“Evenings” expressed the author’s “ideal world.” The life of the Ukrainian people, the real Dikanka, are magically transformed in Gogol. The romanticism of “Evenings” is vital, uniquely “objective”. Gogol poetizes values ​​that really exist. The basis of Gogol’s aesthetic ideal is the affirmation of the fullness and movement of life, the beauty of human spirituality. Gogol is attracted to everything strong, bright, containing an excess of vitality. This criterion determines the nature of descriptions of nature. Gogol makes them extremely, dazzlingly bright, and scatters his visual resources with truly wasteful generosity. Nature is perceived by Gogol as a huge, spiritual, “breathing” organism. The descriptions of nature are permeated by the motif of a harmonious union: “... the blue immeasurable ocean, bent over the earth like a voluptuous dome, seems to have fallen asleep, completely drowned in bliss, hugging and squeezing the beautiful one in its airy embrace!” In unity with the “royal” beauty of nature is the spiritual world of the author, experiencing a state of extreme delight and ecstasy. Therefore, the descriptions of nature in “Evenings” are based on obvious or hidden parallelism: “And above everything breathes, everything is wondrous, everything is solemn. But the soul is both immense and wonderful, and crowds of silver visions harmoniously arise in its depths.”

The originality of Gogol’s authorial position is also revealed in his ability to “cutely pretend” (Belinsky) to be an old “pasichnik” who allegedly collected and published the stories, as well as other storytellers. Using the manner of romantic “game” and “pretense,” Gogol conveys the loquacious, “chatty” speech of the “pasichnik,” his simple-minded slyness, and the intricacy of his conversation with the reader. Thanks to different storytellers (secretary Foma Grigorievich, panic in a pea caftan, Stepan Ivanovich Kurochka, etc.), each of whom has his own tone and manner, the narrative takes on a lyrical, comedic-everyday, or 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 appears; his romantic worldview is united by a lyrical, pathetic and humorous vision.

The character of the nationality of “Evenings” is helped 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 educational and romantic aesthetics. The writer called his modernity the era of “the desire for originality and folk poetry itself.” Gogol’s romantic aesthetics are related to the rapprochement of the folk and the national, as well as the understanding of nationality as a predominantly spiritual category: “True nationality” does not lie in the description of the 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 the expression of the people’s point of view: “The poet... may even be national when he describes a completely foreign world, but he looks at it through the eyes of his national element, through the eyes of all the 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 appears within the boundaries of the romantic artistic system. Without giving a comprehensive picture of people's life, "Evenings" reveal its poetry. It is no coincidence that Belinsky wrote: “Everything that nature can have that is beautiful, the rural life of common people can be seductive, everything that the people can have that is original, typical, all of this shines 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. The spiritual world, the experiences of Gogol’s heroes (Levka and Ganna, Gritska and Parasky, Vakula) are marked by “the stamp of pure initial infancy, and therefore of high poetry,” which the writer himself admired in works of folklore; the image of their young love is covered in song romance: “ Galyu! Galyu! Are you sleeping or don’t you want to come out to me?.. Don’t be afraid: there is no one. The evening was warm. But if anyone showed up, I would cover you with a scroll, wrap my belt around you, cover you with my hands - and no one would see us.” “Evenings” also permeates the atmosphere of songs, dance, celebration, and fair fun, when the streets and roads “boil with people.”

The folklore element is palpable in the fantasy of “Evenings”. Gogol depicts life transformed by folk fantasy. However, the fantastic is not just an “image object”. It is valuable for Gogol for the free, creative transformation of the world, faith 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-scary,” 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 find themselves defeated by the courage, intelligence, and ingenuity of Gogol’s heroes. The blacksmith Vakula was able to subjugate the “evil spirit”, saddled the devil and rode him to St. Petersburg to get slippers from the queen herself for the proud Oksana. The grandfather, the hero of “The Lost Letter,” also emerges victorious from the duel with the “inferno.” A vivid comic effect is produced by Gogol’s technique of “everyday life” of the fantastic. Devils and witches in “Evenings” adopt the habits and behavior of ordinary people, or rather, comedic characters. “Damn... Solokha was seriously softened up: he kissed her hand with such antics as an assessor at the priest’s office; grabbed his heart, groaned and said straight out 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 Missing Letter”), having fallen into the inferno, sees witches there, dressed up, smeared, “like ladies at a fair. And everyone, no matter how many of them there were, danced some kind of damn trick, like they were drunk. They raised some dust, God forbid!” The witch plays “fool” with her grandfather; the cards were brought “greasy, the kind only our priests use to tell fortunes about suitors.”

In two stories (“The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala” and “Terrible Revenge”) the fantastic takes on a sinister (in the latter, with a touch of mystical) character. Fantastic images here express the evil forces that exist in life and are hostile to man, primarily the power of gold. However, in these stories, the story unfolds 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, transforming reality into a dream, into a fairy tale. The boundaries between the real and the fantastic in Gogol are elusive - perhaps the musicality and poetry of the author’s speech are slightly enhanced, it is imperceptibly imbued with the hero’s experiences and, as it were, freed from concreteness and “physicality”, it becomes light, “weightless”. In “May Night”: “An irresistible sleep quickly began to close his eyes, his tired limbs were ready to forget and go numb; my head was bowing... “No, I’ll fall asleep here!” - 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 mingled with the shine of the month...” - and then the real “recedes” more and more and Levka’s wonderful dream unfolds. Gogol's poetry in his first book knows not only the mysterious music of a romantic dream, but also rich, sparkling colors (description of a summer day in Little Russia).

A riot of colors, an abundance of light, its games, sharp contrasts and changes in dazzlingly bright, light and dark tones “embody” the romantic ideas of the collection and 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 does not yet act as a threat to the spiritual. The colorful everyday details here are not “everyday life” in the prosaic-philistine sense of the word; they retain an exotic unusualness and enlargement, for example, a picture of a rural fair, “when all the people merge into one huge monster and move their whole body in the square and in the cramped streets, screaming, cackling, thundering..." The descriptions of food and various dishes contain the same brightness and unusualness. Therefore, they evoke a comical, but not at all negative, impression: “But as soon as you welcome us, we will serve melons such as you may not have eaten in your life; and for honey, I promise, you won’t find anything better in the farmsteads... As soon as you bring in the honeycomb, the spirit will go all over the room, it’s impossible to imagine what kind: pure, like a tear or expensive crystal... And what kind of pies my old woman will feed you! What kind of pies, if only you knew: sugar, perfect sugar!

In Gogol's first collection, an atmosphere of integrity and harmony still reigns, although somewhere there is already a tendency for its destruction. Sad notes sound at the end of “Sorochinskaya Fair”. The second part of “Evenings” includes the story “Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his Aunt”. The elements of folk poetry, freedom, fun, and the atmosphere of a fairy tale are replaced here by the depiction of prosaic, everyday aspects of life, and 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 “practised in activities akin to one meek and kind soul: he cleaned buttons, he read a fortune-telling book, he placed mousetraps in the corners of his room, and finally, having taken off his uniform, he lay on his bed.” The methods of depiction are also changing dramatically. The dynamics and tension of events disappear, being replaced by “stillness” and monotony of scenes, bright colors are muted. Against the background of the pathetic “essentiality” in the form of Shponka and his simple life, the romantic world of other stories turns out to be all the more emphasized, all the more “shining”. At the same time, the dissonant sound of “Ivan Fedorovich,” highlighting the fairy-tale 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 well received by critics. But not many 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 “Evenings,” noting their original humor, poetry, and democracy: “Just now I read Evenings near Dikanka. They amazed me. This is real gaiety, sincere, relaxed, without affectation, without stiffness. And in places what poetry! what sensitivity!<...>I was told that when the publisher (Gogol) entered the printing house... the typesetters began to squirt and snort, covering their mouths with their hands. The factor explained their gaiety by admitting to him that the typesetters were dying of laughter typing his book. Molière and Fielding would probably be happy to make their typesetters laugh."

The 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”. The romantic universalism of “Evenings” was continued in the structure of “Mirgorod”; the world here has truly “expanded immensely” in time and space, including history, the recent past, and modernity. Like “Evenings,” “Mirgorod” is organized by a single poetic thought, but now this is not the idea of ​​integrity and harmony, but the idea of ​​separation. The sharp contrast between the bright, poetic world, possible only in the past or in popular imagination, and the pitiful, “fragmented” present testifies to the deepening 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 heightened contrast in the perception of life leads to the dual world characteristic of romanticism. The movement of the story is based on sharp transitions from the daytime, clear and ordinary world to the night, mysterious, filled with both horror and charm. Maintained in a tone of rude humor, the scenes in the janitor's room, replete with everyday realities, contrast with Khoma's nightly adventures. The clash of contradictions in “Viye” is brought to the point of tragedy, and, unlike such a story as “Terrible Vengeance,” evil remains, if not completely triumphant, then unpunished.

In Viya, the atmosphere of melancholy and horror gradually increases. The nights Khoma spends in church become more and more terrible. After the second reading over the coffin, the hero turns gray. When Khoma and his companions go to church for the third time, “it was a hellish night. Wolves howled in the distance in a whole pack. And even the barking of a dog was somehow terrifying. “It seems as if something else is howling: it’s not a wolf,” said Dorosh.” Fear wins and ultimately kills the calm 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 was always disgusting, repulsively ugly (the sorcerer in “Terrible Vengeance”, the witch in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala”). In the image of the witch lady in Viya, Gogol combines the seemingly incompatible: amazing, perfect beauty and evil, vengeful cruelty. In the beautiful features of the dead lady, Khoma sees “... something terribly piercing. He felt that his soul was beginning to ache somehow painfully, as if suddenly, in the midst of a whirlwind of fun and a swirling crowd, someone was singing a song about an oppressed people. The rubies of her lips seemed to bleed to the very heart.” “Sparkling” beauty becomes terrible. And next to this image appears the image of the “oppressed people” (in other versions - “funeral song”). The theme of evil beauty appears in Gogol's work as a feeling of 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 ardent interest in history, are genetically connected 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 presented in articles published in Arabesques. Going back to the most progressive trends of romantic historical thought and continuing the Enlightenment traditions, Gogol's views developed in a realistic direction. Gogol saw high poetry and social and moral meaning in history. History is not a collection of facts, but an expression of the development of all humanity. Therefore, “its subject is great.” In the spirit of French historiography (Thierry, Guizot), Gogol puts forward the idea of ​​cause-and-effect relationships. The events of the world, he believes, “are closely interconnected and cling to one another, like rings in a chain.” The dialectical nature of Gogol’s historical views is especially visible 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 destinies of huge human groups. The actions of an outstanding personality are great and influence the course of historical events when they are related to 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 rapturous amazement at the “wisdom of providence.” In history, in the concatenation of its events, Gogol sees something “wonderful.” This reflects both the writer’s religious views and the exaltation of the creative forces of life, its creative “soul,” characteristic of the romantics.

Gogol is close to the romantics and in the way he considers historical material, he shares romantic idea about 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 “find out the true way of life, the elements of character, all the twists and shades of feelings, worries, suffering, and joys of the depicted people,” to reveal the spiritual content of the era, the character and “soul” of the people. And therefore, folk legends, tales, and songs that have absorbed this spiritual content acquire great importance.

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

In the article “A Look at the Formation of Little Russia,” speaking about the Ukrainian Cossacks of the 14th-15th centuries, Gogol writes: “Then there was that poetic time when everything was obtained with a saber; when everyone...strove to be an actor and not a spectator.” These words help to understand the intent of Taras Bulba. They contain a hidden contrast between the past and the present and a reproach to the modern generation, which has lost its former activity. While working on the story, the writer set himself great moral and educational goals. The glorious pages of the history of the Ukrainian people gave Gogol the opportunity to most fully reveal the world of his ideal, expand it in comparison with “Evenings”, and include in it an affirmation of the beauty of action, the heroism of the liberation struggle. The Zaporozhye Sich is depicted as a spontaneous, natural democracy, a “strange republic”, not knowing written laws, governed by the people themselves (the scene of the choice of the Koshevo). Gogol's Sich becomes the embodiment of “will and camaraderie.” Gogol paints a community of people of different ages, ranks, and education. Feelings of freedom and fraternal union are the source of that “mad gaiety,” revelry and feasting that reigns in the Sich.

The integral, democratic Sich is contrasted with the class 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 who pride themselves on their family or wealth. Gogol describes in detail their magnificent outfits, thus emphasizing the vanity, arrogance, and desire for luxury of the Polish gentry. Describing the Poles and Cossacks during the siege of Dubno, Gogol creates a significant contrast: the multi-colored rows of Polish nobles 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 here and there it glittered on saber hilts and rifle rims. The Cossacks did not like to dress up richly in battle; They had simple chain mail and retinues...”

The great goal of the Cossacks is the liberation of their homeland. 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, as depicted by Gogol, unites all classes: “... The whole nation rose up, because the patience of the people was overflowing, - it rose to take revenge for the ridicule of its rights, for the shameful humiliation, for the insult to the faith of its ancestors and the sacred custom...”. Folk and national are synonymous for the writer in this case.

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 talk 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 strives 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. Gogol does not embellish the past. The “rough straightforwardness” of the morals of the Cossacks reflects the “mighty wide scope” of the Russian character, the features of a “fierce” but also “brave” century. In the simple, integral natures of the heroes lives the spirit of disobedience and rebellion. The story continues the Decembrist traditions. The Decembrists considered eras of civil strife and liberation wars, which “tempered morals with dangers” and gave “gigantic features” to characters. According to Gogol’s similar thought, the heroic traits of the Cossacks, which are “an unusual phenomenon of Russian strength,” were formed in this way.

The writer expresses the deeply correct 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 aura. Bulba clearly stood out among other characters due to the titanic dimensions of his personality. In the battle of Dubno he “distinguished himself” as a “giant”. Taras’s actions seem to be guided by the force of historical retribution. In the 2nd edition, Gogol strengthened the realistic features of the image, gave it greater specificity and motivation, while maintaining monumentality and epic flavor. Taras is shown as a son of his time, he “was one of the indigenous old colonels: he was all created for abusive anxiety and was distinguished by the rude directness of his character.” He is devoted to the simple, harsh laws of the Sich and despises those of his comrades who adopted Polish customs and “created luxury.” He gives all of himself, his life and the lives of his loved ones to his homeland. 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 Ostap's execution, the image of Taras acquires truly tragic grandeur. Gogol’s restrained and strict psychological drawing makes it possible to feel both the power of grief squeezing the father’s heart and the enormous pride in his son, whom he supports at the most terrible moment with his “I hear!” The depiction of the hero's end is shrouded in enlightened tragedy. He dies, predicting the coming victory of his people.

Thus, even in the 2nd edition, Gogol does not abandon the poeticization of the heroism of an individual. But Gogol's great innovation lies in his depiction of the heroism of the masses. In the 2nd edition, Taras is shown as one of many. In the scene of the battle of Dubno, which is the climax of the story, brief but expressive characteristics of a whole phalanx of remarkable heroes are created: Mosiya Shila, Stepan Guski, Kokubenko, Balaban, Bovdyug, etc. The writer selects characteristic details of their past and draws with bright strokes their valor in battle and a beautiful death: “He (Balaban) hung his head, sensing the death throes, and quietly said: “It seems to me, gentlemen-brothers, that I am dying a good death; I chopped seven, stabbed nine with a spear... May the Russian land bloom forever! ..". And his soul flew away... Kokubenko led his eyes around him and said: “I thank God that I had the opportunity to die before your eyes, comrades! May even better people live after us than we do, and may the Russian land, forever loved by Christ, be beautiful!” And the young soul flew out.” In its depiction of mass folk heroism as the main theme, Taras Bulba differs not only from the romantic literature of the 20s and 30s, but also from the works of Pushkin. For the first time in Russian literature, the people themselves are put in the main place; they become the central character of the story.

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

In his 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. Having surrendered to love, blinded by it, Andriy not only leaves his own people, but fights against them in the enemy army. When reworking the story, Gogol excluded moments that reduced the image of Andriy. His love is a powerful romantic passion, which gave him the feeling of “what a person is given to feel only once in his life.” The uncontrollability and recklessness of Andriy’s love reveals the “indestructibility” of the Cossack nature, “the determination to do something unheard of and impossible for others.” According to a fair thought, SM. Petrova, the great humanist Gogol “points out the inhumanity and cruelty of such relations between peoples, in which, in his words, a wonderful thing - love - leads to betrayal and the 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 sacrificed without hesitation to the general: the homeland, the national liberation struggle, and popular unity. “There is no bond holier than fellowship!” - this idea runs through the entire story and sounds inspired in Taras’s famous speech. In this aspect, Andriy's execution turns out to be cruel, but fair.

Folk-heroic pathos determined the complex, 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 V. Scott's novels, which were highly praised by the writer himself and in Russian criticism of the 20s and 30s. These traditions were reflected in the depiction of local color and the thoroughness of the descriptions. But along with this, researchers rightly say that “Taras Bulba” contains features of a heroic epic. Belinsky also pointed out this: “Taras Bulba” is an excerpt, an episode from the great epic of the life of an entire people. If a Homeric epic is possible in our time, then here is its highest example, ideal and prototype!..” The epic principle is manifested in the poetics and style of “Taras Bulba”: the epic scope and scale, the hyperbolism of artistic generalizations; the solemn, lyrical-pathetic tone of the narrative; in the forms of rhythmic tale; in the “dissolution” of the author in the image of a folk singer, bandura player; in the widest use of folklore techniques (repetition, parallelism, symbolism and metaphorical images, for example, the image of a battle-feast or Taras’s three-fold appeal to the Kurky atamans during the battle of Dubno and their three-fold response). Gogol's historical epic is a completely new and original phenomenon in Russian literature.

“The story 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. Moreover, if “Taras Bulba” turns out to be the “positive pole” of the contrast that permeates “Mirgorod”, then “The Tale of That...” becomes the “negative pole”. The reality depicted in it may look like a pathetic parody of the heroic past. Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich are vulgar Mirgorod inhabitants, devoid of spiritual content and interests and at the same time filled with noble arrogance and swagger. For them, the symbol of noble dignity becomes an old gun, which Ivan Nikiforovich keeps along with all sorts of rubbish and which Ivan Ivanovich wants to acquire at any cost (unlike Ivan Nikiforovich, he is not a hereditary nobleman, so purchasing a gun for him is a kind of self-affirmation). For his part, Ivan Nikiforovich is offended that his neighbor offered a brown pig for a gun: “This gun is a well-known thing; otherwise the devil knows what it is: a pig.” The friendship of the two neighbors, which so touched those around them, suddenly ends because of a trifle: because of the word “gander” that is “disgraceful” for the title of nobility and honor, which Ivan Nikiforovich called Ivan Ivanovich in the heat of an argument. The conflict, thus, reveals not the drama, but the wretchedness of the life depicted. This is a clash within vulgarity itself. 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 become sophisticated, doing petty nasty things to each other, and finally start a legal battle, which becomes the meaning of their lives and ruins them. “Grandfather’s Karbovanites” are moving from “cherished chests” to “the dirty hands of inky businessmen.” Endless litigation testifies to bureaucratic procedures - judicial red tape and chicanery.

Gogol develops in the story the manner of ironic pretense begun in “Evenings.” The narration is told on behalf of supposedly the same ordinary person as the heroes. This, according to Belinsky, “simpleton” sees in them “worthy husbands” of Mirgorod, its “honor and adornment.” Now moved, now choking with delight, he paints Ivan Ivanovich’s bekesha, his house, his “subtle” manner, the lifestyle of two friends, his favorite foods. The narrator's admiration is caused by insignificant and prosaic phenomena. He falls into pathos when describing a puddle in Mirgorod, a fence on which pots hang, a courthouse with “as many as eight windows” - and this creates a sharp 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: “Nice bekesha from Ivan Ivanovich! excellent! And what smiles! Wow, what a joke! blue with frost! ... Oh my God! Nicholas the Wonderworker, saint of God! Why don’t I have such a bekesha! He sewed it back when Agafia Fedoseevna did not go to Kyiv. Do you know Agafia Fedoseevna? the one who bit off the assessor’s ear.” However, at the end of the story, the author drops the ironic mask, and the “funny” story gives way to sad, lyrical reflections on life. The tone of the story and its colors change sharply: instead of a hot, sunny, abundant summer (the beginning of the story) - a picture of autumn, “boring, incessant rains,” “sick day.” The story ends on a note of aching sadness: “The same field again... wet jackdaws and crows, monotonous rain, a tearful sky with no clearing. It's boring in this world, gentlemen!

The plot of the story goes back to the novel by V.T. Narezhny “Two Ivans, or the Passion for Litigation” (1825). Gogol continued and developed the accusatory and satirical tradition of this writer. However, in Narezhny’s novel, the characters, plot development, and pictures of everyday life were sketchy. In Gogol, according to I.A. Goncharova, they “really came to life.” The everyday richness of the story reveals the lack of spirituality of the characters. For Gogol, as for the romantics, the spiritual is modern world increasingly being replaced by things. The accumulation of things, the abundance of subject descriptions (for example, the scene of Ivan Nikiforovich’s dress being aired or the congress of chaises and carts with guests to the mayor’s assembly) at the same time acquire a whimsical and strange character, bordering on the fantastic. From the romantic tradition in Gogol and the deliberate substitution of “physical” phenomena of spiritual life, for example, a comparison: the “pleasant” impression of Ivan Ivanovich’s oratorical gift with the feeling “when they are searching in your head or slowly running a finger along your heel,” as well as “ plant" similes: 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 like ripe plum etc.

The peculiarity of the depiction of life in the story is that it is revealed only as a kingdom of spiritual squalor, i.e. definitely. But this method of depiction, which largely goes back to romanticism, contains enormous critical potential. Gogol exposes the moral essence of philistinism, its self-righteous stupidity and evil selfish nature lurking under external decency. Reality is revealed in its typical manifestations. The romantic turns, “flows” into the realistic.

"Old World Landowners" The most profound and complete realistic principle in “Mirgorod” was expressed in “Old World Landowners.” 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 life of the old people has an inexplicable charm for the author. He loves to “for a minute” descend into her sphere, abandoning “bold dreams” that lead him to another, Big world noisy cities, modern interests. Hence the touching depiction of the life of the heroes - from small rooms to singing doors - their kindness, cordiality, patriarchalism and impracticality, in contrast to the unsightly entrepreneurship of the “terrible reformer” - their heir.

However, the contrast between the motives of peace, serenity and “daring dreams” is not unambiguous. The idyllic depiction of life not only does not hide its squalor, but, on the contrary, exposes it. Idyll borders on irony. The heroes have “grown” into their existence. The whole meaning of life lies in a monotonous existence, in petty worries, in eating prepared supplies for them. But here we encounter a new complexity in the artistic world of the story. Ultimately, in “low” life, not only “bucolic” silence is revealed, 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 heroes, 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 the great moment that awaited her, nor about her soul,<...>she thought only about her poor companion, with whom she spent her life and whom she left orphaned and homeless.” Afanasy Ivanovich also rises to truly poetic and tragic heights in the funeral scene of Pulcheria Ivanovna: “The coffin was lowered... the workers began to use spades, and the earth had already covered and leveled the hole - at that time he made his way forward; everyone parted and gave him space, wanting to know his intention. He raised his eyes, looked vaguely and said: “So you’ve already buried her! Why?!”... He stopped and did not finish his speech...” GA. Gukovsky calls this “why?!” one of those shortest formulas poetry, by which the true genius of the artist is recognized.” A simple phrase shocks with the boundlessness and sincerity of the grief contained in it.

And further in the story, the already noted contrast between the two worlds arises again. The story is given of a certain young man, “full of true nobility and dignity,” standing at the pinnacle of spiritual culture. In his story, everything is brought to some extreme emotional height. The young man experiences genuine romantic passion. He was in love “tenderly, passionately, madly, boldly, modestly.” “Extremity” also characterizes his experiences after the death of his beloved: his “scorching melancholy,” “devouring despair,” and his 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 “petit-ouverte,” and standing behind him, leaning on the back of his chair, was his young wife...” The grandiose, spiritual passion did not stand the test of time. In parallel, the story of Afanasy Ivanovich is completed, whom the author visits five years after the death of Pulcheria Ivanovna. His image again appears against an everyday, “material” background. His boundless grief breaks out during... dinner: ““This is that dish,” said Afanasy Ivanovich, when they served us Mishki with sour cream, “this is that dish,” he continued, and I noticed that his voice began to tremble and a tear was preparing to peek out from his leaden eyes, but he collected all his efforts, wanting to hold it back. “This is the food that for... for... peace... peace...” and suddenly burst into tears. His hand fell on the plate, the plate overturned... the sauce covered him all over; he sat emotionlessly, emotionlessly held the spoon, and tears, like a stream, like a silently flowing fountain, flowed, poured down onto the napkin covering him.” The musicality of the phrase, the poetic comparison of tears with a “non-silently flowing fountain” create a feeling of high drama of the situation.

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

Literature

Bakhtin M.M. Rabelais and Gogol. The art of words and folk laughter culture // Bakhtin M.M. Questions of literature and aesthetics. M., 1975.

Dmitrieva E.E. Sternian tradition and romantic irony in Evenings. News of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Ser. Lit and language. T.51. No. 3. 1992. P. 18-28.

Mann Yu.V. The courage of invention. Features of Gogol's artistic world. M., 1985.

Mashinsky S. Art world Gogol. M., 1979.

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

Stepanov N.L. Early Gogol the Romantic. // N.V. Gogol. Collection Op. in 7 volumes. T.1. M., 1976.

Aikhenvald Yu. Silhouette of Russian writers. M., 1994

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

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

“Mirgorod” is a collection by N.V. Gogol, first published in 1835 (see its full text and analysis). As directed by 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 in “Evenings...”, “Mirgorod” is somewhat larger in volume, since its works are larger.

The collection received its name from the Little Russian town, near which Gogol’s homeland 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 depicted a rural 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, and cooked countless mushrooms, vegetables and fruits. Afanasy Ivanovich feasted on the dishes prepared by his wife and joked kindly at her. And so the quiet, calm life of the two old men passed. They always received rare guests with great cordiality.

Dying, Pulcheria Ivanovna gave detailed instructions to the servants on how to look after and care for 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 simple, but this story by Gogol breathes extraordinary warmth and humanity. A profound sense of compassion allows us to bring this work closer to “The Overcoat”.

Gogol “Mirgorod” – “Taras Bulba”

Gogol “Mirgorod” – “Viy”

Khoma Brut, a philosophy student from a Kyiv 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 him with a broom, forced him to run with extraordinary speed. But thanks to 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.

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

The Cossacks brought Khoma to the master's farm. Looking at the lady lying in the coffin, he recognized in her the very witch whom he had chopped with a log. All the farmers said that the master's daughter had a relationship with the evil spirit.

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

With the first crow of the rooster, the witch lay down in the coffin again. The next night everything happened again. The dead lady, using witchcraft spells, summoned winged monsters to help her, who were breaking into the doors and windows of the temple. However, none of them saw Khoma; the drawn circle saved him again.

During the day, the philosopher tried to escape from the farm, but the master's Cossacks caught him and brought him back. On the third night, the revived dead woman began to scream so that the spirits that had flown 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 lift his eyelids. An inner voice urged Khoma not to look at Viy, but he could not resist looking. "Here he is!" - Viy shouted, pointing his finger at the philosopher. The evil spirits rushed at Khoma and tore him to pieces.

Any interpretation of creativity, the construction of its logic, must be based on the work of the author himself, guided by 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, and explains the path of spiritual and creative quest that the author has gone through - only then can we talk about a high degree of reliability of the proposed version.

In relation to Gogol’s work, this also applies to the second, burned volume “ 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 they were, it had to be a logical delusion arising from the meaning and the content of all previous creativity.

In “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” Gogol first identified himself as an independent artist, and in addition, showed that original poetic style that distinguishes him from everyone else. What is the main feature of this manner?

Gogol introduces elements of traditions and folk legends into the fabric of the narrative, making them an integral part of the depicted 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, immersing himself in folk life, tries to understand what is good and what is evil (the devilish principle). It is no coincidence that in his works demonic forces are woven into human life and are an integral part of it. It is characteristic that “demonicism” arises precisely where the spiritless principle flourishes, where people live in idleness and drunkenness, lies and debauchery. Gogol’s “devilry” is a kind of metaphor, an embodied dark principle in a person. It is characteristic that, while depicting the “demonic principle,” Gogol does not depict the “proud prince of darkness,” the fallen angel, Beelzebub. The “Prince of Darkness” is a force opposing a person who has embarked on the path of self-improvement and serving 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 persons. His characters are a kind of masks, puppets in the hands of the main forces, between which the main conflict in his works unfolds - between the divine and demonic principles in man. Gogol is not talking about a method of movement on the path to serving God, but about instructing people on this path, for in all these Basavryuks, Solokhs, Chubakhs and so on. Not only is there little God, he is not there at all.

In Gogol, therefore, one can observe, as it were, two levels, two layers of action: characters and evil spirits fight in the arena, and behind the scenes, latently, God and the devil confront (hence the “stage quality” 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, see him. And for this you need to cleanse yourself - cleanse yourself of “evil spirits”: anger, stupidity, drunkenness, envy, lust, etc. Thus, in Gogol’s work we are presented with neither hell nor heaven (as, for example, in Dante or Milton - hell or heaven can only be found by those who have already seen God, and, accordingly, the devil), 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 hymns to the divine essence spilled throughout everything around. According to Gogol, everything beautiful is divine, and everything divine is beautiful. But the concept of “beautiful” is by no means identical to the concept of “beauty” (for example, the beauty of the lady in “Vie”, the beauty of a work of art in “Portrait”). The beautiful, according to Gogol, is precisely the embodiment of God on earth.

It is with this description that the first story “Evenings...” begins. As a kind of antithesis to him, a description of the fair appears before us - scenes of unbridled drunkenness (Solopy), deception (gypsies), envy (stepmother), etc. The red scroll, pieces of which the devil is looking for throughout the fair, is a symbol of the presence of “evil spirits” in everything that happens here. It is also no coincidence that Solopy is frightened by a pig’s snout that appears in the window (“closeness” to hell due to drunkenness determines this fear).

A similar balance of power is described in “The Missing Letter,” where all the evil spirits appear as a result of continuous drunkenness, to which the messenger sent with the letter to the queen indulges. It is also characteristic that Gogol almost erases the line between the real and unreal world, into which the characters are immersed as a result of alcohol or drug intoxication (for example, “Nevsky Prospekt”, “Viy”). It is not entirely clear whether everything that happened to the messenger actually happened, or whether these were just events he imagined (cf. Pushkin’s “The Undertaker”). This move is also logical, since the world is the creation of God, therefore, those who fall under the influence of “evil spirits” and move away from God also move away from the real world (God’s creation), ending up in the “demonic”, unreal world. It is characteristic that “irreality” will increase colossally in Gogol’s St. Petersburg Tales, where the city itself no longer appears as part of the natural, divine world, but as something phantasmagoric, unreal, almost completely falling under the demonic principle and generating not people, but some freaks (“Overcoat”, “Nose”, “Notes of a Madman”).

In “Evenings...” Gogol’s idea of ​​youth contrasts with the descriptions of “devilishness,” 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, head, in “May Night, or the Drowned Woman”, Katerina and Danilo/Katerina’s father, 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, asserts that a person is responsible not only for his own ruined soul, but also those who is in his sphere of influence (for example, Taras Bulba’s responsibility for the fate of his sons).

It is Korzh’s greed that pushes Peter to commit a crime (the murder of an innocent baby) in “The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala,” and it is the “disgrace” created by his head that is the reason that allows “evil spirits” into the surrounding divine world in “May Night, or the Drowned Woman.” It is characteristic that the saka Drowned also suffered due to the fault of her 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 in Viy directly state this when they say that “any old woman is a witch” or that all the women in the market 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 of dark and light principles he affirms, a woman occupies a kind of intermediate position. According to Gogol, “a woman is in love with the devil” (as he writes in “Notes of a Madman”), which he directly depicts, for example, in “The Night Before Christmas” in the image of Solokha. In Gogol, a woman is always a tempting element; it is no coincidence that so many troubles are constantly associated with marriage in Gogol’s works. A woman creates confusion in the struggle between good and evil taking place in the world, and as a result, she almost always ends up (wittingly or unwittingly) on the side of the devil. In "The Night Before Christmas" Oksana is the reason that Vakula gets involved with 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 meaninglessness of what the Cossacks are doing, and subsequently to death at the hands of his own father, the fact 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 a ball with a blonde he likes, causes the displeasure of other women, etc.

The only hypostasis when female images in Gogol acquire a different sound and different functions 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 Andria, who selflessly loves her sons and yearns for them, this is also the mother from “Notes of a Madman,” to whom main character makes his last appeals, this is even Solokha in relation to Vakula.

“Male” vices - drunkenness, smoking cradle, doing nothing, stupid stubbornness, etc. - 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 principles, therefore the main blame (and responsibility) for the outcome of the struggle between God and the devil lies with him.

The life of Gogol's Cossacks, consisting mainly of drunkenness, excessive eating, smoking a cradle and doing nothing (for example, Patsyuk from “The Night Before Christmas”), richly presented in “Evenings...”, is replaced by a narrative with less pronounced “external” attributes devilry. “Uncleanness” is not witches or sorcerers, but that spiritless, inert existence that turns a person away from God. Essentially, the collection “Mirgorod” consists of completely everyday works, and only in “Viye” there are elements of the “fantastic”. Gogol, penetrating into the essence of existence, gradually abandons the “external” manifestations of devilry. He no longer requires 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 “Enchanted Place”, where there is no actual presence of evil spirits. The stupidity and greed of the grandfather from “The Enchanted Place”, which ends with him being doused with slop from head to toe, and also with the fact that instead of treasure he finds some kind of garbage in the cauldron, is in many ways reminiscent of the plot of the first story in the collection - “Sorochinskaya Fair” . Thus, demonism, beginning in human existence (the composition of the collection is the first story “Sorochinskaya Fair” and the last “Enchanted Place”), also goes into it.

The story about Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt is noteworthy. For the first time, a character appears before us completely devoid of human face, a character whose life is aimless, meaningless and fruitless, and at the same time completely devoid of “demonic” external surroundings. It is also noteworthy that the story is not finished - its continuation could well be “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 with “The Overcoat” ", "The 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 bias is made precisely towards displaying the “death of souls” (the life of the bursa, the characters of Freebies, Tiberius Gorobets, Khoma Brut; “speaking” surnames are built in contrast - “a big name” and what they mean - “Tiberius” is the name of the ancient Roman Caesar, “Brutus” is the ancient Roman military leader, according to legend, who dealt the fatal blow to Julius Caesar, the students of the bursa are called “rhetors”, “philosophers”, etc. , compared with the “ancient Greek” names of Manilov’s sons in “Dead Souls” - Themi-stoklus and Alcides). Khoma Brut dies from fear, and also from the fact that there was no faith and God’s fire in him. The image of Viy, this kind of lord of dead souls, the master of purgatory, Cerberus, guarding the entrance to Hades, is noteworthy - he is a club-footed man covered in earth, his arms and legs look like roots (symbol dark side personality, subconscious, in which instincts alien to culture and God are stored), 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.

In "Taras Bulba" another side of human life is presented - war, to which Gogol never returns in any of his works (except for "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin", where this topic is presented indirectly).

According to Gogol, war is an unnatural, ungodly activity and senseless in its cruelty. Describing the character of Taras Bulba and those aspects of his personality that cannot evoke sympathy (stubbornness, cruelty), Gogol repeatedly mentions that this was the dictate of the time. However, by revealing the reasons, Gogol does not at all relieve the characters of guilt for the evil that they bring to the world. By depicting them, the author tries 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 events long ago days gone by, but in the fact that he is trying to understand from the point of view of his contemporary life those phenomena that occurred in history. First of all, describing the morals 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 standard 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, and is accustomed to taking into account only his own opinion. As senseless as the “military life” of the Cossacks is, so 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 other than the logic of war. The main reason for the siege of a Polish city, for example, was that the young had to be taught military skills, and the rest had something to do so that they would not get drunk and terrorize the surrounding villages. The formal reason for the war was unverified rumors that the Poles and Jews were oppressing the Orthodox somewhere (before this, the Turks were going to go to war for being “infidels”).

Taras does not take into account 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 during 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, and later, due to his incontinence, does not rescue his son from captivity). The death of Ostap, which takes place in front of the eyes of his father, who came to see whether his son would accept death with dignity (the words “good, son, good,” uttered by Taras during the quartering), is largely due to the fault of Taras. It is also noteworthy that Ostap wants to bury Andriy, who was killed by his father, but he forbids him.

Taras deals with Andriy for betrayal, although upon careful examination it is not entirely clear what exactly Andriy betrayed. The senseless siege of the city by the Cossacks leads to famine starting there. The terrible pictures of human suffering that Andriy sees when he gets there through an underground passage force him to take a different look at the deeds of the Cossacks. Taras is also outraged by the fact that Andriy betrayed the faith of his fathers, that is, Orthodoxy. He himself talks quite a lot about Orthodoxy and faith, although what exactly his “Christianity” consists of is quite difficult to understand - the main Christian qualities are mercy, respect for others, humanism, etc. - either remain outside the scope of the narrative, or are absent from the character of Taras (they are not present in the fabric of the narrative). Without hesitation, he kills his son, who (unlike his father) lowers his weapon and does not raise his hand against a person close to him by blood.

The death of Taras himself is also quite ridiculous (although deserved and justified by the plot - 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 chibouk to the “enemy”. However, Taras dies heroically - he shows the surviving Cossacks the path 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 “take revenge,” that is, to continue to do what Taras himself did. Thus, Bulba for the most part defends not the faith, but the way of life that the Cossacks live and that he himself lived.

In this regard, Taras continues the gallery of Gogol’s types, which began 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 "Viy", the general from "Overcoat" and so on. The same line will be continued in “The Inspector General” (mayor).

The stories of the St. 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”. St. 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 disgusting life he lives (“Nevsky Prospekt”), here human qualities are so unimportant that in a carriage, dressed in a uniform, his nose may well be running around (a symbol of arrogance - “turning up your nose”), here the power of money dominates, 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 the solicitor from “The story of how Ivan Ivanovich and Ivan Nikiforovich quarreled,” which in many ways anticipates the image of Akaki Akakievich from “The Overcoat” and those officials (for example, Ivan Antonovich Jug Snout), whom Gogol will portray in The Government Inspector and Dead Souls. Wanting to paint the devil, the “prince of darkness,” the artist cannot imagine him in any other way except in the guise of a Kolomna moneylender (“Portrait”). The witches here are already deprived of their fairy-tale-mythological attributes - they are simply prostitutes mocking sincere feelings (“Nevsky Prospekt”). These are not fallen, not lost souls, these are precisely “dead souls.”

It is noteworthy that Gogol also saw very dangerous traits of his “dead souls,” not only in high-ranking bribe-takers and embezzlers, but also in the so-called “little man.” Humiliated, deprived of all dignity, but at the same time deprived of a divine soul, the character can only actually turn into evil spirits (for example, “The Overcoat”, where Akaki Akakievich scares passers-by after his death in the form of a ghost), or go into an unreal world, where he 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 fits into 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 would later describe in his “Notes from Underground”). A man who lives only in the 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 (even if it’s 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.

Gogol tried to understand the path of Russia, to find the path that would lead it to God, in his works, depicting “dead souls” in order to turn living souls away from destruction. In the second volume of Dead Souls and Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends, Gogol tried to present the model of society that, in his opinion, should have existed. But the attempt was unsuccessful. Gogol did not see any reason for such constructions in the surrounding reality. And on his deathbed, he repeated after his Mayor: “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, Rus'-troika?”, but to which he never found an answer.

From “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka” to “Mirgorod”

The story “Sorochinskaya Fair” ends with a description of the wedding: “From the blow of the musician’s bow in the homespun scroll... everything turned to unity and turned into agreement. People, on whose gloomy faces, it seemed, a smile had not slipped for centuries, stamped their feet and trembled their shoulders... Everything rushed, everything danced...” But then “thunder, laughter, songs are heard quieter and quieter, the bow dies, weakening and losing unclear sounds in the emptiness of the air... Isn’t it so 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 it... Bored and 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 is created by the abrupt change in mood of the narrator! This early work expressed what would become the emotional dominant of the writer’s entire work. Emotional and moral oscillation 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 the light and dark principles in the writer's mind, 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 national character (or, according to the philosophical and historical terminology of the 1830-1840s, “spirit”), it acquires a social connotation in Gogol’s work. In “Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka” the people appear as the guardian and bearer national foundations lives lost by the educated classes. This conflict determined the nature of the depiction of life, under the “cheerful nationality” (Belinsky) which hid a longing for the former Zaporozhye freedom of the enslaved “Dikan Cossacks”.

The artistic world of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” is woven from motifs of Ukrainian folklore, taken from a variety of genres - heroic-historical “thoughts”, lyrical and ritual songs, fairy tales, anecdotes. However, the motley picture of people’s life does not disintegrate under Gogol’s pen into many colorful pictures of everyday life because it turns out to be one angle, according to Pushkin’s definition, “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 that unites the stories of the cycle, tale - folk vernacular, which is both a means of distinguishing the author’s speech from the speech of his heroes, and the subject of artistic depiction. In the third chapter of “Sorochinskaya Fair”, the narrator, almost imperceptibly for the reader, transfers the initiative of storytelling to a person from the crowd, who initiates Cherevik into the tricks red scrolls. He convinces the listeners of the failure of the fair, because “the assessor - so that he would not have to wipe his lips after the master’s plum - set aside a damned place for the fair, where, even if you crack it, you won’t let a grain go down.” In “The Night Before Christmas,” the author-narrator, giving the floor to Vakula, who turned to Patsyuk, endows the blacksmith with words that express the people’s idea of ​​respect: “I came to you, Patsyuk, God grant you everything, all good things in abundance, bread in proportion !”, and then comments: “The blacksmith sometimes knew how to screw in a fashionable word; He became proficient in this when he was still in Poltava, when he painted the centurion’s plank fence.” Here is the characteristic of Vakula, which makes him stand out 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 the special comedy of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, motivated by the artistic function of their “publisher” - the beekeeper Rudy Panka and other related storytellers.

That is why the role is so significant preface to “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, written on behalf of Rudy Panka as the bearer of the speech norm not of the author, but of his storytellers. 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. Thus, the vernacular - tale, and therefore the spiritual appearance of the characters in “Sorochinskaya Fair” and “The Night Before Christmas” are no different from one another, but the time in the first story is related to the present, takes place before the eyes of the author-narrator, the action of the second dated to the reign of Catherine II, when the decree promulgated in 1775 was being prepared to deprive the Zaporozhye army of all liberties and privileges.

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

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

Fascinated by “historical knowledge,” Gogol actively collects and processes material on the history of Ukraine. “It seems to me,” the writer admitted to one of his correspondents at that time, “that I will write it, that I will say a lot of new things that have not been said before.” And indeed, the new things that Gogol spoke about were 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 Ukraine’s struggle for national independence from the Polish lordship, Gogol does not even give an exact chronology of events, attributing the action either to the 15th or 16th centuries. 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, in “Taras Bulba” there is almost not a single historical or lyrical-epic motif that does not have its source in Ukrainian folklore, in its historical thoughts and songs. The national consciousness imprinted in them receives its personification in the “heroic,” as Belinsky defines it, character of Ataman Bulba.

The image of Taras Bulba is the predecessor of the image of Pugachev in Pushkin’s “The Captain’s Daughter”. However, unlike Pushkin’s character of the leader of the people’s freemen, Bulba is not a social, but a national-historical character. 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 Panko // Pushkin A. S. Poli. collection cit.: in 10 volumes. T. 7. 1978. P. 237.

Last September I went to Ukraine. Before the trip I read Gogol. Mixed feelings - on the one hand, familiar plots from childhood. On the other hand, jokes about husband-wife relationships (and this is generally across the page, in the spirit of “there are so many good girls; it’s just unclear where wives come from”) are somehow no longer funny, the comic plot with evenly spaced pianos in the bushes doesn’t even pull on Feydeau. I probably only really liked “Old World Landowners” and “Taras Bulba”.

I was surprised that Gogol’s name “Ganna” is not “Anna”, but “Galya”.

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

- Hello, gentleman! 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 sitting in front of the blacksmith asked the other one sitting further away.
- And you didn’t know? - said the blacksmith, - it’s me, Vakula, the blacksmith! When we passed through Dikanka in the fall, 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 cart!
- A! - said the same Cossack, - this is the same blacksmith who paints importantly. Hello, fellow countryman, why did God bring you?
- Well, I wanted to take a look, they say...
“Well, fellow countryman,” said the Zaporozhian, drawing himself up and wanting to show that he could speak Russian, “what’s a great city?”
The blacksmith did not want to disgrace himself and seem like a novice, moreover, as we had the opportunity to see above, he himself knew a literate language.
- The province is noble! - he answered indifferently. - There is nothing to say: the houses are chattering, the paintings are hanging across the important ones. Many houses are covered with gold leaf letters to the extreme. Needless to say, wonderful proportion!
The Cossacks, hearing the blacksmith express himself so freely, came to a conclusion that was very favorable to him.

In Taras Bulba, the hero jumps on a horse, “which staggered back 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 well-fed Ukraine, even in military equipment, this is somehow too much...

The same novel shows the horror of war surprisingly well. First, when Andrei sneaks into the Polish fortress and sees heaps of civilians dying of starvation there. And then, when all the Cossacks are killed in a particularly senseless way - at the moment of the siege, news comes that their native Zaporozhye has been plundered, they are divided into two parts, one is chasing the Tatars who took the Cossacks captive, and the other continues to besiege the Polish city in the hope rescue the prisoners. As a result, both of them, and the 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 “are rented by the Jews [...]. If you don’t pay the Jew in advance, then you can’t celebrate mass.” And to make it more plausible, he added that the Jews there don’t even harness horses, they ride on Christians. And that’s it - the crowd forgets about the peace signed with the Poles (yesterday this was a serious argument - it cannot be violated given word!) and goes on a hike. Hurray!!1

Jews are a separate matter. They are clearly present in the novel and play an important role. But at the same time, it is constantly emphasized that a Cossack does not kill a Jew solely because he does not want to get his hands dirty. And so it would be of one benefit to humanity.

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

Not to end on a sad note, here's the best joke in the book. “The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich” consists of seven chapters with wonderful 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 describes the meeting of two honorable persons in Mirgorod.” The most beautiful title is for the sixth chapter: “Chapter VI, from which the reader can easily learn everything that it contains.”