, where he falls into the hands of the Inquisition and almost dies at an auto-da-fé. In Lisbon, the hero meets the beautiful Cunegonde, who has also suffered many misfortunes, and they go to South America, where Candide finds himself in the fantastic countries of Orelion and Eldorado; through Suriname he returns to Europe, visits France, England and Italy, and his wanderings end in the vicinity of Constantinople, where he marries Cunegonde and all the characters in the story gather on the small farm he owns. Apart from Pangloss, there are no happy heroes in the story: everyone tells a chilling story of their suffering, and this abundance of grief makes the reader perceive violence and cruelty as the natural state of the world. People in it differ only in the degree of misfortune; any society is unfair, and the only happy country in the story is the non-existent Eldorado. By depicting the world as a kingdom of the absurd, Voltaire anticipates the literature of the twentieth century.
Candide (the hero's name means "sincere" in French), as it says at the beginning of the story, "is a young man whom nature has endowed with the most pleasant disposition. His whole soul was reflected in his face. He judged things quite sensibly and kind-heartedly." Candide is the model of the “natural man” of the Enlightenment, in the story he plays the role of a simpleton hero, he is a witness and victim of all the vices of society. Candide trusts people, especially his mentors, and learns from his first teacher Pangloss that there is no effect without a cause and everything is for the best in this best of worlds. Pangloss is the embodiment of Leibniz's optimism; the inconsistency and stupidity of his position is proven by every plot twist, but Pangloss is incorrigible. As befits a character in a philosophical story, he is devoid of a psychological dimension, an idea is only tested on him, and Voltaire’s satire deals with Pangloss primarily as the bearer of a false and therefore dangerous idea of optimism.
Pangloss in the story is opposed by brother Martin, a pessimistic philosopher who does not believe in the existence of good in the world; he is as unshakably committed to his convictions as Pangloss, just as incapable of learning lessons from life. The only character to whom this is given is Candide, whose statements throughout the story demonstrate how little by little he gets rid of the illusions of optimism, but is in no hurry to accept the extremes of pessimism. It is clear that in the genre of a philosophical story we cannot talk about the evolution of the hero, as the depiction of moral changes in a person is usually understood; The characters in philosophical stories are deprived of the psychological aspect, so the reader cannot empathize with them, but can only watch in a detached manner as the characters sort through different ideas. Since the heroes of Candide, deprived of an inner world, cannot develop their own ideas naturally, in the process of internal evolution, the author has to take care to supply them with these ideas from without. Such a final idea for Candide is the example of a Turkish elder who declares that he does not know and never knew the names of muftis and viziers: “I believe that in general people who interfere in public affairs sometimes die in the most pitiful way and that they deserve it. But I’m not at all interested in what’s going on in Constantinople; it’s enough for me that I send fruits from the garden I cultivate there for sale.” In the mouth of the same Eastern sage, Voltaire puts the glorification of work (after “Robinson” a very frequent motif in the literature of the Enlightenment, in “Candide” expressed in the most capacious, philosophical form): “Work drives away three great evils from us: boredom, vice and need.” .
The example of a happy old man suggests to Candide the final formulation of his own life position: “We must cultivate our garden.” In these famous words, Voltaire expresses the result of the development of educational thought: each person must clearly limit his field of activity, his “garden,” and work in it steadily, constantly, cheerfully, without questioning the usefulness and meaning of his activities, just like a gardener cultivating the garden day after day. Then the gardener’s work pays off in fruits. “Candide” says that human life is difficult, but bearable, one cannot give in to despair - action must replace contemplation. Goethe would later come to exactly the same conclusion in the finale of Faust.
Voltaire’s work and life itself most clearly embodied the characteristic features of the Enlightenment, its problems and human type educator: philosopher, writer, public figure. That is why his name became, as it were, a symbol of the era, giving the name to a whole mental movement on a European scale (“Voltairianism”), although many of his contemporaries were significantly ahead of him in the field of philosophical, political and social ideas.
Francois-Marie Arouet (1694 - 1778), who went down in history under the name Voltaire, was born into the family of a wealthy Parisian notary. His father’s fortune, which was later increased thanks to his own business abilities, provided him with financial independence, which allowed him to change his place of residence in dangerous moments of his life, to leave Paris and France for a long time, without the risk of falling into poverty. Voltaire studied at the best Jesuit college of those times, where, in addition to the traditional classical education (which he later cruelly laughed at), he acquired strong friendly ties with the scions of noble families, who later occupied important government positions. Voltaire's youth passed in aristocratic literary circles that were opposed to the official regime. There he went through the first school of freethinking and managed to attract attention with the wit, grace and audacity of his poems. Literary success cost him a short-term imprisonment in the Bastille - he was considered the author of a pamphlet on the regent Philip of Orleans. After liberation, in the fall of 1718 in the theater French Comedy his tragedy “Oedipus” was presented, on the poster of which the literary pseudonym “Voltaire” first appeared (later he resorted to many other pseudonyms when he wanted to hide his authorship).
Voltaire's literary work in 1726 was interrupted by a new arrest - this time as a result of a quarrel with the arrogant aristocrat Chevalier de Rohan, who ordered his lackeys to beat Voltaire with sticks. This demonstrative gesture of the aristocrat towards the bourgeoisie and the position of non-interference taken by Voltaire’s noble friends made him clearly feel his inferiority in the face of class privileges. Voltaire's opponent, taking advantage of family connections, hid him in the Bastille. After being released from prison, Voltaire, on the advice of friends, went to England, where he stayed for about two years. There he completed the national heroic poem “Henriad” (1728), begun back in 1722.
Acquaintance with the political, social and spiritual life of England was of great importance for Voltaire’s worldview and creativity. He reflected his impressions in a compact, journalistically sharpened form in “Philosophical (or English) Letters.” Published in France in 1734, this book was immediately banned and burned by the hand of the executioner as blasphemous and seditious. In it, Voltaire, while maintaining a critical attitude towards English reality, emphasized its advantages over the French one. This concerned, first of all, religious tolerance towards sects and faiths that did not belong to the official Anglican Church, constitutional rights protecting the integrity of the individual, respect for people of spiritual culture - scientists, writers, artists. A number of chapters of the book are devoted to the characteristics of English science, philosophy (especially Locke), literature and theater. Voltaire was greatly impressed by Shakespeare, who he first saw on stage and until then completely unknown in France.
Voltaire's sharply critical position towards the church and court brought upon him persecution, which could have resulted in a new arrest. He considered it wise to take refuge away from Paris on the estate of his friend the Marquise du Châtelet, one of the most intelligent and educated women of that time. The fifteen years he spent at her castle in Ciret in Champagne were filled with active and varied activities. Voltaire wrote in all literary and scientific-journalistic genres. Over the years, he wrote dozens of theatrical plays, many poems, the poem “The Virgin of Orleans,” historical works, a popular exposition of Newton’s theory, philosophical works(“Treatise on Metaphysics”), polemical articles. Throughout his life, Voltaire maintained an extensive correspondence, amounting to dozens of volumes. These letters reveal to us the appearance of a tireless fighter for freedom of thought, a defender of victims of fanaticism, who instantly responded to manifestations of social injustice and lawlessness.
Voltaire's relations with the French court were tense. His attempts to make a diplomatic career failed. The royal favorite Marquise de Pompadour hindered both his court and literary career, her intrigues and the machinations of the Jesuits slowed down his election to the French Academy (it took place only in 1746 after three unsuccessful attempts). Voltaire had to fight to stage his tragedies, which were subject to censorship restrictions.
After the death of the Marquise du Châtelet (1749), Voltaire, at the invitation of Frederick II, came to Prussia. Three years spent in the Prussian residence in Potsdam (1750 - 1753) in the royal service opened his eyes to the true meaning of the “enlightened” rule of this “philosopher on the throne.” Frederick willingly demonstrated his religious tolerance to world public opinion (in defiance of the rulers of Catholic countries with whom he was in constant military conflicts). He formed his Academy from French scientists and writers persecuted in their homeland for freethinking. But even with these people he remained the same rude and treacherous despot that he was with his subjects. Voltaire saw in Prussia the poverty of the peasantry, the horrors of conscription and army drill. After a conflict with the king, he resigned and wished to leave the Prussian court. Permission was given, but on the way to France, Voltaire was detained by Prussian gendarmes and subjected to a rude and insulting search.
Returning to his homeland did not promise him anything comforting, and he chose to settle on the territory of the Geneva Republic, close to the French border (“My front paws are in France, my hind paws are in Switzerland; depending on where the danger comes from, I press first one, then the other,” - he wrote to friends). He acquired several estates, of which Ferney became his main residence and the center of world cultural pilgrimage. Here Voltaire spent the last 24 years of his life. Here he was visited by writers, actors - performers of his plays, public figures, travelers from different European countries (including Russia). Victims of fanaticism and tyranny sought refuge and protection here. It was during these years that the social activity Voltaire and his world authority reaches its apogee.
In the early 1760s, in Toulouse, on the initiative of the church authorities, a lawsuit was initiated against the Protestant Jean Calas, accused of murdering his son, allegedly because he was going to convert to Catholicism. The trial was conducted in violation of all legal norms, false witnesses were brought in, the accused was subjected to severe torture, but never pleaded guilty. Nevertheless, according to the court's verdict, he was quartered and his body was burned. Voltaire spent a long time collecting materials to review the case, attracted authoritative lawyers to it, and most importantly, world public opinion. The review of Kalas' case, which ended with posthumous rehabilitation and the return of rights to his family, turned into an exposure of religious fanaticism and judicial arbitrariness. Almost simultaneously, in the same Toulouse, a similar case was initiated against another Protestant, Sirven, who managed to escape from the city in time and escape from reprisals. Voltaire achieved an acquittal in this case as well. The third trial fell on a young man - Cavalier de La Barra, accused of desecration of shrines and atheism. One of the pieces of evidence included Voltaire’s “Philosophical Dictionary” found in his possession. La Barra was executed after having his tongue torn out. During these years, Voltaire’s slogan, with which he began all his letters, was: “Crush the reptile!” (i.e. the Catholic Church). His speeches against judicial arbitrariness and lawlessness in a number of other trials are known.
IN last years In his lifetime, the name of the “Patriarch of Ferney” was surrounded by a halo of worldwide recognition, but he did not dare return to Paris, fearing possible reprisals. Only after the death of Louis XV, when many contemporaries had hopes for a more liberal rule of his successor (illusions that turned out to be short-lived), did he allow himself to be convinced and in the spring of 1778 he came to the capital. A real triumph awaited Voltaire - crowds of people greeted his carriage with flowers; at the French Comedy Theater he attended the performance of his last tragedy “Irene”, the actors crowned his bust with a laurel wreath. A few days later Voltaire died. His nephew took the body secretly from the capital, anticipating possible complications with the funeral - the church would not miss the opportunity to settle scores with him. Indeed, the day after the funeral (at the Abbey of Celliers in Champagne), a ban came from the local bishop to bury Voltaire. In 1791, his ashes were transferred to the Pantheon in Paris. Voltaire's extensive library, containing many of his notes in the fields, was purchased by Catherine II from his heirs and is currently kept in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg.
In his philosophical views, Voltaire was a deist. He denied the immortality and immateriality of the soul, resolutely rejected Descartes' doctrine of “innate ideas,” contrasting it with the empirical philosophy of Locke. On the question of God and the act of creation, Voltaire took the position of a reserved agnostic. In his Treatise on Metaphysics (1734), he presented a number of arguments for and against the existence of God, came to the conclusion that both were untenable, but avoided a final solution to this issue. He had a sharply negative attitude towards any official creeds; he ridiculed religious dogmas and rituals as incompatible with reason and common sense(especially in the Explained Bible, 1776, and the Philosophical Dictionary, 1764), however, he believed that only the enlightened elite could afford to criticize religion, while the common people needed religious teaching as a restraining moral principle (“If God it didn’t exist, it would have to be invented”). Of course, he envisioned such a religion as free from coercion, intolerance and fanaticism. This dual approach to religion reflected Voltaire’s inherent “aristocratism” of thinking, which also manifested itself in his social views: while speaking out against poverty, he nevertheless considered it necessary to divide society into the poor and the rich, in which he saw a stimulus for progress (“Otherwise, who would become would you like to pave roads?").
On a number of philosophical issues, Voltaire's views evolved noticeably. Thus, until 1750, he, although with reservations, shared the optimistic worldview characteristic of the European Enlightenment in early stage(Leibniz, Shaftesbury, A. Pope), and the associated determinism - recognition of the cause-and-effect relationship that dominates the world and creates a relative balance of good and evil. These views were reflected in his early philosophical stories (“Zadig”, 1747) and poems (“Discourse on Man”, 1737). In the mid-1750s, Voltaire moved away from this concept and launched a strong critique of Leibniz's optimistic philosophy. The impetus was, on the one hand, his Prussian experience, on the other, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which destroyed not only Big city, but also the optimistic faith of many contemporaries in the wisdom of the all-good supreme Providence. Voltaire's philosophical poem about the death of Lisbon is dedicated to this event, in which he directly opposes the theory of world harmony. Based on broader material, this polemic was developed in the philosophical story “Candide, or Optimism” (1759) and a number of pamphlets (“The Ignorant Philosopher”, etc.).
Historical works occupy a large place in Voltaire's work. The first of them, “The History of Charles XII” (1731), gives a biography of the Swedish king, who, according to Voltaire, represented an archaic, backward-looking type of conquering monarch. His political antagonist is Peter I, a monarch-reformer and educator. For many theorists of state power, the figure of Peter was represented in the halo of ideas of an “enlightened monarchy,” which they searched in vain among Western European rulers. For Voltaire, the very choice of this antithesis (Charles - Peter) confirmed his basic philosophical and historical idea: the struggle of two opposing principles, personifying the past and the future and embodied in outstanding personalities. Voltaire's book is written as a fascinating narrative, in which dynamic action is combined with merciless accuracy of assessments and lively art of portrait of heroes. This type of historical narrative was completely new and contrasted sharply with the official doxologies and boring factual writing that dominated the historical writings of his time. What was also new was the appeal to contemporary events that had just died down. Thirty years later, Voltaire again turned to the figure of Peter - this time in special work, written on behalf of the Russian court: “History of Russia during the reign of Peter” (1759 - 1763). During these years, when he was especially concerned about the problem of church intervention in state affairs, the independent policy of Peter, who limited the powers of the church to purely religious affairs, came to the fore.
The fundamental work “The Age of Louis XIV” (1751) is devoted to the analysis of the recent past of national history, in which Voltaire unfolds a broad panorama of the life of France during the previous reign. In contrast to the tradition of historiography of the time, which wrote the history of kings and military campaigns, Voltaire dwells in detail on economic life, on Colbert's reforms, on foreign policy, religious disputes and, finally, on the French culture of the "golden" classical age, which Voltaire highly valued. Voltaire's book was banned by censorship not only because of its critical assessment of the late monarch, but also because of the too obvious contrast between the brilliant last century and the insignificant present.
Voltaire’s most significant historical work was his work on world history, “Essay on the Manners and Spirit of Nations” (1756), which in concept and breadth of coverage is a well-known analogy with Montesquieu’s work “On the Spirit of Laws.” Unlike his predecessors, who began the history of the human race with the fall of Adam and Eve and brought it to the era of migration of peoples, Voltaire begins the history of mankind from a primitive state (which is partly judged by descriptions of the life of savages on the distant islands of the Pacific Ocean) and brings it to the discovery America. Here his philosophy of history comes out especially clearly: world events are presented under the sign of the struggle of ideas - reason and superstition, humanity and fanaticism. Thus, historical research in Voltaire is subordinated to the same journalistic and ideological task - the exposure of priests and clergy, as well as the founders of religious teachings and institutions.
The same principles of a philosophical and at the same time journalistic approach to historical material underlie Voltaire’s first great poem, “The Henriad” (1728), glorifying Henry IV. For Voltaire, he embodies the idea of an “enlightened monarch”, a champion of religious tolerance. The poem depicts the era of religious wars in France (late 16th century). One of its most impressive episodes is the description of St. Bartholomew's Night, which Henry tells Queen Elizabeth of England about. Henry’s trip to England itself is a free fiction of the poet, but, according to Voltaire, such a fiction is legitimate, even when we are talking about a relatively recent past, well known to readers - the whole point is that the fiction remains within the limits of the “possible”, not contradicted him. Voltaire needed the English episode to introduce a description of the political structure of England, religious tolerance, i.e. those topics that would soon be developed in the Philosophical Letters. Another example of “updating” historical material is “ prophetic dream"Henry" (a traditional motif of the epic poem), in which St. Louis tells him the history of France and its immediate future under Henry’s descendants - Louis XIII and XIV, that is, already directly brought to the present. Voltaire tried to combine this “updating” with the canonical rules of constructing a classical epic: following the ancient models - Homer and Virgil - he introduces traditional plot motifs: a storm at sea, a love episode in the castle of the beautiful Gabrielle d'Estrée, in whose arms Henry almost died forgets about his high mission, etc. Voltaire tries to rethink the obligatory “upper layer” in a rationalistic spirit characters-instead of the ancient gods interfering in the destinies of people, he introduces the allegorical figures of Fanaticism, Discord, and Rumor. However, these attempts at modern rethinking of the poetic system, which developed in other conditions, on other material, turned out to be untenable - the actual content at every step came into collision with the ossified form. Enthusiastically received by contemporaries brought up in classical taste, the Henriad subsequently lost its poetic sound (with the exception of the impressive painting of St. Bartholomew's Night).
Voltaire’s experiments in the new genre of “philosophical poem”, born of the Enlightenment, turned out to be much more integral and artistically effective. In 1722, he wrote the poem “Pros and Cons,” in which he formulated the main principles of “natural religion” - deism. In the poem, he rejects the very idea of canonical and dogmatic religion, the idea of God as an inexorable punitive force, and advocates for the victims of fanaticism, in particular the pagan tribes of the New World. Subsequently, Voltaire more than once turned to the genre of “philosophical poem,” a plotless poem that combines pathetic eloquence with well-aimed, witty denunciations and paradoxes.
Voltaire’s most famous poem is “The Virgin of Orleans,” which was published in the mid-1750s without the author’s knowledge in a highly distorted form. Voltaire had been working on the poem since the mid-1720s, constantly expanding the text, but was wary of publishing it. The publication of a “pirate” edition forced him to release it in 1762 in Geneva, but without the name of the author. The poem was immediately included in the “List of Prohibited Books” by French censorship.
Originally conceived as a parody of a poem by a minor author of the 17th century. Chaplin's "Virgin", Voltaire's poem grew into a devastating satire on the church, clergy, and religion. Voltaire debunks in it the sugary and sanctimonious legend about Joan of Arc as the chosen one of heaven. Parodically playing on the motif of miraculous power stemming from Jeanne’s purity and virginity, which became the guarantee and condition of her victory over the English, Voltaire takes this idea to the point of absurdity: the plot is based on the fact that Jeanne’s maiden honor is the subject of attacks and insidious intrigues on the part of the enemies of France. Following the traditions of Renaissance literature, Voltaire repeatedly uses this erotic motif, ridiculing, on the one hand, the sanctimonious version of the supernatural essence of Jeanne’s feat, on the other, showing a whole string of depraved, selfish, deceitful and treacherous clergy of various ranks - from an archbishop to a simple ignorant monk . In a truly Renaissance spirit, the morals prevailing in the monasteries and at the court of the pampered and frivolous Charles VII are described. In this monarch of the Hundred Years' War and in his mistress Agnes Sorel, contemporaries easily recognized the features of Louis XV and the Marquise de Pompadour.
As " heavenly powers", obligatory in a high epic poem, Voltaire introduces two warring saints - the patron saints of England and France - St. George and St. Denis. The traditional battles of the gods in the Homeric epic turn here into a hand-to-hand fight, a tavern brawl, a bitten off ear and a damaged nose. Thus, Voltaire continues the tradition of the burlesque poem of the 17th century, which presented a high plot in a reduced vulgar spirit. The image of the main character - a red-cheeked tavern maid with heavy fists, capable of standing up for her honor and putting enemies to flight on the battlefield - is designed in the same vein. The artistic structure of the poem is thoroughly permeated with parodic elements: in addition to Chaplain’s poem, the genre of the heroic epic with its traditional plot situations and stylistic devices is parodied.
"The Virgin of Orleans" from the moment of its appearance to this day has caused the most controversial assessments and judgments. Some (for example, young Pushkin) admired her wit, audacity, and brilliance; others were outraged at the “mockery of a national shrine.” Meanwhile, Zhanna's feat as folk heroine was inaccessible to Voltaire’s consciousness, because, according to his historical concept, it is not the people who make history, but the collision of ideas - light and dark. In “An Essay on the Morals and Spirit of Nations” (1756), he speaks with indignation about the obscurantist clergy, “in their cowardly cruelty, who condemned this courageous girl to the stake.” And at the same time he speaks of the naive, unenlightened consciousness of a simple peasant girl, who easily believed in the idea instilled in her of her divine destiny and chosenness. For Voltaire the historian, Jeanne is a passive instrument and at the same time a victim of other people’s aspirations, interests, intrigues, and not an active character in history. This allowed him to interpret, without any reverence, the figure of Joan in his satirical anti-clerical and anti-religious poem.
Prominent place in artistic creativity Voltaire is occupied dramatic genres, especially tragedies, of which he wrote about thirty over sixty years. Voltaire perfectly understood the effectiveness of theatrical art in promoting advanced educational ideas. He himself was an excellent reciter and constantly participated in home performances of his plays. Actors from Paris often visited him, he learned roles with them, and drew up a plan for the production, to which he attached great importance in achieving a spectacular effect. He paid a lot of attention to the theory of dramatic art.
In Voltaire's tragedies, even more clearly than in poetry, the transformation of the principles of classicism in the spirit of new educational tasks appears. In his aesthetic views, Voltaire was a classicist. He generally accepted the system of classicist tragedy - high style, compact composition, observance of unities. But at the same time, he was not satisfied with the state of the modern tragic repertoire - the sluggishness of the action, the static nature of the mise-en-scène, the absence of any spectacular effects. A sensationalist in his philosophical beliefs, Voltaire sought to influence not only the mind, the consciousness of the audience, but also their feelings - he spoke about this more than once in prefaces, letters, and theoretical works. This is what initially attracted him to Shakespeare. Reproaching the English playwright for “ignorance” (i.e., ignorance of the rules learned from the ancients), for rudeness and obscenity, unacceptable “in decent society,” for combining high and low style, combining the tragic and comic in one play, Voltaire paid tribute to expressiveness, tension and dynamism of his dramas. In a number of tragedies of the 1730s and 1740s, traces of Shakespeare’s external influence are felt ( story line"Othello" in "Zaire", "Hamlet" in "Semiramis"). He creates a translation and adaptation of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", risking doing without female roles in this tragedy (an unheard of thing on the French stage!). But in the last decades of his life, having witnessed the growing popularity of Shakespeare in France, Voltaire became seriously concerned about the fate of the French classical theater, clearly retreating under the onslaught of the plays of the English “barbarian,” the “fair jester,” as he now calls Shakespeare.
Voltaire's tragedies are dedicated to pressing social problems that worried the writer throughout his work: first of all, the fight against religious intolerance and fanaticism, political arbitrariness, despotism and tyranny, which are opposed by republican virtue and civic duty. Already in the first tragedy, “Oedipus” (1718), within the framework of the traditional mythological plot, the idea of the mercilessness of the gods and the cunning of the priests, pushing weak mortals to commit crimes, is heard. In one of the most famous tragedies, “Zaire” (1732), the action takes place during the era of the Crusades in the Middle East. The contrast between Christians and Muslims is clearly not in favor of the former. The tolerant and generous Sultan Orosman is opposed by intolerant crusading knights, who demand that Zaira, a Christian raised in a harem, refuse to marry her beloved Orosman and secretly flee to France with her father and brother. Secret negotiations between Zaira and her brother, misinterpreted by Orosman as a love date, lead to a tragic outcome - Orosman lies in wait for Zaira, kills her and, having learned about his mistake, commits suicide. This external similarity of the plot line of “Zaire” with “Othello” subsequently served as a reason for sharp criticism from Lessing. However, Voltaire did not at all strive to compete with Shakespeare in revealing the spiritual world of the hero. His task was to show the tragic consequences of religious intolerance, which impedes free human feeling.
The problem of religion is posed in a much more acute form in the tragedy “Mohammed” (1742). The founder of Islam appears in it as a conscious deceiver, artificially inciting the fanaticism of the masses in order to please his ambitious plans. According to Voltaire himself, his Mohammed is “Tartuffe with a weapon in his hands.” Mohammed speaks with disdain of the blindness of the “unenlightened mob,” which he will force to serve his own interests. With sophisticated cruelty, he pushes the young man Seid, who was raised by him and blindly devoted to him, to commit parricide, and then deals with him in cold blood. In this tragedy, the principle of the playwright’s use of historical material is especially clear: historical event Voltaire is interested not in its specificity, but as a universal, generalized example of a certain idea, as a model of behavior - in this case, the founder of any new religion. The French ecclesiastical authorities immediately understood this and banned the production of “Mahomet”; they saw in it a denunciation not only of the Muslim religion, but also of Christianity. In the tragedy "Alzira" (1736), Voltaire shows the cruelty and fanaticism of the Spanish conquerors of Peru. In later tragedies of the 1760s, the problems of forcibly imposed monastic vows (“Olympia”, 1764) and restrictions on the power of the church by the state (“Gebras”, 1767) were raised. The republican theme is developed in the tragedies “Brutus” (1730), “The Death of Caesar” (1735), “Agathocles” (1778). This whole range of problems required a wider range of plots than the one that was established in the classicist tragedy of the 17th century. Voltaire turned to the European Middle Ages (“Tancred”), to the history of the East (“The Chinese Orphan”, 1755, with the main character Genghis Khan), to the conquest of the New World (“Alzira”), without, however, abandoning traditional ancient subjects (“ Orestes, Merope). Thus, while preserving the principles of classicist poetics, Voltaire pushed its boundaries from within and sought to adapt the old, time-honored form to new educational tasks.
Voltaire’s dramaturgy also found room for other genres: he wrote opera texts, funny comedies, comedy-pamphlets, and also paid tribute to the serious moralizing comedy “The Prodigal Son” (1736). It was in the preface to this play that he uttered his now famous saying: “All genres are good, except the boring one.” However, in these plays, to a much lesser extent, strengths his dramatic skill, while Voltaire’s tragedies throughout the 18th century. occupied a strong place in the European theatrical repertoire.
To this day, his philosophical stories remain the brightest and most vibrant in Voltaire’s artistic heritage. This genre was formed during the Enlightenment and absorbed its main problems and artistic discoveries. At the heart of each such story is a certain philosophical thesis, which is proven or refuted by the entire course of the narrative. Often it is indicated already in the title itself: “Zadig, or Fate” (1747), “Memnon, or Human Prudence” (1749), “Candide, or Optimism” (1759).
In his early stories of the 1740s, Voltaire widely used the usual French literature XVIII century oriental stylization. Thus, “Zadig” is dedicated to the “Sultana Sheraa” (in whom they tended to see the Marquise de Pompadour) and is presented as a translation from an Arabic manuscript. The action takes place in the conventional East (Babylon) in an equally conventionally designated era. The chapters of the story are completely independent short stories and anecdotes, based on authentic oriental material and only conditionally connected by the story of the hero’s misadventures. They confirm the thesis expressed in one of the last chapters: “There is no evil that does not give rise to good.” The trials and successes sent down by fate to Zadig each time turn out to be unexpected and directly opposite to the expected meaning. What people consider to be random is actually due to a universal cause-and-effect relationship. In this story, Voltaire is still firmly in the position of optimism and determinism, although this in no way prevents him from satirically depicting the depraved morals of the court, the arbitrariness of his favorites, the ignorance of scientists and doctors, the self-interest and deceit of the priests. The transparent oriental decoration makes it easy to see Paris and Versailles.
The grotesque satirical manner of narration, already characteristic of this story, sharply intensifies in Micromegas (1752). Here Voltaire acts as a student of Swift, to whom he directly refers in the text of the story. Using Swift’s “modified optics” technique, he pits a giant inhabitant of the planet Sirius - Micromegas - against a much smaller inhabitant of Saturn, then shows the insignificant, barely distinguishable insects that inhabit the Earth as seen through their eyes: these tiny creatures, seriously imagining themselves as humans, swarm, they are angry, destroying each other because of “several heaps of dirt” that they have never seen and which will go not to them, but to their sovereigns; they conduct profound philosophical debates, which do not in the least move them on the path of knowledge of the truth. At parting, Micromegas hands them his philosophical work, written for them in the smallest handwriting. But the secretary of the Academy of Sciences in Paris finds nothing in it except white paper.
Voltaire’s deepest and most significant story, “Candide,” clearly reveals the philosophical turning point that occurred in the writer’s mind after returning from Prussia and the Lisbon earthquake. Leibniz’s optimistic idea about the “pre-established harmony of good and evil”, about the cause-and-effect relationship that reigns in this “best of possible worlds”, is consistently refuted by the events of the life of the main character, the modest and virtuous young man Candide: for his unjust expulsion from the baronial castle, where he was brought up out of mercy, followed by forced recruitment, torture by spitzrutens (an echo of the Prussian impressions of Voltaire), pictures of bloody massacres and looting of soldiers, the Lisbon earthquake, etc. The narrative is structured as a parody of an adventure novel - the heroes experience the most incredible adventures that follow each other behind a friend at a breakneck pace; they are killed (but not completely!), hanged (but not completely!), then they are resurrected; lovers, separated seemingly forever, meet again and are united in a happy marriage, when not a trace remains of their youth and beauty. The action moves from Germany to Portugal, to the New World, to the utopian country of Eldorado, where gold and gems lying on the ground like simple pebbles; then the heroes return to Europe and finally find a peaceful refuge in Turkey, where they plant an orchard. The very contrast between the mundane everyday ending and the intensely dramatic events preceding it is characteristic of the grotesque manner of storytelling. The action with its unexpected, paradoxical turns, rapid changes of episodes, scenery and characters turns out to be strung on an ongoing philosophical dispute between the Leibnizian Pangloss, the pessimist Martin and Candide, who gradually, wise by life experience, begins to be critical of the optimistic doctrine of Pangloss and his arguments about the natural connection of events, he replies: “You said it well, but we need to cultivate our garden.” Such an ending to the story may mean Voltaire’s frequent departure from any definite decision, from the choice between two opposing concepts of the world. But another interpretation is also possible - a call to turn from useless word debates to real, practical, even small, deeds.
The action of the story “The Simple-minded” (1767) takes place entirely in France, although main character- an Indian from the Huron tribe who ended up in Europe by force of circumstances. Turning to the “natural man” so popular during the Enlightenment,
Voltaire uses here the technique of “defamiliarization” (the concept of “defamiliarization” was introduced by V. B. Shklovsky in 1914), used by Montesquieu in the Persian Letters and Swift in Gulliver’s Travels. France, its public institutions, despotism and arbitrariness of royal power, the omnipotence of ministers and favorites, absurd church bans and establishments, prejudices are shown with the fresh look of a person who grew up in a different world, different living conditions. The hero's simple-minded bewilderment about everything he sees and what stands in the way of his union with his beloved girl turns into a chain of misadventures and persecutions for him. The conventionally prosperous ending of “Candide” and “Zadig” is contrasted here with a sad denouement - the death of a virtuous girl who sacrifices her honor to free her lover from prison. The author’s final conclusion this time is much more unambiguous: he contrasts the Leibnizian formula, reduced to the level of everyday wisdom “There is no cloud without a good,” with the judgment of “honest people”: “There is no good from a bad thing!” The parodic grotesque style, the style of dissonance and deliberate exaggeration, which dominates in “Candide,” is replaced in “The Innocent” by a restrained and simple composition. The coverage of reality phenomena is more limited and clearly closer to the conditions French life. The satirical effect is achieved here throughout the narrative through the “other vision” through the eyes of the Huron and culminates in the bleak ending: sacrifices and trials were in vain; everyone received their share of pitiful handouts and meager benefits - from lemon drops to diamond earrings and a small church parish; anger, indignation and indignation drown in the quagmire of momentary well-being.
In Voltaire's philosophical stories we would search in vain for psychologism, immersion in the spiritual world of characters, a reliable depiction of human characters or a plausible plot. The main thing about them is extremely pointed satirical image social evil, cruelty and meaninglessness of existing social institutions and relations. This harsh reality tests the true value of philosophical interpretations of the world.
An appeal to real life, to its acute social and spiritual conflicts, permeates all of Voltaire’s work - his philosophy, journalism, poetry, prose, drama. For all its topicality, it deeply penetrates into the essence of universal human problems that go far beyond the boundaries of the era when the writer lived and worked.
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Table of contents
Introduction ______________________________ _____
Chapter 1. Voltaire's philosophical views. Controversy with Pascal and Leibniz_____________________ __
Chapter 2. Philosophical novel of the Enlightenment
Chapter 3. General features of Voltaire’s philosophical stories
______________________________ ____________
Chapter 4. General features of Voltaire’s philosophical stories
______________________________ _________________
Conclusion____________________ _________________
Bibliography__________________ ________________
Introduction
The focus of this work is François Marie Voltaire’s philosophical story “Candide”, its place among Voltaire’s philosophical works and in the context of philosophical fiction of the Enlightenment.
The purpose of the work is to obtain a more complete understanding of Voltaire’s “Candide” as a philosophical novel.
The objectives of our research are:
- a brief introduction to Voltaire’s philosophical views,
- definition of the genre “philosophical novel”, identification of its problems, distinctive features of poetics, expressive means etc.,
- a description of the common features of all Voltaire’s philosophical stories,
- analysis of the story “Candide” in the context of the poetics of the genre.
When writing the work, literary articles, monographs on the works of Voltaire, the Enlightenment era, and the actual text of “Candide” were used. A bibliography is presented at the end of the work.
The structure of our study is determined by the previously posed tasks. The first chapter gives a brief overview of Voltaire's educational activities and his philosophical views. The second chapter is devoted to the features of the philosophical novel of the Enlightenment. The third chapter presents
general features of Voltaire's philosophical stories. The fourth chapter contains an analysis of the most significant philosophical story “Candide”, its genre features, plot and compositional structure, and the reflection of Voltaire’s philosophical views in it.
1. Voltaire’s philosophical views. Polemics with Pascal and Leibniz.
Voltaire is the greatest French educator. The entire eighteenth century is often called the century of Voltaire. This is one of the most important key figures for understanding the entire French Enlightenment, a man who had a tremendous impact on the minds of his contemporaries. From his name came the word “Voltairianism,” which came to mean free-thinking not only in France, but also in other European countries.
Voltaire's basic socio-political views reflected the ideology of the emerging French bourgeois democracy and debunked the outdated feudal regime. Voltaire was not a thinker who put forward original philosophical ideas, he was an educator who did a lot for the philosophical education of society. The main thrust of all Voltaire's works is anti-feudal, with anti-clericalism at the center. All his life he fought against the church, religious intolerance and fanaticism.
Voltaire's literary legacy is enormous. He wrote a total of more than a hundred works, which comprised a collection of works amounting to several dozen volumes. He wrote plays, stories, and journalism. Voltaire's philosophical views are expressed in Philosophical Letters (1733), Treatise on Metaphysics (1734), Newton's Principles of Philosophy (1738), and philosophical stories.
Voltaire as a philosopher was interested in fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology. But his main attention was directed to the problem of human existence and action in society.
Voltaire considered the main task of philosophy to be the determination of the principles of human existence, the meaning of an individual’s life and his relationships with other people, and the form of social organization appropriate to humanity. “The dual problem of man and society (Voltaire, in a polemic with Rousseau, argued that even primitive people lived in communities and that the “social state” is “natural” for
humanity) is the alpha and omega of Voltaire’s philosophy, which chronologically and essentially begins with this problem and necessarily
puts in connection with it, even subordinates to it the interpretation of any other ideological issue, and sometimes to the detriment of the truth, as
this was the case with the “social” argument of Voltaire’s deism.”
Kuznetsov p.107
In the creation of a new concept of man, the most important role was played by his polemics with the philosophical and religious anthropology of Pascal.
For Voltaire, Christianity, like all religions, is a superstition. However, in France, Christianity found a brilliant apologist in the person of Pascal. By attacking Pascal and rejecting some of his ideas, Voltaire undermined the strongest foundations of the French Christian tradition.
But what ideas of Pascal was he going to challenge? According to Voltaire, Pascal insults the entire human race by attributing to it traits characteristic of individual people. Voltaire calls Pascal a misanthrope and, defending humanity, claims that people are not as pitiful and evil as Pascal writes.
According to Voltaire, Pascal's pessimism is inappropriate. And if Pascal’s idea of man is erroneous, then the way out of the pitiable state described is no less erroneous. Pascal sees it in true religion, i.e. Christianity, which provides justification for the contradictions inherent in human existence, its greatness and wretchedness. Voltaire objects that other views (myths about Prometheus, Pandora's Box, etc.) could also provide an explanation for the mentioned contradictions.
Agreeing that human knowledge about the infinity of the Universe can never be exhaustively complete, Voltaire in polemics
with Pascal, he emphasizes that, despite the well-known limitations of human cognitive abilities, he currently still knows a lot and the boundaries of his knowledge are constantly expanding, and this is not
gives grounds to talk about his “insignificance.”
The only point of agreement between Voltaire and Pascal is that, according to both thinkers, a person needs faith in God. But Voltaire understands both the foundations of this belief and
its content, and the conclusions arising from it for human life. According to Pascal, human existence acquires meaning
only through serving God as he is presented in the Holy Scriptures. From here Pascal concluded that God must be the only object of human love, and all of God’s creations, including people, do not have this love.
deserve.
The essence of Voltaire's deism is the view of man as the highest value, the principle of respect and love for the human person, and veneration of God.
Voltaire's summary of man's characteristics is the antithesis of Pascal's assertion of his insignificance. Voltaire considers a man
the most perfect and happy being.
However, even condemning Pascal's obsessive pessimism, Voltaire cannot be an indifferent witness to the presence of evil in the world. And there is a lot of evil: the horrors generated by human malice and natural disasters are by no means the imagination of poets. These bare and cruel facts decisively rejected the philosophical optimism of Leibniz, “the most profound metaphysician of Germany,” for whom the world could only be “the best of all possible.” According to Leibniz, the Universe is designed by God in such a way that every observable evil in it is somehow balanced, compensated, and, ultimately, even necessarily blocked
the next blessing.
Voltaire's critical attitude towards the “theory of optimism” gradually outgrew its radical denial in “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” (1756). Voltaire delivered the final and strongest blow to the “theory of optimism” (in its Leibnizian version) in the philosophical story “Candide” (1759),
2.Philosophical novel of the Enlightenment
The culture of the French Enlightenment is characterized by the phenomenon of unity of philosophy and literature. This was reflected in the fact that the greatest French philosophers of this era were at the same time outstanding writers. Putting forward immediate practical tasks and seeing enlightenment as a powerful means of transforming the world, French philosophers consciously used literature as a means of education and propaganda.
A whole system of genres was created, which differed in their setting philosophical problems. In this regard, a corresponding poetics appears. Characteristics new poetics were: convention, fantastic images and situations, reasoning characters carrying certain philosophical ideas, paradoxes.
N.V. Zababurova in her article “French philosophical novel of the 18th century” notes that “the implementation of philosophical content can occur in three ways:
1) as a polemic, i.e. refutation of certain philosophical theories and concepts;
2) as a discussion, i.e. a collision of mutually exclusive points of view or theories with the goal of finding the truth;
3) as an apology for a certain philosophical theory or system.”((XVIII century: literature in the context of culture. - M., 1999. - P. 94). In connection with this, he derives the definitions: “polemical novel”, “discussion novel” , “apologia novel”
There is no fundamental difference between the large (novel) and small (story) philosophical genres of the 18th century in this regard.
The space of the philosophical novel is not oriented toward life-likeness, which is what distinguishes it from other forms of the 18th-century novel. The philosophical novel of the 18th century is characterized by parodying well-known established genres. Most often, travel novels are parodied (Montesquieu's Persian Letters, Voltaire's Micromegas and The Innocent), and love-adventure novels (Voltaire's Candide). At the same time, new genre forms are being created, in particular, the dialogue novel (“Ramo’s Nephew”, “Jacques the Fatalist” by Diderot).
N.v. Zababurova in the above-mentioned article notes the marking function that clarifies the author's intentions. This function, according to her, is performed only by the titles and subtitles of the works, as well as by a number of techniques:
“1) specific nominations (names of philosophers and names of certain philosophical systems);
2) direct and hidden quoting of philosophical works;
3) the use of appropriate philosophical terminology, referring to certain philosophical systems;
4) author's notes inside the text (this technique was actively used by Rousseau and the Marquis de Sade);
5) allusions (for example, in Voltaire’s “Zadig” and Diderot’s “Immodest Treasures” many allusions are connected with the works of French philosophers and natural scientists, with whom the authors polemicized). At the same time, the philosophical novel, especially Voltaire’s, fundamentally gravitates towards anachronisms, emphasizing the conventions art world" ((XVIII century: literature in the context of culture. - M., 1999. - P. 95)
For all their genre differences, philosophical novels of the 18th century are united by the parable form of storytelling. At the center of the novel is a story told to illustrate and confirm or, on the contrary, expose a certain philosophical idea, and the figurative system is subordinated to a didactic setting.
3. General features of Voltaire’s philosophical stories
Philosophical novels and stories are perhaps the most valuable part of Voltaire’s legacy. In 1746, Voltaire wrote a prose work entitled “The World as It Is, or the Vision of Babuk,” with which he opened a series of novels and stories that went down in the history of literature under the name philosophical. He continued to perform in this genre until 1775, that is, for almost thirty years.
It is remarkable that Voltaire himself called them “trinkets” and did not attach serious importance to them. He wrote them unusually easily, “jokingly,” mainly for the amusement of his high-society friends. It took a lot of effort to persuade him to publish these works - at first they were distributed in copies.
Voltaire's artistic quest for the development of philosophical prose led him to the creation in France of its special genre canon. The main thing in a philosophical novel (story) for Voltaire is a polemic with a certain philosophical system or idea. The titles themselves indicate this. We can say that the philosophical idea is formulated in them - “Zadig, or Fate”, “Candide, or Optimism”, “Memnon, or Human Wisdom”, “Babuk, or the World as it is”. Voltaire's novel (story) is constructed as a story of adventures of the idea itself, and not of characters. This idea is exposed as absurd or inconsistent with reality. The method of “testing” is experimental, where the adventures of the characters consistently confirm the absurdity of the original philosophical premise. The mobility of experience is opposed to the isolation of a false idea.
Voltaire's philosophical story gravitates towards the form of a parable (“Memnon, or Human Wisdom”; “Zadig”).
Often philosophical meaning The story is indicated by Voltaire in the original maxim, which opens the narrative.
Voltaire openly talks about the conventionality of events and characters, uses anachronisms, plot parabolas, and fantasy (“Micromegas”).
A parodic interpretation of the philosophical theories with which the author polemicizes is organically combined in Voltaire’s philosophical prose with a parody of established literary forms and genres. So “Candide” is a brilliant parody of a love and adventure novel.
Voltaire saturates his philosophical stories with recognizable literary reminiscences, which enhances the atmosphere of convention. In "Zadig" the familiar oriental settings of French literature of the first half of the century are recognizable.
Voltaire's style is characterized by a tendency toward satirical grotesque and caricature, which distinguished the polemical philosophical novel.
The features of a discussion novel can be noted in some of Voltaire's stories. They are structured as a discussion between adherents and opponents of a certain idea, sometimes taking on a dialogical form (“Ears of the Earl of Chesterfield and Chaplain Goodman”).
The author's philosophical position in Voltaire's novels and stories sometimes does not have a declarative expression. This undoubtedly determines the openness of the ending. The author seems to invite the reader to participate in the discussion.
In Voltaire's philosophical stories we would search in vain for psychologism, immersion in the spiritual world of characters, a reliable depiction of human characters or a plausible plot. The main thing in them is an extremely sharp satirical depiction of social evil, cruelty and meaninglessness of existing social institutions and relations. This harsh reality tests the true value of philosophical interpretations of the world.
4 Common features of Voltaire’s philosophical stories
Andre Maurois in “Literary Portraits” called the story “Candide” the pinnacle of Voltaire’s creativity.
This story was written in 1759 and became an important milestone not only in the development of the philosophical genre, originating from Montesquieu's Persian Letters, but also in the history of all educational thought.
The story tells about the misadventures of the young man Candide, a pupil of a Westphalian baron, who is in love with the daughter of his teacher Cunegonde, a student of the home teacher Dr. Pangloss, who develops Leibniz’s idea that “everything is for the best in this best of worlds.” The cruel trials to which Candide, Cunegonde, Pangloss, Candide's servant and friend Cacambo are subjected, whom fate carries all over the world from Bulgaria, Holland, Portugal (where the famous earthquake of 1755 occurs) to Argentina, the legendary and happy country of Eldorado, Suriname, and then Paris, London, Venice, Constantinople. At the end of the story, Candide, having married the extremely ugly Cunegonde and accompanied by the sick Pangloss, who has lost his optimism, finds refuge on a small farm and finds in physical labor the answer to all philosophical questions: “You need to cultivate your garden.”
Contemporaries perceived the story “Candide” not only as a satire on Leibniz’s theodicy, but also as a radical denial of faith in “all-good providence,” which undermined the foundations of any religion, including deistic. Human world Voltaire portrayed a completely anesthetized
nim: people act in it without any guidance or direction from above, and nowhere is there a supreme judge to support virtue and punish vice. Voltaire believes that good and evil have no
no supernatural causes, and their sources are rooted in the earthly world.
Voltaire traditionally divides evil into physical and moral,
By the first he means illness, injury, death. Moral evil, by
Voltaire, includes violence, cruelty, injustice,
the oppression that people commit against each other is done out of malice or ignorance, out of their own personal will or in accordance with inhuman laws. And there is no deity behind all this either. Voltaire does not agree with Leibniz that our world, as a result of the divine dispensation, is the best possible.
However, it does not plunge the reader into hopeless despair, like Pascal. The ending and the general meaning of the philosophical story are not at all pessimistic. Candide breaks out of the circle of misfortunes that haunted him, he gets his own home, where he lives with the woman he loves. The central character, who has until now been chasing around the world the ghost of prosperity bestowed from outside, meets a hardworking Turkish peasant. The Turk says: “Work drives away three great evils from us: boredom, vice and need” (4,
185). Candide comes to the conclusion that “you need to cultivate your garden” (ibid., 186). Thus, as an alternative to Leibnizian optimism and Pascalian pessimism, Voltaire puts forward the principle of active human activity to improve his life.
“Thus, Voltaire, on the one hand, rejects the traditional Christian view of man’s earthly destiny as a divinely predetermined vale of suffering and mourning: the evil that reigns here, making human life unbearably painful, can and must be eliminated. On the other hand, Voltaire reveals the groundlessness of hopes that this
evil is somehow eliminated by divine providence and a person has the right to expect that without his targeted efforts everything will seem to be on its own
will arrange himself “for the better.” According to Voltaire, only constant and intense worldly activity, illuminated by reasonable goals and knowledge of the means to achieve them, can lead to an improvement in man’s position on earth.” Kuznetsov p.123
Let's turn to the construction of the story. The story is structured as a kind of adventure novel. This genre was very popular among readers - Voltaire's contemporaries. The hero of the story, the young man Candide, experiences a series of adventures, finds himself in different parts of the world, and finds himself in the most unimaginable situations. There is also a love motive in the story.
Despite the obvious signs of the adventure genre, the story is rather a parody of it. Voltaire takes his heroes through so many adventures, following each other in a dizzying
pace to assume the possibility of surviving them to a real person impossible. This parody, inherent in the entire narrative as a whole, from the very beginning does not allow the reader to take the eventful side of the story very seriously. Thus, he draws attention to those thoughts that Voltaire considers necessary to express in the course of the events depicted. Most often, the author puts these thoughts into the mouths of his characters. The story is about the meaning of human
life, about freedom and necessity, about the world as it is, about what is more in it - good or evil.
The story “Candide, or Optimism” ironically plays on the traditions of the baroque or “Greek” novel, where the heroes wander and suffer, but do not lose their physical charm and do not grow old. In Voltaire, on the contrary, Cunegonde in the finale is portrayed as looking dull and grumpy, which spoils Candide’s enjoyment of the long-awaited marriage.
At the same time, the plot motifs of the English educational novel are subject to ironic stylization in the story. The teacher/student situation in this novel parodies the relationship between teacher and student in old novels such as The Adventures of Telemachus. Pangloss and Martin in Voltaire's story adhere to opposing philosophical systems, as do Tom Jones' mentors (Squire, who regards human nature as virtuous, and Thwack, who considers it vicious). Voltaire's hero is given the opportunity to test the philosophical postulates of Pangloss and Martin, just as Tom tests the views on human nature of his teachers and the Mountain Hermit. The parody of the “teacher-student” situation in this case lies in the fact that the student’s experience does not confirm, but rather refutes the teacher’s opinion that “everything is for the best in this best of all worlds.”
At the center of the story is a clash of ideas, the bearers of which Voltaire makes two heroes - the philosophers Pangloss and Martin. In the story, they are Candide's teachers and express two points of view on the world. One of them (Pangloss) is an optimistic assessment of what is happening, the other (Marten) - on the contrary, comes down to pessimism and consists in recognizing the eternal imperfection of a world in which evil rules.
Voltaire tests these philosophies on the fate of Candide, who, based on his own experience, must decide which of his teachers is right. Thus, Voltaire affirms an empirical approach to
resolving philosophical issues.
As for the characters in the story, it should be noted that they are not full-blooded characters. They are only carriers of philosophical theses.
The central character of the story, the young man Candide, has a “speaking” name. Translated, it means “simpleton.” In all life situations, Candide shows naivety and simplicity. And this is intentional. The human appearance of the hero and his name should emphasize the impartiality and sincerity of the conclusion to which he ultimately comes.
Voltaire's focus is on the idea and its fate. Therefore, the composition of the story is built according to a logical principle. The connecting link is the development of thought. . At the beginning of the narrative, Voltaire turns his main attention to the philosophy of Pangloss, which Candide accepts. Its essence is concentrated in the phrase that is repeated many times by Pangloss and Candide - “Everything is for the best in this best of worlds.” Then Martin appears, and Candide becomes acquainted with his views. Then, at the end of the story, he draws his conclusion. Thus, the story is built, as it were, on the replacement of one system of views by another and a conclusion that draws a line under
thoughts of the characters. Since the views of Martin and Pangloss are opposed to each other, this introduces an atmosphere of controversy into the story.
Voltaire needs to resolve this dispute. How does he do this?
Emphasizing the complete contradiction of the philosophy of optimism with the truth of life,
Voltaire exaggerates the situations in which Pangloss finds himself and turns the image of Pangloss into a caricature. Yes, yours famous phrase“Everything is for the best in this best of worlds,” Pangloss pronounces at the moment when the ship on which he and Candide are sinking, when the terrible Lisbon earthquake occurs, when he was almost burned at the stake. This gives the story a satirical edge. Already the name Pangloss, which Voltaire gives to the hero, means “know-it-all” in translation from Greek and speaks of the assessment that the author gives him.
The theory of optimism is exposed in Voltaire by the selection of facts.
There is little joy in the events described in the book. Voltaire, with his story, first of all demonstrates the abundance of evil in the world. Both the laws of nature and human laws are incredibly cruel. All the characters in the book suffer crushing blows of fate, unexpected and merciless, but this is told with humor rather than compassion. The troubles and torments of the characters are usually associated with the grotesque physical bottom: they are flogged, raped, their bellies are ripped open. These sufferings are deliberately reduced, and they are healed from these terrible wounds incredibly easily and quickly, so the story about them is often presented in the tone of a sad and cheerful obscene anecdote. These troubles and misfortunes, of course, are too many for one story, and the density of evil and cruelty, their inevitability and unpredictability are intended to show not so much their excessiveness as their everydayness. As Voltaire talks about something everyday and familiar, about the horrors of war, about the dungeons of the Inquisition, about the lack of rights of a person in a society in which religious fanaticism and despotism reign. But nature is also cruel and inhuman: stories about the bloody mud of war or judicial arbitrariness are replaced by pictures of terrifying natural Disasters- earthquakes, sea storms, etc. Good and evil are no longer balanced and do not complement each other. Evil clearly prevails, and although it seems to the writer (and, we add, to one of the characters in the book - the Manichaean philosopher Martin) to be largely timeless, that is, eternal and irresistible, it has its own specific carriers. But Voltaire's view is not hopelessly pessimistic. The writer believes that by overcoming fanaticism and despotism, it is possible to build a fair society. Voltaire's faith in him, however, is weakened by a certain amount of skepticism. In this sense, the utopian state of Eldorado described in Candide is indicative. In the story, this country of universal prosperity and justice is opposed not only to the Paraguayan dungeons of the Jesuits, but also to many European states. But the happiness of the citizens of this blissful country is doubtful, because it is built on conscious isolationism: in ancient times, a law was passed here according to which “not a single resident had the right to leave the borders of his small country.” Cut off from the world, knowing nothing about it and not even being interested in it, the inhabitants of Eldorado lead a comfortable, happy, but, in general, primitive existence.
Such a life is alien to the hero of the story. Candide is a random and short-lived guest everywhere. He tirelessly searches for Cunegonde, but he is looking not only for her.
The meaning of his search is to determine his place in life.
The writer contrasts the two extreme positions - the irresponsible and conciliatory optimism of Pangloss and the passive pessimism of Martin - with the compromise conclusion of Candide, who saw a lot of evil in life, but also saw good in it and who found relaxation in modest creative work.
What did Voltaire want to say with the phrase he put into Candide’s mouth: “You must cultivate your garden”?
This phrase seems to be the summary of the life of the central character. Candide understands that all his life he lived with illusions imposed from the outside: about the beauty of Cunegonde, about the nobility of her family, about the wisdom of the incomparable philosopher Pangloss; understands how dangerous it is to serve false gods.
“We must cultivate our garden” is a thought about the need for fruitful work, about intervening in life in order to transform it, about the need to solve important practical problems of our time.
Conclusion
Having studied Voltaire’s story, the works of literary scholars on the topic “Candide” by Voltaire as a philosophical novel” and following the tasks put forward in the introduction, we came to the conclusions set out below.
Voltaire is one of the most important figures in understanding the entire French Enlightenment. Voltaire as a philosopher was interested in fundamental questions of ontology and epistemology.
In his works, Voltaire showed the failure of religion as a system. Voltaire, in Candide, criticizes Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony, believing that people should intervene in life to change it and establish more just orders. Radically rejects the “theory of optimism” in the Letzbnitz version. Enters into polemics with the philosophical and religious anthropology of Pascal.
In ethics, Voltaire opposed both the innateness of moral norms and their conventionality. Voltaire conceived the idea of creating a philosophy of history and wrote a number of works (“Philosophy of History”, “Pyrrhonism in History”, “Reflections on History”), which presented a program for studying cultural achievements in all areas of civilization. Voltaire opposed the views of Rousseau, who called for a return to primitive nature. Voltaire understood freedom as free will. Here Voltaire had great hopes for enlightened monarchs who had mastered philosophical conclusions about the laws of social development, the tasks of state power and had freed themselves from prejudices.
The culture of the French Enlightenment is characterized by the phenomenon of unity of philosophy and literature. A whole system of genres was created, which were distinguished by the formulation of philosophical problems in them. In this regard, a corresponding poetics appears. The characteristic features of the new poetics were: convention, fantastic images and situations, reasoning characters carrying certain philosophical ideas, paradoxes.
There is no fundamental difference between the large (novel) and small (story) philosophical genres of the 18th century in this regard. The space of the philosophical novel is not oriented toward life-likeness, which is what distinguishes it from other forms of the 18th-century novel. At the same time, the philosophical novel, especially Voltaire’s, fundamentally gravitates towards anachronisms, emphasizing the conventionality of the artistic world. For all their genre differences, philosophical novels of the 18th century are united by the parable form of storytelling. At the center of the novel is a story told to illustrate and confirm or, on the contrary, expose a certain philosophical idea, and the figurative system is subordinated to a didactic setting.
Voltaire gave the genre of philosophical stories a classical form. The main feature of the genre is the primacy of the idea. In a philosophical story, it is not people who live, interact, and struggle, but ideas; the characters are only their mouthpieces; they are similar to each other both in their actions and in their language. Hence the exotic and often fantastic nature of the plots, the almost complete absence of psychologism and historicism, the ease with which the heroes change the way of their lives, endure the blows of fate, accept the death of loved ones, and die. Time flies at incredible speed, the scene changes so quickly and arbitrarily that the conventions of place and time become obvious to the reader. The plots are emphatically reminiscent of well-known literary models, and therefore are also conventional in nature. The author's speech is given much more attention than dialogue.
In Voltaire’s deepest and most significant story, “Candide,” the philosophical turning point that took place in the writer’s mind clearly appears.
One of the external impetuses for Voltaire to revise his philosophical views and, indirectly, to write Candide was the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, which claimed tens of thousands of lives and wiped out the once picturesque city. Leibniz's optimistic idea about the “pre-established harmony of good and evil”, about the cause-and-effect relationship that reigns in this “best of possible worlds”, is consistently refuted by the events in the life of the main character - the modest and virtuous young man Candide. There are many heroes in the story, and from the pages of “Candide” one can hear a diversity of opinions and assessments, while the author’s position emerges gradually, emerges gradually from the clash of opposing opinions, sometimes obviously controversial, sometimes ridiculous, almost always with undisguised irony woven into the whirlwind flow of events.
The last words of Voltaire’s book were: “But you must cultivate your garden,” for our world is crazy and cruel; This is the credo and modern man, and the wisdom of the builder - wisdom that is still imperfect, but already bearing fruit.
An appeal to real life, to its acute social spiritual conflicts, permeates all of Voltaire’s work and the story “Candide”, in particular.
For all its topicality, it deeply penetrates into the essence of universal human problems that go far beyond the boundaries of the era when the writer lived and worked.
Bibliography - edit
1. Voltaire. Selected works. M., 1947.,
2. .G. N. Ermolenko
FORMS AND FUNCTIONS OF IRONY IN VOLTAIRE'S PHILOSOPHICAL STORY
(XVIII century: The art of living and the life of art. - M., 2004)
3. French philosophical novel of the 18th century: self-awareness of the genre
Author: Zababurova N.V.Publication information: XVIII century: Literature in the context of culture. – M.: URA Publishing House
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The pinnacle of the cycle and Voltaire’s work in general was the story “Candide, or Optimism.” The impetus for its creation was the famous Lisbon earthquake on November 1, 1755, when the flourishing city was destroyed and many people died. This event renewed the controversy surrounding the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz's statement: "Everything is good." Voltaire himself earlier shared Leibniz's optimism, but in Candide an optimistic outlook on life becomes a sign of inexperience and social illiteracy.
Outwardly, the story is structured as a biography of the main character, a story of all kinds of disasters and misfortunes that befall Candide in his wanderings around the world. At the beginning of the story, Candide is expelled from the castle of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronck because he dared to fall in love with the baron’s daughter, the beautiful Cunegonde. He ends up as a mercenary in the Bulgarian army, where he is driven through the ranks thirty-six times and only manages to escape during a battle in which thirty thousand souls were killed; then he survives a storm, a shipwreck and an earthquake in Lisbon, where he falls into the hands of the Inquisition and almost dies at an auto-da-fé. In Lisbon, the hero meets the beautiful Cunegonde, who has also suffered many misfortunes, and they go to South America, where Candide ends up in the fantastic countries of Orelion and Eldorado; through Suriname he returns to Europe, visits France, England and Italy, and his wanderings end in the vicinity of Constantinople, where he marries Cunegonde and all the characters in the story gather on the small farm he owns. Apart from Pangloss, there are no happy heroes in the story: everyone tells a chilling story of their suffering, and this abundance of grief makes the reader perceive violence and cruelty as the natural state of the world. People in it differ only in the degree of misfortune; any society is unfair, and the only happy country in the story is the non-existent Eldorado. By depicting the world as a kingdom of the absurd, Voltaire anticipates the literature of the twentieth century.
Candide (the hero's name means "sincere" in French), as it says at the beginning of the story, "is a young man whom nature has endowed with the most pleasant disposition. His whole soul was reflected in his face. He judged things quite sensibly and kind-heartedly." Candide is the model of the “natural man” of the Enlightenment, in the story he plays the role of a simpleton hero, he is a witness and victim of all the vices of society. Candide trusts people, especially his mentors, and learns from his first teacher Pangloss that there is no effect without a cause and everything is for the best in this best of worlds. Pangloss is the embodiment of Leibniz's optimism; the inconsistency and stupidity of his position is proven by every plot twist, but Pangloss is incorrigible. As befits a character in a philosophical story, he is devoid of a psychological dimension, an idea is only tested on him, and Voltaire’s satire deals with Pangloss primarily as the bearer of a false and therefore dangerous idea of optimism.
Pangloss in the story is opposed by brother Martin, a pessimistic philosopher who does not believe in the existence of good in the world; he is as unshakably committed to his convictions as Pangloss, just as incapable of learning lessons from life. The only character to whom this is given is Candide, whose statements throughout the story demonstrate how little by little he gets rid of the illusions of optimism, but is in no hurry to accept the extremes of pessimism. It is clear that in the genre of a philosophical story we cannot talk about the evolution of the hero, as the depiction of moral changes in a person is usually understood; The characters in philosophical stories are deprived of the psychological aspect, so the reader cannot empathize with them, but can only watch in a detached manner as the characters sort through different ideas. Since the heroes of Candide, deprived of an inner world, cannot develop their own ideas naturally, in the process of internal evolution, the author has to take care of providing them with these ideas from the outside. Such a final idea for Candide is the example of a Turkish elder who declares that he does not know and never knew the names of muftis and viziers: “I believe that in general people who interfere in public affairs sometimes die in the most pitiful way and that they deserve it. But I’m not at all interested in what’s going on in Constantinople; it’s enough for me that I send fruits from the garden I cultivate there for sale.” In the mouth of the same Eastern sage, Voltaire puts the glorification of work (after “Robinson” a very frequent motif in the literature of the Enlightenment, in “Candide” expressed in the most capacious, philosophical form): “Work drives away three great evils from us: boredom, vice and need.” .
The example of a happy old man suggests to Candide the final formulation of his own life position: “We must cultivate our garden.” In these famous words, Voltaire expresses the result of the development of educational thought: each person must clearly limit his field of activity, his “garden,” and work in it steadily, constantly, cheerfully, without questioning the usefulness and meaning of his activities, just like a gardener cultivating the garden day after day. Then the gardener’s work pays off in fruits. “Candide” says that human life is difficult, but bearable, one cannot indulge in despair - action must replace contemplation. Goethe would later come to exactly the same conclusion in the finale of Faust.
