Many famous works by Yuri Trofimov are associated with touching images of childhood. In his prose, one feels the unity of thoughts and those that do not repeat, they only complement each other.
From "Students" to "Preliminary Results" Trifonov develops a single motif of his work, he allows themes to grow in his own works, thereby helping them to fulfill their tasks for realistic prose. Trifonov himself said that he "is not interested in the horizontals of literature, but in its verticals," and it is difficult to characterize the general idea of his stories more capaciously than he did.
The protagonist of the story "The House on the Embankment" - time
Trofimov's story "The House on the Embankment" was published in the journal "Friendship of Peoples" in 1976. This work is called the most social novel of the writer, in "The House on the Embankment" Trofimov pursued the goal of depicting the run of a mysterious and irreversible time that changes everything, including ruthlessly changing people and their destinies.
The social orientation of the story is determined by the comprehension of the past and the present, and both of these categories represent an interrelated process. With the plot itself, Trofimov emphasizes that history is created here and now, that history is in every day, and the presence of the past is felt both in the future and in the present.
Many critics say that the key character of the story is time itself, which is both elusive and most conscious of man as a phenomenon. Trofimov describes the time period from the 30s to the 70s, and using the example of the hero Glebov, he shows the power and mystery of time that changes everything.
The image of Glebov
The narrative moves from the present to the past, from the Glebov we know to the twenty-five-year-old guy whom, it would seem, we cannot know. Candidate of Sciences, modern man Glebov most of all does not want to remember his childhood and youth, but it is during this period that his author returns.
And Glebov's face is complemented by new features and nuances that, for our eyes, were already hidden in wrinkles. Why is the title of the story so simple and unambiguous?
The answer to this question, first of all, lies in the values of Glebov, for him the house is a symbol of owning something, a symbol of becoming; sustainable and stable life, which has its own ideal home.
Being young, he even experiences an evil and unworthy joy that someone else loses his home, this is proof for him that life is changeable, and unfortunately, this gives him a deceptive hope that if he has something now No, it will be mandatory in the future.
This is how the law of the passage of time appears to him. And the house is the main symbol of the story, its very location tells about the key meaning of the story. The house stands on the edge of the land, the house is located near the sea, and over time the house collapses, it goes under water.
The destructive power of time also affects the inhabitants of the house, their lives change dramatically or even end. And only it seems to Glebov that he survived, he not only survived, he achieved the heights he dreamed of. And he tries not to remember what happened, so it is easier for him to believe that nothing happened.
There is, there is some symbolism in the dates of the sadly short life of the Soviet classic Yuri Trifonov (1925-1981). The earthly existence of the writer completely fit into the years of the intrepid existence of the Soviet regime.
This circumstance, as well as lifetime fame, played a cruel joke on him for some time. At the end of the 80s, his prose, firmly connected with the realities of the "scoop", went into a deep shadow. No one wanted to go back to the "scoop", and few people longed to remember the "scoop". But here is the pendulum of history measured back. It seems to be (but only sort of!) the forms of social life and consciousness of the Soviet times are being revived. One party, one truth (not yet a newspaper), attempts to give birth through “I can’t” an ideological platform common to the whole society Even the beau monde began to collect creations of “socialist realism”, however, imitating the naturally liberated West in this
Reader sympathies seem to have turned to the half-forgotten Soviet literary classics.
So I, following in the general flow, undertook to re-read Yury Trifonov's House on the Embankment this summer.
And, to be honest, I have no regrets. Although all the so-called "urban prose" of the 70s remained in the memory of some faceless gray quarters of Brezhnevka and Khrushchev.
So, re-reading Trifonov captured! It has long been noticed that all the work of this writer is one incessant monologue, involuntarily broken by dams and dams of conditional literary forms. It seems that the traditional “Chekhovian” narrative, in which he seems to feel so free, becomes not entirely adequate, cramped to those meanings, to that worldview that the writer discovers, sometimes constrained by the rules of the literary game of his time. (At the same time, you understand why, behind the traditional Dubliners, Joyce naturally arose Ulysses. The author’s consciousness refused to play smooth “objectivity” with the real and began to sculpt the world from the cacophony of its signals, emphasizing precisely this cacophony, this chaos, as the only one accessible to individual consciousness line of being).
Trifonov stopped at this border, preferring (quite in the spirit of the then Soviet still "literary-centric" life) fidelity to the literary tradition, but fidelity, as it sometimes seems to me, is somewhat forced.
Yes, the depth of Trifonov's prose is not standard for the Soviet 70s; At the socio-historical level, the writer is trying to restore the connection of times, the connection of generations, which was artificially cut several times from above. And at the level of fiction, the writer, somewhat contradictory (in my opinion), seeks to extricate himself from the glossy “grand style” of Soviet literature. However, in this last one he moves, I said, not forward, towards modern forms, but restores (in The House on the Embankment, for sure) tracing papers of Russian classics with considerable artistic damage for the work (again, for my taste, of course).
The characters and the basic moral conflict of "House" have something in common with the characters and conflict of "Crime and Punishment". But here's what's curious: Dostoevsky elevated all problems to the universal level, although the characters in his novel are completely private people, outcasts of the then society.
The characters of Trifonov's "House" live in a much more "heroic era" (30-50s of the 20th century), and are by no means the last people in this life. However, how much smaller are their souls, their conflicts and moral compromises, how petty are their problems!
This colossal enlargement of the era and at the same time the refinement of man (together with the devaluation of the human personality and life itself) is stated by Trifon in plain text: “ that tormented Dostoevsky everything is allowed if there is nothing but a room with spiders exists to this day in an insignificant worldly design.”
Oh, these “eternal” eternal “Dostoevsky questions”! I remember how embarrassing and even disgusting it was to read all these Dostoevsky quilted intellectual worthless arguments about morality, conscience, “baby tears” (and now even more often about God). In addition to self-satisfied, not obliging to anything real in life, empty talk and ritual squats in front of a dead literary tradition, there is nothing in this, it seems to me.
We, the “eight-greaters”, are “cynics”, but cynics, only because we are distrustful and unpretentious. We firmly learned: pathos is that verbal fog from which bloody devils appear on the stage.
We are lucky to see it all. Paphos that has not justified itself historically becomes false, deceitful and poisonous pathos. And only time will tell how "deadly" it is.
In The House on the Embankment, Chekhov and Dostoevsky traditions are intricately intertwined. Intertwined quite contradictory.
Why, the contradiction lives between these traditions themselves. Chekhov, as you know, after reading Dostoevsky remarked: "Good, but immodest." Obviously, he considered the scale of self-expression of Dostoevsky's heroes exaggerated. Indeed, Dostoevsky's characters collide with each other like iron balls in empty space. Everything that is landscape, interior, everyday circumstances (which have not yet assumed a fatal, stable neurotic form), everything that in real life anyone relates to and evaluates, all this is “pumped out” from the artistic space of Dostoevsky’s texts. That is why the heroes encounter such a crash and roar, and so, generally speaking, arbitrarily. The natural barriers of real life have been removed between them.
With Chekhov, everything is exactly the opposite: his characters wither, bog down and drown in the stream of life, in a stream that is powerful and indifferent at the same time.
Trifonov crosses both traditions, and as a result the reader receives a somewhat strange text, where the irrefutable "truth of life" and literary convention (sometimes demonstrative, ironic, scornful) coexist with varying degrees of artistic justification.
The reason for this risky hybrid is expressed by one of Trifonov’s heroes, Professor Ganchuk (who, however, suffers from “vulgar sociologism”): “There (in the world of Dostoevsky’s heroes, V.B.) everything is much clearer and simpler, because there was an open social conflict. And now a person does not fully understand what he is doing Therefore, a dispute with himself The conflict goes deep into a person that's what happens.
Young then, in the 70s, V. Makanin, R. Kireev seized on this idea, in any case, it seems, they shared it in full. But they didn’t find anything inside their sourish “antiheroes”, except for the “room with spiders” (and even that is typical, concrete-block, dull).
In Yu. Trifonov's close interest not only in the late Soviet "today", but also in the revolutionary "yesterday", there is the persistence of a catcher who has seized significant prey.
The result of the catch including in the House on the Embankment. Trifonov identifies two types of interaction between man and society: the "Dostoevsky" social walk-field, in which a person, if not, then at least feels himself the demiurge of his own destiny, and "Chekhov's" "river of life", in which a person swims almost involuntarily and always mentally or physically drowning. Both types of heroes and their relationship with society (and fate) coexist simultaneously, but the social "now" makes one of them dominant.
Moreover, the sage Trifonov does not give priority to any of them. Ganchuk, with his revolutionary recklessness and breadth of social naivety (“In five years, all Soviet people will have dachas,” they were told this around 1948!) is just as merciless to his opponents as the representative of the second model, Vadka Baton (his mottos: “ Come what may" and "What can we do, unfortunate Lilliputians? ..")
Periodically, the "river of life" freezes into a kind of social system with its own rigid hierarchy. The house of exemplary life (for the elite) becomes its symbol. House on the embankment.
However, the fate of its inhabitants testifies that the river of life is very sensitively gushing, and even in that early Soviet version of the 30s, it was not at all inclined to external crystallization.
The terrible fluidity (into exile and death) of the inhabitants of the House on the Embankment accustoms the witness to social opportunism and fatalism. From here it is a stone's throw to the "cynical" postmodern "knowing-all" when any social myth is denied in advance its total meaning and absolute "truth".
But Trifonov subtly reveals the SPECIFICITY of the Soviet system. It surprisingly combines the superhuman (in essence, anti-human) force of circumstances and the tracing papers of social behavior that are characteristic of the “Dostoevsky phase”. Oh no: Vadka Baton will not just sit out on his sofa, as Chekhov's "gloomy people" could afford it. The direct heir to the pathos of revolutionary uncompromisingness, the Soviet system ULTIMATICALLY DEMANDS active support for any of its actions. It not only suppresses a person, but also makes him welcome this suppression, involving him in a game on the principles of mutual responsibility and common guilt (and, therefore, the abolition of individual responsibility), turning life into a kind of simulacrum, by no means, however, speculative.
True, true to the humanistic traditions of Russian literature. Trifonov somehow not very convincingly passes into the register of personal moral choice.
N-yes, the eternal pitiful babble of the infinitely steadfast, morally strong Sonechka de Marmaladoff
Unfortunately for himself, Trifonov is too socially picturesque, too socially plastic for such a transition from the obviously public to the unsteady personal to convince the reader.
HOPELESS, this is the feeling that the reader takes out of Trifonov's story. Including the hopelessness of the attempt of a remarkable writer to artistically and convincingly "preserve" one hundred percent convincingly within the framework of the domestic literary tradition (or rather, its "general line").
Of course, in the "dark kingdom" of "House on the Embankment" is full of "rays of light." This is according to a stable racial tradition and female images, and the young genius Anton Ovchinnikov. However, they exist, as it were, outside the field of life, the social game.
In general, I noticed that when reading Soviet classics, one gets the feeling that a mop with a dirty rag was suddenly lowered into a bucket of spring water. This mop, which turns water into garbage, is by no means the result of the pressure of vigilant Soviet censorship. Often this is the result of the author's consciousness being clouded by the illusion of the historical perspective of his native fatherland and all progressive humanity.
In this sense, Trifonov's prose is already socially quite sober.
But I will honestly repeat: and quite about these very prospects, alas, hopeless, it seems that the author himself is afraid of his insights.
Composition
In the artistic world of Yuri Trifonov (1925 - 1981), a special place has always been occupied by images of childhood - the time of personality formation. Starting from the very first stories, childhood and youth were the criteria by which the writer seemed to test reality for humanity and justice, or rather, for inhumanity and injustice. Dostoevsky's famous words about the "teardrop of a child" can be put as an epigraph to all of Trifonov's work: "the scarlet, oozing flesh of childhood" - as the story "House on the Embankment" says. Vulnerable, we add. To the question of the questionnaire "Komsomolskaya Pravda" in 1975 about what kind of loss at the age of sixteen was the worst, Trifonov answered: "The loss of parents."
From story to story, from novel to novel, this shock, this trauma, this pain threshold of his young heroes passes - the loss of their parents, dividing their life into unequal parts: an isolated and prosperous childhood and immersion in the common suffering of "adult life".
He began to print early, early became a professional writer; but the reader really discovered Trifonov from the beginning of the 70s. He opened it and accepted it, because he recognized himself - and was hurt to the core. Trifonov created his own world in prose, which was so close to the world of the city in which we live that sometimes readers and critics forgot that this was literature, and not reality, and treated his characters as their immediate contemporaries.
Trifonov's prose is distinguished by internal unity. Theme with variations. For example, the theme of the exchange runs through all of Trifonov's works, up to the "Old Man". In the novel "Time and Place" all Trifonov's prose is outlined - from "Students" to "Exchange", "Long Farewell", "Preliminary Results"; there you can find all Trifonov's motifs. “The repetition of topics is the development of the task, its growth,” Marina Tsvetaeva noted. So with Trifonov - the topic went deeper and deeper, went in circles, returned, but on a different level. “I am not interested in the horizontal lines of prose, but in its vertical lines,” Trifonov remarked in one of his last stories.
Whatever material he turned to, be it modernity, the time of the civil war, the 30s of the twentieth century or the 70s of the nineteenth, he faced, first of all, the problem of the relationship between the individual and society, and therefore their mutual responsibility. Trifonov was a moralist - but not in the primitive sense of the word; not a hypocrite or a dogmatist, no - he believed that a person is responsible for his actions, which make up the history of a people, a country; and society, the collective cannot, does not have the right to neglect the fate of the individual. Trifonov perceived modern reality as an era and persistently searched for the reasons for the change in public consciousness, stretching the thread farther and farther - into the depths of time. Trifonov was characterized by historical thinking; he subjected each specific social phenomenon to analysis, referring to reality as a witness and historian of our time and a person who is deeply rooted in Russian history, inseparable from it. While "village" prose was looking for its roots and origins, Trifonov was also looking for his "soil". “My soil is everything that Russia has suffered!” - Trifonov himself could subscribe to these words of his hero. Indeed, this was his soil, in the fate and suffering of the country his fate took shape. Moreover: this soil began to nourish the root system of his books. The search for historical memory unites Trifonov with many contemporary Russian writers. At the same time, his memory was also his "home", family memory - a purely Moscow trait - inseparable from the memory of the country.
Yuri Trifonov, as well as other writers, as well as the entire literary process as a whole, of course, was influenced by time. But in his work, he not only honestly and truthfully reflected certain facts of our time, our reality, but sought to get to the bottom of the causes of these facts.
The problem of tolerance and intolerance runs through, perhaps, almost all of Trifonov's "late" prose. The problem of trial and condemnation, moreover, of moral terror is posed in The Students, and in The Exchange, and in The House on the Embankment, and in the novel The Old Man.
Trifonov's story "The House on the Embankment", published by the magazine "Friendship of Peoples" (1976, No. 1), is perhaps his most social thing. In this story, in its sharp content, there was more "novel" than in many swollen multi-page works, proudly labeled by their authors as "novels".
The novel in Trifonov's new story was, first of all, the socio-artistic exploration and understanding of the past and present as an interrelated process. In an interview that followed the publication of “House on the Embankment”, the writer himself explained his creative task in this way: “To see, depict the passage of time, understand what it does to people, how it changes everything around ... Time is a mysterious phenomenon, understand and imagine it in this way it’s hard to imagine infinity… But time is what we bathe in daily, every minute… I want the reader to understand: this mysterious “time connecting thread” passes through us, that this is the nerve of history.” In a conversation with R. Schroeder, Trifonov emphasized: “I know that history is present in every day today, in every human destiny. It lies in wide, invisible, and sometimes quite clearly visible layers in everything that forms the present ... The past is present both in the present and in the future.
Time in "House on the Embankment" determines and directs the development of the plot and the development of characters, people appear in time; time is the main director of events. The prologue of the story is frankly symbolic and immediately determines the distance: “... the shores are changing, mountains are receding, forests are thinning and flying around, the sky is darkening, cold is coming, you have to hurry, hurry - and there is no strength to look back at what has stopped and froze, like a cloud at the edge of the sky." This is an epic time, unbiased to whether the “throwers with their hands” will emerge in its indifferent stream.
The main time of the story is social time, on which the characters of the story feel their dependence. This is the time that, taking a person into submission, as if frees the person from responsibility, the time for which it is convenient to blame everything. “It’s not Glebov’s fault, and not the people,” Glebov’s cruel internal monologue, the main character of the story, goes on, “but the times. So let him not say hello from time to time. ” This social time is able to drastically change the fate of a person, elevate him or drop him to where now, thirty-five years after the "reign" at school, a man who has sunk to the bottom, drunk in the literal and figurative sense of the word, is squatting on his haunches. Trifonov considers the time from the end of the 30s to the beginning of the 50s not only as a certain era, but also as a nutritious soil that has formed such a phenomenon of our time as Vadim Glebov. The writer is far from pessimism, he does not fall into pink optimism: a person, in his opinion, is an object and - at the same time - the subject of an era, that is, it forms it.
From the burning summer of 1972, Trifonov returns Glebov to those times that Shulepnikov still “greeted”.
Trifonov moves the narrative from the present to the past, and from modern Glebov restores Glebov twenty-five years ago; but through one layer the other intentionally shines through. The portrait of Glebov is deliberately doubled by the author: “Almost a quarter of a century ago, when Vadim Aleksandrovich Glebov was not yet bald, full, with breasts like a woman’s, with thick thighs, with a big belly and sagging shoulders ... when he was not yet tormented by heartburn in the morning, dizziness, a feeling of weakness all over the body, when his liver was working normally and he could eat fatty foods, not very fresh meat, drink as much wine and vodka as he liked, without fear of consequences ... when he was quick on his feet, bony, with long hair, in round glasses, in appearance resembled a commoner of the seventies ... in those days ... he himself was unlike himself and unprepossessing, like a caterpillar.
Trifonov visibly, in detail, down to physiology and anatomy, to the “livers”, shows how time flows through a heavy liquid through a person who looks like a vessel with a missing bottom, connected to the system; how it changes the structure; shines through the caterpillar from which the time of today's Glebov nurtured - a doctor of sciences, comfortably settled in life. And, reversing the action a quarter of a century ago, the writer, as it were, stops the moment.
From the result, Trifonov returns to the cause, to the roots, to the origins of the “Glebovshchina”. He returns the hero to what he, Glebov, hates most in his life and what he does not want to remember now - to childhood and youth. And the view "from here", from the 70s, allows you to remotely consider not random, but regular features, allows the author to focus on the image of the time of the 30s - 40s.
Trifonov limits the artistic space. Basically, the action takes place on a small patch between a tall gray house on Bersenevskaya Embankment, a gloomy, gloomy building, similar to a modernized bastion, built in the late 1920s for senior workers (Shulepnikov lives there with his stepfather, Professor Ganchuk's apartment is located there), - and a nondescript two-story house in the Deryuginsky Compound, where the Glebov family lives.
Two houses and a playground between them form a whole world with its characters, passions, relationships, contrasting social life. The big gray house blacking out the alley is multistoried. Life in it, too, seems to be stratified, following a floor-by-floor hierarchy. Modern life - with family quarrels and troubles, pregnancies, scarves, commission shops and grocery stores not only highlights the past, but also enriches it, gives a sense of the real flow of life. Historical, "everyday" problems are impossible in a vacuum; and everyday life is the air in which memory lives, history lives; the everyday life of modern life is not only a springboard for memories.
The house on the embankment is outwardly motionless, but not stable. Everything in it is in a state of intense internal movement, struggle. “Everyone scattered from that house, who goes where,” Shulepnikov says to Glebov, having met with him after the war. Some are evicted from home, like the lyrical hero of the story: the scene of departure is one of the key ones in the story: it is a change in social status, and farewell to childhood, growing up; a turning point, a transition to another world - the hero is no longer at home, but not yet in a new place, in the rain, in a truck.
A big house and a small one define the boundaries of Glebov's social claims and migrations. Since childhood, he has been overwhelmed by a thirst to achieve another position - not a guest. And the owner in a big house. Those memories through which the young heroes of the story pass through are connected with the house on the embankment and with the Deryuginsky Compound. The tests, as it were, portend something serious that the children will have to experience later: separation from their parents, difficult conditions of military life, death at the front.
The collapse of someone else's life brings Glebov evil joy: Although he himself has not yet achieved anything, others have already lost their homes. So, not everything is so tightly fixed in this life, and Glebov has hope! It is the house that defines the values of human life for Glebov. And the path that Glebov goes through in the story is the path to the house, to the vital territory that he longs to capture, to the higher social status that he wants to acquire. He feels the inaccessibility of the big house extremely painfully: “Glebov was not very willing to visit the guys who lived in the big house, not only reluctantly, he went with pleasure, but also with apprehension, because the elevator operators in the entrances always looked with apprehensively and asked: “To whom are you?” Glebov felt like an intruder caught red-handed. And it was almost never possible to know what they would answer in the apartment ... "
Returning to his place, in the Deryuginsky Compound, Glebov, "excited, described which chandelier was in the dining room of the Shulepnikov apartment, and which corridor along which you could ride a bicycle."
Glebov's father, a hardened and experienced man, is a staunch conformist. The main rule of life that he teaches Glebov - caution - also has the character of "spatial self-restraint:" My children, follow the tram rule - do not lean out! The hermetic wisdom of the father was born from a "long-standing and indelible fear" of life.
The conflict in the "House on the Embankment" between the "decent" Ganchuks, who treat everything with a "tinge of secret superiority", and Druzyaev - Shireiko, to whom Glebov internally adjoins, changing Ganchuk to Druzyaev, as if on a new round, returns the conflict of "Exchange" - between the Dmitrievs and the Lukyanovs. In this conflict, it would seem that Glebov is located exactly in the middle, at a crossroads, he can turn around this way and that. But Glebov does not want to decide anything; it seems that fate decides everything for him: on the eve of the performance, which Druzyaev so demands from Glebov, Nila's grandmother dies - an inconspicuous, quiet old woman with a tuft of yellow hair on the back of her head. And everything is decided by itself: Glebov does not have to go anywhere.
The house on the embankment disappears from Glebov's life, the house, which seemed so strong, actually turned out to be fragile, not protected from anything, it stands on the embankment, on the very edge of land, near the water; and this is not just a random location, but a symbol deliberately chosen by the writer. The house goes under the water of time, like some kind of Atlantis, with its heroes, passions, conflicts: “the waves closed over it” - these words addressed by the author to Levka Shulepnikov can be attributed to the whole house. One by one, its inhabitants disappear from life: Anton and Himius died in the war; the elder Shulepnikov was found dead under unclear circumstances; Yulia Mikhailovna died, Sonya first ended up in a house for the mentally ill and also died ... "The house collapsed."
With the disappearance of the house, Glebov also deliberately forgets everything, not only surviving this flood, but also reaching new prestigious heights precisely because he “tried not to remember. What was not remembered ceased to exist. He lived then "a life that did not exist," emphasizes Trifonov.
The story "The House on the Embankment" became a turning point for the writer in many respects. Trifonov sharply re-emphasizes the previous motives, finds a new type, not previously studied in the literature, generalizing the social phenomenon of "Glebovshchina", analyzes social changes through a single human personality. The idea has finally found an artistic embodiment. After all, Sergei Troitsky's reasoning about man as the thread of history can also be attributed to Glebov: he is the thread that stretched from the 30s into the 70s. The historical view of things developed by the writer in "Impatience", on material close to modernity, gives a new artistic result: Trifonov becomes a historian - a chronicler, testifying to modernity.
But not only this is the role of "House on the Embankment" in the work of Trifonov. In this story, the writer subjected to a critical rethinking of his "beginning" - the story "Students".
Memory or oblivion - this is how you can define the deep conflict of the novel "The Old Man", which followed the story "The House on the Embankment". In the novel "The Old Man" Trifonov combined the genre of the urban story and the genre of historical narrative into one whole. chess storytelling.
Memory, which Professor Ganchuk refuses, becomes the main content of the life of Pavel Yevgrafovich Letunov, the protagonist of the novel The Old Man. Memory stretches the thread from the suffocating summer of 1972 to the hot time of the revolution and civil war. Joy and self-punishment, pain and immortality - all this is combined in memory, if it comes in the light of conscience. Pavel Evgrafovich is already on the edge of the abyss, he has come to the end of his life, and his memory reveals what the cunning consciousness could previously hide or hide. The narration of the novel moves in two layers of time, embodied in two stylistic streams. The action takes place in a holiday village, in an old wooden house, where Pavel Evgrafovich Letunov lives with his extended family. The domestic conflict of the novel in the present tense is a conflict with neighbors in the dacha cooperative, connected with obtaining a vacant country house. Fifty-year-old children insist that Pavel Evgrafovich show some efforts to master the new "living space". “I'm tired of our eternal blissful begging. Why should we live worse than everyone, more crowded than everyone, more pitiful than everyone? The question rises to almost "moral" heights. “Keep in mind,” the children threaten, “there will be sin on your conscience. You think about peace of mind, not about grandchildren. But they live, not you and me. All this happens because Pavel Evgrafovich refused to carry out their order “to talk with the chairman of the board about this unfortunate house of Agrafena Lukinichna. But he could not, could not, finally and irrevocably could not. How could he?.. Against the memory of Galya? It seems to them that if the mother is not alive, it means that she has no conscience. And everything starts from scratch.
“Memory from the deepest depths”, which suddenly flooded over Letunov after receiving a letter from Asya, with whom he was in love in a hot revolutionary time, this memory opposes a purely topical and very popular life concept like “Everything starts from scratch”. No, nothing passes, nothing disappears. The act of remembering becomes an ethical, moral act. Although this memory will have its own specific problems and characteristic failures - but more on that later.
Since the two main lines of the novel are connected by the life and memory of Letunov, the novel seems to follow the twists and turns of his memory; the epic beginning is closely intertwined with Letunov's internal monologue about the past and, on his behalf, the ongoing lyrical digressions.
Trifonov, as it were, inserts into the novel the tried and tested genre of the "Moscow" story, with all its motives, the old complex of problems - but he illuminates everything with that tragic historical background against which the current melodramatic passions boil around the ill-fated house. Serebryany Bor, a dacha near Moscow, is a favorite setting for Trifonov's prose. Children's fears and children's love, the first trials and losses in life - all this is enshrined in the mind of Trifonov in the image of the dacha village Sokoliny Bor near Moscow, the Red Partizan cooperative, somewhere not far from the Sokol metro station; a place where you can arrive by trolley bus - Trifonov needs precise topography here, just as in the case of the gray house on Bersenevskaya embankment near the Udarnik cinema.
Time in the village goes not by years and epochs, but by hours and minutes. The lessons of Letunov’s children and grandchildren are momentary, and he himself goes for dinner with ships, fearing to be late, gets it, drinks tea, hears how the children, killing time, play cards, engage in useless and leading nowhere chatter - live their lives. Sometimes disputes break out on a historical topic that are not of vital importance to the debaters - so, scratching the tongues, another round in a waste of time.
Is it possible to justify the actions of a person at times? That is, is it possible to hide behind the times, and then, when they pass, “do not say hello” to them, as the resourceful Glebov suggested?
This is the main, pivotal theme and pivotal problem of the novel The Old Man. What is a person - is it a sliver of circumstances, a plaything of the elements or an active personality capable of at least to some extent pushing the “frames of time”, influencing the historical process? “Man is doomed, time triumphs,” Trifonov remarked bitterly. “But it doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter!” This "doesn't care", stubbornly repeated twice, this "but", stubbornly resisting"! What is "whatever"? “...Despite the dangers, we must remember - here is the only possibility of competition with time” - this is how the writer answered the question about the doom of human efforts.
History and time have power over Letunov, dictate their will to him, but fate, as it seems to Letunov, could turn out completely differently: “An insignificant little thing, like a slight turn of an arrow, throws a locomotive from one track to another, and instead of Rostov you end up in Warsaw ... I was a boy drunk with mighty time.
It should be noted that here the motive of the train, persistent for Trifonov's prose, appears, symbolizing the fate of the hero. “The train is an allegory of life for Y. Trifonov. If the hero jumped on the train, it means that he had time, life was a success,” writes I. Zolotogussky. But this train is still not an allegory of life, but an illusion of choice, with which its heroes console themselves. So it seems to Letunov that the train could turn to Warsaw; in fact, he inevitably (“lava”, “flow”) follows his elemental path, dragging the hero along with him.
Letunov feels his subordination to the burning stream. This subordination reminds him of powerlessness in the face of death - also controlled by the elements. At the bedside of his mother, who was dying of pneumonia in the hungry January 1918, he thinks: “Nothing can be done. You can kill a million people, overthrow a tsar, start a great revolution, blow up half the world with dynamite, but you can’t save one person.” And, nevertheless, the path to the revolution and the path to the revolution were chosen by people; and Trifonov shows different roads, different destinies, in general, and shaped the time - what seems to be an element, a stream. Trifonov analyzes the behavior and capabilities of a person within the historical process, traces the dialectic of the relationship between personality and history.
Shura, Alexander Danilovich Pimenov, a crystal-clear Bolshevik (an ideal revolutionary for Trifonov), carefully delves into the essence of the matter connected with people's lives. “Shura tries to object: it can be difficult to make out who is a counter-revolutionary and who is not ... Each case must be carefully checked, because it is about the fate of people ...” But people like Shura are surrounded by completely different people: Shigontsev, a man with a skull resembling unbaked bread ; Braslavsky, who wants to “go through Carthage” on the hot land: “Do you know why a revolutionary court was established? For the punishment of the enemies of the people, and not for doubts and trials. Shigontsev and Braslavsky also “rely” on history, imagine themselves to be historical figures: “do not be afraid of blood! Milk serves as food for children, and blood is food for the children of freedom, said the deputy Julien ... "
But Shura, and Trifonov along with him, tests historical justice at the cost of the life of a single person. So Shura is trying to cancel the execution of the hostages and the local teacher Slaboserdov, who warns the revolutionaries against careless actions to fulfill the lowered directive. Braslavsky and others like him immediately decide to let Slaboserdov go to waste; Shura does not agree.
Revolutionary and historical justice is being tested on the Weak-Hearted. “Shura whispers: “Why don’t you see, poor fools, what will happen tomorrow? Buried their foreheads in today. And our sufferings are for the sake of another, for the sake of tomorrow…” True historical consciousness is inherent in Shura; Shigontsev and Braslavsky do not see the prospects for their actions, and therefore are doomed. They, like Kandaurov (in their own way, of course), are fixed only in the current moment and are now going “to the stop”, without thinking about the past (about the history of the Cossacks, which must not be forgotten, which is what Slaboheartdov says.
History and man, revolutionary necessity - and the price of human life. The heroes of Trifonov, who are directly involved in the revolution and the civil war, are heroes - ideologists who build the concept of man and history, theorists who put their idea into practice.
Migulin is a most colorful figure, and Trifonov could well put him at the center of the novel. He is really a novel hero - with his tragic fate, an "old man" at forty-seven years old, beloved of nineteen-year-old Asya, who loved him for life. The life of Migulin, a passionate, indomitable man, opposes Kandaurov in the structure of the novel. Kandaurov in the novel is the center of the present; Migulin is the center of the past. The author's merciless trial and death sentence for Kandaurov opposes the trial of Migulin, whose personality, born of history, belongs to history: the controversial figure of Migulin remained in it, although the man died. The tragic irony of life, however, lies precisely in the fact that it is the Migulins who perish, while the Kandaurovs are alive and well. The doom of Kandaurov is, after all, a certain violence of the artist over the truth of life; desire, which Trifonov is trying to pass off as reality.
In the novel, the definition of “old man” is persistently repeated: Migulin is called an old man, an old man at 30 is a convict; the old man - constantly attracting the attention of Trifonov's age; in the old people, in his opinion, experience and time are condensed. In old people, historical time flows into the present: through the “life memories” of old people, Trifonov synthesizes history and modernity: through a single existence on the verge of death, he reveals the essence of historical phenomena and changes. “So many years ... But only for this, perhaps, the days have been extended, for this he was saved, in order to collect from shards, like a vase, and fill it with wine, the sweetest. It's called truth. All the truth, of course, all the years that dragged, flew ... all my losses, labors, all turbines, trenches, trees in the garden, dug holes, people around; everything is true, but there are clouds that sprinkle your garden, and there are storms that thunder over the country, embracing half the world. Everything once whirled like a whirlwind, threw it into the sky, and I never swam in those heights again ... And then what? All lack of time, neglect, short run ... Youth, greed, misunderstanding, enjoying a minute ... My God, but there was never time! S. Eremina and V. Piskunov noted the connection of this motive with another: “no time” - the leitmotif of Kandaurov; there is no time for a balanced decision on Migulin's fate; and only in old age Letunov (the irony of time!) finds time for conscientious work - not only on Migulin: this is just an excuse (albeit tragic) for Pavel Evgrafovich to understand himself to the end. Letunov is convinced that he is dealing with the Migulin case, and he is investigating the Letunov case. In the epilogue of the novel - already after the death of Letunov - a certain graduate student appears - a historian who is writing a dissertation about Migulin. And this is what he thinks about (answering questions about the truth that Letunov constantly asks when asking history): “The truth is that the kindest Pavel Evgrafovich in the twenty-first, when asked by the investigator whether he admits the possibility of participating in a counter-revolutionary uprising, answered sincerely : "I admit", but, of course, I forgot about it, nothing surprising, then everyone or almost everyone thought so ... "
The burning summer of 1972, so realistically written out in detail in the novel, develops into a symbol: “Iron crushed, forests burned. Moscow was dying in suffocation, suffocating from the gray, ashy, brown, reddish, black - at different hours of the day of different colors - haze that filled the streets and houses with a slowly flowing cloud, creeping like fog or poisonous gas, the smell of burning penetrated everywhere, it was possible to escape it is impossible, the lakes have become shallow, the river has bared the stones, the water from the taps barely oozed, the birds did not sing, life has come to an end on this planet, killed by the sun. The picture is both reliable, almost documentary, and generalizing, almost symbolic. The old man is before death, on the verge of non-existence, and the “black and red”, mourning haze of this summer for him is both a harbinger of departure, and a hellish fire that scorches a soul that has betrayed three times. Burning, fire, smoke, not enough air - these natural-emblematic images are persistent in the landscapes of the nineteenth year: "A distinct night terror in the steppe, where the burning of grasses and the smell of wormwood." “And the water became like wormwood, and people die of bitterness,” mutters a deranged seminarian
We can say that Trifonov does not paint a landscape in the usual sense of the word, but a landscape of time. The social landscape in the story "The Exchange" (river bank) or the urban social landscape in "The House on the Embankment" preceded this landscape of time, more precise and - at the same time - more generalized. But there is also a vibrant social landscape in The Old Man. As in "Exchange", this is a landscape of a dacha cooperative village on the river bank. The harsh, fire-breathing time passing through “years filled with red-hot coals and blazing with heat” destroys the children’s dacha idyll, and Trifonov shows the passage of time through the landscape: “The former life collapsed and collapsed, like a sandy shore collapses - with a quiet noise and suddenly. ... The shore collapsed. Along with pine trees, benches, paths strewn with fine gray sand, white dust, cones, cigarette butts, needles, scraps of bus tickets, condoms, hairpins, pennies that fell out of the pockets of those who hugged here once on warm evenings. Everything flew down under the pressure of the water.
The river bank is a persistent Trifon image - an emblem. A house on the bank of a river, on an embankment in a city, or a dacha in the suburbs, as if standing on the banks of an element that can suddenly demolish everything: both the house and the inhabitants. The element of a river, so deceptively quiet, as in the Moscow region, or “black water”, breathing winter steam, in Moscow, can insidiously undermine, bring down an unstable shore - and with it all former life will collapse. “It was a disastrous place, although nothing special in appearance: pines, lilacs, fences, old cottages, a steep bank with benches, which every two years were moved away from the water, because the sandy bank collapsed, and the road, rolled with rough, in small pebbles , tar; the tar was laid in the mid-thirties... On both sides of the Grand Alley stretched plots of new huge dachas, and the pines, enclosed by fences, now creaked with the wind and oozed with a resinous spirit in the heat for someone personally, sort of like musicians invited to play at a wedding. …Yes, yes, it was a bad place. Or rather, a cursed place. Despite all its charms. Because people died here in a strange way: some drowned in the river during their nightly baths, others were struck by a sudden illness, and some took their own lives in the attic of their summer cottages.
Trifonov, as it were, realizes, unfolds in everyday life a metaphor - "to see the time." There are blind people, but there are also people who see it: "Why don't you see, poor fools, what will happen tomorrow?" - says Shura; “how to see the time if you are in it?” - Thinks Letunov, remembering the time when "red foam obscures the eyes." Shigontsev's "look is still the same flaming, satanic" - that is, not seeing, blind in relation to the real historical process, clouded by frenzied fury; about the death of the Trotskyist Braslavsky, whose (talking detail) “By evening, his eyesight was deteriorating,” Shigontsev says: “It’s your own fault, the blind devil!” “A gloomy second” is not only a figurative expression in the text, but also the real blindness of a person before the course of history, the inability to recognize, to discern the essence of historical changes. : "It's your own fault, you blind devil!" “A gloomy second” is not only a figurative expression in the text, but also the real blindness of a person before the course of history, the inability to recognize, to discern the essence of historical changes.
Only blood involvement in history, the novel The Old Man says as a whole, is capable of leading a person beyond the limits of an individual, self-contained existence; only responsibility can save a person from daily night blindness, can make a blind man sighted, otherwise he will “croak” all his life like a frog in a swamp. And in the assertion of this historical responsibility of modern man, which preserves him from the tricks of convenient unconsciousness, lies the pathos of the novel.
The fate of Trifonov's prose can be called happy. It is read by a country where Trifonov's books have collected impressive circulations in thirty years; it is translated and published by East and West, Latin America and Africa. Thanks to the deep social specificity of the person depicted by him and the key moments of Russian history, he became interesting to readers around the world. Whatever Trifonov wrote about - about the People's Will or about the civil war - he wanted to understand our time, convey its problems, reveal the causes of modern social phenomena. Life was perceived by him as a single artistic process, where everything is connected, everything rhymes. And “man is a thread stretching through time, the thinnest nerve of history…”. Yuri Trifonov felt himself to be such a “nerve of history”, responding to pain, and remained for us.
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Trifonov's story "The House on the Embankment", published by the magazine "Friendship of Peoples" (1976, No. 1), is perhaps his most social thing. In this story, in its sharp content, there was more "novel" than in many swollen multi-line works, proudly labeled by their author as "novel".
Time in "House on the Embankment" determines and directs the development of the plot and the development of characters, people appear in time; time is the main director of events. The prologue of the story is frankly symbolic and immediately determines the distance: “... the banks are changing, the mountains are receding, the forests are thinning and flying around, the sky is darkening, cold is coming, you have to hurry, hurry - and there is no strength to look back at what has stopped and froze like a cloud on the edge of the sky” Trifonov Yu.V. Waterfront house. - Moscow: Veche, 2006. P. 7. Further references in the text are given from this edition. . The main time of the story is social time, on which the hero of the story feels his dependence. This is the time that, taking a person into submission, as if frees the person from responsibility, the time for which it is convenient to blame everything. “It’s not Glebov’s fault, and not the people,” Glebov’s cruel internal monologue, the main character of the story, goes on, “but the times. Here is the way with times and does not say hello ”S.9. . This social time can drastically change a person’s fate, elevate him or drop him to where now, 35 years after “reigning” at school, Levka Shulepnikov squats drunk, literally and figuratively sank to the bottom, having lost even his name " Yefim is not Yefim,” Glebov wonders. And in general - he is no longer Shulepnikov, but Prokhorov. Trifonov considers the time from the end of the 30s to the beginning of the 50s not only as a certain era, but also as a nutritious soil that has formed such a phenomenon of our time as Vadim Glebov. The writer is far from pessimism, he does not fall into pink optimism: a person, in his opinion, is the object and - at the same time - the subject of the era, i.e. shapes it.
Trifonov closely follows the calendar, it is important for him that Glebov met Shulepnikov "on one of the unbearably hot August days of 1972", and Glebov's wife carefully scratches out with a childish handwriting on jars of jam: "gooseberry 72", "strawberry 72".
From the burning summer of 1972, Trifonov returns Glebov to those times that Shulepnikov is still “helloing”.
Trifonov moves the narrative from the present to the past, and from modern Glebov restores Glebov of twenty-five years ago; but through one layer another is visible. The portrait of Glebov is deliberately given by the author: “Almost a quarter of a century ago, when Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov was not yet bald, full, with breasts like a woman’s, with thick thighs, with a big belly and sagging shoulders ... when he was not yet tormented by heartburn on in the morning, dizziness, a feeling of bruising all over his body, when his liver was working normally and he could eat fatty foods, not very fresh meat, drink as much wine and vodka as he liked, without fear of consequences ... when he was quick on his feet, bony, with with long hair, in round glasses, he looked like a raznochinets-seventies... in those days... he was unlike himself and unprepossessing, like a caterpillar» p.14. .
Trifonov visibly, in detail down to physiology and anatomy, to the “livers”, shows how time flows through a heavy liquid through a person who looks like a vessel with a missing bottom, connected to the system; how it changes its appearance, its structure; shines through the caterpillar from which the time of today's Glebov has nurtured - a doctor of sciences, comfortably settled in life. And by reversing the action a quarter of a century ago, the writer, as it were, stops the moments.
From the result, Trifonov returns to the cause, to the roots, to the origins of the “Glebovshchina”. He returns the hero to what he, Glebov, hates most in his life and what he does not want to remember now - to childhood and youth. And the view “from here”, from the 70s, allows you to remotely consider not random, but regular features, allows the author to focus his influence on the image of the time of the 30s and 40s.
Trifonov limits the artistic space: the action mainly takes place on a small heel between a tall gray house on Bersenevskaya embankment, a gloomy, gloomy building, similar to modernized concrete, built in the late 1920s for responsible workers (he lives there with his stepfather Shulepnikov, there is an apartment Ganchuk) - and a nondescript two-story house in the Deryuginsky Compound, where the Glebov family lives.
Two houses and a playground between them form a whole world with its characters, passions, relationships, contrasting social life. The big gray house shading the alley is multistoried. Life in it, too, seems to be stratified, following a floor-by-floor hierarchy. It's one thing - the huge apartment of the Shulepnikovs, where you can ride along the corridor almost on a bicycle. The nursery, in which Shulepnikov, the youngest, lives, is a world inaccessible to Glebov, hostile to him; and yet he is drawn there. Shulepnikov's children's room is exotic for Glebov: it is filled with "some kind of terrible bamboo furniture, with carpets on the floor, with bicycle wheels and boxing gloves hanging on the wall, with a huge glass globe that rotated when a light bulb was lit inside, and with an old spyglass on window sill, well fixed on a tripod for the convenience of observations” p.25. . This apartment has soft leather armchairs, deceptively comfortable: when you sit down, you sink to the very bottom, what happens to Glebov when Levka's stepfather interrogates him about who attacked his son Leo in the yard, this apartment even has its own film installation. The Shulepnikovs’ apartment is a special, incredible, according to Vadim, social world, where Shulepnikov’s mother can, for example, poke a cake with a fork and announce that “the cake is stale” - at the Glebovs, on the contrary, “the cake was always fresh”, otherwise there would be no maybe a stale cake is completely ridiculous for the social class to which they belong.
The Ganchuk professorial family lives in the same house on the embankment. Their apartment, their habitat is a different social system, also given through Glebov's perceptions. “Glebov liked the smell of carpets, old books, the circle on the ceiling from a huge lampshade of a table lamp, he liked the walls armored to the ceiling with books and at the very top standing in a row, like soldiers, plaster busts” P.34. .
We go even lower: on the first floor of a large house, in an apartment near the elevator, lives Anton, the most gifted of all boys, not oppressed by the consciousness of his misery, like Glebov. It is no longer easy here - the tests are warningly playful, semi-childish. For example, walk along the outer cornice of the balcony. Or along the granite parapet of the embankment. Or through the Deryuginsky Compound, where the famous robbers rule, that is, the punks from the Glebovsky house. The boys even organize a special society to test the will - TOIV.
What criticism by inertia designates as the everyday background of prose Kertman L. Between the lines of bygone times: rereading Y. Trifonov / L. Kertman // Vopr. lit. 1994. No. 5. P. 77-103 Trifonova, here, in the "House on the Embankment", keeps the plot structure. The objective world is burdened with meaningful social meaning; things do not accompany what is happening, but act; they reflect the destinies of people and influence them. So, we perfectly understand the occupation and position of Shulepnikov, the elder, who arranged a uniform interrogation for Glebov in an office with leather chairs, in which he paces in soft Caucasian boots. So, we accurately imagine the life and rights of the communal apartment in which the Glebov family lives, and the rights of this family itself, paying attention to such, for example, a detail of the real world: grandmother Nina sleeps in the corridor, on a trestle bed, and her idea of happiness is peace and quiet (“so that they don’t clap for days”). The change of fate is directly associated with a change in the environment, with a change in appearance, which in turn determines even the worldview, as the text ironically says in connection with the portrait of Shulepnikov: “Levka has become a different person - tall, forehead, with an early bald spot, with dark red, square, Caucasian mustache, which beat not just the fashion of the time, but denoted character, lifestyle and, perhaps, worldview ”S. 41. . Similarly, a laconic description of the new apartment on Gorky Street, where after the war Levka's mother settled with her new husband, reveals the whole background of the comfortable life of this family - during a difficult war for the life of the whole people: “The decoration of the rooms is somehow noticeably different from the apartment in big house: the luxury of today, more antiquity and a lot of everything on the marine theme. There are sailing models on the cabinet, here the sea is in a frame, there is almost Aivazovsky's sea battle - then it turned out that it really was Aivazovsky ... "S. 50. . And again Glebov is gnawed by the former feeling of injustice: after all, “people sold their last during the war”! His family life contrasts sharply with the life, decorated with Aivazovsky's memorable brush.
The details of the appearance, portraits, and especially the clothes of Glebov and Shulepnikov are also in sharp contrast. Glebov constantly experiences his “patchedness”, nondescriptness. On Glebov's jacket, for example, there is a huge patch, however, very neatly sewn on, which evokes emotion in Sonya, who is in love with him. And after the war, he is again “in his jacket, in a cowboy shirt, in patched trousers” - a poor friend of the bossy stepson, the birthday man of life. "Shulepnikov was wearing a beautiful brown leather American jacket with lots of zippers." Trifonov plastically depicts the natural degeneration of a sense of social inferiority and inequality into a complex mixture of envy and hostility, the desire to become like Shulepnikov in everything - into hatred for him. Trifonov writes the relationship between children and adolescents as social.
Clothing, for example, is the first "home" closest to the human body: the first layer, which separates it from the outside world, shelters the person. Clothing defines social status as much as a house; and that is why Glebov is so jealous of Levka's jacket: for him it is an indicator of a different social level, an inaccessible way of life, and not just a fashionable detail of a toilet, which, in his youth, he would like to have. And the house is a continuation of clothing, the final “finishing” of a person, the materialization of the stability of his status. Let us return to the episode of the departure of the lyrical hero from the house on the embankment. His family is moved somewhere to the outpost, he disappears from this world: “Those who leave this house cease to exist. Shame gnaws at me. It seems to me ashamed to turn out in front of everyone, on the street, the miserable insides of our life. Glebov, nicknamed Baton, walks around like a vulture, looking around at what is happening. He cares about one thing: the house.
“- And that apartment,” Baton asks, “where will you move, what is it like?
“I don't know,” I say.
Baton asks: “How many rooms? Three or four?
“One,” I say.
“And no elevator? Will you walk?" - he is so pleased to ask that he can not hide a smile. p.56
The collapse of someone else's life brings evil joy to Glebov, although he himself did not achieve anything, but others lost their homes. So, not everything is so tightly fixed in this one, and Glebov has hope! It is the house that defines the values of human life for Glebov. And the path that Glebov goes through in the story is the path to the house, to the vital territory that he longs to capture, to the higher social status that he wants to acquire. He feels the inaccessibility of the big house extremely painfully: “Glebov was not very willing to visit the guys who lived in the big house, not only reluctantly, he went with a desire, but also with apprehension, because the elevator operators in the entrances always looked suspiciously and asked: "Who are you?" Glebov felt almost like an intruder caught red-handed. And it was never possible to know that the answer was in the apartment...» P.62. .
Returning to his place, in the Deryuginsky Compound, Glebov “excited, described which chandelier was in the dining room of the Shulepnikov apartment, and which corridor along which one could ride a bicycle.
Glebov's father, a firm and experienced man, is a convinced conformist. The main rule of life that he teaches Glebov - caution - also has the character of "spatial" self-restraint: "My children, follow the tram rule - do not lean out!" And, following his wisdom, my father understands the instability of life in a big house, warning Glebov: “Don’t you really understand that it’s much more spacious to live without your own corridor? ... Yes, I won’t move to that house for a thousand two hundred rubles ... " P.69. . The father understands the instability, the phantasmonic nature of this "stability", he naturally feels fear in relation to the gray house.
The mask of jokes and buffoonery brings Father Glebov closer to Shulepnikov, both of them are Khlestakovs: "They were somewhat similar, father and Levka Shulepnikov." They lie blatantly and shamelessly, getting real pleasure from clownish chatter. “My father said that he saw in Northern India how a fakir was growing a magic tree before his eyes ... And Levka said that his father once captured a gang of fakirs, they were put in a dungeon and they wanted to shoot them like English spies, but when they came to the dungeon in the morning , there was no one there, except for five frogs ... - It was necessary to shoot the frogs, - said the father "S. 71. .
Glebov is seized with a serious, heavy passion, there is no time for jokes, not a trifle, but fate, almost a cancer; his passion is stronger than even his own will: “He did not want to be in a big house, and, however, he went there whenever he was called, or even without an invitation. It was tempting, unusual...» P.73.
That is why Glebov is so attentive and sensitive to the details of the situation, so mindful of the details.
“- I remember your apartment well, I remember that in the dining room there was a huge, mahogany sideboard, and its upper part was held on thin twisted columns. And on the doors there were some oval majolica pictures. Shepherd, cows. Huh? - he says after the war to Shulepnikov's mother.
“- There was such a buffet,” said Alina Fedorovna. - I already forgot about him, but you remember.
Well done! - Levka slapped Glebov on the shoulder. - Infernal observation, colossal memory» P.77. .
Glebov uses everything to achieve his dream, up to the sincere affection for him by Professor Ganchuk's daughter, Sonya. Only at first he inwardly chuckles, can she, a pale and uninteresting girl, really count on this? But after a student party in the Ganchuks' apartment, after Glebov distinctly heard that someone wanted to "dip" in Ganchuk's house, his heavy passion finds a way out - it is necessary to act through Sonya. “... Glebov stayed at night in Sonya's apartment and could not fall asleep for a long time, because he began to think about Sonya in a completely different way ... In the morning he became a completely different person. He realized that he could love Sonya. And when they sat down to have breakfast in the kitchen, Glebov “looked down at the giant bend of the bridge, along which cars were running and the tram was crawling, at the opposite bank with a wall, palaces, fir trees, domes - everything was amazingly picturesque and looked somehow especially fresh and clear from such a height, - he thought that in his life, apparently, a new one was beginning ....
Every day at breakfast to see the palaces from a bird's eye view! And sting all the people, all without exception, who run like ants along the concrete arc down there! P.84.
The Ganchuks not only have an apartment in a big house - they also have a dacha, a "superhouse" in Glebov's understanding, something that further strengthens him in his "love" for Sonya; it was there, in the dacha, that everything finally happened between them: “he was lying on an old-fashioned sofa, with rollers and brushes, throwing his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling, lined with clapboard, darkened with time, and suddenly - a rush of all the blood, up to dizziness - he felt that all this could become his home and maybe even now - no one guesses yet, but he knows - all these yellowed boards with knots, felt, photographs, a creaking window frame, a roof littered with snow belong to him! She was so sweet, half-dead from fatigue, from hops, from all languor ... "S. 88. .
And when, after intimacy, after Sonya's love and confessions, Glebov remains alone in the attic, it is by no means a feeling - at least affection or sexual satisfaction - overwhelms Glebov: he “went up to the window and dissolved it with a blow of his palm. Forest cold and darkness enveloped him, in front of the window a heavy spruce branch blew needles, with a cap of damp - in the darkness it barely glowed - snow.
Glebov stood at the window, breathed, thought: "And this branch is mine!"
Now he is on top, and looking down is a reflection of his new view of people - "ants". But life turned out to be more difficult, more deceptive than Glebov, the winner, imagined; Father, in his tram wisdom, was right about something: Ganchuk, under whom Glebov is writing his thesis, the famous Professor Ganchuk staggered.
And here the main thing happens, no longer a childish, not a comic test of the hero. Those decisions of the test of will, as it were, foreshadowed what would happen next. This was a plot anticipation of the role of Glebov in the situation with Ganchuk.
He remembered: the boys suggested that Glebov join a secret society for testing will, and Glebov was delighted, but answered absolutely wonderfully: “... I am glad to join the TOIV, but he wants to have the right to leave it whenever he wants. That is, he wanted to be a member of our society and not be one at the same time. Suddenly, the extraordinary benefit of such a position was revealed: he owned our secret, not being completely with us ... We were in his hands.
In all children's tests, Glebov stands a little aside, in an advantageous and "output" position, both together and, as it were, separately. “He was absolutely no, Vadik Baton,” recalls the lyrical hero. - But this, as I understood later, is a rare gift: to be nothing. People who know how to be nothing move far” P. 90. .
However, the voice of the lyrical hero sounds here, and by no means the author's position. Baton only at first sight "none". In fact, he clearly pursues his line, satisfies his passion, achieves by any means what he wants. Vadik Glebov “crawls” upwards with persistence, equal to the fatal “lowering” of Levka Shulepnikov down, to the very bottom, lower and lower, down to the crematorium, where he now serves as a gatekeeper, guardian of the kingdom of the dead - it’s as if he no longer exists in the living life, and even his name is different - Prokhorov; therefore, his telephone call today, in the hot summer of 1972, seems to Glebov a call from the other world.
So, at the very moment of Glebov’s triumph and victory, the achievement of the goal (Sonya the bride, the house is almost his own, the department is secured), Ganchuk is accused of cringing and formalism and they want to use Glebov in this: he is required to publicly renounce the leader. Glebov's thoughts are tormentingly fussing: after all, it was not just Ganchuk who staggered, the whole house shook! And he, as a true conformist and pragmatist, understands that now you need to provide yourself with a house in some other way, in a different way. But since Trifonov writes not just a scoundrel and a careerist, but a conformist, self-deception begins. And Ganchuk, Glebov convinces himself, is not so good and correct; and it has some unsavory features. So it was already in childhood: when Shulepnikov, the elder, is looking for “guilty of beating his son Leo”, looking for instigators, Glebov betrays them, consoling himself, however, this is what: “In general, he acted fairly, bad people will be punished . But an unpleasant feeling remained - as if he, perhaps, betrayed someone, although he told the pure truth about bad people ”p.92. .
Glebov does not want to speak out against Ganchuk - and cannot avoid speaking out. He understands that now it is more profitable to be with those who "roll a barrel" on Ganchuk - but he wants to remain clean, on the sidelines; “It is best to delay, to patch up the whole story.” But it is impossible to delay indefinitely. And Trifonov analyzes in detail the illusion of free choice (a test of will!), Which is built by Glebov’s self-deceptive mind: “It was like at a fairy-tale crossroads: if you go straight, you will lay down your head, if you go to the left, you will lose your horse, to the right - also some kind of death. However, in some fairy tales: if you go to the right, you will find a treasure. Glebov belongs to a special breed of bacteria: he was ready to stagnate at the crossroads to the last opportunity, until that final second when they fall to their death from exhaustion. The hero is a waiter, the hero is a rubber puller. What was it - ... confusion before life, which constantly, day after day, slips large and small crossroads? P.94. In the story there is an ironic image of the road on which Glebov stands: a road that leads nowhere, that is, a dead end. He has only one way - up. And only this path is illuminated by a guiding star, a fate on which Glebov, in the end, relied. He turns to the wall, withdraws (both figuratively and literally, lying on the couch at home) and waits.
Let's take a small step aside and turn to the image of Ganchuk, which plays such a significant role in the plot of the story. It is the image of Ganchuk, according to B. Pankin, who generally regards the story as “the most successful” among Trifonov’s urban stories, that is “interesting, unexpected”. In what does B. Pankin see the originality of the image of Ganchuk? The critic puts him on a par with Sergei Proshkin and Grisha Rebrov, "as another hypostasis of the type." I will allow myself a long quotation from an article by B. Pankin, in which his understanding of the image is clearly indicated: “... Ganchuk ... was destined to embody in his own destiny both the connection of times and their break. He was born, began to act, matured and showed himself as a person precisely at the time when a person had more opportunity to manifest and defend himself and his principles (to defend or die) than in other times ... the former red horseman, the grunt turned first into a student of a worker's faculty, then into a teacher and a scientist. The sunset of his career coincided with sometimes, fortunately, short-term, when dishonesty, careerism, opportunism, dressing up in clothes of nobility and integrity, it was easier to win their miserable, illusory victories ... And we see how, he, and now remaining a knight without fear and reproach, and today trying, but in vain, to defeat his enemies in a fair duel, yearns for those times when he was not so unarmed. Pankin B. In a circle, in a spiral // Friendship of Peoples, 1977, No. 5,. pp. 251, 252.
Having correctly outlined Ganchuk's biography, the critic, in my opinion, hurried with the assessment. The fact is that Ganchuk cannot be called a "knight without fear and reproach" in any way, based on the full amount of information about the professor - the grunt, which we receive in the text of the story, and the conclusion that a positive author's program is being built on Ganchuk, and completely unproven.
Let's turn to the text. In frank and unconstrained conversations with Glebov, the professor “talks with pleasure“ about fellow travelers, formalists, Rappovites, Proletcult ... remembered all the twists and turns of the literary battles of the twenties and thirties ”S. 97. .
Trifonov reveals the image of Ganchuk through his direct speech: “Here we dealt a blow to the bespalovism ... It was a relapse, we had to hit hard “We gave them a fight ...”, “By the way, we disarmed him, do you know how?” The author's comment is restrained, but meaningful: “Yes, those were really fights, not quarrels. True understanding was developed in a bloody cabin” P.98. . The writer makes it clear that Ganchuk used in literary discussions methods, to put it mildly, not of a purely literary order: he asserted the truth not only in theoretical disputes.
From the moment when Glebov decides to “crawl” into the house using Sonya, he begins to visit the Ganchuks every day, accompanies the old professor on evening walks. And Trifonov gives a detailed external description of Ganchuk, which develops into a description of the internal image of the professor. Before the reader there is not a "knight without fear and reproach", but a man who is conveniently located in life. “When he put on an astrakhan hat, slipped into white cloaks lined with chocolate-colored leather and into a long fur coat lined with fox fur, he looked like a merchant from Ostrovsky’s plays. But this merchant, walking leisurely, with measured steps along the deserted evening embankment, spoke about the Polish campaign, about the difference between the Cossack cabin and the officer's cabin, about the merciless struggle against the petty-bourgeois elements and anarchist elements, and also talked about Lunacharsky's creative confusion, Gorky's hesitation, Alexei's mistakes Tolstoy...
And about everyone ... he spoke, although respectfully, but with a touch of secret superiority, like a person who has some kind of additional knowledge.
The critical attitude of the author to Ganchuk is obvious. Ganchuk, for example, absolutely does not know and does not understand the modern life of the people around him, declaring: "In five years, every Soviet person will have a dacha." About indifference and how Glebov, who accompanies him in a student coat, feels himself in a twenty-five-degree frost: “Ganchuk turned blue sweetly and puffed in his warm fur coat” P.101.
However, the bitter irony of life also lies in the fact that Trifonov endows Ganchuk and his wife, who talk about the petty-bourgeois elements, by no means with a proletarian origin: Ganchuk, it turns out, comes from a family of a priest, and Yulia Mikhailovna, with her prosecutorial tone, as it turns out, is the daughter of a ruined Vienna banker....
As then, in childhood, Glebov betrayed, but acted, as it seemed to him, “fairly” with “bad people”, and now he will have to betray a person, apparently not the best.
But the Ganchuks are a victim in this situation. And this, that the victim is not the most likeable person, does not change the vile unity of the case. Moreover, the moral conflict only gets worse. And, in the end, the biggest and most innocent victim is the bright simplicity, Sonya. Trifonov, as we already know, ironically defined Glebov as a “rubber puller”, a false hero at a crossroads. But Ganchuk is also a false hero: “a strong, fat old man with ruddy cheeks seemed to him a hero and a grunt, Yeruslan Lazarevich” P.102. "Bogatyr", "merchant from Ostrovsky's plays", "sword", "ruddy cheeks" - these are the definitions of Ganchuk, which are not refuted in any way in the text. His resilience, physical stability is phenomenal. Already after the defeat at the academic council, with bliss and genuine enthusiasm, Ganchuk eats cakes - Napoleon. Even when visiting his daughter's grave - at the end of the story, he is in a hurry, rather, to go home in time for some kind of television program ... Personal pensioner Ganchuk will survive all the attacks, they do not hurt his "rosy cheeks".
The conflict in the “house on the embankment” between the “decent Ganchuks, who treat everything with a “tinge of secret superiority”, and Druzyaev-Shireiko, to whom Glebov internally adjoins, changing Ganchuk to Druzyaev, as if on a new round, returns the conflict of “exchange” - between the Dmitrievs and the Lukyanovs. The hypocrisy of the Ganchuks, who despise people, but live in exactly the way that they verbally despise, is just as little sympathetic to the author as the hypocrisy of Ksenia Fedorovna, for whom other "low" people clean out the cesspool. But the conflict, which in The Exchange was predominantly ethical in nature, here, in The House on the Embankment, becomes not only a moral conflict, but also an ideological one. And in this conflict, it would seem. Glebov is located exactly in the middle, at a crossroads, he can turn this way and that. But Glebov does not want to decide anything, it seems that fate decides for him on the eve of the performance, which Druzyaev so demands from Glebov, grandmother Nina dies - an inconspicuous, quiet old woman with a tuft of yellowed hair on the back of her head. And everything is decided by itself: Glebov does not have to go anywhere. However, the betrayal has already happened anyway, Glebov is engaged in frank self-deception. Yulia Mikhailovna understands this: "It's best if you leave this house ...". Yes, and Glebov's home is no longer here, it collapsed, fell apart, now the house must be looked for elsewhere. Thus ends, one of the main moments of the story is looped: “In the morning, having breakfast in the kitchen and looking at the gray concrete bend of the bridge. To little men, little cars, to a gray-yellow palace with a snow cap on the opposite side of the river, he said that he would call after class and come in the evening. He never came to that house again” P.105.
The house on the embankment disappears from Glebov's life, the house, which seemed so strong, actually turned out to be fragile, not protected from anything, it stands on the embankment, on the very edge of land, near the water, and this is not just a random location, but deliberately thrown out by the writer symbol.
The house goes under the water of time, like some kind of Atlantis, with its heroes, passions, conflicts: “the waves closed over it” - these words addressed by the author to Levka Shulepnikov can be attributed to the whole house. One by one, its inhabitants disappear from life: Anton and Khimius died in the war, the elder Shulepnikov was found dead under unclear circumstances, Yulia Mikhailovna died, Sonya first ended up in a mental hospital and also died .... "The house collapsed."
With the disappearance of the house, Glebov also deliberately forgets everything, not only surviving this flood, but also reaching new prestigious times precisely because "he tried not to remember, what was not remembered ceased to exist." He then lived “a life that did not exist,” emphasizes Trifonov.
Not only Glebov does not want to remember, Ganchuk does not want to remember anything either. At the end of the story, an unknown lyrical hero, “I”, a historian working on the book in the 1920s, is looking for Ganchuk: “He was eighty-six. He shriveled, screwed up his eyes, his head sank into his shoulders, but on his cheekbones there still glimmered a Ganchuk blush that had not been beaten to the end. And in his handshake there is a "hint of the former power." The stranger is eager to ask Ganchuk about the past, but encounters stubborn resistance. “And it's not that the old man's memory is weak. He didn't want to remember."
L. Terkanyan quite rightly notes that the story “The House on the Embankment” is built “on an intense polemic with the philosophy of oblivion, with crafty attempts to hide behind “times”. In this controversy - the pearl of the work "Terakanyan L. Urban stories of Yuri Trifonov. // Trifonov Yu. Another life. Leads, stories. - M., 1978. S. 683. . What Glebov and others like him are trying to forget, burn out in memory, is restored by the entire fabric of the work, and the detailed descriptiveness inherent in the story is artistic and historical evidence of the writer recreating the past, resisting oblivion. The position of the author is expressed in the desire to restore, not to forget anything, to perpetuate everything in the memory of the reader.
The action of the story unfolds in several time layers at once: it begins in 1972, then descends into the pre-war years; then the main events fall at the end of the 40s and the beginning of the 50s; at the end of the story - 1974. The author's voice sounds openly only once: in the prologue of the story, setting the historical distance; after the introduction, all events acquire an internal historical completeness. The living equivalence of different layers of time in the story is obvious; none of the layers is given abstractly, by hint, it is expanded plastically; each time in the story has its own image, its own smell and color.
In The House on the Embankment, Trifonov also combines different voices in the narrative. Most of the story is written in the third person, but Glebov's inner voice, his assessments, his reflections are woven into the dispassionate protocol study of Glebov's psychology. Moreover, as A. Demidov accurately notes, Trifonov "enters into a special lyrical contact with the hero." What is the purpose of this contact? Convicting Glebov is too easy a task. Trifonov sets as his goal the study of the psychology and life concept of Glebov, which required such a thorough penetration into the hero's microworld. Trifonov follows his hero like a shadow of his consciousness, plunging into all the nooks and crannies of self-deception, recreating the hero from within himself. The story "The House on the Embankment" became a turning point for the writer in many respects. Trifonov sharply re-emphasizes the previous motives, finds a new type not previously studied in the literature, generalizing the social phenomenon of "Glebovshchina", analyzes social changes through a single human personality. The idea has finally found an artistic embodiment. After all, Sergei Troitsky's reasoning about man as a thread of history can also be attributed to Glebov, he is the thread that stretched from the 30s into the 70s, already in our time. The historical view of things, developed by the writer in "Impatience", on material close to the present, gives a new artistic result. Trifonov becomes a historian - a chronicler, testifying to the present. But not only this is the role of "House on the Embankment" in the work of Trifonov. In this story, the writer subjected to a critical rethinking of his "beginning" - the story "Students". Analyzing this story in the first chapters of the book, we have already turned to plot motifs and characters who, as it were, have passed from “Students” to “House on the Embankment”. The transfer of the plot and the re-emphasis of the author's attitude are traced in detail in the article by V. Kozheinov "The Problem of the Author and the Way of the Writer".
Let us also turn to an important, in our opinion, private issue raised by V. Kozheinov and representing not only a purely philological interest. This question is related to the image of the author in The House on the Embankment. It is in the voice of the author, according to V. Kozheinov, that the long-standing "Students" are invisibly present in the "House on the Embankment". “The author,” writes V. Kozheinov, stipulating that this is not the imperial Yu.V. Trifonov, and the artistic image, is a classmate and even a friend of Vadim Glebov ... He is also the hero of the story, a youth, and then a young man ... with grateful aspirations, somewhat sentimental, relaxed, but ready to fight for justice.
“... The image of the author, which repeatedly appears in the prehistory of the story, is completely absent when its central collision is deployed. But in the sharpest, culminating scenes, even the very voice of the author, which sounds quite distinctly in the rest of the story, is reduced, almost completely drowned out. Kozheinov V. The problem of the author and the path of the writer. M., 1978. P.75. V. Kozheinov emphasizes precisely the fact that Trifonov does not correct Glebov’s voice, his assessment of what is happening: “The author’s voice exists here, after all, as if only in order to fully embody Glebov’s position and convey his words and intonations. This is exactly how Glebov creates the image of Krasnikova. And this unpleasant image is not corrected in any way by the author's voice. It inevitably turns out that the voice of the author, to one degree or another, is in solidarity here with the voice of Glebov. There. S. 78.
In lyrical digressions, the voice of a certain lyrical "I" sounds, in which Kozheinov sees the image of the author. But this is only one of the voices of the narrative, by which it is impossible to exhaustively judge the author's position in relation to events, and even more so, to himself in the past - the same age as Glebov, the author of the story "Students". In these digressions, some autobiographical details are read (moving from a big house to an outpost, the loss of a father, etc.). However, Trifonov specifically separates this lyrical voice from the voice of the author - the narrator. V. Kozheinov backs up his accusations against the author of The House on the Embankment not in literary criticism, but in fact, resorting to his own biographical memoirs and Trifonov's biography as an argument confirming his, Kozheinov's, thought. V. Kozheinov begins his article with a reference to Bakhtin. Let us resort to Bakhtin and we “The most common occurrence, even in serious and conscientious historical and literary work, is to draw biographical material from works and, conversely, to explain this work by biography, and purely factual justifications seem to be completely sufficient, that is, simply the coincidence of the facts of the life of the hero and the author , - the scientist notes, - samples are made that claim to have some kind of meaning, while the whole of the hero and the whole of the author are completely ignored and, therefore, the most significant moment, the form of attitude to the event, the form of his experience in the whole of life and the world, is ignored. And further: “We deny that completely unprincipled, purely factual approach to this, which is the only one currently dominant, based on the confusion of the author - the creator, the moment of the work, and the author - the person, the moment of the ethical, social event of life, and on misunderstanding the creative principle of the author's relationship to the hero, as a result of misunderstanding and distortion, at best, the transfer of bare facts of the author's ethical, biographical personality ... ”Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979. S. 11,12. A direct comparison of the facts of Trifonov's biography with the author's voice in the work seems to be incorrect. The position of the author differs from the position of any hero of the story, including the lyrical one. He does not share in any way, rather, he refutes, for example, the point of view of the lyrical hero on Glebov (“n was absolutely nothing”), picked up by many critics. No, Glebov is a very definite character. Yes, in some places the author's voice seems to merge with Glebov's voice, making contact with him. But the naive suggestion that he shares Glebov's position in relation to this or that character is not confirmed. Trifonov, I repeat once again, investigates Glebov, connects, and does not join him. It is not the author's voice that corrects Glebov's words and thoughts, but the objective actions and deeds of Glebov themselves correct them. Glebov's life concept is expressed not only in his direct reflections, because they are often illusory and self-deceptions. (After all, Glebov, for example, is “sincerely” tormented over whether he should go speak about Ganchuk. “Sincerely” he convinced himself of his love for Sonya: “And he thought so sincerely, because it seemed firm, definitive and nothing else not. Their closeness grew ever closer. He could not live a day without her."). Glebov's life concept is expressed in his way. The result is important for Glebov, the mastery of living space, the victory over time, which drowns many, both the Dorodnovs and the Druzyaevs, including them - they just were, but he is, Glebov rejoices. He crossed out the past, and Trifonov meticulously restores it. It restores, opposing oblivion, and the author's position consists.
Further, V. Kozheinov reproaches Trifonov that “the voice of the author did not dare, so to speak, to openly speak next to the voice of Glebov in the climactic scenes. He preferred to leave altogether. And this belittled the overall meaning of the story. Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979. S. 12. . But it was precisely this "open speech" that would belittle the meaning of the story, turning it into a private episode of Trifonov's personal biography! Trifonov preferred to settle accounts with himself in his own way. A new, historical look at the past, including in the study of "Glebovshchina" and himself. Trifonov did not define and distinguish himself - the past - from the time that he tried to comprehend and the image of which he rewrote in The House on the Embankment.
Glebov comes from the social lower classes. And to portray a small person negatively, not to sympathize with him, but to discredit him, by and large, is not in the traditions of Russian literature. The humanistic pathos of Gogol's "Overcoat" could never be reduced to the endowment of a hero jaded by life. But this was before Chekhov, who revised this humanistic component and demonstrated that you can laugh at anyone. Hence his desire to show that the little man himself is to blame for his unworthy position (“Thick and Thin”).
Trifonov follows Chekhov in this respect. Of course, there are also satirical arrows against the inhabitants of the big house, and the debunking of Glebov and the Glebovshchina is another hypostasis of debunking the so-called little man. Trifonov, demonstrates what degree of baseness can, as a result, turn into a completely legitimate feeling of social protest.
In The House on the Embankment, Trifonov addresses, as a witness, the memory of his generation, which Glebov wants to cross out (“the life that was not”). And Trifonov's position is expressed, ultimately, through artistic memory, striving for a socio-historical knowledge of the individual and society, vitally connected by time and place.
CONCLUSION
Y. Trifonov's story "The House on the Embankment" was the completion of the "Moscow cycle" of stories (1976). Its publication became an event in literary and social life. On the example of the fate of one of the residents of the famous Moscow house, in which the families of party workers lived (including the Trifonov family during his childhood), the writer showed the mechanism for the formation of conformist public consciousness. The story of the successful critic Glebov, who once did not stand up for his teacher-professor, became in the novel the story of the psychological self-justification of betrayal. Unlike the hero, the author refused to justify the betrayal by the cruel historical circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s.
The story "The House on the Embankment" became a turning point for the writer in many respects. Trifonov sharply re-emphasizes the previous motives, finds a new type, not previously studied in the literature, generalizing the social phenomenon of "Glebovshchina", analyzes social changes through a single human personality. The idea has finally found an artistic embodiment. After all, Sergei Troitsky's reasoning about man as the thread of history can also be attributed to Glebov: he is the thread that stretched from the 30s into the 70s. The historical view of things, developed by the writer in "Impatience", on material close to modernity, gives a new artistic result: Trifonov becomes a historian - a chronicler, testifying to modernity.
Whatever material he turned to, whether it be modernity, the time of the civil war, the 30s of the 20th century or the 70s of the year before last, he faced, first of all, the problem of the relationship between the individual and society, and therefore their mutual responsibility. Trifonov was a moralist, but not in the primitive sense of the word; not a hypocrite or a dogmatist, no - he believed that a person is responsible for his actions, which make up the history of a people, country, and society, a collective cannot, does not have the right to neglect the fate of an individual. Trifonov perceived modern reality as an era and persistently searched for the reasons for the change in public consciousness, stretching the thread farther and farther - deep into time. Trifonov was characterized by historical thinking; he analyzes each specific social phenomenon, treating reality as a witness and historian of our time and a person who is deeply rooted in Russian history, inseparable from it. While "village" prose was looking for its roots and origins, Trifonov was also looking for his "soil". “My soil is everything that Russia has suffered!” - Trifonov himself could subscribe to these words of his hero. Indeed, this was his soil, in the fate and suffering of the country his fate took shape. More than that: this soil began to nourish the root system of his books. The search for historical memory unites Trifonov with individual authors of the 70s of the last century. At the same time, his memory was also his "home", family memory - a purely Moscow feature - inseparable from the memory of the country. This is how he describes the last meeting of the lyrical hero of "House on the Embankment" with one of the boys - childhood friends, with Anton: he said that in two days he was evacuating with his mother to the Urals, and consulted what to take with him: diaries, sci-fi a novel or albums with drawings?... His worries seemed like nothing to me. What albums, what novels could you think about when the Germans were on the threshold of Moscow? Anton drew and wrote every day. From the pocket of his jacket protruded a double-folded general notebook. He said: “I will write down this meeting at the bakery. And our whole conversation. Because it's all important to the story."
Trifonov was recognizable, having found only his own intonation, which could not be confused with anyone else's and which was attached tightly - not to be torn off ... And in this Trifonov's sliding intonation, in the melody of the phrase, which he tried to load as much as possible, the conflict dissolved, like water in sand; the hopelessness that he had did not become fatal. There was a kind of comfort in her, even if there was no consolation.
Trifonov, in fact, did the impossible - he created a unique, in its own way, perfect artistic system in which forced silences are just as organic, just as naturally woven into the fabric of the work, as are the silences coming from aesthetic tasks. Reader's understanding was important to him. Understanding - and the consciousness that it can influence minds. And if it can, then it must.
Yuri Valentinovich Trifonov entered the history of Russian literature of the 20th century as the founder of urban prose and earned a reputation as the creator of a unique artistic world that does not fit into the rigid framework of groups and trends.
LITERATURE
I.Artistic texts
1. Trifonov Yu. Collected works, vols. 1-4. M., 1985-1987
2. Trifonov Yu.V. Waterfront house. Moscow: Veche, 2006.
II.Reference and educational literature
1. Baryshnikov E.P. Literary hero // Krat. lit. encyclopedia. T.4. - M.: Sov. encyclopedia, 1967.
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6. Takho-Godi A.A. and others. Antique Literature: A Textbook for High School. / Ed. A.A. Tahoe-Godi. - 5th ed., revised. - M.: CheRo, 1997.
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8. Chernyshev A. Character // Dictionary of literary terms. - M.: Enlightenment, 1974.
9. Literary encyclopedic dictionary. (Under the general editorship of V.M. Kozhevnikov and P.A. Nikolaev). M., 1987
III.Scientific and critical literature
1. Amusin M. Between empiricism and empyreans: Notes on everyday prose // Lit. review. 1986. No. 9
2. Anninsky L. Dissection of the root: On the journalism of Yuri Trifonov: introduction. Art. / L. Anninsky // Trifonov Yu.V. How our word will respond ... - M .: Owls. Russia, 1985.
3. Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979.
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6. Bugrova N.A. The motive of "unfeeling" in Y. Trifonov's prose.// Rational and emotional in literature and folklore. Part 2. Volgograd: VGIPK RO Publishing House, 2008.
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12. Druzhinin A.V. "Oblomov". Roman I.A. Goncharova // Literary criticism. - M., 1983.
13. Eremina S., Piskunov V. Time and place of Y. Trifonov's prose. -- Questions of Literature, 1982, No. 5
14. Ivanova N. Yuri Trifonov's prose. M., 1984.
15. Kertman L. Between the lines of bygone times: rereading Y. Trifonov / L. Kertman // Vopr. lit. 1994. No. 5.
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Yu.V. Trifonov (1925-81) is considered one of the most prominent masters of "urban" prose (ideological and artistic direction). It's more of a thematic designation. Trifonov is extremely rationalistic. Chekhov's tradition. Early Trifonov - realism; late - elements of postmodernism. Chekhov's artistic and aesthetic principles are his commitment to ordinary plots, to "realism of the simplest case", to reticence, incompleteness of the plot situation, to muffled conflicts, to "infinity", to hidden subtext, to the lyrical activity of the author's narrative, his trust in the reader, recreating the unsaid by the writer
Urban - social, moral, descriptive. At first, this is almost an intermediate designation. Trifonov turned this term into an ideological and meaningful one, he is interested in a certain social type - urban philistinism. Philistinism is not an estate, as in the 19th century, but a moral phenomenon. Most of Trifonov's heroes are people of intellectual labor or belonging to the stratum of the intelligentsia (philologists, translators, playwrights, actresses, engineers, historians). Mostly the humanities. It shows that the overwhelming majority lack the traits of the intelligentsia of Gorky and Chekhov. They strive for personal comfort, shallow, superficial, petty.
The cycle of "Moscow stories"”: “Exchange”, “Another Life”, “Preliminary Results”, “House on the Embankment”. Heroes of middle age, average income. He looks at the world of the intelligentsia very sharply and evilly. The main test for modern man is everyday life, the war against everyday life. Many morally died in this war. Write an article about it. Trifonov is interested in any moments of life, incl. household (exam). Considers the course of life itself; tries to show "small" emotional experiences (excitement before the exam). People are very responsible about what is happening.
Hermetically sealed small world of "little people" who, according to the social level, belong to the elite of society (artists, writers, philologists). But their level of interests, relationships are small. Trifonov gives an assessment of the moral ill-being of society.
1969 - the story "Exchange". The concept is multi-layered, not so much an exchange as a substitution that happened to the hero during an apartment exchange. social antagonism. Substitution - moral degradation.
"House on the Embankment" (1976): the world, which seemed fundamentally significant to the heroes of Trifonov's first novel, is crushed, becomes musty, provincial, small. Prevailing prudence, self-interest. The image of the house (“House on the Embankment”): the house is a kind of state; symbolic, frightening image. painful work, a lot of biographical.
The beginning is essentially a poem in prose. A novel about students, but from an ideological standpoint. The story goes beyond student life. Social differentiation is shown. Childhood entrusts the character.
The house takes on the features of an idyllic space. This is a guarantee of peace of mind, continuity of generations.
The category of memory, the tradition of Dostoevsky are fundamentally significant. Dostoevsky is presented in the form of a second plan. Sonya is the symbolic name of the victim. Sonya's mother is trying to pay off fate. Sonya's parents are victims in some ways, culprits in some ways. The category of memory is in Vadim's memoirs. Talk about Raskolnikov. Vadim - Raskolnikov, Sonya's parents and she herself are his victims. The motive of memory is the motive of oblivion.
The protagonist of the story "The House on the Embankment" is time. The action takes place in Moscow and unfolds in several time frames: the mid-1930s, the second half of the 1940s, and the early 1970s. As in Klim Samghin. Trofimov pursued the goal of depicting the run of a mysterious and irreversible time that changes everything, including mercilessly changing people and their destinies. The social orientation of the story is determined by the comprehension of the past and the present, and both of these categories represent an interrelated process. With the plot itself, Trofimov emphasizes that history is created here and now, that history is in every day, and the presence of the past is felt both in the future and in the present.
In the artistic world of Yuri Trifonov (1925 - 1981), a special place has always been occupied by images of childhood - the time of personality formation. Starting from the very first stories, childhood and youth were the criteria by which the writer seemed to test reality for humanity and justice, or rather, for inhumanity and injustice. Dostoevsky's famous words about the "teardrop of a child" can be put as an epigraph to all of Trifonov's work: "the scarlet, oozing flesh of childhood" - as the story "House on the Embankment" says.
Trifonov was characterized by historical thinking; he subjected each specific social phenomenon to analysis, referring to reality as a witness and historian of our time and a person who is deeply rooted in Russian history, inseparable from it. Man's responsibility to history.
A man in the context of history, a hero of time. In later works - the account of history, the history of the family. In "Exchange" - the image of a grandfather who feels that he has no followers (Narodnaya Volya). Disappointment in the people of the 1970s, who did not look like an ideal. Trifonov is trying to understand something, then he is trying to blame the revolutionaries. Gradually, anti-revolutionary problems arise.
Some historical characters are included in the plot (Nechaev's circle, Kletochnikov). Reflection on history is very important and is presented in different ways (the characters are playwrights/historians, scientists). The theme of history and historical plots. Looking through the prism of time, the category of time is very multilayered. The main theme is how a person changes dramatically during his life. A person lives several lives, and the changes are irreversible. The motive of another life ("Duck Hunt" by Vampilov, Zilov's monologue; "Three Sisters" by Chekhov).
The world through the prism of perception of the protagonist, which is often deliberately biased, distorts what is happening. Prism - a crooked mirror ("The Life of Klim Samgin"). The art of artistic detail (Chekhov).
The motive of fear, the motivation of actions (inaction, rather even) of the hero.
the story "The House on the Embankment" is built "on an intense polemic with the philosophy of oblivion, with crafty attempts to hide behind the "times". In this controversy - the pearl of the work. What Glebov and others like him are trying to forget, burn out in memory, is restored by the entire fabric of the work, and the detailed descriptiveness inherent in the story is artistic and historical evidence of the writer recreating the past, resisting oblivion. The position of the author is expressed in the desire to restore, not to forget anything, to perpetuate everything in the memory of the reader.
He invites the reader to understand, decide, see. Consciously conveys to the reader his right to evaluate life and people. The writer sees his task in the most profound, psychologically convincing recreation of the character of a complex person and the confusing, unclear circumstances of his life.
The author's voice sounds openly only once: in the prologue of the story, setting the historical distance; after the introduction, all events acquire an internal historical completeness. The living equivalence of different layers of time in the story is obvious; none of the layers is given abstractly, by hint, it is expanded plastically; each time in the story has its own image, its own smell and color.
In The House on the Embankment, Trifonov also combines different voices in the narrative. Most of the story is written in the third person, but Glebov's inner voice, his assessments, his reflections are woven into the dispassionate protocol study of Glebov's psychology. Moreover, as A. Demidov accurately notes, Trifonov "enters into a special lyrical contact with the hero." What is the purpose of this contact? Convicting Glebov is too easy a task. Trifonov sets as his goal the study of the psychology and life concept of Glebov, which required such a thorough penetration into the hero's microworld. Trifonov follows his hero like a shadow of his consciousness, plunging into all the nooks and crannies of self-deception, recreating the hero from within himself.
"... One of my favorite tricks - it even began, perhaps, to be repeated too often - is the author's voice, which, as it were, is woven into the hero's internal monologue," Y. Trifonov admitted.
“... The image of the author, which repeatedly appears in the prehistory of the story, is completely absent when its central collision is deployed. But in the sharpest, culminating scenes, even the very voice of the author, which sounds quite distinctly in the rest of the story, is reduced, almost completely drowned out. V. Kozheinov emphasizes precisely the fact that Trifonov does not correct Glebov’s voice, his assessment of what is happening: “The author’s voice exists here, after all, as if only in order to fully embody Glebov’s position and convey his words and intonations. This is exactly how Glebov creates the image of Krasnikova. And this unpleasant image is not corrected in any way by the author's voice. It inevitably turns out that the voice of the author, to one degree or another, is in solidarity here with the voice of Glebov.
In lyrical digressions, the voice of a certain lyrical "I" sounds, in which Kozheinov sees the image of the author. But this is only one of the voices of the narrative, by which one cannot exhaustively judge the author's position in relation to events, and even more so, to himself in the past. In these digressions, some autobiographical details are read (moving from a big house to an outpost, the loss of a father, etc.). However, Trifonov specifically separates this lyrical voice from the voice of the author - the narrator.
V. Kozheinov reproaches Trifonov that “the voice of the author did not dare, so to speak, to openly speak next to Glebov's voice in the climactic scenes. He preferred to leave altogether. And this belittled the overall meaning of the story. But it's the other way around.
The story of the successful critic Glebov, who once did not stand up for his teacher-professor, became in the novel the story of the psychological self-justification of betrayal. Unlike the hero, the author refused to justify the betrayal by the cruel historical circumstances of the 1930s and 1940s.
In The House on the Embankment, Trifonov addresses, as a witness, the memory of his generation, which Glebov wants to cross out (“the life that was not”). And Trifonov's position is expressed, ultimately, through artistic memory, striving for a socio-historical knowledge of the individual and society, vitally connected by time and place.
Candidate of Sciences, modern man Glebov most of all does not want to remember his childhood and youth, but it is during this period that his author returns (25 years ago). The author leads the story from the present to the past, and from the modern Glebov restores Glebov twenty-five years ago; but through one layer another is visible. The portrait of Glebov is deliberately given by the author: “Almost a quarter of a century ago, when Vadim Alexandrovich Glebov was not yet bald, full, with breasts like a woman’s, with thick thighs, with a big belly and sagging shoulders ... when he was not yet tormented by heartburn in the mornings, dizziness, a feeling of weakness all over his body, when his liver was working normally and he could eat fatty foods, not very fresh meat, drink as much wine and vodka as he wanted, without fear of consequences ... when he was quick on his feet, bony, with long hair, in round glasses, in appearance he resembled a raznochinets-seventies ... in those days ... he was unlike himself and plain, like a caterpillar ”.
Trifonov visibly, in detail down to physiology and anatomy, shows how time changes a person. Portrait characteristics are negative. Not for the better, time has changed a person - neither externally nor internally.
2) “He was absolutely no, Vadik Baton,” recalls the lyrical hero. - But this, as I understood later, is a rare gift: to be nothing. People who know how to be nothing go far.”.
However, the voice of the lyrical hero sounds here, and by no means the author's position. Baton only at first sight "none". In fact, he clearly pursues his line, satisfies his passion, achieves by any means what he wants.
3) The highlighted word links together several temporal layers of the work. It helps the narrator to move both in time and in the space of a literary text. " And I still remember how we left that house on the embankment. Rainy October, the smell of naphthalene and dust, the corridor is littered with bundles of books, bundles, suitcases, bags, bundles. It is necessary to demolish all this "Khurda-Murda" from the fifth floor down. The guys came to help. Some person asks the elevator operator: “Whose is this khurda-murda?”
“I remember leaving that house on the embankment...”. This is a memory text in which the highlighted word participates in the organization of the retrospective plan. We do not enter the time plan of the past, but look detached from the present. And from the present we see "bundles of books, bundles, suitcases, bags, bundles." And then a collective concept appears, a word from childhood - “Khurda-Murda”. This word links together the past and the present. The narration is now conducted from the past, on behalf of a participant in the events, and not remembering them. The narrator enters into a dialogue with himself, with his little self, with his company. Here the function of distinguishing between one's own and another's word is also manifested. Khurda-murda is a word belonging to a child, a lyrical hero and his company; the word that needs to be explained so that it is understandable, give a comment on it.
