Since the end of the 20s. a number of journal articles and individual books appear on issues of Russian, Ukrainian and all-Slavic ethnography, and one after another editions of monuments of folk art appear: “Little Russian songs” by M. A. Maksimovich (1827-1834), “Zaporozhye antiquity” Rev. Iv. Sreznevsky (1834, 1835, and 1838), the three-volume “Tales of the Russian People” by I. P. Sakharov (1836-1837) and many others. etc. At the same time, the “Collection of Russian Songs” by Pyotr Kireyevsky was being prepared, published later.
In line with this still nascent folk studies movement, Gogol finds himself as an artist, creates and publishes his first narrative cycle, “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.”
Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine and until the end of his life he considered it his micro-homeland, and himself a Russian writer with a “Khokhlatsky” sourdough.
Coming from among the middle-class Ukrainian nobility, he knew their rural and urban life well, from a young age he was burdened by the provincial-serf “scarcity” and “earthiness” of this life, admired the folk-poetic legends of the “Cossack antiquity”, which then lived not only among the people, but also revered in some “old world” noble families, including in the house of a noble and highly educated distant relative of the future writer - D. P. Troshchinsky, an ardent admirer and collector of Ukrainian “antiques”.
“Evenings” amazed contemporaries with its incomparable originality, poetic freshness and brightness. Pushkin’s review is known: “...everyone was delighted with this lively description of the singing and dancing tribe, these fresh pictures of Little Russian nature, this gaiety, simple-minded and at the same time crafty.
How amazed we were at the Russian book, which made us laugh, we, who had not laughed since the time of Fonvizin! The mention of Fonvizin is not accidental. This is a hint that the simple-minded gaiety of “Evenings” is not as simple-minded as it might seem at first glance.
Belinsky, who greeted “Belkin’s Tale” very coldly, welcomed “Evenings”, also - and before Pushkin - noting in them the combination of “gaiety, poetry and nationality.”
“Merry People” sharply distinguished “Evenings” from the usual naturalistic depiction of serf life in the Russian and Ukrainian villages in the so-called “common folk” stories of that time, in which Belinsky rightly saw a profanation of the idea of nationality.
Gogol happily avoided this danger and did not fall into the other extreme - the idealization of “folk morals”, having found a completely new angle for their depiction. It can be called a mirror reflection of the poetic, life-affirming consciousness of the people themselves. A “living”, as Pushkin put it, “a description of a tribe singing and dancing” is literally woven from motifs of Ukrainian folklore, drawn from its most diverse genres - heroic-historical “thoughts”, lyrical and ritual songs, fairy tales, anecdotes, nativity scenes.
This is the artistic authenticity of the cheerful and poetic folk of Gogol’s first narrative cycle. But his poetic world is permeated with a hidden longing for the former Zaporozhye freedom of the enslaved, like all the “tribes” of the Russian Empire, the “Dikan Cossacks,” which forms the epic beginning and ideological unity of all the stories included in it.
Romantically bright in its national coloring, the poetic world of “Evenings” is devoid of another mandatory attribute of a romantic epic - historical, temporal locality. The historical time in each story is different, special, sometimes definite, and in some cases, for example in “May Night,” conditional. But thanks to this, the national character (according to the philosophical and historical terminology of the 30-40s - “spirit”) of the Cossack tribe appears in “Evenings” from its ideal, invariably beautiful essence.
Its immediate reality is the linguistic consciousness of the people in all the stories of the cycle. The predominantly speech-based characterization of the characters gives the fairy-tale style of “Evenings” a “picturesque syllable” noted by Belinsky, previously unknown to Russian prose, and is one of Gogol’s most promising innovations.
The tale is a means of separating the author’s speech from the speech of his heroes, in “Evenings” - from the vernacular, which thereby becomes both a means and a subject of artistic depiction. Russian prose did not know anything like this before Gogol’s Evenings.
The stylistic norm of the vernacular element of “Evenings” is rustic innocence, under the mask of which lies an abyss of “Khokhlatsky” cheerful slyness and mischief. The combination of one with the other is where the entire comedy of “Evenings” lies, mainly verbal, motivated by the artistic fiction of their “publisher”, “pasichnik” Rudy Panka, and a number of related storytellers.
The preface to “Evenings,” written on behalf of Rudy Panka, characterizes their “publisher” as the bearer of the speech norm not of the author, but of his storytellers and heroes. And this norm remains unchanged in all the stories of the cycle, which also emphasizes the constancy of the fundamental properties of the national character of the “Dikan Cossacks” in all historical circumstances.
So, for example, the vernacular, and thereby the spiritual appearance of the characters in “Sorochinskaya Fair” and “The Night Before Christmas” are no different from one another, despite the fact that the action of the first story is related to modern times, takes place before the eyes of the author, and the action of the second dated to the end of the 18th century, to the time when the government decree promulgated in 1775 was being prepared, according to which the Zaporozhye army was deprived of all its liberties and privileges.
In the breadth of historical time covered by “Evenings,” their lyrical and ethnographic principles merge together and acquire an epic scale.
“The Night Before Christmas” opens the second part of “Evenings”, published at the beginning of 1832. And if the epic of the first part (“Sorochinskaya Fair”, “Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”, “May Night”) declares itself only with the historical overtones of folk fantasy, oral poetic “truths” and “fables”, then the stories of the second part, together with the “Missing Letter” that concludes the first part, have a fairly clearly defined historical space - from the era of the struggle of the “Cossack people” against Polish rule (“Terrible Vengeance”) to its feudal modernity (“Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt”).
Thus, history merges with modernity on the principle of contrasting the beauty of the heroic past of the freedom-loving “tribe” with the ugliness and dullness of its serf existence.
Exactly the same ideological and artistic connection exists between the stories of Gogol’s second cycle - “Mirgorod” (1835). If two of them - "Old World Landowners" and especially "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" - are stylistically and thematically adjacent to the story about Shponka, then the other two - "Viy" and "Taras Bulba" - stand in one along with the overwhelming majority of the stories in “Evenings”, they have in common with them a bright poetic flavor.
It is no coincidence that Gogol gave “Mirgorod” the subtitle “Continuation of evenings on a farm near Dikanka,” thereby emphasizing the ideological and artistic unity of both cycles and the very principle of cyclization. This is the principle of contrast between the natural and the unnatural, the beautiful and the ugly, high poetry and low prose of national life, and at the same time its two social poles - popular and small-scale.
But both in “Evenings” and in “Mirgorod” these social polarities are attached to various eras of national existence and are correlated with one another as its beautiful past and ugly present, and the present is depicted in its immediate feudal “reality”, and the past - so , as it was imprinted in the national consciousness, deposited in the national “spirit” of the people and continues to live in their legends, beliefs, tales, and customs.
Here the most important feature of Gogol’s artistic method is revealed - his philosophical historicism, the Walter Scott origin of the writer’s creativity.
The depiction of popular movements and customs is one of the most promising innovations in W. Scott's historical novels. But this is only the historical background of their action, the main “interest” of which is the love affair and the associated fates of the personal heroes of the story, voluntary or involuntary participants in the depicted historical events.
The nationality of Gogol's Ukrainian stories is already significantly different.
National specificity and the historical projection of their Cossack world act as a form of critical understanding of the “scarcity” and “earthiness” of contemporary Russian life for the writer, which the writer himself recognizes as a temporary “sleep” of the national spirit.
History of Russian literature: in 4 volumes / Edited by N.I. Prutskov and others - L., 1980-1983.
N.V. Gogol is the first major Russian prose writer.
The flowering of realism in Russian prose is usually associated with Gogol and the “Gogolian movement.” It is characterized by special attention to social issues, depiction (often satirical) of the social vices of Nicholas Russia, careful reproduction of socially and culturally significant details in portraits, interiors, landscapes and other descriptions;
Realism Gogol is of a very special kind. Some researchers do not consider Gogol a realist at all, others call his style “fantastic realism.” The fact is that Gogol is a master of phantasmagoria. There is a fantastic element to many of his stories. A feeling of “curved” reality is created, reminiscent of a distorting mirror. This is due to hyperbole and grotesque - the most important elements of Gogol's aesthetics. Much connects Gogol with the romantics. But, starting from romantic traditions, Gogol directs the motifs borrowed from them into a new, realistic direction.
There is a lot of humor in Gogol's works . In Gogol's humor the absurd beginning prevails. The tendency to depict only the funny and ugly psychologically weighed on the writer; he felt guilty for showing only caricatured characters. Gogol repeatedly admitted that he passed on his own spiritual vices to these heroes. This theme sounds especially acute, for example, at the beginning of Chapter VII of Dead Souls. In his later years of creativity, Gogol experienced a deep mental crisis and was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
The real in Gogol's stories coexists with the fantastic throughout the writer's career. But this phenomenon is undergoing some evolution - the role, place and methods of including the fantastic element do not always remain the same.
In Gogol's early works (“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Viy") it's fantastic bring to Front plot (wonderful metamorphoses, the appearance of evil spirits), it is associated with folklore (fairy tales and legends) and romantic literature.
One of Gogol's "favorite" characters is the "devil". Various evil spirits often appear in the plots of Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka, not scary, but rather funny. In the works of a later period, the author’s mystical anxiety, the feeling of the presence of something sinister in the world, is more strongly felt. re, a passionate desire to overcome this with laughter.
In St. Petersburg stories the fantastic element moves away sharply to the background plot, fantasy seems to dissolve in reality. The supernatural is present in the plot not directly, but indirectly, for example, like a dream (“ Nose"), nonsense (" Diary of a Madman"), implausible rumors ("Overcoat").
Finally , in works of the last period (“The Inspector General”, “Dead Souls”) The fantastic element in the plot is practically absent. The events depicted are not supernatural, but rather strange.
The role of descriptions. Gogol is a generally recognized master of artistic descriptions. Descriptions in prose are valuable in themselves, their manner and style are very expressive, primarily due to the abundance of everyday life, portrait, linguistic and other details. Detail is an important aspect of Gogol's realistic writing.
Image of St. Petersburg- one of the important motifs in Gogol’s work (it is present in the fairy tale “The Night Before Christmas”, in “The Inspector General”, in “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” from “Dead Souls”). Gogol also has a cycle of St. Petersburg stories, which can serve as the most typical example of this theme.
St. Petersburg in Gogol's stories is a phantasmagoric, semi-ghost city, in which the strange is intertwined with the everyday, the real with the fantastic, the majestic with the base.
At the same time, Gogol’s works contain a deeply realistic vision of St. Petersburg. Most often, the writer depicts the world of officials and their specific relationships.
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka- the first book of Gogol's stories. Two of its parts appeared in 1831-1832. This book is about Ukraine, where G. was born in 1809. The stories express love for the native land, its nature and people, its history and folk tales. The theme of the rich and generous Ukrainian nature, among which the heroes live, plays a special role in the book, which is not quite common in narrative prose. The fullness of being, the strength and beauty of the spirit are characteristic of the writer’s heroes. The young heroes are beautiful, cheerful, and full of mischief. These heroes feel not just farmers, but “free Cossacks”, who are characterized by a sense of honor and personal dignity. Gogol not only retold traditional plots from folk tales in his stories, he created new and original patterns, as if he continued the work of folk storytellers, creating a book that organically combined literary and folklore traditions, truth and fiction, history and modernity.
Artistic features in Gogol's works
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he soon turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the beneficial influence of Pushkin. But he was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
This social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, Gogol’s plot serves only as a pretext for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The names of Khlestakov, Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and others became household names. Even the minor characters depicted by Gogol on the pages of his works (for example, in “Dead Souls”): Pelageya, the serf girl Korobochka, or Ivan Antonovich, the “jug’s snout,” have great power of generalization and typicality. Gogol emphasizes one or two of his most significant features in the character of the hero. Often he exaggerates them, which makes the image even more vivid and prominent.
The purposes of a vivid, satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, the hero’s home.
If Gogol’s romantic stories contain emphatically picturesque landscapes, giving the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech.
The two worlds depicted by Gogol - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings", in "Taras Bulba", in lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings” or when the story is told about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of folk speech and skillfully used all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life.
1) the periodic structure of a phrase, when many sentences are connected into one whole (“Taras saw how vague the Cossack ranks became and how despondency, indecent for the brave, began to quietly embrace the Cossack heads, but was silent: he wanted to give time to everything, so that they would get used to despondency brought on by farewell to his comrades, and meanwhile in the silence he was preparing to wake them all up at once and suddenly, whooping like a Cossack, so that again and with greater force than before, cheerfulness would return to everyone’s soul, which only the Slavic breed, the wide one, is capable of. a mighty rock is to others as the sea is to shallow rivers");
2) the introduction of lyrical dialogues and monologues (for example, the conversation between Levko and Ganna in the first chapter of “May Night”, monologues - appeals to the Cossacks of Koshevoy, Taras Bulba, Bovdyug in “Taras Bulba”);
3) an abundance of exclamatory and interrogative sentences (for example, in the description of the Ukrainian night in “May Night”);
4) emotional epithets that convey the power of the author’s inspiration, born of love for native nature (description of a day at the Sorochinskaya Fair) or for a folk group (“Taras Bulba”).
Gogol uses everyday speech in different ways. In early works (in “Evenings”) its bearer is the narrator. The author puts into his mouth both vernacular words (everyday words and phrases), and such appeals to listeners that are of a familiar, good-natured nature, characteristic of this environment: “By God, I’m already tired of telling! What are you thinking?
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. Gogol's humor - “laughter through tears” - was determined by the contradictions of the Russian reality of his time, mainly by the contradictions between the people and the anti-people essence of the noble state. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposite of the ideal
life with the reality of life." He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the noble influence of Pushkin, but was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man,” who extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
Gogol's social orientation is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, the plot serves only as an excuse for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The purposes of a vivid satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, homes of the heroes. If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Go-gol's literary speech. The two worlds depicted by the writer - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings...", in "Taras Bulba ”, in the lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then becomes close to live conversational (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings...” or in stories about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of vernacular speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than his predecessors and contemporaries. Material from the site
Gogol loved and had a keen sense of popular colloquial speech, skillfully using all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of social life.
The character of a person, his social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposition of the ideal of life with the reality of life.” He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
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