Characteristics of the narrator and his role in the work. Book "Introduction to literary criticism. Textbook"

Concept narration in a broad sense, it implies communication between a certain subject telling about events and the reader and is applied not only to literary texts(for example, a historian narrates the events). Obviously, one should first of all correlate the narrative with the structure of the literary work. In this case, it is necessary to distinguish between two aspects: “the event that is being told” and “the event of the telling itself.” The term “narration” corresponds in this case exclusively to the second “event”.

Two clarifications need to be made. Firstly, the narrating subject has direct contact with the addressee-reader, absent, for example, in cases of inserted stories addressed by some characters to others. Secondly, a clear distinction between the two named aspects of the work is possible, and their relative autonomy is characteristic mainly of epic works. Of course, the story of a character in a drama about events that are not shown on stage, or a similar story about the past of a lyrical subject (not to mention a special lyrical genre"story in verse ») represent phenomena close to epic storytelling. But these will already be transitional forms.

The accounts of the events of one of the characters, addressed not to the reader, but to listener-characters, and a story about the same events by such a subject of image and speech, who is intermediary between the world of the characters and the reality of the reader. Only the story in the second meaning should – with a more precise and responsible use of words – be called “narration”. For example, inserted stories in Pushkin’s “The Shot” (the stories of Silvio and Count B*) are considered as such precisely because they function within the depicted world and become known thanks to the main narrator, who conveys them to the reader, addressing him directly, and not to one or another event participants.

Thus, with an approach that differentiates “acts of storytelling” depending on their addressee, the category of narrator can be correlated with such different subjects of image and speech as narrator , narrator And "image of the author." What they have in common is mediation function, and on this basis distinctions can be made.

Narrator – That , who informs the reader about the events and actions of the characters, records the passage of time, depicts the appearance of the characters and the setting of the action, analyzes internal state the hero and the motives of his behavior characterize his human type (mental makeup, temperament, attitude towards moral standards etc.), without being either a participant in the events or, more importantly, an object of depiction for any of the characters. The specificity of the narrator is simultaneously in his comprehensive outlook (its boundaries coincide with the boundaries of the depicted world) and in the address of his speech primarily to the reader, i.e., its direction just beyond the boundaries of the depicted world. In other words, this specificity is determined by the position “on the border” of fictional reality.

Let us emphasize: the narrator is not a person, but function. Or, as the German writer Thomas Mann said (in the novel “The Chosen One”), “the weightless, ethereal and omnipresent spirit of storytelling.” But a function can be attached to a character (or a spirit can be embodied in him) - provided that the character as a narrator is completely different from himself as an actor.

This is the situation in Pushkin's The captain's daughter" At the end of this work initial conditions the stories seem to change decisively: “I have not witnessed everything with which it remains for me to notify the reader; but I have heard stories about it so often that the slightest details are engraved in my memory and that it seems to me as if I were there, invisibly present.” Invisible presence is the traditional prerogative of the narrator, and not the storyteller. But is the way of covering events in this part of the work any different from everything that preceded it? Obviously, nothing. Not to mention the absence of purely verbal differences, in both cases the subject of the narrative equally easily brings his point of view closer to the point of view of the character. Masha, in the same way, does not know who the real lady is, whom she managed to “examine from head to toe,” just as the character Grinev, who “seemed remarkable” the appearance of his counselor, does not suspect who she actually accidentally introduced him to life. But the limited vision of the characters is accompanied by portraits of the interlocutors that, in their psychological insight and depth, go far beyond their capabilities. On the other hand, the narrating Grinev is by no means a definite personality, in contrast to Grinev, the protagonist. The second is the image object for the first; the same as all the other characters. At the same time, Pyotr Grinev’s character’s view of what is happening is limited by the conditions of place and time, including features of age and development; his point of view as a narrator is much deeper. On the other hand, Grinev the character is perceived differently by other characters. But in the special function of the “I-narrator,” the subject, whom we call Grinev, is not the subject of the image for any of the characters. He is a subject of depiction only for the author-creator.

The “attachment” of the narrative function to the character is motivated in “The Captain’s Daughter” by the fact that Grinev is credited with the “authorship” of the notes. The character, as it were, turns into the author: hence the broadening of his horizons. The opposite move is also possible artistic thought: turning the author into a special character, creating his own “double” within the depicted world. This is what happens in the novel “Eugene Onegin”. The one who addresses the reader with the words “Now we will fly to the garden, / Where Tatyana met him,” is, of course, the narrator. In the reader’s mind, he is easily identified, on the one hand, with the author-creator (the creator of the work as an artistic whole), on the other, with the character who, together with Onegin, remembers “the beginning of a young life” on the banks of the Neva. In fact, in the depicted world, as one of the heroes, there is, of course, not the author-creator (this is impossible), but the “image of the author”, the prototype of which for the creator of the work is himself as an “extra-artistic” person - as a private person with a special biography (“But the north is harmful to me”) and as a person of a certain profession (belonging to the “perky workshop”).

Concepts " narrator " And " author's image "Sometimes they are mixed up, but they can and should be distinguished. First of all, both of them should be distinguished – precisely as “images” – from the one who created them author-creator. That the narrator is “a fictitious figure, not identical with the author” is a generally accepted opinion. The relationship between the “image of the author” and the original or “primary” author is not so clear. According to M.M. Bakhtin, “the image of the author” is something “created, not created.”

The “image of the author” is created by the original author (the creator of the work) according to the same principle as a self-portrait in painting. This analogy makes it possible to quite clearly distinguish the creation from the creator. A self-portrait of an artist, from a theoretical point of view, can include not only himself with an easel, palette and brush, but also a painting standing on a stretcher, in which the viewer, after looking closely, recognizes the resemblance of the self-portrait he is contemplating. In other words, the artist can depict himself drawing this very self-portrait in front of the audience (cf.: “By now, in the place of my novel / I have finished the first chapter”). But he cannot show how this picture is created as a whole - with the perception of the viewer double perspective (with a self-portrait inside). To create an “image of the author,” like any other, a true author needs a fulcrum outside works, outside the “field of image” (M.M. Bakhtin).

The narrator, unlike the author-creator, is outside only that depicted time and space, under which the plot unfolds. Therefore, he can easily go back or run ahead, and also know the premises or results of the events of the present depicted. But its possibilities are at the same time determined from beyond the boundaries of the entire artistic whole, which includes the depicted “event of the storytelling itself.” The “omniscience” of the narrator (for example, in “War and Peace” by L.N. Tolstoy) is also included in author's intention, as in other cases - in “Crime and Punishment” by F.M. Dostoevsky or in the novels of I.S. Turgenev - the narrator, according to the author's instructions, does not have complete knowledge about the causes of events or about the inner life of the heroes.

In contrast to the narrator narrator is not on the border of the fictional world with the reality of the author and reader, but entirely inside depicted reality. All the main points of the “event of the story itself” in this case become the subject of the image, the “facts” of fictional reality: the “framing” situation of the story (in the short story tradition and oriented towards it prose XIX-XX centuries); the personality of the narrator: he is either biographically connected with the characters about whom he is telling the story (the writer in “The Humiliated and the Insulted,” the chronicler in F. M. Dostoevsky’s “Demons”), or in any case has a special, by no means comprehensive, outlook; a specific speech manner attached to a character or depicted on its own (“The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich Quarreled” by N.V. Gogol). If no one sees the narrator inside the depicted world and does not assume the possibility of its existence, then the narrator certainly enters the horizon of either the narrator or the characters - the listeners (Ivan Vasilyevich in the story “After the Ball” by L.N. Tolstoy).

The image of the narrator- How character or as a “linguistic face” (M.M. Bakhtin) – necessary hallmark this type of depicting subject, the inclusion in the field of depiction of the circumstances of the story is optional. For example, in Pushkin’s “The Shot” there are three narrators, but only two storytelling situations are shown. If such a role is assigned to a character whose story bears no signs of either his outlook or his speech manner (the story of Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov in Fathers and Sons, attributed to Arkady), this is perceived as a conventional device. Its goal is to relieve the author of responsibility for the accuracy of what is told. In fact, the subject of the image in this part of Turgenev’s novel is the narrator.

So, the narrator is the subject of the image, quite objectified and associated with a certain socio-cultural and linguistic environment, from the perspective of which (as happens in the same “Shot”) he portrays other characters. The narrator, on the contrary, is close in his outlook to the author-creator. At the same time, compared to the heroes, he is a bearer of a more neutral speech element, generally accepted linguistic and stylistic norms. This is how, for example, the narrator’s speech differs from Marmeladov’s story in Crime and Punishment. The closer the hero is to the author, the fewer speech differences between the hero and the narrator. Therefore, the leading characters of a great epic, as a rule, are not the subjects of stylistically distinct stories.

The narrator’s “mediation” helps the reader, first of all, to obtain a more reliable and objective understanding of events and actions, as well as the inner life of the characters. The narrator's "mediation" allows entry inside depicted world and look at events through the eyes of the characters. The first is associated with certain advantages external points of view. Conversely, works that seek to directly involve the reader in the character’s perception of events do without a narrator at all or almost without, using the forms of diary, correspondence, and confession (“Poor People” by F.M. Dostoevsky, “Letters of Ernest and Doravra” by F. Emin). The third, intermediate option is when the author-creator seeks to balance the external and internal positions. In such cases, the image of the narrator and his story can turn out to be a “bridge” or a connecting link: this is the case in “A Hero of Our Time” by M.Yu. Lermontov, where the story of Maxim Maksimych connects the “travel notes” of the Author-character with the “magazine” of Pechorin.

So, in a broad sense (that is, without taking into account the differences between compositional forms of speech), a narrative is a set of those statements of speech subjects (narrator, narrator, image of the author) that perform the functions of “mediation” between the depicted world and the reader - the addressee of the entire work as a single artistic work statements.

Since the concepts of “narration” and “point of view” allow for multiple interpretations and are difficult for a beginning writer, it is useful to recall their definitions from a literary studies course.

Narration - this is the totality of those utterances of speech subjects - i.e. narrator, narrator - who perform the functions of “mediation” between the depicted world and the addressee - i.e. by the reader - the entire work as a single artistic statement.

Narration, along with description And reasoning(in Russian literary criticism, the place of “reasoning” in this triad, as a rule, is occupied by characteristic), refers to one of the three traditionally distinguished compositional speech forms. IN modern literary criticism narration is understood as speaking in general And How story (message) about one-time actions and events occurring in a literary work.

Narrator- the one who informs the reader about the events and actions of the characters, records the passage of time, depicts the appearance of the characters and the setting of the action, analyzes the internal state of the hero and the motives of his behavior, characterizes his human type (mental disposition, temperament, attitude to moral standards, etc.) etc.), without being either a participant in the events or an object of depiction for any of the characters. The specificity of the narrator is simultaneously in his comprehensive outlook (its boundaries coincide with the boundaries of the depicted world) and the addressability of his speech primarily to the reader, i.e., its direction just beyond the boundaries of the depicted world. In other words, this specificity is determined by the position “on the border” of fictional reality.

Narrator - not a face, but a function. Or, as I said Thomas Mann(in the novel “The Chosen One”), this is the weightless, ethereal and omnipresent spirit of storytelling. But a function can be attached to a character (or a spirit can be embodied in him) - provided that the character as narrator is completely don't match with him as an actor.

This situation can be seen, for example, in Pushkin’s “The Captain's Daughter”. At the end of this work, the original conditions of the story seem to change decisively: “I have not witnessed everything that remains for me to notify the reader about; but I have heard stories about it so often that the slightest details are etched into my memory and that it seems to me as if I were there, invisibly present.” The invisible presence is the traditional prerogative of the narrator, not the storyteller.

In contrast to the narrator narrator is not on the border of the fictional world with the reality of the author and reader, but entirely within the depicted reality. All the main points of the story itself in this case become the subject of the image, facts of fictional reality:

• the framing situation of the story (in the short story tradition and prose oriented towards it in the 19th-20th centuries);
• the personality of the narrator, who is either biographically connected with the characters about whom the story is told (the writer in “The Humiliated and Insulted”, the chronicler in “Demons” Dostoevsky), or in any case has a special, by no means comprehensive, outlook;
• a specific speech manner attached to a character or depicted on its own (“The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” Gogol, early miniatures Chekhov).

If no one sees the narrator inside the depicted world and does not suggest the possibility of its existence, then the narrator certainly enters the horizon of either the narrator (Ivan Velikopolsky in “Student” Chekhov), or characters (Ivan Vasilyevich in “After the Ball” Tolstoy).

Narrator- subject of the image, quite “objectified” and associated with a certain socio-cultural and linguistic environment, from the perspective of which (as happens in the story “Shot” Pushkin) he also portrays other characters. The narrator, on the contrary, is close in his outlook to the author-creator. At the same time, compared to the heroes, he is the bearer of a more neutral speech element, generally accepted linguistic and stylistic norms. So, for example, the narrator’s speech differs from Marmeladov’s story in “Crime and Punishment” Dostoevsky. The closer the hero is to the author, the fewer speech differences between the hero and the narrator. Therefore, the leading characters of a great epic, as a rule, are not the subjects of stylistically sharply distinguished stories (cf., for example, Prince Myshkin’s story about Marie and the stories of General Ivolgin or Keller’s feuilleton in “The Idiot” Dostoevsky).

Storytelling system prose work performs the function of organizing reader perception. It is important for a writer to keep in mind three levels of the structure of reader perception: objective, psychological and axiological, each of which should be considered using a technique known as the “doctrine of point of view.” Exactly point of view is often the primary way of organizing a narrative.

1. Point of view. Author's choice of point of view

How to express the author's voice and find the right point of view for the story literary characters? All writers ask these questions when they sit down to write a new work. The writer’s ability to illuminate an invented literary story in such a way that it the best way interested the reader. In the US, there are 6-week courses ($300) dedicated solely to choosing a writer's point of view.

Unlike Russian, in Western literary criticism the concept is not “narrator”, but “ point of view " (English: point of view, POV) and, less often, " dot narratives"(English: point of narration, PON).

In non-academic Western reference books, “point of view” is defined as follows: this is the one through whose eyes and whose other senses the reader perceives the actions and events occurring in the work. In other words, the “point of view” defines the narrator, the storyteller (narrator), and everything that the reader knows. In fact, this is a narrator (narrator), but not quite.

In more serious dictionaries literary terms"point of view" is defined as the narrator's attitude towards the story, which determines artistic method and the nature of the characters in the work.

The point of view can be like internal, so external. The internal point of view is if the narrator turns out to be one of the characters; in this case the narration is told in the first person. The external point of view represents the external position of one who does not take part in the action; in this case, the narration is usually told from a third person.

Internal point of view may also be different. First of all, this is a narration from the perspective of the main character; such a narrative pretends to be autobiographical. But this can also be a narration from the point of view of an insignificant character, not a hero. There are huge benefits to this way of storytelling. The secondary character is able to describe the main character from the outside, but he can also accompany the hero and talk about his adventures. The external point of view, in the truest sense of the word, gives expanse of omniscience. The higher consciousness, located outside the story itself, views all heroes from the same distance. Here the narrator is like God. He owns the past, present and future. He knows the secret thoughts and feelings of all his characters. He never has to explain to the reader how he knows all this. The main disadvantage of the omniscient position (or, as it is sometimes called, the Olympian position) is the inability to somehow get closer to the scene of action.

These obvious shortcomings are overcome in external point of view, limiting the narrator’s Olympic capabilities. The limitation is achieved through a narrative where the entire story is told from the point of view of a single character. This limitation allows the narrator to combine almost all the benefits of the internal point of view with many of the advantages of the omniscient position.

Another step in this direction is possible: the narrator can renounce his divine capabilities and talk only about what an external witness of events can see. Such moving point of view makes it possible to use different points of view within one book or story. A moving point of view also provides the opportunity to expand and contrast different modes of perception, as well as to bring the reader closer or further from the scene.

In Longman's Dictionary of Poetic Terms, "point of view" is the physical, mental, or personal perspective that an author maintains regarding the events being described. Physical point of view- this is a point of view, including a temporal one, from which the entire literary history is viewed. Speculative point of view is the perspective of the inner consciousness and emotional relationship that is maintained between the narrator and the story itself. If the narration is told in the first person (“I” or “we”), the speaker is a participant in the events and has the emotional, subjective capabilities of an interested witness. The second person (“you”, “you”) allows you to maintain distance, and, therefore, greater freedom and has a questioning and sometimes accusatory character. Third-person narration suggests various possibilities: 1) position possibilities omniscience, when the narrator walks freely among his characters and penetrates their thoughts, sees through their actions, doing this with the help of editorial commentary or impersonally (this is how he wrote his great novels Lev Tolstoy); 2) possibilities limited points of view.

By Yu.M. Lotman, the concept of “point of view” is similar to the concept of perspective in painting and cinema. The concept " artistic point view" is revealed as the relationship of the system to its subject (the "system" in this case can be linguistic and other, more high levels). Under the “subject of the system” (ideological, stylistic, etc.) Lotman implies a consciousness capable of generating such a structure and, therefore, reconstructed when perceiving the text.

By V.M. Tolmachov, “point of view” is one of the key (developed in the West) concepts of “new criticism”. The point of view describes the “mode of existense” of a work as an ontological act or a self-sufficient structure, autonomous in relation to reality and the personality of the writer and serves as a tool for close reading of a prose text.

J. Genette believes: “What we now metaphorically call narrative perspective, - that is, the second way of regulating information, which stems from the choice (or non-choice) of some restrictive “point of view” - among all the issues of narrative technique, this issue has been studied most often, since the end of the nineteenth century, and with undoubted critical achievements, These include chapters from Percy Lubbock’s book dedicated to Balzac, Flaubert, Tolstoy or James, or chapters from Georges Blain’s book on the “limitations of the field” in Stendhal. However, the majority theoretical works on this issue (which basically come down to various kinds of classifications), in my opinion, in a very annoying way they do not distinguish between what I call here modality And pledge, that is, the question is what is the character whose point of view directs narrative perspective? and a completely different question: who is the narrator? or, to put it briefly, the questions do not differ who sees? and question who speaks?»

The German Stanzel Franz K. spoke like this. For the English term “point of view,” German-language literary criticism does not have an exact correspondence; it therefore uses alternately “position” (Standpunkt), “direction of view” (Blickpunkt), “perspective” or “narrative angle [of view]” (Erza hlwinkel).<…>Although "point of view" is accurate as a term, in its use it is by no means unambiguous. First of all, one should distinguish between the general meaning of “attitude” (Einstellung), “posing a question” (Haltung zu einer Frage) and the special meaning of “The position from which the story is told or from which the event of the story is perceived by the hero of the story.” How does this definition result? special meaning, the term “point of view” storytelling technique covers two aspects that must be separated in the theory of storytelling: telling, that is, communicating something in words to the reader, and recognizing, perceiving, knowing what is happening in a fictional space. Christine Morrison, who noted that the "point of view" of Henry James and Percy Lubbock is used with such ambiguity, therefore distinguishes between the "speaker of narrative words", which in our terminology is the character-narrator, and the "knower". of the narrative story" [knowing the story being told], hence a personal medium or reflector character (Reflektorfigur).

I dwelled in such detail on the definitions of “point of view” because among literary scholars, literary critics and editors - both in Russia and in the world - there remains a significant discrepancy in the interpretation of this term, and an aspiring writer needs to keep this in mind when communicating, first of all, with a literary editor at a publishing house.

Many novice writers unreasonably consider the problem of choosing a “point of view” to be purely literary, far from the actual work on the work. I, they say, will first intuitively write a masterpiece, a bestseller, and then let these abstruse literary scholars and critics take it apart and analyze it using their sophisticated methods. This is an amateurish delusion. Mastering the technique of writing from different points of view is considered one of the main professional skills of a writer. But if you don’t have these skills, if you don’t have writing techniques, all attempts at creativity will go down the drain.

Of course, other outstanding writers wrote and write intuitively, without particularly taking into account the rules. But this is already the “second part of the Marlezon ballet”, when the experience of the first part - the experience of learning the main rules - is long behind us. First learn these rules, then set out to break them brilliantly and win well-deserved laurels from the reader for this.

“Point of view” is one of the basic concepts modern teaching about composition. Inexperienced writers often misunderstand the term "point of view" in everyday meaning: they say, each author and character has their own point of view on life. As a term of literary criticism, “point of view” first appeared at the end of the 19th century in an essay by a famous American writer Henry James about the art of prose. This term was made strictly scientific by an English literary scholar. Percy Lubbock. “Point of view” is a complex and voluminous concept, revealing ways of the author's presence in the text. In fact, we are talking about a thorough analysis of the montage of the text and attempts to see in this montage one’s own logic and the presence of the author. Analysis of the change of points of view is effective in relation to those literary works where expression plan not equal content plan, that is, everything said or presented has second, third, etc. layers of meaning. For example, in the poem Lermontov“Cliff”, of course, we are not talking about a cliff and a cloud. Where the plans of expression and content are inseparable or even identical, the analysis of points of view does not work. For example, in jewelry or abstract painting.

“Point of view” has at least two spectrums of meaning: firstly, it spatial localization, that is, the definition of the place from which the story is being told. If we compare a writer with a cinematographer, we can say that in this case we will be interested in where the film camera was: close, far, above or below, and so on. The same fragment of reality will look very different depending on the change in point of view. The second spectrum of values ​​is the so-called subjective localization, that is, we will be interested in whose consciousness saw the scene. Summarizing numerous observations, Percy Lubbock distinguished two main types of storytelling: panoramic(when the author directly shows his consciousness) and stage(we are not talking about dramaturgy, it means that the author’s consciousness is “hidden” in the characters, the author does not openly manifest himself). According to Lubbock and his followers ( N. Friedman, K. Brooks etc.), the stage method is aesthetically preferable, since it does not impose anything, but only shows. This position, however, can be challenged, since classical “panoramic” texts Lev Tolstoy, for example, have enormous aesthetic potential for impact. Tolstoy, without directly naming the point of view, he defined the point of view for himself as follows: “... the cement that binds every work of art into one whole and therefore produces the illusion of a reflection of life is not the unity of persons and positions, but unity original moral relationship author to the subject."

It is clear that it is very important for a writer to choose the right point of view and narrator. This choice will determine what the author will be able to tell How he will tell his literary story. In other words, not only the form of the story, the structure and style of the work, but also its content largely depends on the choice of the narrator. For example, completely various works will be obtained if four narrators tell about the same episode of a clash: the commander of the regiment participating in the battle; a nurse collecting the wounded on the battlefield; captured enemy soldier; a local elderly shepherdess who accidentally found herself in the thick of battle, searching for her obstinate cow in a minefield. If, in an effort to increase the number of combat scenes in the work, the writer begins to depict the same battle alternately from several points of view, this will certainly irritate the reader, because, firstly, the latter’s attention must constantly switch and he will begin to get confused in the narrators, and, secondly, because the narrated episodes of the battle cannot exactly coincide in time, and, for example, when for one narrator the battle is just beginning, for another it may already be ending, and the artillery hero killed by an enemy sniper for one narrator, for one narrator another - he may still be healthy and even get ready to sneak away after the battle on a date with his beloved from the medical battalion.

The simplest and most obvious way for the reader to clearly switch points of view is to move on to the next point of view at the beginning of the chapter.

The point of view in a work is often, but not always, chosen by the main character in whom the author is most interested. But a writer should always consider other options in which the point of view does not represent main character. If you choose a narrator from among the characters, then the best narrator is, of course, the one who has something to bring to the table. If the writer chooses to be the narrator minor character, then the personal goals of the latter should not exceed the scale of the goals of the protagonist, but, nevertheless, the hero-narrator must have some kind of his own, albeit modest, storyline in literary history. If such minor character to make it simply a “camera” for showing and a mouthpiece for telling the reader what is happening in some scene, then this is a path of missed opportunities.

A special case when the antagonist's point of view is chosen. Here you need to work very carefully, because the antagonist in a literary story is often a relatively unrelated person, and certainly not the main one, but participates in the most difficult and critical scenes in which it is very important to keep the plot tension (and the reader’s interest) at the highest level.

Eliminating one of the points of view during the development of the plot - for example, killing the narrator - is always not fun for the reader. But if such liquidation miraculously can revive literary history, then this is a justified move.

When taking on a new literary story, it is helpful for a writer to first weigh the answers to the following questions: Should I make my protagonist the narrator? If not, then who? What will I get from the replacement? What can I lose?

Here are additional questions to consider when choosing a narrator (point of view) for a new project:

• Which character will have the worst time? (Motive: the one who can have the strongest emotional impact can usually become the best storyteller.)
• Who can be present at the climax? (Motive: it is your narrator who must be present in the climactic scene, otherwise the author dooms the reader to find out about himself important event in literary history second-hand, which is bad).
• Who is involved in most of the central scenes? (Motive: the author will somehow need someone who will be present in the majority key scenes, so why not the narrator).
• Who will carry out the author's ideas in the work? What conclusions is the author going to draw? Who in the work could best draw the author's conclusions?

A professional writer should have this: it is not the author who chooses the point of view, the narrator, but the genre and that specific literary story that the writer wants to embody in his work. That is, the writer should not think about his preferences and skills (“I like to write from the point of view of an omniscient narrator, I am best at this form”), but determine: which narrator will allow him to tell a literary story in the best way. Let, for example, a writer love to create from the position of an omniscient narrator in the third person, but if, for example, his new work falls into the genre of memoirs, then it will probably be more advantageous to write it in the traditional form for this genre - “from me.” That is, the genre's guidelines should always be taken into account. Thus, in the novel genre one can easily find traditional points Gender-divided points of view: some novels are written from a woman’s point of view, others from a man’s point of view, and still others (much less often) from both of these gender points of view. Many people love to read very rare romance novels novels written from a male point of view - whether in the first or third person - but the same novels written from a woman's point of view are treated with lukewarmness. And if the author suddenly decided to be original in choosing a narrator - to break genre stereotypes, I would advise such an innovator to think a hundred times before going to all lengths, risking the misunderstanding of both editors and readers.

In Western literary criticism there is an opinion that visually oriented writers tend to favor multiple points of view or write in the first person. They are supposedly able to “see” literary history “as the weaving of life through several characters.” However kinesthetically oriented writers may object: they say, “visualists” use exactly the same set of events in literary history, only they depict them from the point of view of a more active first person. If the author cannot or does not know how to write in the first person, then he will not choose such a point of view, even if he admires works written in the first person that are similar to his project in genre, theme, style, manner or tone.

So for the right choice narrator in specific work the author, first of all, must know his capabilities as a creator and freely navigate the completed literary history. In other words, the choice of point of view depends primarily on an understanding of the essence of the literary story he is about to tell, and on the skills and preferences of the writer himself. If the planned story requires the author to choose a narrator whom he simply “can’t handle” or categorically “doesn’t like,” then it’s better to abandon the project altogether.

How many points of view can there be in one work? One and more than one - there is no rule common to all works. The established recommendation is this: there should be a minimum number of points of view in order for a writer to tell his literary story. If, for example, the main character cannot be in different places at the same time, then more than one point of view will be needed to cover such a literary story. Depending on the complexity of the plot and the creative tasks of the writer, there may be three or four points of view or narrators, as, for example, in “A Hero of Our Time” Lermontov. Extra narrators are harmful in that with each new narrating person the reader must tune in to him, make adjustments to his perception of the work, and sometimes flip through the book in the opposite direction, which makes reading more complex, difficult and even incomprehensible. The more prepared the target reader, the more points of view can be introduced; modern cannibal Ellochki, who accidentally find themselves reading a book, certainly won’t be able to cope with more than one narrator.

In epic canvases of grandiose scale, such as the novels “War and Peace” Tolstoy, « Quiet Don» Sholokhov or fantasy "Game of Thrones" J.Martina, many are involved storylines, which develop in different times and spaces, and in which separate groups of heroes participate - dozens of heroes, many of whom are classified as the main ones. In this kind of multifocal works it is extremely difficult to use one point of view ( Tolstoy this is achieved with the help of an omniscient narrator who has one voice, one consciousness [the author’s consciousness] dominating the literary story), and it is certainly impossible to use one narrator from among the heroes. In "War and Peace" Tolstoy approximately 600 heroes, and character system includes four categories of heroes (main, secondary, episodic, introductory characters), while the importance of the lower categories is incomparably greater than in a non-epic novel. Therefore, the form “from I” in an epic novel is by definition inapplicable. Readers either love or hate this approach to writing (and such epic novels). When designing an epic literary work, a writer, striving to achieve a greater completeness of the picture, better information, must take into account that, adding each new point of view to the novel, he will inevitably have to sacrifice something (for example, the expectations of those readers who prefer things simpler, and in complex ones according to the construction of the novels, they get confused and stop reading). And, on the contrary, not all readers like it when the author (the same Tolstoy), openly speaking through the narrator, aggressively tries to impose his vision of the events taking place in literary history.

And such “omniscient” authors often fail to impose their assessment. This is how it happened in relation to main character novel "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy. From the strictly fixed author’s point of view, which was carried out in the novel by the omniscient narrator, Anna is an oathbreaker, an adulteress, a public whore, a bad example in a noble family, not a mother at all, but the reader feels sorry for Anna to death, the reader willingly forgives the suicide and even justifies it, he believes her as an innocent victim of an unjust capitalist society, a victim of unfortunate circumstances and everything in the world, but not a criminal. U Tolstoy Anna goes to negative heroes, among the general reader - positive. Isn't this an ideological defeat of the author? The great Tolstoy- the chosen point of view did not work! So, if for focus of this novel, to accept betrayal of marital duty and the inevitable punishment for it (“family thought,” as they themselves explain the main idea of ​​the novel Tolstoy), the author's point of view was initially incorrectly chosen during the planning of the novel (lack of technical skill during the writing of the novel itself Tolstoy, naturally, is excluded).

Now let's imagine that Tolstoy, keeping the “family thought” in the focus of the novel, chose Anna’s husband, the deceived Karenin, as the narrator. Now everyone laughs at the cuckolded husband - both in the service and in high society, whose opinion he values ​​​​extremely; now he “does not have a chance” for promotion, because in the Empire it is not customary to promote a publicly disgraced official who is not even able to cope with his own wife, but is rather pushed aside; but he continues to love and care about the moral and mental state of his only son, moreover, a “late child”, and the son loves his dad, and is not at all eager for his mother. And this one, previously respected by everyone statesman, and now a disgraceful cuckold, this undeservedly offended, unhappy man, exposed to everyone’s ridicule, he will begin from his bell tower to talk about a dissolute wife dancing at all the balls (in the absence, of course, of her husband, who is busy with work), about his little wife, whose brother - he helped a slacker (and also, by the way, an adulterer - this episode begins the novel) plum, such a Karenin, barely restraining his anger, will tell the reader about his experiences as an insulted man, talk about his only woman, whom he loved and provided for everyone, but who, for the sake of a fleeting, unpromising connection with a secular helipad, an insane participant in a crippled dangerous race, trampled all of his a life built with great labor, and will narrate everything in the same spirit - won’t the reader be imbued with compassion for Karenin and condemn his frivolous wife? Choose Tolstoy Such a point of view, he could achieve the artistic goal of the work - the reader’s condemnation of Anna, the destroyer of “family thought” so dear to the author’s heart. But that would be a completely different novel...

The problem of correct/incorrect choice of points of view is not a question of choosing their number, but a question of searching focus(in Russian literary criticism, focus is understood as idea of ​​the work) in literary history and choosing the best point of view to cover it. The main criterion for the correct choice of point of view: if the focus of the literary story falls out of sight, then the narrator was chosen incorrectly. An incorrect narrator is not able to best reveal the idea of ​​a work; he diverts the reader’s attention away from the main plot, destroys the logic of constructing a dramatic plot, etc. Just do not confuse an incorrectly chosen narrator with an “unreliable narrator” - a correctly chosen narrator to solve the author’s special problems.

For an experienced writer, the literary story and characters themselves tell them from what point of view they would like to be written. And if a novice writer cannot immediately choose a point of view, no one is stopping him from experimenting: writing a part (one or two chapters) of an invented literary story in two or three versions - for example, from the first person, from an omniscient narrator and from an unreliable narrator. Experimenting with “voice” is a very interesting and useful activity. There are known cases when famous writer After the novel came out of print, I completely rewrote it from a different point of view.

Whatever point of view the writer chooses, he must use it consistently throughout the work, but if he wants to change it, he can do this at the end of a scene or chapter, at the turn of chapters, so that transition from one point of view to another was clearly structurally highlighted and did not cause confusion in the reader’s perception of literary history. No excuses from the author that the sudden transition from one point of view to another in the middle of an unstructured text was done intentionally - for greater effect - do not work. Another result is at work - a mess that has arisen in the head of the reader, who will now need to explain: this scene was described by the author-narrator, and the next one - by the hero-narrator, whom the author will instruct to continue the story... If a rare intellectual reader can track the author’s transitions that are not structurally distinguished from one point view of the other, then the mass reader will certainly get confused and quit reading in irritation.

Federal Agency for Education

Buryat State University

Faculty of Philology

Department of Russian Literature

Allow for protection:

Head Department of Russian Literature

Doctor of Philology sciences, prof.

S.S. Imikhelova

"___"______________ 2009

The image of the narrator and the features of the narration in "Belkin's Tales" by A.S. Pushkin

(graduate work)

Scientific director:

Doctor of Philology Sciences, Professor S.S. Imikhelova

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I. The image of the narrator in prose

1.2 The image of the narrator in the prose of A.S. Pushkin

CHAPTER II. Features of the narration in "Tales of Belkin" by A.S. Pushkin

2.1 The originality of the narrative in "Belkin's Tales"

2.2 Images of narrators in "Belkin's Tales"

2.3 "The Station Agent": narrative features

CONCLUSION

NOTES

LIST OF REFERENCES USED

INTRODUCTION

The prose of A.S. Pushkin is characterized by a breadth of coverage of phenomena and a variety of characters. As a prose artist, Pushkin published at the end of October 1831 “Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin.” A precious acquisition of the Boldino autumn, Belkin's Tales represent the first completed work of Pushkin's prose.

The originality and originality of "Belkin's Tales" lies in the fact that Pushkin revealed in them a simple and artless, at first glance, attitude to life. The realistic method of Pushkin the prose writer developed under conditions that required an emphatic contrast of his stories with the sentimental and romantic tradition that occupied a dominant position in the prose of this period.

This was also reflected in Pushkin’s desire to portray life as he found it in reality, to objectively reflect its typical aspects, to recreate the images of ordinary people of his time. Appeal to life landed nobility mediocre("Blizzard", "Young Peasant Lady"), the army environment ("Shot"), attention to the fate of the "martyr of the fourteenth class" ("Station Warden"), and finally, to the life of small Moscow artisans ("Undertaker") clearly indicates this aspiration of "Belkin's Tales". Recreating the life of his unremarkable heroes, Pushkin does not embellish it and does not hide those aspects of it that seemed subject to overcoming. The poet chooses irony as a tool for criticizing reality.

"Belkin's Tales" are interesting for researchers for their artistic device - narration on behalf of a fictional narrator.

Were the stories created as "Belkin's stories"? Is Belkin connected with “his” stories? Is Belkin a real significant quantity or is it an imaginary quantity that has no important meaning? These are the questions that make up the “Belkin problem” in Pushkin studies. No less important is the question of the whole system of storytellers, since in “Belkin’s Stories” Belkin’s compositional function is manifested in his “self-elimination” from the stories (the image of the author is included only in the preface).

The question “Why Belkin?”, asked by researchers of Pushkin’s work, arose for a long time in Russian literature and historical and literary science. And there is still no serious and satisfactory answer to this question; not because it is insoluble, but because the tradition of prejudice towards this Pushkin image is too strong (1). Since this problem is still interesting and relevant, we set the goal of the study to give a more extensive description of the concept of “storyteller of Pushkin’s stories”, from which the following follows: tasks research:

1) determine the modern literary status of the “image of the narrator”;

2) identify the specifics of the narrator’s image, his position and the positions he occupies in the text of “Belkin’s Tales”;

3) identify the features of the narrative and the images of the storytellers in one of “Belkin’s Tales” - “ Stationmaster.

Object of study– the originality of A.S. Pushkin’s prose.

Subject of study- a system of images of narrators in "Belkin's Tales".

Methodological basis The work was based on the works of famous domestic scientists: M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Vinogradova, S.G. Bocharova et al.

Research methods: historical-literary and structural-semantic .

Work structure: the thesis consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography of used literature.

CHAPTERI. IMAGE OF A NARRATOR IN PROSE

1.1 The content of the concept “image of the narrator” in the structure of the work

As you know, the image of the author is not a simple subject of speech; most often it is not even named in the structure of the work. This is a concentrated embodiment of the essence of the work, uniting the entire system of speech structures of the characters in their relationship with the narrator, storyteller or storytellers and through them being the ideological and stylistic focus, the focus of the whole. The image of the author usually does not coincide with the narrator in the tale form of narration. In this case, the narrator is a conventional image of the person on whose behalf the story is narrated in the work.

V.V. Vinogradov writes: “The narrator is the speech creation of the author, and the image of the narrator is a form of the author’s literary artistry. The image of the author is seen in him as the image of an actor in the stage image he creates. The relationship between the image of the narrator and the image of the author is dynamic even within one tale composition, this variable value" (2). The structure of the author's image is different in different types artistic prose. Thus, the story as a form of literary narration is realized by the narrator - an intermediary between the author and the world of literary reality.

The image of the narrator leaves an imprint of its expression, its style, and on the forms of depiction of the characters: the characters no longer “reveal themselves” in speech, but their speech is conveyed to the taste of the narrator - in accordance with his style in the principles of his monologue reproduction. The narrator receives his own “sociological” characteristics in the fabric of speech. Of course, for a writer, when making social-stylistic differentiation of characters, it is not necessary to follow the social-expressive stratifications of everyday, pragmatic speech. Here the question of the artist’s dependence on literary traditions, on the structural peculiarities of the language of literature comes up acutely. But in general, the fewer “socially expressive” restrictions in a literary story, the weaker its “dialectal” isolation, i.e. the stronger his attraction to the forms of the general literary language, the more acutely the moment of “writing” appears in it. And the closer the convergence of the image of the narrator with the image of the writer, the more versatile the forms of dialogue can be, the more more possibilities for expressive differentiation of speech of different characters. After all, the narrator, placed at a distant verbal distance from the author, objectifying himself, thereby leaves the stamp of his subjectivity on the speech of the characters, leveling it.

The image of the narrator, to which the literary narrative is attached, fluctuates, sometimes expanding to the limits of the image of the author. At the same time, the relationship between the image of the narrator and the image of the author is dynamic within one literary composition. The dynamics of the forms of this relationship constantly changes the functions of the main verbal spheres of the story, making them fluctuating and semantically multifaceted. The faces of the narrator and the author, covering (or rather: overlapping) and replacing one another, entering into different relationships with the images of the characters, turn out to be the main forms of organization of the plot, give its structure an intermittent asymmetrical “layering” and at the same time form the unity of the tale “subject” .

Unlike the image of the author, which is always present in any work, the image of the narrator is optional; it may or may not be introduced. Thus, a “neutral”, “objective” narration is possible, in which the author himself steps aside and directly creates pictures of life in front of us (of course, the author is invisibly present in every cell of the work, expressing his understanding and assessment of what is happening). We find this method of seemingly “impersonal” narration, for example, in Goncharov’s “Oblomov.”

More often the narration is told from a specific person; in the work besides others human images The image of the narrator also appears. This may be, firstly, the image of the author himself, who directly addresses the reader (cf. “Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin). Very often a work creates and special image a narrator who acts as a separate person from the author. This narrator can be close to the author, related to him and very far from him in character and social status. The narrator can act as just a narrator who knows this or that story, and as active hero works. Finally, the work sometimes features not one, but several narrators, covering the same events in different ways.

The image of the narrator is closer to the images of the characters than the image of the author. The narrator acts as a character and enters into relationships with the characters. The position of the narrator between the author and the characters can be different. He can be separated from the author by means of language, character traits, biographical circumstances, or he can be close to the author by these same characteristics. In this case, the image of the narrator almost merges with the image of the author. But still there cannot be a complete merging of these images. The position of the narrator's image in relation to the author's image and the characters' images can be flexible. Either the narrator retreats into the background or even finds himself “behind the scenes,” and the image of the author dominates the narrative, dictating the “distribution of light and shadow,” “transitions from one style to another,” then the image of the author retreats and the narrator comes forward, actively interacting with characters and expressing judgments and assessments that cannot be attributed to the author. Such a narrator should be interpreted only as one of the semantic and linguistic lines, which only in their entirety, in all the complexity of their interweavings, reflect the author’s position.

E.A. Ivanchikova identifies several types of narrators in works belonging to minor genres:

a) The anonymous narrator performs a “service”, compositional and informative function: in a short preface he introduces another – the main – narrator into the story and gives his characteristics.

b) A special – “experimental” – form of narration with an anonymous narrator (he is revealed using the pronouns “we”, “our”). The story is told from the position of a direct observer and is permeated with irony.

c) An anonymous narrator-observer - an eyewitness and participant in the scenes and episodes described. He gives characteristics of the characters, conveys and comments on their speeches, observes what is happening around him, expresses his judgments in a free, uninhibited form, distributes his personal assessments, and addresses the readers.

d) The narration is told on behalf of a specific (named or not) narrator, who is at the same time one of the characters in the work. Everything that happens is refracted through his consciousness and perception, he not only observes and evaluates, but also acts, he talks not only about others, but also about himself, conveys his own and other people’s statements, shares his impressions and assessments (3).

If a particular narrator is limited in his knowledge and capabilities, then both the subjective and objective author's narration conveys the point of view of an omniscient author who does not indicate and is not obliged to indicate the sources of his knowledge about the world and characters. First of all, the character’s inner life is open to him. Different types of first-person narration differ in the degree of concreteness of the narrator, the nature of the narrator’s position, the nature of the addressee and compositional design, and linguistic appearance. One type of concrete narrator is a narrator who has life experience, close to the writer’s experience (for example, “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth” by L.N. Tolstoy).

The narrator’s speech and its stylistic form not only outline and evaluate objects artistic reality, but also the images of the storytellers themselves, their social types, are created. Thus, one can find a storyteller - an observer, merging with the character he describes, and a storyteller - an accuser and moralist, and a storyteller - a mocker and satirist, and a storyteller - an official, and a storyteller - a layman, while different “faces” of storytellers sometimes appear in one and the same work.

An open narrator is recognized by the presence in the text of the pronouns “I”, “we”, possessive pronouns“my”, “our”, 1st person verb forms. The hidden narrator, compared to the open one, owns a significantly larger space of the novel's text. The hidden narrator is “impersonal,” which brings him closer to the objective author. It is found in texts with an absent narrative self. These are texts of the main narrative, descriptive fragments, scenes. Signals of the narrator's invisible presence are different ways expressing the meaning of approximateness, incomplete knowledge, lack of awareness (for example, “The Overcoat” by N.V. Gogol).

Mixed systems are also possible. Usually, in an abstract story, the narrator follows the fate of an individual character, and we get to know the character. Then one character is left, attention moves to another - and again we learn sequentially what this one did and learned new character.

In a story, a character may be one of the narrators, that is, in a hidden form, he may be a kind of narrative thread, in which case the author takes care to communicate only what his hero could tell. Sometimes only this moment of attaching the narrative thread to a particular character determines the entire structure of the work. Such a character leading the narrative is most often the main character of the work.

The variety of storytellers' masks corresponds to the variety of tale forms of epic narration, the variety of psychological and social types the storytellers themselves and, accordingly, the variety of angles of illumination of objects of artistic reality, the variety of evaluative positions.

There is also a clear genre comparison of texts with the narrator: mono-subjectivity, stylistic integrity of the narrative form, and modal-evaluative unambiguity are typical for works of small genres; for large novels - the duality of the narrator, the stylistic differentiation of the corresponding texts, the distribution of visual functions between different subjects and, thanks to this, achieving certain ideological and artistic results.

1.2 The image of the narrator in the prose of A.S. Pushkin

The question of Belkin was first raised in Russian criticism by A. Grigoriev. His concept was that Belkin was presented as the bearer of the common sense of Russian society and the humble beginning of the Russian soul. This caused the opposite reaction among some critics. N.I. Chernyaev most clearly formulated Belkin’s problem in the title of his article: “Is there anything Belkin in “Belkin’s Tales”” (4)? The author's answer was negative. Following him, scientists such as A. Iskoz (Dolinin), Yu.G. denied the significance of Belkin’s image for the stories themselves. Oksman, V.V. Gippius, N.L. Stepanov and others. The main argument for these researchers was the assumption that the preface “From the Publisher”, the only evidence of Belkin’s authorship, was written later than the stories themselves. This assumption was based on Pushkin’s letter to Pletnev dated December 9, 1830, in which Pushkin reports that he is going to publish “5 stories in prose,” while mentions of Belkin appear only in a letter dated July 3, 1831, that is, much later.

Proponents of a different point of view, asserting the “Belkin principle” in “Belkin’s Tales,” were D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, D.P. Yakubovich, M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Vinogradov and others. The point of view of these researchers was that Belkin acts as a “type” and as a “character”: everything that is discussed in the “Tales” is told as Belkin, and not Pushkin, should have told it. Everything is filtered through Belkin's soul and viewed from his point of view. “Pushkin not only created the character and type of Belkin, but also turned into him. When this happened, there was no longer Pushkin, but there was Belkin, who wrote these stories “out of the simplicity of his soul”” (5).

V.V. Vinogradov writes: “The image of Belkin was... included in the stories later, but received a name and social characteristics, could no longer help but affect the meaning of the whole" (6). According to the researcher, Belkin's invisible presence in the "Tales" themselves plays a significant role in understanding their meaning.

We are closer to the point of view of S.G. Bocharova. In his opinion, “the first persons of the storytellers... speak from the depths of the world about which the stories are told,” and Belkin plays the role of a “mediator”, with the help of which “Pushkin is identified and becomes related to the prosaic world of his stories” (7).

In the fictional prose of A.S. Pushkin's techniques for constructing characters are largely related to the form of the narrative. So, in the story " Queen of Spades" - a work that marks a new, mature stage in the development of his prose and which set the most important social problems of its time, the character of the narrative is determined by the personality of Hermann, its central hero.

The very character of the story is determined by the personality of Hermann, its central hero, and therefore it has repeatedly caused controversy and doubt.

Creative history The "Queen of Spades" can be traced back to 1828. An anecdote heard by chance in the summer of 1828 later became the plot of the story. The first evidence of the beginning of work on the story about the player (so, in contrast to the final text of “The Queen of Spades,” we will call the initial edition of the story, because it is unknown whether the “Queen of Spades” motif was present in it at this stage) dates back to 1832. These are two fragments of its draft edition.

One of the fragments is the beginning of the story, the initial lines of its first chapter, which is already preceded by an epigraph, known from the printed text of “The Queen of Spades” and setting the tone of light irony for the story. The content of the sketch is a description of “young people connected by circumstances” of the environment in which the action of the story was supposed to take place: last words passages introduce the topic card game. The main thing that characterizes the style of the fragment, in contrast to the final text, is the first-person narrative, with the narrator appearing as a member of the community of young people he describes. His presence among the characters gives the narrative a touch of special authenticity, expressing itself with the accuracy of realities that speak of the time of action and the life of the St. Petersburg aristocratic youth (“Four years ago we gathered in St. Petersburg...” . Subsequently, Pushkin abandoned the descriptive accuracy of the early sketch in favor of a different type of narrative, where the author is “immersed in the world of his heroes” and at the same time distanced from it.

"The Queen of Spades" is not redirected to a specific narrator, whose personality would be directly reflected in the narrative; nevertheless, the subject of the narrative is represented here in a hidden form. However, this “image of the author” in “The Queen of Spades” is more complex, and its motivation for the narrative, which is objective in nature, is not directly revealed. The narrative combines the points of view of the “author” and the characters, intricately intertwined, although not merging together (8). The narration is so casual, so concentrated and dynamic that the description is given from the point of view of a person walking through the room, without lingering in it. Difficult decision The “image of the author” is also determined by the complexity of the composition: transitions from one sphere of consciousness to another motivate the movement of the narrative in time; the constant return to chronological segments preceding those already achieved earlier determines the peculiarities of the construction of the story.

Following the initial scene, which forms the content of the first chapter, a scene in the countess's dressing room is introduced (the beginning of chapter two), then it is replaced by a characterization of Lizaveta Ivanovna. The transition to the latter’s point of view is accompanied by a return to an earlier time (“two days after the evening described at the beginning of this story, and a week before the scene on which we stopped,” - the establishment of Lizaveta Ivanovna’s acquaintance with German, the “young engineer” until not yet called by name"). This explains the appeal to the hero of the story, whose characterization goes into a description - from his point of view - of his first meeting with Lizaveta Ivanovna: in the window of the countess's house "he saw a black-haired head, probably tilted over a book or at work. The head rose. Hermann saw a fresh face and black eyes. This minute decided his fate" (9).

The beginning of the third chapter directly continues the scene interrupted earlier: “Only Lizaveta Ivanovna managed to take off her hood and hat when the countess sent for her and ordered the carriage to be brought again” (10), etc.

"The Queen of Spades", developing the principles of Pushkin's realism outlined in "Belkin's Tales", is at the same time, to a greater extent than the latter, "romantic". The image of the hero of the story, a man endowed with “strong passions and a fiery imagination,” mysterious story about three cards, Hermann's madness - all this seems to be marked with the stamp of romanticism. However, both the heroes of the story and the events depicted in it are taken from life itself, the main conflict of the story reflects the most important features of Pushkin’s contemporary reality, and even the fantastic in it remains within the limits of the real.

The entire text of the story speaks of Pushkin’s negative attitude towards his hero, but he sees in him an unusual, strong, strong-willed person, obsessed with his idea and firmly on the path to a certain goal. Hermann is not a “little man” in the usual sense of the word; True, he is not rich and modest, but at the same time he is an ambitious man, paving the way to independence. This trait of his character turns out to be stronger. Hermann does not rebel against society and its conditions, does not protest against them, as Samson Vyrin does in “The Station Agent” and Evgeny in “ Bronze Horseman"; on the contrary, he himself strives to take a place in this society, to secure a position for himself in it. He is confident in his right to this and wants to prove it by any means, but in a collision with the old world he is wrecked.

Showing the death of Hermann, Pushkin also thinks about the fate of that society, which in his story is represented by the old countess - the owner of the secret of three cards, personifying in the story the Russian high-ranking aristocracy of the era of its heyday. The contrast between Hermann and the most characteristic representative of the brilliant nobility of that time, his collision with her even more emphasized the contrast between the position of the poor engineer and his ambitious dreams, determined the inevitability tragic ending stories.

The final chapter of The Queen of Spades, introducing the reader to one of the high-society gambling houses, logically completes the story. Both Chekalinsky, with his constant affectionate smile, and the “society of rich players” gathering in his house show great interest in Hermann’s extraordinary game; however, they all remain completely indifferent to his death. “Nicely sponsored!” the players said. “Chekalinsky shuffled the cards again: the game went on as usual” (11).

Describing secular society, Pushkin does not resort to satire or moralization and maintains the tone of sober objectivity characteristic of his prose. But his critical attitude to the world is manifested both in this final chapter of the story, and in his attention to the fate of the poor pupil of the old countess (it is in her attitude towards Lizaveta Ivanovna that the image of the countess is directly revealed), and in the depiction of the frivolous, although not stupid, young rake Tomsky , and finally, in the funeral scene of the old countess noted by researchers

The complex content of "The Queen of Spades" cannot be reduced to unambiguous definitions. For the first time in Pushkin's completed prose we encounter such a deep development of the character of the main character. Pushkin chooses an exceptional character, solves it by means of realistic typification, excluding traditional interpretation romantic hero. In “The Queen of Spades,” Pushkin sought to take an inside look at a person of a new type, the type of which he noticed in modern reality: the hero of the story hopes, through enrichment, to take a strong position at the top of the social hierarchy. Hermann’s personality is at the center of the story, and the complexity of his image therefore predetermines its understanding (12).

The story is written in third person. The narrator is not identified by a name or a pronoun, but he tells the story from within the society to which he belongs. S. Bocharov, developing the observations of V.V. Vinogradov, gives the following definition: “Speech in the third person not only narrates about the world, but seems to sound from the world about which it narrates; this Pushkin narrative speech is at the same time someone’s, a certain narrator’s, it is placed at a certain distance, as partly someone else's speech" (13). But the narrator does not always speak from himself - often he introduces the floor to the characters. The narrator finds himself in a certain relationship with the author of "The Queen of Spades", who is not indifferent to what the narrator reports. The narrator seems to become closer to the author - he is not just a storyteller, but writing man, who knows how to select facts, calculate time in a story, and most importantly, convey not only the facts, but also the conversations of the characters. The narrator in "Belkin's Tales" looks like the same writer trying to write.

But in “The Queen of Spades” it is important for Pushkin that the author be present at all times during the events described. And Pushkin needs a narrator close to the author to document his view. In the 1830s, Pushkin firmly took the position of documenting his works. That is why he needs a narrator-memoirist, a narrator-witness. This is exactly the kind of narrator who will appear in his “The Captain's Daughter.”

Thus, in Pushkin’s prose, the narrator (“The Queen of Spades”), like the narrator (“Belkin’s Tales”), acts as an intermediary between the author and the world of the entire work. But in both cases, his figure reflects complexity, ambiguity author's attitude to what is depicted. Reality in Pushkin's prose appears on its real, life scale, not complicated by romantic ideas.

CHAPTER II. FEATURES OF THE NARRATOR IN "BELKIN'S STORIES" BY A.S. PUSHKIN

2.1 The originality of the narrative in "Belkin's Tales"

Boldinskaya in the autumn of 1830 last page In the draft manuscript of “The Undertaker,” Pushkin jotted down a list of five titles: “The Undertaker. The Peasant Young Lady. The Stationmaster. The Suicide. Notes of an Elderly Man.” B.V. Tomashevsky considered it possible that behind the “Notes of an Elderly” are hidden “Notes young man", in other words, that at the time of compiling the list, Pushkin intended to implement the idea of ​​​​"Notes" within the framework of the planned collection (1).

Having outlined the composition of the collection, Pushkin settled on the theme of “The Caretaker” as the next one, sketched out a plan for this story to the left of the list and, apparently, at the same time noted the titles “The Peasant Young Lady” and “The Suicide” with vertical strokes, which mean, one can assume, that after “ Caretaker" these plans were next in line. When the story about the caretaker was finished, the poet once again returned to the list, crossed out the names of the two finished stories with a straight line, and crossed out the line before the item “Suicide” with a horizontal line.

There is no other information about the plan for the story “Suicide”. SOUTH. Oksman considered it likely that this name corresponded to the concept of "The Shot". Still, it seems that the above considerations allow us to make a hypothesis regarding the nature of the connection that existed between the creation of “The Caretaker” and Pushkin’s refusal to include the story of a suicide in the collection.

By the same time B.V. Tomashevsky took the first draft of the biography of Pyotr Ivanovich D. (the prototype of the future I.P. Belkin), the author of a manuscript “worthy of some attention” (2). His biography has already taken the form of a letter from a friend of the deceased. On this basis, Tomashevsky believed that the idea of ​​Belkin's Tales could presumably be dated back to the fall of 1829 (3).

These Pushkin stories for the first time recreated the appearance of Russia in its complex social diversity, from various angles, shown not in the light of the usual moral and aesthetic criteria of noble culture, but in revealing the processes that took place behind the façade of this culture, undermined the inviolability of the entire social order of the feudal state. As N. Berkovsky notes, “Belkin’s Tales”, “although not directly and from afar, they introduce into the world of provincial, invisible mass Russia and the mass man in it, preoccupied with his basic human rights - he is not given them, and he seeks them” ( 4). The main thing that was new in the stories was the depiction of characters. Behind the destinies individual heroes Pushkin's stories stand for the Russia of that time with its stagnant way of life and acute contradictions and contrasts between different layers.

"Belkin's Tales" is not a random collection of "anecdotes", but a book of stories interconnected by internal unity. This unity lies not only in the fact that they are all united by the image of their collector - the provincial landowner Belkin, but also in the fact that they collectively paint a picture of Russia, the birth of a new way of life that violates the established foundations, the inert immobility of life.

In "Belkin's Tales" Pushkin abandoned the "exceptional", intellectual hero and the storytelling techniques associated with him, and instead discovered for himself and completely exhausted the possibilities of a simple and endless complex shape stories about “average” people and the events of their private lives.

V.V. Gippius wrote: "In Belkin's Tales" human life gained artistic independence, and the world of “things” sparkled with its “own light” (and not the “reflected” light of the genre, characteristic of sentimental and romantic prose 1800-1820s). And at the basis of this new artistic organization is the “complete removal of all moralization,” the liberation of “narrative prose from didactic ballast” (5).

A big innovation was the introduction in “Belkin’s Tales” of the image of a simple, unlucky storyteller, who, although not alien to the vain desire to be known as a writer, is, however, limited to writing down on paper certain “everyday stories.” He did not compose them himself, but heard them from other people. The result is a rather complex interweaving of stylistic manners. Each of the narrators is very different from the others, and in their own way merges with the heroes of the stories they tell. Above them all rises the image of the simple-minded Ivan Petrovich Belkin.

In "Belkin's Stories" Belkin's compositional function is manifested in his "self-elimination" from the stories (the image of the author is included only in the preface).

The role of Ivan Petrovich Belkin, the author of five Pushkin stories, has long been the subject of controversy among Pushkin scholars. As already mentioned, at one time A. Grigoriev placed Belkin at the center of Pushkin’s prose cycle, he was echoed by Dostoevsky, who believed that “in Belkin’s stories, Belkin himself is most important.” Opponents of this point of view, on the contrary, considered Belkin to be a purely compositional person, do not find “anything Belkin” in the stories, and the very unification of the stories under his name is called accidental.

The reason why Pushkin decided to publish the stories under someone else’s name is known; he named it himself in a letter to Pletnev dated December 9, 1830, when it was still planned to publish the stories anonymously. He did not want to publish the stories under his own name, as this could displease Bulgarin. The literary situation of 1830 was commented on in his time by V. Gippius: “Bulgarin, with his evil and petty pride, would, of course, have perceived Pushkin’s debuts in prose as a personal attack on his – Bulgarin’s – laurels as the “first Russian prose writer” (6). In tense in the atmosphere created in 1830 around the "Literary Gazette" and Pushkin personally, this could have been dangerous. The hoax was, however, short-lived: three years later (in 1834) "Belkin's Tales" were already included in the "Tales" published Alexander Pushkin" (7).

The life material that formed the basis of the stories is stories, incidents, incidents of provincial life. The events that took place in the provinces attracted Pushkin before. But usually they were narrated by the author himself. The independent “voices” of small landowners, officers, and ordinary people were not heard. Now Pushkin gives the floor to Belkin, a native of the local depths of Russia. In "Belkin's Tales" there are no people as a collective image, but characters from different social strata are present everywhere. The degree of comprehension of reality for each character is limited by his horizons: Samson Vyrin perceives life differently than Silvio, and Muromsky or Berestov - in a different way than Minsky.

IN AND. Korovin writes: “Pushkin sought to assure that everything told in “Belkin’s Tales” is true stories, not fictitious at all, but taken from real life. He was faced with the task of motivating fiction. At this stage of Russian prose, narrative motivation was almost mandatory. If Pushkin began to explain how he learned about all the stories told in the stories, then the deliberateness of such a technique would be obvious. But how natural it seems that all the stories were told by Belkin, who lived for a long time in the provinces, made acquaintances with his neighbors - landowners, was in close contact with ordinary people, occasionally went to the city on some business, and led a quiet, measured existence. It was the provincial landowner, at leisure or trying to write out of boredom, who could hear about incidents and write them down. Indeed, in the conditions of the province, such cases are especially valued, retold from mouth to mouth and become legends. Belkin’s type was, as it were, put forward by local life itself” (8).

Ivan Petrovich is attracted to poignant subjects, stories and incidents. They are like bright, quickly flashing lights in a dim, monotonous series of days of provincial life. There was nothing remarkable in the fate of the storytellers who shared the events known to them with Belkin, except for these stories.

There's another one important feature these stories. They all belong to people of the same worldview. They have different professions, but they belong to the same provincial environment - rural or urban. The differences in their views are minor and may not be taken into account. But the commonality of their interests, spiritual development significant. It just allows Pushkin to unite the stories with one narrator - Ivan Petrovich Belkin, who is spiritually close to them.

Pushkin imposes a certain leveling on the diversity of Belkin’s narratives, assigning himself the modest role of “publisher”. He is far from the narrators and from Belkin himself, maintaining a somewhat ironic attitude towards him, as can be seen from the epigraph taken from D.I. Fonvizin at the title of the cycle: “Mitrofan for me.” At the same time, the “publisher’s” sympathetic concern for the release of “stories of the deceased” and the desire to briefly tell about Belkin’s personality are emphasized. This is evidenced by a letter enclosed by the “publisher” from the Nenaradov landowner, Belkin’s neighbor on the estate, who willingly shared information about Belkin, but stated that he himself resolutely refuses to assume the title of writer, “indecent at my age.”

In these stories, the reader has to deal with all the faces of the narrators at once. He cannot get any of them out of his mind.

Pushkin strove for maximum objectivity and realistic depth of image, which explains the complex stylistic system of Belkin's Tales.

V.V. Vinogradov, in his study of Pushkin’s style, wrote: “In the very presentation and coverage of the events that make up the plots different stories, the presence of an intermediate prism between Pushkin and the depicted reality is noticeable. This prism is changeable and complex. She is contradictory. But without seeing it, one cannot understand the style of the stories, one cannot perceive the full depth of their cultural, historical and poetic content" (9).

In "The Shot" and "The Station Agent" the author depicts events from the point of view of different narrators who wear bright features everyday realism. Fluctuations in the reproduction and reflection of everyday life, observed in the style of other stories, for example, in "The Blizzard" and "The Undertaker", also lead to the assumption of social differences in the images of their narrators. At the same time, the presence in the entire cycle of stories of a common stylistic and ideological-characteristic core, which cannot always be considered as a direct and immediate expression of the worldview of Pushkin himself, is also undeniable. Along with differences in language and style, a tendency towards leveling of style is outlined, realistically motivated by the image of Belkin as a “mediator” between the “publisher” and individual storytellers. The history of the text of the stories and observations of the evolution of their style give this hypothesis complete credibility. After all, the epigraphs for the stories were drawn up later. In the surviving manuscript they are not placed in front of the text of each story, but are collected together - behind all the stories. Of course, in the process of reworking the stories, the image of the dummy author evolved. Before this image was consolidated with a name, he was only anticipated as a “literary personality” and was perceived more as a unique point of view, as a “half mask” of Pushkin himself.

All this suggests that the style and composition of the stories must be studied and understood as they are, that is, with the images of the publisher, Belkin and the storytellers. Pushkin needs storytellers who are very distant in their cultural level from the author in order to simplify and make his perception of the world and his thoughts closer to the people. And these narrators are often more primitive than those about whom they talk, they do not penetrate into their sphere of thoughts and feelings, they are not aware of what the reader guesses from the nature of the incidents described.

V.V. Vinogradov writes that the “multiplicity of subjects” of the narrative creates a multifaceted plot and a variety of meanings. These subjects, forming a special sphere of the plot, the sphere of literary and everyday “writers” - the publisher, the author, and the storytellers - are not isolated from each other as typical characters with a clearly defined range of properties and functions. During the course of the story, they either merge or contrast with each other. Thanks to this mobility and change of subjective faces, thanks to their stylistic transformations, there is a constant rethinking of reality, its refraction in different consciousnesses" (10).

Russian life had to appear in the image of the storytellers themselves, that is, from the inside. It was very important for Pushkin that the understanding of history should come not from the author, already familiar to readers, not from the position of high critical consciousness, evaluating life much deeper than the character of the stories, but from the point of view an ordinary person. Therefore, for Belkin, all stories, on the one hand, go beyond the boundaries of his interests, feel extraordinary, and on the other, highlight the spiritual immobility of his existence. The events that Belkin narrates look “romantic” in his eyes; they have everything: love, passion, death, duels, etc. Belkin looks for and finds something poetic in his surroundings, something that stands out sharply from the everyday life in which he is immersed. He wants to join a bright, varied life. He feels a craving for strong feelings. In the stories he recounts, he sees only out-of-the-ordinary cases that exceed the power of his understanding. He just tells stories in good faith. The Nenaradovsky landowner informs Pushkin the publisher: “The above-mentioned stories were, it seems, his first experience. They, as Ivan Petrovich said, for the most part fair and heard by them from different persons. However, the names in them are almost all invented by him, and the names of villages and hamlets are borrowed from our area, which is why my village is mentioned somewhere. This did not happen from any evil intention, but solely from a lack of imagination" (11).

Entrusting the role of the main narrator to Belkin, Pushkin, however, is not removed from the narrative. What seems extraordinary to Belkin, Pushkin reduces to the most ordinary prose of life. Thus, the narrow boundaries of Belkin’s view are expanded immeasurably. For example, the poverty of Belkin’s imagination acquires a special semantic content. The fictional narrator cannot invent or invent anything, except perhaps change people's surnames. He even leaves the names of villages and villages intact. Although Ivan Petrovich’s imagination does not break out beyond the villages - Goryukhino, Nenaradovo. For Pushkin, this seemingly flaw contains the idea: the same cases described by Belkin are happening or can happen everywhere: exceptional cases become typical thanks to intervention in Pushkin’s narrative. The transition from Belkin's point of view to Pushkin's takes place imperceptibly, but precisely in the comparison of different literary styles - from extremely stingy, naive, to sly, funny, sometimes lyrical. This is what it's all about artistic originality"Belkin's Tales" (12).

Belkin puts on a generalized mask of a writer of everyday life, a narrator, in order to highlight his manner of speech and distinguish it from other narrators who are introduced into the work. This is difficult to do, since Belkin’s style merges with the general opinion to which he often refers (“They say...”, “In general, they loved him...”). . Belkin's personality seems to be dissolved in other narrators, in the style, in the words that belong to them. For example, from Pushkin’s narrative it is unclear who the words about the stationmasters belong to: either the titular adviser A.G.N., who told the story about the station superintendent, or Belkin himself, who retold it. Pushkin writes: “You can easily guess that I have friends from the venerable class of caretakers” (13). The person on whose behalf the narrator writes can easily be mistaken for Belkin. And at the same time: “For 20 years in a row, I traveled across Russia in all directions” (14). This does not apply to Belkin, since he served for 8 years. At the same time, the phrase: “I hope to publish a curious stock of my travel observations in a short time” (15) - seems to hint at Belkin.

Pushkin persistently attributed the stories to Belkin and wanted readers to know about his own authorship. The stories are built on the combination of two different artistic views. One belongs to a person of low artistic spiritual development, the other to a national poet who has risen to the heights public consciousness and the heights of world culture. Belkin, for example, talks about Ivan Petrovich Berestov. Excluded from description personal emotions narrator: " IN On weekdays he wore a corduroy jacket, on holidays he wore a frock coat made of cloth homework" (16). But the story concerns a quarrel between landowners, and here Pushkin clearly intervenes in the story: "The Angloman endured criticism as impatiently as our journalists. He was furious and called his zoil a bear and a provincial" (17). Belkin, of course, had nothing to do with journalists; he probably did not use words such as “Anglomaniac” or “zoil” in his speech.

Pushkin, formally and openly accepting the role of publisher and refusing authorship, simultaneously performs a hidden function in the narrative. He, firstly, creates a biography of the author - Belkin, draws his human appearance, that is, clearly separates him from himself, and, secondly, makes it clear that Belkin the man is not equal, not identical to Belkin the author. For this purpose, he reproduces in the very style of presentation the author’s appearance of Belkin - the writer, his outlook, perception and understanding of life. “Pushkin invents Belkin and, therefore, also a storyteller, but a special storyteller: Pushkin needs Belkin as a storyteller - a type, as a character endowed with a stable outlook, but not at all as a storyteller with a peculiar individualized speech” (18). Therefore, Belkin’s actual voice is not heard.

At the same time, despite all the similarities between Belkin and his provincial acquaintances, he still differs from both the landowners and the storytellers. His main difference is that he is a writer. Belkin's narrative style is close oral speech, storytelling. His speech contains many references to rumors, legends, and rumors. This creates the illusion that Pushkin himself was not involved in all events. It deprives him of the opportunity to express his literary bias and at the same time does not allow Belkin himself to interfere in the narrative, since his voice has already been given to the narrator. Pushkin “removes” what is specifically Belkin and gives the style a general, typical character. Belkin's point of view coincides with the point of view of others.

Numerous epithets, often mutually exclusive, attached by critics to Belkin raise the question: do Ivan Petrovich Belkin embody the specific traits of a person from a certain country, a certain historical period, a certain social circle? We do not find a clear answer to this question. We find only assessments of a general moral and psychological order, while the assessments are sharply opposite. These interpretations lead to two mutually exclusive positions:

a) Pushkin regrets, loves Belkin, sympathizes with him;

b) Pushkin laughs (irons or mocks) at Belkin.

2.2 Images of narrators in "Belkin's Tales"

In "Belkin's Tales" the narrator is named by last name, first name, patronymic, his biography is told, character traits are indicated, etc. But “Belkin’s Tales,” offered to the public by the publisher, were not invented by Ivan Petrovich Belkin, but “heard by him from various persons.” Each story is told by a special character (in “The Shot” and “The Station Agent” this appears naked: the story is told in the first person); reasoning and insertions can characterize the narrator or, at worst, the transmitter and recorder of the story, Belkin. Thus, “The Caretaker” was told to him by the titular adviser A.G.N., “The Shot” by Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P., “The Undertaker” by clerk B.V., “Blizzard” and “The Peasant Young Lady” by the girl K. I.T. A hierarchy of images is built: A.G.N., I.L.P., B.V., K.I.T. – Belkin – publisher – author. Each narrator and characters in stories have certain language features. This determines the complexity of the linguistic composition of Belkin's Tales. Its unifying principle is the image of the author. He does not allow stories to “scatter” into pieces that are heterogeneous in language. The peculiarities of the language of the narrators and characters are indicated, but do not dominate the narrative. The main space of the text belongs to the “author’s” language. Against the background of general accuracy and clarity, the noble simplicity of the author's narrative, stylization of the language of the narrator or character can be achieved by few and not very prominent means. This allows Pushkin, in addition to language styles corresponding to the images of the author, to reflect in his artistic prose also language styles corresponding to the images of the characters (19).

The area of ​​“literary” images, allusions and quotes in the style of Belkin’s stories does not form a separate semantic and compositional plan. It is merged with the “reality” that is portrayed by the narrator. Belkin's style now becomes an intermediary link between the styles of individual storytellers and the style of the “publisher”, who has put the imprint of his literary style and his writer’s individuality on all these stories. It embodies a number of transitional shades between them. Here, first of all, the question arises about the cultural and everyday differences in the environment reproduced by different storytellers, about the social differences between the storytellers themselves, about the differences in their worldview, in the manner and style of their stories.

From this point of view, “Belkin’s Tales” should fall into four circles: 1) the story of the girl K.I.T. (“Blizzard” and “Peasant Young Lady”); 2) the story of clerk B.V. ("Undertaker"); 3) the story of the titular adviser A.G.N. ("Stationmaster"); 4) the story of Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. ("Shot"). Belkin himself emphasized the social and cultural boundary between different narrators: while the initials of the three narrators indicate a first name, patronymic, and last name, the clerk is indicated only by the initials of his first and last name. At the same time, it is also striking that the stories are not arranged according to the narrators (the story of the girl K.I.T. “The Snowstorm” and “The Young Lady-Peasant” are separated). It is clear that the order of the stories was not determined by the images of the narrators.

"The Shot", in addition to the self-characterization of the narrator (Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P.), stands out sharply from a number of other stories by the homogeneity of all three story styles, which are merged in the composition of this story. The language of the narrator, Silvio and the Count - with all the expressive individual characteristic differences in their speech - belongs to the same social category. True, the count once uses English expression(the honey moon - “the first month”), but the narrator also owns French(“Silvio stood up and took out of the cardboard a red cap with a gold tassel with galloon”). The narrator not only knows the customs and morals of the officer environment, but has mastered its concepts of honor and courage. The entire verbal structure of his story is based on a concise and precise phrase, characteristic of a military man, devoid of emotional connotation, briefly, even rather dryly, conveying only the very essence, the external side of the events witnessed by “Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P.” Pushkin does not “equip” the lieutenant colonel’s story with any specific, “officer” vocabulary. Professional vocabulary is interspersed very rarely, imperceptibly, without sticking out against the background of the entire language system (playpen, “to put in an ace”). These jargons are on a par with card terms ("ponter", "cheat"). But the very structure of the short, somewhat abrupt phrase, the energetic intonation depicts a person who is used to commanding, who does not like to talk for a long time, who clearly formulates his thoughts. Already the first energetic phrases seem to set the tone for the entire narrative: “We were standing in a small town***. The life of an army officer is known. In the morning there is training, a riding arena; lunch with the regimental commander or in a Jewish tavern: in the evening punch and cards” (20).

At the same time, the narrator is not a limited service officer, but an educated, well-read person who understands people and has a “naturally romantic imagination.” Let us remember his story about the attitude of others towards Silvio after the incident with Lieutenant R*** and his confession: “... I could no longer approach him alone.” That is why Silvio abandoned his slander in conversations with him, that is why he alone truthfully revealed the story of his past life. The lieutenant colonel often resorts to literary and bookish expressions: “Having a naturally romantic imagination, I was most strongly attached to a man whose life was a mystery and who seemed to me the hero of some mysterious story” (21). Hence the complicated syntax and book archaisms: “whom”, “that”, etc.

Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. - a sober and reasonable person, accustomed by life to look at things realistically. But in his youth, under the influence of his “romantic imagination,” he was ready to look at the world through the eyes of Marlinsky and his heroes. The image of Silvio is akin to the heroes of Marlinsky. But in realistic lighting it looks different - more lifelike and complex. The image of Silvio seems “literary” to the narrator due to his everyday exclusivity and due to the distance of his character from the character of the narrator himself. Thus, in “The Shot” the narrator acts as a character contrasting with the image of the main character (Silvio), as a narrative prism, sharpening and emphasizing the romantic reliefs of the image of Silvio with the realistic style of the everyday environment.

The narrator of "The Shot" is portrayed in almost the same colors as I.P. himself. Belkin. Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. endowed with some Belkin character traits. Coincidence and individual facts his "biography". Even the outer outline of the biography of Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. similar to the facts of I.P.’s “life” Belkin, known from the preface. I.L.P. served in the army, retired “due to domestic circumstances” and settled “in a poor village.” Just like Belkin, the lieutenant colonel had a housekeeper who kept her master busy with “stories.” Just like I.P., the lieutenant colonel differed from those around him in his sober lifestyle.

Thus, Belkin’s style here is quite close to the lieutenant colonel’s story, albeit told in the first person and bearing a clear imprint of a military environment. This rapprochement between the author and the narrator justifies the free dramatization of the narrative style, which includes, as it were, two inserted short stories: the story of Silvio and the story of the Count. Both of these stories stand out little from the general background of the narrative. After all, both Silvio and Count B. basically belong to the same social circle of officers and nobles as the narrator himself. But Pushkin also provides the corresponding stylistic and intonation nuances here.

Silvio's own story is even more laconic and straightforward than the lieutenant colonel's story. Silvio says with almost aphoristic brevity: “They decided to cast lots: the first number went to him, the eternal favorite of happiness. He took aim and shot through my cap. The turn was behind me” (22). These short, precise phrases reveal the history of the duel. Silvio does not embellish anything and does not justify himself: “I should have shot first; but the excitement of anger in me was so strong that I did not rely on the fidelity of my hand and, in order to give myself time to cool down, I conceded the first shot to him; my enemy did not agree.” (23). Silvio's speech portrays him as a brave and at the same time selflessly enthusiastic and sincere person.

The count's story, even as conveyed by the lieutenant colonel, retains the flavor of aristocratic speech, although it is very brief and conveys only the actual episode of the duel. “Five years ago I got married. I spent the first month here in this village” (24). However, in general, the count’s story does not change the rapid intonation rhythm of the story, the laconic dynamics of the narrative that determine its style. This intonational energy and conciseness of the phrase convey the internal tension of the action, highlighting the drama of the events, emphasized by the external dryness and efficiency of the story.

The narrator, the owner of a poor village, appears in the second chapter as the same intelligent observer of life. In his story about himself and about the surrounding village life, about the count, we hear different notes than in the story about Silvio and the army environment. With sad irony he speaks about himself, about his wild shyness and timidity.

The story "Shot" is the first socio-psychological story in Russian literature; in it, Pushkin, anticipating Lermontov, his novel “A Hero of Our Time,” depicted human psychology through a multifaceted image: through his actions, through behavior, through the perception of him by others and, finally, through his self-characterization. At the same time, in this story Pushkin embodied the idea that a person’s character is not something given once and for all.

The pathos of Pushkin's story lies not only in the depth of the psychological revelation of the characters. The alarming beginning is given to the story by those historical connections and the associations it evokes.

Imbued with the pathos of the pre-Decembrist years, Pushkin’s story “The Shot,” which tells about Russian life before 1825 and the fate of three officers, conceals Pushkin’s post-Decembrist thoughts and thoughts about the typical destinies of representatives of the Russian nobility, about how their lives developed and changed throughout the first third of the 19th century in connection with the events of 1812 and 1825.

The individual originality of the style of the narrator of “The Snowstorm” and “The Young Peasant Lady” depended most of all on the methods of expressing her personal image, her ideology and her assessments. It is characteristic, first of all, that the central figures of both stories are female characters. In “The Peasant Young Lady” this is the image of Lisa-Akulina, classified as a “Darling” type with the epigraph: “You, Darling, are good in all your outfits.” This image is, according to the story, an artistic concentration an entire social category of “county young ladies”: “What a delight these county young ladies are! Brought up in the fresh air, in the shade of their garden apple trees, they draw knowledge of the world and life from books. Solitude, freedom and reading early develop in them feelings and passions unknown to our absent-minded beauties." This peculiar literary consciousness - the literary taste of a district young lady - is the motivation for the plot in the direction of which the story of the girl K.I.T. moves.

"Blizzard", built as an "adventurous" short story, amazes the reader unexpected turns narrative and ending - the lovers turned out to be husband and wife. The art of the story here lies in the fact that the author, interrupting the thread of the narrative, switches the reader’s attention from one episode to another. And the reader does not understand until the end of the story what made Vladimir, in love and faithful to his bride, write a “half-crazy” letter and abandon her after the parents’ consent to the marriage had already been given. This letter sounds a child’s resentment towards both Marya Gavrilovna and her parents, offended pride and hopeless despair. Vladimir could not defeat either the elemental force of nature or the elemental egoistic feelings within himself.

Pushkin talks differently about each of the characters in the story, and this is the key to the ideological basis of the entire work.

Marya Gavrilovna is included in the everyday sphere and is depicted more fully than other characters. The story is devoted, at first glance, to the story of her life; but Pushkin, as we will see later, is concerned not only with her fate.

From the very beginning of the story, the description of the peaceful, complacently meaningless life of the inhabitants of the Nenaradov estate and the mention of “an era memorable to us” speaks of the author’s pointedly ironic attitude towards the serene life of the family of the good Gavrila Gavrilovich R. Throughout the entire story - where we're talking about about Marya Gavrilovna and Burmin, as well as about Nenaradov’s life and existence, the ironic intonation does not leave the author. The story about the poor army ensign Vladimir is told differently, in a different intonation. True, at the beginning of the story, when it comes to Vladimir’s love for Marya Gavrilovna, the ironic intonation does not leave the author. But the pages devoted to the description of the blizzard and Vladimir’s struggle throughout the night with the raging elements that took him by surprise - the most important moment in revealing his character, and it is no coincidence that these pages are given in a different emotional coloring. “Pushkin,” writes V.V. Vinogradov, “makes the snowstorm a recurring theme in his narrative polyphony.” Analyzing the “image” of a blizzard in each part and based on the position that “in Pushkin’s style the main narrator is multifaceted and changeable,” the scientist comes to the conclusion that “in the semantic picture of the story, the play of colors is focused on different images blizzards, on heterogeneous subjective reflections of one symbol" (25).

In the ironic word of the girl K.I.T. expressed the position of a smart and educated person. She is “familiar with Russian and foreign literature, with Greek mythology... quotes Griboedov." But until now, researchers have not taken into account that the narrator is precisely the "maiden", i.e. single woman, apparently an old maid from Belkin’s circle of acquaintances. This is precisely what can psychologically explain her tone, permeated with irony, her condescending “adult” mockery of the young heroes of the story. This irony reveals the instinct of self-preservation, which helps not to lose peace of mind and self-respect and even feel superior to others for a single woman, smart and well-read, but apparently ugly and poor and therefore without children and family. The narrator’s tone also reveals her own disappointment in the romantic hopes of her youth.

The narrator is very close to the world of her characters, often thinks and feels the same way as them. This closeness is illustrated by the admixture of a sentimental-rhetorical style into the realistic narrative as the main and original form of development of the theme of the peasant young lady. Against this background, it acquires special meaning the choice of "Natalia, the boyar's daughter" as reading material for lovers. This is a kind of literature within literature. It turns out a complex system literary reflections. In the plot of "Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter" we look for correspondences, parallels and contrasts with the love story of Akulina-Liza and Alexei. The same kind of stylistic picture can be seen in "Blizzard". And here central character the story is female image, image of Marya Gavrilovna. It is here that the separation of the style of the author and publisher from the style of the narrator (the girl K.I.T.) is outlined. The narrator in "The Snowstorm", as in "The Young Peasant Lady", is surrounded by an atmosphere of sentimental "romanticism". She is immersed in it together with Marya Gavrilovna. The image of Marya Gavrilovna is conceived as an artistic realistic embodiment of the Russian national feminine character. This is a Russian type of noblewoman, surrounded by the atmosphere of French novels.

The “author” emphasizes that Marya Gavrilovna perceived and built her destiny under the influence of literature. So, expecting a declaration of love from Burmin and having taken a number of “military actions” to speed up events, she was looking forward to the moment of a romantic explanation. “Blizzard” has it all: a secret escape of lovers and a romantic blizzard in the spirit of Zhukovsky’s ballads, the separation of lovers before the wedding. Marya Gavrilovna gets married by chance unknown person. But the story ends with the characters meeting again, in a purely everyday setting. The misunderstanding is cleared up. The young people fell in love with each other: the romantic “plot” had to be replayed again. They truly become husband and wife.

The heroine's dreams are of particular importance for understanding "Blizzard". She had two terrible dreams. The first dream is about the father and the second, which turned out to be prophetic, predicting the imminent death of the groom. It was in a dream that she discovered what she apparently felt on a subconscious level (and that perhaps they understood her smart parents), – Vladimir’s egoistic character (“the soul sees what the mind does not notice”). But despite her dreams, despite her pity for her parents, Masha, true to her word to her groom, goes to church in a sleigh with Vladimir’s coachman.

The striking uniformity in the manner of reproduction, characteristic of “The Snowstorm” and “The Peasant Young Lady” and distinguishing them from other “Belkin’s Tales” into a special group, justifies the indication of the unity of the narrator’s style. Girl's style K.I.T. is not like the style of other storytellers. The literary style of the narrator here serves only as a means of characterization and realistic depiction of local life.

They are organically intertwined with different forms of cultural, historical and social lifestyles. different styles literary expression. Therefore, the “literariness” of the narrator and the sentimental-romantic bent of the heroines are perceived not as a manifestation of the author’s literary imitation or the dependence of the plot on the prevailing literary patterns, but as forms of experience and understanding characteristic of the reproduced world itself, as an essential feature of the depicted reality itself. This realistic ambiguity literary form is created by unique methods of its application and original methods of its synthesis with other narrative styles. This is where Belkin’s style comes into play as the main realistic element that transforms the plot. In relation to this style, the story of the girl K.I.T. is just a material. In the first phrase of the novella (“At the end of 1811, in an era memorable to us...”) in the word us three voices sound: the girls K.I.T., Belkin and Pushkin. The next two sentences are dominated by Belkin's voice, simply talking about the idyllic life of the good Gavrila Gavrilovich's family.

"Blizzard" is a work about the happy fate of Marya Gavrilovna and Burmin and the sad fate of Vladimir Nikolaevich. Why did their destinies turn out this way? Why does fate take away one’s beloved, deprive one of family happiness and, finally, life, while giving everything to another? How is a person’s fate determined - by chance, social laws of everyday life, fate or Providence?

The pathos of “The Peasant Young Ladies” lies in the character traits, in the originality of the cheerful, cheerful Liza of Muromskaya, whom Pushkin talks about without the slightest shade of irony or grin.

The author's “I” in “The Young Peasant Lady” is far from the personality of the narrator. This is the image of a writer who is guided by advanced reader tastes and subjects the stylistic style of the narrator to a literary and critical assessment: “...readers will relieve me of the unnecessary obligation to describe the denouement.” Against this background, all hints and indications of the writer’s “I”, of his relationship to the world of the story, are separated from the personality of the narrator and attributed to the “author.”

In "The Blizzard" there is no such sharp personal separation of the author from the narrator as in "The Peasant Young Lady". Here the narrator includes himself and his readers in the collective plural “we”: “At the end of 1811, in an era memorable to us...”, “we have already said...”.

The story told by the girl K.I.T. about a peasant young lady ends happily, but the story is prompted by the thought - enmity between landowners can be smoothed out more easily than class enmity.

The trinity of aspects of perception and image - the narrator, Belkin and the publisher - can also be found in the composition of "The Undertaker". Story style of clerk B.V. affects the professional, industrial coloring of the narrative.

The methods of depiction and assessment of reality here retain the imprint of the point of view of the original narrator. The style of the narrator (the clerk B.V.), his manner of looking at things and events, his method of grouping and evaluating objects and phenomena are used as material for literary presentation. The plot of Belkin's story is built on them. Its figurative and ideological system is based on them. But the point of view of the narrator in “The Undertaker” (as opposed to the sentimental and romantic preferences of the narrator of “Blizzard” and “Peasant Young Ladies”) is the social and everyday support of the realistic style.

The social and everyday circle in which the sphere of action and image in The Undertaker is closed is distant from literary mannerisms, from the styles of sentimentalism and romanticism. In its flow, it is completely “natural” and, therefore, contrasts with those pictures and images that have developed about it, its themes and plots in world literature. That is why, in the clerk’s story, the depiction of the undertaker’s life and adventures, the presentation of the events that accompanied his housewarming, is assumed to be naively everyday, unartificial and free from any literary tradition. A clerk familiar to Belkin becomes an involuntary participant in the destruction of the traditions of world literature in the methods of reproducing the images of “grave diggers.”

Understood and realized through the prism of Belkin’s transmission, the clerk’s story about the undertaker is placed in a contrasting parallel with the images of world literature, with the “grave diggers” of Shakespeare and W. Scott. The gravediggers of Shakespeare and Scott philosophize, discussing and condemning others from the standpoint of folk ethics, but Hamlet or Edgar Ravenswood reflect on themselves and their relationships to the world of other people. In Pushkin, the old undertaker faces the question of the “honesty” of his craft and his life and judges himself with the court of conscience, which takes forms accessible to his consciousness.

“The Undertaker” is a completely different work both in tone and in imagery, but it is about the same thing as Belkin’s other stories: they contain a philosophy of life. Adrian allows a deviation from the law of the Lord - and receives a kind of warning in the form of a “ball of the dead”. In the epilogue, the hero returns to everyday reality, which is not so bad. If you don’t sin, don’t wish your neighbor to die, but simply live, fulfilling your duty to God and people. Adrian's dream is a metaphor for an unrighteous life - with lies, deception. Even in his sleep, he is ashamed of his work and does not participate in the general ball of the dead. Such a life is worse than death, and therefore the hero “faints.” Also a metaphor is the awakening from the sleep of an unrighteous life (26). The shock experienced in a dream reveals to Adriyan that the living have a place among the living. A nightmare made the hero appreciate and sunlight, and the friendliness of the neighbors, heard in the chatter of a busy worker. The horror of the dream prompted the hero to pay tribute to living life and cheerfully respond to the joys of simple earthly existence, which were hidden from him behind the bustle of business, calculations of profit, petty squabbles and worries.

N.N. Petrunina writes: “The narrator distances himself from the hero, but his voice does not drown out Adrian’s voice” (27). But clerk B.V. close to the undertaker in his human type. The “incident” from the life of Prokhorov, not comprehended in all its multi-valued fullness by the hero of the incident himself, could become a fact of literature only through the mediation of the narrator, who sees and understands much more than the hero, perceives the world and the experiences of the undertaker against the broad background of cultural and historical life, while maintaining the ability to delve into the daily worries of a Moscow artisan, and into the essence of the housewarming drinks that shocked him.

Adrian’s work does not connect him with people, but, on the contrary, divides him. During the celebration of the silver wedding of the German Gottlieb Schulz, guests drink to the health of those for whom they work, and “the guests began to bow to each other, the tailor to the shoemaker, the shoemaker to the tailor... but to Adriyan - no one.” Instead, Yurko shouted: “What? Drink, father, to the health of your dead.” Everyone laughed, but the undertaker was offended. He shares his work with people, and he is aware of this: “What is it, really,” he reasoned out loud, “what makes my craft more dishonest than others? Is the undertaker a brother to the executioner?..”

The life of an undertaker, both external and internal, is inserted into the clear framework of his profession: this is evidenced by the range of his interests, his communication with other people, and even the everyday details of his life: having bought new house, he continues to huddle in the back room, and he has placed coffins and cabinets in the kitchen and living room. All this dominates the house and pushes the living out of it. That is, death displaces life. And the same thing happened in my soul. That's why there's no joy in buying this house. The pursuit of profit - profit from death - gradually crowded out life from Adrian himself: that’s why he is so gloomy. The word “house” in the story has a double meaning: it is the house where Adrian lives, and the “houses” where his clients, the dead, live. The color of the house also has its meaning. Yellow house associated with a madhouse. The abnormality of the hero’s life is emphasized by such artistic details as a strange sign above the gate of the house, with the inscription: “Here, simple and painted coffins are sold and upholstered, old ones are also rented and repaired.”

In The Undertaker, Pushkin portrayed a representative of the lower class, outlining, as it were, the prospect of his growth, his development. A. Grigoriev saw in this story “the seed of the entire natural school.” The meaning of Pushkin's story is that its modest hero is not exhausted by his craft, that in the undertaker he sees a person. Confused by the hardships of his existence, a man rose above the trifles of life, perked up, saw the world, people and himself in this world anew. At this moment, the narrator parts with his hero, parting, making sure that the “housewarming” was not in vain for him (28).

2.3 "The Station Agent": narrative features

In the list of stories, “The Caretaker” (as it was originally called) is listed in third place, after “The Undertaker” and “The Young Peasant Lady.” But he was written second, before "The Young Lady-Peasant". This is a socio-psychological story about the “little man” and his bitter fate in noble society. The fate of the "little one" common man for the first time shown here without sentimental tearfulness, without romantic exaggeration and moralistic orientation, shown as the result of certain historical conditions, the injustice of social relations.

In terms of its genre, "The Station Agent" differs in many ways from other stories. The desire for maximum truth in life and the breadth of social coverage dictated to Pushkin other genre principles. Pushkin here departs from the plot sharpness of the intrigue, turning to a more detailed depiction of life, environment, and especially inner world your hero.

In the introduction to The Station Agent, Pushkin strives to maintain the character of the narrator. Titular Councilor A.G.N., who tells the Boldino story about the caretaker, is wise with years and life experience; he remembers his first visit to the station, enlivened for him by the presence of the “little coquette,” as if it were a long time ago; with new eyes, through the prism of the changes brought by time, he sees Dunya, and the caretaker caressed by her, and himself, “who was in minor ranks,” “fightingly” taking what, in his opinion, was rightfully due him, but so excited by the kiss of the caretaker's daughter. The narrator himself characterizes himself, describing his temper: “Being young and hot-tempered, I was indignant at the baseness and cowardice of the caretaker when this latter gave the troika he had prepared for me under the carriage of the official master...”. He reports some facts of his biography (“for twenty years in a row I have traveled Russia in all directions; almost all postal routes are known to me”). This is a fairly educated and humane person, with warm sympathy for the stationmaster and his fate.

In addition, he discovers and consolidates his position in language and style. The linguistic characterization of the narrator is given in very restrained strokes. His language tends to old-fashioned bookish expressions: “These much-maligned caretakers are generally peaceful people, helpful by nature, prone to community, modest in their claims to honor and not too money-loving...”. Only in the language of “The Station Agent” does the clerical, archaic-order stream of speech appear as a separate, broad stylistic layer; in the language of other stories, clericalisms are felt as a general normal property of book expression of that era. (“What is a stationmaster? A real martyr of the fourteenth class, protected by his rank only from beatings...”).

The narrator's language is subordinate to the "author's" language. This is determined by the hierarchy of images of the narrator and the author. The image of the author stands above the image of the narrator. And if in the aspect of the image of the narrator the discussion about the station guards is quite “serious”, then in the aspect of the image of the author it parodies the scientific presentation that the titular adviser is encroaching on. The irony accompanying this technique contributes to the subsequent switch to the “author’s” style of presentation. The simple-minded reasoning of A.G.N. turn into maxims, which from the author’s point of view can only be understood in the opposite sense. Further, the reasoning is replaced by a narration, which is already in the “author’s” channel: “In 1816, in the month of May, it happened to me to pass through the *** province, along the road now destroyed...” .

In the story, the speech style of Samson Vyrin is most different from the “author’s” language. Vyrin is a former soldier, a man of the people. In his speech, colloquial expressions and intonations are often found: “So you knew my Dunya?” he began. “Who didn’t know her? Oh, Dunya, Dunya! What a girl she was! It used to be that whoever passed by, everyone would praise her, no one will judge. The ladies gave her gifts, sometimes with a scarf, sometimes with earrings. Passing gentlemen stopped on purpose, as if to have lunch or dinner, but in fact only to take a closer look at her...”

Pushkin does not reproduce the story in full. This would lead to a fantastic form of narration, would violate the conciseness that, above all, characterizes the method of his prose. Therefore, the main part of Vyrin’s story is conveyed by the narrator, whose style and style are close to the author’s: “Here he began to tell me in detail his grief. Three years ago, one day in winter evening when the caretaker was ruling new book, and his daughter behind the partition was sewing a dress for herself, the troika drove up, and a traveler in a Circassian hat, in a military overcoat, wrapped in a shawl, entered the room, demanding horses.”

The point here is not only in a more concise presentation of the caretaker’s story, but also in the fact that, narrating about him in the third person, the narrator, “titular adviser A.G.N.”, simultaneously conveys both the experiences of Samson Vyrin himself and his attitude towards his story, to his sad fate: “The poor caretaker did not understand how he himself could allow his Duna to ride with the hussar...”. This form of narration allows not only to condense the presentation of Vyrin’s story, but also to show it as if from the outside, more deeply meaningful than it was in the caretaker’s incoherent story. The narrator gives literary form to his complaints and incoherent memories: “He walked up to the open door and stopped. In the beautifully decorated room, Minsky sat in thought. Dunya, dressed in all the luxury of fashion, sat on the arm of his chair, like a rider on her English saddle ". She looked at Minsky with tenderness, wrapping his black curls around her sparkling fingers. Poor caretaker! Never had his daughter seemed so beautiful to him; he could not help admiring her." Clearly this is an elegant description ("sat... like a cowgirl", "sparkling fingers") not given through the eyes of a caretaker. This scene is presented simultaneously in the perception of the father and in the perception of the narrator. This creates a stylistic and linguistic “polyphony”, a combination in unity work of art a variety of linguistic parts expressing these aspects of the perception of reality. But final words narrator: “I thought about poor Duna for a long time” - seem to conceal the same thought as the words of her father: “There are a lot of them in St. Petersburg, young fools, today in satin and velvet, and tomorrow, you’ll see, sweeping the street along with the tavern’s nakedness.”

The escape of the caretaker's daughter is just the beginning of the drama, which is followed by a chain of events extended in time and transferred from one stage to another. From the postal station the action moves to St. Petersburg, from the caretaker’s house to the grave outside the outskirts. Time and space in “The Caretaker” lose continuity, become discrete and simultaneously move apart. Reducing the distance between the hero’s level of self-awareness and the essence of the plot conflict opened up the opportunity for Samson Vyrin to think and act. He is unable to influence the course of events, but before bowing to fate, he tries to turn back history and save Dunya. The hero comprehends what happened and goes to his grave from the powerless consciousness of his own guilt and the irreparability of the misfortune. In a story about such a hero and such incidents, the omniscient author, who is behind the scenes, observing events from a certain distancing distance, did not provide the opportunities that the narrative system chosen by Pushkin revealed. The titular adviser either turns out to be a direct observer of the events, or restores their missing links according to the stories of eyewitnesses. This serves as a justification for both the discreteness of the story and the continuous change in the distance between the participants in the drama and its observers, and each time the point of view from which certain living pictures of the caretaker’s story are perceived turns out to be optimal for the final goal, imparts to the story the artlessness and simplicity of life itself, the warmth genuine humanity.

The narrator sympathizes with the old caretaker. This is evidenced by the repeated epithets “poor” and “kind”. Other verbal details that emphasize the severity of the caretaker’s grief give an emotional and sympathetic coloring to the narrator’s speeches (“He waited in painful excitement...”). In addition, in the narration of the narrator himself, we hear echoes of the feelings and thoughts of Vyrin, a loving father, and Vyrin, a trusting, helpful and powerless person. Pushkin showed in his hero the traits of humanity, protest against social injustice, which he revealed in the objective, realistic image the fate of the common man. The tragic in the ordinary, in the everyday is presented as human drama, of which there are many in life.

While working on the story, Pushkin used the description of pictures with the story of the prodigal son that already existed in the text of “Notes of a Young Man”. A new idea that has learned the most important artistic idea, which was determined in the exhibition "Notes", was carried out in several days. But “Notes,” along with the description of the pictures, lost the main nerve on which the idea of ​​​​their plot movement was based. It is possible that Pushkin did this because the theme of the fate of a young man involved in the uprising of the Chernigov regiment and who came to the idea of ​​suicide as the only way out from the current situation, was hardly possible in the censored press of the 1830s. On this meaningful artistic detail the narrative is built: in the biblical parable, the unhappy and abandoned prodigal son returns to his happy father; in the story, the happy daughter does not return to her unhappy lonely father.

“M. Gershenzon, in his analysis of Pushkin’s “Station Warden,” was the first to draw attention to the special significance of the pictures on the wall of the post station, illustrating biblical story prodigal son Following him, N. Berkovsky, A. Zholkovsky, V. Tyupa and others saw in the hero of Pushkin’s short story a real prodigal son and laid the blame for his unhappy fate on himself. Samson Vyrin did not have the humility and wisdom of his father from the Gospel parable, when he prevented Dunya from leaving home, when he called her a “lost sheep.” They refuted the opinion of those who explained the hero's tragedy by the social "general way of life" and saw the reasons for the unfortunate fate " little man" V social inequality the hero and his offender Minsky.

The German Slavist W. Schmid gave his interpretation of this work. In Vyrin’s expression about Duna - “lost sheep” and Minsky’s angry cry “... why are you sneaking after me everywhere like a robber?” he discovered a connection with the parable of the good shepherd, the sheep and the wolf that “plunders” them. Vyrin appears in Schmid in the role of the gospel robber and thief who made his way into Minsky’s house - the “sheep” yard - in order to destroy and steal Dunya’s happiness” (29).

There is a further refutation of the “humanity” of the “little man” who died from his own selfish love, and the author’s idea is reconstructed: misfortune and grief are rooted in the person himself, and not in the structure of the world. Thus, the discovery of biblical allusions in the story (thanks to pictures from a biblical parable) helps to overcome the stereotype of its previous perception. And the point is not that Pushkin argues with biblical ideology, questions the indisputability of the parable, but that he is ironic about the hero’s blind, uncritical attitude to the professed clichés, about the rejection of the living truth of life.

But the ideological “polyphony” is also manifested in the fact that the author emphasizes and social essence hero dramas. Main feature Samson Vyrin's personality - paternity. Abandoned and abandoned, he does not stop thinking about Duna. That is why the details of the story are so significant (pictures about prodigal son), acquiring symbolic meaning. That is why individual episodes are so significant, for example, the episode with the money received from Minsky. Why did he return to this money? Why did he “stop, think… and turn back…”? Yes, because he again thought about the time when he would need to save the abandoned Dunya.

The hero's paternity is also manifested in his relationships with peasant children. Already drunk, he still works with the kids, and they are drawn to him. But somewhere he has a beloved daughter, and grandchildren whom he does not know. For some people it’s time to become embittered, but he is still both a loving father and a kind “grandfather” for the peasant children. The circumstances themselves could not eradicate his human essence. Social prejudices have so disfigured human nature of all characters that simple human relationships are inaccessible to them, although human feelings are not alien to either Duna or Minsky, not to mention their father. Pushkin speaks about this ugliness of class relations at the very beginning of the story, ironizing over the veneration of rank and certainly taking the side of the “humiliated and insulted.”

There is no literary stylization in The Station Agent. The leisurely description of the narrator’s meetings with the caretaker Vyrin emphasizes the vital truthfulness and artlessness of the story. Reality and typical situations appear in their natural, unvarnished form. The figure of such a narrator in the narrative system once again emphasizes the democratic pathos of the story - awareness of the injustice of the social system from the point of view of a man from the people. Yes, Pushkin does not idealize Vyrin, just as he does not make Minsky a villain. His narrators (including Belkin) do not try to explain the stationmaster’s misfortune as a random cause, but state the commonness and typicality of such a situation in given social conditions.

V. Gippius noticed the main thing in Pushkin’s story: “... the author’s attention is focused on Vyrin, and not on Duna” (30). The story does not clarify whether Dunya is happy or not, having left her father’s house, whether she found her destiny or whether this destiny was not so successful. We don’t know about this, since the story is not about Duna, but about how her departure with Minsky affected her father.

The entire narrative system testifies to the multiplicity and ambiguity of points of view. But at the same time, the position of the author is felt; he is the “guarantor of the integrity” of the story and the entire cycle. This complexity of the compositional, ideological and narrative structure of Belkin's Tales marked the affirmation of realistic principles and the rejection of the monological subjectivity of sentimentalism and romanticism.

CONCLUSION

“The Stories of Ivan Petrovich Belkin” still remains a mystery. Always considered "simple", they have nevertheless become the object of constant interpretation and acquired a reputation for mystery. One of the mysteries of "Belkin's Tales" is that the narrator escapes, does not directly reveal himself anywhere, but only occasionally reveals himself.

The stories had to convince of the truthfulness of the depiction of Russian life through documentation, references to witnesses and eyewitnesses, and most importantly, through the narration itself, entrusted to Belkin. The Belkin problem divided researchers into two camps: one artistic reality Belkina denies, but admits to the other. Ivan Petrovich Belkin, the “author” of the stories, is an oscillation between a ghost and a face; This literary game; this is a person and a character, but not a character “in the flesh” and not an embodied storyteller with his own word and voice.

In his stories, Pushkin turns to the widespread form of prose storytelling at that time, which contains not so much direct image events, how many stories about these events. This form, associated with oral narration, presupposes a specific narrator, regardless of whether he coincides with the author or not, whether he is named or not named in the work itself. The fact that Pushkin, in the preface to Belkin's Stories, attributes each of them to a specific narrator is a kind of tribute to the traditional manner he chose; however, these narrators have a predominantly conventional meaning, having minimal influence on the construction and character of the stories themselves. Only in “The Shot” and “The Station Agent” the narration is told directly from the first person, who is himself a witness and participant in the events; the compositional solution of these stories is complicated by the fact that their main characters also act as narrators. In "The Shot" it is Silvio and the Count, whose stories complement each other; in "The Station Agent" - Samson Vyrin, whose story about his sad fate, begun in the form of direct speech, is then conveyed by the main narrator (in the preface to “Belkin’s Tales” he is called the titular adviser A.G.N.).

In the remaining three stories, the author's narration dominates: the dialogue in them (as in the stories mentioned above) plays a minor role and is only one of the secondary elements in the description of the actions and state of the heroes, where necessary, accompanying the speech of the conventional narrator and subordinate to it. The dialogue in “The Peasant Young Lady” is more independent, but even here it is not yet a way of directly depicting events. However, even while maintaining this traditional form of narration, Pushkin, unlike other writers in whom it promotes the author’s intervention in the narration and its subjective coloring, strives here for objectivity in the story of the events that make up the plot of his stories. This, in turn, affects the nature of these stories. .

The depiction of the life of different layers of society, the social uniqueness of the environment, which also determines the uniqueness of characters, was the new thing that Pushkin introduced into Russian literature.

The characteristics of the narrators of "Belkin's Tales" are significant for the organization of Pushkin's cycle. The semantics of romantic contrasts is replaced by semantic diversity and depth. Thanks to the development and transformation of the images of authors, storytellers, and the entire narrative structure of the cycle, a new realistic style is born in Pushkin’s work, high in its aesthetic merits. art form.

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23) Makagonenko G.P. The work of A.S. Pushkin in the 1830s. – L., 1974.

24) Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D.N. Collection op. T.4. – M.–Pg., 1924.

25) Petrunina N.N. Pushkin's prose (paths of evolution). – L., 1987.

26) Pushkin A.S. "Belkin's Tales" // Complete. collection op.: A 10 vol. T.6. – M., 1962-1966.

27) Sazonova S.S. About Belkin and his role in "Belkin's Tales". – Riga, 1976.

28) Sidyakov L.S. Fiction Pushkin. – Riga, 1973.

29) Stepanov N.S. Pushkin's prose. – M., 1962.

30) Khrapchenko M.B. Creative individuality writer and the development of literature. – M., 1970.

31) Chernyaev N.I. Critical articles and notes about Pushkin. – Kharkov, 1990.

32) Chicherin A.V. Essays on Russian history literary style. – M., 1977.

NOTES

Chapter 1

1) Makagonenko G.P. The work of A.S. Pushkin in the 1830s. – L., 1974, p.122.

2) Vinogradov V.V. On the theory of artistic speech. – M., 1971.

3) Ivanchikova E.A. The narrator in the narrative structure of Dostoevsky’s works // Philological collection. – M., 1995, p.187.

4) Chernyaev N.I. Critical articles and notes about Pushkin. – Kharkov, 1900, p.299.

5) Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D.N. Collected works T.4. – M. - Pg., 1924, p.52.

6) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. – M., 1941, p.538.

7) Bocharov S.G. Poetics of Pushkin. – M., 1974, p. 120.

8) Sidyakov L.S. Fiction by A.S. Pushkin. – Riga, 1973, p. 101.

9) Pushkin A.S. Full collection Op.: in 10 volumes. Ed. 2nd. – M., 1956-1958. T. 6, p. 332.

10) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 333.

11) Ibid., vol. 8, p. 252.

12) Sidyakov L.S. Fiction by A.S. Pushkin, p. 188.

13) Bocharov S.G. Poetics of Pushkin, p.114.

Chapter 2

1) Pushkin A.S. Full collected works in 10 volumes. T. 8, p. 581.

2) Ibid., vol. 8, p. 581.

3) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 758.

4) Gukasova A.G. Boldinsky period in Pushkin's works. – M., 1973, p. 68.

5) Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. - M.-L. 1966, p.238.

6) Ibid., p.240.

7) Ibid., p.240.

8) Korovin V.I. Soul-nurturing humanity. - M. 1982, p.86.

9) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. - M. 1999, p.601.

10) Ibid., p.607.

11) Pushkin A.S. Complete, collected. op. T. 6, p.81.

12) Korovin V.I. Soul-Nursing Humanity, p.94.

13) Pushkin A.S. Full collection op. T. 6, p.97.

14) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 115.

15) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 89.

16) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 93.

17) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 95.

18) Korovin V.I. Soul-Nursing Humanity, p.94.

19) Gorshkov A.I. All the richness, strength and flexibility of our language, p.143.

20) Pushkin A.S. Belkin's stories // Complete. collection cit.: In 10 volumes. T.6, p.32.

21) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 88.

22) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 93.

23) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 95.

24) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 95.

25) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. - M. 1946, pp.455-459.

26) Zuev N.N. One of the peaks of Russian prose "Belkin's Tale" by A.S. Pushkin // Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 8, p. 30.

27) Petrunina N.N. Pushkin's prose. - L. 1987, p. 99.

28) Ibid., p. 100.

29) Quote. By: Imikhelova S.S. Biblical allusions as a subject of modern literary hermeneutics // Literature and religion: problems of interaction in a general cultural context. – Ulan-Ude, 1999, pp. 43-44.

30) Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. – M. – L., 1966, p. 245.

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If a literary work is narrated in the first person, this does not mean that the author himself is the narrator. The image of the narrator is an author's invention for the realization of a specific author's goal, and its role in the artistic organization of the text is no less important than the action itself, which the author narrates.

Definition

Narrator- a fictional character on whose behalf the story is told about the fate of the heroes or about the events that make up the content literary work.

Comparison

Characters always receive direct or indirect author's assessment, important for disclosure ideological content works. In some genres, a narrator is introduced for this purpose - a person conditionally endowed with his own judgment about the events and characters around whom the plot action unfolds.

The narrator's image is neutral. The reader learns almost nothing about his character, way of thinking, fate. The narrator is interesting only because the story is told on his behalf. From the words of the narrator, we learn about the habits and oddities of Pechorin in the novel by M.Yu. Lermontov “Hero of Our Time”; Pushkin's cycle "Belkin's Tales" is also conveyed by a fictional narrator.

First person narration is a common technique in European literature XVIII – XIX centuries. The narrator was rarely assigned the role of a dispassionate observer of events and a chronologist: it was put into his mouth portrait characteristic the main characters of the work, an assessment of their actions, forecasts and warnings about the consequences of rash actions.

Often a narrator is necessary to express the author's position. In the novel by A.S. Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" the image of the narrator is almost identical to the author himself. However, this is still an image that only partially reflects the author’s worldview.

The introduction of the figure of the narrator into the plot of the work complicates the composition, gives it multifacetedness and at the same time clearly structures the narrative. At the same time, the author remains the creator and creator, the main director of the action, and not its participant.

Conclusions website

1. An author is the creator of a literary work. The narrator is one of his characters.
2. The author builds a plot and describes the events that he should talk about fictional hero- narrator.
3. Thanks to the image of the narrator, it can be expressed author's position in relation to the events described.
4. The narrator's value judgments partially reveal the author's worldview.

Author. Narrator. Hero AUTHOR. NARRATOR. HERO. IN prose And poems L. means. the place belongs to the narrator, whether the story is told in the name of an unnamed narrator or in the first person. L.'s narrator either sets out the plot or introduces it into action, recreating the external situation (“Demon”, “Mtsyri”, “Tambov Treasurer”), and serves the creatures. form of manifestation of the author's position. However, identifying the narrator with the author often leads to a narrowing of the problems of the work, especially L.’s poems, which with this approach turn out to be closed within the individual romantic consciousness of Ch. hero (“Mtsyri”, “Demon”). But Lermont. poems are not reduced to the plot and spiritual “adventures” of the hero: his fate seems, although important, but in in a certain sense a “private” phenomenon to be included in the universal world. Thus, the existence of the Demon intersects with the course of earthly life (nature, the life of the Gudal family, wedding, funeral, battle; it is no coincidence that the description of the horse takes up an entire chapter). Similarly, Pechorin’s life intersects with the orbits of the lives of many people, even those who hardly know him. The fate of Mtsyri is included in the events of the Caucasus. war, and the story of the heroes of “Tambov Treasurer” is not only in the provinces. everyday life, but also in the circle of interests of the reading public. Mtsyri’s confession is preceded by a prologue in the form of an untitled narrative, combining the position of an external observer (“And now a pedestrian sees”) and a narrator delving into thoughts about the fate of Georgia (five verses of the first chapter); the latter unexpectedly uses the verb “bloomed” in the past tense. The effect of being ahead of time is necessary for L. in order to take a position that is historically justified, a position in which the security of Georgia would already be a fait accompli and, because of this, could be an argument explaining the actions of the Russians. army. The hero’s word in the poem, in contrast to the epically detached word of the narrator, is extremely confessional, but with a specific meaning. vocabulary, style, verse there is no sharp line between them, which indicates a certain spiritual unity of all carriers of the word in the poem. The decision is romantic. conflict - in dying words Mtsyri and in the last verse of the poem: “And I will not curse anyone”; but this is also the author’s word, a direct expression of the author’s position. It is important that such a decision must be made by the hero himself. This reveals the author’s attitude to the words of the hero and the narrator. The positions of the narrators and the hero in the poem have local significance; Only the author's position is comprehensive. In “The Demon,” the narrator has unlimited knowledge of the past and future, earthly and heavenly, and because of this, the dispassionateness of his “observing” position: the narrator’s word reflects the absence of a hierarchy of values ​​(which the author establishes), the entire temporal world for him lies on the same value plane . For him, the suffering of the Demon and the galloping horse are equal in description. The narrator's word is descriptive and descriptive. IN last chapter In the epilogue, the author's word sounds, colored with a majestic, regal, imperturbable tonality, as if absorbing the characteristic character of the word of the hero and narrator and standing above it. A certain convergence between the hero’s word and the narrator’s word is revealed in Chapter. VII, where the words of the Demon become the words of the poet himself: “Since the world lost paradise, / I swear, such a beauty / Has not bloomed under the sun of the south.” The epilogue of the author-narrator, separated from the completely completed line of spiritual “quests” of the demonic. hero, indicates the local nature of the “told” plot, which, according to the narrator, has become a story “terrible for children” (another century ahead of its time), and at the same time the universal nature of the “conclusions” stemming from the relationship between the tragedy that once unfolded and the passage of time . (The description of Gudal’s house, which has fallen into disrepair, is not a decline, but a removal of the former.) In “Tambov Treasury”, author. the position is expressed in a combination of two styles in the narrative - high and low, which, however, do not exist separately. The same is the basis of the conflict of the poem, dramatic and anecdotal at the same time. This also determines the composition with its interruption of plans, lyrical. digressions - sometimes in the spirit of lofty dreams (XLII), sometimes in the tone of philistine reasoning (XI, XIII). The poem is held together by the author's ironic lighting, which permeates all levels of the narrative. Here the principle of the relationship between the author and the narrator corresponds to the stylistic principles of depicting reality. This is not observed in other poems. In the novel “Hero...” the change in points of view of the author, narrator and hero is directly revealed in the composition of the work. The nameless narrator actually acts as an arbitrator between Maxim Maksimych and Pechorin (in the preface to Pechorin’s journal). This is confirmed by the preface. from the author: it has the same position regarding the hero. The composition of the novel is subordinated to the task of identifying the essence of the hero: first - the preliminary story of Maxim Maksimych, then - Pechorin's explanatory journal, between which the figure of the narrator appears. The narrator's opinion about Maxim Maksimych is not without a romantic tint. enthusiasm - has long been accepted by researchers as artistically objective and final, due to the identification of the narrator with the author. In the novel, the “story” is told on behalf of the narrator, Maxim Maksimych, Pechorin and the author of the first preface (see Style). The difference in the positions of the narrating characters determines the diverse coverage of the phenomena of reality, creating in meaning. the degree of impression of self-expression of life is a fact indicating the strengthening of realism. positions in Russian prose of the 40s 19th century Auto. L.’s position in “Hero...” also manifests itself in relation to word hero. In the novel there is a sharp line between the word internal and external. Int. the word - the hero's word about himself and to himself - is truthful and sincere. For L. (as opposed to F.M. Dostoevsky), the word that sounds in dialogue turns out to be external; it lacks sincerity, it is only a means to an end. External, i.e. dialogical in form, the word in essence is not such, it tends to become monological, since it is a form of self-affirmation of the hero. The inner word, monologue in form, is essentially dialogical: it is in the word addressed to himself that Pechorin correlates thoughts about the value of his own. personality with the opinions of others about him. It is precisely this, taking into account someone else’s point of view. the word contains the hero’s self-condemnation, containing the power of his merciless reflection in relation to himself and the surrounding reality. In the unfinished novels “Vadim”, “Princess Ligovskaya”, prose. In the sketches “I want to tell you”, “Shtoss”, the author’s position is manifested directly and openly in commenting and assessing the feelings of the characters, author. characterization of persons and events, interference in the thoughts of the characters. In “Hero...” these narrative techniques are replaced by alternation or comparison of positions of the narrator, author and heroes. In general, the author. position in large industries L. can be defined as transpersonal: in “Hero...” he stands above the modern. society; in poems, through the narrator, the author takes a position of superiority over heroes and events due to foreknowledge: historical in “Mtsyri” and universal in “Demon”. The hero’s word is the most important, but not the only one. means of expression understanding the course of events on the scale of society, history or all of humanity.

Lit.: Vinogradov V.V., The problem of authorship and the theory of styles, M., 1961; his, About the theory of art. speeches, M., 1971; Bakhtin M. M., On the methodology of literary criticism, in the book: Context. 74, M., 1975; his, Problem of the text, “VL”, 1976, No. 10; The author's problem in art. lit-re, v. 1, Izhevsk, 1974; Kozhinov V.V., The author’s problem and the writer’s path, in the book: Context. 77, M., 1978; Eikhenbaum(12), p. 221-85.

E. A. Vedenyapina Lermontov Encyclopedia / USSR Academy of Sciences. Institute rus. lit. (Pushkin. House); Scientific-ed. Council of the publishing house "Sov. Encycl."; Ch. ed. Manuilov V. A., Editorial Board: Andronikov I. L., Bazanov V. G., Bushmin A. S., Vatsuro V. E., Zhdanov V. V., Khrapchenko M. B. - M.: Sov. Encycl., 1981

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