Essay: A living soul in the “dark kingdom.” Living soul in the “dark kingdom”

Alive soul V " dark kingdom"

The heroines of Russian literature amaze with their moral purity and rare spiritual strength, which provides them with the opportunity to boldly challenge strict laws and the conventions of society. Such is Pushkin’s Tatyana, Turgenev’s Liza Kalitina. Such is Katerina Kabanova from Ostrovsky’s drama “The Thunderstorm”. What makes it stand out among others? characters plays, this young merchant's wife, who did not receive any education, did not participate in social important matter? Her sphere is family, easy home activities: needlework, caring for flowers, going to church.

In Katerina's subsequent conversation with Varvara, she says unusual words: "Why do people don’t fly like birds?” They seem strange and incomprehensible to Varvara, but they mean a lot for understanding the character of Katerina and her position in the Kabanovsky house. The comparison with a bird that can flap its wings and fly eloquently speaks of how difficult it is for Katerina to endure the oppressive captivity, despotism of a powerful and cruel mother-in-law.The heroine’s involuntarily escaped words speak of her secret dream of freeing herself from this prison, where every living feeling is suppressed and killed.

Katerina’s character cannot be fully understood without her stories about happy time childhood and girlhood in parental home. Carrying away with a dream into a wonderful world full of harmony, Katerina recalls the constant feeling of happiness, joy, merging with everything around her, which she is deprived of in her mother-in-law’s house. “Yes, everything here seems to be from under captivity,” says the heroine, pointing out the sharp contrast of her present life with her sweet and dear past. It is this inability of Katerina to fully come to terms with Kabanov’s oppression that exacerbates her conflict with the “dark kingdom.” The story that happened to the heroine in childhood reveals in her such defining character traits as love of freedom, courage, and determination. And, having become an adult, Katerina is still the same. Her words addressed to Varvara sound prophetic: “And if I get really tired of being here, no force will hold me back. I’ll throw myself out the window, throw myself into the Volga. Information from the Bigreferat website!”

Love for Boris became for Katerina the reason for the awakening and revival of her soul. She is prepared by her entire forced life in the Kabanovsky house, her longing for lost harmony, her dream of happiness. But throughout the entire play, the author strengthens the contrast between Katerina’s sublime, spiritual, boundless love and Boris’s down-to-earth, cautious passion. This ability of Katerina to love deeply and strongly, sacrificing everything for the sake of her beloved, speaks of her living soul, which was able to survive in the dead Kabanovsky world, where all sincere feelings wither and dry up. The motif of bondage is constantly intertwined with Katerina’s thoughts about love. This sounds especially clear in her famous monologue with the key

In a state of severe mental struggle between the duty of a faithful wife and love for Boris, Katerina constantly returns to thoughts about her hated mother-in-law and the hateful walls of the Kabanovsky house. To suppress love, which promises so much happiness, for the sake of sad vegetation in captivity is an impossible task for a young woman. After all, giving up love means forever giving up all the best that life can give. This means that Katerina deliberately commits a sin in order to preserve her living soul, thereby challenging Kabanov’s concepts of morality. What are these concepts? They are quite clearly and specifically formulated by the peculiar ideologist of the “dark kingdom” - Marfa Ignatievna Kabanova. She is absolutely convinced that a strong family should be based on the wife’s fear of her husband, that freedom leads a person to moral decline. For this reason, she so persistently “nags” Tikhon, who is not able to shout at his wife, threaten her or beat her. Katerina’s public repentance further confirms Kabanikha in the correctness and unshakability of her views on the family.

What is the reason for Katerina’s public repentance? Maybe this is fear of God's terrible punishment? I think that the point here is not cowardice or fear of punishment, but Katerina’s exceptional conscientiousness, her inability to lie to her husband and mother-in-law, to pretend in front of people. After all, this is how the first words of her repentance are understood: “My whole heart was torn! I can’t stand it anymore!” Neither the mother-in-law, who now locks her daughter-in-law, nor the husband, who beat her a little, according to what mummy ordered, can condemn and punish Katerina more strongly than she herself. After all, she feels guilty not only before Tikhon and Kabanikha, but also before the whole world, before higher powers goodness and truth. Having committed a sin, Katerina loses the harmony with the world that lived in her. Having gone through difficult spiritual trials, through debilitating pangs of conscience, she is morally cleansed. Katerina atones for her sin through suffering. Farewell to Boris kills the heroine’s last hope for a life in which joy is still possible. She is ready to go with her beloved man to distant Siberia as an unmarried wife, but he cannot and does not want to resist the formidable uncle, hoping for a mythical inheritance.

Katerina has only one option left - suicide. And not because she was disgusted with life. On the contrary, in the heroine’s last monologue, when she says goodbye to the sun, grass, flowers, birds, her great desire to live, to love the beauty of the earth is felt. But Katerina still chooses death, because this is the only way she can preserve the best, bright, pure and sublime that lives in her soul. And the years of living in the gloomy house of the mother-in-law are tantamount to a slow death stretched out over time. Katerina rejects this pitiful semblance of life and, rushing into the Volga, affirms true life, full of joyful selfless love for flowers, trees, birds, for the beauty and harmony of the world. Maybe Tikhon feels this subconsciously when he envies his dead wife. He has boring, monotonous months and years ahead of him, which will completely kill his soul, because keeping it alive in Kabanov’s “dark kingdom” can only be done at the cost of his life. This means that in the image of Katerina A. N. Ostrovsky embodied the living soul of the people, their protest against the Domostroev religion, the oppressive conditions of reality, dependence and lack of freedom.

List of used literature and sources

To prepare this work, materials from the site http://kostyor.ru/student/ were used

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Lyrical digressions in “Dead Souls”

With every word of the poem, the reader can say: “Here is the Russian spirit, here it smells of Russia!” This Russian spirit is felt in humor, and in irony, and in the expression of the author, and in the sweeping power of feelings, and in the lyricism of digressions... V. G. Belinsky I know; If I now open “Dead Souls” at random, the volume will open as usual on page 231... “Rus! What do you want from me? What incomprehensible connection lies between us? Why are you looking like that, and why has everything that is in you turned its eyes full of expectation on me?.. And yet, full of bewilderment, I stand motionless, and a menacing cloud has already overshadowed my head, heavy with the coming rains, and my thoughts are numb before yours. space. What does this vast expanse prophesy? Isn’t it here, in you, that a boundless thought will be born, when you yourself are endless? Shouldn't a hero be here when there is room for him to turn around and walk? And a mighty space envelops me menacingly, reflecting with terrible force in my depths; My eyes lit up with unnatural power: Ooh! what a sparkling, wonderful, unknown distance to the earth! Rus!" This is a favorite. Read and re-read a hundred times. Therefore, the volume always opens itself on page 231......

Depiction of the local nobility in “Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin and in “Dead Souls” by N.V. Gogol

Pushkin and Gogol - great Russians writers XIX century. A prominent place in their work is occupied by the depiction of the life of the upper class of society. Both Pushkin and Gogol, each of them shows it in their own way. The novel "Eugene Onegin", it seems to me, occupies a central place in Pushkin's work. This is not only the largest work in size, but also the widest in its coverage of themes, characters, paintings, and places. For the breadth of its depiction of Russian life, for the depth of typical images and richness of thoughts, V.G. Belinsky called it “an encyclopedia of Russian life.” From it, indeed, one can judge the era, study the life of Russia in the 10-20s of the 19th century. Although it's time to rise national identity, the beginning of an organized revolutionary movement, the absolute majority of the nobility was not affected by these processes. The poet gave us bright pictures provincial nobility. The local nobility has always been considered main support throne. Let's see how Alexander Sergeevich draws it. Before us is a gallery of images and types. No matter how miserable the life of the landowners is in comparison with the human ideal, still, in my opinion, they are nicer than the nobility of the capital. Just because most of them are engaged in housekeeping, which means they have business in their hands. After all, high society has nothing to do with it. The fact that the master lives nearby and monitors the welfare of the peasants is also significant. But still, what amazing wretchedness! Looking through the eyes of an educated man, Onegin, we see portraits of rural playmakers. Here is Onegin’s uncle, who “for about forty years scolded the housekeeper, looked out the window and crushed flies.” Here are landowners who only talk about the farm, the kennel, wine and their relatives. Low culture, lack of high spiritual interests, imitation of foreign things, fear of the new and some kind of mental laziness - these are the characteristic features of many of them. There is a lot of cruelty in them, often unconscious. This is what the poet called “wild lordship.” So, Larina’s mother herself “beat the maids out of anger.” They are all afraid of something new that could limit their power. This is especially evident in their attitude towards Onegin, when...

My soul is not a temple, what is its purpose?

(after the novel “Cathedral” by Oles Gonchar) Know for yourself. How important is it easy? It is necessary to look into the depths of your soul, otherwise fear cries out. And in artistic creation? Pisnanya... Pisnanya will become my own reality... Why don’t you laugh? Adje could fall out of favor. This is what happened to Oles Gonchar because of his novel “The Cathedral.” Those who had an unclean soul were afraid of the “Council.” For an honest person, this is pure life, not nakedness, this is life. ...

Mysterious Russian soul” in N. Leskov’s story “The Enchanted Wanderer

Nikolai Semenovich Leskov was always interested in the characters of strong, unusual natures, paradoxical in their manifestations. This is the hero of the story “The Enchanted Wanderer.” Ivan Severyanych Flyagin tells his fellow travelers about his life with simplicity and truthfulness bordering on confession. The fate of a former runaway serf, a wanderer across the land of his homeland, is revealed to listeners and readers. Leskov calls his hero a hero and compares him with Ilya Muromets. The heroism of a simple man, who went through difficult trials without bending, is in the story symbolic meaning. The hero subdues a wild horse, defeats a steppe hero in a duel, defeats the “green serpent,” and is tempted by a woman’s charms; more than once, sacrificing himself, he saves loved ones, performs a feat of arms, languishes in captivity, baptizes foreigners, and broadcasts about the fate of the country. As if the entire traditional set of ancient Russian hagiographic literature and folklore, reflecting the heroism of a person’s walk through the passions of life, fit into Flyagin’s biography. ...

Living legend of Russian rock

Any song is like a mirror. A person sees in her what he is... Boris Grebenshchikov Rock culture long years was banned in Russia, she lived underground, in samizdat, behind the scenes of official life. This was a kind of emigration within the country: Young talents, writers, poets, bards, as a rule, worked in the public sector as janitors and watchmen in order to earn their basic food. Now there is a new century, a new millennium. Collections of poems by Vysotsky, Tsoi, Makarevich, and Grebenshchikov are published in large editions. External and internal emigrants received the right to life. True, there are no others, and those are far away......

Living soul in the "dark kingdom"

The heroines of Russian literature amaze with their moral purity and rare spiritual strength, which allows them to boldly challenge the strict laws and conventions of society. Such is Pushkin’s Tatyana, Turgenev’s Liza Kalitina. Such is Katerina Kabanova from Ostrovsky’s drama “The Thunderstorm”. How does this young merchant’s wife, who has not received any education and is not involved in a socially significant matter, stand out among the other characters in the play? Her sphere is family, easy home activities: needlework, caring for flowers, going to church.

Katerina’s first words, when she calls Kabanikha her own mother, are clearly insincere and hypocritical. This means that at first the heroine is perceived as a forced, submissive woman, accustomed to a dependent position. But Katerina’s very next remark leads us out of this misconception, since here she is already openly protesting against her mother-in-law’s unfair accusations. In Katerina’s subsequent conversation with Varvara, she utters unusual words: “Why don’t people fly like birds?” They seem strange and incomprehensible to Varvara, but they mean a lot for understanding the character of Katerina and her position in the Kabanovsky house. The comparison with a bird that can flap its wings and fly eloquently speaks of how difficult it is for Katerina to endure the oppressive captivity and despotism of her domineering and cruel mother-in-law. The heroine’s involuntarily escaped words speak of her secret dream of freeing herself from this prison, where every living feeling is suppressed and killed.

Katerina’s character cannot be fully understood without her stories about the happy times of childhood and girlhood in her parents’ home. Carrying away with a dream into this wonderful world full of harmony, Katerina recalls the constant feeling of happiness, joy, merging with everything around her, which she is deprived of in her mother-in-law’s house. “Yes, everything here seems to be from under captivity,” says the heroine, pointing out the sharp contrast of her present life with her sweet and dear past. It is this inability of Katerina to fully come to terms with Kabanov’s oppression that exacerbates her conflict with the “dark kingdom.” The story that happened to the heroine in childhood reveals in her such defining character traits as love of freedom, courage, and determination. And, having become an adult, Katerina is still the same. Her words addressed to Varvara sound prophetic: “And if I get really tired of here, they won’t hold me back with any force. I’ll throw myself out the window, throw myself into the Volga. I don’t want to live here, so I won’t, even if you cut me!”

Love for Boris became for Katerina the reason for the awakening and revival of her soul. She has been prepared by her entire forced life in Kabanov’s house, her longing for lost harmony, her dream of happiness. But throughout the entire play, the author strengthens the contrast between Katerina’s sublime, spiritual, boundless love and Boris’s down-to-earth, cautious passion. This ability of Katerina to love deeply and strongly, sacrificing everything for the sake of her beloved, speaks of her living soul, which was able to survive in the dead Kabanovsky world, where all sincere feelings wither and dry up. The motif of bondage is constantly intertwined with Katerina’s thoughts about love. This sounds especially clear in her famous monologue with the key. In a state of severe mental struggle between the duty of a faithful wife and love for Boris, Katerina constantly returns to thoughts about her hated mother-in-law and the hateful walls of the Kabanovsky house. To suppress love, which promises so much happiness, for the sake of sad vegetation in captivity is an impossible task for a young woman. After all, giving up love means forever giving up all the best that life can give. This means that Katerina deliberately commits a sin in order to preserve her living soul, thereby challenging Kabanov’s concepts of morality. What are these concepts? They are quite clearly and specifically formulated by the peculiar ideologist of the “dark kingdom” - Marfa Ignatievna Kabanova. She is absolutely convinced that a strong family should be based on the wife’s fear of her husband, that freedom leads a person to moral decline. That's why she so persistently nags Tikhon, who is unable to shout at his wife, threaten her or beat her. Katerina’s public repentance further confirms Kabanikha in the correctness and unshakability of her views on the family.

What is the reason for Katerina’s public repentance? Maybe this is fear of God's terrible punishment? I think that the point here is not cowardice or fear of punishment, but Katerina’s exceptional conscientiousness, her inability to lie to her husband and mother-in-law, to pretend in front of people. After all, this is exactly how the first words of her repentance are understood: “My whole heart was torn! I can’t stand it anymore!” Neither the mother-in-law, who now locks her daughter-in-law, nor the husband, who beat her a little because mamma ordered, can condemn and punish Katerina more strongly than she herself. After all, she feels guilty not only before Tikhon and Kabanikha, but also before the whole world, before the highest forces of good and truth. Having committed a sin, Katerina loses the harmony with the world that lived in her. Having gone through difficult spiritual trials, through debilitating pangs of conscience, she is morally cleansed. Katerina atones for her sin through suffering. Farewell to Boris kills the heroine’s last hope for a life in which joy is still possible. She is ready to follow her beloved man to distant Siberia as an unmarried wife, but he cannot and does not want to resist his formidable uncle, hoping for a mythical inheritance.

Katerina has only one option left - suicide. And not because she was disgusted with life. On the contrary, in the heroine’s last monologue, when she says goodbye to the sun, grass, flowers, birds, her great desire to live, to love the beauty of the earth is felt. But Katerina still chooses death, because only in this way can she preserve the best, bright, pure and sublime that lives in her soul. And the years of living in the gloomy house of the mother-in-law are tantamount to a slow death stretched out over time. Katerina rejects this pitiful semblance of life and, rushing into the Volga, claims true life, full of joyful selfless love for flowers, trees, birds, for the beauty and harmony of the world. Maybe Tikhon feels this subconsciously when he envies his dead wife. He has boring, monotonous months and years ahead of him, which will completely kill his soul, because keeping it alive in Kabanov’s “dark kingdom” can only be done at the cost of his life. This means that in the image of Katerina A. N. Ostrovsky embodied the living soul of the people, their protest against the Domostroev religion, the oppressive conditions of reality, dependence and lack of freedom.

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials from the site http://kostyor.ru/student/ were used

Living soul in the "dark kingdom"

Katerina’s character cannot be fully understood without her stories about the happy times of childhood and girlhood in her parents’ home. Carrying away with a dream into this wonderful world full of harmony, Katerina recalls the constant feeling of happiness, joy, merging with everything around her, which she is deprived of in her mother-in-law’s house. “Yes, everything here seems to be from under captivity,” says the heroine, pointing out the sharp contrast of her present life with her sweet and dear past. It is this inability of Katerina to fully come to terms with Kabanov’s oppression that exacerbates her conflict with the “dark kingdom.” The story that happened to the heroine in childhood reveals in her such defining character traits as love of freedom, courage, determination. And, having become an adult, Katerina is still the same. Her words addressed to Varvara sound prophetic: “And if I get really tired of here, they won’t hold me back with any force. I’ll throw myself out the window, throw myself into the Volga. I don’t want to live here, so I won’t, even if you cut me!”

What is the reason for Katerina’s public repentance? Maybe this is fear of God's terrible punishment? I think that the point here is not cowardice or fear of punishment, but Katerina’s exceptional conscientiousness, her inability to lie to her husband and mother-in-law, to pretend in front of people. After all, this is exactly how the first words of her repentance are understood: “My whole heart was torn! I can’t stand it anymore!” Neither the mother-in-law, who now locks her daughter-in-law, nor the husband, who beat her a little because mamma ordered, can condemn and punish Katerina more strongly than she herself. After all, she feels guilty not only before Tikhon and Kabanikha, but also before the whole world, before the highest forces of good and truth. Having committed a sin, Katerina loses the harmony with the world that lived in her. Having gone through difficult spiritual trials, through debilitating pangs of conscience, she is morally cleansed. Katerina atones for her sin through suffering. Farewell to Boris kills the heroine’s last hope for a life in which joy is still possible. She is ready to follow her beloved man to distant Siberia as an unmarried wife, but he cannot and does not want to resist his formidable uncle, hoping for a mythical inheritance.

Katerina has only one option left - suicide. And not because she was disgusted with life. On the contrary, in the heroine’s last monologue, when she says goodbye to the sun, grass, flowers, birds, her great desire to live, to love the beauty of the earth is felt. But Katerina still chooses death, because only in this way can she preserve the best, bright, pure and sublime that lives in her soul. And the years of living in the gloomy house of the mother-in-law are tantamount to a slow death stretched out over time. Katerina rejects this pitiful semblance of life and, rushing into the Volga, affirms true life, full of joyful selfless love for flowers, trees, birds, for the beauty and harmony of the world. Maybe Tikhon feels this subconsciously when he envies his dead wife. He has boring, monotonous months and years ahead of him, which will completely kill his soul, because keeping it alive in Kabanov’s “dark kingdom” can only be done at the cost of his life. This means that in the image of Katerina A. N. Ostrovsky embodied the living soul of the people, their protest against the Domostroev religion, the oppressive conditions of reality, dependence and lack of freedom.

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials from the site http://kostyor.ru/student/ were used

In their program articles 1860 When the real one will come day? (analysis of the novel by I. Turgenev The day before, after which Turgenev broke off relations with Sovremennik) and A ray of light in the dark kingdom (about the drama by A. N. Ostrovsky The Thunderstorm) Dobrolyubov directly called for the liberation of the homeland from the “internal enemy,” which he considered the autocracy. Despite numerous censorship notes, the revolutionary meaning of the articles...

To come into derogation... smart people They notice that our time is getting shorter.” And indeed, time works against the “dark kingdom”. Ostrovsky comes to large-scale artistic generalizations in the play and creates almost symbolic images (thunderstorm). Noteworthy is the remark at the beginning fourth act plays: “In the foreground is a narrow gallery with the arches of an ancient building that is beginning to collapse...

He, in my opinion, does not oppose Kalinov’s little world; he humbly endures not only ridicule, but also obvious rudeness. However, it is this weak-willed creature that the author instructs to characterize the “dark kingdom.” It seems as if Kalinov is fenced off from the rest of the world by a high fence and lives some kind of special, closed life. Ostrovsky focused on the most important...

Theirs is different. Only one person does not belong to the Kalinovsky world by birth and upbringing, and is not similar to other residents of the city in appearance and manners - Boris, “a young man, decently educated,” according to Ostrovsky’s remark. But even though he is a stranger, he is still captured by Kalinov, cannot break ties with him, and has recognized his laws over himself. After all, Boris’s connection with Dikiy is not even a monetary dependence. ...

Composition

The heroines of Russian literature are striking in their moral purity and rare spiritual strength, which allows them to boldly challenge the strict laws and conventions of society. Such is Pushkin’s Tatyana, Turgenev’s Liza Kalitina. Such is Katerina Kabanova from Ostrovsky’s drama “The Thunderstorm”. How does this young merchant’s wife, who has not received any education and is not involved in a socially significant matter, stand out among the other characters in the play? Her sphere is family, easy home activities: needlework, caring for flowers, going to church.

Katerina’s character cannot be fully understood without her stories about the happy times of childhood and girlhood in her parents’ home. Carrying away with a dream into this wonderful world full of harmony, Katerina recalls the constant feeling of happiness, joy, merging with everything around her, which she is deprived of in her mother-in-law’s house. “Yes, everything here seems to be from under captivity,” says the heroine, pointing to the sharp contrast of her present life with her sweet and dear past. It is this inability of Katerina to fully come to terms with Kabanov’s oppression that exacerbates her conflict with the “dark kingdom.” The story that happened to the heroine in childhood reveals in her such defining character traits as love of freedom, courage, determination. And, having become an adult, Katerina is still the same. Her words addressed to Varvara sound prophetic: “And if I get really tired of here, they won’t hold me back with any force. I’ll throw myself out the window, throw myself into the Volga. I don’t want to live here, so I won’t, even if you cut me!”

Love for Boris became for Katerina the reason for the awakening and revival of her soul. She has been prepared by her entire forced life in Kabanov’s house, her longing for lost harmony, her dream of happiness. But throughout the entire play, the author strengthens the contrast between Katerina’s sublime, spiritual, boundless love and Boris’s down-to-earth, cautious passion. This ability of Katerina to love deeply and strongly, sacrificing everything for the sake of her beloved, speaks of her living soul, which was able to survive in the dead Kabanovsky world, where all sincere feelings wither and dry up. The motif of bondage is constantly intertwined with Katerina’s thoughts about love. This sounds especially clear in her famous monologue with the key. In a state of severe mental struggle between the duty of a faithful wife and love for Boris, Katerina constantly returns to thoughts about her hated mother-in-law and the hateful walls of the Kabanovsky house. To suppress love, which promises so much happiness, for the sake of sad vegetation in captivity - this is an impossible task for a young woman. After all, giving up love means forever giving up all the best that life can give. This means that Katerina deliberately commits a sin in order to preserve her living soul, thereby challenging Kabanov’s concepts of morality. What are these concepts? They are quite clearly and specifically formulated by the peculiar ideologist of the “dark kingdom”, Marfa Ignatievna Kabanova. She is absolutely convinced that a strong family should be based on the wife’s fear of her husband, that freedom leads a person to moral decline. That's why she so persistently nags Tikhon, who is unable to shout at his wife, threaten her or beat her. Katerina’s public repentance further confirms Kabanikha in the correctness and unshakability of her views on the family.

What is the reason for Katerina’s public repentance? Maybe this is fear of God's terrible punishment? I think that the point here is not cowardice or fear of punishment, but Katerina’s exceptional conscientiousness, her inability to lie to her husband and mother-in-law, to pretend in front of people. After all, this is exactly how the first words of her repentance are understood: “My whole heart was torn! I can’t stand it anymore!” Neither the mother-in-law, who now locks her daughter-in-law, nor the husband, who beat her a little because mamma ordered, can condemn and punish Katerina more strongly than she herself. After all, she feels guilty not only before Tikhon and Kabanikha, but also before the whole world, before the highest forces of good and truth. Having committed a sin, Katerina loses the harmony with the world that lived in her. Having gone through difficult spiritual trials, through debilitating pangs of conscience, she is morally cleansed. Katerina atones for her sin through suffering. Farewell to Boris kills the heroine’s last hope for a life in which joy is still possible. She is ready to follow her beloved man to distant Siberia as an unmarried wife, but he cannot and does not want to resist his formidable uncle, hoping for a mythical inheritance.

Katerina has only one option left: suicide. And not because she was disgusted with life. On the contrary, in the heroine’s last monologue, when she says goodbye to the sun, grass, flowers, birds, her great desire to live, to love the beauty of the earth is felt. But Katerina still chooses death, because only in this way can she preserve the best, bright, pure and sublime that lives in her soul. And the years of living in the gloomy house of the mother-in-law are tantamount to a slow death stretched out over time. Katerina rejects this pitiful semblance of life and, rushing into the Volga, affirms true life, full of joyful selfless love for flowers, trees, birds, for the beauty and harmony of the world. Maybe Tikhon feels this subconsciously when he envies his dead wife. He has boring, monotonous months and years ahead of him, which will completely kill his soul, because keeping it alive in Kabanov’s “dark kingdom” can only be done at the cost of his life. This means that in the image of Katerina A. N. Ostrovsky embodied the living soul of the people, their protest against the Domostroev religion, the oppressive conditions of reality, dependence and lack of freedom.

Living soul in the "dark kingdom"

What is the reason for Katerina’s public repentance? Maybe this is fear of God's terrible punishment? I think that the point here is not cowardice or fear of punishment, but Katerina’s exceptional conscientiousness, her inability to lie to her husband and mother-in-law, to pretend in front of people. After all, this is exactly how the first words of her repentance are understood: “My whole heart was torn! I can’t stand it anymore!” Neither the mother-in-law, who now locks her daughter-in-law, nor the husband, who beat her a little because mamma ordered, can condemn and punish Katerina more strongly than she herself. After all, she feels guilty not only before Tikhon and Kabanikha, but also before the whole world, before the highest forces of good and truth. Having committed a sin, Katerina loses the harmony with the world that lived in her. Having gone through difficult spiritual trials, through debilitating pangs of conscience, she is morally cleansed. Katerina atones for her sin through suffering. Farewell to Boris kills the heroine’s last hope for a life in which joy is still possible. She is ready to follow her beloved man to distant Siberia as an unmarried wife, but he cannot and does not want to resist his formidable uncle, hoping for a mythical inheritance.

Katerina has only one option left - suicide. And not because she was disgusted with life. On the contrary, in the heroine’s last monologue, when she says goodbye to the sun, grass, flowers, birds, her great desire to live, to love the beauty of the earth is felt. But Katerina still chooses death, because only in this way can she preserve the best, bright, pure and sublime that lives in her soul. And the years of living in the gloomy house of the mother-in-law are tantamount to a slow death stretched out over time. Katerina rejects this pitiful semblance of life and, rushing into the Volga, affirms true life, full of joyful selfless love for flowers, trees, birds, for the beauty and harmony of the world. Maybe Tikhon feels this subconsciously when he envies his dead wife. He has boring, monotonous months and years ahead of him, which will completely kill his soul, because keeping it alive in Kabanov’s “dark kingdom” can only be done at the cost of his life. This means that in the image of Katerina A. N. Ostrovsky embodied the living soul of the people, their protest against the Domostroev religion, the oppressive conditions of reality, dependence and lack of freedom.

Bibliography

To prepare this work, materials from the site http://kostyor.ru/student/ were used