Prose of the Sovremennik magazine and Russian realistic novel of the mid-19th century. Russian novel of the first half of the 19th century: artistic features, themes, style
XIX CENTURY
Russian novel of the 19th century.
The genre of the novel in Russia experienced its greatest flourishing in the 19th century, when its most equal types reached maturity: social, political, historical, philosophical, psychological, love, family, adventure, and fantasy. Mastering the achievements of other genres, the realistic novel of the 19th century. widely covers various spheres of life, critically reveals social problems, and delves deeply into the inner world of the characters. The psychological novel is successfully developing (“Crime and Punishment” by F. Dostoevsky, “Anna Karenina” by L. Tolstoy) and at the same time colossal epics are being created (“War and Peace” by L. Tolstoy).
Characteristic features of the Russian realistic novel of the 19th century:
Interest in modernity, the desire to recreate it for objectivity, reliability, accuracy;
Detailing of everyday life, surroundings, social environment;
Displaying life using typical characters and typical circumstances;
Social analysis;
“self-development” of heroes, whose actions are not random, but determined by character traits and circumstances;
Historicism, the principles of which were applied by romantics in the past, and by realists even to the present day.
Great contribution to the development of the novel genre in Russian XIX literature V. made by O. Pushkin (“Eugene Onegin”), M. Lermontov (“Hero of Our Time”), I. Turgenev and M. Saltykov-Shchedrin created wonderful examples of social (and I. Goncharov - everyday) novels, closely related to current social issues problems. L. Tolstoy, F. Dostoevsky and other Russian realist writers became real masters of psychological analysis; they reflected in their works the intense spiritual search of their contemporaries. Russian realism of the mid-19th century, without losing its social urgency, turned to philosophical questions and put forward the eternal problems of human existence.
The very titles of some novels can tell the reader how different the same “Russian reality” will be for them. “Fathers and Sons”, “Crime and Punishment”, “War and Peace” are titles charged with conflict, and these conflicts are of an equal kind. In one case, there is a clash of generations, behind which there arises a historical difference in aspirations and beliefs. In another, the struggle is tragically transferred into the human soul. In the third, the formidable elements of life collide and involve individual person, but entire nations.
The Russian novel plays a special role in the process of formation and development of this genre in world literature of the second half of the 19th century, primarily the novels of L. Tolstoy (“War and Peace,” “Anna Karenina,” “Resurrection”) and F. Dostoevsky (“ Crime and Punishment”, “The Idiot”, “The Brothers Karamazov”, etc.). In the work of these outstanding writers, one of the decisive qualities of the novel reaches its peak - its ability, through in-depth psychologism, to embody universal meaning in the private destinies and personal experiences of the heroes.
While remaining faithful to the traditions of the early Russian novel by A. Pushkin and M. Lermontov, the Russian novel of the 60s was enriched with new features in the work of every outstanding artist: features of the epic - in L. Tolstoy; with a huge philosophical and psychological scope - in F. Dostoevsky, whose heroes live in direct correlation with the whole world, with the past and future of humanity.
Man and the world in the depiction of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky are in living and constant interaction. It is important for hero-seekers to understand the secret of the human personality, the basis of the universe. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky strive to identify the general laws that govern the private and public lives of people, and turn to moral problems that are revealed through the relationships of the characters. Inner monologues convey the characters’ experiences of their actions and the actions of other people, thus revealing the hidden intentions and secrets of the characters’ souls.
Contemporaries and followers of L. Tolstoy were surprised and delighted by the unusual form of the novel “War and Peace”: a wide epic scope, an in-depth analysis of individual destinies, characters and relationships of people. When creating the Iliad of modern times, Tolstoy did not copy the experience of the ancient Greeks, in whose epic the life of an individual was dissolved in the flow of external events. Readers were amazed by the brightness of the characters in Tolstoy's novel and the richness of the principles of their depiction. The strength of Tolstoy's epic narrative lies in the fact that he expanded its scope, included the theme of the masses into the historical flow and showed their decisive role.
In his novels, F. Dostoevsky (like V. Shakespeare in tragedies) refers to the image of such fact of life, which at its turning point reveals the hero’s highest mental tension - the explosion is prepared both by the character of the person himself and by coincidence social conditions. The writer’s works for the first time tell about an invisible person, rejected by society, as an individual who takes possession of eternal, epoch-making phenomena.
It can be said that L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoevsky have a special place in the history of Russian realism. It is thanks to them that Russian realistic novel has acquired global significance. their psychological mastery and insight into the “dialectics of the soul” opened the way for the artistic quests of 20th-century writers. The novel by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had a huge influence on the further development of the genre in world literature. Outstanding novelists of the 20th century - T. Mann, A. France, G. Rolland, K. Hamsun, J. Galsworthy, W. Faulkner, E. Hemingway and others - turned out to be direct followers of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
POST-REFORM RUSSIA AND THE RUSSIAN NOVEL OF THE SECOND HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY (N.I. Prutskov)
The achievements of the Russian novel in the first half of the 19th century largely predetermined the historical destinies and ideological and artistic principles of the novel of the post-reform decades. The deepest connection with the liberation movement, historicism of thinking, progressive aspiration of heroes and ideals, special interest in a person concerned not with personal success, but with the search for a cause and aware of his duty to society and the people - these are the significant trends that were determined in the novels of Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Herzen, Turgenev and Goncharov. Continuity and succession in ideological and social quests are clearly revealed in the consistent change of heroes of the Russian novel.
Pushkin and Lermontov, Gogol and Herzen, Turgenev and Goncharov created the Russian socio-psychological novel in pre-reform times. His ideological and artistic system does not fit into the usual framework of the Western European novel. The development of the foreign novel was connected primarily with the reality and with the ideas that emerged as a result of the bourgeois revolution. The latter determined the great rise of the Western European novel of the 19th century. But by the middle of the century, outstanding minds of mankind (among them many Russian writers and thinkers) began to realize that the ideas of the bourgeois revolution had exhausted themselves, moreover, they had become vulgar, degenerated, and the existing social reality did not correspond to the ideals of fraternity, equality and freedom proclaimed by the revolution. And such awareness reflected the real picture of life, in which the proletariat was already beginning to act, and its theoretical weapon - Marxism - was being forged. But the writers of the West in the mid-19th century could not yet understand the inspiring historical mission of the proletariat and the all-conquering truth of the teachings of scientific socialism; such an understanding will come much later, at the end of the century, especially in the 20th century.
Therefore, in the capitalist countries of the West, there was an acute feeling of crisis, the collapse of the revolutionary humanistic ideals of the past and, in one way or another, high art connected with these ideals. On the other hand, as a reaction to all these processes, “new” trends in sociology and philosophy began to emerge (especially after the defeat of the 1848 revolution), deviating from the precepts of the great enlighteners, utopian socialists. Similar trends appeared in art, and they revealed a departure from the traditions of the great realists.
Flaubert, for example, clearly understood the beginning of the process of decline of Western European realism; he deeply felt the tragedy of the artist in the bourgeois world, spoke about his break with reality, about his loss of the “guiding thread,” about the degeneration of creativity into sophisticated skill for the sake of mastery. In a letter to Louis Bouillet dated June 4, 1850, Flaubert bitterly admitted that European novelists had no foothold, that the ground was shaking under their feet. In European literature, according to him, there are talents and a rich experience of mastery has been accumulated. “Our orchestra,” wrote Flaubert, “is complex, the palette is rich, the means are varied. We probably understand more about all sorts of tricks and ties than ever before. No, that’s what we’re missing—the inner beginning, the essence, the very idea of the plot.”
Indicative for understanding the difficulties that befell the artist in Western European bourgeois society was the path of such a socially sensitive writer as Zola. He persistently sought not only to understand the essence of his contemporary era, marked by the struggle of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, but also to express deep sympathy for the working class (“Germinal”). However, Zola, while studying and artistically depicting the kingdom of capital and labor, was never able to understand the whole complexity of social contradictions. He found himself dependent on all kinds of bourgeois teachings and theories.
Russian literature and its leading genre - the socio-psychological novel - developed in other historical conditions, had a different soil, and therefore, already in the era of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, acquired such qualities that attracted the special attention of many representatives foreign culture. French writer Xavier Marmier, back in 1861, in articles about Pushkin and Lermontov, noted the exciting power of realism of Russian writers and suggested that the Russian people possess all the necessary qualities to, sooner than anyone else, develop that realism in literature that will become the basis contemporary art. The inextricable connection of the creativity of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol with the life of the people, the combination of truly poetic inspiration (“intangible dreams”) with sober thought, with truth (“sober reality”), the concreteness and objectivity of artistic thinking and the extraordinary simplicity of the implementation of the plan - these are the features of the creations of the founders Russian realism and the Russian novel are noted by many foreign writers.
The Russian novel of the second half of the 19th century reflected the bourgeois reality emerging in Russia. However, this latter, due to the national uniqueness of Russia’s development, was special kind. Naturally, its influence on the development of the Russian novel led to deeply unique results. It is known that the Russian bourgeoisie and the capitalizing nobility were not able to complete the work of the bourgeois transformation of Russia. They did not go further than the extremely scant bourgeois-liberal reforms carried out from above and ensuring the development of capitalism along the landowner, anti-democratic path. This immediately revealed both the ugliness of developing Russian capitalism and the squalor of Russian liberalism.
The peasant question and the question of democratic reforms were not resolved by the liberal reforms of the 60s. Therefore, other anti-liberal forces developed rapidly. The revolutionary-peasant, nationwide struggle for the transformation of Russia shook up the entire post-reform Russia, captured the classics of the Russian novel, and among them those who, subjectively, in their convictions, were far from the ideas of the bourgeois-peasant revolution. This inspired such ideas into the realistic Russian novel, gave rise to such a type of artistic thinking, and determined such ways of depicting people's life that became organically inherent in Russian realism, the Russian novel as an expression of their national identity.
After 1861 and until 1904, difficult but steady preparations for a bourgeois-democratic revolution were underway in Russia. The fate of realistic Russian literature in general, and the fate of the Russian novel in particular, were primarily connected with this process. The organic connection of the Russian novel with the revolutionary liberation movement, with the political struggle, with ideological, socio-philosophical and aesthetic quests, which emerged with all its force in the second half of the 19th century, was recognized by the advanced circles of foreign society, representatives of foreign literature and social thought.
In 1859–1861, a revolutionary situation arose in Russia, which determined the first democratic upsurge in the country. In the fate of the Russian novel, as well as literature in general, the first revolutionary situation and the general pass in the socio-economic development of Russia were of exceptional importance. It was in the 60s that novels and stories about “new people” and, in contrast to them, anti-nihilistic fiction appeared; is being formed folk novel, the epic novel and the utopian socialist novel are being created, the original prose of democratic writers is flourishing.
Sensitive to everything new and emerging, Turgenev was one of the first to sense the changes in the destinies of the Russian novel, to grasp its new possibilities and new conflicts; he realized that the time of the Onegins and Pechorins, the Beltovs and Rudins had passed and the era of the commoner had arrived - the era of the Insarovs and Bazarovs, people of social cause and struggle. Turgenev's novels "Fathers and Sons", "Smoke" and "Nove" were perceived in Western Europe and America as an artistic commentary on the Russian revolutionary events of the 60s and 70s. Turgenev played an outstanding role in gaining world authority for Russian literature. This was facilitated by the strength of Turgenev's realism in artistic reproduction and assessment of reality, numerous translations of his works and the writer's extensive personal connections with the largest literary figures in Western Europe.
Abroad, Turgenev was called the most humane defender of the rights of his people and an innovating writer who opened new paths in the literary and artistic development of mankind. Maupassant, in his article about Turgenev (1883), very accurately described one of the main features of Turgenev’s novel. It consists in the fact that the Russian novelist discarded the old forms of the novel, so characteristic of foreign prose, with behind-the-scenes threads of action, with all kinds of dramatic combinations, and created a novel without artificial intrigue, without literary incidents, free from cliches and authorial arbitrariness in constructing the plot, in handling heroes and events. Maupassant's thought about the need for a new aesthetics of the novel echoes Flaubert's judgments about the absence of a fulcrum in contemporary literature and the dominance of the formal art of intrigue in it. Both writers were looking for ways to improve the art of the novel. Russian novelists showed the way to this. They created a novel characterized by features that affirmed the aesthetics of the “ordinary norm of life.” Rejecting the methods of constructing an entertaining, spectacular and arbitrary plot, they thought primarily about a truthful depiction of reality, about the social significance of the types and events depicted. It was Turgenev, relying on the experience of Pushkin and Lermontov, who created a vivid novel about a personality whose interests are aimed at finding ways of public service. Turgenev's hero is placed in conditions of major socio-political events, in conditions of turning points in the destinies of his homeland.
In his own way, L. N. Tolstoy realized the crisis of Russian society and the pass of its history. In the center of his attention are heroes who, when faced with the life of the people, begin to realize the falsity of the landowner's existence. They are experiencing a deep spiritual crisis, are waging a stubborn, painful struggle with themselves, reaching out to the people, trying to find a relationship with them. mutual language. Tolstoy dreamed of creating such a “conceptual novel” that would capture the very essence of his thoughts about what was happening in Russian reality. " the main idea novel,” he said, “it must be the impossibility of a proper life for an educated landowner of our century with slavery.” All his misfortunes must be exposed and the means to correct them indicated.”
If Tolstoy was ready to answer his question positively - isn’t the life of the peasants better than the life of the nobility - then F. M. Dostoevsky in “Notes from the House of the Dead” (1860–1862) admitted that many of the convicts who committed a crime while defending themselves from their oppressors, are the most gifted and powerful people.
Novels of the post-reform years have become more popular in the sense that the ideological quests of many outstanding novelists, as well as the spiritual life of the heroes they create, are closely connected with thoughts about the people and often take place in conditions of direct relations with the people. The collapse of the old foundations of life and the search for its new forms is a typical element of the plots of many novels of the second half of the 19th century, starting with the novel of the revolutionary democrat - socialist Chernyshevsky and ending with the works of Ertel. With stunning realistic power and genius depth, this consciousness of the need for a radical renewal of life and man is expressed in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, in the prose of Shchedrin.
Tolstoy enriched the Russian and world novel with an artistic study of the “dialectics of the soul” and revealed the connection between the dialectics of the hero’s spiritual world and the deepest processes of life in post-reform Russia. Turgenev greatly contributed to the spread of Tolstoy's popularity abroad. He organized evenings dedicated to Tolstoy in Paris, gave reports on War and Peace, and sent Tolstoy’s novel to Flaubert, Taine, and Abou. The author of Fathers and Sons understood the contrast of Tolstoy's novels with the dominant style of French novelists and yet was confident that the French should understand the power and beauty of the novel War and Peace.
By the 80–90s, the name of Tolstoy acquired world fame. The content and form of Tolstoy’s novels made a huge impression all over the world. The famous Danish critic Georg Brandes in 1908, in a letter to the editor of Russian Vedomosti V. M. Sobolevsky, expressed amazement at the amazing power and vitality of the descriptions in Tolstoy’s works. Brandes emphasized the extraordinary depth of Tolstoy’s “Master and Worker,” and he was delighted with the novel “Resurrection.”
In connection with his work on War and Peace, Tolstoy became aware of his innovative nature, national identity and genre features of the Russian novel. He talks about the departure of the Russian novel, starting with Pushkin, from the techniques of the Western European novel. Representatives of foreign literature also write about this. Romain Rolland was fascinated not only by Tolstoy's power of individualization in the portrait gallery of War and Peace. He also drew attention to the new concept of Tolstoy's novel. The Russian author moved from a novel about the personal fate of heroes to a novel about armies and peoples, about large masses of people and historical eras. Romain Rolland called War and Peace the newest Iliad, and all Western European criticism saw in this novel a majestic revival of the epic.
The prose of M. E. Saltykov - Shchedrin is characterized by originality. His innovation responded to the living demands of post-reform Russia, it reflected the desire of the great satirist to create such a type literary prose, which would be a powerful factor in the struggle to change reality, would serve to prepare the “soil of the future.” It is enough to compare Shchedrin’s works with the works of such outstanding Western European satirists of the 19th century as Dickens and Thackeray to be convinced that the ruthlessness of denial and the clarity of political aspiration, truth and nationality, saturation with advanced humane and democratic ideals, the maturity of philosophical thought and artistic and journalistic expressiveness provided Shchedrin in world literature one of the honorable places among the most outstanding artists- innovators.
Shchedrin's realism most clearly and strongly revealed such features that, to one degree or another, were inherent in the Russian novel in general and the role of which especially increased in post-reform conditions. The direct connection of prose with the most pressing (from the point of view of the interests of the people) socio-political issues of its time is one of these features. Shchedrin believed that the novel was intended to directly depict public life. Main source Shchedrin looked for evil not in people, but in social orders, in the political system of life. This determined the features of Shchedrin’s novel, its genre features. Shchedrin, developing Gogol's legacy, expanded the boundaries of the novel in such a way that its main subject became the whole of Russian life, Russia as a whole. This is evidenced by the novel - review “The Tashkent Gentlemen”, and the historical novel - the chronicle “The History of a City”, and the actual socio-psychological novel with its traditional form “The Golovlev Gentlemen”. In his analysis of human psychology, Shchedrin penetrated to the social and political foundations of life.
Shchedrin enriched the means of fiction by introducing scientific, philosophical and political journalism into it. This tendency has already been revealed in the history of the Russian novel, but it was brilliantly developed and approved only in the work of Shchedrin. He created new type fiction, new types of novel. Shchedrin brilliantly used the diversity of artistic and journalistic forms to reveal reality in many ways.
The development of foreign literature was greatly influenced by Dostoevsky's novels. Genre psychological novel in world literature he enriched with art artistic analysis the infinitely complex and inexhaustibly deep inner world of man. The outstanding Belgian poet Emile Verhaerne, who was influenced by Dostoevsky, conveyed to Bryusov his review of the creator of “Poor People.” According to Verhaeren, Dostoevsky explores characters to the very depths, to that vague and chaotic nature that is inherent in every person; his analysis is impeccable, but at the same time he does not remain a cold observer - he knows how to be both an angel and an executioner at the same time. This is why Dostoevsky seems to Verhaeren to be a completely exceptional writer.
Foreign writers and critics did not always understand that the chaotic, confused, contradictory and dark beginning in the spiritual world of Dostoevsky’s heroes was ultimately generated not by human temperament and not by the national characteristics of the “irrational Russian soul,” but by the social conditions of post-reform Russia. But what is significant is that many foreign admirers of Dostoevsky paid attention to his humanism, to his rebellion against the bourgeois world. In the anxious and painful, often tragically ending quests of Dostoevsky's heroes, foreign readers felt a rebellious and at the same time humanistic force. This force served to fight against that system of life that doomed millions of people to suffering and death.
If Tolstoy revealed the “dialectic of the soul” in unbreakable connection with the dialectics of life and painted a picture of that great breakdown of consciousness and public relations, which led Russia to revolution, then Dostoevsky, in his own way, also came to the idea of the need for fundamental changes in life, in human character. He comprehended the ugly essence of contemporary man, corrupted by serfdom and capitalist predation, by the unbridled struggle for the power of one person over another. The writer persistently sought opportunities for the revival of the human personality; he believed in man, in the bright destinies of his homeland, although he could not understand its real paths. The novels of Dostoevsky and other outstanding Russian novelists of the post-reform era were clear evidence of the deepest and increasingly aggravated crisis of Russian life after 1861, its instability and chaos. But at the same time, they also reflected the progressive development of Russian society, which culminated in the socialist revolution.
The transitional era, when a “quick, difficult, sharp breakdown of all the old “foundations” of old Russia” took place and a new bourgeois Russia, unfamiliar, alien, incomprehensible and scary to the broad masses, was taking shape, put forward new realistic principles, original forms of the novel, its new heroes, characteristic situations and conflicts, typical circumstances of the time. “The whirlpool of increasingly complex social and political life” formed a new type of artistic thinking and caused serious shifts in the genre forms of the story and novel, essay and short story. The rapid breakdown of old forms of the entire structure of life and psyche, the emergence of a new one in the spiritual world and social relations enriched reality, expanded the arena of realism, awakened new forces in society and in man, created the ground for the further development of the moral world of individuality, for the manifestation of its “human essences” . All this placed very difficult demands on the skill of the novelist. There was a need for a new type of novel about modernity, about the change of eras and cultures, a novel that conveys the drama of the current transition in Russian history. The process of dramatizing the structure of the novel and story, their heroes, also penetrated into the works of those artists whose creative image was fully formed in the pre-reform decades (“Cliff” by Goncharov, “Smoke” and “New” by Turgenev, etc.). The increasing pace and intensity of the processes taking place in the lives and consciousness of people powerfully controlled the plot of the novel and recreated its entire artistic system. The plot of the novel absorbed the most significant problems and conflicts, situations and processes of the era. Movement from below and crisis at the top; “new people” and old Russia; various manifestations of “signs of the times” in public life and in ideological quests; breaking down outdated forms, norms of life and thinking; the history of the formation of personality from the people; awakening of the masses under the influence of new circumstances of their lives; change and struggle of different ways and generations; relations between the plebeians and the nobility; the search by the leading personality from the commoners and nobility for opportunities to get closer to the people; painful attempts to borrow “faith” from a peasant - these are the most characteristic plot elements of the progressive novel of the second half of the 19th century.
The plot basis of many novels of the post-reform era was the reproduction of the story of the awakening of an individual’s self-awareness. V.I. Lenin said that the breakdown of serfdom relations and their replacement with capitalist ones, this entire “economic process was reflected in the social sphere by a “general rise in the sense of the individual,” the ousting of the landowner class from “society” by commoners, a hot war of literature against the senseless medieval constraints of the individual and etc.” In these conditions, a hero of passionate quest appeared, a hero breaking out from his native environment, a hero - a Protestant from the people and a hero - revolutionary, bearer of the socialist ideal.
Reproduction of a new era in Russian life, the history of the awakening and rise of the sense of personality, social self-awareness, the opening and explanation of the sources of this process, its course and results required new system, new poetics of the novel and story, new ways of typification and individualization. In the prose of the second half of the 19th century, the role of the author increases, who now often acts as a storyteller or commentator, interpreter and teacher of life, introducing the reader to the process of his thought. The efforts of novelists are increasingly focused on revealing highly controversial social psychology. In the interpretation of circumstances, social, socio-economic relations come to the fore. In this case, the plot acquires an increasingly important role as a means of conveying the entire way of life, its forms, and the change of two eras in it. The structure of the Russian novel of the first half of the 19th century was often associated with the personal history of the protagonist. In the plot of the novel of that time, they played a significant role love relationship; This novel, as a rule, depicted a relatively small circle of people connected by ties of family relationships, friendship, life together in noble nests, etc. Particular attention was paid to individual psychology, to the main character, who was the center of the novel. In all this, of course, something common in the life of the entire country, in its social relations, shone through to one degree or another. But, as a rule, the latter were not the direct subject of the novel. In the living room of Lasunskaya (“Rudin” by Turgenev), the life of a fortress village was not yet acutely felt. Later, the concept of the novel changes decisively. The life of the people powerfully and persistently enters the world of living rooms, family nests and friendly circles, which recreates the very system of the novel, introduces a new vision of the world, and opens up new subjects of depiction.
In "Smoke" and "Novi", in comparison with "Rudin" and "The Noble Nest", Turgenev only enriched the structure of his novel, but did not create a new one. The same should be said about Goncharov’s “Cliff”. But how significant is this renewal of the romance system! It clearly revealed tendencies characteristic of the post-reform era, expanding the scope of the narrative itself. Pisemsky and Dostoevsky went to a deeper breakdown of their poetics of the novel.
Reshetnikov, Gl. Uspensky, Pomyalovsky, Sleptsov, Kushchevsky and other democratic fiction writers sometimes start from the “principle of nepotism” in the structure of their stories and novels, like Shchedrin and Tolstoy. According to this principle, in the realistic system of these writers, it acquires new meaning in connection with their movement beyond the boundaries of private life into the larger working life, in connection with the intrusion into the general processes characterizing the movement of life, ideas and psyche from the old to the new.
At first glance, the plot of Sleptsov’s novel “Hard Time” seems traditional: an advanced person, a revolutionary awakens the consciousness of a woman, frees her from illusions and leads to a break with her family, with the entire environment in which she lived. But it is not love that is the force that inspires Maria Nikolaevna to search for new ways of life. Therefore, the plot of the novel is not limited to a narrow circle of family, personal relationships, or the depiction of certain personal advantages and disadvantages. As a novelist, Sleptsov is associated with the Turgenev tradition (“Rudin”, especially “On the Eve”), but at the same time, as if in contrast to it, he creates his own artistic concept of life and characters. The main conflict of the novel “Hard Time” is not limited to the sphere family relations Ryazanov, Shchetinin and Maria Nikolaevna. The revolutionary Ryazanov, on the one hand, seems to introduce Maria Nikolaevna into the world peasant life, and on the other hand, she sheds all the covers from Shchetinin’s grossly selfish, landowner attitude towards the peasants. Maria Nikolaevna’s “enlightenment” arises and develops not under the influence of a feeling of love, but mainly under the influence of the real school of folk life. Depending on this, Maria Nikolaevna’s spiritual life develops, the history of her relationships with her husband, with Ryazanov, and with the peasants.
In a different form and on different material, Reshetnikov also implements the same principle of constructing a novel. Even if not always skillfully, he goes beyond the private life of individuals and families into the larger life of the working people. The writer creates a “folk novel” in which the main typical person is the working people, the “suffering environment”. Reshetnikov was the first to prove, as N. Shchedrin noted, that common life provides enough material for a novel. The appearance of such a novel was dictated by reality itself, the conditions of the post-reform life of the people, their awakening, but it was also prepared by traditions Gogol direction. For Reshetnikov, the experience of Grigorovich, the author of novels from folk life(among them especially “Displacers”, as well as “Fishermen”). However artistic structure Reshetnikov's novels, their ideological orientation, their entire poetic atmosphere are deeply different from the ideological artistic system Grigorovich. The composition of Reshetnikov’s novel “Where is it better?” clearly conveys the process of awakening feelings human dignity among heroes from the people under the influence of the entire set of circumstances of their lives.
Novelists of the post-reform era are drawn to a problematic novel, a novel of social and moral quests, attracted by heroes who, in their thinking, feelings and actions, go beyond the sphere of personal, family relationships into the big world of life of the entire country, its people, its ideological, social and ethical quest. These heroes are inspired by the ideas of serving the people, the common good, saving the homeland and all humanity, they are looking for ways to transform life and improve man. In the novel “War and Peace,” Tolstoy brilliantly merged into one whole, on the scale of an entire historical era, the personal, family, class and class relations of his heroes and the life of the state, nation, and army.
The inner life of his heroes, their aspirations and ideals are formed and developed on the basis of their relationships with the life of the entire country. The quests and thoughts of these heroes become common national character and meaning. And this is their epic nature. The author's position is also characteristic. He defines and weighs the value of his heroes from the point of view of their ability to move in their thoughts, aspirations and actions from the sphere of the private, individual, egoistic into the general sphere, into the area of the general good and happiness. All this determined the exceptional genre originality of Tolstoy’s work. “War and Peace” is a national - heroic epic, recreating the feat of the Russian people in one of the most dramatic eras in Russian history. At the same time, “War and Peace” is a realistic socio-psychological, historical and philosophical novel. It reproduces social conflicts and spiritual quests inherent in the pre-reform period, but they are thoroughly imbued with the spirit of modernity. They show the position of the writer as a participant in literary social movement 60s. Tolstoy's epic could only arise in conditions of a stormy and profound breakdown of the social system of Russian life, under the influence of the mass peasant movement and ideological quest of the 60s.
It may seem that in the novel “Anna Karenina” Tolstoy moved away from his own conquests that he achieved in “War and Peace” - The basis for such a conclusion is given by the novelist himself, who pointed out that in the novel about the Patriotic War he was occupied with the people's thought, and in the novel about Anna Karenina, the idea is family. However, Tolstoy's family novel has qualities that indicate the further development of the realistic system after War and Peace. Researchers have found that the problem of the people in Anna Karenina plays an extremely large role, but it is revealed mainly through spiritual and moral quest heroes. And therein lies a deep meaning. The artist turned from a novel about the past to a novel about contemporary reality. This reality prompted Tolstoy new way images of the hero’s inner world - in his search for a limited connection with folk life. Therefore, in the novel “Anna Karenina”, precisely in its final part, he was able to take that huge step forward in understanding reality, which was the beginning of a decisive turning point in the writer’s life and creative position, in his entire worldview.
The framework of the traditional love and family novel expanded in Anna Karenina. Tolstoy seemed to artificially add to the intimate story of Anna Karenina the completely different story of Konstantin Levin. But in reality, such a construction of the novel was natural and necessary. It did not violate its integrity, significantly increased the scale of the reality reproduced in it, and made Levin’s moral quests dependent on peasant life. And the intimate drama of Anna herself in the novel acquired a social meaning and was not, from the point of view of the spirit of the time, alien to the history of Levin’s search for life “for the soul, in truth, according to God.” From this point of view, the structure of the novel as a whole is realized, the meaning of the organic, “internal”, as Tolstoy said, and not the plot unity in it of two plot lines, the destinies of its two main characters, is revealed.
Outstanding novelists of the second half of the 19th century recognized and artistically reproduced new forms and processes of post-reform, capitalizing life. Even Goncharov, the most stable, unyielding spirit of the current time, was forced in The Precipice to significantly deviate from his established poetics of the novel (based on the depiction of pre-reform life) and expand the scope of life, using the means of plot and composition to convey the crisis of the old and the emergence of the new. And the structure of Turgenev’s novels, starting with “The Noble Nest,” acquires new features. The framework of Turgenev's novels is expanding, their plots begin to incorporate broad pictures of folk and landowner life, social movements, ideological and political struggle.
F. M. Dostoevsky, and then Gl. Uspensky felt with the greatest acuteness, to the point of tragic pain, the fermentation and chaos in the consciousness and life of the people of the transitional time. It is characteristic that in the 60s the artistic thinking of Ch. Uspensky was embodied primarily in the usual genre forms of novels, short stories and essays. “Ruin” was perceived by the writer in the process of its creation as a novel. Since the 70s, the author of “Sick Conscience” has been acutely aware of the impossibility of continuing to work in his previous manner. He resolutely rejects traditional genres that are now embarrassing for him. The writer is looking for such artistic forms that, in his opinion, could convey with all dramatic acuteness the feeling of the growing alarming instability and inconsistency of Russian life during the transitional time, would allow a living form to respond to the topic of the day generated by this time, and at the same time give If only he had freedom to express his own anxieties and pains for the position and fate of the Russian people.
The era of alarming instability, full of dramas and tragedies in the destinies of the people and the intelligentsia, “killed” Uspensky’s ability to create a novel, sharpened all his artistic thinking to the extreme, and determined the excited, “personal” tone of his works. At the same time, we should not forget that the acute impressions of the “upside down” reality fell on prepared ground. The entire psyche of the artist, with its heightened sensitivity and exposed nerves, was “open” to the dramatic reality that tormented this psyche. With such a mental structure, it was impossible to create novels, achieve artistry, remain in positions of organic thinking and create within the framework of familiar genre forms. Uspensky, like Shchedrin, boldly broke these forms. Dostoevsky, by the nature of his mental organization, was close to Gl. Uspensky. He sensed the decay and degradation of the old and shrewdly guessed the emergence of those new forces of bourgeois society, the anti-human, destructive power of which determined the tragic destinies of people. But this did not lead Dostoevsky to abandon the novel and story. The “spirit of new times” was embodied in these forms. However, their internal artistic logic acquired new features. All the features of Dostoevsky's novels, not excluding the style, tone and forms of narration, bore the stamp of the post-reform era. The structure of his novels changes dramatically after the spiritual turning point he experienced in 1863–1864. In the plots of Dostoevsky's novels wide wave the “spite of the day”, the “current moment” - the power of money, the play of unhealthy passions awakened by new times, court chronicles, political trials - pour in. Dostoevsky combines the reproduction of “low”, “dirty” everyday details with the formulation of great philosophical and ethical questions of his time. The chronicle of the past merges with the present in “Demons” and “The Brothers Karamazov”. Ups and downs, rebellion and humility, crime and repentance, beauty and ugliness, harmony and chaos - all these opposites are combined in Dostoevsky and are a unique expression of a disorderly, tragically chaotic life. Dostoevsky amazes with his reproduction of the diverse deep manifestations of life and the human spirit of the transitional time. The desire for a general synthesis of problems, forms of reproduced reality and forms of storytelling characterizes the innovation of his novels. In an artistic and philosophical generalization of the facts of life, he sometimes rises to a romantic symbol (“The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”).
Dostoevsky sharply contrasted the type of his novel with the novels of Turgenev and Goncharov, and especially Tolstoy. To characterize the various trends in realism of the second half of the 19th century, the polemics between Dostoevsky and Goncharov are indicative. The reason for this controversy was a letter from Goncharov to Dostoevsky dated February 11, 1874. In it, the author of “Oblomov” argued that what is emerging cannot be a type, since the latter “is composed of long and many repetitions or layers of phenomena and persons.” Goncharov believed that the creativity of an “objective artist” “can only appear... when life is established; it doesn’t get along with new, emerging life.” Two years later, in the article “Intentions, objectives and ideas of the novel “The Precipice”” (1876), Goncharov again returned to the question of forms of life worthy of art. “Serious and strict art,” he said, “cannot depict chaos, decay... True work art can only depict established life in some kind of image, in physiognomy, so that people themselves are repeated in numerous types under the influence of certain principles, orders, education, so that some permanent and definite image of a form of life appears and so that people of this form appeared in many forms or copies... Old people, like old orders, are living out their time, new paths have not yet been established... Art has nothing to stop at yet.”
Dostoevsky rejects Goncharov’s position that true art cannot deal with modern, unstable reality. Dostoevsky's response letter to Goncharov's letter dated February 11, 1874 has not survived. But in the “Diary of a Writer” (for January 1877), as well as in the novel “Teenager” (“Conclusion”), Dostoevsky argues with Goncharov on the issue of the forms of contemporary reality and the possibilities of its reproduction in the novel. “If in this chaos,” he writes, “in which social life has long been, but now especially, resides, and it is still impossible to find a normal law and a guiding thread, even perhaps of Shakespearean proportions for an artist, then at least who Will he illuminate at least part of this chaos, even without dreaming of a guiding thread? The main thing is that it’s as if no one cares at all, that it’s still too early for our greatest artists. We, undoubtedly, have a life that is decaying... But there is, of course, a life that is taking shape again, on new principles. Who will notice them and who will point them out? Who can even slightly define and express the laws of both this decomposition and new creation?
The author of “The Teenager” considers himself an artist who captures the processes of decomposition of the old and creation of the new. He contrasts himself with writers who reproduce completed forms and established types of reality and who, on this basis, create works characterized by completeness and integrity. Such writers, according to Dostoevsky, cannot depict modernity, devoid of stability and fullness of expression. They will involuntarily have to turn to the historical kind of creativity and look in the past for “pleasant and gratifying details”, “beautiful types”, and create “artistic complete” pictures. Dostoevsky sneers at such writers. He is ready to include all his outstanding contemporaries, especially Tolstoy, among them. There was a lot of subjectiveness in Dostoevsky’s assessments of the work of his great contemporaries. Tolstoy, already in the pre-reform years, was powerfully captured by modernity, the era of disruption and fermentation. His creative imagination I was especially struck by the character, who is in a continuous intense search for truth and truth, in a state of spiritual crisis and turning point, a break with his environment, with familiar surroundings life. And Tolstoy, under the influence of life and his own quests, had to bring his beloved hero from the nobility more and more closer to the people. In Tolstoy’s last novel, “Resurrection,” Nekhlyudov becomes a renegade of his class. The novelist introduces him to that “guilty Russia” in which he discovered with such stunning force tragic fate working people. And it is in this environment of the rejected that Tolstoy now finds his true heroes. His Katyusha Maslova, Various types revolutionaries - completely new heroes from the people.
Dostoevsky, like Shchedrin, recognizes himself as an artist of the “time of troubles.” “The work,” he declares, “is thankless and without beautiful shapes. And these types (generated by the experienced “disorder and chaos” - Ed.) ... are still a current matter, and therefore cannot be artistically completed. Important mistakes are possible, exaggerations and oversights are possible. In any case, there would be too much guessing involved. But what should a writer do, who does not want to write only in one historical genre and is obsessed with longing for the current one? Guessing and... making mistakes.” This is what Dostoevsky was - a novelist. With the entire style of his novels, he conveyed the dynamics, the beating of the pulse of his contemporary “turned over” and “fitting in” life. And like Tolstoy, but in his own ways, he managed to accomplish this, penetrating into the depths human soul. In this regard, the very composition of Dostoevsky’s novels is already indicative. The history of the formation of characters, the reproduction of various circumstances of this formation, which is so characteristic of the novels of Goncharov and Tolstoy - all this is not directly included in the plot of his novel, but precedes it, is relegated to prehistory. The main thing in the plot is the final dramatic and tragic conflicts and disasters, events and passions, clashes of ideas and the consequences of all this. Dostoevsky, dealing with the drama of the rebelliously searching and suffering soul of his hero, solved the epic reproduction of reality in a dramatic way. Drama is inherent not only in the compositional structure of Dostoevsky's novels. He also reproduces characters through dramatic means.
Connected with this is the enormous role in Dostoevsky’s novels of the characters’ inner speech, their notes and confessions, as well as dialogue and discussions. The drama of events and inner life heroes was a form of expression inherent in Dostoevsky’s novels of the intense beating of the pulse of contemporary reality.
In the post-reform decades, there was not only a rapid dismantling of the old. In this whirlpool was born new Russia, the contradictions of bourgeois development, intertwined with the remnants of serfdom, became increasingly acute. None of the pressing issues were resolved, and therefore the “underground springs of life” continued their great work.
In 1879–1881, a second revolutionary situation arose in Russia; it determined a new democratic upsurge in the country, which, as in 1859–1861, did not result in a mass revolutionary struggle and was replaced by years of reaction. 1881 - the end of the golden age of Russian revolutionary populism, the beginning of its degeneration into petty-bourgeois-kulak liberalism. The populists “did not and could not achieve” their immediate goal - “the awakening of the people’s revolution,” as V.I. Lenin points out.
The triumph of the bourgeois order, the defeat of the revolutionary forces in the country and the rampant reaction after 1881 caused corresponding sentiments in Russian society. These sentiments penetrated journalism, literature, and the Russian novel. A decisive departure from the revolutionary legacy of the 60s and 70s, a conscious desire to slander or vulgarize this legacy, opposing it to the theory of “small deeds”, forgetting politics and ignoring topical issues of people’s life - these are the main trends in the mood of that part of Russian educated society that decided “wiser up” and merge with new living conditions. “He has grown wiser” - this is what Boborykin called his story of 1890, and in the novel “To Work!” he made an attempt to debunk the Russian writer - a democrat, his service to the Russian peasant.
Former democrats outliving their beliefs in socialism, in the peasant and in martial arts, a general decline in the ideological level of literature, as well as the shallowing of the spiritual world of the intellectual, the wide spread of philistine sentiments - this whole muddy wave captured Boborykin and Zasodimsky, Potapenko and Bazhin. It also gave birth to a whole galaxy of new fiction writers, typical “eighties” - Lugovoi, Barantsevich and others. The work of these prose writers was quantitatively very abundant, it overshadowed the classical novel, the largest representatives of which (Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Goncharov) had already completed your creative path.
To understand the special conditions of this difficult period in the history of the Russian novel, one should recall the characteristics that V. I. Lenin gave to this reactionary era in the history of Russia. “After all, in Russia,” he wrote, “there was no era about which one could say to such an extent: “the turn of thought and reason has come,” as about the era Alexandra III! ...It was during this era that Russian revolutionary thought worked most intensively, creating the foundations of a social democratic worldview.” And it is extremely significant that it was during this era that the titan of Russian and world realism, L. Tolstoy, created the novel “Resurrection,” the ideological and artistic concept of which is the key to understanding the new destinies of the Russian novel in that turning point in Russian life. The main character of the novel, Nekhlyudov, stands in the ranks of Tolstoy’s previous “searching” heroes. And in this sense, “Resurrection” is connected with the past, with the stage passed by the author in the vision of the world. However, the way of revealing Nekhlyudov’s image changes significantly. As B. Bursov rightly writes, Nekhlyudov “is preoccupied not so much with what is happening to himself, but with what is happening to others.” And the latter is of fundamental importance, since it leads the hero to the recognition of the objective power of things, independent of his desires and will. This tendency made its way in literature not only in novels, but also in other prose genres, preparing the future flowering of the Russian novel in new conditions and on new grounds. In this regard, Chekhov’s role is exceptionally great, although he did not write novels, but short stories, novellas and short stories. In these genres, he covered problems of a nature that were “subject to” the Russian classical novel, and their structure often has the features of a miniature novel.
Russian poets of the second half of the 19th century in biographies and criticism From the book World art culture. XX century Literature author Olesina E
Russian poets of the second half of the 19th century in biographies and
From the book Thought Armed with Rhymes [Poetic anthology on the history of Russian verse] author Kholshevnikov Vladislav EvgenievichRussian poets of the second half of the 19th century in art When talking about Russian art of the 19th century, experts often call it literary-centric. And indeed, Russian literature largely determined the themes and issues, the general dynamics of development of both music and
From the book History of the Russian Novel. Volume 2 authorPushkin tradition in Russian poetry of the second half of the 19th century 1. Pushkin as a hero of Russian literature. Poems about Pushkin by his contemporaries: Delvig, Kuchelbecker, Yazykov, Glinka. Pushkin is the “ideal” Russian poet in the minds of his poets-followers: Maykova, Pleshcheeva,
From the book History of the Russian Novel. Volume 1 author Philology Team of authors --Russian poetry of the second half of the 20th century in Difficulties of comprehension History of Russian poetry of the 20th century. has not yet been written, although much has been done on the approaches to solving this important problem. The middle and second half of the century were especially “unlucky”, which, if inferior to the beginning of the century,
From the book Foreign Literature of the 20th Century. Educational and methodological manual author Gil Olga LvovnaVerse of the second half of the 19th century Metrics. The main achievements of this period in the field of metrics were the widespread use of 3-syllable meters (III, 19, 24, 26, 36, 38, 51, 52, 55, 56, 60, etc.) and dactylic rhymes. If previously 3-syllables were used only in small genres, then Nekrasov and others
From the book German-language literature: a textbook author Glazkova Tatyana YurievnaCHAPTER XI. POPULAR NOVEL (N.I. Prutskov) 1 The populist novel was created by professional writers, as well as practitioners of the populist movement, participants in “going to the people” and the People’s Will struggle. Two main types have emerged in populist prose
From the book of Litra author Kiselev AlexanderCHAPTER III. RUSSIAN NOVEL OF THE FIRST QUARTER OF THE 19TH CENTURY. FROM A SENTIMENTAL STORY TO A NOVEL (E. N. Kupiyanova - §§ 1–6, L. N. Nazarova - §§ 7–9) 1Development of Russian literary and social thought from the enlightenment of the 18th century to Decembrism, from the sentimental cult of feeling to
From the book History of St. Petersburg in traditions and legends author Sindalovsky Naum AlexandrovichCHAPTER III. RUSSIAN NOVEL OF THE 40-50S (N.I. Prutskov) 1The evolution of the Russian novel in the 40-50s is inseparable from the development of other prose genres, especially the story. The story and the novel in this era are constantly getting closer, turning into each other, mutually enriching and developing
From the author's bookForeign literature of the second half of the 20th century Purpose and objectives of the course The purpose of the course is to develop students’ understanding of the literature of the 20th century. as a cultural and historical phenomenon, about the deep connection of postmodernism with modernism, about the specifics of neorealism, about the features of mass
From the author's bookLiterature of the second half of the 20th century Literature of Germany The division of Germany and the formation of the Federal Republic of Germany and the GDR in 1949 led to the existence of two different literatures. Differences in the sphere of cultural policy emerged immediately, including in relation to returning emigrants.
From the author's bookLiterature of Austria in the middle and second half of the 20th century As before, during this period, the literature of Austria absorbs and reflects the main trends in the literature of other Western European countries. Thus, the work of Hermann Broch (1886–1951) is on a par with the works of D.
From the author's bookSwiss literature of the second half of the 20th century One of the most famous Swiss writers of this period is Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921–1990) - prose writer, playwright, author of a psychological detective story. Writing dramas, including for radio shows, he
From the author's bookRussian literature of the second half of the 19th century, or the Novel in Russian In the second half of the 19th century, the main “specializations” were established in literature: prose, poetry, drama, criticism. After many years of the dominance of poetry, prose comes first. And the biggest ones
From the author's bookSt. Petersburg in the second half of the 19th century ONE OF THE MOST SIGNIFICANT events in the economic, economic, and political life of Russia in the mid-19th century was the construction of the railway between St. Petersburg and Moscow. The road was in the full sense of the word straight, or
Prose of the Sovremennik magazine and the Russian realistic novel of the middle XIX century
The Sovremennik magazine, created by Pushkin and headed by Pletnev after his death, passed into the hands of Panaev and Nekrasov in 1846 and became the press organ for new literature. It was on the pages of this magazine that Belinsky, who was part of the editorial staff, published his articles “A Look at Russian Literature of 1846” and “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847.” In these works, the critic formulated the concept of new literature.
The literature depicting the life of the lower social classes that appeared in the late 1830s was negatively received by critics. She was reproached for excessively following nature, that is, for depicting unsightly, unaesthetic pictures of the life of the social majority. Therefore, Thaddeus Bulgarin, in a review of the collection “Physiology of St. Petersburg,” called the new literature belonging to the “natural literary school" This is how the name “natural school” literature arose.
According to Belinsky, it is this literature that determines the first stage literary development, which began with Gogol. In this regard, it is also called Gogol's. The author of “The Overcoat” was the first, according to the critic, to draw attention to the crowd and began to “depict ordinary people, and not only accepted exceptions to the general rule, which always seduce people into idealization.” Already in his assessment of Gogol’s discoveries, Belinsky affirms the first and main feature of the literature of the natural school - to depict life as it is for the most part, “to reproduce reality in all its truth.”
The second feature of the literature of the natural school is its new hero. This hero is a social type, a “little man”, a representative of the social majority. The writer of the “natural school” is interested in his interaction with the environment. He is convinced that the environment has a detrimental effect on a person, disfigures his nature, turning him into a “small” person, into a social type. Therefore, the third feature of the literature of the “natural school” is the discovery of a new research topic: “little man” and the environment.”
In the literature of the “natural school” the concept of ideal is rethought. Her hero cannot be a role model. Therefore, “the ideal is understood not as decoration (hence, a lie), but as the relationship into which the author establishes the types he creates to each other, in accordance with the thought that he wants to develop with his work.” An ideal is a mobile category, born in the creative process of writing and reading a work. Therefore, the literature of the “natural school” is assigned a special cognitive task. It should not entertain the reader, but show him a life that has never been depicted in literature before. At the same time, following the natural school does not mean following naturalism. The work should not be a copy of reality. The author “needs to be able to understand the phenomena of reality guide them through their fantasy, give them new life" The degree of artistry of a work depends on the author’s talent. Moreover, Belinsky, who affirms the objectivity of new literature, does not abandon the unconscious in the creative process. It is the author’s talent that helps the reader create a clear picture of the era from the contradictory facts of reality.
And Belinsky must admit that there are no great talents in the literature of the natural school. But new literature is important not for its talents, but for the very fact of its existence: “it is only being established, but has not yet been established” . She paves the way for future talent. Opens up ways for further development of literature.
The main genre of new literature was the physiological essay, short story, and novella. But if the last two genres were familiar to the reader, then the physiological essay is a genre born precisely new prose. It was most consistent with its content. The genre of the essay presupposes adherence to the facts of reality and excludes abstract fantasy and speculative images. The purpose of the physiological essay is to create a picture of the social life of Russia in the 1840s. Like a person, society also has its own organism, its own physiology. The primary task of a physiological essay is to describe the social mechanism. His heroes do not go beyond the boundaries of social types, and the authors do not go beyond the boundaries of reproducing the life of the social environment.
An example of a physiological essay is the collection “Physiology of St. Petersburg,” published in 1845 by Nekrasov. It included essays by Belinsky, Dahl, Grigorovich, Grebenka, Nekrasov, Kulchitsky, Panaev. The titles of the works speak for themselves. “Petersburg organ grinders”, “Petersburg corners”, “Petersburg feuilletonist”, “Petersburg janitor”. The purpose of the collection is to describe existing social types and depict their habitat. Other problems, for example, psychological problems, cannot be solved by a physiological essay. The essay classifies social phenomena. But at the same time, he prepares the emergence of literature that will turn to the study of the psychology of the social type.
For example, Grigorovich’s essay “St. Petersburg Organ Grinders” describes three types of organ grinders, Russian, German and Italian. The characterization of their features lies exclusively in the field of social description. But at the same time, exits into social psychology and national character are being planned. “There is nothing more careless than a Russian organ grinder; he never cares about the next day, and if he happens to intercept some money that provides him for several days, he will not hesitate to invite his comrades to the nearest cafe-restaurant.... Like a Neapolitan lazzaroni, he will not work if the money obtained in the morning , enough for the evening.”
By the end of the 1840s, the literature of the “natural school” had fulfilled its purpose. She created a gallery of social phenomena and types. The need for such literature to exist has disappeared. The essay begins to be replaced by a new story, a novel. Already in 1846, works appeared depicting the psychology of social types discovered by the “natural school”. These are “Poor People” and “The Double” by Dostoevsky.
The formation of the new Russian novel, which began in the mid-1840s. The works of Herzen, Goncharov, and Dostoevsky were accompanied by the development of a genre discovered by the literature of the “natural school.” But the physiological essay becomes irrelevant; it is replaced by a cycle of essays, a genre association based on thematic, ideological and artistic principles.
One of the first cycles of essays was “Notes of a Hunter” by Turgenev (1852). The unity of this cycle is determined by the end-to-end hero-storyteller, the hunter, and common topic- human life. Turgenev's genre innovation was that in a series of essays he combined the social phenomena of reality with their philosophical content, outlined a way out through the social to the universal, which would subsequently determine the originality of the Russian classic novel of the 19th century.
The development of the classic Russian novel took place outside of Sovremennik, and cycles of essays were created within the magazine. “Essays on the Bursa” (1862-1863) N.G. Pomyalovsky, “Podlipovtsy” by F.M. Reshetnikov (1864) in external form gravitate toward a novel. But if Pomyalovsky included the genre in the title of the work, Reshetnikov indicated it in the subtitle “Ethnographic Essay.” The famous novel by N.G. Chernyshevsky “What to do?” (1863) the author refers to as “Stories about New People.”
Within the framework of Sovremennik, another novel was being formed, born from the cycle. For example, Yu. Rudenko considers the main structural principle of the novel “What to do?” – the principle of cyclicity. Adherence to the literary tradition of the “natural school” did not allow either Pomyalovsky or Reshetnikov to rise above the social facts of life and look at them through the prism of universal categories. But unlike the literature of the 1840s, following the tradition of the 1860s, they solve the problem of the relationship between the “little man” and the environment in a different way, putting forward the idea of an individual trying his hand at resisting the environment.
For example, in “Essays on the Bursa”, against the background of descriptions of the types of students, the story of a boy nicknamed Karas stands out. Once in the Bursak environment, he is forced to obey its laws. But internally, resistance to them is brewing within him. This is expressed in the way he studies, he can sit at the first tables as an excellent student or in Kamchatka as a poor student. But real resistance begins when he is deprived of the right to spend Easter at home. The hero does everything to prevent this from happening. Forces circumstances to work for oneself, and not against oneself.
But the various pictures of Bursat life are not assembled into a coherent epic canvas due to the absence of a hero, not a social type, but a pronounced character, with his own psychology, the history of the soul.
Addressed to the facts of social reality, to the masses, the authors did not see in them a new hero, perhaps because he had not yet grown out of his environment, had not yet taken shape and was not defined. Such self-determination of a hero from the people will happen later and will be reflected in the work of N.S. Leskova.
But Reshetnikov in “Podlipovtsy” portrays folk heroes, Pila and Sysoika, with a pronounced personal beginning. Saw voluntarily took on the function of mediator between the world of the village and the world of power. The world of Podlipovka is a world before civilization, before morality. Its inhabitants, led by Sysoika, know neither God, nor love, nor the fear of death. They live and die like plants from hunger, cold, and everyday inconveniences. The exit of Pyla and Sysoika from Podlipovka into the world of civilization and their acquaintance with it deprives them of hope that the heroes will find happiness. If the sons of Pila found at least a quiet life in this world, then Pila and Sysoika are doomed to death. They die under the blows of a broken chain, having realized only that the world was not created for people like them. The heroes cannot and do not know how to resist the reality that is killing them.
Reshetnikov’s work, although designated by the author as an ethnographic essay, is to a greater extent gravitates towards social novel, which is just beginning to emerge in the literature. The structure of such a novel is still very fluid; the main genre principle of plot organization has not been determined. Here, the development of relationships is only outlined in embryo, there is no love conflict. Before us is the journey of heroes along the road of life. One picture is strung on top of another, giving rise to a panorama of social reality.
In the 1870s, we will encounter this principle of plot organization in satirical novel Saltykov-Shchedrin “Modern idyll”, in Leskov’s stories. But the nature of generalization in the work of these artists is already different, which allows us to expand the social picture of reality to a universal one.
"What to do?" Chernyshevsky is also at the origins of the new genre of the novel. This work is often called a utopian novel, a social novel. Yu. Rudenko reveals in it the tendencies of the future polyphonic system. The ambiguity of genre interpretations is indicative. Chernyshevsky breaks the usual ideas about the novel, and this is part of his author’s task, which he announces in his introduction. But the principle of cyclicity underlying the new structure also does not contribute to its genre integrity. The expanding space of the novel with the introduction of new themes and characters, with the departure of old ones, reflects the moving panorama of life, open ending strengthens this movement. But the author’s idea, striving to regulate the moving flow of life, comes into conflict with it, which does not contribute to strengthening the genre.
The Russian realistic and classical novel of the 19th century is created in the creative laboratories of Turgenev and Goncharov. The main structure-forming principle of such a novel is the principle of dialogism. The origins of the genre are the novels of A.I. Herzen "Who is to blame?" and I.A. and “Ordinary History”, which appeared in 1846-1847. The plot in them is based on dialogical conflict
The very structure of Herzen's novel reflects the formation of the genre. Its first part is reminiscent of essays from the “natural school”. It presents the biographies of the heroes, but the arrangement of the characters does not add up to a conflict. And only the appearance in the second part of Beltov, a noble hero who embodies the type “ extra person", gives impetus to the novel's action. The love conflict that arises thanks to his introduction into the plot develops into a philosophical debate. The dialogical conflict is revealed in the fact that all the characters are tormented by questions of philosophical content: can a person be the master of his destiny, and, as a consequence, can he be happy. Krutsifersky believes in fate, on which a person’s happiness and misfortune depends, and therefore he is afraid of it. Dr. Krupov thinks like a physiologist, that is, he rejects what cannot be proven as a fact. Therefore, personal failures, in his opinion, cannot be a manifestation of fate, and a person can get rid of them if he leads healthy image life, for example, to pour yourself cold water and not to believe in what does not exist. For him, man is the truth.
Beltov complicates the situation of dialogue-dispute about fate and happiness. He introduces into it the idea of history as fate, which selects from the mass of people only those who are needed for its construction. People “not demanded by history” are doomed and therefore can do what they want with their lives. Beltov, being one of these types of people, chooses for himself the last method of self-realization. But at the same time, he involves Krutsiferskaya in his game, torn between love and pity for her husband and for Beltov, which as a result kills her.
At the end of the novel, all participants in the dialogue-dispute are defeated. None of the proposed answers to the main questions stand the test of life. The question posed in the title of the novel also remained unanswered: who is to blame for the fact that a person has not succeeded in life? This question belongs to the author and expresses his position: the answer is in life itself, and it is unknown to man.
In the works of Turgenev and Goncharov there is a dramatization of a dialogic conflict. Its essence is that the logic of life includes an inevitable confrontation as a result of changes in certain periods of development. Therefore, heroes cannot exist outside of conflict. He can leave characters' dialogues. But he will never leave another dialogue that each hero conducts to the best of his spiritual potential with existence. The possibility of such a dialogue is due to the hero’s consciousness opening towards life.
For example, in Goncharov, the confrontation between such heroes as the younger and older Aduevs, Oblomov and Stolz, Raisky and Volokhov is dictated by their life experiences. None of them denies the subjects about which they come into conflict. Both Aduevs do not deny love, but argue about its essence. The dispute is futile only because in youth and maturity love is presented differently, but as a result, its hero discovers the presence of a different point of view, which expands the boundaries of his own existence. In dialogue with others and one’s own self, the hero’s spiritual mastery of life and self-determination takes place. Therefore, the 19th century novel achieves its universality.
Special place in the development of the genre of realistic novel occupies polyphonic novel Dostoevsky, in which the principle of dialogism reaches its completion. Dialogue becomes not only the structural principle of the novel, but also the way of existence of the hero’s consciousness. Without dialogue, the consciousness of the hero and the author is impossible.
New novel meets the requirements of the new art formulated by Chernyshevsky - “to reproduce what is generally interesting in life.” But at the same time, it deviates from them, because life in a realistic novel is not determined only by its physical and social manifestations. A realistic novel, along with a careful study of the facts of human social existence, affirms the metaphysics of life, which contradicts the logic of the main provisions of Chernyshevsky’s philosophy. Therefore, within the framework of the Sovremennik magazine, we find trends only in the social, public romance.
Works of art
Physiology of St. Petersburg. Almanac (1845). Pomyalovsky N.G. Essays on the Bursa (1862-1863). Reshetnikov F.M. Podlipovtsy (1864)
Research
Kuleshov, V.I. Natural school in Russian literature of the 19th century / V.I. Kuleshov. – M., 1982.
Egorov, B.V. The struggle of aesthetic ideas in Russia in the mid-19th century / B.V. Egorov. – L., 1982
Sazhin, V.M. Books of bitter truth / V.M. Sazhin. – M., 1992
Markovich, V.M. I.S. Turgenev and the Russian realistic novel / V.M. Markovich. – M., 1982. – Ch. 1.2.
For more details, see: Markovich. V.M. Turgenev and the Russian realistic novel. – M., 1982.– Ch. 2.
Markovich V.M. Decree ed.
The century before last became interesting stage development of human history. The emergence of new technologies, faith in progress, the spread of enlightenment ideas, the development of new social relations, the emergence of a new bourgeois class, which became dominant in many European countries - all this was reflected in art. 19th century literature reflected everything turning points development of society. All shocks and discoveries were reflected on the pages of novels by famous writers. Literature of the 19th century– multifaceted, varied and very interesting.
Literature of the 19th century as an indicator of social consciousness
The century began in the atmosphere of the Great French Revolution, the ideas of which captured all of Europe, America and Russia. Under the influence of these events, the greatest books of the 19th century appeared, a list of which you can find in this section. In Great Britain, with the coming to power of Queen Victoria, new era stability, which was accompanied by national growth, development of industry and art. Public peace has created best books 19th century, written in all kinds of genres. In France, on the contrary, there was a lot of revolutionary unrest, accompanied by a change in the political system and the development of social thought. Of course, this also influenced 19th century books. The literary age ended with an era of decadence, characterized by gloomy and mystical moods and a bohemian lifestyle of representatives of art. Thus, the literature of the 19th century presented works that everyone needs to read.
Books of the 19th century on the KnigoPoisk website
If you are interested in 19th-century literature, the list of the KnigoPoisk website will help you find interesting novels. The rating is based on reviews from visitors to our resource. “Books of the 19th century” is a list that will not leave anyone indifferent.
The novel developed, overcoming the sharply negative attitude towards itself on the part of moralists, who assessed this genre as low, pandering to bad taste and spoiling morals. This is due to the fact that the novel, as we know, is a generation and reflection of the crisis and destruction of the foundations of traditionalist culture, when the individual begins to fall out of ready-made, genre forms of being - the emancipation and individualization of the individual leads to its distancing from any ready-made forms and thus inevitably from the norms of existing morality.
The novel focuses on the individual experience of a person who does not fit into the norms of existing morality: the novel’s hero is often a tramp, a “renegade,” a man with “Faustian aspirations,” a young man at an age when, in the language of a tolerant moralist, he still has some then the right to “get mad”; he is interesting precisely because he is a violator of generally accepted norms - and precisely because of these adventures, this extraordinary experience of his. The novel expresses the dreams and aspirations of an individual that lie outside the destiny prepared for him by the existing world order - a person dreams of going beyond the boundaries given to him. He comes up with a different life for himself, in which his dreams will come true - both those that are outside the established moral standards, and those that, in his ideas, correspond to the possibilities of interesting and free life, which are possessed by representatives of other social worlds. Of course, from the point of view of traditional morality, any experience of this kind is an unacceptable temptation, especially unacceptable since it is from the point of view of this experience that a comprehensive picture of the world is built in the novel; as a result, this world appears very far from ideal, so that the reader may not find in it a role model worthy from the point of view of a moralist.
Therefore, traditionalist culture demands from the writer not a novel, but an epic: the epic is proclaimed as the true goal of the novel - the novel must strive to become an epic. Epicness, as we know, presupposes a different point of view on man and the world than in the novel - not from within individual experience, but from the world of super-personal values that ensure the stability of the world order. Hence the “heroism” of the hero of the epic. Therefore, the novel acts as a non-epic or anti-epic genre. At the same time, everything is not so simple: the novel concept is contradictory and paradoxical - after all, the novel, of course, is certainly an epic genre, in it the most important epic values are realized - narrative as a broad view of the world, the vision of man in unity with the world, the plot development of any events in the space of the big world, etc.
The inconsistency of the poetological, and thus the ethical concept of the genre is characteristic to the greatest extent of the most balanced form of the novel - the classic novel of the era of realism, which tries to connect the incompatible, to reconcile incompatible things.
It should be recognized that the novel of the middle and second half of the 19th century. conflicts with some principles of the poetics of the novel set out by M. Bakhtin - a novel of the 19th century. has a relatively stable, completely structured and describable form, which made it a “traditional novel” in the eyes of the twentieth century. Important aesthetic and poetological principles internal organization N.D. Tamarchenko defined this form for the Russian realistic novel, developing the concept of the “internal measure” of a realistic novel, “a novel-specific way of combining variability with stability.”
The classical novel is paradoxical - being a relatively short-term stage in the development of the genre, at which it almost deviates from its absolutely fundamental genre principles, it at the same time acts as one of the indisputable peaks of novel art, the form by which, therefore, you need to study the nature of this genre. Looking ahead, we can say that the ethical concept of this genre form can be assessed both as the pinnacle of modern European humanism and as evidence of its failure. However, in order to understand the poetological and ethical originality of this form, it is necessary to look at it in the context of both previous and subsequent stages of its development.
The situation of a conflict between the aspirations and fantasies of an individual with a general morality, a ready-made world order that does not provide for the right to an exceptional destiny and a special “interesting” life, in the poetics of the 18th century novel appears as a problem of authenticity of utterance characteristic of the genre - a novel that does not have the opportunity to rely on any which tradition, each time must prove its legitimacy - compliance with the accepted ideas about reality and art in society. He must appeal to the real life experience, lying on the other side of traditional literary discourse and coming into conflict with the traditional rhetorical word, burdened with the “truth of moral knowledge,” thus asserting its vitality, experienced as truthfulness. Truthfulness is understood here as the truth of real human experience, conflicting with “literature”; it appears here as a value that replaces and abolishes the traditionalist norm, and with it traditional moral principles.
This means the emergence of new ideas about art. The impression of moral bankruptcy and immorality of the novel arises in connection with a serious break with the great historical tradition of understanding art as a sphere of realization of the ideal. Already in the 17th century, this tradition began to be shaken, as evidenced by the active discussion of the problem of the admissibility of an entertaining moment in art - is it worthy not only to teach, but also to entertain the reader. Sigmund von Birken, in the famous preface to Lohenstein's novel Arminius, says that the novel is more likely to achieve its goal if it does not just teach, but teaches while entertaining. A special system of evidence was required to justify the writer’s right not only to teach. Before early XIX centuries, the idea of art as a depiction of an ideal generally retains its stability - even Schiller and Hegel viewed art in precisely this vein. The idea of art being faithful to nature does not contradict this attitude, since nature here is an abstract concept and acts as a kind of reasonable and natural norm for society, an eternal model of ideas about beauty.
Thus, the attitude toward truthfulness that arises in the novel of modern times is associated with the denial of traditional normative attitudes and seriously undermines the moralistic foundations of the concept of art.
This attitude manifests itself in the novel’s orientation towards artlessness, which means the rejection of art, understood as the image of an ideal. The novel as a genre that does not repeat examples of traditionalist culture asserts itself precisely by distancing itself from them, demonstrating its special genre nature, the essence of which, as M. M. Bakhtin showed, is that it lives on the border with real world, in direct contact with unfinished reality, and does not imitate ideal models. So Byron, starting his famous poem demonstratively as a novel about Childe Harold, first of all not only calls on the muse of the traditional ideal, but also replaces it " a simple story"about what exists in reality and what (unfortunately for the author) does not in any way correspond to the moral values of the literary tradition. The idea of free, openly authentic creativity, working with the material of living reality (which includes ideas and literary forms) is a conscious attitude of the novel, ensuring its viability as a qualitatively new literary form, starting from “literature” - literature that feeds on tradition and ideal.
Hence, characteristic of the novel form, repeatedly described in scientific literature techniques for creating the effect of authenticity and reliability - the use of first-person narration, references to original manuscripts, notes, as well as the introduction of the creative act itself into the text, parody of other genres and the author’s reflection on the creative process. The demonstrative “openness” and incompleteness of the novel form is due to the desire to create the effect of authenticity - contact with the incomplete reality in which the reader resides - participation in an open event of existence, and not the reproduction of an ideal.
Thus, the novel boldly excludes itself from the dominant system of moral precepts - it is no coincidence that the new European novel opens with the story of Lazarillo, blasphemously attacking shrines, which is why it was included in the index of prohibited books. Leaving aside the shades and somewhat schematizing - “straightening” the chronology of the process, it can be argued that, in general, until the second half of the 20s of the 19th century, the novel responded to the challenge of traditionalist culture with the challenge of “truth”, establishing itself essentially as a non-mimetic form that is more does not allow one to contemplate the ideal, but acts primarily as an open event of communication between the author (narrator), the hero acting as a narrator, and the reader.
Need to download an essay? Click and save - » Realistic novel of the 19th century: the poetics of moral compromise. And the finished essay appeared in my bookmarks.