What works of Russian literature describe the restriction of freedom of heroes and in what ways can they be compared with “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”? (Unified State Examination in Literature). Philosophy of freedom

Composition

The theme of freedom and its reflection in one of the works of Russian literature, Freedom. What do we mean by this word? It has a different meaning for everyone, But I see two sides of freedom. The first is physical freedom: you are independent in your movements. The second is spiritual independence, freedom of thought. This theme is often found in Russian literature, but I especially liked the way Mikhail Bulgakov presented it to readers in the novel The Master and Margarita. The author personally encountered the theme of freedom in his life, namely: his work The Master and Margarita came under censorship and Bulgakov, in despair, burned him. Only a few years later, at the insistence of his wife, he restored it from memory. This novel is largely autobiographical: Bulgakov the Master, his wife Margarita. The main character in the book first burns his work and then restores it. Now, I would like to touch more deeply the theme of freedom in the work. In the novel, I saw the dependence of society, since it is completely subordinate to the communist system, they are chasing labor records and socialist ideas, while forgetting about spiritual values. The master, as a free person, does not find his place here. His novel was not published due to the fault of mediocre critics. Literary activity in Moscow has acquired a communist bias, it doesn’t matter whether you have talent or not, the main thing is to please the country’s leadership, which in my opinion is wrong. I was convinced of this after the repentance of Ivan Bezdomny, who realized that he wrote terrible poetry. There is no place for the true in Moscow talent, so the Master destroys the novel about Pontius Pilate and Yeshua Ha-Nozri and goes to the Stravinsky clinic. The Master's book also addresses the theme of freedom. I saw that the prisoner Yeshua, as a prototype of Jesus Christ, is independent in spirit, since he thinks not about himself, but about all humanity. Procurator Pontius Pilate, on the contrary: a slave of his power and Caesar. He is afraid of losing his position, although he is not indifferent to the fate of the preacher and wants to help him. Here, it seems to me, Bulgakov wanted to show us that spiritual independence is the main thing at all times. In the book, the author sends Woland to check how people have changed since the days of Yershalaim. We see that Muscovites are not without eternal human vices: greed. envy and betrayal. This is especially evident during a session of black magic, after which many end up in Stravinsky’s clinic. In her example, I noticed a feature related to freedom. People, although they are in a mental hospital, become freer because they evaluate their life from the outside. There they do not depend on anything and are purified spiritually. With Moscow residents it’s the other way around. Well, what about their judges: Woland and his retinue. At first glance it seemed to me that friendship and mischief reigned in their company, but only in the end you understand that this is not so. Bassoon, Behemoth, Azazello and Gella are Woland’s slaves, they redeem guilt for crimes committed during life. Their cheerfulness is just a mask, they are all sad personalities, although they help the Master and Margarita reunite. By the way, about the relationship between the main characters. It seems to me. they are unequal. Margarita is a slave to her love, unlike the Master. She does everything to meet him again: becomes a witch, goes to the devil’s ball, follows her beloved to the other world. In general, the novel is very interesting for its plot and the skill of the author; it is not for nothing that Bulgakov worked on it for twelve years. But despite its fantastic nature, this work touches on many philosophical topics that we can talk about for a long time, but for me the main thing here is the theme of freedom. it will exist in all centuries, as Bulgakov showed us. And for me personally, freedom is independence physically, materially and most importantly, spiritually. After all, without it, people would break down and die, writers would stop creating great works for us, many historical events would not have happened and humanity would have stopped its path in search of perfection. Do you agree with me?

“The last quarter of the twentieth century in Russian literature was determined by the power of evil,” says the famous Russian writer Viktor Erofeev. He recalls Turgenev's Bazarov, who said an inexpressibly merciful phrase that gives great hope to humanity: “The person is good, the circumstances are bad.”

This phrase can be used as an epigraph to all Russian literature. The main pathos of a significant part of it is the salvation of man and humanity. This is an overwhelming task, and Russian literature has failed to cope with it so brilliantly that it has secured great success for itself.

The 19th-century philosopher Konstantin Leontiev spoke of the rosy Christianity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as devoid of metaphysical essence, but decisively turned towards humanistic doctrines that are reminiscent of the French enlightenment. Russian classical literature taught how to remain a free person in unbearable, extreme situations. In general, freedom and humanism are infinitely connected by the character of the Russian person. How does the desire for freedom manifest itself for a Russian person?

Let's consider the concept of “a person migrating” as a sign of a search for change. The desire for freedom or “escape” from it. The phenomenon that makes up the concept of “migration” is the experience of distinguishing between dynamic and static, settled and migratory. A Russian person is a person who is extremely moving, expanding the level of his existence. Wandering is a characteristic Russian phenomenon; it is little known to the West. Bakhtin explained it by the eternal aspiration of Russian people towards something infinite: “A wanderer walks across the vast Russian land, never settles and is not attached to anything” [Bakhtin 1990:123].

The vast expanses create such a reversal of space that they bring the walker closer to the highest. But very often the wandering person becomes infected with the virus of rebellion; he, as it were, nurses it with his own feet. Rebellion is perhaps indignation, a demand for freedom, space as freedom, loneliness as freedom. And somewhere on the edge of the world and on the edge of the body, a merging of freedom, moment and eternity occurs. Western people are more sedentary people, they value their present, they are afraid of infinity, chaos, and therefore they are afraid of freedom. The Russian word “element” is difficult to translate into foreign languages: it is difficult to give a name if the reality itself has disappeared.

For an Eastern person, the theme of movement is not typical at all. The path for him is a circle, the connected fingers of the Buddha, i.e. isolation. There is nowhere to go when everything is in you. Therefore, Japanese culture is a culture of inner words, thoughts, and not actions.

The pleasure of the preceding is determined by geographical lack of freedom, but by the desire for internal freedom.

2. Views of existentialists on the concept of freedom

2.1 General characteristics and problems of existentialism

exists -th World War in the works of German thinkers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers and in the forties in the works of Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. At the same time, existentialists consider Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche to be their predecessors. Philosophically, existentialism was predominantly influenced by the philosophy of life, as well as the phenomenology of Husserl and Sheller. Existentialism, as a vivid manifestation of non-comformism, was a unique reaction to the spiritual crisis caused by wars and suffering. In a situation of hopelessness and mental confusion, the call of existentialists to human authenticity, to a sense of human dignity turned out to be a source of courage and moral fortitude. Its main theme is human existence, the fate of the individual in the modern world, faith and unbelief, the loss and acquisition of the meaning of life. Dostoevsky once wrote that “if there is no God, then everything is permitted.” This is the starting point of existentialism. In fact, everything is permitted if God does not exist, and therefore a person is abandoned, he has nothing to rely on either within himself or outside. First of all, he has no excuses. Indeed, if existence precedes essence, then nothing can be explained by reference to human nature given once and for all. In other words, there is no determinism,” man is free, man is freedom. Existentialism, in its desire to reveal the specificity of man and his world, also rejects the “multifactorial” concept of man as a being, “partially” determined; for example, subject to passions (not to mention about the authorities) - and partially, in something free. This would mean that one can be half free and half a slave. A person is “always and completely free - or not.”

2.2 The connection between freedom and truth in the works of Martin Heidegger

In his fundamental work “On the Essence of Truth,” Heidegger considers the category of freedom as the essence of truth itself.

Freedom, according to Heidegger, is not the unboundness of action or the possibility of not doing something, and also not only the readiness to do what is required and necessary (and thus, to some extent, what exists). Freedom is part of the revelation of existence as such. Discovery itself is given in existential participation, thanks to which the simplicity of the simple, i.e. "presence" (das "Da"), is what it is. In the being of the latter, man is given a basis of essence that remains unsubstantiated for a long time, which allows him to exist; therefore, “Existence” for Heidegger does not mean here existentia in the sense of an event and the “existent being” of beings. “Existence” here is also not “existential” in the sense of a person’s moral efforts directed at himself and based on his bodily and mental structure, the assumption of the existence of beings.

Along with the category of truth, Heidegger introduces the concept of untruth, considering it as wandering, “like a pit into which he sometimes falls; wandering belongs to the internal constitution of being into which historical man is admitted. Wandering is the sphere of action of the cycle in which existence, including into a cycle, falls into oblivion and loses itself. In this sense, wandering is an essential antipode in relation to the original essence, truth. Wandering opens as an openness to any action that is opposite to the essence of truth. The path of wandering, at the same time, creates an opportunity that a person is able to highlight from existence, namely, not to succumb to error, while he himself recognizes it, without penetrating into the secret of a person."

Plan

I. The multidimensional and contradictory nature of understanding the concept of freedom in the history of philosophy.

II. Man “migrating”: ontology of path, terrain, space, freedom.

III. The dependence of the hero’s freedom on his attachment: to the world, to the place, to things. “Suitcases” by Erofeev and Dovlatov as the main attribute of travel.

IV. Bibliography.

The problem of freedom is one of the important and complex problems; it has worried many thinkers throughout the centuries-old history of mankind. We can say that this is a global human problem, a kind of riddle that many generations of people have been trying to solve from century to century. The very concept of freedom sometimes contains the most unexpected content; this concept is very multifaceted, capacious, historically changeable and contradictory. Speaking about the complexity of the idea of freedom, Hegel wrote: “No idea can be said with such full right that it is indefinite, polysemantic, accessible to the greatest misunderstandings and therefore really subject to them, as the idea of freedom” [Hegel 1956:291]. It is no coincidence that the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer, in his work “Technique of Modern Political Myths,” assessed the word “freedom” as one of the most vague and ambiguous not only in philosophy, but also in politics. Evidence of the semantic “mobility” and “non-specificity” of the concept is the fact that it arises in different oppositions. In philosophy, “freedom”, as a rule, is opposed to “necessity”, in ethics – to “responsibility”, in politics – to “order”. And the meaningful interpretation of the word itself contains various shades: it can be associated with complete self-will, it can be identified with a conscious decision, and with the subtlest motivation of human actions, and with conscious necessity.

In each era, the problem of freedom is posed and solved differently, often in opposite senses, depending on the nature of social relations, on the level of development of the productive forces, on needs and historical tasks. The philosophy of human freedom has been the subject of research by various directions: Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Sartre and Jaspers, Berdyaev and Solovyov. In recent years, a number of publications on the problem of freedom have appeared in the philosophical literature. These are the works of G.A. Andreeva “Christianity and the problem of freedom”, N.M. Berezhny “Social determinism and the problem of man in the history of Marxist-Leninist philosophy”, V.N. Golubenko “Necessity and Freedom” and others. Considerable attention is paid to this problem in monographs and chapters by Anisimov, Garanjoy, Spirkin, Shleifer.

Schopenhauer was right in pointing out that for modern philosophy, as well as for the previous tradition, freedom is the main problem.

The range of understanding of freedom is very wide - from the complete denial of the very possibility of free choice /in the concepts of behaviorism/ to the justification of “escape from freedom” in the conditions of modern civilized society /E. Fromm /.

Schopenhauer presents the problem of the concept of freedom as negative, i.e. It is possible to identify the content of FREEDOM as a concept only by pointing out certain obstacles that prevent a person from realizing himself. That is, freedom is spoken of as overcoming difficulties: the obstacle disappeared - freedom was born. It always arises as a denial of something. It is impossible to define freedom through oneself, so you need to point out completely different, extraneous factors, and through them go straight to the concept of FREEDOM. ON THE. Berdyaev, in contrast to the German philosopher, emphasizes that freedom is positive and meaningful: “Freedom is not the kingdom of arbitrariness and chance” [Berdyaev 1989:369].

Freedom is one of the indisputable universal values. However, even the most radical minds of the past, who spoke in defense of this shrine, believed that freedom is not absolute. Giving an individual the right to control his own life will turn our world into a world of chaos. An old story comes to mind that once there was a trial of a man who, waving his arms, accidentally broke the nose of another person; the accused justified himself by saying that no one could deprive him of the freedom to wave his own arms. The court decided: the accused is guilty because one person's freedom to swing his arms ends where another person's nose begins. A comic example that clearly proves that there is no absolute freedom, freedom is very relative.

The individual has strong instincts of self-will, selfishness, and destructiveness. Freedom is good as long as a person moderates his impulses. Human freedom has its contradictions. According to Niebuhr, man has a tendency to abuse his freedom, overestimate his importance and strive to become everything. Thus, a person falls into sin. “Consequently, the Fall takes place in freedom itself. Moreover, the paradox of evil arises from freedom not as a necessary or integral consequence, but as an internal contradiction, as an “illogical fact” [Shleifer 1983:19].

In practical activities, some people often, overestimating their strengths and capabilities, set themselves HIGH (Beckett) goals. Niebuhr and many other philosophers interpret this problem theologically: when a person, expecting to accomplish many things, relies only on himself, he concentrates attention on himself and neglects dependence on God; he breaks his connection with God and inevitably falls into sin. Human freedom, Niebuhr argues, can increase for both good and evil any desire, and this unique freedom becomes the source of both the destructive and creative forces of the individual. Using Pascal’s expression, Niebuhr emphasizes that “the dignity of man and his wretchedness have the same source” [Shleifer 1983:19]. Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev also discussed freedom as the root of satanic evil and godlikeness. This is freedom when people turn into “demons”; one of the typical examples is the myth of the Fall. He depicts just two aspects: on the one hand, the devil’s: “do not obey the slightest prohibition - then you will be like gods!”, on the other hand, human attraction. This daring challenge was known not only by Dostoevsky, but by Russian epics. Vysheslavtsev cites as an example the strange death of Vasily Buslaev, who did not believe in either sleep or choch.” One day Buslaev was walking with his comrades and saw a black stone, the inscription on which read: do not jump over this stone, and whoever jumps will break his head. Immediately Vasily Buslaev ran, jumped and... died. The boldness of permissiveness chains a person to the eternal root of satanic evil. The limit point of freedom is the support for temptation.

A similar interpretation of the events that took place in the Garden of Eden was given by Lev Shestov. In the Bible we read: “The serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field that the Lord God created. And the serpent said to the woman: Did God truly say: You shall not eat from any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent: We can eat the fruit of the tree. Only from the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, God said, do not eat it or touch it, lest you die. And the serpent said to the woman: No, you will not die. But God knows that on the day you eat of them, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil” [Genesis: 2,17].

God warned people that on the day you eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, you will die; the serpent says: you will be like gods. Isn’t it strange, asks Shestov, that we accept the serpent’s words as truth. Shestov writes that Adam, before the Fall, was involved in divine omnipotence and only after the fall fell under the power of knowledge - and at that moment he lost the most precious gift of God - freedom. “For freedom does not lie in the ability to choose between good and evil, as we are now doomed to think. Freedom is the power and authority to keep evil out of the world. God, the freest being, does not choose between good and evil. And the man he created did not choose, because there was nothing to choose from: there was no evil in paradise” [Shestov L.:147].

So, man did not become free by tasting the fruits, for the freedom to choose between good and evil, which he gained through eating, became his only freedom. Other freedoms were taken away from man when he chose a life based on knowledge rather than faith.

Man inherited the desire to follow bad advice and ignore prohibitions from Adam. So the story with Vasily Buslaev is more than natural. Does a person desire freedom? Is it so? Nietzsche and Kierkegaard drew attention to the fact that many people are simply not capable of personal action. They prefer to be guided by standards. Man's reluctance to follow freedom is undoubtedly one of the most amazing philosophical discoveries. It turns out that freedom is the lot of the few. And here is the paradox: a person agrees to voluntary enslavement. Even before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer formulated in his published work the thesis that man does not have a perfect and established nature. It's not finished yet. Therefore, he is equally free and unfree. We often find ourselves slaves to other people's opinions and moods. In other words, we prefer slavery.

Later, existentialists will pay attention to this formal dependence of man on sociality. Be that as it may, Goethe wrote: “Freedom is a strange thing. Everyone can easily find it if only he knows how to limit himself and find himself. And what use do we have of an excess of freedom that we are unable to use?” Goethe gives an example of rooms that he did not enter in winter. A small room with small items, books, and art objects was enough for him. “What benefit did I have from my spacious house and from the freedom to walk from one room to another, when I had no need to use this freedom” [Goethe 1964:458]. This statement reflects the entire imaginary nature of human nature. Is it possible to talk about a conscious choice on the part of the individual if supporters of psychoanalysis prove that human behavior is “programmed” by childhood impressions, suppressed desires. It turns out that any action, the most secret or completely spontaneous, can be predicted in advance and its inevitability can be proven. What then remains of human subjectivity?

American philosopher Erich Fromm identified and described a special phenomenon of human consciousness and behavior - flight from freedom. This is the name of his book, which was published in 1941. The main idea of the book is that freedom, although it brought independence to man and gave meaning to his existence, but at the same time isolated him, awakened in him a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety. The consequence of such isolation was LONELINESS. The unbearable moral loneliness of a person and the attempt to avoid it are described by Balzac in “The Sorrows of the Inventor” (III part of the novel “Morning Illusions”): “So remember, imprint on your so receptive brain: a person is afraid of loneliness... The thirst for quenching this feeling makes a person waste his strength , all your property, all the fervor of your soul” [Fromm 1997:37]. If an individual has achieved maximum or absolute freedom in the world, he begins to understand that freedom has turned into boundless loneliness. Having eliminated all forms of dependence, the individual is ultimately left with his individual self.” Numerous prohibitions are disappearing, which, although they limited human freedom, made him close to a certain circle of people. In Dostoevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov” there is an ideal phrase to describe this state - “A person is free - this means he is lonely.”

The philosophy of the 20th century has shown that freedom can become a burden that is unbearable for a person, something that he tries to get rid of. It can be said without exaggeration that Schopenhauer's concept was largely predictive and anticipatory in nature.

“The last quarter of the twentieth century in Russian literature was determined by the power of evil,” says the famous Russian writer Viktor Erofeev. He recalls Turgenev’s Bazarov, who said an inexpressibly merciful phrase that gives great hope to humanity: “ The person is good, the circumstances are bad ”.

This phrase can be used as an epigraph to all Russian literature. The main pathos of a significant part of it is the salvation of man and humanity. This is an overwhelming task, and Russian literature failed so Brilliantly to cope with it that it secured great success for itself.

The circumstances of Russian life have always been deplorable and unnatural. Writers fought desperately against them, and this struggle largely obscured the question of the essence of human nature. There was simply not enough energy for in-depth philosophical anthropology. As a result, with all the richness of Russian literature, with the uniqueness of its psychological portraits, stylistic diversity, and religious searches, its general ideological credo boiled down to the philosophy of HOPE. It was expressed in an optimistic belief in the possibility of changes that would provide a person with a decent existence.

The vast expanses create such a reversal of space that they bring the walker closer to the highest. But very often the wandering person becomes infected with the virus of rebellion; he, as it were, nurses it with his own feet. Rebellion is perhaps indignation, a demand for freedom, space as freedom, loneliness as freedom. And somewhere on the edge of the world and on the edge of the body, a merging of freedom, moment and eternity occurs. The Japanese call this satori / “illumination”, “flight of the soul” /, this state can be compared to freedom. Western people are more sedentary people, they value their present, they are afraid of infinity, chaos, and therefore they are afraid of freedom. The Russian word “element” is difficult to translate into foreign languages: it is difficult to give a name if the reality itself has disappeared.

The country is small, densely populated - you can’t escape with your eyes or your body, only with your thoughts. The human picture of the world in its origins reveals similarities with a geographical map. The purpose of the map is to provide orientation in space. The geographical map itself is a secondary concept, since the need and problematic nature of orientation arises only in changing world. A settled existence does not need a map. It only requires travel. But who managed to draw a map before traveling into the unknown? A person “walks” many, many distances in order to come or go, does a person strive for freedom to feel, desire, or directly possess?

If we remember how the hero in folk tales is shown the way to find a treasure or betrothed, then we will note the difference between FAIRY-TALE and ORDINARY. A fairy tale does not provide the hero with maps /unlike an adventure novel/. The road is simply characterized as a test, an obstacle; for example: “you will pass the inaccessible mountains” or “you will go to distant lands”, “you will cross the ocean seas”. The results of the path can also be predicted for the hero: “if you go to the right, you will be killed,” “if you go to the left, you will be married,” etc., or an indication of the path as an order to visit a psychoanalyst (in fairy-tale terminology, an oracle or a witch).

But in general, the map of the path is a tabula rasa: “you will go there, you don’t know where...” Such instructions provide not so much geographical as emotional orientation.

The traveler has to walk almost blindfolded, and at best he is led by a magic ball or thread of Ariadne. The hero's readiness for freedom is confirmed in this way. Will he dare to travel, understand the risk, with an abstract goal as a guide? The travel map turned out to be not so much a prerequisite for the journey as its consequence. She expanded the world coming from the center - home. If the traveler had a detailed map of the area, the travel element would be nullified. Freedom of geography would “dumb down” the PATH, making it simply a matter of moving from one place to another. The pleasure of the preceding conditions lack of freedom geographical, but the desire for inner freedom. The search for that untested “satori”. Because of this, understanding the path is a spatial movement, like an abstraction. Laying roads from one space to another, changing human life by changing spaces. The landscape of the human world changes under the influence of locality. Philosophers of the 19th century divided heroes into two socio-psychological types: “wanderers” and “homebodies”. Perhaps this classification was influenced by the “fairy tale” of Konstantin Batyushkov “Wanderers and Homebodies” /1814/. Philosophers have outlined two types of Russian people: the product of the great St. Petersburg culture - the “eternal seeker” and the “Moscow homebody.” The wanderers looked quite dangerous: they live in a large space and historical time, they are part of unstable social communities, such as a horde, a crowd, a mass. Homebodies are gullible “Manilovs”. They are good and sweet because they are protected from the external aggression of the world not by the shell of their own character, but by the shell of the objective world created by them. This classification is created through the influence of the city ON CONSCIOUSNESS. The city as a type of consciousness is a long-standing topic. There is no need to say that each city has its own face. It is also known that each city has its own special spirit. Perhaps it is this spirit that gives birth to people, history, and relationships in the image and likeness of the city's Face. Physiognomy is not a completely scientific field, but it is quite appropriate to remember it here. Only St. Petersburg could have given birth to the “little man.” Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, A. Bely, Blok, Mandelstam, before and after them, were aware of this “St. Petersburg myth”, or rather, they drew a hero who could only be born by Northern Venice, predicted his fate, as if reading the palm of his hand intricate wrinkles placed, like fatal barcodes, by St. Petersburg on its unlucky “child.”

From here came two types of heroes: heroes who are free to control the lives and desires of other people /Hermann, Raskolnikov/ and heroes who are deprived of will and freedom and are drawn into the cycle of events by the mysterious “elements of St. Petersburg”.

Even Solovyov made a distinction between Western / “mountain” and “stone” / and Eastern Europe / Russia “plain” and “wooden”/. The first is characterized by early and persistent fragmentation, strong attachment to cities, ecological and cultural sedentarism; the second is the eternal movement across a wide and boundless space, the absence of durable dwellings. This is the difference between the heirs of the Romans and the heirs of the Scythians (it is no coincidence that the Greeks did not have a word to denote space).

However, in Russia itself there are two dominant forms - “forests” and “fields”; They make a distinction between Northern and Southern Rus'. Characterizing them, Soloviev writes: “The steppe constantly conditioned this wandering, riotous, Cossack life with primitive forms, the forest more limited, defined, more settled a person, made him a zemstvo, sedentary” [Soloviev 1989: 249 – 255]. Hence the strong activity of the northern Russian man and the instability of the southern one. The image of the folk hero, which has developed in Russian folklore, is molded into an epic hero, who later turned into a Cossack /Ilya Muromets is even called the “old Cossack”/.

Wandering often merges with exile, and at the same time proves humanity’s commitment to the “old sins” of its ancestors. There are: exiles by fate, exiles by God, exiles by country, etc. That is, we are approaching the consideration of the “sad wanderers”, whose descendants we are. Exile teaches us humility: to get lost in humanity, in the crowd, in our loneliness, to LEAVE TO STAY. If we consider exile as a punishment from God, then numerous examples come to mind: Adam, Lot, Moses, Agaspherus... When Christ was led to Golgotha, he, tired from the weight of the cross, wanted to sit down at the house of a Jewish artisan, but he, embittered and exhausted from work, pushed him away him, saying: “Go, don’t stop.” “I will go,” said Christ, “but you will also walk until the end of the age.” Together with Agasfer, we are fulfilling an important mission to go.

In the story of Lot, God convinces him not to look back and thereby exposes him to exile. Living in a mountain cave near the biblical city of Zoar, the exile Lot is the founder of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitan Lot cannot look back, since he is the center of the circle, but “forward” does not exist for the exile. It turns out a closed ring, which turned a pious and righteous sage into a sinful incestuous one. Exile gives a person some kind of freedom, so the story of the daughters is interpreted as a symbol of creation in exile. Lot is able to impregnate his own daughters like his own ideas. Conclusion: creativity is the only form of moral insurance and freedom in exile. The exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the return of Odysseus, Marco Polo's journey to India, the discovery of America, space flights, life's path to God.

The structural dimension of the path consists of establishing tempo and rhythm: ascent, descent, frequency of stops. Thus, it gives the right to consider on the scale of movement: departure, search for a road, return, wandering, wandering. Time and distance are the coordinates of the path with knowledge, moral purification, enrichment. Overcoming the path is the most common form in modern computer games. The symbol of the road and path is the oldest symbol of perfection /characterized by the male phallic image of an arrow/.

Many philosophers have wondered what preceded the journey. I.T. Kasavin claims that this is “CATCHING” the moment. After all, the monkeys chose an opportune moment and only because of this were they able to become humans. If you come down from the trees early, you will remain a four-legged monkey (baboons), but wait a little longer and you will become a brachiator. So, the first journey of man is to descend from the trees, the second is to spread across the Earth. Since then, every historical era has been marked by migrations of peoples. Each time this happened when the prerequisites were in place. Only when a person felt crowded among his own kind, and he felt like a stranger, an outcast, did he leave/i.e. the outcome is always justified /.

Moreover, a migrating person is a person who is superior in strength to his fellow tribesmen, the most fit. The path for him is additional experience, the search for greater freedom.

He, as it were, creates, practices with his migration experience, connects worlds and spaces, without being captive of any of them.

The locality expands the taboos imposed by society, the boundaries of the locality separate the outer space from the internal, the locality serves as the basis for the narrative of “us and others.” Home and hearth are feminine symbols. Wandering is male. Travel lengthens space and slows down time. Only the difficulties of travel can lengthen the time. Ivan Tsarevich must wear out his iron boots, erase his iron staff, find his betrothed across three seas, and return within three days. The separation of home and body is a very important ontological event. The body is, as it were, protected by the house. The body often appears as a wound, so it looks for the shell and finds it in the house. Dostoevsky’s characters arrive inside a flattened, deformed space: in “corners”, “cabins”, “coffins”, “closets”, “rooms”, “burrows”. The house provides the body with a form suitable for survival. The interior plays the role of a shell, a shell, a snail's house, to which the body grows, otherwise the hostile environment would simply destroy it. “So that the wolves are fed and the sheep are safe,” a stunning image of the unity of the area and the path is created: their hybrid is a labyrinth, which is a home that promises an endless journey. A labyrinth is a condensed image of different human paths in sacred space: the path outward and the path inward.

The geography of the world itself suggests itself as a prototype and analogue of the structure of the text. Geography arises as a consequence of travel and its subsequent interpretation. The text is an experience of migration.

Dovlatov gives his heroes the opportunity to expand their living space and, along the “steps” of ellipses, takes them beyond the text to another level of EXISTENCE / into metatextual life/. Great literary humanism created a hero who was initially free to move. The horizons of “another life” beckon him to travel, and he simply cannot “die without scratching the earth’s crust” [Dovlatov 1995:205].

“I’ve walked around the world a lot,” Dovlatov’s hero can boast, like many other heroes of the 20th century. His journey begins right from the cover. Mitka Florensky's drawings are made as if they were drawn by the characters themselves. An external contradiction of rigor and laxity, primitiveness and complexity. People walk and leave traces. Glasha's dogs are moving next to them. Nothing stands still, even the gnarled trees seem to be moving in all their intertwined mass. “Mitek, too, is not a simpleton, but a clown who secretly walks a tightrope” [Genis 1997:11]. The effect of a torn off roof is created: the world we look at from above is moving. Changing his time and space, he wanders. And next to it are maps so that, God forbid, no one gets lost. After all, only by making the Great Journey is a person able to master the world, and therefore become free.

The exodus of people from their homes is a distinctive feature of our century. Heroes go either on long journeys or very long ones. The main attribute of travel is a suitcase. The philosophizing truth-happiness seeker and drunkard Venechka Erofeev also has a suitcase. Or rather, it's not a suitcase, but a suitcase. A tiny container for an arsenal of bottles and gifts. Venechka makes his way to “where heaven and earth merge, where the she-wolf howls at the stars,” where his girlfriend lives with the meekest and plumpest baby in the world who knows the letter “u” and wants to get a glass of nuts for it. He makes his way to the indescribable, blessed Petushki. He stands thoughtfully at the pharmacy and decides which way to go if all roads lead to the same place. Even without a hint from the fairy-tale Alice, you can guess that if you walk somewhere for a long time, you will definitely end up somewhere. If you want to get to the Kursky Station, you will get there, either go right, or left, or straight. Only in fairy tales there is an alternative choice. Initially, your route is conditioned and natural. “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy...” - famous lines of Blok’s poem. Before our eyes is a night city, reflected in the mirror surface. A man stands on a bridge and looks at the wrinkles of the water, and thinks that life is meaningless, and death is even more meaningless. Vasily Gippius, after listening to this poem, told Blok that he would never forget it, because there was a pharmacy on the corner near his house. Blok did not understand the joke and replied: “Near everyone There’s a pharmacy at home.” The pharmacy is a symbol, the boundary of the transition of life into the state of death, the starting point of Venechka’s journey. Despite the initial irreversibility of his path /wherever you go, you will still come where you should/ the hero chooses the right / “righteous” / direction and follows his path with God and the Angels.

He sits down in a dark carriage, clutching to his chest the most valuable and expensive thing he has - his suitcase. You might think that his own luggage is dear to him because of the port wines and liqueurs lined up in curvy bottles. But no, just as tenderly and carefully he pressed this tattered suitcase to his heart even when it was empty. The suitcase is all that he has accumulated during his worthless life. He opened the lid before the Lord, wide, wide open, as soon as you can open your soul, and laid out everything, as if in spirit: “from a sandwich to a strong pink one for thirty-seven rubles.” “Lord, you see what I have. But is it really This I need? Is this what my soul yearns for? This is what people gave me in exchange for what my soul yearns for” [Ven. Erofeev 1997:96]. The Lord, as he should be, is stern / therefore in blue lightning /, but also merciful, generously blesses and shares this Great meal together with his unlucky Child, stupid Venechka.

He trusts his modest and sinful suitcase belongings only to the Angels and God. The suitcase is a kind of landmark for the hero; he uses it to determine the direction of his own movement, almost in the same way as he measures distance not in kilometers and miles, but in grams and liters / “from Chekhov Street to the entrance I drank another six rubles”/.

Venechka remembers that “the suitcase should lie on the left along the train” [Ven. Erofeev: 1997]. The suitcase is a pointing arrow, guarded by Angels. Where is it, the suitcase? The stupid angels let us down, didn’t inspect it, didn’t justify Venechka’s trust, didn’t consider this little thing valuable. All landmarks are lost. As in a terrible, painful dream, the hero rushes around the empty carriage, wanting to find his suitcase, lost just before Pokrov (the city of Petushinsky district), but it is not there. It is with the loss of the suitcase / amulet connected with the outside world, the compass / that the hero becomes even more vulnerable. And before him appears a woman in black, the “inconsolable princess,” the valet Peter /traitor – apostle/, hordes of Erinyes. All these are messengers of dark forces. “When leaving your native land, do not look back, otherwise you will fall into the clutches of the Erinyes.” The hero does not follow the Pythagorean rule. According to some legends, they are the daughters of the Earth, according to others - the Night. But be that as it may, they come from the depths of the underworld and have wings on their shoulders and snakes swirling on their heads. They are the embodiment of punishment for sins; no force can convince them of their own innocence. Therefore, the best defense is not to look back, not to regret about the missing suitcase, about the fading baby who can say the letter “u”, about the girl who is waiting, but it is better to blame yourself for all mortal sins, turn your right cheek when “they take the left” , say that you betrayed him seven times seventy times or more, think about suicide / sighed deeply forty times... and that’s all /, wipe away tears and snot after all your sins are weighed, in the hope that on “those scales a sigh and a tear will outweigh calculation and intent” [Ven. Erofeev 1997:117]. And after the angels laugh and God silently leaves you, believe in that Virgin Queen, mother of the baby, “loving father / THEIR./ as yourself”, that even like this, without a suitcase, crushed in body and soul, they need you. Get up and go, go in hope that the doors will open up, that a new star will light up over Bethlehem, that a New Baby will be born, who will also meekly and tenderly say the letter “u”, and your suitcase will be found, your only personal thing, your cross and the sin that you must bear in order to achieve that bright the city for which he had been yearning for so long and to finish his righteous / “right” / path in the Real refuge of Paradise-Cockerel.

It will seem for a long time that the hero still regretted the past / suitcase / and looked back, like Lot’s wife, at the burning city, but this largely proves that he will not, like Lot, remember his past, he will look directly at the past in the eyes, as it is not exiles who do this, but those who are tried on.

Dovlatov's suitcase is one of the main characters; it is a way to secure everything in one place. Let's remember Korobochka's chest, Shmelevsky Gorkin's chest, Chichikov's box. A. Bely calls her Chichikov’s “wife” - the female hypostasis of the image / cf. Bashmachkin’s overcoat – “lover for one night”/. Just like Plyushkin, Chichikov collects all sorts of rubbish in a box: a poster torn from a pole, a used ticket. As you know, things can tell a lot about their owner. They can take it and prove that the “owner” not single, he is drawn to the past and is connected with his past by chains of things. The symbol of freedom is a lonely traveling man. But traveling light. Seeking to equalize the freedom of life with the freedom of death: when Alexander the Great was dying, he asked for two holes to be made in the lid of the coffin for his hands to show the world that he had not taken anything.

For Dovlatov, a suitcase is not only an attribute of travel, but also an exponent of an emotional attitude towards the world. The suitcase is a symbol of betrayal and exile. It is no coincidence that the look of the beloved, as she abandons the hero, is compared to a suitcase: “There came an even more painful pause. For me. She was full of calm. The look is cold and hard, like the corner of a suitcase” [Dovlatov II 1995:232].

The author acts at the level of rethinking: a thing-person /Gogolian tradition/, a thing-symbol /symbolism/, a person-symbol /postmodernism tradition/, that is, he combines the experience of other eras in his prosaic experience.

But if in the tradition of postmodernism travel acts as a way to study the universe and the soul of the hero, then for Dovlatov travel is an unnecessary and painful process. Having received freedom of movement from the author, the hero dreams of static. Comparing with Valeria Narbikova’s work “...and the Journey...”, we understand that for her travel is not only a way of moving the body, but also a flight of the soul: “Once upon a time in the cold winter there was a train. There were two gentlemen sitting in the compartment. They were traveling in the same direction...” - “Where is the Russian’s soul?”, that is, travel is simply an excuse to talk about a person, to recognize his essence, travel is a test of survival and adaptability to the World. In Dovlatov, for example, in “The Road to a New Apartment,” moving is associated with the idea of loss and catastrophism: faded wallpaper stained with port wine, tasteless furnishings, poor cheap things, human loneliness - everything is put on display for “strangers.” When all the things are taken out of the house, the room begins to resemble a shipwrecked ship: fragments of gramophone records, old toys... Hundreds of eyes look at the hero through his things. The person outside the room looks lost and naked. The owner of the house, Varya Zvyagintseva, began to seem quite middle-aged, not so beautiful, but somehow cheap and empty, like her furniture. It was as if they had taken off the fake mask and remembered the mysterious and eccentric Bunin heroine / “The Case of the Cornet Elagin” /, living in a room with curtains in the shape of bat wings, in a mysterious and enigmatic world. Only immediately after the murder the room begins to seem unkempt and pitiful, the heroine ugly and old, as if after a wonderful ball the things that played a brilliant role lose their power and spiritual content: instead of a priceless diamond there is cheap glass beads, instead of a beautiful face there is stale makeup. Director Malinovsky casually throws out a phrase that fully characterizes what is happening: Things catastrophically devalue the world and the person living in it. Moving destroys a person, when the latter tries to take the whole world (his world) with him, he does not receive the right to do so.

Sergei Dovlatov once compared a cow to a suitcase: “There is something pathetic in a cow, humiliated and repulsive in its submissive reliability. Although, it would seem, both dimensions and horns. An ordinary chicken, and it looks more independent. And this one is a suitcase stuffed with beef and bran” [Dovlatov II 1995:244]. Is this not an allusion to the body, which, like an unbearable burden, pulls a person towards temptations and desires? Should I give up things in order to find the desired peace and desired freedom, or should I hold on to them until my death, until the very End?

So, a person’s lack of freedom is determined by the degree of his attachment to the objective world, to a specific time and space. And this lack of freedom does not contradict the desires of the hero.

Literature

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June 26 2011

Love and forgiveness are not so much Christian concepts as universal ones. They form the basis of all morality, of all world religions. For Mikhail Bulgakov, they are the meaning-forming principles that lie at the foundation of the building of his novel. embodies in prose the ideas that Russians have been dreaming of for fifty years. They were simply embodied mainly in the poetic texts of Tyutchev, Solovyov, Blok, Akhmatova. Bulgakov is the first of the prose writers who managed to adequately, with the skill of a genius, comprehend them in his genre. The duality of existence, the duality of man, the secondary nature of the earthly path in relation to the truth of the world, heavenly love and earthly love - the entire arrangement of the previous poetic tradition is present in Bulgakov’s novel. However, the laws of the genre and the mysterious patterns of creative talent dictated to the writer unique, hitherto unknown ways of solving these problems. Margarita loves the Master, the Master loves Margarita, the Devil helps them - all this has become a commonplace and does not need comment.

However, the following surprising event in the novel, noticed by everyone, but not explained in any way, requires comment. To begin with, a quote: “Follow me, reader! Who told you that there is no true, faithful, eternal love in the world? May the liar be cut off from his vileness!” The fact is that the true heavenly love of poets visits the heroes of the book in the prime of their earthly life. She settles in their hearts, and everything that follows is not meant to save her. Such love is too powerful and does not need protection, and lovers need to stay close to each other. The energy of the clutch feeds them, which the Master writes. It dies and lovers lose each other. Woland returns the manuscript to Margarita - and the Master returns.

Bulgakov finds no place for hatred and despair. He is funny, but his laughter is not sarcastic, but full of such humor, which is equally suitable for ridiculing fools and smart people. All the hatred and revenge of Margarita, flying naked over Moscow, consists of flooding Latunsky’s apartment and breaking glass. This is not revenge at all, but ordinary cheerful hooliganism.

Bulgakov's love redeems everything and forgives everything. Forgiveness overtakes everyone, inevitably, like fate: the gloomy dark purple knight known as Corrvieve-Fagot, and the young man, the demon page who was the cat Behemoth, and Pontius Pilate, and the romantic Master, and his charming companion. The writer shows us, his readers, that earthly love is heavenly love, that the appearance, clothing, era, time of life and place of eternity change, but the love that has overtaken you, which has arisen “like a killer from around the corner,” strikes you in the very heart and forever. And it is unchanged at all times and in all eternities that we are destined to experience. She endows the heroes of the book with the energy of forgiveness, the same energy that Master Yeshua displays in the novel and for which Pontius Pilate has been yearning for two thousand years. Bulgakov managed to penetrate into the human soul and saw that it is the place where earth and sky meet. And then he invented a place of peace and immortality for loving and devoted hearts: “Here is your home, here is your eternal home,” says Margarita, and somewhere far away the voice of another poet who has walked this road to the end echoes her:

Perhaps there is no person who would not agree that the topic of freedom has traditionally been one of the most pressing topics in Russian history. And there is no writer or poet who would not consider freedom for every person as necessary as air, food, love.

The difficult time that we see through the prism of the novel “The Master and Margarita”, at first glance, is not so terrible for the heroes of the work. However, knowing history, we understand that the thirties and forties of our century were some of the most terrible in the life of the Russian state. And they are terrible, first of all, because at that time the very concept of spiritual freedom was brutally suppressed.

According to M.A. Bulgakov, only those who are pure in soul and can withstand the test that Satan, the prince of darkness, gave to the residents of Moscow in the novel can be free in the broad sense of the word. And then freedom is a reward for the difficulties and hardships that this or that character has endured in life.

Using the example of Pontius Pilate, doomed to insomnia and restlessness on long moonlit nights, one can trace the relationship: guilt - redemption - freedom. Pilate’s fault is that he doomed the prisoner Yeshua Ha-Nozri to inhuman torment, he could not find the strength to admit that he was right then, “in the early morning of the fourteenth day of the spring month of Nissan...” For this he was doomed to twelve thousand nights of repentance and loneliness , full of regrets about the interrupted conversation with Yeshua. Every night he expects a prisoner named Ga-Notsri to come to him and they will walk together along the lunar road. At the end of the work, he receives from the Master, as the creator of the novel, the long-awaited freedom and the opportunity to fulfill his old dream, about which he has been dreaming for 2000 long years.

One of the servants who make up Woland's retinue also goes through all three stages on the path to freedom. On the night of farewell, the joker, bully and joker, the tireless Koroviev-Fagot turns into “a dark purple knight with a gloomy and never smiling face.” According to Woland, this knight once made a mistake and made a bad joke, making a pun about light and darkness. Now he is free and can go where he is needed, where he is expected.

The writer created his novel painfully, for 11 years he wrote, rewrote, destroyed entire chapters and wrote again. There was despair in this - after all, M. A. Bulgakov knew that he was writing while terminally ill. And in the novel, the theme of freedom from the fear of death appears, which is reflected in the storyline of the novel associated with one of the main characters - the Master.

The master receives freedom from Woland, and not just freedom of movement, but also the freedom to choose his own path. She was given to him for the hardships and hardships associated with writing a novel, for his talent, for his soul, for his love. And on the night of forgiveness, he felt himself being released, just as he had just released the creature he had created. The master finds an eternal shelter that matches his talent, which suits both him and his companion Margarita.

However, freedom in the novel is granted only to those who consciously need it. A number of characters shown by the author on the pages of the novel “The Master and Margarita,” although they strive for freedom, understand it extremely narrowly, in full accordance with the level of their spiritual development, their moral and vital needs.

The author is not interested in the inner world of these characters. He included them in his novel to accurately recreate the atmosphere in which the Master worked and into which Woland and his retinue burst into a thunderstorm. The thirst for spiritual freedom among these Muscovites “spoiled by the housing problem” has atrophied; they strive only for material freedom, freedom to choose clothes, a restaurant, a mistress, a job. This would allow them to lead the calm, measured city inhabitants.

Woland's retinue is precisely the factor that allows us to identify human vices. The performance staged at the variety theater immediately pulled off the masks from the people sitting in the auditorium. After reading the chapter describing Woland’s speech with his retinue, it becomes clear that these people are free in the isolated world in which they live. They don't need anything else. They cannot even guess that something else exists.

Perhaps the only person of all the Muscovites shown in the novel who does not agree to put up with this wretched atmosphere of profit is Margarita.

Her first meeting with the Master, during which she initiated the acquaintance, the depth and purity of their relationship indicate that Margarita - an extraordinary, talented woman - is able to understand and accept the subtle and sensitive nature of the Master, and appreciate his creations. The feeling whose name is love forces her to seek freedom not only from her legal husband. This is not a problem, and she herself says that in order to leave him, she only needs to explain herself, because that’s what intelligent people do. Margarita does not need freedom for her alone, but she is ready to fight anything for the sake of freedom for two - herself and the Master. She is not even afraid of death, and she easily accepts it, because she is sure that she will not part with the Master, but will completely free herself and him from conventions and injustice.

In connection with the theme of freedom, one cannot fail to mention another hero of the novel - Ivan Bezdomny. At the beginning of the novel, this is an excellent example of a person not free from ideology, from the truths instilled in him. Believing a lie is convenient - but it leads to the loss of spiritual freedom. But the meeting with Woland makes Ivan begin to doubt - and this is the beginning of the search for freedom. Ivan leaves Professor Stravinsky’s clinic a different person, so different that the past no longer matters to him. He gained freedom of thought, freedom to choose his own path in life. Of course, the meeting with the Master had a huge influence on him. One can assume that someday fate will bring them together again.

So, we can say that all Bulgakov’s heroes can be divided into two groups. Some do not think about true freedom, and they are the heroes of a satirical plot. But there is another line in the novel - a philosophical line, and its heroes are people who long to find freedom and peace.

The problem of the search for freedom, the desire for independence, along with the theme of love, is the main one in the immortal Roma of M. A. Bulgakov. And precisely because these questions have always worried, are and will worry humanity, the novel “The Master and Margarita” is destined to have a long life.

Need a cheat sheet? Then save - "The theme of freedom and its reflection in one of the works of Russian literature. Literary essays!

UDC 82(091)(470)

BBK 83.3(2=Rus)

M. Yu. Chotchaeva

Artistic understanding of the problem of personal freedom in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky, A. P. Chekhov, V. T. Shalamova

(Reviewed)

Annotation:

In this article, the problem of freedom is considered as a necessary condition for the development of an individual who finds himself in conditions of unfreedom. The purpose of the work: to prove that in the works of Russian writers about hard labor, freedom is not only a condition of natural existence, but also its qualitative essence, meaning and ideal. But freedom is revealed only when there is unfreedom; in itself, without its antipode, it is not felt.

Keywords:

Freedom, lack of freedom, personality, hard labor, character, genre, prisoner, character, human essence.

Each historical era leaves its mark on the understanding of freedom, summing it up with the previous one. Freedom as an element of the worldview, as a goal and ideal that gives life meaning and strength in the struggle for survival, begins to excite the minds of people from the very moment a person realizes himself as an active subject of transformative activity. It found its mental expression in ancient myths, in atomic theories, in medieval theology and scholasticism, in the mechanical-metaphysical concepts of modern times, in German classical philosophy and in modern world philosophy. Russian literature occupies a special position in the development of the problem of human freedom, interpreting freedom, first of all, as a problem of the foundation of human existence. This understanding of this issue allows us to put forward the thesis that positively oriented freedom, first of all, is realized within the person himself, in his inner being, in his spiritual nature. And at the same time, freedom is a way of realizing the spiritual nature of a person, will, and realizing one’s intentions and goals.

The most vivid embodiment of the problem of freedom in Russian literature is in works about hard labor. F. M. Dostoevsky, with his autobiographical “Notes from the House of the Dead,” paved the way for the theme of hard labor in Russian literature. The main idea of “Notes from the House of the Dead” by F. M. Dostoevsky is the idea of freedom. It is precisely this that underlies the artistic development of the work and determines the value system of the figurative and logical world of Dostoevsky’s work. In the “House of the Dead” metaphor itself, according to T.S. Karlova, mainly, is the socio-political and ethical subtext: “freedom is an indispensable condition of life.”

“Notes from the House of the Dead” is the result of the writer’s ten years of reflection in hard labor and exile, the main idea of which the writer declared was the idea of individual freedom. The “Siberian Notebook”, in which Dostoevsky wrote down his impressions, observations, reflections of the period of penal servitude and settlement, was for him a kind of summary, where behind individual entries were hidden life situations, characters, stories of convicts, which were later included in “Notes from the House of the Dead” : out of 522 entries in the Siberian Notebook, more than 200 were used.

Dostoevsky both begins and ends his “Notes” with the theme of freedom: “It happened that you looked through the cracks of a fence into the light of God: wouldn’t you see at least something? - and all you will see is the edge of the sky and a high earthen rampart overgrown with weeds, and sentries walking back and forth along the rampart, day and night; and right there

you will think that whole years will pass, and you will go to look through the cracks of the fence in the same way and see the same rampart, the same sentries and the same small edge of the sky, not the sky that is above the prison, but another, distant, free sky.”

In Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky shows that freedom is an indispensable condition for living life. He called the prison fortress the House of the Dead because “almost any unauthorized manifestation of personality in a prisoner is considered a crime,” that here there is “forced common cohabitation.”

Arguing that freedom is a necessary condition for the normal development of the human personality, a condition for the moral rebirth of man, Dostoevsky compares life in hard labor with life in freedom in Tsarist Russia, where slavery was protected by law, and exclaims with deep sadness: “how much strength and talent is being lost in our country.” Russia sometimes almost for nothing, in captivity and a hard lot." Dostoevsky argues that no force can kill a person’s thirst for freedom, longing for freedom, and that living life anywhere, even in prison conditions, is unthinkable without “one’s own, inner life,” which develops in addition to the “official” one. In criminals from the people, he noticed “not humiliation at all, but a sense of self-esteem.” The author says that “the prisoner loves terribly... to assure even himself, at least for a while, that he has incomparably more will and power than it seems,” he instinctively strives for “exaltation of his own personality, at least illusory.” Life itself arranged an experiment for Dostoevsky, from which his philosophy grew. The first impressions of hard labor were fear, surprise and despair; It took years to believe in the new reality and understand it. And then, gradually, everything terrible, monstrous and mysterious that surrounded him began to become clearer in his consciousness. He realized that the whole meaning of the word “prisoner” means a person without a will and that all the features of hard labor are explained by one concept - “deprivation of freedom.” It seemed that he could have known this before, but, Dostoevsky notes, “reality makes a completely different impression than knowledge and rumors.” The author does not exaggerate the horrors of hard labor: work in the workshops did not seem too hard to him; the food was tolerable; the authorities, with few exceptions, are humane and benevolent; in the prison it was allowed to engage in any craft, but even this was a burden: “Government convict serf labor was not an occupation, but a duty, the prisoner worked out his lesson or served his legal hours of work and went to the prison. They looked at the work with hatred."

Chekhov gives the same examples in “Sakhalin Island”, describing a man who flatly refused to work in hard labor: “This is a convict, an old man, who from the very first day of his arrival on Sakhalin refused to work, and in the face of his invincible, purely bestial stubbornness, all coercive measures failed ; he was put in a dark cell and flogged several times, but he stoically withstood the punishment and after each execution exclaimed: “Still, I won’t work!” . This attitude to work was typical for convicts. Being in conditions of unfreedom, they hated forced occupations, but, hiding from their superiors, they worked willingly if they could earn money for themselves from it: “There were shoemakers, and shoemakers, and tailors, and carpenters, and carvers, and goldsmiths. There was one Jew, Isai Bumstein, a jeweler, who was also a moneylender. They all worked and earned a penny. Work orders were obtained from the city. Money is minted freedom, and therefore for a person completely deprived of freedom, it is ten times more valuable.”

Without money there is no power and freedom. Dostoevsky writes: “Money... had a strange meaning and power in the prison. It can be said positively that a prisoner who had at least some money in hard labor suffered ten times less than one who had none at all, although the latter was also provided with everything from the government, and why, it seems, would he have money? - as our superiors reasoned... The prisoner is greedy for money to the point of convulsions, to the point of clouding his mind, and if he really throws it away like chips when he goes on a spree, then he throws it away

for what he considers one more degree above money. What is higher than money for a prisoner? Freedom or at least some dream of freedom."

It is characteristic that people of different classes who find themselves in hard labor and forced to live together have the same attitude towards money and work. The nobleman Goryanchikov has a sharply negative attitude towards work, although physically the work does not seem difficult to him: “The hardest work, for example, seemed to me not so hard, backbreaking, and only quite a long time later I realized that the severity and backbreaking of this work was not so much the difficulty and its continuity, as much as in the fact that it is forced, obligatory from under the stick. A man in the wild works, perhaps, incomparably more, sometimes even at night, especially in the summer; but he works for himself, works with a reasonable goal, and it is incomparably easier for him than for a convict in forced and completely useless work. It once occurred to me that if they wanted to completely crush, destroy a person, punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most terrible murderer would shudder from this punishment and be afraid of it in advance, then it would only be necessary to give the work the character of complete, complete uselessness and meaninglessness ".

One of the writers who, following Dostoevsky, turned to the topic of man in conditions of unfreedom, was Varlam Shalamov, who could not help but take into account the literary experience of his predecessor. The leading principles of Shalamov’s “new prose” go back to “Notes from the House of the Dead.” In “Kolyma Stories,” the form and plot of “Notes” are updated, which is due to the partial similarity of the destinies of both writers, the autobiographical nature of their works about hard labor, the commonality of the artistic object and some ideological attitudes.

“My long-time desire,” recalls Varlam Shalamov, “was to write a commentary on “Notes from the House of the Dead.” I held this book in my hands, read and thought about it in the summer of 1949, while working as a paramedic on a forestry mission. I then made myself a careless promise to expose, so to speak, the naivety of Notes from the House of the Dead, all of its literary quality, all of its obsolescence.” This desire to “debunk” Dostoevsky’s convict authority is found in the texts of “Kolyma Tales” (“Tatar Mullah and Clean Air”, “In the Bath”, “Red Cross”, etc.).

Shalamov’s conclusions turned out to be premature: the form of a book about hard labor turned out to be relevant in modern literature.

Varlam Shalamov did not create such a vivid image of freedom in “Kolyma Tales” as Dostoevsky did in “Notes from the House of the Dead.” In Shalamov’s prose, one can see, rather, the motive of meaningless hope. Few heroes of Shalamov’s stories strive to return home, since hope has been killed in them. The hero of the story “The Funeral Oration,” on whose behalf the story is told, dreams only of returning to prison, because he understands that he will bring nothing but fear to the family. The dreams of the former director of Uraltrest Timofeev, at one time a strong and influential person, do not extend beyond soup with dumplings, and only a completely disabled person who is completely dependent on those around him is capable of protest and the desire for freedom. After the war, when yesterday’s soldiers began to arrive in the camps, people “with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons,” armed escapes became possible (the story “The Last Battle of Major Pugachev”). Even death does not give the prisoner the opportunity to gain freedom, to get rid of the monstrous life of the camp, for example, in the story “Sherry Brandy” the prisoners raised the hand of the deceased when distributing bread.

Labor in “Kolyma Stories” becomes torment for the prisoner, physical and mental. He inspires him only with fear and hatred. Liberation from labor by any means and ways, including self-harm, becomes the most desirable goal, since it promises deliverance from forced occupation.

People somehow get used to the physical suffering in hard labor (noise, fumes, stench, cold, cramped conditions). This is not the torment of hard labor: it is in captivity. Everything flows from the longing for freedom

character traits of convicts. Prisoners are big dreamers. That is why they are so gloomy and withdrawn, so afraid of giving themselves away and so hate merry talkers. There is some kind of convulsive anxiety in them, they never feel at home in the prison, they quarrel and quarrel among themselves, since their cohabitation is forced: “The devil took three bast shoes before he gathered us into one heap!” - they said to themselves; and therefore gossip, intrigue, women’s slander, envy, quarrel, anger were always in the foreground in this pitch-black life.” “Pitchless life,” writes Dostoevsky, using a word denoting darkness, hopeless darkness to characterize a hard life.

This hopeless “pitchness” also reigns on convict Sakhalin, otherwise how can one explain that the beautiful adventurer Sonya Zolotaya Ruchka (Sofia Bluvshtein) has turned into a gloomy, depressed creature: “This is a small, thin, already graying woman with a rumpled, old woman’s face. She has shackles on her hands; on the bunk there is only a fur coat made of gray sheepskin, which serves her both as warm clothing and as a bed. She walks around her cell from corner to corner, and it seems that she is constantly sniffing the air, like a mouse in a mousetrap, and her facial expression is mouselike.” Chekhov does not pay much attention to such hardened criminals in his book. He is more interested in such prisoners as Yegor, a modest, hard-working man who ended up in hard labor by accident, or the tramp Nikita Trofimov, nicknamed Handsome, whose entire guilt was that he could not bear the rigors of military service. So the story about the life of convicts turns into reflections on the fate of ordinary Russian people, who, due to circumstances, tragically found themselves in hard labor and yearning for freedom. People who find themselves in captivity, dreaming of freedom, even somewhat romanticize it, which leads to constant escapes and vagrancy, both in the Omsk prison and on the convict Sakhalin. Chekhov considers the continuous escapes from penal servitude to be evidence, the main sign, that human feelings and aspirations are alive among convicts: “The reason that prompts a criminal to seek salvation on the run, and not in work and not in repentance,” writes Chekhov, “serves as the main image of the consciousness of life that does not fall asleep within him. If he is not a philosopher who lives equally well everywhere and under all circumstances, then he cannot and should not not want to run away.”

People deprived of freedom languish, start meaningless quarrels, and work in disgust. But if they are allowed to show their initiative, they are immediately transformed. Particularly dramatic changes occur with convicts on the eve of the holidays. The holiday occupies one of the most important places in human life; all nations had holidays at all stages of their historical development, which allows us to consider the holiday a universal phenomenon of culture and human existence. A holiday is not an abstract idea, but a reality, one way or another accessible to everyone and in any conditions. Both hard labor and prison do not deprive a person of the desire for a holiday.

For people whose freedom is limited, the holiday is one of its manifestations, an opportunity to get out of the control of the authorities. In a prison, a holiday is a temporary deviation from the rules, the admission of some disorder in order to maintain total order and keep chaos within acceptable limits. Before celebrating Christmas in the Omsk prison, the mood of the convicts changed dramatically; they remembered home and the holidays in freedom. The whole day the prisoners did not abandon hope for a miracle. No one could really explain what he was waiting for, but everyone hoped for something bright and beautiful. But the day passed, and nothing changed: “All these poor people wanted to have fun, to spend a great holiday cheerfully - and, Lord! What a difficult and sad day this was for almost everyone. Everyone spent it as if they had been deceived in some kind of hope.”

In the eleventh chapter of Notes from the House of the Dead, art is a way out to freedom, giving a feeling of celebration. For prisoners, the beauty of the theater is that on stage they have the illusion of a full human life. Describing the convict theater, Dostoevsky shows the talent and creativity of the actors. The prisoners themselves

They made the scenery and sewed the curtain, which impressed Goryanchikov: “First of all, I was struck by the curtain. It stretched ten steps across the entire barracks. The curtain was such a luxury that there really was something to marvel at. In addition, it was painted with oil paint: trees, gazebos, ponds and stars were depicted.”

Among the convicts there were artists, musicians, and singers. And the performance of the convict actors simply shocked Goryanchikov: “Imagine prison, shackles, captivity, long sad years ahead, life as monotonous as a drop of water on a gloomy autumn day - and suddenly all these oppressed and prisoners were allowed to turn around for an hour, have fun, forget a heavy dream, to set up a whole theater, and how to set it up: for the pride and surprise of the whole city - know, they say, our people, what kind of prisoners are they!” .

A kind of release for prisoners is everything that somehow connects them with normal life: “What a strange reflection of childish joy, sweet, pure pleasure shone on these furrowed, branded foreheads and cheeks...” wrote Dostoevsky, observing for prisoners during a theatrical performance. Everyone is happy, as if they are even happy. “They just allowed these poor people to live in their own way, to have fun like human beings, to live at least an hour outside of prison - and a person changes morally, even if only for a few minutes.”

Chekhov saw the same “childish joy” on the faces of the exiles during the wedding in the city of Aleksandrovsk: “When the priest laid crowns on the heads of the bride and groom and asked God to crown them with glory and honor, the faces of the women present expressed tenderness and joy, and it seemed to have been forgotten that the action was taking place in a prison church, in hard labor, far, far from their homeland.” But this joy is short-lived, it soon gave way to sadness and melancholy: “When after the wedding the church was empty, and there was a smell of burning from the candles that the watchman was in a hurry to put out, it became sad.”

Both writers believe that real joy and a festive mood are impossible in hard labor. You can forget yourself for a while, but you cannot truly rejoice, since this requires freedom. The motif of freedom runs through the entire content of the books “Notes from the House of the Dead” and “Sakhalin Island”; their construction is largely determined by this ideological concept. Freedom allows a person to realize his spiritual purpose - transcending his own nature and transforming it into another, turning him to the sphere of higher values and ideals, to spirituality.

It is not enough to see in freedom only the absence of external restrictions. In fact, external freedom means nothing more than a condition of normal human existence. You can only free yourself from external bonds. The path to internal freedom has a direction opposite to external liberation. Independence is achieved by expanding boundaries, eliminating obstacles to the realization of one's own freedom, which has been and will be the starting point for writers when describing the human personality.

Notes:

1. Karlova T.S. On the structural meaning of the image of the “House of the Dead” // Dostoevsky:

Materials and research. L., 1974.

2. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete works: In 30 volumes. T. 4. L., 1972-1990.

3. Chekhov A.P. Works: In 18 volumes. T. 14-15. M., 1987.

4. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete works: In 30 volumes. T. 4. L., 1972-1990.

5. Shalamov V. “How little the Race has changed...”: From notes about Dostoevsky // Lit. gas.

6. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete works: In 30 volumes. T. 4. L., 1972-1990.

Chekhov A.P. Works: In 18 volumes. T. 14-15. - M., 1987.