The main character of the work, which belongs to the comic genre, is the narrator, on behalf of whom the narration is being conducted, presented by the writer in the form of plumber Grigory Ivanovich.
The key theme of the story is the contradiction and complete misunderstanding of each other by representatives of the opposite sex (men and women), coming from different classes.
Grigory Ivanovich is described by the writer as an uneducated and ill-mannered commoner, distinguished by a simple and rude speech, who has no idea about the essence of refined manners.
The storyline of the work is built around the acquaintance of a plumber with a lady from an aristocratic society, who, according to the protagonist, is a gallant woman. At the same time, the position of Grigory Ivanovich is based solely on the external data of an aristocrat, who is actually far from representatives of high society.
The relationship between a man and a woman ends almost without starting as a result of the couple’s unsuccessful trip to a theatrical performance, which shows the true qualities of an aristocratic lady, shocking Grigory Ivanovich.
The writer skillfully uses satirical and humorous techniques to reveal the plot, characterizing the heroes of the story and emphasizing their unequal union, which initially foreshadowed the collapse.
The culmination of the work takes place in a scene taking place in a theatrical buffet, in which a lady, forgetting about the rules of decency, greedily and without false modesty absorbs cakes, without thinking about paying for them, since the gentleman who invited her to the theater is nearby. However, Grigory Ivanovich is aware of the awkwardness of the situation due to the lack of the necessary amount of money and is trying to prevent a brewing scandal with the buffet workers.
The finale of the story ends with a complete rupture of relations between the aristocrat and the plumber, who, when participating in a scandalous dispute, do not hesitate to use insulting expressions about each other's behavior, without thinking about the presence of the people around them.
The language style of the work is presented by the writer in the form of a simple form combined with clerical vocabulary, which, when mixed, give the story a subtle and penetrating irony with hints of sadness, revealing the arrogance and absurdity of the petty-bourgeois worldview.
Analysis 2
The hero of the story, a narrow-minded plumber, begins to court a woman whom he considered to belong to the aristocracy. The reason for classifying her as a high society was the golden tooth. With this, Zoshchenko brings the situation to the point of grotesque, showing the stupidity and ignorance of his hero, who did not bother to inquire about the origin and occupation of the lady.
The speech of the protagonist Grigory Ivanovich, on behalf of whom the speech is in question, characterizes him in the best possible way. The constant questions about plumbing, which was the only topic in which he understood, and which he was at least interested in, asked during acquaintances and in the theater, well show the limitations of those whom the author ridicules.
Another feature of the speech is that the plumber refers to the woman he is formally caring for, using the word "comrade", the author not only shows his limitations, but also subtly mocks the new realities of life after the revolution.
The climax is the scene in the theater buffet, where the hero invited his "aristocrat", without even bothering to purchase tickets for the seats nearby. During the intermission, the plumber offered the lady a cake. However, when she took the fourth place, philistinism and stinginess took precedence over decency Grigory Ivanovich in a rather rude form demanded that the woman put him in his place. After that, he did not want to pay for the crumpled last cake.
In the course of this episode, Zoshchenko gently shows that the hero of this work is no exception in the new communist society. The people around, despite positioning themselves as cultured people who are interested in the theater, get into arguments about a half-eaten cake, which shows their true nature.
The story ends with the explanations of a plumber with a lady, where, in response to a reproach for going to a cultural event without money, Grigory Ivanovich says a vulgar phrase that happiness does not lie in money.
The story ridicules the timeless philistinism and the new Soviet man, who, as it turned out, has not changed at all.
Some interesting essays
- Composition Geography is my favorite school subject grade 5 reasoning
It's an amazingly pleasant thing when you go to school with joy, knowing that today will be your favorite subject. No need to sit at a desk and wait for a change. On the contrary, you sit with your mouth open and listen to the teacher
- The image and characteristics of the Count in the story Shot of Pushkin essay
One of the main characters of the work, which is part of the cycle of stories "The Tale of Belkin", is a military officer, who comes from a rich noble family, a handsome, intelligent and courageous Count B.
- The ideological concept of the author in the comedy Gogol's Government Inspector
Gogol came up with the idea to write a comedy based on a "Russian anecdote" while working on Dead Souls. Gogol embodied his idea in the comedy "The Inspector General", which is a bureaucratic-bureaucratic picture
- Composition Bread is the head of everything (according to the proverb about Bread)
Bread is a symbol of prosperity and well-being; we see this product on our table every day. But few people thought about what a long and thorny path he goes through before getting into our house.
Hagia Sophia in Nizhny Novgorod is one of the few surviving ancient churches in Russia. It was rebuilt in stone by Yaroslav the Wise in 1050.
Zoshchenko in his works puts the heroes in such circumstances to which they cannot adapt, which is why they look ridiculous, absurd, pitiful. Such, for example, is the character of the story "The Aristocrat" Grigory Ivanovich. The story is told by the character himself, that is, we hear the whole story from the first person. Grigory Ivanovich talks about how his passion for an aristocrat ended. It must be said that the hero clearly understood for himself what aristocrats look like - they must certainly be in a hat, “the stockings on her are fildecos”, she can be with a monster in her arms and have a “golden tooth”. Even if a woman does not belong to the aristocracy, but looks the way the narrator described her, then for him she automatically goes into the category of aristocrats hated by him after the incident.
And the following happened: the plumber Grigory Ivanovich at the meeting saw just one of these "aristocrats" and was carried away by her. The hero’s courtship of the lady he likes causes laughter - he comes to her “as an official person” and is interested in “in the sense of damaging the water supply and the restroom.” After a month of such walks, the lady began to answer the gentleman's questions about the state of the bathroom in more detail. The hero looks pitiful - he absolutely does not know how to carry on a conversation with the object of his interest, and even when they finally began to walk arm in arm through the streets, he feels embarrassed because he does not know what to talk about, and because they people are watching.
However, Grigory Ivanovich is still trying to join the culture and invites his lady to the theater. He is bored in the theater, and during the intermission, instead of discussing what is happening on the stage, he again starts talking about what is closer to him - about the plumbing. The hero decides to treat the lady with a cake, and since he is “running short of money,” he emphatically invites her to “eat one cake.” The narrator explains his behavior during the scene with cakes by "bourgeois modesty" due to lack of money. This very “bourgeois modesty” prevents the gentleman from admitting to the lady that he is short of money, and the hero tries in every possible way to distract his companion from eating cakes that is ruinous for his pocket. He does not succeed, the situation becomes critical, and the hero, despising his former intentions to look like a cultured person, forces the lady to put back the fourth cake, for which he cannot pay: “Lie down,” I say, “back!”, “Lie down,” I say - to hell with it! The situation also looks comical when the assembled people, the “experts”, evaluate the fourth cake, argue, “a bite has been made on it,” or not.
It is no coincidence that the action of the story takes place in the theatre. The theater is considered a symbol of spiritual culture, which was so lacking in society. Therefore, the theater here acts as a backdrop against which the lack of culture, ignorance, and bad manners of people come out most clearly.
Grigory Ivanovich by no means blames himself for what happened, he attributes his failure in love affairs to the difference in social origin with his subject of passion. He blames the "aristocrat" for everything, with her "aristocratic" behavior in the theater. He does not admit that he was trying to be a cultured person, the hero believes that he was trying to behave in relation to the lady like a “uncut bourgeois”, but in fact he is a “proletariat”.
The funny thing is that the lady had a very distant relation to the aristocracy - perhaps, the matter was limited only by external resemblance to a representative of high society, and even then in the understanding of Grigory Ivanovich. This is evidenced by the behavior of the lady, and her speech. Not at all like a well-mannered and cultured person belonging to the aristocracy, she says at the end of the story to Grigory Ivanovich: “Enough disgusting of you. Those who are without money do not travel with ladies.
The whole narration causes a comic effect, and in combination with the language of the narrator - laughter. The narrator's speech is replete with jargon, vernacular, puns, blunders. What is worth only the expression "an aristocrat is not a woman at all for me, but a smooth place"! About how the main character "walked" the lady, he himself says this: "I will take her by the arm and drag myself like a pike." He calls the lady "a kind of freak", compares himself with "uncut bourgeois". As the action of the story develops, the hero is no longer shy in expressions - he tells the lady to put the cake "to hell with it", and the owner, according to Grigory Ivanovich, "twirls his fists in front of his face." The narrator gives his own interpretation of some words. So, for example, to be indifferent means to play the fool. This hero, who claims to be a cultured person, is not. And all his attempts to get closer to "culture" look ridiculous.
It is difficult to overestimate the significance of Zoshchenko's work - his laughter remains relevant in our modern times, because human and social vices, unfortunately, still remain ineradicable.
In his stories, M. Zoshchenko not only plays with comic situations that he skillfully notices in life, but exaggerates them to the limit. The story "Aristocrat" Zoshchenko turned into a small tragicomedy. But we are talking about a trip to the theater that is natural for any person.
Narrator's comments
The speech in the story is conducted on behalf of a plumber named Grigory Ivanovich, who the aristocracy sees in the presence of a hat, a pug sitting on his hands, in his mouth and fashionable stockings. As in a song about Marusya, who walked along the sea sand. For a complete set of the lady the plumber liked, there is not enough waist in a corset. It was precisely such ladies, so to speak, that Grigory Ivanovich liked, but after getting to know them better, he changed his mind.
Trying to get closer
At first sight, Grigory Ivanovich was carried away by a lady with a golden tooth in her mouth. He did not know how to care and acted bluntly - he went to her apartment and asked if the plumbing was working - he didn’t have enough imagination for more. But the main comic of the story is the presence of primitive vocabulary used by the narrator. Aloud, he calls the lady not by her first name and patronymic, but by a citizen, but to himself he thinks that she is “frya”. That is, there is some neglect on his part. With this, the plumber wants to show that, they say, he does not care about the aristocracy of a citizen, since now everyone is equal.
walks
Further, events developed as follows: after about a month, the "lovers" began to walk the streets together. At the same time, Grigory Ivanovich felt very uncomfortable. He did not know what to talk about with a fellow traveler. In addition, he was uncomfortable walking around, leading the lady by the arm, in front of his acquaintances.
The plumber felt like he was being caught by a pike. Thus continues the comic action of Zoshchenko. "Aristocrat" (a summary of the story is presented in the article) will soon show itself in all its glory to both the reader and the narrator.
Going to the theater
Further, the so-called aristocrat herself asked for herself to go to the theater. It must be assumed that she was not too interested in the performance, but rather, the intermission, in which the tragicomic event described will take place. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So, the heroes went to the theater, because by chance Grigory Ivanovich turned up two tickets, but only in different places. One - in the stalls, where the gallant gentleman put the "aristocrat", and the second place was in the gallery. Our plumber went there and, of course, quickly bored, went to the lobby. There, during the intermission, he met his companion, heading straight to the buffet. With a broad gesture, Grigory Ivanovich invited the lady to eat one cake. So wittily and comically makes fun of the tradesman in the theater Zoshchenko. "Aristocrat" (we continue to present a summary of the story of the same name) will not behave as our hero expected from her.
at the buffet
Grigory Ivanovich's heart sank when he saw the depraved, in his opinion, gait of the lady and her incredible voracity. She grabbed and ate a cake, then another, then, without stopping, began on the third. But Grigory Ivanovich was, to put it mildly, not with money. And when the "aristocrat" grabbed the fourth, the gentleman could not stand it and shouted that the "cheesy woman" put the confectionery back.
With sad irony, which is almost invisible behind the comic situation, Zoshchenko continues the story. The “aristocrat” (the summary of the story comes to an end) was confused and frightened. And the vile barman demanded money for four cakes, since the last, uneaten, was crushed and bitten. Here the public gathered, which began to discuss what had happened and argue about whether the cake had been bitten or not. As a result, people in the intermission had better fun than at the performance in the theater. When Grigory Ivanovich scraped off all the change, he barely had enough money to pay for four cakes. Then he proudly offered the "aristocrat" to finish the last delicacy, but she became embarrassed and refused. And then, unexpectedly, a new, quick and nimble character, Zoshchenko, takes the stage. “Aristocrat” (we continue to present a summary of the story in this article) is a story in which the author finally brought the situation to the point of anecdotal, introducing into the narrative a lively uncle who flew up and expressed a desire to finish the cake. At the same time, the “aristocratic woman” silently looked at how the person instantly ate the delicacy. This is for Grigory Ivanovich's money!
The final
And again our heroes went to inspect the opera, since they obviously did not know how to listen. And each during the second act pondered what to say to each other. They returned in deathly silence, and at the house the lady said in a bourgeois tone that there was nothing to go to the theater without money. But Grigory Ivanovich did not remain silent, but explained that there is no happiness in money. Since then, he does not like "aristocrats". On this note, the story "The Aristocrat" by Zoshchenko ends. The retelling, unfortunately, does not convey the vocabulary used by the characters, namely, it characterizes the characters most of all.
Zoshchenko, "Aristocrat": analysis
It is funny and sad to read this story, which tells about the 20-30s of the last century, when a social stratum surfaced that presented itself as cultural and thinking. The protagonist is pathetic and ridiculous in his ridiculous attempts to woo a woman. A man is able to speak extremely monosyllables and only about the plumbing, in which he is well versed. Even in the theater, he asks his companion not about whether she liked the performance (this question simply does not occur to him), but whether the water supply works here. But the "aristocrat" is no better than Grigory Ivanovich. In the theater, which in the story symbolizes culture, the lady also does not care about what is happening on the stage. All her interest was concentrated on the buffet, in which she did not consider it necessary to moderate her appetites and foresee that the gentleman might not have enough money. The lack of culture, dense ignorance and bad manners of both heroes are shown in full view.
Sad irony comes through in the lines of the story. Is this Russia dreamed of seeing "The Aristocrat" - a vivid mockery of the disgusting, arrogant, ridiculous philistinism, distinguished by a mass of unfounded claims and huge self-conceit.
Analysis of the works of M. Zoshchenko.
The work of Mikhail Zoshchenko is an original phenomenon in Russian Soviet literature. The writer, in his own way, saw some characteristic processes of contemporary reality, brought under the blinding light of satire a gallery of characters that gave rise to the common term "Zoshchenko's hero". All the characters were shown with humor. These works were accessible and understandable to the common reader. “Zoshchenko’s heroes” showed modern people at that time ... so to speak, just a person, for example, in the story “Bathhouse” you can see how the author shows a man who is clearly not rich, who is absent-minded and clumsy, and his phrase about clothes when he loses his number “let's look for him by signs ”And gives a rope from the number. After which he gives such signs of an old, shabby coat on which there is only 1 button from the top and a torn pocket. But in the meantime, he is sure that if he waits until everyone leaves the bathhouse, then he will be given some kind of rag, even though his coat is also bad. The author shows all the comicality of this situation ...
Such situations are usually shown in his stories. And most importantly, the author writes all this for the common people in a simple and understandable language.
Mikhail Zoshchenko
(Zoshchenko M. Selected. T. 1 - M., 1978)
The work of Mikhail Zoshchenko is an original phenomenon in Russian Soviet literature. The writer, in his own way, saw some characteristic processes of contemporary reality, brought under the blinding light of satire a gallery of characters that gave rise to the common term "Zoshchenko's hero". Being at the origins of Soviet satirical and humorous prose, he acted as the creator of an original comic novel that continued the traditions of Gogol, Leskov, and early Chekhov in new historical conditions. Finally, Zoshchenko created his own, completely unique artistic style.
Zoshchenko devoted about four decades to domestic literature. The writer went through a difficult and difficult path of searching. There are three main stages in his work.
The first falls on the 20s - the heyday of the writer's talent, who honed the pen of the accuser of social vices in such popular satirical magazines of that time as "Begemot", "Buzoter", "Red Raven", "Inspector", "Eccentric", "Funny Man". ". At this time, the formation and crystallization of Zoshchenko's short story and story takes place.
In the 30s, Zoshchenko worked mainly in the field of major prose and dramatic genres, looking for ways to "optimistic satire" ("Returned Youth" - 1933, "The Story of a Life" - 1934 and "Blue Book" - 1935). The art of Zoshchenko as a novelist also undergoes significant changes during these years (a cycle of children's stories and stories for children about Lenin).
The final period falls on the war and post-war years.
Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko was born in 1895. After graduating from high school, he studied at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. Without completing his studies, in 1915 he volunteered for the army in order, as he later recalled, "to die with dignity for his country, for his homeland." After the February Revolution, the battalion commander Zoshchenko, demobilized due to illness ("I participated in many battles, was wounded, gassed. I spoiled my heart ...") served as commandant of the Main Post Office in Petrograd. During the troubled days of Yudenich's attack on Petrograd, Zoshchenko was the adjutant of the regiment of the rural poor.
The years of two wars and revolutions (1914-1921) - a period of intensive spiritual growth of the future writer, the formation of his literary and aesthetic convictions. The civil and moral formation of Zoshchenko as a humorist and satirist, an artist of a significant social theme falls on the post-October period.
In the literary heritage, which was to be mastered and critically reworked by Soviet satire, three main lines stand out in the 1920s. Firstly, folklore and fairy tale, coming from a native, an anecdote, a folk legend, a satirical fairy tale; secondly, classical (from Gogol to Chekhov); and finally satirical. In the work of most of the major satirical writers of that time, each of these trends can be traced quite clearly. As for M. Zoshchenko, when developing the original form of his own story, he drew from all these sources, although the Gogol-Chekhov tradition was closest to him.
In the 1920s, the main genre varieties in the writer's work flourished: a satirical story, a comic novel and a satirical-humorous story. Already at the very beginning of the 1920s, the writer created a number of works that were highly appreciated by M. Gorky.
Published in 1922, "The Stories of Nazar Ilyich Mr. Sinebryukhov" attracted everyone's attention. Against the background of the short stories of those years, the figure of the hero-storyteller, the grated, experienced man Nazar Ilyich Sinebryukhov, who went through the front and saw a lot in the world, stood out sharply. M. Zoshchenko seeks and finds a kind of intonation, in which the lyric-ironic beginning and the intimate-confiding note are fused together, removing any barrier between the narrator and the listener.
In "Sinebryukhov's Stories" says a lot about the great culture of the comic tale, which the writer reached at an early stage of his work:
“I had a soulmate. A terribly educated person, I’ll say frankly - gifted with qualities. He traveled to various foreign powers in the rank of valet, he even understood, maybe in French, and drank foreign whiskey, but he was the same as not me , all the same - an ordinary guardsman of an infantry regiment. "
Sometimes the narrative is quite skillfully built on the type of a well-known absurdity, beginning with the words "a tall man of short stature was walking." Such inconsistencies create a certain comic effect. True, while he does not have that distinct satirical orientation, which he will acquire later. In Sinebryukhov's Tales, such specifically Zoshchenko turns of comic speech, which remained in the reader's memory for a long time, appear as "as if suddenly the atmosphere smelled of me", "they will rob me like sticky and throw them away for their kind, for nothing that their own relatives", "second lieutenant wow, but bastard", "breaks the riots", etc. Subsequently, a stylistic game of a similar type, but with an incomparably sharper social meaning, will manifest itself in the speeches of other heroes - Semyon Semenovich Kurochkin and Gavrilych, on whose behalf the narration was conducted in a number of the most popular comic short stories by Zoshchenko in the first half of the 20s.
The works created by the writer in the 1920s were based on specific and very topical facts gleaned either from direct observations or from numerous letters from readers. Their themes are motley and varied: riots in transport and in hostels, grimaces of the New Economic Policy and grimaces of everyday life, the mold of philistinism and philistinism, arrogant pompadourism and creeping servility, and much, much more. Often the story is built in the form of a casual conversation with the reader, and sometimes, when the shortcomings became especially egregious, frankly journalistic notes sounded in the author's voice.
In a series of satirical short stories, M. Zoshchenko maliciously ridiculed the cynically prudent or sentimentally thoughtful earners of individual happiness, intelligent scoundrels and boors, showed in the true light of vulgar and worthless people who are ready to trample on everything truly human on the way to arranging personal well-being ("Matrenishcha", "Grimace of NEP", "Lady with flowers", "Nanny", "Marriage of convenience").
In Zoshchenko's satirical stories, there are no spectacular techniques for sharpening the author's thoughts. They are usually devoid of comedy intrigue. M. Zoshchenko acted here as a denouncer of spiritual Okurovism, a satirist of morals. He chose as the object of analysis the philistine-proprietor, the hoarder and money-grubber, who, from a direct political opponent, became an opponent in the sphere of morality, a hotbed of vulgarity.
The circle of persons acting in Zoshchenko's satirical works is extremely narrow, there is no image of the crowd, the mass, visibly or invisibly present in humorous short stories. The pace of plot development is slow, the characters are deprived of the dynamism that distinguishes the heroes of other works of the writer.
The heroes of these stories are less rude and uncouth than in humorous short stories. The author is primarily interested in the spiritual world, the system of thinking of an outwardly cultured, but all the more disgusting in essence, tradesman. Oddly enough, but in Zoshchenko's satirical stories there are almost no caricatured, grotesque situations, less comic and no fun at all.
However, the main element of Zoshchenko's creativity of the 1920s is still humorous everyday life. Zoshchenko writes about drunkenness, about housing affairs, about losers offended by fate. In a word, he chooses an object that he himself quite fully And accurately described in the story "People": "But, of course, the author still prefers a completely shallow background, a completely petty and insignificant hero with his trifling passions and experiences" . The movement of the plot in such a story is based on the constantly posed and comically resolved contradictions between "yes" and "no". The simple-minded naive narrator assures with the whole tone of his narration that exactly as he does, the depicted should be evaluated, and the reader either guesses or knows for sure that such assessments-characteristics are incorrect. This eternal struggle between the narrator's statement and the reader's negative perception of the events described imparts special dynamism to Zoshchenko's story, filling it with subtle and sad irony.
Zoshchenko has a short story "The Beggar" - about a hefty and impudent subject who got into the habit of regularly going to the hero-narrator, extorting fifty kopecks from him. When he was tired of all this, he advised the enterprising earner to drop in less frequently with uninvited visits. “He didn’t come to see me again - he must have been offended,” the narrator remarked melancholy in the finale. It is not easy for Kostya Pechenkin to hide double-mindedness, to disguise cowardice and meanness with lofty words ("Three Documents"), and the story ends with an ironically sympathetic maxim: "Oh, comrades, it's hard for a person to live in the world!"
This sadly ironic "probably offended" and "it's hard for a man to live in the world" is the nerve of most of Zoshchenko's comic works of the 1920s. In such small masterpieces as "On Live Bait", "Aristocrat", "Bath", "Nervous People", "Scientific Phenomenon" and others, the author, as it were, cuts off various socio-cultural layers, reaching those layers where the sources of indifference nest , incivility, vulgarity.
The hero of "Aristocrat" was carried away by one person in fildekos stockings and a hat. While he "as an official" visited the apartment, and then walked along the street, experiencing the inconvenience of having to take the lady by the arm and "drag like a pike", everything was relatively safe. But as soon as the hero invited the aristocrat to the theater, "she deployed her ideology in its entirety." Seeing cakes in the intermission, the aristocrat "approaches with a depraved gait to the dish and chop with cream and eats." The lady has eaten three cakes and is reaching for the fourth.
"That's when the blood hit my head.
Lie down, - I say, - back!"
After this climax, events unfold like an avalanche, involving an increasing number of actors into their orbit. As a rule, in the first half of Zoshchenko's short story one or two, many - three characters are presented. And only when the development of the plot passes the highest point, when there is a need and need to typify the described phenomenon, to sharpen it satirically, a more or less written group of people, sometimes a crowd, appears.
Same with Aristocrat. The closer to the finale, the more faces the author brings to the stage. First, the figure of the barman appears, who, to all the assurances of the hero, ardently proving that only three pieces have been eaten, since the fourth cake is on the platter, "keeps indifferent."
No, - he answers, - although it is in the dish, but the bite is made on it and the finger is crumpled. "Here are amateur experts, some of whom" say - the bite is done, others - no. "And finally, the crowd attracted by the scandal, who laughs at the sight of an unlucky theater-goer, convulsively turning out his pockets with all kinds of junk before her eyes.
In the finale, only two characters remain again, finally sorting out their relationship. The story ends with a dialogue between the offended lady and the hero dissatisfied with her behavior.
"And at the house she says to me in her bourgeois tone:
Pretty disgusting of you. Those without money don't travel with ladies.
And I say:
Not in money, citizen, happiness. Sorry for the expression."
As you can see, both sides are offended. Moreover, both sides believe only in their own truth, being firmly convinced that it is the opposite side that is wrong. The hero of Zoshchenko's story invariably regards himself as an infallible, "respectable citizen", although in reality he acts as a swaggering layman.
The essence of Zoshchenko's aesthetics lies in the fact that the writer combines two plans (ethical and cultural-historical), showing their deformation, distortion in the minds and behavior of satirical and humorous characters. At the junction of the true and the false, the real and the fictional, a comic spark slips, a smile arises or the reader laughs.
Breaking the connection between cause and effect is the traditional source of the comic. It is important to capture the type of conflicts characteristic of a given environment and era and convey them by means of satirical art. Zoshchenko is dominated by the motive of discord, worldly absurdity, some kind of tragicomic inconsistency of the hero with the pace, rhythm and spirit of the times.
Sometimes Zoshchenko's hero really wants to keep up with progress. A hastily assimilated modern trend seems to such a respected citizen not only as a ride of loyalty, but as an example of organic adaptation to revolutionary reality. Hence the addiction to fashionable names and political terminology, hence the desire to assert their "proletarian" insides through bravado with rudeness, ignorance, rudeness.
It is no coincidence that the hero-narrator sees a petty-bourgeois bias in the fact that Vasya Rastopyrkin - "this pure proletarian, non-party, the devil knows what year - was thrown out of the tram platform just now" by insensitive passengers for dirty clothes ("Petty Bourgeois"). When the clerk Seryozha Kolpakov was finally given a personal telephone, about which he had been busying so much, the hero felt like a "true European with cultural skills and manners." But the trouble is that this "European" has no one to talk to. From anguish, he called the fire station, lied that there was a fire. "In the evening Serezha Kolpakov was arrested for hooliganism."
The writer is concerned about the problem of life and everyday anomalies. Searching for its causes, carrying out reconnaissance of the social and moral sources of negative phenomena, Zoshchenko sometimes creates grotesque exaggerated situations that give rise to an atmosphere of hopelessness, a widespread spill of worldly vulgarity. Such a feeling is created after acquaintance with the stories "Dictaphone", "Dog's scent", "After a hundred years".
Critics of the 1920s and 1930s, noting the innovation of the creator of The Bathhouse and The Aristocrat, willingly wrote on the theme of Mikhail Zoshchenko's "face and mask", often correctly comprehending the meaning of the writer's works, but being embarrassed by the unusual relationship between the author and his comic "double" . The reviewers were not satisfied with the writer's adherence to the same once and for all chosen mask. Meanwhile, Zoshchenko did it deliberately.
S.V. Samples in the book "Actor with a Doll" spoke about how he was looking for his own path in art. It turned out that only the doll helped him find his "manner and voice". The actor managed to “enter into the image” of this or that hero more relaxed and freer precisely “through the doll”.
Zoshchenko's innovation began with the discovery of a comic hero, who, according to the writer, "almost did not appear before in Russian literature," as well as with mask techniques, through which he revealed aspects of life that often remained in the shadows, did not fall into the field of view. satirists.
All comic heroes from the ancient Petrushka to Schweik acted in the conditions of an anti-people society, while Zoshchenko's hero "deployed his ideology" in a different environment. The writer showed the conflict between a person, weighed down by the prejudices of pre-revolutionary life, and morality, the moral principles of the new society.
Developing deliberately ordinary plots, telling private stories that happened to an unremarkable hero, the writer raised these individual cases to the level of a significant generalization. He penetrates the holy of holies of the tradesman, who involuntarily exposes himself in his monologues. This skillful mystification was achieved through mastery of the manner of narration on behalf of the narrator, a tradesman who was not only afraid to openly declare his views, but also tried not to inadvertently give rise to any reprehensible opinions about himself.
Zoshchenko often achieved a comic effect by playing around with words and expressions drawn from the speech of an illiterate tradesman, with its characteristic vulgarisms, incorrect grammatical forms and syntactic constructions ("plitoire", "okromya", "hres", "this", "in it", "brunette", "drunk", "for biting", "fuck cry", "this poodle", "silent animal", "at the stove", etc.).
Traditional humorous schemes were also used, which have come into wide use since the time of the "Satyricon": the enemy of bribes, giving a speech in which he gives recipes for taking bribes ("Speech delivered at a banquet"); an opponent of verbosity, who himself turns out to be a lover of idle and empty talk ("The Americans"); a doctor sewing a watch of "pot gold" into the patient's stomach ("Clock").
Zoshchenko is a writer not only of a comic style, but also of comic situations. The style of his stories is not just funny words, incorrect grammatical phrases and sayings. That was the sad fate of the authors who tried to write "under Zoshchenko", that they, in the apt expression of K. Fedin, acted simply as plagiarists, taking off what was convenient to take off - clothes. However, they were far from comprehending the essence of Zoshchenko's innovation in the realm of the tale. Zoshchenko managed to make the tale very capacious and artistically expressive. The hero-narrator only speaks, and the author does not complicate the structure of the work with additional descriptions of the timbre of his voice, his demeanor, and the details of his behavior. However, the character's gesture, the shade of his voice, his psychological state, and the author's attitude to the narrated are clearly conveyed through the tale manner. What other writers achieved by introducing additional artistic details, Zoshchenko achieved with a manner of narration, a short, extremely concise phrase and at the same time a complete absence of "dryness".
At first, Zoshchenko came up with various names for his fairy tale masks (Sinebryukhov, Kurochkin, Gavrilych), but later abandoned this. For example, "Merry Stories", published on behalf of the gardener Semyon Semyonovich Kurochkin, subsequently began to be published without attachment to the personality of this character. The tale has become more complex, artistically more meaningful.
The form of the tale was used by N. Gogol, I. Gorbunov, N. Leskov, and Soviet writers of the 1920s. Instead of pictures of life, in which there is no intrigue, and sometimes any plot action, as was the case in I. Gorbunov’s masterfully honed miniature dialogues, instead of the emphatically sophisticated stylization of the language of the urban bourgeoisie, which N. Leskov achieved through lexical assimilation of various speech elements and folk etymology , Zoshchenko, not shying away from these methods, seeks and finds means that most closely correspond to the warehouse and spirit of his hero.
Zoshchenko, in his mature years, followed the path blazed by Gogol and Chekhov, but, unlike the numerous accusers of the 1920s, did not copy their manners.
K. Fedin noted the writer's ability to "combine irony with the truth of feeling in a finely constructed story." This was achieved by Zoshchenko's unique methods, among which an important place belonged to a particularly intoned humor.
Zoshchenko's humor is ironic through and through. The writer called his stories: "Happiness", "Love", "Easy Life", "Pleasant Meetings", "Honest Citizen", "Rich Life", "Happy Childhood", etc. And they were talking about the exact opposite of what was stated in the title. The same can be said about the cycle of "Sentimental Tales", in which the dominant beginning; became the tragicomism of the everyday life of the tradesman and the layman. One of the stories bore the romantic title "Lilac Blooms". However, the poetic haze of the title dissipated already on the first pages. Here the life of a musty petty-bourgeois little world, usual for Zoshchenko's works, flowed thickly with its insipid love, betrayals, disgusting scenes of jealousy, scuffle.
The dominance of a trifle, the slavery of trifles, the comicality of the absurd and absurd - this is what the writer pays attention to in a series of sentimental stories. However, there is also much new here, even unexpected for the reader who knew Zoshchenko the novelist. In this regard, the story "What the nightingale sang about" is especially indicative.
Here, in contrast to "The Goat", "Wisdom" and "People", where the characters of all kinds of "former" people, broken by the revolution, knocked out of their usual everyday rut, were drawn, a completely "fire-resistant type" was recreated, which was not shaken by any storms and thunderstorms past social upheaval. Vasily Vasilyevich Bylinkin steps broadly and firmly on the ground. "But Bylinkin wore his heels inward to the very backs." If anything crushes this "philosophically-minded person, burnt through with life and fired upon by heavy artillery," it is the feeling for Liza Rundukova that suddenly flooded over him.
In essence, the story "What the nightingale sang about" is a subtly parodic stylized work that tells the story of the explanations and languishing of two passionately in love heroes. Without changing the canons of the love story, the author sends a test to the lovers, albeit in the form of a childhood illness (mumps), with which Bylinkin unexpectedly falls seriously ill. The heroes stoically endure this formidable invasion of fate, their love becomes even stronger and purer. They walk a lot, holding hands, often sitting over the classic cliff of the river, however, with a somewhat undignified name - Kozyavka.
Love reaches a climax, after which only the death of loving hearts is possible, if the elemental attraction is not crowned with a marriage union. But here the force of such circumstances invades, which under the root crush the carefully cherished feeling.
Bylinkin sang beautifully and captivatingly, gentle roulades were brought out by his broken voice. What about the results?
Let us recall why in the old satirical literature the matrimonial harassment of equally unlucky suitors failed.
It's funny, very funny, that Podkolesin jumps out of the window, although there is no such limiting reduction of the hero as in Zoshchenko's.
Khlestakov's courtship is frustrated by the fact that somewhere in the depths of the stage, the figure of a true auditor looms as a severe retribution.
Krechinsky's wedding cannot take place because this clever swindler aims to receive a million dowry, but at the last moment he takes too clumsy a step.
And what explains the sadly farcical outcome in the story "What the nightingale sang about"? Liza did not have a mother's chest of drawers, on which the hero counted so much. This is where the mug of a tradesman comes out, which before that - though not very skillfully - was covered with thin petals of "haberdashery" treatment.
Zoshchenko writes a magnificent finale, which reveals the true value of what at first looked like a reverently magnanimous feeling. The epilogue, sustained in peacefully elegiac tones, is preceded by a scene of violent scandal.
In the structure of Zoshchenko's stylized-sentimental story, like veins of quartz in granite, bitingly sarcastic inclusions appear. They give the work a satirical flavor, and, unlike the stories where Zoshchenko openly laughs, here the writer, using Mayakovsky's formula, smiles and mocks. At the same time, his smile is most often sad and sad, and the mockery is sardonic.
This is how the epilogue of the story "What the nightingale sang about" is built, where the author finally answers the question posed in the title. As if returning the reader to the happy days of Bylinkin, the writer recreates the atmosphere of love ecstasy, when Lizochka, frustrated "from the chirping of insects or the singing of a nightingale," ingenuously asks her admirer:
Vasya, what do you think this nightingale sings about?
To which Vasya Bylinkin usually answered with restraint:
He wants to eat, that's why he sings."
The originality of "Sentimental Tales" is not only in the more meager introduction of elements of the comic proper, but also in the fact that from work to work there is a growing feeling of something unkind, embedded, it seems, in the very mechanism of life, which interferes with its optimistic perception.
The disadvantage of most of the heroes of "Sentimental Tales" is that they slept through a whole historical period in the life of Russia and therefore, like Apollo Perepenchuk ("Apollo and Tamara"), Ivan Ivanovich Belokopytov ("People") or Michel Sinyagin ("M.P. . Sinyagin"), have no future. They rush about in fear through life, and every even the smallest case is ready to play a fatal role in their restless fate. The case takes the form of inevitability and regularity, determining a lot in the contrite spiritual mood of these heroes.
The fatal slavery of trifles distorts and corrodes the human beginnings of the heroes of the stories "The Goat", "What the Nightingale Sang About", "A Merry Adventure". If there is no goat, the foundations of Zabezhkin's universe collapse, and after that Zabezhkin himself dies. They don’t give mother’s dresser to the bride - and the bride herself is not needed, to whom Bylinkin sang so sweetly. The hero of the "Merry Adventure" Sergei Petukhov, who intends to take a familiar girl to the cinema, does not find the necessary seven hryvnias and because of this he is ready to kill the dying aunt.
The artist paints petty, philistine natures, busy mindlessly spinning around dull, faded joys and habitual sorrows. Social upheavals bypassed these people, who call their existence "wormy and meaningless." However, it sometimes seemed to the author that the foundations of life remained unshaken, that the wind of the revolution only agitated the sea of worldly vulgarity and flew away without changing the essence of human relations.
This perception of the world Zoshchenko determined the nature of his humor. Next to the cheerful, the writer often peeps the sad. But, unlike Gogol, with whom contemporary criticism sometimes compared Zoshchenko, the heroes of his stories so crushed and drowned out everything human in themselves that the tragic simply ceased to exist for them in life.
In Gogol, through the fate of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, the tragedy of a whole layer of disadvantaged people, just like this petty official, was visible. Their spiritual poverty was due to the prevailing social relations. The revolution abolished the exploitative system, opened before every person broad opportunities for a meaningful and interesting life. However, there were still many people who were either dissatisfied with the new order, or simply skeptical and indifferent. Zoshchenko at that time was also not yet sure that the petty-bourgeois swamp would recede and disappear under the influence of social transformations.
The writer pities his little heroes, but the essence of these people is not tragic, but farcical. Sometimes happiness will wander into their street, as happened, for example, with the hero of the story "Happiness", the glazier Ivan Fomich Testov, who once grabbed a bright peacock of luck. But what a sad happiness! Like a hysterical drunken song with a tear and heavy carbon monoxide oblivion.
Tearing off a new overcoat from the shoulders of the Gogol hero, the kidnappers took away with it all the most cherished things that Akaky Akakievich could possibly have. Before the hero Zoshchenko, a world of immense possibilities opened up. However, this hero did not see them, and they remained treasures for him with seven seals.
Occasionally, of course, even such a hero can have an anxious feeling, like the character of "Terrible Night". But it quickly disappears, because the system of past worldly ideas clings tenaciously to the mind of the tradesman. A revolution has passed that stirred up Russia, and the layman for the most part remained almost unaffected by its transformations. By showing the force of inertia of the past, Zoshchenko did a great, useful thing.
"Sentimental stories" differed not only in the originality of the object (according to Zoshchenko, he takes in them "an exceptionally intelligent person", in small stories he writes "about a simpler person"), but they were also written in a different manner than stories.
The narration is conducted not on behalf of the tradesman, the inhabitant, but on behalf of the writer Kolenkorov, and this, as it were, resurrects the traditions of Russian classical literature. In fact, instead of following the humanistic ideals of the 19th century, Kolenkorov turns out to be imitation and epigonism. Zoshchenko parodies, ironically overcomes this outwardly sentimental manner.
Satire, like all Soviet fiction, changed significantly in the 1930s. The creative fate of the author of "The Aristocrat" and "Sentimental Tales" was no exception. The writer who exposed philistinism, ridiculed philistinism, wrote ironically and parodicly about the poisonous scum of the past, turns his eyes in a completely different direction. Zoshchenko is fascinated by the tasks of socialist transformation. He works in the large-circulation newspapers of Leningrad enterprises, visits the construction of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, listening to the rhythms of the grandiose process of social renewal. There is a turning point in all his work: from the worldview to the tonality of the narrative and style.
During this period, Zoshchenko was seized by the idea of merging satire and heroism together. Theoretically, this thesis was proclaimed by him at the very beginning of the 1930s, and practically implemented in "Returned Youth" (1933), "The Story of a Life" (1934), the story "The Blue Book" (1935) and a number of stories of the second half: 30s.
Our enemies abroad often explain Zoshchenko's gravitation toward heroic themes and bright positive character as dictated by external forces. In fact, this was organic for the writer and testified to his inner evolution, which has been so common for the Russian national tradition since the time of Gogol. Suffice it to recall Nekrasov's confession escaping from his sore chest: "The heart is tired of eating malice ...", burning Shchedrin's thirst for the lofty and heroic, Chekhov's unquenched longing for a man in whom everything is fine.
Already in 1927, Zoshchenko, in his usual manner at that time, made the following confession in one of the stories:
“Today I would like to swing at something heroic. At some kind of grandiose, extensive character with many advanced views and moods. Otherwise, everything is trifle and petty - just disgusting ...
And I miss, brothers, the real hero! I wish I could meet someone like that!"
Two years later, in the book Letters to a Writer, M. Zoshchenko again returns to the problem that worried him. He asserts that "the proletarian revolution raised a whole and enormous layer of new, 'indescribable' people."
The writer's meeting with such heroes took place in the 1930s, and this contributed to a significant change in the whole appearance of her short story.
Zoshchenko of the 1930s completely renounces not only the usual social mask, but also the tale manner developed over the years. The author and his characters now speak in quite correct literary language. At the same time, naturally, the range of speech fades somewhat, but it became obvious that it would no longer be possible to embody a new circle of ideas and images with the former Zoshchenko style.
Even a few years before this evolution took place in Zoshchenko's work, the writer foresaw the possibility for him of new creative solutions dictated by the conditions of developing reality.
“They usually think,” he wrote in 1929, “that I am distorting the “beautiful Russian language”, that for the sake of laughter I take words not in the meaning that life gives them, that I purposely write in broken language in order to make the most respectable audience laugh .
This is not true. I hardly distort anything. I write in the language that the street now speaks and thinks. I did this (in short stories) not for the sake of curiosities and not in order to more accurately copy our life. I did this in order to fill, at least temporarily, the colossal gap that has occurred between literature and the street.
I say - temporarily, since I really write so temporarily and in a parodic way.
In the mid-30s, the writer declared: “Every year I shoot and remove exaggeration from my stories more and more.
The departure from the tale was not a simple formal act; it entailed a complete structural restructuring of Zoshchenko's short story. Not only the style is changing, but also the plot and compositional principles, psychological analysis is being widely introduced. Even outwardly, the story looks different, exceeding the previous one by two or three times. Zoshchenko often returns, as it were, to his early experiences of the early 1920s, but at a more mature stage, using the heritage of a fictionalized comic novel in a new way.
The very titles of the stories and feuilletons of the middle and second half of the 1930s ("Tactless", "Bad Wife", "Unequal Marriage", "On Respect for People", "More on the Struggle with Noise") quite accurately indicate the exciting now satirical questions. These are not curiosities of everyday life or communal problems, but problems of ethics, the formation of new moral relations.
The feuilleton "Good impulses" (1937) was written, it would seem, on a very private topic: about tiny windows at the cashiers of entertainment enterprises and at information kiosks. "There are only the cashier's hands sticking out, a ticket book and scissors. That's the whole panorama for you." But the further, the more the theme of a respectful attitude towards the visitor, client, every Soviet person unfolds. The satirist rises against the cloth-drowsy uniformed well-being and the indispensable trepidation before the state "point".
“It’s not that I want to see the expression on the face of the one who gives me a certificate, but I might want to ask him again, to consult. But the window blocks me off and, as they say, it chills my soul. you, realizing your insignificant place in this world, again leave with a constricted heart.
The basis of the plot is a simple fact: the old woman needs to get a certificate.
Her lips are whispering, and you can see that she wants to talk to someone, find out, ask and find out.
Here she comes to the window. The window opens. And there the head of a young nobleman is shown.
The old woman begins her speeches, but the young cavalier says curtly:
Abra sa se kno...
And the window closes.
The old woman was about to lean again towards the window, but again, having received the same answer, she even walked away in some fright.
Thinking this phrase "Abra sa se kno" in my head, I decide to make a translation from the language of the poetry of bureaucracy into the everyday everyday language of prose. And I get: "Refer to the next window."
I tell the translated phrase to the old woman, and she walks unsteadily to the next window.
No, she was not detained there for a long time either, and she soon left with prepared speeches.
The feuilleton is sharpened against, as Zoshchenko delicately puts it, the "unsympathetic style" of life and the work of institutions, according to which a not very outwardly distinguishable, but quite real system of dividing people into two obviously unequal categories has been established. On the one hand, "they say - we, but, they say, - you." But in fact, the author argues, "you are us, and we are partly you." The finale sounds sad and warning: "There is, we would say, some kind of inconsistency."
This inconsistency, which has already reached a grotesque degree, is exposed with caustic sarcasm in the story "Case History" (1936). Here the life and customs of a certain special hospital are described, in which visitors are greeted on the wall by a cheerful poster: “The issuance of corpses from 3 to 4”, and the paramedic admonishes a patient who does not like this announcement with the words: “If, he says, you get better, which is unlikely, then criticize.
In the 1920s, it seemed to many that the cursed legacy of the past could be ended fairly quickly. M. Zoshchenko did not share these complacent illusions either then or a decade later. The satirist saw the amazing vitality of all kinds of social weeds and by no means underestimated the abilities of the tradesman and the layman for mimicry and opportunism.
However, in the 1930s, new prerequisites arose to solve the eternal question of human happiness, due to gigantic socialist transformations, the cultural revolution. This has a significant impact on the nature and direction of the writer's work.
Zoshchenko has teaching intonations that did not exist at all before. The satirist not only and even not so much ridicules, castigates, as patiently teaches, explains, interprets, referring to the mind and conscience of the reader. High and pure didactics was embodied with special perfection in a cycle of touching and affectionate stories for children written in 1937-1938.
In the comic novel and feuilleton of the second half of the 1930s, sad humor is increasingly giving way to instructiveness, and irony to lyrical-philosophical intonation ("Forced Landing", "Commemoration", "Drunk Man", "Bath and People", "Meeting" , "In the tram", etc.). Take, for example, the story "In a tram" (1937). This is not even a short story, but simply a street scene, a genre sketch, which in past years could easily become an arena for funny and funny situations, heavily seasoned with comic salt of witticisms. Suffice it to recall "On live bait", "Galoshes", etc.
Now the writer and anger and fun rarely break out. More than before, he declares the high moral position of the artist, clearly revealed in the key points of the plot - where issues of honor, dignity, and duty that are especially important and dear to the writer's heart are touched upon.
Defending the concept of active goodness, M. Zoshchenko pays more and more attention to positive characters, bolder and more often introduces images of positive characters into a satirical and humorous story. And not just in the role of extras, standards frozen in their virtue, but characters actively acting and fighting ("Merry Game", "New Times", "City Lights", "Debt of Honor").
Previously, the development of Zoshchenko's comic plot consisted of incessant contradictions that arose between the ironic "yes" and the real "no." The contrast between high and low, bad and good, comic and tragic was revealed by the reader himself as he deepened into the satirical text of the narrative. The author sometimes obscured these contrasts, insufficiently clearly differentiating the speech and function of the storyteller and his own position.
The short story and feuilleton of the 1930s are built by Zoshchenko on other compositional principles, not because such an important component of the short story of the previous years as the hero-storyteller disappears. Now the characters of satirical works are confronted not only by the higher position of the author, but also by the very environment in which the characters live. This social confrontation ultimately moves the inner springs of the plot. Observing how the honor and dignity of a person are trampled on by all sorts of bureaucrats, red tape, bureaucrats, the writer raises his voice in his defense. No, as a rule, he does not give an angry rebuff, but in the sadly ironic manner of narration he prefers, major intonations arise, and the firm conviction of an optimist is manifested.
Zoshchenko's trip to the White Sea-Baltic Canal (1933) became a memorable milestone for him, not only because there he saw with his own eyes how people were reborn in the conditions of a gigantic construction site, much worse than those who were the main characters of his works of the 20s . The prospects for the future path opened up to the writer in a new way, for the direct study of the socialist novelty gave a lot to solve such fundamental questions for the satirist as man and society, the historical doom of the past, the inevitability and inevitability of the triumph of the high and beautiful. The social renewal of the native land also promised a moral rebirth of the personality, returning not only to an individual, but, as it were, to the entire planet its long-lost youth.
As a result of the trip, the story "The Story of One Life" (1934) appears, which tells how a thief, "passing through a harsh school of re-education", became a man. This story was favorably received by M. Gorky.
New time bursts not only into the essays, short stories and small feuilletons of Zoshchenko, but also into the pages of his great prose. The former notion of the viability and indestructibility of philistinism is being replaced by a growing confidence in the victory of new human relations. The writer went from general skepticism at the sight of seemingly invincible vulgarity to criticism of the old in the new and to the search for a positive hero. This is how the chain of stories of the 1930s gradually builds up from Youth Restored (1933) through The Blue Book (1935) to Retribution (1936). In these works, denial and affirmation, pathos and irony, lyricism and satire, heroic and comic merged in a whimsical alloy.
In "Returned Youth" the author is especially interested in the relationship between sociological and biological, class-political and universal aspects. If earlier the teaching tone appeared only at the end of small feuilletons, now the features of didactics and preaching permeate the entire fabric of the work. Persuasion and suggestion gradually begin to crowd out the means of satirical ridicule, imperceptibly come to the fore, determining the very movement of the plot.
Compositionally, "Youth Restored" is divided into three unequal parts. The first part is a series of short stories prefaced by the main content of the story and expounding in an unpretentiously amusing way the author's views on the possibility of the return of youth. The last two stories, as Zoshchenko himself noted, even "make you think about the need to learn how to control yourself and your extremely complex body."
This is followed by the actual fictional part, devoted to the story of how the elderly professor of astronomy Volosatov regained his lost youth. And, finally, the most extensive part concludes all the previous - scientific comments on the plot-narrative section of the work.
The genre originality of Zoshchenko's large prose canvases is indisputable. If "Youth Restored" could still be called a story with some degree of conventionality, then for the rest of the works of the lyrical-satirical trilogy ("The Blue Book", "Before Sunrise", 1943) the tested genre definitions - "novel", "story", " memoirs", etc. - didn't fit. Realizing his theoretical principles, which boiled down to the synthesis of documentary and artistic genres, in the 1930s and 1940s Zoshchenko created major works at the intersection of fiction and journalism.
Although in The Blue Book the general principles of combining the satirical and didactic, pathos and irony, touching and funny remained the same, much has changed compared to the previous book. Thus, for example, the method of active authorial intervention in the course of the narrative remained, but not in the form of scientific comments, but in a different form: each main section of the Blue Book is preceded by an introduction, and ends with an afterword. Reworking his old short stories for this book, Zoshchenko not only frees them from the tale-like manner and semi-criminal jargon, but also generously introduces an element of teaching. Many stories are accompanied by introductory or concluding lines of a clearly didactic nature.
The general tone of "The Blue Book" also changes in comparison with "Returned Youth" in the direction of further enlightenment of the background. Here the author still acts mainly as a satirist and humorist, but in the book "there is more joy and hope than ridicule, and less irony than real, cordial and tender affection for people."
There is no plot affinity between these works. At the same time, the "Blue Book" is not accidentally named by the writer as the second part of the trilogy. Here the theme of humanism, the problem of genuine and imaginary human happiness, was further developed. This gives integrity to the heterogeneous historical and contemporary material, gives the narrative an inner grace and unity.
In "Youth Restored" for the first time in Zoshchenko's work the motif of the historical doom of the heritage of the old world sounded with great force, no matter how unshakable and tenacious it may seem at first. From this point of view, the primary task of the satirist was defined in a new way: "to beat out of people all the rubbish that has accumulated over thousands of years."
The deepening of social historicism is the conquest of the author of The Blue Book. It is as if a comical parade of the age-old values of a proprietary society passes before the reader, their poverty and squalor are shown against the background of those ideals and accomplishments that the socialist revolution demonstrates to the world. Zoshchenko historically surveys the distant and relatively near past of mankind, the moral norms generated by the morality of the owners. In accordance with this plan, the book is divided into five main sections: "Money", "Love", "Deceit", "Failures" and "Amazing Events".
In each of the first four sections, Zoshchenko takes the reader through different centuries and countries. So, for example, in "Money" the satirist tells how in ancient Rome the Praetorians traded in the throne of the emperor, how the popes absolved sins for money, how his Serene Highness Prince Menshikov finally stole, coveting the chervonets that the St. Petersburg merchants presented on the name day of Peter I. in a reduced manner retells the events of world history associated with the invariable triumph of the golden calf, speaks of blood and dirt that have stuck to money for many years.
Zoshchenko uses the material of a historical anecdote to make of it not only a murderous satirical sketch of the knights of profit, but also a parable, that is, to lead a contemporary to comprehend the genesis of those vices of the past that have been preserved in the tradesman and layman of our days.
Zoshchenko's historical digressions have an exact and verified address. The satirist, commemorating emperors and kings, princes and dukes, aims at home-grown grabbers and burnouts, which he talks about in comic short stories.
History and modernity are tied in a tight knot here. The events of the past are reflected in the comic novels of today, as in a series of crooked mirrors. Using their effect, the satirist projects the false grandeur of the past onto the screen of the new era, which is why both the past and the still remaining absurd in life take on a particularly stupid and unattractive look.
In a number of responses to the Blue Book, the fundamental innovation of this work of the writer was correctly noted. “Zoshchenko saw in the past,” wrote A. Dymshits, “not only the prototypes of modern philistines, but also saw in him the sprouts of our revolution, which he spoke about with great lyricism in the best in all respects section of the Blue Book - its fifth section - " Amazing events." The pathetic and lyrical fifth section, crowning the book as a whole, gave it an exalted character.
The heroic-romantic and enlightening principle was asserted more and more boldly and decisively in Zoshchenko's prose in the second half of the 1930s. The artistic principles of "Youth Restored" and "The Blue Book" are developed by the writer in a series of new novels and short stories.
In 1936, three stories were completed: "The Black Prince", "The Talisman (The Sixth Story of I.P. Belkin)", which is a stylization of Pushkin's prose, brilliant in form and content, and "Retribution". In "Retribution" the writer moved from trying to succinctly tell about the best people of the revolution to a detailed display of their life and work.
The completion of the heroic and educational-didactic line in the work of Zoshchenko in the 30s are two cycles of stories - stories for children and stories about Lenin (1939). Now we know how natural and organic the appearance of these works was for the artist. But at one time they made a sensation among readers and critics who saw the popular comedian from an unexpected side for many.
In 1940, a book of stories for children "The Most Important" was published in Detizdat. Here we are not talking about choosing a profession, not about "whom to be", because for Zoshchenko the main thing is what to be. The theme of the formation of high morality is the same as in the works for adults, but it is revealed in relation to the children's level of perception and thinking. The writer teaches children to be brave and strong, smart and kind. With an affectionate and cheerful smile, he tells about animals, recalls episodes from his childhood ("Christmas Tree", "Grandma's Gift"), being able to draw a moral lesson from everywhere and convey it to the young reader in an extremely simple and intelligible form.
Zoshchenko approached the Leninist theme for about twenty years. The first and, perhaps, the only test of strength was written back in the first half of the 1920s "The Story of How Semyon Semyonovich Kurochkin Met Lenin", which was then reprinted under the title "Historical Story". The writer returned to this topic only at the end of the 1930s, enriched by the experience of developing historical and revolutionary problems, having experienced a significant change in his worldview and creativity.
Peru Zoshchenko owns sixteen stories about Lenin (twelve of them were published in 1939). They reveal the features of Lenin's character. But in general, the book of short stories recreates the earthly and charming image of the leader, who embodied all the best that revolutionary Russia put forward.
Zoshchenko also intended stories about Lenin for children. Therefore, from the many components of Lenin's personality, the main thing is carefully selected, that which is accessible to the young mind and without which the idea of Lenin is inconceivable. The artistic form of stories is also subordinated to this task.
Although the main provisions of this book were inspired by Gorky's memoirs and Mayakovsky's poem about Lenin, their concrete embodiment was innovative, and therefore Zoshchenko's short stories were perceived by critics and readers as a discovery.
During the Great Patriotic War, Mikhail Zoshchenko lived in Alma-Ata. The tragedy of besieged Leningrad, the terrible blows near Moscow, the great battle on the Volga, the battle on the Kursk Bulge - all this was deeply experienced in the undarkened city on the slopes of Ala-Tau. In an effort to contribute to the common cause of defeating the enemy, Zoshchenko writes a lot on front-line topics. Here we should name screenplays of short films, small satirical plays ("The Cuckoo and the Crows" and "Fritz's Pipe" - 1942), a number of short stories "From the Stories of Fighters" and humoresques published in "Ogonyok", "Crocodile", "Red Army", film story "Soldier's Happiness"
In the same period, the writer continued to work on his largest work of the war years - the final part of the trilogy, the idea of which arose back in the 30s. In the article "About my trilogy" M. Zoshchenko wrote:
"Now I'm thinking of starting a new book, which will be the last in my trilogy, begun by Youth Restored and continued by The Blue Book. All these three books, although not united by a single plot, are connected by an internal idea." Revealing the content of the new work, the writer noted that "the last book of the trilogy is conceived much more complex; it will have a slightly different approach to all material than in Youth Restored and The Blue Book, and the issues that I touched on in the previous two books will culminate in a special chapter of the new book.
This book will bear little resemblance to conventional fiction. It will be more of a treatise, philosophical and journalistic, rather than fiction." The story "Before Sunrise" (1943) really "little like" ordinary fiction. books of the trilogy. But the fundamental difference of the third part is different. The story "Before Sunrise" does not continue, but in many respects revises the principles developed by the writer before. The gap between intentions and creative result led the author to an ideological and artistic failure.
The miscalculation was that the writer focused his attention on the gloomy, melancholy, obsessive idea of \u200b\u200bfear and thereby began to move back from the major and optimism of the first parts of the trilogy. The place of bright lyrics was taken by a gloomy and sometimes simply boring narration, only occasionally illuminated by the semblance of a faint smile. In the story "Before Sunrise" Zoshchenko made another miscalculation, completely freeing his narrative from humor, seriously turning to medicine and physiology for help in understanding social problems.
In the war and post-war years, M. Zoshchenko did not create works that significantly deepened his own achievements of the previous period. His humor has faded and weakened considerably. Much of what was written during the stormy years of the war was accepted by the reader with gratitude and had a positive response in critical articles and reviews. Yu. Herman spoke about the difficult campaign of our warships in the Arctic Ocean during the Great Patriotic War. Enemy mines were all around, a thick red fog loomed. The mood of the sailors is far from positive. But then one of the officers began to read Zoshchenko's "Rogulka" (1943), which had just been published in a front-line newspaper.
“They began to laugh at the table. At first they smiled, then someone snorted, then the laughter became universal, rampant. People who until then every minute turned to the windows literally cried with laughter: a formidable mine suddenly turned into a funny and stupid flyer. Laughter conquered fatigue .. ... laughter turned out to be stronger than the psychic attack that had been dragging on for the fourth day already ".
This story was placed on the shield, where the numbers of the marching combat leaflet were posted, then it went around all the ships of the Northern Fleet.
In the feuilletons, stories, dramatic scenes, and scripts created by M. Zoshchenko in 1941-1945, on the one hand, the theme of pre-war satirical and humorous creativity is continued (stories and feuilletons about the negative phenomena of life in the rear), on the other hand (and most of these works) - the theme of the struggling and victorious people is developed.
A special place in the work of Zoshchenko belongs to the book of partisan stories. In the partisan cycle, the writer again turned to the peasant, rural theme - almost a quarter of a century after he wrote the first stories about peasants. This meeting with the old theme in a new historical era brought both creative excitement and difficulties. Not all of them the author managed to overcome (the narration sometimes acquires a somewhat conventionally literary character, bookish-correct speech is heard from the lips of the characters), but nevertheless he completed the main task. Before us is really not a collection of short stories, but a book with a holistic plot.
In the 1950s, M. Zoshchenko created a number of stories and feuilletons, a cycle of "Literary Anecdotes", devoted a lot of time and energy to translations. The translation of the book of the Finnish writer M. Lassil "For matches" is especially distinguished by its high skill.
When you think about the main thing in Zoshchenko's work, the words of his colleague in literature come to mind. Speaking at the discussion of the "Blue Book", V. Sayanov attributed Zoshchenko to the most democratic writers-linguists:
"Zoshchenko's stories are democratic not only in their language, but also in their characters. It is no coincidence that the plot of Zoshchenko's stories could not and will not be taken by other writers-humorists. They lack Zoshchenko's great internal ideological positions. Zoshchenko is just as democratic in prose as was democratic in Mayakovsky's poetry.
Of fundamental importance for characterizing the contribution of M. Zoshchenko to Soviet satirical and humorous literature are Gorky's assessments. M. Gorky closely followed the development of the artist's talent, suggested the themes of some works, and invariably supported his search for new genres and trends. So, for example, M. Gorky saw the "hidden significance" of the story "Lilac Blooms", energetically supported the innovative book "Letters to the Writer", briefly analyzed the "Blue Book", specifically noting:
“In this work, your peculiar talent is revealed even more confidently and brightly than in the previous ones.
The originality of the book will probably not be immediately appreciated as highly as it deserves, but this should not embarrass you" (p. 166).
M. Gorky especially highly appreciated the Komichev art of the writer: “You have the data of a satirist, a very sharp sense of irony, and the lyrics accompany him in an extremely original way.
Zoshchenko's works were of great importance not only for the development of satirical and humorous literature in the 1920s and 1930s. His work became a significant social phenomenon, the moral authority of satire and its role in social and moral education, thanks to Zoshchenko, increased unusually.
Mikhail Zoshchenko managed to convey the originality of the "nature of a person of transitional times, unusually brightly, sometimes in a sad-ironic, sometimes in a lyrical-humorous coverage, showed how the historical breakdown of his character is taking place. Laying his own path, he set an example for many young writers trying their hand in the complex and difficult art of denunciation by laughter.
Zoshchenko resolved the issue of relations with the former culture in accordance with the social order received from the "man of the masses", believing that the current situation requires a total reassessment of cultural values. This pathos is expressed by him in the "Blue Book" - a kind of adapted encyclopedia of all previous human civilization. The creative task here is the desire to present a set of certain cultural values, ignoring the entire tradition accumulated over the centuries of their generalization, comprehension and transmission in the chain of human generations.
The narrator of the Blue Book, the Proletarian Writer of the first half of the 1930s, sees the task in shifting the historical fact and distorting it, in asserting inaccuracies, in erasing the cultural context in the name of simplicity and accessibility. Working with sources of a literary-historical, philosophical, encyclopedic nature, which, of course, the writer used, amounted to a distortion of historical fact from the point of view closest to the reader's audience. Inaccuracy in the perception of the fact became the artistic task of the writer. The angle of this inaccuracy is due to an attempt to give a historical event in the context of the realities available to the mass consciousness of the 1920s, which is why such phrases appear in the book:
"For example, such a large juicy satirist is the writer-fellow traveler Cervantes. His right hand was cut off ... Another major fellow traveler is Dante. He was kicked out of the country without the right to enter. Voltaire's house was burned down."
Cervantes and Dante as fellow travelers (the latter without the right to enter) - such a perception of history, as it were, sanctioned the demand of the "man of the masses" to see everything through his own prism, to measure the past with the yardstick of his own political, everyday, cultural experience and to consider this measure the only objective and possible. At the same time, Zoshchenko is absolutely serious, adapting culture to the needs of the "working man." Erasing everything, from his point of view, unimportant, he saved himself the right to abstract from it, while bringing the very process of adapting history and culture to discussion with his reader. But with such selection, absolutely everything turns out to be unimportant and unprincipled for the new culture! Therefore, the narrator, as it were, weighs this or that fact, as if pondering whether it should be forgotten or immortalized:
“There they had, if you remember, several Heinrichs. Actually, seven. Heinrich the Birdcatcher ... Then they had such Heinrich the Navigator. This one probably liked to admire the sea. Or maybe he liked to send sea expeditions ... However, he seems to have ruled in England. Or in Portugal. Somewhere in these coastal regions. For the general course of history, it is absolutely unimportant where this Henry was."
Another example of erasing historical memory:
“As the poet said about some, I don’t remember, animal - something like this: “And under each leaf / Both the table and the house were ready.” This, it seems, he said about some individual representative of the animal world. Something like that was read in childhood. Some kind of nonsense. And then it was shrouded in fog. "
The proletarian writer, whose mask Zoshchenko put on, claims to pass judgment on the entire previous civilization, thinks this judgment is infallible, for it expresses the psychology of a person who is sincerely confident in his own rightness and in his own right to judge everything. If something is "shrouded in fog", then "it is absolutely unimportant for the general course of history."
“I was born into an intelligent family,” Zoshchenko wrote. “I was not, in essence, a new person and a new writer. And some of my novelty in literature was entirely my invention.”
This "novelty" led the writer to a creative crisis in the 1930s-1950s, the first sign of which was The Blue Book, and the culmination was the story Youth Restored (1933). The contradictory attitude towards his hero at the beginning of his creative path (evil irony and at the same time sympathy) was replaced with acceptance of him over time. The gradual loss of distance between the author and the audience turned into a conscious rejection of culture, forgetting that the writer was nevertheless born in an "intelligent family" of Russian culture and genetically belongs to it, that the voices of the creators of "The Overcoat" and "Poor People" sound in his voice.
But the "little man", turning into the XX century. "a man of the masses", demanded the complete subordination of the writer, who feels sympathy and compassion for him, and gave him his social order for the Proletarian Writer. Zoshchenko took this order. After that, he could not speak in his own voice. And if in the early 1920s. saving irony determined the distance between the author and the hero, the loss of it led to the fact that the hero Zoshchenko, having forced out his creator, became a writer himself, forcing his literary creator to speak in a strange voice, forgetting his own.
