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What, from your point of view, can explain the "strange" behavior of the merchant Ferapontov in the above episode?
By dusk, the cannonade began to subside. Alpatych came out of the basement and stopped at the door. The once clear evening sky was covered in smoke. And through this smoke a young, high-standing sickle of the moon shone strangely. After the former terrible rumble of guns had fallen silent over the city, silence seemed to be interrupted only by the rustle of steps, groans, distant screams and the crackling of fires, as it were spread throughout the city. The groans of the cook are now quiet. From both sides, black clouds of smoke from fires rose and dispersed. On the street, not in rows, but like ants from a ruined tussock, in different uniforms and in different directions soldiers passed and ran. In the eyes of Alpatych, several of them ran into Ferapontov's yard. Alpatych went to the gate. Some regiment, crowding and hurrying, dammed up the street, going back.
They are surrendering the city, leave, leave, - the officer who noticed his figure said to him and immediately turned to the soldiers with a cry:
I'll let you run around the yards! he shouted.
Alpatych returned to the hut and, calling the coachman, ordered him to leave. Following Alpatych and the coachman, all Ferapontov's household went out. Seeing the smoke and even the lights of the fires, which were now visible in the beginning twilight, the women, who had been silent until then, suddenly began to wail, looking at the fires. As if echoing them, similar cries were heard at the other ends of the street. Alpatych with a coachman, with trembling hands, straightened the tangled reins and horses' lines under a canopy.
When Alpatych was leaving the gate, he saw ten soldiers in the open shop of Ferapontov pouring sacks and knapsacks with wheat flour and sunflowers with a loud voice. At the same time, returning from the street to the shop, Ferapontov entered. Seeing the soldiers, he wanted to shout something, but suddenly stopped and, clutching his hair, burst out laughing with sobbing laughter.
Get it all, guys! Don't get the devils! he shouted, grabbing the sacks himself and throwing them out into the street. Some soldiers, frightened, ran out, some continued to pour. Seeing Alpatych, Ferapontov turned to him.
Decided! Russia! he shouted. - Alpatych! Decided! I'll burn it myself. Decided ... - Ferapontov ran into the yard.
Soldiers walked continuously along the street, filling it all up, so that Alpatych could not pass and had to wait. The hostess Ferapontova with the children was also sitting on the cart, waiting to be able to leave.
It was already quite night. There were stars in the sky and a young moon shone from time to time, shrouded in smoke. On the descent to the Dnieper, the carts of Alpatych and the hostess, slowly moving in the ranks of soldiers and other crews, had to stop. Not far from the crossroads where the carts had stopped, in an alleyway, a house and shops were on fire. The fire has already burned out. The flame either died away and was lost in black smoke, then it suddenly flashed brightly, strangely clearly illuminating the faces of the crowded people standing at the crossroads.
(L. N. Tolstoy "War and Peace")
Question: How, from your point of view, can one explain the "strange" behavior of the merchant Ferapontov in the above episode?
In the novel "War and Peace" Tolstoy showed the struggle of the Russian army with the French invaders. The scene of the burning of shops by the merchant Ferapontov helps us to understand the attitude of the Russian people to this war and the invaders.
This merchant remained in Smolensk to the last. He did not believe that the city would be handed over to the enemy. When the retreating Russian regiments began to pass through the city, Ferapontov did not want to leave the city. He even beat his wife because she wanted to run away with the children from Smolensk. He understood the gravity of the situation only after his cook had been wounded by a shell fragment.
As everybody Orthodox people he went to the prayer service in the cathedral. When Ferapontov returned home, he saw that soldiers were emptying his shop. He wanted to drive the soldiers away, and then he called on everyone to sort out supplies in the shop so that they would not get to the enemy. As we learn later, he set fire to his barn with grain reserves.
Ferapontov is a merchant who knows how to value his property. But at the moment when he realized the hopelessness of the situation in Smolensk, he decided that it would be better for the Russian people to plunder his property than for the French to get it. This is a kind of self-sacrifice. Very many Russian people took this step during the war. That is why the peasants burned hay for horses, the peasants burned their villages. The people did everything to ensure that the French army had nothing to profit from on Russian soil.
Tolstoy introduced this episode into the novel to show the strength folk spirit and self-sacrifice.
For Tolstoy, an artist and thinker, the years of writing "War and Peace" are the time when he, the count, stood on the verge of a break with his class, and at the same time it seemed to him that he had found a model of life, devoid of the vices characteristic of the ruling classes. The events of the war of 1812, as it were, helped him to establish himself in two thoughts. The first is about the remoteness of the higher nobility from the interests of the country and a strong attachment to external manifestations life: “... the same exits, balls, the same french theater, the same interests of the courts, the same interests of service and intrigue. The second is about the strength of the people's spirit, about the fact that a person's path to happiness and truth lies in the rejection of his "I" and in the subordination of this "I" to the general, the people.
Tolstoy compares the Russians and the French with two swordsmen, one of whom demands fencing according to the rules, that is, demands a game (these are French), and the other does not recognize any rules (these are Russians), because he realized that “this is not a joke, but it concerns his life”, and therefore “dropped his sword” and, “taking the first club that came across, began to turn it around”. Tolstoy believes that this way of waging war is “good for the people who, in a moment of trial, without asking how others acted according to the rules in such cases, with simplicity and ease pick up the first club that comes across and nail it until his sense of insult and revenge will not be replaced by contempt and pity.”
The people do not understand and do not recognize the game of war. The war puts before him a matter of life and death. And Tolstoy - a historian, a thinker - welcomes the people's war. Tolstoy - the future non-resistance, sings in the novel "club people's war", creates the image of the partisan hero Tikhon Shcherbaty, considers partisan war an expression of just people's hatred of the enemy, sees in such behavior common people his spiritual height.
In the first volume of the novel, bright episode, depicting the character of a Russian person in the war, is the story of the battery of Captain Tushin. Captain Tushin is an ordinary, unremarkable officer, of whom there were many in the Russian army. This small, thin, shy and weak, in some way even funny man on the battlefield is true hero. Of course, he was afraid, but at the right moment he managed to overcome his fear. And courage lies in this, Tolstoy is convinced, so that, shuddering from the shots, not to run away from where it is dangerous, but to do your own thing. Tushino soldiers are also common, who "like children ... looked at their commander, and the expression that was on his face was invariably reflected on their faces."
In war, one concern owns both the soldiers having fun in a dirty pond, and the merchants burning their bread, and the commander Bagration. At the risk of incurring the wrath of the tsar, after leaving Smolensk, he writes a letter to Arakcheev without any diplomacy: “It hurts, it’s sad, and the whole army is in despair ... Rumor has it that you think about the world. In order to make peace, God forbid! .. If it’s gone like that, we must fight while Russia can and while people are on their feet ... Tell me, for God's sake, that our Russia - our mother - will say that we are so afraid and for what such good and we give the zealous Fatherland to the bastards and instill hatred and disgrace in every subject ... "^^
Not only Bagration thinks so - all of Russia. Although everyone has their own. Ferapontov has a different one, Natasha has a third one, but everyone has one.
And all of them, noble and simple: Prince Andrei and Alpatych, Nikolai Rostov in his regiment and Pierre in Moscow, a man in a frieze overcoat, rejoicing in the fire of Smolensk, and Petya Rostov squeezed by the Moscow crowd, bathing soldiers and General Bagration - they all know now: the time has come when only one thing became important - common destiny all, the fate of the Fatherland.
The novel contains more than a hundred crowd scenes, more than two hundred people from the people, named by name, act in it, although the significance of the people itself is determined not by the number of crowd scenes, but by the people's idea. Major events novels are evaluated by Tolstoy from the point of view of ordinary Russian people - the peasants Karp and Vlas, the elder Vasilisa, the merchant Ferapontov, the sexton and many others who hostilely met the Napoleonic army and resisted it.
Here Alpatych drives up to Smolensk, under which the French are already standing. Willy-nilly, he listens to the merchant Ferapontov, with whom he always stayed in the city. To the message that “everyone is afraid of the Frenchman,” Alpatych replies: “Woman's talk, woman's talk!” He is worried about one thing: the weather is good, "an expensive day for harvesting bread" is being missed. The merchant Ferapontov appears only once on the pages of the novel, but what happens to him will help us understand Natasha, Andrey, and Petya, and everyone ordinary people who yesterday lived in peace, and today live in war.
The owner of a house, an inn and a flour shop, "a fat, black, red forty-year-old man with thick lips, with a thick bump-nose, the same bumps over black, frowning eyebrows and a fat belly" - such is Ferapontov. Nothing like pretty man. Tolstoy deliberately draws him like this: he doesn’t have a stomach, but a belly, not a nose, but a bump; in three lines the word "fat" is repeated four times. He is black, red, and his first words are about money: “The men ask for three rubles from a cart - there is no cross on them!” His wife begs him to leave Smolensk, but Ferapontov does not want to go for anything, does not want to leave good, he even beat his wife for her requests.
The only thing that motivates Ferapontov is the unwillingness to pay seven rubles for a cart (yesterday it was three, today it's already seven!); he is tormented by envy of the merchant Selivanov, who profitably sold flour to the army.
And then the shelling of the city from guns began: “something whistled like a bird flying from top to bottom, a fire flashed in the middle of the street, something shot and covered the street with smoke.” Russian soldiers are already walking along the street, leaving the city; the officer is already shouting to Alpatych: “The city is being surrendered, leave, leave!” And at this time, several soldiers burst into Ferapontov's shop. They “with a loud voice poured sacks and knapsacks with wheat flour and sunflowers. At the same time, Ferapontov entered the shop. Seeing the soldiers, he wanted to shout something, but suddenly stopped and, clutching his hair, burst out laughing with sobbing laughter.
Get it all guys! Don't get the devils! he shouted, grabbing the sacks himself and throwing them out into the street...
Decided! Russia! he shouted. - Alpatych! decided! I'll burn it myself. I decided ... - Ferapontov ran into the yard.
He remained the same - black, red, with a thick belly, a cunning merchant who knows how to benefit from everything. But in his cry: "Don't get the devils!", in which he identifies himself with "Raseya", in his sobbing laughter: "I'll set it on fire myself" - the future fire of Moscow and the death of Napoleon are already lurking. Because the moment has come when the merchant Ferapontov thinks not about money and goods, but about Russia. Maybe he does not think about her, but he feels for her - the way everyone feels at this hour.
Houses and shops are already burning, set on fire by the same owners as Ferapontov, and people are carrying “burning logs from the fire across the street to the neighboring yard” to light something else so that the French do not get it.
"Urruru! - Echoing the collapsed ceiling of the barn, from which there was a smell of cakes from burnt bread, the crowd roared. The flame flared up and illuminated the animatedly joyful and exhausted faces of the people standing around the fire ... "
The spiritual height of ordinary people in the days of the beginning Patriotic War 1812 becomes, we see, the milestone of the new spiritual path truth-seeking hero Pierre. At first, Russian soldiers defending the Russian land, without thinking about themselves, become a great revelation for him. In each of them, Pierre saw that agreement with himself, which he had needed for so long. Rapprochement with the people and the hardships they endured in captivity explain the nature of Pierre’s thoughts and the meaning of the conclusions, who decided that the most important thing is to become like them: “To be a soldier, just a soldier!” However, he did not become a soldier, but this rich man from high society decided under the guise common man dressed in a coachman's caftan.
The height of the spirit of ordinary people in war days also becomes that elusive force called the spirit of the army, which Pierre and Prince Andrei are talking about. This force, according to Tolstoy, determined the moral outcome of the battle. Napoleon ordered two hundred guns to be directed at the Russians - he was reported that the order had been fulfilled, “but that the Russians were still standing.
Our fire is tearing them out in rows, and they are standing, - said the adjutant.
From that moment on, both Napoleon and his entire army began to experience "a feeling of horror in front of that enemy, who, having lost half of his troops, stood just as menacingly at the end as at the beginning of the battle." For the first time, Napoleon, who still lived in a world of eternal success and believed that his victories were inevitable, had to understand that in this war a moral victory had been won over him, because the French "for the first time near Borodino, the hand of the strongest enemy in spirit was laid down."
Using the example of the Frenchman Rambal, who knew how to straighten his mustache and condescendingly talk with the vanquished, Tolstoy shows in what a pitiful position the great french army. Russian soldiers who met a Frenchman could have killed him as an enemy. But the war is won, and cruelty is no longer in the soul of the people, "a sense of insult and revenge" has already been replaced in it by "contempt and pity." The French were fed, they were given vodka, Rambal was taken to the hut ...
For Tolstoy, the most important quality that he appreciates in people is humanity. And it is precisely this, the natural feeling of humanity, that lives now, when the enemy has been expelled, in the souls of ordinary soldiers. It contains the highest nobility that is shown by soldiers who are entirely composed of yesterday's peasants, ordinary Russian people - a victorious people, a people who rose in 1812 to defend their homeland and defeated a huge enemy army led by an invincible commander before.
The writer makes Kutuzov the spokesman for popular feelings and moral heights, who is distinguished in the novel by "an extraordinary power of penetration into the meaning of ongoing phenomena, and its source lies in the popular feeling, which he carried in himself in all its purity and strength."
It is this popular feeling that draws Tolstoy himself to the peasant, in whom he likes everything: kindness, hard work, hard work, health, love of life, spontaneity, patriotism, and obedience to fate. In the intention to show the rapprochement of the advanced part of the nobility with the people in 1812 (in the novel, this is evidenced not only by Kutuzov, but also by Pierre, Natasha), the writer, taking into account historical truth, I believe, speaks only of the increased interest in a simple peasant. But even in this form, Tolstoy's thought was a revelation.
Prince Nikolai Andreevich Bolkonsky, sending his manager Alpatych to Smolensk, gave him only the usual economic assignments. But Princess Mary, on the advice of Desal, sent a letter with Alpatych to the governor "with a request to inform her about the state of affairs and about the degree of danger to which the Bald Mountains are exposed."
And now Yakov Alpatych is going on his way, "accompanied by his family, in a white downy hat (a princely gift), with a stick, just like the prince ..."
Every time Alpatych appears on the pages of War and Peace, he pronounces the name of Prince Bolkonsky, “proudly raising his head and putting his hand in his bosom,” with this gesture he emphasizes the significance of his master. The whole life of Alpatych is a reflection of the life of the old prince. Going on the road, he, just like the prince, removes his relatives:
“- Well, well, women's fees! Grandmas, women! - puffing, Alpatych spoke in a patter exactly as the prince said, and sat down in the kibitochka.
We have already seen that Tolstoy almost never describes the war from himself, with his own eyes. We saw the battles through the eyes of Nikolai Rostov and Andrei Bolkonsky, we will see Borodino through the eyes of Pierre - so now we are approaching Smolensk, under which the French are already standing, together with Alpatych.
Willy-nilly, he listens to the merchant Ferapontov, with whom he always stops in Smolensk. To the message that “everyone is afraid of the Frenchman,” Alpatych answers like a prince: “Woman's talk, woman's talk!” He is worried about one thing: the weather is good, "an expensive day for harvesting bread" is being missed.
The merchant Ferapontov appears only once on the pages of the novel, but what happens to him will help us understand Natasha, Andrey, and Petya, and all the people who lived yesterday in peace and today live in war.
The owner of a house, an inn and a flour shop, "a fat, black, red forty-year-old man with thick lips, with a thick bump-nose, the same bumps over black, frowning eyebrows and a fat belly" - such is Ferapontov. Isn't it a pretty little man? Tolstoy deliberately draws him like this: he doesn’t have a stomach, but a “belly”, not a nose, but a bump; in three lines the word "thick" is repeated four times; he himself is “black, red”, and his very first words are about money: “The men ask for three rubles from a cart - there is no cross on them!” His wife begs him to leave Smolensk: “Do not ruin me with small children; the people, they say, all left; What does he say we are? - Ferapontov does not want to go for anything, does not want to leave good, he beat his wife for her requests: “He beat me like that, he dragged him like that!”
The only thing that interests Ferapontov is how not to pay seven rubles for a cart (yesterday it was three, today it's already seven!); he is tormented by envy of the merchant Selivanov, who profitably sold flour to the army.
And now Alpatych leaves the Ferapontov yard. “Suddenly, a strange sound of a distant whistle and blow was heard, and then there was a merging rumble of cannon fire, from which the windows trembled.”
It was the beginning. "WITH different parties whistles, shots of cannonballs and the bursting of grenades falling in the city were heard. If we saw all this through the eyes of Prince Andrei or his father, we would immediately understand that the bombardment of the city from many guns had begun. But Alpatych is watching us, and he does not understand anything; around him, people are only curious, even cheerful - until the very second when "something whistled like a bird flying from top to bottom, a fire flashed in the middle of the street, something shot and covered the street with smoke." So saw Alpatych and the women standing at the gate. But this something that looked like a bird crushed the thigh of a curious cook - then only people realized what was happening.
Russian soldiers are already walking along the street, leaving the city; the officer is already shouting to Alpatych: “The city is being surrendered, leave, leave!” - and at this time several soldiers burst into Ferapontov's shop. They “with a loud voice poured sacks and knapsacks with wheat flour and sunflowers. At the same time ... Ferapontov entered the shop. Seeing the soldiers, he wanted to shout something, but suddenly stopped and, clutching his hair, burst out laughing with sobbing laughter.
Get it all guys! Don't get the devils! he shouted, grabbing the sacks himself and throwing them out into the street...
Decided! Russia! he shouted. - Alpatych! decided! I'll burn it myself. I decided ... - Ferapontov ran into the yard.
He remained the same - black, red, with a thick belly, a cunning merchant who knows how to benefit from everything. But in his cry: "Don't get the devils!", in his sobbing laughter: "I'll set fire to myself" - the future fire of Moscow and the death of Napoleon, because the moment has come when the merchant Ferapontov thinks not about money and goods, but about Russia.
Maybe he does not think about her, but he feels for her - the way everyone feels at this hour.
Houses and shops are already burning, set on fire by the same owners as Ferapontov, and people are carrying “burning logs from the fire across the street to the neighboring yard” to light something else so that the French do not get it.
Nothing surprising can happen at this moment: even the fact that Alpatych is suddenly called out by Prince Andrei, illuminated by the flames of a fire, is not even strange: Prince Andrei should be here, “in a raincoat, riding a black horse”, with a pale and exhausted face ; he should like this, “raising his knee ... write with a pencil” a note to his father. All swept away war is coming across Smolensk, and only one person remains unchanged in this crazy, blazing world.
"Are you a colonel? shouted the chief of staff, with a German accent, in a voice familiar to Prince Andrei. - In your presence, houses are lit, and you are standing? What does this mean? You will answer, - shouted Berg, who was now assistant chief of staff of the left flank of the infantry troops of the first army ... "
From this "assistant chief of staff of the left flank" turns the soul. He did not understand anything, nothing, just as his friend Drubetskoy did not understand either; with Berg in this war "a very pleasant and visible place"; he does not understand why they light houses; where to him - clean and pink - to a thick, red, black Ferapontov!
And Prince Andrei, who seven years ago shouted at Zherkov for stupid jokes, today does not shout at Berg: he does not notice him, does not hear him.
"- Urruru! - Echoing the collapsed ceiling of the barn, from which there was a smell of cakes from burnt bread, the crowd roared. The flame flared up and illuminated the animatedly joyful and exhausted faces of the people standing around the fire...
Prince Andrei is with them, with these people who burn their bread, with the merchant Ferapontov, and he does not care about Berg; his concern is Russia.
After what Prince Andrei saw in Smolensk, he can no longer be surprised by what he notices, retreating with his regiment high road, past the Bald Mountains: “The bread left on the vine burned and spilled out. The swamps have dried up. The cattle roared from hunger, not finding food in the meadows burned by the sun... The sun seemed to be a big crimson ball. There was no wind, and people were suffocating ... ";
This is war. But even in war people are people. Arriving at his devastated estate, Prince Andrei saw two peasant girls stealing plums in the master's greenhouse. They were frightened by the master, and Prince Andrei, too, "hurriedly turned away from them, afraid to let them notice that he had seen them." After meeting with the girls, there was also a pond in which the soldiers bathed "with laughter and a boom" - "this floundering echoed with fun, and therefore it was especially sad." Sad because the war destroys not only houses and barns, it goes through human lives, and all these people merrily floundering in the pond, tomorrow they may die, and girls with plums too, the war will not spare anyone.
But people no longer want mercy. One concern owns these soldiers having fun in a dirty pond, and merchants burning their bread, and the commander Bagration. At the risk of earning the wrath of the king or the all-powerful Arakcheev, after leaving Smolensk, he nevertheless writes a letter to Arakcheev - lovely letter a soldier not familiar with diplomacy: “It hurts, it’s sad, and the whole army is in despair, which is the most important place abandoned in vain ... Rumor has it that you think about the world. In order to make peace, God forbid! .. If it’s gone like that, we must fight while Russia can and while people are on their feet ... Tell me, for God's sake, that our Russia - our mother - will say that we are so afraid and for what such good and we give the zealous Fatherland to the bastards and instill hatred and disgrace in every subject ... "
What is Russia - our mother? A ruined house in the Bald Mountains, girls with plums; Natasha, who betrayed Prince Andrei with Anatole, sister, son, old father - this is the Russia of Prince Bolkonsky. Ferapontov has a different one, Bagration has a third one, but everyone has one, and all of them: Prince Andrei and Alpatych, Nikolai Rostov in his regiment and Pierre in Moscow; a man in a frieze overcoat, rejoicing at the fire of Smolensk, and Petya Rostov squeezed by the Moscow crowd; bathing soldiers and General Bagration - they all know now: the hour has come when only one thing has become important - the common fate of all, the fate of the Fatherland.
