Genre specificity of "The Canterbury Tales" by J. Chaucer. Composition and genre diversity of the “Canterbury Tales” by J. Chaucer (in comparison with the “decameron” of G. Boccaccio) The significance of the Canterbury Tales for the development of English literature

35: But still, while there is a place and time,

37: I think it would be appropriate

38: Tell you about the situation

39: Each of them, as they seemed to me,

40: And what they were, and to what extent,

41: And more about their outfits...

The story tells of the love of two cousins ​​- Palamon and Arsita - for the daughter-in-law of the Duke of Athens, Emilia. The cousins, being princes of a hostile state, are imprisoned in prison by order of Theseus, from the high tower of which they accidentally see Emilia and both fall in love with her. Enmity breaks out between the cousins, and when Theseus learns of the rivalry between the two brothers, he arranges a knight's tournament, promising to give the winner Emilia as his wife. By the intervention of the gods, Palamon wins; Arsita dies by accident; the story ends with the wedding of Palamon and Emilia.

It should be noted that the Knight's tale is one of the longest tales presented by the Pilgrims. One gets the impression of solemnity and majesty of the narrative, since the narrator often retreats from the main action, presenting listeners with large passages of detailed descriptions, often not related to the very development of the plot (description of the women of Thebes mourning the death of their husbands, descriptions of temples, festivals, battles). Moreover, the Knight, as the story progresses, interrupts himself several times, returning to the main characters and the main development of the plot:

“Long passages presenting descriptions of temples, rituals, and armor of warriors emphasize the pretentious luxury of knightly life. The descriptions are rich in imagery and metaphorical, although, as some researchers note, they are standard: "...Palamon in this fightyng were a wood leon, and as a crueel tigre was Arcite..." ("...Palamon in this fight is like a mad lion, and like a ferocious tiger - Arsita..."); when describing the captives, Palamon and Arsita; the author does not go beyond standard epithets: “woful” (“poor”), “sorweful” (“sad”), “wrecked” (“unhappy”), “pitous” (“pathetic”) - epithets repeated throughout narratives".

The central figures of the narrative (the unfolding of the action) are Palamon and Arsita, but most researchers note that the central image is Duke Theseus. He is presented at the very beginning of the story as an ideal image, the embodiment of nobility, wisdom, justice and military virtues. The narrative opens with the introduction of the Duke, a description of his merits, although it would be logical to expect at the very beginning of the story the introduction of the central figures of the narrative, Palamon and Arsita. Theseus appears as a model of chivalry, an ideal figure, and then as a judge in the dispute between Arsita and Palamon. The Duke's greatness is confirmed by military victories and wealth:

Theseus is an ideal image in terms of knightly virtues: he protects those who need it, has knightly valor in battles, is reasonable in controversial matters, and is sensitive to the suffering of others. So, as we have seen, the Duke of Athens, Theseus, is presented to the reader as an example of knightly behavior, an ideal image who will then act as a judge in a dispute between two brothers.

“The structure of the story is unusual for a simple narrative as the development of a plot. The symmetry of the structure of the story, the symmetry of the images, the pretentious static descriptions, the rich symbolism suggest that attention is not focused on the search for skillfully drawn images, not on moral conclusions - all the reader’s attention is focused on the aesthetic impression of the story.”

At the lexical level, a large number of epithets were noted (when describing characters, temples, rituals), but the standardization and repetition of epithets does not allow us to determine the stylistic coloring of the text. To a greater extent, the stylistic coloring of the text, the lyricism of the story is presented using parallel constructions, enumeration (that is, at the syntactic level).

“The images presented are more symbolic than real. The images are revealed by the structure of the story - the structure presupposes the role and position of each character in the story, his characteristics (if any), symbolism."

The story presents the reader with an expanded image of the Knight as an image of a romantic hero.

This proves the presence of elements of a chivalric romance in this work.

At the same time, Chaucer rethinks the genre tradition of the chivalric romance. The writer presents all the characters as unique individuals and approaches their descriptions in detail; creates the ideal image of a Knight as the embodiment of the dignity of nobility and honor; uses a large number of epithets and metaphors; His descriptions of nature and terrain are especially rich in imagery.

1.3. THE INFLUENCE OF OTHER GENRES OF MEDIEVAL LITERATURE ON THE CANTERBURY TALES

As mentioned earlier, “The Canterbury Tales” is an encyclopedia of poetic genres: here is a courtly tale, an everyday novel, a lay, a fabliau, a fable, a parody of knightly adventure poetry, and a didactic narrative in verse.

The stories of the monastery chaplain and housekeeper are fable-like in nature. The story of the indulgence seller echoes one of the plots used in the Italian collection “Novellino”, and contains elements of a folk tale and parable (the search for death and the fatal role of the found gold lead to the mutual extermination of friends).

The most striking and original are the stories of the miller, the majordomo, the skipper, the carmelite, the bailiff of the church court, and the canon's servant, which reveal closeness to the fabliau and, in general, to the medieval tradition of the short story type.

The spirit of the fabliau also emanates from the story of the Bath weaver about herself. This narrative group contains the themes of adultery and the associated techniques of trickery and counter-cheating (in the stories of the miller, the majordomo and the skipper), which are familiar both to the fabliau and to the classical short story. The story of the bailiff of the church court gives the clearest description of a monk extorting a gift to the church from a dying man, and sarcastically describes the rude retaliatory joke of the patient, rewarding the extortionist with stinking “air”, which still needs to be divided among the monks. In the Carmelite’s story, another extortionist appears in the same satirical vein, a “cunning” and “dashing fellow”, “a despicable bailiff, pimp, thief.” At the moment when the church bailiff tries to rob the poor old woman, and she, in despair, sends him to hell, the devil who is present takes the bailiff’s soul to hell. The story of the canon's servant is devoted to the popular topic of exposing the trickery of alchemists.

Thus, we have come to the conclusion that J. Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” is a unique encyclopedia of medieval literary genres. Among them are a courtly story, an everyday short story, a lay, a fabliau, a folk ballad, a parody of knightly adventure poetry, a fable, and a didactic narrative in verse.

2. REALISM J. CHAUCER AND THE GENRE SPECIFICS OF HIS WORK

“The essence and basis of the book is its realism. It includes portraits of people, their assessment, their views on art, their behavior - in a word, a living picture of life."

It is not for nothing that Gorky called Chaucer the “father of realism”: the lush painting of portraits of his contemporaries in his poetic “Canterbury Tales” and even more so their general concept, such an obvious clash between old feudal England and the new England of merchants and adventurers, testify to Chaucer’s belonging to the literature of the Renaissance.

“But the category of realism is a complex phenomenon that has not yet received an unambiguous definition in the scientific literature. During the 1957 debate, several points of view on realism emerged. According to one of them, realism, understood as verisimilitude, fidelity to reality, can be found already in the earliest monuments of art. From another point of view, realism as an artistic method of understanding reality arises only at a certain stage in the history of mankind. There is no complete unity among supporters of this concept regarding the time of its origin. Some believe that the conditions for the emergence of realism developed only in the 19th century, when literature turned to the study of social reality.” Others associate the genesis of realistic art with the Renaissance, believing that at this time writers began to analyze the influence of society and history on people.

Both of these judgments are fair to a certain extent. Indeed, realism as an artistic method received full development only in the 19th century, when a movement known as critical realism emerged in European literature. However, like any phenomenon in nature and society, realism arose “not immediately, not in a finished form, but with a certain gradualness, experiencing a more or less long process of formation, formation, maturation” [cit. according to 8, 50]. It is therefore natural that some elements, certain aspects of the realistic method are also found in the literature of earlier eras. Based on this point of view, we will try to find out what elements of the realistic method are manifested in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. As you know, one of the most important principles of realism is the reproduction of life in the forms of life itself. This formula, however, does not imply that realism or verisimilitude in the modern sense of the word is obligatory for works of all historical periods. As rightly noted by Academician. N.I. Kondrad: “The concept of “reality” carried different contents for writers of different centuries. “The love potion in the novel “Tristan and Isolde” is not “mystic” at all, but simply a product of the pharmacology of that time. . ."" .

The concept of reality expressed in the Canterbury Tales was largely based on medieval ideas. Thus, “reality” in the late Middle Ages included astrological ideas. Chaucer took them quite seriously. This is evidenced by the fact that in The Canterbury Tales characters and situations are often determined by the position of stars and celestial bodies. An example would be A Knight's Tale. Astrology in Chaucer's time combined medieval superstitions and scientific astronomical knowledge. The writer's interest in them is manifested in the prose treatise “On the Astrolabe,” in which he explains to a certain “little Lewis” how to use this ancient astronomical instrument.

Medieval philosophy often declared real not only the objects around a person, but also angels and even human souls. The influence of these ideas can also be seen in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. His idea of ​​the world includes Christian miracles, which are narrated in the "Abbess's Tale" and in the "Lawyer's Tale", and the fantasy of Breton lais, which appears in the "Tale of the Weaver of Bath", and the idea of ​​​​Christian long-suffering - in the "Oxford Student's Tale" . All these ideas were organic to the medieval consciousness. Chaucer does not question their value, as evidenced by the inclusion of similar motifs in The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer, as a writer of the earliest stage of the English Renaissance, is characterized not by a denial of medieval ideals, but by a somewhat ironic attitude towards them. This is manifested, for example, in “The Tale of an Oxford Student,” which recounts in detail the story of the patient Griselda, popular at that time. The daughter of a poor peasant, she becomes the wife of a large feudal lord, who demands unconditional obedience from her. Wanting to test Griselda, her husband and ruler orders her children to be taken away from her and stages their murder. Then he deprives Griselda of all property and even clothes, expels her from the palace and announces his decision to remarry a young and noble girl. Griselda meekly follows all her husband's orders. Since obedience is one of the basic Christian virtues, at the end of the story Griselda is fully rewarded for it. Her husband returns his favor to her, she again becomes the ruler of the entire area and meets with the children whom she considered killed.

“Chaucer’s hero faithfully retells the famous parable. But his final words are ironic:

It were full hard to fynde now-a-dayes

In al a toun Grisildis thre or two.

It would be very difficult these days

Find two or three Griseldas in the entire city.

The conclusion of the student narrator is very revealing. It reflected the understanding of unrealism and implausibility of ideas that were part of medieval reality.”

Realistic tendencies in Chaucer's art have not fully developed; they are in their infancy. In relation to literature of the 14th century. it is hardly possible to talk about the reproduction of reality in the forms of reality itself. However, the author of The Canterbury Tales is distinguished by a very conscious desire for a truthful depiction of life. This can be confirmed by the words that the writer puts into the mouth of a pilgrim named Chaucer. In the prologue to The Miller's Tale, he expresses the fear that not all storytellers will observe the rules of good dancing in their stories. “Apologizing for the obscenities found in some stories, Chaucer the Pilgrim says:

I moot reherce

Nig tales alle, be they bettre or

Or elles falsen son of my matere.

I have to convey

All their stories, be they good or

Or fake a part of mine

works".

The poet strives to reproduce these stories in a form as close as possible to the way they were allegedly told during the pilgrimage. In "The Canterbury Tales" a creative attitude towards realistic reproduction of life is manifested, albeit in rudimentary form.

Domestic literary scholars, regardless of whether they recognize realism in the literature preceding the 19th century, believe that identifying the features of realism in works of different eras contributes to a correct understanding of continuity in the development of artistic creativity. Thus, R. M. Samarin, discussing the realism of the Renaissance, notes its close connection with the fruitful traditions of medieval art.

Chaucer's work belongs to a complex and transitional historical period, uniting contradictory trends: the originality of The Canterbury Tales largely stems from the fact that the writer continues medieval traditions, interpreting them in a new way. This is manifested, for example, in the ways of characterizing heroes. The artistic method of realism involves depicting typical characters in typical circumstances. The French researcher J. Bedier, analyzing fabliaux, one of the main genres of medieval literature, noted that typification was still weak in it. He probably meant typification as it was understood in the 19th century.

The character of a hero of that time was determined by his position on the hierarchical ladder, but since antiquity, ideas about the influence of external circumstances on a person’s character have existed in scientific treatises and their popular adaptations. Of course, circumstances were often understood in a metaphysical, or even an astrological, spirit. In the era of Chaucer, fiction begins to look for the reasons for certain characteristics of the human personality not just in a person’s position within the feudal hierarchy, but in himself and in external circumstances. The attempts of writers of the late Middle Ages to penetrate the secrets of human psychology were based on the doctrine of temperaments dating back to Hippocrates, according to which all people were divided into choleric, melancholic, sanguine and phlegmatic. Each type of temperament corresponded to certain character traits. Chaucer was probably familiar with this teaching, since its influence is felt, for example, in the portrait of the majordomo. The hero's words and actions confirm this characteristic.

Astrology was considered one of the most important circumstances shaping a person’s character in Chaucer’s time. According to astrological concepts, the star under which a person was born influences his character. Thus, the weaver from Bath claims that her love was predetermined by Venus, and her warlike spirit by Mars. Both of these planets were in the sky at the hour of her birth.

In some cases, Chaucer shows the influence of social circumstances on the character of his hero. The image of the miller Simkin from “The Majordomo’s Tale” is very interesting in this regard. The dishonesty of millers was a generally accepted fact, so it is no coincidence that in Chaucer’s time there was a riddle: “Who is the bravest in the world?” - “The miller’s shirt, because it hugs the swindler every day.” By portraying his hero as a thief, the writer follows medieval ideas about people of his profession. However, Chaucer is not limited only to class and professional characteristics. Simkin is a representative of the wealthy strata of the third estate, so his image contains many features determined precisely by this circumstance. He is a man with a pronounced sense of self-esteem, which comically turns into swagger. But he has no traditional reasons for pride: he is not of noble origin, and has not accomplished any great feats of chivalry. The basis of the miller's independence is his wealth, created by himself through deception and theft. In the person of Simkin in The Canterbury Tales an attempt is made to show a socially determined character.

One of the main features of realistic art is the ability to reveal the typical in the individual and through the individual. Since such a technique was unknown in medieval literature, writers of that time usually limited themselves to a brief typical description, for example in a fabliau. In contrast, Chaucer gives his heroes individualized characteristics. The individualization of images in The Canterbury Tales is determined by certain processes that took place in the society and ideology of the 14th century. The early Middle Ages, as D.S. Likhachev believes, “does not know someone else’s consciousness, someone else’s psychology, someone else’s ideas as an object of objective representation,” because at that time the individual had not yet separated from the collective (class, caste, corporation, guild). However, during the time of Chaucer, due to the growth of entrepreneurship and private initiative, the role of the individual in the life of society increases, which serves as the basis for the emergence of individualistic ideas and trends in the field of ideology.

“In the 14th century. The problem of the individual is heard in literature, art, philosophy, and religion. P. Mrozkowski connects the tendency towards individualization with the ideas of scotism, which “emphasized the beauty of each given individual object.” The founder of this philosophical and theological movement was Dune Scotus (1266-1308). In the famous dispute between medieval realists and nominalists, he took the position of a moderate nominalist. According to J. Morse, in Okoth’s teachings, two points are of greatest value: the idea of ​​the primacy of will over reason and the idea of ​​the uniqueness of the individual.” For us, the second position is more important, which is associated with the dispute about the reality of abstract concepts. According to Duns Scotus, the phenomena denoted by these concepts really exist: after all, humanity consists of individuals. The possibility of combining them into one is due to the fact that the difference between individuals is not generic, but formal in nature. All human souls belong to the same genus, they have a common nature, so collectively they can be called humanity. But each soul has an individual form. “The very existence of a separate soul,” writes J. Morse, analyzing the views of Duns Scotus, “consists in its uniqueness. The soul has not only quidditas ("whatness", spirituality), but also haecceitas ("thisness", ...individuality)... It is not only "soul", but "this soul"; Likewise, the body has not only physicality, but also individuality. A person is not just a human being, he is a human being, and this quality determines his belonging to humanity.”

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer uses various methods of individualization. He emphasizes the features of the appearance and behavior of the participants in the pilgrimage: a wart on the miller’s nose, a merchant’s forked beard, the motto on the abbess’s brooch. Often a writer resorts to characterization by action. In this regard, the image of carpenter John is indicative. In "The Miller's Tale" there is no author's description of this hero; all the traits of his character appear as the action develops. The carpenter's kindness is revealed by Chaucer in the next episode: he himself goes to visit Nicholas when he feigns despair over the supposedly expected flood. Chaucer makes John gullible and not very smart. The reader realizes this when the carpenter accepts Nicholas's prediction at face value. Chaucer's hero is not selfish, he is capable of caring for others. When he learns of the impending disaster, he worries not about himself, but about his young wife:

"How? Well, what about the wife?

Should Alison really die?

Almost for the first time in the history of English literature, Chaucer individualizes the speech of his heroes. He uses this technique when characterizing the students Alan and John in "The Majordomo's Tale"; The northern dialect is noticeable in the speech of these students. According to some Western literary scholars, in the time of Chaucer, northerners were considered rude and uncouth people. This fact aggravates the insult that Alan and John inflict on their master. They seduce his wife and daughter, whose “noble birth” the miller is very proud of.

The above considerations allow us to talk about the realism of The Canterbury Tales, although “its features are still of an initial, rudimentary nature, different from the nature of later and mature realism. These features are due to the close connection between the literature of the early Renaissance and medieval culture."

The realism of J. Chaucer contributed to the rethinking and revaluation of genre canons. The writer did not remain within the canons of realistic elements of the internal and external world. Chaucer's realism became a prerequisite for genre synthesis, which was discussed more than once throughout the work.

In this course work we examined the work of art by J. Chaucer “The Canterbury Tales”. To a certain extent, the phenomenon of genre originality of a work has been studied.

In Chaucer, the various original genres with which he operates not only coexist within the same collection (this was also the case in medieval “examples”), but interact with each other and undergo partial synthesis, in which Chaucer already partly echoes Boccaccio. Chaucer, like Boccaccio, does not have a sharp contrast between “low” and “high” subjects.

"The Canterbury Tales" is a completely Renaissance (in type) encyclopedia of English life of the 14th century, and at the same time - an encyclopedia of poetic genres of the time: here is a courtly story, and an everyday short story, and a lay, and a fabliau, and a folk ballad, and a parody on knightly adventure poetry, and didactic storytelling in verse.

In contrast to the extremely schematic depictions of representatives of various social and professional groups in medieval narrative literature, Chaucer creates very vivid, through lively descriptions and accurate details of behavior and conversation, portraits of social types of English medieval society (namely social types, and not “characters” as sometimes literary scholars identify Chaucer's characters). This depiction of social types is given not only within the framework of individual specific short stories, but no less in the depiction of the narrators. The social typology of the pilgrim-storytellers is clearly and amusingly manifested in their speeches and disputes, in their personal characteristics, and in their choice of plots for the story. And this class-professional typology constitutes the most important specificity and unique charm in The Canterbury Tales. It distinguishes Chaucer not only from his medieval predecessors, but also from most Renaissance novelists, in whom the universal human family principle, on the one hand, and purely individual behavior, on the other, in principle dominate over class features.

The Canterbury Tales represent one of the remarkable syntheses of medieval culture, remotely comparable in this quality even to Dante's Divine Comedy. Chaucer also has, although to a lesser extent, elements of medieval allegorism, alien to the short story as a genre. In the synthesis of The Canterbury Tales, the short stories occupy a leading place, but the synthesis itself is much broader and much more important for Chaucer. In addition, Chaucer’s synthesis of genres is not complete; there is no complete “novelization” of the legend, fable, fairy tale, elements of a knightly narrative, sermon, etc. Even novelistic “stories,” especially in the introductory parts, contain verbose rhetorical arguments about various subjects with examples from the Holy Scriptures and ancient history and literature, and these examples are not developed narratively. The self-characteristics of the narrators and their disputes go far beyond the scope of the short story as a genre or even a collection of short stories as a special genre formation.

FSBEI HPE Stavropol State University

Scientific supervisor: Ph.D. Sc., Associate Professor, Department of Ancient World and Middle Ages, Stavropol State University

D. CHAUCER AND THE “CANTERBURY TALES”: A CONTEMPORARY VIEW ON ENGLAND SOCIETYXIV IN.

In this article we will address the problem of literary texts as one of the types of historical sources. At the same time, the question of their relevance, one way or another, concerns the problem of the author, and, upon closer examination, how origin, education and social experience influence the nature of the text and the ways in which the surrounding reality is reflected in it. From these positions, let us analyze D. Chaucer’s work “The Canterbury Tales”.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340?-1400) is considered the father of English poetry, the creator of literary English, the first English realist poet, and a pre-Renaissance humanist. The poet’s main work, the result of his creative journey, is “The Canterbury Tales,” where the author’s interest in the political, economic, ethical, and religious phenomena of England in the 14th century, and most importantly, in his contemporaries - people of various classes and conditions, was fully expressed.

Chaucer's biography is an excellent example of the existence of personality in various social fields. At different periods of his life, the poet communicated with representatives of almost all classes, which allowed him to understand all aspects of the life of English society. And if we take into account that Chaucer succeeded not only as a poet and various types of employees, but also as a husband and family man, his personality in a good sense becomes amazing.

D. Chaucer was born into a London merchant family of Norman origin; his father was a wealthy wine merchant who had a large enterprise importing Spanish and Italian wines to England. Apparently he was a supplier to the royal court, which made it possible for Chaucer, in his youth, to get into the circle of courtiers, into the English aristocratic society, where the future poet learns life and customs upper feudal class. In 1357, he already occupied the position of page in the retinue of the wife of Edward's son, Duke Lionel Clarence, and two years later he became a squire and took part in King Edward's military campaign in France. There Geoffrey is captured near the city of Reims, but the generous king ransoms him for only 16 livres. Chaucer experienced ups and downs in his court career, successive English kings treated him differently, but the poet himself was always loyal to his patrons, for example, the son of Edward III, Duke of Lancaster John of Gaunt.

At court, Chaucer witnessed one of the most important phenomena of the 14th century: the last surge of knightly culture in English history under Edward III. The king was a passionate lover of tournaments, embodied all chivalric ideals and tried to revive the cult of chivalry. Chaucer shared similar sentiments. In addition, the poet lived during the era of the Hundred Years War, and moreover, was a participant in it. Military actions, coupled with the passion of Edward himself, allowed Chaucer to become imbued with the way of life knighthood: reading the story of a knight from The Canterbury Tales, we see that Chaucer was quite well versed in knightly duels and tournaments, we encounter their detailed description.

From 1370 a new period began in Chaucer's life. He began, on behalf of the king, to accompany diplomatic missions to Europe: he visited Italy twice - in 1373 and 1378. It is suggested that there the poet personally met with the founders of Italian humanism Petrarch and Boccaccio, although there is no reliable data about these meetings. One thing is clear, this period in Chaucer’s life is one of the most important. He gave the poet the opportunity to observe a highly developed urban early humanistic culture, master the Italian language, and expand his social and cultural experience. Moreover, the influence of early Renaissance Italian literature is clearly felt in the same “Canterbury Tales”.

From 1374 to 1386 Chaucer served as customs inspector for wool, leather and furs at the port of London. This position was not easy. The poet had to spend the whole day in the port, write all reports and invoices with his own hand, inspect goods, collect fines and duties. There was no time left for creativity, and only at night Chaucer worked on his works. Then he read books and educated himself.

The poet's passion for reading is obvious. His writings testify to his knowledge of ancient and medieval literature, the works of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio (which is not typical for England), Holy Scripture, the works of the “Church Fathers,” and his interest in philosophy, music, astronomy, and alchemy. References to books are constant throughout Chaucer's major works. And tradition attributes to the poet the possession of a library of 60 volumes, which was a lot for that time. The answer to the question of what kind of education the poet received is still not clear, but many researchers suggest that it was legal. Based on what knowledge Chaucer must have had while holding various government positions, and in what educational institutions people of his circle and wealth studied, Gardner comes to the conclusion that the poet could have studied science in the Inner Temple - a guild of lawyers created from the Temple Church in London.

Surprisingly, the “customs” period is the most productive period of the poet’s work. Now Chaucer saw the true life of London in the 14th century, became acquainted with urban England. Merchants and officials, artisans and small traders, yeomen and villans, monks and priests passed by him. Thus, his service brought him into contact with the business world of London, and the social types he saw later appeared in his stories.

In addition to his service and writing, Chaucer also realizes himself in his personal life: the poet was married to Philippa Roet, maid of honor of the second Duchess of Lancaster, from 1366 and had three children. In addition, despite his intense employment, Chaucer was also involved in social activities - he was a justice of the peace in the county of Kent (1385), and a deputy in parliament from the same county (1386). While in Kent, he met rural England, communicated “with people from the land”: landowners, tenants, managers, villans, cotters. This environment greatly enriched his observations.

The following years were not very successful in Chaucer's life. The era of Richard II was full of intrigue and political conflicts: the Duke of Gloucester and the poet's patron D. Gaunt and the Duke of Lancaster fought for influence over the young Richard II. After Gloucester's victory, Chaucer lost his place in the customs. His financial situation worsened, and in 1387 his wife died. Chaucer was morally depressed; a “dark streak” came in his life. Only in 1389, when the mature Richard II took power into his own hands, Chaucer received the position of caretaker of the royal estates and overseer of the repair of royal buildings, but did not last long in it. In 1391 he was deposed, and in the last years of his life he lived on occasional handouts and errands. On 25 October 1400, Chaucer died and his grave became the first in the "poets' corner" in Westminster Abbey.

Surprisingly, in - in the most difficult years of his life (political intrigues, removal from office, financial problems, death of his wife), Chaucer creates the brightest, most cheerful book, full of humor and irony - “The Canterbury Tales”. The stories can be called “an encyclopedia of literary genres of the Middle Ages.” Here is a chivalric romance, a pious legend, a historical story, a fabliau, a sermon, and a short story. By the way, the frame design of Chaucer’s book itself was innovative for that time; it was well known in the east, but in Europe it was found only in a few authors (for example, Boccaccio).

On an imaginary April morning, 29 pilgrims of different classes from different parts of England set off from Southwark to Canterbury to the tomb of St. Thomas Becket and, in order to entertain themselves along the way, tell each other stories - this, it would seem, is the whole plot of The Canterbury Tales. However, in it Chaucer was able to express the realities of medieval England. Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, who died a violent death in 1170, was famous for the fact that many were healed of illnesses. Such a pilgrimage was very popular in England; it is believed that the poet himself made it in 1385.

In the general prologue, the narrator, whom Chaucer has endowed with his name, appearance, and even the calling of a poet, takes turns introducing and describing the pilgrims. Pilgrims can be divided into several groups: people whose lives are spent on military campaigns, residents of rural areas, city dwellers, clergy, and representatives of the urban intelligentsia. We see that the pilgrims belong to different strata of society; only the highest court (dukes, princes) and church (bishops, archbishops) aristocracy are not represented. This is due to the fact that by the mid-1380s. Chaucer's connection with the royal court weakened significantly, and he intended his stories for a society of townspeople who did not usually encounter the upper classes.

So, in The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer appears from the position of the author-narrator. At the same time, he not only characterizes modern English society and shows the realities of England in the 14th century, but also expresses the views of a representative of a new social type that began to take shape in the cities of that time - a secular official, an educated layman. Although the stories contain several semantic levels and The views of Chaucer himself cannot always be distinguished; researchers note that the characteristics of pilgrims given by the poet are objective and express the trends of the time.

In the prologue, Chaucer describes three characters whose lives are connected with war: a knight, a squire-squire and a yeoman. In this trio, the main character is the knight. More than a third of all stories are devoted to the theme of chivalry; the “knightly” youth of Chaucer himself apparently affected this. In them, two trends in the depiction of chivalry can be distinguished: one develops the image of a valiant and noble warrior outlined by the prologue (the story of the doctor, the knight himself), the other shows the emerging tradition of ridiculing the knight (the story of the weaver from Bath and the merchant). The latest tradition of depicting a knight not only goes back to fabliau and urban literature, but also expresses a pan-European trend - the decline of the knightly class, which was also observed in England.

Chaucer depicts a large number of representatives of the clergy in his stories (abbess, Benedictine monk, Carmelite monk, priest, bailiff of the church court, seller of indulgences). In characterizing these characters, he notes such trends of his time as worldliness and formal piety, oblivion of the vow of poverty and acquisitiveness, deception of the population. In this case, contrasts play an important role: the negative qualities of most of the clergy are set off by the author’s idealized image of the parish priest. This is the only type of clergy for whom the poet apparently felt respect and sympathy: “I didn’t know a better priest,” he says. D. Chaucer does not just criticize the clergy in an abstract way, he reflects the realities of England in the 14th century in his stories. - the decomposition of the clergy, the increase in the number of mendicant money-grubbing monks, the luring of money from the people by the practice of papal indulgences, the arbitrariness of church bailiffs and the spread of Wycliffe’s ideas. Apparently, Chaucer was quite familiar with the ideas of the Lollards, because his contemporary, the reformer of the English church D. Wycliffe, was assisted by D. Gaunt, the poet’s friend and patron. It is important to note that in Chaucer, who was a Catholic all his life, the ironic image of the clergy does not turn into a sharply accusatory one concerning the institution of the Catholic Church as a whole. Obviously, this is not a criticism of faith, but of its bearers.

The Canterbury Tales depicts a whole gallery of city-dwelling pilgrims. We are interested in craftsmen (dyer, carpenter, hat maker, weaver, upholsterer) and merchant. Chaucer describes five wealthy burgher artisans, members of a guild brotherhood, who were part of one of the London guilds. This is the craft elite, wealthy citizens, they are richly dressed, have sufficient income, are wise, and may well become aldermen - participate in city government. These people “with importance and awareness of wealth” stand apart all the way. They are in every possible way drawn to the gentry class, emphasizing their high social position: their wives demand to be called madam, and the townspeople themselves bring a cook with them to prepare food for them on the road. In essence, Chaucer thus reflects the economic and social processes taking place in England in the 14th century: the decomposition of the guild system, the differentiation of guild artisans, the formation of the bourgeoisie, which concentrates power in the city in its hands. It is no coincidence that the poet speaks about all the artisans at once - perhaps he unconsciously expresses the view of his contemporaries, who perceived the townspeople as a single whole. Describing the merchant, Chaucer calls him a worthy man, able to manage his business, caring about profit, and richly dressed. Although the poet ironically notes that the merchant gives money on interest and skillfully hides his debts, he is far from the traditional condemnation of the merchant, does not use the epithet “deceitful”, speaks of him with respect, thus reflecting the growing influence of the merchants in London life.

In his stories, Chaucer also emphasizes the new meaning that money began to acquire in English society in the 16th century. as one of the main types of wealth. To get rich by any means is the main desire of many of the poet’s contemporaries. The theme of greed and money is present in almost half of all the stories, and the pilgrims make money as best they can: the seller of indulgences lures money with holy relics, the doctor of medicine and his friend the pharmacist deceive the sick, etc.

Chaucer paid little attention to the peasantry in comparison with other classes: the plowman-pilgrim in the prologue is practically the only image of a peasant. There is no duality in the image of the peasant; the poet idealizes the plowman, like the priest, saying “he was his brother.” The plowman is hardworking, merciful, very pious, and willingly pays tithes. The peasant is completely devoid of the fighting traits of the followers of Wat Tyler, the leader of the peasant uprising of 1381. Chaucer approached the peasantry from the position of Wycliffe, he was far from both protecting the peasantry and cursing the rebel peasants; For him, social compromise and adherence to the class hierarchy were most acceptable. It is not for nothing that Chaucer’s other hero, the priest, condemns in his sermon both the rebellious “servants” - peasants, and the cruel “masters” - lords, because each has different, but inevitable obligations to each other. Chaucer does not speak directly about social conflicts in his stories, but we come across references to other equally important events in the life of England in the 14th century. – for example, the plague - “Black Death” in the years. in the prologue.

Of the three representatives of the medieval secular “intelligentsia” (lawyer, doctor and Oxford clerk), it is especially worth highlighting the student. The clerk is poor and hungry, but strives for knowledge and would rather have 20 books than an expensive dress. Perhaps this rather benevolent description of the student is inspired by Chaucer’s own love of books and knowledge. The idealized image of a student was rarely encountered in life, so Chaucer shows more realistic clerks, cheerful and resourceful, loving worldly life and love adventures (the stories of the miller and the majordomo).

The general realism of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is also expressed in the fact that many of the characters in the book are believed to have real prototypes in life: the sailor is identified with the pirate John Pierce, and the knight with Henry Lancaster, cousin of Edward III. Moreover, even the Tabard Tavern itself and its owner Harry Bailey, described by Chaucer in his stories, actually existed.

So, the content of The Canterbury Tales is closely related to the social experience of Chaucer, who came from the urban class and was the bearer of his mental attitudes. Due to his occupation, which involved a constant change of professional activity, he had the opportunity to be in close contact not only with the townspeople, but also with the court aristocracy, the clergy and, partly, with the villagers. The stories touch on many pressing issues for Chaucer's time, for example, of a socio-economic nature: the decomposition of the guild system, the growing influence of the merchants, the formation of the bourgeoisie and the justification of the desire for profit. At the same time, the poet not only records events and describes characters, but also to some extent evaluates them - ironically criticizes the greed of the clergy, reflects on the ideals of chivalry that are becoming a thing of the past. The fact that Chaucer's approach to the estates has a specific urban worldview is manifested in the realistically benevolent portrayal of the townspeople and in the practical lack of attention to the peasantry, in the ridicule of the clergy and in the ambivalent assessment of chivalry.

Literature:

1. Alekseev of medieval England and Scotland. M.: Higher school. 1984.

2. Bogodara Chaucer: touches to the portrait // Middle Ages. Vol. 53. M., 1990.

3. Geoffrey Chaucer // Chaucer J. The Canterbury Tales / Trans. from English ; prev : Eksmo, 2008.

4. Gardner J. The Life and Times of Chaucer/Trans. from English; prev - M.: Raduga, 1986.

5. Chaucer J. The Canterbury Tales / Trans. from English ; prev : Eksmo, 2008.

6. Dzhivelegov // History of English literature. Volume I. M.-L.: USSR Academy of Sciences, 1943. [Electronic resource] http://www. /d/dzhiwelegow_a_k/text_0050.shtml

7. Gorbunov medieval. M.: Labyrinth, 2010.

8. Bogodara - political views of Geoffrey Chaucer. // From the history of social movements and social thought. M., 1981.

9. Bryant, A. The Age of Chivalry in the History of England. SPb: Eurasia. 2001.

10. Kosminsky on the history of the Middle Ages /. – M.: Uchpedgiz, 1938

11. About the humanistic ideas of D. Chaucer // Bulletin of Moscow State University. Episode 8. History. 1978 - No. 1

12. Long road to Canterbury\ Newspaper History No. 18, 2005. [Electronic resource] http:///articlef. php? ID=

“The Canterbury Tales” by the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (1340? -1400) is one of the first literary monuments in a single common English language. The book clearly demonstrated the remarkable qualities of Chaucerian humanism: optimistic life-affirmation, interest in a specific person, a sense of social justice, nationality and democracy. The Canterbury Tales is a framed collection of short stories. Taking as a basis the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Thomas Becket in Canterbury, Chaucer painted a broad canvas of English reality of that era.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer - “the father of English poetry” - lived in the 14th century, when his homeland was very far from the Renaissance, which in England had to wait for almost two more centuries. Until Spenser and Marlowe, there was nothing in English poetry not only equal, but simply commensurate with Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales.” Reflecting its age, this book, in a number of ways, still does not fit into the framework of its time. It can be said that Chaucer, living in the middle of the century, anticipated the realism of the English Renaissance, and wrote his “Canterbury Tales” for all centuries.

Until the 14th century, England lagged far behind other European countries, especially Italy. Located on the outskirts, far from the main Mediterranean routes, it was at that time a poor country of hunters, shepherds and cultivators, a country that had not yet accumulated future material wealth and cultural traditions, a country without developed trades and guild crafts, without large urban centers. London in the time of Chaucer had no more than forty thousand inhabitants, and the second largest city, York, had less than twenty thousand, while in Paris at that time, according to very conservative estimates, there lived over eighty thousand. The 14th century was a period of rapid and difficult growth for England, which had a painful impact on the people of that time. They, including Chaucer, happened to become contemporaries and witnesses of great social upheavals, of which the most formidable were: the Hundred Years' War (1337-1453), the “Black Death” - the plague (1348 and subsequent years) and the peasant uprising of 1381 of the year. England, like all of Europe, was already on the verge of a great turning point, which cleared the way for something new and made possible great social changes that accelerated the collapse of the feudal system and brought closer the beginning of the English Renaissance. The 14th century was the time of unity of the English nation, the formation of a single common English language and the emergence of original English literature.<...>

We know very little about the life of Geoffrey Chaucer, and most of this information is of little importance. Chaucer was born around 1340 into the family of a wealthy London wine merchant. The writer's father, John Chaucer, appointed his son to the court for the modest position of page. As a page and then as a squire, Geoffrey twice participated in campaigns in France, and in his first campaign, in 1359, he was not lucky: he was captured by the French, but was ransomed by the king. Upon returning to court, he was entrusted with the duty of entertaining the wife of Edward III with his stories. To the queen, and later to the first wife of Richard II - Anne of Bohemia - Chaucer first read or retold the works of others, translated “The Romance of the Rose”, and then began to compose his own “poems for the occasion”. Around 1359, he wrote the poem “On the Death of the Duchess Blanche,” the wife of his patron and patron John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, then the poem “The Parliament of Birds” (about 1382) - about the matchmaking of Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. All this did not go beyond the scope of ordinary courtly poetry, but Chaucer’s next works revealed extraordinary erudition and great poetic talent for a self-taught man. Chaucer's library consisted of sixty books, a considerable number for the 14th century, when sometimes the price of one book was equal to the cost of building an entire library. Among his favorites were the French poets of his time, the early poems of Boccaccio, Virgil, Statius, Lucan and especially Ovid, Dante and the philosopher Boethius. As a “knowledgeable and reliable” person, he, with the rank of Esquire, repeatedly carried out responsible and secret diplomatic assignments for the king in France and Italy in the 70s. A particularly significant mark was left by Chaucer’s two visits to Italy: in 1373 and 1378. These travels broadened his horizons. In addition to the direct influence that the country of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio undoubtedly had on Chaucer, he became acquainted there first-hand with the best works of these authors. Echoes of Dante’s “Divine Comedy” are found many times in Chaucer, starting with “The Parliament of Birds” and the poem “The Temple of Glory” (1384), right up to a number of places in “The Canterbury Tales”. Boccaccio’s “Glorious Women” served as the prototype for his “Legend of the Good Wives” (mid-80s). Boccaccio's "Theseide" was compressed by Chaucer into a knight's story about Palamon and Arcite, and Petrarch's translation into Latin of Boccaccio's "Griselda", transposed into "Chaucer's Stanzas", became Chaucer's story of an Oxford student. Chaucer sought out and took from all his teachers what he could already consider his own. In this regard, the poem “Troilus and Chryseis” (late 70s - early 80s) is especially indicative. Both in content and form, this is such an independent and subtle development of Boccaccio’s “Filostrato” that it far surpasses its model. Troilus and Chryseis, the only completed major work by Chaucer, can rightfully be called a psychological novel in verse. In the time of Chaucer, the poor poet lived on handouts from patrons and was entirely dependent on his patrons. The king ransomed Chaucer from captivity by paying sixteen livres, but “every thing has its price,” and fifty and seventy livres were paid for two royal horses redeemed at the same time. He was sent on important assignments, but even having succeeded in them, he remained in the shadows. In 1374, as a great royal favor, Chaucer received for his service the position of customs overseer of the port of London for wool, leather and furs. This was far from a sinecure: the position was granted to Chaucer with strict instructions to “write all accounts and reports in his own hand and be constantly on the spot,” and only in 1382 did Chaucer receive the right to entrust his duties to a deputy, and before that he spent the whole day in London port, recording coolies of wool, bales of leather and furs, inspecting goods, collecting duties and fines and meeting with all sorts of people. In the evening he went to the room allotted to him in the tower above the city gates of Aldgate and, straightening his back from working on the account book, worked his eyes on other, favorite books until dawn. In the poem “The Temple of Glory,” the eagle of Jupiter reproached Chaucer for being slow-moving and not interested in anything except books:

As soon as, having summed up, You finish your day's work, It is not entertainment that calls You then and not peace, - No, returning to your home, Deaf to everything, you sit down to Read until you are half-blind Another book by candlelight; And lonely, like a monk, you live, subduing the ardor of passions, amusingly alienating people, although you are always glad of the sun and are not rich in abstinence.

Fate was not kind to Chaucer. Today in favor, tomorrow in disgrace, at times in prosperity, and sometimes in poverty. From the rank of royal ambassador, he ended up as a customs inspector, and then from a wealthy official he became bankrupt, saved from debt prison only by the intercession and new favors of the king. Chaucer's ups and downs were all the steeper and more unexpected because by his very position Chaucer was involved in court intrigues. Already under Edward III, after the death of the heir, the “Black Prince,” the king’s second son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, took power. However, after the death of Edward III, he had to wage a continuous struggle with his brother, the Duke of Gloucester, for influence over the young king Richard II. Chaucer had been associated with John of Gaunt for many years, both through his literary debut, and through Wycliffe, and through joint participation in French campaigns, and by the fact that Chaucer’s wife was a maid of honor to the second Duchess of Lancaster, and by the fact that Chaucer’s sister-in-law became Gaunt’s third wife. Chaucer remained faithful to his patrons even in difficult times. He soon paid for it. After the victory of Gloucester's supporters, he was removed from all positions and deprived of all means of livelihood. Only in 1389, when the mature Richard II finally took power into his own hands, Chaucer received some compensation and was granted by the king the position of caretaker of the royal estates and keeper of the storerooms and sheds with unusable “royal junk.” Then in 1391, after another deposition, Chaucer could not pay his debts and was declared insolvent. He was hired as a forester, made an overseer of “walls, shafts, ditches, sewers, ponds, roads and bridges” along the Thames - in a word, in the last years of his life he lived on random handouts and errands. Chaucer loved and appreciated a good book. In his reclusive years spent in Aldgate Tower, he read a lot, and later, in his lonely old age, the book replaced both his family and his few friends. For many years, his companion was Boethius’s treatise “On the Consolation of Philosophy,” which he not only read, but also translated. However, books could not obscure life from Chaucer. There were days when he cheated on books.

Although I am very weak in science. But there is no force that could tear me away from a new book - I love reading most of all. But May will come, the trees will bloom, I will hear the nightingales singing, - Farewell, books! There is a stronger love, I’ll try to tell you about it.

("The Legend of the Good Wives")

Chaucer had been planning to talk about this for a long time. Concluding his “little tragedy” (eight thousand lines) of Troilus and Chryseis, Chaucer wrote:

I part with my little tragedy without regret, not at all deluded by what I see in it. Go, little book, hit the road! And someday you will meet a Poet who was once married to Dante, Homer, Ovid, Statius or Lucan, - Don’t you dare compete, be modest, kiss the dust at these feet with humility, Be faithful to the memory of your teachers, Confirm the lesson you have learned. There is only one hope that glimmers in me, That maybe, even if I am hunched over and frail, I will try my hand at comedy.

Essentially, “The Canterbury Tales” was such a “comedy”, such a bright story about love for earthly things, for life, the main tone of which is extremely cheerful and optimistic and to which nothing earthly is alien. Their best description can be found in one stanza from Chaucer’s poem “The Parliament of Birds.” This is an inscription on the gate, but not at the entrance to the prison, at the threshold of which all hope must be abandoned. This is not Dante's inscription over the gates of hell. Chaucer's gate leads to a flowering garden - this is the gate of life, and the inscription reads as follows:

Through me you will penetrate into a wondrous garden, Giving healing to the wounds of the heart; Through me you will come to the spring of delights, where young May blooms without decay, and where adventures are full of fun. My reader, forget all your worries and joyfully step on this path.

(Translation by O. Rumer.)

The main core of The Canterbury Tales was created by Chaucer in the late 80s, quickly, over the course of several years. And then, by the mid-90s, work on the book stopped, and Chaucer’s entire work began to fade. Less and less often, he added individual strokes to his huge canvas. In the later story of the canon's servant, in the priest's sermon, traces of creative fatigue are felt. The last decade of Chaucer's life, which fell in the last decade of his century, was difficult and lonely. Chaucer's poems "The Great Vait" and "The Bygone Age" show how soberly and bleakly he assessed the general situation. He has apparently moved away from the court and is alienated from his former friends and patrons. However, gentle and not prone to extremes, he did not follow his other friends to the end - reformers, followers of the famous English theologian - John Wycliffe, Bible translator and teacher of the “poor priests”, from among whom came the “rebellious priest” John Ball, ideologist of the peasant uprising of 1381. It was they, the comrades of John Ball, who had their heads cut off along with the rebels of 1381. It was the enlightened Bishop Thomas Arundel who now sent them to the stake as heretics. 1381 saw the suppression of the rebels' economic demands and the heads of Wat Tyler and John Ball on stakes. The year 1401 will see the suppression of freedom of thought and conscience and the Lollard heretics at the stake. Chaucer was now equally distant from those who cut off heads and from those whose heads flew from their shoulders. Self-restraint became the tragedy of his old age. Creative loneliness became their sad lot. Around Chaucer there was not that literary and general cultural environment that surrounded Boccaccio and Petrarch, which was found in France during the time of Margaret of Navarre and Clement Marot, and Rabelais - an environment that singled out from its ranks Shakespeare, “the first among equals,” the brilliant Elizabethan in a galaxy of talented Elizabethans. The state in which Chaucer left English literature was disappointing. It was also difficult for Chaucer in everyday life. Apparently, during these years he lived alone, his financial situation was unenviable, otherwise the “Complaint to an Empty Purse” would not have been written under his pen. Shortly before his death, in 1399, fortune smiled on him for the last time. The throne was seized by the son of his former patron Lancaster, Henry Bolingbroke. Henry IV remembered Chaucer and took care of him. But life was already over. In October 1400, Chaucer died and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

It was during the most difficult years for him that Chaucer created his brightest, most cheerful book. True, almost everything that Chaucer wrote before was also warmed with humor, but in The Canterbury Tales laughter is the main, all-conquering force. Here Chaucer more readily turns to popular common sense, folk fable, and popular ridicule of the fat-bellied. At the same time, Chaucer did not abandon what his great teachers taught him, and all together made The Canterbury Tales his main contribution to world literature. The concept of the book is very simple. Having gathered from all parts of the country on pilgrimage those who made up “his” England, and having briefly outlined their general appearance in the prologue, Chaucer subsequently leaves each of them to act and tell in their own way. He himself, as the author, slowly narrates how they agreed to go to Canterbury, to the relics of Thomas Becket, and together while away the boredom of the road, telling each other all sorts of entertaining stories; how they carried out their plan; how on the road they got to know each other better, sometimes quarreled, sometimes made fun of each other; how they argued about the merits and demerits of stories, revealing all their ins and outs. It is difficult to determine the genre of this book. If we consider separately the stories from which it is composed, it may seem like an encyclopedia of literary genres of the Middle Ages. However, the essence and basis of the book is its realism. It includes portraits of people, their assessment, their views on art, their behavior - in a word, a living picture of life. Unlike other collections of short stories, even the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales is not held together mechanically. Chaucer’s plan was not completed by him, but from what he managed to do, it is clear that the book has a movement of theme and an internal struggle, as a result of which new goals are outlined and clarified, perhaps not completely clear to Chaucer himself. However, it is clear to everyone that everything in this book is about man and for man; basically about a man of his time, but to create a new man. That's why she survived her time. The book consists of a general prologue, over two dozen stories and the same number of connecting interludes. The prologue occupies a little more than eight hundred lines, but in it, as in an overture, all the main motives of the book are outlined, and all of its more than seventeen thousand verses serve to reveal and develop the characteristic images outlined in the prologue. The connecting part, the so-called framing story, shows the pilgrims in motion and in action. In their bickering about who, when and what to tell, in their tragicomic clashes and quarrels, an internal development has already been outlined, which, unfortunately, did not receive resolution in Chaucer’s unfinished book. It is here, in the connecting part, that the dramatic element is concentrated. So, for example, the figure of the innkeeper Harry Bailey, the main judge of this competition of storytellers, is like a stage role. It is all made up of replicas scattered throughout the book. Introductions to individual stories often develop into monologues in which the narrator’s self-characterization is given. These are the prologues of the indulgence seller, the Bath weaver, the canon's servant and partly the miller, the majordomo and the merchant. The stories in the book are very heterogeneous, and for ease of viewing they can be grouped in different sections. The group is very large in volume - it is “a precious treasure of ancient tales, noble fairy tales, holy traditions.” These are stories borrowed from Chaucer or imitated by a lawyer, a monk, a doctor, a student, a squire, an abbess, a second nun. Chaucer's story about Sir Thopas, the stories of the knight, the chaplain, and the weaver are parodic and sharpened as weapons of struggle against the past. Many figures in the general prologue are satirically given, especially the minister of the feudal church and the miller; The prologues of the indulgence seller and the bailiff, the stories of the canon's servant, the Carmelite and the bailiff are satirical. The parable of the three rakes in the story of the seller of indulgences and the story of the housekeeper have the character of a moral teaching. Often these edifications also take on a parodic and satirical tone in the teachings of a bailiff, a Carmelite, in the tragedies of a monk, or in the story of Melibaeus. The four stories of the so-called marriage group are like a debate in which old views on unequal marriage are discussed and revised. The Bath weaver opens this debate, preaching in her prologue the complete submission of the husband to his wife and illustrating this with her story. The stories of the student about Griselda and the merchant about Januaria and the beautiful May approach the issue from a different angle, and in Franklin's story the same issue is resolved in a new way, on the basis of mutual respect and trust of the spouses. This dispute had been brewing before - already in the miller's story about the old husband's young wife, in the skipper's story about betrayed trust, in the lamentations of Harry Bailey. And it does not subside until the very end of the book, flaring up in the housekeeper’s story as a theme of repentance for hasty punishment for infidelity. The main group of independent stories by Chaucer is most original, freer in interpretation, brighter and closest to people's life. Although the stories of the miller, the majordomo, the skipper, the carmelite, and the bailiff owe something to the current plots of the fabliaux, their main value lies in the fact that these are realistic short stories masterfully developed by Chaucer. Chaucer learned the art of plotting from the French trouvères. But fabliaux, these funny, cruel and sometimes cynical anecdotes, become unrecognizable under his pen. Chaucer's Fablio is no longer an anecdote, but a novella of characters. Chaucer humanizes the cruel French joke and populates the fabliaux with living people, in whom, despite all their rudeness, he is glad to note everything humane. Chaucer's democratic humanism is not the Gelerter armchair humanism of an aristocrat of science, but a simple and heartfelt love for man and for the best manifestations of the human soul, which are capable of ennobling the most unsightly phenomena of life. Chaucer gives many lofty and true thoughts about the “natural man”, about nobility not inherited, but taken from battle, about a new sense of human dignity in the story of the Bath weaver, and in Franklin’s story, and in the priest’s sermon, and in the special ballad “Nobility” ”, but these thoughts arose repeatedly both before and after Chaucer. In art, such declarations have not yet found artistic embodiment; “a word without action is dead.” But Chaucer’s living, creative work created something that still lives on in English literature, something in which its originality was especially clearly reflected. Chaucer's knowledge of life is not the indifferent observations of a researcher. His love for a person is not sentimental and not tearful. His laughter is not a soulless mockery. And from the combination of such knowledge of life, such love for a person and such laughter, Chaucer develops a sympathetic, all-understanding smile. “To understand everything is to forgive everything,” says the saying. In this sense, Chaucer really forgives a lot. In this sense, the prologue of the Bath weaver, as a tragedy of an aging, life-loving woman, and the stories of the miller and merchant about the young wife of an old husband are also humanistic, although Chaucer in these stories does not turn a blind eye to the harsh truth of life. Having put into the mouth of an Oxford student a very suitable story about the uncomplaining passion-bearer Griselda, Chaucer questions the act of a mother who sacrifices her children for the sake of marital submission. He does this on his own behalf in a special afterword, while remembering the Bath weaver:

Griselda died, and with her her humility descended into the darkness of the grave. I loudly warn all husbands: Do not test your wives’ patience. No one will find a second Griselda in his wife - there is no doubt about it.

All medieval ideas about marriage, submission, about divine retribution, about the rights, responsibilities and dignity of man - everything has been turned inside out and thoroughly shaken up. The confession of the Bath weaver is written in the tones of a rough farce, and at the same time it is essentially tragic; no medieval author could have created such a confession. Fabliau situations are often risky and require a “mean tongue,” but in Chaucer all this is washed away by the naive and fresh rudeness of the popular mores of his age. “At that time it was the custom in Albion to call all things by name,” said Voltaire, and to those who are still offended by this, Chaucer directly declares: “There is a whole cartload of goodness here; // But don’t take those jokes seriously.” In another place he appeals to his reader: “Keep the grain, and throw away the husk.” The husk of Chaucer's fabliaux - some of their anecdotalism and rudeness - is a tribute to the genre and a tribute to the century. And the healthy grain is the new thing that we find in them: an apt and vigorous folk language; common sense balanced by sober, mocking criticism; bright, lively, assertive presentation; an appropriately salty joke; sincerity and freshness; an all-justifying, sympathetic smile and a victorious laugh. The easily falling husk cannot hide the mischievous, cheerful enthusiasm and good-natured mockery of what is worthy of ridicule. And all this serves as a means for Chaucer to portray the earthly man of his time, who has already breathed in the first trends of the approaching Renaissance, but is not always able to realize and consolidate his characteristic “cheerful free-thinking” in abstract terms and concepts. Everything in Chaucer is given in the contradiction of contrast. The rudeness and dirtiness of life emphasize nascent love, withering - the craving for life, life's deformities - the beauty of youth. All this happens on the very verge of ridiculous. The laughter has not yet had time to subside, the tears have not yet had time to well up, thereby causing that mixed and good feeling, which was later defined in England as humor.

Chaucer's compositional skill is manifested primarily in his ability to connect the seemingly incompatible. With magnificent ease, he depicts his diverse companions, and gradually a living image of a person emerges from individual strokes, and from the accumulation of individual portraits - a picture of the entire medieval society of England. “The Canterbury Tales” is colorful and colorful, like life itself, at times bright, at times dull and unsightly. Many stories, which in themselves are of little value, acquire meaning in the general context and find their place precisely through contrastive comparison. It was this compositional innovation of Chaucer that allowed him to resolve all the contradictory sounds of the book in a realistic dominant. That is why even fantastic, allegorical and moralizing stories are realistically justified as completely, and sometimes the only possible ones in the mouth of a given storyteller. Chaucer presents the main plot of the story precisely, concisely, vividly and swiftly. An example of this is the end of the indulgence seller's story about the three rakes, the end of the chaplain's story about the chase of the fox, the entire complex plot fabric and the rapid ending of the miller's story. Chaucer is restrained and stingy as a storyteller, but when it is necessary to describe his characters, he skillfully draws the upper room of Dushka Nicholas, and the hovel of the widow, the mistress of Chanticleer, and an excellent genre scene of the arrival of the monk-gatherer to the house of his spiritual son Thomas. Chaucer, generally speaking, avoids long, self-sufficient descriptions. He fights them with the weapon of parody, or he pulls himself back: “But, it seems, I got distracted a little,” or he gets rid of them with a playful excuse:

What good is it for me to dwell on what dishes were served Or how the horns and trumpets sounded. After all, this is how every story ends. There were dishes, mash, songs, and dancing.

But when it is necessary to understand the character of the narrator, Chaucer sacrifices everything for the sake of this main goal, even the laconicism that is so dear to him. Chaucer surrounds the main plot, laconic and swift, in the spirit of the Middle Ages, with an endless thread of leisurely reasoning and teachings and a patchwork motley of playful parodies, moralizing or satirical interludes. He subordinates all this to the character of the narrator, and includes the story itself within the frame of a large epic form. Chaucer's narrative flows with ease, freedom and naturalness unheard of at that time. As a result, this book of Chaucer as a whole is distinguished even among his own works by the exceptional brightness and realism of the image, the richness and expressiveness of the language, when necessary - laconicism, and when necessary - purely Rabelaisian excess and courage. “Read Shakespeare,” Pushkin wrote to N. Raevsky. “Remember - he is never afraid to compromise his character, he makes him speak with all the ease of life, because he is confident that in his time and in his place he will force this person to find a language that matches his character.” This is what Chaucer did before Shakespeare. The famous English historian John Robert Greene, in his assessment of Chaucer, says the following about him: “For the first time in English literature we meet with a dramatic force that not only creates an individual character, but also combines all the characters in a certain combination, not only adapts each story, each a word to the character of this or that person, but also merging everything in poetic unity.” It was this broad, truly poetic attitude to reality that allowed Chaucer to become, according to Gorky’s definition, “the founder of realism.” Born of his stormy and seething century, Chaucer never pretended to be a chronicler, did not intend to write the history of his time; and yet, from the “Canterbury Tales”, as well as from the “Vision of Peter Plowman” by Chaucer’s contemporary, William Langland, historians study the era. Having survived war, plague and rebellion, Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales reluctantly and fleetingly recalls them - these are events that are still too fresh in everyone’s memory and hourly threaten to return. But just from the general prologue, you can get an accurate idea of ​​how they dressed, what they drank and ate, what they were interested in and how the English of the 14th century lived. And this is not an indifferent accumulation of random details. No! Chaucer unerringly selects the most characteristic household items, in which the tastes, habits and habits of the owner are enshrined. Worn by chain mail, pierced and patched, the knight's doublet - from one detail you can immediately identify this slightly archaic figure, as if straight from the pages of a heroic epic. After all, this experienced and skillful military leader is at the same time a knight-monk, combining modesty according to his vow with some sly eccentricity, which is reflected in the subtle irony of his story. And the squire’s magnificent attire is an attribute of the new court tournament, gallant knight, no longer Roland, but Lancelot, touched by a new education and cultural gloss. And then the clasp with the motto “amor vincit omnia” of the cassocked, prissy abbess, the yeoman’s long bow - in a word, those things through which Chaucer shows a person and his place in history. Next we find out what these people did, and again this is a meager and accurate description of the most significant features of their professional work. Such are the portraits of the doctor and the skipper, the lawyer and the seller of indulgences. What was not covered in the prologue, Chaucer completes in stories about an alchemist, a monk-collector or a bailiff of a church court. Having briefly outlined the merchant in the prologue, Chaucer, in the skipper's story, shows the merchant's preparations for the fair and his views on the “hard business” of trade. Thus, through profession, Chaucer again draws the appearance of the whole person. Already in some of the portraits of the prologue, human behavior and character are revealed. We well imagine the knight and the priest as people of duty and life achievement, and the Benedictine and Franklin as zhuirs and wasters of life; lawyer, economist and doctor - as dodgers and businessmen. And then the behavior of Bully Simkin significantly complements and deepens only the outwardly colorful image of the miller in the general prologue. The subtle and complex psychological picture of the prologue of the Bath weaver makes this woman-boy one of Chaucer's most vivid and truthful images. Thus, through behavior and actions, Chaucer completes the appearance of a person. Chaucer never schematizes or generalizes. However, an exhaustive and accurate knowledge of the people and events of his time allowed him to accurately find exactly the right feature, exactly the exact word he needed, which sometimes successfully replaces lengthy descriptions. When the knight, yeoman, squire, merchant and skipper gathered at the table of the Tabard Tavern, they turned out to be the living embodiment of the Hundred Years' War. The humble knight led them to victory. Endurance, fortitude and the mighty bow of the yeoman decided the outcome of the battles. The squire, fighting valiantly under his father, at the same time squandered his knightly glory in predatory raids on the rich cities of Flanders and squandered the spoils of war on expensive French outfits. After all, unlike the old knight, he is a profitable client of the merchant. The merchant himself is the true inspirer of the campaigns: in an effort to ensure trade with Flanders, he pays taxes to the king, but would like to regard this as a salary for the watchman, from whom he demands that the waters be “guarded” on the main road of maritime trade. Finally, the skipper is a thief and privateer, throwing prisoners overboard and trading in captured goods. By doing this, he only fulfills the will of the sender, the order of the venerable merchant-armator, who is not averse to keeping such a robber skipper in his service, turning a blind eye to his exploits and trading his booty for profit. The roles were clearly established and divided already in Chaucer's time. The knight, the squire and the yeoman conquered the markets, the merchant took control of these markets, the skipper carried the merchant's goods, and, on occasion, obtained them by force for his master. Thus, a few strokes in the five portraits of the prologue give a very accurate idea of ​​​​the characteristic features of a large historical process.

As a man of a turning point, Chaucer could not help but think about what was happening. Even in the objective and smiling “Canterbury Tales” we continually encounter mournful and indignant words about the violence and self-interest reigning everywhere. Violence is a terrible legacy of the past, self-interest is the new plague of a corrupt and shameless age. We read about the extortion of the monk-collector and the bailiff of the church court, carried out with the blessing of his patron, the vicar. We read careful but transparent hints of the arbitrariness and lawlessness of those whom Chaucer in the bailiff’s story calls the crowned wrathful. The call in the chaplain’s story: “Beware, lord, of bringing the flatterers closer!” - or such identifications in the economist’s story:

A warlike tyrant or an emperor is similar to a robber, like a dear brother, After all, their character is essentially the same... Only from a robber there is less evil, - After all, the robber’s gang is small, -

finally, the warning to tyrants in the monk's tragedies that the fate of Croesus or Nebuchadnezzar awaits them - in the mouth of the very gentle and tolerant Chaucer, all this is quite unambiguous. “The Poor Priest” in The Canterbury Tales calls in his sermon to follow the natural law, according to which both masters and servants are equal before the Lord and bear different but equally inevitable obligations towards each other. And in the ballad “The Great Vait,” written many years after the defeat of the popular uprising and in the midst of feudal strife and all kinds of lawlessness, Chaucer himself says that the source of troubles is self-interest and violence, and calls on the ruler to fulfill his duty - to protect his servants from selfish rapist feudal lord and not lead them into temptation, subjecting their loyalty to excessive tests. Someone other than the creator of The Canterbury Tales can be accused of grumbling and pessimism. And indeed, he had quite enough objective reasons to call what was happening during these years the “Great Unrest.” By the end of the 14th century, the negative consequences of the shocks England had experienced were already fully felt. The devastation caused by the plague and the defeat of the peasant uprising has not yet subsided. The short heroic time of the first period of the Hundred Years' War has passed. Despite some brilliant victories, things were going poorly for the British in France. Individual French detachments, led by the talented resistance organizer Bertrand Du Guesclin, in some places were already beating the conquerors, who were not able to keep the unconquered country in subjection for decades. For the British, the war lost all purpose and meaning, except for robbery and enrichment: English privateers robbed at sea, and the “free companies” that had fought off the troops - on land, but the recently achieved military power of England was already shaken. Breton and Norman corsairs began to threaten England's sea routes, the lifeblood of its nascent wool trade. Moreover: the enemies threatened to land on the English shores. At the beginning of the 70s, at the mere news of the gathering of the French landing force, confusion gripped all of England, and it is unknown how things would have ended if the priority tasks in Flanders had not diverted the attention of the French. Within the country, the general moral decline is deepening. “Mistress Bribe” ruled over everything. Court intrigues flared up - the beginning of the struggle for power that in the 15th century led to the fratricidal dynastic war of the Scarlet and White Roses. The kings executed the feudal lords. Feudal lords overthrew kings. The "Black Prince" - the conqueror of the French - was replaced by the "Kingmaker" Earl of Warwick. Edward III and Henry V - Richard III. Truly one could say in the words of Shakespeare's Richard II: "There is murder everywhere... Death reigns in the crown of kings."

Having soberly and joylessly assessed the present in the “Great Vacation,” Chaucer, from the abomination of the selfish age in the poem “The Past Age,” is carried away by thought into the “Aetas Prima,” into the “golden age” of serenely patriarchal relations, when peace and justice reigned on earth, man followed the natural right and when the source of self-interest - the precious metal - had not yet been extracted from the depths. Everything said in the “Former Century” resonated with reality in Chaucer’s time as personally experienced and suffered. Moreover: many lines of the “Bygone Age” almost textually coincide with the rebellious folk songs of 1381, the songs of John Ball, “Jack the Driver”, “Jack the Miller”, “Jack the Swede” about the fact that “envy rules, pride and treachery, and idleness has now come to reign”, that “deception and violence rule all around, but truth and conscience are under lock and key.” In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer nowhere directly reveals his attitude to historical events, but here, too, his own position can be determined by his attitude towards people. The legacy of the past for Chaucer is, first of all, the brazen violence and tyranny of the robber barons and their overlords, this is an ascetic deadening scheme, the ego inert thought of the scholastic pseudoscience of alchemists and astrologers-healers, this is a gang of parasites and hangers-on clinging to the church. But what touches him in the best people of the past is their bright faith and tenderness, their moral firmness and purity. He idealizes the unselfishness and simple warmth of the knight and the clerk, the plowman and the poor priest. He wants to preserve these people for the present as he would like them to be. He likes these eccentric righteous people, but the trouble is that the logic of artistic truth reveals their lifelessness and lack of viability. Next in line were people not of this type, but a thief-miller, a usurer-merchant, a scoundrel-lawyer, a rogue-economist, a rip-off manager, a weaver-woman and other money-grubbers from The Canterbury Tales. All of them pursue material wealth first and foremost and achieve them by any means necessary. They all grew up and took shape even before Chaucer, but only now, at a time of devastation, freed from the tight reins of the Middle Ages, from all moral restraint and having become ungirdled, they take back their strength and become dangerously active. They become typical (“after all, an honest miller, where can you find him?”) and do not bode well for the future. Speaking about the “actual course of development”, under which the feudal system was replaced by a capitalist system, Marx writes in the “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” that at this historical stage, “movement ... over immobility ...” inevitably had to prevail, “ acquisitiveness - over the thirst for pleasure...", "... the resourceful egoism of enlightenment... over... the cautious, rustic, lazy and fantastic egoism of superstition." Whom might people of the 14th century have preferred? Who is better: a robber-feudal lord or a bloodsucker-merchant? In essence, both are worse, but the robber was a repeat offender, and the bloodsucker had not yet fully shown himself. For the money-grubbers, with all their vileness, there was then, if not the truth, then a historical justification: objectively, it was they, as representatives of tomorrow, who in Chaucer’s time did the vital sanitary work, like ants, clearing the land of feudal garbage. But even in Chaucer’s depiction, they did this with far from clean hands, in order to soon litter the earth even more than before. These are the roots of the realistically truthful contradiction of Chaucer's characterizations with their harsh chiaroscuro. His knight is a righteous rapist - he is a crusader exterminating infidels; the merchant is a clever rogue; the skipper is a thief and a pirate, but he is also a brave man and an experienced sailor; the plowman is a human soul, but a dumb nag; the priest is a righteous soul and ascetic, but he is a heretic, devoid of the militant spirit of the future Puritans. The distribution of colors and the general tone indicate that often, even if reluctantly, Chaucer recognizes the need, but he cannot come to terms with unprincipledness and shamelessness. In places it seems that Chaucer, in depicting his money-grubber, senses a new and real threat, but in both “The Bygone Age” and “The Great Revolt” he emphasizes the need to shake off feudalism as a priority. In figuring out how to achieve this goal, Chaucer was not ahead of his time, did not develop any coherent positive program, and did not create a coherent image of a new man. He, along with his “poor priest,” shares the naive aspirations of Peter the Plowman, that you just need to remove the feudal lords, overcome self-interest and work tirelessly - and everything will be fine. The only difference with Langland’s views is that Chaucer does not wait for a heavenly deliverer and places all his hopes on the innate sense of justice and common sense of a simple earthly person, who must understand for himself what is good and what is bad. Chaucer is not a fighter by nature; if he fights, it is with the weapon of laughter. He does not call for a fight, but this struggle goes on latently on every page of his “Stories,” just as it flowed unnoticed throughout England throughout the 14th-15th centuries. As a result, feudal lords and ascetics, hypocrites and predators turned out to be weakened, and the cheerful free-thinking, vitality and confidence of the people were strengthened - in a word, everything that fueled Chaucer’s optimism. Despite everything heavy and formidable, worthy of ridicule and disgusting, everything that Chaucer experienced and saw around him, what he denounced in his satirical images, above all the trials and troubles to which his country was subjected and which Chaucer repeatedly mentions - Above all this unsightly reality, Chaucer’s vigorous, life-affirming creativity arises, generated by faith in the vitality, strength and talent of his people. Given this nature of Chaucer's historicism, it is in vain to look in him for a consistent and direct depiction of events or a substantiated analysis of the complex and contradictory historical process that is indirectly shown in The Canterbury Tales. And yet, they became a mouthpiece that preserved for us the voice of the people of his time, and a mirror that reflected their appearance. We will not find this in any of the English writers contemporary to Chaucer. “The founder of realism,” Chaucer carries his wonderful mirror along the high roads of England, and it accurately and truthfully reflects everything that falls within its scope. Chaucer's mirror does not reflect historical cataclysms; it would crack and fall out of his trembling hand, but, to the extent possible, it gives more: it reflects the people with whose hands history was made.

Joyful, full of light and movement, Chaucer's creativity reveals in him great vitality and vigor, which did not allow him to break in the trials and tribulations of his turbulent and terrible century. However, from the contradictions and chaos of the pre-renaissance, the complex and contradictory appearance of Chaucer himself emerges. In general, he is characterized by the duality of a man at a turning point, who wants to combine the best moral foundations of yesterday with internal emancipation, energy and breadth as the property of the future. Still unable to make an irrevocable choice, he at the same time cannot overcome these contradictions, which only the mighty synthesis of Shakespeare could do. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer seemed to read the waste of feudal England, without hiding his sadness for individual righteous people of the past. At the same time, his “Canterbury Tales” were, as it were, a welcoming word to the people of modern times, and Chaucer did not hush up their weaknesses and vices. The disparate features from which Chaucer’s positive images are only just being formed are also doubled. Of the people of modern times, Chaucer still most often encounters Sancho Panzas, like the cheerful innkeeper Bailey. Of the good people of the past, those most readily remembered are people not of this world - Don Quixote in the guise of a student or even a righteous knight. Only in the idealized figure of the “poor priest” is the active feat of Chaucer’s contemporaries and Wycliffe’s followers glimpsed. Chaucer often denounces married wrathful people, as well as their flatterers and servants, but he is still well aware that in the given conditions these denunciations are futile: “Beware of instructing kings, even if they were baked in hell later.” Chaucer could not help but see the true and very unattractive face of the Duke of Lancaster, but in relation to him he shared the illusions and short-sightedness of Wycliffe, further aggravated by the persistence of feudal loyalty to his patron. He is drawn to knowledge of the world, but, as for every person of the Middle Ages, this comes down to astrology and alchemy. True, he ridicules the astrology of charlatans, soothsayers and healers, and in his “Treatise on the Astrolabe” he himself deals with practical instrumental astronomy, naively flaunting his knowledge in this area, and in “The Canterbury Tales” he continually gives complex astronomical definitions of time. From astrological medicine he seeks to highlight the healthy grain of the old Hippocratic teaching on temperaments. He denounces charlatan alchemists, but reveals a deep interest in the technique of alchemical experiment, which has completely passed into modern science and contributed to the knowledge of matter. A sincere and deeply religious man, a chivalrously passionate admirer of the Virgin Mary and an admirer of Francis of Assisi, he is at the same time a free-thinking lover of life, condemning monastic asceticism, and a mocking skeptic when it comes to dogmas that deaden living faith. All his work is imbued with the “cheerful free-thinking” of the Renaissance. But Chaucer's freethinking is an almost instinctive indignation against asceticism and dogma, it is a naively optimistic denial of darkness in the name of light, it is, first of all, love of life and affirmation of life. Only much later, “cheerful free-thinking,” deepened by new humanistic content, appeared as the convulsive laughter of Rabelais, the bitter smile of Cervantes, the titanic impulses of thought and feelings of Marlowe and the powerful, comprehensive and mournful insights of Shakespeare. In the time of Chaucer, that furious dying rebuff had not yet reached its apogee of the unfinished past, which caused the despondency of Rabelais, the rage of Marlowe, the meditation of Shakespeare. Moreover, the possibilities of the man of the High Renaissance, who found himself and realized his power in an open struggle against the inert forces of the feudal past and hand in hand with friends and like-minded people, have not yet been fully revealed. But it was precisely such communication and such an environment that Chaucer lacked. And yet, with all the reservations, Chaucer was for his time an artist of a new type. In his work, the ossified class isolation and schematism of the medieval worldview have already been broken. They are replaced by a struggle against inert tradition, a critical approach to the feudal past and present, and an anxious look into the still unclear future.

Those qualities that were previously considered an integral property of the upper class - feudal lords: valor, nobility, self-sacrifice, self-esteem, good manners, developed intelligence - in Chaucer become accessible to every good person. Not only the wise military leader-knight has a sense of self-worth, but also Harry Bailey, who knows his worth. In Franklin's story, not only the noble Arviragus and Aurelius, but also the rootless sorcerer and philosopher are endowed with inner nobility.

The inner world of man had already been revealed earlier in the art of the Middle Ages, but most often it was passive contemplation, the fulfillment of God's will, its predestination, or at least the dictates of fate. In Chaucer, man is the master of his destiny and fights for it. His inner world is revealed not in reflection, but in effective communication with other people.

Chaucer's man is not a one-dimensional scheme, not a bearer of abstract qualities. And appearance, and thoughts, and behavior, and everything that happens to a person serves Chaucer to reveal his character in all its versatility and inconsistency, and his people are dynamic, living characters. Like Shakespeare, Chaucer did not invent something new in the abstract, but distinguished much of what was inherent in the character of his people and what was revealed later in their history. Chaucer fights the medieval tradition, but accepts from it, in order of continuity, certain obligatory elements of historical and cultural necessity. Enriched with elements of a new ideological and artistic freedom, they enter his work in a new quality and lay the foundation for a new, Chaucerian tradition.

This tradition did not develop immediately and quite organically, since in his work Chaucer expressed some of the essential aspects of the national character: a craving for sober reality, unbending strength and self-confidence, optimism and self-esteem - qualities that were especially hardened in the successful struggle against feudalism. In the field of artistic mastery, this was manifested in the free use of material, in the daring combination of scary and funny, sad and cheerful, low and high, poetic and ordinary, and finally, in the peculiar nature of the grotesque and purely English humor. After Chaucer, these features were brilliantly developed by Shakespeare, especially in the light, comedic plane, which is an integral part of his tragedies and constitutes their earthly, Falstaffian background.

And following Shakespeare, the same features appear in Fielding in the contrasting depiction of people and in the contrasting construction of the novel, as well as in the comic adventures of his heroes on the high roads of life.

Chaucer inspired Walter Scott when he resurrected the people and customs of the English Middle Ages in Ivanhoe. Smollett and Dickens inherited the external characteristics of their characters from Chaucer, sometimes narrowing Chaucer's living images to the grotesque masks of their eccentrics. Of course, Chaucer does not exhaust all the sources and paths of English realism. This is not where Milton's creativity comes from. Defoe and Swift. This is only the beginning of one of the paths along which democratic everyday realism developed in England. Here are the origins of the “comic epic” and the beginning of the “high road epic”, from here a turn to the novel and comedy of characters is planned, here are the prototypes of people typical of one of the guises of Chaucer’s homeland, for “green England”, for Dickens’s “merry old England” and Shakespeare.

With all the allowances for the time and for Chaucer’s not at all tragic worldview, it must be admitted that the English researcher Coulton had grounds when he argued that “after Shakespeare, Chaucer is the most Shakespearean figure in English literature.” And it’s not for nothing that when you think about Chaucer, you remember the words from “Hamlet”: “Scholar, courtier, fighter - gaze, sword, tongue.” But this capacious definition does not cover all of Chaucer. A court poet and customs overseer, a bookworm and a lover of life, a participant in wars and peace negotiations, a regular at fairs and pilgrimages, and above all a keen-eyed artist, he knows people’s life not as a scientist, not as a courtier. He looks at life not from a narrow class point of view, not only as an Esquire of Edward III and a citizen of the City of London. At the same time, he is a son of his country, a cultural European, standing at the level of his era, and an artist, far ahead of his time in England.

He can rightfully be considered the first realistic writer of England and the first, and perhaps the only, representative of the initial stage of the English Renaissance, which only reached maturity and full flowering in the works of Marlowe and Shakespeare.

Vladimir Sobolev

For D. Chaucer, the depiction of human character in The Canterbury Tales as an artistic history of human life in its present and past is one of the basic principles of genre formation. In turn, the variety of characters grows from the variety of genres included in the work. This specific relationship, as one of the characteristic features of Chaucer’s method of artistic comprehension of reality, can be traced, for example, in the aspect of how the genre determines the originality of the author’s “I” in the work. It is the genre that determines what is very important to identify when analyzing the artistic whole - the personality, the position of the writer, expressed in The Canterbury Tales.

It is no coincidence that it included all the genres known to the literature of the Middle Ages, “according to the type of collections of fairy tales, short stories and generally narratives of various types that were found in the East and West before this period.” But the violation of the accepted hierarchy of genres is immediately alarming and is regarded by some researchers as a “departure from the norm, which presupposes a system.” The example of a chivalric romance is followed by a fabliau, then a didactic legend, and again a fabliau. The Christian legend is interspersed with a parody of a chivalric romance and a moralizing allegory, a historical chronicle - with a folk tale, an eastern legend, lives, etc. All of them are cemented by the author’s irreconcilable attitude towards the traditional laws of artistic creativity, which level both the author’s individuality and the distinctive features of the works themselves. The author’s artistic thought is perceived through the genre - a cycle that acts as a mediator between the author’s work and the reader, whose task is not only to see the creative process, but also to understand the author’s artistic concept, where the main thing is the image, the character of a person, free from the template in any manifestation of himself myself. Here the author’s “I” arises on the basis of mastering the images, situations, themes of all previous literature and manifests itself in irony over its heroes, parodying the motives and plots of its works. The correlation of one’s own position with the literary tradition gives rise not to a conventional image of the “person” who leads the narrative, but to the character of a living person with a complex inner world and a unique way of life.

Another way of forming a genre, its enrichment and development is the process of interpenetration of genres. At the intersection of many genres, at the interweaving of the individual and the traditional, Chaucer creates a new genre. There is, as it were, an internal polemic between one genre and another, parody, an explosion of the genre from within, which in turn influences the further transformation of genres. Actually, The Canterbury Tales is structured in such a way that each story is a parody of either the previous one or the source. Using the example of Squire's story, we can examine in detail what properties of the new genre arise from the interaction of two genres of different literary movements, as well as how they affect the deepening of the meaning of the work and the character of the narrator. The originality of the story lies in the alternation of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the real and the fantastic in the lives, characters, and thoughts of the heroes.

This is achieved by the interpenetration of the properties of the genres of urban short stories, folk tales and knightly romances. From the story it can be judged that the Squire is not who he claims to be, or rather, tries to pass off. The son of a knight, outwardly he is faithful to the ideals of his father: from his lips we hear a book story about the “good” old times of knighthood, when noble lords, unearthly beauties and fantastic creatures personifying good or evil lived. But as we read into the meaning of the Squire's story, we find ourselves under the spell of a deliberately hidden irony. The fantastic form of the story is only a shell concealing realistic content.

Under Chaucer's pen, the fantastic plan takes on the outline of a mirage, which quickly dissipates when a trained eye touches it. Fantasy is an unfortunate cliche here. We are dealing with a parody of the fantastic in a chivalric novel: the translation of the fantastic into the realm of the real, which makes this fantastic come into being. The magical objects given by the knight to Princess Kanaka seem extraordinary only at first glance. As it later turns out, the source of their miraculous power lies in the natural properties of things. Gradually, the reader begins to associate that all these accessories are by no means new. The merits of a beautiful mirror were once told by the learned men Agalsen, Villion, and Stagirite; the healing sword once served as a weapon for Telemachus and Achilles, etc. You are becoming more and more convinced that the Squire’s story suffers from artistic eclecticism of motives, details, images, and plot lines. In the knight of the first part of the story, you can easily recognize the Black Knight from the anonymous novel about Gowain; conversations between the princess and the eagle have a folklore source. Thus, the Squire's story represents a typical example of a fragment of a chivalric romance in the last years of its existence, characterized by the decline of the artistic structure and philosophical concept of works of this genre of literature.

In addition, everything that happens to the heroes is terribly frivolous. The king and his servants are so preoccupied with themselves that they do not even think about any adventures; the knight arrived at the feast not because of Kanaka (as this should have happened in a courtly novel), but for business reasons; the signs of attention he shows to the sovereign do not conceal anything ambiguous in relation to his daughter.

The prosaic nature of the heroes' actions is the source of the narrator's hidden irony.

Vision as a formative element of a chivalric romance is also completely excluded by the author: here the heroes’ sleep is not a reason for seeing “something” or moving away from the present in the “charm” of dreams, but a consequence of a person’s physical state. Kambuskan and Kanaka fall asleep... so that “the food is better digested” and “... so that their eyes do not swell from a sleepless night.”

The wounded bird begs the beauty for mercy, but she, having forgotten that freedom for every “living creature” is more valuable than anything in the world, “saves” the eagle from her: she locks the captive in a luxurious golden cage.

Life is perceived by the heroes as it is - from a practical point of view, and not as it should be. The reproduction of the outdated truths of the “golden age” of chivalry contains a new view of Chaucer’s contemporary younger generation, in the image of the Squire, on the traditional adventurous heroics of the genre, a witty look, infecting with the maximalism characteristic only of cheerful natures. This is how the character of the Squire emerges, receiving the final and seemingly unexpected touches in his story. The “sybaritizing” hulk in the portrait sketch of the Great Prologue - in the role of narrator, he evokes sincere sympathy. But in fact, we have before us a parody of the old type of knight in the new conditions of the time, exposing the always unsightly convention of the ideal hero, whose immersion in life, on the one hand, becomes shallow, on the other hand, transforms him in a human way. In this “inversion” there is a polemic with the genre of the chivalric novel, in which departure into another, unearthly life “humanizes” the hero.

By setting in motion the portrait gallery of the Great Prologue and thus making static faces characters, Chaucer gives dramatic features to The Canterbury Tales. For the first time, this feature of the genre was noticed by the American researcher of the writer's work G. Kittredge. Pilgrims reveal their essence not only in the stories and characteristics of the author. They show themselves best in dynamic disputes - dialogues, squabbles rich in dramatic content, entire discussions, observations of each other.

Hence the objectivity of the character characteristics offered by Chaucer. Self-characteristics and their feedback about each other most often correspond to the characters' personalities. The author makes fun of the Monk, revealing his moral buffoonery; The Miller attacks the Manager, and he attacks the Miller, and the most unpleasant traits in the characters of the companions are revealed; insulting the Cook in obscene terms, the Housekeeper does not portray himself in the best possible way. In this case, nothing contradicts psychological plausibility.

But there are cases that contradict it. Negative and positive heroes highly appreciate the virtues of those “whom they internally despise.” The bailiff of the church court with all passion protects and whom... The Bath weaver! from the slander of Carmelite; the canon's servant initially speaks with respect of his master, a charlatan; out of “respect” for the company, in which thieves and scoundrels are held in the same esteem as pious people, the Squire yields to the Innkeeper’s requests.

Such a discrepancy with “human nature” - the basis of the characters’ character - is a conventional device, according to the American researcher G. Dempster, the comic role of a hero reacting to circumstances. The irony hidden in relations to the antipodes expresses the state of the individual when the situation turns to the hero according to his role, and he sees everything from the perspective of this role. This property of Chaucerian comedy can also explain the fact that some stories offered by the heroes do not correspond (in their internal meaning) to the characters of the narrators, highlighting their new qualities: the ambition of the Bailiff, the unscrupulousness of the servant Canon, the conformity of the Squire, etc.

The presence of different speech layers in “The Canterbury Tales” also reveals the genre features of the dramatic work. It intertwines and contrasts different linguistic styles: the style of life of a penitent sinner, the second Nun, with the patriarchal-epic style of the “pure to the point of holiness” Abbess; the bookish, impersonal speech of the Squire - with the figurative wisdom of Franklin; the emotionally sincere speech of the Knight - with the official-business ambitious story of the Priest; The juicy, frankly rude speech of the Bath weaver, always ready to confess her sins, sets off the cynicism of the truthful confessions of the true sinner, the Bailiff.

A characteristic feature of the genre of a dramatic work is manifested in the peculiar correlation of the characters’ stories with their speech (for example, the pathetic story of the Monk - a “truth-seeker” about the falls of great people and the humiliating tone of the same Monk - a jester - a world-eater who dreams of luring out wanderers who have become "disappointed" after the story the last half). The plot completeness of most stories makes it possible to hear not just the voices of the characters, but to perceive them as characters.

Summarizing the above, we can talk about Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” as a polyphonic work, breaking out of the medieval framework of normative thinking and in this sense approaching the works of the Renaissance literary style. The polyphonism of the work is supported by lyrical digressions with their diversity of judgments, opinions, and the clearly expressed voice of the author, compared with the voices of other characters, and the compositional freedom from the strict form of short story collections, and the principle of connecting various life semantic spheres, stylistic layers, entailing the transformation of genres , violation of their boundaries, creation of new genre varieties. All this allows us to conclude that Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” against the general background of medieval literature looks like a work that undoubtedly deserves closer attention from researchers who until recently considered it only a product of medieval artistic consciousness.

Keywords: Geoffrey Chaucer, Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Canterbury Tales”, criticism of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, criticism of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, download criticism, download for free, English literature of the 14th century.

4. "The Canterbury Tales".

Chaucer, apparently, took up this main work in earnest no earlier than 1386. But we know that its individual pieces were written long before that: “St. Cecilia” (the story of the second nun), fragments of the monk’s story, “Lalamon and Archytas” (a knight's story), "Melibaeus" (Chaucer's second story), a priest's story. When these things were written, Chaucer hardly had a plan for The Canterbury Tales. It appeared later, and suitable material, previously prepared, was drawn into the emerging frame in the most natural way. The most significant part of the Canterbury Tales appeared in the four years 1386-1389.

The final text contains 20 complete things, two unfinished and two broken. Here, as we will see, not everything that was planned. But the social meaning of the work, its artistic value and influence on the further growth of English literature were fully felt.

Chaucer lived in the era of the creation of national culture in England. The bourgeoisie entered the arena, preparing to wrest political dominance from the feudal lords. A new worldview was emerging. In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer depicts the society of New England. There is a place for the knight in this society, just as there is a place for him in the motley company of the Canterbury pilgrims. But both here and there they are already being squeezed out, and the most lively and flexible part of the feudal class begins, under the pressure of circumstances, to move onto the path of bourgeois management. And soon - this has already begun with the accession of Chaucer's benefactor Bolingbroke - the feudal lords will begin to exterminate each other: the War of the Roses is approaching. The knights will be replaced by others. These others are the middle classes. Chaucer paints them with particular passion. Many of the Canterbury pilgrims are merchants and artisans of good means or representatives of liberal professions. They wear clothes made of good cloth, they have nice horses, and their wallets have enough to pay for their quarters. Even his peasant (prologue) is not a poor man: he regularly pays his tithes and fulfills his duties, without complaining about his fate. He is not at all like Langland's hungry cotters or the peasant depicted with such stunning strength in the Creed of Peter the Plowman. Chaucer willingly goes into the details of merchant and craft (the miller's story) life. He does not hide the funny sides of the townspeople (the woman from Bath), but nowhere is his humor so imbued with gentle affection as in these cases. His attitude towards the upper classes is not hostile. Only subtle mockery, visible, for example, in the parody story about Sir Topaz, shows that the author has outgrown the knightly ideology. Much more obvious is ridicule of clergy. There are several of them in the company, and all of them are caricatures (with the exception of the priest), especially the monks: perhaps there were echoes of Wyclif’s sermon here. Chaucer knows perfectly well that the church must feed the army of its parasites at the expense of the sons of the people, because otherwise it cannot exist, and he knows how to show this (the story of the seller of indulgences). He considers only the parish priest necessary. The rest are no longer needed.

The book was created, one might say, spontaneously. Its spacious frame easily absorbed all the appropriate epic material from the old. And in order to find subjects for new things, Chaucer did not torture himself. He took “his goods” where he found them. Of the twenty-four stories, many are borrowed from books: stories of a knight, a lawyer, "Melibeus", stories of a monk, doctor, student, second nun, landowner, abbess, housekeeper. Others are then well-known oral traveling stories: the stories of a miller, a steward, a shipman, a chaplain, a seller of indulgences, a woman from Bath, an executor, a merchant, a squire. The priest's story is not a story, but a sermon. Thus, almost only “Topaz” remains to the share of Chaucer’s own invention, and even that is a parody, that is, it assumes the existence of a similar plot in a serious sense. For his realistic pattern to work well, Chaucer needs a strong and frequent plot outline; and where the plot is not finalized in the source, he abandons even a successfully started piece, like the story of Cambiscan (the squire's story). The systematic selection of plots gave The Canterbury Tales an extraordinary variety of genres. Here is everything that the not very rich assortment of literary genres of that time could provide: a chivalric romance (stories of a knight and a squire), a pious legend (the story of the abbess and the second nun), a moralizing tale (the story of an indulgence seller), biographies of great people (the story of a monk) , historical story (doctor's story), short story (student's and shipbuilder's stories), didactic allegory (Chaucer's story about Melibaeus), fablio (miller's story, steward's story, executor's story), animal epic (chaplain's story), mythological story (housekeeper's story), pious a discourse in the form of a sermon (the story of a priest), a parody of a chivalric romance ("Sir Topaz" and the story of a woman from Bath).

The literary treatment of all these plots followed the same plan as in Troilus. Chaucer wanted to make each story as convincing as possible, which is why the elements of everyday and psychological realism are so strong in them. Or he achieved the same persuasiveness in the opposite way, showing the improbability of the situation through parody, as in the tale of the rejuvenated old woman told by the woman of Bath. To enhance the sense of reality of his characters, Chaucer resorts to a method that is largely new in fiction. It is absolutely clear that if several stories are pulled together by a common frame with the narrators appearing in it, then the narrators should appear to the reader as characters more real than the heroes of their stories. Framing, therefore, creates, as it were, two stages of reality. In this form it does not represent a new literary device.

Its use was new. Chaucer deliberately blurs the line between the characters he considers real and the characters he portrays as fictional. He depicts in exactly the same colors the abbess in the general prologue, the woman from Bath in the prologue to her story, and, for example, the beautiful carpenter Alison in the miller’s story. In this way, a fictional image takes on flesh and blood. In exactly the same way, the image of a living student from the general prologue receives its completion in the portrait of the student Nicholas, transferred to the everyday environment of Oxford in the same miller's story. But perhaps the most remarkable example of such a fusion of images was given by Chaucer in two parallel stories of the minor and the executor of the church court (somonour). They are on knives, like the miller and the steward. In the general prologue, both are characterized more externally: the executor’s face was covered in acne and red spots that could not be removed with any ointments or potions, and the Minorite (he is called Frere, in contrast to the important Benedictine - Monk) had the back of his head as white as a lily ; tells about their clothes and external habits. And everyday and psychological characteristics are included in their short stories. The Minorite, in defiance of his enemy, tells how a certain executor, at the very moment when he tried to take the last pennies from a poor and sick old woman, was carried away by the devil to hell, and the characterization of the executor in the story perfectly complements the outline of the general prologue. The same is true in the executor's novella. In revenge on the monk, he first of all gives a little information about where the Minorites are placed in hell: it turns out, under the tail of Satan. Then comes the novella. It tells the story of a Minorite, to whom a certain person, who was bothering him, did an obscene nasty thing. The characterization of the monk in the short story continues the characterization of the minorite in the general prologue, but, as in the previous one, in much sharper satirical tones. It is wonderfully told how the monk casually enters the house, drives away the cat that was lying on the bench, carefully puts his equipment in its place: a stick, a hat and a bag, sits down himself, then kisses the mistress who appears - this was the custom - and the conversation begins, from which the secrets of his craft are revealed in all their ugliness.

The identity of the images is demonstrated quite clearly. When the executor in the story exposes the fraud of his fictional hero, the living minor from the company of pilgrims cannot stand it: “Well, then you’re lying, executor!” Moreover, Chaucer is so carried away by the idea of ​​the identity of the characters in the prologue and the short stories that he sometimes forgets about the necessary literary conventions. In the merchant's story, the action takes place in Pavia at a time not precisely defined, but in any case much earlier. One of his characters, Knight Justin, discussing the good and bad sides of married life, refers to what a woman from Bath, experienced in this matter, said in the prologue to her story. It is clear that the Lombard knight, who did not take part in the pilgrimage to Canterbury, could not hear the wise explanations of the venerable lady who had succeeded five husbands. But for Chaucer, the people created by his fantasy are all so close to reality that the differences in the degree of their reality are erased. For him they are all equally real. The artistic techniques that created them are the same, and they are equally close to the world of reality. Perhaps for contemporaries there was an additional meaning: many of the characters in the prologue, in addition to the innkeeper and Chaucer himself, they easily recognized. If even today it turned out to be relatively easy to establish the true names of some pilgrims from documents, then it was, of course, even easier for contemporaries. And under such conditions, the sign of equality between them and the fictional heroes of the stories, drawn out either with feigned naivety or with obvious and cunning intent, immediately gave an idea of ​​them as people who really existed and were depicted in exact accordance with reality.

Everyone knows the plot that underlies The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer once spent the night in a hotel on the southern outskirts of London in order to go early in the morning on a pilgrimage to venerate the shrine of Thomas Becket. People from different parts of England gathered at the same hotel with the same goal. Chaucer immediately met everyone, became friends with many, and they decided to leave London together under the leadership of their master Harry Bailey. They did it as they planned. Let's go. The journey was long. Harry Bailey suggested that each of the pilgrims (there were 29 in total) tell two stories on the way there and two on the way back. What Chaucer allegedly managed to write down became the content of The Canterbury Tales.

That is why the general prologue to the Canterbury Tales acquired great importance for Chaucer. Formally, it, together with prologues and afterwords to individual stories, is assigned a modest role as a frame for the book, and a purely external one at that: in this sense, Chaucer could have borrowed the idea from Boccaccio. But Chaucer very soon abandoned the idea of ​​​​giving a bare frame: precisely because he had a strong connecting thread between the characters of the general prologue and the stories. And this, in turn, turned the frame into some kind of independent everyday poem, the hero of which naturally became Harry Bailey, the owner of the inn. Only he has enough character to take command and discipline a motley group of pilgrims. Only he has enough gaiety and humor, and at the same time severity, to curb the brawlers. How vigilantly he protects the people who have trusted him, and warns them about swindlers! How incredulously he interrogates the charlatan canon and his servant, who caught up with the pilgrims on the road! How masterfully he leads discussions about the stories he has heard, not allowing the debate to wander to the side and strictly demanding the next story! The new idea has far outgrown the idea of ​​framing the Decameron in terms of artistic significance. Instead of Boccaccio's seven ladies and three gentlemen, belonging to the same circle and little individualized, there is a huge collection of types from the most diverse social strata, which is far from being exhausted by those listed in the prologue. Even their counting in the prologue is confusing. At the beginning (verse 24) the number 29 is indicated, apparently without Harry Bailey and without Chaucer himself. In verse 164, the chaplain and three priests who accompanied the second nun are named, four in total, three of whom do not appear further; in verse 544, Chaucer identifies himself. If we count both him and the three extra pilgrim priests, it comes out not 29, but 33, with Harry Bailey 34, and with the canon’s servant who stopped along the way - the canon himself fled - 35. And we are hardly dealing with negligence here . Chaucer simply left a loophole for a possible increase in the number of stories, because, according to Harry's proposal, each of the pilgrims had to give four stories. This would amount to 140 stories, and Chaucer in 1386, when the general prologue was being written, felt able to carry out this grandiose plan, quantitatively far beyond the Decameron. But, after working hard for four years (1386-1389), he somewhat cooled down to the idea, and less than a fifth of it was written. Nevertheless, the main thing was done. A broad picture of English life at the turning point that the poet witnessed was given.

Of course, Chaucer's poem is far from the laconic colorlessness of the Comedy, where the terzina, with its iron rhythm, forced one to sparingly count words and look for the “single” word for a thought that accurately expresses it. Chaucer does not have graphics, like Dante, but rather the painting of contemporary multi-colored miniatures, which loves details and is not afraid of diversity, which dwells for a long time and lovingly on the external: on the figure, face, clothes, furniture, utensils, weapons, horse decoration. And Chaucer’s verse, with all the variety of meters, fits this style unusually. It flows slowly, easily and generously.

The features of Chaucerian realism are clarified by comparing it with the realism of Boccaccio. For the Florentine, the foreground is not everyday realism, but psychological one. This is even more striking in Fiametta than in The Decameron. Chaucer has some surprisingly harmonious balance between everyday and psychological realism. The background, furnishings, atmosphere, accessories interest him as intensely as the person, his feelings and experiences. Troilus has already given striking evidence of this. In The Canterbury Tales this feature of his genius is in full bloom. Chaucer the poet clearly understands the importance of the material moment in life.

Riding on his horse, with his typical forked beard and sharp, mocking eye, the poet trotts lightly between the pilgrims, rides up first to one, then to the other, looks at the costumes, touches the huge yeoman's bow or the miller's bagpipes, listens to the conversation, lets go jokes. And he writes down his observations on ivory tablets, like those on which his minor (the executor’s story) wrote down the names of the donors at the memorial, in order to erase them immediately upon leaving the house. He is full of insatiable curiosity, wants to be everywhere, wants to see everything. Of course, he was among those who lifted the drunken cook who had fallen from his horse and tried to put him firmly in the saddle. Of course, he, earlier than others, became interested in the fact that he was a strange person, accompanied by a servant, who had caught up with a company of pilgrims at Boton riding on a dappled gray nag. And he hardly remained silent when the innkeeper teased them about the solid build of both of them, as presented in the prologue to the story of Sir Topaz.

This greed for the phenomena of life and, in particular, for knowledge of people and their individual characteristics, is the main thing in Chaucer’s talent. For his time this was a typical and new feature. He looked for what was characteristic in his characters and knew how to find it. Sometimes he limited himself to a detailed description of appearance, and this was enough. Sometimes he added a quick psychological description, and the person was outlined entirely. Sometimes he went deeper into analysis if a character interested him, and a small detail illuminated everything. Sometimes he gave an idea of ​​​​a person’s tastes, putting into his mouth a story of the appropriate tone and content, and this was done both seriously and ironically. It was fitting for a knight and his son, a squire, to tell romantic stories, just as a learned doctor should tell a historical story about Appia Claudius and the beautiful Virginia, or a student about Griselda, or the second nun about Saint Cecilia. But when the abbess, a lady with a tender heart, who wore the motto on her bracelet: “Amor vincit omnia” (love conquers all), who mourned every punished dog and every mouse in a mousetrap, tells with a sharp tinge of hatred the pious legend of a child supposedly tortured by the Jews - it has a special meaning. And the completely open irony is that the tragicomic story about Chanticleer is put into the mouth of the chaplain of the nunnery: the only male clergyman in the nunnery talks about the idyll in the chicken coop, where the rooster Chanticleer, the happy husband of seven gentle feathered wives, enjoys the joys of conjugal life, not received church blessings.

Among the humorists of world literature, Chaucer is one of the largest. His humor is gentle, not malicious. He rarely turns into sarcasm; in his humor there is a great understanding of human weaknesses, a willingness to condescend to them and forgive. But he uses the tool of humor masterfully. Humor is an organic part of his literary talent, and sometimes it seems that he himself does not notice how humorous and ironic touches pour from his pen." Here, for example, is the beginning of the shipman's story:

Once upon a time there lived a merchant in Saint-Denis. He was rich. Therefore he was considered wise.

She agreed to recognize him as her husband and master, Since husbands can be masters of their wives.

Sometimes Chaucer gives irony in a detailed way, but in such a way that it does not stick out intrusively and can be ignored. Thus, in the economist’s story, he lists cases of frivolity and inconstancy in the animal world, always manifested by female individuals - a cat, a she-wolf, etc. And then he adds:

All these examples refer to men who became unfaithful, and not at all to women. For men always have more desire to satisfy their thirst for base things than their wives.

His techniques are extremely varied. Dante's Golden Eagle loses its tragic importance and its Olympian splendor and begins to conduct the most ordinary conversations in a simple language. And just as easily, the rooster Chanticleer and his beloved wife, Madame Pertelotte, rise above the insignificance of their chicken coop and quote Cato and the Holy Scriptures in a scientific dispute. There, reduction, here sublimation equally serve irony. But Chaucer also knows how to use direct ironic speech. He most often puts it into the mouth of Harry Bailey, the innkeeper. Harry's humor is crude, but it hits without a miss. This is how, for example, he congratulates the chaplain of the convent, who has just told me about Chanticleer: “Sir chaplain, may your underworld be blessed! You had a funny tale about Chanticleer. But, to tell the truth, if you were a layman, you would be a magnificent rooster ". Because if you had as much hunting as you have the strength, you would need, I think, seven times seven hens. Look at the muscles of this young priest, what a neck, what the width of his chest. And his eyes are like "A hawk, and his beard does not require any dye, either local or imported. Thank you, sir, for your tale!" The irony here is all the more subtle because the abbess of the chaplain’s monastery also listened to Harry’s sly gratitude.

The Canterbury Tales is full of comic situations, the farce of the cradle (the steward's tale) is crude, and it took La Fontaine's pen to give it real subtlety. But even La Fontaine would probably have been powerless to give subtlety to the prank on the minorite (the executor's story). But the short story about the fooled carpenter (the miller's story) is truly comical, especially its end. It is also not free from some roughness, but in the characterization of the four characters and in the masterfully developed plot it belongs to the best examples of this genre. A similar situation fifty years later would form the basis of one of Masuccio’s short stories: rudeness in those days did not frighten anyone, but in Chaucer it perfectly served the realistic effect. Equally realistic and equally comical, although in a different way, is the description of the movement intensified, accelerated and saturated to the utmost limits - a technique that Chaucer’s contemporary, the most democratic of the Florentine novelists, Franco Sacchetti, liked to resort to for the same purposes. Here's an example. The fox grabbed the magnificent Chanticleer and dragged him into the forest. This was seen by his faithful wife, the chicken Pertelotta. “The unfortunate widow and her two daughters raised their chicken cry and their lamentations, jumped out of the chicken coop and saw how the fox was rushing towards the forest, dragging a rooster. They began to shout: “Oh, oh! Here! For help! Fox! Hold her!" And they rushed in pursuit. And along with them many others with sticks. Collie, our dog, ran. Talbot and Gerlinda and Melkin ran with a spindle in their hands. A cow and a calf ran, even pigs ran, who were so frightened by the dog barks and screams of men and women, that their grunts almost broke their hearts, and they screamed like devils in hell. Ducks screamed as if they were going to be killed. Geese flew over the trees in fear. Swarms of bees flew out of the hives. The noise was so scary that God forbid!" A painting showing a completely new, realistic and very popular literary skill, which, as in Italy, could only be born in the city.

One should not, however, think that Chaucer was only strong in depicting comedic and farcical situations. The Canterbury Tales contains both romantic dramas and true tragedies. The most heartfelt grim tragedy was told to the pilgrims by an indulgence seller, who made it the theme of the aphorism: “Radix malorum est cupiditas” (the root of all evil is greed). Three friends found a treasure and were going to share it. One went for provisions, the remaining two decided to kill him so that everyone would get more. And he poisoned food and drinks in order to appropriate the entire treasure for himself. And everyone died.

The plot was very popular even before Chaucer, and after him it was processed more than once. Chaucer, as always, is interested not so much in the bare plot as in its treatment. The setting here gives the plot tragic credibility. Chaucer gives a picture of double betrayal against the background of a pestilence raging in Flanders, and the first scene is unbridled drunkenness in a tavern - a real feast during the plague. It is interrupted by a death knell, followed by the innkeeper's tale of the devastation caused by the epidemic. This story makes three friends take off in drunken fervor and march to their death. On the way they meet a mysterious old man; a conversation with him further thickens the horror of the whole picture. They receive instructions where to look for death and find a chest with ducats. This turns out to be death: greed kills all three.