Gogol's work marked a new phase in the development of Russian realism. First Belinsky, and then Chernyshevsky began to assert that this writer was the ancestor of the "Gogol period" in our literature, which began in the second half of the 1840s. True, the content of this new period for them was reduced to the development of the so-called accusatory trend in literature. In Gogol, they saw the first satirist writer who crushed in Dead Souls the social foundations of the social order that existed in Russia. This was an extremely one-sided view of the essence of Gogol's realism. After all, it is no coincidence that Dostoevsky, a deeply religious writer, alien to the ideology of revolutionary democracy, is credited with the phrase: “We all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.” The talent of Dostoevsky, who considered himself the heir of Gogol and Pushkin, is infinitely broader and richer than social accusation. The “Gogol trend”, approved by Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, did not last long and was limited, in essence, to the realism of the writers of the second half of the 1840s, who grouped around Belinsky and received, with the light hand of F.V. Bulgarin, the name of the “natural school”. The truly Gogolian tradition, which turned out to be productive, developed in a different direction, leading not to Chernyshevsky with his novel What Is to Be Done?, but to Dostoevsky with his Crime and Punishment.

If we look for an analogy to Gogol's realism, we will have to recall the writers of the late Renaissance - Shakespeare and Cervantes, who acutely felt the crisis of that humanism, which the writers of the early and high Renaissance in Italy affirmed with optimism. This humanism, whose traditions have not died out in our time, was reduced to the idealization of man, his good nature. The new Russian literature, beginning with Pushkin, has never shared such a lightened faith in man, recognizing the truth of the Orthodox Christian dogma about the obscurity of his nature by original sin. This view is evident in Pushkin, starting with Boris Godunov. The Russian Renaissance did not break so sharply with religious tradition as happened in the West, and defended Christian humanism, realizing that faith in man itself initially grew out of the Christian consciousness of his connection with God. Of course, Gogol's realism differs significantly from Pushkin's realism. But the nature of this realism cannot be reduced to social accusation, it can only be understood in the correlation of Gogol's creativity and aesthetic positions with Pushkin's creativity and aesthetic positions.

“I say nothing about the greatness of this loss. My loss is greater than all, - Gogol wrote to friends, having received the news of Pushkin's death. – When I created, I saw before me only Pushkin. Nothing was all sense to me ... his eternal and immutable word was dear to me. I did nothing, I wrote nothing without his advice. Everything that is good in me, I owe it all to him.

Gogol met and got along with Pushkin in 1831, and parted with him, going abroad, in 1836. With the departure of Pushkin, the support disappeared. The vault of heaven of poetry, lofty and unattainable in its divine harmony, which Pushkin, like an Atlantean, held on his shoulders, now fell upon Gogol. He experienced for the first time a feeling of terrible creative loneliness, which he told us about in the seventh chapter of Dead Souls.

It is clear that Gogol sees Pushkin in the poet, who never betrayed the sublime structure of his lyre, and Gogol sees himself in the writer, immersed in the image of “a terrible, amazing mire of trifles that have entangled our life,” a lonely and unrecognized writer. Behind the bitterness of the loss of Pushkin, the great genius of harmony, there is already a hidden polemic with him, testifying to Gogol's creative self-determination in relation to Pushkin's artistic heritage. This controversy is also felt in special articles. Defining Pushkin as a Russian person in his development, Gogol notes that the beauty of his poetry is “purified beauty”, not condescending to the insignificant trifles that entangle a person’s daily life.

In Selected passages from correspondence with friends, while giving Pushkin a high appraisal, Gogol at the same time notices a certain one-sidedness of his aesthetic position: no application to life ... Pushkin was given to the world to prove by himself what a poet himself is, and nothing more ... All his works are a complete arsenal of poet's tools. Go there, choose for yourself every one according to your hand, and go out with him to battle; but the poet himself did not come out to fight him. He didn’t come out because, “becoming a husband, taking strength from everywhere to deal with big things, he didn’t think about how to deal with insignificant and small things.”

We see that through the praise of Pushkin one can hear Gogol's reproach to him. Perhaps this reproach is not entirely fair, but it clearly expresses Gogol's worldview. He is eager to fight with all the accumulated "rubbish and squabbles" of "disheveled reality", which was left without attention by Pushkin. Literature is called upon to actively participate in the life-building of a more perfect person and a more harmonious world order. The task of the writer, according to Gogol, is to open a person's eyes to his own imperfection.

The discrepancy between Gogol and Pushkin was not accidental and was not determined by the personal characteristics of his talent. By the second half of the 1830s, a change of generations began in Russian literature, a new phase was beginning in the very development of artistic creativity. Pushkin's pathos consisted in the approval of harmonic ideals. Gogol's pathos is in criticism, in denunciation of life, which comes into conflict with its own potentialities, discovered by the genius of Pushkin - "Russian man in his development." Pushkin for Gogol remains an ideal, based on which he analyzes modern life, exposing its inherent diseases and calling for healing. The image of Pushkin is for Gogol, as later for Dostoevsky, the "sun of poetry" and at the same time a guarantee that Russian life can be improved in Pushkin's direction. Pushkin is Gogol's light, Gogol's hope.

“The high dignity of Russian nature,” Gogol believes, “consists in the fact that it is more capable than others of accepting the word of the Gospel, which leads to the perfection of man. The seeds of the heavenly Sower were scattered everywhere with equal bounty. But some fell on the road along the way and were plundered by flying birds; others fell on a stone, ascended, but withered; the third, in thorns, rose, but were soon drowned out by bad herbs; the fourth only, having fallen on good ground, bore fruit. This good soil is Russian receptive nature. Well nurtured in the heart, the seeds of Christ gave all the best that is in the Russian character.

Pushkin, according to Gogol, is a genius of Russian susceptibility. “He cared only about saying with one gifted poetic instinct: “Look how beautiful the creation of God!” - and, without adding anything more, fly to another subject and then also say: “Look how beautiful God’s creation is! “… And how true is his response, how sensitive is his ear! You hear the smell, the color of the earth, time, people. In Spain, he is a Spaniard, with a Greek - a Greek, in the Caucasus - a free highlander in the full sense of the word; with an obsolete person, he breathes the antiquity of the past; looks into the peasant's hut - he is Russian from head to toe.

These features of Russian nature are associated, according to Gogol, with the Orthodox Christian soul of the people, endowed with the gift of a disinterested welcoming response to beauty, truth and goodness. This is the secret of Pushkin's "power of excitatory influence" on any talent. Gogol felt this exciting force at the very beginning of his creative path. Pushkin gave him “a certain light” and called on him: “Go, hold on to this light. / Let him be your only meta.” Gogol went his own way in literature, but he determined the direction of movement according to Pushkin's compass. Along with this, the tense sense of responsibility to the country and people that Gogol experienced throughout his life is surprising: “Rus! what do you want from me? What incomprehensible bond lurks between us? Why do you look like that, and why does everything that is in you turn eyes full of expectation on me?

In the second half of his life, Gogol suddenly felt lonely. He felt that his contemporaries misunderstood him. And although Belinsky and other Russian critics highly appreciated him during his lifetime, the writer was not satisfied with these assessments: they glided over the surface of his talent and did not touch the depth. In Gogol, everyone preferred to see a satirist writer, an exposer of the vices of the modern social system. But the hidden spiritual roots that nourished his talent, contemporaries were inclined not to notice.

In one letter to Zhukovsky, Gogol says that in the process of creativity he listens to a higher call that demands unconditional obedience from him and awaits his inspiration. Following Pushkin, Gogol sees a divine gift in the writer's vocation. In depicting human sins, in exposing human vulgarity, Gogol is most afraid of the author's subjectivity and pride. And in this sense, his works gravitated towards prophetic denunciation. The writer, as a person, is subject to the same sins as the people he portrays. But in moments of creative inspiration, he loses his "I", his human "self". It is no longer human, but Divine wisdom that speaks through his lips: the voice of the writer is a prophetic voice.

Gogol's worldview was fundamentally deeply religious. Gogol never shared the ideological principles of Belinsky and Russian thought, according to which a person is by nature good, and evil lies in social relations. "Human nature" was never presented to Gogol as "the measure of all things." The source of social evil lies not in social relations, and it is impossible to eliminate this evil with the help of reforms or revolutions. An imperfect society is not a cause, but a consequence of human depravity. The external organization of life is a reflection of the inner world of a person. And if in a person his Divine prototype is darkened, no changes in the external forms of life are able to destroy evil.

“Recently I have met many wonderful people who have completely gone astray,” Gogol addressed Belinsky and people of his circle. – Some people think that it is possible to correct the world by means of transformations and reforms, by turning in this and that way; others think that through some special, rather mediocre literature, which you call fiction, you can influence the education of society. But the well-being of society will not be brought to a better state either by riots or ardent heads. Fermentation inside cannot be corrected by any constitutions. Society is formed by itself, society is made up of units. It is necessary that each unit perform its own function. A person must be reminded that he is not at all a material beast, but a high citizen of a high heavenly citizenship. As long as he does not live at least a little bit the life of a heavenly citizen, until then earthly citizenship will not come into order either. The source of these convictions of the writer is obvious: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all this will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

All Gogol's work appeals to fallen man: "Get up and go!" “In the moral field, Gogol was brilliantly gifted,” argued the researcher of his work K. Mochulsky, “he was destined to turn all Russian literature from aesthetics to religion, move it from the path of Pushkin to the path of Dostoevsky. All the features that characterize the "great Russian literature", which has become world, were outlined by Gogol: its religious and moral structure, its citizenship and public, its prophetic pathos and messianism.

Gogol castigated social evil to the extent that he saw the root source of imperfections. Gogol gave this source the name vulgarity of modern man. "Vulgar" is a person who has lost the spiritual dimension of life, the image of God. When this image is darkened in the soul, a person turns into a flat being, closed in himself, in his egoism. He becomes a prisoner of his imperfections and plunges into the swamp of spiritual nothingness. People get stuck in the mire of the little things that entangle life. The meaning of their existence is reduced to the consumption of material goods, which pull the human soul down - to prudence, cunning, lies.

Gogol came to the conclusion that any change in life for the better must begin with the transformation of the human personality. Unlike liberal reformers and revolutionary socialists, Gogol did not believe in the possibility of renewing life by changing the existing social order. Gogol refutes any convergence of the name of Christ with revolutionary ideas, which Belinsky repeatedly did, including in the Salzbrunn letter: “Who, in your opinion, can now interpret Christ closer and better? Gogol asks Belinsky a question. – Is it really the current communists and socialists who explain that Christ commanded to take away property and rob those who have made a fortune? Come to your senses!... Christ never told anyone to take away, but, on the contrary, He urgently orders us to yield: give the last shirt to the one who takes off your clothes, go through two with the one who asks you to go through one field with you. “The idea of ​​a “common cause” in Gogol was the idea of ​​a decisive turn in life towards Christ’s truth – not on the path of an external revolution, but on the path of a sharp, but genuine religious turning point in every single human soul,” wrote the Russian religious philosopher Vasily about Gogol. Zenkovsky. In real literature, Gogol saw an effective tool with which to awaken a religious spark in a person and move him to this sharp turning point. And only the failure to write the second volume of Dead Souls, in which he wanted to show the awakening of spiritual concerns in a vulgar person, forced him to turn to a direct religious sermon in Selected passages from correspondence with friends.

Belinsky adhered in those years to revolutionary democratic and socialist convictions. That is why he attacked this book in his "Letter to Gogol", reproaching the writer for renegade, for apostasy from "progressive" views, for religious obscurantism. This letter showed that Belinsky never felt the religious depth of Gogol's realism. He reduced the pathos of Gogol's realistic work to "denunciation of the existing social system."

From Belinsky came the tradition of dividing Gogol's work into two parts. The Inspector General and Dead Souls were viewed as a direct political satire on autocracy and serfdom, indirectly calling for their "overthrow", and "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" were interpreted as a work that resulted from a sharp change in the worldview of the writer, who betrayed his "progressive" beliefs. They did not pay attention to Gogol's repeated and persistent assurances that the "main provisions" of his religious worldview remained unchanged throughout his entire career. The idea of ​​the resurrection of "dead souls" was the main one in his artistic and journalistic work. “Society will only get better when every person takes care of himself and lives like a Christian,” Gogol argued. This was his fundamental conviction from early novels and short stories to Dead Souls and Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends.

INTRODUCTION:

“In every great literature there is a writer who constitutes a separate Great Literature: Shakespeare in England, Goethe in Germany, Cervantes in Spain, Petrarch and Dante in Italy. In Russian literature, the pinnacle rises, which does not overshadow anyone, but in itself is a separate Great Literature - Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol.

When studying the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, I was interested in the fact that the world-famous realist writer invariably used the fantastic principle in his works to achieve his goals.

N. V. Gogol is the first major Russian prose writer. In this capacity, according to many contemporaries, he stood above A.S. Pushkin himself, who was recognized primarily as a poet. For example, V. G. Belinsky, praising Pushkin's "History of the village of Goryukhino", made a reservation: "... If there were no Gogol's stories in our literature, then we would not know anything better."

With N.V. Gogol and the "Gogolian trend" (a later term of Russian criticism introduced by N.G. Chernyshevsky) are usually associated with the flourishing of realism in Russian prose. It is characterized by special attention to social issues, depiction (often satirical) of the social vices of Nikolaev Russia, careful reproduction of socially and culturally significant details in portraits, interiors, landscapes and other descriptions; appeal to the themes of Petersburg life, the image of the fate of a petty official. V.G. Belinsky believed that in the works of N.V. Gogol reflects the spirit of the "ghostly" reality of the then Russia. V.G. Belinsky also emphasized that the work of N.V. Gogol cannot be reduced to social satire (as for N.V. Gogol himself, he never considered himself a satirist).

At the same time, the realism of N.V. Gogol is of a very special kind. Some researchers (for example, the writer V.V. Nabokov) do not consider Gogol a realist at all, others call his style "fantastic realism." The fact is that Gogol is a master of phantasmagoria. In many of his stories there is a fantastic element. There is a feeling of a "displaced", "curved" reality, reminiscent of a distorted mirror. This is due to hyperbole and grotesque - the most important elements of N.V. Gogol.

Therefore, the topic of the essay “Fiction in the works of N.V. Gogol” is relevant for me due to my interest in the creative style of N.V. Gogol, which received its continuation in the work of such writers of the 20th century as, for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov.

Purpose of the study – reveal the role of science fiction in individual works of N.V. Gogol and the ways of its "existence" in a literary text.

As p research subjectI chose the stories of N.V. Gogol "Viy", "Portrait", "Nose".

Research objectives:

• give an idea of ​​the evolution of the fantastic in the works of N.V. Gogol;
• to characterize the features of the fantastic in the stories of N.V. Gogol: "Wii", "Nose", "Portrait".

In connection with the tasksThe main part of the abstract consists of two parts.

The source base of the study came monographic studies (Annensky I.F. "On the Forms of the Fantastic in Gogol", Mann Yu. "Gogol's Poetics", Merezhkovsky D.S. "Gogol and the devil"), a book of educational and methodical nature (Lion P.E., Lokhova N.M. "Literature"), works of art (N.V. Gogol's stories "Viy", "Portrait", "Nose").

Scientific and practical significance of the worklies in the possibility of using its materials for reports, lectures at literature lessons and scientific and practical conferences on Russian literature of the 19th century.

In the St. Petersburg stories, the fantastic element is sharply relegated to the background of the plot, fantasy, as it were, dissolves into reality. The supernatural is present in the plot not directly, but indirectly, indirectly, for example, as a dream ("The Nose"), delirium ("Notes of a Madman"), implausible rumors ("The Overcoat"). Only in the story "Portrait" really supernatural events occur. It is no coincidence that VG Belinsky did not like the first edition of the story "Portrait" precisely because of the excessive presence of a mystical element in it.

As noted above, in the early works of N.V. Gogol, a kind of magical space is formed where the fantastic and real worlds meet, and when you meet the fantastic world, you can notice a certain curvature of everyday space: stacks move from place to place, the character cannot get a fork in his mouth.

But St. Petersburg stories are already “breaking out” of this tradition: here the grotesque is partly social, reality itself requires such a form of depiction.

The devilish power in the story "Viy" is truly terrible. This is either “a huge monster in his tangled hair, in the forest: through a network of hair, two eyes looked terribly, raising a little eyebrow. Above us was something in the air in the form of a huge bubble with a thousand pincers and scorpion stingers stretched out from the middle. Black earth hung on them in tufts. Or is it Viy himself - “a squat, hefty, clumsy man. He was all black. Like sinewy, strong roots, his legs and arms, covered with earth, stood out. He walked heavily, stumbling every minute. Long eyelids were lowered to the ground. Foma noticed with horror that his face was iron... “Lift up my eyelids: I don’t see!” - Viy said in an underground voice, - and everyone rushed to raise his eyelids. Viy pointed his iron finger at Khoma, the philosopher fell to the ground lifeless.

As E. Baratynsky writes in the same years in the poem "The Last Poet":

Age walks along its iron path...

Viy is an image born at the time of "obscuration". He is no less than Pechorin or Onegin, the hero of the time, and more than them - a symbol that has absorbed all the fears, anxiety and pain of this time. At such times, from the dark corners of consciousness, from lullaby fears, from the cave depths of the soul, ghosts and monsters come into the light, acquiring real features.

In the story of N.V. Gogol, the unclean spirits never left the church: “So the church remained forever, with monsters stuck in the doors and windows, overgrown with forest, roots, weeds, wild thorns, and no one will find a way to it now.”

The road to the temple is overgrown with weeds, the temple itself is filled with evil spirits.

I.F. Annensky pointed out that the seriousness of the depiction of supernatural reality in "Viya" also determines the tragic ending of the story, which is necessary to complete the plot: "Khoma's death is the necessary end of the story - make him wake up from a drunken sleep, you will destroy all the artistic significance of the story."

2.2. The “strange” incident with Major Kovalev (based on the novel by N.V. Gogol “The Nose”).

In the story "The Nose" N.V. Gogol completely removes the carrier of fantasy - "the personified embodiment of unreal power." But the fantasy itself remains. Moreover, Gogol's fantasy grows out of a mundane, prosaic basis.

Before us is the real Petersburg of the times of Gogol. This is the center of the city - the Admiralty parts with Nevsky, with the proximity of palaces and the Neva - and Gorokhovaya, and Meshchansky streets, St. Petersburg churches and cathedrals, barbers, restaurants and shops. These are the Tauride Garden, where Major Kovalev's nose walked, and Sadovaya, where Kovalev lives, and the editorial office of the newspaper, and the department, and Gostiny Dvor, and Kazan Cathedral, and Admiralteyskaya Square.

Relationships among department officials are real, as are the details of clothing, everyday life, communication…

But at the same time, everything is absolutely unrealistic!

"The Nose" belongs to those works that put the reader in front of a mystery literally from the first phrase. On the 25th of March, an unusually strange incident happened in Petersburg. One morning, Major Kovalev "woke up quite early" and, "to his great amazement, saw that instead of his nose he had a completely smooth place!" “I woke up pretty early” and the barber Ivan Yakovlevich found in the bun that he cut, it was Major Kovalev’s nose. From the hands of the barber, the nose went to the Neva from St. Isaac's Bridge.

The incident is really fantastic, but (and this is much more strange than what happened) the characters of "The Nose" quite soon forget about the "failure" of the story and begin to behave in it in accordance with their characters.

A list of attempts to find the cause of the mysterious disappearance of Kovalev's nose could make a long and curious list.

I.F. Annensky once wrote that the culprit of the events was Kovalev himself. One of the modern researchers writes that the nose ran away from Kovalev, as he lifted it too high. Perhaps there is more truth in the words of Kovalev himself: “And even if they were cut off in the war or in a duel, or I myself was the cause, but I disappeared for nothing, for nothing, wasted in vain, not for a penny! ..”

And the strangeness of the incident is growing. Instead of floating in the Neva, the nose ends up in a carriage in the center of St. Petersburg: “He was in a uniform embroidered with gold, with a large standing collar; he was wearing suede trousers; by the side of the sword. Kovalev "almost lost his mind at such a spectacle." His own nose travels around St. Petersburg in the rank of state councilor (which is much higher than the rank of Kovalev himself), he prays in the Kazan Cathedral, travels on visits, and even answers Kovalev’s statements that he (the nose) “absolutely does not understand anything.” Kovalev "did not know how to think about such a strange incident."

Of course, everyone involved in this “story” is surprised at what is happening, but, firstly, this surprise is strangely ordinary: the hairdresser, having “recognized” the nose, thinks more about how to get rid of it; Kovalev takes measures to return the nose, turning to the chief of police, to a newspaper expedition, to a private bailiff; the doctor recommends leaving everything as it is, and the policeman, “who at the beginning of the story stood at the end of St. Isaac’s Bridge” (that is, when the nose wrapped in a rag was thrown into the water), returning the loss, says that “at first he took mister. But, fortunately, I had glasses with me, and I immediately saw that it was a nose, ”and does not look at all surprised.

And secondly, they are not at all surprised at what should be surprised. It seems that no one cares at all about the question:

how could a nose become a man at all, and if it did, then how can others perceive it both as a man and as a nose at the same time?

Even more forcing the fantastic nature of the situation, N.V. Gogol deliberately excludes the possibility of explaining "history" as a misunderstanding or deception of the character's feelings, prevents it by introducing a similar perception of the fact by other characters, or, for example, replacing "the supernatural reason for the disappearance of part of his hero's being by the anecdotal awkwardness of a hairdresser", i.e. reason is clearly absurd.

In this regard, the function of the form of rumors also changes in the story. The form of the rumors is "set" in an unusual context. It does not serve as a means of veiled (implicit) fantasy. Rumors appear against the backdrop of a fantastic incident, filed as reliable. Thus, Gogol discovered in the life around him something even more wrong and fantastic than what any version or any rumor could offer.

Probably, the success of Pushkin's "Queen of Spades" prompted N.V. Gogol to tell a story about a man who was killed by the thirst for gold. The author called his story "Portrait". Is it because the portrait of the usurer played a fatal role in the fate of his heroes-artists, whose fates are compared in two parts of the story? Or because N.V. Gogol wanted to give a portrait of modern society and a talented person who perishes or is saved despite hostile circumstances and the humiliating properties of nature? Or is it a portrait of the art and soul of the writer himself, who is trying to escape from the temptation of success and prosperity and purify his soul by high service to art?

Probably, there is a social, moral, and aesthetic meaning in this strange story by Gogol, there is a reflection on what a person, society, and art are. Modernity and eternity are intertwined here so inseparably that the life of the Russian capital in the 30s of the 19th century goes back to biblical reflections about good and evil, about their endless struggle in the human soul.

We first meet the artist Chartkov at that moment in his life when, with youthful ardor, he loves the height of the genius of Raphael, Michelangelo and despises handicraft fakes that replace art for the layman. Seeing in the shop a strange portrait of an old man with piercing eyes, Chartkov is ready to pay the last two kopecks for him. Poverty did not take away from him the ability to see the beauty of life and work with enthusiasm on his sketches. He reaches for the light and does not want to turn art into an anatomical theater, to expose the “disgusting person” with a knife-brush. He rejects artists whose "nature itself ... seems low, dirty," so that "there is nothing illuminating in it." Chartkov, according to his art teacher, is talented, but impatient and prone to worldly pleasures and fuss. But as soon as the money, which miraculously fell out of the frame of the portrait, gives Chartkov the opportunity to lead a scattered secular life and enjoy prosperity, wealth and fame, and not art, become his idols. Chartkov owes his success to the fact that, drawing a portrait of a secular young lady, which turned out to be bad for him, he was able to rely on a disinterested work of talent - a drawing of Psyche, where a dream of an ideal being was heard. But the ideal was not alive, and only by uniting with the impressions of real life did it become attractive, and real life acquired the significance of the ideal. However, Chartkov lied, giving the insignificant girl the appearance of Psyche. Flattering for the sake of success, he betrayed the purity of art. And the talent began to leave Chartkov, betrayed him. “Whoever has a talent in himself must be purer than anyone else in soul,” the father says to his son in the second part of the story. And this is an almost verbatim repetition of Mozart's words in Pushkin's tragedy: "Genius and villainy are two incompatible things." But for A.S. Pushkin's goodness is in the nature of genius. N.V. Gogol, on the other hand, writes a story that the artist, like all people, is subject to the temptation of evil and destroys himself and his talent more terrible and faster than ordinary people. Talent that is not realized in true art, talent that parted with good, becomes destructive for the individual.

Chartkov, who for the sake of success conceded truth to goodness, ceases to feel life in its multicoloredness, variability, and trembling. His portraits comfort customers, but do not live, they do not reveal, but close the personality, nature. And, despite the fame of a fashionable painter, Chartkov feels that he has nothing to do with real art. A wonderful painting by an artist who had perfected himself in Italy caused a shock in Chartkow. Probably, in the admiring outline of this picture, Gogol gave a generalized image of the famous painting by Karl Bryullov “The Last Day of Pompeii”. But the shock experienced by Chartkov does not awaken him to a new life, because for this it is necessary to give up the pursuit of wealth and fame, to kill the evil in himself. Chartkov chooses a different path: he begins to expel talented art from the world, to buy up and cut magnificent canvases, to kill good. And this path leads him to madness and death.

What was the cause of these terrible transformations: the weakness of a person in the face of temptations or the mystical sorcery of a portrait of a usurer who gathered the evil of the world in his burning gaze? N.V. Gogol answered this question ambiguously. A real explanation of Chartkov's fate is as possible as a mystical one. The dream that leads Chartkov to gold can be both the fulfillment of his subconscious desires, and the aggression of evil spirits, which is remembered whenever it comes to the portrait of a usurer. The words "devil", "devil", "darkness", "demon" turn out to be the speech frame of the portrait in the story.

“A.S. Pushkin in The Queen of Spades essentially refutes the mystical interpretation of events. A story written by N.V. Gogol in the year of the emergence and universal success of The Queen of Spades, is a response and objection to A.S. Pushkin. Evil offends not only Chartkov, who is subject to the temptations of success, but also the father of the artist B., who painted a portrait of a usurer who looks like the devil and who himself has become an evil spirit. And "a firm character, an honest straight person", having painted a portrait of evil, feels "incomprehensible anxiety", disgust for life and envy for the success of his talented students.

An artist who has touched evil, painted the usurer's eyes, which "looked demonically crushing", can no longer paint good, his brush is driven by "an impure feeling", and in the picture intended for the temple, "there is no holiness in the faces."

All people associated with the usurer in real life perish, betraying the best properties of their nature. The artist who reproduced evil expanded its influence. The portrait of a usurer robs people of the joy of life and awakens "such longing ... just as if he wanted to kill someone." Stylistically, this combination is characteristic: “just as if ...”

Of course, "exactly" is used in the sense of "as" to avoid tautology. At the same time, the combination “exactly” and “as if” conveys the characteristic of N.V. Gogol's style of detailed realistic description and ghostly, fantastic sense of events.

The story "Portrait" does not bring reassurance, showing how all people, regardless of the properties of their character and the height of their convictions, are subject to evil. N.V. Gogol, having altered the ending of the story, takes away the hope of eradicating evil. In the first edition, the appearance of the usurer mysteriously evaporated from the canvas, leaving the canvas blank. In the final text of the story, the portrait of the usurer disappears: evil again began to roam the world.

CONCLUSION:

“Fiction is a special form of displaying reality, logically incompatible with the real idea of ​​the surrounding world, freeing the writer from any restrictive rules, giving him freedom in realizing his creative abilities and abilities. Apparently, this attracted N.V. Gogol, who actively used fantastic elements in his works. The combination of fantastic and realistic becomes the most important feature of the works of N.V. Gogol.

In Gogol's early works, the fantastic is conceived as a consequence of the influence of specific "carriers of fantasy", is associated with folklore (Little Russian fairy tales and legends), with the carnival tradition and with romantic literature, which also borrowed such motifs from folklore.

Fantasy can appear in an explicit form. Then the "carriers of fantasy" are directly involved in the development of the plot, but the action belongs to the past, and fantastic events are reported either by the author-narrator or by the character acting as the main narrator. In this case, the fantastic "mixes" with the real. According to V.G. Belinsky, a special world of “poetic reality arises, in which you can’t find out in any way what is true and what is a fairy tale, but you involuntarily take everything for true”.

In a work in which fantasy appears in a veiled form (implicit fantasy), there is no direct indication of the unreality of the event, the action takes place in the present, it seems that the author is trying to obscure this unreality, to smooth out the reader's feeling of the unreality of the event. Fiction is most often concentrated in the preface, epilogue, inserts, where legends are told.

The "carriers of science fiction" themselves are not visible, but traces of their activities remain. In this case, the real line develops parallel to the fantastic one, and each action can be explained from two points of view.

In the St. Petersburg stories N.V. Gogol's "bearer of fantasy" is eliminated. It is replaced by an irrational impersonal beginning, present in the entire work. The fantastic element here is sharply relegated to the background of the plot, fantasy, as it were, dissolves into reality.

The connection between fantasy and reality during this period of creativity becomes much more complicated. The contradictions of the era are brought by the writer to the level of absurdity that pervades all Russian life. N.V. Gogol knows how to see and show the ordinary from a completely new angle, from an unexpected angle. An ordinary event takes on an ominous, strange coloring, but a fantastic event is almost inseparable from reality.

The paradox of Gogol's stories of this period is that the fantastic in them is as close as possible to reality, but reality itself is illogical and fantastic in its very essence. Consequently, the role of fantasy is to reveal the unnaturalness of Gogol's contemporary reality.

After doing a little research on "Fantasy in the works of N.V. Gogol", I can conclude that Gogol's fiction is built on the idea of ​​two opposite principles - good and evil, divine and diabolical (as in folk art), but actually good there is no fiction, it is all intertwined with "evil spirits". On the example of his works, the evolution of science fiction is traced, the ways of introducing it into the narrative are being improved.

N.V. Gogol is still a mystery to us. In his work there is some special attraction of mystery. As a child, it is interesting to read fairy tales about ghouls and devils.

In adulthood, thoughts come to a person about the essence of being, about the meaning of life, about the need to fight evil in oneself, people. This evil has different faces, its name is vice! It takes strength to deal with it.

Literary material N.V. Gogol is very good for film adaptation, but difficult to stage. You need special effects, you need big expenses to be convincing in your work. But this does not frighten film and theater artists. Big projects are being made, horror films are being made. They are successful with millions of viewers not only abroad, but also here in Russia. This indicates that N.V. Gogol is still popular and his work is still relevant.

LIST OF USED LITERATURE:

1. Annensky I.F. On the forms of the fantastic in Gogol // Annensky I.F. Books of reflections - M., 1979.
2. Gogol N.V. Tales. Dead Souls: A Book for a Student and a Teacher - M .: AST Publishing House LLC: Olympus, 2002.
3. Lion P.E., Lokhova N.M. Literature: For high school students and those entering universities: Proc. allowance. – M.: Bustard, 2000.
4. Mann Yu. Poetics of Gogol - M .: "Fiction", 1988.
5. Merezhkovsky D.S. Gogol and the devil // In a still whirlpool. Articles and studies of different years - M., 1991.
6. Encyclopedic Dictionary of a Young Literary Critic / Comp. V.I. Novikov. - M .: Pedagogy, 1987.

In every literature there is a writer who constitutes a separate Great Literature: Shakespeare in England, Goethe in Germany, and Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol in Russia. When studying his work, I was interested in the fact that the world-famous realist writer invariably used the fantastic beginning in his works to achieve his goals. N.V. Gogol is the first major Russian prose writer. In this capacity, according to many contemporaries, he stood above A.S. Pushkin himself, who was recognized primarily as a poet. For example, V. G. Belinsky, praising Pushkin's "History of the village of Goryukhino", made a reservation: "... If there were no Gogol's stories in our literature, then we would not know anything better." Nikolai Vasilyevich and the "Gogol trend" are usually associated with the flourishing of realism in Russian prose. Belinsky believed that Gogol's works reflected the spirit of the "ghostly" reality of the then Russia. He also emphasized that his work cannot be attributed to social satire, as for the writer himself, he never considered himself a satirist. At the same time, Gogol's realism is of a very special kind. Some researchers do not consider him a realist at all, others call his style "fantastic realism". The fact is that in many plots of the writer there is a fantastic element. This creates the feeling of a crooked mirror. That's whytopic of my essay“Fiction in the works of N.V. Gogol” is relevant for me due to my interest in his creative style, which was continued in the work of such writers of the 20th century as, for example, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mikhail Bulgakov.Purpose of my research This reveal the role of fantasy in individual works of Gogol and the ways of its "existence" in a literary text. As a pr research subject I chose such stories as "Viy", "Portrait" and "The Nose". But first, I would like to give a brief definition of the word fantasy. So, fantasy is a special form of displaying reality, logically incompatible with the real idea of ​​the world around it, it, as it were, freed the writer from any restrictive rules, gave him freedom to realize his creative abilities and abilities. Apparently, this attracted Gogol, who actively used fantastic elements in his works. The combination of fantastic and realistic becomes the most important feature of his works. According to Belinsky, this is where a special world of “poetic reality arises, in which you never know what is true and what is a fairy tale, but you involuntarily take everything for true”. The real in Gogol's stories coexists with the fantastic throughout his entire work. But some evolution takes place with this phenomenon, i.e. the role, place and ways of including the fantastic element do not always remain the same. So, for example, in the early works of the writer, such as "Wii" and "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", the fantastic comes to the fore of the plot, because Viy is an image born in the time of "clouding". He is no less than Pechorin or Onegin, the hero of the time, and more than them, a symbol that absorbed all the fears, anxiety and pain of that time. At such times, from the dark corners of consciousness, from lullaby fears, from the cave depths of the soul, ghosts emerge into the light, acquiring real features. But already in St. Petersburg stories, such as "The Nose", "Notes of a Madman", as well as "The Overcoat", the fantastic element is sharply relegated to the background and fantasy, as it were, dissolves into reality. The paradox of Gogol's stories of this particular period is that the fantastic in them is as close as possible to reality, but reality itself is fantastic in its very essence. And finally, in the works of the last period, such as The Inspector General and Dead Souls, the fantastic element in the plot is practically absent. They depict events that are not supernatural, but rather strange and unusual, although in principle possible. Based on all of the above, I can conclude that Gogol's fantasy is built on the idea of ​​good and evil. On the example of his works, the evolution of science fiction can be traced, as well as the ways of introducing it into the narrative are being improved. N.V. Gogol is still a mystery to us. In his work there is some special attraction of mystery. As a child, it is interesting to read fairy tales about ghouls and devils. In adulthood, thoughts come to a person about the essence of being, about the meaning of life, about the need to fight evil in oneself and in people. This evil has different faces and it takes strength to deal with them. Gogol's literary material is very good for film adaptation, but difficult to stage. You need special effects, as well as high costs, to be convincing in your work. But this does not frighten film and theater artists, because. big projects are being made, horror films are being made. They are successful with millions of viewers not only abroad, but also here in Russia. This indicates that N.V. Gogol is still popular and his work is still relevant.

History of Russian literature of the 19th century. Part 1. 1800-1830s Yury Vladimirovich Lebedev

The originality of Gogol's realism.

The originality of Gogol's realism.

Gogol's work marked a new phase in the development of Russian realism. First Belinsky, and then Chernyshevsky began to assert that this writer was the ancestor of the "Gogol period" in our literature, which began in the second half of the 1840s. True, the content of this new period for them was reduced to the development of the so-called accusatory trend in literature. In Gogol, they saw the first satirist writer who crushed in Dead Souls the social foundations of the social order that existed in Russia. This was an extremely one-sided view of the essence of Gogol's realism. After all, it is no coincidence that Dostoevsky, a deeply religious writer, alien to the ideology of revolutionary democracy, is credited with the phrase: “We all came out of Gogol’s Overcoat.” The talent of Dostoevsky, who considered himself the heir of Gogol and Pushkin, is infinitely broader and richer than social accusation. The “Gogol trend”, approved by Belinsky and Chernyshevsky, did not last long and was limited, in essence, to the realism of the writers of the second half of the 1840s, who grouped around Belinsky and received, with the light hand of F.V. Bulgarin, the name of the “natural school”. The truly Gogolian tradition, which turned out to be productive, developed in a different direction, leading not to Chernyshevsky with his novel What Is to Be Done?, but to Dostoevsky with his Crime and Punishment.

If we look for an analogy to Gogol's realism, we will have to recall the writers of the late Renaissance - Shakespeare and Cervantes, who acutely felt the crisis of that humanism, which the writers of the early and high Renaissance in Italy affirmed with optimism. This humanism, whose traditions have not died out in our time, was reduced to the idealization of man, his good nature. The new Russian literature, beginning with Pushkin, has never shared such a lightened faith in man, recognizing the truth of the Orthodox Christian dogma about the obscurity of his nature by original sin. This view is evident in Pushkin, starting with Boris Godunov. The Russian Renaissance did not break so sharply with religious tradition as happened in the West, and defended Christian humanism, realizing that faith in man itself initially grew out of the Christian consciousness of his connection with God. Of course, Gogol's realism differs significantly from Pushkin's realism. But the nature of this realism cannot be reduced to social accusation, it can only be understood in the correlation of Gogol's creativity and aesthetic positions with Pushkin's creativity and aesthetic positions.

“I say nothing about the greatness of this loss. My loss is greater than all, - Gogol wrote to friends, having received the news of Pushkin's death. – When I created, I saw before me only Pushkin. Nothing was all sense to me ... his eternal and immutable word was dear to me. I did nothing, I wrote nothing without his advice. Everything that is good in me, I owe it all to him.

Gogol met and got along with Pushkin in 1831, and parted with him, going abroad, in 1836. With the departure of Pushkin, the support disappeared. The vault of heaven of poetry, lofty and unattainable in its divine harmony, which Pushkin, like an Atlantean, held on his shoulders, now fell upon Gogol. He experienced for the first time a feeling of terrible creative loneliness, which he told us about in the seventh chapter of Dead Souls.

It is clear that Gogol sees Pushkin in the poet, who never betrayed the sublime structure of his lyre, and Gogol sees himself in the writer, immersed in the image of “a terrible, amazing mire of trifles that have entangled our life,” a lonely and unrecognized writer. Behind the bitterness of the loss of Pushkin, the great genius of harmony, there is already a hidden polemic with him, testifying to Gogol's creative self-determination in relation to Pushkin's artistic heritage. This controversy is also felt in special articles. Defining Pushkin as a Russian person in his development, Gogol notes that the beauty of his poetry is “purified beauty”, not condescending to the insignificant trifles that entangle a person’s daily life.

In Selected passages from correspondence with friends, while giving Pushkin a high appraisal, Gogol at the same time notices a certain one-sidedness of his aesthetic position: no application to life ... Pushkin was given to the world to prove by himself what a poet himself is, and nothing more ... All his works are a complete arsenal of poet's tools. Go there, choose for yourself every one according to your hand, and go out with him to battle; but the poet himself did not come out to fight him. He didn’t come out because, “becoming a husband, taking strength from everywhere to deal with big things, he didn’t think about how to deal with insignificant and small things.”

We see that through the praise of Pushkin one can hear Gogol's reproach to him. Perhaps this reproach is not entirely fair, but it clearly expresses Gogol's worldview. He is eager to fight with all the accumulated "rubbish and squabbles" of "disheveled reality", which was left without attention by Pushkin. Literature is called upon to actively participate in the life-building of a more perfect person and a more harmonious world order. The task of the writer, according to Gogol, is to open a person's eyes to his own imperfection.

The discrepancy between Gogol and Pushkin was not accidental and was not determined by the personal characteristics of his talent. By the second half of the 1830s, a change of generations began in Russian literature, a new phase was beginning in the very development of artistic creativity. Pushkin's pathos consisted in the approval of harmonic ideals. Gogol's pathos is in criticism, in denunciation of life, which comes into conflict with its own potentialities, discovered by the genius of Pushkin - "Russian man in his development." Pushkin for Gogol remains an ideal, based on which he analyzes modern life, exposing its inherent diseases and calling for healing. The image of Pushkin is for Gogol, as later for Dostoevsky, the "sun of poetry" and at the same time a guarantee that Russian life can be improved in Pushkin's direction. Pushkin is Gogol's light, Gogol's hope.

“The high dignity of Russian nature,” Gogol believes, “consists in the fact that it is more capable than others of accepting the word of the Gospel, which leads to the perfection of man. The seeds of the heavenly Sower were scattered everywhere with equal bounty. But some fell on the road along the way and were plundered by flying birds; others fell on a stone, ascended, but withered; the third, in thorns, rose, but were soon drowned out by bad herbs; the fourth only, having fallen on good ground, bore fruit. This good soil is Russian receptive nature. Well nurtured in the heart, the seeds of Christ gave all the best that is in the Russian character.

Pushkin, according to Gogol, is a genius of Russian susceptibility. “He cared only about saying with one gifted poetic instinct: “Look how beautiful the creation of God!” - and, without adding anything more, fly to another subject and then also say: “Look how beautiful God’s creation is! “… And how true is his response, how sensitive is his ear! You hear the smell, the color of the earth, time, people. In Spain, he is a Spaniard, with a Greek - a Greek, in the Caucasus - a free highlander in the full sense of the word; with an obsolete person, he breathes the antiquity of the past; looks into the peasant's hut - he is Russian from head to toe.

These features of Russian nature are associated, according to Gogol, with the Orthodox Christian soul of the people, endowed with the gift of a disinterested welcoming response to beauty, truth and goodness. This is the secret of Pushkin's "power of excitatory influence" on any talent. Gogol felt this exciting force at the very beginning of his creative path. Pushkin gave him “a certain light” and called on him: “Go, hold on to this light. / Let him be your only meta.” Gogol went his own way in literature, but he determined the direction of movement according to Pushkin's compass. Along with this, the tense sense of responsibility to the country and people that Gogol experienced throughout his life is surprising: “Rus! what do you want from me? What incomprehensible bond lurks between us? Why do you look like that, and why does everything that is in you turn eyes full of expectation on me?

In the second half of his life, Gogol suddenly felt lonely. He felt that his contemporaries misunderstood him. And although Belinsky and other Russian critics highly appreciated him during his lifetime, the writer was not satisfied with these assessments: they glided over the surface of his talent and did not touch the depth. In Gogol, everyone preferred to see a satirist writer, an exposer of the vices of the modern social system. But the hidden spiritual roots that nourished his talent, contemporaries were inclined not to notice.

In one letter to Zhukovsky, Gogol says that in the process of creativity he listens to a higher call that demands unconditional obedience from him and awaits his inspiration. Following Pushkin, Gogol sees a divine gift in the writer's vocation. In depicting human sins, in exposing human vulgarity, Gogol is most afraid of the author's subjectivity and pride. And in this sense, his works gravitated towards prophetic denunciation. The writer, as a person, is subject to the same sins as the people he portrays. But in moments of creative inspiration, he loses his "I", his human "self". It is no longer human, but Divine wisdom that speaks through his lips: the voice of the writer is a prophetic voice.

Gogol's worldview was fundamentally deeply religious. Gogol never shared the ideological principles of Belinsky and Russian thought, according to which a person is by nature good, and evil lies in social relations. "Human nature" was never presented to Gogol as "the measure of all things." The source of social evil lies not in social relations, and it is impossible to eliminate this evil with the help of reforms or revolutions. An imperfect society is not a cause, but a consequence of human depravity. The external organization of life is a reflection of the inner world of a person. And if in a person his Divine prototype is darkened, no changes in the external forms of life are able to destroy evil.

“Recently I have met many wonderful people who have completely gone astray,” Gogol addressed Belinsky and people of his circle. – Some people think that it is possible to correct the world by means of transformations and reforms, by turning in this and that way; others think that through some special, rather mediocre literature, which you call fiction, you can influence the education of society. But the well-being of society will not be brought to a better state either by riots or ardent heads. Fermentation inside cannot be corrected by any constitutions. Society is formed by itself, society is made up of units. It is necessary that each unit perform its own function. A person must be reminded that he is not at all a material beast, but a high citizen of a high heavenly citizenship. As long as he does not live at least a little bit the life of a heavenly citizen, until then earthly citizenship will not come into order either. The source of these convictions of the writer is obvious: “Seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all this will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

All Gogol's work appeals to fallen man: "Get up and go!" “In the moral field, Gogol was brilliantly gifted,” argued the researcher of his work K. Mochulsky, “he was destined to turn all Russian literature from aesthetics to religion, move it from the path of Pushkin to the path of Dostoevsky. All the features that characterize the "great Russian literature", which has become world, were outlined by Gogol: its religious and moral structure, its citizenship and public, its prophetic pathos and messianism.

Gogol castigated social evil to the extent that he saw the root source of imperfections. Gogol gave this source the name vulgarity of modern man. "Vulgar" is a person who has lost the spiritual dimension of life, the image of God. When this image is darkened in the soul, a person turns into a flat being, closed in himself, in his egoism. He becomes a prisoner of his imperfections and plunges into the swamp of spiritual nothingness. People get stuck in the mire of the little things that entangle life. The meaning of their existence is reduced to the consumption of material goods, which pull the human soul down - to prudence, cunning, lies.

Gogol came to the conclusion that any change in life for the better must begin with the transformation of the human personality. Unlike liberal reformers and revolutionary socialists, Gogol did not believe in the possibility of renewing life by changing the existing social order. Gogol refutes any convergence of the name of Christ with revolutionary ideas, which Belinsky repeatedly did, including in the Salzbrunn letter: “Who, in your opinion, can now interpret Christ closer and better? Gogol asks Belinsky a question. – Is it really the current communists and socialists who explain that Christ commanded to take away property and rob those who have made a fortune? Come to your senses!... Christ never told anyone to take away, but, on the contrary, He urgently orders us to yield: give the last shirt to the one who takes off your clothes, go through two with the one who asks you to go through one field with you. “The idea of ​​a “common cause” in Gogol was the idea of ​​a decisive turn in life towards Christ’s truth – not on the path of an external revolution, but on the path of a sharp, but genuine religious turning point in every single human soul,” wrote the Russian religious philosopher Vasily about Gogol. Zenkovsky. In real literature, Gogol saw an effective tool with which to awaken a religious spark in a person and move him to this sharp turning point. And only the failure to write the second volume of Dead Souls, in which he wanted to show the awakening of spiritual concerns in a vulgar person, forced him to turn to a direct religious sermon in Selected passages from correspondence with friends.

Belinsky adhered in those years to revolutionary democratic and socialist convictions. That is why he attacked this book in his "Letter to Gogol", reproaching the writer for renegade, for apostasy from "progressive" views, for religious obscurantism. This letter showed that Belinsky never felt the religious depth of Gogol's realism. He reduced the pathos of Gogol's realistic work to "denunciation of the existing social system."

From Belinsky came the tradition of dividing Gogol's work into two parts. The Inspector General and Dead Souls were viewed as a direct political satire on autocracy and serfdom, indirectly calling for their "overthrow", and "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" were interpreted as a work that resulted from a sharp change in the worldview of the writer, who betrayed his "progressive" beliefs. They did not pay attention to Gogol's repeated and persistent assurances that the "main provisions" of his religious worldview remained unchanged throughout his entire career. The idea of ​​the resurrection of "dead souls" was the main one in his artistic and journalistic work. “Society will only get better when every person takes care of himself and lives like a Christian,” Gogol argued. This was his fundamental conviction from early novels and short stories to Dead Souls and Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends.