Downtrodden people (Dostoevsky. "Humiliated and Insulted", "Time")

/ Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov. downtrodden people
(Works by F.M. Dostoevsky. Two volumes, Moscow, 1860. "Humiliated and Insulted", a novel in 4 parts by F.M. Dostoevsky. "Time", 1861, No. I-VII.) /

"Again about downtrodden personalities! Little else was discussed about them in The Dark Kingdom, little did Sovremennik bother them at all in its critical section! And after all, an ugly thought came into a person's head - art criticism into pathological sketches about Russian society... 1 Now, if only now, the question of the essence and degree of the creative talent of one of the most remarkable figures in our literature, which is extremely important for art, is on the agenda, the question is all the more interesting because, for fifteen years, there have been a variety of opinions have been expressed. The appearance of "Poor People" was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by the entire literary party, which recognized Gogol; Belinsky proclaimed that although Mr. Dostoevsky owed a lot to Gogol, like Lermontov to Pushkin, he was nonetheless in himself, not at all an imitator of Gogol, but an original and enormous talent. He began in such a way, Belinsky added, as no other Russian writer has ever begun. Moreover, Belinsky prophesied in this way: “Mr. Dostoevsky’s talent belongs to the category of those that are comprehended and recognized not suddenly. at the time when he reaches the apogee of his glory" ("Notes of the Fatherland", 1846, No. III, p. 20).<...>G. Goncharov had not yet appeared at that time with Ordinary History; gg. Turgenev and Grigorovich 2 barely published a few insignificant stories; about Ostrovsky, Pisemsky, Tolstoy and other writers who later became famous, there was still neither a rumor nor a spirit. Three more years have passed since then: new writers arose and gained honorable fame for themselves; Mr. Dostoevsky continued to write, and none of his new works could be compared with his first story. In the middle of 1849, his literary activity ceased, and literature did not express any particular regrets 3 . If, during the ten years of silence, Mr. Dostoevsky was sometimes remembered about him, it was only to laugh at his own innocence, with which he was made a genius for the first story, and about the exorbitant pride, to which his general worship brought him. But, two years ago, Mr. Dostoevsky again appeared in literature, although his name was already too pale before the new luminaries that lit up on the horizon of Russian literature in last decade. In these two years he published four large works, and an impartial judgment of criticism has not yet been pronounced on them. Now it is precisely the task that lies ahead for criticism—to determine to what extent Mr. Dostoevsky’s talent has developed and matured, what aesthetic features he presents in comparison with new writers whom Belinsky’s criticism could not yet have in mind, what shortcomings and beauties distinguish his new works and on what place do they really place him among such writers as Messrs. Goncharov, Turgenev, Grigorovich, Tolstoy, etc. Criticism faces an artistic question that is essential for the history of our literature - and he is going to talk about downtrodden people - a subject that is not even aesthetic at all.

Every time I start writing a critical article, I am besieged by demands and exclamations of this kind 4 . In the opinion of one critic 5 , I have no other way out of them than to confess frankly that the solution of questions of such importance is beyond my power. I would, perhaps, and ready to confess; but, firstly, this is insulting to self-esteem, and, secondly, why should I rivet myself? Of course, criticism should serve as an application of the eternal laws of art to a particular work, should, as in a mirror, present the merits and demerits of the author, show him the right path, and point out to readers the places they should or should not admire. Is that what real criticism is supposed to be? Yes, but do you know that the pure theory of criticism is just as inapplicable as the theory of how to become rich and happy or how to win the love of women.<...>

<...>... Mr. Dostoevsky's novel still represents the best literary phenomenon of the current year. And try to apply the rules of strictly artistic criticism to it!<...>

There are a lot of lively, well-finished details in the novel, although the hero of the novel, although he aims for melodrama, is not bad in places, the character of little Nelly is positively well outlined, and the character of old Ikhmenev is also very vividly and naturally outlined. All this entitles the novel to the attention of the public, given the general poverty of good stories at the present time. But all this still does not elevate him enough to apply general artistic requirements to all his particulars and make him the subject of a detailed aesthetic analysis.

Take, for example, the author's very device: the story of Natasha's love and suffering with Alyosha is told to us by a man who himself is passionately in love with her and has decided to sacrifice himself for her happiness. I confess that I don’t like all these gentlemen who bring their spiritual greatness to the point of deliberately kissing their bride’s lover and being on his errands, I don’t like at all. They either did not love at all, or only loved with their head, and only creators who were more familiar with head love than with heart love could invent them in literature.<...>

The action of the novel lasts for some month, and here Ivan Petrovich is constantly running errands, so that he finally falls ill a couple of times and almost catches a fever. But that's all; what exactly is in his soul, we do not know this, although we see that he is not well. In a word, before us is not a passionately in love, loving person to the point of self-sacrifice, telling about the delusions and sufferings of his beloved, about the insults inflicted on his heart, about the desecration of his shrine; before us is simply an author who has clumsily adopted a certain form of a story, without thinking about what duties it imposes on him.<...>

The plot of the novel... is based on Natasha's love for Alyosha. Natasha is represented as a smart, serious girl, with a well-developed moral sense, without special, and even without any, sensual inclinations. Alyosha is a boy, already at the age of 21, windy, cynical, devoid of any moral basis in character, to the point that he is not embarrassed by any of his dirty tricks, but, on the contrary, he immediately talks about it himself, adding that he knows how bad it is, and after that, he repeats the same dirty trick again. Thinking of praising his innocence, the narrator says, among other things: "he could not have lied, and if he had lied, he did not at all suspect that it was bad." You see, he was a naive, sweet child who did not know the difference between good and evil, although he had reached the age of 21, brought up in a secular Petersburg society, experienced something in him and, moreover, was the son of such a father as Prince Valkovsky.<...>It is difficult to say what his charm is, how he could affect a smart and serious girl like Natasha.<...>

<...>... The action of the novel in a strange and unnecessary way doubles between the story of Natasha and the story of little Nelly, which decisively violates the harmony of the impression.<...>

Throughout the novel, the characters speak like the author; they use his favorite words, his phrases; they have the same phrasing... Exceptions are extremely rare.<...>

G. Dostoevsky will probably not complain about me that I declare his novel, so to speak, "below aesthetic criticism." After all, I had in mind our contemporary literature in general, and if I checked my idea with a few cursory remarks about his novel, it was because he fell under my arm.<...>

<...>... If we turn from abstract aesthetic reasoning to the ideas and propositions developed by famous author, then we will find the best means to understand the essence of his talent. Here already the yardstick of our requirements changes: the author may give nothing to art, may not make a step in the history of literature proper, and yet be remarkable for us in the dominant direction and meaning of his works. Even if he does not meet artistic requirements, even if he sometimes misses and expresses himself badly: we don’t pay attention to this, we are still ready to talk about him a lot and for a long time, if only for some reason the meaning of his works is important for society. .<...>

In the works of Mr. Dostoevsky we find one common feature, more or less noticeable in everything he wrote: it is the pain of a person who recognizes himself as unable or, finally, does not even have the right to be a real, complete, independent person, himself by oneself. "Every person should be a person and treat others as a person treats a person" - this is the ideal that has developed in the soul of the author.<...>And meanwhile, entering into life and looking around him, he sees that a person’s quest to preserve his personality, to remain himself, never succeeds, and whoever of the seekers does not have time to die early in consumption or other debilitating disease, as a result only reaches - or to bitterness, unsociableness, madness, or to simple, quiet stupefaction, drowning out human nature in oneself, to a sincere recognition of oneself as something much lower than a person. There are many who even seem to be born with this last consciousness, whom the thought of their human significance never seems to have ever visited. They are like beings of another world, as if they have nothing in common with the rest of humanity... What is the reason for such a rebirth, such an anomaly in human relations? How does this happen? what are the essential features of such phenomena? what results do they lead to? These are the questions that Mr. Dostoevsky's works naturally and necessarily lead the reader to. True, he does not have a solution to all the proposed questions; but if he had solved them, then, of course, he would not have written stories about them. A literary work is sincere, and not custom-made, only when the first basis and the extreme solution of the taken fact is still a question, the solution of which occupies the author himself. But with strong talents, the very act of creativity is so imbued with the whole depth of life's truth that sometimes, from a simple statement of facts and relations made by the artist, their solution follows of itself.<...>

G. Dostoevsky, in his very first work, was a remarkable figure in that direction, which I called predominantly humanistic. In Poor Folk, written under the fresh influence of the best aspects of Gogol and the most vital ideas of Belinsky, Mr. Dostoevsky, with all the energy and freshness of a young talent, set about analyzing the anomalies of our poor reality that struck him, and in this analysis he was able to express his highly humane ideal.<...>

In various forms and cases, Mr. Dostoevsky presented us with a lack of respect for a person for himself and a lack of respect for a person of other people. It would seem that the matter is simple - you think when you read these stories: - a person was born, which means he must live, which means he has the right to exist; this natural right must also have natural conditions for its maintenance, that is, the means of life. And since this need for means is a general need, then its satisfaction must be equally general, for everyone, without subdivisions, that, they say, such and such have the right, but such and such do not. To deny someone's right in this case is to deny the very right to life. And if so, then, within the limits of natural conditions, absolutely every person must be a complete, independent person and, entering into complex combinations public relations, to bring his full personality into it and, taking up the corresponding work, even the most insignificant, nevertheless - in no way conceal, destroy or drown out his direct human rights and demands. It seems clear. And meanwhile, why is this Makar Alekseich Devushkin "hiding, hiding, trembling," constantly ashamed of his life, "yes, he looks around him with an embarrassed look, and listens to every word" and finds the only consolation in the fact that he is a small man, insignificant person?<...>And why does Mr. Golyadkin, in his painful and fruitless attempts to "be in his own right" and "to go his own way," shrink back to the last concessions of his real right, and finally, unable to bear in his feeble head his idea that everyone undermines his right, interferes in your mind?<...>Why does Natasha lose her will and reason, and why does Ivan Petrovich respectfully shun Alyosha, the helipad? Why does old Ikhmenev, enduring all sorts of torments of fatherly love, not want to forgive his daughter, so as not to show the appearance of concession to the prince and his son? Why does little Nellie so wildly accept Ivan Petrovich's favor and go to collect alms in order to buy him a cup broken by her with the money collected? Where is the reason for all these wild, amazingly strange human relationships? What is the root of this incomprehensible discord between what should be in a natural, reasonable order, and what turns out to be in reality?

We have already said that not a single person, not a single story of Mr. Dostoevsky in particular, gives a direct answer to such requests. To find the answer, we must group them and explain one by the other.

People whose human dignity has been offended appear to us in Mr. Dostoevsky in two main types: the meek and the hardened. The first no longer make any protest, bow down under the weight of their position and seriously begin to assure themselves that they are nothing, nothing, and that if His Excellency speaks to them, then they should consider themselves happy and blessed. Others, on the contrary: seeing that their right, their legitimate demands, that which is sacred to them, with which they entered the world, is trampled and not recognized, they want to break with everything around them, to become alien to everything, to be sufficient for themselves and no one in the world can ask for or accept a service, a brotherly feeling, or a kind look. It goes without saying that they fail to maintain their temper, and that is why they are always dissatisfied with themselves, curse themselves and others, contemplate suicide, etc.<...>

Those who have observed in our society what is called "petty people" know that meek and submissive people are also sometimes touchy and scrupulous.<...>

<...>That is the merit of the artist<...>in a downtrodden, lost, depersonalized person, he seeks and shows us the living, never quelled aspirations and needs of human nature, takes out the protest of the personality hidden in the very depths of the soul against external, violent pressure and presents it to our judgment and sympathy. Such discoveries are made to us by Gogol in some of his stories; the same thing, only in a somewhat intricate form, we find in Mr. Dostoevsky's "Poor People" and partly in his other stories.

The official Devushkin, for example, lives for himself, lived to have gray hair, served for almost thirty years quietly and modestly, without thinking about anything, without pretending to anything.<...>In general, Makar Alekseevich has come to such a point that he even wears boots and an overcoat, not for himself, but for others, especially for his Excellency; and he also drinks tea more for others, and all for others out of ambition.<...>... Agree that you feel sorry for the humiliation in which he puts himself, and only the power of compassion drives away in you that feeling of disgust, which otherwise would involuntarily arouse in you such a distortion of human nature ...<...>

A society that has reached the point where such types are developed in it can, it seems, be called exemplary, perfect, irreproachable in the sense of the [state] theory. [...Here, the established hierarchy does not even need to be supported: its benefits and necessity are so clear to everyone, to such an extent it has earned the internal approval of everyone, even the least pleased by it, to such an extent] everyone feels happy and contented under it. .. It is impossible for everyone to be rich, for everyone to be talented, for everyone to be beautiful; it is impossible to be in charge of everyone, to be in the first place for everyone; but the true ideal of the state is that everyone should be satisfied in his place, everyone should be aware of the legitimacy and deep justice of his position and obey with the same willingness with which others command, be just as calm and happy with his ten-ruble salary, like others with twenty thousand income. Then the ideal of the golden age can be realized; then, even if someone suffers troubles from others, and this will not upset either the general course of affairs, or his own happiness, because even in these troubles he will see a legitimate and useful thing and will come to terms with them, as with annual changes. Any member of the ideal hierarchy will argue, as Makar Alekseevich, for example, argues about the boss's reprimands, about the scoffer who dared to speak ironically about them: "Why not scold, if we need to scold our brother? .. Well, let's put it that way, for example, you can bake it for a tone - well, you can do it for a tone; you need to accustom it, you need to give wit ... And since there are different ranks and each rank requires a scolding that is completely corresponding to the rank, it’s natural that after this the tone of the scolding comes out differently. ; is okay! Why, the light stands on that, that we all set the tone before each other, that each of us scolds each other. Without this precaution, the light would not stand, and there would be no order..

Imagine an ideal state which would base its organization on such a philosophy and in which All the members would be imbued with it deeply and sincerely, with all their hearts, with all their being: what a happy state it would be! What eternally indestructible tranquility, what uninterrupted silence, what peace and complacency would reign in it! No one would seek what was not given to him, no one would rush from the place where he was placed, no one would argue about what is higher than his rank. From the poor man the idea of ​​becoming rich would be as far away as the desire to crawl through the eye of a needle; the head clerk would not think of criticizing the orders of his secretary, just as he does not criticize the onset of night after day, and vice versa; even some young man from a small fry, imprisoned for copying papers, would not have taken it into his head then to dream of exploits, fame, etc., just as now it does not occur to him to dream, for example, of turning himself into a crocodile that lives in Egypt, or in an antediluvian mastodon discovered in northern ice. Grace-filled calmness would be poured everywhere, without any impulses and disturbances.<...>

But, to the greatest regret of the friend of mankind, the philosopher's stone is not found, there is no complete perfection on earth, there is nowhere such an ideal society as we assumed ...<...>Some kind of search never ceased to disturb people, and then some empty accident, an insignificant collision - and everything was agitated, and the ideal of uninterrupted silence flew up into dust into the air ...<...>

It must be said that a certain amount of artistic power is constantly felt in Mr. Dostoevsky, and in his first work it even showed itself to a considerable extent. The truth of life did not escape him, and he extremely aptly and clearly drew the line between the official mood, between the appearance, form of a person, and what constitutes his inner being, what is hidden in the recesses of his nature, and only at times, in moments of a special mood, barely visible on the surface. From the observations of the author, transmitted to us in his stories, it turns out that there is not a single person who, in fact, with all his heart and soul, loves an ideal organization that promises so much peace and contentment to people. Even people who are most saturated with it, and they constantly blurt out and evade. Why, if only Makar Alekseich himself: perhaps you think that he really calmed down on the fact that "everyone has his own place, and the places are distributed according to abilities," etc.? Not at all; it is when he resonates in a calm position, and speaks in this way. And as soon as something hits him to the quick, he changes completely, and “liberal thoughts” climb into his head of their own accord. He then asks: “Why does it all happen like this, that a good person is in desolation, and to someone else happiness suggests itself?<...>Feeling deeply, Makar Alekseich no longer confines himself to doubts, but even reaches indignation and offends people cleaner than himself: "that the tailcoat sits on him like a gogol, that he looks at you in a golden lorgnette, shameless - so everything is with him hands descends, so it is necessary to listen to his obscene condescending speech! It's full, isn't it, darlings?"As you wish, but this is almost a challenge from the poor official: apparently, his heart did not quite calm down, he did not quite calm down on the fact that" if we had not set the tone for each other, then the light would not have stood, and there would be no order." No, he now utters cries of the heart and recognizes his right to yell and complain: "And also rich people don't like," he remarks, "poor people - de intrusive. Yes, and always poverty is importunate; sleep, or what, interfere with their groans of hunger? And a heart overflowing with bitterness inspires him with such thoughts, calls out such instincts, which he himself was frightened and would have renounced in his usual position, but which now, of themselves, irresistibly appear in all their strength.<...>Such thoughts, sinking into a person and developing in him with extraordinary speed and strength, with the help of his natural instincts, destroy the general peace and tranquility in that ideal social mechanism that we so gratifyingly pictured above.<...>Makar Alekseich formulated his grave doubts in letters to Varenka; others do not formulate them otherwise than by their behavior, various strange deeds and their sad results. If, for example, you had the patience to at least leaf through the endless pages of Mr. Golyadkin, you would see that he is tormented and going mad for exactly the same general reasons—owing to the unfortunate conflict between the poor remnants of his humanity and the official demands of his position.<...>

Well, think about it - why would a person go crazy? He would only remain true to the serene theory that he is in his right, and everything is in his right, that if a new collegiate certificate was produced before him, then it should be so, and that if Klara Olsufyevna rejected him, then again this means that he shouldn’t have interfered with her - in a word, if he continued to go his own way, without affecting anyone, and remember that everything in the world is distributed in the most lawful way according to abilities, and abilities are given by nature itself, etc. - so he would continue a person to live in the former contentment and tranquility. But it’s not: something arose from the bottom of the soul and expressed itself in the most gloomy protest, of which the slow-witted Mr. Golyadkin was capable of — madness ... I won’t say that Mr. Dostoevsky developed the idea of ​​​​this madness with particular skill: but I must admit, that his theme is the bifurcation of a weak, spineless, and uneducated person between timid directness of action and a Platonic striving for intrigue, a bifurcation under the weight of which the poor man's mind finally collapses - this theme, for a good execution, requires very strong talent.<...>

The ideal theory of the social mechanism, with the reassurance of all people in their place and in their work, does not at all ensure the general welfare.<...>... You can't improve a person to such an extent that he becomes completely a machine.<...>There are such instincts that do not give in to any form, to any oppression and cause a person to do things that are completely incongruous.<...>

[They say that it is gratifying for a person to have someone behind him who cares about him, thinks and decides for him, arranges his whole life, all his actions and even thoughts. They say that this is in accordance with the natural inertia of a person, with his need to give himself to someone wholeheartedly, to set up for the soul some kind of model and lord, in whose will one could rest in peace. All this may very well be true to a certain extent and may even be justified by history. But this opinion can hardly find justification in the tendencies of modern societies. Is it because the societies of modern times have emerged from the state of infancy, in which the natural feeling of impotence necessarily forces them to seek someone else's protection; Is it because the former patrons and guardians of societies known to us from history often met the hopes of people who trusted them with their fate so badly - but only now social tendencies everywhere take on a more courageous, independent character. The lofty virtues of blind, insane devotion, unconditional trust in authorities, unaccountable faith in someone else's word - are becoming rarer and rarer; the deadly submission of one's whole being to a well-known formal program - and in the Jesuit order it has almost remained only on paper. "Natural human inertia" is already recognized as some kind of negative quality, like the ability of water to freeze; on the contrary,] now stands in the foreground initiative, that is, the ability of a person to independently, on his own to take up the matter - and the merits of a person are already judged by the degree of presence of initiative in him and by its direction. Everything somehow strives to stand on its own feet and live by the grace of others, considers itself unworthy. Such a change in tendencies has taken place in the societies of the new peoples of Europe since the end of the last century. We can say that this change has not partially escaped us.<...>

It would be expected that, with the general desire to maintain their own human dignity, those downtrodden personalities, of which we took several copies from Mr. Dostoevsky, will also disappear. However, if you look around you, you will see that they have not disappeared, that Mr. Dostoevsky's heroes are by no means an obsolete phenomenon. Why are they so attached? Okay, is it for them? No, we have seen that none of them is particularly happy because of his downtroddenness, lack of response and renunciation of his own will, of his own personality. Frozen, perhaps, is everything human in them? No, it didn't freeze. ... These people are alive and their soul is alive. They grow dull, forget themselves in a semi-animal dream, become depersonalized, erased, apparently losing both thought and will, and even deliberately try to do this, driving away from themselves all sorts of delusions of thought and assuring themselves that this is none of their business ... But the spark of God still smolders in them, and by no means, as long as a person is alive, it is impossible to extinguish it. You can erase a person, turn into a dirty rag, but still somewhere, in the dirtiest folds of this rag, both feeling and thought will be preserved - though unrequited, imperceptible, but still feeling and thought ...<...>

And there are cases when an "unrequited" feeling, deeply hidden in a person, suddenly responds loudly, and everyone will hear it. The fact is that in a person the sense of justice and legitimacy is not drowned out by anything; he can look silently at all sorts of untruths, he can endure all kinds of insults without grumbling, he can not express his indignation with a single sign; but still, he cannot be insensitive to untruth, as far as he sees and understands it, nevertheless, insult and humiliation painfully echo in his soul, and there is always a limit to the patience of even the most murdered and cowardly person. At the same time, it is necessary for a person to have a feeling of love; everyone has someone dear to himself - a friend, a wife, children, relatives, a mistress. He tries on his position on them, compares them with others, thinks about their contentment, and from the side he argues more freely and clearly. Let us suppose that Makar Alekseich doomed himself to a bitter fate and does not regret himself: I, he says, is like that - let everyone push me around ... and if I don’t finish it, it’s not a problem, and if they offend me - it’s not great master. But now his feeling turns to a pure, tender creature, which soon becomes dearer to him than anything in life, to Varenka: he already indulges in regret over her misfortunes, finds them undeserved, looks into the carriages and sees that the ladies are sitting there all much worse than Varenka; thoughts about the injustice of fate already come to his mind, he becomes somehow hostile to all these people, driving around in carriages and flitting from one magnificent store to another, in a word, the hidden pain that boiled in his chest rises out and makes itself felt.<...>

But why are such flashes of "God's spark" so weak, so poor in results? Why does the consciousness awakened for a moment fall asleep again so soon? Why do human instincts and feelings manifest themselves so little in practical activity, being limited more to sighs and complaints and empty dreams? Yes, because it is, that the people we are talking about have such a character. After all, if they had a different character, they could not have been brought to such a degree of humiliation, vulgarity and insignificance. The question, therefore, is about why such characters are formed in a significant mass, what [general] conditions develop inertia in human society, to the detriment of the activity and mobility of forces.

Perhaps the fault lies in our national character? But after all, this does not solve the question, but only moves away: why national character formed such, mostly inert and weak? We will only have to transfer the decision, instead of the present tense, to historical soil.

Moreover, this is still a controversial issue: after all, we shout a lot about the width and the sweeping nature of Russian nature. Let us not pronounce our judgment on the whole people; we have in mind only one limited circle of him. But it must be confessed - the delights of this sweeping expression are amusing, expressed in the fact that some gentlemen soar in the baths, pouring champagne on the heater, others break dishes and mirrors in taverns, still others spend their whole lives in dog hunting, and in former times they still turned this hunting people too, sewing small-scale sycophants into bearskins and then poisoning them with dogs ... A sort of sweepingness is found in any ignorant society and everywhere falls with the development of education. But where is our sweeping in the circle of ordinary people, and where does it come from? Take from us even immature young men studying science: what are they waiting for, what goal do they assume in life? After all, most of the dreams are limited to a career, the whole purpose of life is to get a better job. This is incomparably less common among other peoples of Europe. Not to mention the French, who have a reputation for braggarts, take other, for example, modest Germans. It is rare that a German student does not cherish in his soul some favorite idea—they are getting more and more into theory—some huge dream. Or he will discover new beginnings of philosophy and pave new paths for thought; or radically transforms existing pedagogical methods, and after him humanity will be educated on new grounds; or he will be a great composer, poet, artist...<...>This is not the warehouse of sweeping dreams, like, for example, a mayor who dreams that he will be made a general because Khlestakov will marry his daughter ... We took a German as an example; take anyone else you want, everywhere you will find a wider scope of imagination, more initiative in the very dreams and plans than we have. An Englishman, for example, having left school and stopped dreaming about being Chatham 6 , Wellington 7 or Byron, begins, let's say, to make plans for enrichment. This, of course, excites the dreams of many of us. But what a difference both in means and in size! Our dreamers of wealth for the most part seize on routine means, take what is at hand and what is badly lying, and often stop at achieving all kinds of comfort. Meanwhile, the Englishman in his mind will invent several machines, several times cross all the oceans, establish several colonies, set up several factories, make several enormous revolutions and outshine all the Rothschilds ... And most importantly, he will go to fulfill his task, and at least half will not be fulfilled, but something will still be achieved ...<...>

And why is it so easy and convenient for us to "turn into rags" [- the astute reader does not, of course, expect decisive explanations from us about this: the time has not yet come for them]. Here are just a few of the most common features, to which we find indications even directly in the works of the author, about whom all these questions are presented to us.

First of all, remember what Makar Alekseevich says when an excess of anguish calls out from the depths of his soul several bold judgments. "I know that this is sinful... This is freethinking... Sin creeps into my soul..." You see that his very thought is bound by the superstitious horror of sin and crime. And who among us does not know the origin of this superstitious fear? What father, sending his children to school, taught them to rely only on themselves and on their abilities and labors, to put science above all else, to seek only true knowledge and see only their support in it, etc.? On the contrary, have they not told each of us: “Try to earn the attention of your superiors, be more humble, do unquestioningly what you are ordered to do, don’t be smart. You will perish"... In such beginnings, in such suggestions, we grew up. From childhood, our blood relatives tried to accustom us to the thought of our insignificance, of our complete dependence on the gaze of a teacher, tutor, and in general any person of higher position. Remember how often you heard from your family: “well done, the teacher praises you”, or vice versa: “bad boy, the authorities are not pleased with you”, and at the same time no explanations and excuses were accepted. And how often did you hear that you were praised for some independent act, that they even said simply: “well done, you have studied this matter very well and you can lead it further” or something like that?

Thus directed from childhood, how do we enter into real life? I'm not talking about the rich and nobles; we don't care about those; we're talking about the poor middle class. Some even after the end of the student period do not go out from under the wing of the parent; they ask for them, bow down, be mean, tell them to bow and be mean to them, get a place, often warm ... Such nestlings have a chance to reach the known levels. But the vast majority of the poor, who have neither a stake nor a court, who do not know where to lay their heads - what does this majority do? Of necessity, he also grovels and bows, and for the first time greets himself with the opportunity to live comfortably somewhere in a corner in the attic, spending two kopecks a day on his own food - and this is still by someone's mercy, because, in fact, we don’t feel the need for people anywhere, and these people themselves don’t feel that they are needed for anything ... Note that, after all, with us, if a person has learned a little bit, then he has no other choice but to like officials. In recent times, everyone who has been trained to the degree of some knowledge of at least one foreign language strives to find his livelihood through literature; but our literature, too, is inundated with all sorts of pretenders, and cannot sufficiently nourish them. Involuntarily, a whole mass of people annually turn again to bureaucratic activity, and involuntarily endure everything, realizing their uselessness and fundamental uselessness.<...>

Where to get the strength and determination [to counter? If it were still a matter between personalities, one on one, then, perhaps, the irritated human feeling would show itself stronger and more decisive; and yet here there are no personalities, except for the innocent, because they do not do their own will. We even saw that Makar Alekseevich's boss, for example, a benevolent person, Yulian Mastakovitch, is a very nice person. Who, then, is pressing and crushing Makar Alekseich? Circumstances! And what to do against the circumstances [when they have developed so firmly and invariably, so inseparable from our order, from our civilization]? Their immensity is able to suppress more than one Makar Alekseich.<...>

Yes, a person is absorbed and destroyed by the general impression of that huge mechanism, which he is not even able to embrace with his reason.<...>Here there is no longer any talk of struggle; here, even for stronger characters, only fruitless irritation, bilious complaints and despair are possible. Take it again last novel Mr. Dostoevsky. Here, for example, is the strong, hot character of little Nelly; but look at how she is set up, and in this situation can she get even the slightest idea of ​​a constant and correct struggle? Her mother died, in debt to Bubnova; there is nothing to bury her with; Nellie remained helpless, defenseless. Bubnova takes her in and, of course, assumes all the rights of a teacher and mistress over her. She is beaten, tortured and tyrannized in every possible way - what to do with it? Bubnova is her benefactor, and had it not been for her, someone else in her place could have done the same thing... Nellie is even maliciously glad of her beatings: she considers them payment for a piece of bread and for the rags that Bubnova gives her. But something else is hard for her: she sees what Bubnova is preparing her for, she is offended, and scared, and bitter ... But again - what will she do? After all, do not kill Bubnova! And to run away from her - where can you run away so that they don’t find you? And now she is sold, and is randomly disposed of, when a vile crime is already ready to be committed against her ... Then - she knows that she is the daughter, the legitimate daughter of the prince. But what of this? Documents are needed, she does not have them; you have to be a lawyer to start a business, and even then the prince has money and connections, more truly than all lawyers ... Poor Nellie, although she ends up with good people, is constantly outraged by the feeling that she lives with strangers, out of mercy ...

Well, let's say it's a child. Let us take another person from the same novel—Ikhmenev. This is a strong character, but strong not for a fight, but for persistence in irritation. He pours out his anger, his bitterness, either on his unrequited wife, or on his daughter, whom he passionately loves, but nevertheless curses several times. Why does he not use all his strength directly, where he should - against his offender - the prince? .. Yes, he would have wished this more than anything in the world, but in dealing with the prince, the established ceremonies and conditions must be observed. A process has been started - well, and it goes slowly, for years, according to [ legal order. This order turns out] in favor of the prince, - everything is in favor of the prince, - no matter how you appeal - everything is in his favor ... You have to pay, sell Ikhmenevka at auction ... After all, the old man knows and feels that this is unfair, insulting, shameless; but how do you change it?<...>

So, then, the situation of these unfortunate, downtrodden, humiliated and insulted people is completely hopeless? Only it remains for them to remain silent and endure, yes, turning into a dirty rag, to keep their unrequited feelings in the farthest folds of it?

I don't know, maybe there is a way out; but literature can hardly indicate it... Many years ago our life produced a certain class of personalities; about twenty years ago, artists noticed and described them; now criticism again had to turn to the analysis of the works of one of these artists; here she grouped, from the artist's paintings, several personalities, generalized something, made some conclusions and comments ... And that's all we can for the time being. We found that we have a lot of downtrodden, humiliated and offended individuals in the middle class [that it is difficult for them both morally and physically], that, despite outward reconciliation with their position, they feel its bitterness, [are ready for irritation and protest,] yearn for a way out... [But here the limit of our observations ends.] Where [this] way out, [when and how] - this should be shown by life itself. We only try to follow it and present for people who do not like or do not know how to follow its phenomena themselves, one or another of the general provisions of reality. Take, perhaps, [a fact, hint or indication] reported in the press as material for your considerations; but, most importantly, follow the uninterrupted, slender, powerful, unrestrained flow of life, and be alive, not dead. Since the appearance of Makar Alekseevich with the brethren, life has already done a lot [only this much has not yet been formulated]. We noticed, among other things, a general desire to restore human dignity [and full rights in one and all]. Perhaps, here already opens a way out of the bitter situation of the driven and downtrodden [, of course, not by their own efforts, but with the help of characters who are less subjected to the burden of such a situation, killing and oppressing. And it is useful for these people, who have a sufficient share of initiative in themselves, to delve into the state of affairs, it is useful to know that] most of these downtrodden ones, whom [they] considered perhaps lost and morally dead, still firmly and deeply, although secretly even for themselves, keep in themselves a living soul and [eternal, inexpressible by any torment] consciousness of their human rights for life and happiness.

I

Raskolnikov got up and sat down on the sofa. He weakly waved Razumikhin to stop the whole stream of his incoherent and ardent consolations addressed to his mother and sister, took them both by the hand and for two minutes silently peered first at one, then at the other. The mother was frightened by his gaze. In this look, a feeling was strong to the point of suffering, but at the same time there was something motionless, even as if insane. Pulcheria Alexandrovna began to cry. Avdotya Romanovna was pale; her hand trembled in her brother's. Go home... with him, he said in a broken voice, pointing to Razumikhin, see you tomorrow; that's it tomorrow... How long have you been here? In the evening, Rodya, answered Pulcheria Alexandrovna, the train was terribly late. But, Rodya, I will never leave you now! I sleep here near... Do not torment me! he said, waving his hand irritably. I will stay with him! Razumikhin cried out, I won’t leave him for a minute, and to hell with all my people there, let them climb the walls! My uncle is president there. Than, than I will thank you! Pulcheria Alexandrovna began, again clasping Razumikhin's hands, but Raskolnikov again interrupted her: I can't, I can't, he repeated irritably, don't torture me! Enough, go away... I can't!... Let's go, mother, let's leave the room for a minute, whispered the frightened Dunya, we are killing him, it can be seen. Why can't I even look at him after three years! Pulcheria Alexandrovna wept. Wait! he stopped them again, you interrupt everything, but my thoughts get in the way... Have you seen Luzhin? No, Rodya, but he already knows about our arrival. We heard, Rodya, that Pyotr Petrovich was so kind to visit you today,” Pulcheria Alexandrovna added with some timidity. Yes ... he was so kind ... Dunya, just now I told Luzhin that I would let him down the stairs, and drove him to hell ... Rodya, what are you! You, right... you don't want to say, Pulcheria Alexandrovna began in fright, but stopped, looking at Dunya. Avdotya Romanovna looked intently at her brother and waited on. Both had already been warned about the quarrel by Nastasya, as far as she could understand and convey, and suffered in bewilderment and expectation. Dunya, Raskolnikov continued with an effort, I do not want this marriage, and therefore you must, tomorrow, at the first word, refuse Luzhin, so that his spirit does not smell. My God! cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. Brother, think what you are saying! Avdotya Romanovna began hot-tempered, but immediately restrained herself. You may not be able now, you are tired, she said meekly. Delirious? No... You're marrying Luzhin for me. I don't accept sacrifices. And therefore, by tomorrow, write a letter... with a refusal... Let me read it in the morning, and that's it! I can't do it! cried the offended girl. By what right... Dunechka, you are also quick-tempered, stop it, tomorrow ... Don't you see ... mother was frightened, rushing to Dunya. Ah, it's better to leave! Delirious! shouted the intoxicated Razumikhin, how dare he! Tomorrow all this nonsense will pop up ... And today he really kicked him out. And so it was. Well, Yut got angry... He orated here, exhibited his knowledge, and left, his tail between his legs... So is it true? cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna. See you tomorrow, brother, Dunya said with compassion, let's go, mother... Farewell, Rodya! Do you hear, sister, he repeated after, gathering his last efforts, I am not delirious; this marriage meanness. Let me be a scoundrel, but you shouldn't ... just someone ... and even though I'm a scoundrel, I won't consider such a sister a sister. Either I, or Luzhin! Go... You're crazy! Despot! Razumikhin roared, but Raskolnikov no longer answered, and perhaps he was not in the strength to answer. He lay down on the sofa and turned to the wall in complete exhaustion. Avdotya Romanovna looked curiously at Razumikhin; her black eyes flashed: Razumikhin even shuddered under that look. Pulcheria Alexandrovna stood as if struck. There's no way I can leave! she whispered to Razumikhin, almost in despair, I will stay here, somewhere ... see Dunya off. And ruin the whole thing! Razumikhin also whispered, losing his temper, let's go out at least to the stairs. Nastasya, shine! I swear to you, he continued in a half whisper, already on the stairs, that just now, me and the doctor, I almost killed! Do you understand this? The doctor himself! And he yielded, so as not to annoy, and left, and I remained downstairs to guard, and he immediately dressed and slipped away. And now he will slip away, if you annoy him, at night, and do something to himself ... Oh, what are you talking about! Yes, and Avdotya Romanovna is impossible in the rooms without you alone! Think where you stand! After all, that scoundrel, Pyotr Petrovich, couldn't it be better for you to have an apartment ... But, you know, I'm a little drunk, and therefore ... scolded; don't turn... But I will go to the hostess here, insisted Pulcheria Alexandrovna, I will beg her to give me and Dunya a corner for this night. I can't leave him like this, I can't! Saying this, they stood on the stairs, on the landing, in front of the mistress's door. Nastasya shone for them from the bottom step. Razumikhin was in unusual agitation. Half an hour later, seeing Raskolnikov home, he was, although excessively chatty, which he was aware of, but completely cheerful and almost fresh, despite the terrible amount of wine he had drunk that evening. Now his state even resembled some kind of ecstasy, and at the same time it was as if all the wine he had drunk again, at once and with redoubled force, rushed into his head. He stood with both ladies, grabbing them both by the hands, persuading them and presenting reasons to them with amazing frankness, and, probably for greater conviction, almost at every word, tightly, tightly, as in a vise, squeezed both of their hands to the point of pain and seemed to be devouring Avdotya Romanovna with his eyes, not in the least embarrassed by this. From pain, they sometimes pulled their hands out of his huge and bony hand, but he not only did not notice what was the matter, but he pulled them even more tightly to himself. If they had ordered him now, for his own service, to throw himself head down from the stairs, he would have done it immediately, without reasoning and without doubting. Pulcheria Alexandrovna, all alarmed at the thought of her Family, although she felt that the young man was very eccentric and was shaking her hand too painfully, but since at the same time he was a providence for her, she did not want to notice all these eccentric details. . But, in spite of the same anxiety, although Avdotya Romanovna was not of a shy nature, she met with amazement and almost even fright the glances of her brother's friend sparkling with wild fire, and only the boundless power of attorney inspired by Nastasya's stories about this strange man kept her from attempts to run away from him and drag his mother with him. She also understood that, perhaps, it was impossible for them to run away from him now. However, after about ten minutes she calmed down significantly: Razumikhin had the property of speaking out all at once, no matter what mood he was in, so that everyone very soon found out with whom they were dealing. Impossible to the hostess, and the most terrible nonsense! he exclaimed, convincing Pulcheria Alexandrovna. Even though you are a mother, if you stay, you will drive him into a frenzy, and then the devil knows what will happen! Listen, here's what I'll do: now Nastasya will sit with him, and I'll take you both to you, because you can't walk the streets alone; here in St. Petersburg on this score... Well, don't give a damn!... Then I'll immediately run here from us and in a quarter of an hour, on my word of honor, I'll bring you a report: what is he like? sleeping or not? and everything else. Then, listen! Then from you in an instant to my place, I have guests there, all drunk, I take Zosimov this is the doctor who treats him, he is now sitting with me, not drunk; this one is not drunk, this one is never drunk! I'm dragging him to Rodka and then to you immediately, which means that at one o'clock you will receive two news about him and from the doctor, you understand, from the doctor himself; it's not like me! If it's bad, I swear, I'll bring you here myself, but it's good, go to bed. And I spend the whole night here, in the passage, he won’t even hear, and I order Zossimova to spend the night with the hostess so that he is at hand. Well, what is better for him now, you or the doctor? After all, the doctor is more useful, more useful. Well then go home! And to the hostess it is impossible; It's possible for me, but impossible for you: she won't let you in, because... because she's a fool. She'll be jealous of Avdotya Romanovna, you want to know, and of you too... And of course Avdotya Romanovna. This is a completely, completely unexpected character! However, I'm also a fool ... I don't give a damn! Let's go! Do you believe me? Well, do you believe me or not? Let's go, mother, said Avdotya Romanovna, he will do exactly as he promises. He has already resurrected his brother, and if it is true that the doctor will agree to spend the night here, then what is better? Here you... you... understand me, because you are an angel! Razumikhin exclaimed in delight. Let's go! Nastasya! Instantly upstairs and sit there with him, with fire; I'll be back in a quarter of an hour... Pulcheria Alexandrovna, although she was not completely convinced, did not resist anymore. Razumikhin took them both by the arms and dragged them down the stairs. However, he worried her: “although he is quick and kind, is he able to fulfill what he promises? In such a form he is! .. " Ah, I see, you think I look like this! Razumikhin interrupted her thoughts, guessing them and striding along the pavement with his huge strides, so that both ladies could hardly follow him, which, however, he did not notice. Nonsense! I mean... I'm drunk as a nut, but that's not the point; I'm not drunk on wine. And this, as I saw you, hit me in the head ... But don't give a damn about me! Pay no attention: I'm lying; I'm not worthy of you... I'm unworthy of you in the highest degree! I love you!.. Don't laugh and don't be angry!.. Be angry with everyone, but don't be angry with me! I am his friend, and therefore your friend too. I so want to... I had a presentiment... of last year, there was one moment like that... However, I didn't foresee it at all, because you seemed to have fallen from the sky. And I, perhaps, will not sleep all night ... This Zosimov was afraid just now that he would go crazy ... That's why there is no need to annoy him ... What are you talking about! exclaimed the mother. Did the doctor himself say so? asked Avdotya Romanovna, frightened. He said, but it's not that, not at all. He gave me such a medicine, a powder, I saw, and you came here ... Eh! .. You had better come tomorrow! It's good that we left. And in an hour Zosimov himself will report to you about everything. That one isn't drunk! And I won't be drunk... And why did I get so drunk? And because they brought into the dispute, damned! After all, he gave a spell not to argue! .. Such nonsense is being fenced! Almost got into a fight! I left my uncle there, chairman... Well, believe me: they demand complete impersonality and find the most relish in it! How would you not be yourself, how would you least resemble yourself! This is what they consider to be the highest progress. And even if they lied in their own way, otherwise ... Listen, Pulcheria Alexandrovna interrupted timidly, but this only turned the heat on. What do you think? shouted Razumikhin, raising his voice even more, do you think I am for the fact that they are lying? Nonsense! I love it when they lie! Lying is the only human privilege over all organisms. Lie you will reach the truth! That's why I'm a man that I lie. They never got to a single truth without lying in advance fourteen times, or maybe a hundred and fourteen, and this is an honorable thing in its own way; well, we can’t lie with our mind! You lie to me, but lie in your own way, and then I will kiss you. To lie in one's own way after all, this is almost better than the truth in one's own way; in the first case you are a man, and in the second you are just a bird! The truth will not go away, but life can be nailed down; there were examples. Well, what are we now? All of us, all without exception, in terms of science, development, thinking, inventions, ideals, desires, liberalism, reason, experience and everything, everything, everything, everything, everything, are still sitting in the first preparatory class of the gymnasium! I liked to get away with someone else's mind eaten! Is not it? Is that what I say? shouted Razumikhin, shaking and squeezing the hands of both ladies, right? My God, I don't know, said poor Pulcheria Alexandrovna. So, so ... although I don’t agree with you on everything, Avdotya Romanovna added seriously and immediately screamed, this time he squeezed her hand so painfully. So? You say so? Well, after that you... you... he shouted in delight, you are the source of kindness, purity, reason and... perfection! Give me your hand, give me... you give yours too, I want to kiss your hands here, now, on your knees! And he knelt in the middle of the pavement, fortunately deserted this time. Stop, please, what are you doing? cried Pulcheria Alexandrovna, alarmed to the extreme. Get up, get up! Dunya laughed and worried too. No way before don't give a hand! That's it, and that's enough, and got up, and let's go! I am an unfortunate fool, I am not worthy of you, and drunk, and ashamed ... I am not worthy of loving you, but to bow before you is the duty of everyone, unless he is a perfect beast! I bowed ... Here are your numbers, and Rodion is right on that alone, that just now he expelled your Pyotr Petrovich! How dare he put you in such numbers? This is a scandal! Do you know who is allowed in here? But you are the bride! Are you a bride? Well, I'll tell you that your fiancé is a scoundrel after this! Listen, Mr. Razumikhin, you forgot... began Pulcheria Alexandrovna. Yes, yes, you are right, I forgot, I am ashamed! Razumikhin caught on, but... but... you can't be angry with me for saying so! That's why I'm sincere, and not because... um! that would be mean; in a word, not because I am in you ... hm! .. well, it’s not necessary, I won’t say why, I don’t dare! society. Not because he came in curled at the hairdresser, not because he was in a hurry to show his mind, but because he was a spy and a speculator; because he is a Jew and a buffoon, and it shows. Do you think he is smart? No, he's a fool, a fool! Well, is he a match for you? Oh my God! You see, ladies, he suddenly stopped, already going up the stairs to the rooms, although they are all drunk there, but they are all honest, and even though we are lying, because I am also lying, but let us finally trust the truth. , because we are standing on a noble road, but Pyotr Petrovich ... is not on a noble road. Although I now scolded them abusively, I still respect them all; I don’t even respect Zametov, I love him so much, because he’s a puppy! Even this cattle Zosimov, therefore, is honest and knows the matter... But enough, everything has been said and forgiven. Forgiven? Is not it? Well, let's go. I know this corridor, I've been; here, in the third room, there was a scandal ... Well, where are you here? Which number? Eighth? Well, lock yourself up for the night, don't let anyone in. In a quarter of an hour I'll toss and turn with the news, and then another half an hour later with Zossimov, you'll see! Farewell, I'm running! My God, Dunechka, what will it be? said Pulcheria Alexandrovna, addressing her daughter anxiously and fearfully. Calm down, mama, answered Dunya, taking off her hat and mantle, God himself sent this gentleman to us, even though he was straight from some kind of drinking bout. You can rely on him, I assure you. And everything he's already done for his brother... Ah, Dunechka, God knows if he will come! And how could I have made up my mind to leave Rodya!... And it was not at all how I imagined finding him! How stern he was, as if he were not happy with us... Tears appeared in her eyes. No, it's not like that, mother. You didn't look, you were crying. He is very upset from a big illness that's the reason for everything. Ah, this disease! Something will be, something will be! And how he spoke to you, Dunya! said the mother, looking timidly into her daughter's eyes in order to read her whole thought, and already half consoled by the fact that Dunya was protecting Rodya, and therefore she had forgiven him. I am sure that he will come to his senses tomorrow, she added, probing to the end. “But I’m so sure that he will say the same thing tomorrow ... about this,” Avdotya Romanovna snapped, and, of course, this was a snag, because there was a point about which Pulcheria Alexandrovna was now too afraid to speak. Dunya came up and kissed her mother. She hugged her tightly. Then she sat down in anxious expectation of Razumikhin's return and timidly began to watch her daughter, who, with her arms folded and also in anticipation, began to walk up and down the room, thinking to herself. Such walking from corner to corner, in thought, was Avdotya Romanovna's usual habit, and her mother was always somehow afraid to disturb her reverie at such a time. Razumikhin, of course, was ridiculous with his sudden, intoxicated passion for Avdotya Romanovna; but, looking at Avdotya Romanovna, especially now, when she was walking around the room, arms folded, sad and thoughtful, perhaps many would excuse him, not to mention his eccentric condition. Avdotya Romanovna was remarkably good-looking, tall, surprisingly slender, strong, self-confident, which was expressed in every gesture of her and which, however, did not in the least detract from her gentleness and grace in her movements. Her face was similar to her brother, but she could even be called a beauty. Her hair was dark brown, a little lighter than her brother's; his eyes are almost black, sparkling, proud, and at the same time, sometimes, at times, unusually kind. She was pale, but not sickly pale; her face shone with freshness and health. Her mouth was a little small, while her lower lip, fresh and scarlet, protruded a little forward, along with her chin, the only irregularity in this beautiful face, but giving it a special characteristic and, among other things, a sort of arrogance. Her expression was always more serious than cheerful, thoughtful; but how the smile went to that face, how the laughter went to her, cheerful, young, selfless! It is clear that hot, frank, rustic, honest, strong as a hero, and drunk Razumikhin, who had never seen anything like it, lost his head at first sight. In addition, the case, as if on purpose, for the first time showed him Dunya at a wonderful moment of love and joy of meeting with his brother. He later saw how her lower lip quivered in indignation in response to the impudent and ungratefully cruel orders of his brother, and he could not resist. He, however, told the truth when he lied drunk on the stairs just now that Raskolnikov's eccentric mistress, Praskovya Pavlovna, would be jealous of him not only for Avdotya Romanovna, but, perhaps, for Pulcheria Alexandrovna herself. Despite the fact that Pulcheria Alexandrovna was already forty-three years old, her face still retained the remnants of its former beauty, and besides, she seemed much younger than her years, which almost always happens with women who have retained clarity of spirit, freshness of impressions and honest, pure heat of the heart until old age. Let's say in brackets that to preserve all this is the only way not to lose one's beauty even in old age. Her hair was already beginning to turn gray and thin, small radiant wrinkles had long since appeared around her eyes, her cheeks were sunken and dried up from care and grief, and yet this face was beautiful. It was a portrait of Dunechkin's face, only twenty years later, and besides the expression of her lower lip, which did not protrude forward. Pulcheria Alexandrovna was sensitive, however, not to the point of cloying, timid and compliant, but to a certain extent: she could give in a lot, she could agree to a lot, even from what contradicted her convictions, but there was always such a trait of honesty, rules and extreme convictions, beyond which no circumstances could force her to cross. Exactly twenty minutes after Razumikhin's departure, there were two quiet but hasty knocks on the door; he returned. I will not enter, there is no time! he hurried when they opened the door, he sleeps in all Ivanovo, perfectly, calmly, and God forbid that he sleeps for ten hours. He has Nastasya; told me not to come out. Now I'll bring Zosimov, he will report to you, and then you to the side; exhausted, I see, utterly. And he started down the corridor from them. What an efficient and ... devoted young man! exclaimed Pulcheria Alexandrovna, extremely delighted. Seems like a nice personality! Avdotya Romanovna answered with some warmth, starting again to pace up and down the room. Almost an hour later there were footsteps in the corridor and another knock on the door. Both women waited, this time fully believing Razumikhin's promise; and indeed, he managed to drag Zosimov. Zosimov immediately agreed to leave the feast and go and see Raskolnikov, but he went to the ladies reluctantly and with great distrust, not trusting the drunken Razumikhin. But his vanity was immediately reassured and even flattered: he realized that they really were waiting for him, like an oracle. He sat for exactly ten minutes and managed to convince and reassure Pulcheria Alexandrovna. He spoke with extraordinary concern, but with restraint and somehow intensely serious, just like a twenty-seven-year-old doctor at an important consultation, and did not evade the subject by a single word and did not show the slightest desire to enter into a more personal and private relationship with both ladies. Noticing even at the entrance how dazzlingly beautiful Avdotya Romanovna was, he immediately tried not to notice her at all, during the entire visit, and addressed himself solely to Pulcheria Alexandrovna. All this gave him extraordinary inner satisfaction. In fact, he said about the patient that he found him at the present moment in a very satisfactory condition. According to his observations, the patient’s illness, in addition to the bad material situation of the last months of life, also has some moral reasons, “is, so to speak, the product of many complex moral and material influences, anxieties, fears, worries, some ideas ... and other things” . Noticing in passing that Avdotya Romanovna began to listen with particular attention, Zossimov expanded somewhat more on this subject. To Pulcheria Alexandrovna's anxious and timid question about "allegedly some suspicions of insanity," he answered with a calm and frank smile that his words were too exaggerated; that, of course, some immovable thought is noticeable in the patient, something revealing monomania, since he, Zossimov, is now especially following this extremely interesting department of medicine, but one must remember that almost up to today the patient was delirious, and ... and, of course, the arrival of his relatives will strengthen him, dispel him and have a salutary effect, “if only new special shocks can be avoided,” he added significantly. Then he got up, bowed respectfully and hospitably, accompanied by blessings, ardent gratitude, prayers, and even Avdotya Romanovna's hand reaching out to him for a shake, without seeking him, and went out extremely pleased with his visit and even more with himself. And we will talk tomorrow; lie down, now, by all means! sealed Razumikhin, leaving with Zosimov. Tomorrow, as soon as possible, I will report to you. However, what a delightful girl this Avdotya Romanovna is! remarked Zosimov, almost licking his lips, when both went out into the street. Delicious? You said amazing! Roared Razumikhin and suddenly rushed at Zosimov and grabbed him by the throat. If you ever dare... See? Understand? he shouted, shaking him by the collar and pressing him against the wall, did you hear? Let go, drunken devil! Zosimov fought back, and then, when he had already released him, he looked at him intently and suddenly rolled with laughter. Razumikhin stood in front of him, hands down, in gloomy and serious thought. Of course, I'm an ass, he said, gloomy as a cloud, but... and so are you. Well, no, brother, not at all either. I don't dream of nonsense. They walked in silence, and, only approaching Raskolnikov's apartment, Razumikhin, greatly preoccupied, broke the silence. Listen, he said to Zosimov, you are a nice fellow, but besides all your bad qualities, you are also a slut, I know that, and even one of the dirty ones. You are a nervous, weak rubbish, you are blissful, you have grown fat and you cannot deny yourself anything, and I call this dirt, because it directly leads to dirt. You have softened yourself up to such an extent that, I confess, I understand least of all how you can be a good and even selfless doctor with all this. He sleeps on a feather bed (the doctor!), And at night he gets up for the patient! In three years, you won’t get up for the patient anymore ... Well, hell, that’s not the point, but this: you are sleeping in the hostess’s apartment today (I forced her to persuade her!), And I’m in the kitchen: here’s a chance for you to meet shorter! Not what you think! Here, brother, there is no shadow of this ... I don't think so at all. Here, brother, modesty, silence, shyness, fierce chastity, and with all this sighs, and melts like wax, and melts! Deliver me from her, for the sake of all the devils in the world! Preavenant! .. I will deserve it, I will deserve it with my head! Zosimov laughed more than ever. Look, you've been dismantled! Why do I need her? I assure you, there is little worries, just say whatever nonsense you want, just sit down beside me and talk. Besides, you're a doctor, start treating something. I swear you won't regret it. She has clavichords; I, you know, strum a little; I have one song there, a Russian one, a real one: “I’ll burst into tears with fuel ...” She loves real ones, well, it started with a song; But you are a virtuoso at the pianoforte, meter, Rubinstein ... I assure you, you will not repent! Why did you make any promises to her, or what? Form subscription? He promised to marry... Nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing! Yes, she is not like that at all; Chebarov came to see her... Well, then drop it! Yes, you can’t quit like that! Why not? Well, yes, somehow it’s impossible, and that’s all! Here, brother, there is a retracting beginning. So why did you lure her? Yes, I didn’t lure at all, maybe I’m even lured myself, due to my stupidity, but it won’t make any difference to her, you or me, as long as someone sits nearby and sighs. Here, brother ... I can’t express it to you, here, well, you know mathematics well, and now you are still studying, I know ... well, start studying integral calculus for her, I’m not kidding, I’m serious, she will definitely not care: she will look at you and sigh, and so on for a whole year in a row. By the way, I talked to her for a very long time, two days in a row, about the Prussian House of Lords (because what is there to talk about with her?), only sighed and sighed! Just don’t talk about love, shy to convulsions, but also show that you can’t move away, well, that’s enough. Comfortably awful; just like at home, read, sit, lie down, write... You can even kiss, with care... Yes, what do I need it for? Eh, I can’t explain to you in any way! You see, you two are perfect for each other! I've been thinking about you before... After all, you'll end up like this! So is it all the same to you sooner or later? Here, brother, such a feather bed lies, eh! and not one feather bed! It draws in here; here is the end of the world, an anchor, a quiet haven, the navel of the earth, the three-fish foundation of the world, the essence of pancakes, fat kulebyaks, an evening samovar, quiet sighs and warm katsaveykas, heated couches, well, that's for sure you died, but at the same time you are alive, both benefits at once! Well, brother, damn, lied, it's time to sleep! Listen: sometimes I wake up at night, well, and go to see him. Just nothing, nonsense, everything is fine. Don't worry, and you especially, and if you want, go too once. But just notice something, for example, delirium, or fever, or whatever, immediately wake me up. However, it can't be...

The fourth volume of the Collected Works of F. M. Dostoevsky publishes works published in 1861–1866: “Humiliated and Insulted”, “Bad Anecdote”, “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”, “Notes from the Underground”, “Crocodile”, "Player". All of them (except for "The Gambler") were first published in the magazines of F. M. and M. M. Dostoevsky "Time" and "Epoch".

Dostoevsky in the novel "Humiliated and Insulted" returns to the motives and characters of "Poor People", "White Nights", "Weak Heart", "Netochka Nezvanova", which in the novel receive a largely different psychological and ideological content. This is a return to the 40s, but enriched by the Siberian experience of Dostoevsky. The novel correlates not only fates, characters, psychological situations, but also two epochs in the life of Russian society - the 1840s and 1860s. The novel became a kind of summing up, but not a farewell to the past, much less a renunciation of it. The past in "The Humiliated and Insulted" is concentrated around the memories of the "Poor People", the personality and the last years of the life of V. G. Belinsky (critic B.). Exactly tragic fate Belinsky occupies a key place in artistic concept novel, organically merging with the fate of other "humiliated and insulted" heroes and the gloomy slum image of the capital city. N. A. Dobrolyubov wrote about Dostoevsky’s commitment to the “truly humane” direction of the 1840s in his last article, emphasizing the relevance and vitality of the ideals and beliefs of the era of Belinsky, Herzen, Petrashevsky in post-reform Russia. The very title of Dostoevsky's novel became an emblem of the humanistic content of Russian literature of the 19th century.

The temporal layers in Dostoevsky's novel "secrets" (obviously genre related to the works of Ch. » strip of life. "Humiliated and Insulted" in a certain sense are perceived as an intermediate link in the writer's work and a sketch for "Crime and Punishment": the search for his own genre and original forms of narration, the discovery of new characters (especially this applies to Prince Valkovsky - the first in the gallery of "predatory" types Dostoevsky). All this determined a special place in the work of the writer "The Humiliated and Insulted" - Dostoevsky's first great "Petersburg" novel, and certainly one of his most popular works. "Humiliated and Insulted", which had a great reader success, strengthened the reputation of Dostoevsky as an artist and the "soil" magazine "Vremya". However, there are almost no actual soil ideas here, unlike other artistic and journalistic works of Dostoevsky of the 1860s, directly or indirectly connected with the “controversy of ideas” of the century and the propaganda of “pochvennichestvo” - a direction whose main essence was to search for a “general idea”, ideal, truly national formulas of progress and enlightenment. With the greatest clarity, the soil program, in many ways consonant with the theory of "Russian socialism" by A. I. Herzen, was outlined by Dostoevsky in the publicist cycle "A number of articles on Russian literature." In 1861, Dostoevsky enthusiastically believed in the possibility of a peaceful and gradual revival of Russia, rejoiced at the new spirit of reforms, the ideas of great emancipation, and the flourishing of "benevolent glasnost." Gradually, however, these hopes faded, which was greatly facilitated by a sharp deterioration in the political situation, the onset of reaction: the massacre of M. L. Mikhailov, the fires in St. Petersburg, the arrest of N. G. Chernyshevsky, and the uprising in Poland (1863-1864). The magazine "Vremya" was also banned, which in 1863 was forced to cease to exist on the April issue.

The story "Bad Anecdote" clearly testified to Dostoevsky's skepticism, distrust of liberal talk about the revival and renewal of Russia and, at the same time, a wary and disgusted attitude towards the vulgar forms that emancipation took. Dostoevsky's satirical story is the writer's direct artistic response to the short-lived "liberal spring", pathetic and inconsistent attempts to introduce the "new order" from above, which ultimately resulted in a "bad anecdote".

The story was written after Dostoevsky's first trip to Western Europe (1862), which played significant role in the evolution of the moods and views of the writer. Dostoevsky, who had long dreamed of a meeting with the "land of holy miracles", saw the France of Napoleon III, about which K. Marx wrote in the book "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte": transported back to a dead era ... ". Marx K., Engels F. Op. T. 8. S. 121. The result of the trip was a radical change in Dostoevsky's ideas about Europe. Referring to the problem of "the West and Russia" in "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", Dostoevsky furiously argues with "Russian Europeans". The proximity of Dostoevsky's paradoxes to the ideas of A. Grigoriev's "organic criticism" is symptomatic. Dostoevsky's controversy with "Western" theories is also deepening, directly affecting the old leaders of the "European" party - Chaadaev and Belinsky (the overall assessment of the critic's activity changes dramatically in comparison with "The Humiliated and Insulted" and "A Number of Articles on Russian Literature"). Accordingly, the controversy with the Slavophiles is clearly softening, receding into the background.

Dostoevsky's journey to the old and newest historical and literary "Russian Europe" undertaken by Dostoevsky in "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" ironically sets off the impressions of what he saw in modern Europe, which appeared as the realm of reason and cleanliness, a grandiose anthill without ideals and "miracles". Dostoevsky depicted with great artistic force the London "Baal" and the musty spiritual climate of France during the period of social and political stagnation. His criticism of bourgeois civilization had certain grounds, largely coinciding with the observations and conclusions of A. I. Herzen. But Dostoevsky (as well as, in part, Herzen), struck by the moral decline of Europe, came to too far and imperative conclusions about the “nature” of Western man in general, in which “there is no fraternal principle, but, on the contrary, the individual, personal, constantly weakening, demanding with a sword in the hand of their rights." This idea of ​​Western Europe, so clearly and categorically formulated by Dostoevsky in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, will remain unchanged in the future. The main ethical and ideological reference point in Dostoevsky's work will be the image of an ideal human brotherhood, vividly depicted in the "feuilleton for the whole summer" (this is how the writer defined the genre nature of the work).

"Winter Notes" - last work, published in the magazine "Time". Dostoevsky took the magazine's ban as a catastrophe. After considerable effort, the magazine managed to be resumed under a different name: Epoch. The new edition was destined to have a short life. Perhaps the most hard times in the life of Dostoevsky. One by one, his wife Maria Dmitrievna, his beloved elder brother Mikhail Mikhailovich, passed away. “And suddenly I was left alone, and I was just scared. The whole life was broken in two at once. In one half, which I crossed, there was everything for which I lived, and in the other, still unknown half, everything was alien, everything was new and not a single heart could replace both of them.<…>Everything around me became cold and deserted,” Dostoevsky wrote on March 31, 1865 to his Siberian friend A.E. Wrangel. The death of the leading literary critic, the ideologist of “pochvennichestvo” Apollon Grigoriev, also dealt a serious blow to journal affairs. The "epoch" was doomed and soon ceased to exist, despite the energetic efforts of Dostoevsky, who published the story "Notes from the Underground" and the story "Crocodile" in the journal.

Philosophical tale"Notes from the Underground" was an important milestone in the ideological and artistic evolution of Dostoevsky. In the story, the “controversy of ideas” of the century and the dramatic circumstances of the writer’s life (and partly the era of the 1840s) were refracted in a complex artistic way. Elements of ideological controversy, parody are very strong in the story (as in the story "Crocodile"), although, of course, they by no means exhaust the content of the work, in which, according to a long-established tradition, they see the beginning of the "new" Dostoevsky, ideological and aesthetic prolegomena to great novels and Diary of a Writer. The arguments and “fantasies” of the Paradoxalist (“anti-hero”) struck a multi-component system of ideas drawn from various European and Russian sources, integrated into a kind of single and integral rational and positivist worldview. They touched both the philosophical propositions of Hegel, O. Comte, G. Bockl, social-utopian "fantasies", and the "theory of egoism" (or "calculation of benefits") of the heroes of Chernyshevsky, the literary "decrees" of Dobrolyubov and Saltykov-Shchedrin, positivist and utilitarian ideas in the articles of Pisarev and Zaitsev, "calendar" and "formulas" (economic, political, aesthetic) by M. N. Katkov.

The irrational rebellion of the Paradoxicalist, who, with the extreme frankness and “hysterical thirst for contradictions and contrasts” characteristic of the hero, challenges everything generally accepted, legalized, “normal”, reasonable, is, in essence, a peculiar confession without “order” and “system”. Logical confession and "natural story" organically merged into a new genre: Dostoevsky's brilliant artistic discovery, appreciated only by A. Grigoriev during the life of the writer ("You write in this way").

The underground is a cynical, hysterical and tragic worldview: a natural product of the apex civilization, cut off from the soil, “living life”. Later, in the outline of the preface to the novel The Teenager, Dostoevsky defined the essence, the most characteristic features of the “underground” person and the “underground”: “I am proud that for the first time I brought out a real person Russian majority and for the first time exposed its ugly and tragic side. The tragedy consists in the consciousness of ugliness.<…>I alone brought out the tragedy of the underground, which consists in suffering, in self-punishment, in the consciousness of the best and in the impossibility of achieving it, and, most importantly, in the vivid conviction of these unfortunates that everyone is like that, and therefore, it’s not worth even correcting! What can support reformers? Reward, faith? Awards - no one, faith - no one! One more step from here, and here is the extreme debauchery, crime (murder)<…>The reason for the underground is the destruction of faith in general rules. "Nothing is sacred." Thus, the writer himself regarded the "underground" as a phenomenon not exceptional, but typical, a kind of paradoxical-tragic and "ugly" variety of "nihilism" - the spiritual disease of modern times.

The story "Crocodile" is even more directly connected than "Notes from the Underground" with the social and literary controversy of the mid-1860s. Here, in particular, Dostoevsky responded to the controversy between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo, which he had previously characterized in a pamphlet article as a "split" in the camp of the "nihilists." Dostoevsky also took advantage of other events in the journal and literary world, creating a “fantastic tale” literally permeated with pamphlet motifs.

The present volume concludes with the novel The Gambler. Dostoevsky, forced to fulfill the enslaving terms of the contract with the book publisher F. T. Stellovsky, interrupted work on Crime and Punishment and dictated The Gambler to the stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina, who soon became the writer’s wife, in less than a month. The novel "The Gambler", whose action takes place in Western Europe, is directly related to the observations and theses of "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions". At the center of the novel is the opposition of the Russian national character (“I take a direct nature, a person, however, highly developed, but in everything unfinished, distrustful and not daring not to believe rebelling against authorities and fearing them") and "Western", complete, stable, constant and, of course, "philistine". Autobiographical motifs are exceptionally strong in The Gambler: Dostoevsky's long-term passion for playing roulette and the complex dramatic story relations between the writer and Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslova echo central images and plot collisions of the novel (and naturally, Dostoevsky's letters of those years and the memoirs of Suslova and A. G. Dostoevskaya serve as an invaluable "real commentary" on the work). Having rapidly completed The Gambler, Dostoevsky concentrated entirely on work on the novel Crime and Punishment.

The text of "Humiliated and Insulted" was prepared by A. V. Arkhipova; the texts of the other works included in this volume are by E. I. Kiyko.

Notes to "Humiliated and Insulted" were compiled by N. F. Budanova; to other works - E. I. Kiyko. The afterword was written by V. A. Tunimanov, who is also the editor of the volume. SA Polozkova took part in the editorial and technical preparation of the volume.

Humiliated and insulted

First published in the journal "Vremya" (1861. No. 1-7) with the subtitle: "From the Notes of a Failed Writer" and a dedication to M. M. Dostoevsky. The novel was published as a separate edition in St. Petersburg in 1861. During Dostoevsky's lifetime it was reprinted in 1865 and 1879.

The emergence of the idea of ​​"The Humiliated and Insulted", obviously, should be attributed to 1857. On November 3 of this year, Dostoevsky from Semipalatinsk informed his brother Mikhail about his intention to write "a novel from Petersburg life like" Poor people "(and the thought is even better than" Poor people ")" . After moving to St. Petersburg in the spring of 1860, Dostoevsky immediately began work on the novel, which A. I. Schubert informed on May 3, 1860: “I returned here and am completely in a feverish situation. It's all about my novel. I want to write well, I feel that there is poetry in him, I know that my entire literary career depends on his success. Three months will now have to sit day and night. But what a reward when I finish! Calmness, a clear look around, the consciousness that he did what he wanted to do, insisted on his own. Dostoevsky F. M. Full coll. cit.: V 30 t. L., 1985. T. 28 2 . S. 9. However, work on the novel proceeded slowly. “... I’m starting to write and I still don’t know what will happen, but I decide to work without straightening my neck,” Dostoevsky complained to A.P. Milyukov on September 10, 1860. There. S. 15. The writer worked on "Humiliated and Insulted" for more than a year. As the date at the end of the journal publication testifies, the novel was completed by the writer on July 9, 1861. On July 16, 1861, M. M. Dostoevsky wrote in connection with this to Y. P. Polonsky: “He (Fyodor Mikhailovich. - Ed.) just got off, then I have finished my novel. Dostoevsky: Articles and materials. Pb., 1922. Sat. 1. S. 459.

The narration in "Humiliated and Insulted" is in the first person. Ivan Petrovich - a beginning poor St. Petersburg writer, raznochinets - is both the narrator and the protagonist of the novel. This image is partly autobiographical. A story about the literary debut of Ivan Petrovich, an enthusiastic assessment of his first novel by "critic B." (i.e. V. G. Belinsky), the relationship of the young writer with his "entrepreneur" (publisher) - these and some other facts go back to the biography of the young Dostoevsky, the author of "Poor People", who brilliantly entered the literary field in 1846 and favored by Belinsky himself. The unexpected and unexplained in the novel collapse - after a successful debut - of Ivan Petrovich's literary hopes is also an indirect reflection of the biography of the young Dostoevsky.

In The Humiliated and Insulted, the novelist abandoned the strict chronological principle that characterized his subsequent novels. The chronology of the novel, as researchers have repeatedly noted, is inconsistent, and the historical background against which events take place is conditional. The action of the novel takes place over a year and a half, but its beginning is timed to the mid-40s, and later the novel mentions the events and facts of the historical, social and literary life of Russia until the end of the 1850s.

An ironic description of the circle of "advanced" youth, gathering on Wednesdays "at Levenka and Borenka" (these names themselves, evoking the memory of the reader Levon and Borenka, Repetilov's friends in Griboedov's comedy "Woe from Wit", testify to the parodic nature of the image of the circle), - an example of Dostoevsky's deliberate displacement of chronological boundaries and the convergence of various eras.

Problems of an abstract philosophical nature, discussed in the circle of Levenka and Borenka, make us recall the “Fridays” of M. V. Petrashevsky, which the young Dostoevsky visited in the late 1840s. The disputes of Alyosha’s friends “about contemporary issues” (“We are talking about glasnost, about beginning reforms, about love for humanity, about modern figures ...”) were characteristic of the raznochin-democratic environment of the late 1850s - early 1860s, on the eve of the bourgeois transformations in Russia.

The shift in chronology allowed Dostoevsky to create a work with a broader coverage of the private and public life of Russia of that era than was originally intended, as well as to express the idea of ​​a succession in the ideological and cultural life of Russia in the 1840s and 1850s.

"Humiliated and Insulted" - Dostoevsky's first great novel after hard labor. It reflected the ideological and artistic evolution of the writer, who brought from Siberia the conviction of the tragic isolation of the progressive Russian intelligentsia from the "soil", disbelief in the revolutionary path of transforming Russian reality.

Ivan Petrovich is depicted as a writer of the Belinsky school and an ideological like-minded critic. However, the humanistic ideal of brotherhood, goodness and justice, to which the hero is faithful, unlike the ideals of Belinsky, does not have an active, effective character. The attitude of the heroes towards the literary first-born Ivan Petrovich, as it were, serves as a criterion for their moral essence. The humanistic pathos of "Poor People" is close to Ikhmenev, but completely alien to Valkovsky, who is able to experience only a feeling of arrogant contempt inherent in the aristocratic environment for the destitute "little man".

The frequent references in the novel to Poor Folk, Belinsky, and the era of the 1840s are far from accidental. The humanistic direction of Russian literature of the 1840s was built on the belief that "the most downtrodden, last person there is also a man and is called my brother. The words of the old man Ikhmenev, expressing his impression of the novel by Ivan Petrovich (and in essence defining the ideological essence of "Poor People"). These words, obviously, are inspired by the title of Dobrolyubov's article "The Downtrodden People", devoted to the analysis of "The Humiliated and Insulted". This belief also constitutes the ethical basis of the novel The Humiliated and Insulted.

ABOUT intercom between "Poor People" and "Humiliated and Insulted" is evidenced by a kind of roll call of the titles of both novels. The epithet "poor" in the title of Dostoevsky's first novel is ambiguous. The “poor” are not only people deprived of material prosperity or the necessary means of subsistence, but also people who are unfortunate, destitute, humiliated, and thereby arouse sympathy and compassion. In this sense, the concepts of "poor", "humiliated", "insulted" are synonymous.

The events described in the novel take place in St. Petersburg. The writer sought to accurately reproduce the topography northern capital. Voznesensky Prospekt (now Mayorova Avenue), Bolshaya Morskaya (Herzen Street), Gorokhovaya (Dzerzhinsky Street), Sixth Line of Vasilevsky Island, Shestilavochnaya Street (now Mayakovsky Street), Liteiny Prospekt, Fontanka, Semenovsky, Voznesensky, Trade Bridges, etc. etc. - all these are historically specific signs of St. Petersburg, which is depicted as a typical big city of that era with its inherent social contradictions and contrasts. Here, "the most important prince of Rothschild", symbolizing the power of money, determines human destinies and relationships.

The anti-capitalist theme, interpreted by Dostoevsky from a humanistic position, runs through the entire novel.

Nelli's story allowed Dostoevsky to portray the St. Petersburg slums and dens with their inhabitants, the life of the urban social "bottom", where poverty, illness, vices, and crimes reign. " Small man”, lost in this terrible world, is doomed to poverty, shame, physical and moral death.

“It was a gloomy story,” Ivan Petrovich characterizes Nelly’s fate in this way, “one of those gloomy and painful stories that so often and inconspicuously, almost mysteriously, come true under the heavy Petersburg sky, in the dark, hidden back streets of a huge city, amid the eccentric boiling of life. , stupid egoism, clashing interests, gloomy debauchery, secret crimes, in the midst of all this pitch hell of a meaningless and abnormal life ... ”(present. vol. p. 164).

No less tragic are the fates of other heroes of the novel, "humiliated and insulted." Nelly's mother and grandfather, robbed and deceived by Valkovsky, perish; misfortunes befell the Ikhmenev family, ruined and disgraced by the same Valkovsky; Ivan Petrovich's personal life and literary plans collapsed.

The all-powerful and triumphant evil is represented in the novel by Prince Valkovsky, who, according to the apt remark of N. A. Dobrolyubov, "has completely taken out his soul." Dobrolyubov N. A. Sobr. cit.: In 9 vols. M.; L., 1963. T. 7. S. 235. Valkovsky is a theorist and practitioner of frank, cynical, predatory egoism and individualism. All the plot lines of the novel are drawn to this sinister figure. He is the cause of misfortune and suffering "humiliated and offended."

Valkovsky is a new type for the writer. This hero-ideologist is the literary predecessor of more complex and artistically perfect heroes of the same kind - the "underground paradoxicalist", Raskolnikov, Svidrigailov, Stavrogin. The image of Valkovsky still does not have the psychological and philosophical complexity that is characteristic, for example, of Svidrigailov and Stavrogin, who are most related to him, in whose souls, however, there is a painful struggle between evil and good.

The image of Prince Valkovsky has certain analogies in Western European literatures - in the works of Choderlos de Laclos, the Marquis de Sade, Schiller, Hoffmann, E. Xu, F. Soulier, Balzac, depicting refined cynics, apologists and preachers of immoralism, in the philosophy of M. Stirner, the author sensational book "The only one and his property". The novel "Humiliated and Insulted" is "literary". Researchers have noted its deep and many-sided connection with the traditions of Western European literature - German (Goethe, Hoffmann, Schiller), English (Dickens), French (J. Sand, E. Xu, Balzac, etc.). For more on this, see: Dostoevsky F. M. Full coll. cit.: V 30 v. 1972. V. 3. S. 525–527 (commentary by I. Z. Serman). But the amoralism of Valkovsky had vital origins in the Russian reality of that time, in contemporary Dostoevsky bourgeois individualistic ethics. Money for Valkovsky is the main engine and arbiter of human destinies. Moreover, the prince is a hedonist, striving to enjoy life, to which he treats consumerism. “Life is a business deal,” says Valkovsky in a conversation with Ivan Petrovich, “don’t throw money away for nothing, but perhaps pay for pleasing, and you will fulfill all your obligations to your neighbor, that’s my morality<…>I have no ideals and do not want to have<…>In the world one can live so cheerfully, so sweetly without ideals…” (present volume, p. 244).

If Valkovsky belongs to the "predatory type", then his son Alyosha is one of the kind, but weak, weak-willed people. Childishness, innocence, "innocence" give Alyosha a peculiar charm and partly make him related to Alyosha Karamazov. In contrast to his father, Alyosha is not a conscious bearer of evil, but his thoughtless egoism, frivolity, irresponsibility in his actions objectively contribute to evil.

Drawing the world of "humiliated and insulted", Dostoevsky does not idealize the inner possibilities of his characters. These are not only good, noble, unfortunate and suffering people, worthy of love and participation. At the same time, they are morally ill, flawed, because the constant insult to human dignity does not go unpunished, but cripples the soul of a person, embitters him.

The problem of egoism in its social and ethical aspects, which occupies a central place in the novel, Dostoevsky explores comprehensively, with great psychological and philosophical depth. Egoism in its various forms and manifestations is portrayed to him as a great social evil, a source of "unseemliness" of the world and human relations. Selfishness divides, divides even the closest, dearest people to each other (the Ikhmenev family), prevents their human understanding and unity.

Valkovsky is the bearer of the most terrible - predatory, cynical, wolf egoism. Alyosha Valkovsky and Katya represent naive, spontaneous egoism in the novel. Natasha is inherent in the egoism of a sick, exclusive, sacrificial love for an unworthy chosen one, which makes her deaf to the suffering of loved ones (parents, Ivan Petrovich). She, like Nellie, is extremely characterized by the egoism of suffering, in which she proudly and fiercely closes herself. The egoism of suffering is also characteristic of the old man Ikhmenev and partly of Ivan Petrovich.

Ivan Petrovich sees the way out of an abnormal, painful state that divides and divides people in love, forgiveness, moral stamina and spiritual unity of the “humiliated and offended”. This idea is touchingly and naively expressed at the end of the novel by the old man Ikhmenev: “Oh! Let us be humiliated, let us be offended, but we are together again, and let, let these proud and arrogant ones, who have humiliated and insulted us, triumph now! Let them throw a stone at us!.. We will go hand in hand…” (see p. 313).

Of course, Dostoevsky understood that such moral unity does not destroy social evil, which triumphs in the novel in the person of Valkovsky. At the end of the novel, the fates of its heroes are tragically destroyed. The humanist writer truthfully showed the tragically insoluble conflicts of his era.

"Humiliated and Insulted" is in many ways a transitional work in Dostoevsky's work. This is the first, not yet quite artistically perfect, experience of the new "ideological novel" for the writer. It contains the beginnings of many ideas, images, and poetics of the mature Dostoevsky.

Chernyshevsky sympathetically responded in Sovremennik to the appearance in print of the first part of The Insulted and Humiliated: “It is impossible to guess how the content will develop in the following parts, therefore we will only say now that the first part arouses strong interest in getting acquainted with the further course of relations between the three main actors faces: the young man on whose behalf the story is being told (the novel takes the form of an autobiography), the girl whom he dearly loves, who herself appreciates his nobility, but gave herself up to another, charming and spineless person. The personality of this happy lover is very well conceived, and if the author manages to maintain psychological fidelity in the relationship between him and the girl who has given herself to him, his romance will be one of the best we have had in recent years. In the first part, in our opinion, the story has truthfulness: this is a combination of pride and strength in a woman with a willingness to endure the cruelest insults from a loved one, one of which, it seems, would be enough to replace the former love with contemptuous hatred - this is a strange combination in In fact, it is very common in women. Natasha has a premonition from the very beginning that the person to whom she is given is not worth her; she anticipates that she is ready to leave her, and yet she does not push him away, on the contrary, she leaves her family for him in order to keep his love for herself by settling with him.<…>Unfortunately, too many of the noblest women can recall similar cases in their own lives, and it’s good if they only remember as past history already alien to their present. Chernyshevsky N. G. Full coll. op. M., 1957. T. 7. S. 951–952.

The beginning of the publication of the novel “Humiliated and Insulted” in the journal “Vremya” was welcomed by A. N. Pleshcheev, who wrote: “His new novel reminded us of his previous works: the same heart-grabbing notes are heard in it ... even that fantastic color that Mr. Dostoevsky loves so much, the coloring, as if inspired by one of his favorite writers, Hoffmann, is found here in the very first scene<…>The first chapter of the new novel, where the strange old man and his dog appear, is, in our opinion, excellent." Moscow statements. 1861. Jan. 17 No. 13 (signed: P).

Dostoyevsky's novel, after its publication, attracted the attention of critics of various directions. Diverging in assessing the ideological and artistic merits of the novel, critics, however, almost unanimously recognized the fascination and entertaining nature of the writer's new work.

An article by A. Khitrov appeared in the journal "Son of the Fatherland", in which the high artistic merits of the novel were noted. “The author is an amazing master of shading the characters of the faces he draws and putting a special shade on each of them, putting it not with several tricks, but at one time,” wrote A. Khitrov. - The heroes of the novel are not some pale shadows, but living people, each speaking according to his own convictions, according to his own view. How alive you see in front of you this unfortunate Smith, who, it seems to you, is still sitting at Miller's and looking with a senselessly cold look at the hot German<…>how alive you see this unfortunate Ikhmenev, hiding his feelings from people, and in silence - crying for his Natasha. Son of the fatherland. 1861. No. 9. S. 1094. The critic notes the artistic authenticity of the images created by Dostoevsky. “In general, in this respect the author has many magnificent, masterful pages. One scene - and the whole person is in front of you. Let's not forget at the same time that the characters chosen by the author are not easy. There. The main advantage of Dostoevsky's novel, according to the critic, lies in the general humanistic idea of ​​the novel, in the author's deep sympathy for all "humiliated and offended".

The critic of The Russian Word, G. A. Kushelev-Bezborodko, on the contrary, emphasized the artistic imperfection of Dostoevsky’s new work, noted the weak side in the “artistic construction” of the novel, the tension and invention of plot situations, the unnatural behavior of the characters in the novel, etc. For example, criticism Ivan Petrovich's attitude towards Natasha, who left him, and her lover seem implausible; old Ikhmenev - to Ivan Petrovich, who deceived his trust; Natasha behaves unjustifiably callously towards her parents.

The love of Natasha and Katya for Alyosha seems incomprehensible and inexplicable to the critic. Both of them love selflessly "the most stupid young man, still a boy, "" a phrase-maker to improbability, a talker, a petty tyrant and at the same time utterly stupid." Rus. word. 1861. No. 9. S. 44–45. According to Kushelev-Bezborodko, the author "did not outline, outline, explain not a single living person, not a single real type." There. S. 46. The title of the novel "does not at all justify its content". “Humiliated and insulted! exclaims the critic. “How many terrible dramas lie in these two words, how many really are humiliated, how many offended!”. In Dostoevsky's novel, the critic believes, "as a matter of fact, only the old man Ikhmenev is humiliated and insulted." The rest of the characters, "if they are offended, then decidedly for their own entertainment." There.

However, despite all the shortcomings, notes Kushelev-Bezborodko, the novel is read with enthusiasm thanks to the "masterful way of telling." Dostoevsky has “an inimitable art of storytelling; he has his own original story, his own turn of phrase, completely original and full of artistry. The peculiar style of Dostoevsky is not inferior in its merits to the style of Turgenev, Goncharov, Pisemsky. The critic calls the novel "The Humiliated and Insulted" "an excellent fairy tale novel." There. S. 45.

The most detailed and meaningful analysis of the novel "The Humiliated and Insulted" is given in the well-known article by N. A. Dobrolyubov "The Downtrodden People", published in the September book of "Sovremennik" for 1861.

Dobrolyubov classified Dostoevsky's novel as one of the "best literary phenomena of the year" Dobrolyubov N. A. Sobr. cit.: In 9 vols. T. 7. S. 228. and sympathetically mentioned Dostoevsky's commitment to the "humanistic" direction of the 1840s. “That was a lively and effective direction,” the critic writes, “a truly humanistic direction, not knocked down and not weakened by various legal and economic maxims. Then the question of why a person is angry or steals was treated in the same way as the question of why he suffers and is afraid of everything: with love and pain, they began to take up the pathological study of such issues, and if this direction continued, it would, without doubt would have been more fruitful than all those who followed him. There. S. 244.

Dobrolyubov noted that in “The Humiliated and Insulted” “there are a lot of lively, well-finished particulars, the hero of the novel, although he aims for melodrama, is not bad in places, the character of little Nelly is described positively well, the character of old Ikhmenev is also very vividly and naturally outlined . All this gives the novel the right to the attention of the public. Dobrolyubov N. A. Sobr. cit.: In 9 vols. T. 7. S. 230.

However, in general, the novel did not satisfy the critic, who said that "The Humiliated and Insulted" was "below aesthetic requirements."

“This poverty and indefiniteness of images, this need to repeat oneself, this inability to process each character even enough to at least give him the appropriate way of external expression,” writes Dobrolyubov, “all this, revealing, on the one hand, a lack of diversity in the author’s reserve of observations , on the other hand, directly speaks against the artistic completeness and integrity of its creation. There. S. 239.

Among the artistic failures of the novel, Dobrolyubov refers to the image of the protagonist, who, according to the critic, is one of "all the humiliated and offended<…>humiliated and offended perhaps more than anyone else. “The action of the novel,” the critic notes, “lasts for some month, and then Ivan Petrovich is constantly running errands<…>But that's all; what exactly is in his soul, we do not know this, although we see that he is not well. In a word, before us is not a passionately in love, loving person to the point of self-sacrifice<…>before us is simply an author who has clumsily adopted a certain form of a story, without thinking about what duties it imposes on him. That is why the tone of the story is decidedly false, composed; and the narrator himself, who, in the essence of the matter, should have been the protagonist, is something like a confidante of ancient tragedies to us. There. pp. 231–232. Other characters in the novel were criticized as well. “Natasha's syllogisms are amazingly true, as if she studied them in the seminary,” Dobrolyubov ironically. - Her psychological insight is amazing, the construction of speech would do honor to any speaker, even from the ancients. But you will agree that it is very noticeable that Natasha speaks in the style of Mr. Dostoevsky? And this syllable is assimilated by most of the characters. There. S. 238. The critic is perplexed, "how can a stinking booger like Alyosha inspire the love of such a girl in himself." There. S. 234. Dostoevsky did not explain this. "The heart of the heroine is hidden from us, and the author, apparently, understands its secrets no more than ours." There. S. 235.

According to the critic, Dostoevsky also failed to "look into the soul" of Valkovsky. “How and what made the prince the way he is? What interests and worries him seriously? What is he afraid of and what, finally, does he believe? And if you don't believe in anything<…>then how and by what means this curious process took place. There. The general nature of Dobrolyubov's remarks testifies that he evaluated Dostoevsky's novel primarily from the standpoint of Gogol's poetics and the "natural school" of the 1840s and 1850s, which provided for the social motivation of the characters' characters and behavior. Therefore, the critic could not fully appreciate the artistic innovation of Dostoevsky, who paved the way for the ideological novel. For more on Dobrolyubov's assessment of the novel The Humiliated and Insulted, see: V. A. Tunimanov, Dostoevsky's work: 1854–1862. L., 1980. S. 156–192. The title of Dobrolyubov's article is directly related to his interpretation of the ideological content of the novel. The critic classifies the "humiliated and insulted" heroes of Dostoevsky among the "downtrodden people", qualifying their "downtroddenness" as "a renunciation of one's own will, of one's own personality." Dobrolyubov N. A. Sobr. cit.: In 9 vols. T. 7. S. 266.

However, for Dobrolyubov, “downtrodden people” are not “dead souls”: “these people are alive and their soul is alive”, “the spark of God still smolders in them and by no means, while a person is alive, it is impossible to extinguish it.” Reflecting on the situation of “downtrodden, humiliated and offended individuals”, whom “we have a lot of in the middle class”, Dobrolyubov comes to the conclusion that, despite outward reconciliation with their position, “they feel its bitterness”, “thirst for an exit”. "Where is this way out, when and how - life will show." There. S. 274.

The critic looks with a certain optimism at the future of the "downtrodden people", since since the appearance of "Makar Ivanovich and the brethren" life has already stepped forward, and in society there is "a common desire to restore human dignity and full rights in everyone and everyone." “Perhaps,” concludes Dobrolyubov, “here already opens a way out of the bitter situation of the driven and downtrodden, of course, not by their own efforts, but with the help of characters who are less subjected to the burden of such a situation, killing and oppressing. And it is useful for these people, who have a sufficient share of initiative in themselves, to delve into the state of affairs, it is useful to know that most of these downtrodden people, whom they considered perhaps morally lost, are nevertheless firmly and deeply, albeit secretly even for themselves, keeps in itself a living soul and an eternal consciousness, indelible by any torment, of its human right to life and happiness. There. S. 275.

In the November book of the "Russian speech" for 1861, an article by E. Tur "The Humiliated and Insulted, a novel by Mr. Dostoevsky" was published. Rus. speech. 1861. 5 Nov. No. 89, pp. 573–576.

E. Tour, like other critics, especially emphasizes the humanistic orientation of Dostoevsky's novel, inherent in his work as a whole. According to E. Tur, “neither the year, nor his life unknown to us (Dostoevsky. - Ed.) changed neither his views, nor his humanity, nor his sympathetic love for everything that bears the name of a person. The same warmth of feeling, the same love, the same tenderness for the unfortunate! How great and wide must be that heart that dictates pages filled with a softening feeling, filled with lofty freshness and the most touching sensitivity. There. S. 574. From these qualities, as E. Tur believes, the shortcomings of Dostoevsky's works also follow, in which, along with subtle psychologism and deep penetration into life, naive, childish ideas about it are found. “The most convex, most integral, most faithful to life and reality character” in the novel, according to the critic, is Prince Valkovsky - “the quintessence of all rot, the work of a special layer of society in which not only fresh juices, but even the shadow of something , which could recall living life, and consequently, strength and development. Rus. speech. 1861. 5 Nov. No. 89. S. 574.“Natasha, Alyosha would be impeccable,” remarks E. Tur, “if the reader could not only reconcile for a minute, but even understand the love of a crazy and passionate, devoted and deep woman of an intelligent, firm, developed, sensitive and hot for a stupid , weak to stupidity, empty to disgrace, a liar boy. Taken by itself, Alyosha's face is extremely lively and correctly depicted.<…>Only our Russian land could develop such spineless faces in a certain stratum of society.<…>He is not evil, not smart, not low, not greedy, but on the other hand, he does more evil than evil, more vile than a notorious villain, and marries millions, leaving a girl who sacrificed everything to him. There. S. 575. E. Tur notes the ambiguity of the title of Dostoevsky's novel: “How much these words alone say - humiliated and insulted! How much bloody, indelible resentment is here, bloody, inexhaustible, inexhaustible tears that flow and yet do not lighten the chest!<…>Humiliated and insulted - after all, this is the consciousness of one's own rightness and, at the same time, one's own impotence! There.

However, in general, "The Humiliated and Insulted", according to E. Tur, "does not stand up to the slightest artistic criticism." The novel is full of shortcomings, inconsistencies, "entanglements both in content and plot." Despite this, it is read with great pleasure. “Many pages are written with amazing knowledge of the human heart, others with genuine feeling, evoking an even stronger feeling from the soul of the reader. External interest does not fall until the very last line, and the very last line leaves the reader with a desire to know what will happen to Natasha after a terrible dream, and whether the kind and handsome Vanya, on whose behalf the story is being told, is destined to console her from all evils and storms that broke out on her hitherto clear life ... ". There. S. 576.

Article by E. F. Zarin (signed: Z-b) “Unprecedented people”, Library for reading. 1862. No. 1. Det. 2. S. 29–56; No. 2. Det. 2. P. 27–42. as its name already testifies, it is polemical in relation to the titles of Dostoevsky's novel and Dobrolyubov's article.

E. F. Zarin sees the main pathos of “The Humiliated and Insulted” in the sermon of the emancipation of women, whose advocate Dostoevsky allegedly acts as. According to the critic, Dostoevsky “had to prove a thing that there is no hint of in life.<…>The author wanted to show an example of emancipation in the very place where all measures against this greatest family evil are combined.<…>in a word, all the conditions under which the most ardent temperament submits to the pressure of established morality. There. No. 2. Det. 2. P. 40,

The heroes of the novel: a selfish, ungrateful daughter, a hard-hearted father, the "melodramatic villain" Prince Valkovsky, the "idiot" Alyosha, the spineless and flabby Vanya (the culprit of the common misfortune) - all of them, in the view of the critic, are some kind of "unprecedented people" rarely encountered in life .

Dostoevsky's novel, the critic writes, belongs to that light genre, "which evokes a difficult rivalry with very famous luminaries mild kind so abounding in French literature<…>he (Dostoevsky. - Ed.) only trimmed it with local St. Petersburg colors, also in a generally accepted and therefore partly routine kind, namely: he removed the sun from our horizon for the entire duration of his novel, partly covered it with fine, automatic frost, spread slurry through the streets and , in conclusion, brought his hero to a state hospital. Library for reading. 1862. No. 2. Det. 2. S. 42.

The initial positive response of A. A. Grigoriev to the novel “The Humiliated and Insulted” is contained in his article “Realism and Idealism in Our Literature (Regarding the New Edition of the Works of Pisemsky and Turgenev)”. Svetoch. 1861. No. 4. Det. 3. P. 11.

Grigoriev saw in "The Insulted and Humiliated" the desire of the "highly gifted author" of "The Double" to overcome the painful and tense direction of "sentimental naturalism" and to say a new, "reasonable and deeply sympathetic word." There. Somewhat later, Grigoriev reproached the author of The Insulted and Humiliated for bookishness and feuilletonism. So, in particular, the critic wrote to H. H. Strakhov on August 12, 1861: “What kind of mixture of amazing strength of feeling and childish absurdities is Dostoevsky's novel? What a disgrace and falseness - a conversation with the prince in a restaurant (the prince is just a book!). What a childhood, that is, a children's composition, Princess Katya and Alyosha! How much reasoning is in Natasha and what depth of Nelli's creation! In general, what a power of everything dreamy and exceptional, and what an ignorance of life! A. A. Grigoriev: Materials for a biography / Ed. V. Princess. Pg., 1917. S. 274.

In 1864, Strakhov published his "Memoirs of Apollo Alexandrovich Grigoriev" in the Epoch magazine. In one of the cited letters from Grigoriev to Strakhov, in particular, it was said that the editors of Vremya should “not drive the high talent of F. Dostoevsky like a mail horse, but cherish him, protect him and keep him from feuilleton activity.” Epoch. 1864. No. 9. S. 9.

Dostoevsky later responded to Ap. Grigorieva: “This letter from Grigorieva obviously refers to my novel “The Humiliated and Insulted”<…>If I wrote a feuilleton novel (which I absolutely confess), then I and only I am to blame for this. So I wrote all my life, so I wrote everything that I published, except for the story "Poor people" and some eyes from the "Dead House"<…>I completely admit that in my novel there are many dolls, and not people, that it contains walking books, and not persons who have taken art form(which really took time and the presentation of ideas in the mind and soul). While I was writing, I, of course, in the heat of work, did not realize this, but only had a presentiment. But this is what I knew for sure, starting to write then: 1) that although the novel will not succeed, there will be poetry in it, 2) that there will be two or three places of hot and strong, 3) that the two most serious characters will be portrayed quite correctly and even artistically<…>The work came out wild, but it has about fifty pages that I am proud of. This work drew, however, some attention of the public. Dostoevsky F. M. Full coll. cit.: V 30 v. 1980. V. 20. S. 133–134.

Dostoevsky in 1864 was inclined to agree with Ap. Grigoriev and those critics who reproached him for not completely freeing himself from the traditional scheme of the democratic feuilleton novel of the 1840-1860s with the bright contrasts of light and shadow, good and evil characteristic of the latter. But at the same time, the writer was clearly aware of his innovation, he highly appreciated the artistic power and psychological depth of some images of "The Humiliated and Insulted".

In Soviet times, the novel was repeatedly reprinted and published in mass editions.

There were no lifetime translations of The Humiliated and Insulted.

There are several adaptations of the novel for the stage (P. A. Cherkasova - St. Petersburg, 1908; A. L. Zhelyabuzhsky - M., 1914, etc.). For more information about them, see: Dostoevsky: One-day newspaper of the Russian Bibliological Society. 1921. 30 Oct. (Nov 12). S. 29.

Numerous Soviet theatrical performances"Humiliated and Insulted". Of these, the most significant: Moscow, Moscow Art Theater 2nd. Inc. Yu. V. Sobolev. Dir. I. N. Bersenev, S. G. Birman; Leningrad, Theatre. Lenin Komsomol. Inc. L. N. Rakhmanov, 3. L. Yudkevich. Staged by G. A. Tovstonogov. Dir. I. S. Olshvanger. See the list of productions: F. M. Dostoevsky and the theater: Bibliographic index/ Comp. S. V. Belov. L., 1980. S. 142–144. See also: Lapkina G. Dostoevsky on the modern stage // Dostoevsky and theatre. L., 1983. S. 294–334.

The story reflects the socio-political position of Dostoevsky during the liberal reforms of the early 1860s. The author of "Bad Anecdote" did not believe the sincerity of the statements of representatives of the social elite about their readiness to come to the aid of the people, to promote social progress and the establishment of the principles of humanism. Dostoevsky, like the writers of the revolutionary-democratic camp, emphasized that the bureaucratic circles, both conservative and liberal alike, are only concerned that the essence of the old social relations should remain unchanged during the reforms.

The artistic and ideological construction of the story and its title - "Bad Anecdote" - date back to the Gogol tradition. See: Stepanova G. V. “Bad Joke” (Dostoevsky and Gogol) // Dostoevsky: Materials and Research. L., 1987. Issue. 7. P. 166–169.

The central figure in the story is the figure of General Pralinsky, who considers himself a humane person and an adherent of new liberal ideas. However, what happened to him confirmed the prediction of the "retrograde", Privy Councilor Nikiforov, that Pralinsky "won't stand" the role he had assumed. Dostoevsky leads the reader to the conclusion that the liberal ideas of such "businesslike" people of the new formation do not correspond to their "nature", which is found in their actions. Dostoevsky's point of view in this case corresponded to the views of Saltykov-Shchedrin, who in "Satires in Prose" (1859-1862) depicted the bureaucratic figures of the times of reforms, describing this period of Russian life as "an era of embarrassment." Zubatov and Udar-Erygin from Saltykov-Shchedrin's essay "To the Reader" are especially close to the main character of Dostoevsky's story, Pralinsky.

In The Bad Joke, as in many of Dostoevsky's works of the 1840s, the bureaucratic milieu is depicted. However, the conflict between "His Excellency" and the "little official", "rubles worth ten a month's salary", here acquired great social acuteness. Pseldonimov has lost the traits of resigned obedience characteristic of Makar Devushkin (“Poor People”) and Vasya Shumkov (“Weak Heart”): his behavior reveals an internal enmity towards General Pralinsky. According to A. M. Remizov, the main “thought of the story, from the end and from the beginning, from Pralinsky and Pseldonimov is disappointed hope». Dostoevsky: Materials and research. L., 1988. Issue. 8, p. 300.

It is no coincidence that the brightest face in the story is Pseldonimov's mother, a simple Russian woman, kind and selfless. The introduction of this image, which is sharply different from all other characters, into the story corresponded to Dostoevsky's conviction that the only true bearer of the highest natural moral truth was the Russian people.

In 1966, directors V. N. Naumov and A. A. Alov made a film based on the “Bad Joke” (it was released in 1987).

Winter notes about summer experiences

According to the genre "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" - original artistic essays. These are travel notes. The idea of ​​creating a work of this kind was suggested to Dostoevsky, probably by his brother, who wrote to him on June 18, 1862: “I wish you would write something for Vremya in Paris. At least letters from abroad. F. M. Dostoevsky: Materials and research / Ed. A. S. Dolinina. L., 1935. S. 535. To the proposal of his brother, who was his co-editor of the magazine "Time", Dostoevsky reacted very sympathetically. In a letter to H. H. Strakhov from Paris dated June 26 (July 8), 1862, he wrote: “I have to stay in Paris for some time, and therefore I want to survey and study it without wasting time, without being lazy<…>I don't know if I'll write something? If you really want to, why not write about Paris, but the trouble is: there is no time either. For a decent letter from abroad, you still need three days of work, but where can you get three days here?

Welcoming the appearance in 1857 of a separate edition of "Letters about Spain" by V.P. Botkin, N.G. Chernyshevsky wrote that "travel is everywhere the most popular part of literature." Chernyshevsky N. G. Full coll. op. M., 1948. T. 4. S. 222. Naming the best books of this kind published in Russia in 1836-1846, Chernyshevsky complained that in the next decade there were much fewer of them.

The author of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions thus continued the tradition already established in Russian literature. When he got to work, Dostoevsky probably skimmed through some of the travel sketches of his predecessors. He carefully re-read Letters from a Russian Traveler by N. M. Karamzin and Letters from Abroad by D. I. Fonvizin (see pp. 389–393). In Dostoevsky's field of vision were numerous later travel essays, letters from abroad, articles that covered social, cultural and political life from different angles. Western Europe. Dostoevsky also took into account the experience of Heinrich Heine as the author of Travel Pictures (1824-1828).

A systematic and consistent description of what he saw and the ups and downs of the journey was not the main task of Dostoevsky. Recordings of travel impressions in "Winter Notes" are interspersed with generalized journalistic essays in the form of various aspects of the life of European countries, mainly France and England, and the author's thoughts about the fate of the West and Russia. Dostoevsky's immediate predecessor in this type of essay was A. I. Herzen as the author of "Letters from France and Italy" (1847-1852), the cycle "Ends and Beginnings" (1862-1863), etc.

Dostoevsky called his travel essays “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions”, thereby emphasizing that they were not written directly after the observations gleaned during the trip, after some time “Summer Impressions” were comprehended and supplemented by associations that arose in the author after returning to homeland under the influence of actual problems of Russian life. In "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" we can single out pages that reproduce individual stages of the journey and are, as it were, sketches from nature. This is in chapter I - impressions of Berlin, Cologne and Dresden, in chapter IV - a story about police orders and secret supervision on the French railway and in Paris hotels, in chapter V - sketches of London at night, in chapter VII - memories of visiting the Pantheon in Paris and others.

This part of the notes artistic structure genetically related to the genre of "physiological" essays, widespread in European and Russian literature of the 1840s. At the same time, Dostoevsky destroyed the tradition established in European literature of dispassionate statement of facts in descriptions of this kind. Pictures of the life of European countries caused the writer to reflect on the problems of a philosophical, historical, social, moral and ethical nature, which gave the presentation a journalistic coloring. Much of the story is devoted to own definition Dostoevsky, finding out “how we in different time Europe was reflected and gradually rushed to visit us with its civilization, and how civilized we were” (p. 398).

The Winter Notes, in one form or another, traces the problem of the relationship between Russia and the West since the 18th century. Many discussions on this topic summarized what Dostoevsky himself had already written about in journalistic and literary-critical articles of 1860–1862, in particular in A Series of Articles on Russian Literature (1861).

In Dostoevsky's system of views, the problem of the historical prospects for the development of Russia naturally followed from his reflections on the nature of the relationship between the part of Russian society that received a European education and the people. From this point of view, Dostoevsky studied various aspects of the political and social life of the West and discussed his impressions with Herzen when he met him in July 1862 in London.

In a letter to N.P. Ogarev dated July 5 (17), 1862, Herzen wrote: “Dostoevsky visited yesterday - he is naive, not entirely clear, but a very nice person. He believes with enthusiasm in the Russian people.

In "Winter Notes" Dostoevsky gave satirical sketches of the social customs of France during the time of Napoleon III, reproduced scary pictures life of the proletarians of capitalist London, exposed the falsity and hypocrisy of the bourgeois-democratic "freedoms" of Europe proclaimed as a result of the revolutions that followed the French Revolution of the 18th century. Dostoevsky wrote sarcastically that only those who have a million enjoy freedom in bourgeois society.

Criticism of European civilization in "Winter Notes" in terms of concreteness and sharpness is close to the democratic thought of the era. Condemning with tremendous force the central fact of the whole European social life- social inequality, Dostoevsky in his positive conclusions approached the Slavophiles.

Dostoevsky argued that the passion for money-grubbing embraced all layers European society. Dostoevsky argued that the “Western personality” (both the worker and the bourgeois to an equal extent) is devoid of a brotherly principle, while the Russian people have an instinctive craving for community, brotherhood, and harmony (p. 428).

Recognizing that the idea of ​​“brotherhood” based “on feeling, on nature, and not on reason” can give rise to the thought: “After all, this is even like a humiliation for reason,” Dostoevsky insisted on the thesis: “Love one another, and all this will be added to you” (p. 430). The fulfillment of this evangelical covenant can, in his opinion, guarantee the achievement of general well-being rather than the arguments of abstract reason.

Dostoevsky passionately argued: “... it is necessary that I sacrifice myself completely, completely, without any thought of profit, not at all thinking that I will sacrifice all of myself to society and for this very society will give me all of itself. It is necessary to sacrifice in such a way that you give everything and even wish that nothing was given back to you for this ... ”(p. 429).

In these judgments of the author of "Winter Notes" one feels a controversy with the eudemonistic morality of the enlighteners and, in particular, with Chernyshevsky, who argued in his work "The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy" that "a person loves himself first of all", that even at the basis of the actions of people who seem to be disinterested, lies "the thought of one's own personal benefit" (Chernyshevsky N. G. Full coll. op. M., 1950. T. 7. S. 281, 283), although it appears in a transformed, mediated form. Chernyshevsky's thesis that human behavior is primarily due to social causes also elicited a polemical response in Winter Notes. So, for example, in the same work "The Anthropological Principle in Philosophy" Chernyshevsky wrote: "Under certain circumstances, a person becomes kind, under others - angry" (ibid., p. 264).

Dostoevsky believed that a person's behavior in society does not depend on "circumstances" and personal benefit realized by the mind, but is dictated primarily by his "nature", the moral and ethical foundations of which are formed under certain national historical conditions over millennia (p. 429). The controversy with the theory of "reasonable egoism" Chernyshevsky was continued by Dostoevsky in the story "Notes from the Underground". For the first time formulated in "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions", the idea of ​​a "highly developed personality", which, being confident in its right to be a personality, "cannot do anything else out of its personality".<…>how to give it all to everyone, so that others would all be exactly the same self-righteous and happy personalities ”(pp. 428-429), was embodied by the writer later in the images of Sonya Marmeladova and Prince Myshkin.

The philosophical problems of the Winter Notes were further developed in ideological discussions on the pages of Dostoevsky's novels of the 1860s and 1870s. Many socio-critical ideas of the latter were formed on the basis of the conclusions that the writer made after getting acquainted with various aspects of the life of Western Europe.

The special, fundamental importance that the author himself attached to the Winter Notes is indicated by the fact that he included them, unlike other feuilletons and articles published in Vremya, in the second volume of his collected works published in 1865–1866. . "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" attracted the attention of both writers and critics. Ap. Grigoriev called Dostoevsky's "foreign memoirs" "brilliantly intelligent and deep", and in an article published in 1864 in the journal Yakor (No. 2), he wrote about the "image" of Bribri and Mabiche: a person could, with such, one might say, impudent ruthlessness, and together with such naivety, expose these lovely types. Grigoriev A. A. Theater criticism. L., 1885. S. 29.

"Notes from the Underground" is a work that opened a new stage in Dostoevsky's work. In the center of the story is a characteristic image of an “ideologist”, a thinker, a bearer of a strange, “paradoxical”, but at the same time theoretically closed system of views. Not being a like-minded person of his “anti-hero”, Dostoevsky gave his reasoning such force of evidence, which subsequently distinguished the monologues of the main characters of his great novels - Raskolnikov, Ippolit Terentyev, Kirillov, Shatov, Stavrogin, Dmitry and Ivan Karamazov.

Dostoevsky tried to explain the principle of building a story based on contrasts in a letter to his brother dated April 13, 1864: “You understand what a transition in music is,” he wrote. - Exactly the same here. In the 1st chapter, apparently, chatter, but suddenly this chatter in the last 2 chapters is resolved by an unexpected catastrophe. The new artistic structure of "Notes from the Underground" was so unusual that even contemporaries versed in matters of literature did not immediately understand its essence and tried to identify the ideology of the "underground" person with the author's worldview. In the process of working on the story, Dostoevsky realized the difficulty of the task before him. In a letter to his brother dated March 20, 1864, he wrote: “He sat down for work, for a story<…>Much harder to write than I thought. And meanwhile, it is absolutely necessary that it be good, I myself need it. It is too strange in its tone, and the tone is sharp and wild: one may not like it; therefore, it is necessary that poetry soften and endure everything.

Creative difficulties were further aggravated by censorship distortions of the text, which destroyed the internal logic of the narrative. So, having received the first double issue of Epoch, where Underground was printed, and finding there, in addition to “terrible typos”, the intervention of the censor, Dostoevsky wrote to his brother on March 26, 1864: “... it would have been better not to print the penultimate chapter at all ( the most important, where the very thought is expressed) than to print it as it is, i.e., in garbled phrases and contradicting itself. But what to do? Pigs of the censor, where I sneered at everything and sometimes blasphemed for the sake of appearance - something is omitted, and where from all this I deduced the need for faith and Christ, it is forbidden ... ".

In a footnote to the journal publication of the first part of the Notes, the author pointed out the connection between his "anti-hero" and the type of "superfluous person."

The problem of "superfluous people", which were replaced by new heroes-figures, was actively discussed in Russian journalism at the turn of the 1860s. Dostoevsky also showed interest in her. So, referring to Chatsky and the “superfluous people” who followed him, Dostoevsky wrote in “Winter Notes”: “They all did not find a case, they did not find two or three generations in a row. This is a fact, and there seems to be nothing to say against the fact, but you can ask out of curiosity. So I don’t understand that an intelligent person, at any time, under any circumstances, could not find a job for himself ”(p. 407).

At the same time, Dostoevsky was also aware of the tragedy of the situation of "superfluous people". The hero of the “Notes” says about himself: “A developed and decent person cannot be conceited without unlimited demands on himself and without despising himself at other times to the point of hatred.<…>I was morbidly developed, as one should be developed person of our time” (p. 483). Dostoevsky considered such a tragic attitude to be a characteristic feature of the “chosen” “superfluous people”. This is evident from his review of Turgenev's Ghosts, which Dostoevsky read while working on Notes from the Underground. In "Ghosts" - Dostoevsky wrote to Turgenev on December 23, 1863 - "... there is a lot of real. It's real - there is the anguish of a developed and conscious being living in our time, captured longing."

Having conceived a work in the center of which the “confessing” “extra person” was supposed to stand, Dostoevsky could not help but take into account the experience of his predecessors who created classic examples of this type, as well as the judgments of critics who explained the historical essence and regularity of the appearance of “extra people”.

The hero of "Notes from the Underground" in terms of his psychological makeup is closest to Turgenev's "Russian Hamlets", to "The Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District" (1849) and to Chulkaturin from "The Diary of a Superfluous Man" (1850). This commonality was noted by N. Strakhov, who in 1867, in an article devoted to the publication of the Collected Works of Dostoevsky in 1865–1866, wrote: “Alienation from life, break with reality<…>this ulcer obviously exists in Russian society. Turgenev gave us several samples of people suffering from this ulcer; such are his "Superfluous Man" and "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District"<…>Mr. F. Dostoevsky, in parallel with Turgenev's Hamlet, wrote his "underground" hero with great brightness ... ”(Otech. Zap. 1867. No. 2. P. 555. Our elegant literature).

It should be noted that Dostoevsky's "anti-hero", unlike Turgenev's "superfluous people", is not a nobleman, not a representative of a "minority", but a petty official who suffers from his social humiliation and rebels against the conditions of public life that depersonalize him. The socio-psychological essence of this rebellion, which took on ugly, paradoxical forms, was explained by Dostoevsky in the early 1870s. Replying to critics who had spoken out about the printed parts of The Teenager, he wrote in a rough draft of "For the Preface" (1875): "I am proud that for the first time I brought out a real person Russian majority and for the first time exposed its ugly and tragic side. The tragedy lies in the consciousness of ugliness<…>Only I brought out the tragedy of the underground, which consists in suffering, in self-punishment, in the consciousness of the best and in the impossibility of achieving it, and, most importantly, in the vivid conviction of these unfortunate people that everyone is like that, and therefore, it’s not worth it to improve! Dostoevsky concluded that "the reason for the underground" lies in the "destruction of faith in general rules. "Nothing is sacred"».

The “underground paradoxist” opposes the enlightening concept of man, against the positivist absolutization of natural scientific methods, especially mathematical ones, in determining laws human being. In the early 1860s, these views were also developed in the ideology of the Russian revolutionary democrats, in particular, in the theory of "reasonable egoism" by N. G. Chernyshevsky. Cm.: Belopolsky V. N. Dostoevsky and philosophical thought his era. Rostov-on-Don, 1987, pp. 112–116.

The main polemical thesis formulated by Dostoevsky back in Winter Notes boiled down to the following: socialism cannot be implemented on the principle of a reasonable contract between the individual and society according to the formula “everyone for everyone and everything for everyone” because, as Dostoevsky argued, “not a person wants to live and on these calculations<…>It all seems foolish to him that this is a prison and that in itself it is better, therefore - complete freedom ”(p. 431).

The entire first part of the story - "Underground" - is a development of this idea.

In terms of theses and concepts, close in some cases to philosophical ideas Kant, Schopenhauer, Stirner, the hero of Notes from the Underground argues that the philosophical materialism of the Enlightenment, the views of representatives of utopian socialism and positivists, as well as the absolute idealism of Hegel, inevitably lead to fatalism and the denial of free will, which he puts above all. “Your own, free and free will,” he says, “your own, even the wildest whim, your own fantasy, sometimes irritated even to the point of madness - that’s all there is that very missed, most profitable benefit. , which does not fit into any classification and from which all systems and theories constantly fly to hell ”(pp. 469-470).

Comparison of Notes from the Underground with Dostoevsky's Articles of 1861–1864 and “Winter Notes on Summer Impressions” clearly convinces that “the hero of the underground embodies the final results of“ detachment from the soil ”, as it was drawn to Dostoevsky”, and therefore this character is “not only a detractor, but also a convict”, not a hero, but an "anti-hero", in the words of the author himself. Skaftymov A. Moral searches of Russian writers. M., 1972. S. 90, 116. While preaching freedom, the underground man actually advocates "freedom from choice, from binding decisions." His egocentrism is generated by "fear of life." Nazirov R. G. Creative principles of F. M. Dostoevsky. Saratov, 1982, pp. 60–61.

Forcing his hero, as a “head”, theoretical thesis, to preach a program of extreme individualism taken to its logical limit, Dostoevsky already outlined in the first part of Notes from the Underground a possible, from his point of view, way out of this state. The imaginary opponent of the “underground man” tells him: “You boast of your consciousness, but you only hesitate, because even though your mind is working, your heart is darkened by depravity, and without a pure heart there will be no full, correct consciousness” (p. 479 –480). Obviously, in the pre-censorship version this idea was developed even more definitely. According to the author, the places where he "deduced the need for faith and Christ" (see above) were banned. What Dostoevsky had in mind when he spoke of "the need for faith and Christ" can be judged from the notes in his notebook (1864–1865) made shortly after the publication of The Underground. Reproaching the “Western socialists” for the fact that, caring only for the material well-being of a person, “they don’t go further than the belly,” Dostoevsky wrote in the outline for the article “Socialism and Christianity”: “There is something much higher than the god-womb. This is to be the master and master of even oneself, one's self, to sacrifice this self, to give it away - to everyone. There is something irresistibly beautiful, sweet, inevitable and even inexplicable in this idea.<…>a socialist cannot imagine how one can voluntarily give oneself for everyone, according to him it is immoral. But for a well-known reward - this is possible<…>And the whole thing, the whole infinity of Christianity over socialism lies in the fact that a Christian (ideal), giving everything, does not demand anything for himself.

The second part of "Notes from the Underground" - "About wet snow" - Nekrasov's verses "When from the darkness of delusion ..." (1845) are prefaced as an epigraph. The theme of this poem also varies in the story, where, however, it undergoes a deep rethinking, like the themes of Georgesand's stories of the 1850s - a rethinking that includes a sympathetic and at the same time polemical attitude towards them. The conflict between Lisa, the bearer of "living life" and the "stillborn", "unprecedented common man", "paradoxicalist" from the underground, ends with the heroine's moral victory. The appearance of this heroine reflects some of the features of a “highly developed personality,” about which Dostoevsky wrote back in Winter Notes (see p. 428) and which was presented at the end of 1864, i.e., after the publication underground”, was supplemented with new touches. Thus, Dostoevsky’s footnote to N. Solovyov’s article “The Theory of Use and Benefit” says: “The higher the consciousness and self-awareness of one’s own face, the higher the pleasure of sacrificing oneself and one’s entire personality out of love for humanity. Here, a person who neglects his rights, rising above them, takes on some kind of solemn image, an incomparably higher image of an all-worldly, albeit humane creditor, prudently, albeit humanely, engaged all his life in determining what is mine and what is yours ”( Epoch, 1864, No. 11, p. 13).

Much of what was only outlined in Notes from the Underground was developed in Dostoevsky's subsequent novels, and in particular in the first of them, in Crime and Punishment.

The first part of Notes from the Underground, published at the end of March 1864, immediately attracted the attention of the revolutionary-democratic camp. Shchedrin included in his review "Literary Trivia" "dramatic true story" - the pamphlet "Swifts". Ridiculing the participants in the magazine "Epokha" in a satirical form, he portrayed F. M. Dostoevsky under the guise of "a fourth swift, a dull novelist".

Shchedrin's parody is the only direct response to Notes from the Underground. Criticism's interest in this story awakened after the publication of Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment (1866).

H. H. Strakhov in the article “Our belles-lettres” emphasized that the “underground man” “applies with malice to reality, to every phenomenon of the meager life that surrounds him, because each such phenomenon offends him as a reproach, as a denunciation of his own inner lifelessness” ( Otech. note 1867. No. 2. P. 555). The critic saw the merit of Dostoevsky in the fact that, having managed to "look into the soul of an underground hero, he is able with the same insight to depict all kinds of variations of these moral vacillations, all types of suffering generated by moral instability" (ibid.).

Ap. Grigoriev. In a letter to H. H. Strakhov dated March 18 (30), 1869, Dostoevsky recalled that Grigoriev praised this story and told him: “You write in this way.”

Subsequently, "Notes from the Underground" attracted special attention of N.K. Mikhailovsky, who devoted a special section to their analysis in the article "Cruel Talent" (1882).

WITH late XIX V. gradually grew interest in this story. The attitude of the “underground man”, genetically related to the “superfluous people” of the 1840s and 1850s, contained the germs of later bourgeois individualism and egocentrism. The artistic discovery of Dostoevsky, who first pointed out the social danger of the transformation of the "independent desire" of the individual into a "principle of behavior consciously chosen by her", at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. received confirmation in Nietzscheism, and later in some areas of existentialism.

In the “Diary of a Writer” for 1873, Dostoevsky said that in 1864 “in the Passage, some German (Gebgardt, who later founded the Zoological Garden in St. Petersburg. - Ed.) showed a crocodile for money” and this fact prompted him to the idea of ​​"writing one fantastic tale, like an imitation of Gogol's novel The Nose." This "literary prank" was this story, titled in the original entry: "About a husband eaten by a crocodile."

The name "Crocodile" was given to the story when it was reprinted in the Collected Works of Dostoevsky in 1865, and its former title: "An Unusual Event, or Passage in the Passage" was moved to the subtitle. The journal publication of the story is also preceded by the following preface.

EDITORIAL FOREWORD

The editors are surprised to publish this almost unbelievable story solely in the respect that, perhaps, indeed, all this somehow happened there. The story explains that a certain gentleman, of known years and of a known appearance, was swallowed by a crocodile in the Passage, completely without a trace, and not only remained alive after that, but even lived in the bowels of the crocodile unharmed and, apparently, willingly for two weeks; was at that time visited by an idle and amusement-inclined public, entered into conversations with visitors, fussed about pensions, often changed his direction (both physically, that is, turning from side to side, and morally, in the sense of behavior) and under the most Finally, out of idleness and vexation, he became a philosopher. Such outrageous silliness would, of course, be unnatural if the extremely sincere tone of the author had not swayed the editors in their favour. In addition, almost all newspaper articles are quoted with the greatest detail, even poems, even furious polemics that have appeared in the light of the swallowed master. - All this nonsense was delivered to the editorial office by Mr. Fyodor Dostoevsky, the closest collaborator and member of the editorial board, but the real author of the story is still unknown. Once, in the absence of Mr. Dostoevsky from home (on business not related to the reader), a certain Unknown person and left a manuscript on his desk with a small letter from himself, but without a signature. In this letter, he briefly but pompously recommends his work and asks to make it public by publishing it in the Epoch. Since the story was also not signed by anyone, the editors authorized Fyodor Dostoevsky, for appearances, to sign his name under it and at the same time. time, in the forms of justice, to invent a decent pseudonym and an unknown author. Thus, the unknown author was named Semyon Strizhov - it is not known why. As for Mr. Dostoevsky, he willingly signed his name, rightly arguing that if the public liked this story, then it would be better for him, because they would think that he had composed; if he doesn't like it, then all he has to do is say that he didn't write it, and that's it.

The editors, however, do not hide from the public one extremely important circumstance, namely: no matter how hard they tried, no matter how much they searched for at least something that could shed some light on this unheard-of passage incident, nothing helped! No one, absolutely no one, heard a word or read about anything even a bit like it, although it turned out that many went to watch the passage crocodiles. In a word, the gentleman swallowed alive, to the greatest regret and to the greatest annoyance of the editors, did not turn out at all. The editors tried to find those issues of newspapers and in them those articles that were indicated by the author; but, to her surprise, she soon noticed that we did not even have newspapers with such names. In such an extreme situation, there was only one thing left for us: to believe everything and decide, although involuntarily, but in good conscience, that the stranger who reported the manuscript could not lie and, therefore, everything he reported was true. So we did, but we immediately consider it our duty to declare that if, in case, all this is a lie, and not the truth, then there has never been a more incredible lie in our literature, except perhaps for the well-known case when a certain Major Kovalev's own nose ran out of his face one morning and then walked around in a uniform and a hat with a plume in the Tauride Garden and along the Nevsky. In any case, the editors would very much like the public to believe everything too; for if she does not believe, then, therefore, she will reproach the editors with lies, and this is already unpleasant for us.

And yet, - we say sincerely, although not without embarrassment - there were people in the editorial office itself who ardently rebelled against us because we decided to believe such a (supposedly) notorious hoax. We were furiously accused by this minority, despite the fact that we did everything in our power to justify such an incredible event in the eyes of the public. Not appreciating enough of our efforts, they shouted, apparently moving away from the subject, that the unknown person's story not only contradicted natural sciences, but even anatomy, that it is impossible for a crocodile to swallow a person of known years, maybe seven inches tall and, most importantly, educated, etc., etc. - you can’t re-read everything that they shouted, and not worth it, especially since the majority of votes were in favor of the editors, and it was already decided that there was nothing better than principle majority vote to know the truth. Nevertheless, the editors, in order to fulfill their duty in all good faith, incline their ears to these exclamations as well. Four of its indispensable members were immediately sent from its midst to search for the truth in the Passage. It was required of them that all of them, together, enter the crocodile room, get acquainted with the crocodiles and find everything themselves on the spot. The seconded were: both editorial secretaries, with a portfolio and without a portfolio, one critic and one novelist. Sparing no expense, the editors handed each of them a quarter to pay for entry into the crocodile room. All quarters were the inalienable property of the editorial office and were acquired by it legally, without any intermediary of any other editorial office.

The sent members returned an hour later in the greatest indignation. Moreover, they did not even want to talk to us, probably out of annoyance, and everyone looked in different directions. Finally, defeated by the intensely affectionate treatment of the editors, they agreed to break the silence and announced bluntly, but still rather rudely, that there was nothing to send them to the Passage, that all the absurdity is visible at first glance, that a crocodile cannot swallow a person whole, but that, who knows, maybe it could happen there somehow. Such a harsh and even, one might say, one-sided verdict at first seriously excited the editors. Nevertheless, everything was very soon and finally settled. In the first place, if "perhaps it could somehow happen there," then, therefore, it really could happen; and secondly, according to the research of those who were on a business trip, it turned out that the story of the unknown person does not speak about those well-known crocodiles that are now shown in the Passage, but about some other, extraneous crocodile, which also seemed to be shown in the Passage, lived in it for three or four weeks and, as is clear from the story, was taken back to his homeland in Germany. This last crocodile, of course, could be larger and more capacious than the current two crocodiles, and consequently, why couldn’t he swallow a gentleman of a certain age, and even more so an educated one?

This consideration finally resolved all the perplexities of the editors. The main thing is that she victoriously defended the story and prints it, even though she could very well do without it, having already a sufficient set of articles and exactly as many sheets as she had originally promised the public for each issue of Epoch, but, not embarrassed by this promise, the editors adds these extra sheets. If you are already wound up in the world " extra people”, why not happen in the magazine and extra sheets?

In the 1860s, Dostoevsky led a discussion with democratic journalism - Sovremennik and Russkiy Slovo. He argued no less fiercely with conservative and liberal bodies - Russkiy Vestnik by M. N. Katkov, Golos and Otechestvennye Zapiski by A. A. Kraevsky. All this is reflected in the "Crocodile". In his speeches, the hero of the story, as it were, synthesized ideological concepts that were different in their socio-political coloring, but equally unacceptable for Dostoevsky, the carriers of which the writer was inclined to reproach for a bookish abstract “theoretical” approach to reality and in isolation from “living life” . Taking advantage of the hilarious, grotesque situation, Dostoevsky caustically parodied both the radical views of the vulgar materialists, "nihilists" of the Russian Word - V. A. Zaitsev and D. I. Pisarev, and the philosophical, aesthetic and socio-economic theories of the Sovremennik employees. At the same time, it should be noted that, in creating the figure of the protagonist of the story, a liberal official swallowed by a crocodile, Dostoevsky relied on satirical characterization"nihilists" in Saltykov-Shchedrin's article "Our public life", directed against the "Russian word". The article says that "lop-eared", "nihilists" are "nothing but titular advisers in an unrepentant form, and titular advisers are repentant nihilists" ( Saltykov-Shchedrin M. E. Sobr. op. M., 1968. T. 6. S. 234).

The appearance of the story in the press caused sharp polemical responses. The publisher of the Golos newspaper ridiculed in the story, Kraevsky, accused the author of the fact that The Crocodile is a pamphlet on N. G. Chernyshevsky, convicted and 1864 by the government of Alexander II and exiled to Siberia. Kraevsky hinted that Ivan Matveyevich, swallowed by a crocodile and preaching from his womb, is a caricature of Chernyshevsky, who wrote the novel What Is to Be Done in the Peter and Paul Fortress, and his frivolous and narrow-minded wife is a caricature of O. S. Chernyshevsky. Dostoevsky, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, appeared in the press with a refutation of this gossip, not being afraid to openly express sympathy for the exiled Chernyshevsky.

Having outlined the history of his acquaintance with N. G. Chernyshevsky and pointing out the benevolent nature of their personal relationship, Dostoevsky rejected the accusation brought against him of outrage over the tragic fate of Chernyshevsky. He wrote: “So, suppose that I, myself a former exile and convict, rejoiced at the exile of another“ unfortunate ”; moreover, he wrote a joyful puffball on this occasion. But where is the evidence for this: in allegory? But bring me whatever you want ... "Notes of a Madman", an ode to "God", "Yuri Miloslavsky". Fet's poems - whatever you want - and I undertake to deduce you at once<…>what exactly is an allegory about the Franco-Prussian war or a puffball on the actor Gorbunov ... ”(“ The Diary of a Writer ”for 1873, IV. Something personal).

The study of the creative history of the story and its draft manuscripts confirms the validity of the words of Dostoevsky, who denied the interpretation of "The Crocodile" as a pamphlet affecting the personality of Chernyshevsky.

The idea for The Gambler arose as early as the autumn of 1863. On September 18 (30), 1863, Dostoevsky wrote from Rome to H. H. Strakhov: “The plot of the story is as follows: one type of foreign Russian. Note: there was a big question in magazines about foreign Russians. All this will be reflected in my story. And in general, the modern minute (if possible, of course) will be reflected in our inner life. I take a direct nature, a man, however, highly developed, but in everything unfinished, distrustful and not daring not to believe rebelling against authorities and fearing them? He consoles himself with the fact that he has nothing to do in Russia and therefore severe criticism of people who call our foreign Russians from Russia.<…>The main thing is that all his vital juices, strength, violence, courage went to roulette. He is a gambler, and not a simple gambler, just as Pushkin's miserly knight is not a mere miser. (This is not at all a comparison of me with Pushkin. I speak only for clarity). He is a poet in his own way, but the fact is that he himself is ashamed of this poetry, for he deeply feels its baseness, although the need for risk ennobles him in his own eyes. The whole story is a story about how he has been playing roulette in gambling houses for the third year.

In the summer of 1865, pressed by creditors, Dostoevsky was forced to sell the "speculator" and "rather bad man" F. T. Stellovsky the right to publish his collected works. “But in our contract there was an article,” Dostoevsky said in a letter to A. V. Korvin-Krukovskaya dated June 17, 1866, “according to which I promise him to prepare a novel for his publication, at least printed sheets, and if I don’t deliver it by November 1, 1866 (the deadline), then he, Stellovsky, is free to publish for free for nine years, and as he pleases, everything that I write, without any remuneration to me.

Fascinated by his work on Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky did not start writing a new novel until the beginning of October 1866. When there was less than a month left to fulfill the obligation, he was forced to invite the stenographer Anna Grigorievna Snitkina (who later became his wife) and dictated to her the text of the novel in for 26 days, from 4 to 29 October. It can be assumed that by this time Dostoevsky had already prepared some draft versions of the text or detailed plans novel, which made it possible to create "The Player" in such a short time.

In her memoirs, A. G. Dostoevskaya told how The Gambler was written. Dostoevskaya A. G. Memories. M., 1971. S. 47 and others. Before her arrival, Dostoevsky made rough sketches, then from 12 to 4 o'clock in the afternoon, with short breaks, he dictated the text to A. G. Snitkina, which she deciphered at home and copied out cleanly. The surviving fragments of the text of The Gambler, written down by the hand of A. G. Snitkina and becoming a typesetting manuscript, testify that before handing over the novel to the publisher, Dostoevsky once again edited the manuscript. The manuscript of the novel, handed over to Stellovsky on November 1, 1866, was called "Ruletenburg" (that is, "City of Roulette"). However, the publisher demanded that the name be changed to "some other, more Russian" one (see Dostoevsky's letter to V. I. Gubin dated May 8 (20), 1871). Dostoevsky agreed, and the novel was published in the 3rd volume of the Complete Works of Dostoevsky, published by F. Stellovsky (St. Petersburg, 1866), under the title "Player"; a separate impression was made from the same set.

In the center of the narrative is the "player", one of the types of "foreign Russians". Next to him is the family of a Russian general, also from "foreign Russians." This family belongs to the number of “random families” knocked out of the usual way of life by the peasant reform, to the artistic study of which Dostoevsky devoted his subsequent novels. Dostoevsky observed many such Russian families abroad during his first trip to Europe in 1862, which he wrote about in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (see pp. 407–408). According to the data given in the October issue of Russkiy Vestnik for 1862, in 1860 alone more than 200,000 Russians went abroad.

It is characteristic that the theme "Russians abroad" - although in a different vein - was developed at the same time by I. S. Turgenev in the novel "Smoke" (1867), written and published almost simultaneously with Dostoevsky's "Player".

The vicissitudes of love between the hero, who is in the service of the general's family as a home teacher, and the general's stepdaughter Polina largely repeat the complex history of the relationship between Dostoevsky and Apollinaria Prokofievna Suslova. In one of his letters, Dostoevsky wrote about her: “She demands everything from people, all perfections, does not forgive a single imperfection in respect of other good features” (N. P. Suslova, dated April 19, 1865). These words can be fully attributed to Polina. Some plot motifs in The Gambler, as evidenced by the diary of A. P. Suslova, were suggested to Dostoevsky by real events. So, Polina's passion for the Frenchman Des Grieux, her desire to return some money to him are artistically transformed facts of the biography of A. P. Suslova. Suslova A.P. Years of closeness with Dostoevsky. Moscow, 1928, pp. 47–60.

The author of "The Gambler" was also close to another passion of the protagonist, Alexei Ivanovich, for the game. During his trips abroad, Dostoevsky constantly informed his relatives about his passion for roulette. In one of his letters to V.D. Constant dated August 20 (September 1), 1863 from Paris, talking about a successful game in Wiesbaden, Dostoevsky wrote: “... in these four days I took a closer look at the players. They are ponted there by several hundred people, and, honestly, except for two, I did not find those who know how to play. Everyone loses to the ground because they don't know how to play. One Frenchwoman and one English lord played there; these ones knew how to play so well and did not lose, but on the contrary, the bank almost cracked. Please don't think that I'm forcing with joy that I didn't lose, saying that I know the secret of how not to lose, but to win. The secret is something I really know; it is terribly stupid and simple, and consists in holding on to every moment, in spite of any phases of the game, and not getting excited. That's all…".

The "theory" of playing roulette by the author of the novel, developed in the cited letter, coincides with the arguments on the same topic of his hero Alexei Ivanovich, especially in the last chapter (see p. 719). A. G. Dostoevskaya recalls that when, in the process of working on the novel, the fate of the characters was discussed, “Fyodor Mikhailovich was completely on the side of the“ player ”and said that he experienced many of his feelings and impressions on himself. He assured me that you can have a strong character, prove it with your life, and yet not have the strength to overcome your passion for playing roulette. Dostoevskaya A. G. Memories. S. 65.

The image of the “player” created by Dostoevsky had a long literary pedigree. The list of works of world literature in which the plot of a gambling game is developed can be endless. Dostoevsky himself pointed to the connection of the novel with Pushkin's traditions. At the same time, one must keep in mind not only the “Little Tragedies” he named, but also the “Queen of Spades”. With the "Queen of Spades" "Player" bring together some details of the plot. However, Pushkin's Hermann is obsessed with a single passion, the desire for wealth, which will give him power over people; Alexey Ivanovich, having won two hundred thousand, immediately spends them. And in this Dostoevsky saw a manifestation of a purely Russian trait of character.

When working on the image of Alexei Ivanovich, Dostoevsky, obviously, had some associations with Pushkin's "Dubrovsky". Troekurov calls the young Dubrovsky, who came to his house in the role of a French tutor, a "teacher", putting a pejorative meaning into this word. Alexey Ivanovich also refers to himself derogatoryly as a "teacher" in those cases when he wants to emphasize his dependent position. Both in Pushkin's story (Chapter XI) and in The Gambler (p. 587, etc.) the word "teacher" is given in French transcription (outchitel).

The Gambler, like other works of this period, is associated with Dostoevsky's journalistic articles of 1861-1864. and especially with Winter Notes on Summer Impressions. This connection is manifested primarily in the fact that in the artistic structure of The Gambler an essential role is played by the author's desire to oppose contemporary Russia to Europe. Many images in this novel are, as it were, an illustration of the conclusions that Dostoevsky expressed in a journalistic form in his report on his first trip abroad. Aleksei Ivanovich is a peculiar version of the young people about whom Dostoevsky said in Winter Notes that they, following Chatsky, having not found a job in Russia, left for Europe and are “looking for something” there (p. 408). But this character is opposed at the same time to Baron von Wurmerhelm and Des Grieux; the "gambler" does not want to "worship a German idol" (p. 606) and does not want to dedicate his life to the accumulation of wealth.

The characters of a Frenchman, a German, an Englishman, according to Dostoevsky, in the course of the historical development of these countries were molded into a well-known finished "form"; the Russian national character is still in the process of development: hence the external “shapelessness” of the natures of Alexei Ivanovich and Polina, hence the inherent desire of a Russian person to overcome the narrowness of the social forms that have developed in the West, in which the writer saw the historical advantage of Russia, a guarantee that in the near future In the future, it will be able to find ways to higher universal ideals. In this regard, in the ideological and artistic conception of the novel, the image of the Russian “grandmother” Antonida Vasilievna, not devoid of symbolism, was of great importance.

Des Grieux and Mademoiselle Blanche are those of the Parisians about whom Dostoevsky wrote with such sarcasm in the chapters "Experience on the Bourgeois" and "Brie-Brie and Mabish". Naming the impostor marquis, swindler and usurer Des Grieux after the noble hero of the eighteenth century novel Manon Lescaut, Dostoevsky ironically exposed the degree of moral decline of the French bourgeoisie, which had lost its former ideals and embarked on the path of money-grubbing.

The figure of the Englishman Mr. Astley, who is sympathetic to both Alexei Ivanovich and "grandmother" and Polina, resembles kind and noble heroes from the novels of Dickens and Thackeray, whose work Dostoevsky highly appreciated. The image of Mr. Astley, outlined by Dostoevsky only in general outlines, also corresponds to the idea of ​​the English that was common in the Russian democratic environment. Saltykov-Shchedrin, in the chronicle Our Social Life (May, 1863), wrote that the traveling Englishman "appears everywhere proudly and self-confidently, and everywhere he brings with him his native type, with all its strengths and weaknesses."

"The Gambler" was repeatedly staged and firmly entered the repertoires of drama theaters. In 1916, S. S. Prokofiev wrote an opera based on the plot of The Gambler, which was then staged at the St. Petersburg Imperial Mariinsky Theater.

Perhaps there are few writers in world literature who would have such a strong influence on the minds and would evoke such diametrically opposite assessments - from enthusiastic acceptance to outright hatred - as F.M. Dostoevsky. “Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientific thinker” (A. Einstein); "He saw the human soul in everything and everywhere" (V. Solovyov) - and "Undeniably and undoubtedly: Dostoevsky is a genius, but this is our evil genius" (M. Gorky) and Lenin's "archically bad Dostoevsky." And for many ordinary readers, Dostoevsky's work is rejected. About why this happens and why the writer’s works are important and valuable to us, why pastors quote him in sermons, and theologians accuse him of heresy, about the heroes of the novel “The Idiot” and Raskolnikov’s watch - we talk with Tatyana Kasatkina, Doctor of Philology, Chairman of the Commission for the study of the creative heritage of F.M. Dostoevsky Scientific Council "History of World Culture" RAS.

Overcoming the "urgent apparently current"

Tatyana Alexandrovna, some do not like Dostoevsky's novels, they consider his work to be something painful. Why do you think?

The rejection of Dostoevsky is not connected with whether a person or not, not connected with a particular religion or confession. It can be explained by only one thing: a person is not ready to see something beyond the “vital apparently current”, according to Dostoevsky's own definition; he is very comfortably settled in this "vital apparently current" and does not want to know anything else.

By the way, it was precisely such readers who created the myth about the “cruel talent”, about Dostoevsky-hysterical-paranoid and so on. And it began during the life of the writer. But we note that, as a rule, these are still people who are not indifferent to Dostoevsky. And not even very indifferent!

I happened to meet with the descendants of the Holy Martyr Philosopher (Ornatsky). They testified that Father Philosopher loved Dostoevsky. Another saint of the twentieth century - the Monk Justin (Popovich) - even wrote the book "Philosophy and Religion of Dostoevsky." It turns out that the saints found something for themselves in his writings?

Not just “found something”: St. Justin (Popovich), for example, directly calls the writer his teacher. So Dostoevsky is a teacher of the saints of the 20th century.

- What did Dostoevsky teach them?

The same thing that Dostoevsky teaches any reader: communion with God. So that we see the image of God in every person, see Christ, and if we are talking about a woman, then the Mother of God. So that in every momentary scene we distinguish between its gospel fundamental principle, the biblical fundamental principle. The writer, through the words of his character the elder Zosima, called the Bible “a sculpture of the world and human characters.” Just imagine: the Bible stands in the center of the universe as a kind of statue, and around it is what the writer called "the vital apparently current."

But here we can pose the question: how does such a worldview differ from the pagan one? After all, any pagan religion is also a "sacred history", and each of its followers in his life brings to life, revives and again gives to be the scenes of that once former "sacred history". And the difference between them is radical.

- What exactly is this difference?

In pagan religions, history ends with this "sacred history" that happened "in the beginning", and in fact - beyond the time. That is, there is no history at all, except for the “sacred”, in fact, no. Everything else is just reproduction. And a person can only give to be again, to appear (better or worse - depending on the qualities of the place of his presence) to what has already been once, because the world is a hundred And t only by the fact that this former is reproduced all the time - such a constant circle of time around the "beginning of time".

And the Christian story is completely different: it is eternity, entered in time, thanks to which for the first time history begins to unfold in time. The history of the presence of Christ in the world is not repeated, it is not renewed - it continues. And a person who re-experiences the gospel story in his life should not repeat it - he should transform. Because too many answers in the gospel story have not been received from man. Too many steps towards God have not been taken. This is what Dostoevsky writes about.

So we are expecting a response.

- What answer should the person give?

Elder Zosima says: "Life is paradise." And in the drafts of the writer, we will meet even more radical: "Life is paradise, we have the keys." And theologians accused Dostoevsky of everything in connection with these words, including Pelagianism: allegedly, salvation depends only on man. But Dostoevsky is not talking about this at all.

Christ has made His step towards man and is now waiting for him reciprocal step - all the work of Dostoevsky is about this

Elder Zosima speaks of a situation when Christ has already made His step towards man and is now waiting for him reciprocal step. He waits, because God does not force anyone, does not force anyone. “Behold, I stand at the door, and to no avail; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and dine with him” (Rev. 3:20). He is waiting to see if a person will open the door for Him or not. And He will not leave this door. This is what all creativity is about - and not only all creativity, but - the whole worldview of Dostoevsky.

- Could you illustrate your idea with some concrete example?

Dostoevsky has a wonderful letter written in connection with the story of Kornilova, a 20-year-old pregnant stepmother who threw her six-year-old stepdaughter out of the window and then went to report herself to the police. The girl did not crash, but Kornilova was sentenced to Siberia. Dostoevsky relates this story in The Diary of a Writer and speculates: could such an act be connected with what can be called the “affect of pregnancy”? And if so, then the Kornilova case needs to be reviewed. Someone K.I. Maslynikov, an admirer of Dostoevsky, who served precisely in the department that could initiate a review of the case, took an ardent part in the fate of the young woman and began a correspondence with Dostoevsky in connection with this. In one of the letters, he lists point by point what he did. Dostoevsky answers him in the same businesslike letter, point by point, and suddenly at the end suddenly and unexpectedly adds: “In Jerusalem there was a font of Bethesda. And the paralytic complained to Christ that he had been waiting for a long time and was living at the font, but he did not have a person who would lower him into the font when the water was disturbed. And further: “According to the meaning of your letter, you want to be such a person in our patient. Do not miss the moment when the waters are indignant, and I will also act to the end.

Here is ideally expressed how Dostoevsky builds the image of a person in his novels and how he sees a person in reality: this is an instant correlation with the gospel situation. And let us note that in the gospel situation the patient never found his man, and he had to wait for Christ - God and Man at the same time. That is, in the Gospel with God, no one wanted to cooperate in order to specific person save. But here the situation changes radically: the Lord has a person who wants to cooperate with Him in order to heal this sick woman. That's what Dostoevsky is all about.

Those who do not want to see how the gospel reference points for any event are turning away from Dostoevsky

Therefore, those who do not want to see the gaping abysses turn away from Dostoevsky: those very “ends and beginnings” are opened, which for a person in the “vital apparently current”, as Dostoevsky writes, is something “still fantastic”. There are completely different points of reference for any event: it is suddenly evaluated in a completely different perspective, in which a person is used to assessing it and in which it is convenient for him to evaluate it. We begin to look at everything from the point of view of eternity, and such a change in perspective can, of course, make you sick.

Christ is the passion of life

- But was the writer Orthodox, because some theologians saw something heretical in his reasoning?

Dostoevsky was Orthodox, but I really don't like it when the word "Orthodox" is used like this: Orthodox - that's all. I would still speak of Dostoevsky as an "Orthodox Christian", and the word "Christian" would be emphasized. Because for Dostoevsky the most important thing is that Christ is present here every minute.

Dostoevsky is about the essential, living Christology and Mariology that affects every person. And according to practically everyone who was then engaged in dogmatic theology (and according to the testimony of many of those who are now engaged in it), this alive knowledge in the system of dogmatic theology was absent. Without this living knowledge of Christ, the 19th century became the century of positivism - in Russia too.

There is a wonderful book by the Italian author Divo Barsotti, by the way, a Catholic priest - "Dostoevsky: Christ is the passion of life." This is a very correct name. For Dostoevsky, Christ is the passion of life. Bunin said rudely: "Dostoevsky's Christ has a plug in every barrel." Dostoevsky is a passionate Christian, and he is, of course, Orthodox, because he is absolutely accurate in the presentation of how the union of man with God is built.

Those who accuse Dostoevsky of Pelagianism do not take into account that for him Christ is a presumption of any action of heroes

Another thing is that theologians, when reading Dostoevsky, most often perceive discourse - and here we hear the voices of heroes, not the author at all. And if you do not distinguish between the voices of the author and the characters, or do not understand that in Dostoevsky we are faced with something more complex than some kind of straightforward statement, you can come to erroneous conclusions. One of the most striking examples is the accusation of the writer of Pelagianism. But the accusers do not take into account the fact that for the writer Christ is the presumption of the world, and the step taken by Christ is the presumption of any action of the heroes (I use the word "presumption" in its original meaning: lat. praesumptio- anticipation, anticipation).

- Dostoevsky remained in the art workshop until the last stroke of the pen, but he wrote, it turns out, about the spiritual?

This is not the only case in world literature. Can you say that Dante, for example, wrote about something else? Although it is quite difficult for us to understand Dante: we know " Divine Comedy” in translation, but in the original its text is simpler in language and it speaks of much rougher, more “head-on”.

But any genius, in fact, why a genius? There are two meanings of this word: one was used at the turn of the XVIII-XIX and in early XIX century, and the other - at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. Pushkin says: “My genius”, and I. Severyanin already writes a poem: “I, the genius Igor Severyanin ...” (1912).

- Please explain what is the difference.

- “My genius” is someone who comes to me, for whom I am just a pen - a writing tool, whom I have to hear, we create together.

“I am a genius” is already something completely different, it is an individuality closed on itself, which cannot give us anything more than a message about itself. Although this is interesting, how interesting is the news about any person, but this is a completely different level of literature.

So, Dostoevsky (like any genius) is a genius because there is a genius in him: that is, a connection between the temporal and the eternal is instantly and powerfully established.

By the way, Alexander Blok somehow wrote an absolutely wonderful thing - we note: while working on historical poem "Retribution". Thinking about how he will build it, Blok writes: "The most important thing for a writer is to establish a connection between the temporal and the timeless."

Dostoevsky was honored by the thinking, writing, theological clergy. This is the only writer, quotes from which I have heard in sermons from the pulpit, and from different priests.

Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) even believed that, to some extent, Alyosha Karamazov was written off from him.

The question is whether the author sets himself the task of influencing outside. For example, Pushkin's work is an absolutely ideal poetic form. Everything that happens happens within the universe that Pushkin creates. But Dostoevsky creates something different. He doesn't write to tell a story at all, he writes to change the world.

By the way, L. Tolstoy does the same thing, however, he “works” on a completely different level - he “works” with morality. And Dostoevsky "works" precisely with religion, if we understand by religion literally the connection between man and God. Tolstoy "works" on a spiritual level, while Dostoevsky works on a spiritual one. And since Dostoevsky sets this for himself as the goal, and since Dostoevsky really becomes the basis of his personality, love for Christ, which he broadcasts through any of his texts, an amazing thing happens: in the 20th century he becomes a guide to Christ for people who have not read the Gospel .

Many of the generation of the currently serving clergy are people who came to the Church thanks to Dostoevsky

You said that Dostoyevsky is quoted in sermons. Very many of the generation of the clergy now serving are people who came to the Church thanks to Dostoevsky.

In the 1970s, when young people suddenly came to churches, many answered the question: “Why?” - answered: "I read Dostoevsky." Then, by the way, Dostoevsky was “permitted”. Incidentally, this was a radical mistake of the Soviet government. If it wanted to survive, it was necessary to "prohibit" Dostoevsky further.

It turns out that while reading Dostoevsky, it is impossible not to come to the Church. Therefore, it is rather ridiculous to hear the words: "We have a Psalter, and we do not need any fiction." Dostoevsky's text is oversaturated with hidden quotations from the Bible: this is the same engine, the engine of each scene, which transforms it from the "vital apparently current" into the original gospel scene. Dostoevsky suddenly begins to talk to the soul about that from which it has long been torn off, and teaches to restore this connection.

Why did God send an idiot?

- I know that I had a significant influence on many, and many especially love the novel The Idiot.

By the way, when the novel was published, a monstrous flurry of criticism immediately fell upon it - and reviews, and parodies, and bullying ... Because the text was completely inadequately read. Dostoevsky's contemporaries were accustomed to the writings of, for example, Nikolai Uspensky with his direct criticism of reality from a democratic standpoint, without any spiritual burden. Dostoevsky began to be appreciated at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries by the children of his first readers.

What exactly is The Idiot about? About the presence of God in a person in that world that lives completely without God and which, as it were, does not need Him.

Everyone with whom Prince Myshkin meets thinks about him: "God sent him directly to me." But why did God send him to them?

Interestingly, at the beginning of the novel, everyone with whom Prince Myshkin meets thinks about him: "God sent him directly to me." But why did God send him to them? For General Yepanchin, for example, he was “sent by God” so that he could slip away from an explanation with his wife ... And others in the same vein. It turns out that these people remember God and use God exclusively in their petty deeds, not even deeds. This state of the art society, its adequate cut. Stepan Trofimovich in the novel "Demons" will say when the Gospel is brought to him: "Yes, I recently refreshed it in my memory, I read it twenty years ago, and now I refreshed it recently according to Renan's wonderful book." We are talking about the book of the French philosopher and historian E. Renan "The Life of Jesus". What is it about? As times about Christ - only man. About Christ in His fundamental undivineness. This is a side view from somewhere, absolutely not in the presence of Christ, not in involvement in a relationship with Him. And Dostoevsky reproduces this view in his novel The Idiot.

It is no coincidence that the impact of the novel The Idiot turned out to be the most radical in the godless Soviet Union. They say that during each showing of the cult performance of G. Tovstonogov "The Idiot" (1957; 2nd edition - 1966), ambulances were on duty near the theater: people's hearts could not stand it. They suddenly began to see in a person what had long been forbidden to see.

Dostoevsky wrote - many years before! - a book that, for the situation of seventy years of the absence of the Gospel, the absence of God in the minds of people in general, turned out to be absolutely adequate to the state of society. She just walked right up to him. And having built in, she absolutely transformed this society from the inside.

- And the main character - who is he? Idiot or...?

This is a person who constantly destroys the aspirations of others. But what exactly is it destroying? This is a cozy, stable stay in the “vital apparently current”.

Everyone stumbles about Prince Myshkin. But without stumbling, without falling out of the pocket, without jumping out of the gutter, you won’t run anywhere. And human development would not have succeeded. A tragedy occurs - as always, when people are somehow removed from the warm liquid of the "essentially current" one way or another. Not without reason, by the way, some extremely unpleasant events in life were called a visit to God.

- And Nastasya Filippovna?

This is a man who chooses. Why did she run away from Prince Myshkin, from the crown? After a very definite exclamation from the crowd: “I would sell my soul for such a princess! “At the price of my life, my night!” - exclaimed some clerk. “At the cost of my life, my night” is a quote from Pushkin’s “Egyptian Nights”.

Pushkin's allusions are very important in the novel "The Idiot"

In general, the whole novel is permeated by Pushkin. Remember how Prince Myshkin says about Rogozhin: "We read Pushkin with him, we read everything." This is an indication to the reader on what background the novel should be perceived.

And what is there, in the "Egyptian Nights"? Cleopatra challenges her admirers: "Who among you will buy my night at the cost of life?" Dostoevsky deeply understood this Pushkin's text. Back in the early 1860s, he wrote an article, the reason for which was a scandal: a certain lady decided to read the "Egyptian Nights" from the stage on some literary evening, and her persecution in the press began. Dostoevsky stood up for the lady and explained that there was nothing "strawberry" in Pushkin's text. That he is not talking about that at all. It is about the horror of that world in which a person becomes, in fact, already a living corpse, in need of sharp replenishment with something unusual, because everything is boredom. Everything is boring if there is a lid over the world instead of the open Sky. And all from the fact that in a person the soul is corrupted and the connection with the spirit is broken.

Nastasya Filippovna is thrown in the face: “You, my dear, are Cleopatra. I am ready, please, “at the cost of your life, your night.” A mirror is placed in front of her, in which she sees herself as Cleopatra - and this is a symbol of beauty that leads to death, predatory beauty. And she runs from the prince to Rogozhin in order to become a victim, and not a devouring spider. That was the choice before her: either you are Cleopatra, or you are an innocent victim.

But in order to read the novel the way Dostoevsky conceived it, one must catch and understand all the allusions in it.

Raskolnikov's mistake

The novel is familiar to everyone - if only because it is "passed" at school. Question about the novel: what, in your opinion, did Raskolnikov make a mistake?

Raskolnikov was mistaken in only one thing - in the means. Remember, he had a watch - from papa? And on the clock - a globe. Here is his legacy. This is his realm: the whole earth. And he feels responsible for the whole world.

Raskolnikov throughout the whole novel only does what he distributes money to everyone.

Raskolnikov lives with a sense of responsibility for everything. This is a hero who, throughout the whole novel, does nothing but distribute money to everyone. A poor young man with no money! And he is busy - distribution. Moreover, this is money received either from the mortgage of her father's watch, or from her mother's pension, which she also receives for her father. It turns out that he has nothing of his own - everything is from his father. And what is from the father is always exactly the right amount for a particular situation: 20 kopecks to the policeman to take the girl home from the boulevard, 25 rubles for Marmeladov’s funeral ... And all the money that he himself “got” turns out to be neither that are not needed - they can only be hidden under a stone.

This watch is a deep symbol. This is a globe, a power-universe that Someone holds in his hand - just like Raskolnikov holds in his hand, but it is also the hand of the One Who holds all "ends and beginnings." This is an open universe, where innumerable grace constantly flows. But it is also clockwork. What is clockwork? What is time anyway? In order to enter the next minute, it is necessary to displace the previous one somewhere. That is, it is something that constantly devours itself in order to renew itself. This is a closed universe, the ouroboros is a snake devouring its own tail: this is the eternal redistribution of what is.

And Raskolnikov thinks so: some kind of God is “incapable”: it’s not clear what is happening in the world, and the dream is bad (dad in a dream was also unable to protect the horse or stop its killers) - which means you need to act yourself. And how can a person act on his own in the world? - Only one way. If the world is closed, then in order to give to someone, you have to take from someone. The principle of redistribution, reshaping, the principle of poverty, not abundance, begins to work.

That is Raskolnikov's mistake! He is really responsible for everything, but he decided that he is responsible for everything in a closed world, and not in a world open to receive grace - that is, that he is a redistributor, and not a mediator and transmitter.

- Has he lost contact with his father?

Yes, he lost contact with his father. I tried to somehow redistribute what was available, and it turned out that it did not work at all. So it turns out: "I killed myself, not the old woman."

And then, through the whole novel, there is a slow and gradual restoration in him of the original appearance of Christ.

The last words of the novel are amazing: “But here a new history begins, the history of the gradual renewal of man, the history of his gradual rebirth, his gradual transition from one world to another, acquaintance with a new, hitherto completely unknown reality.” What happened? metanoia, change of mind. And this means a complete change of everything, a change in the vision of the world and its connections. Approximately the same thing happens with the reader of Dostoevsky.

Dostoevsky and Tolstoy... No one glorified Russian literature like they did. No one glorified Russian culture like Tchaikovsky and they did. Many famous foreign writers of the twentieth century spoke of them with admiration and admiration, recognized their great influence on their work. The English novelist Snow said that modern writers can only play at the feet of such giants as Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky.

And this is surprising. These two compatriots and contemporary did not know each other. Although they communicated with all prominent Russian writers. Both conducted extensive correspondence. But they did not write a single line to each other. interest. They couldn’t help but feel: both, no doubt, felt that only they were equal to each other. They didn’t know each other, although they wanted to get to know each other! The fact that they had a common close friend, critic and philosopher Nikolai Strakhov, did not contribute to their meeting either.

At first, there was simply no chance. In 1855, Tolstoy, a young writer who made everyone talk about himself after the publication of "Childhood", arrives in St. Petersburg, the city where Dostoevsky lived. He meets Turgenev, Nekrasov. But Dostoevsky is not here, he - in exile, after several years of hard labor. When he returns to St. Petersburg, Tolstoy - almost constantly either in Yasnaya Polyana or in Moscow.

But their mutual interest in absentia is growing. The novel "War and Peace" makes the strongest impression on Dostoevsky. After reading it, he constantly thinks about Tolstoy. Then, apparently, he has a desire to see Tolstoy, a desire that was never destined to come true.

And Tolstoy wrote in his diary that he read "The Humiliated and Insulted" and was touched.

In 1877, Strakhov, informing Tolstoy about the success of "Anna Karenina" in St. Petersburg, writes: "Dostoevsky waves his hands and calls you the god of art." Dostoevsky in his "Diary of a Writer" places an article dedicated to this novel. height artist","brilliant scene","brilliantly". In conclusion, he writes: "People like the author of Anna Karenina are the teachers of society, and we are only their students." However, he does not agree with something.

I must say that they (especially Tolstoy) expressed many critical remarks about each other's work and worldview. Apparently, Dostoevsky valued Tolstoy more as an artist than as a thinker, and Tolstoy - on the contrary. Tolstoy really did not like the language that Dostoevsky wrote. Gorky in his book about Tolstoy recalls: "He spoke about Dostoevsky reluctantly, strainedly, bypassing something, overcoming something."

A good opportunity met in 1878, at a lecture by the philosopher Solovyov. Tolstoy was at this lecture with Strakhov. But Strakhov did not introduce them. Maybe they even stood close to each other!

They could have met in 1880. Dostoevsky arrived in Moscow for the Pushkin celebrations. He was going to go before them to Yasnaya Polyana. - May 28, - that, you hear, he is completely crazy<...>I won't go..." (How many geniuses are there who have never been known as madmen?)

On June 6, a monument to Pushkin was unveiled in Moscow. On June 8, a meeting of the Society of Lovers of Russian Literature was held, at which Dostoevsky delivered his famous speech about Pushkin, which shocked the audience. All famous writers were present. Only Tolstoy was absent. Although Turgenev specially traveled to Yasnaya Polyana to persuade him to come. After the moral upheaval, Tolstoy considered all sorts of monuments to be worldly vanity.

In the same year, Tolstoy wrote to Strakhov: "... I read" Dead House ". I forgot a lot, re-read and I don’t know better books from all new literature, including Pushkin ... I enjoyed the whole day yesterday, as I had not enjoyed for a long time. If see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him. "Strakhov showed the letter to Dostoevsky. He was excited and delighted, begged Strakhov to give him this letter. And at the same time he was sincerely upset! That Tolstoy put him above Pushkin, he saw a manifestation of disrespect for his idol.

Shortly before his death, Dostoevsky asks Countess Alexandra Andreevna Tolstaya, Leo Nikolayevich's great-aunt, with whom she corresponded for many years, to explain Tolstoy's teachings to him. According to her, Tolstoy "terribly interested" him. She read to Dostoevsky one of her nephew's letters. "...he clutched his head," recalls A.A. Tolstaya, "and repeated in a desperate voice:"Not that, not that!.."

After the death of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy writes in a letter to Strakhov: "How I wish I could say everything I feel about Dostoevsky<...>I never saw this man and never had a direct relationship with him, and suddenly, when he died, I realized that he was the closest, dearest, most necessary person to me. I was a writer, and writers are all vain, envious, I , at least such a writer. And it never occurred to me to compare with him - never. Everything he did (good, real, what he did) was such that the more he did, the better for me. Art causes I have envy in me, my mind too, but the matter of the heart is only joy. I considered him my friend, and I didn’t think otherwise, like the fact that we would see each other, and that now we just didn’t have to, but that it’s mine. And suddenly at dinner - I dined alone, I was late - I died reading. Some kind of support bounced off me. I was confused, and then it became clear how dear he was to me, and I cried and now I cry. "When Strakhov wrote him a famous letter imbued with hatred for Dostoevsky , Tolstoy defended Dostoevsky in a response letter.

Anna Grigorievna Dostoevskaya, the writer's wife, in her "Memoirs" leads a conversation with Tolstoy.
"I always regret that I never met your husband.
- And how he regretted it! But there was an opportunity to meet - this was when you were at a lecture by Vladimir Solovyov in Salt Gorodok. I remember Fyodor Mikhailovich even reproached Strakhov for why he did not tell him that you were at a lecture. at him,” my husband said, “if we didn’t have to talk.”
- Really? And your husband was at that lecture? Why didn’t Nikolai Nikolayevich tell me about this? How sorry I am! could answer a lot<...>Tell me, what kind of person was your husband, what kind of person did he remain in your soul, in your memories?
I was deeply touched by the sincere tone in which he spoke of Fyodor Mikhailovich.
“My dear husband,” I said enthusiastically, “represented the ideal of a person! All the highest moral and spiritual qualities that adorn a person were manifested in him to the highest degree<...>
“I always thought of him that way,” said Count Lev Nikolaevich somehow thoughtfully and penetratingly.

The last book that Tolstoy read before his departure from Yasnaya Polyana and death at the railway station, were the Brothers Karamazov.

Volgin, in his remarkable book The Last Year of Dostoevsky, makes an interesting suggestion that in 1878 Tolstoy might not have wanted to meet Dostoevsky. (Strakhov claimed that Tolstoy then asked not to be introduced to anyone.)<...>he instinctively removes from himself everything that can shake this faith that is born in pain, writes Volgin. - The meeting (and the inevitable spiritual confrontation) with such a powerful opponent as the author of the "Diary" threatens to destroy the integrity of Tolstoy's world so difficult to erect, to shake its innermost foundations. her late husband, Tolstoy, of course, no longer remembered his then motives.

Obviously, over the years there was a strong mutual desire to meet. And there was a mutual subconscious opposition to this. It turned out to be stronger.