Since the end of the 20s. a number of journal articles and individual books appear devoted to issues of Russian, Ukrainian and pan-Slavic ethnography, and one after another editions of monuments appear folk art: “Little Russian songs” by M. A. Maksimovich (1827-1834), “Zaporozhye antiquity” Revised. Iv. Sreznevsky (1834, 1835, and 1838), the three-volume “Tales of the Russian People” by I. P. Sakharov (1836-1837) and many others. etc. At the same time, the “Collection of Russian Songs” by Pyotr Kireevsky was being prepared, published later.
In line with this still nascent folk studies movement, Gogol finds himself as an artist, creates and publishes his first narrative cycle, “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.”
Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine and until the end of his life he considered it his micro-homeland, and himself a Russian writer with a “Khokhlatsky” sourdough.
Coming from among the middle-class Ukrainian nobility, he knew their rural and urban life well, with youth was burdened by the provincial-serf “scarcity” and “earthliness” of this way of life, admired the folk-poetic legends of the “Cossack antiquity”, which then lived not only among the people, but also revered in some “old-world” noble families, including in the house of a noble and highly educated distant a relative of the future writer - D. P. Troshchinsky, an ardent admirer and collector of Ukrainian “antiques”.
“Evenings” amazed contemporaries with its incomparable originality, poetic freshness and brightness. Pushkin’s review is known: “...everyone was delighted with this living description of the singing and dancing tribe, this fresh paintings Little Russian nature, this gaiety, simple-minded and at the same time crafty.
How amazed we were at the Russian book, which made us laugh, we, who had not laughed since the time of Fonvizin! The mention of Fonvizin is not accidental. This is a hint that the simple-minded gaiety of “Evenings” is not as simple-minded as it might seem at first glance.
Belinsky, who greeted “Belkin’s Tale” very coldly, welcomed “Evenings”, also - and before Pushkin - noting in them the combination of “gaiety, poetry and nationality.”
“Merry People” sharply distinguished “Evenings” from the usual naturalistic depiction of serf life in the Russian and Ukrainian villages in the so-called “common folk” stories of that time, in which Belinsky rightly saw a profanation of the idea of nationality.
Gogol happily avoided this danger and did not fall into the other extreme - the idealization of “folk morals”, having found a completely new angle for their depiction. It can be called a mirror reflection of the poetic, life-affirming consciousness of the people themselves. A “living”, as Pushkin put it, “a description of a tribe singing and dancing” is literally woven from motifs of Ukrainian folklore, drawn from its most diverse genres - heroic-historical “thoughts”, lyrical and ritual songs, fairy tales, anecdotes, nativity scenes.
This is the artistic authenticity of the cheerful and poetic folk of Gogol’s first narrative cycle. But him poetic world permeated with a hidden longing for the former Zaporozhye freedom of the enslaved, like all “tribes” Russian Empire, “Dikan Cossacks”, which forms epic start and the ideological unity of all the stories included in it.
Romantically bright in its national coloring, the poetic world of “Evenings” is devoid of another required attribute romantic epic - historical, temporal locality. Historical time Each story has its own, special, sometimes definite, and in some cases, for example, in “May Night”, conditional. But thanks to this, the national character (according to the philosophical and historical terminology of the 30-40s - “spirit”) of the Cossack tribe appears in “Evenings” from its ideal, invariably beautiful essence.
Its immediate reality is the linguistic consciousness of the people in all the stories of the cycle. The predominantly speech-based characterization of the characters gives the fairy-tale style of “Evenings” a “picturesque syllable” noted by Belinsky, previously unknown to Russian prose, and is one of Gogol’s most promising innovations.
The tale is a means of separating the author’s speech from the speech of his heroes, in “Evenings” - from the vernacular, which thereby becomes both a means and a subject artistic image. Russian prose did not know anything like this before Gogol’s Evenings.
The stylistic norm of the vernacular element of “Evenings” is rustic innocence, under the mask of which lies an abyss of “Khokhlatsky” cheerful slyness and mischief. The combination of one with the other is where the entire comedy of “Evenings” lies, mainly verbal, motivated by the artistic fiction of their “publisher”, “pasichnik” Rudy Panka, and a number of related storytellers.
The preface to “Evenings,” written on behalf of Rudy Panka, characterizes their “publisher” as the bearer of the speech norm not of the author, but of his storytellers and heroes. And this norm remains unchanged in all the stories of the cycle, which also emphasizes the constancy of fundamental properties national character"Dikan Cossacks" in all historical circumstances.
So, for example, the vernacular, and thereby the spiritual appearance of the characters in “Sorochinskaya Fair” and “The Night Before Christmas” are no different from one another, despite the fact that the action of the first story is related to modern times, takes place before the eyes of the author, and the action of the second dedicated to end of the XVIII c., at the time when the government decree promulgated in 1775 was being prepared, according to which the Zaporozhye army was deprived of all its liberties and privileges.
In the breadth of historical time covered by “Evenings,” their lyrical and ethnographic principles merge together and acquire an epic scale.
“The Night Before Christmas” opens the second part of “Evenings”, published at the beginning of 1832. And if the epic of the first part (“Sorochinskaya Fair”, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night”) declares itself only with the historical overtones of folk fantasy, oral poetic “truths” and “fables”, then the stories of the second part, together with the “Missing Letter” that concludes the first part, have a fairly clearly defined historical space - from the era of the struggle of the “Cossack people” against Polish rule (“ Terrible revenge") to its feudal modernity ("Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt").
Thus, history merges with modernity on the principle of contrasting the beauty of the heroic past of the freedom-loving “tribe” with the ugliness and dullness of its serf existence.
Exactly the same ideological and artistic connection exists between the stories of Gogol’s second cycle - “Mirgorod” (1835). If two of them - "Old World Landowners" and especially "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" - are stylistically and thematically adjacent to the story about Shponka, then the other two - "Viy" and "Taras Bulba" - stand in one along with the overwhelming majority of the stories in “Evenings”, they have in common with them a bright poetic flavor.
It is no coincidence that Gogol gave “Mirgorod” the subtitle “Continuation of evenings on a farm near Dikanka,” thereby emphasizing the ideological and artistic unity of both cycles and the very principle of cyclization. This is the principle of contrast between natural and unnatural, beautiful and ugly, high poetry and the lowly prose of national life, and at the same time its two social poles - popular and small-scale.
But both in “Evenings” and in “Mirgorod” these social polarities are attached to various eras of national existence and are correlated with one another as its beautiful past and ugly present, and the present is depicted in its immediate feudal “reality”, and the past - so , how it was imprinted in popular consciousness, was deposited in the national “spirit” of the people and continues to live in their legends, beliefs, tales, and customs.
Here is the most important feature artistic method Gogol - his philosophical historicism, the Walter Scott beginning of the writer’s creativity.
The depiction of popular movements and customs is one of the most promising innovations historical novels V. Scott. But that's just historical background their actions, the main “interest” of which is the love affair and the associated fates of the personal heroes of the story, voluntary or involuntary participants in the depicted historical events.
The nationality of Gogol's Ukrainian stories is already significantly different.
National specificity and historical projection of their Cossack world act as a form of critical understanding of “scarcity” and “earthliness” contemporary writer Russian life, recognized by the writer himself as a temporary “sleep” of the national spirit.
History of Russian literature: in 4 volumes / Edited by N.I. Prutskov and others - L., 1980-1983.
Originality creative manner Gogol is clearly revealed both in the nature of the artistic details he recreated and in the method of their selection. Pushkin's prose, for example, is distinguished by the dynamic disclosure of the hero's actions, the events in which he participates, and on this basis his psychological appearance; artistic detail in Pushkin's prose is an integral element characters in their intentions and actions, in “event” relationships. Gogol was interested in the totality of details that expressively characterize the hero’s mental structure, his social and everyday environment, and the type of people to which he belongs.
Based on the principle of highlighting characteristic, memorable details, it is built in “ Dead souls» description of various aspects way of life and the psychology of heroes. In Manilov’s house, “something was always missing: the living room was filled with beautiful furniture, covered in dandy silk fabric, which, probably, was very expensive; but there wasn’t enough for two chairs, and the chairs were simply upholstered in matting; however, the owner, and for several years, each time warned his guest with the words: “Do not sit on these chairs, they are not ready yet...” In the evening, a very smart candlestick made of dark bronze with three antique graces, with a mother-of-pearl dandy shield, and next to him stood some simple copper invalid, lame, curled up to one side and covered in fat, although neither the owner, nor the mistress, nor the servants noticed this.”
In the examples given, we encounter objective, “material” details. There are a lot of them in Dead Souls, and they are always very expressive. Who doesn’t remember Chichikov’s box, which he carried with him everywhere, carefully hiding its contents from prying eyes? Which reader of Dead Souls will not remember his lingonberry-colored tailcoat with a sparkle; and his silver snuff-box, at the bottom of which were placed two violets for scent, and the fried chicken, which was a constant companion of his travels? Each image is associated with many such details that remain in the reader’s memory.
But Gogol uses not only objective details; he saturates the narrative with details of a different kind, which have “ general meaning" How remarkable, for example, is the character of Sobakevich in the fact that in the list of those sold by him Chichikov dead the soul turned out to be under the guise of a man, Elizabeth Sparrow. Surprisingly clearly reveals Nozdryov’s character traits and such detail as showing him his possessions. “Here is the border!” said Nozdryov. “Everything you see on this side is all mine, on that side, all this forest that is turning blue, and everything beyond the forest is all mine.”
Artistic details were never an end in themselves for Gogol; they are always included in the narrative not due to the writer’s excessive interest in details, but because of their significance for the embodiment of ideas and images. Therefore, despite the abundance of details in “Dead Souls,” the narrative is not fragmented into a description of insignificant, unimportant objects, but unfolds as an amazingly vivid story about human characters and their relationship to reality. The portrayal of individual characters in Dead Souls is strictly subordinated overall plan. From beginning to end, the work is permeated by a single general thought, a coherent ideological and artistic concept, which determines both the very choice of characters in the poem and the depiction of each individual image. One of the main internal lines of the first volume of “Dead Souls” is the demonstration of the insignificance and vulgarity of the “masters of life” to an ever-increasing degree.
Need to download an essay? Click and save - "The originality of Gogol's creative style. And the finished essay appeared in my bookmarks.Gogol began his creative activity like a romantic. However, he soon turned to critical realism, opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the beneficial influence of Pushkin. But he was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest picture of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and “ little man", a resident of St. Petersburg corners.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
This social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, and events public importance. At the same time, Gogol’s plot serves only as a pretext for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The names of Khlestakov, Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and others became household names. Even the minor characters depicted by Gogol on the pages of his works (for example, in “Dead Souls”): Pelageya, the serf girl Korobochka, or Ivan Antonovich, the “jug’s snout,” have great power of generalization and typicality. Gogol emphasizes one or two of his most significant features in the character of the hero. Often he exaggerates them, which makes the image even more vivid and prominent.
To the goals of the bright, satirical image Gogol's heroes are served by a careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, the hero’s home.
If in romantic stories Gogol gives emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain elation of tone, but in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech.
Two worlds depicted by Gogol - folk group and “existents” - determined the main features of the writer’s speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in “Evenings”, in “Taras Bulba”, in lyrical digressions“Dead Souls”), then becomes close to live conversational (in everyday paintings and scenes of “Evenings” or when the story is told about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of folk speech and skillfully used all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena. public life.
1) the periodic structure of a phrase, when many sentences are connected into one whole (“Taras saw how vague the Cossack ranks became and how despondency, indecent for the brave, began to quietly embrace the Cossack heads, but was silent: he wanted to give time to everything, so that they would get used to despondency brought on by farewell to his comrades, and meanwhile in the silence he was preparing to wake them all up at once and suddenly, whooping like a Cossack, so that again and with greater force than before, cheerfulness would return to everyone’s soul, which only the Slavic breed, the wide one, is capable of. a mighty rock is to others as the sea is to shallow rivers");
2) the introduction of lyrical dialogues and monologues (for example, the conversation between Levko and Ganna in the first chapter of “May Night”, monologues - appeals to the Cossacks of Koshevoy, Taras Bulba, Bovdyug in “Taras Bulba”);
3) an abundance of exclamatory and interrogative sentences (for example, in the description of the Ukrainian night in “May Night”);
4) emotional epithets that convey the power of the author’s inspiration, born of love for native nature(description of the day at the Sorochinskaya Fair) or to the folk group (Taras Bulba).
Gogol uses everyday speech in different ways. IN early works(in “Evenings”) its bearer is the narrator. The author puts into his mouth both vernacular words (everyday words and phrases), and such appeals to listeners that are of a familiar, good-natured nature, characteristic of this environment: “By God, I’m already tired of telling! What are you thinking?
The character of a person social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. Gogol's humor - “laughter through tears” - was determined by the contradictions of the Russian reality of his time, mainly by the contradictions between the people and the anti-people essence of the noble state. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposite of the ideal
life with the reality of life." He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature. Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg. Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality. Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types. Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power. The purposes of a vivid satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” the landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes. Subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and the characters of people determined the originality of Gogol’s literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings ...", in "Taras Bulba", in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia). The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life. The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters. Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
