The composition “What role does the silent scene play in comedy. Eloquent silence N.V.

What role does the silent stage play in comedy?
Gogol himself attached great importance to the "silent stage". The actors in the first productions of The Inspector General seldom fulfilled the content of the remark relating to the last scene, the curtain almost always fell immediately, and the audience could not see the petrified actors. Therefore, Gogol wrote and spoke more than once about the last scene. Here are a few of his remarks, in addition to the big remark in the text of the play itself.

“The last scene of The Inspector General must be especially cleverly played. The situation of many people is almost tragic.” And further about the mayor: “It is so rude to be deceived by one who knew how to lead smart people and even skillful rogues! The announcement of the arrival of a real auditor at last was a thunderous blow for him. He turned to stone. His outstretched arms and his head thrown back remained motionless, around him the entire active group forms in an instant a petrified group in different positions. The picture should be set almost like this: in the middle is the mayor, completely dumb and dumbfounded ... The curtain should not fall for two or three minutes ...

The last scene will not be successful until they understand that this is just a silent picture, which is a petrified group ... The fright of each hero is not similar to the fright of the other, how different is the degree of fear and fear of each.

Explain why Gogol wrote so many additional materials that accompany this play. These are “Theatrical tour after the presentation of a new comedy”, and a number of other materials: “An excerpt from a letter written by the author shortly after the presentation of the “Inspector General” to a writer”, “Forewarning for those who would like to play the “Inspector General” properly.
The first performance of the comedy The Inspector General at the Alexandrinsky Theater on April 16, 1836 did not please Gogol, but caused offense at the lack of understanding of his play, the deafness of the audience and actors. The comedy was perceived as a funny adventure of an imaginary auditor, the characters were funny, funny, pleasant, and no one comprehended the horror of the “silent scene”. Khlestakov, in the chaining of the actor Dyur, appeared before the audience as a funny liar. “The Inspector General” was played, - wrote Gogol, - but it’s so vague, so strange in my soul ... The main role was gone ... Dyur didn’t understand what Khlestakov was for a hair ... He became just an ordinary liar ... "

And Gogol felt the need to reveal to the actors and those who would stage the play his understanding of the roles he had created. Hence the many materials devoted to the "Inspector".

Gogol wrote that actors should first of all "try to understand the universal expression of the role, they should consider why this role is called upon." And he reveals in detail in his articles what Khlestakov is, indicates his typicality (it is no coincidence that the hero’s phrase is given: “I am everywhere, everywhere”). Gogol notes in “An Excerpt from a Letter ...”: “Everyone, even for a minute, if not for a few minutes, was or is becoming Khlestakov ... And a dexterous guards officer will sometimes turn out to be Khlestakov, and a statesman will sometimes turn out to be Khlestakov, and our brother, a sinful writer, will sometimes turn out to be Khlestakov. In a word, rarely anyone will not be at least once in their life ... "

Gogol was not particularly worried about the role of the mayor: the actors Sosnovsky (Alexandrinsky Theater) and Shchepkin (Maly Theater) completely satisfied him, the remarks concerned only the transition of the feelings of the mayor in the last act. Gogol paid attention to how Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky should be played. But his main concern is Khlestakov and the "silent stage". He saw that "Remarks for the gentlemen of the actors" and a lengthy remark to the "silent scene" were not enough.

In "Theatrical Journey ..." Gogol refers to the positive hero of comedy - laughter.

As you can see, Gogol was very worried about the performance of roles in his comedy - he wanted the actors to “grab the soul of the role, not the dress”, so that the directors would understand the ideological intent of the comedy and the position of the author.

In The Inspector General, - Gogol later recalled, I decided to collect in one heap everything that was bad in Russia, which I then knew, all the injustices that are done in those places and in those cases where justice is most required of a person, and for one ...

They stood in the same poses, In a silent strange silence. Do not describe their feelings in lines, Their thoughts are somewhere in the depths. Everyone has their own thoughts. But everyone is afraid of one thing - That their insidious deeds Now do not hide for anything. Skvoznik-Dmukhanovsky laments: "Swindler...

The mayor is shown by the author in a comedy as a serious person, smart in his own way, cunning, experienced in life circumstances. True, his idea of ​​an intelligent person is very peculiar, it is connected with the justification of bribery (from Chmykhov’s letter: “you ...

In 1839, in an article about "Woe from Wit", condemning Griboyedov's comedy "from an artistic point of view" (which, as he wrote in a letter to V.P. greeted the Inspector. His...

N. V. Gogol's comedy "The Inspector General" at one time became one of the most innovative works of dramatic art. Many of the techniques used by the author have never been used by playwrights before and have not been embodied on the theater stage. These innovative techniques include the aforementioned “silent scene”, which ends the final part of the comedy The Inspector General. What did the author want to achieve by completing the work with a silent scene? What effect did you expect? It is believed that the silent scene that ends the comedy The Inspector General was introduced into the work by the writer under the impression of the famous painting by the Russian artist Karl Bryullov The Last Day of Pompeii. It is this picture that strikes the person considering it with the strength and expressiveness of a frozen emotion. The image is motionless, static, but at the same time, the faces of the people depicted in the picture, their figures, the poses they take, testify to their inner state better than any words. The eloquence of static scenes, their expressiveness - these are the properties that were subtly noticed by N.V. Gogol and later successfully used by the writer. After all, The Inspector General is far from the only work of the writer in which there is a "silent scene" (in another extremely popular work - the story "Viy" - the author also uses this technique). If we consider the artistic techniques used by N.V. Gogol in more detail, we can notice a certain pattern: the technique of "death", a kind of "petrification" is the basis for the image of many characteristic Gogol characters (for example, the same landowners in "Dead Souls"). In The Inspector General, the silent scene is the climax, and it should be the most eloquent. Fading in an expressive pose (while the poses of all the characters are different, which emphasizes their individual personal qualities) is a real pantomime. The mayor, members of his family, the postmaster, Strawberry, Luka Lukic - all of them become mimes for some time, actors in the "theater of facial expressions and gestures". And words are not needed here, maybe even superfluous. Posture, facial expression can express an incomparably greater surge of emotions than words. Moreover, the silent scene in The Inspector General is also a mass one - everyone is standing as if struck by thunder, and this circumstance once again emphasizes how shocking and stunning the news has become for all the characters that "... an official who arrived by personal order from St. Petersburg demands you this very hour to itself. Gogol was the first Russian playwright to use the pause technique, which was successfully used by many directors, screenwriters and writers after him. Today, the pause technique is one of the most commonly used dramatic techniques.

The silent scene evoked the most varied judgments in the literature about Gogol. Belinsky, without entering into a detailed analysis of the scene, emphasized its organic nature for the general plan: it "excellently closes the whole of the play."

In academic literary criticism, the emphasis was sometimes placed on the political overtones of the silent scene. For H. Kotlyarevsky, for example, this is “an apology for the government’s vigilant power”: “Unter, who makes the head of the city and all high-ranking officials turn to stone and turn into idols, is a clear example of the author’s benevolence.”

According to V. Gippius, the silent scene also expresses the idea of ​​power and law, but interpreted in a peculiar way: “Realistically typified images of local authorities ... he<Гоголь>opposed the bare abstract idea of ​​power, which involuntarily led to even greater generalization, to idea of ​​retribution.

A. Voronsky, relying on the conclusions of Andrei Bely (in the book "Gogol's Mastery") about the gradual "killing of the gesture" of Gogol's heroes, considers the silent scene a symbolic expression of this killing: "All this happened because the living people of" Evenings ", cheerful lads, girls ... gave way to mannequins and puppets, "living corpses".

According to M. Khrapchenko, the appearance of the gendarme and the silent scene represent an "external denouement". “The real denouement of the comedy lies in the monologue of Gorodnichiy, in his angry statements at himself, at the address of clickers, paper-scribblers, in his sarcastic words: “What are you laughing at? laugh at yourself!..” The episode with the gendarme is just a mechanical appendage to the play.

B. Ermilov, on the contrary, is convinced of the psychological plausibility of the comedy finale. “The “psychological” reason for the stupefaction of the actors in the finale of the comedy
it is understandable: having survived so much unrest and trouble, you have to start all over again, and after all, the new auditor just might turn out to be a specially authorized person; and for sure he will become aware of the scandalous story with the false auditor. But this, of course, is not the meaning of the amazing finale. Before us is a parade of carved meanness and vulgarity, frozen in amazement before the very abyss of its own stupidity that shook it.

It would be possible to increase the summary of various sayings about the silent scene. But basically they all come down to the points of view mentioned above.

And how did Gogol himself interpret the silent scene? We do not know what he said about this before the presentation of The Inspector General. After the performance, the writer emphasized many times that the silent scene expresses the idea of ​​“law”, upon the onset of which everything “turned pale and shook” (draft version of “Theatrical Journey ...”). In the final text of The Theater Journey..., the "second lover of the arts", who is closest to Gogol in his views (for example, he owns statements about Aristophanes, about "public comedy"), says that the denouement of the play should remind of justice, of duty of the government: "God grant that the government always and everywhere hears its calling - to be a representative of providence on earth - and that we believe in it, as the ancients believed in fate that overtook crimes."

We have no reason to doubt Gogol's sincerity, that is, that the idea of ​​the law, of the government's defense of justice, was in fact connected by him with the finale of the comedy. G. Gukovsky is inaccurate, believing that the author's commentary on the silent scene arose in the 40s, when the writer "slipped ... into reaction." The sketch of "Theatrical Departure..." was made shortly after the premiere of the comedy, but meanwhile Gogol's interpretation of the finale is basically expressed already here.

But the whole point is that this is nothing more than the conceptual design of one idea. This is the so-called "key", which they usually want to replace the whole reading of an artistic thing. But Gogol, in the second edition of The Examiner's Denouement, puts the following remark into the mouth of the first comedian: "The author did not give me the key ... Then the comedy would have strayed into allegory." The silent scene is not an allegory. This is an element of the figurative thought of The Inspector General, and as such it gives way to a complex and integral artistic worldview. In a word, the task is to read the finale of The Inspector General as an expression of artistic thought.

Some strokes of such a reading are outlined in the above explanations of the silent scene. Attention is drawn to the fact that the "idea of ​​power" is expressed in the finale abstractly, as opposed to the full-blooded concreteness - everyday, psychological, social - of the whole play. More precisely, Gogol outlines some concreteness, but brings it to a certain limit. The trend towards concretization is clearly revealed by the creative history of the final line. In the first draft edition: "The arrived official demands the Governor and all the officials to himself." In the final edition: "Arrived by personal order from St. Petersburg official wants you this very hour to yourself". The new auditor is somewhat concretized and rises in his rank. The authorities that sent him are clearly defined: Petersburg and the tsar. A hint is given of the urgency of the case and, perhaps, the anger of the auditor who arrived. But Gogol does not go further. Nothing is reported about what the auditor will do and what threatens the officials.

The "second lover of the arts" said that the silent stage should make contemporaries believe in the government, "as the ancients believed in rock ...". This is reminiscent of Vyazemsky's venomous remark: "In our comedies, the authorities often take the place of fate (fatum) in ancient tragedies." The reason for such a remark was the finale of Fonvizin's "Undergrowth", where through the mouth of a positive character (Pravdin) the vicious characters (Prostakov) are informed: which your extreme weak-mindedness allowed her, the government orders me to take care of your house and villages.

But the fact of the matter is that the finale of The Inspector General does not report on any specific measures, on punishment in the direct legal and administrative sense of the word.

This kind of reticence is a characteristic property of Gogol's artistic thought. “Picture to us our honest, straightforward man,” Gogol called in The Petersburg Stage ... and he himself attempted this task more than once. But before the second volume of "Dead Souls" he portrayed "our honest, direct man" (in modern times) only on the threshold - on the threshold of an honest deed, like some "very modestly dressed man" in "The Theater Journey ...", or even on the threshold of conscious life: “Now she is like a child,” Chichikov thinks about the governor’s daughter ... From her everything can be done it can be a miracle, or it can turn out to be rubbish, and rubbish will come out! In mid-sentence, Gogol also interrupted the thought in The Government Inspector. It is given as a hint, as an idea of ​​what is due and desirable, but not real and realized.

But the main thing is still not in this. We have already said that Russian comedy before Gogol was distinguished not so much by the triumph of justice in the finale, but by the heterogeneity of two worlds: the exposed and the one that was implied behind the scenes. A happy ending flowed from the existence of the "big world". It might not have been within the scope of the stage action (for example, in Yabed, the punishment of vice is incomplete: Pravolov is captured and imprisoned; but the officials have not yet been convicted), but all the same, it was implied as a possibility.

In Gogol there is no ideally implied world. The intervention of a higher, just, punishing power does not follow from the heterogeneity of the worlds. It comes from outside, suddenly and at once overtakes all the characters.

Let's take a closer look at the outline of the silent scene.

In "Remarks ..." Gogol draws attention to the integrity and instantaneous actions of the characters in a silent scene. "The last spoken word must produce an electrical shock all at once, all of a sudden. The whole group must change position in one blink of an eye. The sound of amazement must go out from all women together, as if from one breast. From non-observance of these remarks, the whole effect may disappear.

We note further that the circle of characters expands at the end of the play to the limit. A lot of people gathered at Gorodnichiy - the extraordinary events that culminated in Khlestakov's "matchmaking" probably raised from their places and those who, using the expression from "Dead Souls", for a long time "could not have been lured out of the house ...". And now they were all struck by the terrible news of the arrival of a real auditor.

However, no matter how large the group of characters in the final scenes, there is no "merchants and citizenship." The real motivation for this is simple: they are no match for Gorodnichy. Only the highest circles of the city gathered. In the graphic outline of the silent scene (which Gogol thought out to the details) there is also a “hierarchical shade”: in the middle is the Governor, next to him, on the right, his family; then on both sides - officials and honorary persons in the city; "other guests" - at the very edge of the stage and in the background.

In a word, the silent scene graphically represents the top of the pyramid of the "prefabricated city". The blow fell on its highest point and, losing some of its strength, spread to the lower "layers of the pyramid." The pose of each character in the silent scene plastically conveys the degree of shock, the force of the blow received. There are many shades here - from the Gorodnichiy, frozen "in the form of a pillar with outstretched arms and his head thrown back," to other guests who "remain just pillars." (The character's character and behavior during the action were also reflected in his posture; it is natural, for example, that Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky froze with "rushing hand movements to each other, gaping mouths and bulging Each other eyes.)

But on the face of the three ladies, the guests, only “the most satirical expression” was reflected in the address of the “Gorodnichiy family”. What will it be like for you now, my dears? their posture seems to say. In general, among the guests striving (in a silent scene) to “look into the face of the Governor”, ​​there were probably those who personally had nothing to fear. But they also froze at the terrible news.

Here we come to the most important "color" of the final scene, to the fact that it expresses petrification, moreover universal petrification. In “An Excerpt from a Letter...” Gogol wrote: “... the last scene will not be successful until they understand that this is just a dumb picture, that all this should represent one petrified group, that the drama ends here and is replaced by numb facial expressions ... that all this must take place under the same conditions that the so-called living pictures"(In the latter case - Gogol's italics).

Petrification had a long-standing, more or less stable meaning in Gogol's poetics. Since we will specifically talk about this in relation to the entire work of Gogol (in Chapter VII), we will now limit ourselves to literally one or two examples. At the Sorochinskaya Fair, when a “terrible pig's face” appeared in the window, “horror seized everyone in the hut. Kum with his mouth open turned into a stone. In The Night Before Christmas, when a clerk was found in the sack instead of the expected palyany, sausage, etc., "the godfather's wife, dumbfounded, let go of her leg, by which she began to pull the clerk out of the sack."

In both cases, petrification expresses a special, higher form of fear caused by some strange, incomprehensible event. In "Portrait" (edition of "Arabesques"), Gogol defined this feeling as follows: "Some kind of wild feeling, not fear, but that inexplicable sensation that we feel when strangeness, representing disorder of nature or, better to say, some madnessnature...»

So, petrification and fear (in its special, highest form) are connected in Gogol's artistic thinking. This sheds light on the genesis of the silent scene in The Inspector General.

It is quite possible that the playwright wanted to lead with a silent scene to the idea of ​​retribution, the triumph of state justice. This is evidenced not only by the author's commentary on the finale, but by the well-known concretization of the very image of a real auditor. However, he expressed this idea by means of fear and petrification.

No, the silent scene is not an additional denouement, not an appendage to the comedy. This is the last, final chord of the piece. And it is very characteristic that it completes both tendencies of The Inspector General: on the one hand, the desire for universality and wholeness, and on the other hand, elements of "mirage", "mirage intrigue".

In a silent scene, the universality of the characters' experiences, the integrity of human life, receives a plastic expression. The degree of shock is different - it increases along with the "guilt" of the characters, that is, their position on the hierarchical ladder. Their poses are varied - they convey all sorts of shades of characters and personal properties. But one feeling shackled all. This feeling is fear. Just as in the course of the play, fear entered into the most diverse experiences of the characters, so now the stamp of a new, higher fear fell on the physiognomy and postures of each character, regardless of whether he was weighed down by personal “guilt”, a crime, or whether he had the opportunity to look "satirically" on Gorodnichiy, that is, on the deeds and misdeeds of another.

Because with all the fragmentation and disintegration of people in modern life, humanity, - Gogol believes, - is united by a single destiny, a single "face of time".

Further. From the universality of the shock of the characters, Gogol threw a bridge to the universality of the same experiences of the audience. “The theater is by no means a trifle and not at all an empty thing, if you take into account the fact that a crowd of five, six thousand people can suddenly fit in it, and that this whole crowd, in no way similar to itself, when disassembled by units, can suddenly shake with one shock sob with only tears and laugh with one universal laugh"(“About the theater, about a one-sided view of the theater and, in general, about one-sidedness”). The universality of the reaction is a special sign of the extraordinary experience of the audience, corresponding to the significance of what is happening on the stage. However, this is an indication that only together people can withstand hard times, just as - on the stage - all the characters together subject to its damaging effects.

And here we must again pay attention to those lines that were already cited at the beginning of the analysis of The Inspector General - to Gogol's review of The Last Day of Pompeii. Speaking about the fact that Bryullov’s painting “chooses strong crises felt by the whole mass,” the writer explains: “This whole group, which stopped at the moment of impact and expressed thousands of different feelings ...- all this is so powerful, so bold, so harmoniously brought into one, as soon as it could arise in the head of a universal genius. But isn't it true that the silent scene of The Inspector General captured "the whole group" of its heroes, "stopped at the moment of impact"? Isn't this petrification (just like, according to Gogol, the petrification of Bryullov's heroes - a kind of silent scene) a plastic expression of the "strong crisis" felt by modern humanity?

Gogol sensitively caught the tremors that shook the 19th century. He felt the illogicality, the illusiveness, the “mirage” of contemporary life, which made the existence of mankind unstable, prone to sudden crises and catastrophes. And the silent scene formalized and concentrated these sensations in itself.

What a terrible irony is hidden in the silent scene! Gogol gave it at a time when the community of people, caused by the "situation of the auditor", threatened to disintegrate. With the last effort, she had to keep this community - and she did, but instead of people, lifeless corpses turned out to be in her power.

Gogol gave a silent scene as an allusion to the triumph of justice, the establishment of harmony. And as a result, the feeling of disharmony, anxiety, fear from this scene increased many times over. In The Examiner's Denouement, one of the characters states: "This very appearance of a gendarme, who, like some kind of executioner, appears at the door, petrification, which his words suggest to everyone, announcing the arrival of a real auditor, who must exterminate them all, wipe them off the face of the earth, destroy them completely - all it's somehow inexplicably scary!"

In the literature about the "Inspector General" the question is often posed: what will Gorodnichiy and others do with the advent of a new auditor? It is said that with the arrival of the gendarme, everything fell into place and returned to its original position, that the Governor will see the arriving auditor, as he saw them before, and that everything will remain unchanged.

What is true in these remarks is that the result of Gogol's comedy is not an idealization, but an exposure of the foundations of social life, and that, consequently, a new revision (like the previous ones) would not have changed anything. Nevertheless, Gogol's artistic thought is deeper. There is no doubt that the Governor would have deceived if he had retained the ability to deceive. But the finale does not throw the heroes back to their original positions, but, having led them through a chain of upheavals, plunges them into a new state of mind. It is too obvious that in the finale they are finally thrown out of the rut of their usual life, amazed forever, and the duration of the silent scene: “almost a minute and a half”, which Gogol insists on

Ermilov V. The Genius of Gogol. M., Soviet writer, 1959. S. 301.

The silent scene in N.V. Gogol's comedy "The Inspector General" is preceded by the denouement of the plot, Khlestakov's letter is read, and the officials' self-deception becomes clear. At this moment, that which bound the characters throughout the entire stage action, fear, leaves, and the unity of people disintegrates before our eyes. The terrible shock that the news of the arrival of the real auditor produced on everyone again unites people with horror, but this is no longer the unity of living people, but the unity of lifeless fossils. Their muteness and frozen poses show the exhaustion of the heroes in their fruitless pursuit of a mirage. The pose of each character in the silent scene plastically conveys the degree of shock, the force of the blow received. There are many shades here - from the mayor frozen "in the form of a pillar with outstretched arms and his head thrown back" to other guests who "remain just pillars." It is important that the character's character and behavior during the actions were also reflected in his posture, for example, Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky froze with "rushing movements of the hands towards each other, gaping mouths and bulging eyes at each other."

On the stage, the city of spiritual poverty, baseness, stupidity and human pity froze, a picture of squalor, senselessness and ugliness, generated by the police-bureaucratic regime of the Nikolaev era, froze.

It is unlikely that by a real auditor Gogol meant some kind of honest and decent official who would restore justice and legality in the city, punish embezzlement and bribery. This scene has a wide symbolic meaning, it reminds all viewers and readers of the work of their personal responsibility for what is happening to them and around them, speaks of inevitable retribution, which sooner or later overtakes everyone who lives out of conscience, who does not value high title of a person.