Andreev from his youth was surprised at the undemanding attitude of people to life, and he denounced this undemandingness. “The time will come,” Andreev, a schoolboy, wrote in his diary, “I will draw people an amazing picture of their life,” and I did. Thought is the object of attention and the main tool of the author, who is turned not to the flow of life, but to reflections on this flow.
Andreev is not one of the writers whose multi-color play of tones gives the impression of living life, as, for example, in A.P. Chekhov, I.A. Bunin, B.K. Zaitsev. He preferred the grotesque, the anguish, the contrast of black and white. A similar expressiveness, emotionality distinguishes the works of F. M. Dostoevsky, beloved by Andreev V. M. Garshin, E. Po. His city is not big, but "huge", his characters are oppressed not by loneliness, but by "fear of loneliness", they do not cry, but "howl". Time in his stories is "compressed" by events. The author seemed to be afraid of being misunderstood in the world of the visually and hearing impaired. It seems that Andreev is bored in the current time, he is attracted by eternity, the "eternal appearance of man", it is important for him not to depict the phenomenon, but to express his evaluative attitude towards it. It is known that the works "The Life of Basil of Thebes" (1903) and "Darkness" (1907) were written under the impression of the events told to the author, but he completely interprets these events in his own way.
There are no difficulties in the periodization of Andreev’s work: he always painted the battle between darkness and light as a battle of equivalent principles, but if in the early period of his work there was an illusory hope for the victory of light in the subtext of his works, then by the end of his work this hope was gone.
Andreev by nature had a special interest in everything inexplicable in the world, in people, in himself; desire to see beyond the boundaries of life. As a young man, he played dangerous games that allowed him to feel the breath of death. The characters of his works also look into the "kingdom of the dead", for example, Eleazar (the story "Eleazar", 1906), who received there "cursed knowledge" that kills the desire to live. Andreev's work also corresponded to the eschatological mindset that was then developing in the intellectual environment, the aggravated questions about the laws of life, the essence of man: "Who am I?", "Meaning, meaning of life, where is he?", "Man? Of course, both beautiful and proud, and impressive - but where is the end? These questions from Andreev's letters lie in the subtext of most of his works. The skeptical attitude of the writer caused all theories of progress. Suffering from his unbelief, he rejects the religious path of salvation: "To what unknown and terrible limits will my denial reach?.. I will not accept God..."
The story "The Lie" (1900) ends with a very characteristic exclamation: "Oh, what madness to be a man and seek the truth! What a pain!" Andreevsky narrator often sympathizes with a person who, figuratively speaking, falls into the abyss and tries to grab at least something. "There was no well-being in his soul," G. I. Chulkov reasoned in his recollections of a friend, "he was all in anticipation of a catastrophe." A. A. Blok also wrote about the same thing, feeling “horror at the door” while reading Andreev4. There was a lot of the author himself in this falling man. Andreev often "entered" his characters, shared with them a common, according to K. I. Chukovsky, "spiritual tone."
Paying attention to social and property inequality, Andreev had reason to call himself a student of G. I. Uspensky and C. Dickens. However, he did not understand and represent the conflicts of life in the same way as M. Gorky, A. S. Serafimovich, E. N. Chirikov, S. Skitalets, and other “knowledge writers”: he did not indicate the possibility of their solution in the context of the current time. Andreev looked at good and evil as eternal, metaphysical forces, perceived people as forced conductors of these forces. A break with the bearers of revolutionary convictions was inevitable. VV Borovsky, crediting Andreev "predominantly" in the "social" writers, pointed to his "incorrect" coverage of the vices of life. The writer was not his own either among the "right" or among the "left" and was weighed down by creative loneliness.
Andreev wanted, first of all, to show the dialectic of thoughts, feelings, the complex inner world of the characters. Almost all of them, more than hunger, cold, are oppressed by the question of why life is built this way and not otherwise. They look into themselves, trying to understand the motives of their behavior. Whoever his hero is, everyone has "his own cross", everyone suffers.
“It doesn’t matter to me who“ he ”is, the hero of my stories: non, official, good-natured or cattle. The only thing that matters to me is that he is a man and as such bears the same hardships of life.”
In these lines of Andreev's letter to Chukovsky there is a bit of exaggeration, his author's attitude to the characters is differentiated, but there is also truth. Critics rightly compared the young prose writer with F. M. Dostoevsky - both artists showed the human soul as a field of collisions of chaos and harmony. However, a significant difference between them is also obvious: Dostoevsky, in the end, provided that humanity accepted Christian humility, predicted the victory of harmony, while Andreev, by the end of the first decade of his work, almost excluded the idea of harmony from the space of his artistic coordinates.
The pathos of many of Andreev's early works is due to the characters' desire for a "different life". In this sense, the story "In the basement" (1901) about embittered people at the bottom of life is noteworthy. Here comes a deceived young woman "from society" with a newborn. She was not without reason afraid of meeting with thieves, prostitutes, but the baby relieves the tension that has arisen. The unfortunate are drawn to a pure "gentle and weak" being. They wanted to keep the boulevard woman away from the child, but she heart-rendingly demands: “Give!.. Give!.. Give!..” And this “careful, two-finger touch on the shoulder” is described as a touch on a dream: , like a light in the steppe, vaguely called them somewhere ... The young prose writer passes the romantic "somewhere" from story to story. A dream, a Christmas tree decoration, a country estate can serve as a symbol of "another", bright life, other relationships. The attraction to this "other" in Andreev's characters is shown as an unconscious, innate feeling, for example, as in the teenager Sashka from the story "Angel" (1899). This restless, half-starved, offended by the whole world “wolf cub”, who “at times ... wanted to stop doing what is called life”, accidentally got into a rich house on a holiday, saw a wax angel on the Christmas tree. A beautiful toy becomes for the child a sign of "a wonderful world where he once lived," where "they do not know about dirt and abuse." She must belong to him! .. Sashka endured a lot, defending the only thing he had - pride, for the sake of an angel, he falls on his knees in front of the "unpleasant aunt." And again passionate: "Give! .. Give! .. Give! .."
The position of the author of these stories, who inherited pain for all the unfortunate from the classics, is humane and demanding, but unlike his predecessors, Andreev is tougher. He sparingly measures offended characters a fraction of peace: their joy is fleeting, and their hope is illusory. The “dead man” Khizhiyakov from the story “In the basement” shed happy tears, it suddenly seemed to him that he “will live a long time, and his life will be beautiful,” but, the narrator concludes his word, at his head “the predatory death was already silently seated” . And Sashka, having played enough of an angel, falls asleep happy for the first time, and at that time the wax toy melts either from the breath of a hot stove, or from the action of some fatal force: Ugly and motionless shadows were carved on the wall ... "The author dashedly indicates the presence of this force almost in each of his works.The characteristic figure of evil is built on various phenomena: shadows, night darkness, natural disasters, obscure characters, mystical "something", "someone", etc. knocking on hot stoves. " A similar fall will have to endure Sasha.
The errand boy from the city barbershop will also survive the fall in the story "Petka in the Country" (1899). The "aged dwarf", who knew only labor, beatings, hunger, also strove with all his heart to the unknown "somewhere", "to another place about which he could not say anything." Having accidentally found himself in the master's country estate, "entering into complete harmony with nature," Petka is externally and internally transformed, but soon a fatal force in the person of the mysterious owner of the barbershop pulls him out of the "other" life. The inhabitants of the barbershop are puppets, but they are described in sufficient detail, and only the master-puppeteer is depicted in the outline. Over the years, the role of the invisible black force in the vicissitudes of the plots becomes more and more noticeable.
Andreev has no or almost no happy endings, but the darkness of life in the early stories was dispelled by glimpses of light: the awakening of Man in man was revealed. The motive of awakening is organically connected with the motive of Andreev's characters striving for "another life". In "Bargamot and Garaska" the awakening is experienced by antipodal characters, in whom, it seemed, everything human had died forever. But outside the plot, the idyll of a drunkard and a policeman (a "relative" of the guard Mymretsov G. I. Uspensky, a classic of "collar propaganda") is doomed. In other typologically similar works, Andreev shows how difficult and how late a person wakes up in a person ("Once Upon a Time", 1901; "Spring", 1902). With the awakening, Andreev's characters often come to realize their callousness ("The First Fee", 1899; "No Forgiveness", 1904).
Very in this sense, the story "Hoste" (1901). The young apprentice Senista is waiting for Master Sazonka in the hospital. He promised not to leave the boy "a victim of loneliness, illness and fear." But Easter came, Sazonka went on a spree and forgot his promise, and when he arrived, Senista was already in the dead room. Only the death of a child, "like a puppy thrown into the garbage," revealed to the master the truth about the darkness of his own soul: "Lord! - Sazonka cried<...>raising your hands to the sky<...>"Aren't we humans?"
The difficult awakening of Man is also mentioned in the story "Theft was Coming" (1902). The man who was about to "maybe kill" is stopped by pity for the freezing puppy. The high price of pity, "light<...>in the midst of deep darkness ... "- this is what it is important to convey to the reader to the humanist narrator.
Many of Andreev's characters are tormented by their isolation, their existential worldview. In vain are their often extreme attempts to free themselves from this ailment ("Valya", 1899; "Silence" and "The Story of Sergei Petrovich", 1900; "Original Man", 1902). The story "The City" (1902) speaks of a petty official, depressed by both life and life, flowing in the stone bag of the city. Surrounded by hundreds of people, he suffocates from the loneliness of a meaningless existence, against which he protests in a pathetic, comical way. Here Andreev continues the theme of the "little man" and his desecrated dignity, set by the author of "The Overcoat". The narration is filled with participation to the person who has the disease "influenza" - the event of the year. Andreev borrows from Gogol the situation of a suffering person defending his dignity: "We are all people! All brothers!" - drunken Petrov cries in a state of passion. However, the writer changes the interpretation of a well-known theme. Among the classics of the golden age of Russian literature, the "little man" is overwhelmed by the character and wealth of the "big man." For Andreev, the material and social hierarchy does not play a decisive role: loneliness crushes. In the "City" the gentlemen are virtuous, and they themselves are the same Petrovs, but at a higher rung of the social ladder. Andreev sees tragedy in the fact that individuals do not constitute a community. A noteworthy episode: a lady from the "institution" meets with laughter Petrov's proposal to marry, but "squeals" understandingly and in fear when he spoke to her about loneliness.
Andreev's misunderstanding is equally dramatic, both inter-class, intra-class, and intra-family. The divisive force in his artistic world has a wicked sense of humor, as presented in the short story "The Grand Slam" (1899). For many years "summer and winter, spring and autumn" four people played vint, but when one of them died, it turned out that the others did not know if the deceased was married, where he lived ... Most of all, the company was struck by the fact that the deceased will never know about his luck in the last game: "he had the right grand slam."
This power overwhelms any well-being. Six-year-old Yura Pushkarev, the protagonist of the story "The Flower Under the Foot" (1911), was born into a wealthy family, loved, but, depressed by the mutual misunderstanding of his parents, is lonely, and only "pretends that life in the world is very fun." The child "leaves people", escaping in a fictional world. To an adult hero named Yuri Pushkarev, outwardly a happy family man, a talented pilot, the writer returns in the story "Flight" (1914). These works constitute a small tragic dilogy. Pushkarev experienced the joy of being only in the sky, where in his subconscious a dream was born to remain forever in the blue expanse. A fatal force threw the car down, but the pilot himself "on the ground ... never returned."
"Andreev, - wrote E. V. Anichkov, - made us feel the terrible, chilling consciousness of the impenetrable abyss that lies between man and man."
Disunity breeds militant selfishness. Dr. Kerzhentsev from the story "Thought" (1902) is capable of strong feelings, but he used all his mind to plan the insidious murder of a more successful friend - the husband of his beloved woman, and then to play with the investigation. He is convinced that he owns the thought, like a swordsman, but at some point the thought betrays and plays tricks on its bearer. She was tired of satisfying "outside" interests. Kerzhentsev lives out his life in a lunatic asylum. The pathos of this Andreevsky story is opposite to the pathos of M. Gorky's lyrical-philosophical poem "Man" (1903), this hymn to the creative power of human thought. Already after the death of Andreev, Gorky recalled that the writer perceived thought as "a cruel joke of the devil on man." About V. M. Garshin, A. P. Chekhov they said that they awaken the conscience. Andreev awakened the mind, or rather, anxiety for its destructive potentialities. The writer surprised his contemporaries with unpredictability, predilection for antinomies.
“Leonid Nikolaevich,” M. Gorky wrote with a table of reproach, “strangely and painfully sharply for himself, he dug himself in two: in the same week he could sing “Hosanna!” to the world and proclaim to him “Anathema!”.
That is how Andreev revealed the dual essence of man, "divine and insignificant", according to the definition of V. S. Solovyov. The artist again and again returns to the question that disturbs him: which of the "abysses" prevails in man? Regarding the relatively light story "On the River" (1900) about how a "stranger" man overcame hatred for the people who offended him and, risking his life, saved them in the spring flood, M. Gorky enthusiastically wrote to Andreev:
"You love the sun. And this is great, this love is the source of true art, real, the very poetry that enlivens life."
However, soon Andreev creates one of the most terrible stories in Russian literature - "The Abyss" (1901). This is a psychologically convincing, artistically expressive study of the fall of the human in man.
It's scary: a pure girl was crucified by "subhumans". But it is even more terrible when, after a short internal struggle, an intellectual, a lover of romantic poetry, a young man tremblingly in love behaves like an animal. A little more "before" he did not even suspect that the beast-abyss lurked in him. "And the black abyss swallowed him" - this is the final phrase of the story. Some critics praised Andreev for his bold drawing, while others urged readers to boycott the author. At meetings with readers, Andreev insisted that no one was immune from such a fall.
In the last decade of creativity, Andreev spoke much more often about the awakening of the beast in man than about the awakening of Man in man. Very expressive in this series is the psychological story "In the Fog" (1902) about how a prosperous student's hatred of himself and the world found an outlet in the murder of a prostitute. Many publications mention the words about Andreev, the authorship of which is attributed to Leo Tolstoy: "He scares, but we are not afraid." But it is unlikely that all readers who are familiar with the named works of Andreev, as well as with his story "Lie", written a year before "The Abyss", or with the stories "Curse of the Beast" (1908) and "Rules of Good" (1911) will hardly agree with this. , telling about the loneliness of a person doomed to fight for survival in the irrational stream of being.
The relationship between M. Gorky and L. N. Andreev is an interesting page in the history of Russian literature. Gorky helped Andreev enter the literary field, contributed to the appearance of his works in the almanacs of the "Knowledge" partnership, introduced "Wednesday" to the circle. In 1901, at the expense of Gorky, the first book of Andreev's stories was published, which brought fame and approval to the author of L. N. Tolstoy, A. P. Chekhov. "The only friend" called Andreev senior comrade. However, all this did not straighten their relationship, which Gorky characterized as "friendship-enmity" (an oxymoron could be born when he read Andreev's letter1).
Indeed, there was a friendship of great writers, according to Andreev, who beat "on one petty-bourgeois snout" of complacency. The allegorical story "Ben-Tobit" (1903) is an example of St. Andrew's blow. The plot of the story moves like a dispassionate narration about outwardly unrelated events: a “kind and good” inhabitant of a village near Golgotha has a toothache, and at the same time, on the mountain itself, the decision of the trial of “some Jesus” is being carried out. The unfortunate Ben-Tobit is outraged by the noise outside the walls of the house, it gets on his nerves. "How they scream!" - this man is indignant, "who did not like injustice", offended by the fact that no one cares about his suffering.
It was a friendship of writers who sang the heroic, rebellious beginnings of personality. The author of "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" (1908), which tells about a sacrificial feat, but more about the feat of overcoming the fear of death, wrote to V.V. Veresaev: "A beautiful person is when he is bold and mad and tramples death with death."
Many of Andreev's characters are united by the spirit of opposition, rebellion is an attribute of their essence. They rebel against the power of gray life, fate, loneliness, against the Creator, even if the doom of protest is revealed to them. Resistance to circumstances makes a person a Human - this idea underlies Andreev's philosophical drama "The Life of a Human" (1906). Mortally wounded by the blows of an incomprehensible evil force, the Man curses her at the edge of the grave, calling for a fight. But the pathos of resistance to the "walls" in Andreev's writings weakens over the years, the author's critical attitude to the "eternal image" of man intensifies.
First, a misunderstanding arose between the writers, then, especially after the events of 1905-1906, something really resembling enmity. Gorky did not idealize a person, but at the same time he often expressed the conviction that the shortcomings of human nature are, in principle, correctable. One criticized the "balance of the abyss", the other - "peppy fiction". Their paths diverged, but even during the years of alienation, Gorky called his contemporary "the most interesting writer ... of all European literature." And one can hardly agree with Gorky's opinion that their controversy interfered with the cause of literature.
To a certain extent, the essence of their differences is revealed by a comparison of Gorky's novel "Mother" (1907) and Andreev's novel "Sashka Zhegulev" (1911). In both works, we are talking about young people who have gone into the revolution. Gorky begins with naturalistic figurativeness, ends with romantic. Andreev's pen goes in the opposite direction: he shows how the seeds of the bright ideas of the revolution germinate in darkness, rebellion, "senseless and merciless."
The artist considers phenomena in the perspective of development, predicts, provokes, warns. In 1908, Andreev completed work on the philosophical and psychological story-pamphlet My Notes. The main character is a demonic character, a criminal convicted of a triple murder, and at the same time a seeker of truth. "Where is the truth? Where is the truth in this world of ghosts and lies?" - the prisoner asks himself, but in the end, the newly-minted inquisitor sees the evil of life in people's desire for freedom, and feels "tender gratitude, almost love" to the iron bars on the prison window, which revealed to him the beauty of limitation. He alters the well-known formula and states: "Lack of freedom is a conscious necessity." This "masterpiece of controversy" confused even the writer's friends, since the narrator hides his attitude to the beliefs of the "iron lattice" poet. It is now clear that in "Notes" Andreev approached the popular in the 20th century. genre of dystopia, predicted the danger of totalitarianism. The builder of the "Integral" from the novel "We" by E. I. Zamyatin, in his notes, in fact, continues the reasoning of this character Andreev:
"Freedom and crime are as inextricably linked as ... well, like the movement of an aero and its speed: the speed of an aero is 0, and it does not move, the freedom of a person is 0, and it does not commit crimes."
Is there one truth "or there are at least two of them," Andreev joked sadly and examined the phenomena from one side, then the other. In "The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men" he reveals the truth on one side of the barricades, in the story "The Governor" - on the other. The problems of these works are indirectly connected with revolutionary affairs. In The Governor (1905), a representative of the authorities doomedly awaits the execution of a death sentence pronounced on him by a people's court. A crowd of strikers "of several thousand people" came to his residence. First, impracticable demands were put forward, and then the pogrom began. The governor was forced to order the firing. Children were also among those killed. The narrator realizes both the justice of the people's anger and the fact that the governor was forced to resort to violence; he sympathizes with both sides. The general, tormented by pangs of conscience, finally condemns himself to death: he refuses to leave the city, travels without guards, and the "Law-Avenger" overtakes him. In both works, the writer points out the absurdity of life in which a person kills a person, the unnaturalness of a person's knowledge of the hour of his death.
The critics were right, they saw in Andreev a supporter of universal values, a non-party artist. In a number of works on the subject of revolution, such as "Into the Dark Distance" (1900), "La Marseillaise" (1903), the most important thing for the author is to show something inexplicable in a person, the paradox of an act. However, the "Black Hundred" considered him a revolutionary writer, and, fearing its threats, the Andreev family lived for some time abroad.
The depth of many of Andreev's works was not immediately revealed. So it happened with "Red Laughter" (1904). The author was prompted to write this story by newspaper news from the fields of the Russo-Japanese War. He showed war as madness that breeds madness. Andreev stylizes his narrative as fragmentary recollections of a front-line officer who has gone mad:
"This is red laughter. When the earth goes crazy, it starts laughing like that. There are no flowers or songs on it, it has become round, smooth and red, like a head that has been torn off the skin."
V. Veresaev, a participant in the Russo-Japanese War, the author of the realistic notes "At War", criticized Andreev's story for not being true. He spoke about the property of human nature to "get used" to all sorts of circumstances. According to Andreev's work, it is precisely directed against the human habit of elevating to the norm what should not be the norm. Gorky urged the author to "improve" the story, to reduce the element of subjectivity, to introduce more concrete, realistic depictions of the war. Andreev answered sharply: “To heal means to destroy the story, its main idea ... My topic: madness and horror." It is clear that the author valued the philosophical generalization contained in the "Red Laughter" and its projection into the coming decades.
Both the already mentioned story "Darkness" and the story "Judas Iscariot" (1907) were not understood by contemporaries who correlated their content with the social situation in Russia after the events of 1905 and condemned the author for "an apology for betrayal." They ignored the most important - philosophical - paradigm of these works.
In the story "Darkness", a selfless and bright young revolutionary hiding from the gendarmes is struck by the "truth of a brothel", revealed to him in the question of the prostitute Lyubka: what right does he have to be good if she is bad? He suddenly realized that his and his comrades' rise had been bought at the price of the fall of many unfortunates, and concluded that "if we cannot illuminate all the darkness with flashlights, then let's put out the fires and climb into the darkness." Yes, the author highlighted the position of an anarchist-maximalist, to which the bomber switched, but he also highlighted the "new Lyubka", who dreamed of joining the ranks of "good" fighters for another life. This plot twist was dismissed by critics, who condemned the author for what they felt was a sympathetic portrayal of a renegade. But the image of Lyubka, which later researchers ignored, plays an important role in the content of the story.
The story "Judas Iscariot" is tougher, in it the author draws the "eternal image" of mankind, who did not accept the Word of God and killed the one who brought it. "Behind her," A. A. Blok wrote about the story, "the author's soul is a living wound." In the story, the genre of which can be defined as "The Gospel of Judas", Andreev does not change much in the storyline outlined by the evangelists. He attributes episodes that could take place in the relationship between the Teacher and the students. All the canonical gospels also differ in episodes. At the same time, Andreev's, so to speak, legal approach to characterizing the behavior of participants in biblical events reveals the dramatic inner world of the "traitor." This approach reveals the predestination of tragedy: without blood, without the miracle of the resurrection, people do not recognize the Son of Man, the Savior. The duality of Judas, which was reflected in his appearance, his tossings, mirrors the duality of Christ's behavior: they both foresaw the course of events and both had reason to love and hate each other. "And who will help poor Iscariot?" - Christ meaningfully answers Peter to the request to help him in power games with Judas. Christ bows his head sadly and understandingly when he hears the words of Judas that in another life he will be the first to be next to the Savior. Judas knows the price of evil and good in this world, painfully experiences his rightness. Judas executes himself for betrayal, without which the Coming would not have taken place: the Word would not have reached mankind. The act of Judas, who, until the very tragic end, hoped that the people on Golgotha were about to see the light, see and realize who they were executing, is "the last stake of faith in people." The author condemns all mankind, including the apostles, for being impervious to goodness3. Andreev has an interesting allegory on this subject, created simultaneously with the story - "The snake's story about how it got poisonous teeth." The ideas of these works will germinate in the final work of the prose writer - the novel Satan's Diary (1919), published after the author's death.
Andreev was always attracted by an artistic experiment in which he could bring together the inhabitants of the real world and the inhabitants of the manifest world. Quite originally, he brought both of them together in the philosophical fairy tale "Earth" (1913). The Creator sends angels to the earth, wishing to know the needs of people, but, having learned the "truth" of the earth, the messengers "give", they cannot keep their clothes unstained and do not return to heaven. They are ashamed to be "clean" among people. A loving God understands them, forgives them, and reproachfully looks at the messenger who visited the earth, but kept his white clothes clean. He himself cannot descend to earth, for then people will not need heaven. There is no such condescending attitude towards humanity in the latest novel, which brings together the inhabitants of opposite worlds.
Andreev for a long time tried on the "wandering" plot associated with the earthly adventures of the incarnated devil. The implementation of the long-standing idea to create "the devil's notes" was preceded by the creation of a colorful picture: Satan-Mephistopheles is sitting over the manuscript, dipping his pen in the ink pot1. At the end of his life, Andreev enthusiastically worked on a work about the stay on earth of the leader of all the unclean with a very non-trivial ending. In the novel "Satan's Diary" the fiend is a suffering person. The idea of the novel can already be seen in the story "My Notes", in the image of the protagonist, in his reflections that the devil himself with all his "reserve of hellish lies, cunning and cunning" can be "led by the nose". The idea for the composition could have originated with Andreev while reading The Brothers Karamazov by F. M. Dostoevsky, in the chapter about the devil who dreams of becoming a naive merchant's wife: my suffering." But where Dostoevsky's devil wanted to find peace, an end to "suffering." The Prince of Darkness Andreeva is just beginning his suffering. An important originality of the work is the multidimensionality of the content: on one side the novel is turned to the time of its creation, on the other - to "eternity". The author trusts Satan to express his most disturbing thoughts about the essence of man, in fact, casts doubt on many ideas of his earlier works. "Satan's Diary", as Yu. Babicheva, a long-time researcher of L. N. Andreeva's work, noted, is also "the personal diary of the author himself."
Satan, in the guise of a merchant he killed and using his own money, decided to play with humanity. But a certain Thomas Magnus decided to take possession of the alien's funds. He plays on the alien's feelings for a certain Mary, in whom the devil saw the Madonna. Love has transformed Satan, he is ashamed of his involvement in evil, the decision has come to become just a man. To atone for past sins, he gives the money to Magnus, who promised to become a benefactor of people. But Satan is deceived and ridiculed: the "earthly Madonna" turns out to be a figurehead, a prostitute. Thomas ridiculed diabolical altruism, took possession of money in order to blow up the planet of people. In the end, in the scientific chemist, Satan sees the illegitimate son of his own father: "It is hard and insulting to be this little thing, which is called a man on earth, a cunning and greedy worm ..." - reflects Satan1.
Magnus is also a tragic figure, a product of human evolution, a character who suffered his misanthropy. The narrator equally understands both Satan and Thomas. It is noteworthy that the writer endows Magnus with an appearance reminiscent of his own (this can be seen by comparing the portrait of the character with the portrait of Andreev, written by I. E. Repin). Satan gives a person an assessment from the outside, Magnus - from the inside, but in the main their assessments coincide. The culmination of the story is parodic: the events of the night are described, "when Satan was tempted by man." Satan is crying, having seen his reflection in people, the earthly ones are laughing "at all ready devils."
Crying - the leitmotifs of Andreev's works. Many and many of his characters shed tears, offended by the powerful and evil darkness. God's light cried - darkness cried, the circle closes, there is no way out for anyone. In "The Diary of Satan" Andreev came close to what L. I. Shestov called "the apotheosis of groundlessness."
At the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, as well as throughout Europe, theatrical life was in its heyday. People of creativity argued about the ways of development of performing arts. In a number of publications, primarily in two "Letters on the Theater" (1911 - 1913), Andreev presented his "theory of the new drama", his vision of the "theater of pure psychism" and created a number of plays that corresponded to the tasks put forward2. He proclaimed "the end of everyday life and ethnography" on the stage, and opposed the "obsolete" A. II. Ostrovsky to the "modern" A.P. Chekhov. It is not the moment that is dramatic, Andreev argues, when the soldiers shoot the rebellious workers, but the one when the factory owner struggles "with two truths" on a sleepless night. He leaves the spectacle for the cafeteria and the cinema; the theater stage, in his opinion, should belong to the invisible - the soul. In the old theatre, the critic concludes, the soul was "contraband". Andreev the prose writer is recognizable in the innovator-playwright.
Andreev's first work for the theater was the romantic-realistic play "To the Stars" (1905) about the place of the intelligentsia in the revolution. Gorky was also interested in this topic, and for some time they worked together on the play, but co-authorship did not take place. The reasons for the gap become clear when comparing the problems of two plays: "To the Stars" by L. N. Andreev and "Children of the Sun" by M. Gorky. In one of Gorky's best plays, born in connection with their common idea, one can detect something "Andreev", for example, in contrasting "children of the sun" with "children of the earth", but not much. It is important for Gorky to imagine the social moment of the intelligentsia's entry into the revolution; for Andreev, the main thing is to correlate the purposefulness of scientists with the purposefulness of revolutionaries. It is noteworthy that Gorky's characters are engaged in biology, their main tool is a microscope, Andreev's characters are astronomers, their instrument is a telescope. Andreev gives the floor to the revolutionaries who believe in the possibility of destroying all "walls", to the petty-bourgeois skeptics, to the neutrals who are "above the fray", and all of them have "their own truth". The movement of life forward - an obvious and important idea of the play - is determined by the creative obsession of individuals, and it does not matter whether they give themselves to the revolution or science. But only people who live with their souls and thoughts turned to the "triumphant immensity" of the Universe are happy with him. The harmony of the eternal Cosmos is opposed to the insane fluidity of the life of the earth. The cosmos is in harmony with the truth, the earth is wounded by the collision of "truths".
Andreev has a number of plays, the presence of which allowed contemporaries to talk about "the theater of Leonid Andreev." This series opens with the philosophical drama The Life of a Man (1907). Other most successful works of this series are Black Masks (1908); "Tsar-Hunger" (1908); "Anatema" (1909); "Ocean" (1911). Andreev's psychological works are close to the named plays, for example, such as "Dog Waltz", "Samson in Chains" (both - 1913-1915), "Requiem" (1917). The playwright called his compositions for the theater "representations", thereby emphasizing that this is not a reflection of life, but a play of the imagination, a spectacle. He argued that on the stage the general is more important than the particular, that the type speaks more than the photograph, and the symbol is more eloquent than the type. Critics noted the language of modern theater found by Andreev - the language of philosophical drama.
In the drama "Life of Man" the formula of life is presented; the author "frees himself from everyday life", goes in the direction of maximum generalization1. There are two central characters in the play: Human, in whose person the author proposes to see humanity, and Someone in gray, called He, - something that combines human ideas about the supreme third-party force: God, fate, fate, the devil. Between them - guests, neighbors, relatives, good people, villains, thoughts, emotions, masks. Someone in gray acts as a messenger of the "circle of iron destiny": birth, poverty, work, love, wealth, fame, misfortune, poverty, oblivion, death. The transience of human stay in the "iron circle" is reminiscent of a candle burning in the hands of a mysterious Someone. The performance involves characters familiar from ancient tragedy - a messenger, moira, a choir. When staging the play, the author demanded that the director avoid halftones: "If kind, then like an angel; if stupid, then like a minister; if ugly, then so that the children are afraid. Sharp contrasts."
Andreev strove for unambiguity, allegorism, for symbols of life. It has no symbols in the symbolist sense. This is the manner of lubok painters, expressionist painters, icon painters, who depicted the earthly path of Christ in squares bordered by a single salary. The play is tragic and heroic at the same time: despite all the blows of outside forces, the Man does not give up, and at the edge of the grave he throws down the glove to the mysterious Someone. The finale of the play is similar to the finale of the story "The Life of Basil of Thebes": the character is broken, but not defeated. A. A. Blok, who watched the play staged by V. E. Meyerhold, in his review noted the non-randomness of the hero’s profession - he, in spite of everything, is a creator, an architect.
"Human Life" is a vivid proof that Man is a man, not a puppet, not a miserable creature doomed to decay, but a wonderful phoenix that overcomes the "icy wind of boundless spaces". Wax melts, but life does not decrease.
A peculiar continuation of the play "The Life of a Man" is the play "Anatema". In this philosophical tragedy reappears Someone blocking the entrances - impassive and powerful guardian of the gates beyond which stretches the Beginning of the beginnings, the Great Mind. He is the guardian and servant of eternity-truth. He is opposed Anatema, the devil cursed for rebellious intentions to know the truth
Universe and equal with the Great Mind. The evil spirit, cowardly and vainly curling around the feet of the guardian, is a tragic figure in its own way. "Everything in the world wants good," the damned one thinks, "and does not know where to find it, everything in the world wants life - and meets only death ..." He comes to doubts about the existence of Mind in the Universe: is the name of this rationality a Lie? ? From despair and anger that it is not possible to know the truth on the other side of the gate, Anatema tries to know the truth on this side of the gate. He puts cruel experiments on the world and suffers from unjustified expectations.
The main part of the drama, which tells about the feat and death of David Leizer, "the beloved son of God", has an associative connection with the biblical legend of the humble Job, with the gospel story of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. Anatema decided to test the truth of love and justice. He endows David with enormous wealth, pushes him to create a "miracle of love" for his neighbor, and contributes to the formation of David's magical power over people. But the diabolical millions are not enough for all those who suffer, and David, as a traitor and deceiver, is stoned to death by his beloved people. Love and justice turned into deception, good - evil. The experiment was set, but Anatema did not get a "clean" result. Before his death, David does not curse people, but regrets that he did not give them the last penny. The epilogue of the play repeats its prologue: the gate, the silent guardian Someone and the truth-seeker Anathema. With the circular composition of the play, the author speaks of life as an endless struggle of opposite principles. Soon after the writing of the play, staged by V.I. Nemirovich-Danchenko, it was a success at the Moscow Art Theater.
In the work of Andreev, artistic and philosophical beginnings merged together. His books feed an aesthetic need and awaken thought, disturb conscience, awaken sympathy for a person and fear for his human component. Andreev sets up a demanding approach to life. Critics have spoken of his "cosmic pessimism," but his tragedy is not directly related to pessimism. Probably, foreseeing a misunderstanding of his works, the writer has repeatedly argued that if a person cries, this does not mean that he is a pessimist and does not want to live, and vice versa, not everyone who laughs is an optimist and has fun. He belonged to the category of people with a heightened sense of death due to an equally heightened sense of life. People who knew him closely wrote about Andreev's passionate love for life.
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Federal Agency for Education
SEI VPO "Samara State University"
Faculty of Philology
Department of Russian and Foreign Literature
Spasociality "philology"
Course work
Imagecities in the early stories of L. Andreev
Introduction
1. Space and time in literature
2. City space in Russian literature. Petersburg image
3. The image of the city in the early stories of L. Andreev
3.1 "Petka in the country"
3.2 "In the Fog"
3.3 "City"
Conclusion
Bibliographic list
Introduction
creative andreev space city
The creative heritage of Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev, which was formed during the period of a turning point in the historical era at the turn of the century, is rich and varied. The writer is known to us as a feuilletonist, author of stories, novels, novels and one of the leading playwrights of his time.
Andreev's literary activity became widely known in the early 1900s, when the first collection of his stories was published. It should be noted that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the small epic genre, in particular the genre of the story, occupied a leading position in Russian literature. One of the factors that contributed to the spread of the genre of the story in the era of "timelessness" was that this epic form, with its laconic and capacious structure, the concentration of visual means, allowed "explore moral problems philosophically in depth and generalized, and at the same time at an almost molecular level." Grechnev V.Ya. Russian story of the late 19th-20th century. L., 1979. S. 199.
At the turn of the century, epic genres "mix" with each other, their boundaries are blurred. Therefore, according to I.I. Moskovkina, most often scientists do not distinguish between Andreev's stories and short stories, they call his stories stories. Moskovkina I.I. "Red Laughter": Apocalypse according to Andreev // Andreev L.N. Red laugh. Releases A.M. Cockerel. M., 2001. S.108-121. This problem of genre originality of the writer requires special consideration.
In the early works of Andreev, the influence of Pomyalovsky, G. Uspensky, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Garshin, Gorky is noticeable. “Andreev writes about the “humiliated and insulted”, about the sucking vulgarity and stupefying effect on a person of a petty-bourgeois environment, about children crushed by need, deprived of joy, about those who are thrown by fate to the very “bottom” of life, about petty bureaucratic people, about standardization human personality in the conditions of bourgeois society. Sokolov A.G. History of Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. M., 1999. S.380-381. L. Andreev wakes up the alarm for human souls. In his works, he writes about heroes who are horrified by the absurdity of life, who are in a tense, excited state, in a state of "shock".
The monograph by L. Jezuitova is devoted directly to the early artistic prose of the writer. In this work, according to the sum of meaningful and formal features, many of Andreev's stories are divided by the author into three groups.
The first group consists of stories of a "philosophical mood", which are closer than others to event-based ones ("At the Window", "Petka in the Country", "Grand Slam", "Once Upon a Time", "In the Fog" and others). The hero is shown here in the flow of everyday life. Andreev focuses on the unconsciously tragic, on the tragic everyday in the life of an ordinary, weak person. The author shows his hero as if from the outside, although often certain aspects of the character's life are given through the prism of his own sensual and spiritual reactions.
The second group of stories includes sketches, sketches, sketches (“Laughter”, “Lie”, “Nabat”, “Abyss”). They are brought together by an overly expressive language style. The empirical element is completely subordinate to mood, an explosion of feelings (this is a cry, a rhythm, a sound, an extreme degree of something catastrophic).
Finally, the third group consists of "confessional-ideological" stories ("The Story of Sergei Petrovich", "Thought"). The hero here does not just exist, goes with the flow, but reflects on his own life. It is shown in the process of realizing oneself, one's place in the world.
L. Iezuitova also highlights the central problem of all the work of Leonid Andreev. This problem is "man and rock". "The relationship of a person with" rock "- subordinatione or disobedience to him, clarificationwhat is above human strength and what the person himself, what are the boundaries and possibilities of his "I" - all this becomes the subject of Andreev's artistic analysis". Iezuitova L.A. Creativity of L. Andreev (1892-1906). L., 1976. P.75. From this follow the author's reflections on the fatal significance of death in human life, on the meaning of being.
The problem of the creative method of Leonid Andreev is still controversial. Researchers rank the writer in various literary movements and currents from realistic to decadent. Some of them believe that the leading principle in the writer's work is realistic, that his expression does not turn into expressionism, his symbol is realistic. Others argue that Andreev was the most prominent representative of Russian expressionism. Still others saw him as a forerunner of existentialism. Indeed, the tragedy of a man L. Andreev, "as if forever imprisoned in a chamber of loneliness", Kolobaeva L.A. Personality in the artistic world of L. Andreeva // Kolobaeva L.A. The concept of personality in Russian literature at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. M., 1990. P. 120. was close to the idea of loneliness, despair in the existentialist philosophy of L. Shestov.
V. Keldysh proposed a concept according to which the writer's artistic system belongs to the "intermediate" phenomena of "dual aesthetic nature", combining the principles of realism, symbolism and expressionism. Keldysh V.A. Russian realism of the early 20th century. M., 1975. S.210-277. Despite the fact that scientists have not come to a consensus on the correlation of literary trends in different periods of the writer's work, in general they speak of the realistic nature of Andreev's early prose and dramaturgy and the synthesis of modernist trends in his mature work.
The main theme of Andreev's early stories is the discovery of the humane in man, a protest against the suppression of the individual. The writer was interested in the problem of man and civilization that was relevant for the turn of the century. The author touched upon the issue of the influence of the city on the consciousness and soul of a person in contemporary society.
The purpose of our study is to reveal the image of the city in the early stories of Leonid Andreev. To achieve this goal, we propose to solve the following tasks:
1 to consider the features of creating the image of the city in Russian literature;
2 to analyze the image of the city in the early stories of L. Andreev on the example of several works.
The analysis will be carried out on the basis of stories written by Andreev from 1898 to 1904 and published in the first volume of the collected works of the writer. Andreev L.N. Collected works in 6 volumes. T.1. M., 1990.
Due to the low level of knowledge of this aspect in the work of Leonid Andreev, our work seems to be relevant.
1. Etcspace and time in literature
The world of a literary work of literature is often perceived by the reader as real. We analyze the actions of fictional characters as if they were actually committed. This is because the author “unconsciously, without attaching artistic significance to this, transferringsits in the world of appearance he createsrealityAndor representations and conceptsof his era." Likhachev D.S. The inner world of a work of art // Questions of Literature. 1968. No. 8.
However, the world of a work of art is the result of not only a display, but also an active transformation of reality associated with the idea and goals of the writer. This inner world is a single artistic whole, organized in a special way and having its own laws of development. The perception of a holistic and original "reality" of the work is provided largely due to such categories of literature as artistic time and artistic space.
It should be noted that in the field of art, real, conceptual and perceptual space and time are distinguished. Conceptual space and time reflect the historical space and time in which the events depicted in the book take place. For example, in I.S. Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”, the main events unfold in Russia in the summer of 1859. Perceptual space and time are, first of all, space - the time of representation and imagination.
“... Within the framework of the perceptual space-time, such eeffects like stretching and compression of time intervals, deformation of spatial relationships that are unacceptable at the level of physical (real) space-time. Zobov R.A. Mostepanenko A.M. On the typology of space-time relations in the sphere of art // Rhythm, space and time in literature and art. L., 1974. S.20. Consequently, the artistic image can only be realized with the help of the perceptual space and time of the subject who creates or perceives the work of art.
In different genres of literature, space and time are reproduced differently. Thus, in dramatic works, artistic time usually coincides in length with the compositional time of the action. In epic and lyrical-epic genres they are not identical.
Speaking of time in literature, they usually mean plot time, that is, time that is the object of the image and which is recognized due to the cause-and-effect relationships of events. “Events in the plot precede each other and follow each other, are built into a complex series, and thanks to this, the readernto notice time in a work of art, even if it does not specifically say anything about time. Likhachev D.S. Artistic time of a verbal work // Likhachev D.S. Poetics of ancient Russian literature. L., 1971. Time can be dynamic in the narrative about the actions of the characters, the transmission of dialogues and static in landscape, portrait characteristics, in the philosophical digressions of the author. Time can flow chronologically in a non-stop way (from beginning to end), or it can be interrupted, unfold in the opposite direction in the “reminiscences” of the hero. Time can be defined by brevity, when describing one day in the life of a hero, or by duration, when it stretches over many years.
In a work of art, not only plot time is depicted, but also the author's own time (and space). This is discussed in detail in B. Uspensky's monograph "The Poetics of Composition". Uspensky B. Poetics of composition. SPb., 2000. The author may not participate in the action, and then the author's time is concentrated at a certain point from which he narrates (internal or external). But the author's time in a work can develop independently and have its own storyline, as, for example, in Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.
The writer also creates a certain space in which the action of the work is localized. This space can be closed, limited by the framework of one room (for example, in L. Andreev's story "Grand Slam"), and cover a vast territory (almost all of Europe in L.N. Tolstoy's "War and Peace"). Space can be topographically concrete and abstract, going beyond the boundaries of the earthly planet; real (as in a chronicle or historical novel) or imaginary (as in a fairy tale). Likhachev D.S. Artistic time of a verbal work // Likhachev D.S. Poetics of ancient Russian literature. L., 1971.
It is important to note that the categories of literature under consideration are closely related to each other. This connection was pointed out by M.M. Bakhtin back in the 30s of the 20th century. In the work "Epos and the Novel" Bakhtin calls the relationship of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, a special term - chronotope (which literally means "time-space"). The literary critic emphasizes the inseparability of space and time and defines time as the fourth dimension of space. In the chronotope “time ... thickens, condenses, becomes artistically visible; space is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Bakhtin M.M. Epic and novel. SPb., 2000. According to Bakhtin, it is the chronotope that determines the genre variety and the image of a person in literature.
It must be remembered that the image and understanding of space and time has changed, just as the genres themselves have changed in different historical eras.
2. City space in Russian literature. ImagePetersburg
In an empirically given reality, a city is a physical (geographical) space of human existence, transformed by him, and, therefore, interconnected with social space. Social space is the space of people's communication, in which their specific behavior is revealed. Konev V.A. Spatial feature of the human world // Konev V.A. Social Philosophy. Samara, 2006. P. 55. And the city, of course, affects a person's life, determines and organizes his being.
In the reality surrounding us, the space of the city is characterized by locality, volume, concreteness, isolation and occupancy. These features of the city space can be reflected to some extent in the artistic world of a literary work. They can also be modified in accordance with the writer's intention, his method and style.
Initially, the city appeared in Rus' as a fortification, a fortress, that is, as a populated place, enclosed by a wall to protect it from the enemy. Gradually, the city turns into a relatively large settlement, commercial, industrial, administrative and cultural center.
In medieval chronicles, in historical stories, there are references to such cities of the Russian land as Kyiv, Novgorod, Vladimir, Suzdal, Yaroslavl and others. In these works of ancient Russian literature, the cities act only as a background for the action, events that tell about the life and exploits of this or that prince. The cities themselves are not individualized and do not carry any additional semantic load in the text.
In Russian literature, starting from the 18th century, the image of the city is directly created (which was largely due to the increase in its role in the public life of a person). In “Poor Lisa” by N.M. Karamzin, the image of “noble” Moscow and its environs arises, in “Gypsies” by A.S. Pushkin - the bondage of a stuffy city from which Aleko flees.
The image of a city in a work of art is often understood as an urban landscape that has emotional and psychological significance. This urban landscape was formed in the realistic direction of the literature of the 19th century (for example, in "Dead Souls" by N.V. Gogol, in the lyrics of N.A. Nekrasov).
The landscape, including the urban landscape, as an element of artistic space, is involved in creating the image of the chronotope. For example, in A.P. Chekhov’s stories “Ionych”, “Lady with a Dog”, descriptions of provincial towns with gray fences and the smell of fried onions form the chronotope of the province. Literature: Basic terms and concepts // Schoolchildren's Handbook. M., 2002. S.209.
In Russian literature, the urban landscape is most vividly reflected in the image of St. Petersburg, the city that from 1712 to 1918 was the capital of the Russian Empire.
Since the founding of St. Petersburg, myths and legends about this city began to take shape. On the one hand, the northern capital personified the new Russia, associated with a cultured, civilized, European city that the country can be proud of. On the other hand, St. Petersburg was built on a swamp by the hands of workers who lived in difficult conditions, starving, dying by the thousands. The city, crowded with foreigners and designed by foreign architects, had a non-Russian appearance. Thus, Petersburg in the minds of the people became the embodiment of the idea of good in the first case and the idea of evil in the second.
V.N. Toporov wrote that "thisBipolarity Petyarburga and honeycomb based on itThe rhyological myth (the “Petersburg” idea) is most fully and adequately reflected precisely in the Petersburg text of literature...” Toporov V.N. Petersburg and "Petersburg Text of Russian Literature" // Toporov V.N. Myth. Ritual. Symbol. Image: Studies in the field of mythopoetic: Selected works. M., 1995. P. 261. . The text about St. Petersburg Toporov refers to the number of "supersaturated realities" that are inseparable from the sphere of the symbolic.
In the literature of the 18th century, the image of a magnificent and ceremonial city is created in solemn odes, laudatory words and speeches (by F. Prokopovich, M.V. Lomonosov, V.K. Trediakovsky, A.P. Sumarokov). A.S. Pushkin in The Bronze Horseman shows two faces of the northern capital: the city of Petrov in the introduction and the city of the unfortunate Eugene in the main part of the poem. Pushkin, according to L. Dolgopolov, "acts as the last singer of the bright, majestic side of St. Petersburg and the first representative of written literature, who embodied in real artistic features his fatal and tragic role in the fate of man." Dolgopolov L. The myth of St. Petersburg and its transformation at the beginning of the century // Dolgopolov L. At the turn of the century: On Russian literature of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. L., 1985. P. 156. In the future, the image of a gloomy, ghostly and soulless Petersburg came to the fore. In N.V. Gogol's "Petersburg stories", poems by N.A. Nekrasov, novels by F.M. Dostoevsky and I.A. Goncharov, Petersburg becomes a city that has a detrimental effect on a person. In the 20th century, the "Petersburg text" is formed and completed in the works of A. Bely, A. Blok, A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam, Vaginov.
The description of St. Petersburg in Russian literature is not limited to its topographic, climatic, ethnographic, everyday, and cultural characteristics. The "Petersburg text" is determined by the unity and integrity of the meanings and ideas that are laid down in it by its creators.
3. The image of the city in the early stories of L. Andreev
Leonid Nikolaevich Andreev was born in the city of Orel. In the parental house on the 2nd Pushkarnaya street of the Oryol settlement, inhabited by the poor, his childhood and youth passed. After graduating from the classical gymnasium, Andreev enters the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, but continues his studies at Moscow University. Having received a diploma, he works as an assistant to a barrister and is published in newspapers, writes court reports, feuilletons, and essays.
The literary activity of the writer began, as he himself admitted, in 1898, when his first story "Bargamot and Garaska" was published. It reflects the vivid impressions of Leonid Andreev about the provincial city of Orel, and the heroes of the story had real prototypes. “Inhabited by shoemakers, hemp swatters, handicraftsmen, tailors and other free professions representatives, possessing two taverns, Sundays and Mondays, Pushkanaya devoted all her leisure hours to the Homeric fight, in which wives, disheveled, bare-haired, dragging their husbands, and little children took a direct part, gazing with delight at the courage of the calves. Andreev L. Bargamot and Garaska // Andreev L.N. Collected works in 6 volumes. M., 1990. T.1. P.44.
Andreev almost did not invent plots for his works. He wrote “about the little that life in Orel, St. Petersburg and Moscow showed him, about people and events that objectively do not rise above and do not fall below the average routine and boring everyday life. And in all this it was necessary to see something hidden from other eyes, to say about the usual in special, “strange” words in order to make the reader talk about himself - in response. Bogdanov A. Between the wall and the abyss // Andreev L.N. Collected works in 6 volumes. M., 1990. T.1. P.11.
The image of the city is created explicitly or in separate strokes in almost all of Leonid Andreev's early stories. Many of his heroes are residents of provincial towns, Moscow and St. Petersburg. In the description of cities, one can trace both a realistically objective way of depicting reality, and an overly expressive way. The stories reproduce the urban landscape, the appearance of cities and the life of people in city apartments and houses. The inner space of urban buildings can completely fence off a person from the outside world (“At the window”), it can be socially hierarchical (“In the basement”). The works mention topographically reliable distinctive features of cities, for example, Vorobyovy Gory and the Tretyakov Gallery in "The Tale of Sergei Petrovich" or the Neva embankment in the story "In the Fog". Usually the city is not specified, it is characterized in general terms.
The image of the city of Leonid Andreev can be different. But it is always a city that has a pernicious effect on the consciousness and soul of an ordinary person. A person feels disharmony in it, perishes in the conditions of a rapidly growing bourgeois civilization. In creating the image of the city, Andreev's tendency to perceive the gloomy and tragic aspects of life was reflected.
Let's take a closer look at the image of the city in such stories by Leonid Andreev as "Petka in the Country", "In the Fog" and "The City".
3.1 "Petka in the country"
The story "Petka in the country" can definitely be attributed to the early realist works of L. Andreev, awakening a humane attitude towards man. This person in the story becomes a little boy of ten years. The child of a lonely and poor cook is deprived of a carefree childhood. From an early age he was forced to serve in a barbershop, where he heard only an angry cry - "Boy, water!" and the threat “Wait a minute!”. Petka was punished for spilling water, but he did not complain. A heavy and monotonous existence dulled the feelings in the child, physically exhausted the boy and turned him into an apathetic old man. He kept losing weight and “Around his eyes and under his nose, wrinkles cut through, as if drawn by a sharp needle, and made him look like a dwarf.”
Petka was born and raised in one of the poorest districts of Moscow. Here he worked in a dirty barbershop, not far from which "there was a quartal filled with cheap housesdebauchery." And Petka got used to this rough and unattractive human life, where theft and robbery were commonplace. On the streets of the city he met the indifferent and angry faces of dirty-dressed people, he saw how a drunken man beat a drunken woman, but none of the running crowd stood up for her. It was a city of impersonal, homeless, socially disadvantaged people.
Petya, not consciously, but intuitively, could not accept his life as the norm. The boy seemed to "everything around him is not true, but a long, unpleasant dream" and he really wanted to go somewhere else. The problem of personality alienation is presented in the story as an innate sense of protest that arises in a child in the conditions of oppressive everyday life.
The symbol of another life for Petka was the dacha in Tsaritsyno, where the boy was invited by the gentlemen of his mother Nadezhda. "He did not know what a dacha was, but he believed that it was the very place where he was so eager."
Petka lived in the extremely closed space of the city. This space was limited by a dark barbershop, shops, shops and taverns located next to it, as well as a boulevard with its "descended" inhabitants. Daily fights and drinking here were a characteristic part of human life. The child did not know another life.
Outside the city, an amazing world opened up for Petka, the existence of which he did not even suspect. It was a world of fields, plains, mountains, forests, rivers and wide clear skies. It was a world of freedom and space, presented before the boy's eyes as something new and strange. “In contrast to the savages of past centuries, who were lost when crossing from the desert to the city, this modern savage, snatched from the stone embraces of the city, felt weak and helpless in the face of nature.. Everything here was alive for him, feeling and having a will.
The urban landscape is depicted in dark and sad tones: a dirty barbershop black with soot, trees gray with dust, grass turning brown in the sun. Petka, living in this city, could not even realize whether he was bored or fun. He mechanically followed the orders of the owner Osip Abramovich or one of the apprentices.
The beauty of nature awakened the soul of a child. Petka seemed to have learned to understand his feelings and express his feelings. In the boy's perception, white joyful clouds are now floating across the sky, and green and light glades with bright colors become cheerful. When Petka was asked if he liked living in the country, he “He smiled embarrassingly and answered: Good! ..”
At the dacha, Petka finally found a real childhood. He fished, swam in the pond, climbed the ruins of the palace, ran barefoot, played hopscotch. Petka's facial wrinkles smoothed out, and he himself noticeably rejuvenated in the fresh air (and this is at ten years old?!).
But a week later, a letter came to the dacha to “Kufarka Nadezhda”, in which the owner of the hairdresser demanded that Petka return to the city. When the boy was told this terrible news, he did not immediately understand where he needed to go. The dacha became his home, but he completely forgot about the city. Realizing what had happened, Petka did not just cry - he screamed. The hysterical child expressed protest and disagreement with all his being, because he did not want to lose his newfound happiness and return to the city, where no one cares about his suffering.
Petka and his mother arrived by train to Moscow . "Jostling among the hurrying passengers, they came out into the rumbling street, and the big greedy city indifferently swallowed up its little victim."
The composition of the work is a circle: the story ends in the same place from which it began. The city did not let go and pursued the child like bad luck. And the little man of Leonid Andreev could not resist this force, standing above him. Once again in a stuffy barbershop, Petka unquestioningly carried out orders. And only at night, with bated breath, did he remember the dacha and tell Nikolka about how "What does not happen, what no one has ever seen or heard."
In the story, the natural environment, which gives inner freedom, is opposed to the space of the city, which is closed, fettering and enslaving a person. Such an antithesis was significant in Andreev's work. She is found in such stories of the writer as “From the life of staff captain Kablukov”, “Hotel”, “City”, “The story of Sergei Petrovich”.
3.2 "In the Fog"
Leonid Andreev's story depicts the mental state of a 17-year-old boy who is acutely experiencing his own moral insignificance. Gymnasium student Pavel Rybakov was close to corrupt women and fell ill with a shameful disease, "one cannot think of without horror and self-loathing". In the soul of the hero, there is a struggle between two principles: dreams of bright love for the pure and innocent Katya Reimer coexist with his repeated “falls”. Pavel feels like a bad, lost person, hides his illness from his family and suffers alone.
Leonid Andreev reveals in the work the phenomenon of "disintegration" of the bourgeois-intellectual environment. Sergei Andreevich, Pavel's father, thought that he knew his son, because he always discussed with him many issues of life seriously and frankly, as with an adult. But it turned out that Paul “in some mysterious moods, in some disgusting drawings…”. Even in this relatively prosperous family in terms of upbringing, one of the acute problems of morality - the preservation by the younger generation of purity, not only spiritual, but also physical - remains unresolved.
L.Andreev is interested in the cardinal problems of the troubles of human existence. The writer, according to V. Grechnev, says that society cannot answer an important question: how to deal with the fact that a person has long been living a double life - an obvious one that he is proud of, and a secret that he despises and tries to hide. Explicit life is described in smart and useful books: music, theater, exhibitions... “And next to her, a completely different life continues to flow - disgustingly dirty and qishameless, she both outside the person and inside him, she repels him with her ugliness and in an incomprehensible way attracts to herself, he does not forget about her both in the bosom of nature and in the hustle and bustle of city streets. Grechnev V.Ya. Tragedy in everyday life (type of hero, conflict and originality of psychologism in the stories of L. Andreev) // Grechnev V.Ya. Russian story of the late 19th - early 20th century. L., 1979. P. 139. Pseudo-moral society turns a blind eye to this reverse side of civilization, does not allow itself to think about it.
Pavel Rybakov sinks to the bottom of street debauchery with the move to St. Petersburg. The image of the capital is revealed metonymically in the story: through the natural and climatic characteristics of the city - fog. The fog is not so much a detail of the urban landscape as it recreates the symbolic plan of the work, reflects Paul's state of mind. The November fog is painted by Andreev the artist in an alarming dark yellow color. It covers everything: the streets, the houses of the stone city, the figures of passers-by. Fog penetrates into Pavel's room : "everything was yellow from him: the ceiling, walls and a crumpled pillow", "yellow ... notebooks and papers", "Paul's face also turned yellow from him."
In the story, the dirty city fog and the "dirty" illness of the protagonist are metaphorically brought together. They carry death within them. In the fog, which is compared with a shapeless yellow-bellied reptile, belated painfully bright flowers perish. Because of the illness, Paul feels miserable , terribly lonely "like a leper on his pus". He decides to commit suicide and murder the prostitute Manechka on the very day when the city was suffocating in a yellow fog from the very dawn.
In St. Petersburg, Pavel is in the grip of something fatal, leaving no hope of salvation. Here he is mercilessly pursued by women with cold and impudent eyes. When Paul “asleep and powerless to control his feelings and desires, they grow like fiery ghosts from the depths of his being; when he is awake, some terrible force takes him in his iron hands and ... throws him into the dirty embrace of dirty women.
In the expressive description of the city, the influence on L. Andreev of the work of Ch. Baudelaire, E. Poe is noticeable. In Paul's mind, the city is teeming with women, "Like rotten meat with worms". In this city, he fell ill and because of the illness he feels himself "in some fetid slops". The city makes a terrible and unpleasant impression not only on Paul, but also on the reader: “sticky and gray mud lay on the pavement”, “the air is motionless and heavy”, “wood lice crawl along the slippery, high walls”.
The indifferent city is covered with a cloudy and cold fog. And it seemed incomprehensible and strange to Paul that “that in this leaden, rotten-smelling fog, some kind of restless and lively life continues to flow ...”.
The image of Petersburg in Leonid Andreev's story "In the Fog" continues the folklore tradition in Russian literature, according to which Petersburg is the center of evil and crime, suffering and death.
3.3 "City"
The urban landscape is presented most fully and characteristically for the work of Leonid Andreev in the story called "The City", written in 1902.
The story tells about a poor official who feels completely alone among the thousands of people living in a huge city. Petrov was very afraid of this city, especially during the day, when the streets are full of strangers and people unknown to him. The main character had no family or friends. There was no one around to whom he could tell about his experiences and fears. In the city “each ... person was a separate world, with his own laws and goals, with his own special joy and sorrow, - and everyone was like a ghost,who appeared for a momentand, unsolved, unrecognized disappeared. And than the more there were people who did not know each other, the more terrible the loneliness of each became.
Against the background of general alienation, Petrov is still looking for human communication. Once a year, at Easter, he meets another unfortunate official in the house of Messrs. Vasilevsky. Their meetings gradually develop into an acquaintance. A friendly relationship seems to be established between them, where feelings of joy, anxiety, and grief are manifested. But sincere conversations do not work, and in laconic conversations, each of them speaks about his own. In the end, they even remain nameless for each other (and for readers): another official in Petrov’s memoirs is only "That", Petrov himself for "that" - "humpbacked".
On the one hand, the hero of Leonid Andreev is an ordinary, weak person, he belongs to the faceless mass of the city's inhabitants. Every day, Petrov went to work, in the winter he occasionally went to the theater, and in the summer he went to his friends at the dacha. His life flowed measuredly and monotonously, like everyone else, and was "measured" by the change of seasons.
On the other hand, the writer singles out a small official from the crowd, who is intuitively aware of the pettiness and ordinaryness of his personality. Unlike other residents of the city, Petrov thinks about why he is alone among many people, why obstacles arise in the way of rapprochement between man and man. Misunderstanding and loneliness lead Petrov to a kind of protest. In a drunken riot with tears he screams : "We are all humans! All brothers!. The hero of Andreev almost literally repeats Bashmachkin's exclamations from Gogol's story: "I am your brother", "Why do you offend me?"). Petrov protests under the influence of alcohol, but he simply cannot express his suffering in any other way.
In this story, Andreev continues to develop the theme of the "little man" in literature. The writer, however, does not focus on the low social position of the official, on his oppression by the masters. V.A. Meskin rightly notes: “The tragedy here is not that the individual rejects society,and not that society rejects individuality, but in the fact that individuals do not constitute a single society. Meskin V.A. Between "two truths" // Andreev L.A. Red laugh. Remizov A.M. Cockerel. M., 2001. S.93-94.
The separation of people occurs within the boundaries of the city. In the description of this city, Andreev's inclination towards hyperbolization is observed. This is understandable, because the reader sees the urban landscape through the eyes of the intimidated Petrov. "The city was crowded and huge"- these characteristic features are repeated in the text in different variations several times.
The urban landscape is concretized in expressively rich descriptions of streets and houses. “With the colossal weight of his stone swollen houses, he 'city' crushed the ground on which he stood, and the streets between the houses were narrow, crooked and deep, like cracks in the rock”. Streets, “broken, suffocated, frozen in a terrible convulsion”, they are animated, endowed with the ability to be seized with panic fear, to flee the city into an open field. But, like Petrov, the streets are captured by the city. Houses are likened to impersonal residents: “sometimes blushing with the cold and liquid blood of fresh brick, sometimes painted with dark and light paint, they stood on the sides with unshakable firmness, indifferently met and saw off, crowded in a dense crowd both in front and behind, lost their physiognomy and became similar to one another ...”.
Leonid Andreev did not seek to objectively recreate any real city in his work, although the features of St. Petersburg are guessed in it. For the writer, it is much more important to convey the emotional perception of the city by its inhabitants, to show the relationship between the subject of consciousness (Petrov) and the object of the image (the city).
The city acts in relation to the hero as “something stubborn, invincible, indifferently cruel.” Petrov is at the mercy of the stone city, he feels "a grain of sand among other grains of sand" and suffocate with loneliness.
The giant city, once created by human hands, comes to life, abstracts and begins to live a self-sufficient life. He mercilessly "kills" his inhabitants: the Smirnovs, Antonovs, Nikiforovs. And the “little man” of L. Andreev, lost in city furnished rooms, becomes depersonalized under the influence of life in this city. Petrov, however, does not resign himself to his position and tries to "revolt" against the evil fate of fate, but everything ends with the victory of the indifferent city. “The huge city has become even larger, and where the field spread wide, new streets uncontrollably stretch, and on the sides of their thick, open stone houses, they heavily press the ground on which they stand. And to the seven cemeteries that were in the city, a new one, the eighth, was added.
Thus, the city of Andreev is paradoxical, disharmonious. It does not connect, but, on the contrary, will separate the people living in it. The city acts as a symbol of loneliness, a symbol of a divisive beginning. The mystical city is destroying people, turning them into ghosts. It is alien to man and represents for him a space of horror and stuffiness. This "dead" city, which captures the free field, leaves no hope for "resurrection" to anyone.
Conclusion
We examined the image of the city in the early stories of Leonid Andreev on the example of works that L. Iezuitova classifies as stories of “philosophical mood”. It is in them that the image of the city is reflected most vividly and fully, here it plays a significant role.
The description of the city revealed the writer's tragic worldview. The city acts in relation to the hero as a hostile and destructive principle. Within the urban space, a person, regardless of his social position in society, age, life experience, is dominated by a fatal force, a fatal predetermination of fate. And L. Andreev did not see the possibility of overcoming this evil of civilization. According to the writer, who was formed in the era of religious nihilism and disappointment in the materialistic theories of "social progress", something is wrong in the deepest foundations of people's lives.
Bibliographic ssqueak
I. Fiction
1.Andreev L.N. Collected works in 6 volumes. T.1. M., 1990.
II. Scientific and critical literature
1. Achatova A.A. The originality of the genre of the story of L. Andreev in the early 900s // Problems of method and genre. Tomsk, 1977. Issue. 5.
2. Bakhtin M.M. Epic and novel. SPb., 2000.
3. Bogdanov A. Between the wall and the abyss // Andreev L.N. Collected works in 6 volumes. T.1. M., 1990.
4. Grechnev V.Ya. Russian story of the late 19th-20th century. L., 1979.
5. Dolgopolov L. At the turn of the century: On Russian literature of the late 19th - early 20th century. L., 1985.
6. Zobov R.A., Mostepanenko A.M. On the typology of space-time relations in the sphere of art // Rhythm, space and time in literature and art. L., 1974.
7. Iezuitova L.A. Creativity of Leonid Andreev (1892-1906). L., 1976.
8. Karpov I.P. Word of Leonid Andreev // Andreev L.N. Red laugh. Remizov A.M. Cockerel. M., 2001.
9. Keldysh V.A. Russian realism of the early 20th century. M., 1975.
10. Kolobaeva L.A. The concept of personality in Russian literature at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries. M., 1990.
11. Kulova T.K. Creative searches of Leonid Andreev // Critical realism of the 20th century. and modernism. M., 1967.
12. Levin F.L.N.Andreev // Andreev L. Novels and stories. Kuibyshev, 1981.
13. Likhachev D.S. The inner world of a work of art // Questions of Literature. 1968. No. 8.
14. Likhachev D.S. Poetics of ancient Russian literature. L., 1971.
15. Meskin V.A. Between "two truths" // Andreev L.A. Red laugh. Remizov A.M. Cockerel. M., 2001.
16. Meskin V.A. The artistic method of Leonid Andreev and expressionism // Problems of the poetics of Russian literature of the 19th century. M., 1983.
17. Mikheeva L.N. With a thought about Russia, about man: Pages of creativity of A.I. Kuprin, I.A. Bunin, L.N. Andreev. M., 1992.
18. Moskovkina I.I. "Red Laughter": Apocalypse according to Andreev // Andreev L.A. Red laugh. Remizov A.M. Cockerel. M., 2001.
19. Muratova K.D. Leonid Andreev // History of Russian literature. T.4. L., 1983.
20. Novikova T.N. Poetics of the genre of the story of the 80-90s of the 19th century. in Russian criticism // Problems of the poetics of Russian literature of the 19th century. M., 1983.
21. Smirnova L.A. Creativity of LN Andreev: Problems of artistic method and style. M., 1986.
22. Sokolov A.G. History of Russian literature of the late 19th - early 20th centuries. M., 1999.
23. Toporov V.N. Petersburg and "Petersburg Text of Russian Literature" // Toporov V.N. Myth. Ritual. Symbol. Image: Research in the field of mythopoetic: Selected. M., 1995.
24. Uspensky B. Poetics of composition. SPb., 2000.
25. Shipacheva N.A. “Language and style of L.N. Andreev’s story “City” // Russian speech. 1988. No. 3.
III. Reference literature
1. Brief literary encyclopedia. In 9 volumes. T.9. M., 1971.
2. Literary encyclopedic dictionary. M., 1987.
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Andreev "Governor" - composition "Essay based on Andreev's story" Governor ""
At the beginning of 1906, Andreev's story "The Governor" was published in the social-democratic journal Pravda. The action of the story takes place in the provinces, but the allusion to the events of January 9 in St. Petersburg is easily guessed. The central character of the work is guilty of shooting down a workers' demonstration. However, the author is not interested in events, but in the state of mind of the governor, who executes himself by an internal court. Painful introspection brings him to the point that he himself goes towards death, to the bullets of terrorists.
Progressive criticism (Gorky, Lunacharsky), highly appreciating the story in general, noted in it the deliberateness of some situations (the governor's waking dream), abstract humanistic compassion for the culprit in the death of workers, sweetness (the image of a schoolgirl). It is difficult, however, to agree with those critics who see in the sugary letter of the schoolgirl "the author's sympathy for a repentant sinner."
There is also a motif in the story that the governor realizes the inevitability of retribution; it is no coincidence that the work ends with the symbolic image of the “terrible Law-Avenger”. This, perhaps, is the main thing in the story, although it is expressed vaguely and vaguely. The theme of retribution against the tsarist gendarmes is reflected in many works of both Russian and Ukrainian literature, and the story "The Governor" occupies one of the prominent places in this regard. Some researchers believe that he was to some extent the impetus for the creation of M. Kotsiubinsky's sketch "Unknown". The commonality of not only the theme, but also artistic techniques is striking: the disclosure of human psychology before execution. However, these works differ very significantly from one another: Andreev shows the experiences of a governor sentenced to death by terrorists, while Kotsyubinsky shows a terrorist's confession on the eve of the assassination of a tsarist dignitary.
It is hardly worth, however, so sharply contrasting Andreev's story and Kotsiubinsky's sketch, as P. Kolesnik, for example, does. After all, if Unknown, by killing the governor, fulfilled the will of the people, then the character of Andreev's story is condemned to death by the people. The most merciless judges of the governor were people of the most difficult life - women, wives and mothers of workers from the most impoverished Kanatnaya street: "Perhaps it was in the woman's head that the idea was born that the governor should be killed."
The solution of the topic by Andreev and Kotsyubinsky is different, but both writers often resorted to similar techniques. In The Governor and in such works by Kotsyubinsky as Unknown, 220, Laughter, there are elements of symbolism and expressionism. We do not always find in them a clear motivation for actions. Writers resort to conditional methods, showing abrupt, outwardly unmotivated changes in the hero's mind. So, Pan Chubinsky (“Laughter” by Kotsiubinsky), having looked closely at the maid Varvara, suddenly understood her difficult life and justified her hatred for the owners. So the governor of Andreev suddenly admitted that it was not a state necessity to shoot the hungry. And yet, with some similarity in their creative manner, Kotsyubinsky’s stories are polemical in relation to Andreev’s, because they primarily emphasize the idea of a just revenge of the people, while for Andreev, the psychological moment is primarily important, the experience of a person in general, outside his social ties.
.The story of Leonid Andreev "Kusak" is about compassion, the responsibility of a person for those whom he has tamed. Subsequently, this idea was formulated and presented to the world in the form of an aphorism by another master of the word, the French writer A. de Saint-Exupery. The author of the story calls to feel the pain of the suffering living soul of a homeless dog.
History of creation and description of the story
The story of a stray dog is told by an outside observer. Biter grew up and became an adult dog despite the ruthless circumstances in which she found herself. The dog has no home and is always hungry. But the main thing that haunts her is the cruelty of people, strong people who have the opportunity to offend a weak animal. Kusaka dreams of affection and one day she dares to accept it, but as a result she gets kicked in the stomach with a boot. She doesn't trust anyone anymore. One day, being in the garden of someone else's dacha, the dog bites the girl who wants to caress her. So she gets acquainted with the family of summer residents and becomes “her” dog here.
A good attitude and daily food change not only the life, but also the character of a homeless animal. Kusaka becomes affectionate, guards the dacha and amuses the new owners with her funny joy. However, autumn comes, the girl Lelya leaves for the city with her family, leaving her four-legged friend in an abandoned dacha. The story ends with the dreary howl of a homeless and useless Kusaka.
Main characters
L. Andreev wrote that, having made the main character of the story a dog, he wanted to convey to the reader the idea that “every living thing has the same soul,” which means that it suffers equally and needs compassion and love. Kusaka has a faithful heart, knows how to be grateful, responsive to affection and capable of love.
Another heroine of the story, the girl Lelya, on the contrary, does not appreciate fidelity, her love is selfish and fickle. The girl could be better, she has good moral inclinations. But her upbringing is occupied by adults, for whom well-being and peace of mind are more important than such “little things” as compassion and responsibility for a weak and trusting creature.
Story analysis
In a letter to K. Chukovsky, Leonid Andreev writes that the works included in the collection are united by one idea: to show that "all living things suffer only suffering." Among the heroes of the stories there are people of different classes and even a stray dog, but, as part of the “alive”, they are all united by “great impersonality and equality” and are equally forced to resist the “enormous forces of life”.
The writer shows the difference between pity, implicated in momentary emotions, and real, lively and active compassion. The selfishness of the girl and her family is obvious: they are glad that they were able to shelter a homeless animal. But this joy is not based on responsibility and largely comes from the considerations that the dog brightens up the suburban life of summer residents with its inept and unrestrained manifestation of joy. It is not surprising that pity for a homeless animal easily turns into indifference at the mere thought of personal inconvenience from living a dog in a city house.
The story, it seems, could be a story with a happy ending. Like the ones in Christmas stories. But L. Andreev aims to awaken the conscience of people, to show the cruelty of indifference to the suffering of a weak being. The writer wants a person to accept the pain of someone else's soul as his own. Only then will he himself become kinder, closer to his high calling - to be a man.
V.A. Meskin
The time will come, I will paint people an amazing picture of their lives.
From the diary of Andreev the high school student
The literary glory of Leonid Andreev (1871-1919) - a prose writer, playwright, critic, journalist - grew rapidly. Even before the release of the first book of "Tales" in 1901, his works of fiction, published in newspapers and magazines, were a great success. Perhaps not a single major critic has passed by his work. There were more positive responses, and even his opponents, such as 3. Gippius, unconditionally recognized his talent, calling him a "star of the first magnitude." At the end of the first decade of the new century, when the warm friendship between Andreev and Gorky had already been cooled by the first ice of alienation, Gorky, nevertheless, recognizes Andreev as "the most interesting writer ... of all European literature." Andreev was translated during his lifetime, published in Europe and Japan. The famous modern Venezuelan writer R.G. Paredes calls him "a teacher in the field of ... storytelling."
In recent years, after decades of official semi-ban, artificial semi-forgetfulness, the second wave of reader, scientific interest in Andreev is rising higher and higher in our country. The writer's work is returning in full to our culture, along with the work of its other prominent representatives, who were previously completely or semi-exiled. Solovyov and Berdyaev, Merezhkovsky and Gippius, Minsky and Balmont, Shmelev and Remizov, Tsvetaeva and Gumilyov, Zaitsev and Nabokov, and many others return. An attempt to excommunicate these prominent figures of spiritual life at the turn of the 19th-20th centuries from their homeland. was a consequence of the fact that their vision of the world and man did not coincide with the dominant ideology approved by the state after 1917.
They were not like-minded, there were tough debates between them, some of them changed their beliefs over the years, but they were united by a passionate search for truth, the rejection of a simplified approach to explaining the world, man, society, history. All of them, humanists, sympathized with the humiliated and offended, some in the years when, according to Lenin, "everyone became Marxists", "had been ill" with Marxism or, like Andreev, "gravitated" towards social democracy. However, even before the bloody events of 1905, and even more so after them, many bearers of high culture were frightened by the outwardly attractive and not new idea of a quick (revolutionary) device for a happy life for all people, which is more and more popular among the masses.
Now it is difficult to deny that they were far-sighted, rejecting the path to a social paradise through blood and a "fair" redistribution of earthly goods. They were frightened by the original Marxist principle of collective (class) guilt and responsibility, which allows a person to take personal responsibility more freely. They were outraged by the fact that, making a fetish of the future, the party, the class, the struggle, the revolutionaries indifferently pass by the person, his inner, very difficult to predict potentials. Many of those later expelled “called the (revolutionary. - V. M.) intelligentsia to think ... to prevent trouble - before it's too late. However, their call was not heard.
This appeal was addressed to those who, according to the tradition of the 19th century, blamed all the people's troubles only on the "environment", "conditions", naively believing that with a change in the "environment", the constitution, the moral code, human nature easily changes. “By laying responsibility on the conditions, that is, again on the environment, he (mechanistic, social determinism. - V.M.) seemed to withdraw the personality from both (personal. - V.M.) responsibility and from the environment.” One of the first to raise this issue in literature was Dostoevsky, who pointed out the danger of the “underground man” hidden in almost everyone.
The writer peers into the dual nature of people, in fact, accepts the thesis of Vl. Solovyov: "Man is at the same time both the Divine and the insignificance." Altruism, sacrifice, love, fidelity on the pages of Andreev's works are often given in fusion with misanthropy, selfishness, hatred, betrayal. At the same time, being an atheist, the writer rejects the path of salvation indicated by this philosopher: “I will not accept God ...”
Andreev is trying to build his concept of man, again and again returns to the question of what dominates in him, what is the meaning of life, what is truth. Painful, eternal questions he asks himself, his friends. In a letter to V. Veresaev (June 1904): “The meaning of life, where is it?”; G. Bernstein (October 1908): "... whom to sympathize with, whom to believe, whom to love?" In search of an answer, the writer brings together antipode characters in an irreconcilable battle, even more fiercely than the fight of opposite principles in the souls of his characters.
Like the writers of democratic convictions close to him - Gorky, Serafimovich, Veresaev, Teleshov, he displays the glaring social contrasts of his time, but above all Andreev seeks to show the dialectic of thoughts, feelings, the inner world of each character - from the governor general, manufacturer, priest, official , student, worker, revolutionary to errand boy, drunkard, thief, prostitute. And whoever his hero is, he is not simple, everyone has “his own cross”, everyone suffers.
Blok, after reading the story "The Life of Basil of Thebes", felt "horror at the door." The worldview of its author was more tragic than that of many other contemporary writers. “... there was no well-being in his soul,” G. Chulkov recalled, “he was all in anticipation of a catastrophe.” There was no hope for the correction of man, there was no moral support: everything seemed deceptive, sinister. Close friends with whom I published under the same cover of the almanac "Knowledge", with whom I argued all night long in the "Sreda" circle, partly found such support, hope, either in the already mentioned idea of a revolutionary reorganization of life (like Gorky), or in the idea of a "natural person "(like Kuprin), or in ideas close to pantheism (like Bunin, Zaitsev), etc. It was also easier for those with whom the "Knowledge" people were in continuous polemics - the God-seekers of Soloviev, grouped around the magazine "New Way" ( Merezhkovsky, Gippius and others). Being in opposition to the government, to the official, “obedient to the state” church, these figures defended the path of Christian salvation, the path of moral self-purification: they could hope in God.
N. Berdyaev argued that in the movement of history, periods when a person especially feels his involvement in God are replaced by others, when a person denies both this involvement and God himself. Andreev lived in the era of the overthrow of the gods, as well as disappointments and in non-religious theories of "social progress". The theme of the "crisis of life" did not leave the pages of magazines and books. "God is dead," said F. Nietzsche, thus marking the birth of a new outlook on life, people, and the world. The thought of God for centuries determined the meaning of human existence, and the rejection of it could not be painless. A person felt his loneliness in the universe, he was seized by a feeling of defenselessness, fear of the infinity of the cosmos, the mystery of its elements. Fear, as you know, is the main mode of human existence in the worldview of existentialists. Fear is a companion of absurdity, when a person suddenly discovers that he is alone - there is no God!
Not a single saving idea convinced Andreev, a skeptic and an atheist who vainly sought a faith-support. “To what unknown and terrible limits will my denial reach? - he wrote in the already mentioned letter to Veresaev. - The eternal “no” - will it be replaced by at least some “yes”? Relatives of the writer claimed that the pain of his characters was his pain, that longing did not leave the artist's eyes, and the thought of suicide often haunted him. One of the highest paid writers of the beginning of the century, he was weary of the wealth that had fallen on him, caustically sneered at himself, well-fed, writing about the hungry, and very generously shared with the poor fellow writers.
The story "In the basement" (1901) tells about unfortunate, embittered people at the bottom of life. Here comes a young, lonely woman with a baby. Desperate people are drawn to the "gentle and weak", pure being. They wanted to keep the boulevard woman away from the child, but she heart-rendingly demands: “Give! .. Give! .. Give! ..” And this “careful, two-finger touch on the shoulder” is like touching a dream. “... Lighting up with a smile of strange happiness, they stood, a thief, a prostitute and a lonely, dead person, and this little life, weak as a light in the steppe, vaguely called them somewhere ...”
The attraction to another life in Andreev's characters is an innate feeling. An accidental dream, a dacha-estate, and a Christmas tree decoration can turn out to be its symbol. Here is a teenager Sashka from the story "Angel" (1899) - a restless, half-starved, offended by the whole world "biter", who "at times ... wanted to stop doing what is called life," sees a wax angel on a Christmas tree. A tender toy becomes for a child a symbol of some other world, where people live differently. She must belong to him! For nothing in this world, he would not have fallen on his knees, but for the sake of an angel ... And again passionate: “Give! .. Give! .. Give! ..”
The position of the author of these stories, who inherited pain for all the unfortunate from Garshin, Reshetnikov, G. Uspensky, is humane and demanding. However, unlike his predecessors, Andreev is tougher, very sparingly measures offended by life characters a fraction of peace. Their joy is fleeting, illusory. So, having played enough with an angel, Sashka, perhaps for the first time, falls asleep happy, and at that time the wax toy melts from the breaths of the stove, as from the breaths of evil fate: “Here the angel woke up, as if for a flight, and fell with a soft knock on the hot plates. Wouldn't Sashka survive such a fall when he woke up? The author tactfully kept silent about this.
Andreev does not seem to have a single happy ending. This feature of the works during the life of the author supported the talk about his "cosmic pessimism". However, the tragic is not always directly related to pessimism. In an early article “The Wild Duck” (about Ibsen's play of the same name), he wrote: “... refuting all life, you are its unwitting apologist. I never believe in life as much as when I read Schopenhauer's "father" of pessimism: a man thought like this - and lived. This means that life is mighty and invincible. As if anticipating a one-sided reading of his books, he argued that if a person cries, this does not mean that he is a pessimist and does not want to live, and vice versa, not everyone who laughs is an optimist and has fun. B. Zaitsev wrote about the "wounded and sick" soul of Andreev. And he also claimed: "And he loved life passionately."
"Two Truths", "Two Lives", "Two Abysses" - this is how his contemporaries formulated the understanding of Andreev's creativity already in the titles of their works. In different stories, he gives a different vision of what, in his opinion, lies in the depths: the human soul. “Leonid Nikolaevich,” Gorky wrote, “could painfully sharply ... split in two: in the same week he could sing to the world: “Hosanna” - and proclaim to him: “Anathema”! ..” And nowhere was it, so to speak , games for the public, everywhere a sincere desire to get to the point. “There were a lot of Andreevs,” wrote K. Chukovsky, “and everyone was real.”
“Which of the “abysses” is stronger in a person?” - again and again the writer returns to this issue. Regarding the “bright” story “On the River” (1900), Gorky sent an enthusiastic letter to Andreev: “You love the sun. And this is magnificent, this love is the source of true art, real, the very poetry that enlivens life. However, a few months later, he also wrote one of the most terrible stories in Russian literature called The Abyss (1902). This is a psychologically convincing, artistically expressive study of the fall of the human in man. A pure girl was crucified by "subhumans" - it's scary, but even worse when an intellectual, a lover of romantic poetry, a young man tremblingly in love finally behaves like an animal. A little more "before" he did not even suspect that the beast lurked in himself. “And the black abyss swallowed him up” - this is the final phrase of this story.
They said about Garshin, Chekhov that they awakened the conscience, Andreev awakened the mind, awakened the alarm for human souls.
A good person or a good beginning in a person, if they win a relative moral victory in his works (for example, “Once upon a time” and “Hotel”, both - 1901), then only at the limit of concentration of all efforts. Evil in this sense is more mobile, wins more confidently, especially if the conflict is intrapersonal. Dr. Kerzhentsev from the story "Thought" (1902) is by nature a clever man, conceited, capable of strong feelings. However, he used all of himself and all his mind on the plan of the insidious murder of his former, somewhat more successful friend in life - the husband of his beloved woman, and then on a casuistic game with the investigation. He is convinced that he owns a thought, like an experienced swordsman, but at some point, a proud thought betrays its carrier and cruelly plays a person. It becomes, as it were, cramped in his head, boring to satisfy his interests. Kerzhentsev lives out his life in a lunatic asylum. The pathos of Andreevsky's story is opposed to the pathos of Gorky's poem "Man" - a hymn to the creative power of human thought.
Gorky described relations with Andreev as “friendship-enmity” (slightly correcting a similar definition given in Andreev’s letter to him dated August 12, 1911), Yes, there was a friendship between two great writers who, according to Andreev, beat “one philistine muzzle » complacency and complacency. The allegorical story "Ben-Tobit" (1903) is a vivid example of such Andreev's blow. Its plot moves, as it were, as a dispassionate narration about two outwardly loosely connected events: a “good and good” resident of a village near Mount Golgotha has a toothache, and at the same time, on the mountain itself, a judgment is being carried out against some preacher Jesus. The unfortunate Ben-Tobit is outraged by the noise outside the walls of the house, it gets on his nerves. "How they scream!" - this man is indignant, "who did not like injustice", offended by the fact that no one cares about his suffering ...
There was a friendship of writers who sang the heroic, rebellious beginnings of personality. The author of The Tale of the Seven Hanged Men wrote to Veresaev: “A man is beautiful when he is bold and mad and tramples death with death.”
It is also true that between the writers there was a mutual misunderstanding, "enmity". It is unfair to say that Gorky did not see, did not describe potentially dangerous, black beginnings in a person, especially in works created at the turn of two centuries, but at the same time he carried the conviction that evil in a person is exterminable, as already mentioned, by efforts from outside: a good example , the wisdom of the collective. He sharply criticizes Andreev's "balance of the abyss", the idea of the coexistence of antagonistic principles in man both in articles and in private letters. In response, Andreev writes that he does not share the optimism of his opponent, expressing doubts that "peppy" fiction contributes to the elimination of human vices.
Nearly a hundred years separate us from this dispute. A definite answer has not yet been found. And is it possible? Life provides convincing examples to prove both points of view. Unfortunately, the correctness of Andreev is indisputable, who convinced that a person is mysteriously unpredictable, forcing the reader to peer into himself not without fear.
The short story “Theft was Coming” (1902) offered for reading is little known: a very limited list of the writer's works was replicated in the Soviet period. This is a very Andreev style work. There are authors who depict nature, the objective world, and the inner state of a person with surprising accuracy in words, like with a thin brush. The multicolor play of tones and halftones creates the impression of living life in all its mobile variety of light and shadow. The masters of this manner of writing were, for example, Chekhov, Bunin, Zaitsev. Andreev, who appreciated Chekhov's "lessons", turns to a different manner. It is more important for him not to depict the phenomenon that attracted his attention, but to express his attitude towards it. St. Andrew's narrative often takes the form of a cry, a contrasting outline in black and white colors. The author seems to be afraid of being misunderstood in the world of the visually and hearing impaired. This is a work of increased expressiveness. Emotionality, expressiveness distinguish the works of Dostoevsky, highly revered by Andreev Garshin. Like his predecessor writers, Andreev is addicted: to pairing extremes, breaking, straining, exaggerating, etc.
The tendency towards extreme expressiveness declares itself in the story "There was a theft" already in the description of the situation at home, street, field. Black objects stand out sharply against a white background, and vice versa. This opposition mirrors the struggle between light and darkness in the soul of the main character. The very first critics of the writer noticed that if Andreev speaks of silence, then “deathly”, if he describes a scream, then to “hoarseness”, if laughter, then “to tears”, “to hysteria”. It is this tonality that the author of this work keeps from the first phrase to the last. The main character of the story is also characteristic in this sense: he is not just a thief, but also a murderer, a rapist, a robber, an extremely saturated image that has absorbed all possible criminal vices. Generalization is also facilitated by the fact that the author deprives him of his name, calling simply “man”. Such richness of character makes the turn in his plot development more expressive. Suddenly, a saving kind spark flares up in the soul of such a person. There is no absolute habit of villainy, even such a “reflex to light” is not lost.
Andreev aggravates the conflict as much as possible, but does not resolve it. The way out of the impasse found “today” does not mean at all that the same way out, so to speak, will work tomorrow. Do you remember the Paschal reconciliation of Bargamot and Garaska in Andreev's well-known story? Could the friendship between the policeman and the drunkard be long-lasting?
Of course not. It is no coincidence that Gorky saw in the finale the author's "smart smile of distrust", a sad smile. In the spiritual battle between light and darkness in this story, light also seems to win. For how long? Forever? But why suddenly "wild laughter erupted ... at home, fences and gardens"?
In addition to the criminal and the puppy, there is another character in the story that is more or less visibly present on the pages of almost all Andreev's works - rock. The writer skillfully knows how to create an atmosphere of his presence behind the character, wherever he is: in the house, in the field, at sea or even in the church. Instilling in a person, fate makes him its puppet, turns him into an obedient instrument. Rock is the master of time and space. If he retreats, it is only to play, relax the person, and then hit harder. The artistic substance of this evil force in Andreev most often is night, darkness, gloom, shadow, which, on an equal footing with the characters, participate in plot events. And in the story offered to readers, the character acts as if under the pressure of some external force. The human wins in man, but is it not because the darkness "gathers somewhere far away", but "he walks in a circle of light"?
Keywords: Leonid Andreev, writers of the Silver Age, expressionism, criticism of the work of Leonid Andreev, criticism of the works of Leonid Andreev, analysis of the works of Leonid Andreev, download criticism, download analysis, free download, Russian literature of the 20th century
