Zulfyu Livaneli: “We also came out of Gogol’s “The Overcoat.” How and what we came out of Gogol’s “The Overcoat”

This phrase, first found in the French literary critic Eugene de Vogüe (I indicate the source so that you are not mistaken: the phrase does not belong to Dostoevsky!), reflects the significance of this short story in world literature.

It sounds pompous, but it is here that the the main problem, which has worried people for many centuries. This "little man" problem. Of course, she is not alone, there are both moral and ethical problems here, but still in the foreground, as we would say today, is the average person. The "little man" problem

Theses, which I formulated in the form of questions and answers, so that it is more convenient for you to place them in your essay materials.

• Who is Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, main character stories? A minor official in the office, engaged in copying documents, inconspicuous, quiet, not attracting any attention to himself. His colleagues mocked him, and the hero only said in response: “Why are you offending me?”, and behind these words one could hear: “I am your brother” (as Gogol writes).

• What does he have in life? Nothing. He lives in a small apartment, eats poorly, and all his interests boil down to copying papers.

• How does he himself feel about this? Akaki is not at all bothered by this. He didn’t know any other life, had nothing, and the hero is happy. Gogol does not hide the spiritual poverty of the hero’s interests and life.

• What shook the usual course of life of the little official? The overcoat was worn out into trash. Akaki stopped drinking tea in the evenings, wore a dressing gown so as not to wear out other clothes at home, walked on tiptoe so that the soles of his shoes would not wear out, and finally the money for a new overcoat was saved up. The new overcoat became the meaning of life.

• How did the hero’s life change after purchasing a new overcoat? He was noticed, Akaki was even invited to an evening with his superiors. But horror! When he returned, the overcoat was pulled off his shoulders. Akakiy tried to turn to the boss for help, but he kicked him out. The hero caught a cold, fell ill and died. The reader understands that Akaki died not from illness, but from grief.

Like this sad story. What did Gogol want to tell his readers? What is idea stories?

• The author condemns social system, in which a person is visible only when he occupies a post.

The ending of the story

As you understand, “The Overcoat” is not an easy story. Its main mystery remains - the ending. At the end, Gogol talks about a ghost pulling off greatcoats, coats and fur coats from people. He calmed down only when he did the same with the boss, who rudely threw Akaki out into the street.

Why does Gogol need to introduce such a fantastic story? Here literary scholars disagree. I don’t think it’s necessary to present all points of view; I’ll tell you about the one that, in my opinion, follows from the entire work of the great writer.

Earlier I said that for Gogol the main thing in a person was the soul, that he always looked beyond the social both in society and in man.

The ghost tearing off the greatcoats of passers-by, powerful and terrible, is the soul of Akaki, who has not found goodness and justice in the world and has escaped from the shackles..

This version belongs to the great Russian writer V. Nabokov.

Attention, Unified State Examination! The material on “The Overcoat” is an excellent illustration for texts with the problem of goodness, justice, mercy (the attitude of people around the hero and the system itself), on the other hand, an illustration for texts about the spiritual misery of a person focused on one material goal.

The material was prepared by Karelina Larisa Vladislavovna, teacher of the Russian language of the highest category, honorary worker general education RF

Dostoevsky left school with the rank of lieutenant engineer in 1843, that is, somewhere in the middle of the reign of Nicholas I. And after hard labor, after it became clear that Dostoevsky had become a great writer of the Russian land, he was never ashamed to sign rank - retired engineer-lieutenant Dostoevsky.

Not long before, in 1842, Gogol's "Dead Souls" and Gogol - at the height of glory, Dostoevsky would later say that we all came out of the sleeve of Gogol's "Overcoat"; and Gogol remains for Dostoevsky not just a pinnacle, but a teacher. Gogol’s words (later Dostoevsky himself would call them “words”) - they are scattered throughout all his works, including his mature ones. For example, Svidrigailov’s wandering around St. Petersburg after he let Dunya go. So he got involved with some incomprehensible personalities due to the fact that both of their noses stuck out to the side, but in different directions. This is Gogol. Elsewhere, in a tavern, there sits a little man who wants to sneeze, but he just can’t, it’s Gogol again. Makar Devushkin in “Poor People” is partly similar to Poprishchin and even more like Akaki Akakievich. And these little words, little words, a taste for words - what will later be called “reduced laughter,” that is, as if squeezed into the narrative, not obvious, which needs to be discovered. The whole Captain Lebyadkin is a Gogol plot. But if in Gogol, say, Nozdryov is a cheerful demon, then Dostoevsky’s demons are always gloomy, even when Lebyadkin writes poetry, and even madrigals dedicated to Liza Tushina. (Dostoevsky’s influence is enormous, only the lion’s share of it is extra-literary, since it is an influence on souls. For example, Shostakovich’s last work is precisely music based on the poems of Captain Lebyadkin.

2.Name the main aspects of the artistic embodiment of the theme of art in Gogol’s “Petersburg Tales”.

Gogol's comedy is the comedy of the established, everyday, which has acquired the force of habit, the comedy of petty life, to which the satirist gave a huge generalizing meaning. After the satire of classicism, Gogol's work was one of the milestones of new realistic literature. Gogol's significance for Russian literature was enormous. With the appearance of Gogol, literature turned to Russian life, to the Russian people; began to strive for originality, nationality, from rhetorical she sought to become natural, natural. In no other Russian writer has this desire achieved such success as in Gogol. To do this, it was necessary to pay attention to the crowd, to the masses, to portray ordinary people, and unpleasant ones were only an exception to the general rule. This is a great merit on Gogol’s part. With this, he completely changed his view of art itself.

One of the most beautiful achievements of Gogol's art is the word. Few of the great writers mastered the magic of words, the art of verbal painting, as completely as Gogol.

Language mastery is an extremely important, perhaps even the most important, element of the art of writing. But the concept of artistic mastery, according to Gogol, is even more capacious, for it more directly absorbs all aspects of the work - both its form and content. At the same time, the language of the work is in no way neutral in relation to the content. Understanding this very complex and always individually manifested relationship within art artistic word lies at the very essence of Gogol’s aesthetic position.

Great art never gets old. The classics invade the spiritual life of our society and become part of its self-awareness.

Gogol was one of the most amazing and original masters of artistic expression. Among the great Russian writers, he possessed, perhaps, perhaps the most expressive signs of style. Gogol's language, Gogol's landscape, Gogol's humor, Gogol's manner of depicting a portrait - these expressions have long become commonplace. And, nevertheless, the study of Gogol’s style and artistic skill still remains far from a fully resolved task.

Gogol's Petersburg is a city of incredible incidents, ghostly and absurd life,

fantastic events and ideals. Any metamorphosis is possible in it. Live

turns into a thing, a puppet (such are the inhabitants of the aristocratic Nevsky

avenue). A thing, object or part of the body becomes a “person”, an important person, sometimes

even with a high rank (for example, the nose that disappeared from the collegiate assessor Kovalev,

has the rank of state councilor). The city depersonalizes people, distorts their good

qualities, emphasizes the bad, changing their appearance beyond recognition.

In Nevsky Prospekt, Gogol showed a noisy, bustling crowd of people of all kinds

classes, discord between a sublime dream (Piskarev) and vulgar reality,

contradictions between the insane luxury of the minority and the abject poverty

majority, triumph of selfishness, “boiling commercialism” (Pirogov)

capital city.

"Petersburg Tales" reveal a clear evolution from social and everyday satire

(“Nevsky Prospekt”) to grotesque socio-political pamphleteering (“Notes

crazy"), from the organic interaction of romanticism with the predominant role

the second (“Nevsky Prospekt”) to more and more consistent realism (“The Overcoat”).

The stories “The Nose” and “The Overcoat” depict two poles of St. Petersburg life: the absurd

phantasmagoria and everyday reality. These poles, however, are not so far from each other

friend, as it might seem at first glance. The plot of “The Nose” is based on the most

the most fantastic of all city “stories”. Gogol's fantasy in this

the work is fundamentally different from folk poetic fiction in

“In the evenings...”

Fantasy in The Nose is a mystery that is nowhere to be found and is everywhere. This is weird

the unreality of St. Petersburg life, in which any delusional vision is indistinguishable from

reality.

This story depicts the monstrous power of servility and veneration. Deepening

showing the absurdity of human relationships in despotic conditions

bureaucratic subordination, when the individual, as such, loses all meaning,

Gogol skillfully uses the grotesque.

In the story “The Overcoat,” the intimidated, downtrodden Bashmachkin shows his dissatisfaction

significant persons who rudely belittled and insulted him, able

protest in a fantastic continuation of the story. This "little man", eternal

titular adviser" Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin becomes part of the St. Petersburg

mythology, ghost, fantastic avenger who terrifies

"significant persons". It would seem a completely ordinary, everyday story - about how it was

a new overcoat is stolen - grows not only into a vividly social story about

relationships in the bureaucratic system of St. Petersburg life of the “little

person" and " significant person", but develops into a mystery work that poses

question: what is a person, how and why does he live, what does he encounter in the environment around him?

Generalizing realism, the achievements of romanticism, creating a fusion of satire in his work

and lyrics, analysis of reality and dreams in a wonderful person and the future of the country,

he raised critical realism to a new, higher level compared to their

predecessors.

But I would like to note that Gogol’s fiction has forever become the property of not only

Russian, but also world literature, entered its golden fund. Modern Art

openly acknowledges Gogol as his mentor. Capacity, the striking power of laughter is paradoxical

combined in his work with tragic shock. Gogol seemed to have discovered a common

the root of the tragic and the comic. The echo of Gogol in art is also heard in novels

Bulgakov, and in the plays of Mayakovsky, and in the phantasmagoria of Kafka. Years will pass, but the mystery

Gogol's laughter will remain for new generations of his readers and followers

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1. Note the features of the problematic, the organization of the narrative, the means of creating the comic and satirical in the “Ukrainian” stories of “Mirgorod” by N.V. Gogol (“Old World Landowners”, “The Tale of How They Quarreled...”)

In Mirgorod, Gogol tried to take a further step towards overcoming individualism as a point of view on the world, as the starting position of perceiving reality in the image of a narrative carrier. However, even here there is still no single and ultimate (for Gogol) solution to this issue. .

However, it is not the image of the narrator in “Viya” that determines Gogol’s search for justification for the author’s appearance, and not even the image of the narrator of “Old World Landowners,” although it is much more revealed and fundamental. Starting from the first word of the story about two old men, a completely individual character is introduced into it. narrator (“I really love...”); then he appears in the story all the time, talks about himself, moves in space, visits Afanasy Ivanovich and Pulcheria Ivanovna; he is a friend of the old people, he loves them; everything that is told in the story is his “memoirs” about the old people, including his personal impressions and, possibly, what he was told about them. He is both the bearer of speech, and the rationale for all the information in the story, and its character, the protagonist. For all that, he is not at all a traditional image of the narrator, and he is not at all a specific image of the real author, although in the text of the story, unlike “Viy,” the tale forms and personal pronouns of the conversation with the reader are always emphasized: “I loved to visit they have..."; “Good old men! But my story..."; “It has, without a doubt, ever happened to you...” (to you - that is, to the reader); “Soon, unknown from where, some distant relative arrived, the heir to the estate, who served as “I” in “Old World Landowners” - all the time indefinite, open to almost any imaginary specifications in the likely circle of Gogol’s readers, each of whom can complete the inner the image of this “I” becoming a part of it, the reader’s “I”. Hence the exclamation quoted above: “and, God, what a long string of memories this brings back to me!” - and here the speech breaks off, but exactly what kind of string and what kind of memories, not a word is said about this, and the reader is, as it were, invited to recreate this entire long string of memories himself. Of course, here there is the use of the experience of Zhukovsky’s stylistics (and his school and, perhaps, the wise ones); but this is no longer romanticism at all, since the personal here strives to become general, and subjectivism has given way to the objective world of social existence, and individualism has disappeared here, and “suggestivity” is not justified by the cult of the individual, from which there is, they say, no way outside of it, but, on the contrary, by the feeling and idea of ​​community, the unity of the mental life of many individuals in the unity of the people's ideal.

And this is where the uncertainty of the personal tone of such exclamations as “Good old people! but my story is approaching...” or “Poor old lady! she didn’t think at that time...” Who, exactly, is exclaiming this? It seems that both the author, and the narrator, and the reader along with him, and, as it were, human humanity in general, that is, the “normal” perception of a person who for a moment has overthrown all lies and artificial creations of the evil age and returned to the principles of folk truth (according to Gogol ).

This desire to generalize the image of the narrator, a desire that is still unsteady, emerging for the first time and, apparently, taking shape, so to speak, gropingly, leads to the fact that “fairytale” forms can appear in the story even where a “point of view” cannot clearly be assumed » individual narrator. So, when Pulcheria Ivanovna talks with Afanasy Ivanovich before her death, “such deep, such crushing heartfelt pity was expressed on her face that I don’t know if anyone at that time could have looked at her indifferently.” Who is this “I” here? The author-narrator, of course. But how does he know what the expression on the dear old lady’s face was like at that moment? First as a lieutenant, I don’t remember in which regiment...”, etc.

The story about the quarrel is written in a sharply emphasized fantastic manner. From its very first lines onwards the narrator’s “I”, stylistically brought to the point of grotesqueness, runs through its entire text; It is he who begins the story with the exclamation: “Ivan Ivanovich’s glorious bekesha! Excellent! And what funny things!” etc. It is he who admires the bekesha and its owner so excessively. He is given - both by the manner of his speech and its very content - a certain characteristic, also burlesque, “travesty”, like the character of the entire story as a whole: after all, his speech is parodic-rhetorical; he doesn’t just tell, but rhetorically embellishes his speech, however, constantly breaking from this parodic “high” tone into the tone of “low” conversation with listeners that is familiar to him “in life”. So, starting with a series of exclamations of delight up to: “velvet! silver! fire!" etc., he immediately inserts a parte: “He sewed it back when Agafya Fedoseevna did not go to Kyiv. Do you know Agafya Fedoseevna? the one who bit off the assessor’s ear.”

Below - again exclamations and delight, and suddenly - a grin of speech in a clearly everyday tone: “Yes, the house is not very bad. I like...”, etc., and again a conversation with the intended listener about mutual acquaintances: “Wonderful person Ivan Ivanovich! The Poltava commissar knows him too! Dorosh Tarasovich Pukhivochka, when he travels from Khorol, he always stops by to see him. And Archpriest Father Peter, who lives in Koliberd...”, etc.

The narrator - both in his rhetorical delights and in his shabby à parte jokes - is obviously comical; he himself is not only the bearer of the story, but also the object of the image or, moreover, satire, and very serious satire. He is in no way opposed to his heroes, as well as to the entire environment, their surrounding, vulgar, despicable environment, which brings a person to a shameful “earthliness”. He himself is flesh of the flesh of this environment. He is one of this entire company of Mirgorod vulgarities, one of the Ivanov Ivanovichs, Nikiforovichs and other Ivanovichs depicted in the story. He - so to speak, the subject of presentation - is completely merged with its object. The two main characters of the story are given “from the outside”, without revealing their psychology; but the reader is exposed to a world of thoughts, or rather little thoughts, and feelings, the experiences of the narrator - and these are the standard feelings and thoughts of all the heroes of the story, for whom, as for the narrator, the world is Mirgorod and its gentry, the highest delight and poetry - bekesha and abundantly tasty food, as for the homeland, culture, people, etc., they all have no idea about this. At the same time, the narrator is stupid, stiff, ignorant, vulgar - and these are not at all his personal traits, but the traits of the entire environment depicted in the story, the entire way of life condemned in it. This means that the narrator, very specific stylistically, appears before the reader as if in the form of the spiritual essence of the circle of phenomena of reality that is depicted, in the form of the voice of that collective vulgarity that is described in the story. Therefore, with prim “bashfulness” and a dirty grin, he talks about Gapka’s children running around Ivan Ivanovich’s yard, and about Gapka’s merits. That’s why he loves his vulgar heroes so much, he is their friend (“I know Ivan Nikiforovich very well and I can say...”), he is the same as them. And he quite seriously disputes the gossip that Ivan Nikiforovich was born with a backward tail, because “this invention is so absurd and at the same time vile and indecent that I do not even consider it necessary to refute it before enlightened readers, who, without any doubt, know that only witches, and then very few, have a tail back, which, however, belong more to the female sex than to the male” (this is how we learn about the degree of enlightenment of the narrator).

Here is an explanation of the merits of Ivan Ivanovich’s oratory, suddenly revealing pictures of the narrator’s noble life and his understanding of the merits of cultural phenomena: “Lord, how he speaks! This feeling can only be compared to when someone is searching in your head or slowly running a finger along your heel. You listen, you condense, and you hang your head. Nice! extremely nice! like a dream after a swim.”

All these features, which describe the narrator both as a person and as the voice of the world of vulgarity, as one of the objects of satire, are concentrated especially densely in the first chapter of the story. This chapter is devoted to the characteristics of both Ivans; it is also dedicated to the characterization of the narrator, who is deeply merged with both Ivans in the idea of ​​the story.

But the image of the narrator does not disappear further. He, the narrator, accompanies the presentation with his comments, as if substituting his psychological understanding in place of the psychology of the heroes (after all, he carries all the psychology in the story), for example: “Big trouble! By God, this won’t make me cry!” - answered Ivan Nikiforovich. Lied, lied, by God, lied! He was very annoyed by this." And then the narrator retains his parodic (or travesty) rhetoric; see, for example, the “rhetorical” introduction to chapter three: “So, two respectable men, the honor and adornment of Mirgorod, quarreled among themselves! and for what?”, and below: “...and these two friends... When I heard about this, it struck me like thunder! For a long time I didn’t want to believe: righteous God!” etc., or: “Night has come... Oh, if I were a painter, I would wonderfully depict all the beauty of the night!” And another demonstration of the narrator’s stupidity and vulgarity, for example: “I confess, I don’t understand why it’s arranged this way, that women grab us by the nose as deftly as if by the handle of a kettle? Either their hands are made that way, or our noses are no longer suitable for anything.” And then - the narrator’s narrow horizons: “Wonderful city of Mirgorod! There are no buildings in it! And under thatch, and under the roof, even under a wooden roof. To the right is a street, to the left is a street, everywhere there is a beautiful fence...", etc. - even the narrator’s imagination, barren from lack of culture, cannot tell him anything more beautiful and magnificent than a wooden roof (he has never seen an iron one) or fences on the streets of the town, - and then a parodic description of a puddle (travesties of rhetorical landscapes) right up to its ending, comic in its obvious “reversal”: “A beautiful puddle! Houses and small houses, which from a distance can be mistaken for haystacks, surround them and marvel at its beauty.”

Or again - at the end of the story: “The mayor gave the assembly! Where will I get brushes and paints to depict the variety of the convention and the magnificent feast? etc. - and at the end again: “At the same time, Ivan Nikiforovich looked!.. No!.. I can’t!.. Give me another feather! My pen is sluggish, dead, with a thin comb for this picture!..”, etc. - with a clear exposure of travesty, with a comic realization of the “high” metonymy “feather” - for it is not only metonymic and as such “languid” and “dead,” but also quite real and “base” - with “subtle calculation.” And here Gogol uses comic, travesty stylistic moves, widespread in the corresponding literary tradition, mainly of the 18th century. But his meaning of this, of course, is completely different.

Meanwhile, in the “tale” of the story about the quarrel between the two Ivans, there are notes that clearly fall out of the tone of the vulgar narrator, the mouthpiece of the environment of the Ivans themselves. Is it really the same person who says initial words stories - from “Ivan Ivanovich’s glorious bekesha!” to “the same one that bit off the assessor’s ear,” and pronounces the final paragraph of the same story, with its gloomy landscape, with its literary and “intelligent” style, and with a thought that rejects the whole world of Mirgorod vulgarities, pronounces right up to the final exclamation: “Again the same field, pitted in places, black and green in others, wet jackdaws and crows, monotonous rain, a tearful sky with no clearing. “It’s boring in this world, gentlemen!” There is an obvious difference in the appearance of this clearly positive person, expressing the point of view of the real author, and the narrator of almost the entire story.

Actually, this reasonable and humane-loving author-narrator does not appear in the text of the story itself, except for shades of “literariness”, even poetry of speech, sometimes making its way in a comic tale, for example: “This gave the whole room some kind of wonderful half-light” (chapter second); but most likely these shades are involuntary and, in an artistic sense, accidental.

Kalashnikova O. L. Doctor of Philology, Prof. Dnepropetrovsk national University - Dnepropetrovsk (Ukraine) / 2009

Universal influence on the domestic, or even more so on world literature- the lot of very few (even great) writers. N.V. Gogol is one of them, and his “Overcoat”, as soon as it appeared, took one of the leading places in the national cultural cosmos. A short story, rightly claiming to be a national cultural myth, was created as if on the sidelines of the writer’s main plans: conceived back in 1834, it was published only in the 3rd volume of Gogol’s collected works in 1842, when the writer had already become famous for his “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka", "Mirgorod", when the passions around his "Inspector General" had already subsided, and when the first volume of " Dead souls", which caused long-term, even centuries-old controversy around the name and creation of the writer. Due to these circumstances of its birth, “The Overcoat” could well have remained in the shadow of Gogol’s pinnacle creations, but this did not happen. Moreover, it was this little story that became business card new direction in Russian literature. And the thought of F. Dostoevsky, which has long acquired the weight of an aphorism ( “We all came out of Gogol’s “Overcoat””), expressed by him in a conversation with the French critic M. de Vogüe, went beyond stating the fact of Gogol’s indisputable influence on the natural school, and through it on the subsequent development Russian literature and acquired the meaning of a formula decoding the mental essence of Russian post-Gogol literature.

WITH light hand Gogol’s “little man”, the example of which was the hero of “The Overcoat” Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, became already in the 1840-60s. perhaps the main hero of Russian literature. And although the attitude contemporary writer criticism of the story and the stream of countless imitations it generated on the theme of the poor official was not unambiguous, the very fact of the birth of a new one, often identified by contemporaries with Gogol natural school in Russian literature (which gave rise to the discussion of Slavophil criticism with Belinsky in the 1840s) turned out to be significant. Gogol’s contemporaries praised and reviled “The Overcoat” for the same thing: sympathy for a small, poor official and a truthful depiction of the petty life of the “eternal titular adviser”: although they guessed that with Gogol a new, “Gogolian” stage in the development of Russian literature began, but disagreed as to whether this was good or bad.

How is this realized today? How do you see the literature and society that emerged from N.V. Gogol’s “The Overcoat”? Did Gogol’s “The Overcoat” fit into the “textualized” hyperreality modeled by postmodernism? How and what kind of people did we emerge from Gogol’s “The Overcoat”? The answer to these questions seems relevant not only for literary criticism, but also for the interpretation of the current sociocultural situation.

All the more curious is the answer proposed by the writer who entered literature in the late 60s. of the last century, who survived all the “perestroikas” with it, but never coincided with any of the “isms” - V. Makanin. Belonging both to realism and the era of postmodernism, this writer turned out to be the “wrong” son of postmodernism, for he stubbornly demonstrated and continues to demonstrate his umbilical connection with the traditions of Russian classics, on which his work is “insisted”.

Looking at modern Russia Through the prism of literary myths assimilated by the national collective unconscious, V. Makanin tries to comprehend the literary origins of the processes taking place in society, moving away from the priority of deconstruction of “sacred places”, ideologemes of the Soviet collective unconscious, characteristic of socially engaged conceptualists of the 70-80s. (D. Prigov, V. Sorokin), and “undressing” the usual mythological models of the world and man born from classical literature. It is literature (according to Makanin) that helps to “read” and understand the perceived catastrophic Russian reality of the period of the collapse of the former Great Empire.

Carrying out archaeological excavations in the national cultural unconscious, the writer seeks to identify a certain national topic, national constants of culture, a synonym for which for the Russian consciousness from the moment of the birth of secular writing was precisely literature: those signs introduced into the consciousness by literature that determined not only the national artistic code, but also the very social model of life of Russians.

That is why, in the final result for the writer’s work in the 1990s. In the novel “Underground, or Hero of Our Time” (1999), he replaces the principle of transculturalism and multireligiousness, characteristic of postmodernism as a sociocultural phenomenon, with an emphasized, declared monoculturalism. In the “endless Babylonian library of already created texts,” Makanin selects only “his own,” limiting the circle of iconic images to domestic culture, reflecting an infinite number of times those cultural signs that have long been included in mass consciousness, becoming a “commonplace”, and by virtue of this alone they determine the appearance of a national, “our” hero of our time. And here Gogol’s “The Overcoat” is among the most important Russian cultural myths, born of literature and indicated in the mythological titles of the chapters of Makanin’s novel: Dulychov and others. Little man Tetelin. I met you. Dog scherzo. Winter and flute. Chamber number one. Another. Double. One day of Venedikt Petrovich.

In the very first phrase of the chapter Little Man Tetelin: “Tetelin died when he bought himself such coveted tweed trousers in a trading tent that is right under our windows (The plot of “The Overcoat”),” - not only the literary pretext is directly indicated, but also emphasized genetic link named after the modern “little man” Tetelin with Gogol’s Akaki Akakievich, who received Gogol’s story in the first edition significant surname- Tishkevich, who doubled the root trait for the character of Gogol’s hero, also indicated in the name (Akaky - the quietest). But even this identification is not enough for the author of “Underground...”, and immediately after the declared parallel with Gogol’s myth, he calls Tetelin “quiet,” although he immediately designates the other side of the forced humility of such a person - aggression: “Tetelin considered that the trousers they are long for him, quiet, but how dared he: he threw his trousers back into the mouth of the tent, demanding money back from the Caucasians." And only then, so that the obsessively emphasized identity does not disappear in the reader’s mind, he names the one who dreamed of tweed trousers and died because of that that they turned out to be long, Tetelina “this Akaki Akakievich.”

However, in modern world The plot of “The Overcoat” unfolds differently than in the iconic text for Russian literature. The meagerness and pettiness of not only the very dream of the current Akaki Akakievich (tweed trousers), but also the unjustified suffering due to the fact that they turned out to be long, is enhanced by the demonstration of a completely friendly attitude towards Tetelin from the Caucasian sellers, who offered him to simply hem his long trousers. The involuntary “killers” are not at all aggressive, but rather confused, because the reason for the unexpected cardiac arrest of the nervous Tetelin seems insignificant to them, and to the reader of the novel. Therefore, in the description of the actions of Caucasians, the key definition for the Gogol type “quiet” naturally arises: “... Akhmet came to the wake (to seek peace). A quiet, almost silent step, no one noticed how or when he entered - he appeared.” Moreover, travestying the mythologeme, Makanin put Gogol’s famous “I am your brother” into the mouth of a Caucasian: “Brother,” said one. “Brother,” echoed the other.”

In “Underground”, as in Gogol, Tetelin’s “pity” is consistently pumped up, accumulating in his characteristics (“quiet, taught trademark pity..., pitiful, insignificant, and eyes like a rabbit.” But in this accumulation there are degrees of pity Negogolev’s, different, condemning intonation is heard, and then proclaimed directly: “... by the end of the year, Mr. Tetelin finally evolved into a petty watchman-penny-pincher... they overlooked the little one.”

Falling among the literary constants of the national collective unconscious, being designated by the author as such, (we note in passing that the iconicity of “The Overcoat” also determined the presence of the nomination of the same name in the well-known literary prize Russia - prizes named after. N. Gogol) “The Overcoat”, among other cultural national myths, allows Makanin to realize literary centricity not only as mental trait, but also how decoder of the psychology of an entire generation of Russians, called by the writer a generation of “soldiers of literature”, ousted from the new time by a “generation of politicians and businessmen” with their own, no longer literary, and therefore not “superfluous” (!!) - new hero.

The “literary” generation perceived Gogol’s hero as the national cultural tradition made him: a “little man” requiring unconditional sympathy, who, along with another no less significant type for Russian literature - the “superfluous man” (Lermontov’s formula is stated in the title of Makanin’s novel “ Underground, or Hero of Our Time") - shaped the worldview of more than one generation of Russians. The sacralization and mythologization of Gogol’s hero in the Russian consciousness is eloquently evidenced by numerous attempts to compare the hero of “The Overcoat” with Saint Akaki and his life or to name him as real prototype Gogol's hero of the Kyiv holy fool, wanderer Ivan Bosogo, a former clerk, about whom Gogol could have learned during his trip to M. A. Maksimovich in Kyiv in July 1835. In this regard, the opinion of Peter Weil, expressed during a discussion on Radio Liberty regarding modern humorous television programs, is curious: “In the Russian tradition, in general, there is a rather strange attitude towards laughter; they loved it, but were embarrassed, loved it, but did not respect it. Even Gogol was always appreciated for his pity for the little man, and not for his grandiose, amazing humor. This was allowed if not for his “The Overcoat”, or some other works in which the suffering little man is depicted, then, I’m afraid, Gogol would never have gotten into the pantheon of Russian literature. ".

For a Russian educated in literature, the hero of “The Overcoat” takes on an anthological meaning. This is a hero-tester, allowing the reader to evaluate the humanism of his own soul, the measure of humanity in his own conscience, and to repent if this measure turns out to be insufficient. It is the “little man” who forms that generation of “Dostoevsky’s students - repentant intellectuals” against whom D. Merezhkovsky rebels in “The Defense of Belinsky” (1915). But in this “little man” psychoanalysts easily identify “two opposite, disagreeing natures - the nature of an insulted and humiliated creature and an aggressive, frightening one that brings terror to all living things.” It was this “double bottom” that V. Ermakov, who stood at the origins of Soviet psychoanalytic literary criticism, saw in the hero of “The Overcoat”. And B. Eikhenbaum, in the famous essay “How Gogol’s “Overcoat” was Made,” disputes the conclusions of “naive and sensitive literary historians, hypnotized by Belinsky” regarding the conceptual role of the famous “humane” passage of the story: “Leave me alone, why are you offending me?” - and in these penetrating words other words rang: “I am your brother.” This “sentimental-melodramatic declamation” is assessed by Eikhenbaum as “an unexpected introduction into the general punning style” of the work, which is a game where “the facial expressions of laughter are replaced by the facial expressions of grief.”

Moving away from the opposition to the postmodern artistic code of constants indicated in the works of Russian “late postmodernism” (T. Tolstaya, V. Pelevin, D. Galkovsky) national culture as a kind of counterbalance, Makanin revises the constants themselves, revealing their inadequacy to the new time, the modern socio-cultural universe of another Russia with “new Russians” and “new beggars”, revealing "tragic guilt" of these constants in development Russia. New times debunk Gogol’s myth of the “little man,” which is key for the consciousness of the Russian intelligentsia, revealing behind the external pitiable defenselessness of Gogol’s Akaki Akakievich the meagerness of the soul of a vain and vile little man: “As a type, Akaki is only a pretype for us, and the classics in the 19th century put an end to the little man , without guessing the dynamics of his imitative development - without seeing (behind the St. Petersburg fog) such a precocious, vain twister. The pettiness of desires turned into the pettiness of the soul at the historical exit. They didn’t finish checking the little one.” A certain game with the “Overcoat” code is also present in the iconic coincidence of the names of Gogol’s tailor - Petrovich, and the main character of “Underground”, a former intelligence officer and writer Petrovich, passing sentence on the reincarnated Akaki Akakievich - Tetelin. Both Petrovichs cut or reshape their overcoat for the “little man.”

Recoding in "Underground, or Hero of Our Time" of one of the most popular in Russian classical literature Gogol's cultural myth, allows you to show etymology of helplessness brought up on the literary myths of the generation of the 1960s, who became new Russia“superfluous people,” a generation that lost the battle to the aliterary, pragmatic generation of the 1990s - “the generation of businessmen and politicians.” The pathetic “little man” as well as the “superfluous” “hero of our time” cannot become creators, cannot write new the myth of the new Russia. In addition, brought up on the idea of ​​sympathy for the “little man” - a kind of ideal of a poor creature, neglected by fate, in need of protection, the reader also perceived the corresponding model of behavior: fruitless and useless “pity” for oneself, the unfortunate one, while only the search model can be creative exit, and therefore action.

Having crossed the threshold of the new millennium, Makanin formulates even more sharply the idea of ​​​​the development of the pitiful “little man” in the conditions of a new society based on the ideal of profit and benefit. In the novel "Fright" (2006), a chapter appears “Who will the little man vote for?”, reintroducing Gogol’s mythologeme, but now into the social, politicized context of the new realities of Russia in the third millennium. The writer shows the further evolution of the inactive, and therefore antisocial personality. The current “little man” is incapable of any action, even for his own good. Therefore, Petrovich, the hero who migrated to Makanin’s new novel from “Underground...”, decides to vote for the candidate at whose television appearance he will complete his sexual intercourse, accompanied as an accompaniment by the broadcast of pre-election television debates.

It is curious that other-mental perception completely transforms and central image Gogol's story, and the very idea of ​​"The Overcoat". Thus, the American choreographer Noah de Gelber offered his interpretation of Gogol’s work, staging a ballet to the music of D. Shostakovich at the Mariinsky Theater, the premiere took place on March 21, 2006. The American read the story of Akaki Akakievich as a failed attempt of this hero break into a world of stability and prosperity. But the ballet performed by Russian actors turned out to be different from the declarations of the famous director, because it came into a certain contradiction with Russian mentality, brought up on Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, on that “philanthropic” (according to K. Aksakov), “humanistic” (as Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, A. Khomyakov, Yu. Samarin called it), “compassionately sentimental” (according to Chernyshevsky ) attitude towards man in general and towards the “small” in particular, which another American, Professor D. Fanger, calls “ethical”, based on the “humane place” of the story. . This is exactly how Andrei Ivanov danced Akaki Akakievich, touching, naive, desperately pitiful.

However, inactivity, incomprehensible to an American and completely justified by the Russian mentality, also activates that second nature of Akaki Akakievich, about which the psychoanalyst Ermakov wrote: aggressiveness. This is the other side of pity, because the weak most often does not thank those who pity him, but is secretly envious. The reader of The Overcoat, on which several generations of Russians were raised, received an inoculation of such secret envy. This hidden or concealed envy is the germ of that aggression that results in class and social conflicts. petty soul being in power dark forces, under certain conditions can do terrible things. Isn’t this what Gogol prophetically warned about, did he only want to awaken pity in the Russian soul?

Cultural myths explain the world, guide development, provide social direction, and answer the spiritual needs of society. Will Gogol's myth be reconstructed or deconstructed in modern literature will deprive the author of “The Overcoat” of the prophet status he so coveted? I think not. Rather, this is a rereading of “The Overcoat” - evidence of a new, postmodernist mythologization of a cult text. And Gogol was and remains a prophet. The question is, are you ready? We truly hear and understand his prophecy.

We all came out of Gogol's overcoat
The authorship is erroneously attributed to F. M. Dostoevsky, who once uttered this phrase in a conversation with the French writer E. de Vogue. The latter understood it as the writer’s own passions and cited it in his book “Russian Novel” (1886).
But in reality, these words belong, as proved by the Soviet literary critic S. A. Reiser (see: Questions of Literature. 1968. No. 2) to the French critic Eugene Vogüe, who published an article about Dostoevsky in “Rftvue des deux Mondes” (1885. No. 1) . In it, he spoke about the origins of the work of this Russian writer.
In its present form, this expression came into circulation after Eugene Vogüe’s book “Modern Russian Writers. Tolstoy - Turgenev - Dostoevsky" (Moscow, 1887).
Used: to characterize the humanistic traditions of classical Russian literature.

encyclopedic Dictionary winged words and expressions. - M.: “Locked-Press”. Vadim Serov. 2003.

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Books

• Sentimental stories, Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko. For most readers, Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958), both during his lifetime and today, is the “king of laughter”, the author of “The Bath” and “The Aristocrat”. Meanwhile, in the 1920s, a book appeared...
• Sentimental stories, Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko. For most readers, Mikhail Zoshchenko (1894-1958), both during his lifetime and today, is the “king of laughter”, the author of “Bathhouse” and “Aristocrat”. Meanwhile, in the 1920s, a book appeared introducing...