Any interpretation of creativity, the construction of its logic, must be based on the creativity of the author himself, focus on the text. Only when the idea of ​​each individual work comes into interaction with the ideas of other works, forms a logical, indissoluble unity with them, explains the path of spiritual and creative searches that the author has gone through, only then can we speak of a high degree of reliability of the proposed version.

With regard to Gogol's work, this also applies to the second, burned volume of "Dead Souls", and "Selected passages from correspondence with friends", which, like any work in the writer's work, were not of an accidental nature, or the nature of a tragic delusion, and even if were such, then it must have been a logical fallacy arising from the meaning and content of all previous creativity.

In "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" Gogol for the first time defined himself as an independent artist, and in addition, he showed that original poetic manner that distinguishes him from all the others. What does it consist main feature this manner?

Gogol introduces elements of legends and folk legends into the fabric of the narrative, making them an integral part of the displayed folk life. However, this is not the main thing.

According to Gogol, the human soul is a kind of arena in which there is a constant, eternal struggle between good and evil, dark and light, God and the devil. Gogol, plunging into the life of the people, is trying to understand what is good and what is evil (devilish beginning). It is no coincidence that demonic forces are woven into human life in his works, they are an integral part of it. It is characteristic that “devilry” arises exactly where the unspiritual principle flourishes, where people live in idleness and drunkenness, lies and depravity. Gogol's "devilry" is a kind of metaphor, a materialized dark principle in man. It is characteristic that, in depicting the "demonic beginning", Gogol does not draw the "proud prince of darkness", the fallen angel, Beelzebub. The “Prince of Darkness” is a force that opposes a person who has embarked on the path of self-improvement and service to God. This is a tempting start. Gogol has no personalities. The subject of his depiction is not individuals, but the spiritual life of the people, represented in faces. His characters are a kind of masks, puppets in the hands of the main forces, between which the main conflict unfolds in his works - between the divine and demonic principles in man. Gogol is not talking about a way to move along the path of serving God, but about instructing people on this path, for in all these Basavryuks, Solokhas, Chubakhs, and so on. Not only is God not enough, he is not there at all.

In Gogol, thus, one can observe, as it were, two levels, two layers of action: characters and evil spirits fight in the arena, and behind the scenes, implicitly, god and the devil confront (hence the "stage character" of Gogol's works, the "carnival" beginning, about which many researchers have said. In order to resist the devil, you need to take the side of God, to see him. And for this you need to cleanse yourself - cleanse yourself of "evil spirits": malice, stupidity, drunkenness, envy, lust, and so on. Thus, in Gogol's work, we see neither hell nor heaven (as, for example, in Dante or Milton - only those who have already seen God, and, accordingly, the devil, can find hell or paradise), but rather purgatory. Some of the characters pass it (for example, the blacksmith Vakula from The Night Before Christmas), some do not (for example, Khoma Brut from Viy),

The function of descriptions of nature in Gogol is noteworthy. The world, according to Gogol, is the creation of God, and his presence in it is inescapable. Gogol's descriptions of nature are a kind of hymn to the divine essence, poured into everything around. According to Gogol, everything beautiful is divine, and everything divine is beautiful. But the concept of “beautiful” is by no means identical with the concept of “beauty” (for example, the beauty of a pannochka in Vie, the beauty of a work of art in Portrait). The beautiful, according to Gogol, is precisely the incarnation of God on earth.

It is with this description that the first story "Evenings ..." begins. As a kind of antithesis, a description of the fair appears before us - scenes of unrestrained drunkenness (Solopiy), deceit (gypsies), envy (stepmother), etc. A red scroll, pieces of which the devil is looking for throughout the fair, is a symbol of the presence of "evil" everything that happens here. It is no coincidence that Solopiy is frightened by a pig's snout that appeared in the window ("proximity" to the devil due to drunkenness determines this fear).

A similar alignment of forces is described in The Missing Letter, where all evil spirits appear as a result of unrestrained drunkenness, to which a messenger sent with a letter to the queen indulges. It is also characteristic that Gogol almost blurs the line between the real and the unreal world, into which the characters are immersed as a result of alcohol or drug intoxication (for example, Nevsky Prospekt, Viy). It is not completely clear whether everything that happened to the messenger really happened, or whether these were just events that he dreamed of (compare with Pushkin's "The Undertaker"). This move is also logical, since the world is the creation of God, therefore, one who falls under the influence of "evil spirits" and moves away from God, moves away from real world(God's creation), getting into the world of "demonic", surreal. It is characteristic that "irreality" will increase colossally in Gogol's St. Petersburg stories, where the city itself no longer appears as part of the natural, divine world, but as something phantasmagoric, unreal, almost completely fallen under the demonic principle and giving rise not to people, but to some kind of freaks ("Overcoat", "Nose", "Notes of a Madman").

Gogol's idea of ​​youth contrasts with the descriptions of "devilry" in "Evenings ...", since young people are those who have not yet had time to make their choice, those who, due to their age, are still innocent. It is young people who resist the evil spirits generated and emanating from the older generation, which is already mired in sins (for example, the apposition of Vakula / his mother, Solokha, in “The Night Before Christmas”; Peter and Ivas / Korzh in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”; Levko / his father, the head, in “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, Katerina and Danilo / Katerina’s father, a sorcerer, etc.). Quite in the spirit of Christian prophecies (Isaiah) that “the sins of the fathers will fall on their children”, Gogol raises the question of the responsibility of the older generation for the fragile souls of the younger generation, claims that a person is responsible not only for his ruined soul, but also for those who is in the sphere of his influence (for example, the responsibility of Taras Bulba for the fate of his sons).

It is the greed of Korzh that pushes Peter to commit a crime (the murder of an innocent baby) in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, it is the “disgraceful things” done by the head that are the reason that lets “evil spirits” into the surrounding divine world in “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”. It is characteristic that the Drowned Saka also suffered through the fault of the evil stepmother (witch), which is partly the reason why she helps Levko. The very process of “recognizing” evil spirits, outwardly completely indistinguishable from people, is also symbolic. It is characteristic that the characters of "Viya" directly declare this when they say that "any old woman is a witch" or that all the women in the bazaar are witches, and also that a witch cannot be distinguished by any external signs. .

Gogol's attitude towards women in general is quite remarkable. In the opposition between the dark and the light, which he affirms, the woman occupies, as it were, an intermediate position. According to Gogol, "a woman is in love with the devil" (as he writes in "Notes of a Madman"), which is directly depicted by him, for example, in "The Night Before Christmas" in the image of Solokha. A woman in Gogol is always a tempting beginning, it is no coincidence that so many troubles are constantly associated with marriage in Gogol's works. A woman brings confusion into the struggle between good and evil taking place in the world, and as a result almost always finds herself (willingly or unwittingly) on the side of the devil. In "The Night Before Christmas" Oksana is the reason that Vakula contacts the devil, in "Terrible Revenge" - Katerina releases the sorcerer chained in the basement, Ivan Fedorovich Shponka loses his peace because they want to marry him, in "Notes crazy "one of the reasons for the protagonist's madness is the daughter of his boss, with whom he is in love, Andria leads to an understanding of the senselessness of what the Cossacks are doing, and subsequently to death at the hands of his own father, that he falls under the spell of a beautiful Polish woman, Chichikov's troubles in Dead Souls ” begin with the fact that he, flirting at the ball with the blonde he liked, causes displeasure of other women, etc.

The only hypostasis when female images in Gogol they acquire a different sound and other functions - this is when a woman acts as a mother. Motherhood is that divine thing that is contained in a woman and thanks to which she can rise above the sinful world. This is the mother of Ostap and Andriy, who selflessly loves her sons and yearns for them, this is also the mother from Notes of a Madman, to whom main character draws his last calls, it is even Solokha in relation to Vakula.

"Male" vices - drunkenness, smoking a cradle, doing nothing, stupid stubbornness, and so on. - are also manifestations of the demonic principle, but a man, according to Gogol, has the ability to choose. He is open to both light and dark beginnings, so the main fault (and responsibility) for the outcome of the struggle between God and the devil lies precisely with him.

The life of Gogol's Cossacks, consisting mainly of drunkenness, immoderate food, smoking cradles and doing nothing (for example, Patsyuk from "The Night Before Christmas"), richly represented in "Evenings ...", is replaced by a narrative with less pronounced "external" attributes demonism. "Uncleanness" is not witches or sorcerers, but that soulless, inert existence that turns a person away from God. In essence, the collection "Mirgorod" consists of quite everyday works, and only in "Viy" there are elements of "fantastic". Gogol, penetrating into the essence of being, gradually renounces the "external" manifestations of demonism. He no longer needs folklore and mythological metaphors in order to show the demonic essence of what is happening. The transition to this kind of narrative is outlined in the last two stories of "Evenings ..." - "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt" and "The Enchanted Place", where there is no actual presence of evil spirits. The stupidity and greed of the grandfather from the "Enchanted Place", ending with the fact that he is doused with slop from head to toe, and also that instead of the treasure he finds some kind of garbage in the boiler, in many ways resembles the plot of the first story of the collection - "Sorochinsky Fair" . Thus, demonism, starting in human existence (the composition of the collection is the first story "Sorochinsky Fair" and the last "The Enchanted Place"), and goes into it.

The story about Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt is noteworthy. For the first time we see a character completely devoid of a human face, a character whose life is aimless, meaningless and fruitless, and at the same time completely devoid of a "demonic" external entourage. It is also noteworthy that the story is not finished - the Old World Landowners, The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich (from Mirgorod), as well as St. Petersburg stories and the line ending in The Overcoat ”, “Inspector General” and “Dead Souls”.

If in "Evenings ..." the "souls" of the characters are not yet completely "dead", death only hovers over them in the form of any evil spirit, then starting with "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt" Gogol opens precisely the gallery of "dead" souls.

The collection "Mirgorod" is characterized by the story "Viy", where demonism is still present in the form of external attributes, but where the roll is made precisely in the direction of displaying the "mortification of souls" (the life of the Bursa, the characters of Freebie, Tiberius Gorobets, Khoma Brutus; "speaking" surnames are built in contrast - the “big name” and what they mean - “Tiberius” is the name of the ancient Roman Caesar, “Brutus” is the ancient Roman commander, according to legend, who dealt the mortal blow to Julius Caesar, the students of the Bursa are called “rhetors”, “philosophers” and so on. , compared with the "ancient Greek" names of the sons of Manilov in "Dead Souls" - Themistoclus and Alkid). Khoma Brutus dies from fear, and also from the fact that he did not have faith and God's fire. The image of Viy, this kind of lord of dead souls, the owner of purgatory, Cerberus, guarding the entrance to Hades, is noteworthy - this is a clubfoot man sprinkled with earth, his hands and feet look like roots (a symbol of the dark side of the personality, the subconscious, which stores alien culture and god instincts), but he has an iron face (symbolizing aggression, war). And in this regard, the connection between the stories "Viy" and "Taras Bulba" is much closer than it might seem at first glance.

Another side appears in Taras Bulba human life- the war, to which Gogol does not return in any of his works (with the exception of The Tale of Captain Kopeikin, where this topic is presented indirectly).

According to Gogol, war is an occupation that is unnatural, ungodly and senseless in its cruelty. Describing the character of Taras Bulba and those aspects of his personality that cannot arouse sympathy (stubbornness, cruelty), Gogol repeatedly mentions that such was the dictate of the time. However, revealing the reasons, Gogol does not at all remove the blame from the characters for the evil that they bring to the world. Depicting them, the author is trying to cast a glance into the future, to understand where the "Rus-troika" is rushing, to see the path to God.

Gogol's historicism does not consist in the fact that he depicts the events of bygone days, but in the fact that he tries to comprehend from the point of view of contemporary life those phenomena that occurred in history. First of all, describing the mores of that distant era, Gogol wants to understand what exactly in the ethical institutions of society is transient and inspired by the era, and what is eternal. In other words, history for Gogol is the yardstick by which he tries to measure life in order to understand the place of God in it.

Taras Bulba is a typical Cossack, that is, he sees military affairs as his main occupation, despises rural and any other work, accustomed to reckon only with his own opinion. Just as senseless is the "military life" of the Cossacks, so senseless are the reasons for their military campaigns. Accustomed to living in constant confrontation with their neighbors, in constant wars, they do not know any other logic of life than the logic of war. The main reason for the siege of the Polish city, for example, was that the young had to be taught military affairs, the rest had to be occupied with something so that the surrounding villages would not get drunk and terrorize. The formal reason for the war was unverified rumors that the Poles and Jews were oppressing the Orthodox somewhere (before that, the Turks were going to fight because they were “basurmans”).

Taras does not consider the opinion of his sons, sending them to the Sich and deciding their fate for them (however, this was quite in the spirit of the times). It is significant that both sons die in the process of a completely senseless campaign - one at the hands of the father, the other through his fault (the father insists on continuing the siege of the city, later, due to his intemperance, does not rescue his son from captivity). The death of Ostap, which takes place in front of his father, who came to see if his son will accept death with dignity (the words "good, son, good" pronounced by Taras during the quartering), is largely due to Taras. It is also noteworthy that Ostap wants to bury Andriy, who was killed by his father, but he forbids him.

Taras cracks down on Andriy for betrayal, although upon closer examination it is not entirely clear what exactly Andriy betrayed. The senseless siege of the city by the Cossacks leads to the fact that famine begins there. The terrible pictures of human suffering that Andriy sees, getting there through the underground passage, make him take a different look at the deeds of the Cossacks. Taras is also indignant at the fact that Andriy betrayed the faith of the fathers, that is, Orthodoxy. He himself talks quite a lot about Orthodoxy and faith, although what exactly his "Christianity" consists of is rather difficult to understand - the main Christian qualities are mercy, respect for someone else's personality, humanism, and so on. - either remain outside the scope of the narrative, or are absent in the character of Taras (they are not in the fabric of the narrative). He does not hesitate to kill his son, who (unlike his father) lowers his weapon and does not raise his hand to a person close by blood.

The death of Taras himself is also rather absurd (although well-deserved and plot-based - tragic guilt for the murder of one son, moral responsibility for the death of another and for the death of almost all the Cossacks who besieged the city) - he does not want to leave his "enemy" chibouk. However, Taras dies heroically - he shows the Cossacks who survived the way to the saving shuttles. However, his motives are not only to save the lives of people given to them by God, but to have someone to continue the fight and "revenge", that is, to continue to do what Taras himself did. Thus, Bulba for the most part does not defend the faith, but the way of life that the Cossacks live and he himself lived.

In this regard, Taras continues the gallery of Gogol's types, which were started back in "Evenings ..." and continued in "Mirgorod": this is the head from "May Night or the Drowned Woman", Chub from "The Night Before Christmas", the centurion, the father of the lady, from "Viya", a general from the "Overcoat" and so on. The same line will be continued in the "Auditor" (mayor).

The stories of the Petersburg cycle (“Nevsky Prospekt”, “The Nose”, “Portrait”, “Notes of a Madman”) continue the presentation of the gallery of “dead souls” that was started by Gogol in Mirgorod. Petersburg appears as a kind of city of the dead, a kind of phantasmagoria in which there is no place for normal human feelings - here even love and a sincere impulse meet with misunderstanding, since the “man” quite likes the nasty life that he lives (“Nevsky Prospekt”), here human qualities are so unimportant that in a carriage, dressed in a uniform, the nose may well drive around (a symbol of arrogance is “turn up the nose”), the power of money reigns here, destroying all the best that can be in a person (“Portrait”). What appears before us is not people, but evil spirits in human form - for example, the appearance of a solicitor from "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", in many respects anticipating the image of Akaky Akakievich from "The Overcoat" and those officials (for example, Ivan Antonovich Pitcher Snout), whom Gogol will portray in The Inspector General and Dead Souls. Wanting to draw the devil, the “prince of darkness”, the artist cannot imagine him in any other way than in the guise of a Kolomna usurer (“Portrait”). Witches here are already deprived of their fairy-tale-mythological paraphernalia - they are just prostitutes, mocking sincere feelings ("Nevsky Prospekt"). These are not fallen, not lost souls, this is precisely " dead Souls».

It is noteworthy that Gogol also saw very dangerous features of his "dead souls", not only in high-ranking bribe-takers and embezzlers of public funds, but also in the so-called "little man". Humiliated, devoid of all dignity, but at the same time deprived of a divine soul, the character can only turn into evil spirits (for example, “The Overcoat”, where Akaki Akakievich, after death, in the form of a ghost, scares passers-by), or go into an unreal world, where it is important and significant ("Notes of a Madman"). The “little man” is terrible, according to Gogol, not at all because he is “small”, but because he is so small that not a single divine spark can fit in him. And such a person is doubly terrible if he suddenly imagines himself to be Napoleon (it is precisely the emergence of such a character into the light of day that Dostoevsky will later describe in his Notes from the Underground). A person who lives only in a dream of an overcoat cannot be called a man, although he has a human appearance. However, in relation to the characters around him, he is not so bad - he has a dream (albeit about an overcoat), and his life is not limited to drinking, playing cards and rewriting circulars. In the world that Gogol describes, even the dream of an overcoat is a kind of substitute for the soul.

To understand the ways of Russia, to find the path that will lead her to God, Gogol tried in his works, depicting "dead souls" in order to avert living souls from death. In the second volume of Dead Souls and Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol tried to present the model of society that, in his opinion, should have existed. But the attempt was not successful. Gogol saw no reason for such constructions in the surrounding reality. And on his deathbed, he repeated after his Governor: “Killed, killed, completely killed! I don't see anything. I see some pig snouts instead of faces, but nothing else ... "

Thus, Gogol's satire is of a philosophical and ethical nature and tries to answer the question that Gogol asked in his main work: "Where are you rushing, Russia-troika?", but to which he did not find an answer.

"Mirgorod" is a collection of N.V. Gogol, first published in 1835 (see its full text and analysis). At the direction of the author himself, it serves as a continuation of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.

"Mirgorod" consists of two parts and four stories. The first part includes "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba", the second - "Viy" and "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich."

Although there are four stories in Mirgorod, and eight stories in Evenings, Mirgorod is somewhat larger in volume, since his works are larger.

The collection got its name from the Little Russian town, near which Gogol's birthplace was located. The plots of his stories, as in "Evenings ..." are taken from Ukrainian life.

Gogol "Mirgorod" - "Old World Landowners"

In the story "Old World Landowners" N.V. Gogol portrayed a village patriarchal idyll dear to his heart. The elderly noble spouses Afanasy Ivanovich Tovstogub and Pulcheria Ivanovna were simple, kind and sincere people who lived in a small, clean house with small rooms. All the desires of this bright couple "did not fly over the palisade of their small courtyard." Pulcheria Ivanovna salted, dried, cooked countless mushrooms, vegetables and fruits. Afanasy Ivanovich regaled himself on the dishes prepared by his wife and mocked her without malice. And so passed the quiet, calm life of the two old men. They always received rare guests with great cordiality.

Dying, Pulcheria Ivanovna gave detailed orders to the household on how to look after and look after Afanasy Ivanovich. He was unable to console himself after her death and soon also passed away into eternity. Afanasy Ivanovich bequeathed to bury himself next to his beloved wife.

The plot of "Old World Landowners" is very unpretentious, but this story by Gogol breathes with extraordinary warmth and humanity. A penetrating feeling of compassion makes it possible to bring this work closer to The Overcoat.

Gogol "Mirgorod" - "Taras Bulba"

Gogol "Mirgorod" - "Viy"

Homa Brut, a philosophy student from the Kiev Seminary, returning home for the holidays, accidentally spent the night in the house of an old witch. At night, she jumped on him like a horse, and, driving with a broom, made him run with extraordinary speed. But thanks to the prayer, Brutus escaped from under the sorceress and began to beat her with a log. Exhausted from the blows, the old woman suddenly turned into a beautiful young girl.

Homa threw her into the field, and he returned to Kiev. But the Cossacks, sent by one neighboring centurion pan, soon arrived there for him. The daughter of this centurion returned from a walk severely beaten and, dying, asked that the student Khoma Brut read prayers for her for three days.

The Cossacks brought Khoma to the master's farm. Glancing at the lady lying in the coffin, he recognized in her the same witch whom he had beaten with a log. All the farmers said that the pan's daughter had a connection with the unclean.

That same night Khoma was taken to the church where the coffin stood and locked up there. When he began to read prayers, the blue corpse of the deceased pannochka rose from the coffin to grab him. But her dead eyes did not see her victim, besides, the witch could not cross the circle that Khoma circled around him.

With the first cock crow, the sorceress again lay down in the coffin. The next night it all happened again. The dead pannochka summoned winged monsters to help her with witchcraft spells, which broke into the doors and windows of the temple. However, none of them saw Khoma, he was again saved by the drawn circle.

During the day, the philosopher tried to escape from the farm, but the pan Cossacks caught him and brought him back. On the third night, the revived dead woman began to scream so that the spirits that had flocked to her would bring the king of the gnomes - Viy. A terrible monster with an iron face and eyelids hanging down to the ground entered. So that Viy could see Khoma, the evil spirits began to raise his eyelids. An inner voice urged Khoma not to look at Viy, but he could not resist and looked. "Here it is!" Viy shouted, pointing his finger at the philosopher. The evil spirits rushed at Khoma and tore him to pieces.

In "Evenings" the "ideal world" of the author was expressed. The life of the Ukrainian people, the real Dikanka, are magically transformed by Gogol. The romanticism of "Evenings" is vital, peculiarly "objective". Gogol poeticizes values ​​that really exist. The basis of Gogol's aesthetic ideal is the assertion of the fullness and movement of life, the beauty of human spirituality. Gogol is attracted by everything strong, bright, containing an excess of vitality. This criterion determines the character of descriptions of nature. Gogol makes them extremely, dazzlingly bright, with truly wasteful generosity, he scatters pictorial means. Nature is perceived by Gogol as a huge, spiritualized, "breathing" organism. Descriptions of nature are permeated with the motive of harmonic union: “... the blue immeasurable ocean, bent over the earth with a voluptuous dome, seems to have fallen asleep, all drowned in bliss, embracing and squeezing the beautiful in its airy embrace!”. In unity with the "royal" beauty of nature is the spiritual world of the author, who is experiencing a state of extreme delight and ecstasy. Therefore, the descriptions of nature in the Evenings are based on explicit or hidden parallelism: “And above everything breathes, everything is marvelous, everything is solemn. And in the soul it is both immense and wonderful, and crowds of silver visions harmoniously arise in its depths.

The originality of the author's position of Gogol is also revealed in the ability to "pretend to be cute" (Belinsky) as an old "beekeeper" who allegedly collected and published stories, as well as other storytellers. Using the manner of a romantic "game" and "pretense", Gogol conveys the talkative, "talkative" speech of the "beekeeper", his ingenuous cunning, intricate conversation with the reader. Thanks to different storytellers (deacon Foma Grigoryevich, panich in a pea caftan, Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, etc.), each of whom has his own tone and manner, the narration gets either a lyrical, or a comedy-everyday, or a legendary character, which determines the genre varieties of stories. . At the same time, "Evenings" are distinguished by unity and integrity, which are created by the image of the author. Under the guise of different narrators, a single author acts, his romantic worldview combines a lyrical-pathetic and humorous vision.

The nature of the people of the "Evenings" helps to better understand Gogol's later articles "A Few Words about Pushkin" and "On Little Russian Songs". In his judgments about nationality, Gogol used and developed the achievements of enlightenment and romantic aesthetics. The writer called his modernity the era of "the desire for originality and actually folk poetry." The rapprochement of the folk and the national, as well as the understanding of the people as a predominantly spiritual category, are related to Gogol's romantic aesthetics: "True nationality" does not consist in the description of a sundress, but in the very spirit of the people. However, Gogol goes further than the romantics: he concretizes the concept of “folk spirit” and sees the nationality of art in expressing the people’s point of view: “A poet ... can be national even then when he describes a completely foreign world, but looks at it through the eyes of his national element, through the eyes of of the whole people..." Here Gogol anticipates Belinsky and the realistic aesthetics of the 2nd half of the 19th century.

At the same time, in Evenings, the nationality still appears within the boundaries of the romantic artistic system. Without giving a comprehensive picture of folk life, "Evenings" reveal its poetry. It is no coincidence that Belinsky wrote: “Everything that nature can have is beautiful, the rural life of seductive commoners, everything that the people can have is original, typical, all this glitters with rainbow colors in these first poetic dreams of Mr. Gogol.” The people here appear in their "natural" and at the same time "festive" state. Spiritual world, the experiences of Gogol's heroes (Levka and Ganna, Gritsk and Paraska, Vakula) are marked by "the seal of pure original infancy, and therefore - high poetry", which the writer himself admired in the works of folklore, the image of their young love is fanned with song romance: "Galya! Galya! Are you sleeping or don't you want to come out to me?.. Don't be afraid: there is no one. The evening is warm. But if anyone showed up, I will cover you with a scroll, wrap my belt around you, cover you with my hands - and no one will see us. Evenings is filled with the atmosphere of songs, dance, celebration, fair fun, when the streets and roads are "boiling with people."

The folklore beginning is palpable in the fantasy of "Evenings". Gogol depicts life transformed by folk fantasy. However, the fantastic is not just a "pictorial object". It is valuable for Gogol by the free, creative transformation of the world, belief in its "wonderfulness" and therefore comes into contact with certain facets of the writer's aesthetic ideal. Creating a joyful dream world, Gogol often turns to "non-terrible", comic fantasy, so often found in folk tales. Fantastic characters in "Evenings" can help a person (the drowned lady in "May Night") or try to harm him, but most often they are defeated by the courage, intelligence, ingenuity of Gogol's heroes. The blacksmith Vakula was able to subjugate the "evil spirits", saddled the devil and went to St. Petersburg to get laces from the queen herself for the proud Oksana. The grandfather, the hero of the "Missing Letter", also emerges victorious from the duel with the "inferno". A vivid comic effect is produced by Gogol's method of "experiencing" the fantastic. Devils and witches in "Evenings" adopt the habits, mannerisms of ordinary people, or rather, comedic characters. “Damn ... he was seriously softened by Solokha: he kissed her hand with such antics, like an assessor at a priest’s; took hold of his heart, groaned and said bluntly that if she did not agree to satisfy his passions and, as usual, reward him, then he was ready for anything: he would throw himself into the water, and send his soul to the very hell. Grandfather (“The Lost Letter”), having fallen into the heat, sees witches there, discharged, smeared, “like pannochki at a fair. And everyone, no matter how many there were, danced some kind of damn trepak like drunken ones. Dust raised God forbid what!”. The witch plays "fool" with her grandfather;

In two stories ("Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala" and "A Terrible Revenge"), the fantastic acquires an ominous (in the latter - with a touch of mystical) character. The fantastic images here express the evil, hostile forces that exist in life, first of all, the power of gold. However, even in these stories, the story is not of triumph, but of the punishment of evil, and thus the final victory of good and justice is affirmed.

In Evenings, Gogol perfected the romantic art of translating the ordinary into the extraordinary, turning reality into a dream, into a fairy tale. The boundaries between the real and the fantastic in Gogol are elusive - except that the musicality and poetry of the author's speech are slightly amplified, it is imperceptibly imbued with the experiences of the hero and, as it were, is freed from concreteness and "corporality", becomes light, "weightless". In “May Night”: “An irresistible sleep quickly began to close his eyes, tired members were ready to forget and become numb; head bowed ... "No, that way I'll fall asleep here again!" he said, rising to his feet and rubbing his eyes. He looked around: the night seemed even more brilliant before him. Some strange, intoxicating radiance was mixed with the brilliance of the moon ... "- and then the real more and more "recedes" and the wonderful dream of Levkos unfolds. Gogol's poetry in his first book knows not only the mysterious music of a romantic dream, but also rich, sparkling colors (description summer day in Little Russia).

A riot of colors, an abundance of light, its games, sharp contrasts and a change of dazzlingly bright, light and dark tones “embodied” the romantic ideas of the collection, carry a life-affirming, major aspiration.

In the depiction of folk life in "Evenings", in fact, there is no opposition between poetry and prose. Prose is not yet a threat to the spiritual. The colorful everyday details here are not “everyday life” in the prosaic-petty-bourgeois sense of the word, they retain an exotic unusualness and enlargement, for example, a picture of a rural fair, “when the whole people grows together into one huge monster and moves with its whole body in the square and in the cramped streets, screaming, cackling, thundering ... ". The descriptions of food and various dishes conclude the same brightness and unusualness. Therefore, they cause a comical, but by no means a negative impression: “But as you wish to visit, we will serve melons such as you may not have eaten in your life; and honey, I’m afraid, you won’t find better on the farms ... As you bring in the honeycomb, the spirit will go all over the room, you can’t imagine what kind: pure as a tear or expensive crystal ... And what kind of pies my old woman will feed! What kind of pies, if you only knew: sugar, perfect sugar!

In Gogol's first collection, an atmosphere of integrity and harmony still reigns, although somewhere there is already a tendency to destroy it. Sad notes sound at the end of the "Sorochinsky Fair". The second part of "Evenings" includes the story "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt." The elements of folk poetry, freedom, fun, the atmosphere of a fairy tale are replaced here by the image of the prosaic, everyday aspects of life, the role of the author's irony becomes significant. The heroes of the story are distinguished by spiritual squalor. While in the infantry regiment, Ivan Fedorovich "practiced in occupations akin to one meek and kind soul: either he cleaned buttons, then he read a fortune-telling book, then he put mousetraps in the corners of his room, then, finally, throwing off his uniform, he lay on the bed." The ways of depiction are also changing drastically. The dynamics and intensity of events disappear, being replaced by the “immobility” and monotony of the scenes, bright colors are muted. Against the backdrop of pitiful "essentiality" in the form of Shponka and his uncomplicated life, the romantic world of other stories turns out to be all the more emphasized, all the more "radiant". At the same time, the dissonant sound of "Ivan Fedorovich", emphasizing the fabulous nature of the romance of "Evenings", is a reminder of the ugliness of the reality that really exists. evening dikanka mirgorod gogol

"Evenings" was generally approved by critics. But not many people were able to truly understand Gogol's innovation. The first of them was Pushkin, who gave an enthusiastic and at the same time insightful review of the Evenings, noting their original humor, poetry, democracy: “I just read Evenings near Dikanka. They amazed me. Here is real gaiety, sincere, unconstrained, without affectation, without stiffness. And what poetry! what sensitivity!<...>I was told that when the publisher (Gogol) entered the printing house ... the compositors began to squirt and snort, covering their mouths with their hands. Factor explained their gaiety by confessing to him that the compositors were dying of laughter as they typed his book. Molière and Fielding would probably be glad to make their compositors laugh."

Collection "Mirgorod" as a stage in the development of romanticism and the establishment of Gogol's realism

Mirgorod is an important milestone both in the evolution of Gogol's romanticism and in the formation and establishment of his realism. Gogol called the collection a continuation of Evenings. In the structure of "Mirgorod" the romantic universalism of "Evenings" was continued, the world here truly "immensely moved apart" in time and space, including history, the recent past, and the present. Like "Evenings", "Mirgorod" is organized by a single poetic thought, but now it is not the idea of ​​wholeness and harmony, but the idea of ​​separation. The sharp contrast between the bright, poetic world, possible only in the past or in folk fantasy, and the miserable, "fragmented" present testifies to the deepening of the tragedy of Gogol's worldview.

"Viy" is close to "Evenings" in terms of genre (a fantastic story based on folklore sources), but Gogol's romanticism appears here in a new quality. The aggravated contrast in the perception of life leads to a dual world characteristic of romanticism. The movement of the story is based on abrupt transitions from the daytime, clear and ordinary world to the nighttime, mysterious, full of horror and charm at the same time. Sustained in a tone of rude humor, the scenes in the janitor's room, replete with everyday realities, contrast with Khoma's nighttime adventures. The clash of contradictions in "Viy" is brought to the point of tragedy, and, unlike such a story as "Terrible Revenge", evil remains, if not completely triumphant, then unpunished.

In Viy, an atmosphere of melancholy and horror is gradually growing. The nights spent by Khoma in the church are becoming more and more terrible. After the second reading over the coffin, the hero turns gray. When Khoma and his guides go to church for the third time, “it was a hellish night. The wolves howled in the distance in a whole pack. And the most dog barking was somehow terrible. "It seems as if something else is howling: it's not a wolf," said Dorosh. Fear wins and, in the end, kills the imperturbable and cheerful philosopher. The tragedy of the story is also expressed in the appearance of the theme of evil hiding in the image of beauty. This topic was not in "Evenings". There, evil has always been disgusting, repulsively ugly (the sorcerer in The Terrible Revenge, the witch in The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala). In the image of the lady-witch in Viy, Gogol combines what seems to be incompatible: amazing, perfect beauty and evil, vengeful cruelty. In the beautiful features of the dead lady Khoma sees “... something terribly poignant. He felt that his soul began to somehow painfully whine, as if suddenly, in the midst of a whirlwind of fun and a swirling crowd, someone sang a song about the oppressed people. The rubies of her lips seemed to boil with blood to the very heart. "Sparkling" beauty becomes scary. And next to this image appears the image of the "oppressed people" (in other versions - "funeral songs"). The theme of evil beauty arises in Gogol's work as a feeling of the destruction of the harmony of life.

Taras Bulba. With the contrast of construction in Mirgorod, Gogol's "ideal" world receives further expression and development. In "Taras Bulba" the history of the Ukrainian people, their heroic national liberation struggle is poeticized. The appearance of "Taras Bulba" in the "Mirgorod" system, as well as Gogol's keen interest in history, are genetically linked with the achievements of romantic historicism, which enriched art with the idea of ​​development, which later played a large role in the formation of realism in the 19th century. Gogol's historical views are set forth in articles published in Arabesques. Going back to the most progressive currents of romantic historical thought and continuing the traditions of the Enlightenment, Gogol's views developed in a realistic direction. In history, Gogol saw high poetry and social and moral meaning. History is not a collection of facts, but an expression of the development of all mankind. Therefore, "its subject is great." In the spirit of French historiography (Thierry, Guizot), Gogol puts forward the idea of ​​causal relationships. The events of the world, he believes, "are closely linked and cling to one another, like rings in a chain." The dialectical nature of Gogol's historical views is especially evident in the article "On the Middle Ages". Here, the transitional nature of the Middle Ages is brilliantly revealed, ending in Europe with the formation of powerful centralized states, grandiose scientific and technical inventions, geographical discoveries. History becomes an expression of the fate of huge human groups. The actions of an outstanding personality are great and have an impact on the course of historical events when they are associated with an understanding of national needs and interests (article "Al-Mamun"). At the same time, the spectacle of great historical events plunges Gogol into a state of ecstatic amazement at the "wisdom of providence." In history, in the linkage of its events, Gogol sees something "wonderful." Both the religious views of the writer and the exaltation of the creative forces of life, its creative "soul", characteristic of the romantics, are reflected here.

Gogol is close to the romantics and in the way of considering historical material, he shares the romantic idea of ​​blurring the lines between science and art. A historical essay should be a fascinating artistic narrative. In history, for Gogol, it is not so much the facts that are important, it is important to “learn the true way of life, the elements of character, all the twists and shades of feelings, excitement, suffering, fun of the depicted people”, to reveal the spiritual content of the era, the character and “soul” of the people. And therefore, folk legends, tales, songs that have absorbed this spiritual content are of great importance.

Gogol's judgments are closely connected with his historical prose, primarily with Taras Bulba. The story has two editions. First, the editorial office of Mirgorod. Subsequently, Gogol significantly revised it, deepened the historical color and image of the people, developed the epic features of the narrative. In the new edition, the story was included in the Collected Works of Gogol in 1842. There are different opinions about the creative method of the writer. Some researchers consider this work realistic, others - romantic. Obviously, the most correct would be to attribute the 1st edition to romanticism. In the 2nd, while maintaining a number of romantic features, the realistic beginning is enhanced.

In the article “A Look at the Compilation of Little Russia”, speaking of the Ukrainian Cossacks of the XIV-XV centuries, Gogol writes: “Then there was that poetic time when everything was mined with a saber; when everyone... aspired to be actor and not by the spectator. These words help to understand the intention of "Taras Bulba". They contain a hidden opposition of the past and the present and a reproach to the modern generation, which has lost its former activity. Working on the story, the writer set himself great moral, educational tasks. Glorious pages in the history of the Ukrainian people made it possible for Gogol to most fully reveal the world of his ideal, to expand it in comparison with Evenings, to include in it the affirmation of the beauty of action, the heroism of the liberation struggle. The Zaporizhzhya Sich is depicted as a spontaneous, natural democracy, a "strange republic" that does not know written laws and is ruled by the people themselves (the scene of the choice of the Koschevoi). The Gogol Sich becomes the embodiment of "will and camaraderie". Gogol draws a commonwealth of people different ages, titles, education. Feelings of freedom and fraternal union are the source of that "mad gaiety", revelry and feast that reign in the Sich.

The integral, democratic Sich is opposed to the estate and vain world of royal Poland. The conflict between the Sich and Poland appears in the story (especially in the 2nd edition) as a conflict between two different social systems, cultures, and civilizations. Polish "knights" are nobles, aristocrats, boasting of family or wealth. Gogol describes in detail their magnificent outfits, thus emphasizing the vanity, arrogance, desire for luxury of the Polish panship. Describing the Poles and Cossacks during the siege of Dubno, Gogol creates a significant contrast: the multi-colored rows of Polish gentry on the ramparts, sparkling with gold and precious stones, and the Cossacks, who “... stood quietly in front of the walls. There was no gold on any of them, only in some places it shone on saber hilts and rifle frames. The Cossacks did not like to dress up richly in battles; simple were on them chain mail and retinues ... ".

The great goal of the Cossacks is the liberation of the motherland. Moreover, if in the 1st edition the Cossacks defended the Sich, then in the 2nd edition the homeland is associated with the entire Russian land, the unity of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples is affirmed.

The national liberation struggle in the image of Gogol unites all estates: "... The whole nation has risen, for the patience of the people has overflowed, - it has risen to avenge the ridicule of its rights, for the shameful humiliation, for insulting the faith of the ancestors and the holy custom ...". Folk and national for the writer in this case are synonymous.

Like many romantics, Gogol does not strive for chronological accuracy - the time depicted in the story contains events that actually took place in the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. History is mastered by Gogol primarily in its spiritual essence. Gogol does not speak about the complex social composition of the Sich, almost does not depict the social stratification of the Cossacks, he shows it as an integrity and seeks to reveal the general "spiritual atmosphere" of the heroic time.

The struggle of the Ukrainian people against the Polish oppressors is revealed by Gogol in its high moral content. There is no embellishment of the past in Gogol. The "rough frankness" of the mores of the Cossacks reflects the "mighty wide scope" of the Russian character, the features of the "fierce", but also "brave" age. In the simple, whole natures of the heroes lives the spirit of disobedience and rebelliousness. The story continues the Decembrist traditions. The Decembrists considered the era of internecine strife and wars of liberation to be a fertile subject for the Russian historical novel, which “tempered morals with dangers”, gave “gigantic features” to characters. According to Gogol's similar thought, the heroic traits of the Cossacks were formed in this way, which is "an unusual phenomenon of Russian strength."

The writer expresses a deeply true idea that the "eternal struggle and restless life" of the Cossacks "saved Europe from the indomitable aspirations of the nomads, who threatened to overturn it."

The characteristic features of the Cossacks are expressed in the personality of Taras Bulba. In the editorial office of Mirgorod, his image appeared in a romantic halo. Bulba clearly stood out among other characters with the titanic dimensions of his personality. In the battle of Dubno, he "distinguishes" as a "giant". The actions of Taras seem to be guided by the power of historical retribution. In the 2nd edition, Gogol strengthened the realistic features of the image, gave it greater concreteness and motivation, while retaining monumentality and epic coloring. Taras is shown as the son of his time, he "was one of the indigenous old colonels: he was all created for abusive anxiety and was distinguished by the rough directness of his temper." He is devoted to the simple, harsh laws of the Sich and despises those of his comrades who adopted Polish customs, "brought up luxury." He gives everything to his homeland, his life and the lives of his loved ones. Without hesitation, with a firm hand, he executes his son, who betrayed his people. And at the same time, Bulba is shown in his deep human tenderness and longing for another son who did not disgrace his father's honor. In the scene of the execution of Ostap, the image of Taras acquires a truly tragic grandeur. The restrained and strict psychological drawing of Gogol makes it possible to feel both the power of grief squeezing the heart of the father, and great pride in his son, whom he supports at the most terrible moment with his “I hear!”. Enlightened tragedy fanned the image of the end of the hero. He dies, predicting the coming victory of his people.

Thus, in the 2nd edition, Gogol does not refuse to poeticize the heroism of an individual. But Gogol's great innovation is in depicting the heroism of the masses. In the 2nd edition, Taras is shown as one of many. In the scene of the battle near Dubno, which is the culmination of the story, brief but expressive characteristics of a whole phalanx of remarkable heroes are created: Mosiah Shil, Stepan Guska, Kokubenok, Balaban, Bovdyuga, etc. The writer chooses the characteristic details of their past and draws with bright strokes valor in battle and beautiful death: “He (Balaban) drooped ... his head, sensing death throes, and quietly said: “It seems to me, brothers and gentlemen, I am dying a good death; I chopped seven, pierced nine with a spear ... Let the Russian land bloom forever! ..". And his soul flew away ... Kokubenko turned his eyes around him and said: "Thank God that I had a chance to die before your eyes, comrades! May even better ones live after us than we do, and the Russian land forever loved by Christ flaunts!". And a young soul flew out. The depiction of mass folk heroism as the main theme of Taras Bulba differs not only from the romantic literature of the 1920s and 1930s, but also from the works of Pushkin. For the first time in Russian literature, the people themselves come forward to the main place, they become the central hero of the story.

The realistic historicism of Gogol in the 2nd edition is also manifested in the objectivity and scale of the image of the Sich, the disclosure of those deep processes that took place in it and, as a result, led to its weakening. This is Andriy's story.

In the depiction of love, Andria Gogol continues the literary plot, which has an acute conflict - the love of two people belonging to different civilizations, but brings it to an "absolute" expression. Surrendering to love, blinded by it, Andriy not only leaves his own, but fights against them in the enemy army. Reworking the story, Gogol excluded moments that reduce the image of Andrii. His love is a powerful romantic passion that gave him the feeling of "that once in a lifetime a person is given to feel." In the impetuousness and recklessness of Andriy's love, the "indestructibility" of the Cossack nature, "the determination to do something unheard of and impossible for others" is revealed. According to the just thought of SM. Petrov, the great humanist Gogol "points to the inhumanity and cruelty of such relations between peoples, in which, - in his words, - a wondrous marvel - love - leads to the betrayal and death of a son at the hands of his father." And at the same time, in the ethical pathos of the story, the individual is without hesitation sacrificed to the common: the motherland, the national liberation struggle, national cohesion. "There is no bond more holy than fellowship!" - this idea runs through the whole story and sounds inspired in the famous speech of Taras. In this aspect, Andriy's execution turns out to be cruel, but fair.

Folk-heroic pathos determined the complex, in its own way unique genre of "Taras Bulba". Until now, we have used the term "story". Elements of a historical story or novel are indeed inherent in Taras Bulba. Gogol followed some traditions of the novels of V. Scott, which were highly appreciated both by the writer himself and in Russian criticism of the 20-30s. These traditions were reflected in the depiction of local color, the thoroughness of the descriptions. But along with this, researchers rightly speak of the presence in Taras Bulba of the features of a heroic epic. Belinsky pointed this out: “Taras Bulba” is an excerpt, an episode from the great epic of the life of an entire people. If in our time a Homeric epic is possible, then here is its highest example, ideal and prototype!..». The epic beginning is manifested in the poetics and style of "Taras Bulba": the epic scope and scale, the hyperbolism of artistic generalizations; solemn, lyrical-pathetic tone of the narration; in the forms of a rhythmic tale; in the "dissolution" of the author in the image of a folk singer, bandura player; in the widest use of folklore techniques (repetitions, parallelism, symbolism and metaphorical images, for example, the image of a battle-feast or Taras's triple appeal to the kuren atamans during the battle of Dubno and their triple response). Gogol's historical epic is a completely new and original phenomenon in Russian literature.

"The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich." The fantastic and heroic world of "Mirgorod" is, as it were, "inside" the collection. It is framed by the stories “Old World Landowners” and “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich”, revealing modern life. At the same time, if the “positive pole” of the contrast that permeates “Mirgorod” is “Taras Bulba”, then the “negative” becomes “The Tale of That ...”. The reality depicted in it may look like a pathetic parody of the heroic past. Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich are vulgar inhabitants of Mirgorod, devoid of spiritual content and interests, and at the same time full of noble arrogance and swagger. The symbol of noble dignity for them is an old gun, which is kept by Ivan Nikiforovich along with all sorts of rubbish and which Ivan Ivanovich wants to acquire at all costs (unlike Ivan Nikiforovich, he is not a hereditary nobleman, so the acquisition of a gun for him is a kind of self-affirmation). For his part, Ivan Nikiforovich is offended by the fact that a neighbor offered a brown pig for a gun: “This is a gun - a well-known thing; and the devil knows what it is: a pig. The friendship of the two neighbors, which so touched those around them, suddenly breaks off because of a trifle: because of the “diabolical” word for the noble rank and honor of the word “gander”, which Ivan Nikiforovich called Ivan Ivanovich in the heat of a dispute. The conflict, therefore, reveals not the drama, but the squalor of the depicted life. This is a clash within the very same vulgarity. From the very beginning, it has an absurd character and then becomes overgrown with more and more absurdities, such as the abduction of Ivan Nikiforovich's petition by a brown pig. Former friends excel by doing petty nasty things to each other, and, finally, start a lawsuit that becomes the meaning of their lives and ruins them. "Grandfather's karbovanets" from "cherished chests" pass into "dirty hands of ink dealers." Endless litigation testifies to bureaucratic practices - judicial red tape and chicanery.

Gogol develops in the story the manner of ironic pretense begun in Evenings. The narration is conducted on behalf of supposedly the same layman as the characters. This, according to Belinsky, "a simpleton" sees in them "worthy husbands" of Mirgorod, his "honor and adornment." Now touched, now choking with delight, he paints Ivan Ivanovich's bekesha, his house, "subtle" manner, the way of life of two friends, favorite foods. The admiration of the narrator is caused by insignificant and prosaic phenomena. He falls into pathos when describing the Mirgorod puddle, the wattle fence on which the pots hang, the courthouse, which has "as many as eight windows" - and this creates the sharpest comic effect.

The stupidly naive philistine thinking of the narrator itself becomes the object of an ironic, often grotesque image and is magnificently revealed in the style of speech, its alogisms, absurd associations, funny pathos and hyperbole. For example: “Glorious bekesha at Ivan Ivanovich! excellent! And what embarrassment! Fu you an abyss, what taunts! gray with frost! ... Oh my God! Nicholas the Wonderworker, the saint of God! Why don't I have such a bekeshi! He sewed it back then, when Agafia Fedoseevna did not go to Kiev. Do you know Agafia Fedoseevna? the same one that bit off the assessor's ear. However, at the end of the story, the author throws off the ironic mask, and the "funny" story gives way to sad lyrical reflections on life. The tonality of the narrative, its colors change dramatically: instead of a hot, sunny, plentiful summer (the beginning of the story), there is a picture of autumn, “boring, incessant rains”, “sick day”. The story ends on a note of aching sadness: “Again, the same field ... wet jackdaws and crows, monotonous rain, a tearful sky without a gap. Boring in this world, gentlemen!

The plot of the story goes back to the novel by V.T. Narezhny "Two Ivans, or Passion for Litigation" (1825). Gogol continued and developed the accusatory and satirical tradition of this writer. However, in Narezhny's novel, the characters, the development of the plot, and the pictures of everyday life were schematic. Gogol, according to I.A. Goncharova, they "really came to life." The everyday saturation of the story reveals the lack of spirituality of the characters. For Gogol, as for the romantics, the spiritual modern world more and more crowded out by things. The accumulation of things, the abundance of subject descriptions (for example, the scene of airing Ivan Nikiforovich's dress or the congress of chaises and carts with guests to the assembly to the mayor) at the same time acquire a bizarre and strange character, bordering on fantasy. From Gogol’s romantic tradition and the deliberate substitution of “physical” phenomena of spiritual life, for example, comparing: the “pleasure” of the impression of Ivan Ivanovich’s oratorical gift with the feeling “when they are looking for you in your head or slowly running a finger along your heel”, as well as “ vegetable" likenesses: Ivan Ivanovich's head looks like a radish with its tail down, and Ivan Nikiforovich's head looks like a radish with its tail up. He has a nose in the form of a ripe plum, etc.

The peculiarity of the depiction of life in the story is that it is revealed only as a realm of spiritual squalor, i.e. clearly. But this method of depiction, which in many respects goes back to romanticism, contains an enormous critical potential. Gogol exposes the moral essence of philistinism, its self-satisfied stupidity and malicious egoistic nature, lurking under external decency. Reality is revealed in its typical manifestations. The romantic passes, "overflows" into the realistic.

"Old World Landlords". The most profound and complete realistic beginning in Mirgorod was expressed in Old World Landowners. The researchers saw in this work either satire or idyll. The disagreements are explained by the complexity of the artistic world of the story, in which there is a "multidimensional" view of reality. The serenity of the old people's life has an inexplicable charm for the author. He loves to "for a moment" descend into her sphere, refusing "daring dreams" that lead to another, Big world bustling cities, modern interests. Hence the touching image of the life of heroes - from small rooms to singing doors - their kindness, cordiality, patriarchy and impracticality, in contrast to the unsightly entrepreneurship of the "terrible reformer" - their heir.

However, the opposition of the motives of peace, serenity and "daring dreams" is devoid of unambiguity. The idyllic depiction of life not only does not hide its squalor, but, on the contrary, exposes it. The idyll borders on irony. The characters have "grown" into their vegetative existence. In a monotonous existence, in petty worries, in eating prepared supplies for them lies the whole meaning of life. But here we meet with a new complexity of the artistic world of the story. Ultimately, in the "low" life, not only "bucolic" silence is found, but also poetry and drama.

G.A. Gukovsky rightly wrote that the main theme of "Old World Landowners" is love. The central episode is the death of Pulcheria Ivanovna. This tragic event reveals the mutual touching love of the characters, which is revealed, respectively, in the behavior of Pulcheria Ivanovna before her death and Afanasy Ivanovich after the death of his wife. In anticipation of her death, Pulcheria Ivanovna “did not think about that great moment that awaited her, nor about her soul,<...>she thought only of her poor companion, with whom she spent her life and whom she left orphaned and homeless. Afanasy Ivanovich also rises to a truly poetic and tragic height in the scene of Pulcheria Ivanovna's funeral: “They lowered the coffin ... the workers set to work with spades, and the earth had already covered and leveled the pit - at that time he made his way forward; everyone parted, gave him a place, wanting to know his intention. He raised his eyes, looked vaguely and said: “So you have already buried her! Why?!”... He stopped and did not finish his speech...”. GA. Gukovsky calls it “why?!” one of those shortest formulas of poetry by which the true genius of the artist is known. The uncomplicated phrase shocks with the boundlessness and sincerity of the grief contained in it.

And further in the story, the contrast of the two worlds already noted by us reappears. The story of a certain young man, “full of true nobility and dignity”, standing at the top of spiritual culture, is given. In his story, everything is brought to some extreme emotional height. The young man experiences a genuine romantic passion. He was in love "tenderly, passionately, furiously, boldly, modestly." “Ultimateness” also characterizes his experiences after the death of his beloved: his “scorching melancholy”, “devouring despair”, a double attempt to commit suicide. However, a year passed - and the author saw him in "a crowded hall. He was sitting at the table, cheerfully saying "petite-overt", and behind him stood, leaning on the back of his chair, his young wife ... ". A grandiose, spiritualized passion did not stand the test of time. In parallel, the story of Afanasy Ivanovich, whom the author visits five years after the death of Pulcheria Ivanovna, is completed. His image reappears against the everyday, "material" background. His boundless grief breaks through during ... dinner: "This is that dish," said Afanasy Ivanovich, when they served us little cakes with sour cream, "this is that dish," he continued, and I noticed that his voice began to tremble and a tear was about to come out of his leaden eyes, but he gathered all his efforts to hold it back. "This is the food that after ... rest ... rest ... rest ..." - and suddenly burst into tears. His hand fell on the plate, the plate overturned... the sauce poured all over him; he sat insensibly, insensibly holding the spoon, and tears, like a stream, like a ceaselessly gushing fountain, poured, poured down on the napkin that covered him. The musicality of the phrase, the poetic comparison of tears with a "silently gushing fountain" create a feeling of high drama of the situation.

The heroes themselves do not realize the beauty and grandeur of their love. In addition, love also appears in the "base garb" of an "almost insensible" habit. Hence the complexity of the lyrical mood that permeates the story: humor mixed with sadness, or "laughter through tears."

Literature

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Dmitrieva E.E. Stnrian tradition and romantic irony in Evenings. Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Ser. Lit and yaz. T.51. No. 3. 1992. S. 18-28.

Mann Yu.V. The audacity of invention. Features of the artistic world of Gogol. M., 1985.

Mashinsky S. Artistic world of Gogol. M., 1979.

Pereverzev V.F. Gogol's work // Pereverzev V.F. Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky. M., 1982.

Stepanov N.L. Early Romantic Gogol. // N.V. Gogol. Sobr. op. in 7 vols. T.1. M., 1976.

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NV Gogol: A book for students and teachers. M., 1996

Nabokov V. Lectures on Russian literature. M., 1998

From "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" to "Mirgorod"

The story “Sorochinsky Fair” ends with a description of the wedding: “From the strike of a musician in a homespun scroll with a bow ... everything turned to unity and passed into agreement. People, on whose gloomy faces, it seems, a smile did not slip for a century, stamped their feet and shuddered their shoulders ... Everything was rushing, everything was dancing ... "But here" thunder, laughter, songs are heard quieter and quieter, the bow dies, weakening and losing obscure sounds in the emptiness of the air ... Isn't it true that joy, a beautiful and fickle guest, flies away from us, and in vain does a lonely sound think to express joy. In his own echo, he already hears sadness, and desertedly and wildly listens to him ... Boringly abandoned! And the heart becomes heavy and sad, and there is nothing to help it ... ".

This was written in 1829. Gogol is only 20 years old, but what a strange harmony the abrupt change of mood of the narrator forms! This early work expressed what would become the emotional dominant of the entire work of the writer. Emotional and moral fluctuation between melancholy and fun, between bitter doubts and hopes, between ideal and reality is not only a characteristic feature of his temperament, which contemporaries spoke and wrote about. Gogol's worldview and all his work are marked by the struggle between light and dark principles in the mind of the writer, the struggle with himself and with the evil of the world around him.

In Russian literature, the appearance of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka marked a new stage in the development of the concept nationalities, far from new, but acquiring new content in the early 1830s. Nationality is now understood not only as a form of expression of the national character (or, according to the philosophical and historical terminology of the 1830s-1840s, "spirit"), it acquires a social coloring in Gogol's work. In "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" the people appear as the guardian and bearer of the national foundations of life, lost by the educated classes. This conflict determined the nature of the image of life, under the "joyful people" (Belinsky), which hid a longing for the former Zaporizhzhya liberty of the enslaved "Dikan Cossacks".

The artistic world of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" is woven from the motifs of Ukrainian folklore, taken from a variety of genres - heroic-historical "dooms", lyrical and ritual songs, fairy tales, anecdotes. However, the motley picture of folk life does not disintegrate under Gogol's pen into many colored pictures of everyday life, because it turns out to be one angle, according to Pushkin, “a living description of a singing and dancing tribe”, which can be defined as a reflection of the poetic, life-affirming consciousness of the people themselves.

Another, no less important beginning uniting the story of the cycle, tale - folk vernacular, which is both a means of delimiting the author's speech from the speech of his heroes, and the subject of artistic representation. In the third chapter of the Sorochinskaya Fair, the narrator almost imperceptibly for the reader transfers the initiative of telling a person from the crowd, who initiates Cherevik into tricks. red scrolls. He convinces the listeners of the failure of the fair, because "the assessor - so that he did not have to wipe his lips after the Pan's slivyanka - set aside a damned place for the fair, where, even if you crack, you won't let down a single grain." In The Night Before Christmas, the author-narrator, giving the floor to Vakula, who turned to Patsyuk, endows the blacksmith with words that reflect the popular idea of ​​​​respect: !”, and then comments: “The blacksmith sometimes knew how to screw in a buzzword; he had become adept at this when he was still in Poltava, when he painted a board fence for the centurion. Here is the characteristic of Vakula, which distinguishes him from the crowd, and the definition of the boundary that exists between the author and his hero. The combination of the author's word and the speech of the characters contains a special comedy of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", motivated by the artistic function of their "publisher" - the beekeeper Rudy Pank and other storytellers related to him.

That is why the role preface to "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", written on behalf of Rudy Pank as the bearer of the speech norm not of the author, but of his narrators. This role remains unchanged in all the stories of the cycle, which emphasizes the constancy of the properties of the national character and his point of view on the life depicted in the stories. An important consequence of this feature of the cycle is that time in the stories is devoid of historical certainty. So, vernacular is a tale, and hence the spiritual appearance of the characters of the "Sorochinsky Fair" and "The Night Before Christmas", do not differ from one another, and in fact the time in the first story is related to the present, takes place before the eyes of the narrator, the action of the second dated to the time of the reign of Catherine II, when a decree promulgated in 1775 was being prepared to deprive the Zaporizhzhya army of all liberties and privileges.

The manifestation of a story in “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” is peculiar, which in some stories (“Sorochinsky Fair”, “The Night Before Christmas”, “May Night”) appears before us in the guise of oral poetic fantasies, and in other works it has clearly marked temporary boundaries - from the era of the struggle of the "Cossack people" against the Poles ("Terrible revenge") to its present ("Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt"). However, even in the case when the story is hidden behind the events of everyday life, it sounds like a folk tale, asserting liberty and freedom as an indispensable condition for human existence. In the words of Paraska (“Sorochinsky Fair”), one can hear the protest of a free Cossack woman: “No, stepmother, it’s enough to beat your stepdaughter for you! Rather than sand rise on a stone and an oak tree bend into the water like a willow, than I bend down before you! Outraged by the arbitrariness of the village head, Levko (“May Night”) reminds the lads of their rights with dignity: “What kind of slaves are we, guys? .. We, thank God, are free Cossacks! Let's show him, lads, that we are free Cossacks!

On the same grounds, the stories are connected in the cycle Mirgorod. It is no coincidence that Gogol gave this collection the subtitle "Continuation of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", thus emphasizing the ideological and artistic unity of the cycles and the very principle of cyclization.

Hooked on" historical knowledge”, Gogol actively collects and processes material on the history of Ukraine. “It seems to me,” the writer admitted at that time to one of his correspondents, “that I will write it, that I will say a lot of new things that have not been said before me.” Indeed, the new thing that Gogol spoke about was reflected not in the History of Ukraine, which he did not complete, but in the story Taras Bulba, which was written in the genre of folk-heroic epic, previously unknown in Russian literature. The hero of the work is the "national spirit" of the freedom-loving Zaporozhye Cossacks. Reproducing in the story the events of the era of the struggle of Ukraine for national independence from the Polish panship, Gogol does not even give an exact chronology of events, referring the action either to the 15th or to the 16th century. It is also impossible to find a real-historical prototype of the image of Taras Bulba. This can be explained by the fact that the main source for the images and characters of the story created by Gogol were monuments of folk poetry, and not historical works and archival documents. As special studies have shown, there is almost not a single historical or lyrical-epic motif in Taras Bulba that does not have its source in Ukrainian folklore, in its historical thoughts and songs. The people's consciousness imprinted in them gets its personification in the "heroic", according to Belinsky's definition, the character of Ataman Bulba.

The image of Taras Bulba is the predecessor of the image of Pugachev in " Captain's daughter» Pushkin. However, unlike Pushkin's character of the leader of the freemen, Bulba is not a social character, but a national-historical one. Work on the story continued intermittently for about nine years: from 1833 to 1842. The first edition of "Taras Bulba" appeared in the collection "Mirgorod", the second - during the period of work on the first part of "Dead Souls".

• Pushkin A. S. Evenings on a farm near Dikanka: stories published by Pasichnik Rudy Pank // Pushkin A. S. Poli. coll. cit.: in 10 vols. T. 7. 1978. S. 237.

In September last year, I went to Ukraine. Before the trip I read Gogol. Mixed feeling - on the one hand, familiar stories from childhood. On the other hand, jokes about husband-wife relationships (and this is generally through the page, in the spirit of “how many good girls; it’s not clear where wives come from”) are somehow no longer funny, the comic plot with evenly spaced pianos in the bushes doesn’t even pull on Faydo. I really liked only "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba", I guess.

I was surprised that Gogol's name "Ganna" is not "Anna", but "Galya".

In The Night Before Christmas, the attitude towards the Russian language is beautifully described - this was not at all visible in the film, and in general, when reading the Russian version of the story, it is very difficult to convey the game with the language.

- Hello, sir! God help you! that's where we met! - said the blacksmith, coming close and bowing to the ground.
- What kind of person is there? - the one who was sitting in front of the blacksmith asked another, who was sitting farther away.
- Didn't you know? - said the blacksmith, - it's me, Vakula, the blacksmith! When we drove through Dikanka in the autumn, we stayed, God grant you all health and longevity, for almost two days. And then I put a new tire on the front wheel of your wagon!
- A! - said the same Cossack, - this is the same blacksmith who paints importantly. Hello, fellow countryman, why did God bring you?
- And so, I wanted to look, they say ...
“Well, fellow countryman,” said the Cossack, drawing himself up and wanting to show that he could also speak Russian, “what a big city?
The blacksmith himself did not want to disgrace himself and seem like a beginner, moreover, as they had the opportunity to see above this, he himself knew a literate language.
- The province is noble! he replied indifferently. - There is nothing to say: the houses are boisterous, the pictures hang important through. Many houses are filled with letters of gold leaf to the extreme. Nothing to say, wonderful proportion!
The Cossacks, hearing the blacksmith speaking so freely, drew a conclusion very favorable to him.

In Taras Bulba, the hero jumps on a horse, “which recoiled furiously, feeling a twenty-pound burden on itself, because Taras was extremely heavy and fat.” Do I understand correctly that 20 pounds = 320 kilograms? Even for a hearty Ukraine, even in military equipment, this is somehow a bit too much ...

The horror of war is shown surprisingly well in the same novel. First, when Andrei sneaks into the Polish fortress and sees heaps of civilians who died of starvation there. And then, when all the Cossacks are killed somehow especially senselessly - at the moment of the siege, the news comes that their native Zaporozhye has been plundered, they are divided into two parts, one is chasing the Tatars who have captured the Cossacks, and the other continues to besiege the Polish city in the hope rescue the prisoners. As a result, both those and others, and third - all die one by one.
And the reason for the war with the Poles is excellent - someone came to the Sich and said that the Orthodox churches "have the Jews [...] on rent. If you don’t pay the Jew in advance, then you can’t rule the Mass. ” And for greater credibility, he added that there the Jews and horses are no longer harnessed, they ride Christians. And that's it - the crowd forgets about the peace signed with the Poles (even yesterday it was a serious argument - you can't break this word!) And knocks down the campaign. Hooray!!1

Jews are a separate issue. In the novel, they are unequivocally present, playing important role. But at the same time, it is constantly emphasized that the Cossack does not kill a Jew solely because he does not want to get his hands dirty. And that would be one benefit to mankind.

This Jew was the famous Yankel. He had already found himself here as a tenant and innkeeper; little by little he took all the district lords and gentry into his own hands, gradually sucked out almost all the money and strongly signified his presence as a Jew in that direction. At a distance of three miles in all directions, not a single hut remained in order: everything fell down and decrepit, everything got drunk, and there was poverty and tatters; as after a fire or a plague, the whole region was weathered. And if Yankel had lived there for another ten years, he would probably have weathered the entire province.

Not to end on a sad note, the book's best joke. “The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” consists of seven chapters with beautiful titles in the spirit of “Chapter II, from which you can find out what Ivan Ivanovich wanted, what the conversation between Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich was about and how it ended " or there "Chapter V, which outlines the meeting of two persons of honor in Mirgorod." The most beautiful title is for the sixth chapter: "Chapter VI, from which the reader can easily learn all that is contained in it."