Short satirical stories in Zoshchenko style. Mikhail Zoshchenko - writer, satirist, playwright. The twenties through the eyes of the heroes of Mikhail Zoshchenko

Tarasevich Valentina

Among the masters of Soviet satire and humor, a special place belongs to Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958). His works still attract the attention of readers. After the writer's death, his stories, feuilletons, novellas, and comedies were published about twenty times with a circulation of several million copies.

Mikhail Zoshchenko perfected the style of comic tale, which had rich traditions in Russian literature. He created an original style of lyrical and ironic storytelling in stories of the 20s-30s.

Zoshchenko's humor attracts with its spontaneity and non-triviality.

In his works, Zoshchenko, unlike modern satirical writers, never humiliated his hero, but, on the contrary, tried to help a person get rid of vices. Zoshchenko's laughter is not laughter for the sake of laughter, but laughter for the sake of moral cleansing. This is precisely what attracts us to the work of M.M. Zoshchenko.

How does a writer manage to create a comic effect in his works? What techniques does he use?

This work is an attempt to answer these questions and analyze the linguistic means of comedy.

Thus, purpose My work was to identify the role of linguistic means of creating the comic in the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko.

Download:

Preview:

Regional scientific and practical conference for high school students

“Into the world of search, into the world of creativity, into the world of science”

Techniques for creating comics

in satirical stories

Mikhail Zoshchenko

Municipal educational institution "Ikei Secondary School"

Tarasevich Valentina.

Head: teacher of Russian language and literature Gapeevtseva E.A.

2013

Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………3

Chapter I. 1.1 Zoshchenko is a master of the comic………………………………………………………………...….6

1.2 Hero Zoshchenko……………………………………………………………………………….7

Chapter II. Language means of the comic in the works of M. Zoshchenko……………….….7

2.1. Classification of speech comic means……………………………………….………7

2.2. Means of comedy in the works of Zoshchenko………………………………………….…9

Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...15

List of references………………………………………………………...16

Appendix 1. Survey results…………………………………………….…….17

Appendix 2. Techniques for creating comic……………………………………….……..18

Introduction

The origins of satire lie in ancient times. Satire can be found in works of Sanskrit literature and Chinese literature. In ancient Greece, satire reflected intense political struggle.

As a special literary form, satire was first formed among the Romans, where the name itself appeared (Latin satira, from satura - an accusatory genre in ancient Roman literature of an entertaining and didactic nature, combining prose and poetry).

In Russia, satire first appears in folk oral literature (fairy tales, proverbs, songs of guslars, folk dramas). Examples of satire are also known in ancient Russian literature (“The Prayer of Daniil the Zatochnik”). The aggravation of social struggle in the 17th century puts forward satire as a powerful accusatory weapon against the clergy ("Kalyazin Petition"), bribery of judges ("Shemyakin Court", "The Tale of Ruff Ershovich"), etc. Satire in Russia in the 18th century, as in Western Europe , develops within the framework of classicism and takes on a moralizing character (satires by A.D. Kantemir), develops in the form of a fable (V.V. Kapnist, I.I. Khemnitser), comedy (“The Minor” by D.I. Fonvizin, “The Yabeda” V.V. Kapnista). Satirical journalism is widely developed (N.I. Novikov, I.A. Krylov, etc.). Satire reached its greatest flowering in the 19th century, in the literature of critical realism. The main direction of Russian social satire of the 19th century was given by A.S. Griboyedov (1795-1829) in the comedy “Woe from Wit” and N.V. Gogol (1809-1852) in the comedy “The Inspector General” and in “Dead Souls”, exposing the basic foundations of landowner and bureaucratic Russia. The fables of I.A. are imbued with satirical pathos. Krylov, a few poems and prose works by A.S. Pushkin, poetry by M.Yu. Lermontova, N.P. Ogarev, Ukrainian poet T.G. Shevchenko, dramaturgy by A.N. Ostrovsky. Russian satirical literature was enriched with new features in the second half of the 19th century in the works of writers - revolutionary democrats: N.A. Nekrasova (1821-1877) (poems “The Moral Man”), N.A. Dobrolyubov, as well as poets of the 60s, grouped around the satirical magazine Iskra. Inspired by love for the people and high ethical principles, satire was a powerful factor in the development of the Russian liberation movement. Satire reaches unsurpassed political acuteness in the work of the great Russian satirist - revolutionary democrat M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889), who exposed bourgeois-landlord Russia and bourgeois Europe, the arbitrariness and stupidity of the authorities, the bureaucratic apparatus, the excesses of the serf owners, etc. (“Messrs. Golovlevs”, “The History of a City”, “Modern Idyll”, “Fairy Tales”, etc.). In the 80s, during the era of reactions, satire reached great strength and depth in the stories of A.P. Chekhov (1860-1904). Revolutionary satire, persecuted by censorship, sounds passionately in the pamphlets of M. Gorky (1868-1936), directed against imperialism and bourgeois pseudo-democracy ("American Essays", "My Interviews"), in the stream of satirical leaflets and magazines of 1905-1906, in the feuilletons of the Bolshevik newspaper "Pravda". After the Great October Socialist Revolution, Soviet satire was aimed at fighting the class enemy, bureaucracy, and capitalist remnants in people's minds.

Among the masters of Soviet satire and humor, a special place belongs to Mikhail Zoshchenko (1895-1958). His works still attract the attention of readers. After the writer's death, his stories, feuilletons, novellas, and comedies were published about twenty times with a circulation of several million copies.

Mikhail Zoshchenko perfected the style of comic tale, which had rich traditions in Russian literature. He created an original style of lyrical and ironic storytelling in stories of the 20s-30s.

Zoshchenko's humor attracts with its spontaneity and non-triviality.

In his works, Zoshchenko, unlike modern satirical writers, never humiliated his hero, but on the contrary tried to help a person get rid of vices. Zoshchenko's laughter is not laughter for the sake of laughter, but laughter for the sake of moral cleansing. This is precisely what attracts us to the work of M.M. Zoshchenko.

How does a writer manage to create a comic effect in his works? What techniques does he use?

This work is an attempt to answer these questions and analyze the linguistic means of comedy.

Thus, the goal My work was to identify the role of linguistic means of creating the comic in the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko.

To achieve this goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:

Study the linguistic means of comics.

Analyze the linguistic features of Zoshchenko’s stories.

Find out what role comic devices play in the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko.

Hypothesis our research work:

To create a comic effect, Mikhail Zoshchenko uses special linguistic means in his stories.

I was prompted to do research on this topic by my interest in the work of Mikhail Zoshchenko, in the nature of the comic, and simply in new discoveries. In addition, the survey revealed that many of my peers do not know the theory of the techniques of creating comics, they find it difficult to name the stories of Mikhail Zoshchenko, although they like to read humorous and satirical literary works. (Annex 1)

Thus, despite relevance topic, it has an undeniable novelty for the students of our school. Novelty The results obtained is that, within the framework of a small study, we tried to identify the most striking and frequently used techniques for creating the comic, used by Mikhail Zoshchenko in his satirical stories.

Research methods: sociological (survey - questioning, non-survey - analysis of documents, observation, comparison, counting, analysis and synthesis.), theoretical (linguistic, literary criticism). The choice of research methods is optimal, as it corresponds to the specifics of the work.

Chapter I. Zoshchenko - master of the comic

Mikhail Zoshchenko perfected the style of comic tale, which had rich traditions in Russian literature. He created an original style - a lyrical and ironic narrative in stories of the 20s-30s. and the cycle of “Sentimental Stories”.

The work of Mikhail Zoshchenko is a unique phenomenon in Russian Soviet literature. The writer, in his own way, saw some of the characteristic processes of contemporary reality, brought out under the blinding light of satire a gallery of characters who gave rise to the common concept of “Zoshchenko’s hero.” Being at the origins of Soviet satirical and humorous prose, he became the creator of an original comic novella, which continued the traditions of Gogol, Leskov, and early Chekhov in new historical conditions. Finally, Zoshchenko created his own, completely unique artistic style.

Developing the original form of his own story, he drew from all these sources, although the Gogol-Chekhov tradition was closest to him.

Zoshchenko would not be himself if not for his writing style. It was a language unknown to literature, and therefore did not have its own spelling. His language breaks, scooping up and hyperbolizing all the painting and improbability of street speech, the infestation of “storm-ravaged everyday life.”

Zoshchenko is endowed with absolute pitch and a brilliant memory. Over the years spent in the midst of poor people, he managed to penetrate the secret of their conversational structure, with its characteristic vulgarisms, incorrect grammatical forms and syntactic structures, managed to adopt the intonation of their speech, their expressions, turns of phrase, words - he studied this language to the subtleties and from the very first steps in literature I began to use it easily and naturally. In his language one could easily encounter such expressions as “plitoir”, “okromya”, “creepy”, “this”, “in it”, “brunette”, “dragged”, “for the bite”, “why cry”, “ this poodle”, “a dumb animal”, “at the stove”, etc.

But Zoshchenko is a writer not only of a comic style, but also of comic situations. Not only his language is comical, but also the place where the story of the next story unfolded: a wake, a communal apartment, a hospital - everything is so familiar, personal, everyday familiar. And the story itself: a fight in a communal apartment over a hedgehog in short supply, a row at a wake over a broken glass.

Some phrases from the writer’s works have remained in Russian literature as aphorisms: “as if the atmosphere suddenly smelled on me”, “they will pick you up like a stick and throw you away for their dear ones, even though they are their own relatives”, “the second lieutenant is wow, but a bastard”, “ causing disturbances."

Zoshchenko, while writing his stories, chuckled himself. So much so that later, when I read stories to my friends, I never laughed. He sat gloomy, gloomy, as if not understanding what there was to laugh about. Having laughed while working on the story, he later perceived it with melancholy and sadness. I perceived it as the other side of the coin. If you listen carefully to his laughter, it is not difficult to discern that the carefree and humorous notes are only a background for the notes of pain and bitterness.

1.2. Hero Zoshchenko

Zoshchenko's hero is an everyman, a man with poor morals and a primitive outlook on life. This man in the street personified an entire human layer of the Russia of that time. Zoshchenko, in many of his works, tried to emphasize that this man in the street often spent all his strength fighting all sorts of minor everyday troubles, instead of actually doing something for the good of society. But the writer did not ridicule the man himself, but the philistine traits in him. “I combine these characteristic, often shaded features in one hero, and then the hero becomes familiar to us and seen somewhere,” Zoshchenko wrote.

With his stories, Zoshchenko seemed to be calling not to fight people who bear philistine traits, but to help them get rid of these traits.

In satirical stories, the characters are less rude and uncouth than in humorous short stories. The author is interested, first of all, in the spiritual world, the system of thinking of an outwardly cultured, but even more so essentially disgusting, bourgeois.

Chapter II. Language means of the comic in the works of M. Zoshchenko

2.1. Classification of means of speech comedy

All comic means can be divided into several groups, among which are those formed by phonetic means; means formed by lexical means (tropes and the use of vernacular, borrowings, etc.); means formed by morphological means (incorrect use of case forms, gender, etc.); means formed by syntactic means (use of stylistic figures: parallelism, ellipsis, repetitions, gradation, etc.) (Appendix 2)

Phonetic means include, for example, the use of spelling irregularities, which helps authors give a capacious portrait of the narrator or hero.

Stylistic figures include anaphora, epiphora, parallelism, antithesis, gradation, inversion, rhetorical questions and appeals, polyunion and non-union, silence, etc.

Syntactic means - default, rhetorical questions, gradation, parallelism and antithesis.

Lexical means include all tropes as figurative and expressive means, as well as puns, paradoxes, ironies, and alogisms.

These are epithets - “words that define an object or action and emphasize some characteristic property or quality in them.”

Comparisons are the comparison of two phenomena in order to explain one of them with the help of the other.

Metaphors are words or expressions that are used figuratively based on the similarity in some respect of two objects or phenomena.

To create a comic effect, hyperboles and litotes are often used - figurative expressions containing an exorbitant exaggeration (or understatement) of size, strength, meaning, etc.

Irony also refers to lexical means. Irony is “the use of a word or expression in the opposite sense to its literal meaning for the purpose of ridicule.”

In addition, lexical means also include allegory, personification, periphrasis, etc. All of these means are paths.

However, only tropes do not completely determine the lexical means of creating comedy. This should also include the use of colloquial, special (professional), borrowed or dialect vocabulary. The author builds the entire monologue and the entire comic situation on the special vocabulary used by thieves in law, but at the same time it is familiar to most of the population: “there is no need to shaggy grandma,” “there will be no will for a century,” etc.

We include the so-called grammatical, or more precisely morphological, means in cases where the author deliberately incorrectly uses grammatical categories in order to create comedy.

Use of colloquial forms such as evony, ikhny, etc. can also be classified as grammatical means, although in the full sense these are lexico-grammatical means.

Pun [fr. calembour] - a play on words based on deliberate or involuntary ambiguity generated by homonymy or similarity of sound and causing a comic effect, for example: “I’m rushing, exactly like that; // But I’m moving forward, and you’re rushing while sitting” (K. Prutkov)

Alogism (from a - negative prefix and Greek logismos - reason) - 1) denial of logical thinking as a means of achieving truth; irrationalism, mysticism, fideism oppose logic to intuition, faith or revelation - 2) in stylistics, a deliberate violation of logical connections in speech for the purpose of stylistic (including comic) effect.

Paradox, - a, m. (book). - 1. A strange statement that diverges from generally accepted opinion, as well as an opinion that contradicts (sometimes only at first glance) common sense. Speak in paradoxes. 2. A phenomenon that seems incredible and unexpected, adj. paradoxical.

2.2. Means of comedy in the works of Zoshchenko

Having examined the comic in the works of Zoshchenko, in our work we will focus on the most striking, in our opinion, means of the comic, such as puns, alogism, redundancy of speech (tautology, pleonasm), the use of words in an unusual meaning (the use of colloquial forms, incorrect use of grammatical forms, the creation an unusual synonymous series, a clash of colloquial, scientific and foreign vocabulary), since they are the most commonly used.

2.2.1. Pun as a means of creating comedy

Among the favorite speech devices of Zoshchenko the stylist is a pun, a play on words based on homonymy and polysemy of words.

In the “Dictionary of the Russian Language” by S.I. Ozhegov the following definition is given: “A pun is a joke based on the comic use of words that sound similar but have different meanings.” In the “Dictionary of Foreign Words” edited by I.V. Lekhin and Professor F.N. Petrov we read: “A pun is a play on words based on their sound similarity with different meanings.”

In a pun, laughter occurs when the more general meaning of a word is replaced in our minds by its literal meaning. In creating a pun, the main role is played by the ability to find and apply the specific and literal meaning of a word and replace it with the more general and broader meaning that the interlocutor has in mind. This skill requires a certain talent, which Zoshchenko possessed. In order to create puns, he uses the convergence and collision of literal and figurative meanings more often than the convergence and collision of several meanings of a word.

“Here you are, citizens, asking me, was I an actor? Well, there was. He played in theaters. Touched this art.”

In this example, taken from the story “Actor,” the narrator, using the word touched, uses it in a figurative, metaphorical meaning, i.e. “I was involved in the world of art.” At the same time, touching also has the meaning of incomplete action.

Zoshchenko’s puns often show duality in understanding the meaning.

“I was right at the same point with this family. And he was like a member of the family” (“Great Society History”, 1922).

“At least I am an unilluminated person” (“Great Society History”, 1922).

In the speech of the narrator Zoshchenko, there are numerous cases of replacing the expected word with another, consonant, but distant in meaning.

So, instead of the expected “family member”, the narrator says a member of the family name, “unenlightened person” - a person not illuminated, etc.

2.2.2. Alogism as a means of creating comedy

The main feature of Zoshchenko’s technique for creating verbal comedy is alogism. The basis of alogism as a stylistic device and a means of creating a comic is the lack of logical expediency in the use of various elements of speech, from speech to grammatical constructions; verbal comic alogism arises as a result of a discrepancy between the logic of the narrator and the logic of the reader.

In “Administrative Delight” (1927), antonyms create discord, for example:

“But the fact is that [a pig] has wandered in and is clearly disturbing the public order.”

Disorder and order are words with opposite meanings. In addition to the substitution of the word, the compatibility of the verb violate with nouns is broken here. According to the norms of the Russian literary language, one can “violate” rules, order, or other norms.

“Now we’ll draw up an act and move the matter downhill.”

Obviously, in the story “The Watchman” (1930) we mean not downhill (i.e. “down”), but uphill (“forward, improve the situation”). The antonymic substitution in - under creates a comic effect.

Discord and discord also arise due to the use of non-literary forms of words. For example, in the story “The Groom” (1923):

“And here, my brothers, my woman is dying. Today she, let's say, has collapsed, but tomorrow she feels worse. The brandite is thrown around and falls from the stove.”

Brandit is a non-literary form of the verb "to rave". In general, it should be noted that there are many non-literary forms in Zoshchenko’s stories: brandite instead of “delirious” (“The Groom,” 1923), they are starving instead of starving (“Devil’s Man,” 1922), let’s lie down instead of lie down (“Bad Place,” 1921), cunning instead of cunning (“Bad Place”), by the way instead of by the way (“Motherhood and Infancy”, 1929), I ask instead of ask (“Great Society Story”), hello instead of hello (“Victoria Kazimirovna”), whole instead of whole (“Velikosvetskaya history"), skeleton instead of skeleton ("Victoria Kazimirovna"), flow instead of flow ("Great History").

“We spent a whole year with him just wonderfully.”

“And he walks all in white, like some kind of skeleton.”

“My hands are already mutilated - the blood is flowing, and now it stings.”

2.2.3. Redundancy of speech as a means of creating comedy

The speech of the narrator's hero in Zoshchenko's comic tale contains a lot of unnecessary things; it suffers from tautology and pleonasms.

Tautology - (Greek tautología, from tauto - the same and lógos - word), 1) repetition of the same or similar words, for example, “clearer than clear,” “cries, filled with tears.” In poetic speech, especially in oral folk art, tautology is used to enhance the emotional impact. Tautology is a type of pleonasm.

Pleonasm - (from the Greek pleonasmós - excess), verbosity, the use of words that are unnecessary not only for semantic completeness, but usually also for stylistic expressiveness. It is classified as a stylistic “figure of addition”, but is considered as an extreme, turning into a “flaw of style”; the border of this transition is unsteady and is determined by the sense of proportion and taste of the era. Pleonasm is common in colloquial speech (“I saw with my own eyes”), where it, like other addition figures, serves as one of the forms of natural redundancy of speech. The tautological nature of the language of the narrator-hero Zoshchenko can be judged by the following examples:

“In a word, she was a poetic person who could smell flowers and nasturtiums all day long” (“Lady with Flowers”, 1930)

“And I committed a criminal offense” (“High Society History”, 1922)

“The old prince, Your Excellency, was killed to death, and the lovely Pole Victoria Kazimirovna was dismissed from the estate” (“Great Society History”, 1922)

“The bastard almost strangled him by the throat” (“A minor incident from his personal life”, 1927)

“And the diver, Comrade Filippov, fell deeply and too much in love with her” (“The Story of a Student and a Diver”)

2.2.4. Using words with unusual meanings

Non-literary words create comic effects, and the heroes are perceived by readers as uneducated ordinary people. It is language that gives a picture of the hero’s social status. This replacement of a literary standardized word form with a non-literary, dialectal one is used by Zoshchenko to show that the narrator, who criticizes others for ignorance, is ignorant himself. For example:

“Her boy is a sucking mammal” (“High Society History”, 1922)

“I haven’t seen you, son of a bitch, for seven years... Yes, I’m you, you brat...” (“You don’t need to have relatives”)

Often, comparing Soviet with foreign leads to the inclusion of foreign words and even entire sentences in foreign languages. Particularly effective in this regard is the alternation of Russian and foreign words and phrases with the same meaning, for example:

“The German kicked his head, they say, bite-dritte, please take it away, what are we talking about, it’s a pity or something” (“Product Quality”, 1927).

“Put on a new blues tunic” (“Victoria Kazimirovna”)

Or the use of foreign words in the Russian context:

“It’s either lorigan or rose” (“Product Quality”, 1927).

The use of words in an unusual meaning makes the reader laugh; the creation of a synonymous series that is unusual for the reader serves as a means of creating a comic effect. So, for example, Zoshchenko, violating the normative literary language, creates synonymous series, such as a printed organ - a newspaper ("Cannibal", 1938), a photographic card - face - muzzle - physiognomy ("Guests", 1926), inclusions in a common network - connection electricity ("The Last Story"), a child - an object - a shibzdik ("Incident", "Happy Childhood"), front, hind legs - arms, legs ("The Story of a Student and a Diver"), a woman - a young woman ("An Incident" ).

“Instead of tearing up the printed organ, you would have taken it and reported it to the editor.”

“It was later discovered that he had been cheated on his photographic card, and he walked around with gumboil for three weeks.”

“And, by the way, she’s riding in this carriage, among others, such a little woman. Such a young woman with a child.”

“Some kind of idiot, about ten years old, is sitting there.” ("Happy childhood")

2.2.5. Paradox as a means of creating comedy

Paradox - (Greek parádoxos - “contrary to common opinion”) - an expression in which the conclusion does not coincide with the premise and does not follow from it, but, on the contrary, contradicts it, giving an unexpected and unusual interpretation of it (for example, “I will believe what anything, as long as it is completely incredible" - O. Wilde). The paradox is characterized by brevity and completeness, bringing it closer to an aphorism, emphasized sharpness of the formulation, bringing it closer to a play on words, a pun, and, finally, unusual content, contrary to the generally accepted interpretation of this problem, which is affected by the paradox. Example: “All smart people are fools, and only fools are smart.” At first glance, such judgments are meaningless, but some meaning can be found in them; it may even seem that some particularly subtle thoughts are encrypted through paradox. The master of such paradoxes was Mikhail Zoshchenko.

For example: “Yes, wonderful beauty,” said Vasya, looking with some amazement at the peeling plaster of the house. - Indeed, very beautiful...”

2.2.6. Irony as a means of creating comedy

Irony is very close to paradox. Determining it is not very difficult. If, in paradox, concepts that exclude each other are united despite their incompatibility, then in irony, one concept is expressed in words, but another concept, opposite to it, is implied (but not expressed in words). The positive is expressed in words, but the negative opposite is understood. In this way, irony allegorically reveals the shortcomings of the one (or what) they are talking about. It represents one of the types of ridicule, and this is also what determines its comedy.

By the fact that a disadvantage is indicated through its opposite advantage, this disadvantage is highlighted and emphasized. Irony is especially expressive in oral speech, when its means is a special mocking intonation.

It happens that the situation itself forces you to understand a word or phrase in a sense that is directly opposite to the generally known one. The pompous expression “the audience is over” when applied to the watchman emphasizes the absurdity and comicality of the situation being described: “Then the watchman finished his water, wiped his mouth with his sleeve and closed his eyes, wanting to show that the audience was over” (“Night Incident”)

“Now, he says, all my ambition has been crushed into blood.” ("Patient")

2.2.7. A clash of different styles

The speech of the narrator in Zoshchenko's works is divided into separate lexical units belonging to different styles. The clash of different styles in the same text speaks of a certain person who is illiterate, impudent and funny. At the same time, it is interesting to note that Zoshchenko managed to create stories and novellas in which almost incompatible, even mutually exclusive lexical series can exist very close to each other, they can literally coexist in one phrase or a character’s remark. This allows the author to freely maneuver the text and provides the opportunity to sharply, unexpectedly turn the narrative in a different direction. For example:

“They make a lot of noise, but the German is certainly quiet, and it was as if the atmosphere suddenly hit me.” ("High Society History")

“The prince, Your Excellency, just vomited a little, jumped to his feet, shook my hand, was delighted.” ("High Society History")

“There’s one without a hat, a long-maned fellow, but not a priest.” (“A minor incident from my personal life”)

Conclusion

Over more than three decades of work in literature, Zoshchenko has come a long and difficult way. There were undoubted successes and even genuine discoveries along this path that promoted him to the ranks of the greatest masters of Soviet literature. There were also equally undeniable miscalculations. Today it is very clear that the satirist’s creativity flourished in the 20s - 30s. But it is equally obvious that Zoshchenko’s best works from these seemingly distant years are still close and dear to the reader. Dear because the laughter of the great master of Russian literature today remains our faithful ally in the struggle for a person free from the heavy burden of the past, from the self-interest and petty calculations of the acquirer.

In the course of our work, we came to the following conclusions:

Verbal means of creating a comic, namely alogism, stylistic substitutions and displacements, a clash of several styles, often even in one sentence, are a fairly productive comic means and are based on the principle of emotional-style contrast.

The narrator Zoshchenko is the very subject of satire; he betrays his squalor, sometimes naivety, sometimes simple-mindedness, sometimes petty-bourgeois pettiness, without realizing it, as if absolutely involuntarily and therefore incredibly funny.

Zoshchenko's satire is not a call to fight people who bear philistine traits, but a call to fight these traits.

Zoshchenko's laughter is laughter through tears.

List of used literature

1. Alexandrova, Z.E. Dictionary of synonyms Russian. language /Ed. L.A. Cheshko. / Z.E. Alexandrova. - 5th ed., stereotype. M.: Rus.yaz., 1986. 600 p.
2. Zoshchenko M.M. Works: In 5 volumes. M.: Enlightenment, 1993.
3. Zoshchenko M.M. Dear Citizens: Parodies. Stories. Feuilletons. Satirical notes. Letters to the writer. One-act plays. M., 1991. (From the press archive).
4. Mikhail Zoshchenko. Materials for a creative biography: Book 1 / Rep. ed. ON THE. Groznova. M.: Education, 1997.
5. Ozhegov, S.I. and Shvedova, N.Yu. Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language. / S.I. Ozhegov, N.Yu. Shvedova // Russian Academy of Sciences Instrument of the Russian language; Russian Cultural Foundation. M: Az Ltd., 1992. 960 p.
6. Chukovsky K. From memories. - Sat. "Mikhail Zoshchenko in the memoirs of his contemporaries." M.: Enlightenment, pp. 36-37.
7. www.zoschenko.info
8. en.wikipedia.org

Appendix 1. Survey results

A total of 68 people took part in the survey.

Question No. 1.

Yes - 98%.

No - 2%.

Question No. 2.

What techniques for creating comics do you know?

Comparison - 8 people.

Metaphor - 10 people.

Epithets - 10 people.

Hyperbole - 12 people.

Allegory - 2 people.

Discrepancy - 3 people.

Surprise - 8 people.

Irony - 21 people.

Question #3

What stories by M. Zoshchenko have you read?

Glass - 24 people. Galosh - 36 people. Incident on the Volga - 8 people. Stupid story - 12 people. Stories about Lelya and Minka - 11 people. .Meeting - 7 people.

Appendix 2. Techniques for creating a comic

Whatever you want, comrades, I really sympathize with Nikolai Ivanovich.

This dear man suffered for the entire six hryvnia, and did not see anything particularly outstanding for that money.

Just now his character turned out to be soft and compliant. If someone else were in his place, he might have scattered the entire movie and smoked the audience out of the theater. That’s why six hryvnias don’t lie on the floor every day. You need to understand.

And on Saturday, our darling, Nikolai Ivanovich, of course, drank a little. After payday.

And this man was extremely conscientious. Another drunk person would have started to fuss and get upset, but Nikolai Ivanovich walked along the avenue with decorum and nobility. He sang something like that.

Suddenly he looks - there is a movie in front of him.

“Give it to me, he thinks, it doesn’t matter, I’ll go to the cinema. The man thinks I’m cultured, semi-intelligent, why should I drunkenly chatter around the panels and offend passers-by? Let him think I’ll watch the tape while drunk. I never did".

He bought a ticket with his own money. And he sat in the front row.

He sat down in the front row and looked at him decorously and nobly.

Just maybe he looked at one inscription and suddenly went to Riga. That’s why it’s very warm in the hall, the audience breathes and the darkness has a beneficial effect on the psyche.

Our Nikolai Ivanovich went to Riga, everything is decorous and noble - he doesn’t bother anyone, he can’t grab the screen with his hands, he doesn’t unscrew the light bulbs, but he sits and quietly goes to Riga.

Suddenly the sober public began to express dissatisfaction with Riga.

“You could,” they say, “comrade, walk around in the foyer for this purpose, but, they say, you distract those watching the drama to other ideas.”

Nikolai Ivanovich - a cultured, conscientious man - did not, of course, argue and get excited in vain. And he stood up and walked quietly.

“Why, he thinks, get involved with sober people? They won’t cause a scandal.”

He went to the exit. Contacts the cashier.

“Just now,” he says, “lady, I bought a ticket from you, I ask you to return the money back.” Because I can’t look at the picture—it’s driving me around in the dark.

Cashier says:

“We can’t give you the money back, if he drives you around, go to sleep quietly.”

There was a lot of noise and quarrel. If someone else were in Nikolai Ivanovich’s place, he would have dragged the cashier out of the cash register by the hair of her hair and returned her most pure money. And Nikolai Ivanovich, a quiet and cultured man, only maybe pushed the cashier once:

“You,” he says, “understand, you pest, I haven’t looked at your feed yet.” Give it back, he says, my pure ones.

And everything is so decorous and noble, without scandal - he asks for his own money back. Then the manager comes running.

“We,” he says, “don’t return the money - since, he says, it’s taken, be so kind as to watch the tape.”

If someone else were in Nikolai Ivanovich’s place, he would have spat at the manager and gone to look after his holy ones. And Nikolai

Ivanovich became very sad about the money, he began to explain heatedly and went back to Riga.

Here, of course, they grabbed Nikolai Ivanovich like a dog and dragged him to the police. They kept us there until the morning. And in the morning they fined him three rubles and released him.

Now I really feel sorry for Nikolai Ivanovich. This, you know, is a sad case: the person, one might say, didn’t even look at the tape, he just held out for a ticket - and please, charge three and six hryvnia for this petty pleasure. And for what, one wonders, three six hryvnia?

There is hardly a person who has not read a single work by Mikhail Zoshchenko. In the 20-30s, he actively collaborated in satirical magazines (“Behemoth”, “Smekhach”, “Cannon”, “The Inspector General” and others). And even then his reputation as a famous satirist was established. Under the pen of Zoshchenko, all the sad aspects of life cause laughter instead of the expected sadness or fear. The author himself claimed that in his stories “there is not a drop of fiction. Everything here is the naked truth.”

However, despite the resounding success among readers, the work of this writer turned out to be incompatible with the tenets of socialist realism. The notorious resolutions of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of the late forties, along with other writers, journalists, and composers, accused Zoshchenko of lack of ideas and propaganda of petty bourgeois ideology.

Mikhail Mikhailovich's letter to Stalin (“I have never been an anti-Soviet person... I have never been a literary scoundrel or a low person”) remained unanswered. In 1946, he was expelled from the Writers' Union, and over the next ten years not a single book of his was published.

Zoshchenko’s good name was restored only during Khrushchev’s “thaw”.

How can one explain the unprecedented fame of this satirist?

We should start with the fact that the writer’s biography itself had a huge influence on his work. He accomplished a lot. Battalion commander, head of post and telegraph, border guard, regimental adjutant, criminal investigation agent, rabbit and chicken breeding instructor, shoemaker, assistant accountant. And this is not a complete list of who this man was and what he did before he sat down at the writing table.

He saw many people who had to live in an era of great social and political change. He spoke to them in their language, they were his teachers.

Zoshchenko was a conscientious and sensitive person, he was tormented by pain for others, and the writer considered himself called to serve the “poor” (as he later calls him) man. This “poor” man personifies an entire human layer of Russia at that time.

The writer made the “poor” person not only the object, but, more importantly, the subject of the story. The hero of Zoshchenko’s stories was the most ordinary man in the street, a representative of the urban lower classes, not familiar with the heights of Russian culture, but at the same time brought to the forefront of life by the course of history, suddenly becoming everything from nothing. Zoshchenko practically became an exponent of the structure of feelings, life principles and mindsets of this social environment. It was her speech that sounded from the pages of Zoshchenkov’s stories.

These citizens of the new revolutionary Russia quite quickly mastered revolutionary phraseology, but were never able to overcome the inertia of previous habits and ideas. It was these “little people” who made up the majority of the country’s population who were enthusiastic about the task assigned to them of destroying the bad old, but who did not know how to start building a good new one or who understood this construction primarily as satisfying their own needs that were infringed before the revolution - it was these people who did not stand out in any way became the subject of Zoshchenko’s primary attention.

Interest in this type of hero, new to literature, led, in turn, to the search for an appropriate style of writing, easily accessible, and, moreover, “native” to the reader. Reading these stories syllable by syllable, the novice reader is absolutely sure that the author is his own.

And the place where the events unfold is so familiar and familiar (a bathhouse, a tram, a communal kitchen, a post office, a hospital). And the story itself (a fight in a communal apartment over a hedgehog (“Nervous People”), bath problems with paper numbers (“Bathhouse”), which a naked man has “nowhere to put,” a glass cracked at a funeral in the story of the same name and tea that “smells like a mop”) is also close to the audience.

Hence the increased attention to skaz, which soon became an indispensable feature of the artist’s individual style.

“I never wrote how birds sing in the forest,” Zoshchenko recalled. - I went through formal training. New tasks and a new reader forced me to turn to new forms. It was not out of aesthetic needs that I took the forms with which you see me. The new content dictated to me exactly the form in which it would be most beneficial for me to present the content.” Almost all critics who wrote about Zoshchenko noted his fabulous style, masterfully reproducing the language of the modern street.” Here is what Zoshchenko himself wrote in 1929: “They usually think that I distort the “beautiful Russian language”, that for the sake of laughter I take words in a meaning other than the meaning given to them in life, that I deliberately write in broken language in order to make the most venerable the public. It's right. I distort almost nothing. I write in the language that the street now speaks and thinks. I did this not for the sake of curiosity and not in order to more accurately copy our life. I did this in order to fill, at least temporarily, the gap that occurred between literature and the street.

Zoshchenko's stories are kept in the spirit of the language and character of the hero on whose behalf the story is told. This technique helps to naturally penetrate into the inner world of the hero, to show the essence of his nature.

In order to present the central character of Zoshchenko's stories in full growth, it is necessary to compose his portrait from those sometimes small and almost never specially emphasized dashes and touches that are scattered throughout individual stories. When comparing them, connections are revealed between seemingly distant works. Zoshchenko’s big theme with its own cross-cutting character is revealed not in any one work, but in the entire work of the satirist, as if in parts.

This is how, for example, the story is told about how the narrator, Nikolai Ivanovich, a friend, suffered unjustly (the story “A Regrettable Incident”).

He once took a ticket to the cinema. True, I was a little drunk at the time. But you have to understand that it was Saturday afternoon. Nikolai Ivanovich sits in the front row and calmly watches a movie. “Only, maybe he looked at one inscription and suddenly went to Riga. That’s why it’s very warm in the hall, the audience is breathing, and the darkness has a beneficial effect on the psyche.

Our Nikolai Ivanovich went to Riga, everything is decorous - nobly - he doesn’t bother anyone, he can’t grab the screen with his hands, he doesn’t unscrew the light bulbs, but he sits and quietly goes to Riga ... "

The hero also behaves “noble” further. Even with the cashier who refuses to return his money for an unwatched film, he is extremely polite. “If someone else were in Nikolai Ivanovich’s place, he would have dragged the cashier out of the cash register by the hair and returned his pure ones. And Nikolai Ivanovich is a quiet and cultured man, only maybe he shoved the cashier.”

As a result, Nikolai Ivanovich was taken to the police station and was fined three rubles.

The hero of Zoshchenkov's stories has very definite and firm views on life. Confident in the infallibility of his own views and actions, he is perplexed and surprised every time he gets into trouble. But at the same time, he never allows himself to be openly indignant and indignant: he is too passive for this. That is why Zoshchenko refused to directly oppose his own views to the hero’s views and chose a much more complex and difficult path of exposing the narrator indirectly, by the very method of his portrayal. The attention he constantly paid to honing the “technique” of writing is indicative: in the conditions of everyday magazine and newspaper work, when he had to write several stories and feuilletons a week and when the topics of most of them were determined by the editorial assignment, its role increased especially noticeably.

That is why an analysis of the artistic originality of Zoshchenko’s work will be incomplete without talking about the main features of this “technique”, individual techniques for achieving a comic effect and the artistic functions of these techniques directly in the text of the works. Of course, the task is not at all to show that Zoshchenko, like many other writers working in the field of satire, used the technique of unexpected resolution of the plot situation, and the technique of “playing out” details, and numerous ways of achieving purely linguistic, sometimes “linguistic” comedy ... All these techniques, as well as many others, were known long before Zoshchenko.

The peculiarities of Zoshchenko’s use of them are, first of all, that he transformed the techniques of the comic in general into techniques of the comic within his own system, in this case skaz.

The tale, by its very nature, is dual. Skaz - 1) A method of narration focused on the reproduction of live, oral speech, imitation of an improvisational story that is born before the eyes of the reader. A tale is always “alien” speech, a narrative mask, behind which you need to see the author’s face. Zoshchenko's plot also carries a double burden. From the author's point of view, it is important primarily as a means of revealing characters. From the point of view of the narrator - in itself, as a real incident from life. This is exactly how the episode of visiting the theater in the company of an “aristocrat”, and the story of the cracked glass, and the incident with the unwatched movie are described. The author's point of view is hidden inside the tale. At the same time, the narrator's point of view is deliberately “protruded.” That is why, in terms of their external, “primary” perception, events are depicted each time as a completely specific story, a participant or witness of which the hero was and for the authenticity of which, as well as for the truthfulness of the sanctified, he is ready to vouch.

For all its specificity, the hero’s story almost always acts as a particular illustration on a general theme.

“For some reason, citizens, there are a lot of thieves these days. There is a rod all around indiscriminately. It’s impossible to find a person right now from whom nothing was stolen.

My suitcase was also recently taken away before reaching Zhmerinka...” this is how the story “Thieves” begins. “What is this, citizens, happening on the family front? Husbands have to work in uniform. Especially those whose, you know, wife is busy with advanced issues.

Just now, you know what a boring story. Come home. I enter the apartment. For example, I knock on my own door, but they don’t open...” - this is the beginning of the story “The Husband.” It is easy to see that there is a general pattern. The story about how the hero was robbed is preceded by discussions about theft in general. The story of a husband who does not know what to do in front of a closed door is preceded by discussions about the situation on the “family front” in general. Each time this narrator tries to elevate a single fact to the rank of widespread and, from his point of view, completely normal phenomena; by this he immediately strives to set the listener (reader) to a very definite perception of the fact. But the futility of such attempts is obvious as one gets acquainted directly with the events themselves. The listener has a feeling of inconsistency, incommensurability between the general reasoning preceding the story and the particular case and, as a consequence of this, a very definite, negative attitude towards the narrator’s claims to the infallibility of judgments.

When reading Zoshchenko’s stories, it is striking that the narrator, be it an “average person” (“Wonderful Rest”) or a “non-party tradesman” (“Husband”). Mostly completely serious. But on the other hand, the contours of the events passed through his consciousness are involuntarily exaggerated and shifted.

Thus, irony, by establishing a distance between the author and the narrator, destroys the illusion of the identity of their views. At the same time, plot irony is each time complemented by linguistic irony.

In his memoirs about Zoshchenko, K. Chukovsky wrote about the language of the characters in Zoshchenko’s stories: “The illogicality, tongue-tiedness, clumsiness, and impotence of this bourgeois jargon is also reflected, according to Zoshchenko’s observations, in the idiotic repetitions of the same word, stuck in wretched minds. It is necessary, for example, for Zoshchenko’s tradesman to tell his readers that one woman was traveling to the city of Novorossiysk, he conducts his story like this: “... and, by the way, in this carriage, among others, there is such a general (!) little woman. Such a young woman with a child.

She has a child in her arms. So she goes with him. She goes with him to Novorossiysk..."

The word Novorossiysk is repeated five times, and the word goes (are going) nine times, and the narrator cannot get rid of his poor little thought, which has been stuck in his head for a long time. If Chukovsky, citing Zoshchenkov’s quotation, draws attention to the narrator’s tongue-tiedness, then Stanislav Rassadin believes that a system is visible behind this tongue-tiedness. Zoshchenko is not at all busy with the shorthand recording of train vocabulary. The hero-narrator needs a repetitive phrase about Novorossiysk to the point of stupefaction because he needs a pole walking through an unfamiliar swamp along a narrow road. And the narrator uses this support in the same way as they use a pole - he pushes off from it. Moves forward with pushes.

Zoshchenkov's character is not able to immediately and completely convey his feeling. His unsteady thought does not mark time, no, but makes its way forward with great difficulty and uncertainty, stopping for corrections, clarifications and digressions.”

All Zoshchenko’s works have another amazing feature: they can be used to study the history of our country. With a keen sense of time, the writer was able to capture not just the problems that worried his contemporaries, but also the very spirit of the era.

This perhaps explains the difficulty of translating his stories into other languages. The foreign reader is so unprepared to perceive the life described by Zoshchenko that he often evaluates it as a genre of some kind of social fiction. Indeed, how can one explain to a person unfamiliar with Russian realities the essence of, say, the story “Case History.” Only a compatriot who knows first-hand about these problems is able to understand how a sign “Issuing corpses from 3 to 4” can hang in the emergency room.

CONCLUSION

Following life, reality in the choice of characters and themes of his works, moving away from his noble, officer past and from the literary continuation of this past in his own writings, Zoshchenko purposefully followed the path of a people's writer. At the same time, observing the mass of people newly emerging in public life, he did not idealize this people, but paid tribute to them with his satire. However, he could not take the position of an author-mentor, portraying and condemning people from the outside; he could not find himself in a lordly position over the people, no matter how they appeared before his eyes. This is how Zoshchenko’s true democracy manifested itself. And so the need arose to invent our own form of satire, unprecedented in literature. Zoshchenko's talent and human kindness were brilliantly expressed in this literary discovery, where he seemed to identify himself, the author, with these people he ridiculed. And now, without separating himself from this people, he received the fullest right to ridicule them, to subject them to his merciless satire.

This approach to exposing reality is not new. Here is an excerpt from a brilliant article by the famous film director G. Kozintsev, “The Folk Art of Charlie Chaplin”, written half a century ago: “... only one character in King Lear sees a ripening plague through the imaginary calm of the state. This character is a buffoon.

What kings, generals, statesmen see about what they see. He is the only person who can tell the truth. He has the right to speak because he tells the truth with a joke. He's wearing a jester costume!

Having put on this “suit”, this mask of a comic character, Zoshchenko was able to speak about the “plague” that he deeply saw and felt around him. It was not his fault that he was not heard and understood. The eyes of society were then obscured by the red color of banners, flags, slogans, and the ears were filled with the bravura brass of the orchestras...

Truly: there is no prophet in his own country. But the widespread superficial understanding of his work made it possible for two decades of an open, public life for both Zoshchenko’s stories and an outwardly prosperous existence for himself.

This cannot be said about the works of M. Bulgakov and his fate as a writer.

M.A. Bulgakov stands out among the undeservedly forgotten, “banned” writers. However, time, which previously seemed to work against Bulgakov, dooming him to oblivion, seemed to turn its face towards him, marking the rapid growth of literary recognition.

Interest in Bulgakov's work in our time is much higher than in previous years. How can this phenomenon be explained? Probably because the world of formalism, soulless democracy, self-interest, immoral businessmen and careerists is opposed by Bulgakov to the world of eternal values: historical truth, creative search, conscience. When Bulgakov’s story “Fatal Eggs,” not the writer’s first satirical work, was published in 1925, one of the critics remarked: “Bulgakov wants to become a satirist of our era.”

Now, perhaps, no one will deny that Bulgakov became a satirist of our era. And the most outstanding one too. And this despite the fact that he did not want to become one at all. The era itself made him a satirist. By the nature of his talent he was a lyricist. Everything he wrote went through his heart. Every image he created carries his love or hatred, admiration or bitterness, tenderness or regret. When you read Bulgakov's books, you inevitably become infected with these feelings of his. With satire, he only “snarls” at all the bad things that were born and multiplied before his eyes, from which he himself more than once had to fight off and which threatened the people and the country with serious troubles. He was disgusted by bureaucratic forms of managing people and the life of society as a whole, and bureaucracy was taking ever deeper roots in all spheres of social life.

He could not stand violence - neither against himself nor against other people. And over the time of war communism, it was used more and more widely and was primarily directed against the breadwinner of the country - the peasant - and against the intelligentsia, which he considered the best part of the people.

He saw the main misfortune of his “backward country” in lack of culture and ignorance, and both, with the destruction of the intelligentsia, despite the “cultural revolution” and the elimination of illiteracy, did not decrease, but, on the contrary, penetrated into the state apparatus and into those layers societies which, by all accounts, should have constituted his intellectual milieu.

And he rushed into battle to defend that “reasonable, good, eternal” that the best minds and souls of the Russian intelligentsia sowed in their time and that was now discarded and trampled underfoot in the name of the so-called class interests of the proletariat.

Bulgakov had his own creative interest in these battles. They kindled his imagination and sharpened his pen. And even the fact that criticism responded to the thin sword of his satire with a cudgel did not deprive him of either humor or courage. But he never entered into such fights out of pure passion, as often happened with satirists and humorists. He was invariably guided by anxiety and pain for the good and eternal that was lost by people and the country along the path along which they did not walk of their own free will. That is why, in the tenth year of his work, in the conditions of flourishing Stalinism, his works were banned. But for the same reason, when six decades later it was returned to readers, it turned out that these works not only were not outdated, but turned out to be more topical than many, many modern works written on the most pressing topic of the day.

Bulgakov's creative world is fantastically rich, diverse, and full of all kinds of surprises. Not a single one of his novels, not a single story or play fits into the patterns we are accustomed to.

They are perceived and interpreted differently by different people. Each attentive reader has his own Bulgakov. Let everyone who enters Bulgakov's world take at least a small share of his wealth. They are inexhaustible and now, thank God, they are open to everyone.

It is not easy to identify signs of the new, to embody the content of life in memorable artistic images. Is it easier to reveal negative trends, to show not only what we still, by inertia, call remnants of the past, but also the shortcomings of our own growth? In a word, what has received the figurative name of “bait”.

In the hierarchy of modern literary genres and genres, especially if you look at them from a historical perspective, satirical genres are destined for a place somewhere at the bottom. They are assigned a subordinate role, a very modest one, close to a gradually disappearing value. How else? A time will come when only remnants will remain, and then they will not exist. What's a satirist to do? Faith is as noble as it is naive. With this approach, the law of unity and struggle of opposites is violated, the dialectical position on the negation of negation is consigned to oblivion. For internal opposites are a property of the structure of any object or process.

The nature of the connection and interaction between opposites is revealed in its own way by the art of satire.

The hope for the quick extinction of satire will apparently have to wait. Satire is an organic property of any great art, and it is immortal. The growth of material well-being, as is known, does not automatically entail an increase in moral dignity. Sometimes the relationship can be reversed. After all, there is a test of poverty, and there is a test of satiety. In our time, conflicts arise that are no less acute than in the 20s and 30s, when the struggle was between class opponents.

Nowadays these are not antagonistic contradictions, but the intensity and severity of their manifestation is not much less, especially when it comes to the struggle of high morality and intelligence with lack of spirituality, of ethical and aesthetic values ​​with vulgarity, no longer covered by polished wardrobes, but by references to Kafka or surrealism.

Attention!

If you can read this text, it means that your browser either cannot handle CSS Internet technology, or CSS support is disabled in your browser. We strongly recommend that you enable CSS in your browser or download and install a modern browser on your computer, for example: Mozilla Firefox.

ZOSCHENKO, MIKHAIL MIKHAILOVICH (1894-1958), Russian writer. Born on July 29 (August 9), 1894 in St. Petersburg in the family of an artist. Childhood impressions - including the difficult relationships between parents - were later reflected in Zoshchenko’s stories for children ( Christmas tree, Galoshes and ice cream, Grandma's gift, Do not lie etc.), and in his story Before sunrise(1943). The first literary experiences date back to childhood. In one of his notebooks, he noted that in 1902-1906 he already tried to write poetry, and in 1907 he wrote a story Coat.

In 1913 Zoshchenko entered the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. His first surviving stories date back to this time - Vanity(1914) and Two-kopeck(1914). Studies were interrupted by the First World War. In 1915, Zoshchenko volunteered to go to the front, commanded a battalion, and became a Knight of St. George. Literary work did not stop during these years. Zoshchenko tried his hand at short stories, epistolary and satirical genres (he composed letters to fictitious recipients and epigrams to fellow soldiers). In 1917 he was demobilized due to heart disease that arose after gas poisoning.

Upon returning to Petrograd they wrote Marusya, Philistine, Neighbour and other unpublished stories in which the influence of G. Maupassant was felt. In 1918, despite his illness, Zoshchenko volunteered for the Red Army and fought on the fronts of the Civil War until 1919. Returning to Petrograd, he earned his living, as before the war, by various professions: shoemaker, carpenter, carpenter, actor, rabbit breeding instructor, policeman, criminal investigation officer, etc. In humorous stories written at that time Orders on railway police and criminal supervision Art. Ligovo and other unpublished works, the style of the future satirist can already be felt.

In 1919, Zoshchenko studied at the Creative Studio, organized by the publishing house “World Literature”. The classes were supervised by K.I. Chukovsky, who highly appreciated Zoshchenko’s work. Recalling his stories and parodies written during his studio studies, Chukovsky wrote: “It was strange to see that such a sad man was endowed with this wondrous ability to powerfully make his neighbors laugh.” In addition to prose, during his studies Zoshchenko wrote articles about the works of A. Blok, V. Mayakovsky, N. Teffi and others. At the Studio he met the writers V. Kaverin, Vs. Ivanov, L. Lunts, K. Fedin, E. Polonskaya and others, who in 1921 united in the literary group “Serapion Brothers,” which advocated freedom of creativity from political tutelage. Creative communication was facilitated by the life of Zoshchenko and other “serapions” in the famous Petrograd House of Arts, described by O. Forsh in the novel Crazy ship.

In 1920-1921 Zoshchenko wrote the first stories that were subsequently published: Love, War, Old Woman Wrangel, female fish. Cycle Stories of Nazar Ilyich, Mr. Sinebryukhov(1921-1922) was published as a separate book by the Erato publishing house. This event marked Zoshchenko's transition to professional literary activity. The very first publication made him famous. Phrases from his stories acquired the character of catchphrases: “Why are you disturbing the disorder?”; “The second lieutenant is wow, but he’s a bastard,” etc. From 1922 to 1946, his books went through about 100 editions, including collected works in six volumes (1928-1932).

By the mid-1920s, Zoshchenko became one of the most popular writers. His stories Bath, Aristocrat, Disease history and others, which he himself often read before numerous audiences, were known and loved in all levels of society. In a letter to Zoshchenko A.M. Gorky noted: “I don’t know of such a relationship between irony and lyricism in anyone’s literature.” Chukovsky believed that at the center of Zoshchenko’s work was the fight against callousness in human relationships.

In story collections of the 1920s Humorous stories (1923), Dear citizens(1926), etc. Zoshchenko created a new type of hero for Russian literature - a Soviet man who has not received an education, has no skills in spiritual work, does not have cultural baggage, but strives to become a full participant in life, to become equal to the “rest of humanity.” The reflection of such a hero produced a strikingly funny impression. The fact that the story was told on behalf of a highly individualized narrator gave literary critics the basis to define Zoshchenko’s creative style as “fairy-tale.” Academician V.V. Vinogradov in the study Zoshchenko language analyzed in detail the writer's narrative techniques, noted the artistic transformation of various speech layers in his vocabulary. Chukovsky noted that Zoshchenko introduced into literature “a new, not yet fully formed, but victoriously spreading extra-literary speech throughout the country and began to freely use it as his own speech.” Zoshchenko’s work was highly appreciated by many of his outstanding contemporaries - A. Tolstoy, Y. Olesha, S. Marshak, Y. Tynyanov and others.

In 1929, which received the name “the year of the great turning point” in Soviet history, Zoshchenko published a book Letters to the writer- a kind of sociological research. It consisted of several dozen letters from the huge reader mail that the writer received, and his commentary on them. In the preface to the book, Zoshchenko wrote that he wanted to “show genuine and undisguised life, genuine living people with their desires, taste, thoughts.” The book caused bewilderment among many readers, who expected only more funny stories from Zoshchenko. After its release, director V. Meyerhold was forbidden to stage Zoshchenko’s play Dear comrade (1930).

The inhumane Soviet reality could not but affect the emotional state of the susceptible writer, who was prone to depression from childhood. A trip along the White Sea Canal, organized in the 1930s for propaganda purposes for a large group of Soviet writers, left a depressing impression on him. No less difficult for Zoshchenko was the need to write after this trip that criminals were allegedly being re-educated in Stalin’s camps ( The story of one life, 1934). An attempt to get rid of a depressed state and correct one’s own painful psyche was a kind of psychological research - a story Youth returned(1933). The story evoked an interested reaction in the scientific community that was unexpected for the writer: the book was discussed at numerous academic meetings and reviewed in scientific publications; Academician I. Pavlov began to invite Zoshchenko to his famous “Wednesdays”.

As a continuation Restored youth a collection of stories was conceived Blue Book(1935). Zoshchenko believed Blue Book according to the internal content of the novel, he defined it as “a short history of human relations” and wrote that it “is not driven by a novella, but by a philosophical idea that makes it.” Stories about modernity were interspersed in this work with stories set in the past - in different periods of history. Both the present and the past were presented in the perception of the typical hero Zoshchenko, unencumbered by cultural baggage and understanding history as a set of everyday episodes.

After publication Blue Book, which caused devastating reviews in party publications, Zoshchenko was actually prohibited from publishing works that went beyond the scope of “positive satire on individual shortcomings.” Despite his high writing activity (commissioned feuilletons for the press, plays, film scripts, etc.), Zoshchenko’s true talent was manifested only in the stories for children that he wrote for the magazines “Chizh” and “Hedgehog”.

In the 1930s, the writer worked on a book that he considered the most important in his life. The work continued during the Patriotic War in Alma-Ata, in evacuation, since Zoshchenko could not go to the front due to severe heart disease. In 1943, the initial chapters of this scientific and artistic study of the subconscious were published in the magazine "October" under the title Before sunrise. Zoshchenko examined incidents from his life that gave impetus to severe mental illness, from which doctors could not save him. The modern scientific world notes that in this book the writer anticipated many discoveries of science about the unconscious by decades.

The magazine publication caused such a scandal, such a barrage of critical abuse was rained down on the writer that the publication Before sunrise was interrupted. Zoshchenko addressed a letter to Stalin, asking him to familiarize himself with the book “or give orders to check it more thoroughly than has been done by critics.” The response was another stream of abuse in the press, the book was called “nonsense, needed only by the enemies of our homeland” (Bolshevik magazine). In 1946, after the release of the resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad,” the party leader of Leningrad A. Zhdanov recalled the book in his report Before sunrise, calling it a “disgusting thing.”

The resolution of 1946, which “criticized” Zoshchenko and A. Akhmatova with the rudeness inherent in Soviet ideology, led to their public persecution and a ban on the publication of their works. The reason was the publication of Zoshchenko’s children’s story Monkey Adventures(1945), in which the authorities saw a hint that in the Soviet country monkeys live better than people. At a writers’ meeting, Zoshchenko stated that the honor of an officer and a writer does not allow him to come to terms with the fact that in the Central Committee resolution he is called a “coward” and a “scum of literature.” Subsequently, Zoshchenko also refused to come forward with the repentance and admission of “mistakes” expected of him. In 1954, at a meeting with English students, Zoshchenko again tried to express his attitude towards the 1946 resolution, after which the persecution began in the second round.

The saddest consequence of this ideological campaign was the exacerbation of mental illness, which did not allow the writer to work fully. His reinstatement in the Writers' Union after Stalin's death (1953) and the publication of his first book after a long break (1956) brought only temporary relief to his condition.

The writer saw in his own way some of the characteristic processes of modern reality. He is the creator of an original comic novella, which continued the traditions of Gogol, Leskov, and early Chekhov in new historical conventions. Z created his own unique thin style.

Three main stages can be distinguished in his work.

1The years of two wars and revolutions (1914-1921) are a period of intense spiritual growth of the future writer, the formation of his literary and aesthetic convictions.

2The civil and moral formation of Z as a humorist and satirist, an artist of significant social themes, occurred in the pre-October period. The first occurs in the 20s - the heyday of the writer’s talent, who honed his pen as an exposer of social vices in such popular satirical magazines of the time as “Behemoth”, “Buzoter”, “Red Raven”, “The Inspector General”, “Eccentric”, “Smekhach” ". At this time, the formation of Zoshchenko's short story and story took place. The 1920s saw the heyday of the main genre varieties in the writer’s work: the satirical story, the comic novella and the satirical-humorous story. Already at the very beginning of the 20s, the writer created a number of works that were highly appreciated by M. Gorky. The works created by the writer in the 20s were based on specific and very topical facts, gleaned either from direct observations or from numerous letters from readers. Their themes are motley and varied: riots in transport and in hostels, the grimaces of the NEP and the grimaces of everyday life, the mold of philistinism and philistinism, arrogant pompadour and creeping lackeyness and much, much more. Often the story is constructed in the form of a casual conversation with the reader, and sometimes, when the shortcomings became particularly egregious, the author’s voice sounded frankly journalistic notes. In a series of satirical short stories, M. Zoshchenko angrily ridiculed cynically calculating or sentimentally pensive earners of individual happiness, intelligent scoundrels and boors, and showed in their true light vulgar and worthless people who are ready to trample on everything truly human on the way to achieving personal well-being (“Matrenishcha”, "Grimace of NEP", "Lady with Flowers", "Nanny", "Marriage of Convenience"). In Zoshchenko's satirical stories there are no effective techniques for sharpening the author's thoughts. They, as a rule, are devoid of sharp comedic intrigue. M. Zoshchenko acted here as an exposer of spiritual smoking, a satirist of morals. He chose as the object of analysis the bourgeois owner - a hoarder and money-grubber, who from a direct political opponent became an adversary in the sphere of morality, a breeding ground for vulgarity. The main element of creativity in the 20s is still humorous everyday life.

1 In 1920-1921 Zoshchenko wrote the first stories that were subsequently published: Love, War, Old Woman Wrangel, Female Fish. (1928-1932).

2By the mid-1920s, Zoshchenko became one of the most popular writers. His stories Bathhouse, Aristocrat, Case History, etc., which he often read himself in front of numerous audiences, were known and loved in all levels of society. activity (custom-made feuilletons for the press, plays, film scripts, etc.), Zoshchenko’s true talent manifested itself only in the stories for children that he wrote for the magazines “Chizh” and “Hedgehog”.

Stories by M.M. Zoshchenko

A significant place in Zoshchenko’s work is occupied by stories in which the writer directly responds to real events of the day. The most famous among them: “Aristocrat”, “Glass”, “Case History”, “Nervous People”, “Fitter”. It was a language unknown to literature, and therefore did not have its own spelling. Zoshchenko was endowed with absolute pitch and a brilliant memory. Over the years spent in the midst of poor people, he managed to penetrate the secret of their conversational structure, with its characteristic vulgarisms, incorrect grammatical forms and syntactic structures, managed to adopt the intonation of their speech, their expressions, turns of phrase, words - he studied this language to the subtleties and has already From the first steps in literature, I began to use it easily and naturally. In his language one could easily encounter such expressions as “plitoir”, “okromya”, “creepy”, “this”, “in it”, “brunette”, “dragged”, “for the bite”, “why cry”, “ this poodle”, “a dumb animal”, “at the stove”, etc. But Zoshchenko is a writer not only of a comic style, but also of comic situations. Not only his language is comical, but also the place where the story of the next story unfolded: a wake, a communal apartment, a hospital - everything is so familiar, personal, everyday familiar. And the story itself: a fight in a communal apartment over a hedgehog in short supply, a row at a wake over a broken glass. Some of Zoshchenko’s phrases have remained in Russian literature as eaphorisms: “as if the atmosphere suddenly smelled on me”, “they will rob you like a stick and throw you away for their kind ones, even though they are their own relatives”, “the second lieutenant is nothing, but a bastard”, “disturbing the riots”. Zoshchenko While he was writing his stories, he himself was laughing. So much so that later, when I read stories to my friends, I never laughed. He sat gloomy, gloomy, as if not understanding what there was to laugh about.

Having laughed while working on the story, he later perceived it with melancholy and sadness. I perceived it as the other side of the coin.

Zoshchenko's hero is an ordinary man, a man with poor morals and a primitive outlook on life. This man in the street personified an entire human layer of the Russia of that time. The average person often spent all his energy fighting various kinds of minor everyday troubles, instead of actually doing something for the benefit of society. But the writer did not ridicule the man himself, but the philistine traits in him.

Thus, the hero of “The Aristocrat” (1923) became infatuated with one person in fildecos stockings and a hat. While he “as an official person” visited the apartment and then walked along the street, experiencing the inconvenience of having to take the lady’s arm and “drag like a pike,” everything was relatively safe. But as soon as the hero invited the aristocrat to the theater, “she and

unfolded her ideology in its entirety." Seeing the cakes during the intermission, the aristocrat "approaches the dish with a lecherous gait and grabs the cream and eats it."

The lady has eaten three cakes and is reaching for the fourth.

“Then the blood rushed to my head.

“Lie down,” I say, “back!”

After this culmination, events unfold like an avalanche, drawing into their orbit an ever-increasing number of characters. As a rule, in the first half of Zoshchenko's short story one or two, or even three, characters are presented. And only when the development of the plot reaches its highest point, when the need arises to typify the phenomenon being described, to sharpen it satirically, a more or less written out group of people, sometimes a crowd, appears.

So it is in "The Aristocrat". The closer to the finale, the greater the number of faces the author brings to the stage. First, the figure of the barman appears, who, in response to all the assurances of the hero, who passionately proves that only three pieces have been eaten, since the fourth cake is on the platter, “behaves indifferently.”

“No,” he answers, “although it is in the dish, a bite was made on it and it was crushed with a finger.”

There are also amateur experts, some of whom “say the bite is done, others say it’s not.” And, finally, the crowd, attracted by the scandal, laughs at the sight of the unlucky theatergoer, frantically turning out his pockets with all kinds of junk before their eyes.

In the finale, again only two characters remain, finally clarifying their relationship. The story ends with a dialogue between the offended lady and the hero, dissatisfied with her behavior.

“And at the house she says to me in her bourgeois tone:

Quite disgusting of you. Those who don't have money don't travel with ladies.

And I say:

Happiness is not in money, citizen. Sorry for the expression."

As we can see, both sides are offended. Moreover, both sides believe only in their own truth, being firmly convinced that it is the other side that is wrong. The hero of Zoshchenkov's story invariably considers himself infallible, a “respected citizen,” although in reality he acts as a arrogant man in the street.