The image of a Russian woman in Russian literature. The image of the ideal woman in Russian literature. Female images in the works of a. with. Pushkin and L. n. fat

The BBC recently aired a TV series on War and Peace by Tolstoy. In the West, everything is like ours - there, too, the release of film (television) adaptation dramatically increases interest in the literary source. And now Lev Nikolaevich's masterpiece suddenly became one of the bestsellers, and along with it readers became interested in all Russian literature. On this wave, the popular literary site Literary Hub published the article "The 10 Russian Literary Heroines You Should Know". It seemed to me that this is an interesting side view of our classics and I translated the article for my blog. I spread it here too. Illustrations are taken from the original article.

Attention! There are spoilers in the text.

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We know that all happy heroines are equally happy, and every unhappy woman is unhappy in her own way. But the fact is that there are few happy characters in Russian literature. Russian heroines tend to complicate their lives. This is as it should be, because their beauty as literary characters largely stems from their ability to suffer, from their tragic destinies, from their "Russianness".

The most important thing to understand about Russian female characters is that their fates are not stories of overcoming obstacles in order to achieve "and they lived happily ever after." Guardians of primordial Russian values, they know that there is more to life than happiness.

1. Tatiana Larina (A. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin")

In the beginning there was Tatiana. This is a kind of Eve of Russian literature. And not only because it is chronologically the first, but also because Pushkin occupies a special place in Russian hearts. Almost any Russian is able to recite the poetry of the father of Russian literature by heart (and after a few shots of vodka, many will do it). Pushkin's masterpiece, the poem "Eugene Onegin", is the story of not only Onegin, but also Tatyana, a young innocent girl from the provinces, who falls in love with the main character. Unlike Onegin, who is shown as a cynical bon vivant spoiled by fashionable European values, Tatiana embodies the essence and purity of the mysterious Russian soul. Including a tendency towards self-sacrifice and a disregard for happiness, as shown by her famous rejection of the person she loves.

2. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy "Anna Karenina")

Unlike Pushkin's Tatyana, who resists the temptation to get along with Onegin, Anna Tolstoy abandons both her husband and son in order to flee with Vronsky. As a true dramatic heroine, Anna voluntarily makes the wrong choice, a choice she will have to pay for. Anna's sin and the source of her tragic fate is not that she left the child, but that selfishly indulging her sexual and romantic desires, she forgot the lesson of Tatiana's selflessness. If you see a light at the end of the tunnel, don't flatter yourself, it could be a train.

3. Sonya Marmeladova (FM Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment")

In Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment, Sonya appears as the antipode of Raskolnikov. A whore and a saint at the same time, Sonya accepts her existence as a path of martyrdom. Having learned about Raskolnikov's crime, she does not repulse him, on the contrary, she attracts him to herself in order to save his soul. The famous scene is characteristic here when they read the biblical story of the resurrection of Lazarus. Sonya is able to forgive Raskolnikov, since she believes that everyone is equal before God, and God forgives. For the repentant assassin, this is a godsend.

4. Natalia Rostova (Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace")

Natalia is everyone's dream: smart, cheerful, sincere. But if Pushkin's Tatyana is too good to be true, Natalya seems alive, real. Partly because Tolstoy added other qualities to her image: she is capricious, naive, flirtatious and, for the mores of the early 19th century, a little cocky. In War and Peace, Natalia begins as a charming teenager, exuding joy and vitality. Throughout the novel, she grows older, learns the lessons of life, tames her changeable heart, becomes wiser, her character acquires integrity. And this woman, which is generally uncharacteristic for Russian heroines, is still smiling after more than a thousand pages.

5. Irina Prozorova (A.P. Chekhov "Three Sisters")

At the beginning of Chekhov's play Three Sisters, Irina is the youngest and full of hope. Her older brother and sisters are whiny and capricious, they are tired of life in the provinces, and Irina's naive soul is filled with optimism. She dreams of returning to Moscow, where, in her opinion, she will find her true love and be happy. But, as the chance to move to Moscow evaporates, she realizes more and more that she is stuck in the village and is losing her spark. Through Irina and her sisters, Chekhov shows us that life is just a series of sad moments, only occasionally interspersed with short bursts of joy. Like Irina, we waste our time on trifles, dreaming of a better future, but gradually we realize the insignificance of our existence.

6. Liza Kalitina (I. S. Turgenev "The Noble Nest")

In the novel "A Noble Nest" Turgenev created a model of the Russian heroine. Liza is young, naive, pure in heart. She is torn between two boyfriends: a young, handsome, cheerful officer and an old, sad, married man. Guess who she picked? Lisa's choice says a lot about the mysterious Russian soul. She is clearly going towards suffering. Lisa's choice shows that the pursuit of sadness and melancholy is no worse than any other option. At the end of the story, Lisa is disappointed in love and goes to a monastery, choosing the path of sacrifice and hardship. “Happiness is not for me,” she explains her act. "Even when I hoped for happiness, my heart was always heavy."

7. Margarita (M. Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita")

Chronologically, the last on the list, Bulgakov's Margarita, is an extremely strange heroine. At the beginning of the novel, this is a woman unhappy in marriage, then she becomes the mistress and muse of the Master, in order to then turn into a witch flying on a broomstick. For the Master, Margarita is not only a source of inspiration. She becomes, like Sonya for Raskolnikov, his healer, lover, savior. When the Master is in trouble, Margarita turns to none other than Satan himself for help. Having concluded, like Faust, a contract with the Devil, she nevertheless reunites with her beloved, albeit not quite in this world.

8. Olga Semyonova (A.P. Chekhov "Darling")

In "Darling" Chekhov tells the story of Olga Semyonova, a loving and gentle soul, a simple person who, as they say, lives in love. Olga becomes a widow early. Twice. When there is no one around whom she could love, she closes herself in the company of a cat. In a review of Darling, Tolstoy wrote that intending to ridicule the dim woman, Chekhov accidentally created a character that was very likable to himself. Tolstoy went even further, he condemned Chekhov for an excessively harsh attitude towards Olga, urging her to judge her soul, not her intellect. According to Tolstoy, Olga embodies the ability of Russian women to love unconditionally, a virtue unknown to men.

9. Anna Sergeevna Odintsova (I. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons")

In the novel “Fathers and Sons” (often incorrectly translated “Fathers and Sons”), Madame Odintsova is a lonely woman of mature age, and the sound of her surname in Russian also hints at loneliness. Odintsova is an atypical heroine who has become a kind of pioneer among female literary characters. Unlike other women in the novel, who follow the obligations imposed on them by society, Mrs. Odintsova is childless, she has no mother or husband (she is a widow). She stubbornly defends her independence, like Pushkin's Tatyana, refusing the only chance to find true love.

10. Nastasya Filippovna (FM Dostoevsky "The Idiot")

The heroine of The Idiot, Nastasya Filippovna, gives an idea of ​​how complex Dostoevsky is. Beauty makes her a victim. Orphaned in childhood, Nastasya becomes a kept woman and the mistress of an elderly man who picked her up. But every time she tries to break free from the clutches of her position and build her own destiny, she continues to feel humiliated. Feelings of guilt cast a fateful shadow over all of her decisions. By tradition, like many other Russian heroines, Nastasya has several options for fate, mainly associated with men. And in full accordance with tradition, she is not able to make the right choice. Surrendering to fate instead of fighting, the heroine drifts towards her tragic end.

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The author of this text is the writer and diplomat Guillermo Erades. He worked for some time in Russia, knows Russian literature well, is an admirer of Chekhov and the author of the book Back to Moscow. So this glance is not entirely an outsider. On the other hand, how to write about Russian literary heroines without knowing the Russian classics?

Guillermo doesn't explain his choice of characters. In my opinion, the absence of Princess Mary or “poor Liza” (which, by the way, was written earlier than Pushkin’s Tatyana) and Katerina Kabanova (from “The Groza” by Ostroskiy) is surprising. It seems to me that these Russian literary heroines are better known in our country than Liza Kalitina or Olga Semyonova. However, this is my subjective opinion. Who would you add to this list?

There has always been a special attitude towards women in Russian literature, and until a certain time the main place in it was occupied by a man - a hero, with whom the problems posed by the authors were associated. Karamzin was one of the first to draw attention to the fate of poor Liza, who, as it turned out, also knew how to love selflessly. And Pushkin portrayed Tatyana Larina, who knows how not only to love very much, but also to abandon her feelings, when the fate of a loved one depends on it.

The situation changed radically in the second half of the nineteenth century, when, due to the growth of the revolutionary movement, many traditional views on the place of women in society changed. Writers of different views saw the role of women in life in different ways.

One can speak of a kind of polemic between Chernyshevsky and Tolstoy using the example of the novels "What is to be done?" and “War and Peace”.

Chernyshevsky, being a revolutionary democrat, advocated the equality of men and women, appreciated the mind in a woman, saw and respected a man in her. Vera Pavlovna is free in her right to love the one she chooses. She works along with men, does not depend financially on her husband. Her workshop is proof of her viability as an organizer and entrepreneur. Vera Pavlovna is in no way inferior to men: neither in the ability to think logically, nor in a sober assessment of the social situation in the country.

This was supposed to be a woman in the mind of Chernyshevsky, and indeed of all those who professed the ideas of revolutionary democracy.

But as many supporters of women's emancipation existed, there were as many opponents of it, one of whom was L.N. Tolstoy.

In the novel Anna Karenina, the author also raised the problem of free love. But if Vera Pavlovna did not have children, then Tolstoy showed a heroine who must think not only about her happiness, but also about the well-being of her children. Anna's love for Vronsky negatively affected the fate of Seryozha and the newborn girl, who was legally considered Karenina, but was Vronsky's daughter. The mother's deed fell like a dark stain on the lives of the children.

Tolstoy showed his ideal in the image of Natasha Rostova. For him, it was she who was a true woman.

Throughout the novel, we follow how a playful little girl becomes a real mother, a loving wife, a homemaker.

From the very beginning, Tolstoy emphasizes that there is not an ounce of falsehood in Natasha, she feels unnaturalness and lies more sharply than anyone. By appearing on a name day in a living room full of semi-official ladies, she violates this atmosphere of pretense. All her actions are subject to feelings, not reason. She even sees people in her own way: Boris is gray, narrow, like a mantel clock, and Pierre is rectangular, red-brown. For her, these characteristics are enough to understand who is who.

Natasha is called “living life” in the novel. With her energy, she inspires those around her to a new life. With support and understanding, the heroine practically saves her mother after the death of Petrusha. Prince Andrey, who had time to say goodbye to all the joys of life, having seen Natasha, felt that all was not lost for him. And after the betrothal, the whole world for Andrey was divided into two parts: one - she, where everything is light, the other - everything else, there is darkness. “What does it matter to me what the sovereign says in the Council? Will it make me happier? ” - says Bolkonsky.

Natasha can be forgiven for her hobby for Kuragin. This was the only time her intuition let her down. All her actions are subject to momentary impulses that cannot always be explained. She did not understand Andrey's desire to postpone the wedding for a year. Natasha strove to live every second, and the year for her was equal to eternity.

Tolstoy endows his heroine with all the best qualities, moreover, she rarely evaluates her actions, more often relying on an inner moral feeling.

Like all his beloved heroes, the author sees Natasha Rostova as part of the people. He emphasizes this in the scene with his uncle, when “the countess, brought up by a French emigrant,” danced no worse than Agafya. This feeling of unity with the people, as well as true patriotism, pushes Natasha to give carts for the wounded when leaving Moscow, leaving almost all things in the city.

Even the highly spiritual Princess Marya, who at first did not love the pagan Natasha, understood her and accepted her as she is.

Natasha Rostova was not very smart, and even that was not important for Tolstoy. “Now, when he (Pierre) was telling all this to Natasha, he experienced that rare pleasure that women give when listening to a man - not smart women who, listening, try to remember what they are told in order to enrich their mind and retell the same on occasion; but the pleasure that real women, gifted with the ability to choose and absorb in themselves all the best that are only in the manifestations of a man, give.

Natasha realized herself as a mother, wife. Tolstoy emphasizes that she herself raised all her children (an impossible thing for a noblewoman), but for the author this is absolutely natural.

Despite the diversity of female characters in Russian literature, they are united by the fact that around them they are trying to create harmony of feelings and peace for their loved ones.

Rereading Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy, we again and again experience together with Tatyana Larina, Natalia Lasunskaya, Natasha Rostova. They show an example of pure love, devotion, loyalty, self-sacrifice. These images live in us, sometimes answering many of our questions, helping us not to make mistakes, to take the only right step. In these images, there is not only external beauty, but also the beauty of the soul, which calls on us to improve spiritually.

FEMALE IMAGES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE (II option)

It is impossible to imagine world literature without the image of a woman. Even without being the main character of the work, she brings some special character to the story. Since the beginning of the world, men have admired the representatives of the beautiful half of humanity, idolized and worshiped them. Already in the myths of Ancient Greece, we meet the gentle beauty Aphrodite, wise Athena, insidious Hera. These women-goddesses were recognized as equal to men, their advice was obeyed, they were trusted with the fate of the world, they were feared.

And at the same time, the woman was always surrounded by mystery, her actions led to confusion and bewilderment. To delve into the psychology of a woman, to understand her is the same as solving one of the most ancient mysteries of the Universe.

Russian writers have always assigned a special place to women in their works. Everyone, of course, saw her in his own way, but for everyone she was a support, hope, an object of admiration. Turgenev sang the image of a staunch, honest girl, capable of making any sacrifices for love; Nekrasov admired the image of a peasant woman who “will stop a galloping horse and enter a burning hut”; for Pushkin, the main virtue of a woman was her marital fidelity.

Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy in the epic "War and Peace" created unforgettable images of Natasha Rostova, Princess Marya, Helen, Sonya. They are all different in their characters, outlook on life, attitude towards loved ones.

Natasha Rostova ... She is a fragile, gentle girl, but she has a strong character. In it, one can feel that closeness to the people, nature, sources, which the author so appreciated. He admired Natasha's ability to feel someone else's grief, pain.

Loving, Natasha gives all of herself, a loved one replaces her - relatives and friends. Natasha is natural, she, with her charm and charm, returns to Prince Andrey the desire to live.

A difficult test for her was a meeting with Anatol Kuragin. All her hopes are lost, dreams are shattered, Prince Andrei will never forgive betrayal, although she is simply entangled in her feelings.

Some time after the death of Prince Andrei, Natasha realizes that she loves Pierre, and she is ashamed. She believes that she is betraying the memory of her lover. But Natasha's feelings often prevail over her mind, and this is also her charm.

Another female character that caught my attention in the novel is Princess Marya. This heroine is so beautiful internally that her appearance does not matter. Her eyes radiated such light that her face lost its ugliness.

Princess Marya sincerely believes in God, she believes that only He has the right to forgive and have mercy. She scolds herself for unkind thoughts, for disobeying her father and tries to see only good in others. She is proud and noble, like her brother, but her pride does not offend, because kindness - an integral part of her nature - softens this sometimes unpleasant feeling to others.

In my opinion, the image of Maria Volkonskaya is the image of a guardian angel. She protects everyone for whom she feels even the slightest responsibility. Tolstoy believes that such a person as Princess Marya deserves much more than an alliance with Anatol Kuragin, who did not understand what treasure he had lost; however, he had completely different moral values.

In War and Peace, the author, admiring the courage and resilience of the Russian people, praises Russian women as well. Princess Marya, who feels offended at the mere thought that the French will be on her estate; Natasha, who is ready to leave the house in what she was, but give all the carts for the wounded.

But the author not only admires the woman. Helen Bezukhova in the work is the personification of vice. She is beautiful, but her beauty does not attract, because inwardly she is simply ugly. She has no soul, she does not understand the suffering of another person. Having a child from her husband is something terrible for her. She pays dearly for Boris choosing her.

Helen evokes only contempt and pity.

Tolstoy's attitude to women is ambiguous. In the novel, he emphasizes that external beauty is not the main thing in a person. The spiritual world and inner beauty mean much more.

Kuprin also believes that appearance can be deceiving and a woman is able to use her attractiveness to achieve the goals she needs.

Shurochka Nikolaeva from the story "Duel" is a complex nature. She does not love her husband, but lives with him and forces him to study, because only he is able, having entered the academy, to pull her out of the boondocks in which they live. She leaves her loved one only because he is weaker than her, unable to give her what she wants. She, without any regret, stifles in herself the feeling that people have been waiting for all their lives. But she does not command either respect for her strong will or admiration.

Shurochka uses Yuri Romashov because she knows about his love for her. She is so immoral that she is able to persuade Romashov not to shoot, knowing full well that he will die tomorrow. And all for his own sake, for he loves himself more than anyone else. Her main goal is to create the best living conditions for herself, while the methods do not matter. She steps over people and does not feel guilty.

The image of Shurochka does not attract, although she is beautiful, her business qualities are repulsive: there is no true femininity in her, which, in my opinion, implies warmth, sincerity, sacrifice.

Both Tolstoy and Kuprin are unanimous in their opinion that a woman should remain a woman. Many writers transferred the character traits of their loved ones to the images of the main heroines of their works. I think that is why the image of a woman in Russian literature is so striking in its brightness, originality, strength of emotional experience.

Beloved women have always served as a source of inspiration for men. Everyone has their own female ideal, but at all times the representatives of the stronger sex admired female devotion, the ability to sacrifice, patience.

A true woman will forever remain inextricably linked with family, children, home.

And men will not cease to be amazed at women's whims, to seek explanations for women's actions, to fight for women's love.

FEMALE IMAGES IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE (III option)

For the first time, a bright female image in the center of the work appeared in Karamzin's "Poor Liza". Before that, female images, of course, were present in the works, but their inner world was not given enough attention. And it is natural that the female image for the first time clearly manifested itself in sentimentalism, because sentimentalism is an image of feelings, and a woman is always full of emotions and is characterized by the manifestation of feelings.

The female image and its image changed with the development of literature. It was different in different directions of literature, but as literature developed and psychologism deepened - the psychologically female image, like all images, became more complex and the inner world became more significant. If in medieval novels the ideal of the female image is a noble virtuous beauty and that's all, in realism the ideal becomes more complicated, and the inner world of a woman takes on a significant role.

The female image is most clearly manifested in love, jealousy, passion; and in order to more vividly express the ideal of the female image, the author often puts a woman in conditions where she fully expresses her feelings, but, of course, not only to portray the ideal, although this also plays a role.

A woman's feelings determine her inner world, and often, if a woman’s inner world is ideal for the author, he uses a woman as an indicator, i.e. her attitude to this or that hero corresponds to the attitude of the author.

Often, through the ideal of a woman in a novel, a person is “purified” and “reborn”, as, for example, in FM Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”.

The development of the ideal of the female image in Russian literature can be traced back to the works of the 19th century.

In my essay, I want to consider the ideal of the female image of the 1st half of the 19th century, in Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin" - Tatyana Larina and the ideal of the 2nd half of the 19th century, in the novel by Leo Tolstoy "War and Peace" - to Train Rostov ...

What is Pushkin's ideal in general? Of course, this is the harmony of the human soul and just harmony. At the beginning of his work, Pushkin wrote the poem "The Beauty Who Smelled Tobacco", which in a joking manner depicts the problem that Pushkin faces in the future - the lack of harmony.

Of course, the ideal of the female image for Pushkin is, first of all, a harmonious woman, calm and close to nature. In the novel "Eugene Onegin", of course, this is Tatyana Larina.

Leo Tolstoy's ideal is a natural life and a person who lives a natural life. Natural life is life in all its manifestations, with all the natural feelings inherent in man - love, hate, friendship. And of course, the ideal of the female image in the novel War and Peace is Natasha Rostova. She is natural, and this naturalness is contained in her from birth.

If you look at the appearance of Natasha and Tatiana, they seem completely different.

Pushkin describes Tatyana as follows.

So, she was called Tatiana.
Not her sister's beauty.
Not the freshness of her ruddy.
She would not have attracted the eyes.
Dika, sad, silent.
As a forest doe is fearful,
She is in her own family.

She seemed like a stranger to a girl.
She did not know how to caress
To his father, nor to his mother;
Child herself, in a crowd of children
I didn't want to play and jump.
And often all day alone
She sat silently by the window.

The complete opposite of Tatyana is a lively, cheerful Natasha: “Black-eyed, with a big mouth, an ugly, but lively girl ...” And Natasha’s relations with relatives are completely different: “Having turned away from her father, she (Natasha) ran to her mother and, not paying any attention to her stern remark, hid her flushed face in the lace of her mother's mantilla and laughed (...), she fell on her mother and burst out laughing so loudly and loudly that everyone, even the prim guest, laughed against her will ”. Different families, characters, relationships, appearance ... What can be in common between Tatyana and Natasha?

But the most important thing is that both Tatiana and Natasha are both Russian souls. Tatyana spoke and wrote poorly in Russian, read foreign literature, but still:

Tatiana (Russian soul),
Without knowing why,
With her cold beauty
She loved the Russian winter.

About Natasha, Tolstoy writes: “Where, how, when she sucked into herself from the Russian air that she breathed - this decanter, brought up by an emigrant Frenchwoman, this spirit, where did she get these techniques that should have long ago supplanted education? But the spirit and the methods were the same, inimitable, unstudied, Russian, which her uncle had expected from her ”. This Russian spirit is embedded in Natasha and Tatyana, and therefore they are harmonious.

Both Natasha and Tatiana yearn for love. And when Prince Andrey began to visit the Rostovs after the ball, it seemed to Natasha, “that even when she first saw Prince Andrey in Otradnoye, she fell in love with him. She seemed to be frightened by this strange, unexpected happiness that the one whom she had chosen back then (she was firmly convinced of this), that he met her again, and, it seems, was not indifferent to her. " Tatyana has:

Tatiana listened with annoyance
Such gossip, but secretly
With inexplicable joy
I involuntarily thought about:
And thought was born in the heart;
The time has come, she fell in love. (...)
(...) Long sincere heartache
Her young breasts were pressed against her;
The soul was waiting ... for someone.
And she waited ... Eyes were opened;
She said: it's him!

Natasha wanted to be noticed, to be chosen to dance at the ball; and when Prince Andrew “chooses” her, Natasha decides that she herself chose him and fell in love at first sight. Natasha really wants it to be true love.

Tatiana also chooses Onegin purely intuitively: she saw him only once before she decided that she was in love.

Although both Natasha and Tatyana were waiting for “someone”, nevertheless, in my opinion, Natasha wanted to love and be loved, and Tatyana only wanted to love. And Natasha decides that she loves the one with whom she is already loved; and Tatiana, completely not knowing Onegin, not knowing his feelings, fell in love with him.

Natasha and Tatiana wanted to be happy, and, of course, they want to know what the future holds for them. Both girls are fortune-telling at Christmas time; but neither Tatyana nor Natasha saw anything in the mirror when they were guessing, and both were afraid to guess in the bathhouse. Natasha is very surprised that she does not see anything in the mirror, but believes that she is to blame. Tatiana tries all fortune-telling: one after another, but none of them portends her happiness. For Natasha, fortune-telling did not bode well either. Of course, what Sonya invented, looking in the mirror, seemed possible and true to Natasha. When a person loves, he naturally tries to find out what will be, whether he will be happy; so are Natasha and Tatiana.

It is characteristic that when both heroines find themselves in almost the same situation, they behave differently. After Onegin, having rejected Tatyana's love, leaves, Tatyana cannot live as before:

And alone cruel
Stronger her passion burns,
And about Onegin distant
Her heart speaks louder.

As for Natasha, at a time when Prince Andrew is leaving for his father, and Natasha decides that he has abandoned her, then: “The next day after this conversation, Natasha put on that old dress, which she was especially aware of for the one delivered to him in the morning gaiety, and in the morning she began her old way of life, from which she lagged behind after the ball. " Of course, Natasha was worried and waited for Prince Andrei, but this state is not always characteristic of such a lively and cheerful Natasha.

It is characteristic of both girls that they love not an ideal at all, but a real person. Tatiana, when she, after spending many hours in Onegin's "cell", realized what he really was, she did not stop loving him. Natasha knew Pierre for a long time and quite well, but still she loved him, and not some ideal.

It is interesting that Natasha, being married, does not occupy any place in secular society. And Tatyana, who could have stayed only in the village, becomes a real secular lady. And although they both remain harmonious in their souls, Natasha also lives happily. And Tatiana:

How Tatiana has changed!
How firmly she entered her role!
Like an oppressive dignity
Accepted receptions soon!
Who would dare to look for a gentle girl
In this stately, in this careless
Legislator Hall?

Natasha also changed, but she became a woman completely opposite to Tatyana. Natasha melted into her family, and she didn't just have time for social events. It is possible that if Tatyana found her happiness in the family, she would not be so famous in society either.

In my opinion, the situation most clearly characterizes the heroines is when they understand that they love one person, but are connected with another. This is how Tatyana, being married, meets Onegin; and when Onegin confesses his love to her, she says:

I love you (why dissemble?),
But I am given to another;
And I will be faithful to him forever.

As for Natasha, after the engagement with Prince Andrey, she meets Anatol Kuragin and decides that she is in love and succumbs to his persuasion to flee with him. Since Natasha is natural from birth, she cannot love one person and be the bride of another. For her, it is so natural that a person can love and stop loving.

For Tatyana, it is impossible to destroy the marriage, because this would destroy her spiritual harmony.

What are the similarities between Natasha and Tatiana?

They are both harmonious, close to nature and love nature, they have a Russian soul, and they both wanted to love, and, of course, they are natural in their own way.

Tatyana cannot be as natural as Natasha, she has her own moral foundations, the violation of which will lead to a violation of harmony in her soul.

For Natasha, the right thing is when she is happy, if she loves, then she should be with this person, and this is natural.

As a result, the ideals of the female image of Tolstoy and Pushkin are different, although they intersect.

For Tolstoy's ideal, it is very important to find your place in life and live a natural life, but for this all the harmony of the human soul is also needed.

Pushkin's ideal must be harmonious; harmony of the soul is the main thing, and you can live a natural life without harmony of the soul (for example, the parents of Tatiana Larina).

The ideal of the female image ... How many of them have already been and there will be more. But ideals are not repeated in works of genius, they only intersect or are completely opposite.

FEMALE IMAGES IN THE WORKS OF A. S. PUSHKIN AND L. N. TOLSTOY

Russian women ... When you hear these words, extraordinary images emerge from the novels of A.S. Pushkin, I.S. Turgenev, L.N. Tolstoy. And it is not at all necessary that they perform feats. The heroines of Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy are unusually sweet and attractive. They are all strong and remarkable in their spiritual qualities. They know how to love and hate in full force, without reservations. They are strong, whole individuals.

The image of Tatyana Larina, as the main heroine of Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin", is the most perfect among the other female characters of the novel.

A great influence on Tatyana and the formation of her character was exerted by the impressions of her native nature and her closeness to the nanny Filipyevna. The parents and the community of local nobles that surrounded the Larin family in the village did not have a significant impact on her. Pushkin pays special attention to Tatiana's participation in Christmas divination, which was part of the Russian folk life of that time:

Tatiana believed in legends
Common folk antiquity.
And dreams, and card fortune-telling,
And the predictions of the moon.

Tatiana not only understands Russian folk speech well, but she herself uses elements of vernacular in her speech: "I feel sick", "What do I need?"

One should not deny the usual at that time and in that environment, influences of an alien nature (French, Western novels). But they also enrich Tatyana's personality, find echoes in her heart, and the French language gives her the opportunity to convey her feelings most strongly, which, as I see it, corresponds to Pushkin's attitude towards foreign culture as a culture that contributes to the enrichment of Russian. But it does not drown out the national basis, but reveals and makes it possible for the primordially Russian to open up. Perhaps that is why Pushkin emphasizes the national basis of the character of the heroine, “the Russian soul”. This is the basis of his love for her, which shines through throughout the story and does not allow a single drop of irony on the part of the author.

In relation to Onegin, the main features of Tatyana's personality are revealed with the greatest completeness. She writes and sends a letter - a declaration of love. This is a bold step, completely unacceptable from the point of view of morality. But Tatiana is “an exceptional being”. Falling in love with Onegin, she obeys only her feelings. She speaks about her love immediately, without any tricks and decorations. It is impossible to find another beginning of the letter that would express with such immediacy what these words say:

I am writing to you - what more?
What else can I say?

In this letter, she reveals to Onegin all her “trusting soul”.

Unrequited love for Onegin, the duel and death of Lensky, the departure of Onegin - Tatiana deeply experiences all these events. A dreamy, enthusiastic girl turns into a woman seriously pondering over life.

In the last chapter of the novel, Tatiana is a secular woman, but inside she remains the same. And she rejects Onegin not because she does not love, but because she does not want to betray herself, her views, her high understanding of the word "loyalty."

But along with such female images, there are others. To highlight them, the authors show other women who are far inferior to them in moral and spiritual qualities.

The complete opposite of Tatiana is her sister Olga. Despite the same upbringing and the environment surrounding the Larins sisters, they grew up very different. Olga is careless and windy. And Onegin, a connoisseur of the female soul, gives her the following description:

Olga has no life in her features.
Just like in the Madonna of Vendice ...

She does not seem to notice Lensky's feelings. And even in the last hours before the duel, he dreams of Olga's loyalty. But he is greatly mistaken in the sincerity of her feelings for him. She quickly forgets him after meeting the young lancer she is marrying.

There are many more heroines in Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace. And for Tolstoy, inner and outer beauty is important in them.

Like Tatyana Larina, Natasha Rostova is a whole person. She is very far from intellectual life, lives only by feelings, sometimes she makes mistakes, sometimes logic refuses her. She is naive, wants everyone to be happy, everyone is good.

We don't even know if she's smart or not. But that doesn't matter. Tolstoy shows that her dignity is not in her mind, but in something else. Tolstoy confronts her with Andrei Bolkonsky and Pierre Bezukhov (their favorite characters), and both fall in love with her. And this is no coincidence.

Natasha is Tolstoy's ideal woman, she is a reflection of Pushkin's Tatyana. At the end of the novel, she becomes what Tolstoy wants to see her. And the “female” is a praise for her, as it is a symbol of a caring mother. Down - good. Indeed, according to Tolstoy, a woman's vocation is family, children. Examples of the opposite are Anna Karenina, Helen Kuragina.

Helene is a secular beauty who grew up in society, unlike Tatyana, Natasha, Princess Marya. But it was the light that corrupted her, made her soulless. Tolstoy calls her entire family just that - “a soulless breed”. There is nothing behind her good looks. She gets married only because her husband has a lot of money. She is not interested in spiritual values, she does not admire the beauty of nature. Helen is an immoral and selfish woman.

Princess Marya Volkonskaya is another matter. She is very ugly, her gait is heavy, but Tolstoy immediately draws our attention to her beautiful radiant eyes. And the eyes are the “mirror of the soul”. And Princess Marya's soul is deep, primordially Russian, capable of sincere feelings. And this is what unites her with Natasha Rostova, with Tatyana Larina. Naturalness is important in them.

Tolstoy continues the traditions of Pushkin in revealing the human character in all its complexity, contradiction and diversity.

In the images of his heroines, Tolstoy pays great attention to their portrait. He usually emphasizes in them any detail, a line, persistently repeating it. And thanks to this, this person is engraved in the memory and is no longer forgotten.

It is also interesting that Helene almost always speaks only French, and Natasha and Marya resort to it only when they get into the atmosphere of high-society salons.

Smiles, glances, gestures and facial expressions perfectly convey the complex emotional experiences of Marya and Natasha, Helen's empty conversations.

As we can see, the beloved heroines of the works of AS Pushkin and LN Tolstoy are sincerely feeling, “natures are deep, loving, passionate”. One cannot help but admire such women, one cannot help but love them as sincerely as they love people, life, and the Fatherland.

TWO KATERINAS (Katerina Izmailova and Katerina Kabanova)

Terrible manners in our city, sir.

A. N. Ostrovsky

The history of numerous interpretations of "Lady Macbeth ..." by Leskov has a tendency to constant convergence of the images of Katerina Izmailova and Katerina Kabanova from Ostrovsky's drama The Thunderstorm. Moreover, this rapprochement occurs not on literary grounds, but in the context of the interpretation of the image of Katerina Dobrolyubov in his famous article "A ray of light in a dark kingdom." However, reading these works today, you hardly notice the similarities of these heroines. Of course, they are, but they are hardly significant. These are:

First: their habitat. The unhappy merchant life of the Russian hinterland;

Secondly: the heroines have the same names. They are both Catherine;

Third: each is unfaithful to her merchant husband;

Fourth: the suicide of the heroines;

Fifth: the geography of their death is the greatest and most Russian of the rivers - the Volga River.

And this is where not only the formal, but also the substantive similarity of both the heroines and the works in general ends. As for the portrait resemblance, here Ostrovsky does not say anything about the appearance of his Katerina, allowing the reader and viewer to conjecture the image themselves. It is only known that she is very beautiful. The portrait of Izmailova was drawn by Leskov in sufficient detail. He stores a large number of infernal signs. Here and black hair, and dark eyes, and unusual, superhuman strength, with a graceful and fragile physique. They both dislike their husbands. But betrayal for Katerina from The Storm is a moral crime, a deep personal drama. Izmailova is cheating on her husband out of boredom. I was bored for five years, on the sixth I decided to have fun. Ostrovsky lacks the main component of adultery - carnal, physiological passion. Katerina says to Boris: "If I had my own will, I would not go to you." Varvara understands this too. It is not for nothing that she whispers coldly afterwards: "I got it right!"

For Katerina Izmailova, an unreasonable Asian passion is the main content of the world. Katerina in "The Thunderstorm" personifies man's humility, his involvement in the fateful movements of fate.

Izmailova herself draws the lines of life. And what a simple Russian person can do in his freedom, Leskov knows very well: “He (this person) lets loose all his bestial simplicity, begins to be silly, to scoff at himself, at people, at feelings. Not particularly gentle, and without that, he becomes especially angry. " Katerina Kabanova cannot offend a living being. Her image is a bird flying away to the Volga region. She expects punishment and reckoning for imaginary and real sins. Watching the thunderstorm, she says to her husband: "Tisha, I know who she will kill." The image of imminent, inevitable death is always with her, and she always speaks and thinks about this. She is a truly tragic figure in the drama.

Izmailov Leskov cannot even think about repentance. Her passion swept away all moral notions and religious imperatives from her soul. Going to set up a samovar and kill a person are the same actions, but a mortal sin is an ordinary job. Katerina suffers from Ostrovsky. Her painful life seems to be weighed down by a primordial, primordial fall. And before her betrayal, she tests herself with deep metaphysical doubts. Here she shares her thoughts about death with Varvara. She is scared not to die, she is scared that "death will find you with all your sins, with all the evil thoughts."

And her suicide is not a crime. She, like a bird from the New Testament parable, flew away to the beautiful, paradise lands of the Trans-Volga region. "Good for you, Katya!" - says Tikhon over the corpse of his wife. We will not find anything like this in the image of Izmailova. Where there is no depth of thought, the depth of feeling is impossible. After three atrocities, Katerina kills herself, not out of repentance, but for another murder. Nothing Christian, nothing evangelical - no humility, no forgiveness.

And yet now, a century later, when the social layer described by the authors has slipped into historical oblivion, the images of these women seem to be reflected in each other's rays. And the abyss hidden behind them does not seem so fatal, attracting the eyes of the modern reader and viewer.

THE THEME OF LOVE IN THE WORKS OF I. S. TURGENEV AND F. M. DOSTOEVSKY

The theme of love in the novels of the second half of the 19th century is one of the leading: almost all authors touch on it in one way or another, but each has his own attitude to this problem. The difference in perceptions can be explained by the fact that each author, being first of all a person, has met different manifestations of this feeling throughout his life. Here we can assume that F.M.Dostoevsky (the first author whose work we will consider), being a tragic personality, considers love from the position of suffering: love for him is almost always associated with torment.

Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky, as a great master psychologist, described people, their thoughts and experiences in a "vortex" stream; his characters are constantly in dynamic development. He chose the moments of the most tragic, the most significant. Hence the universal, universal problem of love, which his heroes are trying to solve. Rodion Raskolnikov, having committed the murder, “cut himself off with scissors” from people. Violation of one commandment (Thou shalt not kill) entailed ignoring all the others, therefore, he could not “love his neighbor as himself,” since he is special, he is a sovereign.

In the opinion of Sonechka, this holy and righteous sinner, it is precisely the lack of love for one's neighbor (Raskolnikov calls humanity an “anthill,” “a trembling creature”) that is its principal cause of sin. This is the difference between them: his sin is a confirmation of his “exclusivity”, his greatness, his power over every louse (be it mother, Dunya, Sonya), her sin is a sacrifice in the name of love for her relatives: to her father- a drunkard, a consumptive stepmother, her children, whom Sonya loves more than her pride, more than her pride, more than life, finally. His sin is the destruction of life, hers is the salvation of life.

At first, Raskolnikov hates Sonya, since he sees that he, the Sovereign and “God”, loves this little downtrodden creature, despite everything, loves and regrets (things are interconnected) - this fact strikes a powerful blow to his invented theory. Moreover, the love of his mother for him, his son, also, in spite of everything, “torments him”, Pulcheria Alexandrovna constantly makes sacrifices for the sake of “beloved Rodenka”.

Dunya's sacrifice is agonizing for him, her love for her brother is another step to refutation, to the collapse of his theory.

What is the attitude of other heroes of "Crime and Punishment" to the problem of "love for one's neighbor." PP Luzhin, as Raskolnikov's double, fully agrees with the provisions of the theory of "man-god". His opinion is clearly expressed in the following words: "Science says: love, first of all, yourself, for everything in the world is based on personal interest."

Another double - Svidrigailov, this "voluptuous spider", until the last moment, piously believed in the absence of love at all. But the moment has come: a sudden love for Duna leads this person, devastated by voluptuousness, to complete ruin; the result is death. This is the relationship of Svidrigailov and Luzhin with the theme of love in the novel.

What is the final position of Raskolnikov? Much later, in hard labor, Rodion Romanovich will free himself from hatred for Sonya, he will appreciate her mercy to him, he will be able to understand all the sacrifices that were made for him and for all of them; he will love Sonya. As a terrible infection he will perceive the pride that has filled many hearts, he will find God anew, and through him and through his sacrifice - love for all.

A truly universal, universal perception of love - this is the distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky and his heroes.

Thus, speaking of the difference between the perception of love by Dostoevsky and Turgenev, one must first of all bear in mind the scale.

In the image of Bazarov, we can see all the same pride as in the image of Raskolnikov. But his views do not have such an absolute relationship with the events taking place. He influences others, but his views do not lead to specific disregard for moral and ethical laws. All action is not outside of him: he commits crimes within himself. Hence his tragedy is not universal, but purely personal. This is practically where the differences end (the differences are fundamental on this issue). The similarities remain: what are they?

Bazarov, like the hero of Crime and Punishment, had a “theory of its own kind” - nihilistic views that were fashionable at that time. Like Raskolnikov, Eugene became proud, inventing the absence of any norms, any principles, piously believing that he was right.

But, according to Turgenev, this is only a purely personal delusion: in other words, his views do not lead to any serious consequences for those around him.

He lives practically without breaking the basic commandments. Nevertheless, when a meeting with Odintsova makes E.V. Bazarov believe in the existence of love, thereby admitting the wrongness of his beliefs, Bazarov, in the author's opinion, must die.

Here we can say about one more difference between the two classics - this time the differences are that Dostoevsky, with his “dirt” and torment, gives vent to his hero; at the same time, Turgenev, this poet, does not forgive his “beloved hero” the elementary delusion of youth and denies the right to life. Hence Bazarov's love for Anna Sergeevna is only a step towards devastation and death.

In the tragedy of the finale, Bazarov is somewhat similar to Svidrigailov: at first they both perceived love as sensuality. But there is also a huge difference between them: realizing the incorrectness of their ideas, one dies, and this is explained by all the terrible evil that he committed, the other is an absolutely normal person, and love could show him a new right path. But, according to Turgenev, the most natural outcome is to bury your hero in the grave, with all his experiences, with the newly born storm of thoughts and doubts.

From all of the above, we can conclude: the main similarity in views of love is the portrayal of it as a means by which the author shows the delusions of the heroes. The difference lies in the positions in which the heroes are given: the moral quest of the murderer in Crime and Punishment and the moral quest of an absolutely normal person in Fathers and Children.

THE MOTIF OF UNHAPPY LOVE IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE XIX CENTURY

One of the most important themes in many 19th century novels is the theme of love. As a rule, it is the core of the entire work, around which all events take place. Love is the cause of various conflicts, the development of the storyline. It is feelings that rule events, life, the world; because of them, a person performs this or that action, and it does not matter - whether it is love for oneself or another person. It happens that the hero commits a crime or commits some immoral act, motivating his actions with passionate love and jealousy, but, as a rule, such feelings are false and destructive.

There is different love between different characters, it cannot be said that it is one and the same, but it is possible to determine its main directions, which will be common.

Doomed love, tragic This is the love of “extremes”. It captures either the strong or the fallen. For example, Bazarov. He never thought about true love, but when he met Anna Sergeevna Odintsova, he realized what it was. Having fallen in love with her, he saw the world from a different angle: everything that seemed insignificant turns out to be important and significant; life becomes something mysterious; nature attracts and is a particle of man himself, lives inside him. From the very beginning, it is clear that the love of Bazarov and Odintsova is doomed. These two passionate and strong natures cannot love each other, they cannot create a family. Anna Sergeevna Odintsova understands this and partly because of this refuses Bazarov, although she loves him no less than he loves her. Odintsova proves this by visiting him in the village when Bazarov is dying. She does not love him, why do that? And if so, then the news of his illness shook the soul, and Bazarov is not indifferent to Anna Sergeevna. This love ends in nothing: Bazarov dies, and Anna Sergeevna Odintsova remains to live as she did before, but this is a fatal love, because it is partly destroying Bazarov. Another example of tragic love is the love of Sonya and Nikolai (“War and Peace”). Sonya was madly in love with Nikolai, but he constantly hesitated: he thought he loved her, then he didn't. This love was incomplete and could not be otherwise, since Sonya is a fallen woman, she is one of those people who are not able to start a family and are doomed to live “on the edge of someone else's nest” (and it happened). In fact, Nikolai never loved Sonya, he only wanted to love her, it was a deception. When real feelings awakened in him, he immediately understood it. Only when he saw Marya, Nikolai fell in love. He felt like he had never before with Sonya or with someone else. This is where true love was. Of course, Nikolai had some feelings for Sonya, but it was only pity and a memory of the old days. He knew that Sonya loved and loved him truly and, understanding her, he could not strike such a strong blow - to reject their friendship. Nikolai did everything to mitigate her misfortune, but nevertheless Sonya was unhappy. This love (of Nikolai and Sonya) caused unbearable pain to Sonya, ending not as she expected; and opened my eyes to Nikolai, making it clear what are false and what are real feelings, and helped to understand myself.

The most tragic love of Katerina and Boris ("The Thunderstorm"). She was doomed from the start. Katerina is a young girl, kind, naive, but with an unusually strong character. She did not have time to find out true love, as she was married to a rude, boring Tikhon. Katerina sought to know the world, she was absolutely interested in everything, so it is not surprising that she was immediately drawn to Boris. He was young, handsome. He was a man from another world, with different interests, new ideas. Boris and Katerina immediately noticed each other, since both stood out from the gray homogeneous mass of people in the city of Kalinov. The inhabitants of the city were boring, monotonous, lived with old values, the laws of "Domostroi", false faith and debauchery. Katerina was so eager to know true love and, only by touching it, she died, this love ended before it could begin.

WHAT IS LOVE? (Based on the works of Russian literature of the XIX century)

In the second half of the 19th century, many works of a wide variety of genres were written in Russia: novels, stories, and plays. In many (especially classical) works, an important role is played by a love conflict, “It was just such a time,” we might think. But no, this is not so - in fact, love and happiness are, one might say, “eternal” themes that worried people in ancient times, passed through the centuries and excite writers to this day. To the question "what is love?" it is impossible to answer unequivocally: everyone understands it in their own way. There are many points of view on this score, and their amazing variety can be traced on the example of only two works, for example, "Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky and "Fathers and Children" by Turgenev.

In "Crime and Punishment" one of the minor characters is Svidrigailov - a scoundrel, a sharpie, a vicious person who has committed many atrocities. He is the embodiment of lust. On the night before suicide, pictures of the past appear to him. One of the recollections is the corpse of a fourteen-year-old drowned girl: “she was only fourteen years old, but it was already a broken heart, and it ruined itself, offended by the insult, which horrified and surprised this young child's consciousness ... who pulled out the last cry of despair, not heard, but one who was impudently mocked in the dark night, in the darkness, in the cold, in the damp thaw, when the wind howled. " Voluptuousness and lust - these are the feelings that overwhelmed Svidrigailov while committing violence. Can these feelings be called love? From the point of view of the author, no. He believes that love is self-sacrifice, embodied in the image of Sonya, Dunya, mother - after all, it is important for the author to show not only the love of a woman and a man, but also the love of a mother for her son, brother for sister (sister for brother).

Dunya agrees to marry Luzhin for the sake of her brother, and the mother understands perfectly well that she is sacrificing her daughter for the sake of her firstborn. Dunya hesitated for a long time before making a decision, but in the end she made up her mind: “... before making a decision, Dunya did not sleep all night, and, believing that I was already asleep, got out of bed and walked all night and forward across the room, finally knelt down and prayed long and fervently in front of the icon, and in the morning she announced to me that she had made up her mind. "

Sonia immediately, without hesitation, agrees to give all of herself, all her love to Raskolnikov, to sacrifice herself for the well-being of her beloved: "Come to me, I will put a cross on you, pray and go." Sonya happily agrees to follow Raskolnikov anywhere, to accompany him everywhere. “He met her restless and painfully caring look on him ...” - here is Sonin's love, all her dedication.

Another love that cannot be ignored is love for God, the echo of which runs through the entire work. We cannot imagine Sonya without her love for God, without religion. "What would I be without God?" - Sonya is perplexed. Indeed, religion is the only consolation for the “humiliated and insulted” in their poverty, which is why moral purity is so important for them ...

As for another understanding of love, in order to see it, we will have to analyze another work - for example, "Fathers and Sons" by I. S. Turgenev. In this novel, the conflict between "fathers" and "children" encompasses all aspects of life, views, beliefs. A person's worldview subconsciously guides his actions and feelings, and if for Arkady, by virtue of his principles, family happiness, a prosperous, calm life is possible, then for Bazarov it is not.

It is worth remembering the views of Turgenev himself about love, happiness. He believes that happiness is harmony, and other feelings, experiences, violent emotions, jealousy are disharmony, which means that where love is passion, there can be no happiness.

Bazarov himself perfectly understands the dissimilarity of their natures with Arkady. He says to the young man: “You are not created for our bitter, tart, mongrel life ...” His comparison of Arkady with a jackdaw is very appropriate: “Here you are! - study! Jackdaw is the most respectable family bird. An example for you! "

Although Arkady is a “son” by age, his worldview is clearly paternal, and Bazarov's nihilism is alien to him, fake. The ideal of his love is the same as that of Nikolai Petrovich - harmonious relationships, calm and long love until old age.

Bazarov is a completely different person. He comes from a different social environment, he has a completely different system of views from Arkady, and his experiences are much deeper. His convictions include the fact that love is "rubbish, unforgivable nonsense, and chivalrous feelings are ugliness, illness," but he himself has an "animal" passion for Anna Odintsova, but she turns out to be a cold woman, and a painful period in Bazarov's life begins: his postulates like “knocking out a wedge by a wedge” (this concerns women) are powerless, and he loses power over himself. His love - "a passion similar to malice and, perhaps, akin to it" - pours out for Bazarov in a genuine tragedy.

All these characters: Arkady, and Bazarov, and Sonya - differ from each other in worldview, outlook on life, and their love is also different.

Love-passion of Bazarov and love-happiness of Katya and Arkady, love-self-sacrifice of Sonya, Dunya, mother - how many semantic shades have been put by the authors in one single word - love! What different feelings can sometimes be expressed in one word! Each character has his own perception of the world, his ideals, which means that already on the basis of the subconscious, different people have different sensations. Probably, in the world as there have not yet been two identical people, so love has never been repeated. And different writers, putting different meanings into this concept and depicting love in different forms, gradually come to the solution of one of the philosophical, “eternal” questions - stumbling blocks: “what is love? "

THE THEME OF LOVE IN THE RUSSIAN NOVEL OF THE II HALF OF THE XIX CENTURY (Based on the novels of I. A. Goncharov “Oblomov”, I. S. Turgenev “Fathers and Sons”, L. N. Tolstoy “War and Peace”) (I version)

I loved you....

The theme of love is traditional for world literature, in particular, for Russian literature it is one of the “eternal” ethical problems of our world. They say all the time that it is impossible to answer questions about concepts that cannot be defined: about life and death, love and hate, envy, indifference, etc. But, probably, unsolvable questions and tasks have a strange charm: they are like a magnet, attract people, their thoughts; therefore, many art workers tried to express in their work what is difficult to convey in words, music, paint on canvas, that which every person vaguely feels, and love takes a significant place in the life of people, in their world, and therefore in their creations ...

In Leo Tolstoy's novel War and Peace, the author creates several plot lines related to the theme of love. But the most striking among them is the storyline of the love of Prince Andrei Bolkonsky and Natasha Rostova. There are many opinions about their relationship: someone says that Natasha did not love Prince Andrei, proving this by the fact that she cheated on him with Anatol Kuragin; someone says that Prince Andrey did not love Natasha, since he could not forgive her, and someone says that in literature there are few examples of such high love. And it seems to me that this was probably the strangest love that I read about in Russian literature at the end of the 19th century. I am sure that they were created for each other: how Natasha felt the night in Otradnoye (“After all, such a lovely night has never, never happened ... So I would have squatted down, grabbed myself under my knees ... and flew away. .. "), so Prince Andrew saw the sky over Austerlitz (" ... Everything is empty, everything is deception, except for this endless sky ... there is nothing but silence, tranquility ... "); as Natasha was waiting for the arrival of Prince Andrei, so he wanted to return to her ... But on the other hand, what could have happened if they had got married? At the end of the novel, Natasha becomes a “female” - a woman who only cares about her family; Before the war, Prince Andrey wanted to become a good master in his village Bogucharovo; so maybe it would be a great couple. But then they would have lost the main thing that, in my opinion, was in them: their restless striving for something distant and strange, their search for spiritual happiness. For someone, the life of Pierre and Natasha after the wedding, the life of Olga Ilyinskaya and Andrei Stolz, etc., may be ideal - everything is very calm and measured, rare misunderstandings do not spoil the relationship; But won't such a life become the second variant of Oblomovism? Oblomov is lying on the couch. His friend Stolz comes to him and introduces him to the charming girl Olga Ilyinskaya, who sings in such a way that Oblomov is crying with happiness. Time passes, and Oblomov realizes that he is in love. What is he dreaming about? To rebuild the estate, sit under the trees in the garden, listen to the birds and see Olga, surrounded by children, leave the house and head towards him ... In my opinion, this is very similar to what Andrei Stolts and Olga Ilyinskaya, Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova, Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya, Arkady and Katya in the novel by I. S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons". It seems that this is some kind of strange irony: Natasha, who was madly in love with Prince Andrei, Princess Marya, agitated by romantic dreams before meeting with Anatol Kuragin, Nikolai Rostov, who performed a noble deed on the model of medieval knights (the princess's departure from the estate) - all these strong and unusual personalities end up at the same conclusion - a happy family life in a distant estate. There is a similar storyline in Ivan Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons" - Arkady's love for Katya Odintsova. Meeting, hobbies of Arkady Anna Sergeevna, Katya's wonderful singing, wedding and ... life on the estate of Arkady. One could say that everything is returning to normal. But in the novel "Fathers and Sons" there is another storyline - this is Bazarov's love for Anna Sergeevna Odintsova, it seems to me, even more beautiful than the love of Prince Andrei and Natasha Rostova. At the beginning of the novel, Bazarov believes that “Raphael is not worth a dime”, denies art and poetry, thinks that “in this atom, at this mathematical point [he himself], the blood turns, thought works, wants something too ... What a disgrace! What a nonsense! ” - Bazarov is a person who calmly denies everything. But he falls in love with Madame Odintsov and tells her: “I love you stupidly, madly,” - Turgenev shows how “passion beat strong and heavy in him - a passion similar to malice, and perhaps akin to it ...” However their fate did not work out, perhaps because they met too late, when Madame Odintsova had already come to the conviction that "calm is still the best." The idea of ​​a quiet life is present to varying degrees in many novels of Russian literature and in different storylines. This is not only Oblomov, who does not want to get up from his couch, but also the Bergi and the Rostov family, where they do not like to deviate from traditions, and the Bolkonsky family, where life moves according to the once established order. Because of his love of peace, his unwillingness to quarrel with his son, Nikolai Petrovich did not immediately marry Fenechka (one of the secondary storylines of the novel "Fathers and Sons").

However, it would be wrong to associate the theme of love only with the relationship between men and women. The old Countess of Rostov and Prince Nikolai Bolkonsky love their children, and the children love their parents (Arkady, Bazarov, Natasha, Princess Marya, etc.). There is also love for the homeland (Prince Andrei, Kutuzov), for nature (Natasha, Arkady, Nikolai Petrovich), etc. Probably, it is impossible to say firmly that someone loves someone, since only the author knew this exactly, to Moreover, in the complex characters of the heroes, various feelings struggle, and therefore one can only conventionally say that this or that expression (words) is true in relation to any hero. In any case, I think that as long as people live, they will feel: love, rejoice, sadness, be indifferent - and they will always try to understand what is happening to them, and try to explain it in words, so the theme of feelings and love will always be present in art.

THE THEME OF LOVE IN THE RUSSIAN NOVEL OF THE II HALF OF THE XIX CENTURY (Based on the novels of I. A. Goncharov “Oblomov”, I. S. Turgenev “Fathers and Sons”, L. N. Tolstoy “War and Peace”) (version II)

From ancient times to the present day, nothing excites the minds of writers and poets like the theme of love. She is one of the key in the entire world of fiction. However, despite the fact that in most books there is a love intrigue, each time the author finds some new twist on this topic, because until now love is one of those concepts that a person cannot describe with a standard phrase or definition. As in a landscape - the lighting or the season changes and perception changes, so in the theme of love: a new writer appears, and with him other heroes, and the problem appears before him in a different guise.

In many works, the theme of love is closely related to the basis of the plot and conflict, serves as a means of revealing the character of the main characters.

In the novels of Russian classics of the second half of the 19th century, the love theme is not the main one, but at the same time it plays one of the important roles in the works. As one of the famous English writers A. Christie said already in the XX century, “the one who never loved anyone, never lived”, and Russian prose writers, not yet knowing this phrase, but unconditionally understanding that in the life of every person there is love something that helps to most fully reveal his inner world and the main character traits, of course, could not help but refer to this topic.

In the works of the 19th century, echoes of the previous era of “romantic” love are heard: Oblomov can be called a romantic: the symbol of their love with Olga is a branch of lilac, which was once plucked by a girl while walking in the garden. Over the entire time of their relationship, Oblomov often mentally returns to this flower in a conversation, and often the minutes of love that leave and never return, he compares with a faded lilac. The feelings of the other couple - Arkady and Katya from "Fathers and Children" can only be called romantic. There is no suffering, no torment, only pure, light, serene love, which in the future will turn into the same pleasant and calm family life, with a bunch of children, common dinners and big holidays with friends and relatives. They can be called an ideal family: the spouses live in mutual understanding and boundless love, about such a life the hero of another work, Oblomov, dreams of. His idealistic reflections echoed those of Nikolai Rostov about his wife and marriage: “... a white hood, a wife at a samovar, a wife's carriage, children ...” - these ideas about the future gave him pleasure. However, such pictures are not destined to come true (at least for those heroes who dream about it), they have no place in the real world. But the fact that there is no idyll, as Nikolai and Oblomov imagine it, does not mean that there is no happy family life in the world: each of these writers in their works draws pictures of an ideal married couple: Pierre Bezukhov and Natasha Rostova, Marya Volkonskaya and Nikolai Rostov , Stolz and Olga Ilyinskaya, Arkady and Katya. Harmony and mutual understanding based on love and devotion reign in these families.

But, of course, reading these works, one cannot speak only about the happy side of love: there is suffering, and torment, and heavy passion, and unrequited love.

The theme of love suffering is most closely associated with the protagonist of Fathers and Children, Yevgeny Bazarov. His feeling is a heavy, all-consuming passion for a woman who is not able to love him, the thought of her does not leave Bazarov until his death, and until the last minutes love remains in him. He resists the feeling, because this is what Bazarov considers romance and nonsense, but he cannot fight it.

Suffering is brought not only by unrequited love, but also by the understanding that happiness with the person you love and loved yourself is impossible. Sonechka put her whole life on the card of her love for Nikolai, but she is a "barren flower", and she is not destined to start a family, the girl is poor, her happiness with Rostov is at first prevented by the countess, and later Nikolai meets a being that was higher than Sonya and even himself - Marya Volkonskaya, falls in love with her and, realizing that he is loved, marries. Sonia, of course, is very worried, her heart will always belong only to Nikolai Rostov, but she is unable to do anything.

But Natasha Rostova experiences incomparably greater grief in depth and meaning: first, when, due to her passion for Kuragin, she parted with Prince Andrei, the man she loved for the first time in her life, then when she lost him for the second time due to the death of Bolkonsky. For the first time, her suffering is aggravated by the fact that she realizes that she lost her fiancé only through her own fault; the break with Bolkonsky leads Natasha to a deep mental crisis. Natasha's life is a series of trials, through which she came to her ideal - to family life, which is based on the same strong connection as her soul and body.

On the example of Rostova Tolstoy, one of the few writers, traces the path of development of love from childhood love and flirting to something solid, fundamental, eternal. Like Tolstoy, Goncharov draws different stages of Olga Ilyinskaya's love, but the difference between these two heroines is that Natasha is able to really love more than once (and she has no doubt that this may be abnormal), because the essence of her life is love - to Boris, mother, Andrei, brothers, Pierre, while Olga is tormented, thinking that her feelings for Oblomov were genuine, but if so, what does she feel for Stolz? .. If Olga fell in love after Oblomov, then for many other heroes of Russian literature this feeling arises only once in a lifetime: for example, Marya Volkonskaya at first glance understood that Nikolai was the only one for her, and Anna Sergeevna Odintsova remained forever in Bazarov's memory.

Important in revealing the theme of love is how people change under its influence, how they pass the “test of love”. In the psychological novel by I. A. Goncharov “Oblomov” the influence of feelings on the protagonist could not be ignored. Olga wants to change her lover, pull him out of “Oblomovism”, prevent him from falling, she makes him do what was not typical of Oblomov before: get up early, walk, climb mountains, but he does not pass the test of love, nothing can change him, and Olga's hands give up, she knows that; there are sprouts of beauty in him, but he is mired in the usual “Oblomov way of life”.

Love is many-sided and multifaceted, beautiful in all its manifestations, but not many Russian writers of the second half of the 19th century were “researchers of love,” with the exception of Goncharov. Basically, the theme of love was presented as a material on the basis of which one can build the character of the heroes, although, meanwhile, this does not prevent the writers from revealing this topic from different angles and admiring the romantic feelings of the heroes and empathizing with their sufferings.

MOTIVES OF KNIGHT'S SERVICE TO WOMAN IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE (I option)

First, I would like to reveal the concept of "chivalry". A knight is not necessarily a man in armor and with a sword, sitting on a horse and fighting monsters or enemies. A knight is a person who forgets himself in the name of something, a person who is disinterested and honest. Speaking of knightly service to a woman, we mean a person who is ready to sacrifice for her, the one and only.

The most striking example of this, in my opinion, would be Pavel Petrovich - the hero of Ivan Turgenev's novel "Fathers and Sons".

He was a hereditary nobleman, brilliantly educated, who, like many representatives of his social circle, had high moral qualities. A brilliant career awaited him, as he had extraordinary abilities. Nothing foreshadowed failure. But he met Princess R., as the author called her. At first, she, too, treated him favorably, but then ... Princess R. broke Pavel Petrovich's heart, but he did not, in word or deed, want to offend her or take revenge on her. He, like a real knight, set off in pursuit of his beloved, sacrificing his career. Not every person is capable of this. Therefore, we can safely say that Pavel Petrovich is a representative of a wonderful galaxy of knights in Russian literature.

I would like to mention one more knight. Chatsky, the hero of AS Griboyedov's comedy "Woe from Wit," loved Sophia so much that, I think, he deserves this title. He sacrificed his feelings for the happiness of his beloved woman.

With this I would like to finish my essay. Much can be written about chivalry, but it is not interesting to read a lot of the same, the only thing I would like to add is the wish that there were more knights, because over the centuries they disappear, as we see.

Of course, I do not want to say that they have disappeared altogether, but for some reason there are very few of them, although this is strange in connection with the peculiar mentality of the Russian nation. In the Russians, it seems to me, chivalry should be inherent in the blood. Russians should be the same knights and dreamers like Lensky, who madly loved Olga and sacrificed his life for her.

MOTIVES OF KNIGHT'S SERVICE TO WOMAN IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE (II option)

Russian literature is very diverse. And one of these varieties is the direction in which, whether a writer or a poet, touches upon the themes of love and, in particular, the motives of chivalrous service to a woman.

Women are like flowers on ice. They adorn him and the life of everyone on earth. For example, A.S. Pushkin during his life met many women and loved many, both good and bad. And many of his poems and poems are dedicated to his beloved. And everywhere he speaks of them with warmth and elevates their beauty, both external and internal. All of them are beautiful for him, give him strength, energy, they, in most cases, are the source of his inspiration. It turns out that love is one of the main motives of chivalrous service to a woman. Love can change any person, and then he worships his chosen one, she will become an ideal for him, the meaning of life. Will this not entail a violent surge of emotions, will it not inspire a man to devote poetry or novels to his beloved? And no matter what the woman is, love will still prevail over the consciousness of the person whose heart will submit to her. Such an example is the Russian poet M. Yu. Lermontov. He fell in love many times, but very often his lovers did not reciprocate. Yes, he was very worried, but still this did not prevent him from dedicating his poems to them, written from a pure heart, albeit with a pain in his chest. For some, love is destructive, but for others it is the salvation of the soul. All this is confirmed again and again in the works of famous Russian writers and poets.

One of the main motives is nobility. Often it appears only after a person has fallen in love. This, of course, is good, but nobility should be shown in all cases. And it is not at all necessary to love a woman in order to treat her wisely. Some men cultivate this feeling in themselves from their youth, and it remains with them for life. Others do not recognize him at all. Let's look at an example. In Pushkin's novel "Eugene Onegin" the main character acted nobly with Tatiana. He did not take advantage of her feelings for him. He did not love Tatiana, but a sense of nobility was in his blood, and he would never have treated her disrespectfully. But in the case of Olga, he, of course, showed himself from the other side. And Lensky, Olga's admirer, could not resist, his pride was hurt, and he challenged Onegin to a duel. He acted nobly, trying to protect Olga's honor from such a playboy as Onegin. Pushkin's views are somewhat similar to those of his heroes. After all, he died only because rumors about his wife were spread. And his nobility did not allow him to remain silent in silence. So nobility is also one of the motives of chivalrous service to women in Russian literature.

Hatred of a woman and at the same time admiration for her beauty is another motive. Take, for example, M. Yu. Lermontov. As I already wrote, he was often rejected. And it was natural that in his soul a certain amount of hatred arose towards them. But, thanks to his admiration for them, he managed to overcome the barrier of anger and dedicated many of his poems to precisely those women, hatred for whom was mixed with admiration, maybe character, figure, face, soul, mind or something else.

Respect for a woman, as a mother, as a homemaker, is also a motive.

Women were and always will be the most beautiful and revered on earth, and men will always serve them chivalrously.

THE THEME OF A LITTLE MAN IN RUSSIAN LITERATURE OF THE XIX CENTURY

The theme of the little man is one of the traditional themes in Russian literature of the last two centuries. This topic first appeared in Russian literature in the 19th century (in “Poor Liza” by Karamzin). Probably, the reasons for this can be called the fact that the image of a small person is characteristic, first of all, of realism, and this artistic method finally took shape only in the 19th century. However, in my opinion, this topic could be relevant in any historical period, since it, among other things, involves a description of the relationship between man and power, and these relationships have existed since ancient times.

The next (after “Poor Liza”) significant work on this topic can be considered “The Station Keeper” by A. Pushkin. Although for Pushkin this was hardly a characteristic theme.

One of the maximum manifestations of the theme of the little man found in the work of N. V. Gogol, in particular in his story "The Overcoat". Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin (the protagonist of the story) is one of the most typical little people. This is an official, "not that very wonderful." He, a titular councilor, is extremely poor, even for a decent overcoat he has to save up for a long time, denying himself everything. The overcoat, obtained after such labors and torments, is soon taken away from him on the street. It would seem that there is a law that will protect him. But it turns out that no one can and does not want to help the robbed official, even those who would simply have to do it. Akaki Akakievich is absolutely defenseless, he has no prospects in his life - due to his low rank, he is completely dependent on his superiors, he will not be promoted in service (after all, he is an “eternal titular adviser”).

Gogol calls Bashmachkin “one official”, and Bashmachkin serves in “one department,” and he is the most ordinary person. All this allows us to say that Akaki Akakievich is an ordinary little man, hundreds of other officials are in his position. This position of a servant of power characterizes the power itself in a corresponding way. Power is heartless and ruthless.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's little man is shown as defenseless in his novel Crime and Punishment.

Here, like Gogol's, an official is represented as a small man - Marmeladov. This man was at the very bottom. For drunkenness he was kicked out of service, and after that nothing could stop him. He drank everything that he could drink, although he perfectly understood what he was driving his family to. He says about himself: "I have an animal image."

Of course, he is most to blame for his situation, but it is also noteworthy that no one wants to help him, everyone laughs at him, only a few are ready to help him (for example, Raskolnikov, who gives the last money to the Marmeladov family). The little man is surrounded by a soulless crowd. “For this I drink, that in this drink I seek compassion and feelings ...”, - says Marmeladov. “To be sorry! why feel sorry for me! " - he exclaims and immediately admits: "There is nothing to feel sorry for me!"

But his children are not to blame for the fact that they are beggars. And the society, which does not care, is probably also to blame. The chief is also to blame, to whom the appeals of Katerina Ivanovna were addressed: “Your Excellency! Protect the orphans! ” The entire ruling class is also to blame, because the carriage that crushed Marmeladov was "awaiting some significant person," and therefore this carriage was not detained.

Sonia, daughter of Marmeladov, and a former student of Raskolnikov also belong to little people. But what is important here is that these people retained their human qualities - compassion, mercy, self-esteem (despite the downtroddenness of the Hundred, the poverty of Raskolnikov). They are not yet broken, they are still able to fight for life. Dostoevsky and Gogol depict the social position of little people in approximately the same way, but Dostoevsky, unlike Gogol, also shows the inner world of these people.

The theme of the little man is also present in the works; M.E.Saltykova-Shchedrin. Take, for example, his tale “Med-; after all in the voivodeship ”. All the characters are presented here in a grotesque form, this is one of the features of the tales of Saltykov-Shchedrin. In the fairy tale in question there is a small, but very informative, episode concerning the theme of small people. Toptygin “I ate Chizhik”. I ate it just like that, for no reason, without understanding. And although he was immediately laughed at by the entire forest society, the very possibility of unreasonable harm by the boss to the little person is important.

Little people are shown in the "History of a city", and they are shown in a very peculiar way. Here they are typical inhabitants. As time goes on, mayors are replaced, but the townsfolk do not change. They remain the same gray mass, they are completely dependent, weak-willed and stupid. The mayors take the city of Foolov by storm, go on campaigns to it. But ordinary people are used to it. They only want the mayors to praise them more often, call them “guys”, and make optimistic speeches. The organ says: “I will not tolerate it! I will ruin! " And for ordinary people, this is normal. Then, the townsfolk understand that the “former scoundrel” Gloom-Grumblev personifies “the end of everything”, but silently climb to stop the river when he orders: “Drive! "

A. P. Chekhov presents a completely new type of little person to the reader. Chekhov's little man "grew larger", is no longer so defenseless. This is evident in his stories. One of these stories is “The Man in the Case”. Teacher Belikov can be attributed to the number of small people, he does not live in vain according to the principle: "No matter how something happens." He is afraid of the authorities, although, of course, his fear is greatly exaggerated. But this little man “put the case” on the whole city, made the whole city live according to the same principle. It follows that a small person can have power over other small people.

This can be seen in the other two stories "Unter Prishibeev" and "Chameleon". The hero of the first of them - Sergeant Prishibeev - keeps the whole neighborhood in fear, tries to force everyone not to turn on the lights in the evenings, not to sing songs. This is none of his business, but he cannot be stopped. And he, too, is a small person, if he is brought to trial and even sentenced. In "Chameleon" a little man, a policeman, not only subordinates, but also obeys, as a little man should.

Another feature of Chekhov's little people is the almost complete absence of positive qualities in many of them. In other words, the moral degradation of the personality is shown. Belikov is a boring, empty person, his fear borders on idiocy. Thuja prishibeev and stubborn. Both of these heroes are socially dangerous, because for all their qualities they have moral power over people. Bailiff Ochumelov (the hero of "The Chameleon") is a little tyrant who humiliates those who depend on him. But in front of the authorities, he grovels. This hero, unlike the two previous ones, has not only moral, but official power, and therefore is doubly dangerous.

Considering that all the considered works were written in different years of the XIX century, we can say that the little man still changes in time. For example, the dissimilarity of Bashmachkin and Belikov is obvious. It is also possible that this arises as a result of a different vision of the authors of the problem, different ways of portraying it (for example, caustic satire in Saltykov-Shchedrin and clear sympathy in Gogol).

Thus, in Russian literature of the 19th century, the theme of the little man is revealed by depicting the relationship of little people both with the authorities and with other people. At the same time, through the description of the situation of small people, the power standing over them can also be characterized. A small person can belong to different categories of the population. Not only the social position of little people can be shown, but also their inner world. Little people are often to blame for their own troubles, because they do not try to fight.

PUSHKIN'S REMINISCENCES IN THE POEM “DEAD SOULS” by NV GOGOL.

The poem "Dead Souls" is the most significant creation of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Uniquely unique and originals of the share, it is nevertheless associated with many literary traditions. This applies to both the content and the formal aspects of the work, in which everything is organically interconnected. Dead Souls was published after the death of Pushkin, but the beginning of work on the book coincided with the time when the writers came close. This could not but be reflected in "Dead Souls", the plot of which, according to Gogol's own admission, was presented to him by Pushkin. However, it's not just personal contacts. BV Tomashevsky in his work "The Poetic Legacy of Pushkin" noted the influence of his artistic system, which was experienced by all subsequent literature "in general, and, perhaps, prose writers are more poets." Gogol, by virtue of his talent, was able to find his own path in literature, in many respects different from Pushkin's. This must be taken into account when analyzing Pushkin's reminiscences in Gogol's poem. The following questions are important here: what is the role of Pushkin's reminiscences in Dead Souls? what meaning do they have for Gogol? what is their meaning? Answers to these questions will help to understand more deeply the peculiarity of Gogol's poem, to note some historical and literary patterns. The most general conclusion that can be drawn / on the topic under consideration is as follows: Gogol's reminiscences reflect the influence of Pushkin on him. Our task is to understand the results of this influence. By Pushkin's reminiscences in Dead Souls, we mean everything that leads to comparison with Pushkin's work, reminds of him, as well as a direct echo of Pushkin's expressions. In other words, Gogol's question of Pushkin's reminiscences is a question of the connections between the original creative worlds of two Russian writers who were in a relationship of continuity. In the light of the stated guidelines, let us take a close look at the work of Gogol itself.

First of all, we pay attention to the author's genre definition. We know that it was fundamental for Gogol. He emphasized this in his own cover for the first edition of the book. Why is a work that resembles an adventure novel in form, and even saturated with a large number of satirical sketches, is still called a poem? The meaning of this was correctly grasped by VG Belinsky, noting the "prevalence of subjectivity", which, "penetrating and animating the whole of Gogol's poem, reaches high lyrical pathos and covers the soul of the reader with illuminating waves ...". Before the reader of the poem, pictures of the provincial town, landowners' estates unfold, and behind them rises "all Russia", the Russian reality of that time. The emotional coloring of the narrative, manifested in the author's increased interest in what he depicts, the very subject of the image - the modern life of Russian life - leads us to compare the central work of Gogol with the central work of Pushkin. Both in "Eugene Onegin" by Pushkin, and in "Dead Souls" by Gogol, there are clearly expressed lyrical and epic principles. Both works are unique in terms of genre. At first, Pushkin intended to call his novel in verse a poem. (“I am now writing a new poem,” he wrote in a letter to Delvig in November 1823. The final genre definition of "Eugene Onegin" reflected Pushkin's awareness of his artistic discovery: the transfer of trends inherent in prose to poetry. Gogol, on the other hand, transferred an agitated lyric note to prose. The noted thematic and genre conversions between Eugene Onegin and Dead Souls are supported by a large number of different kinds of reminiscences, which we are now going to review.

One more preliminary note. We will consider the first volume of Dead Souls as an independent work, not forgetting about its three-part concept, realized only partially.

A close look at the text of Dead Souls reveals many analogies with Pushkin's novel. Here are the most notable ones. In both works, the same scheme is seen: the central hero from the city enters the countryside, the description / his stay in which is given the main place. The end of the story, the hero comes in the same place where it starts. The hero returns to the clan, from which he then soon leaves, like Chatsky. Let's remember that Pushkin leaves his hero

In a minute, angry for him.

The protagonists themselves are comparable. Both of them stand out against the background of the society around them. Their characteristics are similar. This is how the author says about Chichikov: “The newcomer somehow knew how to find himself in everything and showed himself an experienced socialite. Whatever the conversation was, he always knew how to support it ... "Onegin, who had a happy talent, speaks as" an experienced socialite "

Without coercion in conversation
Touch everything lightly
With a learned air of a connoisseur ...

It is precisely “with a learned air of a connoisseur” that Chichikov talks about a horse farm, good dogs, judicial tricks, billiard games, virtue, making hot wine, about customs overseers and officials. For this, everyone declares him to be a "smart" man, "learned", "respectable and amiable" and so on. About Onegin

The light has decided.
That he is smart and very nice.

Then Gogol reveals the “strange quality of the hero”. For Pushkin, Onegin is a “strange companion,” an eccentric in the eyes of those around him. Along the way, one can note the non-random correspondences of the names of the authors and their main characters: Pushkin - Onegin, Chichikov - Gogol. In two works, the main character's travel motive is important. However, if Onegin is driving out of boredom, then Chichikov has no time to be bored. It is the parallelism of situations and images, given by reminiscences, that underlines the essential differences. Let us explain this textually. Pushkin's reminiscences clearly sound in the description of Chichikov's preparation for the governor's party, which "took more than two hours of time." The main semantic detail here - "such attentiveness to the toilet, which is not even seen everywhere" - goes back to Pushkin's poems:

He's three hours at least
I spent in front of the mirrors
And came out of the restroom
Like windy Venus ...

Let us point out the continuation of the reminiscences: “Having dressed in this way, he rolled in his own carriage along the endlessly wide streets, illuminated by meager illumination from here and there flickering windows. However, the governor's house was so illuminated, even if only for a ball; a carriage with lanterns, in front of the entrance there are two gendarmes, posters' shouts in the distance - in a word, everything is as it should be ”. The above quotation is an echo of verses XXVII stanza of the first chapter of "Eugene Onegin":

We'd better hurry to the ball.
Where headlong in the pit carriage
Already my Onegin galloped.
Before the faded houses
Along the sleepy street in rows
Double carriage lights
Merry light is pouring out
Littered with bowls all around
The magnificent house shines ...

And tightness, and shine, and joy,
And I'll give you a thoughtful outfit.

Chichikov, leaving the hall, "had to close his eyes for a minute, because the sparkle from candles, lamps and ladies' dresses was terrible." Before us is like a retelling of the first chapter of Onegin. But what kind of retelling, or rather an arrangement? Whereas in Pushkin the image of the ball evokes enthusiastic memories, pouring out into the inspired lines “I remember the sea before the storm ...” etc., Gogol, in a similar place in the story, gives a long comparison of “black tailcoats” with flies on sugar as a digression. A similar relationship can be seen in almost all reminiscences.

Perfume in faceted crystal;
Combs, steel nail files,
Straight scissors, curves
And brushes of thirty kinds
For nails and teeth

are replaced by the second hero with soap (with which he rubs both cheeks for an extremely long time, “propping them up from the inside with your tongue”) and a towel (with which he wipes his face, “starting from behind his ears and snorting twice into the very face of the tavern servant”). To top it off, he plucked two hairs out of his nose in front of the mirror. It is already difficult for us to imagine him “like windy Venus”, “the second Chaadaev”. This is a completely new hero. Reminiscences show its continuity. If Onegin carries in himself “an illness for which it is high time to find a cause”, then with Chichikov, Gogol seems to be trying to reveal this “ailment” more deeply in order to get rid of it later. The motive of the hardening of the human heart resounds in Dead Souls with increasing force.

The decline, reaching the level of parody, plays an important semantic role. It is curious to note that the "diminished" hero Chichikov goes to the evening in his own carriage, and the noble Onegin - in a Yamskaya carriage. Maybe Chichikov claims to be the “hero of his time”? Whether Gogol sees evil irony in this is difficult to say. One thing is clear, he caught the redistribution of positions in Russian life and reflected this redistribution. In his other work - "Theatrical passing after the presentation of a new comedy", he says about it directly: "It is worth looking closely around. Everything changed a long time ago in the world ... Do not they now have more electricity, money capital, a profitable marriage, than love? " The fact that in Pushkin's novel was a kind of background - an ordinary noble-landlord environment - came to the fore in Gogol's work.

The landowners that Chichikov visits are in many ways reminiscent of the Larins' neighbors who gathered for Tatiana's name day. Instead of the “strange companion” of Pushkin, who was even on friendly terms with him (“I made friends with him at that time”), the “scoundrel” hero appears on the stage. The author's element in Dead Souls is very reminiscent of the lyrical digressions of Eugene Onegin. Gogol, like Pushkin, continuously conducts a conversation with the reader, referring to him, commenting on events, giving characteristics, sharing his thoughts .. Recall, for example, the beginning of chapter six, where the author writes: “Before, long ago, in the years of my youth, in the years of my childhood irrevocably flashed, it was fun for me to drive up for the first time to an unfamiliar place ... O my youth! oh my freshness! " Do not echoes of Pushkin's poetry sound in this passage?

In those days when in the gardens of the Lyceum
I blossomed serenely ...

Elements of Pushkin's poetics are felt in Dead Souls. Let us point out some of the literary devices characteristic of Eugene Onegin. First of all, this is irony. Gogol's words have a direct and hidden meaning. Just like Pushkin, Gogol does not hide the conventions of his story. For example, he writes: "It is very doubtful that the hero we have chosen will be liked by the readers." In Pushkin:

I was already thinking about the form of the plan
And as a hero I will name.

There is no long exposition, the action begins immediately (the heroes move at the very first moment: Onegin “flies to the post office,” Chichikov drives into the hotel gate in a chaise). Much in the heroes is revealed only later (Onegin's office in the seventh chapter, the biography of Chichikov in the eleventh). Gogol's Pushkin technique of special enumeration appears in descriptions. “Meanwhile, the chaise turned into more deserted streets ... Now the pavement ended, and the barrier, and the city back ... And again, on both sides of the pole track, they rested again to write miles, station keepers, wells, carts, gray villages with samovars , broads and a lively bearded master ... the song will drag on in the distance, pine tops in the fog, bells disappearing far away, crows like flies, and the horizon without end ... ”Compare:

Along Tverskaya
The carriage rushes through the bumps.
They flash past the booth, women,
Boys, benches, lamps.
Palaces, gardens, monasteries,
Bukharians, sleighs, vegetable gardens,
Merchants, hovels, peasants.
Balconies, lions at the gates
And flocks of jackdaws on the crosses.

The reminiscences noted above testify to Gogol's assimilation of Pushkin's creative experience.

BV Tomashevsky, in the work already mentioned, noted the possibility of the appearance of yet another kind of reminiscences from Pushkin - those associated not with the laws of literary specifics, but with the personal perception of impressions from Pushkin's speech, containing apt and varied characteristics. We would attribute the following textual convergence to this genus: "His appearance at the ball produced an extraordinary effect."

Meanwhile, Onegin's appearance
The Larins produced
Everyone was impressed.

From the point of view of Pushkin's reminiscences, the letter written to Chichikov is interesting. On the whole, it is perceived as a parody of Tatyana Onegin's letter, but the words “leave forever the city where people in stuffy fences do not use the air” refer us to the poem “Gypsies”:

Whenever you imagine
Bondage of stuffy cities!
There are people in heaps behind the fence
They do not breathe the morning coolness ...

This reminiscence contains not one Pushkin motive, but, touching upon various elements of Pushkin's world, as it were, creates his generalized representation. In Gogol's situation, he seems vulgar. Gogol apparently felt by the artist's intuition what Belinsky categorically expressed in 1835, announcing him the head of literature. Pushkin's time, it was necessary to understand, is over. The Gogol period in literature carried a completely different flavor. Pushkin's heroes in the new situation could not be taken seriously. Pushkin also did not ignore the problem of a new hero like Chichikov. Even before Gogol's character in The Queen of Spades, Hermann was brought out, for whom the passion for achieving wealth overshadows everything human. "He has the profile of Napoleon, and the soul of Mephistopheles." In the fourth chapter of Pushkin's story, we read about Hermann: “He sat at the window with folded hands and a menacing frown. In this position, he remarkably resembled a portrait of Napoleon. " In "Dead Souls" at the council of officials "they found that Chichikov's face, if he turns and turns sideways, is very much like a portrait of Napoleon." This extremely important reminiscence connects the image of Chichikov with the image of Hermann and helps to understand the essence of the former with the help of the latter. The analogy between Hermann and Chichikov (who must also have the soul of Mephistopheles) is enhanced by a comparison (through Napoleon) with the Antichrist. Someone said that "Napoleon is the Antichrist and keeps on a stone chain ... but after that he will break the chain and take over the whole world." Thus, various reminiscences form a synthetic image of a new hero, based on an understanding of Pushkin's literary tradition. Another component of this tradition was difficultly rethought by Gogol in The Tale of Captain Kopeikin. Captain Kopeikin is forced to take the path of robbery by the most serious life circumstances. The situation is largely reminiscent of Dubrovsky. The story, which had a complex creative history, in the initial edition contained in the finale a clear plot reminiscence from Dubrovsky; having saved up money, Kopeikin leaves abroad, from where he writes a letter to the emperor with a request to forgive his accomplices. The parallel between Kopeikin (who is associated with Chichikov) and Dubrovsky is important for understanding the “robber” element in Chichikov. It is difficult to divide this element into a romantic-complacent and a criminal-villainous side. In "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin" Pushkin's verses from "The Bronze Horseman", dedicated to St. Petersburg, responded in a peculiar way. “There is some sort of spitz in the air; the bridges hang there like a devil, you can imagine, without any, that is, touch. " What a stunning parody of Pushkin's magnificent anthem, which has the following words:

Bridges hung over the waters; and light
Admiralty needle.

In the Petersburg story of Pushkin, a “little” man dies. In Gogol's inserted story, another “little” person finds the strength to withstand. Pushkin's plot is more tragic, but it retains, along with artlessness and simplicity, a kind of sublime outlook on things. Gogol's world is completely different. Reminiscences highlight this distinction. However, in the main - in thinking about the future of Russia - the two great writers turn out to be consonant. “Aren't you, Russia, that a brisk, unattainable troika, rushing? .. Eh, horses, horses, what kind of horses!., Together and at once strained copper breasts and, almost without touching the ground with hooves, turned into only elongated lines. .. Russia, where are you rushing? Give an answer ".

And what a fire in this horse!
Where are you galloping, proud horse,
And where will you drop your hooves?
O powerful lord of Destiny!
Aren't you right above the abyss itself?
Has he reared Russia?

In conclusion, let us note one more Pushkin's reminiscence when describing Chichikov's arrival in Manilovka: “The view was revived by two women who ... walked up their knees in the pond ... Even the weather itself was very helpful: the day was either clear or gloomy .. To complete the picture, there was no lack of a rooster, a harbinger of changeable weather ... "Elements of this landscape make us remember" Count Nulin ": ........

The turkeys were screaming
Following the wet cock;
Three ducks were gargling in a puddle;
A woman walked through a dirty yard,
The weather was getting worse ...

Thus, Pushkin's reminiscences in Gogol's Dead Souls reflected his creative assimilation of Pushkin's artistic experience, which gave a tremendous impetus to the development of Russian literature.

"NEW PEOPLE" IN THE LITERATURE OF THE XIX CENTURY

In the literature of 1850-1860, a whole series of novels emerged, which were called novels about “new people”.

What criteria is used to classify a person as “new people”? First of all, the emergence of "new people" is due to the political and historical situation of society. They are representatives of a new era, therefore, they have a new perception of time, space, new tasks, new relationships. Hence the prospect of the development of these people in the future. So, in literature, “new people” “begin” with Turgenev’s novels “Rudin” (1856), “On the Eve” (1859), “Fathers and Sons” (1862).

At the turn of the 30-40s, after the defeat of the Decembrists, fermentation took place in Russian society. One part of him was seized by despair and pessimism, the other - scrupulous activity, expressed in attempts to continue the work of the Decembrists. Soon, public thought takes a more formalized direction - the direction of propaganda. It was this idea of ​​society that Turgenev expressed in the type of Rudin. At first, the novel was called "Genius Nature". In this case, “genius” means illumination, striving for truth (the task of this hero, indeed, is more moral than social), his task is to sow “reasonable, good, eternal”, and he fulfills this with honor, but he lacks nature , lack of strength to overcome obstacles.

Turgenev also touches on such a painful issue for Russians as the choice of activity, activity that is fruitful and useful. Yes, every time has its own heroes and tasks. For the society of that time, Rudin's enthusiasts and propagandists were needed. But no matter how harshly the descendants accused their fathers of "vulgarity and doctrinaire", the Rudins are people of the moment, of a specific situation, they are rattles. But when a person grows up, there is no need for rattles ...

The novel "On the Eve" (1859) is somewhat different, it can even be called "intermediate". This is the time between Rudin and Bazarov (again a matter of time!). The title of the book speaks for itself. On the eve of ... what? .. Elena Stakhova is in the center of the novel. She is waiting for someone ... she must love someone ... Whom? Elena's inner state reflects the situation of the time; she embraces the whole of Russia. What does Russia need? Why did not the Shubins or the Bersenievs, who seem to be worthy people, attract her attention? And this happened because they did not have enough active love for the Motherland, full surrender of themselves to it. That is why he attracted Elena Insarov, who is fighting for the liberation of his land from Turkish oppression. Insarov's example is a classic example, a man for all times. After all, there is nothing new in it (for failure-free service to the Motherland is not at all new!), But it was precisely this well-forgotten old that Russian society lacked ...

In 1862, Turgenev's most controversial, most poignant novel, Fathers and Sons, was published. Of course, all three novels are political, dispute novels, and controversial novels. But in the novel "Fathers and Sons" this is especially well noted, for it is manifested specifically in the "battles" of Bazarov with Kirsanov. The “skirmishes” turn out to be so irreconcilable, because they represent the conflict of two eras - the noble and the raznochin.

The novel's acute political character is also shown in the concrete social conditioning of the “new man” type. Evgeny Bazarov is a nihilist, collective type. His prototypes were Dobrolyubov, Preobrazhensky, and Pisarev.

It is also known that nihilism was very fashionable among young people of the 50-60s of the XIX century. Of course, denial is the path to self-destruction. But what caused it, this is an unconditional denial of all living life, Bazarov gives a very good answer to this:

“And then we realized that chatting, just chatting about our sores was not worth the trouble, that it only leads to vulgarity and doctrinaire; we saw that our clever people, the so-called progressive people and accusers, are worthless, that we are engaged in nonsense ... when it comes to daily bread ... ”So Bazarov got involved in obtaining“ daily bread ”. It is not for nothing that he does not associate his profession with politics, but becomes a doctor and “fiddles with people”. There was no activity in Rudin; this activity appeared in Bazarov. That is why he is head and shoulders above everyone else in the novel. Because he found himself, raised himself, and did not live the life of an empty flower, like Pavel Petrovich, and even more so, did not “see off day after day” like Anna Sergeevna.

The question of time and space is posed in a new way. Bazarov says: "Let it (time) depend on me." Thus, this stern man turns to such a universal human idea: "Everything depends on a person!"

The idea of ​​space is shown through the inner liberation of the personality. After all, personal freedom is, first of all, going beyond the framework of one's own “I”, and this can happen only when giving oneself to something. Bazarov devotes himself to the cause, the Motherland (“Russia needs me ...”), feeling.

He feels enormous forces, but he cannot do something the way he wants. That is why he withdraws into himself, becomes bilious, irritated, gloomy.

While working on this work, Turgenev gave great progress to this image and the novel acquired a philosophical meaning.

What did this "iron man" lack? Not only general education was lacking, Bazarov did not want to come to terms with life, did not want to accept it for what it is. He did not recognize human impulses in himself. This is his tragedy. It crashed on people - this is the tragedy of this image. But it is not for nothing that the novel has such a reconciling end, it is not for nothing that Yevgeny Bazarov's grave is holy. There was something natural and deeply sincere in his actions. This is what gets through to Bazarov. The direction of nihilism has not justified itself in history. It formed the basis of socialism ... A continuation novel, a response novel to Turgenev's work was the novel What Is to Be Done? N. G. Chernyshevsky.

If Turgenev created collective types generated by social cataclysms, showed their development in this society, then Chernyshevsky not only continued them, but also gave a detailed answer, creating a programmatic work "What is to be done?"

If Turgenev did not outline the background of Bazarov, then Chernyshevsky gave a complete story of the lives of his heroes.

What distinguishes Chernyshevsky's “new people”?

First, they are common democrats. And they, as you know, represent the period of the bourgeois development of society. The nascent class creates its own new, creates a historical foundation, hence - new relations, new perception. The theory of “reasonable egoism” was the expression of these historical and moral tasks.

Chernyshevsky creates two types of “new people”. These people are “special” (Rakhmetov) and “ordinary” (Vera Pavlovna, Lopukhov, Kirsanov). Thus, the author solves the problem of reorganizing society. Lopukhov, Kirsanov, Rodalskaya rebuild it with creative, constructive, harmonious work, through self-education and self-education. Rakhmetov - "revolutionary", although this path is shown vaguely. That is why the question of time immediately arises. That is why Rakhmetov is a man of the future, and Lopukhov, Kirsanov, Vera Pavlovna are people of the present. In Chernyshevsky's “new people”, in the first place is the inner freedom of the individual. “New people” create their own ethics, solve moral and psychological issues. Self-analysis (unlike Bazarov) is the main thing that distinguishes them. They believe that the power of reason will bring up “good and eternal” in a person. The author examines this issue in the formation of the hero from the initial forms of struggle against family despotism to preparation and "change of scenery".

Chernyshevsky argues that a person should be a harmonious person. So, for example, Vera Pavlovna (the issue of emancipation), being a wife, a mother, has the opportunity for social life, the opportunity to study, and most importantly, she has nurtured a desire for work.

Chernyshevsky's “new people” treat each other “in a new way”, that is, the author says that these are quite normal relations, but in the conditions of that time they were considered special and new. The heroes of the novel treat each other with respect, delicately, even if you have to step over yourself. They are above their “ego”. And that "theory of reasonable egoism", which they created, is only a deep introspection. Their selfishness is public, not personal.

Rudin, Bazarov, Lopukhov, Kirsanovs. There were - and no. Let each of them have their own shortcomings, their own theories, which have not been justified by time. But these people gave themselves to their Motherland, Russia, they rooted for it, suffered, therefore they are “new people”.

The role of a woman has always depended on the time in which she lived. The woman was both the furniture in the house, and the servant in her own family, and the domineering mistress of her time and her destiny. And personally to me, as a girl, this topic is close and interesting. At sixteen, I want to find my place, to understand my destiny in this world, so that, looking at the goals set, I want to achieve them. Naturally, I was interested in how the role of women in society is presented in literature, how they understood her purpose, and how Russian writers answered this difficult question.

Our writers of the 19th century in their works often described the unequal position of the Russian woman. “You’re a share! - Russian women’s share! It’s hardly more difficult to find,” exclaims Nekrasov. Chernyshevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, and many others also wrote on this topic. First of all, the writers expressed their dreams, their hopes in heroines and compared them with the prejudices, passions and delusions of society throughout the country. I learned a lot about the personality of a woman, about her mission, place, role in the family and society. Literary works are a deep ocean in which you can plunge in search of answers to the questions of the soul and heart. Lessons can truly be learned from these creations that are worth, and even necessary, to be applied in our everyday life today. Even after so many years, the problems that the authors posed to readers in the 19th century are still relevant.

Russian literature has always been distinguished by the depth of its ideological content, its relentless striving to resolve issues of the meaning of life, a humane attitude towards a person, and the truthfulness of its depiction. Russian writers strove to bring out the best features of our people in female characters. Only in Russian literature is so much attention paid to the depiction of the inner world and the complex experiences of the female soul.

Different women, different fates, different images are presented on the pages of fiction, journalism, painting, sculpture, on the movie screen. In Russian folklore, a woman acts in the most diverse forms of a totem, an ancient pagan deity, often in the role of a warrior, avenger, bearer of evil and a good enchantress, the Mother of God, Tsar Maiden, sister, friend, rival, bride, etc. Her image can be beautiful and ugly, bewitching and repulsive. Folklore motives are known to have influenced all aspects of the development of literature, art and culture in general. Everyone who at least somehow touched on this issue speaks and writes about the ratio of evil and good principles in a woman.

Woman, this is the beginning of the beginning. Her beauty, charm, rich spiritual world at all times inspired poets and writers. Beautiful female images still excite the hearts of readers. These are the divine beauties of A.S. Pushkin, and the charming images of Leo Tolstoy, and the heroines of I.S. Turgenev, as well as the images of simple peasant women N.A. Nekrasov. Poets and writers of the 20th century, following the traditions of their predecessors, also create amazing female images worthy of admiration. Poetry of V.Ya.Bryusov and A.A. Akhmatova creates an unforgettable gallery of strong and gentle, affectionate and arrogant, vulnerable and daring heroines. All of them are deeply individual, each of them is endowed only with her inherent character traits, but they are united by one thing - high spirituality and moral purity, they are not capable of meanness and deceit, of base human passions. But at the same time: women - who and when could understand them! They were admired, they were hated, they were loved, they performed feats in their honor. For many years, the versatility of female nature has been tried to comprehend not only representatives of art, but also pundits. The woman was appreciated, loved and respected at all times.

FI Tyutchev said: "There is nothing more beautiful in the world of a woman." At all times, women were dedicated to poetry, painted portraits, given flowers, carried in their arms, and composed romances in their honor. Who does not know the classic lines of A.S. Pushkin - .. I remember a wonderful moment ... ..

All the heroines are so different, each has its own life, its own idea of ​​happiness, but they are all united by love ... .. Russian literature tends to sing the image of a loving and devoted wife:

Let's remember "The Lay of Igor's Campaign" - a work in which for the first time the image of a Russian woman is sung - loving, worried, suffering, ready for great sacrifices in the name of her beloved. It is Yaroslavna who weeps for her husband and calls for strength to save him.

"Women in the era of Peter the Great" by A.N. Tolstoy presented female images from all social strata of society.

XIX century, 1825. Petersburg, the Decembrists. "Women of Russia". The wives of the Decembrists share the fate of the prisoners, write letters to their relatives, and master farming in conditions of exile. Heartfelt, kind, meek, calm - they quickly became everyone's favorites. But even if it is unbearably difficult for them, they, Russian women, will endure everything. Such is their fate. Many years later, N.A. Nekrasov, in his poem "Russian Women", will write about the fate of Princess E. I. Trubetskoy and Princess M. N. Volkonskaya.

The works of I.S. Turgenev - one of the most lyrical and poetic works in Russian literature. Feminine images give them a special charm. "Turgenev woman" is some kind of special dimension, a kind of ideal that embodies both external and internal beauty. They are inherent in poetry, and the integrity of nature, and incredible strength of mind. These heroines, of course, are very different, each of them has her own life, her own experiences, but all of them are united by love and the desire to be happy. The novel "Fathers and Sons" presents a whole gallery of female images. - from the simple peasant woman Fenichka to the high society lady Anna Sergeevna Odintsova.

The woman is the inspirer, the woman is the Muse, the woman is the mother. A WOMAN is that light and kind beginning that leads the world to harmony and beauty. Bearers of popular ideals and women of the high society.

Higher female vocation and appointment of L.N. Tolstoy sees in motherhood, in raising children, because it is a woman who is that bright and kind beginning that leads the world to harmony and beauty. At the same time L.N. In his epic novel War and Peace, Tolstoy reveals the image of a woman as the bearer of popular ideals. Tolstoy's thoughts about the true destiny of women are not outdated even today.

A.S. Pushkin in his most significant work "Eugene Onegin" revealed the rich inner world of his heroine, which left an imprint on her appearance. Such is Tatiana Larina A.S. Pushkin is a "sweet" and "faithful" ideal, morally irreproachable, seeking deep content in life. The name of Tatiana was not chosen by the author by chance, but was given in memory of the holy Martyr Tatiana, who embodied, on the one hand, spiritual holiness and purity, and on the other, firmness of faith and opposition to earthly passions. "I am still the same ... But there is another in me." Representatives of the "past century", the heroines are not abstract images, but living people with their shortcomings and advantages, yet each of them is an individuality.

M. Yu. Lermontov's novel "A Hero of Our Time" presents images of four women: Circassian women Bela ("Bela"), long-haired "undina" - the friend of the smuggler Yanko ("Taman"), Princess Mary and Princess Vera ("Princess Mary"); this gallery of female images is completed by the episodic figure of Nastya, "the pretty daughter of the old police officer" ("The Fatalist").

The images of the nineteenth century became the basis for the modern appearance of a woman - a heroine, with a big heart, a fiery soul and a readiness for great unforgettable feats. The female images of modernity, which bear the imprint of the twentieth century, were created by the great poetesses - A. Akhmatova, Z. Gippius, M. Tsvetaeva. The one who considers the images of women created by them only as exquisite hothouse flowers, skillfully inscribed in the romantic background of the Art Nouveau style, is mistaken. Indeed, behind their external appearance, thanks to the poets V. Brusov, A. Akhmatova, we distinguish high spirituality, brilliant mind, nobility of feelings.

You are a woman, and in this you are right.
From the century removed by the starry crown.
You are the image of a deity in our abysses!
V.Ya.Bryusov

Russian literature has always been distinguished by the depth of its ideological content, its relentless striving to resolve issues of the meaning of life, a humane attitude towards a person, and the truthfulness of its depiction. Russian writers strove to express in female images the best features inherent in our people. In no other literature in the world will we find such beautiful and pure images of women, distinguished by their faithful and loving hearts, as well as their unique spiritual beauty. The woman is multifaceted, harmonious, over time her image has changed, acquired the features of modernity, but he always breathed with warmth, mystery and mystery.

Between the wise men there was an eccentric:
“I think,” he writes, “so,
I undoubtedly exist. "
No! you love and that's why
You exist - I will understand
Rather, the truth is.

(E.A. Baratynsky).

Introduction.

Since prehistoric times, a woman has become an object of "male art". We are told about this by the so-called "Venus" - stone figurines of pregnant women with large breasts. Literature remained male for a long time, because they wrote something about women, trying to convey their image, to preserve what is valuable and what a man saw in a woman. The woman was and is still the subject of worship (from the ancient mysteries to the Christian veneration of the Virgin Mary). Gioconda's smile continues to excite the minds of men.

In our work, we will consider a number of literary female images, consider their independent artistic world and the author's attitude to them. The arbitrariness of the choice of this or that heroine is explained by the desire to provide a contrast, to sharpen the erotic paradigms of the author-male relationship.

In this introduction, I would like to note one more thing. The image of a woman is often alienated from the woman herself. So the medieval troubadours sang hymns to very little familiar to them Ladies of the heart. But the power of real love must also have something artistic in it. Otto Weininger wrote that the image of a woman in art is more beautiful than a woman herself, and therefore an element of adoration, dreams and the consciousness of sympathy for the beloved woman is needed. A woman often makes herself a work of art, and this beauty cannot be explained. "Why is that woman beautiful?" - Somehow they asked Aristotle what the great philosopher replied in the way that beauty is obvious (unfortunately, Aristotle's composition "On Love" has not reached us).

And further. In philosophy, several concepts of erotic love have developed. If Vladimir Solovyov speaks of a loving attitude towards a woman-personality, then such writers as, for example, Vasily Rozanov, saw in a woman only an object of sexual attraction and an image of a mother. We will come across these two lines in our analysis. Naturally, these two contradictory concepts do not contradict, but they cannot be combined due to the conventionality of the analysis (division into elements) of the sexual feeling itself. On the other hand, two more opinions are important, the opinions of two other great Russian philosophers are important. So Ivan Ilyin says that it is simply impossible to live without love, and that you need to love not just the dear, but precisely the good, but in the good there is also dear. Nikolai Berdyaev, continuing the line of Vladimir Solovyov, says that the beauty of a woman and her freedom is in her - female - personality.

Thus, we turn to two examples of pre-Pushkin literature.

First part.
1.
Cry Yaroslavna and Svetlana.
The Lay of Igor's Host contains one of the most poetic parts: Yaroslavna's Lament. This part (like the entire work) dates back to the XII century. The image of Yaroslavna is well noticed in the famous painting by Vasily Perov, where “crying” is a prayer selflessly turned to the sky.

At dawn wailing in Putivl,
Like a cuckoo in early spring
Yaroslavna calls the young
On the wall, the sobbing city:

"... Take care of the prince, lord,
Save on the far side
So that I forget tears from now on,
To make him come back to me alive! "

A young wife is waiting for her husband from a military campaign. She turns to the wind, to the sun, to all nature. She is faithful and cannot imagine her life without her husband. But there is no hope of his return.

This plot is somehow repeated in "Svetlana" by V. A. Zhukovsky.

How can I, girlfriends, sing?
Dear friend far away;
I am destined to die
In lonely sadness.

Svetlana, waiting for the groom, has a dream where her groom is shown dead. However, upon waking up, she sees the groom safe and sound. Zhukovsky at the end of the ballad urges not to believe in dreams, but to believe in the Conduct.

Both Yaroslavna's cry and Svetlana's sadness are very religious, they are imbued with prayer, great love. Zhukovsky generally enriched Russian culture with moral ideas.

Tatiana.

“This is a positive type, not a negative one, this is a type of positive beauty, this is the apotheosis of a Russian woman ...” This is how Dostoevsky's image of Tatiana Larina is interpreted.

Pushkin, somewhat outwardly similar to Zhukovsky (both were curly and wore sideburns), used two motives of "Svetlana": in "Snowstorm" and in Tatyana's dream
("Eugene Onegin"). Because of a snowstorm in the story of the same name by Pushkin, a girl marries a stranger to her. Pushkin conveys Svetlana's silence to his Tatyana. Svetlana dreams about how she falls into a blizzard. Tatyana dreams of being carried away by a bear in winter, she dreams of various devilry, which is headed by her beloved Onegin (the motive "Satan's ball" appears already here). "Tatiana loves not jokingly." Onegin did not understand the feelings of young Tatiana, but at the same time he did not want to use these feelings, about which he read a whole sermon in front of Tatiana.

“He did not know how to distinguish between completeness and perfection in the poor girl, and indeed, perhaps, he took her for a“ moral embryo ”. This is she, the embryo, this is after her letter to Onegin! If there is any moral embryo in the poem, it is, of course, himself, Onegin, and this is indisputable. And he could not at all recognize her: does he know the human soul? This is an abstract person, this is a restless dreamer throughout his life. " - We read in the famous Pushkin speech of Dostoevsky in 1880.

For some Russian stupidity, Onegin, because of the invitation to the Larins, took offense and offended Lensky, whom he killed in a duel, killed the fiancé of Tatyana's sister, Olga.
Onegin is a person tired of the games of society, of the intrigues of the world, spiritually empty. This is what Tatyana saw in his "abandoned cell", in the books he read.
But Tatyana changes (see illustration by M.P. Klodt in 1886), gets married, and when Onegin suddenly falls in love with her, she tells him:

"...I got married. You should,
I will forgive you, leave me;
I know: in your heart there is
And pride and outright honor.
I love you (why dissemble?),
But I am given to another;
And I will be faithful to him forever. "

This loyalty, this imperative, is what Pushkin admires. Onegin's mistake is that he did not understand a woman, like many other heroes of Russian literature, as real men do not understand women.

Vladimir Nabokov comments: “Tatiana as a 'type' (a favorite word of Russian criticism) became the mother and grandmother of countless female characters in the works of many Russian writers - from Turgenev to Chekhov. Literary evolution turned the Russian Heloise - Pushkin's connection between Tatyana Larina and Princess N - into the “national type” of a Russian woman, ardent and pure, dreamy and straightforward, a staunch friend and heroic wife. In historical reality, this image became associated with revolutionary aspirations, which in the course of the following years gave rise to at least two generations of gentle, highly educated and, moreover, incredibly brave young Russian noblewomen, who were ready to give their lives to save the people from government oppression. A lot of disappointments awaited these pure Tatyana-like souls, when life confronted them with real peasants and workers, ordinary people whom they tried to educate and enlighten, did not believe them and did not understand them. Tatiana disappeared from Russian literature and from Russian life just before the October Revolution, when men-realists in heavy boots took power into their own hands. In Soviet literature, the image of Tatyana was supplanted by the image of her younger sister, who has now become a full-breasted, lively and red-cheeked girl. Olga is the right girl of Soviet fiction, she helps to organize the work of the plant, exposes sabotage, makes speeches and radiates absolute health. "

Poor Lisa.

Nikolai Karamzin is a typical romantic and literary man of his generation. "Nature", for example, he called "nature", here and there he has the interjection "Ah!" Lisa's story seems to us funny, flat, theatrical. But this is all from our deepening of hearts. For adolescents, however, such a story is quite useful and remarkable.
Liza is the daughter of a well-to-do peasant, "after death his wife and daughter were impoverished." We find her at the age of fifteen. "Liza, not sparing her tender youth, not sparing her rare beauty, worked day and night - weaving canvases, knitting stockings, picking flowers in the spring, and taking berries in the summer and selling them in Moscow." “The meadows were covered with flowers, and Liza came to Moscow with lilies of the valley. A young, well-dressed man, pleasant-looking, met her on the street. " He bought flowers from her and promised to buy flowers from her every day. Then she will wait for him all day, but he will not appear. However, he will find her home and meet his widowed mother. Their daily dates began, full of pathos of love and big, loud words. "Flaming cheeks", "gazes", "sighs", "bad dream", "the image of a loved one", "lowered blue eyes" - all these have become cliches nowadays, and in the years of Karamzin it was also a discovery that " peasant women also love. A relationship began. “Ah, Liza, Liza! What happened to you? Until now, waking up with the birds, you have fun with them in the morning, and a pure, joyful soul shone in your eyes, like the sun shines in drops of heavenly dew. " The dream has come true. Suddenly Liza heard the sound of oars - she looked at the river and saw a boat, and in the boat - Erast. All the veins in her were hammered, and, of course, not from fear. " Lisa's dream was coming true. “Erast jumped ashore, went up to Liza and - her dream was partly fulfilled: for he looked at her with an affectionate air, took her hand ... could take his hands from him - could not turn away when he approached her with his pink lips ... Ah! He kissed her, kissed her with such fervor that the whole universe seemed to her on fire burning! “Dear Liza! - said Erast. - Dear Liza! I love you, ”and these words echoed in the depths of her soul, like heavenly, delightful music; she hardly dared to believe her ears and ... ”At first, their relationship was pure, exuded trembling and purity. “There, the often quiet moon, through green branches, strewn its rays with its fair Liza's hair, with which marshmallows and the hand of a dear friend played; often these rays illuminated in the eyes of tender Liza a brilliant tear of love, always drained by Erast's kiss. They hugged - but the chaste, bashful Cynthia did not hide from them behind a cloud: their embrace was pure and innocent. " But the relationship became more intimate and closer. “She threw herself into his arms - and in this hour purity must perish! - Erast felt an extraordinary excitement in his blood - never Liza seemed so charming to him - never her caresses touched him so much - never her kisses were so fiery - she knew nothing, suspected nothing, was not afraid of anything - the darkness of the evening fed desire - not a single star shone in the sky - no ray could illuminate delusion. " The words "delusion" and "harlot" - in Russian, these are the same root words.
Lisa lost her innocence and took it painfully. “It seemed to me that I was dying, that my soul ... No, I don't know how to say that! .. Are you silent, Erast? Are you sighing? .. My God! What?" - Meanwhile lightning flashed and thunder struck. Liza trembled all over. “Erast, Erast! - she said. - I'm scared! I'm afraid the thunder will kill me like a criminal! " From this one spark, the future "Thunderstorm" of Ostrovsky will be born in the sky. The relationship continued, but Erast's soul was already satiated. The fulfillment of all desires is the most dangerous temptation of love. This is what Karamzin tells us. Erast left Lisa, claiming that he was going to war. But one day she will meet him in Moscow. And this is what he will tell her: “Liza! Circumstances have changed; I am engaged to marry; you must leave me alone and for your own peace of mind forget me. I loved you and now I love you, that is, I wish you all the best. Here is a hundred rubles - take them, - he put the money in her pocket, - let me kiss you one last time - and go home "" ... He really was in the army, but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost almost all of his estate. Peace was soon concluded, and Erast returned to Moscow, burdened with debts. He had only one way to improve his circumstances - to marry an elderly rich widow who had long been in love with him.

Lisa drowned herself. And all because of the mixing of high feelings with some kind of innocent, but still lust.

Tatiana Larina and Anna Karenina.

V.V. In his lectures on Russian literature, Nabokov asked the question: how would Pushkin perceive Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina?

Tatiana loves, but does not dare to change. Anna easily goes to treason with Vronsky. She is burdened by her unloved husband (both husband and lover are called Alexei). Anna challenges the hypocritical light, where everything "secretly lascivious" is hidden behind conventions. Anna goes to the end, torn between love for her son and love for a man. "Russian Madame Bovary", she goes to death, to suicide. In the world of Eugene Onegin and Svetlana, fidelity in marriage is celebrated. In the world of the novel "Anna Karenina" there is a complete revelry: "everything is confused ..."

"... With the usual tact of a socialite, one glance at
the appearance of this lady, Vronsky determined her belonging
to the higher world. He apologized and went to the carriage, but he felt
the need to look at her again - not because she was very
beautiful, not for the grace and modest grace that were visible in
her whole figure, but because in the expression of her pretty face when she
walked past him, there was something especially affectionate and gentle. When he looked around, she turned her head too. Shiny, which seemed dark from thick eyelashes,
the gray eyes, friendly, rested attentively on his face, as if she recognized him, and immediately shifted to the approaching crowd, as if looking for someone. In this short glance, Vronsky had time to notice a restrained liveliness that played in her face and fluttered between her sparkling eyes and a faint smile curling her ruddy lips. It was as if the excess of something so overwhelmed her being that, by her will, it was expressed in a glint of a glance, then in a smile. She deliberately put out the light in her eyes, but he shone against her will in a barely noticeable smile. "

“Anna Karenina is an unusually attractive and sincere woman, but at the same time unhappy, guilty and pitiful. The fate of the heroine was significantly influenced by the laws of society of those times, the tragic disunity and misunderstanding in the family. In addition, the novel is based on popular moral ideas about the role of women. Anna cannot be happy by making other people unhappy and violating the laws of morality and duty. "

Tatiana does not change, but Anna does. Why? Because Tatiana has moral principles, she has a grudge against Eugene. Tatiana is religious, respects her husband, respects the very institution of marriage, appeals to honor and honesty. Anna Karenina despises her official husband and is fond of Vronsky, she is not religious, she sees all the conventions of secular morality, easily indulges in passions and emotions, her marriage means nothing to her. There are two philosophies, two ways of life: the imperative of Kant again meets in the battle with the attitude to morality of F. Nietzsche.

In "Eugene Onegin" and "Anna Karenina" there are examples of "love that succeeded": these are Lensky and Olga, these are Levin and Katya, respectively. In contrast to the main lines, we see examples and happy ones. Pushkin and Tolstoy paint us two pictures: how it should and how it should not.

Tatiana continues in the "Turgenev girl", Anna finds in common with Katerina from Ostrovsky's "Storm" and with Chekhov's "lady with a dog".

Turgenev girl.

The type of the so-called "Turgenev girl" comes out of the ideal image of Tatiana Larina. In Turgenev's books, this is a closed, but subtly sensitive girl, who, as a rule, grew up in nature in a remote estate (without the pernicious influence of secular and city life), clean, modest and well-educated.

In the novel "Rudin":

"... Natalya Alekseevna [Lasunskaya], at first glance, she might not have liked it. She had not yet developed, she was thin, dark-skinned, kept a little stooped. But her features were beautiful and correct, although too large for a seventeen-year-old girl. She was especially good a clean and even forehead over thin, as if broken in the middle of the eyebrows. She spoke little, listened and looked attentively, almost intently, as if she wanted to give herself an account of everything. She often remained motionless, dropped her hands and thought; her face then expressed inner work of thoughts ... A barely perceptible smile will suddenly appear on the lips and disappear; large dark eyes will quietly rise ... "

"The scene in the garden" between Onegin and Tatiana is somewhat repeated in "Rudin". Both men show their cowardice, while the girls are waiting and languishing in strong love, Eugene arrogantly speaks of his fatigue, and Dmitry Rudin admits that he does not dare go against the will of Natalia's mother.
And here is the portrait of the heroine of "Spring Waters":

“A girl of about nineteen rushed impulsively into the pastry shop, with dark curls scattered over her bare shoulders, with outstretched arms outstretched, and, seeing Sanin, she immediately rushed to him, grabbed his hand and drew him along, saying in a choking voice:“ Hurry, hurry , here, save! " Not out of unwillingness to obey, but simply out of an excess of amazement, Sanin did not immediately follow the girl - and, as it were, rested on the spot: he had never seen such a beauty in his life. She turned to him and with such despair in her voice, in her gaze, in the movement of her clenched hand, convulsively raised to her pale cheek, said: "Yes, go, go!" - that he immediately rushed after her through the open door. "

"Her nose was somewhat large, but a beautiful, aquiline fret, the upper lip was slightly shaded by fluff; but the complexion, even and matte, neither take ivory or milky amber, wavy hair, like Allorieva Judith in the Palazzo -Pitty, - and especially eyes, dark gray, with a black border around the pupils, magnificent, triumphant eyes, - even now, when fear and grief darkened their brilliance ... Sanin involuntarily recalled the wonderful land from which he was returning ... Yes, he is in Italy I have never seen anything like it! The girl breathed rarely and unevenly; it seemed that she was always waiting for her brother to breathe? "

And here is the portrait of Asya from the story of the same name:

“The girl, whom he called his sister, at first glance seemed very pretty to me. There was something of her own, special, in the warehouse of her swarthy, round face, with a small thin nose, almost childish cheeks and black, light eyes. She was gracefully built, but as if not yet fully developed. (…) Asya took off her hat; her black hair, cropped and combed like a boy's, fell in large curls around her neck and ears. At first she was shy of me. (…) I have not seen a more mobile creature. She did not sit still for a moment; she got up, ran into the house and ran again, sang in an undertone, often laughed, and in a strange way: it seemed that she was laughing not at what she heard, but at various thoughts that crossed her mind. Her big eyes looked straight, bright, bold, but sometimes her eyelids slightly squinted, and then her gaze suddenly became deep and gentle. "

In the story "First Love" we see a love triangle: Turgenev's girl, father and son. We see the reverse triangle in Nabokov's Lolita: Humbert, mother, daughter.
"First love" is always unhappy.

In general, the Turgenev girl can be briefly described as follows: young, now laughing, now pensive, now calm, now indifferent - and constantly attractive.

Turgenev's girl is chaste, her emotionality is not the emotionality of Anna Karenina.

Sonya Marmeladova, images of women Nekrasov and Katerina from Ostrovsky's "The Thunderstorm".

Sonya Marmeladova ("Crime and Punishment" by Dostoevsky) is a harlot, but a harlot who repents, atoning for her sin and Raskolnikov's sin. Nabokov did not believe in this image.

“And I see, at about six o'clock, Sonechka got up, put on a handkerchief, put on a burnusik and left the apartment, and at nine o'clock and came back ... I laid out thirty rubles. At the same time, she did not utter a word ... but took only ... a handkerchief ... completely covered her head and face with it and lay down on the bed against the wall, only her shoulders and body shuddered ... "

Dostoevsky radicalized this image, trying to "rummage everything". Yes, Sonya is a prostitute with a yellow ticket, but she takes a sin on her soul in order to feed her family. This is a solid female character. She is the bearer of gospel truth. In the eyes of Luzhin and Lebeziatnikov, Sonya appears as a fallen creature, they despise "such", consider a girl "notorious behavior."

Reading Raskolnikov's Gospel, the legend about the resurrection of Lazarus, Sonya awakens faith, love and repentance in his soul. "They were resurrected by love, the heart of one contained endless sources of life for the heart of the other." Rodion came to what Sonia urged him to, he overestimated life and its essence, as evidenced by his words: “Can her convictions now not be my convictions? Her feelings, her aspirations at least ... "

Sonya covers her face, as she is ashamed, ashamed in front of herself and God. Therefore, she rarely comes home, just to give the money, she is embarrassed when meeting with Raskolnikov's sister and mother, she feels awkward even at the commemoration of her own father, where she was so shamelessly insulted. She repents, but this repentance, which the text of the Gospel calls for, is inaccessible to Anna Karenina. Tatiana Pushkina and Svetlana Zhukovsky are religious, but they do not allow themselves to sin. All of Sonya's actions surprise with their sincerity and openness. She does nothing for herself, everything for the sake of someone: her stepmother, step brothers and sisters, Raskolnikov.

Sonya does not belong to the caste of "sacred prostitutes" that Rozanov speaks of. This is a harlot, still a harlot, but none of the readers will dare to throw a stone at her. Sonya calls on Raskolnikov to repentance, she agrees to carry his cross, to help him come to the truth through suffering. We do not doubt her words, the reader is sure that Sonya will follow Raskolnikov everywhere, everywhere and always will be with him. But all this is not clear, for example, to Vladimir Nabokov. He does not believe in the image of a murderer, nor in the image of a harlot. "We do not see" (Dostoevsky does not describe) how Sonya is engaged in her "craft", such is the logic of Nabokov's denial of the image of Marmeladova.

The Christian sacrifice of the "girls of Nekrasov" is clearer. These are the wives of the Decembrists who go to Siberia for the spouses-revolutionaries. This girl who is being whipped in the square. It is a suffering, pitying love. Nekrasov has compassion for compassion. His muse is a woman who is publicly flogged.

Nekrasov and admires the Woman:

There are women in Russian villages
With the calm importance of faces,
With beautiful strength in movement,
With a gait, with the gaze of queens -

And he sees all the injustice of a woman's position in society:

But early on, the bonds weighed over me
Another, unkind and unloved Muse,
The sad companion of the sad poor
Born for labor, suffering and bondage, -
That Muse crying, grieving and aching,
Thirsty all the hour, humiliatingly asking,
Which gold is the only idol ...
To the delight of a new stranger in the world of God,
In a wretched hut, in front of a smoky torch,
Bent down by labor, killed by the torment,
She sang to me - and was full of longing
And her simple song is an eternal complaint.
Women are clearly not one of those "who live well in Russia."

“The fact is that the character of Katerina, as it is performed in The Thunderstorm, is a step forward not only in Ostrovsky's dramatic activities, but also in all of our literature. It corresponds to a new phase of our people's life, it has long demanded its implementation in literature, our best writers have been circling around it; but they could only understand its necessity and could not comprehend and feel its essence; Ostrovsky managed to do this. None of the critics on The Thunderstorm wanted or knew how to present a proper assessment of this character ...
... The field in which Ostrovsky observes and shows us Russian life does not concern purely social and state relations, but is limited to the family; in a family who most of all withstands all the oppression of tyranny, if not a woman? What bailiff, worker, servant of the Wild One can be so driven, beaten, detached from his personality, like his wife? Who can boil so much grief and indignation against the absurd fantasies of a tyrant? And at the same time, who less than her has the opportunity to express her murmur, to refuse to perform that which is disgusting to her? Servants and clerks are connected only in a material, human way; they can leave the tyrant as soon as they find another place for themselves. The wife, according to prevailing concepts, is inextricably linked with him, spiritually, through the sacrament; no matter what her husband does, she must obey him and share a meaningless life with him ... Being in such a position, a woman, of course, must forget that she is the same person, with the same rights as a man. She can only demoralize, and if the personality is strong in her, then get a tendency to the same tyranny from which she suffered so much ... In general, in a woman, even having reached the position of an independent and con amore exercising in tyranny, one can always see her comparative powerlessness, a consequence of her age-old oppression: she is harder, more suspicious, soulless in her demands; she does not lend itself to sound reasoning, not because she despises him, but rather because she is afraid of not coping with him: “You’ll start, they say, to reason, and what else will come of this, they’ll be entangled just”, and as a result, she is strictly adheres to antiquity and various instructions given to her by some Feklusheya ...
It is clear from this that if a woman really wants to free herself from such a situation, then her business will be serious and decisive ... home remedies of the good old times will still lead to obedience. A woman who wants to go to the end in her uprising against the oppression and tyranny of the elders in the Russian family must be filled with heroic self-sacrifice, must make up her mind and be ready for everything. "

Katerina is in some ways a woman of Nekrasov's poetry, if you believe the interpretation of "The Storm" in Dobrolyubov's article "A ray of light in the dark kingdom." Here Dobrolyubov writes about the revolution, predicts the emergence of feminism:

“Thus, the emergence of a female energetic character is fully consistent with the situation to which tyranny is brought in Ostrovsky's drama. It went to the extreme, to the denial of all common sense; it is more than ever hostile to the natural requirements of mankind and more fiercely than ever tries to stop their development, because in their triumph it sees the approach of its inevitable death. Through this, it evokes even more murmur and protest even in the weakest beings. At the same time, tyranny, as we have seen, lost its self-confidence, lost its firmness in action, and lost a significant portion of the power that consisted for him in instilling fear in everyone. Therefore, the protest against him is not drowned out at the very beginning, but can turn into a stubborn struggle. "

But Katerina is not a feminist or a revolutionary:

“First of all, you are struck by the extraordinary originality of this character. There is nothing external, alien in him, but everything comes out somehow from within him; every impression is processed in him and then organically merges with him. We see this, for example, in Katerina's simple-minded story about her childhood and about life in her mother's house. It turns out that her upbringing and young life did not give her anything: in her mother's house it was the same as in the Kabanovs - they went to church, sewed gold on velvet, listened to the stories of pilgrims, dined, walked in the garden, again talked with the pilgrims and We prayed ourselves ... After listening to Katerina's story, Varvara, her husband's sister, remarks with surprise: "Why, we have the same thing." But the difference is determined by Katerina very quickly in five words: "Yes, everything here seems to be out of bondage!" And further conversation shows that in all this appearance, which is so commonplace in our country everywhere, Katerina knew how to find her own special meaning, to apply it to her needs and aspirations, until the heavy hand of Kabanikha lay on her. Katerina does not at all belong to violent characters, never happy, loving to destroy at all costs. On the contrary, this character is predominantly creative, loving, ideal. "

A woman of the 19th century had to endure a lot:

“In the gloomy atmosphere of the new family, Katerina began to feel the inadequacy of her appearance, which she had thought to be content with before. Under the heavy hand of the soulless Kabanikha there is no room for her bright visions, just as there is no freedom for her feelings. In a fit of tenderness for her husband, she wants to hug him, - the old woman shouts: “What are you hanging around your neck, shameless woman? Bow down at your feet! " She wants to be left alone and mourn quietly, as it used to be, and her mother-in-law says: "Why aren't you howling?" She is looking for light, air, wants to dream and frolic, water her flowers, look at the sun, at the Volga, send her greetings to all living things - but she is kept in captivity, she is constantly suspected of unclean, depraved plans. She still seeks refuge in religious practice, in church attendance, in soul-saving conversations; but even here he does not find the previous impressions. Killed by day's work and eternal bondage, she can no longer dream with the former clarity of angels singing in a dusty pillar, illuminated by the sun, cannot imagine the Gardens of Eden with their unperturbed appearance and joy. Everything is gloomy, scary around her, everything blows cold and some kind of irresistible threat: the faces of the saints are so strict, and the church readings are so formidable, and the stories of the pilgrims are so monstrous ... "

“Katerina tells Vary about her character from her childhood memories:“ I was born so hot! I was still six years old, no more - so I did! They offended me with something at home, but it was towards evening, it was already dark, - I ran out to the Volga, got into the boat, and pushed it away from the shore. The next morning they found it, ten miles away ... ”This childish fervor was preserved in Katerina; it was only with her general maturity that she gained the strength to withstand impressions and dominate them. An adult Katerina, put in the need to endure grievances, finds the strength to endure them for a long time, without vain complaints, half-resistances and all sorts of noisy antics. She endures until some interest speaks in her, especially close to her heart and legitimate in her eyes, until such a demand of her nature is insulted in her, without the satisfaction of which she cannot remain calm. Then she won't look at anything. She will not resort to diplomatic tricks, deceit and trickery - she is not like that. "

As a result, Dobrolyubov writes:

“But even without any lofty considerations, just for humanity, we are glad to see the deliverance of Katerina - even through death, if it is impossible otherwise. On this score, we have in the drama itself a terrible testimony telling us that living in the "dark kingdom" is worse than death. "

Total for the XIX century.

Starting with Zhukovsky and ending with L. Tolstoy, we are given a whole evolution of the images of women in literature and in society. In the 19th century, there was some kind of breakdown in the "women's issue". Light, ideal images of young ladies were replaced by images of "traitors and prostitutes", not "traitors and prostitutes" themselves, but made such by society. All their betrayal, repentance, death loudly cried out about themselves, that a woman can no longer live in a patriarchal order, which has reached the point of "tyranny." Nevertheless, there are bright images of "Turgenev girls", some of them are foreign women, and they are the ray of light that "men's literature" carried then.

A double yoke, a double serfdom, dominated the woman. The woman was seen as a slave to everyday life, she was a toy in the hands of male lust. It should be noted that Pushkin and L. Tolstoy were great womanizers, offended quite a few ordinary Russian women, offended cynically, disgustingly, and only with their creativity they could only atone for their guilt before them. (For example, in one of his letters, Pushkin admits that his "Wonderful Moment" was only a pretext for seducing Anna Kern. In Raphael's "Sistine Madonna" L. Tolstoy saw only a simple "girl who gave birth").

The point here is not the suppression of "female sexuality", but the humiliated general attitude that was assigned to a woman. There is a double alienation here: alienation in the ideal image, assimilation of a woman to an angel, and on the other hand, her being trampled into the mud by "tyrants".

Second part.

The philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov and the poetry of Alexander Blok.

In his series of articles "The Meaning of Love" Vladimir Solovyov refuted Western theories (Schopenhauer) of sexual love. The Russian philosopher showed that the necessity of procreation, the generic instinct is inversely related to the feeling of love (on the example of an ascending ladder in the living world). It was in sexual love that he saw love itself, that is, love between a man and a woman, since it is possible only between equally loving, is something more than friendship, love for the Fatherland and motherly love. Only a person who sees a person in another, in the object of his adoration, can love. The selfishness of men is the non-recognition of personality in the "beloved woman." Onegin did not see the person in Tatiana, neither when she opened her girlish heart to him, nor in her marriage. Katerina from Ostrovsky's The Storm, Anna Karenina has a personality, but this personality is tragic. The Turgenev girl also has a personality, and it is this presence that captivates.

A. Blok was married to the daughter of Dmitry Mendeleev, whom he idolized. In his work, the poet sang the image of the "Stranger" in Christian tones. (Compare the famous "Stranger" by I. Kramskoy).

... And slowly, passing between the drunks,
Always without companions, alone
Breathing with spirits and mists
She sits by the window.

And they blow with ancient beliefs
Her elastic silks
And a hat with mourning feathers
And in the rings is a narrow hand.

And chained by a strange closeness,
Looking beyond the dark veil
And I see the coast enchanted
And the enchanted distance.

Deaf secrets are entrusted to me,
Someone's sun has been handed to me
And all the souls of my bend
A tart wine pierced.

And ostrich feathers bowed
In my brain swaying
And deep blue eyes
Blossom on the distant shore.

There is a treasure in my soul
And the key is entrusted only to me!
You really are a drunken monster!
I know: the truth is in wine.

The appearance of the "stranger" and the end of the poem are tied to alcohol. This is a vision of a drunk.
The very appearance of the "Stranger" tells us that a man knows nothing about a woman, did not know and is not able to know her, that a woman is a sacred secret. This is a mystical attitude towards a woman, also alienated.

And the heavy sleep of everyday consciousness
You shake off, longing and loving.
Vl. Soloviev

I have a presentiment of you. The years pass by -
All in one guise I foresee You.
The entire horizon is on fire - and unbearably clear,
And silently I wait - longing and loving.

The entire horizon is on fire, and the appearance is near,
But I'm scared: you will change your appearance,
And you will boldly arouse suspicion
Changing the usual features at the end.

Oh, how I fall - both sad and low,
Not having overcome the deadly dreams!
How clear is the horizon! And radiance is near.
But I am afraid: you will change your appearance.
Blok is a knight of the Fair Lady. Christian knight. Often he turns to God through the prism of the philosophy of Vladimir Solovyov. But there is also a place for mysticism, superstition, divination. Love again, as it was in Zhukovsky, buries itself between pagan mysticism and Christian truth.
2.

Yesenin and Mayakovsky.

Yesenin is also prone to mysticism. So in the form of a Russian birch, he sees a girl. "As a young wife he kissed a birch." Or here:

Green hairstyle,
Girlish breasts.
Oh thin birch,
What looked into the pond?

What is the wind whispering to you?
What is the sand ringing about?
Or do you want in braids-branches
Are you a moon comb?

Open up, reveal a secret to me
Your tree thoughts
I fell in love with sad
Your pre-autumn noise.

And in response to me a birch:
"O curious friend,
Starry tonight
Here the shepherd shed tears.

The moon cast shadows
They shone green.
Behind bare knees
He hugged me.

And so, taking a deep breath,
He said to the ringing of the branches:
"Goodbye my dove,
Until the new cranes. "

At the same time, Yesenin loves some kind of oriental secret about a woman:

Shagane you are mine, Shagane!


About wavy rye in the moonlight.
Shagane you are mine, Shagane.

Because I'm from the north or something,
That the moon is a hundred times bigger there,
No matter how beautiful Shiraz is,
It is no better than Ryazan's expanse.
Because I'm from the north, or something.

I'm ready to tell you the field
I took this hair from the rye,
If you want, knit on your finger -
I don't feel any pain at all.
I am ready to tell you the field.

About wavy rye under the moon
Guess my curls.
Honey, joke, smile
Do not wake only the memory in me
About wavy rye in the moonlight.

Shagane you are mine, Shagane!
There, in the north, the girl too,
She looks terribly like you
Maybe he is thinking of me ...
Shagane you are mine, Shagane.

Yesenin is a bully, or rather gives the image of a bully, whom only female love can save.

From the cycle "LOVE OF A HOOLIGAN"
* * *
A blue fire swept around
Forgotten birthplaces.

I was all - like a neglected garden,
He was greedy for women and potions.
I didn't like to sing and dance
And lose your life without looking back.

I would only look at you
To see the eye of a golden-brown whirlpool,
And so that, without loving the past,
You could not leave for another.

Gentle step, light waist,
If you knew with a stubborn heart,
How a bully knows how to love
How he knows how to be submissive.

I'd forget the taverns forever
And I would have abandoned writing poetry,
Just touch your hand subtly
And your hair color in autumn.

I'd follow you forever
At least to ours, at least to strangers gave ...
The first time I sang about love
For the first time I renounce making a row.
A contemporary of Blok and Yesenin, Vladimir Mayakovsky, notes that in relation to a woman, a man turns into a "cloud in his pants." Mayakovsky's hopes are connected with the "future communist world", with the triumph of Marxism-Leninism. But this turns out to be just a change in the sign: the "new woman" is looking for a cut with a "hammer and sickle" for the sake of a new fashion.

Love (Adult)
Vladimir Mayakovsky

Adults have things to do.
Pockets in rubles.
Be in love?
Please!
Publications for a hundred.
And I,
homeless,
arms
in tattered
put it in my pocket
and wandered around, big-eyed.
Night.
Wear your best dress.
You rest your soul on wives, on widows.
Me
Moscow was choking in its arms
the ring of their endless Gardens.
Into hearts
at one o'clock
mistresses are ticking.
The partners of the love bed are delighted.
Capitals heartbeat wild
I caught
Passionate lying area.
Unbuttoned -
the heart is almost outside -
I open myself to the sun and a puddle.
Enter with passions!
Climb with love!
From now on, I have no power to rule my heart.
I know the home of others.
It is in the chest - anyone knows!
On me
the anatomy went crazy.
Solid heart -
buzzing all over the place.
Oh how many there are
springs alone,
for 20 years in a heated pile!
Their burden is unspent — simply unbearable.
Unbearable not so
for a verse,
but literally.

Philistine love, "lust without love" appears. The "boat of love" is not only broken about everyday life. Love breaks down with the fall of morals. Zamyatin shows a grotesque version of the fall in morals in the "new world" in "WE". They give tickets for sexual intercourse. Women cannot give birth. People do not have names, not affectionate female names, for example, but numbers.

The Alexander Green phenomenon.

Assol is a scandal in Russian literature. The "scarlet sails" of communism have taken on a romantic color. The attitude to pursue a dream "with your own hands" is correct. But should Assol wait for her Gray? For this love, for this romance, they throw stones at Green and even hate him. The romantic, youthful dream of love, however, does not reveal anything wrong with it. In a vulgar world, in a world of debauchery, in a spiritless world, the heroines of Alexander Green carry the truth about love. This is only a project of love, a project of love, which was described by Vladimir Solovyov. They laugh at Assol, but faith saves her. Gray only fulfilled her wish, and did not just appear out of nowhere. He was the first to fall in love with Assol and for her sake hired a scarlet canvas for the sails of his ship "Secret". Green's woman is romantic and chaste
"Running on the Waves" is a more complex piece. The main character sets off in pursuit of a certain Biche Saniel, but ends up in the arms of Daisy, a cheerful girl who also believes in “running on the waves”. It was Christ who walked on the waves. It's a secret. Sacrament, faith - this is what unites the heroes and heroines of Green's extravaganzas. A person needs faith in a dream. "Love is possible in reality," not "happiness was so possible." Green and his works testify to the citizenship of the world, a break with Russian tradition. Grinevsky became Green. The question of a woman's fidelity is not raised at all, nor is the question of sexuality itself. Alexander Green is a knight of the Beautiful Lady in the 20th century. Misunderstood, he remained almost a storyteller. But the ideals that he sets forth are indisputably useful to youth.

Soviet woman in Soviet literature.

Characteristic here in our conversation is the image of the heroine from the story "The Viper" by Alexei Tolstoy. Such heroines are well described by Vladimir Nabokov in the article "The Triumph of Virtue." “The situation is even simpler with female types. Soviet writers have a genuine cult of women. She appears in two main varieties: a bourgeois woman who loves upholstered furniture and perfumes and suspicious specialists, and a communist woman (a responsible worker or a passionate neophyte), and a good half of Soviet literature is used to depict her. This popular woman has elastic breasts, is young, vigorous, participates in processions, and is amazingly able to work. She is a cross between a revolutionary, a sister of mercy and a provincial young lady. But above all she is a saint. Her casual love interests and disappointments don't count; she has only one fiancé, a class fiancé - Lenin. "
In "Virgin Land Upturned" by Sholokhov there is an invariably vulgar moment: the main character agrees to extramarital sex with the heroine Lushka, justifying himself: "What am I a monk, or what?" So much for the "virgin soil" raised.
Now we will talk about another Nobel laureate (apart from Sholokhov, who we just noticed, who was the only socialist realist to receive the highest literary award). Let's take a look at the heroines of Ivan Bunin.

Heroines of Ivan Bunin are happier than his own wife and mistress. They always have "easy breathing". If she is cheating on her beloved, then this is only a pre-emptive blow, as in the story "Mitya's Love". The main character falls into treason, and then learns that he was cheated on. Ivan Bunin is trying to bring us a "Grammar of Love", but it turns out some kind of "Kama Sutra" (I have nothing against this cultural monument). Yes, a girl with Bunin can become a nun, but the night before she devotes herself to God, she surrenders to a man, knowing that this will be the first and last time in her life. The opportunity to indulge your passion is always preferable to some kind of dream, some kind of alienation, expectation ("Natalie"). Bunin echoes the "amorous philosophy" of Vasily Rozanov. "Sex is good!" - this is their common pretentious slogan. But Bunin is still a real poet of love lyrics, his erotica does not clash with morality, his erotica is beautiful. "Dark alleys", they have not yet been revealed, the grammar of love does not turn into obsessive pornography. Bunin is looking for the "Formula of Love".
Bunin's women are more emotional than Turgenev's girls, they are more relaxed, but also simpler, because they are not so “strange”. But Turgenev's girls are chaste, for them there is almost no question of sexual intimacy, while for Bunin, sex is very important for a woman. Bunin's male heroes are even more frivolous: this is how the story "Tanya" opens:
“She served as a maid of his relative, a petty landowner Kazakova, she was seventeen years old, she was short, which was especially noticeable when she, gently wiggling her skirt and slightly lifting her small breasts under her blouse, walked barefoot or, in winter, in felt boots, her simple face was only pretty, and the gray peasant eyes were beautiful only in youth. At that distant time, he was spending himself especially recklessly, he led a wandering life, had many casual love meetings and connections - and he treated the connection with her as an accidental one ... "
For the writer Ivan Bunin, in the words of the philosopher Ivan Ilin, the principle “cute, therefore, good” is stronger than the principle of “good, therefore, cute”.
The place of a young girl is not at a desk, but in bed, according to Eduard Limonov; obviously, this opinion is already rooted in the works of Bunin.

But Bunin has other merits. This is the singer of autumn, end of life, end of love. During his reign, the terrible First World War and the collapse of the Romanovs' house, the death of old Russia, the death of "Holy Russia" and the accession of the "resefser" began. How does the woman of Bunin's works grieve? "Should I cry or sing at the top of my voice?" -
the heroine of the story "Cold Autumn" is recognized. Isn't Yaroslavna crying here? Russia is constantly at war in its history and modernity, and Russian women cry, cry in tune: "The girls are crying, the girls are sad today."
Moments of love, true love are something worth living for. Life is measured by such moments. Human life is short and meaningless without love ("Master from San Francisco"). It is not necessarily something sexy, but something affectionate, something sensitive. Spring and autumn are equal. The past moments of love are "... that magical, incomprehensible, incomprehensible neither the mind nor the heart, which is called the past."

Love is incomprehensible, it is mysterious, it is in the moonlight, it is in nature, which Fet sang, it is in silence, which Tyutchev sang. Semyon Frank writes that heavenly heights and Sodom's abysses are equally incomprehensible. And all of this is related to love. On one side of the scale is Green's ideal, faith in "true love", faith in a place of love, falling in love, and on the other, the depths of Sodom that Dostoevsky's heroes reach. The angel of love and the demon of depravity always fight for every human soul: both men and women, first of all women.

I am happy when you are blue
You raise your eyes to me:
Young hopes shine in them -
Heaven of a cloudless day.
It's bitter for me when you, lowering
Dark eyelashes, shut up:
You love, without knowing it,
And you shyly conceal love.
But always, everywhere and unchanged
Near you my soul is bright ...
Dear friend! Oh be blessed
Beauty and youth are yours!

"Loneliness"

And the wind, and the rain, and the haze
Over a cold desert of water.
Here life died until spring,
The gardens were empty until spring.
I'm alone at the dacha.
It's dark for me
Behind the easel, and blowing through the window.

Yesterday you were with me
But you are really sad with me.
In the evening of a rainy day
You began to seem to me like a wife ...
Well, goodbye!
Sometime before spring
I live alone - without a wife ...

Going on endlessly today
The same clouds - ridge after ridge.
Your footprint in the rain by the porch
Broken, filled with water.
And it hurts me to look alone
Into the late afternoon gray darkness.

I wanted to shout after:
Come back, I became akin to you!
But for a woman, there is no past:
She fell out of love - and became a stranger to her.
Well! I'll flood the fireplace, I'll drink ...
It would be nice to buy a dog.

The Master and Margarita.

"Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no real, faithful, eternal love in the world? Let the liar cut off his vile tongue!" - this is how the second part of Bulgakov's novel opens. The famous love that appeared to the heroes "like a killer from the backyard" requires its own analysis.
The Master and Margarita met in a deserted alley and immediately realized that they loved each other: “She, however, later insisted that this was not so, that we loved each other a long time ago, without knowing each other, never not seeing ... "
But...
First, Margarita is cheating on her husband with the Master.
Secondly, she sells her soul to the devil, goes naked to the "Satan's ball", for the sake of her Master.
Third, the Master and Margarita in the novel “do not deserve light,” but peace.
And yet, the main male image in the novel is not the Master, not Yeshua and not Pilate, but Woland himself, Satan. This is a sex symbol of our time, an image of a successful and attractive man.
But back to Margarita.
“First of all, let us reveal a secret that the master did not want to reveal to Ivanushka. His beloved [Master's] name was Margarita Nikolaevna. Everything the master said about her was true. He described his beloved correctly. She was beautiful and smart. To this we must add one more thing - we can say with confidence that many women would give anything they want in order to exchange their lives for the life of Margarita Nikolaevna. Thirty-year-old childless Margarita was the wife of a very prominent specialist, who, moreover, made the most important discovery of national importance. Her husband was young, handsome, kind, honest and adored his wife. "
Mikhail Bulgakov poses the eternal question: what does a woman need? And does not know the answer:
“Gods, my gods! What did this woman need ?! What did this woman need, in whose eyes some kind of incomprehensible light always burned? Do not know. I don't know. Obviously, she was telling the truth, she needed him, a master, and not at all a Gothic mansion, and not a separate garden, and not money. She loved him, she spoke the truth. Even me, a truthful narrator, but a stranger, squeezes my heart at the thought of what Margarita experienced when she came to the master's house the next day, fortunately, without having time to talk with her husband, who did not return on time, and found out, that the master is no longer ... She did everything to find out something about him [the Master], and, of course, did not find out anything at all. Then she returned to the mansion and healed in the same place. "
Margarita is a frivolous lady, but without "light breath".
Margarita is the muse and inspirer of the Master; it was she who first appreciated the Master's novel about Pilate. She admires the talent of her lover. I would like to wish such love to every writer. It was she who, having read the first pages of his novel, named her lover a master (and sewed him a hat with the letter "M"). It is she who takes revenge on the critics who did not accept the novel, so similar to the Gospel.
The writer's wife - Elena Sergeevna Bulgakova - was with M. Bulgakov to the end, together with him she experienced all the persecutions and always instilled faith and hope in her husband.
Margarita is faithful to the Master and his novel. But she hardly understood Jesus Christ, whose reflection was Yeshua from the novel about Pilate. “Invisible and free! Invisible and free! ”- confesses the witch Margarita. She appreciates the Master's novel only artistically, the Gospel truth is completely opposite to her way of life. Sonya Marmeladova feels more and more deeply the sacred history from the New Testament. Perhaps M. Bulgakov succumbed to the following concept of Nikolai Berdyaev. In The Meaning of Creativity, Berdyaev writes that if the Old Testament is the covenant of the law, the New Testament is the covenant of redemption, then the New Testament is coming - the covenant of creativity and freedom. And what kind of creativity can there be after Christ? - creativity on the theme of the Gospel. The love of the Master and Margarita bears "Berdyaev's motives": freedom, artistic creativity, the high role of personality and mystic.
(Andrei Kuraev believes that the novel about Pilate is a caricature of Tolstoyism, of Leo Tolstoy's reading of the Gospel).

7.
Happy couples: Assol and Gray, Master and Margarita.
Do we believe in the happiness of Gray and Assol? As teenagers, we all trusted Green. But is such a reality possible. Vladimir Nabokov, criticizing Freud, says that it is poetry that forms sexuality, and not sexuality - poetry. Yes, maybe these happy stories are impossible, but they give us an ideal, an example. Scarlet Sails is the Kantian categorical imperative of Russian love literature. A man is not a prince on horseback, a man is one who, out of love, is able to embody a woman's dream of happiness.
The Master and Margarita are happy in a different way. The Light of Love is not available to them, this is not a bright story. They only get peace. The Christian sacrament of marriage is inaccessible to them, they do not know the true canonical history of Christ, Yeshua is only a philosopher for them. Moreover, the central place in this "apocryphal" is assigned to Pilate, a simple Roman bureaucrat who played so strongly in the sacred history of mankind.
The protest is caused by vulgar pop songs about the love of the Master and Margarita, about Gray and Assol. It is mass culture that kills the meaning that love carries with these couples. M. Bulgakov saw the fall of "Holy Russia", his "apocrypha" became an evangelical breeze for the Soviet intelligentsia. The atheistic power, which erected monuments to Judas, strives in its vector to the point opposite to the divine, to the satanic point. Woland and all his retinue came to Moscow as the Bolsheviks came to "take power." The godlessness of the first years of Soviet power allows Woland to roam like that.
But why is Satan necessarily a man? In the story of V.V. Nabokov's "Fairy Tale" Satan takes on a woman's face, tempts the hero with the opportunity to spend the night with a dozen women at once. The Witch-Margarita continues the tradition of "Pannochka" from "Viy" by Gogol and his other Little Russian heroines.

The girls of Dostoevsky and Nabokov. A question about age in love.

Now let's talk about little women - about girls - in Russian literature. So clearly and distinctly we will compare Lolita Nabokov and Matryosha Dostoevsky. And then consider a girl from the country of the Soviets.

In "Demons" F.M. Dostoevsky has a so-called “forbidden chapter” - the chapter “At Tikhon's”. In it, Stavrogin comes to Father Tikhon (bishop) with a certain paper, a note that he wants to publish publicly. This note is of a confessional nature. There Stavrogin writes that he indulged in debauchery, "in which he did not find pleasure." In particular and mainly, he writes how he seduced a young girl - a girl of ten years old - Matryosha. After that, Matryosha hanged herself.

"She was fair-haired and springy, her face was ordinary, but there is a lot of childish and quiet, extremely quiet in him."

Here's how the crime itself is described:

“My heart began to beat violently. I got up and began to approach her. They had a lot of geraniums on their windows and the sun was shining very brightly. I sat down quietly on the floor beside me. She shuddered and at first was incredibly frightened and jumped up. I took her hand and kissed her, pulled her back onto the bench and began to look into her eyes. The fact that I kissed her hand suddenly made her laugh like a child, but only for one second, because she jumped up quickly another time and already in such fright that the spasm went down her face. She looked at me with horrified, motionless eyes, and her lips began to move to cry, but still did not scream. I kissed her hand again and took her on my lap. Then suddenly she drew back and smiled as if from shame, but with a kind of wry smile. Her whole face flushed with shame. I kept whispering something to her and laughing. Finally, suddenly such a strange thing happened, which I will never forget and which led me to surprise: the girl put her arms around my neck and suddenly began to kiss terribly herself. Her face expressed complete admiration. "

To all this, the girl will then say: "She killed God." And here is how she will look at Stavrogin after “this”: “There was no one but Matreshcha. She was lying in the closet behind the screens on her mother's bed, and I saw her look out; but I pretended not to notice. All the windows were open. The air was warm, it was even hot. I walked around the room and sat down on the sofa. I remember everything until the last minute. It was a decided pleasure for me not to speak to Matryoshka. I waited and sat for an hour, and suddenly she jumped up from behind the screens. I heard how both her feet hit the floor when she jumped out of bed, then rather quick steps, and she stood on the threshold into my room. She looked at me in silence. During those four or five days, in which I have never seen her close since that time, I really lost a lot of weight. Her face seemed to be dry, and her head was probably hot. The eyes became large and looked at me motionless, as if with dull curiosity, as it seemed to me at first. I sat in the corner of the sofa, looked at her and did not touch. And then suddenly again I felt hatred. But very soon I noticed that she was not at all afraid of me, and, perhaps, rather delirious. But she was not delirious either. She suddenly often nodded her head at me, as they nod when they are very reproachful, and suddenly raised her little fist at me and began to threaten me with it from the spot. The first moment this movement seemed funny to me, but then I could not bear it: I got up and moved towards her. There was such despair on her face that it was impossible to see in the face of a child. She kept waving her fist at me with a threat and kept nodding, reproaching. "

Then Stavrog has a dream about an island of paradise, as if from the picture of Claude Lorrain, "Assis and Galatea". This dream clearly anticipates the dreams of Nabokov's Humbert about an island where only nymphets live (see about Nabokov below). This is Stavrogin's dream: “This is a corner of the Greek archipelago; gentle blue waves, islands and rocks, a blossoming coastal area, a magical panorama in the distance, a setting calling sun - you cannot express it in words. Here European mankind remembered its cradle, here the first scenes from mythology, its earthly paradise ... Beautiful people lived here! They got up and fell asleep happy and innocent; the groves were filled with their merry songs, the great surplus of untold strength went into love and simple-hearted joy. The sun bathed these islands and the sea with rays, rejoicing in their beautiful children. Wonderful dream, high delusion! A dream, the most incredible of all that was, to which all of humanity gave all its strength all its life, for which it sacrificed everything, for which the prophets died on crosses and were killed, without which the peoples do not want to live and cannot even die. It was as if I had lived all this sensation in this dream; I don't know what exactly I dreamed about, but the rocks, and the sea, and the slanting rays of the setting sun - all this I seemed to still see when I woke up and opened my eyes, for the first time in my life, literally wetted with tears. The feeling of happiness, still unknown to me, passed through my heart even to the point of pain. " Father Tikhon says to Stavrogin: "But there is, of course, no greater and more terrible crime, like your act with the young lady." And a little earlier: "I will not hide anything in front of you: I was horrified by a great idle force, deliberately gone into an abomination."
Berdyaev admires the image of Stavrogin. But in our conversation, one question is important: why are such scum like Stavrogin so popular with women? So Lolita likes the pornographer Quilty, although his filth is hundreds of times more than Humbert's.

Nabokov did not like Dostoevsky for his "neglect of the word." Nabokov gives us his Matryosha.

But when talking about Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977), the question always arises whether he is a Russian or American writer, because he wrote in two languages ​​(this is not counting French). Nabokov is a man of the level of the Renaissance people: a writer of all genres and styles, of all kinds of literature, a researcher of butterflies, a skilled chess player and a compiler of chess problems. He is a man of a global scale. He is both a Russian and an American writer. But, they will ask me, "Lolita" is Nabokov's English-language work. Yes, but the translation into Russian was made by the author himself, and much has changed in the translation (a whole paragraph is missing), so the translation of Lolita into Russian belongs to Russian literature. Why was there such a translation? - So that the Soviet and post-Soviet vulgarians would not kill the novel, where, according to the author's words, "high moral morality" triumphs.

In a postscript to the Russian edition, Nabokov writes: “I console myself, firstly, with the fact that the clumsiness of the proposed translation is guilty not only of the translator who has lost the habit of his native speech, but also the spirit of the language into which the translation is being made. During six months of work on the Russian "Lolita" I not only became convinced of the disappearance of many personal trinkets and irreplaceable language skills and treasures, but also came to some general conclusions about the mutual translatability of the two amazing languages. "

The chapter "At Tikhon's" was banned. Lolita was also banned and still raises questions. Nabokov, on the other hand, defended his novel "to the last drop of ink."

What a bad deed have I done


about my poor girl?

Oh, I know, people are afraid of me,
and they burn people like me for magic,
and, like poison in a hollow emerald,
are dying from my art.

But how funny that at the end of the paragraph,
the proofreader and the eyelid in spite of,
the shadow of the Russian branch will fluctuate
on the marble of my hand.

(Nabokov's parody of Pasternak's Nobel Prize).

“A homeless girl, a busy mother, a maniac choking with lust — all of them are not only colorful characters in a one-of-a-kind story; they also warn us of dangerous inclines; they indicate possible disasters. Lolita should force us all - parents, social workers, educators - to devote ourselves with great vigilance and insight to the task of raising a healthier generation in a more reliable world. " - This is how the fictional Ph.D. John Rae concludes his review of the novel.

Lolita is a confession, like Stavrogin's leaflet. "Lolita" - repentance, warning. Humbert Humbert is a pseudonym taken from the history of the Christian church. It was Humbert Silva-Candida who was guilty of separating Catholicism from Orthodoxy.

This is how the story of repentance itself begins, this is how Lolita Humbert presents us:

“Lolita, the light of my life, the fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-li-ta: the tip of the tongue takes three steps down the palate to push against the teeth in the third. Lo. Lee. That.
She was Lo, just Lo, in the morning, five feet tall (no two vershoks and one sock). She was Lola in long pants. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always: Lolita. "

And here is how she appeared to him:

“This is the veranda,” my driver [Lolita's mother, Charlotte Haze] sang, and then, without the slightest warning, a blue sea wave swelled under my heart, and from the reed rug on the veranda, out of the circle of the sun, half naked, on her knees, turning on her knees to me, my Riviera love looked attentively at me over dark glasses.
It was the same child - the same thin, honey-colored shoulders, the same silky, flexible, bare back, the same light brown head of hair. A black shawl with white polka dots tied around her torso hid from my aged gorilla eyes - but not from the gaze of young memory - the half-developed chest that I so caressed on that immortal day. And as if I were a fabulous nanny of a little princess (lost, stolen, found, dressed in gypsy rags through which her nakedness smiles at the king and her hounds), I recognized the dark brown birthmark on her side. With sacred horror and ecstasy (the king is sobbing with joy, the trumpets are trumpeting, the nanny is drunk), I again saw the lovely sunken belly, where my southward directed lips stopped in passing, and those boyish thighs, on which I kissed the jagged imprint from the waistband of crazy, immortal day at the Pink Rocks. A quarter of a century since then, what I have lived has narrowed, formed a quivering edge and disappeared.
It is extremely difficult for me to express with the required force this explosion, this trembling, this impulse of passionate recognition. In that sun-permeated moment, during which my gaze managed to crawl a kneeling girl (blinking over her strict dark glasses - oh, little Herr Doktor, who was destined to cure me of all my pains), while I walked past her under the guise of maturity (in the guise of a stately courageous handsome, screen hero), the emptiness of my soul managed to absorb all the details of her bright charm and compare them with the features of my dead bride. Later, of course, she, this nova, this Lolita, my Lolita, had to completely overshadow her prototype. I am only trying to emphasize that the revelation on the American veranda was only a consequence of that "principality by the sea" in my suffering adolescence. Everything that happened between these two events boiled down to a series of blind searches and delusions and false seeds of joy. Everything that was in common between these two beings made them one for me. "

In the films of S. Kubrick and E. Lyne, this moment is well shown - the moment when Humbert first saw Lolita. Through dark glasses she looked at him.

But Humbert still does not distinguish the personality of Lolita from his dream of a nymphet: “And now I want to state the following idea. In the age range between nine and fourteen, there are girls who, for some enchanted wanderers, twice or many times their age, reveal their true essence - not human, but nymphic (that is, demonic); and I propose to call these little darlings: nymphets. " And Further:
“The reader will notice that I replace spatial concepts with the concepts of time. Moreover: I would like him to see these limits, 9-14, as the visible outlines (mirrored shallows, crimson rocks) of an enchanted island on which these nymphets of mine are found and which is surrounded by a wide misty ocean. The question arises: are all girls within these age limits - nymphets? Of course no. Otherwise, we initiates, we lonely sailors, we nympholeptics, would have gone mad long ago. But beauty also does not serve as a criterion, while vulgarity (or at least what is called vulgarity in one environment or another) does not necessarily exclude the presence of those mysterious features - that fabulously strange grace, that elusive, changeable, soul-killing, enticing charm - which distinguish the nymphet from her contemporaries, who are incomparably more dependent on the spatial world of one-time phenomena than on the weightless island of enchanted time, where Lolita plays with others like her. The island, the sea, which Stavrogin took from the painting by Claude Lorrain, "Assis and Galatea".

A living, real person - Lolita - is lost behind the abstract concept of a nymphet. Humbert is enchanted, Humbert has immersed himself in his own mythology. Only at the end of the novel will he say that Lolita, who has already ceased to be a nymphet, is the most beautiful creature in this world, or one that can only be thought of (dreaming of seeing) on ​​that one.

Like Matryosha, Lolita herself responds (or rather, even provokes) to Humbert's lust with lust: “Suffice it to say that the skewed observer did not see a trace of chastity in this pretty, barely formed girl, who was finally corrupted by the skills of modern children, joint training , scam businesses like girl scout bonfires and the like. For her, purely mechanical intercourse was an integral part of the secret world of adolescents, unknown to adults. What adults do to have children, it did not interest her at all. Lolitochka wielded the rod of my life unusually energetically and efficiently, as if it were an insensitive device that had nothing to do with me. She, of course, terribly wanted to amaze me with the youthful tricks of a young puny, but she was not quite ready for some discrepancies between a child's size and mine. Only vanity did not allow her to give up what she had begun, for in my wild position I pretended to be a hopeless fool and left her to work herself - at least for now I could endure my non-interference. But all this, in fact, is irrelevant; I am not interested in sexual matters. Everyone can imagine one or another manifestation of our animal life for himself. Another great feat beckons me: to define once and for all the disastrous charm of nymphets. " Matryosha felt that “she had killed God,” she hanged herself. Lolita was the brainchild of an impending and corrupting sexual revolution.

The relationship between Humbert and Lolita is somewhat similar to an ordinary everyday relationship. A man buys whatever she wants for his woman. At the same time, a woman may not like “her sponsor”. But here the problem is different: the girl has nowhere else to go, and she runs away at the first opportunity. "Love cannot be only physical, otherwise it is selfish, and therefore sinful." Lolita is just a delight for Humbert, an outlet for his lust. He uses the little girl as a thing, like a rag, but he also worships her as an idol, the idol of his "nymphet" cult.

All his life Nabokov struggled with the "totalitarian sexual myth" of the psychoanalysts of the Freudian school, whom the writer hated. In his article "What should everyone know?" Nabokov sneers at the fact that the "Viennese charlatan" was made an example of a good doctor. Nabokov saw that moral decline, that debauchery, that sexual licentiousness that Freud's theory carries. It is precisely on Freudians that "Lolita" strikes first of all, where all the intentions of psychoanalysis are called "libido-believings".

But there were perverters at all times. This was felt, for example, by Krylov, whom Nabokov greatly appreciated:

In a dwelling of gloomy shadows
Appeared before the judges
At the same hour: Robber
(He crashed on the highways,
And finally got into the loop);
Another was the glorious Writer covered with glory:
He thin poured poison in his creations,
Instilled unbelief, rooted depravity,
I was, like a Siren, sweetheart,
And, like Sirena, he was dangerous ...
The meaning of the fable is that the writer is more dangerous and sinful than the robber, because:
He was harmful
While only lived;
And you ... your bones have already decayed,
And the sun will never rise
So that new troubles from you are not illuminated.
The poison of your creations not only does not weaken,
But, overflowing, forever grow fierce.
Nabokov belongs to that kind of writers who felt all the responsibility to be a Writer. Therefore, for example, Nabokov does not favor the author of Lady Chatterley's Lover, David Lawrence.
9.
"The Lady with the Dog" by Chekhov and "Spring in Fialta" by Nabokov.
Chekhov's "Lady with a Dog" continues the age-old debate about whether to change or not change: Anna Karenina and Katerina from The Thunderstorm have already lined up against Tatiana. And now another blow to the institution of marriage: Anna Sergeevna. At the age of twenty she was married off, but she considers her husband nothing more than a “lackey”. She is unhappy with him. From him, she “runs away” to Yalta, where she meets Dmitry Dmitrievich Gurov, a womanizer, an adulterer, for whom women are a “lower race”.
This is how she enters into Gurov's life:
"Sitting in the pavilion at Vernet, he saw a young lady, a short blonde woman, in a beret walking along the embankment: a white spitz was running after her."
Gurov himself was that kind of man, a lecher, who outwardly was very attractive:
“There was something attractive, elusive in his appearance, character, in all his nature, which attracted women to him, attracted them; he knew about it, and he himself was also attracted by some kind of force. " “He always seemed to women not who he was, and they loved in him not himself, but the man whom their imaginations created and whom they eagerly sought in their lives; and then, when they noticed their mistake, they still loved. And none of them were happy with him. Time passed, he got to know each other, got together, parted, but never once loved; there was anything but love. "
The hero deftly manages to seduce the "lady with the dog". And after the betrayal, she, this Anna Sergeevna, echoing Matryosha, who “killed God,” says:
“May God forgive me! .. This is awful ... How can I justify myself? I am a bad, low woman, I despise myself and do not think about justification. I did not deceive my husband, but myself. And not only now, but I have been deceiving for a long time. My husband may be an honest, good man, but he is a lackey! I do not know what he does there, how he serves, but I only know that he is a lackey. "
Another "Anna on the neck" who wanted "freedom".
Chekhov describes their fall from grace as follows:
“Her room was stuffy, smelled of perfume that she bought in a Japanese store. Gurov, looking at her now, thought: "There are so many meetings in life!" From the past he retained the memory of carefree, good-natured women, cheerful with love, grateful to him for happiness, even if only for a very short time; and about those - like, for example, his wife - who loved without sincerity, with unnecessary conversations, mannered, with hysteria, with such an expression as if it was not love, not passion, but something more significant; and about such two or three, very beautiful, cold, who suddenly flashed on their face a predatory expression, a stubborn desire to take, snatch from life more than it can give, and these were not the first youth, capricious, not reasoning, imperious, not smart women, and when Gurov cooled towards them, their beauty aroused hatred in him and the lace on their underwear seemed to him then like scales. "
But much later, when the lovers are separated, they will dream of each other, they will find each other a friend.
This is how Dmitry sees Anna now: “Anna Sergeevna also came in. She sat down in the third row, and when Gurov looked at her, his heart sank, and he understood clearly that for him now in the whole world there was no closer, dearer and more important person; she, lost in the provincial crowd, this little woman, not remarkable at all, with a vulgar lorgnette in her hands, filled his whole life now, was his grief, joy, the only happiness that he now desired for himself; and to the sound of a bad orchestra, trashy philistine violins, he thought about how good she was. I thought and dreamed. "
And this will already be their true love.
“And only now, when his head became gray, he fell in love, properly, really - for the first time in his life.
Anna Sergeevna and he loved each other as very close, dear people, as husband and wife, as tender friends; it seemed to them that fate itself intended them for each other, and it was not clear why he was married, and she was married; and it was as if they were two migratory birds, a male and a female, who had been caught and forced to live in separate cages. They forgave each other for what they were ashamed of in their past, forgave everything in the present and felt that this love of theirs had changed both of them. "
Chekhov leaves the final open. It is not known how this story will end. But the philosophy of life is expressed by the author of "Ladies with the Dog" very succinctly: "And in this constancy, in complete indifference to the life and death of each of us, there is perhaps a guarantee of our eternal salvation, the continuous movement of life on earth, continuous perfection." "... Everything is beautiful in this world, everything except what we ourselves think and do when we forget about the highest goals of being, about our human dignity."
The theme of infidelity in marriage is continued by Nabokov's story "Spring in Fialta".
Before us is Nina and the one she calls Vassenka. It is from his face that the story is told. Fialta is a fictional city that smacks of Green's cosmopolitanism. "Fialta" stands for "violet" and "Yalta". There are some parallels with Chekhov's "Lady with a Dog" and the general poetics of Bunin.
Vassenka is married, he has children, Nina is also married. Their friendship or friendship or romance lasts their entire life (they meet in different cities under different circumstances, sometimes only in a shadow), starting from childhood, when they first kissed. This is how the lyrical hero writes about Nina's childish love: "... female love was spring water containing healing salts, which she willingly gave to everyone from her ladle, just remind."
Nina's husband is a mediocre writer Ferdinand. Here is how the double betrayal of the main characters to their spouses is described: “Ferdinand left to fence,” she said casually and, looking at the lower part of my face and thinking something over to herself (her love intelligence was incomparable), she turned to me and led, wagging on her thin ankles ... and only when we locked ourselves in ... yes, everything happened so simply, those few exclamations and chuckles that we uttered so did not correspond to the romantic terminology that there was nowhere to spread the brocade word : betrayal ... "Nina with her" light breath "on the same day will forget about the betrayal. It looks like another heroine of Nabokov, the wife of Centsinnatus from "Invitation to Execution", who says: "I, you know, am kind: this is such a small thing, and a man is such a relief."
And here is the last meeting between Nina and Vassenka before her death in a car accident:
“Nina, who was standing higher, put her hand on my shoulder, smiling and carefully, so as not to break her smile, kissing me. With unbearable strength, I went through (or so it seems to me now) everything that ever happened between us ... "Vassenka confesses:" What if I love you? " - but Nina did not accept these words, did not understand, and Vassenka is forced to make excuses, reducing everything to a joke.
The heroines of Vladimir Nabokov's novels, plays and stories are as erotic as the heroines of Bunin, but something, some kind of artistic truth and power in Nabokov's work, punishes for debauchery. Nabokov is not a propagandist and not a supporter of the "sexual revolution", because he saw an obvious evil in this: he hated Marx, Freud and Sartre, and it was their "Big Ideas" that influenced the student movements of the late 70s of the XX century in the West - to the sexual revolution.
10.
A woman at war.
The First and Second World Wars discovered the truth that a woman can work for men, master "male professions." A woman can fight, and not just wait for a sweetheart from the war. But even in war and in any "male" labor, she remains a woman. In this place, the example of the heroines of Boris Vasiliev's story "The Dawns Here Are Quiet ..." is indicative for us. We will consider female images as they die in a thriller-like text.
Liza Brichkina was the first to die; she was sent by Vaskov for help, but she drowned in a swamp. "Liza Brichkina has lived all nineteen years in a sense of tomorrow." Mother was ill for a long time, caring for her mother replaced almost all of Lisa's education. Father drank ...
Liza has been waiting all her life, "waiting for something." Her first love was a hunter, who lived by the grace of her father in their hayloft. Liza expected that she would "knock on her window" herself, but no one was bored. Once Lisa herself asked the hunter at night to help him arrange a sleeping place. But the hunter drove her away. “Nonsense should not be done even out of boredom,” were his words that night. But leaving, the hunter left such a launch, again reassuring Brichkina, gave her a new expectation: “You need to learn, Liza. You run completely wild in the forest. Come in August, I’ll arrange a college with a hostel ”. But the dream was not destined to come true - the war began. She fell under the control of Vaskov and she immediately liked him for his "solidity." The girls made fun of her because of this, but not evil. Rita Osnyanina told her that she should “live easier”. Vaskov promised her to "sing together" after the assignment, and this was Lisa's new hope, with whom she died.

The second was killed Sonya Gurvich. She ran for Vaskov's pouch, forgotten by Osyanina, ran at once, unexpectedly, without a command, ran away and was killed ... Sonya Gurvich knew German and was a translator. Her parents lived in Minsk. Father is a doctor. The family is large, even at the university she wore the altered dresses of her sisters. In the reading room there was a constant "bespectacled" neighbor with her. He and Sonya had only one evening - an evening in the Gorky Park of Culture and Leisure, and in five days he will volunteer for the front (he presented her with "Blok's thin book"). Sofya Solomonovna Gurvich died a heroic death: she was stabbed to death by non-human fascists. Vaskov took cruel revenge on the Fritz for her ...
They were quiet, inconspicuous girls, alive, whose image was not alienated either from Vaskov or from the author of the story. The girls are meek, inconspicuous, secretly in love. And such simple girls were ground down by the war.
Galya Chetvertak. Orphan. She grew, as they say, a gray mouse. Big inventor and dreamer. All my life I lived in some of my dreams. The surname "Chetvertak" is fictitious, fictitious and her mother. Her first love was shrouded in mystery, her first love "overtook" her. They did not take a quarter to the front for a long time, but she stormed the military registration and enlistment office for a long time and achieved her goal. More than all the other girls, she was afraid of Sonya's death. In the first attack on the Fritzes, Galya got cold feet, hid away, but Vaskov did not scold her. She died while hiding in the bushes, and the Fritzes passed by, but the Quarters lost their nerves, she ran and was shot.
Evgenia Komelkova. She died at the age of nineteen, leading the Germans away from Osyanina, who was wounded by a shrapnel and Vaskov, who was caring for her. Evgenia Komelkova had, perhaps, the easiest breath of all the girls Vaskov commanded. Until the last minutes, she believed in life. She loved life and rejoiced at every whim, was happy and carefree. “And Zhenya was not afraid of anything. She rode horses, shot at the shooting range, sat with her father in ambush for wild boars, drove her father's motorcycle around the military town. And she also danced a gypsy girl and a matchish at the evenings, sang to the guitar and played novels with the lieutenants drawn into a glass. Easy to twist, for fun, without falling in love. " Because of this, there were various rumors, which Zhenya did not pay attention to. She even had an affair with a real colonel, Luzhin, who had a family. It was he who "picked up" her when she lost her family. “Then she needed such support. I had to cuddle up, cry out, complain, caress and find myself again in this formidable military world. " After his death, Zhenya was left with a “proud and beautiful face”. It was Yevgenia Komelkova who staged the play "theater" for the Germans, pretending to be an idle bather, which confused the plans of the Germans. It was she who was the soul of their female company. And it was because of her romance with Luzhin that she was assigned to the women's team. Zhenya was jealous. “Zhenya, you are a mermaid! Zhenya your skin is transparent! Zhenya, you just need to sculpt a sculpture! Zhenya, you can walk without a bra! Oh, Zhenya, I need you to go to the museum. Under glass on black velvet! Unhappy woman, to pack such a figure in uniform is easier to die. Beautiful, beautiful are rarely happy. "The most feminine of all" fighters "Vaskov. Can you judge her for her "light breathing"? But the war wrote off a lot. She inspired other girls, she was the emotional center, she died like a hero, the animals were killed point-blank by the Germans.

Margarita Osyanina. She was wounded by a grenade splinter and, in order not to suffer, she shot herself. After her death, she had a three-year-old son (Albert, Alik), who was adopted by the surviving Vaskov. At less than eighteen years old, Rita Mushtakova married Lieutenant Osyanin, a red commander and border guard, whom she met at a school evening. A year after registering at the registry office, she gave birth to a boy. The husband died on the second day of the war in a bayonet counterattack. The mourning for her husband was long, but with the appearance of Zhenya Osyanina "thawed", "softened". Then she "took someone" in the city, where she roamed two or three nights a week at night. And it was because of this that she was the first to find the Fritzes.
War forced to kill; a mother, a mother-to-be, who herself must be the first to hate death, is forced to kill. This is how the hero of B. Vasiliev argues. The war broke psychology. But a soldier needs a woman so much, so much so that without a woman and there is no reason to fight, and yet they fought for a home, for a family, for a hearth, for which the keeper is a woman. But women also fought, fought as best they could, but remained women. Can Zhenya be judged for her "light breath"? According to Roman law, yes. According to Greek, aesthetic law, according to the principle of kalokagatya - no, because beautiful is at the same time good. How could there be an Inquisition that punished such girls? It is impossible for a man to blame a woman. Moreover, in the war.

11.
Family love.
The best example of true love (according to many writers and philosophers) is the example of the "old-world landowners" N.V. Gogol. Their life was quiet, impassive, calm. Kindness, cordiality, frankness were always expressed on their faces. Afanasy Ivanovich "took away quite deftly" Pulcheria Ivanovna, "whom the relatives did not want to give up for him."
“Pulcheria Ivanovna was somewhat serious, almost never laughed; but on her face and in her eyes was written so much kindness, so much readiness to treat you with everything that was best for them, that you would probably find a smile already too cloying for her kind face. "
"It was impossible to look at their mutual love without participation." They both loved warmth, loved to eat well, were careless about the affairs of a large household, although, of course, they did something in this direction. However, all the burden lay on the shoulders of Pulcheria Ivanovna.
“Pulcheria Ivanovna's room was all filled with chests, drawers, drawers and little chests. Many bundles and sacks of seeds, flowers, garden seeds, watermelon seeds, hung along the walls. A lot of balls with multi-colored wool, scraps of old dresses, sewn for half a century, were stacked in the corners in the chests and between the chests. "
Pulcheria Ivanovna strictly followed the girl's, "... she considered it necessary to keep them [girls] in the house and strictly watched their morality."
Afanasy Ivanovich loved to play a trick on his wife: he would say about the fire, then about what was going to the war, then he made fun of her cat.
They also loved the guests, from whom Pulcheria Ivanovna was always "extremely in spirit."
Pulcheria Ivanovna guessed in advance the approach of her death, but thought only of her husband, so that her husband would feel good without her, so that he would “not notice her absence”. Without her, Afanasy Ivanovich was in a long, hot sadness. He felt once that Pulcheria Ivanovna was calling him and quickly died and was buried next to her.
The family, the love of these kind little Russian old men gives us an example of a true married life. They turned to each other "on you" and they had no children, but their warmth and hospitality, their tenderness towards another, their affection captivates. It is love, not passion, that guides them. And they live only for each other.
This kind of love is rare in our time. During the time after the "sexual revolution", after the fall in morals from the collapse of the USSR, in our time it is already difficult to find women worthy of praise in literature. Or maybe it is necessary to write, write the ideal of a woman or write the reality of a woman, so that our reality is more beautiful, moral, warm and bright. To avoid the situation that Vladimir Makanin defined as “one and one”. People who would be together do not see, do not notice each other. Love is no longer dreamed of behind the tinsel of the passing days, the "boat of love" breaks down on everyday life, even if there were "scarlet sails" in the remnant. "Sex! Sex! Sex!" - we hear in the media and from living people in our environment. Where is the love? Where has all chastity gone, without which there is no mystery, mystery, mysticism. There are men and women, they sleep with each other, walk left and right. Beloved women no longer write poetry, and women no longer really need poetry. Romance and the desire to have a healthy family get rid of a hitherto unprecedented debauchery. Pornography from the Internet breaks all records in popularity: complete alienation, oblivion of the sexual sphere. Illusory, virtual erotica replaces the happiness of full-fledged love, living, real, bodily-spiritual. And we look at the older generation and wonder: how did they live so much together, didn’t run away after three years of marriage? And they, these happy couples, are surprised at the moral abyss in which Russian youth find themselves. There is no more poetry now that would form a high level of sexuality, a sublime sex life, quivering, someone goes into reading fantasy, goes into the world of fairy tales, someone studies books on the wisdom of the East, someone reads detectives or little ones for nothing love-story.
Saves culture, the culture of sexual relations, which was, which cannot be completely erased. Russian Orthodox Christianity is being revived, which has always stimulated the purity of sexual relations. We have a capital of our female images from our fiction, which we must increase. At all times, men and women loved each other, leaving monuments of this love in culture and in life itself - in children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We need to reinvent love.

Of course, we can no longer resurrect poor Liza's feelings for Erast, but a way must be found. With the institution of family and marriage, love itself is destroyed, the demographic structure of society is destroyed. The birth rate is declining, the Russian people, cut off from their roots and culture, are dying out. But our baggage, our literary capital, both tsarist and Soviet times, Russian-foreign, all this treasure must be absorbed and rethought within the framework of modernity and with thoughts about the future.

The position of women in society has changed dramatically over the 19th and 20th centuries. This was reflected in Russian fiction, which flourished at the same time. The status of women in society went hand in hand with the evolution of the female image. Literature influenced society, and society influenced literature. This interdependent, ambivalent process has not stopped today. Living male writers with great interest tried to find out the secret that the woman carries, they looked for the paths along which the woman walks, tried to guess what she wants. There is no doubt that Russian literature with its female images influenced the formation of a new status for women, their liberation and preserved her - women - dignity. But the evolution of female images is not a straight line, but an opportunity to look at different women from different angles. Every male writer writing about a woman is Pygmalion who brings many Galateas to life. These are living images, you can fall in love with them, you can cry with them, you can admire the eroticism they possess. Masters of Russian prose, poetry and drama brought out images of heroic women, you can certainly fall in love with them.

What a bad deed have I done
and am I a corrupter and a villain,
me making the whole world dream
about my poor girl? -

Nabokov writes about his Lolita. The girls of A. Green cause admiration for their courage and belief in a dream, Bunin's heroines seduce in an erotic sense, in a living girl you want to see the Turgenev type, and war is not terrible if a woman is nearby.

All of us - men and women - are looking for happiness in love for each other, one sex admires the other. But situations arise - external and internal - when love cannot find a way out. Such situations are considered by Russian classical literature and offer solutions to these situations. Misunderstandings between the sexes can be found by reading Russian classics. Literature is an occasion for acquaintance and conversation, discussing artistic images, the erotic position of the person himself is revealed, be it a man-reader or a reader-woman. Attitude towards sex, love, marriage and family is one of the most important components of the worldview of an individual and the ideology of society. A society where there is no love, where the birth rate is low, where there are no beacons and stars along which a person orientates himself in love, there is viciousness and evil triumphing. Societies where there are large families, where love is a value, where men and women understand each other, and do not use in the name of their lustful appetites, there is a flourishing of this society, there is culture, there is literature, because, as I noted above , love literature and real love go hand in hand.

So let us love, let us comprehend the sacrament of marriage, let us admire our women! Let more children be born, let new serious books about love be written, let new images excite the soul!