What were the main artistic ideas of the natural school? Natural school

The natural school is the conventional name for the initial stage of the development of critical realism in Russian literature of the 1840s, which arose under the influence of the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol.

The “natural school” included Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Grigorovich, Herzen, Goncharov, Nekrasov, Panaev, Dahl, Chernyshevsky, Saltykov-Shchedrin and others.

The term “Natural School” was first used by Thaddeus Bulgarin as a disparaging description of the work of Nikolai Gogol’s young followers in the “Northern Bee” of January 26, 1846, but was reinterpreted by Vissarion Belinsky in the article “A Look at Russian Literature of 1846”: “natural”, then is an unartificial, strictly truthful depiction of reality. The main idea of ​​the “natural school” was the thesis that literature should be an imitation of reality.

The formation of the “Natural School” dates back to 1842-1845, when a group of writers (Nikolai Nekrasov, Dmitry Grigorovich, Ivan Turgenev, Alexander Herzen, Ivan Panaev, Evgeny Grebenka, Vladimir Dal) united under the ideological influence of Belinsky in the journal Otechestvennye Zapiski. Somewhat later, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov published there. These writers also appeared in the collections “Physiology of St. Petersburg” (1845), “Petersburg Collection” (1846), which became the program for the “Natural School”.

It was to Gogol - the author of “Dead Souls”, “The Government Inspector”, “The Overcoat” - that Belinsky and a number of other critics built a natural school as the founder. Indeed, many writers who belong to the natural school experienced the powerful influence of various aspects of Gogol’s work. Such is his exceptional power of satire on the “vile Russian reality”, the severity of his presentation of the problem of the “small man”, his gift for depicting the “prosaic essential squabbles of life”. In addition to Gogol, writers of the natural school were influenced by such representatives of Western European literature as Dickens, Balzac, and George Sand.

The “Natural School” aroused criticism from representatives of different directions: it was accused of being partial to “low people”, of “mudophileness”, of political unreliability (Bulgarin), of a one-sided negative approach to life, of imitation of the latest French literature. After Belinsky’s death, the very name “natural school” was banned by censorship. In the 1850s, the term “Gogolian direction” was used (the title of N. G. Chernyshevsky’s work “Essays on the Gogolian period of Russian literature” is typical). Later, the term “Gogolian direction” began to be understood more broadly than the “natural school” itself, using it as a designation of critical realism.

The most general characteristics on the basis of which the writer was considered to belong to the Natural School were the following: socially significant topics that covered a wider range than even the circle of social observations (often in the “low” strata of society), a critical attitude towards social reality, artistic realism expressions that fought against the embellishment of reality, self-sufficient aesthetics, and romantic rhetoric.

In the works of the participants of the “natural school,” new spheres of Russian life opened up for the reader. The choice of subject matter testified to the democratic basis of their creativity. They exposed serfdom, the crippling power of money, and the injustice of the entire social system that oppresses the human personality. The question of the “little man” grew into a problem of social inequality.

The Natural School is characterized by a predominant attention to the genres of artistic prose (“physiological essay,” story, novel). Following Gogol, the writers of the Natural School subjected bureaucracy to satirical ridicule (for example, in Nekrasov’s poems), depicted the life and customs of the nobility (“Notes of a Young Man” by A. I. Herzen, “Ordinary History” by I. A. Goncharov), and criticized the dark sides urban civilization (“The Double” by F. M. Dostoevsky, essays by Nekrasov, V. I. Dahl, Ya. P. Butkov), they depicted the “little man” with deep sympathy (“Poor People” by Dostoevsky, “A Confused Affair” by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin). From A. S. Pushkin and M. Yu. Lermontov, the Natural School adopted the themes of the “hero of the time” (“Who is to blame?” Herzen, “The Diary of an Extra Man” by I. S. Turgenev, etc.), the emancipation of women (“The Thieving Magpie "Herzen, "Polinka Sax" by A.V. Druzhinin). N. sh. innovatively solved traditional themes for Russian literature (thus, a commoner became a “hero of the time”: “Andrei Kolosov” by Turgenev, “Doctor Krupov” by Herzen, “The Life and Adventures of Tikhon Trosnikov” by Nekrasov) and put forward new ones (a true depiction of the life of a serf village: “Notes hunter" by Turgenev, "Village" and "Anton the Miserable" by D. V. Grigorovich).

Directions.

Among the writers classified as N.Sh., the Literary Encyclopedia identifies three movements.

In the 1840s, disagreements had not yet become acute. So far, the writers themselves, united under the name of the natural school, were not clearly aware of the full depth of the contradictions separating them. Therefore, for example, in the collection “Physiology of St. Petersburg,” one of the characteristic documents of the natural school, the names of Nekrasov, Ivan Panaev, Grigorovich, and Dahl are next to each other. Hence the convergence in the minds of contemporaries of urban sketches and stories of Nekrasov with the bureaucratic stories of Dostoevsky.

By the 1860s, the division between writers classified as belonging to the natural school would sharply worsen. Turgenev will take an irreconcilable position in relation to the “Contemporary” of Nekrasov and Chernyshevsky and define himself as an artist-ideologist of the “Prussian” path of development of capitalism. Dostoevsky will remain in the camp that supports the dominant order (although democratic protest was also characteristic of Dostoevsky in the 1840s, in “Poor People,” for example, and in this regard he had connecting threads with Nekrasov).

And, finally, Nekrasov, Saltykov, Herzen, whose works will pave the way for the wide literary production of the revolutionary part of the commoners of the 1860s, will reflect the interests of the “peasant democracy” fighting for the “American” path of development of Russian capitalism, for the “peasant revolution”.

LLC Training Center

"Professional"

Abstract on the discipline:

"literature"

On this topic:

""Natural school" in the history of the Russian literary language"

Executor:

Borovskikh Irina Anatolevna

Moscow 2016.

Content:

Introduction.

Chronological boundaries of the school.

3.Philosophical and aesthetic direction of the school.

The main areas in which the natural school was studied:

a) thematic approach

b) genre approach

5. Conclusion.

6. Literature used.

Introduction:

“Natural school” is one of the most difficult problems in the history of the formation of the Russian literary language. Is this so...?

This is the rallying of writers around one printed organ: Otechestvennye zapiski, and then Sovremennik; a more or less conscious orientation towards Gogol’s work, which does not exclude polemics with him in some cases; a high level of theoretical understanding of the processes occurring in literature: critical articles by Belinsky, Nekrasov, Pleshcheev, Maykov. Vivid evidence of unanimity is the almanacs “Physiology of St. Petersburg” and “Petersburg Collection”. Among the writers belonging to the natural school, there were extremely bright individuals, so different from each other that it is not possible to talk about the common style or language of their works: Herzen, Dostoevsky, Turgenev and Goncharov, Saltykov and Pisemsky.

Based on this, researcher Yu. Mann pointed out that the “Natural School” is, strictly speaking, not a school (a school, from Mann’s point of view, is a community of style, theme, that is, a high degree of community). It is interesting that Vinogradov, when defining the concept of “Natural School,” united not writers, but works, believing that “poetic individuality in itself is extracurricular, it does not fit into the framework of one or another school.

It is interesting to explore the origin and development of the principles of the “Natural School” in the work of its individual representatives.

In determining the composition of the participants, we proceed from the fact that the decisive factors are not the personal contacts of the artists, not the circle closeness that develops around Belinsky, but loyalty to certain creative principles that arose under the influence of the general literary situation and the ideological and artistic needs of the time.

Let's try to reveal the concept of the “Natural School” and prove that it was a cultural phenomenon and took an aesthetic position in Russian literature.

Chronological boundaries of the school .

An analysis of the works of writers undoubtedly associated with the “Natural School”, developing in its mainstream, and then outgrowing its framework, proves the impossibility of strictly limiting the time of the school’s existence. On the one hand, certain principles of the “natural school” began to take shape back in the late 30s of the 19th century, and on the other hand, in the early 50s there was no sharp disintegration of the school. In the work of some of its representatives, the artistic principles of the “natural school” continue to live until the end of the 50s. Such a bright representative as Pisemsky entered the literature only in the late 40s (although the researcher Kuleshov argued that Ostrovsky and Pisemsky are outside the boundaries of the natural school). In fact, the complex process of developing new approaches to life material, new principles of poetics cannot be artificially limited to one decade.

The most significant signs of the existence of a “natural school”:

The relationship between man and environment;

The pathos of the social study of life, when the social structure of society itself is a special and independent object of depiction;

Consideration of a person, first of all, in the system of his social connections, as a typical representative of a certain layer of people.

This was the novelty and specificity of the ideological and artistic position of the figures of the “natural school”. The poetics of the natural school developed under the influence of the task of studying and describing reality and the environment as completely as possible.

Hence the demand for “naturalness”, the utmost life-like authenticity of the image, the attraction to the unceasing “prose” of life.

Fiction and fantasy give way to observation, collection of material, its analysis, and classification.

In the works of V. Dahl, Druzhinin, Panaev, Butkov, V. Sollogub, the “physiological” essay and the story and moral narrative that grew on their basis received initial development.

With the appearance of the works of Turgenev, Goncharov, Herzen, Dostoevsky, Saltykov, Grigorovich, Pisemsky, Nekrasov, Ostrovsky, a new period begins in the history of the “natural school”. The leading genres are stories and novels.

Philosophical and aesthetic foundations of the natural school.

Vinogradov, Kuleshov, and Mann saw the unity of the “natural school” differently. It is obvious that the work of specific writers and critics can never entirely fit within the framework of any artistic and philosophical doctrine.

For Belinsky, the “natural school” was just that: a school, a direction, albeit of a “broad type” in artistic terms. The very word “school” implies something that does not arise arbitrarily, but is created consciously, with some pre-given goals in mind.

In ideological terms, it is a certain system of views on reality, its content, leading trends, possibilities and ways of its development. A common worldview is an important condition for the formation of a literary school. And meanwhile, the literary school is united, first of all, by structural and poetic aspects. Thus, young writers of the 40s adopted Gogol’s techniques, but not Gogol’s worldview.

According to Belinsky, a genius creates what and when he wants; his activity cannot be predicted and directed. His works are inexhaustible in the number of possible interpretations. One of the tasks of fiction, Belinsky believed, was the promotion of advanced scientific ideas.

At the origins of the “Natural School” are Belinsky and Herzen, who were largely brought up on the ideas of Hegel. Even later, arguing with him, this generation retained the Hegelian structure of thinking, commitment to rationalism, categories such as historicism, and the primacy of objective reality over subjective perception.

However, it is worth noting that Hegelian historicism and the “Russian idea” derived from it are by no means the exclusive property of Belinsky and the circle of writers who united around the “Notes of the Fatherland” in the early 40s.

Thus, Moscow Slavophiles, based on the same historical and philosophical premises as Belinsky, made opposite conclusions: yes, the Russian nation has reached world-historical boundaries; Yes, history is the key to modernity, but the full realization of the “spirit” of the nation and the great future glory lies not so much in the successes of civilization and Western enlightenment, as Belinsky and Herzen believed, but primarily in the manifestation of Orthodox-Byzantine principles.

So, although Hegel’s ideas were based on the “natural school,” they did not determine its originality against the literary background of the era of the 40s.

The name “Natural School” was first used by Bulgarin in the feuilleton “Northern Bee” dated January 26, 1846. Under Bulgarin’s pen, this word was a dirty word. In the mouth of Belinsky - the banner of Russian realistic literature. Both defenders and enemies, and later researchers of the “natural school,” attributed to it the work of young writers who entered literature after Pushkin and Lermontov, directly following Gogol, Goncharov and Dostoevsky, Nekrasov and others.

Belinsky, in his annual review “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847,” wrote: “The Natural School” is in the foreground of Russian literature. Belinsky attributed the first steps of the “Natural School” to the beginning of the 40s. Its final chronological boundary was later determined to be the beginning of the 50s. Thus, the Natural School covers a decade of Russian literature.

According to Mann, one of the brightest decades, when all those who in the second half of the 19th century were destined to form the basis of Russian literature declared themselves.

Now the concept of “natural school” is one of the generally accepted and most commonly used.

Researchers Blagoy, Bursov, Pospelov, Sokolov addressed the problem of the “natural school”.

The main directions in which the “Natural School” was studied.

Most commonthematic approach . The “Natural School” began with sketches of the city, broadly depicted the life of officials, but did not limit itself to this, but addressed the most disadvantaged segments of the population of the Russian capital: janitors (Dal), organ grinders (Grigorovich), merchant clerks and shopkeepers (Ostrovsky), declassed inhabitants of the St. Petersburg slums (“Petersburg Corners” by Nekrasov). A typical hero of the natural school was a democrat - a commoner who defended his right to exist.

Genre approach. Researcher Tseitlin in his doctoral dissertation examines the formation of the “Natural School” mainly as the development of the “Russian physiological essay.” In his opinion, the natural school owed its birth to physiological studies. Mann also agrees with this conclusion.

A. Herzen's first novel “Who is to Blame?” in 1847. Artist-publicist,

The writer is a researcher and thinker, drawing on the power of deep social and philosophical thought. Herzen enriches the art of words,

artistic principles of realism with the achievements of science and philosophy, sociology and history. According to Prutskov, Herzen is the founder of the artistic and journalistic novel in Russian literature, in which science and poetry, artistry and journalism merged into one whole.

Belinsky especially emphasized the presence in Herzen’s work of a synthesis of philosophical thought and artistry. In this synthesis, he sees the uniqueness of the writer, the strength of his advantage over his contemporaries. Herzen expanded the scope of art and opened up new creative possibilities for him. Belinsky notes that the author of “Who is to Blame?” “he knew how to bring the mind to poetry, to turn thoughts into living faces...” Belinsky calls Herzen “a predominantly thinking and conscious nature”

The novel is a unique synthesis of an artistic reflection of life with a scientific and philosophical analysis of social phenomena and human characters. The artistic structure of the novel is original, it testifies to the bold innovation of the writer. For the first time in the novel, Herzen brought together a plebeian and a nobleman, a general. He made this collision the artistic core of his depiction of the life of the novel's heroes.

With the development of the “Natural School,” prose genres began to dominate in literature. The desire for facts, for accuracy and reliability also put forward new principles of plotting - not novelistic, but essayistic. Popular genres in the 40s were essays, memoirs, travel, short stories, social - everyday and social - psychological stories. The socio-psychological novel is also beginning to occupy an important place, the flourishing of which in the second half of the 19th century predetermined the glory of Russian realistic prose.

At that time, the principles of the “Natural School” were transferred to poetry (poems by Nekrasov, Ogarev, poems by Turgenev) and drama (Turgenev).

The language of literature is also being democratized. The language of newspapers and journalism, vernacular language, professionalism and dialectisms are introduced into artistic speech. The social pathos and democratic content of the “Natural School” influenced advanced Russian art: visual (P.A. Fedotov) and musical (A.S. Dargomyzhsky, M.P. Mussorgsky).

Conclusion.

“Natural school” in the history of the Russian literary language took an aesthetic position and was a cultural phenomenon.

Belinsky argued that the “Natural School” is in the forefront of Russian literature. Under the motto of the “Gogolian direction,” the “Natural School” united the best writers of the time, although different in their worldview. These writers expanded the area of ​​Russian life, which received the right to be depicted in art. They turned to the reproduction of the lower strata of society, denied serfdom, the destructive power of money and officials, and the evils of the social system that disfigure the human personality.

For some writers, the denial of social injustice has grown into a depiction of the growing protest of the most disadvantaged (“Poor People” by Dostoevsky, “Confused Affair” by Saltykov, poems by Nekrasov and his essay “Petersburg Corners”, “Anton Goremyk” by Grigorovich)

Used Books:

Kuleshov V.I., Natural school in Russian literature of the 19th century, M., 1965.

Pospelov G.N., History of Russian literature of the 19th century, vol. 2, part 1, M., 1962

Materials from the sitehttp:// feb- web. ru

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NATURAL SCHOOL

The literary map of the 40s - early 50s of the last century is extremely colorful and diverse. At the beginning of the 40s, Baratynsky’s activities were still continuing; The late 40s and early 50s saw the rise of Tyutchev's poetic activity. In the 40s, Zhukovsky created a translation of the Odyssey (1842-1849); Thus, twenty years later, the Russian reader received a perfect translation of the second Homeric poem. At the same time, Zhukovsky completed his cycle of fairy tales, begun back in 1831: one of his best works, based on Russian folklore motifs, “The Tale of Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf” (1845), was published. All this not only enriched the overall picture of artistic life, but also concealed prospects for subsequent development.

However, the decisive role at this time was played by works united by the concept of “natural school”. “The natural school now stands in the foreground of Russian literature,” Belinsky stated in the article “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847.”

At the beginning of the natural school we are faced with an interesting historical and literary paradox. Why was F.V. Bulgarin’s scolding expression (it was he who in one of the feuilletons of “The Northern Bee” in 1846 dubbed the new literary phenomenon “natural school”) was instantly picked up by contemporaries, turned into an aesthetic slogan, a cry, a spell, and later - a literary term? Because it grew from the root concept of a new direction - nature, natural. One of the first publications of this direction was called “Ours, Copied from Life by Russians” (1841), and the author of the preface, persuading writers to support the planned enterprise, added: “In vast Russia there is so much original, original, special - where better to describe than in place , from life? The very word “describe,” which five to ten years earlier had sounded like an insult to the artist (“he is not a creator, but a copyist,” criticism usually used to say in such cases), no longer shocked representatives of the natural school at all. They were proud of “copying from life” as an extremely good, solid work. “Copying from life” was presented as a characteristic feature of an artist who keeps up with the times, especially the authors of “physiologies” (we will dwell on this genre below).

The very concept of the culture and technology of artistic work has also changed, or rather in the value relationship of its various stages. Previously, moments of creativity and transformation - the activity of fantasy and artistic invention - came to the fore. Rough, preparatory, painstaking work was, of course, implied, but it was supposed to be spoken about with restraint, with tact, or not at all. However, the authors of the natural school brought the rough side of artistic work to the fore: for them it is not only an integral, but a defining or even programmatic moment of creativity. What, for example, should an artist do if he decides to capture the life of a big city? - asked the author of “Journal Marks” (1844) in “Russian Invalid” (perhaps it was Belinsky). He must “look into the remotest corners of the city; eavesdrop, notice, question, compare, enter into society of different classes and conditions, take a closer look at the morals and lifestyle of the dark inhabitants of this or that dark street.” Actually, that’s what the authors did. D. V. Grigorovich left memories of how he worked on “The St. Petersburg Organ Grinders”: “For about two weeks I wandered all day long in three Podyachesky streets, where organ grinders mainly settled at that time, entering into conversation with them, I went into impossible slums, I then wrote down, down to the smallest detail, everything I saw and heard about.”

Returning to the very designation of the new artistic phenomenon, it should be noted that the hidden irony was apparently not invested in the epithet “natural”, but in its combination with the word “school”. Natural - and suddenly school! What was given a legitimate but subordinate place suddenly reveals claims to occupy the highest levels in the aesthetic hierarchy. But for the supporters of the natural school, such irony ceased to have any effect or was not even felt: they were really working to create

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aesthetically significant, the main direction of literature for its time, and they succeeded.

The natural school provides the literary historian with material available for comparison with foreign language, European material. True, the similarities cover a comparatively less valuable area of ​​literature - the area of ​​​​so-called “physiologies”, “physiological sketch”; but this “lesser value” should be understood only in the sense of artistic significance and durability (“Ordinary History” and “Who’s to Blame?” are still alive, and the overwhelming majority of “physiologies” are firmly forgotten); in the sense of historical and literary specificity, the situation was the opposite, since it was the “physiologies” that showed the contours of the new literary phenomenon with the greatest relief and typicality.

The traditions of “physiologism,” as we know, developed in a number of European countries: first of all, probably in Spain, back in the 17th century, then in England (moral descriptive essays in the Spectatora and other satirical magazines of the 18th century, and later in Essays Bose" (1836) by Dickens; "The Book of Snobs" (1846-1847) by Thackeray and others), to a lesser extent in Germany; and especially intensely and completely in France. France is a country, so to speak, of the classic “physiological outline”; her example had a stimulating effect on other literatures, including Russian. Of course, the ground for Russian “physiology” was prepared through the efforts of Russian writers, but it was prepared gradually, not specially: neither Pushkin nor Gogol worked in the actual “physiological genre”; “The Beggar” by M. P. Pogodin or “Stories of a Russian Soldier” by N. A. Polevoy, which foreshadowed the aesthetic principles of the natural school (see section 9 on this), also have not yet been formalized into “physiological essays”; the achievements of such essayists as F.V. Bulgarin were still quite modest, and most importantly - traditional (moralizing, balancing vice and virtue). The rapid flowering of “physiologism” occurred in the 40s, not without the influence of French models, which is documented by a number of expressive echoes and parallels. For example, the almanac “The French in their own image” (“Les français peints par eux-mêmes”, vol. 1-9, 1840-1842) has a parallel in Russian literature that is already familiar to us - “Ours, described from life by Russians” (vol. 1-14, 1841-1842).

It is estimated that, in quantitative terms, Russian “physiologists” are significantly inferior to the French (research by A. G. Tseitlin): for 22,700 subscribers of “The French in their own image” there are 800 subscribers of a similar publication “Ours, copied from life by Russians.” Some differences are also noted in the manner and nature of the genre: Russian literature does not seem to know the parody, humorous “physiology” (such as “Physiology of Candy” or “Physiology of Champagne”), which flourished in France (research by I. W. Peters). However, with all these differences, there is a similarity in the very nature of “physiologism” as a phenomenon that goes beyond the genre.

“... That’s what physiology is for, that is, the history of our inner life...” - said in N. A. Nekrasov’s review of “Physiology of St. Petersburg” (part 1). “Physiology” is a synonym for the internal, hidden, hiding under the everyday and familiar. “Physiologism” is nature itself, having uncovered its veils before the observer. Where previous artists suggested reticence and suggestiveness of the image, considering them in their own way the most accurate analogue of truth, “physiology” requires clarity and completeness - at least within the chosen topic. The following comparison of V. I. Dal (1801-1872) with Gogol will clarify this difference.

V. Dahl's work “Human Life, or a Walk along Nevsky Prospect” (1843) was clearly inspired by “Nevsky Prospect”. The first page of the essay contains a reference to Gogol, but this reference is polemical: the “other”, i.e. Gogol, has already presented the “world” of Nevsky Prospekt, however “this is not the world that I can talk about: let me tell you, how for one private person the whole world is limited, in fact, by the walls of Nevsky Prospekt.”

Gogol’s work unfolds a mysterious phantasmagoria of Nevsky Prospekt: ​​thousands of people, representatives of the most different categories and groups of the capital’s population come here for a while and disappear; where they came from and where they disappeared is unknown. Dahl chooses a different aspect: instead of the flickering of faces and reticence, there is a strict focus on one character - the petty official Osip Ivanovich, about whom almost everything is reported, from birth to death - in other words, from his appearance on Nevsky Prospekt to his departure from the main street of the capital.

“Physiologism” - ideally - strives for completeness and completeness, to start a thing from the beginning and finish with the end. The author of “physiology” is always aware of what and to what extent he is studying; perhaps the definition of “subject of research” is

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his first (if implicit) mental operation. We call this phenomenon localization, meaning purposeful concentration on a selected area of ​​​​life. Localization does not cancel the attitude towards the difference between the internal and the external, the essential from the accidental, i.e. the attitude towards generality. But it is this particular phenomenon or object that is being generalized. “A painter from life” draws types, “the essence of the type is that, when depicting, for example, even a water carrier, to depict not just any one water carrier, but all of them in one,” wrote V. G. Belinsky in a review of the book “Our , copied from life by Russians" (1841). Note: in one water carrier - “all” water carriers, and not, say, typical human properties in general. It would be a big stretch to see Gogol’s Pirogov, Akaki Akakievich, Khlestakov, and Chichikov as types of certain professions or class conditions. “Physiology” distinguishes human species and subspecies in professions and conditions.

The concept of the human species - or, more precisely, species - with all the ensuing biological associations, with the natural scientific pathos of research and generalization, was introduced into literary consciousness precisely by the realism of the 40s. “Doesn’t society create from man, according to the environment in which he acts, as many diverse species as exist in the animal world?<...>If Buffon created an amazing work by trying to present the entire animal world in one book, then why not create a similar work about human society? - Balzac wrote in the preface to The Human Comedy. And this suggests that the great literature of the 40s and subsequent years was not only not separated by an impenetrable wall from “physiologism,” but also went through its school and learned some of its features.”

In the phenomenon of localization, we distinguish several types or directions. The most common type is already clear from what was said above: it was based on the description of some social, professional, or circle characteristic. Balzac has essays “Grisette” (1831), “Banker” (1831), “Provincial” (1831), “Monograph on the Rentier” (1844), etc. “Ours, copied from life by Russians” in the very first issues (1841) offered the essays “Water Carrier”, “The Young Lady”, “Army Officer”, “Coffin Master”, “Nanny”, “Medicine Man”, “Ural Cossack”. In the overwhelming majority, this is the localization of a type: social, professional, etc. But these types, in turn, could also be differentiated: subtypes, professions, classes were given.

Localization could also be based on the description of a specific place - a part of a city, a district, a public institution in which people of different groups collided. An expressive French example of this kind of localization is “The History and Physiology of the Parisian Boulevards” (1844) by Balzac. Of the Russian “physiologies” that were built on this kind of localization, we mention “The Alexandrinsky Theater” (1845) by V. G. Belinsky, “Omnibus” (1845) by A. Ya. Kulchitsky (and Balzac has an essay “The Departure of the Stagecoach”, 1832; the interest of “physiology” in “means of communication” is understandable, since they carry out the meeting and communication of various people, in an acute dynamic form they reveal the morals and habits of various groups of the population), “Petersburg corners” (1845) by N. A. Nekrasova, “Notes of a Zamoskvoretsky resident "(1847) by A. N. Ostrovsky, "Moscow markets" (c. 1848) by I. T. Kokorev.

Finally, the third type of localization grew out of the description of one custom, habit, tradition, which provided the writer with the opportunity to “through”, that is, to observe society from one angle. I. T. Kokorev (1826-1853) especially loved this technique; he has essays “Tea in Moscow” (1848), “Wedding in Moscow” (1848), “Gathering Sunday” (1849) - about how Sunday is spent in various parts of Moscow (parallel from Balzac: essay “Sunday Day” , 1831, depicting how the holiday is spent by “ladies-saints”, “students”, “shopkeepers”, “bourgeois” and other groups of the Parisian population).

“Physiology” tends to strive for unification - into cycles, into books. Small images make up big ones; Thus, Paris became the general image of many French “physiologists.” In Russian literature, this example resonated as a reproach and as an incentive. “Is St. Petersburg, at least for us, less interesting than Paris for the French?” - wrote the author of “Journal Marks” in 1844. Around this time, I. S. Turgenev sketched out a list of “plots”, indicating that the idea of ​​​​creating a collective image of St. Petersburg was in the air. Turgenev did not realize his plan, but in 1845 the famous “Physiology of St. Petersburg” was published, the purpose, scale and, finally, genre of which are already indicated by the name itself (in addition to the above-mentioned “Petersburg Organ Grinders” and “Petersburg Corners”, the book included “Petersburg janitor" by Dahl, "Petersburg side" by E. P. Grebenka (1812-1848), "Petersburg and Moscow" by Belinsky).

The book about St. Petersburg is also interesting because it was a collective “physiology” similar to

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Illustration:

V. Bernardsky. Kolomna

Engraving. First half of the 19th century

such collective “physiologies”, which were “Paris, or the Books of a Hundred and One,” “Demon in Paris,” etc. Collectivity stemmed from the very nature of localization: works adequate to the chosen area of ​​​​life were united into one whole over and above the individual differences of their creators. In this regard, in his review of “Physiology of St. Petersburg,” Nekrasov successfully said about the “faculty of writers”: “... the faculty of your writers should act very unanimously, in a common direction towards one unchanging goal.” The unanimity of the physiological book exceeded the “unanimity” of the magazine: in the latter, writers united within a single direction, in the former - within both a single direction, and a single theme or even image.

Ideally, this image gravitated towards such a high scale that even surpassed the scale of Moscow and St. Petersburg. Belinsky dreamed of capturing in literature “the boundless and diverse Russia, which contains so many climates, so many peoples and tribes, so many faiths and customs...”. This wish was put forward in the introduction to “Physiology of St. Petersburg” as a kind of maximum program for the entire “faculty” of Russian writers.

The natural school greatly expanded the scope of images and lifted a number of prohibitions that invisibly weighed down on literature. The world of artisans, beggars, thieves, prostitutes, not to mention petty officials and the rural poor, established itself as a full-fledged artistic material. The point was not so much the novelty of the type (although to some extent that too), but rather the general accents and the nature of the presentation of the material. What was the exception and exotic has become the rule.

The expansion of artistic material was consolidated by graphically-literally moving the artist’s gaze along vertical or horizontal lines. We have already seen how in Dahl’s “The Life of a Man...” the fate of a character received a topographical projection; each of her states was personified by a certain

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place on Nevsky Prospekt. In the space allotted to him, the character of the essay moved from the “right, plebeian side” of Nevsky Prospect to the “left, aristocratic” in order to finally make a “reverse descent all the way to the Nevsky Cemetery.”

Along with the horizontal method, the natural school used another - vertical. We are talking about the technique of vertical dissection of a multi-story building, popular in the literature of the 40s - and not only Russian literature. The French almanac “Demon in Paris” offered a pencil “physiology” “Cross-section of a Parisian house on January 1, 1845. Five floors of the Parisian world" (art. Bertal and Lavielle). Our early idea for a similar plan (unfortunately, the idea was not realized) was “Troichatka, or an Almanac of 3 floors.” Rudy Panko (Gogol) was intended to describe the attic here, Gomozeyka (V. Odoevsky) - the living room, Belkin (A. Pushkin) - the cellar. “Petersburg Peaks” (1845-1846) by Ya. P. Butkov (c. 1820-1857) realized this plan, but with a significant amendment. The introduction to the book gives a general cross-section of the capital's house, defines all three of its levels or floors: “lower”, “middle” line and “upper”; but then sharply and finally turns his attention to the latter: “There are special people working here, whom, perhaps, Petersburg does not know, people who make up not a society, but a crowd.” The writer’s gaze moved vertically (from bottom to top), discovering a country still unknown in literature with its inhabitants, traditions, everyday experience, etc.

In terms of psychological and moral aspects, the natural school sought to present its favorite type of characters with all the birthmarks, contradictions, and vices. Aestheticism, which in former times often accompanied the description of the lower “ranks of life”, was rejected: a cult of naked, unsmoothed, unkempt, “dirty” reality was established. Turgenev said about Dahl: “The Russian man was hurt by him - and the Russian man loves him...” This paradox expresses the tendency of both Dahl and many other writers of the natural school - with all their love for their characters, to speak “the complete truth” about them. This tendency, however, was not the only one within the school: the contrast of “man” and “environment”, the probing of some original, uncorrupted, undistorted by outside influences of human nature often led to a kind of stratification of representation: on the one hand, dry, protocol, dispassionate description, on the other hand, sensitive and sentimental notes enveloping this description (the expression “sentimental naturalism” was applied by A. Grigoriev specifically to the works of the natural school).

The concept of human nature gradually became as characteristic of the philosophy of the natural school as the concept of the human species, but their interaction did not proceed smoothly, revealing the internal dynamism and conflict of the entire school. For the category “human species” requires plurality (society, according to Balzac, creates as many diverse species as there are in the animal world); the category “human nature” requires unity. For the first, the differences between an official, a peasant, an artisan, etc. are more important than their similarities; for the second, similarities are more important than differences. The first favors the diversity and dissimilarity of characteristics, but at the same time involuntarily leads to their ossification, death (for the common thing - the human soul - is taken out of the classification brackets). The second enlivens the image with a unique and universally significant human substance, but at the same time monotonizes it and averages it (partly through the above-mentioned sentimental cliches). Both trends acted together, sometimes even within the boundaries of one phenomenon, greatly complicating and dramatizing the appearance of the natural school as a whole.

It must also be said that for the natural school a person’s social place is an aesthetically significant factor. The lower a person is on the hierarchical ladder, the less appropriate ridicule and satirical exaggeration, including the use of animal motifs, were towards him. In the oppressed and persecuted, despite external pressure, the human essence should be seen more clearly - this is one of the sources of the latent polemics that the writers of the natural school (before Dostoevsky) conducted with Gogol’s “The Overcoat”. Here is also the source of, as a rule, a sympathetic interpretation of female types, in the event that their unequal, disadvantaged position in society was touched upon (“Polinka Sax” (1847) by A. V. Druzhinin, “The Talnikov Family” (1848) by N. Stanitsky ( A. Ya. Panaeva) and others). The female theme was brought under the same denominator with the theme of a petty official, a miserable craftsman, etc., which was noted by A. Grigoriev in a letter to Gogol in 1847: “All modern literature is nothing more than, in its language, a protest in in favor of women, on the one hand, and in favor of the poor, on the other; in a word, in favor of the weakest.”

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Of the “weakest”, the central place in the natural school was occupied by the peasant, the serf, not only in prose, but also in poetry: poems by N. A. Nekrasov (1821-1877) - “The Gardener” (1846), “Troika” (1847) ); N. P. Ogareva (1813-1877) - “The Village Watchman” (1840), “The Tavern” (1842), etc.

The peasant theme was not discovered in the 40s - it had declared itself many times in literature before, either with Novikov’s satirical journalism and Radishchev’s “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow,” or Belinsky’s “Dmitry Kalinin” and N. F.’s “Three Stories.” Pavlova, then burst into flames with a whole fireworks display of civil poems, from Kapnist’s “Ode to Slavery” to Pushkin’s “Village.” And yet, the Russian public associated the discovery of the peasant, or rather serf, “theme” with the natural school - with D. V. Grigorovich (1822-1899), and then with I. S. Turgenev (1818-1883). “The first writer who managed to arouse a taste for the peasant was Grigorovich,” noted Saltykov-Shchedrin. - He was the first to make it clear that the men do not lead all the round dances, but plow, harrow, sow and generally cultivate the land, and that, moreover, the carefree life of the villagers is very often abolished by such phenomena as corvée, quitrents, recruitment, etc. “The situation here was similar to the discovery by the natural school of the world of artisans, the urban poor, etc. - a discovery that was to some extent determined by the novelty of the material, but even more so by the nature of its presentation and artistic processing.

In the past, the serf theme appeared only under the sign of extraordinaryness, not to mention the fact that many works were banned or not published. Further, the peasant theme, even if it appeared in such acute forms as individual protest or collective uprising, always constituted only part of the whole, intertwined with the theme of a lofty central character with his own destiny, as, for example, in the book published only in 1841. Pushkin’s “Dubrovsky” or Lermontov’s “Vadim”, which remained completely unknown to contemporaries. But in “The Village” (1846) and “Anton the Miserable” (1847) by Grigorovich, and then in Turgenev’s “Notes of a Hunter,” peasant life became “the main subject of the narrative” (Grigorovich’s expression). Moreover, a “subject” illuminated from its specific social side; the peasant acted in a variety of relationships with elders, managers, officials and, of course, landowners. It was not in vain that Saltykov-Shchedrin mentioned “corvee labor, dues, recruitment, etc.,” thereby making it clear that the new “picture of the world” was fundamentally different from the one that was offered in previous times by a sentimental and romanticized image of the life of the villagers.

All this explains why both Grigorovich and Turgenev not only objectively were, but also felt like discoverers of the topic. They extended that taste for nature, which determines much in the worldview and poetics of the natural school, to peasant life (Saltykov-Shchedrin spoke in this regard about “taste for the peasant”). A careful analysis would reveal in the works of Grigorovich (as well as in “Notes of a Hunter,” which we will discuss below) a strong physiological basis, with the indispensable localization of certain moments of peasant life, sometimes with some redundancy of descriptions.

The question of the size and length of the work played a constructive and aesthetic role in this case - no less than two decades earlier, at the time of the creation of romantic poems. But the question of the plot organization of the work, that is, its design into a story (genre designation “Village”) or into a story (designation “Anton the Miserable”); however, there was hardly an impassable border between both genres. For it was important for Grigorovich to create an epic work of peasant life, a work of sufficiently large volume, with the concentration of many episodic characters around the main one, whose fate is revealed by a sequential chain of episodes and descriptions. The writer was clearly aware of the reasons for his success. “Until that time,” he said about the “Village,” “there had been no stories from folk life"(emphasis added - Yu. M.). “The Tale” - unlike “physiology” - presupposed a saturation with conflicting material, presupposed conflict. The tension in “The Village” was created by the nature of the connection between the central character - the poor peasant orphan Akulina - and the cruel, merciless, heartless environment. No one from the lordly and peasant environment understood her suffering, no one could notice “those subtle signs of spiritual grief, that silent despair (the only expressions of true grief) that ... were strongly marked in every feature of her face.” The majority did not see Akulina as a person; persecution and oppression seemed to exclude her from the circle of her compatriots.

In “The Village” and “Anton the Miserable,” the connections of the central character with the environment are built largely according to the classical scheme developed

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in the Russian story, poem and drama of previous decades: one above all, one against all, or - to be more precise in relation to this case - all against one. But how this scheme is sharpened by the everyday and social material of peasant serf life! Belinsky wrote that Anton is “a tragic face, in the full meaning of the word.” Herzen, in connection with “Anton the Miserable,” noted that “our “folk scenes” immediately take on a gloomy and tragic character, depressing the reader; I say “tragic” only in the sense of Laocoon. It is a tragic fate to which a person succumbs without resistance.” The tragic in these interpretations is the force of persecution, the force of external conditions hanging over a person who is socially dependent on others. If, moreover, this person is deprived of the aggressiveness and instinct of adaptability of his other more resilient brothers, then the force of persecution hangs over him like an inexorable fate and results in a fatal confluence of unidirectional circumstances. Anton's horse was stolen - and he was punished! This paradox was emphasized half a century later by another critic, Eug. Solovyov (Andreevich), again operating with the concept of the tragic: “The scheme of Russian tragedy is precisely that a person, having once stumbled... not only no longer has the strength to get up, but on the contrary, accidentally and against his will, through the combination of God knows what circumstances, he reaches to crime, complete destruction and Siberia.”

Although in “Notes of a Hunter” the physiological basis is even more noticeable than in Grigorovich, their author - in terms of genre - chooses a different solution. The line of divergence with Grigorovich was indirectly indicated later by Turgenev himself. Paying tribute to Grigorovich’s priority, the author of “Notes of a Hunter” wrote: ““Village” is the first of our “village stories” - Dorfgeschichten. It was written in a somewhat refined language - not without sentimentality...” “Dorfgeschichten” is a clear allusion to “Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten” - “Black Forest Country Stories” (1843-1854) by B. Auerbach. Turgenev, apparently, considers it possible to draw this parallel precisely because the German writer also received a novelistic and novelistic treatment of the peasant material. But it is significant that Turgenev did not apply such an analogy to his book, apparently sensing in it a completely different initial genre setting and a different, non-sentimental tonality.

In “Notes of a Hunter” there is a noticeable effort to rise above the physiological basis to an all-Russian, universal content. Comparisons and associations with which the narrative is equipped - comparisons with famous historical people, with famous literary characters, with events and phenomena of other times and other geographical latitudes - are intended to neutralize the impression of local limitation and isolation. Turgenev compares Khor, this typical Russian peasant, with Socrates (“the same high, knobby forehead, the same small eyes, the same snub nose”); The practicality of Khor’s mind, his administrative acumen remind the author of no less than a crowned reformer of Russia: “From our conversations I took away one conviction... that Peter the Great was primarily a Russian man, Russian precisely in his transformations.” This is already a direct link to the current fierce debate between Westerners and Slavophiles, that is, to the level of socio-political concepts and generalizations. The text of Sovremennik, where the story was first published (1847, No. 1), also contained a comparison with Goethe and Schiller (“in a word, Khor was more like Goethe, Kalinich more like Schiller”), a comparison that for its time had increased philosophical load, since both German writers appeared as unique signs not only of different types of psyche, but also of opposing methods of artistic thought and creativity. In a word, Turgenev destroys the impression of isolation and local limitation in both the social-hierarchical direction (from Khor to Peter I) and interethnic (from Khor to Socrates; from Khor and Kalinich to Goethe and Schiller).

At the same time, in the unfolding of the action and the arrangement of parts of each of the stories, Turgenev retained much from the “physiological outline.” The latter is built freely, “not constrained by the fences of the story,” as Kokorev said. The sequence of episodes and descriptions is not regulated by strict novelistic intrigue. The narrator's arrival at some place; meeting with some notable person; conversation with him, impressions of his appearance, various information that was obtained about him from others; sometimes a new meeting with the character or with persons who knew him; brief information about his subsequent fate - this is the typical scheme of Turgenev's stories. There is, of course, internal action (as in any work); but the external is extremely free, implicit, blurred, disappearing. To start a story, it is enough to simply introduce the hero to the reader (“Imagine, dear readers, a person

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plump, tall, about seventy years old..."); for the end, a simple figure of silence is enough: “But maybe the reader is already bored of sitting with me at Ovsyanikov’s one-household, and therefore I eloquently fall silent” (“Ovsyanikov’s One-Manor”).

With this construction, a special role falls to the narrator, in other words, to the author’s presence. This question was also important for “physiology,” and important in a fundamental sense that goes beyond the boundaries of “physiology.” For the European novel, understood rather not as a genre, but as a special kind of literature, focused on revealing the “private person”, “private life”, there was a need for a motivation for entering this life, “eavesdropping” and “spying” on it. And the novel found a similar motivation in the choice of a special character who performed the function of an “observer of private life”: a rogue, an adventurer, a prostitute, a courtesan; in the selection of special genre varieties, special storytelling techniques that facilitate entry into the behind-the-scenes spheres - a picaresque novel, a novel of letters, a criminal novel, etc. (M. M. Bakhtin). In “physiology”, a sufficient motivation for revealing the reserve was already the author’s interest in nature, the focus on the steady expansion of the material, on the discovery of hidden secrets. Hence the spread in the “physiological essay” of the symbolism of looking out and prying out secrets (“You must reveal secrets, spied through a keyhole, noticed from around a corner, taken by surprise...” - wrote Nekrasov in a review of “Physiology of St. Petersburg”), which in will later become the subject of reflection and controversy in Dostoevsky’s “Poor People.” In a word, “physiologism” is already motivation. “Physiologism” is a non-novel way of enhancing novelistic moments in modern literature, and this was its great (and not yet identified) historical and theoretical significance.

Returning to Turgenev’s book, we should note the special position of the narrator in it. Although the title of the book itself did not arise without the prompting of chance (editor I. I. Panaev accompanied the magazine publication of “Khor and Kalinich” with the words “From the Notes of a Hunter” in order to incline the reader to indulgence), but the “zest” is already contained in the title, i.e. ... in the uniqueness of the author’s position as a “hunter”. For, as a “hunter,” the narrator enters into a unique relationship with peasant life, outside the direct property-hierarchical ties of the landowner and the peasant. These relationships are freer, more natural: the absence of the usual dependence of the peasant on the master, and sometimes even the emergence of common aspirations and a common cause (hunting!) contribute to the fact that the world of people's life (including from its social side, i.e. serfdom) reveals its veils to the author. But he doesn’t reveal it completely, only to a certain extent, because as a hunter (the other side of his position!) the author still remains an outsider to peasant life, a witness, and much of it seems to flee from his gaze. This secrecy is especially evident, perhaps, in “Bezhin Meadow,” where in relation to the characters - a group of peasant children - the author acts doubly aloof: as a “master” (although not a landowner, but an idle man, a hunter) and as an adult (observation by L M. Lotman).

It follows that mystery and understatement are the most important poetic aspect of “Notes of a Hunter.” Much is shown, but behind this many guess more. In the spiritual life of the people, enormous potentialities that are to unfold in the future have been sensed and indicated (but not fully described or illuminated). How and in what way - the book does not say, but the very openness of the perspective turned out to be extremely in tune with the public mood of the 40-50s and contributed to the enormous success of the book.

And success not only in Russia. Of the works of the natural school, and indeed of all previous Russian literature, “Notes of Hunting” won the earliest and lasting success in the West. The revelation of the strength of a historically young people, genre originality (for Western literature knew well the novelistic and novelistic treatment of folk life, but a work in which prominent folk types, the breadth of generalization grew out of the unpretentiousness of “physiologism”, was new) - all this caused countless enthusiastic reviews , belonging to the most prominent writers and critics: T. Storm and F. Bodenstedt, Lamartine and George Sand, Daudet and Flaubert, A. France and Maupassant, Rolland and Galsworthy... Let us only quote the words of Prosper Merimee dating back to 1868: “. .. the work “Notes of a Hunter” ... was for us, as it were, a revelation of Russian morals and immediately made us feel the power of the author’s talent... The author does not defend the peasants as ardently as Mrs. Beecher Stowe did in relation to the blacks, but he is also Russian The peasant of Mr. Turgenev is not a fictional figure like Uncle Tom. The author did not flatter the peasant and showed him with all his bad instincts and great virtues.” Comparison

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with Beecher Stowe’s book was suggested not only by chronology (“Uncle Tom’s Cabin” was published in the same year as the first separate edition of “Notes of a Hunter” - in 1852), but also by the similarity of the topic, with it - as the French writer felt - different solutions. The oppressed people - American blacks, Russian serfs - cried out for compassion and sympathy; Meanwhile, if one writer paid tribute to sentimentality, then the other retained a stern, objective flavor. Was Turgenev's manner of treating folk themes the only one in the natural school? Not at all. The polarization of pictorial aspects noted above was also evident here, if we recall the style of Grigorovich’s stories (primarily the nature of the depiction of the central character). We know that in “sentimentality” Turgenev saw the common point of two writers - Grigorovich and Auerbach. But, probably, we are faced with a typologically broader phenomenon, since sentimental and utopian moments in general, as a rule, accompanied the treatment of folk themes in European realism of the 40-50s of the 19th century.

Opponents of the natural school - from among its contemporaries - limited it according to genre (“physiology”) and thematic criteria (depiction of the lower strata, mainly peasants). On the contrary, the school's supporters sought to overcome such restrictions. Bearing in mind Yu. F. Samarin, Belinsky wrote in “Answer to the Moskvitian” (1847): “Does he really not see any talent, does not recognize any merit in such writers as, for example: Lugansky (Dal) , author of “Tarantas”, author of the story “Who is to Blame?”, author of “Poor People”, author of “Ordinary History”, author of “Notes of a Hunter”, author of “The Last Visit”. Most of the works mentioned here do not relate to “physiology” and are not devoted to the peasant theme. It was important for Belinsky to prove that the natural school is not regulated in thematic or genre terms and, moreover, covers the most significant phenomena of literature. Time has confirmed that these phenomena belong to the school, although not in such a close sense as it seemed to its contemporaries.

The similarity of the mentioned works with the school is manifested in two ways: from the point of view of the philological genre and psychologism in general, and from the point of view of deep poetic principles. Let's focus on the first one first. In many novels and stories of the 40s and 50s, a “physiological” basis is also easily discernible. Predilection for nature, various types of its “localization” - by type, place of action, customs - all this existed not only in “physiologies”, but also extended to related genres. In “Tarantas” (1845) by V. A. Sollogub (1813-1882) one can find many physiological descriptions, as evidenced by the titles of the chapters: “Station”, “Hotel”, “Provincial Town”, etc. “Ordinary History "(1847) I. A. Goncharova (1812-1891) offers (in the second chapter of the first part) a comparative description of St. Petersburg and the provincial city. The influence of “physiologism” was also felt in “Who is to Blame?” (1845-1847) A. I. Herzen, for example in the description of the “public garden” of the city of NN. But even more important, from the point of view of the natural school, are some general poetic points.

« Reality - this is the password and slogan of our century ‹...›. A powerful, courageous age, it does not tolerate anything false, counterfeit, weak, blurry, but loves something powerful, strong, essential,” Belinsky wrote in the article “Woe from Wit” (1840). Although the philosophical understanding of “reality” expressed in these words is not identical to the artistic understanding, it accurately conveys the atmosphere in which “Tarantas”, “Who is to blame?”, “Ordinary History” and many other works were created. In relation to them, the category “reality” itself is perhaps more appropriate than “nature”. For the category “reality” contained a higher ideological meaning. It was assumed not only the opposition of the external to the internal, not only, as in “physiologies,” something characteristic of a type, phenomenon, custom, etc., but a certain pattern of the given. Reality is the real trends of history, the “century”, opposing imaginary and illusory trends. The contrast between internal and external in the aspect of “reality” acts as the ability to distinguish a certain substantial meaning of history from a priori imposed on it, falsely understood categories. Exposing “prejudices”, and those that result in concepts, is the other side of a true understanding of reality. In a word, “reality” is a higher, relatively speaking, novel level of manifestation of the category “nature”. In relation to reality, all the characters in a work are usually taken - main and secondary. Reality verifies the correctness of their views, explains the anomalies and vagaries of life’s path, determining mental properties,

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actions, moral and moral guilt. Reality itself acts as the superhero of the work.

Specifically speaking, the literature of the 40s developed a number of more or less stable types of conflicts, types of correlation of characters with each other and reality. We call one of them a dialogic conflict, because it involves two, sometimes several, characters embodying two opposing points of view. The latter represent significant positions relevant to the fundamental problems of our time. But, being limited by the opinions of one or several people, these points of view embrace reality only incompletely, fragmentarily.

The general scheme of the dialogic conflict is drawn on the collision of the “dreamer” and the “practitioner”, and the material is borrowed from the corresponding eternal images of world art. But the processing and presentation of this material not only bears a national and historical imprint, but also reveals a fairly wide capacity for variation. In “Tarantas” - Ivan Vasilyevich and Vasily Ivanovich, that is, romanticism of the Slavophile kind, complicated by the enthusiasm of Westernized romanticism, on the one hand, and landowner practicality, loyalty to ancient laws, on the other. In “Ordinary History” - Alexander and Peter Aduev; in other words - romantic maximalism and dreaminess, which developed in the patriarchal bosom of the Russian province, and the smart and sweeping businesslike efficiency of the capital, brought up by the spirit of the new time, the century of European “industriality”. In "Who's to Blame?" Beltov, on the one hand, and Joseph and Krupov, on the other, in other words, romantic maximalism, demanding (and not finding) a broad political field for itself, and opposing it is efficiency and readiness for “small things”, regardless of the color that this businesslike attitude becomes pinkish-beautiful or, conversely, skeptically cold. From the above it is clear that the relationship between these “sides” is antagonistic and with their greater or lesser equality (in “Ordinary History” neither has advantages over the other, while in “Who is to blame?” Beltov’s position is ideologically more significant, higher ), - given their equality relative to each other, they both lose before the complexity, completeness, and omnipotence of reality.

It was noted above that the artistic understanding of reality is not in all respects identical to the philosophical and journalistic understanding. This can also be seen in dialogic conflict. The 40-50s were a time of struggle against various epigonic modifications of romanticism, as well as a time of ever-increasing battles between Westerners and Slavophiles. Meanwhile, if the dialogical conflict used each of these positions as one of its sides, it did not absolutize it and did not give it decisive advantages over the other. Rather, he acted here - in his own artistic sphere - according to the dialectical law of the negation of the negation, emanating from the limitations of two opposing points of view, seeking a higher synthesis. At the same time, this makes it possible to explain the position of Belinsky, who, being a living participant in the debate, reinterpreted the dialogic conflict into a unidirectional conflict: strictly Slavophile, as in “Tarantas,” or consistently anti-romantic, as in “Ordinary History.”

Illustration:

Innkeeper and police officer

Illustration by G. Gagarin
to the story “Tarantas” by V. Sollogub. 1845

Among the typical conflicts of the natural school was one in which any misfortunes, anomalies, crimes, or mistakes were strictly determined by previous circumstances. Accordingly, the development of the narrative consisted in identifying and exploring these circumstances, which are often chronologically far removed from their result. “How confusing everything is, how strange everything is in this world!” - exclaims the narrator in “Who is to Blame?” The novel pursues the goal of unraveling the infinitely complex tangle of human destinies, and this means biographically determining

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their tortuous and abnormal course. Herzen's biography - the novel largely consists of a series of biographies - is a consistent probing of that “evil matter” that “now hides, then suddenly reveals itself,” but never disappears without a trace. Impulses from it pass from the past to the present, from indirect influence to direct action, from the life fate of one character to the fate of another. Thus, Vladimir Beltov, with his spiritual development, pays for grief, for the ugly upbringing of his mother, and Mitya Krutsifersky in his bodily, physical organization bears the imprint of the suffering of other people (he was born in a “troubled time”, when his parents were persecuted by the cruel revenge of the governor). Biographies of episodic characters are “nested” into the biographies of the main characters (as in large frames - smaller frames); but both large and small biographies are connected by a relationship of similarity and continuity. We can say that the cyclical “Who is to blame?” implements the general tendency towards cyclicity characteristic of the “physiologism” of the natural school - but with an important amendment, in the spirit of the above-mentioned difference between “reality” and “nature”. In “physiology”, each part of the cycle said: “Here is another side of life” (“nature”). In the novel, in addition to this conclusion, each new biography says: “Here is another manifestation of the pattern,” and this pattern is the dictate of the omnipotent objectively real course of things.

Finally, the natural school developed a type of conflict in which a radical change in the character’s way of thinking, attitude, and even the nature of the character’s activities was demonstrated; Moreover, the direction of this process is from enthusiasm, dreaminess, good-naturedness, “romanticism” to prudence, coldness, efficiency, and practicality. This is the path of Alexander Aduev in “Ordinary History”, Lubkovsky in “A Good Place” (“Petersburg Heights”), Butkov, Ivan Vasilyevich’s friend, in “Tarantas”, etc. “Transformation” is usually prepared gradually, imperceptibly, under daily pressure circumstances and - in narrative terms - comes unexpectedly sharply, spasmodically, with demonstrative external lack of motivation (the metamorphosis of Alexander Aduev in the “Epilogue”). In this case, the decisive factor contributing to the “transformation” usually becomes a move to St. Petersburg, a collision with the way and character of St. Petersburg life. But just as in a dialogic conflict neither side received full advantages, so the transformation of a “romantic” into a “realist” was, as it were, balanced by the awakening of unexpected, “romantic” impulses in the worldview of a person of a different, opposite type (the behavior of Pyotr Aduev in the “Epilogue "). Let us add that this type of conflict has many analogies in Western European realism, in particular in Balzac (the story of Rastignac in the novel “Père Goriot”, the career of Lousteau or the fate of Lucien Chardon in “Lost Illusions”, etc.); Moreover, moving from the provinces to the capital functionally plays the same role as moving to St. Petersburg in the works of Russian authors.

The noted types of conflict - dialogic, retrospective study of existing anomalies, and finally, "transformation", the transition of a character from one life-ideological status to the opposite - formed, respectively, three different types of work. But they could also act together, intertwining with each other, as happened in “Ordinary History” and “Who’s to Blame?” - two highest achievements of the natural school.

When answering the question of what a natural school is, it is necessary to remember that the word “school” itself combines a broader and a narrower meaning. The latter is characteristic of our time; the first - for the time of existence of the natural school.

In today's understanding, a school presupposes a high level of artistic community, up to a commonality of plots, themes, characteristic techniques of style, up to the technique of drawing and painting or plastic arts (if we mean schools in the fine arts). This community is inherited from one brilliant master, the founder of the school, or is jointly developed and polished by its participants. But when Belinsky wrote about the natural school, although he traced it back to its head and founder Gogol, he used the concept of “school” in a rather broad sense. He spoke of it as a school of truth and truth in art and contrasted the natural school with the rhetorical school, that is, untruthful art - a concept as broad as the first.

This does not mean that Belinsky refused any specification of the concept of “natural school”; but the specification was carried out by him to a certain extent and went in a certain direction. This can best be seen from Belinsky’s reasoning in a letter to K. Kavelin dated December 7, 1847, where experimental solutions to two life situations were proposed by different schools - natural

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and rhetorical (in Belinsky - “rhetorical”): “For example, the honest secretary of the district court. A writer of the rhetorical school, having depicted his civil and legal exploits, will end up with the fact that (for his virtue) he will receive a great rank and become a governor, and then a senator... But a writer of the natural school, for whom the truth is most precious, at the end of the story will present, that the hero was entangled on all sides and confused, condemned, disgraced from his place... Whether a writer of the rhetorical school portrays a valiant governor, he will present an amazing picture of a province radically transformed and brought to the last extremes of prosperity. The naturalist will imagine that this truly well-intentioned, intelligent, knowledgeable, noble and talented governor sees, finally, with surprise and horror, that he did not improve matters, but only ruined them even more...” These considerations do not predetermine any a specific aspect of characterization, say, concentration on the negative qualities of a character (on the contrary, the positive, honest direction of both heroes is emphasized), nor, even more so, the way of stylistically solving the topic. Only one thing is predetermined - the character’s dependence on the “invisible power of things,” on “reality.”

A broad, in the spirit of Belinsky, understanding of the “natural school”, from a historical point of view, is more justified than that which is involuntarily given by today’s semantic content of the category “school”. In fact, we do not find a single stylistic coloring of unity of themes and plots, etc. in the natural school (which does not exclude the existence of a number of stylistic streams in it), but we do find a certain commonality of attitude towards “nature” and “reality”, a certain type relationship between characters and reality. Of course, this community needs to be presented as specifically and completely as possible, as a type of organization of the work, as a type of localization, and finally, as a type of leading conflicts, which is what we have tried to do in this section.

After Pushkin, Gogol, Lermontov, after the great pioneers of classical Russian literature, the natural school showed not only the development, but in a certain sense, the straightening of realistic principles. The nature of the artistic treatment of “nature”, the rigidity of the relationship between characters in the conflicts of the natural school created a certain pattern that narrowed the entire diversity of the real world. In addition, this pattern could be interpreted in the spirit that the natural school supposedly cultivated a person’s complete subordination to circumstances, refusal of active action and resistance. A. A. Grigoriev interpreted Herzen’s novel in this spirit: “... the novelist expressed the basic idea that it is not we who are to blame, but the lie in whose networks we have been entangled since childhood... that no one is to blame for anything, that everything is conditioned by previous data... In a word, man is a slave and there is no escape from slavery. All modern literature strives to prove this; this is clearly and clearly stated in “Who is to Blame?” A. Grigoriev in relation to “Who is to blame?” and “all modern literature” is right and wrong; his interpretation is based on a displacement of moments: the system of conflicts in Herzen's novel does demonstrate the character's subordination to circumstances, but this does not mean that it is given in an openly sympathetic or neutral light. On the contrary, the participation of other aspects of poetics (primarily the role of the narrator) predetermined the possibility of a different (condemning, offended, indignant, etc.) perception of this process; and it is characteristic that later (in 1847) Herzen himself deduced from the material of the novel the prospect of a different - practical and effective - biography (noted by S. D. Leshchiner). However, the critic's reasoning was fair in the sense that it covered the actual one-directionality and stereotyped nature of the leading constructions of the works of the natural school. In the critical discourse of the late 40s and subsequent years, this stereotype was denounced with the sarcastic formula “the environment is stuck.”

Apollo Grigoriev contrasted Gogol’s “Selected Passages from Correspondence with Friends” (1847) with the natural school. However, the search for deeper solutions and the refutation of patterns also occurred within the school itself, which ultimately led to the transformation and restructuring of the latter. This process can be observed most clearly in the work of Dostoevsky, especially in his transition from “Poor People” to “The Double.” “Poor People” (1846) is largely built on typical conflicts of the natural school - such as “transformation”, a breakdown of character using the functional role of moving to St. Petersburg (Varenka’s fate), as well as a conflict in which some events are motivated and explained by previous misfortunes and anomalies. In addition, we must recall the strong elements of “physiologism” in the story (description of a St. Petersburg apartment, fixation of a certain type, for example, an organ grinder - this eloquent parallel to the hero of “physiological

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essay" by Grigorovich, etc.). But the transfer of artistic emphasis to the “ambition” of the central character (Devushkin), his stubborn resistance to circumstances, the moral, “ambitious” (and not material) aspect of this resistance, leading to a chronic conflict situation - all this has already given an unusual result for the school. The result prompted Valerian Maykov to say that if for Gogol “the individual is important as a representative of a known society or a known circle,” then for Dostoevsky “society itself is interesting because of its influence on the personality of the individual.” In “The Double” (1846), a change in the artistic attitude has already led to a radical transformation of the conflicts of the natural school. Dostoevsky proceeded from some extreme conclusions of the natural school - from the distinction between the categories “environment” (reality) and “man”, from the school’s deep interest in human nature (essence), however, delving into it, he obtained results that were are fraught with refutation of the entire school.

In the late 40s and 50s, internal polemics with the poetics of the natural school acquired a fairly wide scope. We can observe it in the works of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1826-1889): “Contradictions” (1847) and “An Entangled Case” (1848); A. F. Pisemsky (1820-1881): “The Mattress” (1850), “Is She Guilty?” (1855); I. S. Turgenev (his repulsion from the so-called “old manner”) and other writers. This meant that the natural school as a certain period, as a stage in the development of Russian literature, was receding into the past.

But her influence, the impulses emanating from her, were felt for a long time, determining the picture of Russian literature for decades. These impulses were of a dual nature, corresponding, relatively speaking, to the physiological and novel level of the natural school.

Just as in French literature “physiology” influenced many writers, including Maupassant and Zola, so in Russian literature the physiological taste for “nature”, for the classification of types and phenomena, interest in everyday life and everyday life is felt in the autobiographical trilogy “Childhood” ", "Adolescence" and "Youth" (1852-1857) by L. N. Tolstoy, and in "Letters from Avenue Marigny" by Herzen (where, by the way, the type of servant is outlined and the expression itself is used - "the physiology of the Parisian servant"), and in the autobiographical books of S. T. Aksakov “Family Chronicle” (1856) and “Childhood of Bagrov the Grandson” (1858), and in “Notes from the House of the Dead” (1861-1862) by Dostoevsky, and in “Provincial Sketches” (1856 -1857) Saltykov-Shchedrin, and in many, many other works. But in addition to “physiologism,” the natural school gave Russian literature a developed system of artistic conflicts, a manner of depicting characters and their relationships with each other and “reality,” and finally, an orientation towards a mass, broad, democratic hero. The influence and transformation of this system could also be traced over many, many decades of development and further deepening of Russian realism.

Speaking about the “natural school”, it should be borne in mind that it is impossible to identify theoretical principles that explain the uniqueness of the new stage and the living literary process. Literature is always “broader” than the framework of the theory created on its basis. The artistic method of the “natural school” rather reflected the desire of theory to direct the literary process in a certain direction, rather than the desire to impose its own criteria. And yet the realities of the literary process of the 1840s - early 1850s. confirm the existence of some artistic community of principles for depicting reality, expressed in the problems of the works, in their stylistic features.

In literary science, it is generally accepted that this stage represents a phase of critical understanding of reality, the period of formation of the principles of critical realism. One of the controversial issues concerning the originality of the method is the question of the relationship between a new type of artistic thinking - realism - with romanticism, on the one hand, and with naturalism, on the other.

It is generally accepted that the realism of the 1840s, the realism of the “natural school,” began by polemically delimiting itself from its predecessor, romanticism. However, polemics in theory (Belinsky paid a lot of attention to this) are one thing, and polemics taking an artistic form are another, because polemics can arise only when there is a common interest in the subject of disagreement. Such a common interest among romantics and realists was the question of the nature of the conflict between the hero and the environment.

The romantics defended the right of the individual to resist the environment, the “crowd,” motivating this right by the sanctity of protest as a form of human self-realization. These are the heroes of Pushkin’s romantic poems, “The Demon” and “Mtsyri” by Lermontov. But so are the heroes of works of the 1840s and early 1850s. present us with various forms of romantic protest. These heroes are not exceptional personalities of romanticism acting in exceptional circumstances, but heroes of the environment that gave birth to and raised them. Writers of the “natural school” begin to explore the historical pattern of the internal decomposition of the environment, its internal conflict, which becomes the most important achievement of realism. Artistic forms of studying this conflict are presented in such works as “Poor People” by Dostoevsky, “Who is to Blame” by Herzen, “Ordinary History” by Goncharov, “Notes of a Hunter” by Turgenev. In these works we will find the entire spectrum of moral issues in the literature of the new period. The analysis of modern reality is embodied in “Poor People” in the form of a confession of a humiliated and insulted consciousness, which, however, contains the entire surrounding world and gives it a true negative assessment. Herzen's story "Who is to blame?" presents to the reader the problem of the “superfluous man” of the 1840s. and raises the question of why the same environment forms such different characters as Krutsifersky and Beltov. The ordinary story of the collapse of romantic idealism in a collision with the real world, told by Goncharov in the romance of the same name, combines both the ironic characteristics of the romantic attitude towards reality and the longing for the romantic ideal, for the manifestation of the universal in man.

In Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" the conflict between the hero and the environment is captured in a cycle of essays and stories, united by the point of view of the author-narrator. The idyll of Khor and Kalinich is replaced by a picture of folk tragedy in “Raspberry Water”, “Biryuk”, “Arinushka”.

With Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" and Grigorovich's "Village" a new theme appears in Russian literature - the theme of the Russian peasantry, which is no longer perceived by writers as a homogeneous mass opposing the hero: in this environment, both Turgenev, Grigorovich, and somewhat later Saltykov-Shchedrin will see faces and destinies of no less interest than the figure of a romantic character.

Thus, the romantic worldview of the heroes of new Russian literature constitutes, as we see, one of the most important signs of new literary thinking. At the same time, the romantic principle turns out to be included in a different coordinate system: in the study of the social, historical roots of the moral conflict between man and the surrounding world.

Along with romanticism, he played a significant role in the formation of realism in the 1840s. played naturalism. As a movement with a clearly realized program, naturalism arose in the second half of the 19th century, but already in the 1840s. the work of many Russian writers - V. I. Dahl, A. V. Druzhinin, Ya. P. Butkov, I. I. Panaev - developed in this direction mainly in the genre of “physiological” essay. So, for example, Dahl answered A. Melnikov (Pechersky) to his proposal to give his ethnographic materials an artistic form: “Art is not my doing.” Thus, Dahl admitted that he lacked the ability to generalize, choosing from the mass of impressions not the random, but the natural. The heroes of Russian "physiologies" - organ grinders, janitors, minor officials - introduced the reader to the life and customs of the inhabitants of the "corners" of life, showing the influence of the environment on human psychology, his moral outlook. In this regard, “physiology” can be considered as a stage in the formation of such an important feature of realism as typing, developing forms of typing descriptions that have generalization properties. The environment under the pen of "physiologists" took customized forms(what is worth just the image of a “green half-stuff with a small head instead of a cork” - a metaphor for a person who has lost his human appearance in Nekrasov’s “Petersburg Corners”), but these were attempts to see in the individual manifestation of the natural: the environment depersonalizes a person, deprives him of human dignity.

Naturalism of the 1840s different from the naturalism that E. Zola later promoted: “I don’t want, like Balzac, to decide what the structure of human life should be, to be a politician, a philosopher, a moralist. I will be content with the role of a scientist... I don’t want to touch on the issue of assessment political system, I do not want to defend any politics or religion. The picture I paint is a simple analysis of a piece of reality as it is."

However, the origins of this tradition are also the work of Gogol, who proved that “now the electricity of rank binds action more strongly than love.” Let us recall the “loveless” plot of “The Inspector General” and “Dead Souls” or the immortal story “The Nose”, in which all the action is built on the “electricity of the rank”. These Gogolian traditions were subsequently most fully manifested in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s “The History of a City.”

Elements of naturalism determined the originality of the literary process of the late 18th – early 19th centuries, and were reflected in the novel “The Pretty Cook” by M. D. Chulkov, “Russian Gilblaz” by V. T. Narezhny, the fables of A. E. Izmailov, the stories of M. P. Pogodina. What was conventionally called naturalism in this era was a form of expression of the self-awareness of the democratic lower classes. This art could never compete with pre-romanticism and romanticism, but it influenced the process of democratization of Russian literature in the 1840s.

So, realism in Russia since the beginning of the 19th century. takes shape in the works of Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, but only in the middle of the century it acquires a classical, complete form in the works of Turgenev, Nekrasov, Ostrovsky, Goncharov, Saltykov-Shchedrin. Realism of the 1840–1850s was destined to play a decisive role in connecting the traditions of the 1830s. with the innovation of the 1860s.

Literature of the 1830s laid the foundations for realistic typification, but its manifestation in various genres was heterogeneous: Lermontov’s poem remained romantic, Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” was built on the basis of a romantic antithesis. In "Eugene Onegin" the turn to everyday realism was only outlined, but already in "The Captain's Daughter" the features of a new artistic thinking clearly appeared. The novella and short story still had to show their capabilities in depicting the connections between man and the environment, and to comprehend the “mechanism” of social life. In the realism of the “natural school” self-knowledge of realism as a literary movement takes place.

To represent this phenomenon in the system, various approaches to its classification have been proposed. Thus, A.G. Tseitlin distinguishes in the realism of the 1840–1850s. two currents: socio-psychological, to which he includes the works of Grigorovich, Goncharov, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and socio-political, expressed in the works of Herzen, Shchedrin, Nekrasov. V.V. Vinogradov and A.I. Beletsky evaluate the work of Gogol (“The Overcoat”) and Dostoevsky (“Poor People”) as a completely independent line in the development of sentimental naturalism. The basis for this conclusion is objective reality: Gogol, and after him Dostoevsky, really bring a new emphasis to the development of the traditional theme of the “little” man. The contrast of the meager external existence of this person and the depth of the hero’s internal experiences builds the conflict of many works.

Despite the fact that the existence of the “natural school” was not secured either by statute or organizationally, and its ideas received different expressions, the main features of the new literary movement were expressed in the following:

• – critical pathos of the image of reality;
• – the search for a new social ideal, which is found in democracy;
• – nationality as a form of national identity.

designation that arose in the 1840s. in Russia, a literary movement associated with the creative traditions of N.V. Gogol and the aesthetics of V.G. Belinsky. The term “natural school” was first used by F. V. Bulgarin as a negative, disparaging characteristic of the work of young writers, but then was picked up by V. G. Belinsky himself, who polemically rethought its meaning, declaring the main goal of the school “natural”, i.e. .not a romantic, strictly truthful depiction of reality.

The formation of the natural school dates back to 1842–45, when a group of writers (N. A. Nekrasov, D. V. Grigorovich, I. S. Turgenev, A. I. Herzen, I. I. Panaev, E. P. Grebenka , V.I. Dal) united under the ideological influence of Belinsky in the journal Otechestvennye zapiski. Somewhat later, F. M. Dostoevsky and M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin published there. Soon, young writers released their programmatic collection “Physiology of St. Petersburg” (1845), which consisted of “physiological essays” representing live observations, sketches from nature - the physiology of life in a big city, mainly the life of workers and the St. Petersburg poor (for example, “Petersburg janitor "D. V. Grigorovich, "Petersburg organ grinders" by V. I. Dahl, "Petersburg corners" by N. A. Nekrasov). The essays expanded readers' understanding of the boundaries of literature and were the first experience of social typification, which became a consistent method of studying society, and at the same time presented a holistic materialist worldview, with the affirmation of the primacy of socio-economic relations in the life of the individual. The collection opened with an article by Belinsky, explaining the creative and ideological principles of the natural school. The critic wrote about the need for mass realistic literature, which “in the form of travel, trips, essays, stories would introduce us to various parts of boundless and diverse Russia...”. Writers must, according to Belinsky, not only know Russian reality, but also correctly understand it, “not only observe, but also judge.” The success of the new association was consolidated by the “Petersburg Collection” (1846), which was distinguished by genre diversity, included artistically more significant things and served as a kind of introduction to readers of new literary talents: F. M. Dostoevsky’s first story “Poor People” was published there, Nekrasov’s first poems about peasants, stories by Herzen, Turgenev, etc. Since 1847, the journal Sovremennik, whose editors were Nekrasov and Panaev, became the organ of the natural school. It publishes “Notes of a Hunter” by Turgenev, “Ordinary History” by I. A. Goncharov, “Who is to Blame?” Herzen, “The Entangled Case” by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and others. A statement of the principles of the natural school is also contained in Belinsky’s articles: “Answer to the “Moscowite””, “A Look at Russian Literature of 1840”, “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847” ." Not limiting themselves to describing the urban poor, many authors of the natural school also began to depict the countryside. D. V. Grigorovich was the first to open this topic with his stories “Village” and “Anton the Miserable,” which were very vividly received by readers, followed by “Notes of a Hunter” by Turgenev, peasant poems by N. A. Nekrasov, Herzen's stories.

Promoting Gogol's realism, Belinsky wrote that the natural school more consciously than before used the method of critical depiction of reality inherent in Gogol's satire. At the same time, he noted that this school “was the result of the entire past development of our literature and a response to the modern needs of our society.” In 1848, Belinsky already argued that the natural school occupies a leading position in Russian. literature.

The desire for facts, for accuracy and reliability put forward new principles of plotting - not novelistic, but essayistic. Popular genres in the 1840s become essays, memoirs, travel, short stories, social, everyday and socio-psychological stories. The socio-psychological novel also begins to occupy an important place (the first, completely belonging to the natural school, are “Who is to Blame?” by A. I. Herzen and “Ordinary History” by I. A. Goncharov), which flourished in the second half. 19th century predetermined the glory of the Russian. realistic prose. At the same time, the principles of the natural school are transferred to poetry (poems by N. A. Nekrasov, N. P. Ogarev, poems by I. S. Turgenev) and drama (I. S. Turgenev). The language of literature is enriched by the language of newspapers, journalism and professionalism and is weakened by the widespread use of colloquialisms and dialectisms by writers.

The natural school was subjected to a wide variety of criticism: it was accused of being partial to “low people”, of “mudophileness”, of political unreliability (Bulgarin), of a one-sided negative approach to life, of imitation of the latest French literature. Excellent definition

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