A new image of the Russian village and the peasant soul. The theme of the village in modern literature (Based on the works of V. Rasputin)

PLAN
1. The image and fate of the village in Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries
2. The dying village is a symbol of the death of the Russian peasantry in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”
3. “Here there is neither subtraction nor addition - that’s how it was on earth...” The role of literature in understanding the events of the collectivization period

1. The image and fate of the village in Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries.

The life of the Russian village has long been the subject of depiction in Russian literature. The theme of the village appears at the turn of the 18th-19th centuries in the works of N.M. Karamzin (The Tale "Poor Liza") and A.N. Radishchev ("Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow"). It should immediately be noted that the theme of the village in the 19th century was identical to the theme of the life of the entire people; the concepts of “peasantry” and “people” were perceived as identical, and talking about the fate of the peasant in fiction- meant talking about the fate of the entire Russian people.
In the first half of the 19th century, A.S. Pushkin artistically explored the issue of the relationship between the aristocracy and the lower classes (the stories “The Captain's Daughter” and “Dubrovsky”, as well as “The History of the Village of Goryukhin”). N.V. Gogol embodies his ideas about the beauty, strength and ability to work of the Russian people in the wonderful images of serfs from the poem “Dead Souls”; at the same time, the image of the city is assessed in literature as an image of the untruth of Russian life, as an image of a place where it is impossible to live. The image of St. Petersburg, depicted on the pages of Gogol’s “Petersburg Tales” (the image of a city where a cruel wind blows on a person from all four sides at once), - this image is developed in the novels of F. M. Dostoevsky. It is impossible to live in Dostoevsky’s Petersburg: you can only die or commit crimes in it.
L.N. Tolstoy proudly called himself “the lawyer of the 100 million agricultural people.” For L. Tolstoy, the Russian peasant has always been the bearer of the highest truth, which lies in the total, spiritual wisdom of the people. It is no coincidence that he titled one of his articles, written while working at the Yasnaya Polyana school: “Who should learn to write from whom - peasant children from us or from peasant children.” Platon Karataev from the epic novel "War and Peace" became the personification of "everything good, round and Russian", the embodiment of the swarm principle, which, according to Tolstoy, expresses the main features of the thinking of the Russian peasant. It is known that a biologically self-sufficient unit is the entire swarm of bees, and not an individual bee; so the people, in the understanding of Leo Tolstoy, continue their historical life thanks to the law of people's life developed over centuries: to be like everyone else! And the best heroes of War and Peace learn this law - Prince Andrey, Pierre Bezukhov, Natasha Rostova.
Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov, mourning the hard life of a peasant, asked the people a question that contained the answer: “What worse would your lot be, When would you endure less?” Narodnik writers (Gleb Ivanovich Uspensky, Fyodor Mikhailovich Reshetnikov) and democratic revolutionaries of the 1860s - 80s called on the people to change their destiny, to resolutely protest against poverty and lawlessness.
Ivan Alekseevich Bunin, who knew very well and passionately loved the peasant and his difficult lot, deeply revealed the reason for the plight of the people in his stories “The Village” (1910) and “Sukhodol” (1911). The wonderful writer, however, did not turn a blind eye to the peasant’s own shortcomings - his reluctance to learn anything, inertia, that is, reluctance to any changes, sometimes bestial cruelty and greed.
Another great representative of Russian critical realism, Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, was close to this position. In his stories “Men” (1897) and “In the Ravine” (1900), he admitted that the troubles of the peasantry were his own fault.
In the second half of the 19th century, the social picture of Russian society changed; after the abolition of serfdom (1861), streams of peasants flocked to the city. An urban proletariat is emerging, increasingly losing its genetic connection with the countryside. (Note that Leo Tolstoy, for example, considered the “factory worker” to be only a spoiled peasant, divorced from his age-old folk roots).
Great humanist twentieth century, Maxim Gorky, was very wary of the peasantry. This attitude was clearly manifested both in his early romantic stories (for example, in the story “Chelkash”) and in the cycle of stories “Across Rus',” and especially fully developed in the cycle of journalistic articles “Untimely Thoughts” (1917-18). Men from the village of Krasnovidovo near Kazan set fire to the house in which the popular educator Mikhail Romas lives with his associates (among them young Alyosha Peshkov) in the story “My Universities” (1923). Perhaps it is not surprising, therefore, that he considers the peasantry to be a completely anti-revolutionary class and metaphorically represents it in the image of a huge fresh swamp, in which a handful of the revolutionary-minded proletariat can dissolve without a trace.
After 1917, the ratio of city and countryside changed polarity. Now, in literature, as well as in the political life of the country, supporters of a new, technical, Western-oriented Russia are gaining the upper hand. The drama of the division of human destinies, the destinies of people, was imprinted in the work of one of the finest lyricists of the twentieth century - Sergei Yesenin. In the poems of his last years - " Rus' is leaving", "Soviet Rus'", "Letter to the Motherland", in the poem "Anna Snegina" and many others, Yesenin poses the question: who am I with? His sweet childhood is connected with the "old", patriarchal Russia, and life demonstrates the superior strength of the new, “steel" Russia. The words of another very deep and soulful writer, Vasily Shukshin, are very suitable for Yesenin: “I remind myself of a man,” Shukshin said, “who has one foot on the shore, and the other is in the boat. It’s impossible to swim, and it’s impossible to walk.” A severe crisis caused by the impossibility of choosing between two parts of one’s soul, halves of the split Russian peasant life, claimed Yesenin’s life in 1925.
In the literature of the 1920s and 30s, the village appears as an object of social tutelage on the part of the city, as some kind of “sponsored person” who needs to be brought up to one’s level - brought up patiently, condescendingly. The people as the keeper of the eternal secret, especially as the God-bearing people in literature and the political consciousness of society, ceases to exist.
The topic of collectivization arose in modern Russian literature almost simultaneously with the events of collectivization itself. The most famous writers of those years devoted their pens to depicting the socialist restructuring of the countryside: Fyodor Panferov's novels "Bruski" (1928-37), Alexander Tvardovsky's poem "The Path to Socialism" and especially "The Country of Ant" (1936), the famous novel by Mikhail Sholokhov " Virgin Lands Recovered" (book 1 - 1932, book 2 - 1959) - all these texts strongly affirm the need for the transition of domestic agriculture to the path of collectivization, socialization of property and labor. And these were even the best of the novels, stories and poems, paintings, performances and films that glorified collectivization. Meanwhile, in the “victorious” year of 1936, the country produced, for example, exactly half as much meat as in 1918, when the country was on fire civil war. A terrible famine struck the most fertile Ukraine in 1932-33.
A modern researcher of literature on the topic of collectivization, Yuri Dvorya-shin, testifies: “In the atmosphere of a general attack on the countryside in the 30s, to some writers the very idea of ​​​​remaking the peasantry because of its supposed underdevelopment and insignificance from the point of view of the future seemed unrealistic , and therefore insufficient. At that time, even such revelations that reached readers, for example, from the pages of Panferov’s “Whetstones” did not seem wild: “At times he (Kirill Zhdarkin, the main character of the novel - A.T. ) it seemed - to remake a peasant who was accustomed to his piece of land - the greatest nonsense, nonsense, an empty fantasy; it must simply be used, as oxen are used for a tractor, in order to raise a new generation on the bones of this small owner - the people of the coming era."
However, the moral and humanistic aspect in covering the events of our time, the events of collectivization, has not disappeared from the field of view of the most thoughtful and honest writers. Such works as the stories of Ivan Makarov “The Island”, “Fortel Mortel”, Ivan Kataev “Milk” and some others reflected the writers’ understanding of the complexity and ambiguity of the relationship between the universal and the class in social transformations.
New peasant poets - Nikolai Klyuev, Sergei Klychkov, Pyotr Oreshin, Aleksey Shiryaevets - were destroyed because in their poems they dared to mourn the fate of their native villages, the entire Russian peasantry.
It was precisely because of the depiction of the devastation beginning in the village - as well as throughout the country - that he incurred the first wave of cruel criticism. great writer twentieth century Andrei Platonovich Platonov. His story “The Doubting Makar” and the poor peasant chronicle “For Future Use,” written in 1929-30, metaphorically and covertly depicted the emerging kingdom of Soviet absurdity.
In modern Russian literature, many stories and novels are devoted to the topic of collectivization: “On the Irtysh” and “The Commission” by Sergei Zalygin (1960s), “Farewell, Gyulsary!” Chingiz Aitmatova; in the eighties, literature gained the opportunity to talk about the blind spots of Soviet history more freely, and the novels of Vasily Belov “Eves” and “The Year of the Great Turning Point” (not yet finished), “Men and Women” by Boris Mozhaev, “Ravines” by Sergei Antonov appeared , tetralogy by Fyodor Abramov "Pryasliny" ("Two Winters and Three Summers", "Crossroads", "Brothers and Sisters", "Home"). The tragic story “Everything Flows” by Vasily Grossman, which had never seen the light of day, is being published... Many films and theatrical productions are devoted to this topic, and society has gained the opportunity to access documentary evidence of the era. However, it is precisely under these conditions that the courage of those writers who were able to capture this cruel era “from the inside” becomes increasingly clear and obvious. We will devote our article to the study of the theme of collectivization in Andrei Platonov’s story “The Pit” (1929-30).

2. The dying village is a symbol of the death of the Russian peasantry in A. Platonov’s story “The Pit”.

If we consider everything written by Andrei Platonov as one book, then its first chapter will be works dedicated to the Leninist revolution. "Chevengur", as if in a lens, collects all the themes, plots, heroes of this chapter, develops and deepens them. main topic the second chapter is the Stalinist revolution, the era of the “great turning point”, the time of the second “great leap”. Lenin believed in the possibility of an immediate leap “from the kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom.” This mirage attracts the Chevengur apostles. Stalin ordered the country to jump a second time: from an “agrarian country” to an “industrial country,” from backward Russia to communist Russia. Platonov reflects on this time in “The Doubting Makar”, in the stories “The Pit”, “For Future Use”, “The Juvenile Sea”, in the essays “Che-Che-O”, in the plays “Fourteen Red Huts” and “Hurdy Organ”. The story “Jan” will be a philosophical summing up. The chapter will close in 1934.
The story "Pit" can be considered as a continuation of "Chevengur": a utopia is being built again. The foundation is being laid for a happy future, a foundation is being dug for a “common home for the proletariat.” Once again it is being built by dreamers, “fools”, reminiscent of the heroes of the novel. But ten years have passed since Chevengur’s death. The novel told about the construction of communism in one district, the story - about the construction of socialism in one country. Platonov writes “The Pit” in December 1929 - April 1930. These dates determine the plot of the story: December 27, 1929 Stalin announced the transition to a policy of “liquidation of the kulaks as a class”, March 2, 1930 Stalin in The article “Dizziness from Success” was briefly delayed by the mad rush to complete collectivization.
The heroes of "Chevengur" have aged ten years, their situation has changed, but they continue to believe, continuing to express doubts.
"The Pit" is the most capacious of Platonov's works. The writer abandoned the slow epic narrative, which in “Chevengur” conveyed the dead immobility of the achieved goal. The feverish running is fortunately conveyed in “The Pit” very concisely, in a short space of one hundred pages. Never again will Platonov succeed in such a complete merging of the real and concrete socio-historical background and ontological subtext.
The story consists of two chronotopes: urban and rural: two different spaces - city and village - are united by one time, the time of the race to socialism. The socialist project, it is called the Plan, is carried out in city and countryside under the leadership of one Organization. Platonov gives a symbolic meaning to real events strictly defined by time and space, turning “The Pit” into the only adequate depiction in literature of events, the significance of which in the history of the country and people exceeds the significance of the October Revolution.
The socialist project in the city consists of the construction of a single building, “where the entire local class of the proletariat will enter to settle.” The socialist project in the village consists of creating a collective farm and eliminating the kulaks. The implementation of these projects brings builders and managers into action. Platonov depicts the structure of Soviet society that emerged in the late 20s.
The peculiarity of Platonov’s heroes is that they long for happiness, paradise on earth, which, however, is not like the “paradise” of leader Pashkin. They do not believe that “happiness will come from materialism,” as Voshchev is assured at the factory committee. Individuals who believe in “materialism,” such as Prokofy Dvanov or Kozlov, easily get their “share.” Happiness remains incomprehensible for those who see it not as the satisfaction of base needs, but as the achievement of another, higher stage of existence.
The metaphysical, existential melancholy of Plato's heroes seems to the writer to be evidence of the powerful possibilities inherent in man. In every person, Platonov emphasizes, choosing as his heroes people who occupy the lowest position in society. The fundamental difference between "Chevengur" and "Pit", the difference caused by the difference between 1921 and 1930, is that during the years of the Leninist revolution there was still the opportunity to interpret the idea, to independently choose ways to achieve "paradise", during the years of the Stalinist revolution " "fools" obsessed with the idea of ​​happiness have no choice: they go to utopia the way their leaders show them.
A comparison of the paths to “paradise”, to a communist utopia, shows that in both the first and second cases the same path is chosen. In "Chevengur" the apostles of the new faith exterminated the bourgeois and semi-bourgeois and stopped working. In "The Pit" the bearers of the new faith, the proletarians, perform two functions: they work and kill their enemies. Their work, however, is imaginary; it is meaningless, because it is the fulfillment of paper plans. Digging the ground, digging a pit, a hole in the ground, under the foundation of the future all-proletarian house, the workers act in an unreal world.
They return to the real world when they are invited to take part in the killing of enemies.
All citizens of the USSR were notified of the beginning of “complete collectivization.” The land doctor Safronov is not talking about a dream, he says: “according to the plenum” we are “obligated... to liquidate no less as a class...” Safronov sets out the directive of the “plenum” - meaning the plenum of the Central Committee and the Central Control Commission of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks, which met in April 1929 - to the girl Nastya. With childish naivety, Nastya reveals the meaning of the plenum directives. "Who will you stay with?" - she asks Safronov. “With tasks, with a firm line of further activities,” he answers. “This means,” the girl sums up, “kill all the bad people, otherwise there are very few good ones.” The excavator finds this conclusion quite class-based and clear: “It was monarchism that indiscriminately needed people for war, but we only have one class of roads.” He ominously adds: “Yes, we will soon cleanse our class of the unconscious element.” "According to the plenum", the only way building a new world, a “common proletarian home” - the extermination of all classes except one, the worker, and then the purge of this only surviving class. Nastya draws a logical conclusion: “Then there will only be the most important people.”
The village appears in the city chronotope unnoticed, carefully, and explodes with a terrible metaphor: men come to the city for coffins. Where a foundation pit is being dug for the “common proletarian house,” peasants from a neighboring village stacked coffins “for future use.” One of the walkers behind the coffins, “an unknown man with yellow eyes,” recalls the recent past: “His melancholy mind imagined a village in the rye, and the wind rushed over it and quietly turned a wooden mill, grinding its daily, peaceful bread. He lived like this in recent times. , feeling fullness in his stomach and family happiness in his soul; and no matter how many years he looked from the village into the distance and into the future, he saw at the end of the plain only the radiance of the sky and the earth, and above him he had sufficient light of the sun and stars. The man remembers a happy life: family happiness in his soul, fullness in his stomach, confidence in the future and in the universe. Simple peasant happiness perished, the world collapsed. Death has come for everyone: one hundred coffins have been prepared for all residents of the village, including children. The girl Nastya, looking at the men dragging the coffins into the village, asks a dangerously naive question: “Were they bourgeois?” Honest Chiklin replies: “No, baby. They live in straw huts, sow bread and eat with us.” “Why do they need coffins then?” the girl asked inexorably and logically. “Only the bourgeoisie should die, but the poor should not!” Platonov writes: “The diggers remained silent, not yet aware of the data to speak.”
The village depicted by the writer in the second half of the story is a village during the collectivization period, a village at the time of the Last Judgment. Comparing the collectivization described by Platonov with the classic Soviet novel about collectivization, “Virgin Soil Upturned” by Sholokhov, we see that both writers used the same elements: worker activists organizing a collective farm, stratification among the peasants - some join the collective farm, others refuse, - dispossession as a form of permitted robbery, the destruction of livestock by peasants, the liquidation of kulaks. Sholokhov put together from these elements a narrative about a measure necessary in the interests of the state and the poor, bringing joy and happiness to all those who agree with it. Platonov, giving the elements of collectivization the apocalyptic form of the Last Judgment, depicts the grotesque situation of building a new world, about which neither those who build it have any idea - driving those who agree into the collective farm, exterminating those who disagree - nor those for whom it - supposedly - under construction.
The contrast between the idyllic memory of a calm, happy village and the apocalypse of collectivization is presented as successive scenes of death and destruction. “Cry, grandma, cry harder,” says the “comrade activist”, the organizer of the collective farm, to the peasant woman, “this sun of a new life has risen and the light hurts your dark eyes.”
The cutting light of the “sun of new life” is merciless: without hiding a single detail, it illuminates the nightmarishly monstrous image of the construction of a utopia. Platonov uses only one surreal detail: a bear takes an active part in the dispossession of kulaks - he indicates the huts of the kulaks and subkulak members. Joseph Brodsky writes: “If Dostoevsky can be considered the first writer of the absurd for Captain Lebyadkin’s poems about the cockroach, then Platonov can be considered the first serious surrealist for the scene with the hammer bear in “The Pit.” The scene with the bear does not appear by chance in the story. Even in “Chevengur,” the builders of utopia believed that with the advent of communism, the liberation of animals would occur. In the “year of the great turning point,” the bear is freed and joins the proletariat. But the atmosphere of surrealism is not created by the proletarian bear. The impression of a terrible dream, an obsession, is created by the normal behavior of people who calmly, as if naturally, perform abnormal, unnatural actions.
They kill Kozlov and Safronov, who came to the village to help build the collective farm, without looking, without asking, Chiklin kills a peasant who happened to be at hand, they kill, putting on a raft that descends into the ocean, all the peasants who did not want to enter the collective farm, the peasants they kill livestock, not wanting to give it to the collective farm. Collectivization is portrayed by the writer as collective suicide. Peasants, by killing livestock, killing workers who came to agitate them, destroying trees, joining a collective farm or refusing to do so, destroy their own flesh.
Platonov does not want the reader to have any doubts about the meaning of what is happening. He introduces a generalizing image of the Russian peasantry: “The old plowman Ivan Semenovich Kretinin kissed young trees in his garden and crushed them from the soil by the roots, and his woman wailed over the bare branches. “Don’t cry, old woman,” said Kretinin, “you’re on a collective farm.” You’ll become a peasant’s slave, and these trees are my flesh, and let her suffer now, she’s bored of being socialized into captivity!” The peasant agrees rather to socialize the flesh of his wife than his trees, which he feels with his flesh. Platonov turns to a religious symbol: “...in that short time they ate beef like a sacrament - no one wanted to eat it, but it was necessary to hide the flesh of the native slaughter in one’s body and save it there from socialization.”
The village is divided into organized and unorganized: organized - peasants who agree to give up their flesh into captivity, to go to the collective farm, having first killed the cattle, which they spare more than themselves, unorganized - peasants who refuse to go to the collective farm, preferring to die.
The extermination of the “unorganized” - putting men, women and children on a raft lowered into the sea - is a repetition of the scene of the murder of the “bourgeois” and “semi-bourgeois” in “Cheven-Gur”: Utopia necessarily requires sacrifice, the elimination of the “unclean”. There are, however, differences in the massacres of 1921 and 1930. In 1921, the Chevengur apostols killed, poisoned by the Idea, out of internal necessity - like medieval chiliasts. In 1930, the murder took place on a direct order from above, based on another instruction from the region: “... it’s time to get going,” the activist declares, “we have the fourteenth plenum in our region!” In 1930 there is no such connection between victim and executioner as existed between the apostles and their victims. Saying goodbye to life, the “disorganized” ask the activist only one thing: “Turn away from us for a short time, let us not see you.” The murdered “bourgeois” died alone, holding the executioner’s hand as the last thread connecting them to life. The “kulaks” sent to death acquire spiritual strength from their neighbors, to whom they say goodbye in a Christian way: having confessed their sins and received forgiveness. Everyone kisses, and the kiss gives birth to “new relatives”: “After kissing, people bowed to the ground - each to everyone and stood on their feet, free and empty at heart.” The ancient ritual gives people going to death freedom and cleanses the heart. “We lived fiercely, but we end according to our conscience,” one peasant remarks to another.
The “unorganized”, doomed to death by the next plenum, die “according to their conscience”, in accordance with the Christian faith. But without a priest, although in the village in which the collective farm is being organized, there is both a church and a priest.
"The pit" can be studied from many points of view: as a model of the "new story", as the best example of "Platonic language", as a historical source. The exceptional value of the story as a historical source lies in the fact that the writer managed to depict all the diversity in a very small area - 100 pages, one city and one village. social groups and layers that took part - active or passive - in collectivization. Platonov does not introduce new themes into the story, but brings to the boiling point all the problems that are dear and important to him, expressing them sharply, openly and mercilessly.
Religion - the Christian faith and the pseudo-religion of utopia that replaces it - is depicted in “The Pit” more clearly than in other works of the writer.
There is a church in the village: “Near the church, old forgotten grass grew, and there were no paths or other human traces of passage, which means people have not prayed in the temple for a long time.” People do not pray - because it is prohibited. The believers are watched over by a former priest who “dissociated himself from his soul and cut his hair into a foxtrot.” He lists everyone who comes to church on the sheet: “And those sheets with the designation of a person who has made the sign of a hand-made cross, or who has bowed his body before the heavenly power, or who has performed another act of veneration of the sub-kulak saints, those sheets of paper every midnight I personally accompany you to a fellow activist.”
At night the priest commits his betrayal. At night, after sending the raft with those condemned to death, an activist, a priest of the new faith, organizes a rejoicing: dancing to the radio for the “organized.” This is a monstrous dance among the dead and dying - a thanksgiving prayer for the survivors. The men dance at night, enchanted, as if in a dream: “... An unclear moon appeared in the distant sky, empty of whirlwinds and clouds - in a sky that was so deserted that it allowed for eternal freedom, and so eerie that friendship was needed for freedom ". Under this deserted and eerie sky, the men are triumphant, rejoicing, still believing that they will be able to please “our mother, the Socialist-Revolutionary,” who “is wise like a girl,” but will calm down and become “a humble woman.”
The writer knows that these hopes are vain and ridiculous. “Liquidated!?” says one of the dispossessed navvies to the navvie Chiklin. “Look, today I’m gone, and tomorrow you won’t be. So it will turn out that only yours will come to socialism.” main man". The nature of the utopia under construction could raise doubts in 1921. Ten years later there is no longer any doubt: the "kingdom-state" is not "wise as a girl", it acts according to a solid plan. "You will make a collective farm out of the entire republic, and the entire republic then it will be an individual economy!" - there the dispossessed peasant defines the character of the socialist utopia. These words amaze the navvy Chiklin with their accuracy; having heard them, he rushes to the door of the hut and opens it, "so that freedom can be seen." Platonov creates an amazing meta -a head start, revealing the feelings of a worker who understands that socialism is becoming a “single-personal economy”, that “one... main person will come to socialism.” “... He also once hit a locked prison door, not understanding captivity, and cried out from the grinding power of his heart." Feeling in his heart the closing doors of the prison, the worker Chiklin, consoling himself, finds only one objection: “We can appoint a tsar when it is useful to us, and we can knock him down with one swing..." Chiklin, When we say “we,” we mean the working class. But these are only fragments of the old confidence in the meaning and role of the proletariat.
The hope that the Chevengur apostles carried within themselves, the hope of becoming subjects of history instead of objects, perished. “What kind of face am I to you?” says Chiklin. “I’m nobody: our party is our face!”
The Party is the “face”, the embodiment of the working class; “the main man” is the embodiment of socialism and the party - these are the elements of the socialist utopia, which is being built in feverish haste in town and countryside. It bears little resemblance to the dream of its apostles, but the writer, noting the differences, emphasizes the inextricable connection between dream and realization. With childish naivety, Nastya points out this connection. In a letter from the city to the collective farm, she writes to Chiklin, having learned about the murder of her acquaintances: “Eliminate the kulaks as a class. Long live Lenin, Kozlov and Safronov!” inextricably welded together are the “great dreamer,” as Herbert Wells called Lenin, and the fulfillers of his dreams, the Kozlovs and Safronovs, who died and killed out of love for those distant. Lenin died, but his work lives on. And for the sake of this cause, the peasants are destroyed and the workers themselves die. The party continues the work of Lenin.
The party is represented on the collective farm by an activist, he is also called “comrade activist.” In the gallery of Plato's bureaucrats, he occupies a special place: the activist directly leads the organization of mass murder. 15 years will pass after the writing of “The Pit”, and the expression “murderer at a desk” will appear. Outwardly, the activist does not look like polished SS men; he reads papers not at a desk, but at the kitchen table. But both his function and the motives for his behavior are the same as those of the organizers of Hitler’s concentration camps, the extermination of Jews and all other “unorganized” and harmful to Hitler’s utopia.
The activist is, first of all, a man of paper: “He read each new directive with the curiosity of future pleasure...” Paper gives him pleasure for many reasons: it is a source of “enthusiasm for future action”, it introduces him to “a whole body living in the contentment of glory before his eyes devoted, convinced masses." The paper makes him tremble with fear: it’s easy to make a mistake - run ahead or end up behind. But strict adherence to directives clearly labeled and “imaged” globes on stamps,” allowed the activist to leave “the common, guided life” and become “an assistant of the avant-garde and immediately have all the benefits of the future.” The working class and the poor peasantry are still building the future, but a member of the avant-garde, an activist, is already it has, having left the “guided” life for the “guided” one. Looking at the “image of the globes” on the stamps, he strengthens in his service to the directives, for he is convinced that “the entire globe, all its softness will soon fall into clear, iron hands -ki". He does not want to remain "without influence on the universal body of the earth." Platonov concludes the portrait of the "murderer at the desk": "And with the avarice of assured happiness, the activist stroked his chest, exhausted by stress." Happiness is guaranteed to the activist who feels himself as an assistant of an iron hand, which is “part of a whole body, living in the contentment of glory in front of the devoted, convinced masses." The whole body with iron hands is an idol that crushed the dreams of the Chevengur apostles, leaving for those who survived the only way to fortunately - to become a helper. “The whole body”, “the whole scale” leaves no other place for the “private” Makars, Chiklins...
The activist carries out his difficult, dangerous work with pleasure - the danger threatens primarily from the Higher Authority, which sends out directives - because he feels himself in the future, feels like a participant in a cause that affects the "universal body of the earth." He firmly expects to receive his “share” after the “softness” of the globe is in “iron hands.” The activist explains the essence of this ideology to the “brooding” seeker of truth Voshchev. “Is the truth due to the proletariat?” - asked Voshchev. “The proletariat is supposed to have a movement,” the activist said, “and whatever comes along, it’s all his: be it the truth, be it the kulak’s looted jacket, everything will go into the organized cauldron, you won’t know anything.” The truth and the “looted jacket” are dumped together into a common pot, the distribution from which will be made by those who are already “in the future”: activists, the Pashkins. An activist is a generalized image of a party leader on a collective farm. Platonov does not give him a name, he calls him an activist, highlighting the main characteristic of the party representative on the collective farm.
Activist - acts: organizes a collective farm, organizes dispossession of kulaks, organizes the liquidation of kulaks, conducts ideological work. All party representatives, organizers of collective farms - from Davydov from “Virgin Soil Upturned” to Mitya, the representative from “On the Irtysh” - are kept in the activists from “Kotlovan”. Sholokhov in 1932, portraying a positive hero, Zalygin in 1964, portraying an obedient servant of the directive, added only psychological details to the “activist” Platonov. The main thing is that the essence of the character was open and mercilessly revealed by the author of "The Pit".
An activist is a generalized image of a fanatic in the church period of utopia: a voluptuous thirst to be among the leaders who have already come into the future and are pulling those led with them, a thirst to be among the winners allows him to become both a worker in relation to the higher and a ruthless master in relation to the lower. After sobering up, Lev Kopelev, who participated in the organization of collective farms in the era, spoke about the happiness of being together with the winners, to be with the future, about the sweet intoxication in which the “activists” acted, seduced by utopia, its “truth” or its “jacket”. which Platonov talks about.
Andrei Platonov was the first to present genocide in literature as a necessary element in the construction of a socialist utopia, the first to explain the mechanism of genocide. The writer shows that the initial - necessary and obligatory - condition of genocide is the transformation of a person into an abstraction, depriving him of the name of a person, branding him with a negative sign - “bourgeois”, “semi-bourgeois”, “fist”, “sub-kulak”, “pest”. The activist, having created a “special side column” called “a list of the kulak liquidated to death, as a class, by the proletariat, according to the property-escheat remainder,” enters into it “instead of people... signs of existence...” They explain to the “unorganized” that “there is no soul in them , but there is only one property mood." The future confirmed the tragic insight of the writer: Soviet studies of the collectivization era provide accurate data regarding the losses of large and small livestock, but even approximate figures for human losses are not reported. In the “side column” of the peasantry liquidated to death, instead of people, “signs of existence” and “property mood” are recorded.
The only writer of his time, Platonov understood the inexorable nature of the mechanism of genocide, which devoured those who set it in motion. The organizer of the collective farm "General Line", the liquidator of the kulaks, the activist becomes a victim of a change in the general line. The next directive coming to the collective farm accuses it of “running into the leftist swamp of right-wing opportunism.” Platonov leaves no doubt about the origin of the new directive and the new general line: everything changed after the publication of Stalin’s article “Dizziness from Success,” in which the blame for the madness of “complete collectivization” was placed on local party leaders and activists. But the exact dating of the events only emphasizes their nightmarishly delusional character. The reality is nightmarish, and everyone lives in delirium. And they die in delirium. Kind, looking after the girl Nastya like a mother, Chiklin easily and thoughtlessly kills the activist with one blow, just as he had previously killed a man without thinking.
The writer expresses boundless despair: people who live by feelings turn out to be little better than people who live by their minds. Feelings and instinct turn out to be insufficient protection against clever people. In "Chevengur" the apostles, waiting in the steppe for beggars, greet them with a flag on which is written: "Poor comrades"! You have made every convenience and thing in the world, and now you have destroyed it and want the best for each other. For this reason, comrades are acquired in Chevengur from the roads they pass." In "The Pit" the inscription on the flag heralds a new era in which all previous dreams are condemned and discarded: "For the party, for loyalty to it, for the shock work that breaks through the doors to the future for the proletariat ".
The elements have been tamed, the future is locked and entry into it is allowed only as a reward “for hard work”, with a pass issued by the Party guarding the door. Loyalty to the party becomes the highest virtue. The activist dies because he was mistaken in believing that loyalty to the directive would guarantee him a pass to “happiness and at least in the future... a district post.” Those who remained faithful to the Idea are dying, those who thought it was enough to be faithful to the Directive are dying. They die, killing millions of people and thereby fulfilling their role. The Apostles, who believe in the Idea, interfere with the realized utopia, because they consider the interpretation of the Idea to be their right; obedient servants of the directive interfere, because they believe that blind obedience gives them some kind of rights. Their elimination turns Utopia, Socialism into a “single-person economy” in which power belongs to the “main man”.
Real and therefore fantasy world, depicted by Platonov, becomes similar to the fantastic, and therefore similar to the real, world of the United State, depicted by Zamyatin.
In a victorious utopia there is no room for another utopia. goes out last hope on the possibility of merging two utopias. "Prushevsky! Will the people of higher science be able to resurrect the dead people back?" - asks Zhachev. And he hears in response a monosyllabic and unequivocal: “No.” The hope of a disabled person sounds bitterly: “Marxism can do everything. Why then does Lenin lie in Moscow intact. He is waiting for science - he wants to be resurrected.” Lenin wants to be resurrected, but he cannot. And he is not needed where his utopia has won.
Platonov returns in the finale of "The Pit" to the theme of the deceased child, which in "Chevengur" meant the collapse of hope for a dream come true, disappointment in communism. In “Chevengur” the nameless child of a nameless beggar woman, invited with other “others” to the city of the Sun, was dying. In “The Pit” the girl Nastya, an unfortunate orphan of non-proletarian origin, dies, who was taken in and loved by the diggers, who saw the future in her. “Now I don’t believe in anything,” Zhachev declares after Nastya's death. Voshchev stands in bewilderment over the girl’s corpse, not knowing, “Where will communism be in the world now?” He asks himself: “Why... now do we need the meaning of life and the truth of universal origin, if there is no small, faithful person in whom the truth would become joy and movement?”
To express the oppressive hopeless feeling of loss of faith, Platonov, as usual, uses religious symbolism. Zhachev says his “I don’t believe in anything now!” in "It's the morning of the second day." On the second day, God separates the water from the firmament, the earth from the sky. The day of Nastya’s death, the birthday of the collective farm and the liquidation of the “unorganized,” is, for Platonov, the “second day,” when reality is separated from dreams, when dreams, hope and faith die, a terrible reality remains.
Chiklin spends fifteen hours digging a “special grave” for Nastya so that “it is deep... and so that the child will never be disturbed by the noise of life from the surface of the earth.” Chiklin buries faith and hope. And at this time, all the workers and all the collective farmers begin to dig a pit, larger than the size planned for the construction of a house, into which “every person from a barracks and a clay hut” can move in. Platonov concludes: “all the poor and middle-aged men worked with such zeal for life, as if they wanted to be saved forever in the abyss of the pit.”
The pit of the “common proletarian house” turns out to be an abyss. The abyss becomes a temple of socialist utopia. This cathedral is not erected on the ground and does not reach out to the sky, it is directed into the depths of the earth, into a hole whose digging has no end.

3. “Here there is neither subtracting nor adding - this is how it was on earth...” The role of literature in understanding the events of the collectivization period.

Even at the height of the events of collectivization, not all writers were fascinated by the scale with which the collapse of the traditional foundations of the Russian village was carried out. Boris Leonidovich Pasternak wrote in one of his letters to a loved one: “In the early 30s, a movement was born among writers, which consisted of trips to collective farms to collect materials about the new village. I wanted to be like everyone else, and went on such a trip with a project to write a book. Words cannot express what I saw. It was a misfortune so inhuman, so unimaginable, a catastrophe so terrible that it, so to speak, became abstract and inaccessible to rational perception. I got sick. I couldn't write for a whole year."
Among the works of literature that raised questions about the relationship between class and universal humanity in the events of collectivization, special mention should be made of the texts of Andrei Platonov: the novel “Chevengur”, the stories “The Pit” (1929-30) and “The Juvenile Sea” (1932). Their humanistic meaning and philosophical depth appeared before the readers of the 80s in all their completeness and significance. Unfortunately, participation in literary process These works, which reflected the tragic fate of the Russian peasantry, were reduced to a minimum due to the impossibility or direct prohibition of publication. And yet, despite this circumstance, A. Platonov’s influence on the literature and spiritual life of the people was not completely interrupted.
Modern literature and history are getting to the deeper meaning of the terrible tragedy of the peasantry that occurred in the 20-30s, largely thanks to the civil feat of the courageous man and great writer Andrei Platonovich Platonov.

NOTES

Dvoryashin Yu.A. M.A. Sholokhov and Russian prose of the 20-30s about the fate of the peasantry. - Novosibirsk, 1992. - P. 11.
The writer returns to the Stalinist revolution in a play written in 1937-1938, during the era of the next “Great Leap Forward”.
Andrey Platonov. Pit. Bilingual edition with a foreword by Joseph Brodsky. - Michigan: Ardis, 1973, p.179.
The dates are in the manuscript.
I. Stalin. Essays. T. 1, p.169.
Andrey Platonov. Pit // "Grani", No. 70, 1969, p.178.
Ibid., p.222.
Ibid., p.217.
Ibid., p.222.
Ibid., p.239.
Ibid., p.165.
Andrey Platonov. Chevengur. YMCA-Press, Paris, 1972, p.248.
Ibid., p.249.
Andrey Platonov. Pit. Page 245.
Ibid., p.247.
Ibid., pp. 250, 251.
Ibid., p.242.
Ibid., p.243.
Ibid., p.261.
Ibid., p.258.
Ibid., p.258.
Ibid., p.259.
Ibid., p.259.
Ibid., p.236.
Ibid., pp. 228, 229.
Ibid., page 233.
Ibid., pp. 264, 265.
Ibid., p.245.
Ibid., p.273.
Andrey Platonov. Chevengur. p.222.
Andrey Platonov. Pit. Page 268.
Ibid., p.266.
Ibid., pp. 283, 284.
Quote by: Savelzon I.V. From the history of Russian literature. M.A. Bulgakov. A.P. Platonov: Teaching aid. - Orenburg, 1997.

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Introduction

1. Description of the Russian national character in the works of writers

2. Vasily Shukshin

3. The originality of Shukshin’s heroes

4. The image of the Russian village in the works of V.M. Shukshina

Conclusion

List of used literature

Introduction

In Russian literature, the genre of village prose is noticeably different from all other genres. What is the reason for this difference? You can talk about this for an extremely long time, but still not come to a final conclusion. This happens because the scope of this genre may not fit within the description of rural life. This genre can also include works that describe the relationship between people in the city and the countryside, and even works in which the main character is not a villager at all, but in spirit and idea, these works are nothing more than village prose.

IN foreign literature There are very few works of this type. There are significantly more of them in our country. This situation is explained not only by the peculiarities of the formation of states and regions, their national and economic specifics, but also by the character, “portrait” of each people inhabiting a given area. In countries Western Europe, the peasantry played an insignificant role, and all national life was in full swing in the cities. In Russia, since ancient times, Russian villages occupied the most main role in history. Not in terms of power (on the contrary - the peasants were the most powerless), but in spirit - the peasantry was and, probably, remains the driving force Russian history. It was from the dark, ignorant peasants that Stenka Razin, and Emelyan Pugachev, and Ivan Bolotnikov came out; it was because of the peasants, or rather because of serfdom, that that cruel struggle took place, the victims of which were tsars, poets, and part of the outstanding Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century. Thanks to this, works covering this topic occupy a special place in the literature.

Modern rural prose plays a large role in the literary process these days. This genre today rightfully occupies one of the leading places in terms of readability and popularity. The modern reader is concerned about the problems that are raised in novels of this genre. These are questions of morality, love of nature, good, good relations to people and other problems that are so relevant today. Among modern writers who have written or are writing in the genre of village prose, the leading place is occupied by such writers as Viktor Petrovich Astafiev ("The Fish Tsar", "The Shepherd and the Shepherdess"), Valentin Grigorievich Rasputin ("Live and Remember", "Farewell to Matera "), Vasily Makarovich Shukshin ("Villages", "Lyubavins", "I came to give you freedom") and others.

Vasily Makarovich Shukshin occupies a special place in this series. His unique creativity has attracted and will continue to attract hundreds of thousands of readers not only in our country, but also abroad. It's rare to find such a master folk word, such a sincere admirer native land what an outstanding writer he was.

The purpose of the course work is to determine the world of the Russian village in the stories of V.M. Shukshina.

1 . DescriptionRussian nationalthcharacterin workswriters

From time immemorial, people from the Russian hinterland have glorified the Russian land, mastering the heights of world science and culture. Let us at least remember Mikhailo Vasilyevich Lomonosov. So are our contemporaries Viktor Astafiev and Vasily Belov. Valentin Rasputin, Alexander Yashin, Vasily Shukshin, representatives of the so-called “village prose”, are rightfully considered masters of Russian literature. At the same time, they forever remained faithful to their rural birthright, their “small homeland.”

I have always been interested in reading their works, especially the stories and stories of Vasily Makarovich Shukshin. In his stories about fellow countrymen one can see the writer’s great love for the Russian village, concern for today’s man and his future fate.

Sometimes they say that the ideals of Russian classics are too far from modernity and are inaccessible to us. These ideals cannot be inaccessible to a schoolchild, but they are difficult for him. Classics - and this is what we try to convey to our students - is not entertainment. The artistic exploration of life in Russian classical literature never turned into an aesthetic pursuit; it always pursued a living spiritual and practical goal. V.F. Odoevsky formulated, for example, the purpose of his writing: “I would like to express in letters the psychological law according to which not a single word uttered by a person, not a single action is forgotten, does not disappear in the world, but certainly produces some kind of action; so that responsibility is connected with every word, with every seemingly insignificant act, with every movement of a person’s soul.”

When studying works of Russian classics, I try to penetrate into the “secrets” of the student’s soul. I will give several examples of such work. Russian verbal - artistic creativity and the national sense of the world is so deeply rooted in the religious element that even movements that have outwardly broken with religion still find themselves internally connected with it.

F.I. Tyutchev in the poem “Silentium” (“Silence!” - Lat.) speaks of special strings of the human soul that are silent in everyday life, but clearly declare themselves in moments of liberation from everything external, worldly, vain. F.M. Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov recalls the seed sown by God into the soul of man from other worlds. This seed or source gives a person hope and faith in immortality. I.S. Turgenev felt more keenly than many Russian writers the short duration and fragility of human life on earth, the inexorability and irreversibility of the rapid flight of historical time. Sensitive to everything topical and momentary, able to capture life in its beautiful moments, I.S. Turgenev simultaneously possessed a generic feature of any Russian classic writer - a rare sense of freedom from everything temporary, finite, personal and egoistic, from everything subjectively biased, clouding the acuity of vision, breadth of vision, completeness of artistic perception. In the troubled years for Russia, I.S. Turgenev creates a prose poem "Russian Language". The bitter consciousness of the deepest national crisis that Russia was then experiencing did not deprive I.S. Turgenev of hope and faith. Our language gave him this faith and hope.

So, the depiction of the Russian national character distinguishes Russian literature as a whole. The search for a hero who is morally harmonious, who clearly understands the boundaries of good and evil, who exists according to the laws of conscience and honor, unites many Russian writers. The twentieth century (especially the second half) felt the loss of the moral ideal even more acutely than the nineteenth: the connection of times fell apart, the string broke, which A.P. so sensitively grasped. Chekhov (the play “The Cherry Orchard”), and the task of literature is to realize that we are not “Ivans who do not remember kinship.”

I would especially like to dwell on the depiction of the folk world in the works of V.M. Shukshina. Among the writers of the late twentieth century, it was V.M. Shukshin turned to the people’s soil, believing that people who retained their “roots,” albeit subconsciously, but were drawn to the spiritual principle inherent in the people’s consciousness, contained hope and testified that the world had not yet perished.

Speaking about the depiction of the folk world by V.M. Shukshin, we come to the conclusion that the writer deeply comprehended the nature of the Russian national character and showed in his works what kind of person the Russian village yearns for. About the soul of a Russian person V.G. Rasputin writes in the story "Izba". The writer turns readers to the Christian norms of simple and ascetic life and at the same time, to the norms of brave, courageous deeds, creation, asceticism. We can say that the story returns readers to the spiritual space of the ancient, maternal culture. The tradition of hagiographic literature is noticeable in the story. Severe, ascetic Agafya's life, her ascetic work, her love for her native land, for every mound and every blade of grass, which erected "mansions" in a new place - these are the moments of content that make the story about the life of a Siberian peasant woman similar to life. There is also a miracle in the story: despite the "superpower “, Agafya, having built a hut, lives in it “twenty years without one year,” that is, she will be awarded longevity. And the hut built by her hands, after Agafya’s death, will stand on the shore, will for many years preserve the foundations of centuries-old peasant life, not let them perish even in our days.

The plot of the story, the character of the main character, the circumstances of her life, the story of the forced move - everything refutes the popular ideas about the laziness and commitment to drunkenness of the Russian person. It should also be noted main feature fate of Agafya: “Here (in Krivolutskaya) Agafya’s Vologzhin family settled from the very beginning and lived for two and a half centuries, taking root in half the village.” This is how the story explains the strength of character, perseverance, and asceticism of Agafya, who is building her “house” in a new place, a hut, after which the story is named. In the story of how Agafya set up her hut in a new place, the story of V.G. Rasputin comes close to the life of Sergius of Radonezh. It is especially close in the glorification of carpentry, which was mastered by Agafya’s voluntary assistant, Savely Vedernikov, who earned an apt description from his fellow villagers: he has “golden hands.” Everything that Savely’s “golden hands” do shines with beauty, pleases the eye, and glows. “The raw plank, and how board to board lay on two shiny slopes, playing with whiteness and newness, how it shone already in the twilight, when, having knocked on last time Savely went down the roof with an ax, as if light was streaming over the hut and she stood up to her full height, immediately moving into the residential order.”

Not only life, but also fairy tales, legends, and parables resonate in the style of the story. As in the fairy tale, after Agafya’s death the hut continues their common life. The blood connection between the hut and Agafya, who “endured” it, is not broken, reminding people to this day of the strength and perseverance of the peasant breed.

At the beginning of the century, S. Yesenin called himself “the poet of the golden log hut.” In the story by V.G. Rasputin, written at the end of the 20th century, the hut is made of logs darkened by time. There is only a glow under the night sky from the brand new plank roof. Izba - a word-symbol - was fixed at the end of the 20th century in the meaning of Russia, homeland. The parable layer of V.G.’s story is connected with the symbolism of village reality, with the symbolism of the word. Rasputin.

So, moral problems traditionally remain the focus of Russian literature; our task is to convey to students the life-affirming foundations of the works being studied. The portrayal of the Russian national character distinguishes Russian literature; the search for a hero who is morally harmonious, clearly aware of the boundaries of good and evil, and who exists according to the laws of conscience and honor, unites many Russian writers.

2 . Vasily Shukshin

Vasily Makarovich Shukshin was born in 1929, in the village of Srostki, Altai Territory. And through the entire life of the future writer, the beauty and severity of those places ran like a red thread. It was thanks to his small homeland that Shukshin learned to appreciate the land, the work of man on this land, and learned to understand the harsh prose of rural life. From the very beginning of his creative career, he discovered new ways in depicting a person. His characters turned out to be unusual and in their own way social status, both in life maturity and moral experience. Having already become a fully mature young man, Shukshin goes to the center of Russia. In 1958, he made his debut in cinema ("Two Fedoras"), as well as in literature ("A Story in a Cart"). In 1963, Shukshin released his first collection, “Rural Residents.” And in 1964, his film “There Lives a Guy Like This” was awarded the main prize at the Venice Film Festival. comes to Shukshin worldwide fame. But he doesn't stop there. Years of intense and painstaking work. For example: in 1965 his novel “The Lyubavins” was published and at the same time the film “There Lives Such a Guy” appeared on the country’s screens. Just from this example alone one can judge with what dedication and intensity the artist worked.

Or maybe it’s haste, impatience? Or the desire to immediately establish oneself in literature on the most solid - “novel” basis? This is certainly not the case. Shukshin wrote only two novels. And as Vasily Makarovich himself said, he was interested in one topic: the fate of the Russian peasantry. Shukshin managed to touch a nerve, penetrate into our souls and make us ask in shock: “What is happening to us”? Shukshin did not spare himself, he was in a hurry to have time to tell the truth, and with this truth to bring people together. He was obsessed with one thought that he wanted to think out loud. And be understood! All the efforts of Shukshin, the creator, were aimed at this. He believed: “Art - so to speak, to be understood...” From his first steps in art, Shukshin explained, argued, proved and suffered when he was not understood. They tell him that the film “There Lives a Guy Like This” is a comedy. He is perplexed and writes an afterword to the film. At a meeting with young scientists, a tricky question is thrown at him, he hesitates, and then sits down to write an article (“Monologue on the Stairs”).

3 . The originality of Shukshin's heroes

One of the creators of village prose was Shukshin. The writer published his first work, the story “Two on a Cart,” in 1958. Then, over the course of fifteen years of literary activity, he published 125 stories. In the collection of stories “Rural Residents,” the writer included the cycle “They are from Katun,” in which he lovingly talked about his fellow countrymen and his native land.

The writer’s works differed from what Belov, Rasputin, Astafiev, Nosov wrote within the framework of village prose. Shukshin did not admire nature, did not go into long discussions, did not admire the people and village life. His short stories are episodes snatched from life, short scenes where the dramatic is interspersed with the comic.

The heroes of Shukshin's village prose often belong to the well-known literary type of "little man". The classics of Russian literature - Gogol, Pushkin, Dostoevsky - more than once brought out similar types in their works. The image also remains relevant for village prose. While the characters are typical, Shukshin's heroes are distinguished by an independent view of things, which was alien to Gogol's Akaki Akakievich or Pushkin's stationmaster. The men immediately sense insincerity; they are not ready to submit to fictitious city values. Original little people - that's what Shukshin got.

The weirdo is strange to city residents; his own daughter-in-law’s attitude towards him borders on hatred. At the same time, the unusualness and spontaneity of Chudik and people like him, according to Shukshin’s deep conviction, makes life more beautiful. The author talks about the talent and beauty of the soul of his weirdo heroes. Their actions are not always consistent with our usual patterns of behavior, and their value systems are surprising. He falls out of the blue, loves dogs, is surprised by human malice, and as a child wanted to become a spy.

The story "Rural Residents" is about the people of a Siberian village. The plot is simple: the family receives a letter from their son with an invitation to come and visit him in the capital. Grandma Malanya, grandson Shurka and neighbor Lizunov imagine such a trip as a truly epoch-making event. Innocence, naivety and spontaneity are visible in the characters' characters; they are revealed through dialogue about how to travel and what to take with you on the road. In this story we can observe Shukshin's skill in composition. If in “The Freak” we were talking about an atypical beginning, then here the author gives an open ending, thanks to which the reader himself can complete and think out the plot, give assessments and draw conclusions.

It’s easy to notice how carefully the writer treats the construction literary characters. The images, with a relatively small amount of text, are deep and psychological. Shukshin writes about the feat of life: even if nothing remarkable happens in it, living every new day is equally difficult.

The material for the film “There Lives Such a Guy” was Shukshin’s story “Grinka Malyugin.” In it, a young driver accomplishes a feat: he takes a burning truck into the river so that barrels of gasoline do not explode. When a journalist comes to the wounded hero in the hospital, Grinka is embarrassed to talk about heroism, duty, and saving people. The character's striking modesty borders on holiness.

All Shukshin's stories are characterized by the characters' manner of speech and a bright, stylistically and artistically rich style. Various shades of life colloquial speech in Shukshin’s works look in contrast to the literary cliches of socialist realism. The stories often contain interjections, exclamations, rhetorical questions, and marked vocabulary. As a result, we see natural, emotional, living heroes.

The autobiographical nature of many of Shukshin’s stories, his knowledge of rural life and problems gave credibility to the troubles that the author writes about. The contrast between city and countryside, the outflow of young people from the village, the dying of villages - all these problems are widely covered in Shukshin’s stories. He modifies the type of little man, introduces new features into the concept of Russian national character, as a result of which he gains fame.

Where did the writer get the material for his works? Everywhere, where people live. What material is this, what characters? That material and those characters that have rarely entered the sphere of art before. And it took for him to come from the depths of the people great talent, so that with love and respect he would tell the simple, strict truth about his fellow countrymen. And this truth became a fact of art and aroused love and respect for the author himself. Shukshin's hero turned out to be not only unfamiliar, but also partly incomprehensible. Lovers of “distilled” prose demanded a “beautiful hero”, they demanded that the writer invent, so as not to disturb his own soul. The polarity of opinions and harshness of assessments arose, oddly enough, precisely because the hero was not fictional. And when the hero represents real person, he cannot be only moral or only immoral. And when a hero is invented to please someone, there is complete immorality. Isn’t it from here, from a lack of understanding of Shukshin’s creative position, that creative errors in the perception of his heroes come from. After all, what is striking about his heroes is the spontaneity of action, the logical unpredictability of an act: he will either unexpectedly accomplish a feat, or suddenly escape from the camp three months before the end of his sentence.

Shukshin himself admitted: “I am most interested in exploring the character of a non-dogmatic person, a person not grounded in the science of behavior. Such a person is impulsive, gives in to impulses, and therefore is extremely natural. But he always has a reasonable soul.” The writer's characters are truly impulsive and extremely natural. And they do this by virtue of internal moral concepts, perhaps not yet realized by themselves. They have a heightened reaction to the humiliation of man by man. This reaction takes on a variety of forms. Sometimes it leads to the most unexpected results.

Seryoga Bezmenov was burned by the pain of his wife’s betrayal, and he cut off two of his fingers (“Fingerless”).

A bespectacled man in a store was insulted by a boorish salesman, and for the first time in his life he got drunk and ended up in a sobering-up station (“And in the morning they woke up...”), etc. and so on.

In such situations, Shukshin’s characters may even commit suicide (“Suraz”, “The wife saw off her husband to Paris”). No, they cannot stand insults, humiliation, resentment. They offended Sashka Ermolaev ("Resentment"), the "inflexible" aunt-seller was rude. So what? Happens. But Shukshin’s hero will not endure, but will prove, explain, break through the wall of indifference. And... he grabs the hammer. Or he will leave the hospital, as Vanka Teplyashin did, as Shukshin did ("Klyauza"). A very natural reaction of a conscientious and kind person...

No Shukshin does not idealize his strange, unlucky heroes. Idealization generally contradicts the art of a writer. But in each of them he finds something that is close to him. And now, it is no longer possible to make out who is calling to humanity there - the writer Shukshin or Vanka Teplyashin.

Shukshinsky’s hero, faced with a “narrow-minded gorilla,” can, in despair, grab a hammer himself in order to prove to the wrongdoer that he is right, and Shukshin himself can say: “Here you need to immediately hit him on the head with a stool - the only way to tell the boor that he did something wrong” ( "Borya"). This is a purely “Shuksha” collision, when truth, conscience, honor cannot prove that they are who they are. And it’s so easy, so simple for a boor to reproach a conscientious person. And more and more often, the clashes of Shukshin’s heroes become dramatic for them. Shukshin was considered by many to be a comic, “joke” writer, but over the years the one-sidedness of this statement, as well as another - about the “compassionate lack of conflict” of Vasily Makarovich’s works, became more and more clearly revealed. The plot situations of Shukshin's stories are poignant. In the course of their development, comedic situations can be dramatized, and something comic is revealed in dramatic situations. With an enlarged depiction of unusual, exceptional circumstances, the situation suggests their possible explosion, a catastrophe, which, having broken out, breaks the usual course of life of the heroes. Most often, the actions of the heroes are determined by a strong desire for happiness, for the establishment of justice (“In Autumn”).

Did Shukshin write about the cruel and gloomy property owners Lyubavins, the freedom-loving rebel Stepan Razin, old men and old women, did he talk about the breaking of the entryway, about the inevitable departure of a person and his farewell to all earthly people, did he stage films about Pashka Kogolnikov, Ivan Rastorguev, the Gromov brothers, Yegor Prokudin , he depicted his heroes against the backdrop of specific and generalized images - a river, a road, an endless expanse of arable land, a home, unknown graves. Shukshin understands this central image comprehensive content, solving the cardinal problem: what is a person? What is the essence of his existence on Earth?

The study of the Russian national character, which has developed over the centuries, and the changes in it associated with the turbulent changes of the twentieth century, constitutes the strong side of Shukshin’s work.

Gravity and attraction to the earth are the strongest feeling of the farmer. Born with man, it is a figurative representation of the greatness and power of the earth, the source of life, the guardians of time and the generations gone with it in art. The earth is a poetically meaningful image in Shukshin’s art: the native house, the arable land, the steppe, the Motherland, the mother - the damp earth... Folk-figurative associations and perceptions create an integral system of national, historical and philosophical concepts: about the infinity of life and the goals of generations receding into the past, about Motherland, about spiritual ties. The comprehensive image of the earth - the Motherland - becomes the center of gravity of the entire content of Shukshin’s work: the main collisions, artistic concepts, moral and aesthetic ideals and poetics. The enrichment and renewal, even the complication of the original concepts of land and home in Shukshin’s work is quite natural. His worldview life experience, a heightened sense of homeland, artistic insight, born in a new era in the life of the people, determined such a unique prose.

4 . The image of the Russian village in the works of V.M. Shukshina

In Shukshin’s stories, a lot is built on the analysis of the collision of city and countryside, two different psychologies, ideas about life. The writer does not oppose the village to the city, he only opposes the absorption of the village by the city, against the loss of those roots, without which it is impossible to preserve the moral principle within oneself. The bourgeoisie, the philistine - this is a person without roots, who does not remember his moral kinship, deprived of “kindness of soul”, “intelligence of spirit”. And in the Russian village, prowess, a sense of truth, and a desire for justice are still preserved - what has been erased is distorted in people of an urban type. In the story “My Son-in-Law Stole a Car of Firewood,” the hero is afraid of the prosecutor’s office, a man indifferent to his fate; fear and humiliation initially suppress the self-esteem of the hero Shukshin, but the innate inner strength, the root sense of truth forces the hero of the story to overcome fear, animal fear for himself, and win a moral victory over his opponent.

The relationship between city and countryside has always been complex and contradictory. To the city's "boast" of civilization, the village man often responds with rudeness and defends himself with harshness. But, according to Shukshin, real people are united not by place of residence, not by environment, but by the inviolability of the concepts of honor, courage, and nobility. They are related in spirit, in their desire to preserve their own in any situation. human dignity- and at the same time remember the dignity of others. Thus, the hero of the story “The Freak” always strives to bring joy to people, does not understand their alienation and feels sorry for them. But Shukshin loves his hero not only for this, but also because the personal, individual, that which distinguishes one person from another, has not been erased in him. “Weird people” are necessary in life, because they are the ones who make it kinder. And how important it is to understand this, to see a person in your interlocutor!

In the story "Exam" the paths of two people accidentally crossed strangers: Professor and Student. But despite the formal situation of the exam, they started talking - and saw each other as people.

Shukshin - people's writer. It's not just that his heroes are simple, unnoticeable and the lives they live are ordinary. Seeing, understanding the pain of another person, believing in yourself and in the truth is common. Seeing, understanding the pain of another person, believing in oneself and in the truth are primordial folk qualities. A person has the right to classify himself as a people only if he has a sense of spiritual tradition and the moral need to be kind. Otherwise, even if he is “originally” rural, his soul is still faceless, and if there are many such people, then the nation ceases to be a people and turns into a crowd. Such a threat hung over us in the era of stagnation. But Shukshin loved Russia with all his soul. He believed in the ineradicability of conscience, kindness, and a sense of justice in the Russian soul. Despite time, overcoming its pressure, Shukshin’s heroes remain people, remain true to themselves and the moral traditions of their people...

V. Shukshin’s first attempt to understand the fate of the Russian peasantry at historical junctures was the novel “The Lyubavins.” It was about the early 20s of our century. But the main character, the main embodiment, the focus of the Russian national character for Shukshin was Stepan Razin. It is to him, his uprising, that the second and last novel Shukshin "I came to give you freedom." It is difficult to say when Shukshin first became interested in Razin’s personality. But already in the collection “Rural Residents” a conversation about him begins. There was a moment when the writer realized that Stepan Razin, in some facets of his character, was absolutely modern, that he was the concentration national characteristics Russian people. And this, a precious discovery for himself, Shukshin wanted to convey to the reader. Today's people acutely feel how “the distance between modernity and history has shortened.” Writers, turning to the events of the past, study them from the perspective of people of the twentieth century, seek and find those moral and spiritual values ​​that are necessary in our time.

Several years pass after finishing work on the novel “Lyubavina,” and Shukshin tries to explore the processes taking place in the Russian peasantry at a new artistic level. It was his dream to direct a film about Stepan Razin. He returned to her constantly. If we take into account the nature of Shukshin’s talent, inspired and nourished by living life, and take into account that he himself was going to play the role of Stepan Razin, then one could expect a new deep insight into the Russian national character from the film. One of best books Shukshin is called “Characters” - and this name itself emphasizes the writer’s passion for what developed in certain historical conditions.

In stories written in recent years, there is increasingly a passionate, sincere author's voice addressed directly to the reader. Shukshin spoke about the most important, painful issues, revealing his artistic position. It was as if he felt that his heroes could not say everything, but they definitely had to say it. More and more “sudden”, “fictional” stories from Vasily Makarovich Shukshin himself appear. Such an open movement towards “unheard-of simplicity”, a kind of nakedness, is in the traditions of Russian literature. Here, in fact, it is no longer art, it is going beyond its limits, when the soul screams about its pain. Now the stories are entirely the author's word. The interview is a naked revelation. And everywhere questions, questions, questions. The most important things about the meaning of life.

Art should teach goodness. Shukshin saw the most precious wealth in the ability of a pure human heart to do good. “If we are strong and truly smart in anything, it is in doing a good deed,” he said.

Vasily Makarovich Shukshin lived with this, believed in it.

Conclusion

A person who believes in the power of good, the power of truth and asks, begs, demands from people moral purity. The desire for ethical spirituality is the basis of Shukshin’s creativity. In the traditions of Russian literature main task He considered the artist to be the knowledge of the human soul. In the traditions of Russian literature, he sought to see in this soul the “sprouts” of the good, the simple, the eternal. But at the same time, Shukshin managed to express the world in his works modern man, the complex, “confused” world of man in the era of stagnation. Shukshin reveals and explores in his heroes the qualities inherent in the Russian people: honesty, kindness, hard work, conscientiousness. But this is a world in which the best is forced to fight for its existence in human souls with enormous “pressure” of hypocrisy, philistinism, indifference, and lies. Yes, Shukshin explores the world. He writes about Russia and about the people who live on Russian soil. His originality is in a special manner of thinking, perceiving the world, a special “angle of view” on the Russian person. In Shukshin's stories one can always feel psychological depth, the inner intensity of the hero's state of mind. They are small in volume, reminiscent of ordinary, familiar everyday scenes, casually overheard ordinary conversations. But in these short stories The most important issues of human relations are touched upon. Shukshin's stories force the reader to notice in life what is most often not noticed and is considered a trifle. But in fact, our whole life consists of such little things. And Shukshin shows how a person, his essence, is revealed in seemingly insignificant actions. The heroes of Shukshin's stories are different people. But in the center of it creative world one who seeks truth in small and large things, a thinking and experiencing person. Shukshin himself spoke about his creative credo this way: “A smart and talented person will somehow find a way to reveal the truth, even with a hint, even with a half-word, otherwise it will torture him, otherwise, as it seems to him, life will pass wasted." In Shukshin's stories, a lot is built on the analysis of the collision of city and village, two different psychologies, ideas about life. The writer does not contrast the village with the city, he only opposes the absorption of the village by the city, against the loss of those roots, without which it is impossible to preserve the moral beginning. The bourgeoisie, the philistine, is a person without roots, not remembering his moral kinship, deprived of “kindness of soul,” “intelligence of spirit.” And in the Russian village, prowess, a sense of truth, and the desire for justice are still preserved that has been erased , distorted in people of an urban type. A village person often responds to an urban “boast” of civilization with rudeness and defends himself with harshness. But, according to Shukshin, real people are united not by place of residence, not by environment, but by the inviolability of the concepts of honor, courage, nobility. They are related in spirit, by striving to preserve one’s human dignity in any situation and at the same time remembering the dignity of others.Shukshin is a national writer. It's not just that his heroes are simple, unnoticeable and the lives they live are ordinary. Seeing, understanding the pain of another person, believing in oneself and in the truth are primordial folk qualities. A person has the right to classify himself as a people only if he has a sense of spiritual tradition and the moral need to be kind. Otherwise, even if he is “originally” rural, his soul is still faceless, and if there are many such people, then the nation ceases to be a people and turns into a crowd. Such a threat hung over us in the era of stagnation. But Shukshin loved Russia with all his soul. He believed in the ineradicability of conscience, kindness, and a sense of justice in the Russian soul. Despite time, overcoming its pressure, Shukshin’s heroes remain people, remain true to themselves and the moral traditions of their people...

His stories are fast-paced, free of extraneous description, generally devoid of exposition, and characters are quickly introduced into the action. You will never find in Shukshin’s stories even the most amusing, but self-sufficient detail. The details of the narrative are sparse, but effective and plot-driven. His landscapes, which correspond to the state of mind of the characters, are always extremely brief.

Among the Russians modern writers, masters of storytelling, Shukshin is given a place of honor. His novelistic creativity is a bright and original phenomenon. With all the diversity genre forms Shukshin has a favorite moral problematic and a creative manner inherent only to this author, that creative handwriting by which you recognize every page of it. Vasily Shukshin's prose is a unique phenomenon, with its own stylistic features. The writer thinks out, develops, and further imagines the characters seen in life. Shukshin peers into his character and examines him thoroughly like an artist, revealing his spiritual multi-layeredness and versatility. In his stories, life appears in its multidimensionality, inexhaustibility, and amazing diversity. The intonation of his works is fluid and rich in shades. Shukshin creates a unique human character on several pages and through him shows some layer of life, some side of existence. village prose Shukshin story

Shukshin is a deeply social writer. He explored new social phenomena, trodden his path in art and turning to unknown layers of life. He was attracted to ordinary life ordinary people, where, under the cover of everyday life, he could see the special - those features that together created the Russian national character. The Russian national character, the Russian people in their historical movement - this is what has invariably occupied creative thinking Shukshin in the years of his maturity. He is primarily interested in the moral world of man. The literature of the 70s was characterized by a deep formulation of moral problems, a tireless interest in the innermost depths of the human soul, and the courage of artistic quest. Shukshin’s creativity develops in this direction, full of faith in the inexhaustible possibilities of the human personality. In the great modern debate about man, he is always on the side of optimism, but he is not kind either - he is merciless towards everything evil, dark that stains human soul. Direct and merciless criticism of some phenomena encountered in the moral sphere of our society is necessary, necessary. Speaking against careerism and greed, against rudeness and ignorance, Shukshin not only castigates their carriers, but also warns. He wants to protect us from mistakes and actions, to spiritually strengthen us readers. Shukshin never controls his heroes. He knows how to detect in everyday character the typifying principle germinating in him. His truth is not bookish, it was suffered, it arose as the result of his life. Exploring new social phenomena as an artist, Shukshin trampled his path in art and turned to unknown layers of life. This is the ordinary life of ordinary people. Social conflicts Shukshin is occupied primarily with their moral side. The artist peers with deep interest into the individual psychology of the hero. One of its main themes is the theme of real and imaginary moral values, the theme of truth and falsehood in human relationships. His work is characterized by the formulation of complex ethical problems. What is happiness and how is it achieved? What does honest work give a person? What kind of life position, that worldview, that code of morality that helps to achieve high satisfaction and true happiness

WITHlist of used literature

1. Arsenyev K.K. Landscape in the modern Russian novel // Arsenyev K.K. Critical Studies on Russian literature. T.1-2. T.2. St. Petersburg: typography. MM. Stasyulevich, 1888;

2. Gorn V.F. Vasily Shukshin. Barnaul, 1990;

3. Zarechnov V.A. Functions of landscape in the early stories of V.M. Shukshina: Interuniversity collection of articles. Barnaul, 2006;

4. Kozlov S.M. Poetics of stories by V.M. Shukshina. Barnaul, 1992;

5. Ovchinnikova O.S. The nationality of Shukshin's prose. Biysk 1992;

Creativity V.M. Shukshina. Encyclopedic Dictionary - Reference Book, vol. 1, 2,3 B.

6. V. Horn Disturbed Soul

7. V. Horn The fate of the Russian peasantry

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“Once Sasha saw a portrait in his father’s office...” It happened to me almost the same as with the hero of Nekrasov’s poem “Grandfather.” Only I saw a portrait of my great-grandmother and great-grandfather in my grandmother Vera’s room. She lives in Saratov, and previously came to us herself. And this summer we visited her. She told me for a long time about her parents. I was surprised to learn that my great-grandfather Emelyan was a savvy and businesslike man. He fought in the imperialist army, then in the Red Army in the civilian army. He returned to his Andreevka. Took over the farm. He and his brothers decided to build a mill. Emelyan and Aksinya built a new, good-quality house. And suddenly collectivization. My ancestors were still very far from riches, but they were included in the lists of kulaks anyway. Emelyan was warned in time. And, handing over their small children to relatives, abandoning everything they had acquired through hard work, they fled with their great-grandmother lightly. First to Saratov, then to Central Asia, then to Stalingrad. Emelyan worked at a sawmill and managed the house. But for many years they trembled at the appearance of any official. My grandmother also told me about how the “kulaks” from the village were thrown into the snow in a wild field in the middle of winter, how the “poor” divided their property, how the village became poor.

Preparing for this essay, remembering what I read about collectivization, I suddenly realized how typical the fate of my ancestors was. Is it not similar ordeals that the poet’s brother Ivan Tvardovsky talks about in his “Pages of Experience”?

Or the “Roundup” by Vasily Bykov that I remember. My great-grandfather was “lucky”: he survived and remained free. Millions were unlucky. They were taken to Solovki and the Northern Urals, to logging sites and mines. There the living envied the dead. Such is the fate of the main story of Khvedor Rovba. Having received the allotment, this participant in the civil war, like Sholokhov’s Titus Borodin, “clung to the farm.” The peasant is getting rich, but those in power don’t like it. Khvedor is subject to such taxes that he is unable to pay them. For non-payment, Rovba, his wife Gannulya and their ten-year-old daughter Olenka are taken to the North to a camp. First the wife, then the daughter dies from inhuman conditions. Having become orphaned and buried his loved ones, Khvedor flees to his homeland with a false certificate in someone else’s name. His impulse is both deeply understandable and inexplicable. After all, it was in those parts that “people posed the greatest danger to him in the fields, villages, and on the roads,” “and now he feared meeting his own people most of all.”

This feeling of homeland is very strong in our peasants. It’s very opportune to say something else here literary heroes from A. Solzhenitsyn’s novel “In the First Circle” - Spiridon. This one seems to have included all the twists and turns of our history. He was a worker, after the revolution he became a peasant. I visited the Greens, then the Whites, and ended up with the Reds. He started a strong farm, but everything was burned in a fire. That is why he avoided dispossession. He himself accepted the rank of commissar and dispossessed them. But he gave bad orders (he was sick of what was going on in the village). For “negligence” I ended up in a camp for the first time. He dug channels, then he became a guard himself. After his term he lived a happy life with his family. During the war he fell into occupation, farmed on his own, involuntarily became a partisan, then he and his family ended up in Germany. So social upheavals tossed people around like chips in a storm.

Spiridon had two attachments: to his family and to his homeland. It was for the sake of the children that he ended up in the camp a second time. He returned from captivity, knowing in advance that arrest could not be avoided. “I didn’t believe a penny in their leaflets (that is, Soviet ones), and I knew that I couldn’t get away from prison - I knew, he confessed to prisoner Nerzhin, - but I thought that all the blame would be placed on me, and what does the children have to do with it? If they put me in prison, let the children live. But these plagues decided in their own way - and theirs took my head too.” This is how the best human feelings were trampled out.

Spiridon remained alive. The fate of Khvedor turned out differently. The raid drives him into a swamp, where he dies, perceiving death as deliverance. It’s scary to read about people who were doomed to death from hunger, or from overwork, or from despair.

The books of V. Belov, B. Mozhaev, A. Platonov, the stories of V. Astafiev and the works of other writers visibly and honestly show the era of the “great turning point in the countryside,” dispossession, and the tragedy of our peasantry. The village was split along the lines of poor and kulak, but even more along moral lines. In B. Mozhaev’s novel “Men and Women” we clearly see such a contrast. For one of the leaders of collectivization, Vozvyshaev, there are no people, there are only class enemies and those whom the authorities declare as bearers of a new society. It costs him nothing to kick people out of the house and send them to who knows where. These are fists, not people! Local activist Zenin argues similarly. When Prokop Aldonin was dispossessed, he had a heart attack. A doctor’s help is needed, but Zenin is calm, muttering “through his teeth”: “He’s gone crazy with greed.” After a while, Sanka comes running to Zenin:

• He's great! Dead - ah!...My fathers! What have we done?
• Nothing special. One less class enemy, Zenin calmly objects.

Andrei Borodin perceives what is happening differently. At first, he internally resists the lawlessness, but is not yet able to speak against it. He is only hiding from activist meetings. But then he speaks out openly. As one would expect, he is declared “the defender of the exploiting class” and is put in cold storage.

A difficult fate befell our peasant. Much is still unknown, for example, the number of victims of the famine in Ukraine and the Volga region in 1933. Some historians believe that the famine of the early thirties was chosen as one of the most effective methods the fight against the peasantry, who did not want to accept collectivization and turn into powerless day laborers. Is it so? Historians will return to this topic again and again. And the writers will have their say.

Literature gives us the opportunity to see what the life of collective farmers has become. Let us turn to the famous story of A. Solzhenitsyn “ Matrenin Dvor" It takes place in 1956. The details noted by the author are more eloquent than long arguments. “She didn’t announce what for breakfast, and it was easy to guess: unpeeled potato, or cardboard soup (that’s how everyone in the village pronounced it), or barley porridge (you couldn’t buy any other cereal that year at Torfoprodukt, and even barley - then in battle - as the cheapest one, they fattened the pigs and took them in bags).” Matryona's fate is a bitter, typical fate of a Russian peasant woman. She lost her husband and six children. “There was a lot of injustice with Matryona: she was sick, but was not considered disabled; She worked on a collective farm for a quarter of a century, but not because she didn’t work at a factory - she wasn’t entitled to a pension for herself, and she could only get it for her husband, that is, for the loss of a breadwinner.” But my husband had been gone for fifteen years, and obtaining these certificates was troublesome. “These efforts were made more difficult by the fact that the social security service from Talnov was twenty kilometers to the east, the village council was ten kilometers to the west, and the village council was an hour’s walk to the north. They drove her from office to office for two months... Each passage is a day.”

This story is a pain for the souls of people crippled by greed, accustomed to taking property from living owners. Likewise, Matryona’s relatives demand that part of her house (the upper room) be dismantled, without waiting for her to die. Everything ends tragically. The broken room is taken out on a tractor. But at the crossing the tractor gets stuck. A fast train crashes into him. Matryona and two other people die. It’s scary to read about those whose greed has consumed all their feelings. “His daughter was losing her mind, his son-in-law was on trial, own home his son was lying, killed by him, on the same street - the woman he had killed, whom he had once loved,” but Thaddeus only came for a short time to stand at the coffins. “His high forehead was overshadowed by a heavy thought, but this thought was to save the logs of the upper room from the fire and from the machinations of Matryona’s sisters.”

In the works of V. Belov, V. Rasputin, V. Lipatov, we read about the difficult life of our peasants in the 60s and 70s, about the destruction of nature, abandoned villages. But in them we meet people as simple and pure as Matryona. These are the true roots of our people, these are the righteous, without whom, “according to the proverb, a village does not stand.” Neither the city. Neither the whole land is ours.”

Events that took place almost sixty years ago today cause controversy, struggle, anger and pain as if they happened yesterday. This is because we all, even children, feel our origins in that time. After all, almost everyone’s great-grandfather, grandfather, or even father plowed the land. By reading about that time, we learn more about our ancestors, which means we understand ourselves better. Isn’t that why today many, as in the song, “dream of the village,” and many dream of their own farm.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save - "The fate of the Russian village in works of modern literature. Literary essays!

Separate for the first time image of the city Pushkin introduces it into Russian literature in the poem “The Bronze Horseman”. Later, Gogol continued his tradition: in the stories “The Overcoat” and “The Nose” the image of St. Petersburg appears - filled with imperial beauty, coldness and slight infernality. Gogol shows that such a majestic city simply cannot be friendly towards its inhabitants.

Dostoevsky in his novel “Crime and Punishment” approaches the description of St. Petersburg differently: since his novel is about people of the bottom living in tenement houses, he shows the poor and dirty areas of the capital of the empire.

Instead of the majestic Senate Square, Sennaya Square (in the slum area) is described, instead of gallant ladies and gentlemen - alcoholics and prostitutes, instead of noble houses - tiny rooms.

It is implied that in such a city people a priori cannot be happy: Petersburg is either deceitful and cold, or just as abandoned and poor. Literature needs a worthy confrontation with the image of the city. Thus, writers begin to turn their attention to village image.

The village as the embodiment of a moral ideal in Russian prose and poetry

One of the first authors of this direction was Grigorovich. He wrote the story “The Village,” based on childhood memories. The plot is based on the story of an orphan girl who was married against her will, and she eventually committed suicide because... I couldn’t live in my husband’s house.

1847 story “Anton the Miserable.” The main character lives very poorly, that’s why he was called that. He goes to the city to sell a horse (the most valuable thing for a peasant!), thereby abandoning any hopes for the future. And his horse is stolen. And everything turns out very bad and sad.

In his stories, Grigorovich describes the same time of year, autumn. Those. it's almost constant rain, porridge underfoot, low dark sky... in general, complete depression. And the mood of the stories is the same: troubles, misfortunes, hardships and anxiety... there is no perspective, no horizon, sheer hopelessness and hopelessness. The people living there are just as dull and gray as surrounding landscape. There are no children in the stories, therefore, there is no indication (hope) for any future.

He also wrote novels about peasant life, which were not successful. He also wrote quite detailed memoirs, from which one can create an impression of his contemporaries and his friends. Grigorovich never managed to go beyond the natural school, as a result of which he did not take a decent place in the history of literature, unlike Turgenev, who later replaced naturalism with realism, also describing inner world heroes.

Turgenev's image of a village

In the collection of stories “Notes of a Hunter,” Turgenev creates a complete image of a peasant soul, contrasting and at the same time harmonious. The real Russian character, in his opinion, combines the natural principle, heroic strength and sensitivity.

Turgenev admires such beauty and sincerity of the Russian people. He believes in the people and loves them, proves that everything bad in an ordinary Russian person is due only to the difficulties of his life (even after the abolition of serfdom). However, the heroes of "Notes of a Hunter" can maintain spiritual strength and wealth even in difficult conditions.

(Based on the works of V. Astafiev and V. Rasputin)

In our difficult times, we sometimes try not to notice the difficulties that arise in the modern village. But they are the ones that are connected with the most pressing problems of society - ecology and moral behavior of humans. The solution to these problems determines the further course of the history of our civilization.

The theme of many works by writers - contemporaries of V. Rasputin and V. Astafiev - is ecological problem. The example of Matera shows the fate of our numerous villages, which were destroyed supposedly for the benefit of the people, having built various hydroelectric power plants, thermal power plants, etc. The destinies of the heroes unfold against the backdrop of the main problem that affects everyone. Throughout the history of Matera, the inhabitants stuck to each other, i.e. lived as one family. And the flooding of their native land unexpectedly fell on their heads. Residents are delaying leaving until the last minute, because many of them were afraid to leave here, where they had existed for many years. In the literal sense of the word, people are being erased from their past and are being confronted with an unknown future. Mostly elderly people lived in the village, but it is impossible to start a completely new life at 70-80 years old. People resist to the last, they are even ready to die, but they cannot resist the huge machine of Reality, which sweeps away everything in its path. I believe that the heroes created by Rasputin are patriots of their native land. Maybe that’s why even nature itself “helps” the residents to ward off inevitable death from Matera.

Like Rasputin, Astafiev devotes a cycle of his stories to his contemporaries, “those who are lost or wandering, who are ready to shoot each other, who are drowning in the poison of the “babble”. The writer is trying by all means to draw the reader’s attention to the main idea - a ruthless attitude towards the taiga. After all, since ancient times it has been a rich source of various natural resources. Using the example of Ignatyich, the author shows the lawless robbery of nature. He lives one day at a time, without thinking about the consequences. In a duel with the symbolic king fish, in the face of an unknown higher power, the hero is transformed; at that moment he prays only for salvation. It seems to me that the unusual animal acts as the arbiter of justice over the poacher, showing that it is impossible to use nature forever.

Both works are united by one idea: man’s stewardship of the environment. The urgency of this problem lies in the fact that the merciless exploitation and pollution of nature is fraught with irreparable consequences and environmental disasters in the future. Existence human society, its well-being and prosperity depend only on us and our joint efforts!