"Notes from the House of the Dead" F.M. Dostoevsky and the hero-narrator

Literature and library science

Having killed his wife out of jealousy, Alexander Petrovich himself confessed to the murder, and after serving hard labor, he cut off all ties with relatives and remained in a settlement in the Siberian city of K. Sirotkin, a former recruit of 23 years old, who had been sent to hard labor for the murder of a commander. Alei is a 22-year-old Dagestani who went to hard labor with his older brothers for attacking an Armenian merchant.

8. "Notes from the Dead House" by F.M. Dostoevsky. Composition, system of characters, image of the dead house.

First published in the Russkiy Mir newspaper. Fully published for the first time in the magazine "Time", April. WorkFyodor Dostoyevsky, consisting of the same name story in two parts, as well as several short stories. Created under the impression of imprisonment in Omsk jail in 18501854

Notes from the House of the Dead reflects the impressions of what Dostoevsky experienced and saw in hard labor in Siberia, in the Omsk jail, where he spent four years, convicted in the case of the Petrashevists. Pursuing the goal of complete separation of the Petrashevites, the tsarist government distributed them among criminals. This was, of course, especially difficult for the writer, but at the same time it unwittingly pushed him against the masses of the people. Already in the first exit from the prisonletter to brother Michael dated January 30 February 22, 1854Dostoevsky wrote: “In general, time has not been lost for me. If I didn’t know Russia, then the Russian people are good, and as good as, perhaps, not many people know it. As a book about the Russian people, Notes from the House of the Dead is successively connected with numerous stories and essays from folk life, published in the 1840s and 1850s on the pages of Sovremennik, Otechestvennye zapiski, and Library for Reading. But first of all, Dostoevsky relied on the richest experience of his own observations. The idea for the book appeared, apparently, while still in hard labor. Only in 1859, after the completion"Uncle's Dream" And "Village Stepanchikova", the idea of ​​\u200b\u200bNotes was finally ripe.

The narration is conducted on behalf of the main character, Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a nobleman who found himself on hard labor 10 years for the murder of his wife. Having killed his wife out of jealousy, Alexander Petrovich himself confessed to the murder, and after serving hard labor , cut off all ties with relatives and remained in a settlement in the Siberian city of K., leading a secluded life and earning a living by tutoring. One of his few entertainments is reading and literary sketches about hard labor . Actually, "alive by the House of the Dead", which gave the name of the story, the author calls prison , where the convicts are serving their sentences, and their notes “Scenes from the House of the Dead”.

Characters

Goryanchikov Alexander Petrovich the main character of the story, on whose behalf the story is being told.

Akim Akimych one of the four former nobles , comrade Goryanchikov, senior prisoner in the barracks. Sentenced to 12 years for the execution of a Caucasian prince who set fire to his fortress. An extremely pedantic and stupidly well-behaved person.

Gazin convict- kisser , wine merchant, Tatar, the strongest convict in prison . He was famous for committing crimes, killing small innocent children, enjoying their fear and torment.

Sirotkin former recruit , 23 years old, who ended up in hard labor for the murder of a commander.

Dutov a former soldier who rushed to the guard officer in order to delay the punishment (driving through the ranks) and received an even longer sentence.

Orlov is a killer with a strong will, completely fearless before punishments and trials.

Nurra is a highlander, Lezgin, cheerful, intolerant of theft, drunkenness, devout, a favorite of convicts.

Alei is a 22-year-old Dagestani who went to hard labor with his older brothers for attacking an Armenian merchant. A neighbor on the bunks of Goryanchikov, who became close friends with him and taught Alei to read and write in Russian.

Isai Fomich is a Jew who went to hard labor for murder. Moneylender and jeweler. Was on friendly terms with Goryanchikov.

Osip smuggler , who raised smuggling to the rank of art, in prison carried the wine. He was terribly afraid of punishments and many times refused to engage in carrying, but he still broke down. Most of the time he worked as a cook, preparing separate (not state-owned) food for the money of the prisoners (including Goryanchikov).

Sushilov a prisoner who changed his name at the stage with another prisoner: for a ruble, silver and a red shirt, he changed settlement for eternal hard labor . Served Goryanchikov.

A-c one of four noblemen. Got 10 years hard labor for a false denunciation on which he wanted to earn money. penal servitude did not lead him to repentance, but corrupted him, turning him into an informer and a scoundrel. The author uses this character to portray the complete moral fall of a person. One of the escapees.

Nastasya Ivanovna is a widow who disinterestedly takes care of the convicts.

Petrov, a former soldier, ended up in hard labor, stabbing a colonel during an exercise, because he unfairly hit him. Characterized as the most determined convict. He sympathized with Goryanchikov, but treated him as a dependent person, a curiosity prison.

Baklushin went to hard labor for the murder of a German who betrothed his bride. Theater organizer in jail.

Luchka Ukrainian, got on hard labor for the murder of six people, already in custody he killed the head of the prison.

Ustyantsev former soldier; to avoid punishment, he drank tobacco-infused wine to evoke consumption from which he later died.

Mikhailov, a convict who died in a military hospital from consumption.

Zherebyatnikov lieutenant , an executor with sadistic tendencies.

Smekalov lieutenant , an executor who was popular among convicts.

Shishkov is a prisoner who ended up in hard labor for the murder of his wife (the story "Akulkin's husband").

Kulikov gypsies, horse thief, guard vet . One of the escapees.

Elkin is a Siberian who ended up in hard labor forcounterfeiting. watchful veterinarian , who quickly took away his practice from Kulikov.

The story features an unnamed fourth nobleman, a frivolous, eccentric, unreasonable and not cruel person, falsely accused of killing his father, acquitted and released from hard labor only ten years later. Prototype Dmitry from the novel Brothers Karamazov.

dead house

strong gates guarded by sentries, a special world, with its own laws, clothes, customs and customs; two long one-story barracks for prisoners. At night we were locked up in the barracks, a long and stuffy room lit by tallow candles. In winter they locked up early, and for four hours in the barracks there was a din, laughter, curses and the ringing of chains. There were about 250 people permanently in prison. Each strip of Russia had its representatives here.

Most of the prisoners are civil exiles, criminals deprived of any rights, with branded faces. They were sent for terms of 8 to 12 years, and then sent across Siberia to the settlement. Military-grade criminals were sent for short periods, and then returned to where they came from. Many of them returned to prison for repeated crimes. This category was called "always". Criminals were sent to the "special department" from all over Rus'. They did not know their term and worked more than the rest of the convicts.

Endless gossip and intrigues were conducted around the barracks, but no one dared to rebel against the internal charters of the prison. Strong people did not enter into quarrels, they were reasonable and obedient, it was profitable.

They hated hard labor. Many in the prison had their own business, without which they could not survive. The prisoners were forbidden to have tools, but the authorities turned a blind eye to this. All sorts of crafts met here. Work orders were obtained from the city.

Money and tobacco saved from scurvy, and work saved from crime. Despite this, both work and money were forbidden. Searches were carried out at night, everything forbidden was taken away, so the money was immediately drunk away.

The one who did not know how, became a dealer or usurer. Even government items were accepted on bail. Almost everyone had a chest with a lock, but this did not save them from theft. There were also kissers who sold wine. Former smugglers quickly put their skills to good use. There was another regular income, alms, which were always divided equally.

“Notes from the House of the Dead” is a work of an unusual genre, with which F.M. Dostoevsky re-entered Russian literature, returned him fame and recognition. This was the opening of a new topic - Russian penal servitude. "Notes from the Dead House" set the canon of Russian camp prose with its artlessness and simplicity of depiction of an earthly hell that grabs you by the throat and does not let go until the end.

If you look for predecessors, then, most likely, this is “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum, written by himself”, there is a description of the prison passions that the rebellious Avvakum experienced, but the first comprehensive description of “hard labor” is, of course, “Notes from the House of the Dead”.

After the discovery of Dostoevsky, a whole series of "hard labor" works began. Among the documentary books one can name "Siberia and Hard Labor" by S.V. Maksimov, “Sakhalin Island” by A.P. Chekhov, they are adjoined by “Siberia and exile” by the American traveler and publicist John Kennan. In the 20th century, the improved Soviet penal servitude received light in the new artistic discoveries of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Varlam Shalamov... There are very important similarities between them. I will stop at just one. Chekhov wrote about the convict island of Sakhalin that “we are obliged to go there to worship, as the Turks go to Mecca. We rotted millions of people in prisons, rotted in vain, without reason, barbarically.

This echoes what Dostoevsky wrote half a century before: “And how much youth was buried in these walls in vain, how many great forces died here in vain!” Very often, "Notes from the House of the Dead" was compared with the image of hell in Dante's "Divine Comedy": this is such a new, earthly hell.

The figure of the narrator

Let's see how this piece is written. It is not Dostoevsky himself who narrates about hard labor. This is not documentary prose, it is still fiction. The writer invents a narrator, a narrator: a certain Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, who served 10 years in hard labor for the murder of his wife, probably, as we guess from jealousy, and now, at the end of his life, is writing these notes. The figure of Goryanchikov turned out to be rather conditional, not fully developed biographically. Perhaps she will unfold in this plot of her crime and will receive a continuation from Leo Tolstoy in The Kreutzer Sonata.

Of course, we understand that Fyodor Mikhailovich himself hid behind Alexander Petrovich, perhaps because he could not write about himself, because he was a political criminal, and, of course, censorship would not have missed, but this work was written on behalf of a criminal. A picture of penal servitude unfolds before us in its most varied manifestations, and these pictures seem to be strung on top of each other, like links in the shackles in which Dostoevsky spent these four years. But these paintings have very important backgrounds: psychological, moral and even philosophical.

The figure of Goryanchikov is an invention of Dostoevsky not only forced, but having a certain artistic meaning. And when we read “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” in the 20th century, we understand that Solzhenitsyn returned to the same trick - to see hard labor through the eyes of a convict who survived it.

"Rebirth of Beliefs"

But I repeat, behind this book is Dostoevsky and his, as he put it, "the rebirth of convictions." What happened to him in prison? What did hard labor reveal to him as a writer, as a person? After all, a member of the socialist circle M.B. came to hard labor. Petrashevsky, who was influenced by V.G. Belinsky, whom he later recalled: “He believed in the new moral foundations of socialism to the point of madness and without any reflection; there was only delight... But he had to overthrow religion, from which came the moral foundations of the society he denied. He radically denied family, property, and the moral responsibility of the individual. I draw attention to this last phrase: "He radically denied the family, property and moral responsibility of the individual."

In the 1840s, when these new ideas were spreading, one phrase belonging to the Frenchman P.-J. Proudhon. In 1840 he published the book What is Property? and he answered this question with a short phrase that became catchy: "Property is theft." It is characteristic that Proudhon himself did not completely reject private property and even considered it a condition of freedom, but glib phrases have the following feature: they outgrow their authors.

So, the denial of personal responsibility and the denial of property. Dostoevsky ended up in penal servitude, and, in essence, found himself in the same phalanstere that was drawn to the imagination of Belinsky and his followers. It is clear that hard labor was not drawn, it is clear that they dreamed of some new city, where everyone would be equal, everyone would work equally and there would be no property. Modern researchers, in particular, Valentin Aleksandrovich Nedzvetsky, “Notes from the House of the Dead” calls “the first dystopia”, and only others followed it: Shchedrin’s “History of a City” followed - the final city of Nepreklonsk, the barracks city of Ugryum-Burcheev - well, and in XX century and Zamyatin, and Orwell, and others.

That is, it turns out that Dostoevsky found himself in hard labor in a community where there is no property, where everyone is equal in their lack of freedom and wholly obeys the dictates of the beneficent supreme power (the parade-ground major is in some ways even cooler than Gloom-Burcheev). And Dostoevsky finally comes to a very important thought, which rejects Proudhon's postulate. Here is what he writes here: “Without labor and without legal, normal property, a person cannot live, he becomes corrupted, turns into a beast. And therefore, due to natural need and some sense of self-preservation, everyone in prison had “his own skill and occupation” in order to have at least some kind of property. And then Dostoevsky gives a wonderful aphorism. He says that it was impossible to survive in hard labor without money: “Money is minted freedom.” “Money is minted freedom, and therefore for a person who is completely deprived of freedom, it is ten times more expensive.” Here are some new ideas that come to his mind.

Well, here is the common labor: the labor of the phalanstery and the labor of hard labor, obligatory here and there - labor that loses its meaning when there is no property. Here is what Dostoevsky-Goryanchikov writes about hard labor: “The work itself, for example, seemed to me not at all so hard, hard labor, and only quite a long time later I realized that the burden and hard labor of this work was not so much in the difficulty and continuity of it, but in the fact that that she is forced, obligatory, under duress. A peasant in the wild works, perhaps, and incomparably more, sometimes even at night, especially in summer; but he works for himself, works with a reasonable goal, and it is incomparably easier for him than for a hard laborer in forced and completely useless work for him. The thought once came to me that if they wanted to completely crush, destroy a person, punish him with the most terrible punishment .., then it would only be necessary to give the work the character of complete, utter uselessness and nonsense. If the current hard labor is both uninteresting and boring, then it is reasonable: the prisoner makes bricks, digs the earth, plasters, builds; there is meaning and purpose in this work. The hard laborer is sometimes even carried away by it, he wants to work smarter, faster, better.

Here the parallel with "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" is inevitable. Most of this story is occupied by the image of labor and the enthusiasm for the labor of skilled convicts, who set a goal for themselves, and the work acquired at least some meaning, ceased to be an obligation that threatened, after all, the entire socialist world order. These are the discoveries made by Dostoevsky (and Solzhenitsyn after him), they led him to what he calls "the rebirth of convictions."

Inside the people's life

Another unbearable hard labor that Dostoevsky writes about is forced common cohabitation, another type of lack of freedom. This forced cohabitation was further complicated by the fact that, after all, Dostoevsky was a nobleman, and on the same bunk beds were ordinary peasants, a people who were hostile to "bars", strangers. And here Dostoevsky discovered for himself the terrible abyss that opened up between the people and the educated class. He writes about this: “No matter how fair, kind, smart, he [the nobleman] will be hated for whole years, despised by everything, by the whole mass; they won’t understand him, and most importantly, they won’t believe him ... Not his own person, and that’s all.” “They [that is, the nobles] are separated from the common people,” Dostoevsky continues, “by the deepest abyss.”

Dostoevsky even composes such a metaphor: he speaks of a distinctive smell that man by smell can identify his own and someone else's person. This alienation had deep historical roots: after the coup of Peter I, Russia finally split into two unequal halves - the educated class and the people. Then, on the eve of the catastrophe, Blok would speak with pain about the separation of the intelligentsia and the people. The gulf between them widened more and more, and Dostoevsky felt it in his own skin. Russian classical literature of the 19th century set one of its main goals to unite these, as it were, dispersed halves of another planet, through the knowledge and study of the masses of the people.

In Pushkin, Lermontov, we discover the still not lost ability to reincarnate in the people's consciousness. Dostoevsky especially appreciated such works as Pushkin's poem "Matchmaker Ivan, how we will drink" (a humorous word from a man from the people), "Song about the merchant Kalashnikov" by Lermontov. And what is very important to note, Pushkin also began an investigation into the phenomenon of Pugachevism, prophetically guessing the coming national catastrophe.

Beginning with Gogol, Russian literature took the position of an attentive and sympathetic observer of people's life. This is in "Dead Souls", Turgenev went along this path (I recall his "Notes of a Hunter", "Mumu"), Grigorovich ("Village", "Anton-Goremyka"), Pisemsky ("Carpenter's Artel"), Leo Tolstoy ("Morning of the landowner", "Caucasian stories", "Sevastopol stories"), Saltykov-Shchedrin (people's chapters in the "Provincial essays").

These are all observers, and the reincarnation in the manner of Pushkin-Lermontov found, perhaps, a continuation in the poetry of Nekrasov, where people's voices sounded, although as an observer, the folk writer Nekrasov admired Dostoevsky, for example, in the poem "Vlas" "the majestic image" of a peasant. One can recall Leskov, who tried to convey this element of folk life, its laughter and grief and at the same time its righteousness in his stylizations of fairy tales. It can be said that, in general, all Russian literature of the 19th century was a kind of circulation among the people. Russian writers discovered their own people, like Columbus discovered America. And a very special role in this movement of Russian literature was played by Dostoevsky's book Notes from the House of the Dead, because here is not just an observer, here is a person who found himself in the midst of the people's environment and experienced its laws.

It is one thing to observe people's life from the outside, and another thing to be inside it. This border crossing made a tremendous impression on Dostoevsky. Last time I already spoke about the crisis, about which he wrote to Natalya Dmitrievna Fonvizina. Faced with the people - Dostoevsky went through a crisis of alienation.

Let us turn to the letter that he writes literally a week after his release from hard labor. This letter to his brother at the beginning of 1854 is a kind of summary of a future book, which will be written only five years later. Here is what he says here: “These are the people...

In parallel with his work on The Insulted and Humiliated, Dostoevsky continues his Notes from the House of the Dead. Their appearance on the pages of Vremya was perceived by contemporaries as one of the major events in the literary and social life of the early 1960s.

For censorship reasons, the author made Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, who was sentenced to hard labor for the murder of his wife, the hero-narrator of "Notes from the House of the Dead".

But already contemporaries quite naturally perceived the image of the hero of the Notes as autobiographical; having deduced the fictitious figure of Goryanchikov in the preface, the author later did not take it into account and openly built his story as a story about the fate of not a criminal, but a political criminal, saturated with autobiographical confessions, reflections on personally rethought and experienced.

But "Notes" is not just an autobiography, memoirs or a series of documentary sketches, it is a book about people's Russia, outstanding in value and unique in genre, where, with the documentary accuracy of the story, the generalizing meaning of the experienced is extracted from it by the thought and creative imagination of the author, who combines a brilliant artist , psychologist and publicist.

The "Notes" are constructed in the form of a story about the tsar's penal servitude, devoid of any external literary embellishments, artless and severely truthful in tone. It starts from the first day of stay in prison and ends with the release of the hero to freedom.

In the course of the narrative, the main moments of the life of the prisoners are concisely outlined - forced labor, conversations, fun and entertainment in their free hours, a bathhouse, a hospital, weekdays and holidays of the jail. The author depicts all the main ranks of the hard labor administration - from the cruel despot and executioner Major Krivtsov to humane doctors who, at the risk of themselves, hide inhumanly punished prisoners in the hospital and often save them from death.

All this makes “Notes from the House of the Dead” an important artistic document, where the hell of tsarist hard labor and the entire feudal socio-political system of Nicholas I standing behind it, on the magnificent facade of which flaunted the words: “autocracy”, “orthodoxy” and “ nationality."

But this does not exhaust the socio-psychological and moral problems of the Notes, through which three cross-cutting ideas, especially passionately and painfully experienced by the author, pass through. The first of these is the idea of ​​people's Russia and its great opportunities.

Dostoevsky rejects that romantic-melodramatic attitude towards the criminal and the underworld, under the influence of which his various representatives, dissimilar in their physical and moral appearance, merged into a conventional, generalized figure of a “noble robber” or a stilted villain. There does not exist and cannot exist a single "type" of a criminal given once and for all—such is the most important thesis of the Notes.

People in penal servitude are just as individual, infinitely varied and different from each other as they are everywhere else. The dull uniformity of the external forms of life in the prison does not erase, but even more emphasizes and reveals the differences between them, due to the dissimilarity of the conditions of their past life, nationality, environment, upbringing, personal character and psychology.

Hence - a wide and varied gallery of human characters, drawn in "Notes": from the kind and meek Dagestani Tatar Aley to the cheerful, affectionate and mischievous Baklushin and the "desperate" Orlov or Petrov, strong, but crippled people, of which in other domestic and social Under historical conditions, courageous and talented people's leaders like Pugachev could emerge, capable of captivating the masses.

All of these are, for the most part, the bearers of not the worst, but the best of the people's forces, fruitlessly wasted and ruined because of the bad and unjust organization of life.

The second most important cross-cutting theme of the “Notes” is the theme of disunity, the tragic isolation from each other in Russia of the upper and lower classes, the people and the intelligentsia, isolation, which also could not disappear in the conditions of hard labor that forcibly equalized them. And here the hero and his comrades forever remain for the people of the people the representatives of another class of oppressor nobles, hated by them.

Finally, the third most important subject of reflection for the author and his hero is the different attitude towards the inhabitants of the prison of official state and people's Russia.

While the state sees in them criminals who are legally punished and do not deserve a better fate, peasant Russia, without removing their personal guilt and responsibility for the evil committed, looks at them not as criminals, but as their "unfortunate" brothers in humanity, worthy of sympathy and pity, and this plebeian humanism of the masses, manifested in their attitude towards every pariah of society, even the most contemptible, Dostoevsky ardently and passionately opposes to the egoism and callousness of the prison administration and the official tops.

One of the problems of fundamental importance for Dostoevsky's work, first sharply and polemically stated in the Notes, is the problem of the "environment." Like all major realist writers of the 19th century, Dostoevsky recognized the enormous importance of the social and cultural-historical conditions of place and time, the whole moral and psychological atmosphere of the outside world, which determine the character of a person, his innermost thoughts and actions.

But at the same time, he passionately and confidently rebelled against the fatalistic notion of the environment as an instance, an appeal to which allows one to justify a person’s behavior by its influence and thereby relieve him of moral responsibility for his thoughts and actions.

Whatever the "environment" and its influence, the last resort that determines one or another decision by a person of the basic questions of his being remains - according to Dostoevsky - the person himself, his moral "I", semi-instinctively or consciously living in the human person. The influence of the environment does not free a person from moral responsibility to other people, to the world.

An attempt to remove responsibility from him is a sophism of bourgeois jurisprudence, created to cover up an unclean conscience or to justify the crimes of the powerful of this world - such is one of Dostoevsky's fundamental convictions, which found deep artistic expression in each of his novels of the 60-70s.

In 1862-1863. Dostoevsky traveled abroad for the first time, visited Paris, London, Italy. In London, on July 4 (16), 1862, he met with Herzen, during which, judging by the entry in the diary of the London exile, they talked on a topic that worried them both about the future of Russia and Europe, in the approach to which significant differences were revealed between them. differences and points of convergence.

Reflection of Dostoevsky's first trip abroad and mentally continued dialogue with Herzen upon his return were "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" (1863), where capitalist civilization is likened to the new inhuman kingdom of Baal.

In the central part of the "Notes" - "Experience on the Bourgeois" - the writer characterizes with deep sarcasm the spiritual and moral evolution of the French "third estate", which led him from the lofty aspirations of the era of the Great French Revolution of the XVIII century. to cowardly vegetating under the shadow of the empire of Napoleon III.

Skeptically assessing the possibility of establishing a socialist system in the West, where all classes, including workers, are “owners” and where, therefore, from the point of view of the writer, there are no necessary real prerequisites for the realization of the ideal of a brotherly relationship of people to each other, Dostoevsky binds his hopes for the future human unity with the Russian people, affirming as the highest ethical ideal the ability of the individual to freely, without violence against himself, expand his “I” to brotherly sympathy for other people and voluntary, loving service to them.

The angry-sarcastic reflections on bourgeois civilization in "Winter Notes on Summer Impressions" can be characterized as historical and sociological "prolegomena", anticipating the problems of Dostoevsky's five great novels. Another - philosophical - prologue to them, according to the correct definition of the famous Soviet researcher Dostoevsky A. S. Dolinin, was Notes from the Underground (1864).

In Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky makes the soul of a modern individualist a subject of psychological research, condensing the action in time and space to the limit and forcing his hero to go through all possible phases of humiliation, proud self-intoxication and suffering for several hours in order to demonstrate to the reader a mournful the result of this merciless philosophical and psychological experiment.

Unlike his many predecessors, Dostoevsky chooses as an object of analysis not the majestic "titan"-individualist, not Melmoth, Faust or the Demon, but an ordinary Russian official, whose soul the new era has opened up contradictions, doubts and temptations, similar to those that were previously the lot of a select few "spiritual aristocrats".

An insignificant plebeian in the company of his aristocratic school friends, the hero of the Notes rises high above them in a proud, free and uninhibited flight of thought, rejecting all obligatory social and ethical norms, which he considers annoying and unnecessary hindrances that constrain a person and interfere with his liberation.

Intoxicated by the boundless freedom of spiritual self-manifestation that has opened up to him, he is ready to recognize his personal whim as the only law for himself and for the whole world, the refusal to implement which likens it to an insignificant "pin" or a piano key, actuated by someone else's hand.

At such a moment, nature itself appears to the hero of the Notes as a blank wall erected on the path of self-deployment and self-realization of a free person, and the bright “crystal palaces” of Western European and Russian enlighteners and socialists, including Chernyshevsky, are just a new kind of prison.

But, as the author shows in the second part of the Notes, the same hero who, in proud dreams, likened himself to the new Nero, calmly looking at the burning Rome and the people stretched out at his feet, turns out in the face of life to be just a weak man who suffers painfully from his loneliness and more than anything in the world needs participation and brotherhood.

His proud “Nietzschean” (before Nietzsche) claims and dreams are just a mask under which hides a sick human soul, wounded by endless humiliations, in need of the love and compassion of another person and crying out for help at the top of its voice.

Found in the work on the Notes, a form of intellectual story-paradox, where the turning point, tragic moment of human life and the sudden spiritual upheaval experienced under its influence, as it were, “turn over” the individualist hero, removing the veil from his consciousness and revealing, at least vaguely, not previously guessed the truth of "living life", Dostoevsky used in his work on such of his later masterpieces of the 70s as "The Meek" (1876) and "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man" (1877).

In the "dead house" Dostoevsky encountered what many of the participants in the "going to the people" of the 1970s and 1980s met twenty or thirty years later. He came to hard labor, recognizing himself as the bearer of the ideas of the renewal of mankind, a fighter for his liberation.

But the people from the people with whom he ended up in prison together - the writer told about this in Notes from the House of the Dead - did not recognize him as their own, they saw in him a "master", "alien". Here is the source of the tragic social and moral searches of Dostoevsky in the 1960s and 1970s.

From the moral collision in which Dostoevsky found himself, different outcomes were possible. One is the one to which the Narodnik revolutionaries of the 1970s leaned. They recognized as the main engine of history not the people, but a critically thinking person who, by his active action and initiative, should give impetus to the thought and will of the people, awaken him from historical apathy and hibernation.

Dostoevsky drew the opposite conclusion from a similar collision. He was struck not by the weakness of the people, but by the presence in them of his own, special strength and truth. The people are not a "blank slate" on which the intelligentsia has the right to write their letters. The people are not the object, but the subject of history. He has his own worldview that has been formed over the centuries, his own view of things, which he has suffered through.

Without a sensitive, attentive attitude towards them, without reliance on the historical and moral self-consciousness of the people, any profound transformation of life is impossible. This is the conclusion that henceforth became the cornerstone of Dostoevsky's worldview.

After getting to know the inhabitants of the “dead house”, Dostoevsky refuses to believe that the human mass is passive material, just an object for “manipulations” by various kinds of utopians and benefactors of mankind, even the most noble and disinterested in their goals.

The people is not a dead lever for applying the forces of individual, more developed or "strong" personalities, but an independent organism, a historical force endowed with intelligence and high moral consciousness. And any attempt to impose on people ideals that are not based on the deepest layers of the consciousness of the people with its deep conscientiousness, the need for public truth, leads the individual into a vicious circle, executes him with moral torture and pangs of conscience - such is the conclusion that Dostoevsky drew from the experience of the defeat of the Petrashevists and Western European revolutions of 1848-1849

This new circle of Dostoevsky's reflections determined the peculiarities not only of the ideological problematics, but also of the artistic structure of his novels, written in the 1960s and 1970s.

Already in the early stories and novels of Dostoevsky, the characters are immersed in the atmosphere of St. Petersburg, they act against the backdrop of a carefully described social situation, they encounter people belonging to different and even opposite social strata.

And yet, the themes of the nation and the people as special, independent themes in their broad philosophical and historical sound, in which we meet them in Pushkin, Lermontov or Gogol, in the work of Dostoevsky of the 40s. are not yet available.

Only in The Mistress and the initial chapters of Netochka Nezvanova, which tells the story of Netochka's stepfather, the musician Yegor Efimov, can one find the first timid approaches to posing these themes, so important for the subsequent work of the writer.

In Notes from the House of the Dead, things are fundamentally different. The problem of the relationship of the hero - a representative of an educated minority - not just with individual people from the people's environment, but with the people, considered as the main force in the historical life of the country, as an exponent of the most important features of the national character and the basis of the whole life of the nation, is brought to the fore by Dostoevsky. It forms the core that binds the narrator's subjective impressions and thoughts with the author's objective analysis of his fate.

The principle of depicting and analyzing individual psychology and the fate of the central characters in relation to psychology, moral consciousness, the fate of the nation and people was the most important conquest, which since the time of "Notes from the House of the Dead" has firmly entered the artistic system of Dostoevsky the novelist, becoming one of the defining elements this system. It was further developed in the novel Crime and Punishment (1866).

Comparing here and in each of the subsequent novels the ideas and experiences of the protagonist with the moral consciousness of the masses, based on his characteristic understanding of the people as the main criterion in assessing the psychology and fate of the main characters, Dostoevsky approached the illumination of the psychology and ideals of the people in many respects one-sidedly, so how, unlike the revolutionary democrats, he did not see (and partly did not want to see) those changes in the psychology and moods of the masses that were taking place before his eyes.

Therefore, in his works written after Notes from the House of the Dead, people from the people invariably act in the same role - bearers of the ideals of love and humility, moral stamina in need and suffering. A realistic depiction of all the real historical complexity of the life of the people and the people's characters of the post-reform era, taking into account the struggle of opposing tendencies in people's life, the spontaneous awakening of part of the masses, their transition to a conscious struggle against the oppressors, was not available to Dostoevsky.

The belief in the immutability and constancy of the basic properties of the folk character (which Dostoevsky considered brotherly feeling for every suffering person, humility and forgiveness) often obscured the picture of folk life with its real historical trends and contradictions from the great Russian novelist.

And yet, the principle of analyzing and evaluating the ideas and actions of the heroes of the first plan in inseparable unity with the analysis of the ideas and moral feelings of the masses was a huge artistic achievement of Dostoevsky the novelist, without which the appearance of such masterpieces as "Crime and Punishment" and "Brothers" would not have been possible. Karamazov".

The principle of assessing the hero and his mental quest against the background of folk life, in comparison with the practical life experience and ideals of the people, unites Dostoevsky with Turgenev, Tolstoy and other great Russian novelists of his era, each of whom is creative, in accordance with the individual characteristics of talent and the originality of the artistic system. developed in his novels this most important aesthetic principle of Russian realistic art, discovered by Pushkin and Gogol.

History of Russian literature: in 4 volumes / Edited by N.I. Prutskov and others - L., 1980-1983

In the remote regions of Siberia, among the steppes, mountains or impenetrable forests, occasionally come across small towns, with one, many with two thousand inhabitants, wooden, nondescript, with two churches - one in the city, the other in a cemetery - cities that look more like a good suburban village than in the city. They are usually very adequately equipped with police officers, assessors and all the rest of the subaltern rank. In general, in Siberia, despite the cold, it is extremely warm to serve. People live simple, illiberal; orders are old, strong, consecrated for centuries. Officials who rightly play the part of the Siberian nobility are either natives, hardened Siberians, or strangers from Russia, mostly from the capitals, seduced by the salary that is not set off, double runs and tempting hopes in the future. Of these, those who know how to solve the riddle of life almost always remain in Siberia and take root in it with pleasure. Subsequently, they bear rich and sweet fruits. But others, a frivolous people who do not know how to solve the riddle of life, will soon get bored with Siberia and ask themselves with anguish: why did they come to it? They impatiently serve their legal term of service, three years, and after it has expired, they immediately bother about their transfer and return home, scolding Siberia and laughing at her. They are wrong: not only from official, but even from many points of view, one can be blessed in Siberia. The climate is excellent; there are many remarkably rich and hospitable merchants; many extremely sufficient foreigners. Young ladies bloom with roses and are moral to the last extreme. The game flies through the streets and stumbles upon the hunter itself. Champagne is drunk unnaturally much. Caviar is amazing. Harvest happens in other places fifteen times ... In general, the land is blessed. You just need to know how to use it. In Siberia, they know how to use it.

In one of these cheerful and self-satisfied towns, with the sweetest people, the memory of which will remain indelible in my heart, I met Alexander Petrovich Goryanchikov, a settler who was born in Russia as a nobleman and landowner, who later became a second-class exile convict for the murder of his wife and, after the expiration of a ten-year term of hard labor determined for him by law, he humbly and inaudibly lived out his life in the town of K. as a settler. He, in fact, was assigned to one suburban volost, but he lived in the city, having the opportunity to get at least some kind of livelihood in it by teaching children. In Siberian cities one often comes across teachers from exiled settlers; they are not shy. They teach mainly the French language, which is so necessary in the field of life and which without them in the remote regions of Siberia would have no idea. For the first time I met Alexander Petrovich in the house of an old, honored and hospitable official, Ivan Ivanovich Gvozdikov, who had five daughters, of different years, who showed great promise. Alexander Petrovich gave them lessons four times a week, thirty silver kopecks a lesson. His appearance intrigued me. He was an extremely pale and thin man, not yet old, about thirty-five, small and frail. He was always dressed very cleanly, in a European way. If you spoke to him, he looked at you extremely intently and attentively, listening with strict politeness to your every word, as if pondering it, as if you had asked him a task with your question or wanted to extort some secret from him, and, finally, he answered clearly and briefly, but weighing every word of his answer to such an extent that you suddenly felt awkward for some reason, and you yourself finally rejoiced at the end of the conversation. I then asked Ivan Ivanovich about him and found out that Goryanchikov lives impeccably and morally, and that otherwise Ivan Ivanovich would not have invited him for his daughters; but that he is terribly unsociable, hiding from everyone, extremely learned, reads a lot, but speaks very little, and that in general it is quite difficult to get into conversation with him. Others claimed that he was positively insane, although they found that, in fact, this was not such an important shortcoming, that many of the honorary members of the city were ready to show kindness to Alexander Petrovich in every possible way, that he could even be useful, write requests and so on. It was believed that he must have decent relatives in Russia, maybe not even the last people, but they knew that from the very exile he stubbornly cut off all relations with them - in a word, he hurt himself. In addition, everyone here knew his story, they knew that he had killed his wife in the first year of his marriage, killed him out of jealousy and himself denounced himself (which greatly facilitated his punishment). The same crimes are always looked upon as misfortunes and regretted. But, in spite of all this, the eccentric stubbornly avoided everyone and appeared in public only to give lessons.

At first I did not pay much attention to him, but, I do not know why, he gradually began to interest me. There was something mysterious about him. There was no way to talk to him. Of course, he always answered my questions, and even with an air as if he considered this his first duty; but after his answers I somehow found it hard to question him longer; and on his face, after such conversations, one could always see some kind of suffering and fatigue. I remember walking with him one fine summer evening from Ivan Ivanovich. It suddenly occurred to me to invite him over for a minute to smoke a cigarette. I cannot describe the horror expressed on his face; he was completely lost, began to mutter some incoherent words, and suddenly, looking angrily at me, rushed to run in the opposite direction. I was even surprised. Since then, when meeting with me, he looked at me as if with some kind of fear. But I did not let up; something drew me to him, and a month later, for no apparent reason, I myself went to Goryanchikov. Of course, I acted stupidly and indelicately. He lodged on the very edge of the city, with an old bourgeois woman who had a sick, consumptive daughter, and that illegitimate daughter, a child of ten years old, a pretty and cheerful girl. Alexander Petrovich was sitting with her and teaching her to read the minute I went in to see him. When he saw me, he became so confused, as if I had caught him in some kind of crime. He was completely at a loss, jumped up from his chair and looked at me with all his eyes. We finally sat down; he closely followed my every glance, as if he suspected some special mysterious meaning in each of them. I guessed that he was suspicious to the point of madness. He looked at me with hatred, almost asking: “Will you leave here soon?” I talked to him about our town, current news; he remained silent and smiled maliciously; it turned out that he not only did not know the most ordinary, well-known city news, but was not even interested in knowing them. Then I started talking about our region, about its needs; he listened to me in silence and looked into my eyes so strangely that I finally felt ashamed of our conversation. However, I almost teased him with new books and magazines; I had them in my hands, fresh from the post office, and I offered them uncut to him. He gave them a greedy look, but immediately changed his mind and declined the offer, responding with lack of time. Finally I said goodbye to him and, leaving him, I felt that some unbearable weight had been lifted from my heart. I was ashamed and it seemed extremely stupid to pester a man who sets his main task - to hide as far as possible from the whole world. But the deed was done. I remember that I hardly noticed his books at all, and, therefore, it was unfairly said about him that he reads a lot. However, driving twice, very late at night, past his windows, I noticed a light in them. What did he do, sitting up until dawn? Did he write? And if so, what exactly?

Circumstances removed me from our town for three months. Returning home already in the winter, I learned that Alexander Petrovich died in the autumn, died in seclusion and never even called a doctor to him. The town has almost forgotten about him. His apartment was empty. I immediately made the acquaintance of the mistress of the dead man, intending to find out from her; What was her lodger particularly busy with, and did he write anything? For two kopecks, she brought me a whole basket of papers left over from the deceased. The old woman confessed that she had already used up two notebooks. She was a gloomy and silent woman, from whom it was difficult to get anything worthwhile. She had nothing new to tell me about her tenant. According to her, he almost never did anything and for months did not open a book and did not take a pen in his hands; but whole nights he paced up and down the room and kept thinking something, and sometimes talking to himself; that he was very fond of and very fond of her granddaughter, Katya, especially since he found out that her name was Katya, and that on Catherine's day every time he went to someone to serve a memorial service. Guests could not stand; he went out from the yard only to teach children; he even looked askance at her, the old woman, when she, once a week, came at least a little to tidy up his room, and almost never said a single word to her for three whole years. I asked Katya: does she remember her teacher? She looked at me silently, turned to the wall and began to cry. So, this man could at least make someone love him.

"Notes from the House of the Dead" attracted the attention of the public as an image of hard labor, which no one depicted visually to The House of the Dead,” wrote Dostoevsky in 1863. But since the theme of "Notes from the House of the Dead" is much broader and concerns many general issues of folk life, the evaluation of the work only from the side of the image of the prison subsequently began to upset the writer. Among Dostoevsky's rough notes dating back to 1876, we find the following: “In criticism of Notes from the House of the Dead, it means that Dostoevsky put on prisons, but now it is outdated. So they said in the bookstore, offering something different, nearest denunciation of prisons".

The attention of the memoirist in Notes from the House of the Dead is focused not so much on his own experiences as on the life and characters of those around him. prison and everything that I lived during these years, in one clear and vivid picture. Each chapter, being part of the whole, is a completely finished work, dedicated, like the whole book, to the general life of the prison. The image of individual characters is also subordinated to this main task.

There are many mass scenes in the story. Dostoevsky's desire to focus not on individual characteristics, but on the general life of a mass of people creates the epic style of Notes from the House of the Dead.

F. M. Dostoevsky. Notes from the House of the Dead (Part 1). audiobook

The theme of the work goes far beyond the Siberian penal servitude. Telling the stories of prisoners or simply reflecting on the mores of the prison, Dostoevsky turns to the causes of the crimes committed there, in the "freedom". And every time when comparing freemen and convicts, it turns out that the difference is not so great, that “people are people everywhere”, that convicts live according to the same general laws, more precisely, that free people live according to convict laws. It is no coincidence, therefore, that other crimes are even deliberately committed with the aim of getting into prison “and there getting rid of the incomparably more hard labor life in the wild.”

Establishing similarities between the life of hard labor and "freedom", Dostoevsky deals primarily with the most important social issues: the attitude of the people to the nobles and the administration, the role of money, the role of labor, etc. As was evident from Dostoevsky's first letter upon his release from prison, he was deeply shocked by the hostility of the prisoners to the convicts from the nobility. In Notes from the House of the Dead, this is widely shown and socially explained: “Yes, they don’t like nobles, especially political ones ... Firstly, you and the people are different, unlike them, and secondly, they are all the same were either landlords or military ranks. Judge for yourself, can they love you, sir?”

Particularly expressive in this regard is the chapter "Claim". It is characteristic that, despite the gravity of his position as a nobleman, the narrator understands and fully justifies the hatred of the prisoners for the nobles, who, having left the prison, will again move into an estate hostile to the people. The same feelings are manifested in the attitude of the common people to the administration, to everything official. Even the doctors of the hospital were treated with prejudice by the prisoners, "because the doctors are still gentlemen."

With remarkable skill, images of people from the people are created in the Notes from the House of the Dead. These are most often strong and whole natures, closely fused with their environment, alien to intellectual reflection. Precisely because in their previous life these people were oppressed and humiliated, because social causes most often pushed them to crimes, there is no repentance in their souls, but only a firm consciousness of their right.

Dostoevsky is convinced that the wonderful natural qualities of people imprisoned in a prison, under other conditions, could develop in a completely different way, find a different application for themselves. Dostoevsky’s words about the fact that the best people from the people ended up in prison are an angry accusation against the entire social structure: “Mighty forces died in vain, they died abnormally, illegally, irrevocably. And who is to blame? So, who's to blame?"

However, Dostoevsky does not depict rebels as positive heroes, but humble ones, he even claims that rebellious moods gradually fade away in prison. Dostoevsky's favorite characters in Notes from the House of the Dead are the quiet and affectionate young man Alei, the kind widow Nastasya Ivanovna, an old believer who decided to suffer for his faith. Speaking, for example, about Nastasya Ivanovna, Dostoevsky, without naming names, polemicizes with the theory of rational egoism Chernyshevsky: “Some say (I have heard and read this) that the highest love for one's neighbor is at the same time the greatest egoism. What was the egoism here, I can’t understand at all. ”

In Notes from the House of the Dead, that moral ideal of Dostoevsky was first formed, which he later did not get tired of promoting, passing it off as a popular ideal. Personal honesty and nobility, religious humility and active love - these are the main features that Dostoevsky endows with his favorite heroes. Subsequently creating Prince Myshkin (“The Idiot”), Alyosha (“The Brothers Karamazov”), he essentially developed the trends laid down in Notes from the House of the Dead. These tendencies, which make the Notes related to the work of the “late” Dostoevsky, could not yet be noticed by the critics of the sixties, but after all the subsequent works of the writer they became obvious. It is characteristic that special attention was paid to this side of the "Notes from the House of the Dead" L. N. Tolstoy, who emphasized that here Dostoevsky was close to his own convictions. In a letter to Strakhov dated September 26, 1880, he wrote: “The other day I was unwell, and I was reading The Dead House. I forgot a lot, re-read and do not know better books from all new literature, including Pushkin. Not the tone, but the point of view is amazing: sincere, natural and Christian. Good, instructive book. I enjoyed the whole day yesterday, as I have not enjoyed for a long time. If you see Dostoevsky, tell him that I love him.”