Civil penalty. On May 19, 1864, an event took place on Mytninskaya Square in St. Petersburg, which forever entered the annals of the Russian liberation movement. It was a foggy, hazy Petersburg morning. It drizzled cold, piercing rain. Streams of water slid along the tall black pillar with chains, long drops fell to the ground from the wet wooden platform of the scaffold. By eight o'clock in the morning more than two thousand people had gathered here. Writers, magazine staff, students of the medical-surgical academy, officers of the army rifle battalions came to say goodbye to a man who for about seven years had been the ruler of the thoughts of the radical part of Russian society.
After a long wait, a carriage appeared, surrounded by mounted gendarmes, and Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky climbed onto the scaffold. The executioner took off his hat, and the reading of the sentence began. A not very competent official did it loudly, but badly, with stutters, with pauses. In one place he choked and barely uttered "satsal ideas." A smile flickered across Chernyshevsky's pale face. The verdict declared that Chernyshevsky "to his literary activity had a great influence on young people "and that" for the intent to overthrow the existing order "he is deprived of" all the rights of the state "and refers" to hard labor for 14 years, "and then" settles in Siberia forever.
The rain intensified. Chernyshevsky often raised his hand, wiping cold water flowing down the face, running down the collar of the coat. Finally the reading stopped. “The executioners lowered him to his knees. They broke a saber over his head and then, raising him even higher a few steps, took his hands in chains, attached to a pole. At this time, it began to rain very heavily, the executioner put a hat on him. Chernyshevsky thanked him, straightened his cap as far as his hands allowed him, and then, putting his hand in his hand, calmly awaited the end of this procedure. There was dead silence in the crowd, - an eyewitness of the "civil execution" recalls. - At the end of the ceremony, everyone rushed to the carriage, broke through the line of police officers ... and only through the efforts of the mounted gendarmes, the crowd was separated from the carriage. Then... bouquets of flowers were thrown to him. One woman who threw flowers was arrested. Someone shouted: "Farewell, Chernyshevsky!" This cry was immediately supported by others ... "
The next day, May 20, 1864, Chernyshevsky, in shackles, under the protection of gendarmes, was sent to Siberia, where he was destined to live for almost 20 years in isolation from society, from relatives, from his beloved work. Worse than any penal servitude was this debilitating inaction, this doomedness to reflect on the brightly lived and suddenly cut off years ...
Childhood. Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky was born
12 (24) July. 1828 in Saratov in the family of Archpriest Gavriil Ivanovich Chernyshevsky and his wife Evgenia Egorovn (nee 
Golubev). Both his_his_grandfather and his maternal great-grandfather were priests. Grandfather, Yegor Ivanovich Golubev, archpriest of the Sergius Church in Saratov, died in 1818, and the Saratov governor turned to the Penza bishop with a request to send the “best student” to the vacant place on the condition, as was customary in the clergy, to marry the daughter of the deceased archpriest. worthy man turned out to be the librarian of the Penza Seminary Gavriil Ivanovich Chernyshevsky, a man of high learning and impeccable behavior. In 1816, he was noticed by the famous statesman M. M. Speransky, who fell into disgrace and held the post of Penza governor. Speransky invited Gavriil Ivanovich to go to Petersburg, but at the insistence of his mother, he refused the flattering offer that promised him brilliant career statesman. Gavriil Ivanovich recalled this episode in his life not without regret and transferred the unfulfilled dreams of youth to his only son, who was in no way inferior to his father in talent and abilities. Prosperity and a warm family atmosphere reigned in Chernyshevsky's house, inspired by deep religious feelings. this disgust from them "has been in me since childhood, thanks, of course, to the modest and strictly moral lifestyle of all my close elder relatives." Chernyshevsky always treated his parents with filial reverence and reverence, shared with them his worries and plans, joys and sorrows In turn, the mother loved her son selflessly, and for the father he was also the subject of "undisguised pride. FROM early years the boy showed exceptional natural talent. Father saved him from religious school preferring in-depth home education. He himself taught his son Latin and Greek, the boy successfully studied French on his own, and German colonist Gref taught him German. In my father's house was good library, in which, along with spiritual literature, there were works by Russian writers - Pushkin, Zhukovsky, Gogol, as well as modern magazines. In "Notes of the Fatherland" the boy read translated novels by Dickens, George Sand, was fond of articles by V. G. Belinsky. So from childhood Chernyshevsky turned into, according to him own words, into a true book-eater.
It would seem that family well-being, religious piety, the love with which the boy was surrounded from childhood - nothing foreshadowed in him a future denier, a revolutionary overthrower of the foundations of the social order that existed in Russia. However, I.S. Turgenev drew attention to one feature of the Russian revolutionary fighters: “All the true deniers whom I knew - without exception (Belinsky, Bakunin, Herzen, Dobrolyubov, etc.) came from relatively kind and honest parents. And therein lies great meaning: this takes away from the doers, from the deniers, every shadow of personal indignation, personal irritability. They go their own way only because they are more sensitive to demands. folk life". This very sensitivity to the grief of others and the suffering of one's neighbor presupposed a high development of Christian moral feelings, which took place in the family cradle. The power of denial was fed and maintained by the equal power of faith, hope and love. In contrast to the peace and harmony that reigned in the family, the social untruth hurt the eyes, so from childhood Chernyshevsky began to wonder why "people's misfortunes and sufferings occur", tried to "make out what is true and what is false, what is good and what is evil" .
Saratov Theological Seminary. In 18421, Chernyshevsky entered the Saratov Theological Seminary as a student of his own, "living at home and coming to the seminary only for lessons. Modest, quiet and shy, he was nicknamed by the poor seminarians "gentry": young Chernyshevsky was too different from most of his comrades - and well dressed, and the son of an archpriest revered by everyone in the city, and goes to the seminary in his own cab, and in terms of knowledge he is head and shoulders above his classmates. topic. pedagogical principles based on the belief that bodily suffering contributes to the purification human soul. Strong students were encouraged, and weak students were punished. Language teacher and Latin Voskresensky often punished the sinful flesh of his pupils, and after corporal punishment invited him home for tea, directing their souls to the path of virtue.
Under these conditions, smart students turned out to be a kind of savior and protector of the weak. Chernyshevsky recalled: “Many medieval customs remained in seminary teaching, among them are student-teacher disputes. Having finished explaining the lesson, the teacher says: “Who has to make an objection?” A student who wants to distinguish himself - to distinguish himself not so much in front of the teacher as in front of his comrades - gets up and says: "I have an objection." The dispute begins; it often ends with curses from the teacher who objected; sometimes the objector is sent to his knees; but on the other hand, he acquires among his comrades the glory of a genius. It must be said that each course in the seminary has five "geniuses" before whom the comrades absolutely bow ... "Moreover, in each class there was also a spiritual, intellectual leader - the one who is "smarter than everyone." Chernyshevsky easily became such a leader.
According to the recollections of his classmates, “Nikolai Gavrilovich came to class deliberately earlier than was necessary, and was engaged in translation with his comrades. A group of 5-10 people will come up, he will translate difficult passages and explain; as soon as this one leaves, another one comes up, there is a third, etc. And there was no case for Chernyshevsky to express, even in a half-word, his displeasure.
Petersburg University. So, from an early age, Chernyshevsky was strengthened by his truly inherent sense of mental exclusivity, and after him, faith in the power of the human mind, which transforms the world around him. Having not completed the seminary, having studied there for less than four years out of six, he left her with the firm intention of continuing his education at the university. Why did Chernyshevsky turn down the brilliant spiritual career that was opening before him? In a conversation with a friend before leaving for St. Petersburg, the young man said: "I would like fame." Probably, his outstanding mental abilities did not find satisfaction; he outgrew the level of seminary learning by self-education. It is possible that Chernyshevsky was prompted to receive a secular education by his father, who had just experienced an undeserved disgrace from the spiritual authorities. The position of the clergy in Russia at that time was far from being brilliant. Since the reform of Peter I, it was dependent on the state, on officials, on secular authorities. University education, on the other hand, gave greater independence, and under certain mental capacity and the prospect of moving from the clergy to the privileged nobility. The father remembered his youth and wanted to see in his son the realization of his unfulfilled hopes. One way or another, but in May 1846, the young man, accompanied by his beloved mother, went “for a long time” to a distant capital to take exams at the university.
On August 2, 1846, the half-educated seminarian enters into a daring rivalry with the sons of the nobility, graduates of boarding schools and gymnasiums, and wins a brilliant victory. On August 14, he was enrolled in the historical and philological department of the Faculty of Philosophy. In the first year, Chernyshevsky studies a lot, reads Lermontov, Gogol, Schiller, and begins to keep a diary. He is fascinated by the ideas of moral self-improvement, the Bible is still a reference book. Chernyshevsky sympathizes with Gogol's "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" and condemns the rejection of this book by Belinsky and Nekrasov.
The revolution that broke out in France in February 1848 significantly changes the circle of interests of a sophomore student. He is fascinated by philosophical and political questions. Characteristic entries appear in the diary: “The socialists do not want the destruction of property and the family, but that these benefits, now the privilege of a few, be extended to all!” In September 1848, Chernyshevsky met Alexander Khanykov, a participant in the "Fridays" of M. V. Petrashevsky, who gave him the writings of the French utopian socialist Fourier to read. Dostoevsky noted that "the emerging socialism was then compared, even by some of its horsemen, with Christianity and was taken only as a correction and improvement of the latter, in accordance with the age and civilization." Socialism was seen as a "new revelation", the continuation and development of the main provisions ethical doctrine Jesus Christ. “I finished reading Fourier this morning,” Chernyshevsky writes in his diary. “Now I see that he is not really dangerous for my Christian convictions ...” But a deeper acquaintance with socialist teachings gives rise to doubts about the identity of socialism with Christianity: “If this is a revelation, - the last revelation, let it be, and what does it matter to the agitation of the souls of the weak, such as mine ... But I do not believe that there is a new one, and it would be a pity for me to part with Jesus Christ, who is so good, so sweet to his soul a person who is good and loving humanity, and so pours peace into the soul when you think about it. Chernyshevsky likens modern civilization to the era of Rome during the decline, when the foundations of the old worldview were destroyed and everyone expected the arrival of the messiah, savior, herald of the new faith. And the young man is ready to stay with the truth of the new teaching and even leave Christ if Christianity disagrees with the “last revelation”. Moreover, he feels immense powers in his soul. He wants to become the ancestor of a doctrine that can renew the world and give a “decidedly new direction” to all mankind. In this regard, such a touching detail is noteworthy. Diaries are written with a specially invented method of cursive writing, incomprehensible to the uninitiated. One day Chernyshevsky remarks the following: “If I die without rereading them well and without copying them into a generally readable language, then this will be lost for the biographers whom I am waiting for, because in essence I think that I will be a wonderful person.”
On April 23, the Petrashevites were arrested, including A. Khanykov, an acquaintance of Chernyshevsky. By a lucky chance, the young man was not involved in this political process. And yet Chernyshevsky does not lose heart. In the summer of 1849, he writes: “If I now had the power in my hands, I would immediately proclaim the emancipation of the peasants, disband more than half of the troops, if not now, then I would soon limit as much as possible the administrative and government power in general, especially small persons (i.e., small people). e. provincial and county), as much as possible education, teaching, schools. He would hardly have tried to give political rights to women.” After graduating from university, he dreams of becoming a journalist and leader of the "extreme left, something like Louis Blanc", famous figure French Revolution of 1848.
Saratov gymnasium. However, the years of the "gloomy seven years" do not allow his vocation to unfold. Shortly after graduating from the university, in March 1851, Chernyshevsky left for Saratov and was assigned as a teacher to the local gymnasium. According to the memoirs of one of his students, “mind, extensive knowledge ... cordiality, humanity, extraordinary simplicity and accessibility ... attracted, connected the hearts of students with loving heart young teacher. His colleagues at the gymnasium perceived the direction of the young teacher differently. The headmaster exclaimed: “What freedom Chernyshevsky allows me! He tells his students about the dangers of serfdom. This is freethinking and Voltairianism! Moreover, the words of the director did not exaggerate anything, for the freethinker-teacher himself admitted that he was telling the truth to students, “who smell of hard labor.” And yet the fate of a provincial teacher was clearly insufficient for Chernyshevsky’s seething forces. a head clerk, or an official for special assignments," Chernyshevsky complained in his diary. "Be that as it may, I still have such pride that it is deadly for me. No, I must go to Petersburg."
Shortly before leaving, he proposes to the daughter of a Saratov doctor, Olga Sokratovna Vasilyeva. Chernyshevsky's love is peculiar: the usual young feeling is complicated by the motive of salvation, the release of the bride from the despotic guardianship of her parents. The first condition that Chernyshevsky puts before the chosen one of his heart is this: “... If you chose a person better than me, know that I will be glad to see you happier than you could be with me; but know that it would be a heavy blow to me.” Chernyshevsky formulated the second condition as follows: "... We will soon have a riot, and if it happens, I will certainly participate in it ... Neither dirt, nor drunken men with oak, nor massacre will frighten me." “It won’t scare me either,” Olga Sokratovna answered in the spirit of “new women”, the future heroines of Chernyshevsky's novels.
Approaches to a new aesthetic. In May 1853, Chernyshevsky and his young wife left for St. Petersburg. Here he gets a job as a teacher of literature in cadet corps, begins to be published in magazines - first in the "Notes of the Fatherland" by A. Kraevsky, and after meeting N. A. Nekrasov in the fall of 1853 - in the "Contemporary". Like a knight at a crossroads, he is faced with a choice of which path to follow: a journalist, a professor or a metropolitan official. However, even V. G. Belinsky said that for practical participation in public life the raznochinets were given "only two means: a department and a journal." Upon arrival in St. Petersburg, Chernyshevsky began preparing for the master's examinations in Russian literature and worked on his dissertation "The Aesthetic Relationship of Art to Reality." Literature and art attract his attention not by chance. “Among a people deprived of public freedom,” A. I. Herzen wrote, “literature is the only tribune from the height of which he makes the cry of his indignation and his conscience heard.” And Chernyshevsky himself, three years later, would say in Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature: “Literature in our country still concentrates almost the entire mental life of the people, and therefore it is directly incumbent on it to deal with such interests that in other countries have already passed, so to speak , in a special department of other areas of mental activity ... "
Chernyshevsky noted with chagrin that after the death of V. G. Belinsky, in the era of the "gloomy seven years", his former friends A. V. Druzhinin, P. V. Annenkov, V. P. Botkin departed from the principles of revolutionary democratic criticism. Based on the aesthetic teachings of the German idealist philosopher Hegel, they believed that artistic creativity is independent of reality, that a real writer escapes from the contradictions of life into a pure and worldly sphere free from the fuss of the eternal ideals of goodness, truth, beauty. These Eternal values are not revealed in life by art, but, on the contrary, are brought into life by it, making up for its fatal imperfection, its irremovable disharmony and incompleteness. Only art can give the ideal of perfect beauty, which cannot be embodied in the environment.
current reality. Such aesthetic views diverted the writer's attention from questions of social reconstruction, deprived art of its effective character, its ability to renew and improve life.
In his dissertation, "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality," Chernyshevsky spoke out against this "slavish admiration for old opinions that have long outlived themselves." For about two years he sought permission to defend it: university circles were alarmed and frightened by the "spirit of free research and free criticism" contained in it.
Finally, on May 10, 1855, a long-awaited event took place at the Faculty of History and Philology of St. Petersburg University. According to N. V. Shelgunov, a friend and like-minded person of Chernyshevsky, “the small auditorium reserved for the debate was packed with listeners. There were also students, but it seems that there were more outsiders, officers and civilian youth. It was very crowded, so that the audience stood at the windows... Chernyshevsky defended his dissertation with his usual modesty, but with the firmness of an unshakable conviction. After the dispute, Pletnev turned to Chernyshevsky with the following remark: “It seems that I didn’t read that to you at lectures!” Indeed, Pletnev did not read this, but what he read would not have been able to lead the public to the delight that the dissertation led her to. It was all new and all tempting ... "
Chernyshevsky really solves in a new way in his dissertation the main question of aesthetics about the beautiful: “beautiful is life”, “that being is beautiful in which we see life as it should be according to our concepts.” Unlike Hegel and his Russian followers, Chernyshevsky sees the source of beauty not in art, but in life. The forms of beauty are not brought into life by art, but exist objectively, independently of art in reality itself.
In affirming the formula "beautiful is life", Chernyshevsky is aware that the forms of beauty that objectively exist in life are in themselves aesthetically neutral. They are perceived as beautiful only in the light of certain human concepts. But what then is the criterion of beauty? Maybe the formula is true that they don't argue about tastes, maybe, how many people - so many concepts of beauty? Chernyshevsky shows that people's tastes are far from arbitrary, that they are socially determined: different classes of society have different ideas about beauty. Moreover, true, healthy tastes are represented by those classes of society that lead a working lifestyle: “the peasant in the concept of“ life ”always contains the concept of work: you can’t live without work ...” And therefore “in the descriptions of the beauty in folk songs there is not a single one sign of beauty, which would not be an expression of flourishing health and balance of forces in the body, the always consequence of a life of contentment with constant and serious, but not excessive work. And vice versa, the secular "half-air" beauty seems to the villager decidedly "nondescript", even makes an unpleasant impression on him, because he is used to considering "thinness" as a result of illness or "bitter lot".
It is clear that Chernyshevsky's dissertation was the first manifesto of democratic aesthetics in Russia. Subordinating the ideal to the real, the art of reality, Chernyshevsky created a fundamentally new aesthetic theory not of an idealistic, but of a materialistic type. His work, enthusiastically greeted by young people of different ranks, irritated many prominent Russian writers. Turgenev, for example, called it "an abomination and insolence unheard of." This was due to the fact that Chernyshevsky destroyed the foundation of idealistic aesthetics, on which a whole generation of Russian cultural nobles of the 30s and 40s was brought up. In addition, Chernyshevsky's youthful work was not free from obvious errors and simplifications. “When a stick is bent in one direction,” he said, “it can be straightened only by bending it in the opposite direction: such is the law of social life.” There are a lot of such "distortions" in Chernyshevsky's work. So, he claims, for example, that “works of art cannot withstand comparison with living reality”: it is much better to look at the sea itself than at its image, but for lack of the best, a person is content with the worst, for the lack of a thing - its surrogate. Of course, neither Turgenev nor Leo Tolstoy could agree with such a belittling of the role of art. Chernyshevsky's dissertation also irritated them with a utilitarian, applied understanding of art, when it was assigned the role of a simple illustration of certain scientific truths. Turgenev long remembered Chernyshevsky's passage, which offended his artistic nature, and put it into the mouth of Bazarov in a slightly modified form. Looking at an album with views of Saxon Switzerland, Bazarov arrogantly remarks to Odintsova that he really has no artistic taste: “... But these views could interest me from a geological point of view, from the point of view of mountain formations, for example ... The drawing will clearly show me that that the book is set out on as many as ten pages.
However, these simplified judgments about art, made in the heat of polemical fervor, do not in the least detract from the truth of the general pathos of Chernyshevsky's aesthetic views. Following Belinsky, he pushes the boundaries of art in order to enrich its content. “The general interest in life is the content of art,” he says. In the same way, Chernyshevsky expands the boundaries of the aesthetic, which in the works of his predecessors, as a rule, were confined to the sphere of art. Chernyshevsky, on the other hand, shows that the realm of the aesthetic is extremely broad: it embraces the entire real world, the entire reality.
In Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature, Chernyshevsky showed that the traditions of Belinsky's criticism of the 1940s are still viable. Rejecting the theorists pure art”, developing the ideas of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky wrote: “Literature cannot but be a servant of one or another direction of ideas: this is a destination that lies in its nature - a destination that it cannot refuse, even if it wanted to refuse. The followers of the theory of pure art, presented to us as something that should be alien to worldly affairs, are deceived or pretend: the words "art must be independent of life" have always served only as a cover for the struggle against the directions of literature that these people did not like, in order to make it a servant of another direction, which was more to the taste of these people. However, in a dispute with his ideological opponents, Chernyshevsky "goes too far" in the opposite direction: behind the "Gogol" direction, he recognizes "substantiality", while he accuses the "Pushkin" one of "shaping". "Pushkin was par excellence a poet of form... In his works, one should not look for, most importantly, deep content, clearly conscious and consistent." In fact, Chernyshevsky is inferior to Pushkin to the liberals. Considering art as one of the forms of socially useful activity, Chernyshevsky clearly underestimates its specificity. He appreciates in art only momentary, concrete historical content that meets the interests of society at a given moment, and is skeptical about that enduring and eternal that makes a work of real art interesting for different times and different generations. But in the main, he remains right: "Only those areas of literature achieve brilliant development that satisfy the urgent needs of the era."
Beginning in 1857, when the young Dobrolyubov took over the literary-critical department of Sovremennik, Chernyshevsky abandoned criticism and turned to questions of an economic and political nature, to the substantiation of the theory of the peasant socialist revolution. In the mid-60s, he became one of the inspirers and leaders of the underground revolutionary organization "Land and Freedom". The government has been following his actions for a long time and is eagerly looking for a suitable reason for his arrest. In early July 1862, Pavel Vetoshnikov was detained at the border, who was carrying correspondence from A. I. Herzen from London to Russia. In one of Herzen's letters, the secret police read: "We are ready to publish Sovremennik here with Chernyshevsky" (the publication of the magazine was then suspended by the government). These careless words of Herzen were the reason for Chernyshevsky's arrest. On July 7, 1862, he was taken under investigation and imprisoned in the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
creative history novel What to Do? A two-year investigation began; in addition to his connection with the "London propagandists", Chernyshevsky was accused of authoring the revolutionary proclamation "Bow to the lordly peasants from their well-wishers." Here, in the solitary confinement of Alekseevsky ravelin, Chernyshevsky worked hard for four months on the novel What Is To Be Done? It was started on December 4, 1862 and completed on April 14, 1863.
What prompted Chernyshevsky to turn to an unusual for him, critic and publicist, art form? The opinion was expressed that the motives that pushed Chernyshevsky to fiction are connected with those extreme conditions in which he found himself. Tribune and publicist, he was artificially isolated from journal work, addressing the reader in his usual form of a scientific journalistic article now turned out to be impossible. And so literary form was chosen by Chernyshevsky as a convenient way to encrypt a direct journalistic word. From this, a conclusion was made about the artistic stylization, the aesthetic inferiority of this work.
However, the facts prove otherwise. Even in Saratov, while teaching at the gymnasium, Chernyshevsky took up the pen of a fiction writer. The cherished dream of writing a novel lived in him even during the period of cooperation in Sovremennik. But the journal work drew Chernyshevsky into a tense public struggle on topical issues of our time, demanded a direct journalistic word. Now the situation has changed. In conditions of isolation from a stormy public life, in solitary confinement in the Peter and Paul Fortress, the writer got the opportunity to realize a long-conceived and already matured idea. Hence the extraordinary short term, which Chernyshevsky needed for its implementation.
"Special person". New people in Chernyshevsky's novel are intermediaries between vulgar and superior people. “The Rakhmetovs are a different breed,” says Vera Pavlovna, “they merge with common cause so that it is a necessity for them, filling their life; for them, it even replaces personal life. But to us, Sasha, this is not available. We are not eagles like him."
Creating the image of a professional revolutionary, Chernyshevsky also looks into the future, in many ways ahead of his time. But characteristic properties The writer defines people of this type with the maximum possible completeness for his time. First, he shows the process of becoming a revolutionary, dividing Rakhmetov's life path into three stages: theoretical training, practical familiarization with the life of the people, and the transition to professional revolutionary activity. Secondly, at all stages of his life, Rakhmetov acts with full dedication, with an absolute strain of spiritual and physical strength. He goes through a truly heroic hardening both in mental studies and in practical life, where for several years he performs hard physical work, earning himself the nickname of the legendary Volga barge hauler Nikitushka Lomov. And now he has "an abyss of affairs", about which Chernyshevsky specifically does not expand, so as not to tease the censorship.
The main difference between Rakhmetov and new people is
in the fact that “he loves more sublimely and wider”: it is no coincidence that for new people he is a little scary, but for ordinary people, like the maid Masha, for example, he is his own person. Comparison of the hero with an eagle and with Nikitushka Lomov is simultaneously intended to emphasize both the breadth of the hero's views on life, and his extreme closeness to the people, sensitivity to understanding the primary and most pressing human needs. It is these qualities that make Rakhmetov a historical figure. "A great mass of honest and good people, and there are few such people; but they are in it - theine in tea, bouquet in noble wine; from them strength and aroma; this is the color the best people, these are engines of engines, this is the salt of the salt of the earth. Rakhmet's "rigorism" should not be confused with "sacrifice" or self-restraint. He belongs to that breed of people for whom a great common cause of historical scale and significance has become the highest need, the highest meaning of existence. There is no sign of regret in Rakhmetov's refusal of love, for Rakhmetov's "reasonable egoism" is larger and fuller than the rational egoism of new people.
Vera Pavlovna says: “But is it possible for a man, such as we, not an eagle, to care for others, when he himself is very hard? Does he care about convictions when his feelings torment him? But here the heroine expresses her desire to move to the highest stage of development that Rakhmetov has reached. “No, I need a personal matter, a necessary matter on which my own life would depend, which ... for my whole fate would be more important than all my hobbies with passion ...” Thus, in the novel, the prospect of new people moving to the higher level opens up, a succession is built connection between them.
But at the same time, Chernyshevsky does not consider Rakhmetov's "rigorism" to be the norm of everyday life. human existence. Such people are needed on the steep passes of history as individuals who absorb the needs of the people and deeply feel the pain of the people. That is why in the chapter "Change of scenery" the "lady in mourning" changes her outfit for a wedding dress, and next to her is a man of about thirty. The happiness of love returns to Rakhmetov after the revolution.
The fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna. The key place in the novel is occupied by Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream, in which Chernyshevsky unfolds the picture of a "bright future". He paints a society in which the interests of each are organically combined with the interests of all. This is a society where man has learned to intelligently control the forces of nature, where the dramatic division between the mental and physical labor and the personality acquired the harmonic completeness and completeness that had been lost over the centuries.
However, it was in Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream that the weaknesses typical of utopians of all times and peoples were revealed. They consisted in excessive "regulation of details", which caused disagreement even in the circle of Chernyshevsky's like-minded people. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “Reading Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, I came to the conclusion that his mistake lay precisely in the fact that he was too preoccupied with practical ideals. Who knows if it will! And can the forms of life indicated in the novel be called final? After all, Fourier was a great thinker, and the entire applied part of his theory turns out to be more or less untenable, and only undying general propositions remain.
Hard labor and exile. The novel Prologue. After the publication of the novel What Is to Be Done? the pages of legal publications were closed for Chernyshevsky forever. Following the civil execution stretched long and painful years of Siberian exile. However, even there Chernyshevsky continued his persistent fiction work. He conceived a trilogy consisting of the novels The Old Man, The Prologue, and Utopia. The novel "Starina" was secretly transported to St. Petersburg, but the writer's cousin A.N. Pypin was forced to destroy it in 1866, when, after Karakozov shot at Alexander II, searches and arrests began in St. Petersburg. The novel "Utopia" Chernyshevsky did not write, the idea of the trilogy went out on the unfinished novel "Prologue".
The action of the Prologue begins in 1857 and opens with a description of the Petersburg spring. This is a metaphorical image, clearly hinting at the "spring" of public awakening, at a time of great expectations and hopes. But the bitter irony immediately destroys the illusion: “admiring the spring, he (Petersburg. - Yu. L.) continued to live in winter, behind double windows. And in this he was right: the Ladoga ice has not yet passed.
This feeling of the impending "Ladoga ice" was not in the novel "What is to be done?". It ended with the optimistic chapter "A Change of Scenery", in which Chernyshevsky hoped to wait for a revolutionary upheaval very soon... But he never did. The pages of the novel Prologue are permeated with a bitter consciousness of lost illusions.
Two camps are opposed to each other in it: revolutionary democrats - Volgin, Levitsky, Nivelzin, Sokolovsky - and liberals - Ryazantsev and Savelov. The first part of the "Prologue of the Prologue" deals with the private lives of these people. We have history love relationship Nivelzin and Savelova, similar to the story of Lopukhov, Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna. Volgin and Nivelzin, new people, are trying to save the heroine from "family slavery". But nothing comes of this attempt. The heroine is not able to surrender to "reasonable" arguments " free love". She loves Nivelzin, but “with her husband she has such brilliant career". It turns out that the most reasonable concepts are powerless in the face of complex reality, which does not want to fit into the Procrustean bed of clear and precise logical schemes. Thus, in a particular example, new people begin to realize
that move life alone lofty notions and reasonable calculations is unusually difficult.
In the everyday episode, like in a drop of water, the drama of the social struggle of the sixties revolutionaries is reflected, who, according to V. I. Lenin, "remained alone and, apparently, suffered a complete defeat." If the pathos "What to do?" - an optimistic statement of a dream, then the pathos of the "Prologue" is a collision of a dream with a harsh reality of life.
Along with the general tone of the novel, its characters also change: where Rakhmetov was, now Volgin appears. This is a typical intellectual, strange, short-sighted, absent-minded. He is always ironic, bitterly joking with himself. Volgin is a man of "a suspicious, timid nature", the principle of his life is "to wait and wait as long as possible, to wait as quietly as possible." What caused such a strange position for a revolutionary?
The liberals invite Volgin to make a radical speech at a meeting of the provincial nobles so that, frightened by it, they will sign the most liberal draft of the upcoming peasant reform. Volgin's position at this meeting is ambiguous and comical. And so, standing aside by the window, he falls into deep thought. “He recalled how it used to be that a crowd of drunken barge haulers was walking down the street of his native city: noise, screaming, remote songs, robber songs. A stranger would have thought: "The city is in danger - here, now they will rush to rob shops and houses, they will smash everything piece by piece." The door of the booth opens a little, from where a sleepy old face, with a gray, half-faded mustache, sticks out, a toothless mouth opens and either screams or groans with a decrepit wheeze: “Cattle, why are they roaring? Here I am!” The daring gang quieted down, the front one was buried behind the back - there would still be such a cry, and the daring fellows would have fled, calling themselves “not thieves, not robbers, Stenka Razin workers”, promising that as they “waving the oar”, then “Moscow will shake ", - they would run away, wherever their eyes look ...
"Poor nation, wretched nation! A nation of slaves, from top to bottom, all slaves...” he thought and frowned.
How to be a revolutionary, if he does not see a grain of that revolutionary spirit in the nikushkas of the drowsmen, which he dreamed of during the period of work on the novel “What is to be done?”. A question that has already been answered is now put in a new way. “Wait,” Volgin replies. The most active in the novel "Prologue" are the liberals. They really have an "abyss of deeds", but they are perceived as empty dances: "They talk:" Let's free the peasants. Where is the strength for such a thing? Still no strength. It is absurd to get down to business when there is no strength for it. And you see what it is leading to: they will release you. What will come out? Judge for yourself what comes out when you take on a task that you cannot do. Naturally, if you ruin the case, an abomination will come out, ”Volgin assesses the situation. Reproaching the people in slavery for the lack of revolutionary spirit in them, Volgin, in disputes with Levitsky, suddenly expresses doubts about the expediency of revolutionary ways to change the world in general: “The smoother and calmer the progress of improvements, the better. it common law nature: a given amount of force produces the greatest amount of motion when it acts smoothly and constantly; action by jerks and jumps is less economical. Political economy has revealed that this truth is just as immutable in social life. We should wish that everything went off quietly, peacefully. The calmer the better." It is obvious that Volgin himself is in a state of painful doubts. This is partly why he holds back the young impulses of his friend Levitsky.
But Volgin's call to "wait" cannot satisfy the young romantic. It seems to Levitsky that now, when the people are silent, and it is necessary to work to improve the fate of the peasant, to explain to society the tragedy of his situation. But society, according to Volgin, "does not want to think about anything but trifles." And in such conditions, one will have to adapt to his views, to exchange great ideas for small trifles. One warrior in the field is not an army, why fall into exaltation.
What to do? There is no clear answer to this question in the Prologue. The novel ends on a dramatic note of an unfinished dispute between the characters and goes into a description of Levitsky's love interests, which, in turn, are interrupted in mid-sentence.
This is the result of Chernyshevsky's artistic work, which by no means reduces the significance of the writer's legacy. Pushkin once said: "A fool alone does not change, because time does not bring him development, and experiments do not exist for him." In hard labor, persecuted and persecuted, Chernyshevsky found the courage to directly and harshly face the truth that he told himself and the world in the novel "Prologue". This courage is also a civil feat of Chernyshevsky, a writer and thinker.
Only in August 1883, Chernyshevsky was “graciously” allowed to return from Siberia, but not to St. Petersburg, but to Astrakhan, under police supervision. He met Russia, seized by government reaction after the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya. After a seventeen-year separation, he met with the aged Olga Sokratovna (only once, in 1866, she visited him for five days in Siberia), with adult sons completely unfamiliar to him ... Chernyshevsky lived alone in Astrakhan. The whole Russian life has changed, which he hardly understood and could no longer enter.
After much trouble, he was allowed to move to his homeland, to Saratov. But shortly after arriving here, on October 17 (29), 1889, Chernyshevsky died.
Chernyshevsky Nikolai Gavrilovich - prominent public figure XIX century. Famous Russian writer, critic, scientist, philosopher, publicist. His most famous work is the novel What Is to Be Done?, which had a very great influence on the society of its time. In this article we will talk about the life and work of the author.
Chernyshevsky: biography. Childhood and youth
Born on July 12 (24), 1828 in Saratov. His father was the archpriest of the local Alexander Nevsky cathedral, came from the serfs of the village of Chernysheva, hence the surname originates. At first, he studied at home under the supervision of his father and cousin. The boy also had a French tutor who taught him the language.
In 1846, Chernyshevsky Nikolai Gavrilovich entered St. Petersburg University in the department of history and philology. Already at this time, the circle of interests of the future writer began to take shape, which would later be reflected in his works. The young man studies Russian literature, reads Feuerbach, Hegel, positivist philosophers. Chernyshevsky realizes that the main thing in human actions- this is usefulness, not abstract ideas and useless aesthetics. The works of Saint-Simon and Fourier made the greatest impression on him. Their dream of a society where everyone is equal seemed to him quite real and achievable.
After graduating from the university in 1850, Chernyshevsky returned to his native Saratov. Here he took the place of a teacher of literature in a local gymnasium. From the students, he did not hide his rebellious ideas at all and clearly thought more about how to transform the world than about teaching children.
Moving to the capital
In 1853, Chernyshevsky (the biography of the writer is presented in this article) decides to quit teaching and move to St. Petersburg, where he begins his journalistic career. Very quickly, he became the most prominent representative of the Sovremennik magazine, where he was invited by N. A. Nekrasov. At the beginning of his cooperation with the publication, Chernyshevsky focused all his attention on the problems of literature, since the political situation in the country did not allow him to speak openly on more burning topics.
In parallel with his work in Sovremennik, the writer defended his dissertation in 1855 on the topic "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality." In it, he denies the principles of "pure art" and formulates a new view - "the beautiful is life itself." According to the author, art should serve for the benefit of people, and not exalt itself.
Chernyshevsky develops the same idea in "Essays on the Gogol Period", published in Sovremennik. In this work, he analyzed the most famous wills of the classics in terms of the principles he voiced.
New orders
Chernyshevsky became famous for such unusual views on art. The biography of the writer says that he had both supporters and ardent opponents.
With the coming to power of Alexander II, the political situation in the country changed dramatically. And many topics that were previously considered taboo are now allowed to be discussed publicly. In addition, the whole country expected reforms and significant changes from the monarch.
Sovremennik, headed by Dobrolyubov, Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky, did not stand aside and participated in all political discussions. Chernyshevsky was the most active in publishing, and he tried to express his opinion on any issue. In addition, he has reviewed literary works, evaluating them in terms of usefulness to society. In this regard, Fet suffered greatly from his attacks, and was eventually forced to leave the capital.
However, the news of the liberation of the peasants received the greatest resonance. Chernyshevsky himself perceived the reform as the beginning of even more serious changes. About which he often wrote and spoke.
Arrest and exile
Creativity Chernyshevsky led to the arrest. It happened on June 12, 1862, the writer was taken into custody and imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress. He was accused of compiling a proclamation entitled "Bow to the lordly peasants from their well-wishers." This view was written by hand and given to a man who turned out to be a provocateur.
Another reason for the arrest was a letter from Herzen intercepted by the secret police, in which a proposal was made to publish the banned Sovremennik in London. At the same time, Chernyshevsky acted as an intermediary.
The investigation into the case lasted a year and a half. The writer did not give up all this time and actively fought against investigative committee. Protesting against the actions of the secret police, he went on a hunger strike, which lasted 9 days. At the same time, Chernyshevsky did not leave his vocation and continued to write. It was here that he wrote the novel What Is to Be Done?, later published in parts in Sovremennik.
The writer's verdict was delivered on February 7, 1864. It reported that Chernyshevsky was sentenced to 14 years of hard labor, after which he would have to settle permanently in Siberia. However, Alexander II personally reduced the time of hard labor to 7 years. AT total The writer spent more than 20 years in prison.
For 7 years, Chernyshevsky was repeatedly transferred from one prison to another. He visited the Nerchinsk penal servitude, the Kadai and Akatui prisons, and the Aleksandriysky Zavod, where the house-museum named after the writer is still preserved.
After the end of hard labor, in 1871, Chernyshevsky was sent to Vilyuysk. Three years later, he was officially offered release, but the writer refused to write a petition for clemency.
views
Chernyshevsky's philosophical views throughout his life were sharply rebellious. The writer can be called a direct follower of the Russian revolutionary-democratic school and progressive Western philosophy, especially the social utopians. Passion in university years Hegel led to criticism of the idealistic views of Christianity and liberal morality, which the writer considered "slavish".
Chernyshevsky's philosophy is called monistic and is associated with anthropological materialism, since he focused on the material world, neglecting spirituality. He was sure that natural needs and circumstances form the moral consciousness of a person. If all the needs of people are satisfied, then the personality will flourish and there will be no moral pathologies. But in order to achieve this, it is necessary to seriously change the conditions of life, and this is possible only through a revolution.
His ethical standards are based on anthropological principles and the concept of rational egoism. Man belongs to the world of nature and obeys its laws. Chernyshevsky did not recognize free will, replacing it with the principle of causality.
Personal life
Chernyshevsky married quite early. The biography of the writer says that this happened in 1853 in Saratov, Olga Sokratovna Vasilyeva became the chosen one. The girl had great success in the local society, but for some reason she preferred the quiet and awkward Chernyshevsky to all her fans. In marriage, they had two boys.
The Chernyshevsky family lived happily until the writer was arrested. After he was sent to hard labor, Olga Sokratovna visited him in 1866. However, she refused to go to Siberia after her husband - the local climate did not suit her. She lived alone for twenty years. During this time, beautiful woman several lovers have changed. The writer did not at all blame his wife's connections and even wrote to her that it was harmful for a woman to remain alone for a long time.
Chernyshevsky: facts from life
Here are some notable events from the life of the author:
- Little Nikolai was incredibly well-read. For his love of books, he even received the nickname "bibliophage", that is, "the devourer of books."
- The censorship passed the novel What Is to Be Done?, not noticing a revolutionary theme in it.
- In official correspondence and documentation of the secret police, the writer was called "enemy number one of the Russian Empire."
- F. M. Dostoevsky was an ardent ideological opponent of Chernyshevsky and frankly argued with him in his Notes from the Underground.
The most famous work
Let's talk about the book "What to do?". Chernyshevsky's novel, as noted above, was written during his arrest in the Peter and Paul Fortress (1862-1863). And, in fact, it was the answer to Turgenev's work "Fathers and Sons".
The writer handed over the finished parts of the manuscript to the investigative commission, which conducted his case. Censor Beketov overlooked the political orientation of the novel, for which he was soon removed from office. However, this did not help, since the work had already been published in Sovremennik by that time. Issues of the magazine were banned, but the text had already been rewritten more than once and in this form was distributed throughout the country.
The book “What is to be done?” became a real revelation for contemporaries. Chernyshevsky's novel instantly became a bestseller, everyone read and discussed it. In 1867, the work was published in Geneva by the forces of the Russian emigration. After that, it was translated into English, Serbian, Polish, French and other European languages.
Last years of life and death
In 1883, Chernyshevsky was allowed to move to Astrakhan. By this time he was already a sick man of advanced years. During these years, his son Mikhail began to bother for him. Thanks to his efforts, the writer moved to Saratov in 1889. However, in the same year, he falls ill with malaria. The author died on October 17 (29) from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was buried at the Resurrection Cemetery in Saratov.
The memory of Chernyshevsky is still alive. His works continue to be read and studied not only by literary critics, but also by historians.
Unconventional and unusual for Russian prose XIX century, the plot twist, more characteristic of French adventure novels - the mysterious suicide described in the first chapter of "What is to be done?" - was, according to the generally accepted opinion of all researchers, a kind of intriguing device designed to confuse the commission of inquiry and tsarist censorship. The melodramatic tone of the narrative of family drama in the second chapter, and the unexpected title of the third - "Foreword", which begins with the words: "The content of the story is love, the main person is a woman, this is good, even if the story itself was bad ...".
Moreover, in this chapter, the author, addressing the audience in a half-joking, half-mocking tone, admits that he quite deliberately "began the story with spectacular scenes torn from the middle or end of it, covered them with fog." After that, the author, having laughed a lot at his readers, says: “I have not a shadow of artistic talent. I don't even speak the language well. But it's still nothing ... Truth is a good thing: it rewards the shortcomings of the writer who serves her.
The reader is puzzled: on the one hand, the author clearly despises him, reckoning him among the majority with whom he is “impudent”, on the other hand, as if he is ready to reveal all the cards to him and, moreover, intrigues him by the fact that his narrative also contains a hidden meaning! The reader is left with one thing - to read, and in the process of reading to gain patience, and the deeper he plunges into the work, the more tests his patience undergoes ...
The fact that the author really does not speak the language well, the reader is convinced literally from the first pages. So, for example, Chernyshevsky has a weakness for stringing verbal chains: “Mother stopped daring to enter her room”; loves repetition: “It’s strange for others, but you don’t know that it’s strange, but I know that it’s not strange”; the author's speech is careless and vulgar, and sometimes one gets the feeling that this is a bad translation from a foreign language: "The gentleman broke into ambition"; “For a long time they felt the sides of one of themselves”; “He answered with exquisite tolerance”; "People fall into two main departments"; "The end of this beginning happened when they passed by the old man"; the author's digressions are dark, clumsy and wordy: “They did not even think that they think it; and this is the best thing, that they did not even notice that they were thinking this ”; “Vera Pavlovna ... began to think, not at all, but somewhat, no, not several, but almost completely, to think that there was nothing important, which she took for strong passion just a dream that will dissipate in a few days... or did she think not, didn't think it, that she felt it wasn't? Yes, this is not so, no, so, so, more and more firmly she thought that she was thinking this.
At times, the tone of the narration seems to parody the intonations of a Russian everyday fairy tale: “After tea ... she came to her little room and lay down. So she reads in her bed, only the book falls from her eyes, and she thinks
Vera Pavlovna: what is it, recent times, I got a little bored sometimes? Alas, such examples can be cited ad infinitum... The mixing of styles is no less annoying: over the course of one semantic episode, the same faces continually stray from a pathetically sublime style to an everyday, frivolous or vulgar one.
Why did the Russian public accept this novel? The critic Skabichevsky recalled: “We read the novel almost on our knees, with such piety that does not allow the slightest smile on our lips, with which they read liturgical books". Even Herzen, admitting that the novel was "vilely written," immediately made the reservation: "on the other hand, there is a lot of good stuff." What is the "other side"? Obviously, from the side of Truth, the service of which should remove all accusations of mediocrity from the author! And the “advanced minds” of that era identified Truth with Benefit, Benefit with Happiness, Happiness with serving the same Truth...
Be that as it may, it is difficult to reproach Chernyshevsky with insincerity, because he wanted good, and not for himself, but for everyone! As Vladimir Nabokov wrote in The Gift (in the chapter devoted to Chernyshevsky), “the brilliant Russian reader understood the good that the mediocre novelist tried in vain to express.” Another thing is how Chernyshevsky himself went to this good and where he led the “new people”. (Recall that the regicide Sophia Perovskaya was already in early youth adopted Rakhmetov's "boxing diet" and slept on the bare floor.) Let the revolutionary Chernyshevsky be judged with all severity by history, and the writer and critic Chernyshevsky by the history of literature.
NIKOL AI GAVRILOVICH CHERNYSHEVSKY-NOVELIST AND RUSSIAN DEMOCRATIC FILM OF THE 60S
The development of Russian realism in the 60s-80s took place under the sign of the formation of a "sociological" (or social) trend, which replaced the "psychological" trend in the Russian historical and literary process. This conditional typological distinction of concepts, indicating the difference in the divine principles of embodiment in a literary work of the relationship between the individual and the environment, has been entrenched in domestic literary science. In this trend, it is customary to single out a line conventionally designated as a socio-ethical one, in line with which the work of L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoevsky flowed, and a revolutionary-democratic (or educational) one, which gave the schools of Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin to Russian literature.
Chernyshevsky entered the history of Russian literature primarily as the author of the novel What Is to Be Done?, which had a tremendous impact not only on the subsequent development of Russian realism, but also on the formation of the moral ideals of an entire generation. The traditions of Chernyshevsky as a novelist were most consistently embodied in democratic literature 60-80s of the 19th century, which consolidated in its artistic practice the discovery in the field of psychology research of “new” people from among the raznochintsy, who became the heroes of the novel “What to do?
The creation of the novel was preceded by a significant stage in the spiritual development of N.G. Chernyshevsky, reflected in his journalistic and literary-critical activities, which was associated with the Sovremennik magazine. Being the leading literary critic of the magazine (1853-1862), in 1855 Chernyshevsky defended his dissertation for a master's degree in Russian literature (“Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality”), in which he acts as the successor of V.G. Belinsky, completing the work begun by the critic on the theoretical substantiation of realism, the problems of folk art. The main subject of research in Chernyshevsky's dissertation was the central issue of aesthetics - the relationship of art to reality. The critic formulates the main aspects of the relationship between art and life: philosophical and epistemological (“reproduction of life is a common characteristic feature of art”, art is a “textbook of life”) and social and axiological (“works of art have another meaning - explanations of life ... and sentence about the phenomena of life). These aesthetic principles formed the basis of the theory
critical realism, gave a methodological key to scientific forecasting of the ways of development of domestic literature.
Following the logic of the indicated principles of approach to art, Chernyshevsky formulated the aesthetic ideal of the beautiful according to the concepts of the “common people” (life “in contentment with great job which, however, does not reach exhaustion"), gave a description of the revolutionary-democratic interpretation of this ideal, which provides for the satisfaction of the material, mental and moral needs of a person: "science recognizes noble aspirations for everything high and beautiful in a person as essential as the need to eat and drink". For the first time in Chernyshevsky's aesthetics, the socialist ideal of man as a comprehensively developed personality was proclaimed.
Claiming that " practical life embraces not only the material, but also the mental and moral activity of a person, ”Chernyshevsky thereby expands the sphere of manifestation of sublime. deeds. According to Chernyshevsky, they can be performed not only by selected individuals, but also by representatives of the masses (“And there were always, everywhere thousands of people whose whole life was a continuous series of lofty feelings and deeds ... it depends on the person himself to what extent his life is filled with beautiful and great". In his literary-critical works, Chernyshevsky substantiates the program of activity of a positively beautiful person. Thus, in the review "Russian Man on Rendez-Vous" (1858), dedicated to Turgenev's story "Asya", the critic recreates the image of the hero of the new time, portraying him as a public figure whose words do not diverge from deeds.The new hero, in his opinion, will come not from the environment of the Enlightened noble intelligentsia, who have lost their civil positions, but from the environment of democratic youth, who will find effective ways of rapprochement with the people: the article "Not Is the Beginning of a Change?" (1861),
In a review of "Childhood and adolescence" and military stories. L. Tolstoy "(1856) Chernyshevsky expresses his opinion about the originality of the talent of a young writer who came to literature. Considering the features of Tolstoy's psychological analysis, he points out that Count Tolstoy is most interested in "the mental process itself, its forms, its laws, the dialectics of the soul, to put it in a definitive term." In the same article, Chernyshevsky draws the attention of readers to the fact that Tolstoy's work is marked by a heightened interest in the "moral side" of the phenomena of reality, in social and ethical problems.
Arguing the need to express the heroic in literature, Chernyshevsky persistently pursued the idea that at this historical stage in the development of literature, the path of the “Gogolian trend”, the predominantly critical trend, is the most fruitful. In the work "Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature" (1855-1856), he develops the theory of realistic art, arguing that his future path is a creative synthesis of life, politics, science and poetry. Chernyshevsky's aesthetic attitudes will be embodied in the novel What Is To Be Done? (1863), which was written by him in the Alekseevsky ravelin of the Peter and Paul Fortress.
The artistic method of Chernyshevsky the novelist
In a letter to N. Nekrasov dated November 5, 1856, Chernyshevsky wrote that he placed special hopes on him as a poet, in whose work “poetry of the heart” was harmoniously combined with “poetry of thought” and that “poetry of the heart has the same rights as and poetry of thought. Time confirmed Chernyshevsky's forecast regarding Nekrasov, who opened a new page in the history of Russian poetry. Chernyshevsky himself artistically embodied the principles he outlined in the novel What Is To Be Done?. In it, the author concretized the concept of "poetry of thought", meaning by this the poetization of natural science, political, socialist ideas, acting in this case as the ideological supporter of A. Herzen. At the same time, the “poetry of the heart” occupies the author no less: acting as the heir to the traditions of the Russian novel (primarily the novel by I. Turgenev), Chernyshevsky rethinks it and presents this side of the life of his heroes in the light of the theory of “reasonable egoism” - ethics “ new" people, heroes of the new time.
In this case, the intellectual, rationalistic beginning becomes a poetic content and takes on an artistic form corresponding to it. The aesthetic justification for a new type of artistic thinking is associated with the name of V. Belinsky, who wrote in the article “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847”: “Now the very limits of the novel and story have moved apart,” therefore “the novel and story give full scope to the writer in relation to the predominant property of his talent", when "the thinking element ... merged even with the artistic".
Author of "What to do?" begins the story with an explanation of the special aesthetic position of the narrator, who talks about his artistic tastes and ends the dialogue with the “insightful” reader by admitting that he “has not a shadow of an artistic 370
Ayaznta." This statement contains a clear allusion to the closeness of the narrative style of the novel to the works of A. Herzen, noting the peculiarities of whose style Belinsky wrote: “The power of thought is the main strength of his talent; the artistic manner of capturing correctly the phenomena of reality is a secondary, auxiliary power of his talent ”(“ A look at Russian literature of 1847. The second article ”).
Indeed, in the novel What Is to Be Done? scientific sociological thought organizes the structure of the work, determines the features of its plot-compositional structure, the system of images of the work, and stimulates the reader's aesthetic experiences. Having made philosophical and sociological thought the genre motivation of the work, Chernyshevsky thereby expanded the ideas about the artistry of a work of realistic art.
"What to do?"
The studies devoted to the novel contain a significant number of versions explaining its complex architectonics. Attention was drawn to the "internal construction" of the work along the "four belts", to the "double plot" (family-psychological and "secret", Aesopian), the "multi-stage" and "cyclicality" of a series of closed plots (stories and chapters). Attempts were made to prove that the peculiarity of the structure of the novel lies in the fact that the frontiers are a "set of stories" united by the author's analysis of the social ideal and ethics of the "new people".
Indeed, in the storylines of the novel, one can note the following of certain traditions, which were embodied in the works of Russian writers of the middle of the century. This is the motive of the suffering of the girl in native family, alien to her in spirit, and a meeting with a person of high civic ideals (“Rudin”, “On the Eve”, “Cliff”), the situation of a love triangle, a way out of which a woman finds (“ Noble Nest", "Thunderstorm"). However, the nature of the connection of the situations of the novel genetically ascending to certain types of plot schemes demonstrates the author's innovative approach to solving the problem. The novel "What to do?" for all the seeming mosaic construction, it has a through line of narration. This is a story about the formation of a young generation of builders of a new life. Therefore, stories about Dmitry Lopukhov and Alexander Kirsanov, Katya Polozova and Nastya Kryukova, Rakhmetov are naturally (sometimes even contrary to traditional ideas about “main” and “secondary” characters) in the narrative about the life of Vera Pavlovna.
Genre originality novel consists in combining three content-structural elements in it: a description of the intimate family life of the characters, an analysis of the process of mastering a new ideology and morality by them, and a description of the ways of realizing ideals in reality.
l Artistic unity of the novel is also given by the function of the author-narrator.
Chernyshevsky enters into conversation with a variety of readers. This is evidenced by a wide range of intonational means used by the narrator, which include and irony, and mockery, and sarcasm, and pathos. Words sometimes sound ironic that characterize the level of moral development of the "good" reader's "public", still "illegible and slow-witted", which the novelist will have to win over to his side. Chernyshevsky uses the technique of a literary mask, thus veiling his own point of view. The author-narrator substantiates “the main requirements of the artist With tvennosti".
A special role in the structure of the novel belongs to the "dreams" of Vera Pavlovna, which cannot be considered as extra-plot "inserts" necessary to disguise revolutionary and socialist ideas. "Dreams" by Vera Pavlovna represent an interpretation of the key elements of the event plot. In the first two dreams, Vera Pavlovna's relationship with the "vulgar people" of the old world is completed and her transition to the "society of pure people" is traced. The third dream psychologically substantiates the plot of the second marriage of the heroine, and in the fourth dream the spiritual world of the developed personality of Vera Pavlovna is presented and an image of a beautiful future is created.
Especially important role the fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna plays in the artistic structure of the novel. It was in this dream that a qualitatively new facet of the realistic method of Chernyshevsky the novelist, who included “idyllic” pictures of a bright future, was most clearly manifested. Based on the experience of the works of utopian socialists, in a special author's digression, the author claims that “the purest nonsense that the idyll is inaccessible; it is not only a good thing for almost all people, but also possible, very possible.” A few years earlier, Chernyshevsky substantiated the "idyllic" poetics of the future novel, characterizing the features of the works of utopian socialists; “... the first manifestations of new social aspirations always have the character of enthusiasm, dreaminess, so that they are more like poetry than serious science.
It should be noted that Chernyshevsky deviates from the “canon” adopted in utopian novels and transfers the function of narrating about the future heroine. The change in the “subject” of the narrative is a significant fact: Vera Pavlovna’s “dream” is, first of all, the result of the “processing” of the experiences experienced by the individual psyche, therefore it characterizes the self-consciousness of the heroine at a certain stage of her life. Chernyshevsky was aware that the "idyllic" image of the coming communism created in the novel cannot be the fruit of pure fantasy, she "is unable to create for her paintings any element other than those given to her by reality."
One of the vivid images of the "dream" is the "crystal palace" in which the people of the future live. Its image goes back to the review of "Paxton's Palace", compiled by Chernyshevsky in 1854 and published in the August issue of Notes of the Fatherland (the area described in it is called Seidengham, and in the novel Seidengham). This palace was built in London's Hyde Park for the World Exhibition of 1851, and then its improved design was resumed three years later in the town of Sadengham. From this description later and
the poetics of the fourth "dream" of Vera Pavlovna is being formed. Such details of the image as "huge, most magnificent halls" capable of accommodating a huge number of people during lunch and rest hours, greenhouses, glass, orchestras, magnificent table setting - all these "fantastic" elements of the life of ordinary people who know how to work and rejoice, no doubt go back to the description of the real celebration of the opening of the Crystal Palace.
Between the "dream" of Vera Pavlovna and the magazine review there is a similarity of a different order. We can talk about the coincidence of the compositional methods of unfolding the image of the history of mankind in both descriptions. In the description of the Crystal Palace, the reader got acquainted with the museum expositions of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and so on chambers, the exhibits of which reflected milestones in the history of mankind. In the novel, the movement of time in the understanding of the heroine is presented as a movement from the era, the symbol of which was the Phoenician goddess Astarte (female slave), to the image of the Greek Aphrodite (half-slave queen), she is replaced by the goddess of the Middle Ages - the grieving Immaculateness, etc.
It should be noted the important role of poetic inclusions in the "dream". They perform several functions. They can be considered as a lyrical version of the main theme of the novel - the theme of liberation, which sounds in the journalistic digressions of the narrator. Poetic inserts introduce into the novel the motif of an "inspired poet" who sings a hymn to the sun, light, and love. It is interesting that the fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna is preceded by lines cited by Chernyshevsky from memory from A. Koltsov's "Russian Song", which at the very beginning of the chapter "pick up" lines from Goethe's "May Song" and Schiller's poem "Four Centuries". The symbolism of the association of poets in the dream of the heroine is unconditional: Chernyshevsky “erases” the temporal and stylistic difference in the manners of each of the poets, thereby indicating the timeless nature of a person’s desire for freedom. At the same time, it can be assumed that in this way Chernyshevsky points to the "sources" of the moral state of the heroine, brought up on the enlightenment ideas of Goethe, the romantic pathos of Schiller's poetry, the national poetry of Koltsov and Nekrasov.
Thus, the “utopia” of Chernyshevsky, created in Vera Pavlovna’s dream, is not the fruit of the author’s pure fiction, just as the depiction of the heroine’s workshop cannot be called the creation of the author’s fantasy. This is evidenced by a large number of documents confirming the existence of such public organizations (sewing, shoe shops, artels of translators and bookbinders, everyday life 374
0btx communes), which set themselves the goal of shaping the public consciousness of the common people. In the novel itself, the fourth dream is compositionally located between the story of two workshops - Vera Pavlovna and Mertsalova - and immediately precedes the message about the construction of a new workshop and the hopes that “in two years, instead of two sewing workshops, there will be four, five, and soon ten, and twenty." But if for Chernyshevsky and his like-minded people the communes were a sign of the future and their appearance gave hope for the accomplishment of a social revolution, then for such writers as F. Dostoevsky, N. Leskov, they were alien phenomena of Russian life. In “Crime and Punishment”, F. Dostoevsky ridiculed the ideas of the commune, embodying his negative attitude towards them in the image of the morally unscrupulous Lebeziatnikov, and N. Leskov devoted the novel “Nowhere” to exposing the failure of the socialist “hostel”, tracing the tragedy of pure-hearted people - Liza Bakhareva, Reiner, who connected themselves with "new" people.
In his novel, Chernyshevsky introduced the reader to different types of "new people", continuing the series begun by Turgenev's Bazarov. However, Chernyshevsky took a certain risk, undertaking to artistically substantiate the possibility of dividing "new people" into "ordinary people" (Lopukhov, Kirsanov, Vera Pavlovna, Polozova, Mer - Tsalova) and "special" (Rakhmetov). However, the image of Rakhmetov in the plot of the novel is motivated socio-psychologically: the need for change has ripened in society, so it has brought to life a new breed of man. Rakhmetov is almost devoid of individuality (a brief biography of the hero, "breaking out" from his environment, is rather a means of typing, rather than individualizing the hero). Grotesque turns out to be one of the central episodes, memorable to the reader, with a bed studded with nails, an exaggerated "romantic story" with a young widow. It is curious that the love story about Rakhmetov becomes known to the reader from the words of Kirsanov, who gives an appropriate assessment of the behavior of his friend on "rendez-vous". This is a significant fact of the novel: it reflects Chernyshevsky's belief that there is no insurmountable boundary between "ordinary" and "special" people. It is no coincidence that the author "trusts" Rakhmetov to explain Lopukhov's act and convey a note from him to Vera Pavlovna. Chernyshevsky does not show a “special” hero in the field of practical activity, as happens by “ordinary” people who conduct educational work among the people: Lopukhov and Mertsalova with girls in the workshop, Lopukhov with students and factory workers. Imagining personality traits of a professional
revolutionary, Chernyshevsky had some difficulty in to specifically depict"underground" activities of Rakhmetov. Apparently it is possible explain by the fact that the image of Rakhmetov is known # degree "limited" his "feature": in case of victory or deathaffairsHe mustassimilate with "ordinary" people, accepting themimagelife. Second of named options and is considered democratic fiction of the 60s and 70s, in which depicts a complex social situation resulting from collapse of hopes for an ambulance peasant revolution.
The plot-compositional side of the novel "What is to be done?" has long attracted researchers with its magnificent and complex architectonics. This complexity has been tried to be explained from different perspectives. Attention was drawn to the "internal construction" of the work (in four zones: vulgar people, new people, superior people and dreams), “double plot” (family-psychological and “secret”, “Aesopian”), “multi-stage” and “cyclicality” of a series of closed plots (stories, chapters), “a set of stories” united by the author’s analysis of the social ideal and ethics new people. Genesis found out storylines novel, which in many respects represent a contamination of several plots traditional for Russian literature of the middle of the century, implemented in the creative practice of I. S. Turgenev, I. A. Goncharov, A. V. Druzhinin and other authors (oppression of a girl in her own family, alien to her in spirit , and a meeting with a person of high aspirations; a story about the position of a married woman and a family conflict, known as the "triangle"; the plot of a biographical story). one
All these interesting observations help to comprehend the process of the formation of Chernyshevsky's novel along the paths of cyclization of stories and novels, to genetically restore the typological genealogy of a number of its plot points. Without them, the literary innovation of Chernyshevsky the novelist will look unconvincing. However, the genetic approach sometimes relegated to the background the elucidation of the nature of qualitatively new plot situations of “What is to be done?”, and the excessive “anatomization” of the work into a number of “closed”, “inserted” plots hardly helped to reveal its plot-compositional integrity and solidity. Apparently, it is more expedient to talk not about "closed" plots and "double" centers, but about new and interconnected plot situations integrated into a single artistic structure of the novel.
It has a history of the formation of the young generation of builders of a new life, passing through the whole work, capturing its social, ethical-philosophical and moral-psychological aspects. In the narrative about the life of Vera Pavlovna, naturally and logically (sometimes even contrary to traditional ideas about the main, secondary and “inserted” characters), stories about Dmitry Lopukhov and Alexander Kirsanov, Katya Polozova and Nastya Kryukova, Rakhmetov and the young widow he saved, “the lady in mourning" and "a man in his thirties", which appeared in the chapter "A Change of Scenery". And this happened because the story about the formation and fate of the new woman absorbed not only the intimate love experiences of the heroine, but also the whole process of introducing her to the great cause of restructuring the social, family-legal and moral-ethical foundations of society. The dream of personal happiness naturally developed into the socialist dream of the happiness of all people.
Structural unity "What to do?" is carried out primarily in the subjective form of manifestation of the author's position, when the image of the author-narrator is introduced into the novel. A wide range of intonational and stylistic means of the narrator, including good nature and frankness, mystification and audacity, irony and mockery, sarcasm and contempt, gives reason to speak of Chernyshevsky's intention to create in this image the impression of a literary mask, designed to exercise the author's influence on the heterogeneous readers of the book: "noble "reader (friend), "insightful" reader (enemy) and that "kind" reader's "public", still "illegible and slow-witted", which the novelist has to win over to his side. The “scissors” that seem at first glance between a genuine author and a narrator who does not have “a shadow of artistic talent” (the third section of the Preface) become less noticeable in the course of further narration. It is noteworthy that such a multi-valued stylistic manner, in which the serious was sprinkled with jokes and irony, was generally characteristic of Chernyshevsky, who liked to mystify his interlocutor even in everyday situations.
Chernyshevsky, and in other works written in the Peter and Paul Fortress, seeks to create the impression of objectivity in the narrative by introducing into it a narrator with a liberal orientation (“Alferyev”) or even several narrators (“The Tale in the Story”). Such a manner will also be characteristic of some works about “new people” by other authors (I. Kushchevsky, “Nikolai Negorev, or the Prosperous Russian”; A. Osipovich-Novodvorsky, “An Episode from the Life of Neither a Peacock, nor a Crow”, 1877). However, in "What to do?" the functions of a conservative interlocutor are transferred to the “astute reader”, personifying the reactionary principle both politically, and morally, ethically, and aesthetically. In relation to him, the narrator acts as an antagonist and an irreconcilable polemicist. Compositionally, they are firmly “attached to each other” (XI, 263).
The call to devote oneself to the revolution, the glorification of the revolutionary - the “engine of the engines” of social progress, the socio-economic substantiation of the behavior and character of people, the propaganda of materialism and socialism, the struggle for women's equality, the approval of new moral and ethical standards of people's behavior - this is far from a complete complex of social political and philosophical and moral problems that worried the author-narrator in conversations with the reader, who still has so much "mess and nonsense in his head." Formed in lyrical digressions, conversations and polemics with the “astute reader”, the author’s “intervention” becomes the structural and organizing factor of the narrative. And here the author-narrator himself substantiates "the main requirements of artistry", new principles of plot construction, "without any tricks", "mysteriousness", "showiness" and "embellishment". The novelist's creative laboratory opens before readers, when in the narrator's digressions he gets acquainted with the new principles of materialistic aesthetics underlying the novel, with reflections on the relationship between fiction and life material, on different concepts of plot and composition, on outdated definitions of main and secondary characters, etc. e. Thus, in the presence of the reader, a new poetics was formed, an original artistic structure of the socio-philosophical novel.
Let us consider how other forms of genre structural unity are realized in the novel What Is to Be Done?
From the plot-compositional side, all the encounters of the heroine with other characters (including Rakhmetov and the “lady in mourning”) are interconnected and are included in a cross-cutting event plot in which the “personal” and ideological are in indissoluble artistic unity. To be convinced of this, it is necessary to abandon the outdated and misleading habit of considering Vera Pavlovna's "dreams" as extra-plot "inserts" and "episodes" necessary only to mask dangerous revolutionary and socialist ideas.
"Dreams" by Vera Pavlovna represent an unusually bold artistic interpretation of the event plot at the key, turning points in the heroine's spiritual life and are realized in two varieties. In one case, these are artistic and symbolic paintings that affirm the typological unity and interconnection of the heroine’s personal liberation and the liberation of all girls from the “basement” in general (“Verochka’s First Dream”), female emancipation and social renewal of all mankind (“Vera Pavlovna’s Fourth Dream”); in the other, a retrospective and extremely “compressed” presentation of events that influenced the worldview and psychology of the heroine and predetermined new plot twists. It is through "The Second Dream of Vera Pavlovna" that the reader learns about the disputes in the Lopukhov circle about the natural science works of the German chemist Liebig (about different conditions for the growth of an ear of wheat, about the significance of drainage work), philosophical discussions about the real and fantastic desires of people, about the laws of historical progress and civil war in America. In the home youth "university", Vera Pavlovna, having mastered the idea that "life has labor as its main element", decided to organize a new type of labor partnership.
Both varieties are artistically convincing and original because they use the psychological impressions of people in a state of dreaming (reflection of real events, conversations and impressions in fantastic grotesque images or in overlapping paintings that whimsically shift the temporal and spatial boundaries of real "original sources") . Natural in the complex of dreams of the heroine are the symbolic images of the "Bride of her suitors", which first appeared as a bold artistic allegory of the revolution in Lopukhov's conversation with Vera Pavlovna during a quadrille (IV section of the first chapter), and her younger sister- "Bright Beauty", personifying Love-Equality ("Third Dream of Vera Pavlovna", the first part of her "Fourth Dream"). It is noteworthy that just in these pinnacle plot moments, the structural unity of the novel, the relationship between personal and social, love and revolutionary activity, was especially clearly manifested.
Thus, the story of the first and second marriages of Vera Pavlovna, of the love and happiness of the young women goes synchronously with the history of its spiritual development, which culminated in the organization of the labor commune and its leadership and recognition of the sanctity of the revolutionary feat. “Forget what I told you, Sasha, listen to her!” (XI, 335) - she whispers excitedly to her husband, shocked by the fate of the "lady in mourning" and her fiery appeals:
My dear, be bold
Trust rock!
And even earlier, she will be given a lesson in humanity, moral stamina and fidelity to social ideals by Rakhmetov (see XI, 210-223), who, since that memorable visit to her, unexpectedly for the reader, but naturally for the author and his heroine, has become the central character of the novel.
This is how Chernyshevsky's book about love, socialism and revolution was created.
Involving traditional plot situations, contaminating and rethinking them, the author of What Is To Be Done? in his artistic decisions, in fact, he laid the foundations for a new plot and compositional construction, which would later be used in other works about the “new people”. This includes a fundamentally new variant of resolving the hero’s situation on “rendez-vous”, which Chernyshevsky’s predecessors (for example, Turgenev) interpreted as an impossible opportunity for a thoughtful and searching girl to find her happiness through meeting a man of lofty aspirations.
Chernyshevsky looked optimistically at the possibility of an ideological "conversion" of a woman under the influence of a man with concepts and views unusual for people in her circle. Even women from the privileged circles of society (Katerina Vasilievna Polozova, a young widow saved by Rakhmetov) found themselves in the sphere of such a spiritual revival. But the author undoubtedly saw the main reserve in replenishing the ranks of the “new people” in the female democratic environment, even providing for the possibility of the moral revival of the so-called “fallen woman” (Nastya Kryukova). The description of the relationship between Lopukhov and Verochka Rozalskaya translated the traditional “rendez-vous” plot situation into a new plot version of “new conversion”. The ideological and moral-ethical influence on the consciousness of the heroine was carried out through Lopukhov's enlightening conversations, reading books recommended by him, socio-philosophical discussions taking place in the "society of pure people". The plot-organizing factors in the story of Vera Pavlovna and Lopukhov, in its, so to speak, internal justification, were the new moral and ethical views of the characters (the theory of “reasonable egoism”), and in the external, eventual manifestation, a fictitious marriage, which then became valid.
The "selfishness" of the heroes of What Is to Be Done?, their "theory of calculating benefits" "reveals the true motives of life" (XI, 66). He is reasonable because he is subject to their natural desire for happiness and goodness. The personal benefit of a person must correspond to the universal interest, which Chernyshevsky identified with the interest of the working people. There is no lonely happiness, the happiness of one person depends on the happiness of other people, on the general well-being of society. That is why Lopukhov frees Verochka from domestic oppression and forced marriage, and Kirsanov cures Katya Polozova and helps her free herself from the illusion of "happiness" with Jean Solovtsov, a contender for her huge inheritance.
A new moral and ethical doctrine, regulating in a new way the personal and social relationships of people, thus lies at the basis of plot situations unusual for the literature of the middle of the century. This doctrine also determines the optimistic denouement of the intricate "triangle" (the love of a married woman for her husband's friend), over the resolution of which literature has struggled so unsuccessfully. Convinced that Vera Pavlovna loves Kirsanov, Lopukhov "leaves the stage." Subsequently, regarding his act, he will write: “What a high pleasure it is to feel acting like a noble person ...” (XI, 236).
The plot situation of the "new conversion" absorbed a whole range of ideas of the novelist, including the process of forming a new person - a socialist, and the implementation of the idea of women's emancipation, and the formation of a morally healthy family. Its different versions were artistically tested by Chernyshevsky in the story "Alferyev" (the relationship of the hero with Serafima Antonovna Chekmazova is a negative option; with Liza Dyatlova - an example of comradely norms in relations between a man and a woman, incomprehensible and suspicious for the older generation), in "Tales in a story" (the story of Lizaveta Sergeevna Krylova), in the "Prologue" (Nivelzin and Lidia Vasilievna Savelova, Levitsky and Anyuta, Levitsky and Mary), in "The Story of a Girl" (Liza Svilina).
In fiction about “new people”, the situation of the hero on “rendez-vous” in its new interpretation of “new conversion” will be artistically presented in two typological solutions, coming from Turgenev and Goncharov, in one case, and from Chernyshevsky, in another. Bazarov-Volokhov's typological "model" (Evgeny Bazarov - Odintsova, Mark Volokhov - Vera), testifying to the difficulties of "new conversion" (complicated by the theory of "freedom of passions"), can be seen in few novels. Of these, the works of 1879 stand out: N. Arnoldi (“Vasilisa”) and O. Shapir (“One of many”). The first of them tells the tragic story of Vasilisa Nikolaevna Zagorskaya, who courageously broke with the aristocratic environment, but failed to organically merge with the revolutionary environment and accept the new ideals of the Russian political emigrant Sergei Borisov. The long and complicated romance of a “new” man and a woman who came out of privileged circles (Mikhail Nezhinsky and Eva Arkadievna Simborskaya), in the work of O. Shapir, also ends with the suicide of the heroine.
The second version of the "new conversion", coming from "What is to be done?", was artistically refracted in a much larger group of works. Among them are "Hard Time" by V. Sleptsov (Maria Nikolaevna Shchetinina - Ryazanov), "Step by Step" by I. Omulevsky (Lizaveta Mikhailovna Prozorova - Svetlov), "Roman" by A. Osipovich-Novodvorsky (Natalia Kirikova - Alyosha), " Andrey Kozhukhov” by S. Stepnyak‑Kravchinsky (Tanya Repina – Kozhukhov) and others. By the beginning of the new century, this process is becoming common and widespread. In social-democratic organizations, the appearance of girls who have parted from a privileged position in society has become common. The ideas of socialism entered the consciousness of Natasha, Sashenka, Sophia and Lyudmila (M. Gorky's story "Mother"), and they, in turn, pass them on to the working youth.
In the novel "What to do?" the differentiation of "new people" is clearly traced. It proved to be extremely stable in the artistic practice of democratic literature for at least two decades.
Chernyshevsky's contemporaries understood very well the creative difficulties in depicting a new type of contemporary figure. “In general, we think that a modern young man cannot be chosen as the hero of a novel,” writes the “landlord” S. S. Rymarenko in a handwritten lecture on I. S. Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” in the spring of 1862, “a deep analysis of his action is more under the jurisdiction of the III Department than the artist modern society. I think comments here are superfluous, everyone understands what I want to say without them. Rymarenko foresees only two possibilities for the writer: “One of the two is either to speak about him in oblique terms, or to portray him in a completely different light against the present. Both are unenviable." 2
Chernyshevsky took the path of differentiating the "new people" into "ordinary" (Lopukhov, Kirsanov, Vera Pavlovna, Mertsalov, Polozova) and "special" (Rakhmetov), filling these concepts with a deep social and ideological meaning, while maintaining a high level of artistic impressionability. The conditional allocation of two types in the system of positive characters has its own philosophical and socio-historical justifications. Especially often mentioned in this connection is the influence of Chernyshevsky's philosophical and anthropological ideas when distinguishing "extraordinary people" into a "special breed", as having the right to this isolation due to the innate properties of their individual "nature". This is the influence of anthropologism on the artistic method of the author of What Is To Be Done? often exaggerated, some critics of the novel with this approach tendentiously note in the image of Rakhmetov even “duality”, “straightforwardness”, “schematism” and other “shortcomings” and deviations from realism. Wrong accents in determining the worldview, anthropological and artistic and aesthetic aspects in the typological structure of the “new people” are largely due to ignoring the connections of the novel with the revolutionary reality of the 60s, on the one hand, and underestimating the artistic and logical means of comprehensively recreating the image of an intellectual figure - with another. The "circumstances" of life, social being, and not the biologically given properties of human nature determine the behavior and morality of the "new people" - both "special" and "ordinary".
Differentiation of heroes "What to do?" is confirmed by the practice of "landlord" figures, which provides, in addition to organizing an "underground" society, according to the name of that time, also forms of legal influence on social strata, to which, for example, one of the memoirists (M. N. Sleptsova) attributed "the publication of popular books , the organization of reading rooms with very cheap fees, the organization of a network of Sunday schools. 3
Chernyshevsky's authorial foresight lies in the fact that, having sensitively grasped these two aspects of social activity in life, he "transferred" them to the level of artistic typology. However, the novelist did not contrast “special people” with “ordinary” ones, leaders of the revolutionary underground with ordinary figures of the liberation movement, but outlined a dialectical relationship between them, introducing the images of “a lady in mourning” and “a man of about thirty” as a transitional link. In the future, democratic literature of the 60-70s. will reflect the expansion of the relationship between "exceptional" and "ordinary", which will be observed in the history of several generations of revolutionary fighters.
In the sphere of activity of "ordinary" people, Chernyshevsky included legal educational work in Sunday schools (teaching Kirsanov and Mertsalov in a team of workers in a sewing workshop), among the advanced part of the students (Lopukhov could talk for hours with students), at factory enterprises (classes in a factory office for Lopukhov - one of the ways to "influence the people of the whole plant" - XI, 193), in the scientific field. The name of Kirsanov is associated with the scientific and medical plot of the collision of a raznochinets doctor with the "aces" of St. Petersburg private practice - in the episode of the treatment of Katya Polozova; his experiments on the artificial production of protein are hailed by Lopukhov as "a complete revolution of the whole question of food, the whole life of mankind" (XI, 180).
But most of all, the readers of the novel were excited by the legendary figure of a “special” person. In the conditions of the first revolutionary situation, the selection of "special people" - revolutionaries, from among the new heroes, the recognition of their central position in the general arrangement of novel characters was undoubtedly a civic and creative feat of the writer. Despite the fact that the writer was not able to tell in detail about those aspects of life in which Rakhmanov (the original name of Rakhmetov in draft version novel) was “the main character” (XI, 729), he still managed to recreate the moral and psychological image of a professional revolutionary, introduce him to social, ideological and moral ideas, trace the ways and conditions for the formation of a new hero of our time, even hint at some specific aspects of its practical activities.
Of course, all this is achieved by special ways of artistic generalization, in which historically specific names and events disappear, and the means of allegory serve as additional creative finds for recreating the mysterious, hidden from the eyes of "enlightened people" of the "underground" activity of the Rakhmetovs. The artistic impact on the reader was carried out with the help of a whole range of means, including the author's intervention (section XXXI - "Conversation with the insightful reader and his expulsion", etc.), the polysemantic use of artistic (event) time, the assumption of two variants of Rakhmetov's activity in the period from 1859 to 1861 (abroad and in Russian conditions), artistic and symbolic comparison of the hero with the burlatsky leader Nikitushka Lomov. Deliberately grotesque, at first glance "improbable" episodes from Rakhmetov's life are introduced into the novel: the famous "trial" of the hero on a bed studded with nails (Rakhmetov is preparing for possible torture and deprivation), and the "romantic story" of his relationship with the young widow he saved ( the author's rejection of a love affair when portraying a professional revolutionary). The narrator can suddenly move from the semi-legendary high style of stories and rumors about a gentleman of a “very rare breed” to an everyday scene of a conversation between the now “cunning”, “nice”, “cheerful person” with Vera Pavlovna (section XXX of the third chapter). Throughout the section, a well-thought-out lexical-stylistic system of allegory was consistently carried out (Rakhmetov “was engaged in other people’s affairs or nobody’s affairs in particular”, “he had no personal affairs, everyone knew that”, “Rakhmetov’s fiery speeches, of course, are not about love”, etc. d.).
In the "Rakhmetov" parts of the novel, new plot situations are presented for the first time, which will become pivotal in the structure of subsequent works about professional revolutionaries. The description of Rakhmetov's three-year wandering around Russia, introduced into the narrative as a private episode of the biography of the hero who achieved "respect and love of ordinary people", turned out to be unexpectedly popular among the readers of the novel, and then received creative development in many works based on the plot of "going to the people" and encounters between the hero and commoners. Suffice it to recall the observation of one memoirist who, in Chernyshevsky's two or three phrases about how Rakhmetov "pulled the strap" with barge haulers, saw "the first hint of 'going to the people'." 4 And at the end of the summer of 1874, in the midst of the historical "going to the people", D. M. Rogachev repeated the path of Rakhmetov, setting off with barge haulers along the Volga. For two years of wandering, he was a barge hauler, a loader and a laborer.
The motif of "walking", "wandering" and meetings underlies many works about "new people". Among them are “Stepan Rulev” by N. Bazhin, “An Episode from the Life of Neither Peasant nor Crow” by A. Osipovich-Novodvorsky, “Nov” by I. Turgenev, “Through the Castles and Vessels” by P. Zasodimsky, etc. Genetically go back to the episodes "going to the people", mastered by democratic literature, plot twists in the story of M. Gorky "Mother" in connection with the description of the trips of Rybin, Nilovna and Sofya to villages and villages.
Attention of many readers of "What to do?" attracted Rakhmetov's trips abroad. In an atmosphere of strengthening ties between the revolutionaries and the Russian political emigration and, in particular, with the Russian section of the First International, Rakhmetov was even perceived as a propagandist of the "Western movement". 5 In the literature after Chernyshevsky, plot situations became familiar, reflecting the trips of “new people” abroad and the life of Russian political emigration (“Step by Step” by I. Omulevsky, “Vasilisa” by N. Arnoldi, “One of Many” by O. Shapir, “ Two Brothers” by K. Stanyukovich, “Andrey Kozhukhov” by S. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky and others). Chernyshevsky returned to this plot in Siberian exile, telling in the novel "Reflections of Radiance" about the wanderings of his new hero Vladimir Vasilyevich, a member of the Paris Commune.
No less (if not more) popular among readers was the "erotic episode" from Rakhmetov's life. Rakhmetovsky's rigorism in relation to a woman noticeably influenced young people, for example, on the eve of mass going to the people. It was believed that family life with its joys was not created for revolutionaries doomed to death. In the charters of some revolutionary circles, it was proposed "to introduce celibacy as a requirement from members." Rakhmetov's rigorism was followed by the most prominent revolutionaries of the seventies - A. Mikhailov, D. Lizogub, S. Khalturin, M. Ashenbrenner and others.
It is difficult to overestimate the literary consequences of the story first told by Kirsanov about his extraordinary friend. Rakhmetov's version of "rendez-vous" is firmly rooted in works about professional revolutionaries, largely determining their plot and compositional structure. Stepan Rulev with N. Bazhin, Ryazanov with V. Sleptsov ("Hard Time"), Telenyev with D. Girs ("Old and Young Russia"), Pavlusha Skripitsyn (in the first part of the novel by V. Bervi -Flerovsky "On Life and Death") and Anna Semyonovna with her theory of celibacy (in the second part of the same work), Lena Zubova and Anna Vulich in S. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky ("Andrey Kozhukhov") and, finally, Pavel Vlasov in M Gorky ("Mother").
However, due to the active intrusion of women into the revolutionary movement of the 70s. in fiction about “new people”, another plot option was also developed, by the way, also provided by Chernyshevsky in the tragic story of “ladies in mourning” and “men of about thirty” as an alternative to Rakhmetov’s attitude to marriage. It was embodied, for example, in the description of the relationship between Skripitsyn and Anyuta, Pavlov and Masha, Ispot and Anna Semyonovna in the already mentioned novel by Bervi-Flerovsky, Zina Lomova and Boris Mayevsky, Tanya Repina and Andrei Kozhukhov - in the work of S. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky. These plot love-intimate situations usually ended tragically. Life has confirmed that in the absence of political freedoms, in an atmosphere of gendarmerie repressions, a revolutionary is deprived of family happiness.
The Rakhmetovsky type of professional revolutionary, artistically discovered by Chernyshevsky, had a tremendous impact on the life and struggle of several generations of revolutionary fighters. V. I. Lenin saw the greatest merit of Chernyshevsky the novelist in the fact that “he not only showed that every right-thinking and really decent person should be a revolutionary, but also something else, even more important: what should be a revolutionary, what should be his rules, how he should go to his goal, what methods and means to achieve its implementation. Artistic principles discovered by Chernyshevsky in the novel What Is To Be Done? to recreate the heroic character of a professional revolutionary, turned out to be exceptionally convincing for his followers, who set themselves the task of preserving the heroic ideal in life and in literature. A number of stable signs of a revolutionary were used:
renunciation of noble privileges and material benefits (Vasily Telenyev, an army officer, retired and lives by lessons; Sergei Overin, being the heir of two hundred souls, “abandoned” the peasants, that is, abandoned them; Arkady Karamanov breaks with his father and gives up land peasants);
great physical hardiness and ability to endure hardships (Telenyev is a good swimmer, he tests his physical strength in the fight against a rural strongman; Overin tests his endurance by sticking a lancet into the palm of his right hand; Stozharov can sleep on nails, like Rakhmetov, the author calls him a rigorist) ; renunciation of love for a woman in the name of a great public purpose(love is not included in Teleniev’s life calculations; Overin, delighted with Lisa’s courageous behavior during the arrest, is ready to marry her, but abandons his intention when he learns that Malinin loves her; Stozharov leaves his beloved girl, Varia Barmitinova; Svetlov declares to Khristina Zhilinskaya, that he never marries, and reads to her a Circassian song from Lermontov’s poem “Izmail Bey”, which is also familiar to readers from the novel “What Is to Be Done?”; Seliverstov is unhappy in his personal life, but he “has a business, there is another love, a greater , there is another happiness, more complete" - a common cause);
great theoretical preparation, ideological conviction and devotion to the cause of the people (Telenyev defends his theoretical positions in a dispute with Markinson, conducts propaganda work with the peasants, classifying himself among those educated people who wish the peasants well; Overin "calculates the range of historical events in Russia", creates a new science - "historical algebra", according to which the nobility equals zero; all this prepared him for a decisive step - to lead a peasant uprising; Svetlov promotes advanced ideas through the school of adults and unhesitatingly sympathizes with the rebel workers of the Yeltsin factory).
All these characteristic elements of the "Rakhmetov" ideological and artistic structure with an emphasis on the "exclusivity" of the characters allow us to speak of Chernyshevsky's undoubted influence on the works of democratic fiction.
N. G. Chernyshevsky continued and developed the principles of the theory of children's literature laid down by V. G. Belinsky. Articles and reviews by N. G. Chernyshevsky devoted to children's literature are an important part of literary heritage great critic. Chernyshevsky was convinced that children's literature was called upon to propagate revolutionary democratic ideas, to educate in children the character traits necessary for a citizen of their homeland and a fighter for the liberation of the people. Each drink and review by N. G. Chernyshevsky testifies to what a consistent struggle for a new, realistic Russian literature he led. He believed that in children's books it is necessary, first of all, to depict life truthfully and provide broad educational material.
N. G. Chernyshevsky insisted on recognizing the child's right to the free development of his personality in accordance with the characteristics and requirements of age. He considers it natural for a child to be addicted to outdoor games, to books with a rapid development of action, to fantasy and entertainment. The critic creates his reviews as articles of a polemical nature, putting critical issues shaping the child's worldview. He is interested in the theory of children's literature inseparable connection with the social problems of the time. Chernyshevsky acted as a consistent fighter for the inclusion in the reading of children of the necessary, talented works of modern Russian and foreign literature. Chernyshevsky's struggle to widen the circle children's reading had a socio-political character. He pointed out the need to expand the reading circle of children with works of literature for adults: A. S. Pushkin, M. Yu. Lermontov, N. V. Gogol, I. I. Lazhechnikov, V. Scott, J. Sand, C. Dickens. One of Chernyshevsky's favorite writers was Ch. Dickens. The great critic appreciated him as an excellent realist and as a defender of the oppressed, "a punisher of lies and hypocrisy." Trusting the sharpness and insight of the child's mind, Chernyshevsky considered it necessary to show realistically, with "Dickensian" colors, the life of the oppressed classes.
N. G. Chernyshevsky fought for the formation of a materialistic worldview of the younger generation. To do this, he advised to create books about animals and plants, about various natural phenomena. Each progressive popular science book received the most lively attention from the critic. So, he reviews D. Mikhailov's book "Introduction to the Study of Natural History" and notes its role in the initial acquaintance of children with the animal world.
N. G. Chernyshevsky is outraged by educational books written without taking into account state of the art science. He reveals the reasons why reactionary writers are afraid of progressive ideas in children's books.
N. G. Chernyshevsky noted as the main shortcomings of books for children their class character, as well as the desire inherent in many writers to smooth out the contradictions between the people and the ruling classes. One of the most convincing and polemically sharp articles of N. G. Chernyshevsky is his review of the New Tales. There were eleven stories in this book, "borrowed from the public and private life of different peoples." The book was translated from French, the stories were taken from foreign children's magazines. These were works about meekness and humility, about the omnipotence of God and the need to obey him. N. G. Chernyshevsky gives a sharp description of the New Tales: “This book in itself is not interesting. The “new stories” are almost worse than all the old ones and are told in the most incomprehensible way? in a sloppy tongue."
N. G. Chernyshevsky exposes the reactionary, didactic nature, and primitiveness of such books in the parody Fedinka and Petinka. “Fedinka did not like to study, but Petinka loved to study; Fedinka said: I know everything myself, and Petinka said: if I don’t start studying, I won’t know anything. When they grew up, Fedinka didn’t know anything, and Petinka became a smart person.”
Chernyshevsky is convinced that children's books need a dynamic plot and laconic style. He turned great attention in the language of children's literature: "A lot of things can be explained to children very easily, if only the explainer himself clearly understands the subject that he undertook to talk with children, and could speak in human language." Chernyshevsky approvingly assessed the language and style of L. Tolstoy's stories, placed in the appendix to the magazine " Yasnaya Polyana”, he noted that the exposition is “quite simple; the language is artless and understandable. The book by N. G. Chernyshevsky not only denies the reactionary ideas about A. S. Pushkin, their reviews and articles, with which the majority of children's books were imbued, but also puts forward and affirms the advanced ideals of new children's literature. First of all, Chernyshevsky considers it necessary to create for the younger generation the image of a contemporary hero. And he himself creates such an image in the book for youth “Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. His Life and Works (1856).
Arguing the need for realistic literature for children, Chernyshevsky spoke about such features of it as nationality and patriotism. In the introductory chapter, he gives an interpretation by the revolutionary democrats of the concept " great writer", emphasizing that this is "a person who provides a great service, doing a lot of good for his homeland." He speaks primarily about Pushkin's nationality, notes that the poet's defense of popular interests determined his place in literature. Chernyshevsky's book on Pushkin goes beyond the usual biographical genre. She explained to the younger generation the great significance of Pushkin's poetry and promoted the revolutionary democratic understanding of nationality and patriotism. Chernyshevsky in this book turned to children with contemporary issues. Chernyshevsky's lively and emotional narrative about the life and work of Pushkin was invaluable for establishing realistic children's literature.
Chernyshevsky shows Pushkin as a poet who managed to combine progressive and modern ideological content with a perfect poetic form: "... he taught the public to love and respect literature, aroused a strong interest in it in society, taught the writer to write about what is entertaining and useful for Russian readers."
The second part of the book about Pushkin was at that time the most complete anthology of the poet's works, selected by Chernyshevsky for children's reading. It included excerpts from poems, a scene from Boris Godunov, a chapter from Eugene Onegin, and Pushkin's lyrics. Chernyshevsky promoted the idea of revolution in his articles and reviews of children's literature. Addressing teachers and children's writers, he called for teaching children to comprehend the events of social life, to give them not only positive information, but also to expose the abnormal, ugly phenomena of modern society. Belinsky's thoughts on realistic direction in children's > literature found a deep, substantiated development in the articles and reviews of Chernyshevsky. He developed into a new historical period questions of ideological, scientific and artistic nature of children's literature.
