Composition “Analysis of the story by I. Turgenev“ Asya

"Asya" I.S. Turgenev. Systematic analysis of the story and analysis of some of its connections with German literature.

Turgenev developed this genre throughout his work, but his love stories became the most famous: "Asya", "First Love", "Faust", "Calm", "Correspondence", "Spring Waters". They are also often called "elegiac" - not only for the poetry of feeling and the beauty of landscape sketches, but also for their characteristic motifs, from lyrical to plot. Recall that the content of the elegy is made up of love experiences and melancholy reflections on life: regret for the past youth, memories of deceived happiness, sadness about the future, as, for example, in Pushkin's "Elegy" of 1830 ("Mad years faded fun ..."). This analogy is all the more appropriate because Pushkin was for Turgenev the most important reference point in Russian literature, and Pushkin's motifs permeate all of his prose. No less important for Turgenev was the German literary and philosophical tradition, primarily in the person of I.V. Goethe; it is no coincidence that the action of "Asia" takes place in Germany, and the next Turgenev's story is called "Faust".

The realistic method (detailed accurate depiction of reality, psychological alignment of characters and situations) is organically combined in elegiac stories with the problems of romanticism. Behind the story of one love, a large-scale philosophical generalization is read, therefore, many details (realistic in themselves) begin to shine with symbolic meaning.

Flowering and the focus of life, love is understood by Turgenev as an elemental, natural force that moves the universe. Therefore, its understanding is inseparable from natural philosophy (philosophy of nature). Landscapes in Asa and other stories of the 50s do not take up much space in the text, but this is far from being just an elegant intro to the plot or background decoration. The infinite, mysterious beauty of nature serves for Turgenev as indisputable proof of its divinity. "Man is connected with nature" by a thousand inextricable threads: he is her son ". Every human feeling has its source in nature; while the heroes admire her, she imperceptibly directs their fate.

Following the pantheistic understanding of nature, Turgenev considers it as a single organism in which "all lives merge into one world life", from which "comes a common, endless harmony", "one of those" open "mysteries that we all see and do not we see." Although in it, “everything seems to live only for itself,” at the same time, everything “exists for the other, in the other it only reaches its reconciliation or resolution” - this is the formula of love as an essence and an internal law of nature. “Her crown is love. It is only through love that one can approach it…” – Turgenev quotes Goethe’s Fragment on Nature.

Like all living things, man naively considers himself "the center of the universe", especially since he is the only one of all natural beings who has reason and self-consciousness. He is fascinated by the beauty of the world and the play of natural forces, but trembles, realizing his doom to death. To be happy, the romantic consciousness needs to absorb the whole world, to enjoy the fullness of natural life. So Faust from the drama of Goethe in his famous monologue dreams of wings, looking down from the hill at the setting sun:

Oh give me wings to fly away from the earth

And rush after him, not getting tired on the way!

And I would see in the glow of rays

The whole world is at my feet: and sleeping valleys,

And burning peaks with golden brilliance,

And a river in gold, and a stream in silver.<...>

Alas, only the spirit soars, having renounced the body, -

We cannot soar with bodily wings!

But sometimes you can't suppress

Innate desire in the soul -

Striving up… (translated by N. Kholodkovsky)

Asya and N.N., admiring the Rhine valley from the hill, are also eager to soar from the earth. With purely romantic idealism, Turgenev's heroes demand everything or nothing from life, languish with "all-embracing desires" ("- If we were birds, how we would soar, how we would fly ... So we would drown in this blue .. But we are not birds." But we can grow wings," I objected. "How- - Live - you will know. There are feelings that lift us from the ground") In the future, the motif of the wings, repeated many times in the story, becomes a metaphor for love.

However, romanticism, by its very logic, assumes the unattainability of the ideal, since the contradiction between dream and reality is insoluble. For Turgenev, this contradiction permeates the very nature of man, who is both a natural being, longing for earthly joys, "happiness to the point of satiety", and a spiritual person, striving for eternity and depth of knowledge, as Faust formulates in the same scene:

… two souls live in me

And both are not at odds with each other.

One, like the passion of love, ardent

And greedily clings to the earth entirely,

The other is all for the clouds

So it would have rushed out of the body. (translated by B. Pasternak)

This is where the pernicious internal division comes from. Earthly passions suppress the spiritual nature of a person, and having soared on the wings of the spirit, a person quickly realizes his weakness. “‒ Remember, you talked about wings yesterday?.. My wings have grown, but there is nowhere to fly,” Asya will say to the hero.

The late German romantics represented passions as external, often deceitful and hostile forces to a person, whose plaything he becomes. Then love was likened to fate and itself became the embodiment of a tragic discord between dream and reality. According to Turgenev, a thinking, spiritually developed personality is doomed to defeat and suffering (which he also shows in the novel "Fathers and Sons").

"Asya" Turgenev began in the summer of 1857 in Sinzig on the Rhine, where the story takes place, and finished in November in Rome. It is interesting to note that "Notes of a Hunter", famous for depicting Russian nature and types of national character, Turgenev wrote in Bougival, in the estate of Pauline Viardot near Paris. "Fathers and Sons" was composed by him in London. If we lie further on this “European voyage” of Russian literature, it will turn out that “Dead Souls” were born in Rome, “Oblomov” was written in Marienbad; Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot" - in Geneva and Milan, "Demons" - in Dresden. It is these works that are considered the most profound word about Russia in the literature of the 19th century, and Europeans traditionally judge the “mysterious Russian soul” by them. Is this a game of chance or a pattern?

In all these creations, one way or another, the question of Russia's place in the European world is raised. But rarely in Russian literature you will find a story about modernity, where the action itself takes place in Europe, as in "Ace" or in "Spring Waters". How does this affect their problem?

Germany is depicted in "Ace" as a peaceful, lovingly accepting environment. Friendly, hardworking people, affectionate, picturesque landscapes seem to be deliberately opposed to the "uncomfortable" paintings of "Dead Souls". “Greetings to you, a modest corner of the German land, with your unpretentious contentment, with ubiquitous traces of diligent hands, patient, although unhurried work ... Hello to you and the world!” - the hero exclaims, and we guess the author's position behind his direct, declarative intonation. On the other hand, Germany is an important cultural context for the story. In the atmosphere of an old town, "the word" Gretchen "- not an exclamation, not a question - just begged to be on the lips" (meaning Margarita from Goethe's Faust). In the course of the story, N.N. He also reads Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea to Gagina and Asya. Without this “Goethe’s immortal idyll” about life in the German provinces, it is impossible to “recreate Germany” and understand its “secret ideal,” wrote A.A. Fet (himself half German) in his essays "From Abroad". So the story is built on comparisons with both Russian and German literary traditions.

The hero of the story is designated simply as Mr. N.N., and we know nothing about his life before and after the story told. By this, Turgenev deliberately deprives him of bright individual features, so that the narration sounds as objective as possible and so that the author himself can quietly stand behind the hero, sometimes speaking on his behalf. N.N. - one of the Russian educated nobles, and every Turgenev reader could easily apply what happened to him to himself, and more broadly - to the fate of each of the people. Almost always he is sympathetic to readers. The hero talks about the events of twenty years ago, evaluating them from the standpoint of newly acquired experience. Now touching, now ironically, now lamenting, he makes subtle psychological observations on himself and on others, behind which a perceptive and omniscient author is guessed.

For the hero, a journey through Germany is the beginning of a life journey. Since he wanted to join the student business, it means that he himself recently graduated from one of the German universities, and for Turgenev this is an autobiographical detail. That N.N. meets compatriots in the German provinces, it seems both strange and fateful, because he usually avoided them abroad and in a big city he would certainly have avoided making acquaintance. So the motive of fate is for the first time outlined in the story.

N.N. and his new acquaintance Gagin are surprisingly similar. These are soft, noble, European-educated people, subtle connoisseurs of art. You can sincerely become attached to them, but since life turned towards them only with its sunny side, their “half-delicateness” threatens to turn into lack of will. A developed intellect gives rise to enhanced reflection and, as a result, indecision.

I soon understood it. It was just a Russian soul, truthful, honest, simple, but, unfortunately, a little sluggish, without tenacity and inner heat. Youth did not seethe in him; she shone with a quiet light. He was very nice and smart, but I could not imagine what would become of him as soon as he matured. To be an artist... Without bitter, constant work there are no artists... but to work, I thought, looking at his soft features, listening to his unhurried speech - no! you will not work, you will not be able to surrender.

This is how Oblomov's features appear in Gagina. A characteristic episode is when Gagin went to study, and N.N., having joined him, wanted to read, then two friends, instead of doing business, “rather cleverly and subtly talked about exactly how it should work.” Here, the author's irony over the "diligence" of the Russian nobles is obvious, which in "Fathers and Sons" will grow to a sad conclusion about their inability to transform Russian reality. That is how N.G. understood the story. Chernyshevsky in his critical article "Russian man on rendez-vous" ("Atenaeus" 1858). Drawing an analogy between Mr. N. N., whom he calls Romeo, on the one hand, and Pechorin (“A Hero of Our Time”), Beltov (“Who is to blame?” Herzen), Agarin (“Sasha” Nekrasov), Rudin - on the other hand, Chernyshevsky establishes the social typicality of the behavior of the hero "Asia" and sharply condemns him, seeing in him almost a scoundrel. Chernyshevsky admits that Mr. N. N. belongs to the best people of noble society, but considers that the historical role of figures of this type, that is, Russian liberal nobles, has been played out, that they have lost their progressive significance. Such a sharp assessment of the hero was alien to Turgenev. His task was to translate the conflict into a universal, philosophical plane and show the unattainability of the ideal.

If the author makes the image of Gagin completely understandable to readers, then his sister appears as a riddle, the solution of which N.N. gets carried away at first with curiosity, and then selflessly, but still cannot comprehend to the end. Her unusual liveliness is bizarrely combined with a timid shyness caused by her illegitimate birth and long life in the village. This is also the source of her unsociableness and thoughtful daydreaming (remember how she loves to be alone, constantly runs away from her brother and N.N., and on the first evening of meeting she goes to her place and “without lighting a candle, she stands behind an unopened window for a long time”). The last features bring Asya closer to her favorite heroine - Tatyana Larina.

But it is very difficult to form a complete picture of Asya's character: it is the embodiment of uncertainty and variability. (“What a chameleon this girl is!” - N.N. involuntarily exclaims) Either she is shy of a stranger, then she suddenly laughs, (“Asia, as if on purpose, as soon as she saw me, burst out laughing for no reason and, out of her habit, immediately ran away Gagin was embarrassed, muttered after her that she was crazy, asked me to excuse her”); sometimes she climbs the ruins and sings songs loudly, which is completely indecent for a secular young lady. But here she meets the English on the road and begins to portray a well-bred person, prim in keeping up appearances. After listening to the reading of Goethe's poem "Hermann and Dorothea", she wants to appear homely and sedate, like Dorothea. Then he “imposes fasting and repentance on himself” and turns into a Russian provincial girl. It is impossible to tell at what point she is more herself. Her image shimmers, shimmering with different colors, strokes, intonations.

The rapid change in her moods is aggravated by the fact that Asya often acts inconsistently with her own feelings and desires: “Sometimes I want to cry, but I laugh. You shouldn't judge me...by what I do”; “Sometimes I don’t know what’s in my head.<...>Sometimes I'm afraid of myself, by God. The last phrase brings her closer to the mysterious beloved of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov from “Fathers and Sons” (“What was nesting in this soul - God knows! It seemed that she was in the power of some secret, unknown to her forces; they played with her as they wanted ; her small mind could not cope with their whim"). The image of Asya expands endlessly, because in her the elemental, natural principle manifests itself. Women, according to the philosophical views of Turgenev, are closer to nature, because their nature has an emotional (spiritual) dominant, while the male has an intellectual (spiritual) one. If the natural element of love captures a man from outside (that is, he opposes it), then through a woman she directly expresses herself. The "unknown forces" inherent in every woman find their fullest expression in some. The amazing diversity and liveliness of Asya, the irresistible charm, freshness and passion stem precisely from here. Her fearful "wildness" also characterizes her as a "natural person", far from society. When Asya is sad, “shadows run across her face” like clouds across the sky, and her love is compared to a thunderstorm (“I assure you, we are prudent people, and we cannot imagine how deeply she feels and with what incredible strength these feelings are expressed in her; it comes upon her as unexpectedly and as irresistibly as a thunderstorm.

Nature is also depicted in a constant change of states and moods (an example is the sunset over the Rhine from Chapter II). She is truly alive. She languishes, imperiously invades the soul, as if touching its secret strings, quietly but authoritatively whispers to her about happiness: “The air caressed her face, and the lindens smelled so sweet that the chest involuntarily breathed deeper and deeper.” The moon "gazes intently" from a clear sky, and illuminates the city with "a serene and at the same time quietly soul-exciting light." Light, air, smells are depicted as perceptible to visibility. "a scarlet, thin light lay on the vines"; the air "swayed and rolled in waves"; “The evening quietly melted and shimmered into the night”; the “strong” smell of cannabis “amazes” N.N.; the nightingale "infected" him with the sweet poison of his sounds.

A separate, shortest chapter X is devoted to nature - the only descriptive one (which already completely contradicts the form of an oral story, for which a presentation of the general outline of events is typical). This isolation indicates the philosophical significance of the passage:

<...>Having entered the middle of the Rhine, I asked the carrier to let the boat go downstream. The old man lifted the oars - and the royal river carried us. Looking around, listening, remembering, I suddenly felt a secret uneasiness in my heart ... I raised my eyes to the sky - but there was no peace in the sky either: dotted with stars, it kept stirring, moving, shuddering; I leaned towards the river... but even there, and in that dark, cold depth, the stars also swayed and trembled; an alarming animation seemed to me everywhere - and anxiety grew in me. I leaned on the edge of the boat ... The whisper of the wind in my ears, the quiet murmur of the water behind the stern irritated me, and the fresh breath of the wave did not cool me; the nightingale sang on the shore and infected me with the sweet poison of its sounds. Tears welled up in my eyes, but they were not tears of pointless delight. What I felt was not that vague, until recently experienced feeling of all-encompassing desires, when the soul expands, sounds, when it seems to it that it understands and loves everything .. No! I have a thirst for happiness. I didn’t dare to call him by his name yet, but happiness, happiness to the point of satiety - that’s what I wanted, that’s what I yearned for ... And the boat kept on rushing, and the old ferryman sat and dozed, bending over the oars.

It seems to the hero that he voluntarily trusts the flow, but in fact he is drawn by an endless stream of life, which he is unable to resist. The landscape is mystically beautiful, but secretly menacing. The intoxication of life and the insane thirst for happiness are accompanied by the growth of a vague and persistent anxiety. The hero floats over the “dark, cold depths”, where the abyss of “moving stars” is reflected (Turgenev almost repeats Tyutchev’s metaphors: “chaos is stirring”, “And we are swimming, surrounded on all sides by a flaming abyss”).

The "majestic" and "royal" Rhine is likened to the river of life and becomes a symbol of nature as a whole (water is one of its primary elements). At the same time, it is covered with many legends and deeply integrated into German culture: at the stone bench on the shore, from where N.N. for hours he admired the “majestic river”, from the branches of a huge ash tree peeps out “a small statue of the Madonna”; not far from the house of the Gagins, the rock of Lorelei rises; Finally, by the river itself, “over the grave of a man who drowned about seventy years ago, stood a stone cross with an old inscription half-buried into the ground.” These images develop the themes of love and death, and at the same time correlate with the image of Asya: it is from the bench by the statue of the Madonna that the hero will want to go to the city of L., where he will meet Asya, and later on in the same place he will learn from Gagin the secret of Asya’s birth, after which he will become possible convergence; Asya is the first to mention the cliff of Lorelei. Then when brother and N.N. looking for Asya in the ruins of a knight's castle, they find her sitting “on a ledge of a wall, right above the abyss” - in knightly times she sat on the top of a rock above the fatal whirlpool of Lorelei, charming and ruining those floating along the river, hence the involuntary “hostile feeling” of N. N. at the sight of her. The legend of Lorelei depicts love as captivating a person and then destroying him, which corresponds to Turgenev's concept. Finally, Asya's white dress will flash in the dark near the stone cross on the shore, when the hero is looking for her in vain after an awkward date, and this emphasis on the motive of death will emphasize the tragic end of the love story - and N.N.

It is symbolically important that the Rhine separates the hero and the heroine: going to Asya, the hero must always come into contact with the elements. The Rhine turns out to be both a connecting link between the heroes, and at the same time an obstacle. Finally, it is along the Rhine that Asya sails away from him forever, and when the hero hurries after her on another flight of the steamer, he sees a young couple on one side of the Rhine (the maid Ganhen is already cheating on her fiancé who has gone into the soldiers; by the way, Ganhen is a diminutive of Anna, as and Asya), “and on the other side of the Rhine, my little Madonna still looked out sadly from the dark green of the old ash tree.”

The famous vineyards of the Rhine valley are also associated with the Rhine, which in the figurative system of the story symbolize the flowering of youth, the juice of life and its sweetness. It is this phase of the zenith, fullness and fermentation of forces that the hero experiences. This motif acquires plot development in an episode of a student feast - "the joyful boiling of young, fresh life, this impulse forward - wherever it is, if only forward" (recall the Anacreontic image of a happy "life feast" in Pushkin's poetry). Thus, when the hero sets off across the Rhine for the "celebration of life" and youth, he meets Asya and her brother, gaining both friendship and love. Soon he is feasting with Gagin on a hill overlooking the Rhine, enjoying the distant sounds of music from the commercial, and when two friends drink a bottle of Rhine wine, “the moon has risen and played along the Rhine; everything lit up, darkened, changed, even the wine in our faceted glasses shone with a mysterious brilliance. So the Rhine wine in the interlocking of motives and allusions is likened to a certain mysterious elixir of youth (akin to the wine that was given by Mephistopheles to Faust before he falls in love with Gretchen). It is significant that Asya is also compared with wine and grapes: “There was something restless in all her movements: this wild animal had recently been grafted, this wine was still fermenting.” It remains to be noted that in the context of Pushkin's poetry, the feast of youth also has a downside: “The fading fun of the mad years is hard for me, like a vague hangover, and, like wine, the sadness of past days in my soul gets older, the stronger.” This elegiac context will be updated in the epilogue of the story.

On the same evening, the parting of the heroes is accompanied by the following significant detail:

– You drove into the moon pillar, you broke it, - Asya shouted to me. I lowered my eyes; around the boat, blackening, waves swayed. - Farewell! came her voice again. "Until tomorrow," Gagin said after her.

The boat has landed. I went out and looked around. There was no one to be seen on the opposite bank. The moon pillar again stretched like a golden bridge across the entire river.

The lunar pillar sets the vertical axis of the universe - it connects heaven and earth and can be interpreted as a symbol of cosmic harmony. At the same time, it, like a "golden bridge", connects both banks of the river. This is a sign of the resolution of all contradictions, the eternal unity of the natural world, where, however, a person will never penetrate, how not to go along the lunar road. With his movement, the hero involuntarily destroys a beautiful picture, which portends the destruction of his love (Asia finally suddenly shouts to him: “Farewell!”). At the moment when the hero breaks the moon pillar, he does not see it, and when he looks back from the shore, the golden bridge has already been restored to its former inviolability. Also, looking back into the past, the hero will understand what kind of feeling he destroyed when Asya and her brother have long disappeared from his life (as they disappear from the banks of the Rhine). And the natural harmony turned out to be perturbed for no more than a moment and, as before, indifferent to the fate of the hero, shines with its eternal beauty.

Finally, the river of life, "the river of times in its striving", in the endless alternation of births and deaths, turns out, as Derzhavin's quoted aphorism confirms, to be the river of "oblivion" - Lethe. And then the “peppy old man” carrier, tirelessly plunging oars into the gloomy “dark waters”, cannot but evoke associations with old Charon, transporting all new souls to the kingdom of the dead.

Especially difficult to interpret is the image of a small Catholic Madonna "with an almost childish face and a red heart on her chest, pierced by swords." Since Turgenev opens and ends the whole love story with this symbol, it means that he is one of the key ones for him. There is a similar image in Goethe's Faust: Gretchen, suffering from love, puts flowers to the statue of mater dolorosa with a sword in his heart. In addition, the Madonna's childish facial expression is similar to Asya (which gives the image of the heroine a timeless dimension). A red heart forever pierced by arrows is a sign that love is inseparable from suffering. I would like to pay special attention to the fact that the face of the Madonna always “peeps out sadly” “from the branches” or “from the dark green of the old ash tree”. Thus, this image can be understood as one of the faces of nature. In Gothic temples, on the portals and capitals, the faces and figures of saints were surrounded by floral ornaments - leaves and flowers carved from stone, and the columns of High German Gothic were likened to tree trunks in shape. This was due to the pagan echo of the early Christian worldview and, most importantly, the understanding of the temple as a model of the universe - with heaven and earth, plants and animals, people and spirits, saints and deities of the elements - a world transformed, brought to harmony by God's grace. Nature also has a spiritual, mysterious face, especially when it is enlightened by grief. Another pantheist, Tyutchev, also felt similar states in nature: “... Damage, exhaustion, and on everything / That meek smile of withering, / What in a rational being we call / The divine bashfulness of suffering.”

But nature is changeable not only in terms of lighting and weather, but also in terms of the general spirit, the structure of being, which it sets. In Germany, in June, she rejoices, inspiring the hero with a sense of freedom and the boundlessness of his forces. A different mood seizes him when he remembers the Russian landscape:

“... suddenly I was struck by a strong, familiar, but rare smell in Germany. I stopped and saw a small hemp bed near the road. Her steppe smell instantly reminded me of my homeland and aroused in my soul a passionate longing for her. I wanted to breathe Russian air, to walk on Russian soil. “What am I doing here, why am I dragging myself in a foreign country, between strangers—” I exclaimed, and the deathly heaviness that I felt in my heart suddenly resolved into a bitter and burning excitement.

For the first time, motives of longing and bitterness appear on the pages of the story. The next day, as if guessing his thoughts, N.N., and the heroine shows her “Russianness”:

Is it because I thought a lot about Russia at night and in the morning - Asya seemed to me a completely Russian girl, a simple girl, almost a maid. She was wearing an old dress, she combed her hair behind her ears, and sat motionless by the window, sewing in the embroidery frame, modestly, quietly, as if she had done nothing else in her lifetime. She said almost nothing, calmly looked at her work, and her features took on such an insignificant, everyday expression that I involuntarily remembered our home-grown Katya and Masha. To complete the resemblance, she began to hum "Mother, dove" in an undertone. I looked at her yellowish, faded face, remembered yesterday's dreams, and I felt sorry for something.

So, the idea of ​​everyday life, aging, the decline of life is associated with Russia. Russian nature is exciting in its elemental power, but strict and joyless. And a Russian woman In the artistic system of Turgenev of the 50s, called by fate to humility and fulfillment of duty - like Tatyana Larina, who marries an unloved man and remains faithful to him, like Lisa Kalitina, the heroine of Turgenev's next novel This will be Lisa Kalitina from "The Noble Nest" with her deep religiosity, renunciation of life and happiness (cf. Tyutchev's poem "Russian Woman"). In The Nest of Nobles, the description of the steppe unfolds into a whole philosophy of Russian life:

“... and suddenly finds a dead silence; nothing will knock, nothing will move; the wind does not move the leaf; the swallows rush without a cry one after another over the earth, and the soul becomes sad from their silent raid. “When I am at the bottom of the river,” Lavretsky thinks again. “And always, at all times, life is quiet and unhurried here,” he thinks, “whoever enters its circle, submit: there is nothing to worry about, nothing to stir up; here only he is lucky who paves his path slowly, like a plowman furrows with a plow. And what strength is all around, what health in this inactive stillness!<...>each leaf on each tree, each grass on its stem, expands in its entire width. My best years have gone into womanly love, - Lavretsky continues to think, - let boredom sober me up here, let it calm me down, prepare me so that I too can do things slowly.<...>At the same time, in other places on earth, life was seething, hurrying, rumbling; here the same life flowed inaudibly, like water over swamp grasses; and until the very evening Lavretsky could not tear himself away from the contemplation of this departing, flowing life; sorrow for the past melted in his soul like spring snow—and a strange thing! “There has never been such a deep and strong feeling of homeland in him.”

In the face of the ancient forest of Polesie, which “is sullenly silent or howls deafly,” “the consciousness of our insignificance” penetrates into the human heart (“A trip to Polesie”). There, it seems, nature says to a person: “I don’t care about you - I reign, and you are fussing about how not to die.” In fact, nature is one, unchanging and multifaceted at the same time, it just turns in a person with new sides, embodying different phases of being.

Asya's mother, the maid of the late lady, is called Tatyana (Greek for "martyr"), and her appearance emphasizes strictness, humility, prudence, and religiosity. After the birth of Asya, she herself refused to marry her father, considering herself unworthy of being a lady. Natural passion and the rejection of it - these are the constants of the Russian female character. Asya, remembering her mother, directly quotes "Onegin" and says that she "would like to be Tatyana." Contemplating the procession of the pilgrims, Asya dreams: I wish I could go with them,<...>“Go somewhere far away, to prayer, to a difficult feat,” which already outlines the image of Lisa Kalitina.

Onegin's motives are directly reflected in the plot: Asya is the first to write to N.N. a note with an unexpected confession after a short acquaintance, and the hero, following Onegin, responds to a declaration of love with a “reprimand”, emphasizing that not everyone would treat her as honestly as he did. ("You are dealing with an honest man - yes, an honest man")

Like Tatyana, Asya reads a lot indiscriminately (N.N. finds her reading a bad French novel) and, according to literary stereotypes, composes a hero for herself (“No, Asya needs a hero, an extraordinary person - or a picturesque shepherd in a mountain gorge”). But if Tatyana "loves without joking", then Asya also "does not have a single feeling in half." Her feeling is much deeper than that of the hero. N.N. first of all, an esthete: he egoistically dreams of endless “happiness”, enjoys the poetic nature of relations with Asya, is touched by her childish spontaneity and admires, being an artist in his soul, how “her slender appearance was clearly and beautifully drawn” on the ledge of a medieval wall, as she sits in garden, "all doused with a clear sunbeam." For Asya, love is the first responsible life test, an almost desperate attempt to know oneself and the world. It is no coincidence that it is she who pronounces Faust's daring dream of wings. If the thirst for infinite happiness Mr. N.N. for all its loftiness is selfish in its orientation, then Asya’s desire for a “difficult feat”, an ambitious desire to “leave a trace behind oneself” implies life with others and for others (a feat is always done for someone). “In Asya's imagination, lofty human aspirations, high moral ideals do not contradict the hope for the realization of personal happiness, on the contrary, they presuppose each other. The love that has arisen, although not yet realized, helps her in determining her ideals.<...>She is demanding of herself and needs help to fulfill her aspirations. “Tell me what should I read? Tell me what should I do? - she asks N. However, Mr. N. is not a hero, as Asya considers him, he is not able to play the role that is assigned to him. Therefore, the hero misunderstands a lot in Asya’s feelings: “... I’m not only about the future - I didn’t think about tomorrow; I felt very good. Asya blushed when I entered the room; I noticed that she was dressed up again, but the expression of her face did not go with her outfit: it was sad. And I came so cheerful!”

At the highest moment of meeting in Asa, the natural principle manifests itself with irresistible force:

I raised my head and saw her face. How it suddenly changed! The expression of fear vanished from him, his gaze went somewhere far away and carried me along with it, his lips parted slightly, his forehead turned pale as marble, and the curls moved back, as if the wind had thrown them away. I forgot everything, I pulled her towards me - her hand obediently obeyed, her whole body followed her hand, the shawl rolled from her shoulders, and her head quietly lay on my chest, lay under my burning lips.

– It was also described how a canoe was drawn by the river. The gaze went into the distance, as if the distance of the sky opened up, when the clouds parted, and the curls thrown back by the wind convey the sensations of a winged flight. But happiness, according to Turgenev, is possible only for a moment. When the hero thinks that it is near, the author's voice clearly intrudes into his speech: “Happiness has no tomorrow; he does not have yesterday either; it does not remember the past, does not think about the future; he has a present - and that is not a day, but an instant. I don’t remember how I got to Z. It wasn’t my legs that carried me, it wasn’t the boat that carried me: some kind of wide, strong wings lifted me. At this moment, Asya is already lost to him (just as Onegin passionately and seriously fell in love with Tatyana, already lost to him).

The unavailability of N.N. taking a decisive step can be attributed to the Russian national character, although, of course, not so directly and vulgarly sociologically as Chernyshevsky did. But, if we have reason to compare Gagin and N.N. with Oblomov (the excerpt "Oblomov's Dream" was published already in 1848), then the antithesis in the person of the German Stolz inevitably arises in the mind and seeks embodiment, especially since the action of "Asia" takes place on German soil. This antithesis is not directly expressed in the system of characters, but comes through when considering the Goethe motives of the story. This is, firstly, Faust himself, who decided to defy fate and sacrifice immortality for the sake of the highest moment of happiness, and, secondly, Hermann from Goethe's poem "Hermann and Dorothea", read by Mr. N.N. new acquaintances: This is not only an idyll of German life, but also a story of happy love, which was not prevented by the social inequality of her beloved (the refugee Dorothea is at first ready to be hired as a servant in Herman's house). The most significant thing is that in Goethe Herman falls in love with Dorothea at first sight and proposes to her on the same day, while it is precisely the need to make a decision in one evening that plunges Mr. N.N. into confusion and confusion.

But it would be a mistake to think that the outcome of the meeting depended only on two lovers. He was predetermined and fate. Recall that a third character also takes part in the meeting scene - the old widow Frau Louise. She good-naturedly patronizes young people, but some features of her appearance should alert us very much. For the first time we see her in Chapter IV, when friends come to the German woman for Asya, so that she says goodbye to the departing N.N. But instead, Asya gives him a branch of geranium through Gagin (which will later remain the only memory of Asya), but refuses to go down:

A lighted window on the third floor banged and opened, and we saw Asya's dark head. The toothless and blind-sighted face of an old German woman peeped out from behind her.

– I'm here, - Asya said, coquettishly leaning her elbows on the window, - I feel good here. On you, take it, - she added, throwing a geranium branch to Gagin, - imagine that I am the lady of your heart.

Frau Louise laughed.

When Gagin passes N.N. a branch, he returns home "with a strange heaviness in his heart", which then gives way to longing at the memory of Russia.

The whole scene is filled with dark symbolism. Asya's lovely head and the "toothless" old woman's face behind form together an allegorical picture of the unity of love and death - a common plot of church painting of the Baroque era. At the same time, the image of the old woman is associated with the ancient goddess of fate - Parka.

In chapter IX, Asya admits that it was Frau Louise who told her the legend of Lorelei, and adds, as if by chance: “I like this tale. Frau Louise tells me all sorts of fairy tales. Frau Luise has a black cat with yellow eyes...” It turns out that the German sorceress Frau Luise tells Asya about the beautiful sorceress Lorelei. This casts an ominous and magical glow on Asya and her love (the Old Witch is again a character from Faust). It is noteworthy that Asya is sincerely attached to the old German woman, and she, in turn, is very sympathetic to Mr. N.N. It turns out that love and death are inseparable and act “together”.

On a date with Asya, the hero does not go to the stone chapel, as was originally planned, but to Frau Louise's house, which looks like a "huge, hunched bird." A change of meeting place is an ominous sign, for a stone chapel can symbolize the longevity and sanctification of a relationship, while Frau Louise's house has an almost demonic flavor.

I knocked weakly on the door; she opened at once. I crossed the threshold and found myself in complete darkness. - Here! I heard an old woman's voice. - Offers. I took a step or two gropingly, someone's bony hand took my hand. “You, Frau Louise,” I asked. “I,” the same voice answered me, “I, my fine young man.<...>In the faint light that fell from the tiny window, I saw the wrinkled face of the burgomaster's widow. A cloyingly sly smile stretched her sunken lips, her dull eyes shrank.

Clearer allusions to the mystical meaning of the image are hardly possible within the framework of realism. Finally, the widow of the burgomaster, “smiling with her nasty smile,” calls the hero to give him Asya’s last note with the words “goodbye forever!”

The motive of death concerns Asya in the epilogue:

…I keep, as a shrine, her notes and a dried geranium flower, the same flower that she once threw to me from the window. It still emits a faint smell, and the hand that gave it to me, that hand that I only once had to press to my lips, may have been smoldering in the grave for a long time ... And I myself - what happened to me? What is left of me, of those blissful and anxious days, of those winged hopes and aspirations? Thus, the light evaporation of an insignificant grass survives all the joys and all the sorrows of a person - it survives the person himself.

The mention of Asya's "perhaps decayed" hand evokes the "bony hand" of Frau Louise. So love, death (and nature, indicated by a geranium branch) are finally intertwined with a common motif and “shake hands with each other” ... And the words that end the story about the evaporation of an insignificant grass that outlives a person (a sign of the eternity of nature) directly echo the finale of “Fathers and Sons” with their philosophical picture of flowers on Bazarov's grave.

However, the circle of associations with which Turgenev surrounds his heroine can be continued. In her endless variability and playful playfulness in her behavior, Asya resembles another romantic, fantastic heroine - Ondine from the poem of the same name by Zhukovsky (a poetic translation of the poem by the German romanticist De La Motte Fouquet, so this parallel organically fits into the German background of Turgenev's story). Undine - a river deity in the form of a beautiful girl living among people, with whom a noble knight falls in love, marries her, but then leaves,

The rapprochement of Asya with Lorelei and with the Rhine by a number of common motives confirms this parallel (Ondine leaves her husband, plunging into the jets of the Danube). This analogy also confirms Asya's organic connection with nature, because Ondine is a fantastic creature personifying the natural element - water, hence her endless waywardness and variability, transitions from stormy jokes to affectionate meekness. And here is how Asya is described:

I have not seen a creature more mobile. Not for a moment did she sit still; she got up, ran into the house and ran again, sang in an undertone, often laughed, and in a strange way: it seemed that she laughed not at what she heard, but at various thoughts that came into her head. Her large eyes looked straight, bright, bold, but sometimes her eyelids squinted slightly, and then her gaze suddenly became deep and tender.

Asya's "wildness" is especially pronounced when she climbs alone over the ruins of a knight's castle overgrown with bushes. When she, laughing, jumps over them, “like a goat, she fully reveals her closeness to the natural world, and at that moment N.N. feels in it something alien, hostile. Even her appearance at this moment speaks of the wild wildness of a natural being: “As if she had guessed my thoughts, she suddenly threw a quick and piercing glance at me, laughed again, jumped off the wall in two jumps.<...>A strange smile slightly twitched her eyebrows, nostrils and lips; dark eyes squinted half-arrogantly, half-jovially. Gagin constantly repeats that he should be condescending to Asa, and the fisherman and his wife say the same about Ondine ("Everything will mischief, but she will be eighteen years old; but her heart is the kindest in her"<...>even though at times you gasp, you still love Undine. Isn't it?" - "What's true is true; You can't stop loving her at all."

But then, when Asya gets used to N.N. and begins to speak frankly with him, then becomes childishly meek and trusting. In the same way, Undine, alone with a knight, shows loving humility and devotion.

The motive of flight is also characteristic of both heroines: just as Ondine often runs away from old people, and once a knight and a fisherman go together to look for her at night, so Asya often runs away from her brother, and then from N.N., and then he is together with Gagin starts looking for her in the dark.

Both heroines are given the motif of the mystery of birth. In the case of Ondine, when the current carries her to the fishermen, then for her this is the only opportunity to get into the world of people. It is possible that Asya’s illegitimacy is also due to her motivational commonality with Ondine, which, on the one hand, looks like a kind of inferiority and leads to the inability to endure the refusal of Mr. N.N., and on the other hand, her dual origin gives her genuine originality and mystery. Undine at the time of the poem is 18 years old, Asya is the eighteenth year. (It is interesting that the fishermen at baptism wanted to call Ondine Dorothea - ‘God’s gift’, and Asya imitates, in particular, Dorothea from Goethe’s idyll).

It is characteristic that if a knight approaches Ondine in the midst of the natural world (on a cape cut off from the rest of the world by a forest, and then also by a flooded stream), then N.N. meets Asya in the German province - outside the usual urban environment, and their romance takes place outside the city walls, on the banks of the Rhine. Both love stories (in the phase of rapprochement of lovers) are oriented towards the idyll genre. It is Asya who chooses an apartment outside the city, with a magnificent view of the Rhine and vineyards.

N.N. all the time she feels that Asya behaves differently from noble girls (“She appeared to me as a semi-mysterious creature”). And the knight, despite being in love with Ondine, is constantly embarrassed by her otherness, feels something alien in her, involuntarily fears her, which ultimately kills his affection. N.N. also experiences something similar: “Asya herself, with her fiery head, with her past, with her upbringing, this attractive, but strange creature - I confess, she scared me.” So the duality of his feelings and behavior becomes clearer.

In Fouquet-Zhukovsky's poem De La Motte, the plot is built on the original idea of ​​the Christian consecration of pantheistic nature. Ondine, being in fact a pagan deity, is constantly called a cherub, an angel, everything demonic in her gradually disappears. True, she is baptized as a child, but she is baptized not with a Christian name, but with Undine - her natural name. Having fallen in love with a knight, she marries him in a Christian way, after which she has an immortal human soul, for which she humbly asks the priest to pray.

Both Ondine and Lorelei, like mermaids, destroy their beloved. However, both of them - at the same time and belong to the world of people and themselves suffer and die. Lorelei, bewitched by the god of the Rhine, throws herself into the waves out of love for the knight who once abandoned her. When Gulbrand leaves Ondine, she grieves doubly, because, continuing to love him, she is now obliged to kill him for treason according to the law of the realm of spirits, no matter how she tries to save him.

In philosophical terms, the plot of "Ondine" tells about the possibility of the unity of nature and man, in which a person acquires the fullness of elemental being, and nature acquires reason and an immortal soul.

When projecting the ideas of the poem onto the plot of Turgenev's story, it is confirmed that the union with Asya would be tantamount to a union with nature itself, which dearly loves and kills. Such is the fate of anyone who wants to connect with nature. But "All that threatens death, for the mortal heart conceals inexplicable pleasures, immortality, perhaps a pledge." But Turgenev's hero, the hero of modern times, refuses such a fatal union, and then the all-powerful laws of life and fate block his way back. The hero remains unharmed... to slowly lean towards his own sunset.

Let us recall that two sides of being are united in Asa: the all-powerful and mysterious, elemental power of love (Gretchen's passion) - and Tatyana's Christian spirituality, the "mild smile of withering" of Russian nature. The text of "Ondine" also helps to clarify the image of the Madonna, looking out from the leaves of an ash tree. This is the face of spiritualized nature, which has acquired an immortal soul and therefore suffers forever.

In his works, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev often touches on the theme of love. But it almost always has a sad ending. His story "Asya" is no exception. In this beautiful and at the same time sad work, he raises the question of true happiness. "Asya" tells not only about love, but also raises moral problems.

The story "Asya" I. S. Turgenev began to write after a year of inactivity. The idea came unexpectedly when the writer was in Germany in 1857. Driving past the ruins, in Zinitsk, Ivan Sergeevich saw a small house nearby. On the first floor, Turgenev noticed an old woman, and on the second, a young girl. The writer began to invent with interest who they were and why they lived in this house. The reliability of this fact is proved by the letters of the writer and the chronology of work left by him.

Interesting facts will best tell about the creation of Asya:

1. Poor health of the writer. Although he wrote the story with inspiration, but pain and weakness made themselves felt. Turgenev finished his work in November 1857, and in 1858 it was published in the Sovremennik magazine.
2. The autobiographical nature of the story. Asya's true prototype is unknown. In addition to the version about the image of a girl from Zinitsk, there is an opinion that the main character is similar in fate to Turgenev's illegitimate daughter, Polina. There is also a theory that the writer could take his sister, Barbara, as a prototype. But it is important to note that if Turgenev’s daughter is really the prototype of Asya, then their characters are very different. Polina was not endowed with love for the high, and the main character of the story had a subtle sense of beauty and an unshakable love for nature.

Genre and direction

The genre of the work "Asya" by I. S. Turgenev is a story. Although initially the writer conceived it as a story. A distinctive feature of the story is that it is larger in volume, there are several characters in it, many events and actions take place, but in a fairly short period of time. The titles of such books are most often speaking and associated with the main character.

I. S. Turgenev worked in the direction of realism. In his works, the surrounding reality is vividly depicted and the inner world of the characters is described with the help of psychologism techniques. However, in the story "Asya" there are features of romanticism. This can be seen in the main character, who is a typical "Turgenev girl". The writer put on her especially romantic features. This is reflected not only in appearance, but also in her character. She delights readers with her purity and sincerity.

Composition

For each work, the role of composition is extremely important. For example, in order to convey an accurate picture of what is happening. Thanks to special compositional techniques, the reader is pleased and interested in reading the book, as the text is built into a single whole.

The composition of the story "Asya" is very concisely built.

1. I exposition. Memoirs of N. N. about his youth and life in Germany.
2. II-VIII Tie. Acquaintance with Gagin and his sister Asya. Rapprochement of N. N. with them. Asya's childhood story. The first serious conversation between N.N. and the heroine. The heroine is no longer afraid of him and begins to trust him.
3. X-XV Development of actions. Rapprochement of Asya and N. N. The experience of the girl and the confession to Gagin about her love for the narrator. A note from Asya.
4. XVI-XXI The climax of the action and an instant denouement. N.N.'s date with Asya, which ended in parting. Unexpected departure of heroes from the city.
5. XXII Epilogue. N.N.'s reflections on life and happiness. Regret for a missed moment.

essence

The narrator N. N. shares his memories of the past days of his carefree youth. He traveled abroad and observed people with rapture. No purpose or responsibility. The main events of the story unfold in the German town of Z., on the banks of the Rhine River. The place was secluded, as his soul demanded. N.N.'s heart was broken by a young widow who exchanged the narrator for a lieutenant.

The location of the city in which the narrator settled was excellent.

One day, N.N. got to the commercial, where students had fun. There he accidentally heard a conversation between two Russians and accidentally met them. It turned out to be the Gagin family. Elder brother and younger sister Asya, seventeen years old. After a short conversation, they invited the narrator to visit them, in a lonely house, which was located outside the city, where they tasted milk, berries and bread. When the pale evening came and the moon rose, N. N. went home by boat and felt really happy.

The next day, Gagin came to his house and woke him up with the sound of a stick, after which they drank coffee and talked about what worries everyone. N. N. told about unhappy love, and his interlocutor that he started painting too late and was afraid not to realize himself in creativity. Every day the narrator becomes more and more attached to Gagin and his sister. Asya behaved strangely and always in different ways. Now she is tense, then cheerful and carefree, like a child. N.N. often looks closely not only at the behavior of the girl, but also at her appearance. In his opinion, she had the most changeable face he had ever seen. Sometimes it was pale, sometimes it hid a smile.

Once after dinner, Gagin accompanied N.N. to the boat so that he would go home. On the way, they made a detour to the house of an elderly lady, where Asya was. The girl threw a branch of geranium to N.N. and invited him to imagine that she was the lady of his heart. The narrator's thoughts became confused. He began to be overcome by homesickness. Before going to sleep, he thought about Asa, calling her a capricious girl in his head. Also, N.N. was sure that she was not Gagin's sister. For two weeks in a row, he visited them and watched with interest the behavior of the heroine. N.N. understood that the girl attracted him, even when she was angry. One evening, he overheard a conversation between Asya and her brother. Sitting in the gazebo, the girl confessed her eternal love to Gagin. With bitterness in his heart, N.N. went home. He considered that he was brazenly deceived, and they were not relatives at all, but lovers.

N.N. spent several days alone with nature. He did not want to see Gagin and Asya. He walked through the mountains, looked at the clouds and talked with the locals who met him along the way.

At the end of the third day, returning home, N. N. found a note. In it, Gagin asked him to come. What was N.N.'s surprise when he found out the whole truth. Gagin said that he met Asya when she was about nine years old. She was his father's daughter and a maid. Later, the girl became an orphan, and he took her to him. After N.N. found out the whole truth, his heart became light. To some extent, he understood Asya, her anxiety and childish naivety. His beginning was attracted by her soul. After talking with Gagin, N.N. went for a walk with Asya. For the first time, she was not afraid to tell something and ask questions. N. N. begins to notice behind him that he is not up to her stories. He admires Asya, and she dreams that her wings will grow. Then they went home and danced the waltz until the evening. When N.N. was driving home, there were tears in his eyes from happiness. He didn't want to think if he was in love or not. He just felt good.

The next day, after another conversation with Asya, N.N. realized that the girl loved him. She looked flustered. She talked about death and asked strange questions. One day, walking around the city, he met a boy who handed him a note from Asya. The girl wanted to see him immediately, at four o'clock at the chapel. It was only twelve o'clock, and he went to his room. Suddenly, an excited Gagin came to him. He reported that Asya had a fever during the night. She confessed to her brother that she was in love with N.N. and wanted to leave the city. The narrator was puzzled and told Gagin about the note he had received from Asya. He realized that he was not marrying a seventeen-year-old girl, and he needed to end this immediately. Having gone to the appointed place, N.N. again met the boy, who had previously handed over a note from Asya. He said that the girl had changed the meeting place and was waiting for him at Frau Luisi's house in an hour and a half. There was no need to return home, and N. N. went to wait in a small garden, where he drank a glass of beer. When the time came, he went to the old woman's house and knocked weakly on the door. Frau Luise escorted him to the third floor, where Asya was already sitting. Addressing her by her first name and patronymic, N.N. saw her trembling. He felt sorry for her, and he was confused. Then he pulled Asya towards him, and her head lay on his chest. But suddenly N.N. remembered Gagina and their conversation. He began to blame Asya for telling her brother about her feelings, and because of this, they need to immediately end the relationship. The girl silently listened to him, but, unable to stand it, fell to her knees and wept bitterly. N.N. was frightened and realized what a mistake he had made. But she jumped up and ran away. He went to the Gagins' house, but Asya was not there. Wandering the streets, N.N. looked for her, but to no avail. He felt remorse and regret for not telling Asya how much he loved her and did not want to lose her. Returning again to their house, Gagin said that the heroine was found, but she was already going to bed. N. N. decided that tomorrow he would certainly confess everything to her. He was even ready to marry her. But his plans were not destined to come true. At six o'clock in the morning, Asya and Gagin left the city.

N. N. felt unbearable grief and anger at himself. He decided to find Asya at all costs and never let go again in his life. When he was walking home to pack his things and follow the Gagins, he was distracted by Frau Lisa, who gave him a note from Asya. It was written in it that he needed to say just one word, and then everything would be different. When N.N. reached the city of Cologne, he found out the further direction of the Gagins and followed them to London, but further searches were unsuccessful.

N.N. never saw Asya again, not even knowing if she was still alive. Soon he resigned himself and sent everything to the fate of fate. But only the heroine awakened strong and vivid emotions in him.

Main characters and their characteristics

• Anna Gagina (Asia) is the main character of the story of the same name. The description of Asya is given by the author: she is a swarthy girl with short black hair. She was seventeen years old and, due to her age, was not fully developed, but had a special grace in her movements. At the same time, Asya never sat idle. She was constantly moving, humming something and laughing out loud. It was hard not to notice children's antics in Asya's behavior, sometimes they were even indecent. Throughout the work, Turgenev reveals her image gradually. At first, Asya seems strange and aloof to us, but later we learn her fate. The young girl does not know how to be in society at all, because she grew up surrounded by peasants. She is ashamed of her origin. There are no restrictions for her, she does not know what a lie is. The moral qualities of the heroine: honesty, openness, fortitude and the ability to love. It is precisely because Asya is endowed with these qualities that she rushes headlong into the pool of love. But due to the indecision of N.N., the girl could not find true happiness. Turgenev's attitude towards Asya is reverent and tender. Reading the work, you notice with what love he describes it. The writer endowed her with exceptionally positive qualities.
• Gagin - Asya's brother. A young man with a cap on his head and a wide jacket. So, when meeting, Turgenev describes his hero. Gagin had a happy face, big eyes and curly hair. In the course of the work, we learn that Gagin is a fairly wealthy nobleman. He doesn't depend on anyone. During one of the conversations with N.N., Gagin says that he is engaged in painting and plans to devote his future to this. Turgenev endowed him with a calm and balanced character. We can say that Gagin is a mediocre Russian person, his image is a traditional type of amateur in all spheres of life.
• N. N.- the one thanks to whom readers get acquainted with Turgenevskaya Asya. The narrator tells about his past days when he was twenty-five years old. Carefree and young, he traveled abroad. This is a person who loves to be in the crowd and watch people, faces, their laughter and conversations. This calmed him down. N.N. was not the one who thinks about life, and in general about tomorrow. At the moment of the last meeting, he behaves aloofly and blames only Asya for all the problems, and this completes the image of N.N. The cowardice and indecision of the hero's character lead to a tragic denouement of the story.

Themes

• The main theme of the story is Love. However, as in many works of Turgenev. Love for Ivan Sergeevich is not a simple feeling. In his opinion, this is an element that plays with the fate of people. Asya could not find mutual and true all-consuming love. Her happiness with N.N. became doomed to impossibility. It is worth noting that Turgenev's worldview about the "unrealizability of feelings" in the story was formed under the influence of the German philosopher. Thus, a pure and beautiful feeling remained only a memory for the heroes of the story. The theme of love in the performance of the writer is inextricably linked with the tragedy of the attraction of two hearts.
• Nature. I. S. Turgenev, as a real artist, describes nature in his works. One can feel the admiration of the author before her mighty power. Also, the landscape carries an emotional load. In order to create a romantic and calm atmosphere, Turgenev specially placed his heroes in a quiet town in Germany. A detailed description of the nature and experiences of the characters makes one admire the skill of the writer.
• Rock Theme. Fate in the story "Asya" is the fate that mercilessly separated N.N. from Asya. But still, there would be no predestination if he had not been afraid to show his feelings in time. The separation was entirely his fault. But it seems that N.N. did not fully realize this. In the epilogue, he says that maybe this is all for the best, and fate has correctly disposed of their lives. According to N.N., most likely, their marriage would have been unhappy. And besides, he was still young then, and the future did not bother him.

Problems

1. Russia motif. At the beginning of the work, when N.N. was not thinking about anything and was heading home, he was struck by a smell that was rare for Germany. Next to the road, he saw a hemp patch. The smell was familiar to him and reminded him of his homeland. Suddenly for himself, he was pierced by longing for his native land. There was a desire to return back in order to walk around the Russian expanses again and enjoy this air. N. N. began to ask himself why he was here and why. After that, even Asya began to remind him of an absolutely Russian girl, and this feeling increased the hero's attraction to her. This passage contains the personal experiences of I. S. Turgenev. Although he lived abroad, the writer was still overcome by homesickness.
2. The tragedy of Asya lies primarily in its origin. The girl does not know how to behave in society at all and is shy in communicating with strangers. Although the main tragedy of the story is still that Asya allowed herself to fall in love with someone who could not give her the feelings that she deserves. A young, sincere and proud girl could not suppress her quivering love and affection. The tragedy of Asya is connected with the theme of the superfluous person in the works of Turgenev. N.N. was a carefree and not purposeful young man. Because of the fear of becoming happy, he made the main character unhappy.

The problematics of the work is quite multifaceted, therefore, in addition to the above problems, in the story "Asya" Turgenev asks the reader other equally important problematic questions.

• For example, describing the fate of Asya, the writer raises the problem of extramarital affairs. He draws the attention of readers to the fact that this is not normal, and the child suffers the most from this. Society is not ready to accept such unions, so do not condemn children to non-recognition and alienation.
• Connected with this transitional age problem. In fact, Asya is still a teenager, she is only seventeen years old, and her behavior is not always clear to N.N. Turgenev shows that she is still very young and not formed as a person, so she took a rather ordinary and stupid person for her ideal.
• The problem of cowardice and moral choice is also prominent in the story. The protagonist made a mistake because of the fear of taking a decisive action, he was also afraid of the reaction of society to his marriage to an illegitimate girl. He is too dependent on outside opinion, on generally accepted canons, and even love could not free him from social slavery.

main idea

The plot of the story by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev is quite simple due to the fact that it is more important for him to depict the inner world of his characters than their actions. The psychology of the book is much more important than the action. Depicting the characters, the writer reflected on the thirst for what forms them. Therefore, the meaning of the work can be expressed by the phrase: "Happiness has no tomorrow." N.N. lived in anticipation of him, unconsciously searched for him on his travels, but, having come across him face to face, he lost forever, smugly believing that tomorrow he would have time to return him. But the essence of happiness is transience and fragility - one has only to miss it, it will disappear forever, and there will be no "tomorrow".

The main idea of ​​Turgenev is undeniable, but nevertheless, we are once again convinced of its correctness by the tragedy of first love, which is often accompanied by unrealizable illusions and dramatic turns. The writer clearly shows how N.N.'s cowardice and fear of his own feelings destroyed everything, how a young girl made a mistake in him, but could not convince her heart of this.

What does it teach?

Turgenev makes readers think about what love really is. He does not want to show this feeling only through the prism of something beautiful. It is more important for him to portray, though harsh, but the reality of life. Love can heal a person and give him the most wonderful emotions, but sometimes he does not find the strength to fight for it. It is easy to lose it, but it is impossible to return it... But not everything is so sad. It is important to understand that thanks to the fact that Asya has known the feeling of sincere love, she has become much stronger and wiser. After all, everything in our life is a lesson.

The story "Asya" teaches not to be afraid to be happy. There is no need to be silent about what is really important to say. The narrator N.N. could not confess to Asya that he loves her. He regretted this offense all his life, keeping her beautiful image in his heart. Thanks to young Asya, who does not know how to feel half, N. N. understands the main truth. There is only a moment, because "happiness has no tomorrow." This is the main conclusion from the read.

The moral of the story is also very instructive. Each of us at least once in his life regretted a wrong deed or a word that was said out of anger or fatigue. But you can’t take back the spoken word, so people should take a responsible approach to what they say.

Artistic details

The role of the landscape. To reveal the state of mind of the heroes, Turgenev uses a landscape, which in the story becomes a "landscape of the soul." He always plays a certain role. Either romantic or psychological. Also, the landscape performs different functions in the text. It can only be a background, or acquire a symbolic meaning, create an image of a hero. Every detail of Turgenev's landscape even breathes in its own way. For example, in the first chapter, when N. N. recalls his love with a young widow, his feelings are not so sincere. While the city described by Turgenev is filled with liveliness. Thus, the reader notices how subtly the writer compares it with N.N.’s “love”. The man enjoys simulated longing, although his soul has already been consoled and blossomed, like the blossoming scenery of a story. Or the seventh chapter, where the narrator is depressed because of the overheard conversation between Asya and Gagin. N. N. finds solace in the beauty of nature.

Music. With the help of music, the writer reveals aspects of his characters that were previously hidden. Reading the story, a person may not immediately pay attention to its significance. For the first time we “hear” music when N. N. meets Asya and her brother. The next important point is the mention of the Lanner waltz in the second chapter, which is an important detail of the story. N.N. heard his sounds when he returned home. Later, under the same waltz, he circled with Asya in a dance. In this episode, we see how Turgenev again reveals the girl in a new way. She waltzed beautifully. This moment is significant, as we notice that N. N. is not indifferent to the heroine. The author uses waltz sounds for the second time for a reason. He appears precisely at a significant, turning point for lovers. At the end of the story, the music stops and does not reappear.

Psychologism and originality

The artistic originality of the work lies in the fact that Turgenev moves to the so-called new stage of his work. The study of personality with the help of psychological techniques is achieved by realism. Turgenev also masterfully uses a literary technique, thanks to which he focuses readers' attention on the fact that N. N.'s memories are connected exclusively with the past, thereby showing that he could not find anything more significant and important in his life than a love relationship with Asya.

In his story, the writer applies the principle of "secret psychologism". This is actually the invented method of Ivan Sergeevich, since he believed that the writer should also be a psychologist. Turgenev portrayed completely different personalities according to the psychological type: the melancholic N. N. and the choleric Asya. If we learn the heroine's temperament through N. N.'s observations of her behavior, then the narrator himself is revealed through reasoning monologues. With their help, the writer reveals his personality and experiences.

Criticism

Simple, but at the same time, such a deep and soulful work received both positive and negative reviews.

It is worth paying attention to the article by Chernyshevsky, who did not share the views of the writer, “Russian man on rendez-vous. Reflections after reading the story "Asya". In it, he immediately declares that he is not interested in the artistic merit of the work. He criticized the hero N.N., considering him almost a villain. Chernyshevsky writes that the narrator is a portrait of the Russian intelligentsia, which is disfigured by deprivation of civil rights. But considering the image of the main character of the story, he notes that even criticism carries exceptionally bright feelings. This is due to the poetic image of Asya, which impressed Chernyshevsky.

It is important to note that Turgenev himself, in a letter to Leo Tolstoy, admitted that he agreed with all the reviews and would be surprised if everyone liked his creation:

I know you are unhappy with my latest story; and you are not alone, many of my good friends do not praise her; I am convinced that all of you are right;

The creation of the story "Asya" was an important stage in his work for him. He wrote it while in a mental disorder. Nevertheless, the editors of the Sovremennik magazine, in which the story was published, enthusiastically appreciated the new work of the writer. But N. A. Nekrasov had a remark about the scene of the last meeting between N. N. and Asya:

The hero unexpectedly showed an unnecessary rudeness of nature, which you do not expect from him, bursting into reproaches: they should be softened and reduced, I wanted to, but did not dare.

Despite all the comments, Turgenev's friends did not stand aside and expressed their opinion. Although L. N. Tolstoy did not like Asya, he noted the artistic merits of the story and re-read it.

Even the literary critic D. I. Pisarev, a nihilist and a very radical journalist who burned with revolutionary fervor, praised the story with enthusiasm. He was impressed by the character of the heroine, and he believed that she was "a sweet, fresh, free child of nature."

By genre, this work can be attributed to the story. It is based on a beautiful love story, which, unfortunately, ended in separation.

The plot is an acquaintance with the Gagins. Action development - relationships between young people. The climax is the explanation of N. N. with Gagin. The denouement is an explanation with Asya. Conclusion - N.N.'s reflections on the past and present.

Journey N.N.
Acquaintance of N. N. with Gagin and his sister.
N.N. draws attention to the unusual behavior of the girl and comes to the conclusion that Gagin is not her brother.
Explanation of Gagin and Asya. N.N. is an involuntary witness.
Asya's secret is revealed.
Date of N. N. and Asya.
Gagin and Asya leave. N.N. tries to find them, but fails.

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1. New!

The story is one of the freest genres, in which each era and each writer sets his own laws. The average volume between the novel and the story, just one, but given in the development of the plot line, a small circle of characters - this exhausts its main features. Even in the relatively young Russian prose of the early 19th century. there were many different genres. The sentimental stories of Karamzin, Pushkin's stories of Belkin, St. Petersburg stories of Gogol were a noticeable phenomenon, and the genres of secular and mysterious romantic stories were widespread.

Turgenev developed this genre throughout his work, but his love stories “Asya”, “First Love”, “Faust”, “Calm”, “Correspondence”, “Spring Waters” became the most famous. They are also often called "elegiac" not only for the poetry of feeling and the beauty of landscape sketches, but also for their characteristic motifs, from lyrical to plot. Recall that the content of the elegy is made up of love experiences and melancholy reflections on life: regrets about the past youth, memories of deceived happiness, sadness about the future, as, for example, in Pushkin’s “Elegy” of 1830 (“Mad years faded fun ...” ). This analogy is all the more appropriate because for Turgenev Pushkin was the most important reference point in Russian literature, and Pushkin's motifs permeate all of his prose. No less important for Turgenev was the German literary and philosophical tradition, primarily in the person of I.V. Goethe; it is no coincidence that the action of "Asia" takes place in Germany, and the next Turgenev's story is called "Faust".

The realistic method (detailed accurate depiction of reality, psychological alignment of characters and situations) is organically combined in elegiac stories with the problems of romanticism. Behind the story of one love, a large-scale philosophical generalization is read, therefore, many details (realistic in themselves) begin to shine with symbolic meaning.

Flowering and the focus of life, love is understood by Turgenev as an elemental, natural force that moves the universe. Therefore, its understanding is inseparable from natural philosophy (philosophy of nature). Landscapes in "Ace" and other stories of the 50s. do not take up a lot of space in the text, but this is far from being just an elegant intro to the plot or background decoration. The infinite, mysterious beauty of nature serves for Turgenev as indisputable proof of its divinity. “Man is connected with nature “by a thousand inextricable threads: he is her son.” Every human feeling has its source in nature; while the heroes admire her, she imperceptibly directs their fate.

Following the pantheistic understanding of nature, Turgenev considers it as a single organism in which “all lives merge into one world life”, from which “comes a common, endless harmony”, “one of those“ open ”mysteries that we all see and do not we see." Although in it, “everything seems to live only for itself,” at the same time, everything “exists for the other, in the other it only reaches its reconciliation or resolution” - this is the formula of love as an essence and an internal law of nature. “Her vened is love. Only through love can one get closer to it ... ”- Turgenev quotes Goethe’s Fragment on Nature.

Like all living things, man naively considers himself the “center of the universe”, especially since he is the only one of all natural beings who has reason and self-consciousness. He is fascinated by the beauty of the world and the play of natural forces, but trembles, realizing his doom to death. To be happy, the romantic consciousness needs to absorb the whole world, to enjoy the fullness of natural life. So, Faust from the drama of Goethe in the famous monologue dreams of wings, looking from the hill at the setting sun:

Oh give me wings to fly away from the earth
And rush after him, not getting tired on the way!
And I would see in the glow of rays
The whole world is at my feet: and sleeping valleys,
And burning peaks with golden brilliance,
And a river in gold, and a stream in silver.
<...>
Alas, only the spirit soars, having renounced the body, -
We cannot soar with bodily wings!
But sometimes you can't suppress
Innate desire in the soul -
Striving up... (per. N. Kholodkovsky)

Asya and H.H., admiring the Rhine valley from the hill, are also eager to soar from the ground. With purely romantic idealism, Turgenev's heroes demand everything or nothing from life, languish with "comprehensive desires" ("If we were birds, how we would soar, how we would fly ... So we would drown in this blue .. But we are not birds." - "And wings can grow with us," I objected. "How?" In the future, the motif of wings, repeated many times in the story, becomes a metaphor for love.

However, romanticism, by its very logic, assumes the unattainability of the ideal, since the contradiction between dream and reality is insoluble. For Turgenev, this contradiction permeates the very nature of man, who is at the same time a natural being, thirsting for earthly joys, “happiness to the point of satiety”, and a spiritual person, striving for eternity and depth of knowledge, as Faust formulates in the same scene:

...two souls live in me
And both are not at odds with each other.
One, like the passion of love, ardent
And greedily clings to the earth entirely,
The other is all for the clouds
So it would have rushed out of the body (translated by B. Pasternak).

This is where the pernicious internal division comes from. Earthly passions suppress the spiritual nature of a person, and having soared on the wings of the spirit, a person quickly realizes his weakness. “Remember, you talked about wings yesterday?.. My wings have grown, but there is nowhere to fly,” Asya will say to the hero.

The late German romantics represented passions as external, often deceitful and hostile forces to a person, whose plaything he becomes. Then love was likened to fate and itself became the embodiment of a tragic discord between dream and reality. According to Turgenev, a thinking, spiritually developed person is doomed to defeat and suffering (which he also shows in the novel “Fathers and Sons”).

"Asya" Turgenev began in the summer of 1857 in Sinzig am Rhein, where the story takes place, and finished in November in Rome. It is interesting to note that "Notes of a Hunter", famous for depicting Russian nature and types of national character, Turgenev wrote in Bougival, in the estate of Pauline Viardot near Paris. “Fathers and Sons” was composed by him in London. If we trace further this “European voyage” of Russian literature, it turns out that “Dead Souls” were born in Rome, “Oblomov” was written in Marienbad; Dostoevsky's novel "The Idiot" - in Geneva and Milan, "Demons" - in Dresden. It is these works that are considered the most profound word about Russia in the literature of the 19th century, and Europeans traditionally judge the “mysterious Russian soul” by them. Is this a game of chance or a pattern?

In all these creations, one way or another, the question of Russia's place in the European world is raised. But rarely in Russian literature you will find a story about modernity, where the action itself takes place in Europe, as in "Ace" or in "Spring Waters". How does this affect their problem?

Germany is depicted in "Ace" as a peaceful, lovingly accepting environment. Friendly, hard-working people, affectionate, picturesque landscapes seem to be deliberately opposed to the “uncomfortable” pictures of “Dead Souls”. “Greetings to you, a modest corner of the German land, with your unpretentious contentment, with ubiquitous traces of diligent hands, patient, although unhurried work ... Hello to you and the world!” - the hero exclaims, and we guess the author's position behind his direct, declarative intonation. Germany is also an important cultural context for the story. In the atmosphere of an old town, “the word “Gretchen” - either an exclamation or a question - just begged to be on the lips” (meaning Margarita from Goethe’s Faust). In the course of the story, H.H. reads Goethe's Hermann and Dorothea to Gagin and Asya. Without this “immortal Goethe idyll” about life in the German provinces, it is impossible to “recreate Germany” and understand its “secret ideal,” wrote A.A. Fet (himself half German) in his essays “From Abroad”. So the story is built on comparisons with both Russian and German literary tradition.

The hero of the story is designated simply as Mr. H.H., and we do not know anything about his life before and after the story told. By this, Turgenev deliberately deprives him of bright individual features, so that the narration sounds as objective as possible and so that the author himself can quietly stand behind the hero, sometimes speaking on his behalf. H.H. - one of the Russian educated nobles, and every Turgenev reader could easily apply what happened to him to himself, and more broadly - to the fate of each of the people. Almost always he is sympathetic to readers. The hero talks about the events of twenty years ago, evaluating them from the standpoint of newly acquired experience. Now touching, now ironically, now lamenting, he makes subtle psychological observations on himself and on others, behind which a perceptive and omniscient author is guessed.

For the hero, a journey through Germany is the beginning of a life journey. Since he wanted to join the student business, it means that he himself recently graduated from one of the German universities, and for Turgenev this is an autobiographical detail. That H.H. meets compatriots in the German provinces, it seems both strange and fateful, because he usually avoided them abroad and in a big city he would certainly have avoided making acquaintance. So the motive of fate is for the first time outlined in the story.

H.H. and his new acquaintance Gagin are surprisingly similar. These are soft, noble, European-educated people, subtle connoisseurs of art. You can sincerely become attached to them, but since life turned towards them only with its sunny side, their “half-delicateness” threatens to turn into lack of will. A developed intellect gives rise to enhanced reflection and, as a result, indecision.

This is how Oblomov's features appear in Gagina. A characteristic episode is when Gagin went to study, and N.N., having joined him, wanted to read, then two friends, instead of doing business, “rather cleverly and subtly talked about exactly how it should work.” Here, the author's irony over the "diligent work" of the Russian nobles is obvious, which in "Fathers and Sons" will grow to a sad conclusion about their inability to transform Russian reality. That is how N.G. understood the story. Chernyshevsky in his critical article “Russian man on rendez-vous” (“Atenaeus”, 1858). Drawing an analogy between Mr. N.N., whom he calls Romeo, on the one hand, and Pechorin (“Hero of our time”), Beltov (“Who is to blame?” Herzen), Agarin (“Sasha” Nekrasov), Rudin - on the other hand, Chernyshevsky establishes the social typicality of the behavior of the hero "Asia" and sharply condemns him, seeing him as almost a scoundrel. Chernyshevsky acknowledges that Mr. N.N. belongs to the best people of the noble society, but believes that the historical role of figures of this type, i.e. Russian liberal nobles, it is played that they have lost their progressive significance. Such a sharp assessment of the hero was alien to Turgenev. His task was to translate the conflict into a universal, philosophical plane and show the unattainability of the ideal.

If the author makes the image of Gagin completely understandable to readers, then his sister appears as a riddle, the solution of which N.N. gets carried away at first with curiosity, and then selflessly, but still cannot comprehend to the end. Her unusual liveliness is bizarrely combined with a timid shyness caused by her illegitimate birth and long life in the village. This is also the source of her unsociableness and thoughtful daydreaming (remember how she loves to be alone, constantly runs away from her brother and H.H., and on the first evening of meeting she goes to her place and, “without lighting a candle, stands for a long time behind an unopened window”). The last features bring Asya closer to her favorite heroine - Tatyana Larina.

But it is very difficult to form a complete picture of Asya's character: it is the embodiment of uncertainty and variability. (“What a chameleon this girl is!” - H.H. involuntarily exclaims) Now she is shy of a stranger, then she suddenly laughs (“Asia, as if on purpose, as soon as she saw me, burst out laughing for no reason and, out of her habit, immediately ran away. Gagin was embarrassed, muttered after her that she was crazy, asked me to excuse her”); sometimes she climbs the ruins and sings songs loudly, which is completely indecent for a secular young lady. But here she meets the English on the road and begins to portray a well-bred person, prim in keeping up appearances. After listening to the reading of Goethe's poem "Hermann and Dorothea", she wants to appear homely and sedate, like Dorothea. Then he “imposes fasting and repentance on himself” and turns into a Russian provincial girl. It is impossible to say at what point she is more herself. Her image shimmers, shimmering with different colors, strokes, intonations.

The rapid change in her moods is aggravated by the fact that Asya often acts inconsistently with her own feelings and desires: “Sometimes I want to cry, but I laugh. You shouldn't judge me... by what I do”; “Sometimes I don’t know what’s in my head.<...>Sometimes I'm afraid of myself, by God." The last phrase brings her closer to the mysterious beloved of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov from “Fathers and Sons” (“What nested in this soul - God knows! It seemed that she was in the power of some secret, unknown to her forces; they played with her as they wanted ; her small mind could not cope with their whim"). The image of Asya expands endlessly, because in her the elemental, natural principle manifests itself. Women, according to Turgenev's philosophical views, are closer to nature, because their nature has an emotional (spiritual) dominant, while men's - intellectual (spiritual). If the natural element of love captures a man from the outside (ie, he opposes it), then through a woman she directly expresses herself. The “unknown forces” inherent in every woman find their fullest expression in some. The amazing diversity and liveliness of Asya, the irresistible charm, freshness and passion stem precisely from here. Her fearful "wildness" also characterizes her as a "natural person", far from society. When Asya is sad, “shadows run across her face” like clouds across the sky, and her love is compared to a thunderstorm (“I assure you, we are prudent people, and we cannot imagine how deeply she feels and with what incredible strength these feelings are expressed in her; it comes upon her as unexpectedly and as irresistibly as a thunderstorm.

Nature is also depicted in a constant change of states and moods (an example is the sunset over the Rhine from chapter II). She is truly alive. She languishes, imperiously invades the soul, as if touching its secret strings, quietly but authoritatively whispers to her about happiness: “The air caressed her face, and the lindens smelled so sweet that the chest involuntarily breathed deeper and deeper.” The moon “gazes intently” from a clear sky, and illuminates the city with “a serene and at the same time quietly exciting light.” Light, air, smells are depicted tangible to the point of visibility. rolled over in waves”; “the evening quietly melted and shimmered into the night”; “strong” smell of cannabis “amazes” H.H.; the nightingale “infected” him with “the sweet poison of its sounds”.

A separate, shortest chapter X is devoted to nature - the only descriptive one (which already completely contradicts the form of an oral story, for which a presentation of the general outline of events is typical). This isolation indicates the philosophical significance of the passage:

<...>Having entered the middle of the Rhine, I asked the carrier to let the boat go downstream. The old man lifted the oars - and the royal river carried us. Looking around, listening, remembering, I suddenly felt a secret uneasiness in my heart ... I raised my eyes to the sky - but there was no peace in the sky either: dotted with stars, it kept stirring, moving, shuddering; I leaned towards the river... but even there, and in that dark, cold depth, the stars also swayed and trembled; an alarming animation seemed to me everywhere - and anxiety grew in me. I leaned on the edge of the boat ... The whisper of the wind in my ears, the quiet murmur of the water behind the stern irritated me, and the fresh breath of the wave did not cool me; the nightingale sang on the shore and infected me with the sweet poison of its sounds. Tears welled up in my eyes, but they were not tears of pointless delight. What I felt was not that vague feeling of all-encompassing desires that I had recently experienced, when the soul expands, sounds, when it seems to it that it understands and loves everything ... No! I have a thirst for happiness. I didn’t dare to call him by his name yet, but happiness, happiness to the point of satiety - that’s what I wanted, that’s what I yearned for ... And the boat kept on rushing, and the old ferryman sat and dozed, bending over the oars.

It seems to the hero that he voluntarily trusts the flow, but in fact he is drawn by an endless stream of life, which he is unable to resist. The landscape is mystically beautiful, but secretly menacing. The intoxication of life and the insane thirst for happiness are accompanied by the growth of a vague and persistent anxiety. The hero floats over the “dark, cold depths”, where the abyss of “moving stars” is reflected (Turgenev almost repeats Tyutchev’s metaphors: “chaos stirs”, “And we float, surrounded on all sides by a flaming abyss”).

The “majestic” and “regal” Rhine is likened to the river of life and becomes a symbol of nature as a whole (water is one of its primary elements). At the same time, it is covered with many legends and deeply integrated into German culture: at the stone bench on the shore, from where H.H. spent hours admiring the “majestic river”, “a small statue of the Madonna” peeps out of the branches of a huge ash tree; not far from the house of the Gagins, the rock of Lorelei rises. Near the river itself, “over the grave of a man who drowned about seventy years ago, stood a stone cross with an old inscription half-buried into the ground.” These images develop the themes of love and death and at the same time correlate with the image of Asya: it is from the bench by the statue of the Madonna that the hero will want to go to the city of L., where he will meet Asya, and later in the same place he will learn from Gagin the secret of Asya’s birth, after which it will become possible their convergence; Asya is the first to mention the cliff of Lorelei. Then when brother and H.H. looking for Asya in the ruins of a knight's castle, they find her sitting “on a ledge of a wall, right above the abyss” - in knightly times, she sat on the top of a rock above the fatal whirlpool of Lorelei, charming and ruining those floating along the river, hence the involuntary “hostile feeling” H.H. at the sight of her. The legend of Lorelei depicts love as captivating a person and then destroying him, which corresponds to Turgenev's concept. Finally, Asya's white dress will flash in the dark at the stone cross on the shore, when the hero is looking for her in vain after an awkward date, and this emphasis on the motive of death will emphasize the tragic end of the love story and the earthly path of H.H.

It is symbolically important that the Rhine separates the hero and the heroine: going to Asya, the hero must always come into contact with the elements. The Rhine turns out to be both a connecting link between the heroes, and at the same time an obstacle. It is along the Rhine that Asya sails away from him forever, and when the hero hurries after her on another flight of the steamer, he sees a young couple on one side of the Rhine (the maid Ganhen is already cheating on her fiancé who has gone into the soldiers; by the way, Ganhen is a diminutive of Anna, like Asya ), “and on the other side of the Rhine, my little Madonna still looked out sadly from the dark green of the old ash tree.”

The famous vineyards of the Rhine valley are also associated with the Rhine, which in the figurative system of the story symbolize the flowering of youth, the juice of life and its sweetness. It is this phase of the zenith, fullness and fermentation of forces that the hero experiences. This motif acquires plot development in an episode of a student feast - “the joyful boiling of young, fresh life, this impulse forward - wherever it is, if only forward” (recall the Anacreontic image of a happy “life feast” in Pushkin's poetry). Thus, when the hero sets off across the Rhine for the “celebration of life” and youth, he meets Asya and her brother, gaining both friendship and love. Soon he is feasting with Gagin on a hill overlooking the Rhine, enjoying the distant sounds of music from the merchant, and when two friends drink a bottle of Rhine wine, “the moon has risen and played along the Rhine; everything lit up, darkened, changed, even the wine in our faceted glasses shone with a mysterious brilliance. So the Rhine wine in the interlocking of motives and allusions is likened to a certain mysterious elixir of youth (akin to the wine that was given by Mephistopheles to Faust before he falls in love with Gretchen). It is significant that Asya is also compared with wine and grapes: “There was something restless in all her movements: this wild animal had recently been grafted, this wine was still fermenting.” It remains to be noted that in the context of Pushkin's poetry, the feast of youth also has a downside: “The faded joy of the mad years is hard for me, like a vague hangover, and, like wine, the sadness of past days in my soul gets older, the stronger.” This elegiac context will be updated in the epilogue of the story.

On the same evening, the parting of the heroes is accompanied by the following significant detail:

You drove into the moon pillar, you broke it, - Asya shouted to me.

I lowered my eyes; around the boat, blackening, waves swayed.

See you tomorrow,” Gagin said after her.

The boat has landed. I went out and looked around. There was no one to be seen on the opposite bank. The moon pillar again stretched like a golden bridge across the entire river.

The lunar pillar sets the vertical axis of the universe - it connects heaven and earth and can be interpreted as a symbol of cosmic harmony. At the same time, like a “golden bridge”, it connects both banks of the river. This is a sign of the resolution of all contradictions, the eternal unity of the natural world, where, however, a person will never penetrate, how not to go along the lunar road. With his movement, the hero involuntarily destroys a beautiful picture, which portends the destruction of his love (Asya finally unexpectedly shouts to him: “Farewell!”). At the moment the hero breaks the moon pillar, he does not see it, and when he looks back from the shore, the “golden bridge” has already been restored to its former inviolability. Also, looking back into the past, the hero will understand what kind of feeling he destroyed when Asya and her brother disappear from his life long ago (as they disappear from the banks of the Rhine). And the natural harmony turned out to be perturbed for no more than a moment and, as before, indifferent to the fate of the hero, shines with its eternal beauty.

Finally, the river of life, “the river of times in its striving”, in the endless alternation of births and deaths, turns out, as Derzhavin’s quoted aphorism confirms, to be the river of “oblivion” - Lethe. And then the “peppy old man” carrier, tirelessly plunging oars into the gloomy “dark waters”, cannot but evoke associations with old Charon, transporting all new souls to the kingdom of the dead.

Especially difficult to interpret is the image of a small Catholic Madonna “with an almost childish face and a red heart on her chest, pierced by swords.” Since Turgenev opens and ends the whole love story with this symbol, it means that he is one of the key ones for him. There is a similar image in Goethe's Faust: Gretchen, suffering from love, puts flowers to the statue of mater dolorosa with a sword in his heart12. In addition, Madonna's childish facial expression is similar to Asya (which gives the image of the heroine a timeless dimension). A red heart forever pierced by arrows is a sign that love is inseparable from suffering. I would like to pay special attention to the fact that the face of the Madonna always “peeps out sadly” “from the branches” or “from the dark green of the old ash tree”. This image can be understood as one of the faces of nature. In Gothic temples, on the portals and capitals, the faces and figures of saints were surrounded by floral ornaments - leaves and flowers carved from stone, and the columns of High German Gothic were likened to tree trunks in shape. This was due to the pagan echo of the early Christian worldview and, most importantly, the understanding of the temple as a model of the universe - with heaven and earth, plants and animals, people and spirits, saints and deities of the elements - a transfigured world, brought to harmony by God's grace. Nature also has a spiritual, mysterious face, especially when it is enlightened by grief. Another pantheist, Tyutchev, also felt similar states in nature: “... Damage, exhaustion, and on everything / That meek smile of withering, / What in a rational being we call / Divine bashfulness of suffering.”

But nature is changeable not only in terms of lighting and weather, but also in terms of the general spirit, the structure of being, which it sets. In Germany, in June, she rejoices, inspiring the hero with a sense of freedom and the boundlessness of his forces. A different mood seizes him when he remembers the Russian landscape:

...suddenly I was struck by a strong, familiar, but rare smell in Germany. I stopped and saw a small hemp bed near the road. Her steppe smell instantly reminded me of my homeland and aroused in my soul a passionate longing for her. I wanted to breathe Russian air, to walk on Russian soil. “What am I doing here, why am I dragging myself in a strange side, between strangers!” I exclaimed, and the deathly heaviness that I felt on my heart suddenly resolved into bitter and burning excitement.

For the first time, motives of longing and bitterness appear on the pages of the story. The next day, as if guessing N.N.’s thoughts, the heroine shows her “Russianness”:

Is it because I thought a lot about Russia at night and in the morning - Asya seemed to me a completely Russian girl, a simple girl, almost a maid. She was wearing an old dress, she combed her hair behind her ears, and sat motionless by the window, sewing in the embroidery frame, modestly, quietly, as if she had done nothing else in her lifetime. She said almost nothing, calmly looked at her work, and her features took on such an insignificant, everyday expression that I involuntarily remembered our home-grown Katya and Masha. To complete the resemblance, she began to hum "Mother, dove" in an undertone. I looked at her yellowish, faded face, remembered yesterday's dreams, and I felt sorry for something.

So, the idea of ​​everyday life, aging, the decline of life is associated with Russia. Russian nature is exciting in its elemental power, but strict and joyless. And the Russian woman in the artistic system of Turgenev of the 50s, is called by fate to humility and duty, like Tatyana Larina, who marries an unloved man and remains faithful to him, like Liza Kapitana from the "Noble Nest", with her deep religiosity, renunciation of life and happiness (cf. Tyutchev's poem "Russian Woman"). In The Nest of Nobles, the description of the steppe unfolds into a whole philosophy of Russian life:

...and suddenly finds dead silence; nothing will knock, nothing will move; the wind does not move the leaf; the swallows rush without a cry one after another over the earth, and the soul becomes sad from their silent raid. “That's when I'm at the bottom of the river,” Lavretsky thinks again. - And always, at any time, life is quiet and unhurried here, - he thinks, - whoever enters its circle, - submit: there is nothing to worry about, nothing to stir up; here only he is lucky who paves his path slowly, like a plowman furrows with a plow. And what strength is all around, what health in this inactive stillness!<...>Each leaf on each tree, each grass on its stem, expands in its entire width. My best years have gone into womanly love, - Lavretsky continues to think, - let boredom sober me up here, let it calm me down, prepare me so that I can also slowly do business.<...>At the same time, in other places on earth, life was seething, hurrying, rumbling; here the same life flowed inaudibly, like water over swamp grasses; and until the very evening Lavretsky could not tear himself away from the contemplation of this departing, flowing life; sorrow for the past melted in his soul like spring snow - and a strange thing! - never had a feeling of homeland so deep and strong in him.

In the face of the ancient forest of Polissya, which “is sullenly silent or howls deafly”, “the consciousness of our insignificance” penetrates into the human heart (“A trip to Polissya”). There, it seems, nature says to a person: “I don’t care about you - I reign, and you worry about how not to die.” In fact, nature is one, unchanging and multifaceted at the same time, it just turns to a person with new sides, embodying different phases of being.

Asya's mother, the maid of the late lady, is called Tatyana (Greek for “martyr”), and her appearance emphasizes strictness, humility, prudence, and religiosity. After the birth of Asya, she herself refused to marry her father, considering herself unworthy of being a lady. Natural passion and the rejection of it - these are the constants of the Russian female character. Asya, remembering her mother, directly quotes "Onegin" and says that she "would like to be Tatyana." Contemplating the procession of the pilgrims, Asya dreams: “I wish I could go with them<...>Go somewhere far away, to prayer, to a difficult feat, ”which already outlines the image of Lisa Kalitina.

Onegin's motives are directly reflected in the plot: Asya is the first to write H.H. a note with an unexpected confession after a short acquaintance, and the hero, following Onegin, responds to a declaration of love with a “reprimand”, emphasizing that not everyone would deal with her as honestly as he (“You are dealing with an honest man - yes, with an honest human").

Like Tatyana, Asya reads a lot indiscriminately (H.H. finds her reading a bad French novel) and, according to literary stereotypes, composes a hero for herself (“No, Asya needs a hero, an extraordinary person - or a picturesque shepherd in a mountain gorge”). But if Tatyana “loves without joking”, then Asya also “does not have a single feeling in half”. Her feeling is much deeper than that of the hero. H.H. first of all, an esthete: he egoistically dreams of endless “happiness”, enjoys the poetry of relations with Asya, is touched by her childish spontaneity and admires, being an artist in his soul, how “her slender appearance was clearly and beautifully drawn” on the ledge of a medieval wall, as she sits in garden, "all drenched in a clear sunbeam." For Asya, love is the first responsible life test, an almost desperate attempt to know oneself and the world. It is no coincidence that it is she who pronounces Faust's daring dream of wings. If the thirst for infinite happiness Mr. H.H. for all her loftiness is selfish in its orientation, then Asya’s desire for a “difficult feat”, an ambitious desire to “leave a trace behind herself” implies life with others and for others (a feat is always done for someone). “In Asya's imagination, lofty human aspirations, high moral ideals do not contradict the hope for the realization of personal happiness, on the contrary, they presuppose each other. The love that has arisen, although not yet realized, helps her in determining her ideals.<...>She is demanding of herself and needs help to fulfill her aspirations. “Tell me what should I read? Tell me what should I do?” she asks H.H. However, Mr H.H. not a hero, as Asya considers him, he is not able to play the role that is assigned to him. Therefore, the hero misunderstands a lot in Asya's feelings: “... I'm not only about the future - I didn't think about tomorrow; I felt very good. Asya blushed when I entered the room; I noticed that she was dressed up again, but the expression of her face did not go with her outfit: it was sad. And I came so cheerful!”

At the highest moment of meeting in Asa, the natural principle manifests itself with irresistible force:

I raised my head and saw her face. How it suddenly changed! The expression of fear vanished from him; I forgot everything, I pulled her towards me - her hand obediently obeyed, her whole body followed her hand, the shawl rolled from her shoulders, and her head quietly lay on my chest, lay under my burning lips.

It was also described how a canoe was drawn by the river. The gaze went into the distance, as if the distance of the sky opened up, when the clouds parted, and the curls thrown back by the wind convey the sensations of a winged flight. But happiness, according to Turgenev, is possible only for a moment. When the hero thinks that it is near, the author's voice clearly intrudes into his speech: “Happiness has no tomorrow; he does not have yesterday either; it does not remember the past, does not think about the future; he has a present - and that is not a day, but a moment. I don’t remember how I got to the west. It wasn’t my legs that carried me, it wasn’t the boat that carried me: some kind of wide, strong wings lifted me. At this moment, Asya is already lost to him (just as Onegin passionately and seriously fell in love with Tatyana, already lost to him).

Unprepared H.H. taking a decisive step can be attributed to the Russian national character, although, of course, not so directly and vulgarly sociologically as Chernyshevsky did. But if we have reason to compare Gagin and H.H. with Oblomov (the excerpt “Oblomov’s Dream” was published already in 1848), then the antithesis in the person of the German Stolz inevitably arises in the mind and seeks embodiment, especially since the action of “Asia” takes place on German soil. This antithesis is not directly expressed in the system of characters, but comes through when considering Goethe's motives in the story. This is, firstly, Faust himself, who decided to defy fate and sacrifice immortality for the sake of the highest moment of happiness, and, secondly, Hermann from Goethe's poem "Hermann and Dorothea", read by Mr. H.H. new acquaintances. This is not only an idyll of German life, but also a story about happy love, which was not prevented by the social inequality of her beloved (the refugee Dorothea is at first ready to be hired as a servant in Herman's house). The most significant thing is that in Goethe Hermann falls in love with Dorothea at first sight and proposes to her on the same day, while it is precisely the need to make a decision in one evening that plunges Mr. N.N. into confusion and confusion.

But it is a mistake to think that the outcome of the meeting depended only on two lovers. He was predetermined and fate. Recall that a third character also takes part in the meeting scene - the old widow Frau Louise. She good-naturedly patronizes young people, but some features of her appearance should alert us very much. For the first time we see her in chapter IV, when friends come to the German woman for Asya, so that she says goodbye to the departing N.N. But instead, Asya gives him a branch of geranium through Gagin (which will later remain the only memory of Asya), but refuses to go down:

A lighted window on the third floor banged and opened, and we saw Asya's dark head. The toothless and blind-sighted face of an old German woman peeped out from behind her.

I'm here, - Asya said, coquettishly leaning her elbows on the window, - I feel good here. On you, take it, - she added, throwing a geranium branch to Gagin, - imagine that I am the lady of your heart.

Frau Louise laughed.

When Gagin passes N.N. branch, he returns home “with a strange heaviness in his heart”, which is replaced by longing at the memory of Russia.

The whole scene is filled with dark symbolism. Asya's lovely head and the "toothless" old woman's face behind form together an allegorical picture of the unity of love and death - a common plot of church painting of the Baroque era. At the same time, the image of the old woman is also associated with the ancient goddess of fate - Parka.

In chapter IX, Asya admits that it was Frau Louise who told her the legend of Lorelei, and adds, as if by chance: “I like this tale. Frau Louise tells me all sorts of fairy tales. Frau Louise has a black cat with yellow eyes...”. It turns out that the German sorceress Frau Luise tells Asya about the beautiful sorceress Lorelei. This casts an ominous and magical glow on Asya and her love (the Old Witch is again a character from Faust). It is noteworthy that Asya is sincerely attached to the old German woman, and she, in turn, is very sympathetic to Mr. N.N. It turns out that love and death are inseparable and act “together”.

On a date with Asya, the hero does not go to the stone chapel, as was originally planned, but to the house of Frau Louise, which looks like a “huge, hunched bird”. A change of meeting place is an ominous sign, for a stone chapel can symbolize the longevity and sanctification of relationships, while Frau Louise's house has an almost demonic flavor.

I knocked weakly on the door; she opened at once. I crossed the threshold and found myself in complete darkness.

I took a step or two gropingly, someone's bony hand took my hand.

You are Frau Louise, I asked.

<...>In the faint light that fell from the tiny window, I saw the wrinkled face of the burgomaster's widow. A cloyingly sly smile stretched her sunken lips, her dull eyes shrank.

Clearer allusions to the mystical meaning of the image are hardly possible within the framework of realism. Finally, the widow of the burgomaster, “smiling with her nasty smile,” calls the hero to give him Asya’s last note with the words “goodbye forever!”.

The motive of death concerns Asya in the epilogue:

... I keep, as a shrine, her notes and a dried geranium flower, the same flower that she once threw to me from the window. It still emits a faint smell, and the hand that gave it to me, that hand that I only once had to press to my lips, may have been smoldering in the grave for a long time ... And I myself - what happened to me? What is left of me, of those blissful and anxious days, of those winged hopes and aspirations? Thus, the light evaporation of an insignificant grass survives all the joys and all the sorrows of a person - it survives the person himself.

The mention of the “perhaps decayed” hand of Asya brings to mind the “boney hand” of Frau Louise. So love, death (and nature, indicated by a geranium branch) are finally intertwined by a common motif and “shake hands with each other” ... children” with their philosophical picture of flowers on Bazarov’s grave.

However, the circle of associations with which Turgenev surrounds his heroine can be continued. In her endless variability and playful playfulness in her behavior, Asya resembles another romantic, fantastic heroine - Ondine from the poem of the same name by Zhukovsky (a poetic translation of the poem by the German romanticist de la Motte Fouquet, therefore this parallel organically fits into the German background of Turgenev's story). Undine is a river deity, in the form of a beautiful girl living among people, with whom a noble knight falls in love, marries her, but then leaves her.

The rapprochement of Asya with Lorelei and with the Rhine by a number of common motives confirms this parallel (Ondine leaves her husband, plunging into the jets of the Danube). This analogy also confirms Asya's organic connection with nature, because Ondine is a fantastic creature personifying the natural element - water, hence her endless waywardness and variability, transitions from stormy jokes to affectionate meekness. And here is how Asya is described:

I have not seen a creature more mobile. Not for a moment did she sit still; she got up, ran into the house and ran again, sang in an undertone, often laughed, and in a strange way: it seemed that she laughed not at what she heard, but at various thoughts that came into her head. Her large eyes looked straight, bright, bold, but sometimes her eyelids squinted slightly, and then her gaze suddenly became deep and tender.

Asya's “wildness” is especially vividly manifested when she climbs alone over the ruins of a knight's castle overgrown with bushes. When she jumps over them, laughing, “like a goat,” she fully reveals her closeness to the natural world, and at that moment H.H. feels in it something alien, hostile. Even her appearance at this moment speaks of the wild wildness of a natural being: “As if she had guessed my thoughts, she suddenly threw a quick and piercing glance at me, laughed again, jumped off the wall in two jumps.<...>A strange smile slightly twitched her eyebrows, nostrils and lips; dark eyes squinted half-arrogantly, half-jovially. Gagin constantly repeats that he should be condescending to Asya, and the fisherman and his wife say the same about Ondine (“Everything will be mischievous, but she will be eighteen years old; but her heart is the kindest in her.<...>Though sometimes you gasp, you still love Undine. Is not it?" - “What is true is true; You can't stop loving her at all."

But then, when Asya gets used to H.H. and begins to speak frankly with him, then becomes childishly meek and trusting. In the same way, Undine, alone with a knight, shows loving humility and devotion.

The motive of flight is also characteristic of both heroines: just as Ondine often runs away from the old people, and one day the knight and the fisherman go together to look for her at night, so Asya often runs away from her brother, and then from H.H., and then he, together with Gagin, embarks on her searching in the dark.

Both heroines are given the motif of the mystery of birth. In the case of Ondine, when the current carries her to the fishermen, this is the only way for her to get into the world of people. It is possible that Asya’s illegitimate birth is also due to the motivational commonality with Ondine, which, on the one hand, looks like a kind of inferiority and leads to the impossibility of enduring the refusal of Mr. H.H., and on the other hand, gives her genuine originality and mystery. Undine is 18 years old at the time of the poem, Asya is eighteen years old (it is interesting that the fishermen at baptism wanted to call Undine Dorothea - ‘God’s gift’, and Asya imitates, in particular, Dorothea from Goethe’s idyll).

It is characteristic that if a knight approaches Ondine in the midst of the natural world (on a cape cut off from the rest of the world by a forest, and then also by a flooded stream), then H.H. meets Asya in the German province, outside the usual urban environment, and their romance takes place outside the city walls, on the banks of the Rhine. Both love stories (in the phase of rapprochement of lovers) are oriented towards the idyll genre. It is Asya who chooses an apartment outside the city, with a magnificent view of the Rhine and vineyards.

H.H. all the time she feels that Asya behaves differently from noble girls (“She appeared to me as a semi-mysterious creature”). And the knight, despite being in love with Ondine, is constantly embarrassed by her otherness, feels something alien in her, involuntarily fears her, which ultimately kills his affection. H.H. also experiences something similar: “Asya herself, with her fiery head, with her past, with her upbringing, this attractive, but strange creature - I confess, she scared me.” So the duality of his feelings and behavior becomes clearer.

In the poem de la Motte Fouquet - Zhukovsky, the plot is built on the original idea of ​​the Christian consecration of pantheistic nature. Ondine, being essentially a pagan deity, is constantly called a cherub, an angel, everything demonic in her gradually disappears. True, she is baptized as a child, but she is baptized not with a Christian name, but with Uvdina - her natural name. Having fallen in love with a knight, she marries him in a Christian way, after which she has an immortal human soul, for which she humbly asks the priest to pray.

Both Ondine and Lorelei, like mermaids, destroy their beloved. However, both of them at the same time belong to the world of people and suffer and perish themselves. Lorelei, bewitched by the god of the Rhine, throws herself into the waves out of love for the knight who once abandoned her. When Gulbrand leaves Ondine, she grieves doubly, because, continuing to love him, she is now obliged to kill him for treason according to the law of the realm of spirits, no matter how she tries to save him.

In philosophical terms, the plot of "Ondine" tells about the possibility of unity of nature and man, in which a person acquires the fullness of elemental being, and nature - reason and an immortal soul.

When projecting the ideas of the poem onto the plot of Turgenev's story, it is confirmed that a union with Asya would be tantamount to a union with nature itself, which dearly loves and kills. Such is the fate of anyone who wants to connect with nature. But "everything that threatens death, for the mortal heart conceals inexplicable pleasures, immortality, perhaps a pledge." But Turgenev's hero, the hero of modern times, refuses such a fatal union, and then the all-powerful laws of life and fate block his way back. The hero remains unharmed to slowly decline towards his own sunset.

Let us recall that two sides of being are united in Asa - the all-powerful and mysterious, elemental power of love (Gretchen's passion) and Tatyana's Christian spirituality, the “mild smile of withering” of Russian nature. The text of "Ondine" also helps to clarify the image of the Madonna, looking out from the leaves of an ash tree. This is the face of spiritualized nature, which has acquired an immortal soul and therefore suffers forever.

Almost every famous Russian classic in his work turned to such a literary genre as a story, its main characteristics are the average volume between a novel and a story, one detailed plot line, a small number of characters. The famous prose writer of the 19th century, Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, turned to this genre more than once throughout his entire literary career.

One of his most famous works, written in the genre of love lyrics, is the story "Asya", which is also often referred to as an elegiac genre of literature. Here readers find not only beautiful landscape sketches and a subtle, poetic description of feelings, but also some lyrical motifs that smoothly turn into plot ones. Even during the life of the writer, the story was translated and published in many European countries and enjoyed a great polarity of readers both in Russia and abroad.

History of writing

The story "Asya" Turgenev began to write in July 1857 in Germany, in the city of Sinzeg am Rhein, where the events described in the book take place. Having finished the book in November of the same year (writing the story was a little delayed due to the author’s illness and overwork), Turgenev sent the work to the editors of the Russian journal Sovremennik, in which it had long been expected and published in early 1858.

According to Turgenev himself, he was inspired to write the story by a fleeting picture he saw in Germany: an elderly woman looks out of the window of the house on the first floor, and the silhouette of a young girl is seen in the window of the second floor. The writer, thinking about what he saw, comes up with a possible fate for these people and thus creates the story "Asya".

According to many literary critics, this story was personal for the author, since it was based on some events that took place in Turgenev's real life, and the images of the main characters have a clear connection both with the author himself and with his inner circle (the prototype for Asya could be the fate of his illegitimate daughter Polina Brewer or his half-sister V.N. Zhitova, also born out of wedlock, Mr. N.N., on behalf of whom the story is told in Asya, has character traits and a similar fate with the author himself) .

Analysis of the work

Plot development

The description of the events that took place in the story is conducted on behalf of a certain N.N., whose name the author leaves unknown. The narrator recalls his youth and his stay in Germany, where on the banks of the Rhine he meets his compatriot from Russia Gagin and his sister Anna, whom he takes care of and calls Asya. A young girl with her eccentricity of actions, constantly changing disposition and amazing attractive appearance makes N.N. great impression, and he wants to know as much as possible about her.

Gagin tells him the difficult fate of Asya: she is his illegitimate half-sister, born from his father's relationship with the maid. After the death of her mother, her father took the thirteen-year-old Asya to him and raised her as a young lady from a good society should. Gagin, after the death of his father, becomes her guardian, first he sends her to a boarding house, then they leave to live abroad. Now N.N., knowing the unclear social status of the girl who was born to a serf mother and a landowner father, understands what caused Asya's nervous tension and her slightly eccentric behavior. He becomes deeply sorry for the unfortunate Asya, and he begins to have tender feelings for the girl.

Asya, like Pushkinskaya Tatyana, writes a letter to Mr. N.N. asking for a date, he, unsure of his feelings, hesitates and promises Gagin not to accept his sister's love, because he is afraid to marry her. The meeting between Asya and the narrator is chaotic, Mr. N.N. reproaches her that she confessed her feelings for his brother and now they cannot be together. Asya runs away in confusion, N.N. realizes that he really loves the girl and wants her back, but does not find it. The next day, having come to the Gagins' house with the firm intention of asking for the girl's hand, he learns that Gagin and Asya left the city, he tries to find them, but all his efforts are in vain. Never again in his life N.N. does not meet Asya and her brother, and at the end of his life's journey he realizes that although he had other hobbies, he truly loved only Asya and he still keeps the dried flower that she once gave him.

Main characters

The main character of the story, Anna, whom her brother calls Asya, is a young girl with an unusually attractive appearance (a thin boyish figure, short curly hair, wide-open eyes bordered by long and fluffy eyelashes), a direct and noble character, distinguished by an ardent temperament and a difficult, tragic fate. Born from an extramarital affair between a maid and a landowner, and raised by her mother in strictness and obedience, after her death, she cannot get used to her new role as a mistress for a long time. She perfectly understands her false position, therefore she does not know how to behave in society, she is shy and shy of everyone, and at the same time proudly wants no one to pay attention to her origin. Left early alone without parental attention and left to herself, Asya, beyond her years, thinks early about the life contradictions surrounding her.

The main character of the story, like other female images in Turgenev's works, is distinguished by an amazing purity of soul, morality, sincerity and openness of feelings, a craving for strong feelings and experiences, a desire to perform feats and great deeds for the benefit of people. It is on the pages of this story that such a common concept for all the heroines of the Turgenev young lady and the Turgenev feeling of love appears, which for the author is akin to a revolution invading the lives of the heroes, testing their feelings for stamina and ability to survive in difficult living conditions.

Mr. N.N.

The main male character and narrator of the story, Mr. N.N., has the features of a new literary type, which in Turgenev replaced the type of "superfluous people". This hero completely lacks the typical “extra person” conflict with the outside world. He is an absolutely calm and prosperous person with a balanced and harmonious self-organization, easily gives in to vivid impressions and feelings, all his experiences are simple and natural, without falsehood and pretense. In love experiences, this hero strives for peace of mind, which would be intertwined with their aesthetic completeness.

After meeting Asya, his love becomes more tense and contradictory; at the last moment, the hero cannot fully surrender to feelings, because they are overshadowed by the disclosure of the secret of feelings. Later, he cannot immediately tell Asya's brother that he is ready to marry her, because he does not want to disturb the feeling of happiness that overwhelms him, and also fearing future changes and the responsibility that he will have to take on someone else's life. All this leads to a tragic denouement, after his betrayal, he loses Asya forever and it is too late to correct the mistakes he made. He has lost his love, rejected the future and the very life that he could have, and pays for it throughout his life devoid of joy and love.

Features of compositional construction

The genre of this work refers to an elegiac story, the basis of which is a description of love experiences and melancholic discussions about the meaning of life, regrets about unfulfilled dreams and sadness about the future. The work is based on a beautiful love story that ended in a tragic separation. The composition of the story is built according to the classical model: the beginning of the plot is a meeting with the Gagin family, the development of the plot is the rapprochement of the main characters, the emergence of love, the culmination is a conversation between Gagin and N.N. about Asya's feelings, the denouement is a date with Asya, an explanation of the main characters, the Gagin family leaves Germany, an epilogue - Mr. N.N. reflects on the past, regrets unfulfilled love. The highlight of this work is Turgenev's use of the old literary technique of plot framing, when a narrator is introduced into the narrative and the motivation for his actions is given. Thus, the reader receives a "story within a story" designed to reinforce the meaning of the story being told.

In his critical article “A Russian Man at a Rendezvous,” Chernyshevsky sharply condemns the indecisiveness and petty, timid selfishness of Mr. N.N., whose image is slightly softened by the author in the epilogue of the work. Chernyshevsky, on the contrary, without choosing expressions, sharply condemns the act of Mr. N.N. and pronounces his sentence in the same way as he did. The story "Asya", due to the depth of its content, has become a real gem in the literary heritage of the great Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. The great writer, like no one else, managed to convey his philosophical reflections and thoughts about the fate of people, about that time in the life of every person when his actions and words can forever change it for better or worse.