Gogol began his creative activity as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
The originality of Gogol was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the county landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the "little man", a resident of St. Petersburg corners.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who scourged "the vulgarity of a vulgar man", exposing to the utmost the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
The social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of characters-types.
Deep insight into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of his contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of the word, to draw images of a huge generalizing power.
The goals of a vivid satirical depiction of heroes in Gogol are a careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. So, for example, portraits of the heroes of "Dead Souls" were created. These details in Gogol are mostly everyday: things, clothes, housing of heroes. If in romantic stories Gogol are given underlined scenic landscapes, giving the work a certain elation of tone, then in his realistic works, especially in "Dead Souls", the landscape is one of the means of describing the types, characterizing the characters.
The subject, social orientation and ideological coverage of the phenomena of life and the characters of people determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the folk collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is either enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings ...", in "Taras Bulba ”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to live colloquial (in everyday paintings and scenes of “Evenings ...” or in narratives about bureaucratic landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common language, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. material from the site
Gogol loved and subtly felt folk colloquial speech, skillfully applied all its shades to characterize his heroes and the phenomena of social life.
The character of a person, his social position, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol's characters.
The strength of Gogol the stylist is in his humor. In his articles on Dead Souls, Belinsky showed that Gogol's humor "consists in opposition to the ideal of life with the reality of life." He wrote: "Humor is the most powerful tool of the spirit of negation, which destroys the old and prepares the new."
The writer's work is such a mystery that it is hardly possible to solve it, especially the work of such complex and rich natures as Gogol was.
It is all the more difficult to unravel Gogol's spiritual life because he was one of those people who do not like to speak out and not only jealously guard their best aspirations and plans to themselves, but sometimes even avert their eyes from their true goals and views in a mystifying manner. This feature of Gogol is so great that even his intimate letters to people close to him do not always correctly determine his real thoughts and acquire the character of persuasiveness only when, in terms of the feelings and opinions expressed in them, they partly coincide with other Gogol's notes, partly with direct evidence from people, who knew him personally. But the surest way to recognize the identity of such a secretive person as Gogol is, of course, to approach him at a time when he is not aware of your presence and, so to speak, to overhear what he says in private.
But where did Gogol really remain himself? When could one take him by surprise and hear the sincere and fundamental note of his voice? I believe that most of the time he was himself in his writings; his colossal talent took possession of him irrevocably and made him involuntarily, here and there, directly surrender to his passion, in the words of Shakespeare, “to cling to a dream”1). Yes, and Gogol himself tells us this way to solve the riddle. When he was nineteen years old, after leaving the Nizhyn Lyceum, he wrote to his mother: “Do you believe that I inwardly laughed at myself along with you! Here they call me a humble man, the beginning of meekness and patience. In one place I am the most quiet, modest, courteous, in another - gloomy, thoughtful, uncouth, etc., in the third - chatty and annoying to the extreme, in others I am smart, in others I am stupid. Honor me in any way you like, but only from my real career will you know my real character. One has to be especially careful in judging Gogol's ignorance, which, although it cannot be denied and impossible not to point out, but which somehow disappears from our eyes as soon as we come into contact with his gift of insight and his amazing, so to speak, eye of life. . He himself brilliantly illuminated this issue of his illiteracy in the story "Portrait". One painter is defined here as follows: “He was a remarkable man in many respects. He was an artist, of which there are few - one of those miracles that only Rus' alone spews from its unopened womb, a self-taught artist who himself found in his soul, without teachers and schools, rules and laws, carried away only by one thirst for improvement and walking, reasons, perhaps unknown to him, only one path indicated from the soul; one of those self-born miracles that contemporaries often honor with the insulting word “ignorant” and which, not cooling off from the blasphemy of their own failures, receive only new zeal and strength and already go far in their souls from those works for which they received the title of ignorant. With a high inner instinct, he felt the presence of thought in every object. In these words, much is applicable to Gogol himself, who, mainly in himself, sought both strength and different ways to express these forces.
Before offering general attention to the various aspects of his life and the development of his work, I allow myself to make one reservation. Everyone knows that in the character of this man there were many qualities that unpleasantly struck those who met him in life: his whims, and arrogance, and the obsessive tone of teaching, and cunning, sometimes combined with searching - all this repelled him very much. many; but I will not dwell at all on these, if you will, dark features of Gogol. I won't wonder if he was good or bad man? The rules of ordinary morality are too narrow to cover such a complex, sometimes sick and repressed, sometimes highly inspired existence as inner life this peculiar person. I am trying not to appreciate his morality, but only to try to explain how Gogol developed and what methods of creativity he discovered in connection with his personality.
There is, fortunately, one document which, in many respects, inspires serious confidence in judging Gogol's development as a writer. This document is his own "Author's Confession". He inspires confidence, because the accuracy of the information told here is confirmed by many people who knew Gogol, and his own note in a letter to Pletnev (June 10, 1847), where he writes about this confession: “I only pray to God that He give me strength to state everything simply and truthfully. In this “Author's Confession” there is one valuable remark: “From early youth,” writes Gogol, “I had one road which I am walking. I was only secretive because I wasn't stupid - that's all." With this remark, Gogol destroys the assumptions about some kind of turn in his personal development, which is often seen in his “Correspondence with Friends”.
This exposure of Gogol is so important that for all the reliability of the document, let's try not to believe him in this case. Is it really true that Gogol remained true to himself even in the last part of his life? Let's try to trace this according to the information we have about his life. Let us first focus our attention on his morbid daydreaming, religiosity and sadness, leaving aside his real aspirations for the time being. From what age do these qualities, which distinguished him in adulthood, become noticeable in him? Let's start from childhood. We all know that in his youth and early youth he was a man of irrepressible gaiety. And it was true; so it seemed to everyone, so it seemed at times and himself, but look what was hidden behind this cheerfulness. As a child, he could sometimes hear some strange voices coming from nowhere and calling him by name; those voices had an amazing effect on him. In the story "Old World Landowners" he recalls this. “I confess that I have always been afraid of this mysterious call. I remember that as a child I often heard it: sometimes suddenly someone would clearly pronounce my name. The day was usually at this time the clearest and sunniest; not a single leaf in the garden moved on a tree; the silence was dead... I usually then ran with the greatest fear and taking a breath from the garden, and only then calmed down when I came across some person, the sight of which drove out this terrible heart desert. If such incidents that captured the child were not as frequent as he himself says about it, then in any case they do not prove even at this age the boy’s great vitality in life, but rather the exorbitant development of the imagination, which overwhelmingly influenced, according to apparently a weak organism.
His religious feeling received vitality and strength in early childhood and then did not leave him all his life. And it is extremely curious that for the first time it spoke in him and directed his thoughts to the objects of faith under the influence of his same fiery imagination: having described in a letter to his mother (October 2, 1833) the pampering with which he was surrounded, he writes about his childhood: I remember I didn't feel much, I looked at everything as if it were things made to please me... I went to church because I was ordered or carried... I was baptized because I saw that everyone is baptized. But once - I vividly, as now, remember this incident - I asked you to tell me about the Last Judgment, and you told me, a child, so well, so clearly, so touchingly about the blessings that await people for a virtuous life, and they described the eternal torments of sinners so strikingly, so terribly, that it shocked me and awakened all sensitivity in me, it inspired and subsequently produced the highest thoughts in me. One can really believe that this story about the Last Judgment, touching and terrible, laid in Gogol from these years that fiery attitude towards religion, which can be seen constantly in his correspondence with his mother from Nizhyn, and from St. Petersburg, and from abroad. , and from Moscow - from everywhere and at any age. In one of his letters (1829), for example, at the age of twenty, he tells his mother that he “feels a just punishment heavy Hand of the Almighty”, and at the end of the letter he adds: “In tenderness I acknowledged the invisible Hand that cares for me, and blessed so wonderfully assigned to me the way”.
Much was written and said at one time about Gogol's arrogant hypocrisy, which was revealed unexpectedly to everyone with the publication of his correspondence, but the materials for his biography, collected and published since then, clearly convince him that the prophetic and demanding tone in matters of morality for him was not news at all. Re-read his letters to his relatives, to his mother and sisters, with whom even in his youth he felt not constrained, as with those high-ranking officials (with whom he ceased to be shy only later), re-read - and you will see a curious picture of precisely those contradictory moods. , which suddenly showed up for everyone at the end of his life. These moods did not exactly form, but only showed up by that time, because they had existed before, but remained an intimate secret of the writer himself. In these early letters to his relatives, especially to his mother, he either showers them terribly haughtily with his instructions, sometimes on a religious, sometimes on an everyday lining, and sometimes even goes so far as to recommend that they read only his letters and nothing more, or, touched by their objections, with genuine sadness and even some self-flagellation, he seeks to make amends for the offense inflicted. And besides, this tendency to sadness in general began to manifest itself in him even in his early youth. True, when he was seventeen years old, he wrote to his mother: unraveled the science of a cheerful, happy life, I was surprised how people, greedy for happiness, immediately run away from him, having met him. But with all this, he himself recalls in the “Author's Confession”: “The reason for the cheerfulness that was noticed in the first works of mine that appeared in print was a certain spiritual need. I was subjected to fits of melancholy, inexplicable to me, which, perhaps, was due to my morbid condition. To entertain myself I came up with everything funny that I could think of ... "
Yes, he did not escape these sad notes even in those works of his youth, the irrepressible and completely unconstrained gaiety of which remains striking to this day, and it is curious that the sad remarks in these stories of his are not all particular, but a broad and vivid pessimistic generalization, throwing light on some features of the basic worldview of man. Although in the story about Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich he pours out one after another inimitable everyday anecdotes from provincial life, he ends the story in a way that a completely cheerful person would never have ended: “Again the same field, pitted in places, black, in places turning green, wet jackdaws and crows, monotonous rain, a tearful sky without a gap ... Boring in this world, gentlemen!
If we think that the sad ending of the anecdote about these two neighbors could lead Gogol to this reflection and that it is an accident that naturally accompanies such a denouement, then how can we explain, if not a personal trait of a person, the end of the story “Sorochinsky Fair”? After all, this story is really a village fair - noisy, colorful, cheerful, culminating in a happy wedding, where both the old and the young set off and dance, and in the village street everything rushed and danced at the blow of the musician's bow. But, having barely described the cheerful picture, Gogol imperceptibly passes to the following remark: “Thunder, laughter, songs were heard quieter and quieter. The bow was dying, weakening and losing indistinct sounds in the density of the air. There was still a stomping sound somewhere, something like the murmur of a distant sea, and soon everything became empty and muffled.
Is it not so that joy, a beautiful and fickle guest, flies away from us, and in vain does a lonely sound think to express joy? In his own echo, he already hears sadness and the desert, and wildly listens to him. Is it not so that the frisky friends of a stormy and free youth one by one, one by one, are lost in the world and finally leave one of their old brothers? Bored left! And the heart becomes heavy and sad, there is nothing to help it.”
There are many such examples of sad lyricism in Gogol's writings. You can’t collect them all, but remember, for example, Gogol’s remark in the first volume of Dead Souls about Chichikov’s fleeting meeting with the governor’s daughter, who quickly disappeared from his eyes in her magnificent carriage. This disappearance of the governor's daughter involuntarily makes Gogol exclaim that "brilliant joy" is disappearing from our lives in exactly the same way. What is this sadness of Gogol? Compassion for people? Civic anguish? May be so; but above all, as the whole tone of his lyrical digressions convinces us, this is personal dissatisfaction, a deep biographical trait, this is sadness about oneself. No wonder it true friend Pushkin, who was killed before Gogol began to age, already called him "the great melancholic."
In one of the letters I have already cited, you may have noticed that Gogol refuses to consider himself a dreamer. But was it really so? Why does Gogol love the legend so much? old beautiful and terrible legend? Why did he so vividly describe the May night and the round dance of mermaids playing kites in the moonlight? Where did he dig up his “Wii” and all the terrible visions that accompany this story? Why did he become interested in Terrible Vengeance in the fantasy of a giant horseman who “with a terrible hand” grabbed the sorcerer and lifted him into the air over a bottomless abyss in the Carpathian mountains? Let us recall, by the way, how Gogol admired the dream of the “poor son of the desert” and what a poetic dream of the birth of Christianity arose before his dreamy and distant gaze. I will not talk about his enthusiasm for the heroic life, which you will find in the story "Taras Bulba", in the story "Opage" 2).
How deeply he experienced all this life of the past, surrounded by a halo of legend, can be judged by his own terminology: he writes about Little Russian thoughts and songs, for example, to Pogodin: “Little Russian songs with me: I breathe and do not inhale the frame”. About the songs collected by Mr. Sakharov 3), he writes what he wants sound like their sounds. This appeal to national antiquity, folk tradition and heroic legend forces us to recognize in Gogol purely romantic qualities. His contemporaries, the romantics of the 1940s, who were well acquainted with Western poetry of this kind, more than we were struck by the similarity of Gogol's works with the works of Western romantics. In the journal Teleskop, for example, in 1831 (No. 20, p. 653), the great similarity between "Evenings on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" and Tiek's story "Spells of Love" was pointed out 4). Gogol, who generally read very little, Western literature in particular, he was fond of an English writer, then a favorite of the Russian public - this romantic writer and painter of Scottish antiquity - Walter Scott.
In order to be even more convinced of Gogol's lively inclination to dream, we need only go abroad with him and see how he spends his time there. We can make these observations by skimming through the pages of the story "Rome", in which people who knew him personally, including Annenkov 5), who understood Gogol very subtly, see a lot of autobiographical. In this unfinished passage, which tells how the Roman prince is experiencing impressions both from the nature of Italy and from the creations of its art - temples, palaces and paintings, Gogol involuntarily betrays his own feelings tested in the same places and for the same reasons. “In Genoa, the prince remembered that he had not been in church for many years ... He entered quietly and knelt in silence at the magnificent marble columns and prayed for a long time, not knowing why ... Oh! how many feelings then crowded together in his chest! ..
Dreams took possession of the prince with particular force when contemplating some marvelous Italian landscape, beginning to darken and become covered in dusk in the last minutes of the evening. Here is how this prince is described, at one of such moments admiring Rome from the hill at the onset of evening: “The sun was sinking lower to the earth; rosier and hotter became its brilliance on the whole architectural mass; the city became even more alive and closer, the pinns became even darker; the mountains became even bluer and more phosphorescent; even more solemnly and better ready to go out the heavenly air ... God! what a view! The prince, embraced by him, forgot himself, and the beauty of Annunziata, and the mysterious fate of his people, and everything that is in the world.
Annenkov, who lived with Gogol in Rome, saw more than once how, for half a day, he lay on the arcade of an old Roman water pipe, looking at the blue sky or at the dead and magnificent Roman Campagna; sometimes he spent whole hours among the dense vegetation, somewhere in the thicket, and from there rushed “ sharp, unmoving eyes into the dark greenery that ran in bunches over the rocks, and remained motionless for hours, with inflamed cheeks”. What was he thinking about at that time? Didn't he live this time with the same dreams as his Roman prince? It can be thought that his southern, fiery fantasy more than once, in the midst of these contemplations, made him see not the objects on which he fixed his eyes, but some of his own golden dreams, and what at those moments he could say together with the author of Faust :
And again reality darkens before me,
And again I live my favorite dream 6).
No wonder Gogol loved so much gothic architecture, not without reason he chose nothing other than the Middle Ages with his course of lectures on history.
So, the ability to break away from reality, to be carried away into one's own dreams and to give oneself to one's thoughts with fervor and passion, is the fundamental feature of this famous realist of ours. It provided a fertile ground for gradually and irrevocably surrendering to the inflamed imagination of a stubborn and intolerant sectarian. “So, after many years and labors, and experiments, and reflections, apparently going forward,” writes Gogol, “ I came to what I already thought about during my childhood". This gradual fascination of Gogol with questions of narrow morality was noted by Russian criticism even before the appearance of Correspondence with Friends.
Already in the first volume of Dead Souls, Belinsky saw with amazing insight unkind signs, he was afraid of ominous omens for the talent of this beloved writer. But even if Gogol himself strengthened himself in these views, why did he publish his intimate correspondence with friends?
Referring to himself, his words are so contradictory that they positively exclude each other. Then he says he wants to release “a picky book, which would make everyone startle”, adding: “Believe that a Russian person, until you make him angry, you will not make him speak. He will still lie on his side and demand that the author regale him with something reconciling with life. He writes what he wanted with this book reconcile people with life, then, falling into a completely different tone, he writes to Zhukovsky that, after the publication of this book, he “woke up, as if after some kind of dream, feeling, like a delinquent schoolboy, that screwed up more than he intended”, So what swung in this book with such Khlestakov that he did not have the courage to look into it”. People who met him before the publication of this book saw him often thoughtful and, as it were, already more determined and focused. But no matter what views Gogol came to in this book, the saddest thing about this correspondence is that with it Gogol renounced his talent, was ready to see in it a sinful desire. How could this happen? And what actually happened? Who left whom? Did Gogol abandon his talent, or did Gogol leave his talent? In fact, both things happened. Suffering more and more from various tormenting ailments, which doctors even found it difficult to determine, and gradually coming to an age when people can do less and less without a definite world outlook, he began to build this world outlook with all his passion. Belonging to those people who cannot joke with ideas, he began to greedily destroy in himself everything that could contradict these ideas, which were becoming more and more determined in him, and in this hard work he did not at all have the most important help for clarifying these ideas to himself: he had no knowledge, he was really ignorant. “At school,” he says to himself, “I received a rather poor upbringing, and therefore it is not surprising that the idea of learning came to me in adulthood. I started with such initial books, that he was ashamed even to show and hid all his activities.
Pushkin was no longer alive at that time, and new friends, according to him own words, pushed him on this path. And the path was filled with painful and tearing contradictions with oneself. He - neither more nor less - so greedily and ardently wanted to know the soul of a person at once and entered into such a tragic struggle with himself, which sometimes made him completely exhausted. In 1849 he writes: “I am all suffered, I just sick in mind and body everything was so shaken”, and in the “Author’s Confession” he remarks: “It’s probably harder for me than for anyone else to give up writing, when this was the only subject of all my thoughts, when I left everything else, all the best lures of life, and, like a monk, he severed ties with everything that is dear to a person on earth, then, in order not to think about anything else, except for his work.
How Gogol loved his talent, how he revered it, is best seen from a few touching words of his, written in his youth, during the full flowering of this talent. Here is what he wrote then, referring to his genius. “Oh, don’t be separated from me! live on earth with me at least two hours every day, like my beautiful brother! I will! I will! Life boils in me. My work will be inspired. Above them, a deity inaccessible to the earth will winnow. I will! oh, kiss and bless me!"
But if mystical ideas, which were not at all new to him, more and more convinced him to nevertheless make this break with his talent, then the talent itself began to weaken towards the end of his life; and he noticed this weakening of his impressionability already in the first volume of Dead Souls. He writes here: “Before, a long time ago, in those years of my youth, in the years of my irretrievably flashed childhood, it was fun for me to drive up to a familiar place for the first time; it doesn’t matter whether it was a village, a poor provincial town, a village, a suburb - a child’s curious look revealed a lot of curious things in him. Having immediately described the freshness of his then imagination, he continues: my chilled gaze is uncomfortable, it is not funny to me, and that which in previous years would have awakened a living movement in the face, laughter and incessant speeches, now slips by, and an indifferent silence preserves my motionless lips. Oh my youth! oh, my freshness!..” These were his first forebodings, which made him already aware of the approach of a sad denouement.
Read Tikhonravov's notes 7) to the II and III volumes of Gogol's works, and you will see that this is a real mournful leaf of terrible suffering, where there was no return, where every day both life and talent run away from him with such implacability that nothing can hold on, no effort, as in famous painting Repin cannot be held back by the Terrible that life that escapes through his fingers, cannot be held back ... no matter how frantically and gently he squeezes the head of his dear, but dying son in his convulsive arms.
Gogol made similar efforts. “I tried,” he writes already in 1826, “to act contrary to circumstances and this order, not drawn from me. “ I I tried several times to write as before, as I wrote in my youth, that is, anyhow, wherever my pen leads; but nothing came out on paper. My efforts, - he writes in the "Author's confession", - almost always ended in illness, suffering, and, finally, in such seizures, as a result of which it was necessary to put off for a long time everything busy. What was I to do? Was it my fault... as if there were two springs in the age of man!”
He felt very well that an abyss was opening up under him, and he could only cry out in despair for help, which no one was able to give him, he only heard, unexpectedly for himself, from all sides condemnation and indignation at the last thing that came out from under him. pen. In the last chapter of Notes of a Madman, Poprishchin writes: “No, I no longer have the strength to endure... God! what are they doing to me! They don't listen, they don't see, they don't listen to me! What do they want from me, poor guy? What can I give them? I dont have anything... Help me! take me!.. Further, further, so that nothing, nothing could be seen ... There the sky swirls before me; an asterisk flickers in the distance; the forest is rushing with dark trees and a moon; on one side the sea, on the other Italy; and the Russian huts are visible. Does my house turn blue in the distance? Is my mother sitting in front of the window? Mother, save your poor son! He has no place in the world! they chase him! Mother, have pity about your sick child."
In this prayer, something akin to the author himself can really be seen. And why, in fact, is the petty bureaucrat Poprishchin, who never left St. Petersburg, this unsuccessful pretender to the Spanish throne, why did he suddenly combine in his tragic impulse both the Russian countryside and dear, dear to Gogol Italy?
Gogol died in 1852; The nearest reason for his death, the doctors could not determine. Three days before his death, he stopped eating. He burned and melted from some kind of internal fire that devoured him ... Such is tragic side the life of this extraordinary man.
And now, from these sad impressions, let's move on to those of his properties that were the greatest happiness and joy in his life, to his ability to create, let's move on to characterizing his colossal brilliant talent. In this case, we will follow his own words, spoken in the first volume of Dead Souls: “On the road! on the road! Away with the wrinkle that has crept over the forehead and the stern twilight of the face! At once and suddenly we will plunge into life, with all its soundless chirps and bells, and see what Chichikov is doing.
If, wanting to define Gogol's talent, we want to listen to his own definitions, we will fall into great perplexity. For example, here are two of his opinions. In one place of the "Author's Confession" he says: "I never did not create anything in the imagination and did not have this property. The only thing that came out well for me was what I took from reality, from data known to me. Guess the person I could only when I imagined the smallest details of his appearance. I never wrote portrait in the sense of a simple copy. I created portrait, but created it due to consideration, not imagination”. And a little higher he writes that “ invented entirely funny faces and characters, mentally put them in the most ridiculous situations, without caring at all about why this is, for what and to whom what benefit will come of it. True, the last words refer to his earlier works, in any case they show that the ability of unconstrained imagination existed in him and even on such a scale that, in his own words, many readers were left in “perplexity to decide how an intelligent person could come in the head such nonsense. Where did Gogol's vivid imagination disappear to in the heyday of his work? And how to understand it I created out of consideration, not imagination.
In order to get closer to the truth in resolving this issue, again, let's not take his word for it, but let's begin to observe him himself at a time when, speaking about other subjects, he accidentally blurts out, without noticing it, about himself; Let us listen along the way to the voice of contemporaries who knew him, and take a closer look at his creations. In embarking on similar face-to-face confrontations of human opinions and feelings, let us keep in mind that there is no such creativity in the world that would not be combined from the work of thought and fantasy constantly passing one into the other, and that the source of some kind of rich fantasy, even and for The Sunken Bell 8), there is always a real fact. Let us first turn to that period of his life when, so to speak, he was on the border between the unaccountable joy of youth and the imminent transition to a more mature age.
In 1835, at the time when The Inspector General had already begun to be prepared, Gogol wrote to his mother: “Literature is completely is not a consequence of the mind, but a consequence of feeling, in the same way as music and painting.” And how much at that very time fantasy simply overcame him, with the force of a hallucination presenting him against his own will bright pictures, you can judge by his letter to Pogodin, which also refers to this period of his life. Informing in this letter that he cannot continue the planned comedy under censorship conditions, Gogol writes: “So, I cannot take up the comedy. I'll take up history - the stage is moving in front of me, applause is noisy, faces are protruding from the boxes, from the district, from the chairs and baring their teeth, and history to hell. In one of his letters from the same period, he remarks that he has “ a hundred different beginnings and not a single story, not even a single excerpt complete”, which could hardly be a person without an ardent imagination. And according to Tikhonravov, who patiently compared all kinds of sheets, half-sheets, shreds, shreds of drafts left after Gogol, this was precisely his manner of writing. “He wrote his great works not in sequence of chapters or scenes, but without any order.” A feature that hardly shows that a person works with logic, and does not create with imagination. And how far from the only example of where Gogol's fantasy could take him is the picturesque rendering of the complaint of a beautiful Polish woman in the story "Taras Bulba" (1842). Gogol writes that the Pole woman “pulled back her long hair, which had fallen over her eyes, and poured herself all over in pitiful speeches, pronouncing them in a quiet, quiet voice, just as the wind, having risen in a beautiful evening, suddenly runs through the thick thicket of the driving reed: they rustle, resound and rush suddenly depressingly subtle sounds, and the stopped traveler catches them with incomprehensible sadness, not sensing either the fading evening, or the rushing cheerful songs of the people wandering from field work and stubble, or the distant rumble of a cart passing somewhere. Looking through these lines, you involuntarily ask yourself the question: how, if not by a flight of fiery fantasy, could Gogol be transported from the “quiet complaints” of a Pole to the “rattling of a cart”? What consideration can cause a person to come to such a surprise? No wonder Gogol, later recalling the flowering of his talent, said that he wrote "sometimes at random, wherever the pen leads."
For all that, the same studies of Tikhonravov and Shenrock 9) testify that Gogol constantly reworked his creations; yes, it is easy for anyone to be convinced of this by skimming through the table of contents to his works, in which at every step you will meet: “initial edition”, “later edition”, “additional chapters”, etc. In the period, for example, from 1839 to In 1842, in fits and starts, he worked on a new edition of Taras Bulba and at the same time revised Portrait, The Government Inspector, Marriage, Players, and composed “ Theatrical tour” and the last chapters of the first volume of Dead Souls. That's all true, but look how he accidentally blurts out about such properties of this processing, which only say that he is in the heat of inspiration. Here is what he writes from Vienna in 1840: “I began to feel some kind of cheerfulness of youth ... I felt that thoughts were moving in my head, like an awakened swarm of bees; my imagination becomes sensitive. Oh, what a joy it was, if you only knew! The plot, which of late I lazily kept in my head, not daring even to take it up, unfolded before me in such majesty that everything in me felt sweet thrill, and I, forgetting everything, suddenly moved to that world, in which he had not been for a long time, and at the same moment sat down to work, forgetting that it was not at all suitable while drinking water, and it was here calmness of the head and thoughts was required. It can be seen that the former beekeeper, Rudy Panko, has not forgotten his habit - “always throwing in something new.”
Be that as it may, however, Gogol was right when he spoke about the participation of considerations in his work, and it is worth considering what these considerations of his were aimed at. According to the memoirs of Berg 10), Gogol gave him the following advice on how to compose: “First you need to sketch everything as you have to, even badly, waterily, but absolutely everything and forget about this notebook. Then in a month, in two, sometimes more (this will affect itself) to get what was written and re-read it; you will see that much is wrong, much is superfluous, and something is missing. Make corrections and notes in the margins - and throw the notebook again. With a new revision of it - new notes in the margins, and where there is not enough space - take a separate piece and stick it on the side. When everything is written in this way, take and copy the notebook with your own hand. Here new insights will come by themselves, cuts, additions, syllable cleansing. And put the notebook down again. Travel, have fun, do nothing, or at least write something else. An hour will come, an abandoned notebook will be remembered: take it, re-read it, correct it in the same way and, when it is dirty again, copy it with your own hand.
So, giving advice to a friend, Gogol revealed to us the techniques own work. These are completely the techniques of the painter. Imagine an artist in his studio. His whole room is filled with sketches; these sketches are pinned to the wall, hung on the stove, lying on the floor and on the sofa. Here you will find the corner of the hut, and the sunset, and the tense muscle of a person, and the movement human face. The artist is standing in front of the painting he has begun, which should combine these scattered everyday impressions, somehow brought to the shreds of the canvas. Sometimes, in thought, he examines his sketches, and then he goes to the easel, puts paint on the canvas in one place, in another, and, now approaching the picture, now stepping back from it a step or two, he squints one eye, as if wanting to concentrate, and looking closely at this picture. If at that moment satisfaction flickers on his face, then this is a sure sign that life has begun to play in the picture. The artist in these moments, of course, thinks, but the consideration of his special property: there is also the ability to see what the other does not see, and a passionate desire, and an unconscious sense of taste, and a simple eye. Gogol also had his own sketches, from which he subsequently took the tones and colors, the whole color of his works. His notebook, fortunately preserved, gives us an excellent collection of such sketches. What is not in it! You remember, of course, all sorts of things lying on Plyushkin's desk - and "an old book bound in leather with a red edge," and "a lemon, all dried up," and "a broken arm of an armchair," and "a glass with some kind of liquid and three flies, covered with a letter”... If you, not knowing who owns Gogol’s book, began to leaf through it, you would have to change your assumptions about its owner several times, until, having reached the last page, you would decide after all the diversity of the impressions received, that such a book could belong to only one person - a living and observant artist. Here you will find inscribed the names of bird calls, and the technical expressions of arable farming and catching pigeons; a list of dog names and will accept with the remark: “We have not yet spoken about greyhounds”; card names; folk “bends”, in the sense of offensive witticism; an endless list of various dishes, such as “mash”, “malt”, etc., characteristic of different classes; enumeration of the prosecutor's bribes and next to it - a list of Golokhvast stallions with all their signs; samples of the business language of official paper; a list of typical nicknames, next to a hot review of the theater. Here you will read a detailed description folk custom and the ceremony, and questions to Khomyakov about the peasants, or a note, a sketch from nature under a fresh impression, like this: “Hung on a mountain slope living picture: a bunch of trees along with huts hiding under their shadow, a pond, a wattle fence and a path, on which a cart was pounding. Sayings, proverbs and cries of peddlers are also written down right there, and, finally, to the horror for your puritanical feelings, you will stumble here on some pages about well-aimed, true, but unprintable words. Life itself entered this book in its full and angular integrity. Among all this kaleidoscopic variegation, remarks of a religious nature flicker.
Has it ever happened to you on the street, having driven away personal worries and anxieties for a few minutes, breaking away, so to speak, from yourself, to look around and peer with fresh attention into that phantasmagoria of a lively and rapid change of impressions in which we bathe every day? It is this air of the street, its vague movement, discordant sounds and the rapid turn of feelings and shocks that emanates from Gogol's notebook. From time to time you open it, and as if a window suddenly flew open:
And noise broke into the room,
And the blessing of the nearby temple,
And the voice of the people, and the sound of the wheel 11).
People who knew Gogol noted his enormous ability to peer into life. Turgenev, who listened to his lectures and later met with him, said that Gogol had " constant insight facial expression". Annenkov remembers about the observation that has grown to his face. In Gogol himself you will find the expression: hawk-eye of the observer.
He was distinguished by an extraordinary art of inquiring and questioning; he collected his living material everywhere; his letters to relatives and friends are full of questions about common acquaintances and even strangers, about how they dress, spend time, do they have any sayings and the like, and at the same time he always asks to tell him everything, to “the very last insect ". He terribly valued his own immediate impression of life and paid little attention to other people's generalizations. He moved away from those people who always have ready-made definitions for various occasions, and constantly laughed at them, “on the contrary, he could spend whole hours with any horse breeder, with a manufacturer, with a craftsman who expounds the deepest subtleties of the game of grandmas.” In The Old World Landowners, Gogol involuntarily spoke about this in the words: “I don’t like reasoning when they remain just reasoning.” Gogol was afraid of visitors like fire and loved such attitudes towards people who would not demand anything from him, and he himself, according to the testimony of the engraver Jordan 12), “could take what he needed and what was worth it, full hand without giving anything.” Moreover, while collecting the information he needed, he sometimes thought little about the means. Remember how the men talked about Plyushkin going for a morning walk? “There the fisherman went hunting!” Remember that “after him there was no need to sweep the street, and what if a woman, somehow gaping at the well, forgot the bucket, he dragged the bucket too”? Gogol did exactly the same thing. In 1835, starting the first drafts of Dead Souls, he was looking for “a good call-to-letter with whom he could get along briefly”, and later he tried to get extracts from cases, memorandums, instructing Prokopovich 13) to ask I. G. for such papers. Pashchenka 14), who, according to him, “may kidnap from his own justice." In what way and from where the plot of "Dead Souls" was "borrowed" You can judge by Pushkin's jolly remark: "You have to be more careful with this Little Russian: he robs me so that you can't even shout." Gogol wrote: “Even Bulgarin’s critics do me good, because, as a German, I take a spit out of all rubbish.”
Thanks to his amazing ability to remember every little thing, Gogol firmly kept all this colorful and colorful everyday material in his head and used it widely and skillfully. His considerations, which he mentions, were those inner work artist, which consists much more of the movement of images and feelings than of logical, abstract thinking and analysis. Those parts of his letters where he mentions facts and does not own definitions himself, they eloquently say that this is really so: either he asks a friend to include in his story some saying that he suddenly heard and aptly heard, then he writes that he continues to work, that is, throw chaos on paper, from which should the creation of “Dead Souls” will take place. The very manuscripts that remained after Gogol prove that his processing of what was thrown, often rashly, onto paper was a manifestation of the subtle taste of the artist, who hated vulgarity, caricature and farce and removed from his first sketches everything that violated his sense of proportion, and sometimes added to already written new features snatched from life. It was a constant desire to write in such a way as to answer in the affirmative to the question posed in Dead Souls: “Does this look like the truth?” Let's also not forget that in the story "Rome" the Roman prince often spent long hours peering at the paintings of the greatest artists, "staring a silent gaze and with the gaze entering deeper with the soul into the secrets of the brush, seeing invisibly in the beauty of spiritual thoughts. For it elevates the art of man highly, giving nobility and marvelous beauty to the movements of the soul.” This love of beauty was not noticed by those of his contemporaries who were ready to see in him only an anecdote and a dangerous libelist.
But no matter how much art elevated Gogol, no matter how it raised him above his weaknesses, it never took him completely off the ground, and his sensitive ear was always open to the slightest sounds coming from the street. The recollection of one trustworthy contemporary of his, Annenkov, who wrote down some chapters of Dead Souls after Gogol, has been preserved. This reminiscence truly depicts how Gogol, in the midst of sublime pathos, freely deviated for some worldly impression, subtly experienced it or made a sly remark, and again immediately proceeded to his inspired exposition. This was in Rome. Annenkov lived with Gogol in the same apartment and wrote down the chapters of Dead Souls under his dictation. Here's how it happened. “Gogol,” says Annenkov, “stretched the inner shutters of the windows from the irresistible southern sun, I sat down at round table, and Nikolai Vasilyevich, spreading out a notebook in front of him on the same table, further away, would go into it all and begin to dictate measuredly, solemnly ... It was like a calm, correctly poured inspiration, which is usually generated by a deep contemplation of an object. Nikolai Vasilyevich waited patiently for my last word and continued new period the same voice, imbued with concentrated feeling and thought. The excellent tone of this poetic dictation was so true in itself that it could not be weakened or changed in any way. Often the roar of an Italian donkey was piercingly heard in the room, then a blow of a stick was heard on its sides and an angry cry of a woman: └Ecco, ladrone!“ 15) - Gogol stopped, said, smiling: └How softened, scoundrel!“, and again began the second half phrases with the same force and strength with which its first half poured out from him. When Annenkov, under the influence of what Gogol dictated to him, leaned back in his chair and, unable to restrain himself, burst into laughter, Gogol looked at him coolly, but smiled affectionately and only said: “Try not to laugh, Jules!” This was the nickname given by Gogol to Annenkov. And having dictated “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin,” Gogol himself began to laugh along with Annenkov and several times slyly asked: “What is the story about Captain Kopeikin?”
After especially successful chapters, Gogol's calmness, which he maintained during dictation, sometimes broke through, and he gave himself over to the most noisy gaiety. Having finished dictating the sixth chapter of “Dead Souls”, for example, he called Annenkov for a walk, turned into a back alley, “here he began to sing a wild little Russian song and suddenly started just dancing and began to twist such things with an umbrella in the air that no more than two minutes the handle of the umbrella remained in his hands, and the rest flew to the side. He quickly picked up the broken part and continued the song.”
Gogol's purely artistic work is sometimes expressed in the fact that he was able to fully experience their comic situations and antics with his heroes, he himself sometimes laughed at the moments of creating his stories and comedies. This ability to be transported into a fictitious position and into an imaginary character manifested itself in him in life in an enormous ability to imagine in the faces of any acquaintance, stranger, and imitation was always joined by some immediately invented story in which the represented and guessed person acted completely in accordance with his character. His contemporaries tell many anecdotes, how in this way he managed to tease, then to make people laugh, then to have a calming effect on people. This ability made him an indispensable reader. own works. Turgenev, who was once present when Gogol was reading The Inspector General, conveys this recollection as follows: “He struck me with the extreme simplicity and restraint of manner, some important and at the same time naive sincerity, which, as if it didn’t matter whether there were listeners and what he think. It seemed that Gogol's only concern was how to delve into the subject, new to him, and how to more accurately convey his own impression. The effect was extraordinary, especially in comic, humorous meters; it was impossible not to laugh - a good, healthy laugh; and the culprit of all this fun continued, not embarrassed by the general gaiety and, as if inwardly marveling at it, more and more immersed in the matter itself, and only occasionally on the lips and around the eyes did the craftsman’s sly smile tremble.
Taking into account all these properties of Gogol, we will not be far from the truth if we say that his talent was direct and that when Gogol speaks of a deep reflection on his works, we believe him, but we understand this term in his mouth not in the sense consistent logical conclusions, but in the sense of constant artistic persistent guessing of true combinations, characters and human properties; we have the right to understand it in this way, especially since the very term guessing the truth belongs to him. His requirements for art were thus primarily reduced to truth, to measure and to beauty.
All these sides artistic activity he aptly grasped with a much more direct feeling , than inference. He would hardly, for example, be able to accurately answer the question of what false classicism is. But the falsity and affectation of Russian imitations of French comedy, when compared with some living image from his notebook, immediately caught his eye and caused simply laughter. “Isn't it funny,” he writes, for example, “that a Russian judge, who is extremely numerous in vaudeville, begins to sing a couplet in an ordinary conversation? In the French theater we forgive these tricks against naturalness, because we know that the French judge is a dancer and composes couplets, plays well on the flageolet 16), maybe even draws in albums. But if our judge begins to do all this and is clothed with such a rough appearance with which he is usually presented in our vaudevilles, then ... The judge is forced to sing! Yes, if our district judge sings, then the audience will hear such a roar that, surely, they will not show themselves in the theater another time.
This ability to feel truth and naturalness tore Gogol from his fantastic dreams of youth and made him a great representative of realism, but his great demands for spiritual life, his eternal self-deepening gave him a special lofty quality to realism. His writings are not a record of life, not a page recorded in a clinic, and not a dead, albeit accurate, photograph. He himself remarks that he never wrote a simple copy a c painted portraits, and for this, in his words, he “needed guess the person. Once he had obtained the truth, he jealously guarded himself from the dashing eye: he contemplated it for a long time and nurtured it in the very recesses of his soul, and when inspiration visited him, he shared this wealth with us, leaving the imprint of his spiritual life on it. You will recall that in the painting that amazed Chartkov at the exhibition, “it was visible”, according to Gogol, “the power of creation, already contained in the soul of the artist himself... It was evident how everything extracted from the world, the artist enclosed in his soul, and from there, from the spiritual spring, directed him one consonant solemn song. Tikhonravov, who had the opportunity to look closely at Gogol's activities, points out that with these words he "explains his view of the process of artistic creation." This is where these “pearls of creation” came from, into which, under his inspired hand, our “sometimes bitter worldly road” turned.
Repeating the reproaches that were made to him for his invariable choice of supposedly completely undesirable plots, Gogol wrote: “Why, then, flaunt the poverty of our life and our sad imperfection, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote back streets of the state? What is to be done if a writer is already of such a quality, and he himself has already fallen ill with his imperfection, and his talent is already arranged in such a way as to portray to him the poverty of our life, digging people out of the wilderness, from the remote corners of the state. Only a person capable of deeply sympathizing with the suffering of another could fall ill with such a strange disease. This disease has a very simple name - it is called the ability to sympathize with people. Remember that young man in the story “The Overcoat”, who, recalling the clerical tricks of officials over poor Akaky Akakievich, “many times,” says Gogol, “shuddered later in his lifetime, seeing how much ferocious rudeness is hidden in refined, educated secularism and - God! - even in that person whom the world recognizes as noble and honest. With this appeal to humanity, with his love for beauty and enormous moral demands on life, Gogol, with all his realism, adjoins that cultural period Russian life, to which his time referred him: he is a magnificent variety of idealists of the 40s; and one of the notable representatives of precisely these idealists of the 1940s, Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, well understood the lining of Dead Souls when he said that they “have words of reconciliation, there are forebodings and hopes of a full and solemn future, but ... that it is a poem deeply suffered.”
As for whether Gogol can be called the head of realism in Russian literature, there is a lot of debate about this, and I think they argue because the very question of this cannot be raised. If we look at the literary process as a constant complex development, in which each phenomenon grows naturally from a whole series of complex antecedents, then is it possible to isolate any writer and put him at the head of others. Here we can talk about only one question: with the name of which author was associated in the eyes of the majority of Russian readers and writers the idea of realism? Gogol was undoubtedly such a bone of contention in the 30s and 40s, and it can be argued that the debate about realism became especially fierce with the appearance of his works, although he was not the founder of this trend, but only a brilliant successor to the work of Fonvizin, Griboedov, Pushkin, and most importantly - the whole growth cultural success Russian society.
With all this, one feature of Gogol is highly characteristic of him: no matter how keen an observer of Russian customs he was, he had little interest in social issues in the definite form in which Russian life put forward them. The Roman prince I have already quoted more than once (read - Gogol) saw, “how magazine reading of huge sheets absorbed the whole day (Frenchman) and did not leave an hour for practical life; like every Frenchman was brought up by this strange whirlwind of bookish, typographically moving politics and warmly and ardently took all interests to heart, becoming fiercely against his opponents, not yet knowing in the face either his own interests or opponents ... and the word politics disgusted finally strongly Italian. He gave up all reading and devoted himself entirely to artistic creativity. Gogol also read very little ... His lack of interest in public life is explained not only by his personal characteristics, but also simply by the lack of knowledge that could deepen the significance of these issues before him. As soon as Gogol tries to speak out on this subject, immediately his speech sounds like some kind of absurd, screaming dissonance. Here is what he writes, for example, to Belinsky in response to his famous letter: “If only you could define what is meant by the name of European civilization! Here and phalanstery 17), and red ones, and all sorts, and everyone is ready to eat each other”. It is obvious that for Gogol all these phalanstery And all sorts seemed very vague. As an example of his still relatively mild review of such cultural people like the Germans, it is worth reading his letter to Balabina 18) dated May 20, 1839, in which Gogol says: “And can you say that every German is a Schiller. I agree that he is Schiller, but only the Schiller that you can learn about if you ever have the patience to read my story └Nevsky Prospekt.
In order to get an idea of the naivety of Gogol's judgment in everything that concerns social relations, you need to read his article on estates in the state. His ignorance sometimes resulted in an amazing self-confidence of opinion. It cost him nothing, for example, to write: “I have confidence that if I wait to read my plan, then in the eyes of Uvarov he will distinguish me from the crowd sluggish professors that fill the universities.” It cost him nothing to assert with aplomb that he would write a multi-volume magnificent universal history, but in this respect life severely punished him for not having a multi-volume universal history, but a brief history of his professorship. Gogol was, in essence, a stranger to everything that had anything to do with politics, and he was right when he called himself a man. non-state, but it is curious how even in these cases, where he could only grope and constantly stumble, it is curious how his talent for observation to the external manifestation of life, including social life, saved him. Although in reality he did not belong to either the Slavophiles or the Westernizers and, probably, not reading their polemical articles, he at the same time unusually skillfully captured the typical features of the then Moscow and St. Petersburg journalism, although, of course, he rarely held in his hands the periodicals of that time, I only skimmed through them and judged them by almost the same titles. Here is how he joked about these magazines: “In Moscow they talk about Kant, Schelling, and so on, in St. Petersburg magazines they talk about the public and good intentions ... In Moscow, magazines go along with the century, but extremely behind books; in St. Petersburg, magazines do not keep pace with the century, but they come out neatly. Writers live in Moscow, they make money in St. Petersburg.” In order to quite clearly imagine the ambiguity of Gogol's social worldview, it is worth comparing him with another satirist, however, a satirist of our time - with Saltykov!
But no matter how great were the gaps in Gogol's social education, his writings were destined to play big role in the development of Russian self-consciousness. When you express any general idea to reinforce it, to make it clear itself, you always need specific example. The persuasiveness and brightness of an example largely depends on two reasons: firstly, on its universal recognition, and secondly, on whether it embraces life broadly or narrowly. In science, for greater persuasiveness, they collect a huge amount of facts and often prove thoughts with the results of statistical calculations. But where can you find the statistics of morals?.. How to calculate and express with what figures the spiritual movements of a person? In the realm of the moral life of man, the only statistical result so far is true to reality. artistic type: he immediately gives you both a generalization of life and a vivid example. Gogol gave us a vivid and absolutely correct depiction of a widespread fact, and, moreover, one that everyone looked at closely and therefore noticed little; he refreshed general attention to this fact, although the social meaning of this fact remained unclear to him. And when he proposed in this way to Russian society to look in the mirror, different people reacted differently to this examination of themselves.
Those who knew “whose meat the cat ate” were very annoyed, and the “Inspector General”, although they were very excited, was not approved by them. One contemporary explained the failure of the first performance in this way, saying that he could not really arouse sympathy for a performance that ridicules bribery, in such auditorium where half the audience was giving, and half taker.
Those who did not know “whose meat the cat ate”, looking into Gogol’s mirror, laughed innocently and heartily, recognizing their good friends every now and then, but rejoicing only similarity and not understanding the bitter side of the matter.
Finally, the third, who were in the minority, immediately noticed the reverse side of the coin and actively began to interpret the meaning of the fact for themselves, using the social terminology that Gogol so aptly put into circulation. Regarding the "Inspector" in "Molva" at that time it was written: "Names actors from the "Inspector" the next day they turned into their own names: the Khlestakovs, Anna Andreevna, Marya Antonovna, the mayor, Strawberry, Tyapkin-Lyapkin went arm in arm with Famusov, Molchalin, Chatsky, Prostakov. And all this happened so soon, even before the performance. Look: they, these gentlemen and ladies, are walking along Tverskoy Boulevard, in the park, around the city, and everywhere, wherever there are a dozen people, between them, probably, one comes out of Gogol's comedy ... ”To this, understandable to everyone and for Our famous critic of the 40s, Vissarion Grigorievich Belinsky, relied on all convincing social terminology, and, firmly standing on this first step created by Gogol, he led the Russian person much higher along the path of social self-consciousness.
So it happened, as a surprise to Gogol, that he, who was closest to official patriotism, contributed with his writings to the awakening of a different feeling for the homeland, conscious, much higher and connected with the information that came from the unkind to him European enlightenment. In an unexpected way for himself, he supported a man who undoubtedly did not share his convictions, the well-known Westerner Chaadaev, who, just in the year of the publication of The Government Inspector, in 1836, wrote: “I do not know how to love my fatherland with my eyes closed, with my head bowed. and with closed mouths ... I find that one can be useful to the fatherland only under the condition of seeing it clearly; I think that the time of blind cupids has passed, that now we are primarily indebted to our fatherland for the truth. I love my fatherland the way Peter the Great taught me to love it.” These words of Chaadaev define Gogol's social significance very precisely. Gogol really unleashed the eyes of his readers. But in order to do this, even talent was not enough; it was necessary to conclude in oneself a stable moral personality so that, among all literary and non-literary temptations and attacks, one should steadily move along a once guessed direction. It takes courage to use talent.
Among the most intricate and contradictory oddities of Gogol's character, in him stubbornly and powerfully retained its inviolability and strength, something indefinable, which was the most intimate and powerful side of his existence. He rarely let anyone into these "holy holies", sometimes made the impression mysterious person, and already school comrades, masters in the matter of nicknames, called him Mysterious Karla. Gogol knew the price of his innermost and lofty poetic aspirations and loved them very much. In 1835, he wrote: “Peace be with you, my heavenly guests, who brought divine moments to me in my cramped apartment, close to the attic! Nobody knows you, I again lower you to the bottom of my soul!..”
And there, at the bottom of this soul, a good light burned. Cheerful laughter sparkled brightly there, a living sense of beauty did not fade away, compassion for people constantly glimmered and sadness inseparable from it - this is the true foundations of humor.
Published on: Alferov A. D. Features of Gogol's work and the meaning of his poetry
for Russian self-consciousness (public lecture). M.: T-vo I. D. Sytin, 1901. S. 5–39.
Alexander Danilovich Alferov (1862–1919) - literary critic and methodologist, author of a number of textbooks and teaching aids on the history of Russian literature. He was a consistent supporter of the philological study of his native language, based on the methodology of F. I. Buslaev. “Essays on the history of modern Russian literature XIX century” (1915) by Alferov are written in a genre similar to essays. They lacked detailed analysis of the works, a presentation of the biography and creative path of the writer. The author sought to give the opportunity to feel in the writer that "there is a peculiarity in him, and leaving the rest to an independent personal impression." Popular at the beginning of the 20th century were the anthologies “Pre-Petrine Literature and folk poetry” (1906) and “Russian Literature of the 18th Century” (1907), prepared by Alferov together with A. E. Gruzinsky, as well as their “Collection of Questions on the History of Russian Literature” (1900), which was reprinted several times.
A. D. Alferov was a member of the Cadets Party, but was not involved in political activities. In August 1919, A.S. (Alexandra Samsonovna, wife of A.D. Alferov) and A.D. Alferovs were arrested by the Cheka in the school colony Bolshevo, near Moscow, taken to Lubyanka and shot without trial.
1) Macbeth. Action 1st. Scene 3. (“... why did I so involuntarily / Cling to a dream with a terrible temptation ...”). Per. A. I. Kroneberg.
2) Nizhyn Colonel Stepan Ostranitsa, called in some historical sources hetman. In 1830-1832, Gogol worked on a historical novel about the heroic struggle of the Cossacks with Poland for national independence in the 17th century and the campaign of Ostrany. Two of them were published by the author himself in the second part of "Arabesques" ("Prisoner. An excerpt from a historical novel"). Information about the campaign of Stepan Ostranitsa and his execution in 1638 was obtained by Gogol from handwritten source"History of the Rus", which he also referred to in his work on "Taras Bulba". Separate motifs of the unfinished novel were then reflected in Taras Bulba.
3) Ivan Petrovich Sakharov - Russian ethnographer-folklorist, archaeologist and paleographer. Born August 29 (September 10), 1807 in Tula, in the family of a priest. Graduated from the Tula Theological Seminary. In 1835 he graduated from the medical faculty of Moscow University. In the same year, I. P. Sakharov began to publish. His first works were articles on archeology and ethnography. He began to collect songs, rituals and traditions. In 1836, I. P. Sakharov published “Tales of the Russian people about the family life of their ancestors”, in three volumes. Then a two-volume book of songs of the Russian people (1838–1839), “Russian Folk Tales” (1841) and other works (http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki).
4) This refers to “Liebeszauber”, a story by Ludwig Tieck, published in Russian translation under the title “Spells of Love” (1830. “Galatea”, No. 10-11). There was also an earlier translation of L. Tik's story called "Witchcraft" ("Slavyanin", 1827).
5) Pavel Vasilievich Annenkov (June 19 (July 1), 1813, according to other sources June 18 (30), 1812, Moscow - March 8 (20), 1887, Dresden) - Russian literary critic, literary historian and memoirist. He made his debut in print with essays "Letters from abroad" in the journal "Notes of the Fatherland" in 1841.
Annenkov went down in history as the founder of Pushkin studies, the author of the first critically prepared collected works of Pushkin (1855-1857) and the first extensive biography of Pushkin - “Materials for the Biography of Pushkin” (1855), later, collecting new materials and having the opportunity to publish under more liberal censorship conditions many old, published the book "Pushkin in the Alexander era" (1881; 1998). For the most recent publications, see: Annenkov P.V.. Literary Memories. M., 1983; 1989; Paris letters. M., 1983; 1984; Critical Essays. Comp., prepared. text, intro. st., notes d. philol. Sciences I. N. Sukhikh. SPb., 2000.
6) Faust. Dedication. Per. N. Kholodkovsky.
7) Tikhonravov Nikolai Savvich (1832-1893) - historian of Russian literature. Specialized in history ancient Russian literature and literature of the 18th century; along with this, he studied a lot of Gogol's work. He edited the edition of Gogol's Works (5 volumes, Moscow, 1889–1890). It not only gives a corrected and supplemented text, the result of many years of the most careful study, but at the same time, in extensive “notes” by the editor, it presents a detailed picture of the history of this text, the history of each work and the whole literary activity Gogol, in connection with the history of the internal development of the writer.
8) Gerhard Hauptmann. Sunken bell (“Die versunkene Glocke”). Dramatic tale in verse.
9) Vladimir Ivanovich Shenrok - historian of literature, almost all of Shenrok's literary and scientific activities are devoted to the study of Gogol. Books: “Index to Gogol's Letters”, M., 1888; "Gogol's student years". M., 1898). All of Shenrock's works on Gogol are combined in Materials for Gogol's Biography (4 vols., Moscow, 1892–1898).
10) Nikolai Vasilyevich Berg (1823-1884) - poet, translator, journalist. The work of N. Berg “The village of Zakharovo” (1851) is one of the first to tell about the places associated with A. S. Pushkin. Peru Berg owns "Notes on the siege of Sevastopol" (1858), "My wanderings in the wide world" (1863), memories of meetings with Gogol, Nekrasov, Turgenev.
11) “Spring! the first frame is exposed - / And the noise burst into the room, / And the blessing of the nearby temple, / And the voice of the people, and the sound of the wheel ”( Apollo Maykov. 1854 ).
12) Fyodor Ivanov Jordan (1800-1883). He often met with Gogol in Rome, about which he spoke in his memoirs (“Notes of the rector and professor of the Academy of Arts Fyodor Ivanovich Jordan”, M., 1918). After Gogol's death, Jordan, according to the writer's will, engraved his portrait by F. Moller for "The Works and Letters of N. Gogol" (St. Petersburg, 1857. Vol. I).
13) Nikolai Yakovlevich Prokopovich - Gogol's classmate at the Nizhyn gymnasium, one of his closest friends.
14) Timofei Grigorievich Pashchenko, together with his brother Ivan Grigorievich, were Gogol's junior classmates in the Nizhyn “gymnasium of higher sciences”.
15) Here (to you), robber! ( it.).
16) Flageolet (fr. flageolet , reduce. from the old flageol - flute)- old flute of high register, flute.
17) Phalanster - in the teachings of Charles Fourier's utopian socialism, a palace of a special type, which is the center of life of the phalanx - a self-sufficient commune of 1600-1800 people working together for mutual benefit. Fourier himself, due to lack of financial support, was never able to found a single phalanstery, but some of his followers succeeded.
18) Marya Petrovna Balabina - a student of N.V. Gogol. At the beginning of 1831, P. A. Pletnev recommended the financially constrained Gogol to the Balabin family as a home teacher.
Publication prepared M. Raitsina
Composition
Gogol began his creative activity as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism, opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
The originality of Gogol was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the county landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the "little man", a resident of St. Petersburg corners.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who scourged the "vulgarity of a vulgar person", exposing to the utmost the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
The social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of characters-types.
Deep insight into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of his contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of the word, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The goals of a vivid satirical depiction of heroes are served by Gogol's careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. So, for example, portraits of the heroes of "Dead Souls" were created. These details in Gogol are mostly everyday: things, clothes, housing of heroes. If in Gogol's romantic stories emphatically picturesque landscapes are given, giving the work a certain elation of tone, then in his realistic works, especially in "Dead Souls", the landscape is one of the means of depicting types, characteristics of heroes. Theme, social orientation and ideological coverage of the phenomena of life and the characters of people determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the folk collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings ...", in "Taras Bulba ”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to live colloquial (in everyday paintings and scenes of “Evenings ...” or in narratives about bureaucratic landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common language, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Gogol loved and subtly felt folk colloquial speech, skillfully applied all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life.
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol's characters.
The strength of Gogol the stylist is in his humor. In his articles on Dead Souls, Belinsky showed that Gogol's humor "consists in opposition to the ideal of life with the reality of life." He wrote: "Humor is the most powerful tool of the spirit of negation, which destroys the old and prepares the new."
Gogol's language, the principles of his style, his satirical manner had an undeniable influence on the development of the Russian literary and artistic language from the mid-30s. Thanks to the genius of Gogol, the style of colloquial everyday speech was freed from "conditional constraints and literary stamps", emphasizes Vinogradov.
Gogol's unusual, surprisingly natural language, his humor acted in an intoxicating way, Vinogradov notes. In Rus' appeared absolutely new language, distinguished by its simplicity and accuracy, strength and closeness to nature; turns of speech invented by Gogol quickly became commonplace, Vinogradov continues. The great writer enriched the Russian language with new phraseological phrases and words that originated from the names of Gogol's heroes.
Vinogradov claims that Gogol saw his main purpose in "bringing the language of fiction closer to the living and colloquial speech people".
One of the characteristic features of Gogol's style was Gogol's ability to skillfully mix Russian and Ukrainian speech, high style and jargon, clerical, landlord, hunting, lackey, gambling, bourgeois, the language of kitchen workers and artisans, interspersing archaisms and neologisms into speech, as characters, as well as in the author's speech.
Vinogradov notes that the genre of the most early prose Gogol has the character of the style of the Karamzin school and is distinguished by a high, serious, pathetic narrative style. Gogol, understanding the value Ukrainian folklore, really wanted to become a "truly folk writer" and tried to involve a variety of oral folk speech in the Russian literary and artistic narrative system.
The writer connected the reliability of the reality he conveyed with the degree of mastery of the class, estate, professional style of the language and dialect of the latter. As a result, the language of Gogol's narration acquires several stylistic and linguistic planes and becomes very heterogeneous. gogol literature speech
Russian reality is transmitted through the appropriate language environment. At the same time, all the existing semantic and expressive shades of the official business language are revealed, which, with an ironic description of the discrepancy between the conditional semantics of the public office language and the actual essence of phenomena, come out quite sharply.
Gogol's vernacular style is intertwined with clerical and business style. V. Vinogradov finds that Gogol sought to introduce vernacular into the literary language different layers society (small and middle nobility, urban intelligentsia and officials) and by mixing them with the literary and bookish language to find a new Russian literary language.
As a business state language in the works of Gogol, Vinogradov points to the interweaving of clerical and colloquial bureaucratic speech. In "Notes of a Madman" and in "The Nose" Gogol uses the clerical-business style and colloquial-bureaucratic speech much more than other styles of colloquial speech.
The official business language binds together the diverse dialects and styles of Gogol, who at the same time tries to expose and remove all unnecessary hypocritical and false forms of expression. Sometimes Gogol, in order to show the conventionality of a concept, resorted to an ironic description of the content that society puts into a particular word. For example: "In a word, they were what is called happy"; "There was nothing else in this secluded or, as we say, beautiful square."
Gogol believed that the literary and bookish language of the upper classes was painfully affected by borrowings from foreign, "foreign" languages, it is impossible to find foreign words that could describe Russian life with the same accuracy as Russian words; as a result of which some foreign words were used in a distorted sense, some were assigned a different meaning, while some native Russian words irrevocably disappeared from use.
Vinogradov points out that Gogol, closely linking the secular narrative language with the Europeanized Russian-French salon language, not only denied and parodied it, but also openly opposed his style of narration to the language norms that corresponded to the salon-ladies' language. In addition, Gogol also struggled with the mixed half-French, half-common Russian language of romanticism. Gogol contrasts the romantic style with a realistic style that reflects reality more fully and believably. According to Vinogradov, Gogol shows the confrontation between the style of romantic language and everyday life, which can only be described by naturalistic language. "A mixture of solemnly - bookish with colloquial, with vernacular is formed. The syntactic forms of the former romantic style are preserved, but the phraseology and the structure of symbols, comparisons sharply deviate from romantic semantics." The romantic style of narration does not completely and completely disappear from Gogol's language, it is mixed with a new semantic system.
As regards the national scientific language- the language, which, according to Gogol, is intended to be universal, national-democratic, devoid of class limitations, then the writer, as Vinogradov notes, was against the abuse philosophical language. Gogol saw the peculiarity of the Russian scientific language in its adequacy, accuracy, brevity and objectivity, in the absence of the need to embellish it. Gogol saw the significance and strength of the Russian scientific language in the uniqueness of the very nature of the Russian language, writes Vinogradov, the writer believed that there was no language like Russian. Gogol saw the sources of the Russian scientific language in Church Slavonic, peasant and folk poetry.
Gogol strove to include in his language the professional speech of not only the nobility, but also the bourgeois class. Attaching great importance to the peasant language, Gogol replenishes his lexicon, writing down the names, terminology and phraseology of accessories and parts of a peasant costume, inventory and household utensils peasant hut, arable, laundry, beekeeping, forestry and gardening, weaving, fishing, traditional medicine, that is, everything connected with the peasant language and its dialects. The language of crafts and technical specialties was also interesting to the writer, notes Vinogradov, as well as the language of noble life, hobbies and entertainment. Hunting, gambling, military dialects and jargon attracted close attention Gogol.
Gogol especially closely watched the administrative language, its style and rhetoric, emphasizes Vinogradov.
In oral speech, Gogol was primarily interested in the vocabulary, phraseology and syntax of noble and peasant vernacular, colloquial urban intelligentsia and bureaucratic language, Vinogradov points out.
In the opinion of V. Vinogradov, Gogol's interest in the professional language and dialects of merchants is characteristic.
Gogol sought to find ways to reform the relationship between his contemporary literary language and the professional language of the church. He introduced into literary speech church symbolism and phraseology, Vinogradov notes. Gogol believed that the introduction of elements of the church language into the literary language would bring life to the ossified and deceitful business and bureaucratic language. .
