Hello dear.
Not so long ago I asked your opinion about whether it is worthwhile to analyze together with you one of my favorite poetic works not only "Nashegovse" (c), but in general in principle, and in general received a satisfactory answer: And this so you should, at least, at least try :-) And, although, as aptly noted in his comment, the smart and respected me eulampij
I can't even compare with Nabokov, and even less with Yuri Lotman (whose work I consider excellent), I cannot compare, but I will try to tell you at least a little about those things that may not be entirely clear, which we can find in the lines immortal work. I want to note right away that I will not analyze the impulses, the essence, the system of relationships and the psychological nuances of the characters. Theoretically I could, but I'm not a literary critic or a psychologist. My hobby is history, and for me a great work, it is also a great excuse to plunge into the era.
Well, most importantly - let's read it together again, and maybe for someone I will even reveal the clarity, beauty and greatness of this novel, written, by the way, in a special language - the "Onegin stanza" - which Pushkin himself invented, mixing the style of classical English and Italian sonnet. The same 14 lines, but with its own rhythm and rhyme system. Literally it looks like this: AbAb CCdd EffE gg (capital letters denote feminine rhyme, lowercase - masculine). For me, the structure is openwork, which makes it easy to read and pleasant to learn. But it is extremely difficult. And you understand why it took Pushkin so long to create the whole novel (almost 8 years)
In general, if anything, do not judge strictly :-)
Or like this...
Let's start with the epigraph. You know, in my school years, I did not pay much attention to the epigraphs, considering them to be too much to show off. However, time has passed, and for me it is not only an inseparable part of the work itself, but sometimes its generally concentrated essence. Maybe I'm getting old, but now I myself am not averse to using the tools of the epigraph even in my posts. It brings me a certain pleasure :-)
In Eugene Onegin, there is an epigraph before the work itself. Plus, there is also a dedication. Well, there are separate epigraphs before each chapter. Sometimes we will disassemble, sometimes not.
The first epigraph is written in French and can be translated like this: “ Permeated with vanity, he possessed, moreover, a special pride, which prompts him to confess with equal indifference to his both good and bad deeds - a consequence of a sense of superiority, perhaps imaginary". It is supposedly taken from a private letter, and serves to make the reader believe that the author and Eugene Onegin are good friends, that the author seems to be directly involved in the events.
drawing of the very light of Russian literature
The dedication is more multi-line, its meaning is not fully cited, but it was made to Peter Alexandrovich Pletnev. The rector of the department of literature of my Alma mater, Petr Aleksandrovich, had a sensitive and gentle character, wrote poetry and was a critic. But he criticized so courteously and delicately that he managed to be a friend of almost all the literary "stars" of that time. Including Pushkin.
P. Pletnev
The epigraph before the first chapter consists of one line: “ And in a hurry to live and to feel in a hurry". And the signature of Kn. Vyazemsky. This is part of the work of Pyotr Andreevich Vyazemsky, a brilliant and interesting friend of Alexander Sergeevich. The work is called "The First Snow" and I don't see any sense in citing it here - if you wish, you can find it yourself. Vyazemsky himself was also a poet, but kind of unique - he wrote only one collection of poems, even closer to the end of his life.
P. Vyazemsky
But at the same time, he was a real "man of the Renaissance" (this is how I call multilaterally developed personalities), because he was engaged in a lot of things, starting from a translator and ending with state affairs. A real "gold fund of the nation". It is a pity that few remember him these days. He was a very interesting and witty person. Book. - this is short for the prince. The Vyazemskys are generally Rurikovichs, and they received their surname from the inheritance - the city of Vyazma. And the coat of arms of the city, by the way, is taken from their family coat of arms.
coat of arms of princes Vyazemsky
Well, the meaning of the epigraph ... Here - at your discretion. Moreover, I think it is better to draw conclusions after reading the entire first chapter in its entirety :-)
Perhaps it's time to move on to the text itself.
« My uncle has the most honest rules
When seriously ill,
He made himself respect
And I could not have imagined it better.
His example to others is science;
But oh my god what a boredom
Sitting with a sick person day and night,
Without leaving a single step away!
What a base deceit
To amuse half-dead
Correct his pillows,
It's sad to bring medicine
Sigh and think to yourself:
When will the devil take you!»
This piece is probably remembered by everyone who went to the Soviet, Russian, Ukrainian, and other schools of the post-Soviet space. For most, this is literally everything they know and remember about the novel :-) In general, recognizable.
For me, in the above excerpt, the main lines are these:
What a base deceit
To amuse half-dead
I think they should be used as a motto for opponents of using drugs against male erectile dysfunction like Viagra :-))))
But let's go further.
So the young rake thought,
Flying in the dust on the postage
By the Most High will of Zeus
Heir to all his relatives.
Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan!
With the hero of my novel
Without preamble, this very hour
Let me introduce you:
Onegin, my good friend,
Born on the banks of the Neva,
Where maybe you were born
Or shone, my reader;
I once walked there too:
But the north is bad for me.
Postal, they are also "transfer" - this is a state, state crew, in fact a taxi. Keeping your carriage was not very profitable, and the carriage and horses were ruinous in general. Therefore, we used the "transfer" ones. Moreover, the order of use was very carefully regulated and was monitored by a special official - the station superintendent. Since Onegin did not serve, he was rather low in the Table of Ranks, so the number of horses for the whole trip was not large for Eugene, namely, only 3. He rode in a troika. Therefore, he cannot "fly in the dust" in any way, since he could not change horses at every post station, which means he had to take care of them and give them a rest. Moreover, there might not have been any free horses, which means that the trip could have dragged on. By the way, the travel time can be roughly calculated. Uncle's estate was in the Pskov region, Eugene lived in St. Petersburg. From St. Petersburg to, say, Mikhailovsky, about 400 kilometers. Let's translate it into versts and get about 375 versts. In the summer, the horses walked at a speed of 10 miles per hour, and walked about 100 miles per day. Eugene was forced to take care of the horses and I think he traveled no more than 70 miles a day. And this means, even if he did not wait for the horses when changing, and rode almost non-stop, then he got somewhere about 4-5 days in one direction in any direction. And even more.
Post station
By the way, as you know, you had to pay for such a "taxi". Evgeny was driving, most likely along the Vitebsk tract. In Pushkin's times, the tax (running fee) on this tract was 5 kopecks per verst, which means that the trip cost about 19 rubles one way. Not so much (a stagecoach to Moscow cost 70 rubles, and renting a box in the theater for a year was even 500), but not too little, because for 10-15 rubles you could buy a serf.
Ruble of 1825.
About the line “ But the north is bad for me ", I think everyone knows everything :-) So subtly Pushkin tricked the authorities about his exile.
Well, let's finish today on this.
To be continued….
Have a nice time of day
S. G. BOCHAROV
FRENCH EPIGRAPH TO "EUGENE ONEGIN"
(ONEGIN AND STAVROGIN)
We all know the epigraphs to the chapters Eugene Onegina... But - a strange thing - least of all we know the main epigraph to the novel. We notice it less and remember it worse, and if we notice it, then we are not sufficiently aware of the fact that it is the only common epigraph that led the entire novel Eugene Onegin.
Here is the epigraph:
“Pétri de vanité il avait encore plus de cette espèce d’orgueil qui fait avouer avec la même indifférence les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions, suite d’un sentiment de supériorité peut-être imaginaire.”
Tiré d'une lettre particulière is a mystification of Pushkin. He himself composed this French text at the end of 1823 in Odessa, at the end of the first chapter " Onegin”. It was to the 1st chapter that this text was first put as an epigraph, when it was published separately in 1825. However, in 1833, Pushkin raised this text in the meaning of when in the first full edition “ Eugene Onegina”Removed it from the 1st chapter and put it ahead of the whole novel as a general epigraph.
We agree that this is an intriguing fact, and still not properly explained - that the famous Russian novel in
verses, a fragment of French prose deliberately made by the author and imitating an original document (letter) is preselected as a philosophical and psychological key.
Pushkin considered the French language the language of prose par excellence: in his reviews of European literature, he noted that prose had a decisive preponderance in French literature since the era of “the skeptic Montagne and the cynic Rabelais”. But as a language of prose, French was for Pushkin a model for study and, one might even say, an educational model; this was especially true of the problem of "metaphysical language" discussed by Pushkin with Vyazemsky and Baratynsky in connection with Vyazemsky's translation “ Adolf”Benjamin Constant. Under the metaphysical language was meant not only the language of abstract reasoning, "scholarship, politics and philosophy", but also the language of psychological analysis in literary literature - A. Akhmatova wrote about this.
One might think that the French epigraph, first to Chapter 1, and then to the entire novel, was for Pushkin an experience in the spirit of “metaphysical language,” an experience of a refined psychological aphorism that combines a clear analytical division of contradictory states with their rationalistic ordering. The closest and most inspiring example of such an analytical language was “ Adolf", But the culture of expression, the pastiche of which was created in this Pushkin text, is, of course, wider." Adolf”. Direct sources of Pushkin's alleged French quotation have not been found and probably will not be found; Nabokov gives an interesting analogy from Malebranche, and also quite plausibly sees in Pushkin's aphorism an allusion to Rousseau's extravagant confessions; undoubtedly, there is also a generalized résumé of the characters of the heroes of European novels of the early 19th century, in which “modern man is portrayed quite correctly” - the works of Chateaubriand, Byron, Constant, Maturin.
“Eugene Onegin”Was not only an encyclopedia of Russian life, but also an encyclopedia of European culture. “A living artistic university of European culture” - I quote L. V. Pumpyansky, - Pushkin worked in the conviction that “Russian culture is formed not on provincial paths, but on the long paths of common European culture, not in a remote corner, but in the free space of the international intellectual interaction ”. L. V. Pumpyansky noted that in four lines dedicated to Voltaire in the message “To the grandee” of 1830, “reduction of whole layers
thoughts ”and in terms of the power of reducing thought, these lines are equal to a whole study.
IN " Onegin”In four stanzas of the 3rd chapter, telling about the reading of Tatyana, and in one stanza of the 7th chapter - about the reading of Onegin - such an abbreviated summary history and theory of the European novel is given, at least in its three stages and in its three types, represented by the names of Richardson, Byron and Constant; All these layers of European literature in the structure of Pushkin's novel are present, in Hegel's language, in a filmed form, and all of them are summed up here by the effect that they had on the souls of Russian readers in Russian reality - Onegin and Tatiana.
The French epigraph sounds like a similar reduction in layers of characterization of the modern hero in the European novel. It is not possible to directly correlate him with any one famous hero - Adolf or Melmot - it is not possible: the image presented here is placed somewhere between the supernatural greatness of Melmot and the social weakness of Adolf (in 1823, when the epigraph was being composed, Pushkin had just read Melmota and, according to the hypothesis of T.G. Tsiavlovskaya, he reread it together with Karolina Sobanskaya Adolf). It must be emphasized that Pushkin was dealing precisely with the total experience of the European novel as the starting point of his own novel. In the preface to his translation “ Adolf"Vyazemsky especially noted that he looks at this novel not as a creation" exclusively French, but more European, a representative not of a French community, but a representative of his age, secular, so to speak, practical metaphysics of our generation. " In the 1st chapter “ Onegin”The line“ Like Child-Harold is gloomy, languid ”had a rough version:“ But as Adolf is gloomy, languid ”(VI, 244); in a French letter to Alexander Raevsky in October 1823, Pushkin replaced “un caractére Byronique” with “un caractére Melmothique” (XIII, 378), ie. these three models were interchangeable for him as variants of the same type. And Byron, and “ Melmota“Pushkin read in French: French is the epigraph and is a sign of connection with European tradition, a cultural landmark. It is also significant that this is French prose. The novel in Pushkin's poems was connected to the genetic line of the great European novel in prose, and in the course of work on “ Onegin"There was a reorientation from Byronov" Don Juan"As an initial reference pattern on" Adolf”, Which was reflected in the famous characterization of“ modern man ”in the 7th chapter, which Pushkin in a special
article about Vyazemsky's translation he quoted from his own novel as referring to Adolf.
There is an obvious overlap between this famous passage in Chapter 7 and the French epigraph. Indeed, here, in the 7th chapter, the Russian poet translates the psychological content of the latest European novel - and in the draft manuscript of the 7th chapter, “two or three novels, which reflected the century,” anonymous in the final text, were revealed in one line: “Melmot , Rene, Adolphe Constant ”(VI, 438) - translates it into his living poetic Russian language. And in this translation the psychological model seems to come to life, saturated with an emotional tone and flexible intonations, which it seems to be deliberately lacking in the French epigraph, which against the background of the text of the novel in verse is perceived as non-emotional and non-intonation. The difference between him and the portrait of a “modern man” in Chapter 7 is like between a mask and a living face. But along with this translation of the European content into Russian verse, Pushkin translated this content into the Russian hero, into his Onegin, moreover, without any parody. We read Pushkin's poetic formula of the century and modern man as already related to our literature and our spiritual history. And in fact, this formula works further after Pushkin's novel for about half a century, not only in Russian literature, among its heroes, but also in our everyday life and even on the stage of our political history. This is how it responds already in the second half of the century - an example unexpected, but very expressive and for our topic, as it becomes clear now, essential: in 1870 M. N. Katkov in “ Moskovsky Vedomosti"Draws the following portrait of Mikhail Bakunin, his former friend, and now a political opponent:" It was a dry and callous nature, an empty mind and fruitlessly agitated<...> All the interests with which he seemed to be fuming were phenomena without essence. " Contact with Pushkin's formula of the soul “selfish and dry” and the mind “seething in empty action” is obvious. It is likely that Katkov, who had written well about Pushkin fifteen years earlier, somewhat stylized his characterization to fit Pushkin's formula, but there is no doubt that Bakunin himself gave him grounds for this. The psychological structure, as if translated from the European, found its own long history in Russian life, and one of its heroes was this noble intellectual of the 40s, who started a stormy political intrigue. Katkov's article was written about an event that served
Dostoevsky's impetus for Demons (the murder of student Ivanov by Nechaev's group), and regarding Bakunin there is a version that he was at least one of Stavrogin's prototypes in this novel. For me this is an important example, because in this report I am interested in Stavrogin, more precisely: Onegin and Stavrogin - this is the best way to formulate the topic.
Here I return to the French epigraph to “ Eugene Onegin”. I dare to suggest that Stavrogin was predicted in him, that is, let's say more carefully, the possibility of a future Stavrogin lurks, the possibility of the development of the psychological complex outlined here, as it were, towards Stavrogin. In his dying letter, Stavrogin writes: “I still, as always before, can wish to do a good deed and feel pleasure from it; I wish the evil side by side and I also feel pleasure. " Recall: “qui fait avouer avec la meme indifférence les bonnes comme les mauvaises actions”. It's not the same: equally indifferent confession in good and evil deeds and the same a wish; the immoralism of the second state is much deeper. Nevertheless, this very symmetry of the indifferent equilibrium of good and evil unites these two states. The hero of Pushkin's epigraph finds in this a special kind of pride, Stavrogin speaks of freedom from the prejudice of distinguishing between good and evil, but adding, “that I can be free from all prejudice, but<...> if I achieve that freedom, then I will perish ”(12, 113). The position of Prince-Stavrogin in the preparatory materials for the novel is defined by the words: “proudly and haughtily” (II, 121). Everyone recognizes the immeasurable superiority of Stavrogin, but one of the main themes of the novel is the doubtfulness of this superiority, "perhaps imaginary," peut-être imaginaire.
Much has been written on the theme of "Pushkin and Dostoevsky" - about the germination of Pushkin's seeds in the images of Dostoevsky - but the theme of "Onegin and Stavrogin" has not yet been posed. Meanwhile, this topic is undoubted, and if we unfold it properly, then, perhaps, the hypothesis just expressed that, perhaps, the program of the future Stavrogin is also laid down in the French epigraph to Pushkin's novel, will not seem so fantastic either. From researchers - Akim Volynsky has a quick rapprochement of two heroes; it is necessary to mention the unpublished report by D. Darskiy "Pushkin and Dostoevsky" (1924); finally, my colleague V.S.Nepomnyashchy compared the two heroes in connection with Tatyana's dream.
Actually, Dostoevsky himself raised the topic in his reflections on Russian literature, in which he put on
original place “ Eugene Onegina”. Dostoevsky wrote a lot about Onegin himself as a hero and a type and spoke about him most fully in Pushkin's speech, moreover, what is said here about Onegin as a type of Russian wanderer in his native land, torn off from the soil, from popular power and popular morality, proud, idle and suffering - coincides almost literally with the numerous characteristics of Stavrogin in the novel, and in the materials and plans for him, and in the letters of Dostoevsky.
Onegin's type, as Dostoevsky called him, was in his eyes precisely the undying and developing type of Russian literature and Russian life throughout the 19th century. “This type finally entered the consciousness of our entire society and went to be reborn and develop with each new generation” (19, 12). “This is a common Russian type throughout the present century” (26, 216). At the same time, the current wanderers go not to the camps, like Aleko, but to the people; there was no Fourier then, but would have been - Aleko and Onegin would have rushed to the Fourier system (26, 215-216). T. e. in new rebirths and mutations of a constant type, it is filled with a variable ideological content. After all, this is exactly what Katkov recorded in his own way in the guise of Bakunin, a Russian wanderer in the European revolutionary field; And this is how the new ideological load is combined with the traditional and old psychological structure of an idle bored master inherited from the “Onegin type” - this is Stavrogin's theme.
Dostoevsky liked to establish a literary pedigree for his characters, especially Pushkin's pedigree eagerly, beginning with the stationmaster for Makar Devushkin; more than once he remembered both Hermann and the Covetous Knight. Following him, philologists also followed the path, for example, from Hermann to Raskolnikov, to the Adolescent, and to Stavrogin in the scene of his meeting with Lisa - a wonderful article by AL Bem “The Twilight of a Hero”. You can also trace the path from Onegin to Stavrogin - for in the genetic line of the heroes of Russian literature discovered by Onegin - he is known to all of us - Stavrogin appeared, it seems like the last, closing link and some really twilight result (after Stavrogin there is no continuation of the series, and in it is the beginning of a new formation belonging to a different era and a new psychological phenomenon - decadence; A. Volynsky wrote about this); moreover, it is possible to consider this path from Onegin to Stavrogin in a direct comparison of these two outstanding heroes of our literature, bypassing the evolutionary series between them.
For such a direct comparison, I take two scenes - one of “ Eugene Onegina", The other from" Demons”: Tatyana's dream and Stavrogin's meeting with Chromonozhka. These scenes, at a distance of almost half a century of literary history that have passed between them, are reflected in one another - as a prophetic foreshadowing and a tragic consequence - and attract significant motives scattered across the space of both novels.
Tatiana's dream: through him Tatiana, and we together with her, acquire new knowledge about her hero. He appears in a completely different setting from his real environment, environment and society, in a new role and a new look. He is surrounded by evil spirits, obviously, of an average hand, and maybe even a "petty bastard", recalling the word of Pushkin from another poem, because he commands them like the chieftain of a bandit gang. "He's the boss there, that's clear."
Captain Lebyadkin, receiving Stavrogin at his place, said to him just before his meeting with Lamented: "You are the owner here, not me, but I, so to speak, in the form of only your clerk ..."
This is a quote, voluntary or involuntary; such indirect quotations from the world of Pushkin “ Onegin”A lot is scattered in the text Demons, and I will extract and mark them in the course of my discussion. A.L.Behm said well that Dostoevsky in “ Demons”,“ Maybe, without realizing it,<...> was dominated by literary reminiscences ”; the same researcher called Dostoevsky a genius reader. Hidden Onegin quotes in “ Demons”- each individually seems to be an isolated and accidental coincidence, but taken together they form a context, as it were, parallel to the corresponding Pushkin's context. In this case, the voluntary or involuntary non-randomness of the roll call of one and the other “master” is determined by the fact that Stavrogin is the “master” for Lebyadkin in their life together in the Petersburg slums, where he “played tricks”, like Prince Harry with Falstaff, communicating “with the scum of the Petersburg population ”, to which Pushkin symbolically corresponded to Onegin in the company of the petty bastard of the demonic world.
This episode from Stavrogin's biography is connected to the big theme of the European adventure novel, which L. Grossman described as follows: "the wanderings of aristocrats through the slums and their comradely fraternization with public scum." This theme, as is well known, is very active in English and French romanticism of the 1820-1840s (“ Pelem”Bulwer-Lytton, Musset, Balzac, Xu), and it is no coincidence that in one of the reviews of Demons in the current press
Stavrogin was called a mixture of Pechorin and Rodolphe from the novel by E. Syu (12, 268). IN " RollaMusset gave an up-to-date interpretation of this motive of the contact of an aristocrat and an intellectual hero with the dirty bottom of social life, an interpretation that helps to understand the meaning of this motive in both Dostoevsky and Pushkin:
L'hypocrisie est morte, on ne croit plus aux prêtres;
Mais la vertu se meurt, on ne croit plus à Dieu.
Le noble n'est plus fier du sang de ses ancêtres,
Mais il le prostitue au fond d'un mauvais lieu.
Musset thus elevated this aristocrat's fad to the spiritual sickness of the century - unbelief... It doesn't take long to prove that this is the root of Stavrogin's personality and fate; but the same root and total Onegin skepticism, although this deep motivation is present in Pushkin's novel more in a latent form. We can say that Stavrogin is the twilight result of that study of the state of unbelief, which Pushkin began in our literature with his lyceum poem on this topic - “Unbelief” (1817). It is interesting that Dostoevsky, speaking about the same illness of the century in a famous letter to ND Fonvizina in 1854, called himself the Musset formula - “un enfant du siécle” (not “son of the century”, as the title of Musset's novel is inaccurately translated ): “I am a child of the century, a child of unbelief and doubt ...” (28, book I, 176).
In a real plot “ Onegin“There is no such adventurous motive of the hero's adventures on a social day, but, as it is said, Yevgeny's environment in Tatyana's dream presents a symbolic parallel to him. Pushkin was interested in this motive, as evidenced by the plans of "Russian Pelam", conceived under the influence of the novel by Bulwer-Lytton. Here a broad adventurous action is conceived, in which the young hero sinks into a bad society and connects his fate with a nobleman-robber. In a very interesting article by Yu. M. Lotman, this plot “a nobleman and a robber” by Pushkin is considered and it is shown that it spun off “from the Onegin trunk”. Yu. M. Lotman hypothesized that, perhaps, in “ Onegin”A similar episode was planned - in those plans to expand the Onegin plot, which were associated with the hero's journey across Russia, in which
he, along a route unmotivated by the author, directs his way to the Volga and hears there the songs of the barge haulers about “How Stenka Razin in the old days Bloated the Volga wave” (VI, 499). In 1825-1826. Pushkin writes the 5th chapter of the novel with Tatyana's dream, the ballad "The Groom", thematically parallel, "A Scene from Faust", also, as we will see, participating in the thematic ensemble that interests us now, and "Songs about Stenka Razin" with their classic the motive for the sacrifice of the red maiden; here in the foreground is the same keyword - "owner":
The owner himself sits at the stern,
The owner himself is formidable Stenka Razin.
Stavrogin's path Demons leads him from the social bottom to the political bottom. Both are identified right in the novel: “How could I get lost in such a slum?”- Stavrogin himself formulates about his belonging to the organization of Verkhovensky. It is also significant that Verkhovensky comprehends the situation in the spirit of the classic adventure novel: "An aristocrat, when he goes to democracy, is charming!" The next step on this path - to a criminal offense, Fedka Convict with his knife: not only "in such a slum", but also "to Fedka in the shop." Fedka Convict is a representative of that robbery world, on which political demons pin their hopes as the main “element to the huge Russian revolt” (11, 278). The Pushkin theme “the gentleman and the robber”, which already in Pushkin developed into the topic “the gentleman-robber” (see article by Yu. M. Lotman), is brought up in the situation “ Demons"The ideological rationale formulated in" Catechism of a revolutionary“Nechaeva:“ let us unite with the wild, robber world, this true and only revolutionary in Russia ”(12, 194). The name of Stenka Razin is one of the main symbols in the program of Peter Verkhovensky, and Stavrogin remarks with surprise that this role is destined for him. Finally, in the speech of Pyotr Stepanovich, Razin's painted boat appears: “We, you know, will sit in the boat, maple oars, silk sails, a red girl is sitting in the stern, the light is Lizaveta Nikolaevna ... or whatever the hell is it that song ... "Then, in anger, he will throw to his (also)" owner ":" What a 'boat' you are, you old, hole-making wood barge for scrap! " This is one of the moments of Stavrogin's overthrow from the height of his superiority, “perhaps imaginary”.
IN " Onegin”, As you know, the big plans of expansion of action, connected with the chapter about Onegin's wandering and the so-called 10th chapter, remained unfulfilled. The novel was supposed to include a lot of historical and political material, including a chronicle of the Decembrist movement. How the fate of the hero should have contacted these pictures remains unclear. The journey is accompanied by a single refrain "Tosca!" and does not bring renewal and salvation. The only entry of the hero into the field of social activity in the main plot of the novel - his village reform, the replacement of corvee with light rent - is given in the following motivation: “Alone among his possessions, Just to spend timeFirst, our Eugene decided to establish a new Order ”. Stavrogin declares to Shatov about his participation in Verkhovensky's society: “I am not a friend to them, but if I helped by chance, then only as an idle person”. He also says in his letter: “In Russia I not connected by anything ...”This is also a quote, voluntary or involuntary (“ Alien for everyone, not connected by anything ”in Onegin's letter). We can say that the Decembrist possibilities of Onegin, who could connect with the movement (if we believe the only testimony of M.V. Yuzefovich), apparently, also as an idle person - that they unfolded in the history of Stavrogin, and the very idea of \u200b\u200bcombining a hopelessly personal history of a similar a hero with a radical political cause, widely targeted, but not realized in “ Eugene Onegin", Foreshadowed such a novel as" Demons”.
One more comparison. In the preparatory materials for “ Demons”Is the following reasoning of the Prince (future Stavrogin):
“So, first of all, in order to calm down, it is necessary to prejudge the question of whether it is possible to really believe seriously?
In that all, the whole knot of life for the Russian people and all of its purpose and being ahead.
If it is impossible, then although it is not required now, it is not at all so innocuous if someone demands, which is best burn everything.” (11, 179).
Somehow inevitably, the conclusion of Pushkin's "Scene from Faust" is recalled here: “ Drown everything”.
This is also almost a quote and, as is always the case with Dostoevsky with Pushkin's motives, the motive acquires new and more complex philosophical justifications and even gets political concretization, because “to burn everything,” the Prince specifies, means “to join Nechaev”.
This formula of absolute destruction, so close, almost in quotation, Pushkin-Faustian, but with a new ideological and political rationale, it did not enter the text " Demons”, But the picture of the coming destruction is here, in the speech of Peter Verkhovensky, and he sees it like this:“ the sea will be agitated, and the booth will collapse ... ”“ The sea will agitate ”recalls the same thing -“ drown everything ”. It is remarkable that in D. Minaev's parody on “ Demons"It was proposed to take this from Pushkin as an epigraph:" A million characters and their universal extermination at the end of the novel, which should have an epigraph from Pushkin's "Scene from Faust": " Faust... Drown everyone! " (12, 260).
"And the booth will collapse ..." And this is the finale of Tatyana's dream: "the hut staggered ..." Tatyana's dream ends up with a picture that is mythologically equivalent to a universal catastrophe, the collapse of the universe, and here this disintegration of the universe into chaos as a result this is how it will be called further in the text “ Onegin”Is no longer this dream-symbolic, but the real murder of Lensky in a duel).
The argument is louder, louder; suddenly Eugene
Grabs a long knife, and instantly
Lensky is defeated; scary shadow
Thickened; intolerable scream
It rang out ... the hut staggered ...
This picture can be compared with the entire novel. Demons in general, because where else in literature is such a complete realization of this symbolic and mythological picture in all its moments and details given in the plot, if not in “ Demons ”?
So, summarizing our projection “ Demons"To Tatyana's dream: Onegin is here surrounded by demons, like the chieftain of a robber gang, a" long knife "appears in his hand, next to him is a girl-victim. I would venture to say that this is in “ Eugene Onegin”Prophecy about Stavrogin. Such a prophetic anticipation. K “ Demons"Taken by the epigraph" Demons"Pushkin's (poem), but a suitable epigraph would be Tatyana's dream, in which there are not only demons, but with Onegin-Stavrogin in the center, that is, a certain anticipation of the structural scheme of Dostoevsky's novel.
Tatiana's dream, I said, is reflected in Stavrogin's visit to the Chromonozhka. She, too, acquires new knowledge about her hero from a dream. “Why did you know that I about it Did you see a dream? "," But why did you dream in this very form? " - her remarks to Stavrogin. Tatyana could also ask this question: why did Onegin dream about Onegin like that?
The vision of Chromopod - half in a dream, half on the transition to reality - about how Stavrogin, entering, took out a knife from his pocket. In the sense of her vision, he stabbed himself with this knife - an impostor in Stavrogin stabbed a real person, a prince: "Did you kill him or not, confess!" But with this materialized knife Fedka Convict will soon be killed herself. The metaphor of stabbed love (like a stabbed dream in Shakespeare) also comes from Pushkin, in whom it is either realized in the plot, as in the ballad “The Bridegroom,” then it is present as a potential motive, as in Tatyana’s dream, then it is deployed precisely as a metaphor, in “Scene from Fausta ”: an intellectual hero-lover, fed up with passion and lust, appears as a highwayman:
A sacrifice to my whim
I look, drunk with pleasure,
With irresistible disgust:
So reckless fool
Vainly decided on an evil deed,
Slaughtering a beggar in the forest
Scolds the skinned body.
Pushkin's Faust here completely turns into Fedka Convict from “ Demons”.
The plot of Stavrogin's relationship with Chromonozhka also gives such a piercing rapprochement with the Onegin text. “You can't be here,” Nikolai Vsevolodovich told her in a gentle, melodic voice, and an extraordinary tenderness shone in his eyes. ” Let's remember Onegin at Tatiana's birthday.
He bowed silently to her,
But somehow the gaze of his eyes
He was wonderfully gentle. Is it because
That he was really moved
Or he, flirting, was naughty,
Involuntarily, eh, il out of goodwill.
But this gaze expressed tenderness:
He revived Tanya's heart.
As you can see, the interpretation of this microevent remains problematic and open. “Unusual tenderness” in the eyes of Stavrogin (I think and am convinced that Dostoevsky was also here in the grip of literary reminiscences) is interpreted more definitely (although not completely unambiguously) - as a demonic, Luciferic charm and almost
that antichrist is seductiveness. “Charming like a demon” is written in the materials for the novel (11, 175).
The main point of the scene with Lame Leg is the debunking of the hero as an impostor, Grishka Otrepiev. Along this line, the scene clearly relates to another episode “ Eugene Onegina"- Tatiana's visit to Onegin's house, reading his books and opening -" Is he really a parody? " Dostoevsky especially emphasized this scene in Onegin and in Pushkin's speech he spoke of "the unattainable beauty and depth of these stanzas." In the report mentioned above, D. Darsky likened both Tatyana at Pushkin's, and Lame-legged at Dostoevsky's to the wise evangelical virgins, waiting with lit lamps for the heavenly bridegroom. This is a justified assimilation: in the spirit of such a parallel, Pushkin formulated the level of expectation of Tatyana in the prose program of her letter: “Come, you must be this and that. If not, God deceived me ”(VI, 314). Both heroines experience the very moment of the appearance of the hero - as the epiphany - as is he will enter: “You just entered - I instantly recognized ...” - “All five years I only imagined how is he will enter ”. For both, the result of insight is the debunking of this miraculous image (in which halos are combined and semi-divine, "angelic", and regal, "princely", and demonic, even satanic - named in one place Onegin and "satanic freak"), in whose place turns out to be a prosaic “modern man”, in the language of Marya Timofeevna - in the place of the prince and the falcon - the owl and the merchant. Further reduction - into moral cripples - is carried out through the mouth of another woman, Liza: "you, of course, stand for every legless and armless one." Proto quote from “ Eugene Onegina”:
Why, as a Tula assessor,
Am I not paralyzed?
Why can't I feel it in my shoulder
At least rheumatism? ..
In a personal and moral sense, this is how Stavrogin lies in paralysis, or it can be said more generally - the well-known structure of the hero of Russian literature, the one that Dostoevsky called "the Onegin type", came to the historical paralysis.
I must say in conclusion about this structure and hero shape... Both of our heroes, albeit to a different degree, are distinguished by a special mysterious centrality, which can be described as follows: the hero stands in the center of the questions and expectations addressed to him, he is solved, the right word and name are sought for him (“Really word found? ”), it is
intriguing center of the sphere. “Everything else,” Dostoevsky formulated this extraordinary stavroginocentrism of the novel, “moves around him like a kaleidoscope” (11, 136). More than one person in the novel (both Shatov and Verkhovensky) call Stavrogin their sun; and in fact everything revolves around this sun, as the center of attraction of all interests, but, according to N. Berdyaev's words about Stavrogin, the sun is already extinct. At the same time, the authors of both novels more or less deviate from the direct and open characterization of their hero and give him in a way of characterizing profile, multiple, variable, dotted (L. V. Pumpyansky believed that the method of “multiple illumination of the hero, in different profiles”, was created in the European novel by Pushkin: neither the heroes of Byron, nor Rene, nor Adolf, nor Melmot are given). Heroes - both, - are in different guises: “What will appear today? Melmot, cosmopolitan, patriot ... ”Stavrogin has his own list of alternating roles: Prince Harry (and partly Hamlet), the wise serpent, Ivan Tsarevich, Grishka Otrepiev. They play some of these roles themselves, others ascribe to them and even impose on other interested persons or rumor, "a common voice" - so that it is correctly noted about Stavrogin's "semi-involuntary imposture". The main question that is solved by the whole novel - and that and the other novel - is the question of the hero's face, the core of his personality: what is it and is it? What is behind the change of profiles - is it a tragic depth, or a fatal emptiness?
It should be emphasized that such a structure of the hero distinguishes and connects in our literature of the last century precisely these two - Onegin and Stavrogin, the first and last person in the genealogical series of heroes that we were talking about. In Stavrogin, this structure gives rise to a kind of grandiose contradiction, about which Yu. Tynyanov spoke curiously (his words are reported by L. Ya. Ginzburg), that this is “a game from scratch. All heroes Demons they say: Stavrogin !, Oh, Stavrogin is something wonderful! And so on until the very end; until the very end - nothing more. " Indeed, Stavrogin's significance is incredibly exaggerated in the novel. “You mean so much in my life,” Shatov tells him. He is very much means for all, but the real personal provision of this meaning remains unclear, and the gap between the size of the meaning and the dignity of the “signified” is growing, inflation of the meaning, leading to an absolute collapse.
The particular gravity of the Stavrogin situation is that they want to see in him an ideological leader, an ideological banner,
while his fatal misfortune is his inability to live by the idea. The name of this hereditary disease - hereditary, if we mean his literary pedigree - is constantly repeated in the novel: idleness, idleness “not by desire to be idle”, emphasized Dostoevsky, but from the loss of connection with all relatives (29, Book I, 232). “Great idle power” - formulates Tikhon (with these words he connected Stavrogin with Onegin V. S. Nepomnyashchy). It must be remembered that Pushkin also tried to intellectualize his Onegin, to connect him with the philosophical interests of the era, as evidenced, for example, by the initial composition of Onegin's library in the drafts of Chapter 7, which was investigated by Yu.M. Lotman: it consisted of philosophical and historical writings European thinkers, however, the poet abandoned this option and replaced his intellectual reading with “two or three novels,” which the hero himself turns out to be a “parody” of. The structure of the hero, as it were, required that ideological interests, from reading to possible Decembrism, not merge with the core of the soul. An interesting parallel is also shown by the evolution of the image of Prince-Stavrogin from extensive preparatory materials to the novel itself: in the materials, the future Stavrogin seriously and ardently lives on the ideas of Dostoevsky himself about faith and soil, in Stavrogin of the novel this ideological saturation seemed to disappear somewhere, and in its place a mysterious void was formed - the very hereditary incurable idleness. The evolution of the concept consisted in unloading and simply emptying the central hero from ideological saturation and approaching the state that is formulated by the words: “I am an idle mind, and I am bored” (11, 266). Pay attention: Stavrogin of Dostoevsky's protagonists is almost the only one not the hero of the idea and in this resolutely differs not only from Raskolnikov and Ivan Karamazov, but also from the socially and psychologically related Versilov. True, of course, for Shatov and Kirillov, he is a great teacher and generator of simultaneously suggested opposite ideas. But he himself will tell Shatov about this that, by convincing him, he was convincing himself, he was busy about himself. He himself sought salvation in life with an idea, “looked for a burden,” but he was not given such salvation in the novel.
Stavrogin and Dasha have such a conversation: “So, now to the end. - Are you still waiting for the end? - Yes I'm sure. - In the world nothing ends. "This will be the end." She talks about the spiritual story of her hero, which will inevitably have an end, and soon. “Nothing ends in the world” - this is a structural formula “ Eugene Onegina”And his hero, who is opposed
structural formula “ Demons”And their hero. In the biographical end of it, so stressed and forced, it seems to me, there appears a certain more significant end - the exhaustion of a certain cultural type of Russian literature and the completion of the cycle of its development - “hero's twilight,” in the words of A. L. Bem.
Nikolai Stavrogin has a rich background in Russian literature; the one who deals with it will have to take into account the French epigraph to “ Eugene Onegin”.
1 Eugene Onegin, a novel in verse by Aleksandr Pushkin, translated from the Russian, with a commentary, by Wladimir Nabokov, N. Y., 1964, 2, pp. 5-8.
2 L. Pumpyansky, Turgenev and the West, in the book: I. S. Turgenev. Materials and research, Orel, 1940. p. 97.
3 L. I. Volpert, Pushkin and the psychological tradition in French literature, Tallinn, 1980, p. 118.
4 P.A. Vyazemsky, Aesthetics and Literary Criticism. M., 1984, p. 128-129.
5 Roman numerals indicate volumes of Pushkin's Big Academic Complete Works.
6 Dispute about Bakunin and Dostoevsky. Articles by L.P. Grossman and Viach. Polonsky, L., 1926, p. 201.
7 Arabic numerals indicate volumes of the complete collected works of Dostoevsky in 30 volumes.
8 A. L. Volynsky, The Book of Great Wrath. SPb., 1904, p. 8.
9 Stored at TsGALI.
10 B. Nepomniachtchi, "The beginning of a large poem", - "Literature Voprosy", 1982, no. 166; see also in his book. “Poetry and destiny. Over the pages of Pushkin's spiritual biography ”, ed. 2nd, add., M., 1987, p. 353-354.
11 A. L. Boehm, The Twilight of the Hero, in the book: "Russian Literature of the XIX century." Questions of plot and composition, Gorky, 1972, p. 114.
12 A. L. Boehm, Dostoevsky is a genius reader, in the book: "On Dostoevsky", collection of works. II, ed. A.L.Bema, Prague, 1933.
13 Leonid Grossman, Poetics of Dostoevsky, M., 1925, p. 57.
14 Yu.M. Lotman, “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin (Reconstruction of the Concept and Ideological and Compositional Function)”, - “Semiotics of the Text. Works on sign systems ”, Tartu, 1979, XI, p. 33.
15 See the article by V.M. Markovich“On the mythological implications of Tatyana’s dream”, in the book: “Boldinskie readings”, Gorky, 1981, p. 73.
16 Nikolay Berdyaev, Stavrogin, - In the book: Nikolay Berdyaev, Collected works; v. 3. Types of religious thought in Russia. Paris, 1989, p. 106.
17 L. Pumpyansky, decree. cit., p. 105-106.
18 L. Saraskina, "Contradictions live together ..." - "Voprosy literatury", 1984, no. 11, p. 174.
19 Lydia Ginsburg, About the old and the new, L., 1982, p. 361.
20 B. Nepomniachtchi, “The beginning of a large poem”, p. 166.
21 Yu.M. Lotman, A. S. Pushkin's novel “Eugene Onegin”. Comment, L., 1980, p. 317-319.
P. S. FROM ABTOPA
Dedicated to the memory of Alfred Ludwigovich Bem.
The text printed above is a lecture read at the conference "Pushkin and France" in June 1987 in Paris and then published in the periodical of the Slavic Institute in Paris "Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique", XXXII (2), 1991. The conference program required a report on the Pushkin-French theme, and therefore the title of the French epigraph was included; but it is easy to see that here it serves only as a slightly camouflaged approach to another topic that has long occupied me, the internal topic of the history of Russian literature - about Onegin and Stavrogin. According to the long-standing impression, these two outstanding heroes of our literature are in an undoubted and deep literary relationship, but little noticed by the critics-philologists. I tried to lay out my preliminary observations on this topic in my report, limiting myself, in fact, to the demonstration of material, though, in my opinion, expressive. The topic is subject to thought and writing; meanwhile, while reprinting the report, I would like to accompany it with laconic notes, in order, perhaps, to understand, at least in some approximation, the historical-literary and even partially philosophical perspective, into which it will be necessary to include “observations” and still rather primitive ones (within report) convergence of parallel places.
1. The report only names the names of predecessors in the opening of the topic - A. L. Volynsky and D. S. Darsky, but it is worth, apparently, to quote their remarks - at least only to assure the reader that the topic is not completely sucked out of the thumb, once thoughtful observers have already come across it.
A. Volynsky: “This is some kind of new Eugene Onegin - a homeless wanderer on his own land, as Dostoevsky called Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, but much more substantial, much more complex and already in a modern way, decadently unscrewed, much more significant for Russia than the relatively primitive Onegin of the 1920s ”(see the bibliographic reference in the notes to the report).
D. Darsky, in the above-mentioned 1924 report, stated such an effective, probably too effective thesis: "Anchar-Stavrogin grew out of the poisonous grain of Onegin."
2. In these remarks, the main plot was guessed, one of a number of similar cross-cutting plots running in our literature along the line from Pushkin to Dostoevsky. The concept of the main plot was introduced by LE Pinsky in his book about Shakespeare: the main plot - “the plot of all plots” - is the metaplot of Shakespeare's tragedies as a “large text,” a single whole. We use this concept, extending it to the internal connections of literature, branching in its body and connecting its various creators at time distances. In the article about Pushkin's "The Undertaker" we tried to identify one of the microplots passing from Pushkin to Dostoevsky. As we all remember, here in a dream to Adrian Prokhorov among the dead guests is his oldest customer, to whom he once sold his first coffin, “and still pine for oak,” he inadvertently reminds the owner of the first deception, but without reproach, unintentionally, just to recall the circumstances of the case, because it was not at all for reproach that this shadow appeared along with other Orthodox dead at the invitation of its undertaker - they came to greet his; nevertheless, this shadow undoubtedly appeared from the subconscious of the undertaker as his repressed conscience. The next morning, the nightmare, which turned out to be “only a dream,” is forever, apparently, ousted from his consciousness - but in Pushkin's story he remains its main event; and a decade and a half later, young Dostoevsky writes the strange story "Mr. Prokharchin", his third work. Her hero, a petty official, driven by existential fear, from his wild solitude in the St. Petersburg corners goes out into the city, into the world, and sees poverty, fire and someone else's misfortune, and these pictures copulate in his dying delirium in such a feeling that he is to blame for everything and will have to answer; and in the form of a distant biographical source of this feeling of global guilt, a memory of a petty deception in which he once happened to be a sinner emerges from the depths of a dead memory: he ran away from a cabman without paying; and now this cabman in delirium appears in the form of some Pugachev and “lifts all God's people up against Semyon Ivanitch.”
We can say together with D. Darsky, who answered in advance the objections that his rapprochement between Tatyana and Chromonozhka, Onegin and Stavrogin is arbitrary: “Least of all I would like to overwhelm with the paradoxicality of comparisons, but I cannot refuse the thought that I see so clearly”. So we clearly see how the barely outlined motive of Pushkin's story is assimilated and grows in Dostoevsky's early story.
The same motive: some old, rather innocent sin, firmly forgotten by a person, emerges in a catastrophically shaken consciousness from its dark depths, and suddenly the whole life of a person is called into question. Did Dostoevsky remember "The Undertaker" when he wrote "Mister Prokharchin"? Perhaps, even then, according to A.L.Behm, he was at the mercy of literary reminiscences? Or, rather, a certain objective memory in the very material of Russian literature did its invisible latent work?
We know how this case developed with Dostoevsky. The disproportionate growth of little guilt in the “fantastic head” of Mr. Prokharchin was the beginning of a path, at the end of which there is a huge truth that everyone is to blame for everyone in front of everyone (“The Brothers Karamazov”). Already, Mr. Prokharchin had a presentiment of this and “saw clearly that it was as if all this was being done for a reason now and that it would not be in vain”. We can say that the transformation of a small guilt into a big idea took place here.
However, is it really true that the origin of this artistic and moral movement was "The Undertaker"? After all, to his simple hero, apparently, his prophetic dream "will pass for nothing" and will be forgotten. The catastrophic motive came to him from the subconscious besides him and will leave him besides him. But Pushkin's story retained this motive and transferred it to literature for development. It's like a grain thrown into literary soil, and we know what kind of seed it gave Dostoevsky. It was not in vain not only in the Boldin tragedies, where they are given in plain text, but also in the Boldin stories, where they are almost never pronounced, was Akhmatova able to read “formidable questions of morality”. How "formidable" - you really need to feel it, return back to "The Undertaker" from "Mr. Prokharchin".
This is the thinnest and almost imperceptible thread in the large fabric of Russian literature - the continuity of Pushkin's motive in Dostoevsky's early story. A thin thread in a large fabric, if we imagine literature as a common fabric, which has been developed by different masters. Germination - to use another metaphor, but both metaphors are possible here - the germination of Dostoevsky's great theme from Pushkin's grain, which was as if secretly sown in the dream of Pushkin's undertaker. Secretly not only for the unpretentious hero, but, probably, for the author, who did not expect future shoots. Such secrets of literature are not soon revealed, and philological efforts are needed for this, in what we can
see a justification for our occupation, an apology for literary criticism.
So, an imperceptible motive in one of Belkin's stories gave rise to a main theme that cuts through our literature. In Mister Prokharchin, the genetic connection between Dostoevsky and Pushkin was manifested in the human material that the characters of the two stories of the two writers represent, the grassroots social and the primitive intellectually. Along the line of Onegin and Stavrogin, the same connection is realized at a different level and in a different material - at the level of the intellectual heroes of the first plan, in the material of not “little” people, but “superfluous” people.
3. Dostoevsky talked a lot not only about Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, but about “Onegin's type” as “the general Russian type, throughout the present century”, and in the materials for the novel he presented his Prince-Stavrogin as “the fruit of the Russian century” (“Prince - a person who gets bored. The fruit of the Russian age "- 11, 134). In Dostoevsky's understanding, the Onegin type is a dynamic structure that has self-development not only in literature, but also in Russian everyday life and social life. Dostoevsky recorded and considered such a phenomenon as the spontaneous evolution of literary structures in the form of products similar to human models of such a semantic concentration, which appeared in Pushkin - the evolution of literary-psychological complexes and structures is in its own way as organic as age-related, family evolution, with change of generations, with the phenomena of inheritance and mutation. So he drew literary genealogies for his heroes, most willingly Pushkin ones, but not only, establishing their genetic links with the previous heroes of Russian literature.
Dostoevsky was delighted with the words of Apollo Maikov about Stepan Trofimovich: “In your review, one ingenious expression slipped through:“ This Turgenev's heroes in old age”. This is genius! As I wrote, I myself dreamed of something like that; but you have designated everything in three words as a formula ”(29, book I, 185).
That is: as if by natural evolution (not primitive biologically age, but historical age, with the change of eras) Turgenev's heroes turned into the heroes of "Demons", Rudin into Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky. But Dostoevsky also placed the real heroes of Russian history in the ranks of organic-historical evolution and linked them by kinship: “Our Belinsky and Granovsky would not have believed if they were told that they are Nechaev's direct fathers. This relationship and continuity
i wanted to express the thought that developed from fathers to children in my work ”(29, book I, 260).
This means: as Stepan Trofimovich is the father of Pyotr Stepanovich, so in real history Granovsky ideological father of Nechaev. And vice versa. Dostoevsky personified ideological history, rethinking the literary formula of fathers and children, and derived the formula of fathers and children from literature directly into history, into the Russian history of ideas. And at the same time, in literature, he discovered genealogical connections between, as it were, different generations of literary heroes of different writers among themselves: the heroes of "Demons" are Turgenev's heroes in old age.
4. The experience of constructing a genetic series (or even a genealogical tree) of the leading heroes of literature before Dostoevsky, which is memorable to us from school, was undertaken by its antipode Dobrolyubov in the article “What is Oblomovism”. The provisions of this article about the changes in the "generic traits" of the main type in time, "new phases of its existence" are close to Dostoevsky's reasoning about the Onegin type. Dobrolyubov opened his genealogical series, of course, also by Onegin, and closed it on Oblomov, declaring all the characters in a number of relatives, “Oblomov brothers”. The last in the series, Oblomov, is the exhaustion of the series, the result, for Dobrolyubov, is also twilight, and he, perhaps, could have called his article, like AL \u200b\u200bBem's article about Stavrogin - "Twilight of a Hero" (but, of course, such a title , with these Wagner-Nietzsche associations, with Dobrolyubov it is impossible).
Dostoevsky, in his reflections on the Onegin type, also summed it up, but Dostoevsky traced the type's genealogy differently on the map of literature. Based on the novel "Demons" and all that he said about the Onegin type, it is possible to imagine a different genetic line of heroes from the same ancestral point. From Onegin to Oblomov - Dobrolyubov's row. From Onegin to Stavrogin - Dostoevsky's row. The final heroes characterize the worldview optics of the series designers: Oblomov for Dobrolyubov is the personification of social uselessness, Stavrogin for Dostoevsky is the bearer of the spiritual illness of the century, the century of “disbelief and doubt”.
5. In the creative history of "Demons" the main event was the unexpected for the author the nomination of Prince-Stavrogin to the center of the novel, which was initially conceived as a political novel
and even tendentious, with the figure of “Nechaev” in the center. As a result, a dual structure was formed, in which duality does not mean the trail of a failed “cohesion of two designs” sewn with white threads (as Viach. Polonsky believed in his long-standing polemic with L. Grossman), but the very nerve of the situation of a political tragedy novel. A person with the oldest, perhaps among Dostoevsky's protagonists, psychological, social and literary heredity (quite combined with “decadent disintegration” and generally foreshadowing of a modernist type of personality felt by A. Volynsky) was involved in the center of the ultra-daily intrigue; in a less acute form, such a fusion the old, already shabby romanticism, “so ridiculed by Belinsky,” as the devil will tell him sarcastically, with an early decadent complex will appear in Ivan Karamazov): its signal in the novel is the comparison of Nikolai Vsevolodovich with “the gentlemen of the good old times” (ch. “The Wise Serpent” ), in which the assimilation is overridden by the assimilation, but the assimilation itself is not profoundly accidental. Stavrogin's paradox is that, among the central figures of Dostoevsky, he is together and somewhat archaic and even kind of anachronistic, being an epigone of the old psychological type (there are similar features in Versilov; there is a special question about his connections with the Onegin type), and is the most modernistic ... The paradox of the "Possessed" situation is in the perceived non-fusion a central person with a background of events, in the center of which he is placed.
Above, in the report, we mentioned the creative history of “Eugene Onegin”, which prophesied the structural scheme of “Demons”. As you know, Pushkin deduced and removed from the novel a large amount of historical and political material that filled the already written fragments of chapters not included in the novel. This decision is understood in different ways by Pushkin scholars, and, for example, the most attentive researcher of the history of Onegin's plan, I. M. Dyakonov, cannot reconcile with it, he does not agree otherwise to regard the final text of Onegin as a forced censorship version, a “cut-down version” for the press. However, taking into account the forced reasons, one can see a deeper teleology in this decision. One can admit, as E.G. Babaev noted, that Pushkin “felt a kind of split in his idea”. He refused wide opportunities and thanks to this, precisely, by the power of limiting the range of action, he created in Onegin the artistic formula of the Russian novel, which consists in the fact that a love story, the relationship of several persons turns out to be oversaturated
historical and philosophical meaning. LV Pumpyansky wrote about the “Onegin type of the Russian novel” as its internal form. But the broad plan, which remained in the poet's draft papers, also predicted something in the future forms of the novel. It is clear that the version of the author's intention to bring Onegin to the Decembrists enjoyed exaggerated attention of the Pushkinists in Soviet times. However, "Demons" urge to treat this version as a plot opportunities, with renewed attention. In "Demons" half a century later something happened that not nevertheless it happened in “Onegin” - “an idle person”, “a bored master” found himself in the center of a radical political movement, where it would seem that he had nothing to do. In general, the situation of a bored master in the political arena turned out to be quite long-term in Russian literature and public life (see below); in its source was the unrealized possibility of Pushkin's novel in verse. The Demons also responded to the “split in design” that Pushkin did not allow in Onegin, while Dostoevsky made it a constructive principle of his political novel-pamphlet-tragedy.
6. From Pushkin came the metaphor of stabbed love (like a stabbed dream in Shakespeare); she appeared at the same time in “The Bridegroom” and “A Scene from Faust”, and in the same 1825 the knife, symbolically conjugated with sensual love, flashed in Tatyana's dream. In our literature, the metaphor has taken root not only as an image of violence and corruption (“The villain destroys a girl, she cuts her right hand”: deprives her of honor), but also as an image of sensual love as such: the motive prevailing in “Scene from Faust”, where one who has drunk to the intellectual hero-lover Mephistophilus shows him, as in a mirror, right in the image of the future Fedka Convict, and thus the future fusion of Stavrogin with this latter is prophesied (in general, the connection of “Demons” with “Scene from Faust” is as significant as with “ Onegin ”). It is this mirror of metaphor that Pushkin's Faust cannot bear, and it is precisely this reminder that he drowns out with the all-destructive gesture: "Drown everything."
Two aspects of the metaphor operate in The Hero of Our Time and in Anna Karenina. “- You are a dangerous person! - she said to me: - I would rather like to get caught in the forest under the knife of a murderer than on your tongue ... I ask you not jokingly: when you decide to speak ill of me, take a knife and stab me, - I think this it won't be very difficult for you. - Do I look like a murderer? .. - You are worse ... ”Comparison, referring, of course, not only to
secular slander of the hero, but to all his intrigue with Princess Mary. He also chops off her right hand, seduces and corrupts psychologically.
The same metaphor in Anna Karenina is especially sharp because it refers not to temptation and violence, but to true love; but, having become physical love, it appears devoid of spiritualizing, ennobling veils, terribly naked as sin: sensual love as the murder of love. This image, which has taken root in literature, can probably be regarded as a national metaphor associated with the ascetic roots of Russian spiritual culture.
“He felt what a murderer should feel when he sees a body that has taken his life. This body, deprived of his life, was their love, the first period of their love. But, despite all the horror of the murderer in front of the body of the murdered, it is necessary to cut into pieces, hide this body, it is necessary to use what he acquired by murder. And with bitterness, as if with passion, the murderer rushes at this body, and drags and cuts it. So he covered her face and shoulders with kisses”.
It seems that the connection of this scene with Pushkin's “Scene from Faust” has not yet been noted. It is undeniable and can be explained, apparently, not by the influence, but by the action of the same mysterious force - the deep literary memory.
7. To the published report on the French epigraph, I received a serious objection from two well-known Pushkin scholars: all this is more true about Dostoevsky than about Pushkin, Pushkin is read too "after Dostoevsky", Dostoevsky's problems are attributed to him, and even Pushkin dissolves into Dostoevsky , Onegin - in Stavrogin. This objection was accompanied by disagreement with the meaningful and expansive interpretations of famous Pushkin passages (especially Tatiana's dream) as being detached from the text and "literary historicism." Regarding Tatyana's dream, a wonderful Pushkin scholar wrote to me that Tatyana is not obliged to see Pushkin's concepts in her dreams. I replied that I must, and all the well-known dreamers of Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy cannot see anything else in their famous dreams as concepts (not theoretical, of course) of their creators.
Fifteen years ago, a landmark article by Yu. N. Chumakov appeared “Poetic and Universal in Eugene Onegin”. It outlines three aspects, three stages, three stages of understanding Pushkin's novel: the poetic and the real (history of literature), the poetic proper (poetics), the poetic and the universal. This last aspect
did not yet fit into the literary term, but the beginning of this direction of understanding literature was laid by Symbolist criticism, which mainly conjured over Gogol and especially Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky gave a formula precious for symbolism - “realism in the highest sense”, which Vyacheslav Ivanov translated into his own language: a realibus ad realiora. The Symbolists looked at Russian literature of the 19th century as the history of the preparation of their Symbolism, not noticing nothing else in it. But on the other hand, they were able to find in it “realism in the highest sense” not only in Dostoevsky. A look at “Eugene Onegin” “against the background of universality” was stated, albeit in the most general terms, in two later articles by Vyacheslav Ivanov - “A Novel in Verse” and “Two Lighthouses” (1937). Having said that, as in the Boldin tragedies and “Scene from Faust,” Pushkin in the novel “deeply thought about the nature of human sinfulness” and explored the deep roots of mortal sins, and especially boredom as a demonic, possessed state (“Despondency” is his canonical name in the list of deadly sins "; Pushkin knew him canonically:" The spirit of dull idleness "), Ivanov introduced a point of view that was already familiar with Dostoevsky, but new with respect to the" encyclopedia of Russian life. " If Nikolai Stavrogin was interested in our philosophical criticism from Vyacheslav Ivanov to Daniil Andreev exclusively as a bearer of universal, metaphysical themes (with the switch to these plans and the most realistic social typicality; thus, N. Berdyaev's judgment on the noumenal, metaphysical lordship of Stavrogin is remarkable, that is, the fusion of the social and the spiritual, the deepening of the social to the spiritual level, to a subtle spiritual essence, the “noumenon” of an aristocrat, a “cheesy barchon”, to some already intelligible essence: the noumenal lordship as an intelligible character of Stavrogin; a very interesting remark), then a similar look at Eugene Onegin is a much more difficult and controversial case.
Meanwhile, it cannot be said that such a view is not present in the novel itself, it is, first of all, Tatiana's view, with her crowning-debunking of her hero. She thinks of him in the superhuman categories of a guardian angel or an insidious tempter, but disappointment awaits her: he behaved not like a titan of good or even evil, "but just like a well-bred secular and, moreover, quite decent person." However, in the novel he stubbornly does not boil down to this “simple”, to his prosaic, psychological, social basis. Tatyana's dream again introduces a different scale:
the hero is either a demon, or a fabulous good fellow (“Onegin, glittering with his eyes, Rises from the table thundering”); but that Tatyana's dream is a huge revelation of some hidden truths, there seems to be no doubt (and the revelation, if you will, of the “concept” of the hero and heroine, if we recall the aforementioned objection of the Pushkinist; we can also recall what Marya Timofeevna said to Stavrogin: “only you- then why did I dream in this form? "As if he was responsible for the way she dreamed. According to Dostoevsky, and according to Pushkin, he and the other hero answer). And the seemingly decisive debunking to a "parody" still does not solve his riddle. Onegin's mystery lies in the continuous pulsation of the faces of a prosaic “modern man” and a “companion of the strange”, a spiritual personality with unknown possibilities (in both directions - plus and minus, to put it simply) and from time to time flashing poetic halos in his features, which would be too “Just” take it off like a literary mask. No, Onegin is also “realism in the highest sense,” not a very simple realism. And literary masks are not so superficial and refer not to one shell, but also to the mysterious, problematic core of this personality; such are his “Melmot” features - not only periodically shining and sparkling gaze from him, but also another, “wonderfully gentle” (“Your wonderful look tormented me”): the one and the other in alternation and combination constitutes the belonging of Melmot the wanderer (and and Onegin is a wanderer for Dostoevsky, only in his native land), or rather, a sparkling look and a melodiously gentle voice. Much has been said about “Adolf” as a prototype, but, apparently, “Adolf” and “Melmot” in pair formed a dual archetypal basis, which was reflected in the dual illumination and double scale of assessment and measurement of the unstable, fluctuating volume of this image, which has so much defined in our literature. ...
A. Sinyavsky-Tertz spoke well of this scope of possibilities in his own language: “so that in the end it can be pulled anywhere - to superfluous people, to petty demons, and to Carbonaria ...” Literature pulled it out, and held out , according to our hypothesis, to Stavrogin, who can also be pulled in the same directions, and it is essential that Pushkin Onegin still did not reach the Carbonarius, he refused - in Stavrogin it came to this, to the embodiment and such a possibility: the possibilities of Russian history , Russian life is ripe.
To the aforementioned typologies of Russian literary heroes Dobrolyubov and Dostoevsky, one can add the summary that SN Trubetskoy summed up the 19th century in 1901, who examined two routes on the map of literature: “history” extra person"From Turgenev to Chekhov" and "the history of the Russian" superman "from the Demon and Pechorin to the tramps of Maxim Gorky." Obviously, at certain points of the process, in works and heroes, these two "stories" merged, intersected, and both of them went back to Onegin - not only the story of an extra man, but also of a Russian superman. From aristocratic Byronism to homegrown democratic Nietzscheanism - the range of S.N. Trubetskoy's typology inserted into the European frame: between Byronism and Nietzscheanism as two epoch-making trends at two ends of the century. In the person of Stavrogin, both could resonate and bizarrely converge as an echo and a harbinger; such is the range of Stavrogin, he is at the intersection of the great lines of spiritual movements of the century.
8. In his article “The Evolution of the Image of Stavrogin,” AL Boehm showed that the author had a moment of great hesitation in deciding the final fate of the hero: Dostoevsky tested the possibilities of his salvation, purification, and rebirth, and as a result he was denied this. But possibilities were tested and different outcomes were presented. The key, peripetian in the Aristotelian sense (turning for better or worse) was supposed to be the chapter “At Tikhon's”, which, as a result, was not included in the novel, but in its movement and denouement it determined many important things.
Stavrogin comes to Tikhon for repentance (“I have recourse as to the last resort”), but it turns out that he is not ready to repentance, but is already completely incapable; repentance breaks down, and this predetermines its end. M. Bakhtin remarkably described the stylistic features of Stavrogin's confession, making his attempt at confession internally contradictory and doomed: he “repents in a mask that is motionless and deathly,” “as it were, turns away from us after every word thrown to us,” he says, “turning away from the listener”.
On the pages of the novel, the last act of the hero's tragedy is played out. Stavrogin is very serious in the novel; he seeks salvation, his actions are his last struggle. He refuses the role of the master of demons (the role of Onegin in Tatyana's dream), impostor, political Ivan Tsarevich (by the way, as S. V. Lominadze noted in his conversation, our revolution, if translated into the language of “Demons”, did without Stavrogin, the charming “aristocrat in democracy”;
and it seems that Pyotr Verkhovensky became her Tsarevich Ivan directly, if we recall that the comparison of Lenin with him became a commonplace in political journalism, especially in the critical months of 1917), warns Shatov, from whom he takes a slap in the face, and declares that he is his he will not give them up, he prepares for two feats of repentance - the announcement of a secret marriage and a public confession. Here, at the culmination of his efforts, his struggle finally breaks down. "Not being ashamed to confess to a crime, why are you ashamed of repentance?" - Tikhon says to him. Stavrogin's confession is confession without repentance. Once, on the last page of Adolf, his author formulated the main problem of that new hero, who went for a walk from him through Russian literature and eventually reached Stavrogin. There is, it seems to us, a connection between Stavrogin's confession with this place of “Adolf”: “I hate this vanity, which is preoccupied only with oneself, telling about the evil he has done, which seeks to evoke sympathy for itself, describing itself, and which, remaining unharmed , soars among the ruins, analyzing yourself instead of repenting (s'analyse au lieu de se repentir). What is not another French epigraph to the entire situation described (and by the way, could it also serve as a prototype for Pushkin for his French epigraph? "Je hais cette vanité" - says Benjamin Constant; "Pétri de vanité" - Pushkin picks up, and then both vary the motive of superiority, “perhaps imaginary”)? It seems that this French text throws light on much in Russian literature, from Pechorin's magazine to Stavrogin's confession. In the latter, self-analysis comes to an act of repentance, but a desperate attempt to change the situation - to repent instead of analyzing - fails, fails, and the Stavrogin “document” only once again confirms what has already been described in “Adolf”: “Other passages in your presentation are reinforced syllable, you seem to admire your psychology and grab at every little thing, just to surprise the reader with insensitivity, which you do not have ”.
The author's work on Stavrogin, studied by A.L.Behm, suggests that Dostoevsky was afraid to decide the fate of the hero by his own will and seemed to be waiting for a decision in testing the possibilities that the material contained. It was about a terrible thing: was the hero predetermined to perdition, just as - a different option, a different outcome - in the concept of The Life of the Great Sinner, the hero was “as if predetermined by the author for spiritual rebirth”? This is the structural idea of \u200b\u200bliving, taken by Dostoevsky as an internal form for the planned cycle of novels. “Everything is clearing up.
Dies confessing to a crime ”(9, 139). Prince-Stavrogin got out of this idea, and already in the plans of The Demons, and then in the plot movement of the novel being written, the same issue was solved anew. Saving states and outcomes were tested and weighed: faith, enthusiasm, love, heroism. But it turned out: late... “The feat overpowers, faith prevails, but the demons believe and tremble. “It's late,” says the Prince and runs to Uri, and then hanged himself ”(11, 175). Dostoevsky had already shown this “late” in the person of Svidrigailov, who was also looking for salvation in his novel in his own way (it’s not too late for Raskolnikov), and again reproduced and tested the situation in the more complex case of Nikolai Stavrogin. “And the demons believe and tremble” (James 2:19). Mysterious words that speak of a graceless faith, combined with graceless trembling, apparently with fear and horror, not with love (here, by the way, the motives of the dispute between Konstantin Leontiev and Dostoevsky wander around). Words that predetermine death, and not just suicide, but self-destruction: a word invented by Dostoevsky for a similar occasion. Such an outcome as a consequence of faith and awe in this sense, the outcome of Judas, who just believed and trembled. Probably, the translation into the language of psychology of such a composition of faith and awe means the last, extreme, hopeless despair. In the versions of the chapter “At Tikhon's,” the author also explained the hero's confession itself (a feat that “masters”) a contradictory motive - the need for a nationwide execution, a cross, with disbelief in the cross (12, 108). Stavrogin by his name is associated with the cross and makes his ascent to the attic as to his Golgotha, to self-crucifixion (the detail with which his path is described climbing on the steps of a long and “terribly steep” staircase), but according to the way of Judas (which is also reminded of the association arising in the denouement of the scene, which, according to A.L.Behm, received “peak significance” in deciding the fate of the hero after the removal of the chapter from the novel “At Tikhon's” - a date with Lame: he runs away from her at night and on this night he gives her over to Fedka Convict, and she shouts anathema to him " follow into the dark”; Wed: “He, having taken a piece, immediately left; and it was night”- In. 13, 30). The last word of the novel (literally - the last lines) - incredibly large-scale details of the chosen method (a hammer, a nail in reserve, a strong silk cord, richly soaped), speaking of the high consciousness of the decision (“Everything meant premeditation and consciousness until the last minute”) as deliberately - an inevitable result, moreover, a consciously inevitably shameful (in Innokenty Annensky about another
works of Russian literature is a remark: “not to commit suicide, because this can mean drowning yourself or stabbed to death, namely, to hang yourself, that is, to become something not only dead, but self-punished, clearly punished and, moreover, disgusting and disgraced .. . ”)
Here we recall again “Scene from Faust”. The same A.L.Behm examined it against the background of Goethe's "Faust" (the first part) and came to the conclusion that Pushkin rejected the concept of the seeker and the seeker of Faust, in which his endless striving overlaps intermediate results, including such a tragic one, as the death of Margaret, and "saw the opportunity to interpret the image of Faust in a different way, to lead him not by way of resurrection, but by way of final death." That is, as if by the way of the future Stavrogin, which the researcher seems to remember, he remembers his articles about Stavrogin when he writes that Pushkin does not accept the titanic self-justification of Faust from Goethe and objects to him in an unforgettable image of a satiated lover as a robber from the high road. Perhaps Boehm also reads Pushkin too “after Dostoevsky”? But the idea is really very much sharply different: in the place of Faust, who is endlessly striving and seeking, and thus in the final finale of the justified and saved, - Faust bored... "For Faust, in Pushkin's view, after the death of Margarita, spiritual death occurred, and he is only capable of senseless rushing from crime to crime." Indeed, if the researcher is to be believed, did not Pushkin read Dostoevsky? Let us recall: an hour, perhaps, before the national confession, “before the great step, you will throw yourself into a new crime as an outcome, so that only to avoidpromulgation of leaflets! " If a researcher reads Pushkin as if Pushkin read Dostoevsky, then woe to the researcher; and yet a researcher whose eyesight is magnetized by reading Dostoevsky actually reads Pushkin differently and acquires the ability to see those challenges and tasks that cannot be discerned in Pushkin without Dostoevsky.
“Resurrect yourself with love” (11, 151) is a variant of salvation, tried in the plans for the novel. It was also tried in the plot as the very last chance: in one night, a “complete romance” with Lisa. “It's like the great artists in their poems sometimes have such sickscenes that are then painfully remembered all my life - for example, the last monologue of Othello by Shakespeare, Eugene at Tatyana's feet ... ”- the words of Versilov in“ Teenager ”(13, 382). If we recall this in Dostoevsky himself, then a more “painful” scene than the chapter “The Completed Novel” may
to be, and not to remember. Eugene at Tatyana's feet, Stavrogin in front of Liza.
But Eugene in the last chapter is revived by great love and in some essential sense is ultimately saved; we “suddenly” leave him “in a moment that is evil for him”, at the moment of a catastrophe, but on spiritual rise, not in emptiness, but in the fullness of sensations (“In what a storm of sensations Now he is immersed in his heart!”) His “finished” too the romance with Tatiana is finished differently, as well as, in comparison with "Demons", the whole novel "Eugene Onegin".
We talked about this in the report: the structural formula of "Demons" opposes structural formula "Onegin", which is that the novel ends and does not end, breaks off: "And suddenly I knew how to part with him ... ”“ - In the world, nothing ends. "This will be the end." Here is the contrast between two great novels. The poet expounded the impression of his contemporaries, answering Pletnev: “You speak fairly, Which is strange, even impolite Roman does not end interrupt ... you say: thank God, While your Onegin is alive, the novel is not over ..."In" Demons "predetermined, unswerving end of hero (he cannot remain outside the novel "for the time being alive"), which signifies a certain result exceeding the biographical fate of this only person, Nikolai Stavrogin, provokes a sharply expressed poetics of the endcarefully framed in the final chapters. In the last chapters, the novel very quickly, swiftly and landslide goes to an end, to some kind of final end, an end raised to a degree. The external sign of this idea is the headings of the chapters of the third part: "The End of the Holiday", "The Completed Novel", "The Last Decision", "The Last Wandering of Stepan Trofimovich", "Conclusion". Five chapters of the eight-third part in the headings convey the idea of \u200b\u200bthe end.
9. An objection to the harsh decisions of Russian literature was an article by N. Berdyaev “Stavrogin” (1914). This is a defense of the hero and even his apology from the standpoint of a “new religious consciousness”, the forerunner of which for Berdyaev was Dostoevsky. But also within the boundaries of this great movement of the early XX century. Berdyaev's article is exceptional. Parallel articles by Vyach. Ivanova and SN Bulgakova speak of Stavrogin in strict tones rooted in the Christian worldview of their authors, and interpret it as “the mask of non-being”. In relation to them, Berdyaev's article is peculiarly heretical. Stavrogin is a creative, tragically brilliant personality, and this is above all, and as such he is dear to Berdyaev and, according to Berdyaev, to Dostoevsky himself, and therefore his death is not
may be final. What does Berdyaev mean when he asserts this main thesis about the inconclusive, immortal death of Nikolai Stavrogin - does he take upon himself the decision about the afterlife of his soul, or is he expecting his “new birth” as a valuable entity in life and culture? In any case, he decisively separates Dostoevsky from the "Orthodox consciousness" for whom Stavrogin, who laid hands on himself like Judas, "died irrevocably." But the author's attitude to his hero is defined in terms of the Orthodox consciousness: "Nikolai Stavrogin is the weakness, the seduction, the sin of Dostoevsky."
With these words, he conveys the assessment of the "old religious consciousness." He himself says something else - that Dostoevsky loves Stavrogin not in the order of the author's weakness for his hero, but as a Christian thinker of a new make-up, who cherishes a creative personality as such, even if it has tragically lost itself.
Dostoevsky himself, and not just anywhere, but in the chapter “At Tikhon,” allowed himself to play sharply with Orthodox usage: “- Do you remember:“ Write to the angel of the Church of Laodicea ... ”? - I remember. Lovely words. - Adorable? A strange expression for a bishop, and in general you are an eccentric ... "
Stavrogin is surprised because Tikhon uses the ascetic term in the everyday secular sense: charming, delightful words. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky deliberately allowed him to do this and did not want to compromise him with this; rather, on the contrary, he shaded his human freedom and indestructibility into the official framework: “and in general you are an eccentric”. By way of comparison, I recall from a recent work about Pushkin: the remarkable Pushkin scholar V. Nepomniachtchi complains to Pushkin about the inaccuracy, non-canonical use of words: “in the future he will get confused more than once, attributing, for example, to the Gospel“ the divine eloquence"And" forever new charm“- charm in sacred language means seduction. As if he wants to speak in that new language, but he doesn't listen to him well. It seems that he is confused, as if trapped. "
One thing can be said to this: no, it does not seem. Another seems to be that such claims to the poet's language can lead us far along the path of losing the ability to hear Pushkin's words, to hear this language. And it also seems: the author judges Pushkin condescendingly and condescendingly, as one who speaks the correct language about a non-master and “confused”. Here's a comparison: a heart expert - the bishop Dostoevsky allows what the Pushkin scholar of our day does not allow the poet... Pushkin
nevertheless, in his last years, to which the lines refer, which Pushkinist (1836) was not completely satisfied with, did not become a spiritual writer in a specific sense, remained a poet - and thank God, we say from a pure heart and from all our Russian spirituality , may we be allowed to say so, because to the great benefit it was for her that it was so (otherwise, perhaps, the ironic poet describes our “current socio-cultural situation” aptly: “The bear of great spirituality is stepping on everyone's ear there. under the spirituality of a pood, the agile Pushkin has calmed down forever ... ”).
"A strange expression for a bishop." This trait is not accidental in Dostoevsky: after all, Tikhon is condemned in the monastic circle (through the mouth of the strict “and, moreover, well-known for scholarship,” the father of the archimandrite) “in a careless life and almost in heresy”. And Elder Zosima is marked with similar features, he is also suspected of something like religious modernism: “He believed in a fashionable way, did not recognize material fire in hell”. Dostoevsky sharply endowed his hierarchs with such manifestations of free religious spirituality, with a certain bias towards mystical pantheism and features of a kind of Franciscanism. And I heard accusations of heresy, especially from Leontyev, who also referred to the Optina monks, who almost condemned the figure of Zosima and did not recognize the "Karamazovs" as a "correct Orthodox novel." There is no documentary evidence of this, but it is plausible. But Orthodox thought accepted Dostoevsky as a Christian writer, churched him, as Rozanov wrote in opposition to Leontyev.
"Lovely words." And, by the way, the verdict to the hero is seen in them: neither cold nor hot, I will vomit out of my mouth (an extremely harsh Slavic version, in the Russian text I will smoothed out “I will vomit”). This is what happens to Stavrogin, and he himself takes upon himself the execution of the sentence. Berdyaev's article is a reinterpretation, reinterpretation in the key of the book The Meaning of Creativity, which he was writing at the same time. And Berdyaev is more in the article than Dostoevsky and Stavrogin. Berdyaev is right that one cannot approach Dostoevsky's tragic heroes with a catechism. But the question of death and salvation is nevertheless resolved severely in the novel. And Berdyaev is also right that the author loves his hopeless hero, which is why generations of critics and readers continue to be carried away by him; the author, in any case, confessed to an intimate, cordial connection with the hero: “I took him from my heart” (29, book I, 142). And he probably did not want to take upon himself the final judgment, but within the limits of his creative competence and
creative power submitted to the unswerving poetic logic that condemned the hero. But, of course, the author did not predetermine the fate of his soul in eternity (Berdyaev, it seems, also decided to judge this).
10. So, the end, the result, the denouement are sharply drawn in "Demons" and Stavrogin. But it also has modernist ties. The results are relative: the hero is an expressive link in the historical and literary chain. It was said above about a bored master in the political arena as a figure who is potentially in Onegin and, in fact, in Stavrogin. But with Stavrogin, she does not leave the stage, remaining a fairly long-term model in our literature and political life. At the beginning of 1918, Mikhail Prishvin published in the Socialist-Revolutionary newspaper Volia Strana an article “Bolshevik from Balaganchik” as a response to Blok’s “Intelligentsia and Revolution”, and Blok enters into his notebook: “Mr. Prishvin hait me in“ The Will of the Country "As the fiercest enemy did not find fault." The Bolshevik from "Balaganchik" is a Bolshevik from the decadents, like Onegin among the Decembrists and Stavrogin among Nechaev. There were years, Prishvin recalls, he and Blok went to the whips together, “I am as curious, he is as bored,” now, “as a bored one,” he went into the revolution. Prishvin reveals the genetic connection with the old type in the last words of the article: “at the Great Court, those who possess a word will be asked a fiery answer, and the word of a bored master will not be accepted there”.
This switching of the topic from a literary context to a political one - and vice versa - is constantly taking place, and just as Katkov spoke about Bakunin, transferring the literary model to a political figure, so Prishvin is now talking about Blok.
Meanwhile, the Bolshevik from "Balaganchik" writes the poem "The Twelve", with the motive of boredom passing through it as an urge to robbery and destruction. Boredom as a source of destructive action is the motive of Pushkin's “Scenes from Faust”; boredom and destruction - the first and last word in the text as an impulse and result: “I'm bored, devil” - “Drown everything”. In between, there is an explanation of Mephistophilus that boredom is a state of a thinking being, that is, belonging to an intellectual hero. In Blok's revolutionary poem, it is already a part of idleness, with the same destructive effects, boredom with a knife in hand; but such a figure - the future Fedka Convicts - was already turned into an intellectual hero in the Pushkin scene; and Dostoevsky's political demons associate calculations with Fedka Convict; and to the characters of “Twelve” - “On the back b need an ace of diamonds”.
And at the end of the same 1918, Blok writes in his diary: “But destruction is as old as construction, and just as traditionally, how is it. Destroying the hateful, we are the same miss and yawnas when they looked at its construction. "
This is almost a direct quote from "A Scene from Faust" - it is clear that the unconscious, but all the more expressive linking links, as it were, a single text, a single chain of poetry and history; from the very explanation of Mephistophilus: “And everyone yawns and lives - And the coffin, yawning, awaits all of you. Yawn and you. "
Blok had already been brought closer to the “Scene from Faust”. I. Rodnyanskaya finds an echo of the squeamish remark “To drown everything” in his Italian poems (“The whole load of multi-storey melancholy - Go away in the cleansing centuries”) and especially in the strangely monstrous diary entry on April 5, 1912 about the sinking of “Titanic”, “which made me happy yesterday unspeakably ”- that very bourgeois-depraved ship, about which a squeamish remark was thrown. She was thrown into the future, in which she went to respond with echoes - the replica of Prince Stavrogin, the poetic and human reactions of Alexander Blok.
In short, Ivan Tsarevich in the dreams of Peter Verkhovensky. Handsome, idol, impostor, deified Stavrogin, the illusory leader of the revolution. Illusory, because it is performed without him, and Verkhovensky-Lenin himself will become her Tsarevich Ivan (which, incidentally, is also predicted in The Possessed, in the conversation of the elder Verkhovensky with his son: “Have mercy, I shout to him, but are you really like is, do you want to offer people in exchange for Christ? Il rit ").
11. Last note: “House in Kolomna”, octaves X-XII. The death of the idyll: the house in Kolomna no longer exists, a three-story house has grown in its place. And on the site of a funny innocent incident with an old woman, Parasha and a mustachioed cook, which excited the world of idylls, there is a conflict of a different scale, a big conflict of European literature - civilization destroying the idyll, and the poet's formidable reaction.
I felt sad: to a high house
I looked askance. If at this time
The fire would have engulfed him all around
Then my angry gaze
The flame was pleasant. A strange dream
The heart is full; a lot of nonsense
It comes to our mind when we delve
Alone or with a friend alone.
This is a serious place in a humorous poem - so serious that the author realizes himself and with an effort squeezes a shocked feeling in himself in order to return to the light tone of the comic story. But without this place, we cannot understand what the joke is really about, as if told about nothing.
Then blessed is he who rules with a strong word
And keeps the thought on a leash,
Who lulls or crushes in the heart
An instantly hissed serpent ...
Why, in the context of our topic, this fleeting motive, so little noticed by readers and even researchers, why is it still difficult for us to evaluate the mysterious work as a whole? The head of a philologist is also full of a strange dream, and connections appear, perhaps somewhat fantastic, but exciting the imagination. The theme around Onegin and Stavrogin has grown and overflowed its banks, and as if the topic is not lost; however, there is a circulatory system of literature, in which its living forces are communicated in unknown ways, there is a large context, continuously expanding beyond its own limits; there is what is called intertextual links in the ultra-modern literary language.
It seems to us that in the “intertext” of literature a thread stretches from the lyrical motive of a funny poem to the fire motives of “Demons” (“Burn Everything” is an echo replica of “A Scene from Faust” by Prince Stavrogin in the materials for the novel, the program, in the novel itself partially realized in a big fire that takes the lives of both women of Stavrogin -
Marya Timofeevna and Liza), existing against the background of several scenes in the last act of the second part of Goethe's Faust. There, Goethe also lost his idyll: a fire that destroyed the house of the patriarchal mythological old men Philemon and Baucis, together with them, who gave way to progress carried out with ideal goals by Faust, but in reality - Mephistopheles with three rapists. AL Boehm showed the connection between the fire-fighting pictures of Demons and these scenes of Faust in another of his works, Faust in the works of Dostoevsky: “This is how Goethe's Faust resounded in the works of Dostoevsky. However, it is as if different goals are being pursued through fire in these two cases - construction and revolutionary destruction. Different goals, but with the same results, and then - to the ground, and then - and Pyotr Stepanovich destroys for future construction: “and the sea will agitate, and the booth will collapse, and then we will think about how to build a stone structure. For the first time! Build we we will be, we are alone! ”
A stone structure ... Isn't it the same one that grew up on the site of a small house in Kolomna ("hovels"), and on the site of the hut of Philemon and Bavkis, and the burned-out wooden District? In all three cases, fire blazes, but in Pushkin it blazes differently. He blazes mentally, but the main thing is that he devours a stone structure. He is mentally directed with the strength of the poet to the stone structure. The poet's experience is also destructive, revengeful, vicious, terrorist, and that is why it is so difficult. That is why it must be crushed like a snake, because it is akin to a robber and Pugachev's one (and is capable of merging with it), and in potency and a "world fire" that will flare up a century later "on the mountain to all bourgeoisie"; “Lock the floors ...” - after all, this is just for the inhabitants of stone buildings, tall houses. Just as Dostoevsky took Stavrogin from his heart, as Pushkin knew for himself, from the inside out, the mortal sin of his hero (“The heart is empty, the mind is idle”), so from the inside he knows the destructive element blazing with fire in the vastness of Russian history before and after Pushkin. But, firstly, the fire is fanned by Pushkin in defense erased by civilization from the place of the hovel. It is directed oppositely to the fires of Goethe and Dostoevsky. Pushkin responds to these future images of destruction in advance (the second part of Faust has not yet been available for readers). It also responds in a destructive way, but with a different historical and moral vector. This is truly both “black” and “holy” malice. And, secondly, the poet owns the elements, in his own heart and in the world, he is an exorcist of them, he keeps his thoughts on a leash and, most importantly, he rules firmly
word. If we recall Blok's - “surrender to the elements” - then in the XI stanza of “Little House in Kolomna” we are shown exactly how it happens with a poet and what it means. "Then blessed is he who rules with a strong word." Blok also knew this (“But you, artist, believe firmly ...”), but he yielded to the elements consciously, “conceptually” and therefore found himself in a large context of literary ties alongside not only creators, but directly with literary heroes.
With Dostoevsky, not only “Faust” “resounded”, Onegin somehow resounded with him. Submission of materials to substantiate this connection is the purpose of our report and the accompanying notes; there could have been more of them, since suitable material crawls out of all the cracks in literary history. We limited ourselves to eleven, not without recalling the number of Theses on Feuerbach, famous in our youth, of which the eleventh, the last thesis was the most famous. Our eleventh thesis is much inferior to it in indisputable strength; we see the fragility of the hastily put together here; but it is enough for us if the last note helps to better notice and appreciate the significance of the fiery motive in Pushkin's playful poem.
1 L. Pinsky, Shakespeare, M., 1971, p. 101.
2 Dispute about Bakunin and Dostoevsky, p. 194-196.
3 About this - in our article “The Cup of Life and Sticky Notes” - in the book: S.G. Bocharov, About art worlds, M., 1985, p. 219.
4 "Pushkin, Research and Materials", v. X, L., 1982, p. 104.
5 E. G. Babaev, From the history of the Russian novel, M., 1984, p. 36
6 “Boldinskie readings”, Gorky, 1978, p. 75.
8 "Pushkin in Russian philosophical criticism", M., 1990, p. 249, 256.
9 Nikolay Berdyaev, Stavrogin, p. 107-109.
10 Yu.M. Lotman, A. S. Pushkin's novel “Eugene Onegin”. Comment. from. 236.
11 See: Yu. N. Chumakov, “Eugene Onegin” and a Russian poetic novel, Novosibirsk, 1983, p. 38.
12 Abram Tertz, Walks with Pushkin, Paris, 1989, p. 170.
13 "Questions of Literature", 1990, No. 9, p. 134.
14 See: “About Dostojevskem”, Praha, 1972, p. 84-130.
15 M. Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's poetics, M., 1963, p. 330-331.
16 “How it was. Diary of A. I. Shingarev ”, M., 1918, p. 17.
17 A. L. Boehm, Evolution of the image of Stavrogin, - “About Dostojevskem”, p. 94.
18 Lena Szilard, The originality of the motivational structure of “Demons”, - “Dostoevsky Studies”, no. 4, 1983. p. 160.
19 A. L. Boehm, Evolution of the image of Stavrogin, - “About Dostojevskem”, p. 117.
20 Innokenty Annensky, Books of reflections, M., 1979, p. 70.
21 “Voprosy literatury”, 1991, no. 6, p. 96.
22 Ibid, p. 102.
23 Sergey Bulgakov, Quiet thoughts, M., 1918, p. 7.
24 Nikolay Berdyaev, Stavrogin, p. 99.
25 B. Nepomniachtchi, Gift. Notes on the spiritual biography of Pushkin, - "New World", 1989, no. 6, p. 255.
26 Poems by Timur Kibirov. See: "New World", 1991, no. 9, p. 108.
27 Alexander Blok, Notebooks, M., 1965, p. 388.
29 See: S. Lominadze... On the classics and contemporaries, M., 1989, p. 360-365.
30 Alexander Blok, Sobr. cit., t. 7, M., 1963, p. 350.
31 I. Rodnyanskaya, Artist in Search of Truth, M., 1989, p. 303.
32 B. Nepomniachtchi, Pushkin in two hundred years. Chapter from the book. Poet and crowd, - "New World", 1993, no. 6, p. 230-233.
33 M. M. Prishvin, Collected. cit., t. 3, M., 1983, p. 47.
34 “O Dostojevckem”, p. 213.
35 Wed E. I. Khudoshina, which connected these lines of "Little House in Kolomna" with the historiosophical views of Pushkin in the 1930s; see: E.I. Khudoshina... The genre of the poetic story in the works of Pushkin. Novosibirsk, 1987, p. 40-41.
36 See: S. Lominadze... On the classics and contemporaries, p. 152-201.
Footnotes
The hypocrisy has died, the priests are no longer believed; but valor dies, no longer believe God. The nobleman no longer takes pride in the blood of his ancestors, but dishonors it at the bottom of the dens. ( french)
In search of the hidden meaning: on the poetics of epigraphs in "Eugene Onegin"
Studios
Andrey Ranchin
Andrei Mikhailovich Ranchin (1964) - literary critic, historian of Russian literature; Doctor of Philology, teaches at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University.
In search of hidden meaning: on the poetics of epigraphs in "Eugene Onegin"
A lot has been written about epigraphs in Pushkin's novel in verse. And yet, the role of epigraphs, their relationship with the text of chapters is still not completely clear. Let's try, without pretending to be an absolute novelty of interpretations, without rushing to re-read the novel. The landmarks in this rereading - a journey through the small and endless space of the text - will be three well-known commentaries: ““ Eugene Onegin ”. Roman A.S. Pushkin. A guide for secondary school teachers "N.L. Brodsky (1st ed., 1932), “Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Commentary "Yu.M. Lotman (1st ed., 1980) and “Commentary on the novel by A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" "V.V. Nabokov (1st ed., On english language, 1964).
Let's start, naturally, from the beginning - from the French epigraph to the entire text of the novel (VV Nabokov called it “the main epigraph”). In the Russian translation, these lines, supposedly taken from a certain private letter, sound like this: “Imbued with vanity, he possessed, moreover, a special pride that prompts him to confess with equal indifference to his both good and bad deeds - a consequence of a sense of superiority, perhaps , imaginary ”.
Without touching on the content, let us think about the form of this epigraph, ask ourselves two questions. First, why are these lines presented by the author of the work as a fragment from a private letter? Second, why are they written in French?
The reference to a private letter as the source of the epigraph is intended, first of all, to give Onegin the traits of a real personality: Eugene supposedly exists in reality, and one of his acquaintances gives him such certification in a letter to another mutual acquaintance. Pushkin will point out the reality of Onegin later: “Onegin, my good friend” (Chapter One, stanza II). Lines from a private letter give the narrative about Onegin a touch of a certain intimacy, almost secular chatter, gossip and "gossip."
The true source of this epigraph is literary. As pointed out by Yu. Semyonov, and then, independently of him, V.V. Nabokov, this is a French translation of the work of the English social thinker Eduard Burke "Thoughts and details about poverty" ( V.V. Nabokov Commentary on the novel by A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin" / Per. from English SPb., 1998. P. 19, 86–88). The epigraph, as well as other epigraphs in the novel, turns out to be “with a double bottom”: its true source is reliably hidden from the inquiring eyes of the reader.
The French language of the letter indicates that the person who is reported undoubtedly belongs to the high society, in which French, and not Russian, dominated in Russia. Indeed, Onegin, although in the eighth chapter will be opposed to the light personified in the image of “N.N. a wonderful person ”(stanza X), is a young man from the capital city, and belonging to a secular society is one of its most important characteristics. Onegin is a Russian European, “a Muscovite in Harold's cloak” (chapter seven, stanza XXIV), an avid reader of contemporary French novels. French writing is associated with Evgeny's Europeanism. Tatiana, having looked through the books from his library, even asks the question: "Is he really a parody?" (chapter seven, stanza XXIV). And if the author resolutely defends the hero from such a thought, expressed by the general reader from the high society in the eighth chapter, then he does not dare to argue with Tatyana: her assumption remains both unconfirmed and not refuted. Note that in relation to Tatyana, who inspiredly imitates the heroines of sentimental novels, the judgment about pretense, insincerity is not expressed even in the form of a question. She is “above” such suspicions.
Now about the content of the "main epigraph". The main thing in it is the inconsistency of the characteristics of the person referred to in the "private letter". A certain special pride is combined with vanity, which seems to be manifested in indifference to people's opinions (therefore, “he” is recognized with indifference both in good and evil deeds). But is it not an imaginary indifference, is it not behind it a strong desire to win, albeit unfavorable, attention of the crowd, to show its originality? Is “he” above those around him? And yes (“a sense of superiority”) and no (“perhaps imaginary”). Thus, starting from the “main epigraph”, the author's complex attitude to the hero is set, it is indicated that the reader should not expect an unambiguous assessment of Eugene by his creator and “friend”. The words "Yes and no" - this is the answer to the question about Onegin "Is he familiar to you?" (chapter eight, stanza VIII) belongs, it seems, not only to the voice of light, but also to the creator of Eugene.
The first chapter opens with a line from the famous elegy of Pushkin's friend Prince P.A. Vyazemsky "First Snow": "And he is in a hurry to live and in a hurry to feel." In Vyazemsky's poem, this line expresses ecstasy, enjoyment of life and its main gift - love. The hero and his beloved rush in a sleigh on the first snow; nature is enveloped in the torpor of death under a white veil; he and she burn with passion.
Who can express the delight of the lucky ones?
Like a blizzard light, their edged run
The snow cuts straight with reins
And, like a bright cloud from the ground, howling it,
Silver dust sprinkles them.
They were embarrassed by the time in one winged moment.
Young fervor so slips through life,
And in a hurry to live, and in a hurry to feel.
Vyazemsky writes about the joyful rapture of passion, Pushkin in the first chapter of his novel - about the bitter fruits of this rapture. About satiety. About the premature old age of the soul. And at the beginning of the first chapter, Onegin flies “in the dust on the postage”, hurrying to the village to see his sick and hotly unloved uncle, and does not ride in a sleigh with a preppy. In the village, Evgenia is greeted not by numb winter nature, but by flowering fields, but he, a living dead, has no joy in that. The motive from "First Snow" is "inverted", turned into its opposite. As noted by Yu.M. Lotman, the hedonism of "First Snow" was openly contested by the author of "Eugene Onegin" in the 9th stanza of the first chapter, removed from the final text of the novel ( Lotman Yu.M. Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Commentary // Pushkin A.S. Eugene Onegin: A novel in verse. M., 1991.S. 326).
Epigraph from the Roman poet Horace "O rus!" (“O village” - lat.) With a pseudo-translation “O Rus!”, Built on the consonance of Latin and Russian words, is at first glance nothing more than an example of a pun, a language game. According to Yu.M. Lotman, “the double epigraph creates a pun intended contradiction between the tradition of the conventional literary image of the village and the idea of \u200b\u200ba real Russian village” ( Lotman Yu.M. Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". P. 388). Probably, one of the functions of this “twin” is just that. But she is not the only one and, perhaps, not the most important. The identification of “village” and “Russia” dictated by a pun-like consonance is ultimately quite serious: it is the Russian village that appears in Pushkin's novel as the quintessence of Russian national life. And besides, this epigraph is a kind of model of the poetic mechanism of the entire Pushkin's work, which is built on switching from a serious plan to a playful one and vice versa, demonstrating the ubiquity and limitations of the translated meanings. (Let us recall at least the ironic translation of Lensky's pre-duel verses filled with colorless metaphors: “All this meant, friends: // I shoot myself with a friend” - chapter five, stanzas XV, XVI, XVII.
French epigraph from the poem "Narcissus, or the Island of Venus" by Sh.L.K. Malfilatra, translated into Russian as: “She was a girl, she was in love,” opens chapter three. Malfilatra speaks of the unrequited love of the nymph Echo for Narcissus. The meaning of the epigraph is quite transparent. Here is how V.V. Nabokov, citing a more lengthy than Pushkin quotation from the poem: ““ She [the nymph Echo] was a girl [and, therefore, curious, as is characteristic of all of them]; [moreover], she was in love ... I forgive her [as it should be forgiven to my Tatiana]; love made her guilty<…>... Oh, if fate would have excused her too! "
According to Greek mythology, the nymph Echo, withering away from love for Narcissus (who, in turn, exhausted from an unrequited passion for his own reflection), turned into a forest voice, like Tatyana in Ch. 7, XXVIII, when the image of Onegin appears in front of her in the margins of the book he read (Ch. 7, XXII-XXIV) ”( V.V. Nabokov Commentary on the novel by A.S. Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin". P. 282).
However, the relationship between the epigraph and the text of the third chapter is still more complicated. The awakening of love for Onegin in Tatiana is interpreted in the text of the novel and as a consequence of natural law (“The time has come, she fell in love. // So the fallen grain in the earth // Spring is revived by fire” - chapter three, stanza VII), and as the embodiment of fantasies, games imagination, inspired by the sensitive novels read (“By the happy power of dreams // Animated creatures, // Lover of Julia Volmar, // Malek-Adele and de Linard, // And Werther, rebellious martyr, // And the incomparable Grandison<…> All for the gentle dreamer // They put on a single image, // They merged in one Onegin ”- chapter three, stanza IX).
The epigraph from Malfilatra, it would seem, speaks only of the omnipotence of natural law - the law of love. But in fact, this is indicated by the lines quoted by Pushkin in the poem of Malfilatra itself. In relation to Pushkin's text, their meaning changes somewhat. The power of love over the heart of a young maiden is spoken of in lines from a literary work, moreover, created in the same era (in the 18th century) as the novels that fed Tatyana's imagination. This is how Tatyana's love awakening turns from a “natural” phenomenon into a “literary” one, becomes evidence of the magnetic influence of literature on the world of feelings of a provincial young lady.
With Eugene's narcissism, things are also not so simple. Of course, the mythological image of Narcissus asks for the role of a “mirror” for Onegin: the self-centered handsome man rejected the unfortunate nymph, Onegin turned his back on Tatiana in love. In the fourth chapter, responding to Tatiana's recognition that touched him, Eugene confesses to his own egoism. But Narcissus's narcissism is still alien to him, he did not love Tatiana, not because he loved only himself.
Epigraph to the fourth chapter - "Morality in the nature of things", the dictum of the French politician and financier J. Necker, Yu.M. Lotman interprets it as ironic: “In comparison with the content of the chapter, the epigraph gets an ironic sound. Necker says that morality is the basis of human and social behavior. However, in the Russian context, the word "morality" could sound like a moral teaching, a preaching of morality<...> Indicative is Brodsky's mistake, who translated the epigraph: "Morality in the nature of things"<…> The possibility of ambiguity, in which the morality that governs the world is confused with the morality read in the garden to the young heroine by the “glittering” hero, created a situation of hidden comic ”( Lotman Yu.M. Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Comment. P. 453).
But this epigraph certainly has a different meaning. Responding to Tatyana's confession, Onegin indeed, somewhat unexpectedly, puts on the mask of a “moralist” (“This is how Eugene preached” - chapter four, stanza XVII). And later, in her turn, responding to Evgeny's confession, Tatyana will recall his mentor tone with resentment. But she will note and appreciate something else: “You acted nobly” (chapter eight, stanza XLIII). Not being a Grandison, Eugene did not act like Lovlas, rejecting the role of a cynical seducer. I acted, in this respect, morally. The hero's response to the recognition of an inexperienced girl turns out to be ambiguous. Therefore, the translation of N.L. Brodsky, despite the factual inaccuracy, is not devoid of meaning. Eugene's morality is somewhat moral.
Epigraph to the fifth chapter from the ballad by V.A. Zhukovsky "Svetlana": "Oh, do not know these terrible dreams, // You, my Svetlana!" - Yu.M. Lotman explains this: "... The" duality "of Svetlana Zhukovsky and Tatiana Larina, given by the epigraph, revealed not only the parallelism of their nationality, but also a deep difference in the interpretation of the image of one, focused on romantic fiction and play, the other - on everyday and psychological reality" ( Lotman Yu.M. Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Comment. P. 478).
In the reality of Pushkin's text, the correlation between Svetlana and Tatiana is more complex. Even at the beginning of the third chapter, Tatyana Lensky compares with Svetlana: “Yes, the one who is sad // And silent, like Svetlana” (stanza V). The dream of Pushkin's heroine, in contrast to Svetlana's dream, turns out to be prophetic and in this sense “more romantic” than the dream of the heroine of the ballad. Onegin, hurrying to meet Tatyana, the Petersburg princess, “walks like a dead man” (chapter eight, stanza XL), like a dead groom in Zhukovsky's ballad. Onegin in love is in a “strange dream” (chapter eight, stanza XXI). And Tatiana is now “now surrounded by the Epiphany cold” (chapter eight, stanza XXXIII). Epiphany cold is a metaphor reminiscent of Svetlana's fortune-telling that took place at Christmas time, in the days from Christmas to Epiphany.
Pushkin now deviates from the romantic ballad plot, then turns the events of Svetlana into metaphors, then revives ballad fantasy and mysticism.
The epigraph to the sixth chapter, taken from the canzone of F. Petrarch, in the Russian translation sounds “Where the days are cloudy and short, // A tribe will be born that does not hurt to die”, is deeply analyzed by Yu.M. Lotman: “P<ушкин>, quoting, he omitted the middle verse, which changed the meaning of the quotation: In Petrarch: "Where the days are foggy and short - a born enemy of the world - a people will be born who will not be painful to die." The reason for the lack of fear of death is in the innate ferocity of this tribe. With the omission of the middle verse, it became possible to interpret the cause of the non-fear of death in a different way, as a consequence of disappointment and “premature old age of the soul” ”( Lotman Yu.M. Roman A.S. Pushkin "Eugene Onegin". Comment. P. 510).
Undoubtedly, the deletion of one line dramatically changes the meaning of Petrarch's lines, and the elegiac key is easily matched to the epigraph. The motives of disappointment, premature old age of the soul are traditional for the elegy genre, and Lensky, whose death is described in the sixth chapter, paid a generous tribute to this genre: “He sang the color of life faded, // At almost eighteen years old” (chapter two, stanza X) ... But Vladimir went to a duel with a desire not to die, but to kill. Take revenge on the offender. He was killed on the spot, but it hurt him to say goodbye to life.
So the Petrarch text, the elegiac code and the realities of the artistic world created by Pushkin, due to the mutual superposition, create a flickering of meanings.
Let's stop here. The role of epigraphs to the seventh chapter is succinctly and fully described by Yu.M. Lotman, various, complementary interpretations of the epigraph from Byron to the eighth chapter are given in the comments by N.L. Brodsky and Yu.M. Lotman.
Perhaps it would be worth recalling only one thing. Pushkin's novel is “multilingual”, it brings together different styles and even different languages \u200b\u200b- in the literal sense of the word. (The stylistic multidimensionality of "Eugene Onegin" is remarkably traced in the book by SG Bocharov "Poetics of Pushkin". Moscow, 1974.) The external, most noticeable sign of this "multilingualism" is the epigraphs to the novel: French, Russian, Latin, Italian, English ...
The epigraphs to Pushkin's novel in verse are similar to that “magic crystal” with which the poet himself compared his creation. Seen through their bizarre glass, the chapters of Pushkin's text take on unexpected outlines, turn into new facets.
The role and function of epigraphs in the works of A.S. Pushkin
The epigraph is one of the optional elements of the composition of a literary work. It is due to its non-binding nature that the epigraph, when applied, always carries an important semantic load. Considering that the epigraph is a type of the author's expression, we can distinguish two options for its use, depending on whether the author's direct statement is present in the work. In one case, the epigraph will be an integral part of the structure of artistic speech given on behalf of the author. In the other, it is the only element, apart from the title, that clearly expresses the author's view. "Eugene Onegin" and "The Captain's Daughter" respectively represent the two cases indicated. Pushkin often used epigraphs. In addition to the works under consideration, we meet with them in the "Tales of Belkin", "The Queen of Spades", "Poltava", "The Stone Guest", "Arapa of Peter the Great", "Dubrovsky", "Egyptian Nights", "Bakhchisarai Fountain". The above list of works emphasizes that the epigraphs in Pushkin's works in a certain way "work" in the direction of the formation of meaning. What is the mechanism of this work? In what connections does each epigraph appear to the text? What does it serve? Answers to these questions will clarify the role of Pushkin's epigraphs. Without this, one cannot count on a serious understanding of his novels and stories. In The Captain's Daughter, as in Eugene Onegin or in Belkin's Tales, we come across a whole system of epigraphs. They are prefaced to each chapter and to the entire work. Some chapters have multiple epigraphs. Such a system is not uncommon in the literature. This is found, for example, in Stendhal's novel Red and Black, written at approximately the same time as Pushkin's novels.
Epigraphs in the novel "Eugene Onegin"
In the twenties of the 19th century, romantic novels by Walter Scott and his many imitators were very popular among the Russian public. Especially loved in Russia was Byron, whose sublime disappointment contrasted effectively with the motionless domestic everyday life. Romantic works attracted by their uniqueness: the characters of the heroes, passionate feelings, exotic pictures of nature excited the imagination. And it seemed that on the basis of Russian everyday life it was impossible to create a work that could interest the reader.
The appearance of the first chapters of Eugene Onegin caused a wide cultural resonance. Pushkin not only depicted a broad panorama of Russian reality, not only recorded the realities of everyday life or social life, but was able to reveal the causes of the phenomena, ironically connect them with the peculiarities of the national character and worldview.
Space and time, social and individual consciousness are revealed by the artist in living facts of reality, illuminated by a lyrical and sometimes ironic look. Pushkin is not characterized by moralizing. The reproduction of social life is free of didactics, and the most interesting subject of research unexpectedly appears secular customs, theater, balls, inhabitants of estates, details of everyday life - narrative material that does not pretend to be poetic generalization. The system of oppositions (Petersburg society - local nobility; patriarchal Moscow - Russian dandy; Onegin - Lensky; Tatyana - Olga, etc.) streamlines the diversity of life. Hidden and obvious irony is evident in the description of the landlord's existence. Admiration for "sweet antiquity", a village that has revealed a female ideal to the national world, is inseparable from the mocking characteristics of the Larins' neighbors. The world of everyday worries develops with pictures of fantastic dreams, read from books, and the wonders of Christmas fortune-telling.
The scale and at the same time the intimacy of the plot, the unity of epic and lyrical characteristics allowed the author to give an original interpretation of life, its most dramatic conflicts, which were maximally embodied in the image of Eugene Onegin. Contemporary Pushkin criticism has repeatedly asked about the literary and social roots of the image of the protagonist. Often sounded the name of Byron's Child Harold, but no less common was the indication of domestic origins.
Onegin's byronism, the character's disillusionment are confirmed by his literary preferences, character, views: “What is he? Is it really an imitation, an insignificant ghost, or even a Muscovite in Harold's cloak ... "- Tatiana says about" the hero of her novel. " Herzen wrote that “in Pushkin they saw the successor of Byron,” but “by the end of their life, Pushkin and Byron were completely separated from each other,” which is expressed in the specifics of the characters they created: “Onegin is Russian, he is possible only in Russia: there he is necessary, and there you meet him at every step ... The image of Onegin is so national that it is found in all novels and poems that receive any recognition in Russia, and not because they wanted to copy him, but because you constantly find him near yourself or in yourself. "
Reproduction with an encyclopedic completeness of problems and characters relevant to Russian reality in the 20s of the XIX century is achieved not only by the most detailed depiction of life situations, inclinations, sympathies, moral guidelines, the spiritual world of contemporaries, but also by special aesthetic means and compositional solutions, to the most significant of which epigraphs belong. Quotes from familiar to the reader and authoritative artistic sources open up the opportunity for the author to create a multifaceted image designed for the organic perception of contextual meanings, acting as preliminary explanations, a kind of exposition of Pushkin's narrative. The poet assigns a quote from another text the role communicative mediator.
The choice of a common epigraph to the novel seems no coincidence. The epigraphs of Eugene Onegin are distinguished by their closeness to the personality of its author. Their literary sources are either the works of contemporary Russian writers associated with Pushkin by personal relations, or the works of old and new European authors who were part of his reading circle.
Let us dwell on the connection between the general epigraph and the title of the novel. Epigraph to the novel: “Permeated with vanity, he had, moreover, a special pride, which prompts him to confess with equal indifference to his both good and bad deeds, as a consequence of a sense of superiority: perhaps imaginary. From a private letter. "The content of the text of the epigraph to "Eugene Onegin" is a direct psychological characteristic given in the third person. It is natural to attribute her to the main character, after whom the novel is named. Thus, the epigraph strengthens the concentration of our attention on Onegin (this is the focus of the title of the novel), prepares us for his perception.
When Pushkin in the second stanza addresses his readers:
Friends of Lyudmila and Ruslan,
With the hero of my novel
Without hesitation, this very hour
Let me introduce you -
we already have some idea of \u200b\u200bit.
Let's move on to a direct analysis of the role of epigraphs before individual chapters of Pushkin's novels.
The first chapter of "Eugene Onegin" begins with a line of the poem "First Snow" by P. A. Vyazemsky. This line succinctly expresses the character of the "social life of a young St. Petersburg young man", the description of which the chapter is devoted to, indirectly characterizes the hero and summarizes the worldview and moods inherent in "young fervor": "And he is in a hurry to live and to feel in a hurry." Let's read the poem by P.A. Vyazemsky. The hero's pursuit of life and the transience of sincere feelings are allegorically contained both in the title of the poem "First Snow" and in its content: "A single runaway day, like a deceptive dream, like a shadow of ghosts, / Flickering, you carry away an inhuman deception!" The ending of the poem - "And having exhausted feelings, leaves a trace of a faded dream in our lonely heart ..." - correlates with the spiritual state of Onegin, who "no longer has charms." In a deeper understanding the epigraph sets not only the theme, but also the nature of its development ... Onegin is not only in a hurry to feel. It follows that "early feelings in him cooled down." By means of an epigraph, this information is expected for a trained reader. It is not the plot itself that becomes important, but what is behind it.
Epigraph may highlight part of the text, enhance its individual elements. Epigraph of the second chapter of "Eugene Onegin" built on a pun intended comparison of an exclamation taken from the sixth satire of Horace, with a similar-sounding Russian word. This creates a play on words: "About rus! .. About Russia!" This epigraph distinguishes the village part of the novel: Russia is primarily a village, the most important part of life is spent there. And here the author's irony about the combination of motives of European culture and domestic patriarchy is clearly heard. The unchanging world of landowners' estates with a feeling of eternal peace and immobility contrasts sharply with the vital activity of the hero, likened to the "first snow" in the first chapter.
In the well-known plan-table of contents for the novel third chapter has the name "Young Lady". The epigraph to this chapter accurately enough represents its character. The French verse taken from the poem "Narcissus" is not accidental here. Let's remember that Tatiana
... did not know Russian well,
And expressed herself with difficulty
In their own language.
Quote from Malfilatra "She was a girl, she was in love" becomes the theme of the third chapter,revealing the inner world of the heroine. Pushkin suggests formula for the emotional state of a girl , which will determine the basis of the love twists and turns of not only this novel, but also subsequent literature. The author depicts various manifestations of Tatiana's soul, explores the circumstances of the formation of the image, which later became classic. The heroine of Pushkin opens a gallery of female characters of Russian literature, combining sincerity of feelings with special purity of thoughts, ideal performances with a desire to embody herself in the real world; in this character there is neither excessive passion, nor mental licentiousness.
"Morality in the nature of things" - we read before the fourth chapter... Pushkin's words by Necker are only set the problematic chapter. With regard to the situation of Onegin and Tatiana, the statement of the epigraph can be perceived ironically. Irony is an important artistic tool in the hands of Pushkin. "Morality is in the nature of things." Various interpretations of this dictum known at the beginning of the 19th century are possible. On the one hand, this is a warning of Tatyana's decisive act, but the heroine, in her declaration of love, repeats the pattern of behavior outlined by romantic works. On the other hand, this ethical recommendation, as it were, concentrates in itself the rebuke of Onegin, who uses a date to teach and is so carried away by edifying rhetoric that Tatyana's love expectations will not come true. The reader's expectations are not destined to come true either: sensuality, romantic vows, happy tears, tacit agreement expressed by the eyes, etc. All this is deliberately rejected by the author due to the contrived sentimentality and literary nature of the conflict. A lecture on moral and ethical topics seems to be more convincing for a person who has an understanding of the basics of the "nature of things." Projecting on Pushkin's hero, the epigraph to the fourth chapter acquires ironic meaning: the morality that rules the world is confused with the morality read in the garden to the young heroine by the "glittering" hero. Onegin treats Tatiana morally and nobly: he teaches her to "rule herself." Feelings need to be rationally controlled. However, we know that Onegin himself learned this, vigorously exercising in the "science of tender passion." Obviously, morality stems not from rationality, but from the natural physical limitations of a person: "early feelings in him cooled down" - Onegin became moral involuntarily, due to premature old age, lost the ability to receive pleasure and instead of lessons in love gives lessons in morality. This is another possible meaning of the epigraph.
The role of the epigraph to the fifth chapter is explained by Yu. M. Lotman in terms of setting the parallelism of the images of Svetlana Zhukovsky and Tatiana in order to identify the differences in their interpretation: "one focused on romantic fiction, play, the other - on everyday and psychological reality." In the poetic structure of Eugene Onegin, Tatyana's dream sets a special metaphorical meaning for assessing the heroine's inner world and the narrative itself. The author expands the space of the story to mythopoetic allegory. Quoting Zhukovsky at the beginning of the fifth chapter - "Oh, do not know these terrible dreams, you, my Svetlana!" - clearly reveals the association with the work of the predecessor, prepares a dramatic plot. The poetic interpretation of the "wonderful dream" - a symbolic landscape, folklore emblems, open sentimentality - anticipates the tragic inevitability of the destruction of the world familiar to the heroine. The epigraph-warning, realizing a symbolic allegory, also draws the rich spiritual content of the image.In the composition of the novel, based on the techniques of contrast and parallelism with mirror projections (Tatiana's letter - Onegin's letter; Tatiana's explanation - Onegin's explanation, etc.), there is no opposition to the heroine's dream. The "waking" Onegin is set in the plane of real social existence, his nature is freed from the associative-poetic context. And on the contrary, the nature of Tatiana's soul is infinitely diverse and poetic.
The epigraph of the sixth chapter prepares the death of Lensky. The epigraph-epitaph, which opens the sixth chapter of the novel - "Where the days are cloudy and short, a tribe will be born that does not hurt to die" - brings the pathos of "The Life of Madonna Laura" by Petrarch to the plot of the romantic Vladimir Lensky, alien to Russian life, who created another world in the soul, the difference of which from others and prepares the character's tragedy. The motives of the poetry of Petrarch are necessary for the author to to introduce the character to the philosophical tradition of accepting death developed by Western culture , interrupting the short-term life mission of the "singer of love". But Yu. M. Lotman also showed one more meaning of this epigraph. Pushkin did not completely take the quote from Petrarch, but released a verse saying that the reason for the absence of the fear of death is in the innate belligerence of the tribe. With such a pass, the epigraph also applies to Onegin, who was equally risky in a duel. Devastated Onegin, perhaps, also "does not hurt to die."
The triple epigraph to the seventh chapter creates a variety of intonations(panegyric, ironic, satirical) narration. Dmitriev, Baratynsky, Griboyedov, united by statements about Moscow, represent a variety of assessments of the national symbol. The poetic characteristics of the ancient capital will be developed in the plot of the novel, outline the specifics of resolving conflicts, and determine the special shades of the characters' behavior.
Epigraph from Byronappeared at the stage of a white manuscript, when Pushkin decided that the eighth chapter will be the last.
The theme of the epigraph is farewell.
I ask you to leave me, -
says Tatiana Onegin in the last scene of the novel.
Forgive me too, my strange companion,
And you, my faithful ideal,
And you, alive and constant,
Even a little work, -
says the poet. Pushkin devotes the whole forty-ninth stanza to parting with the reader.
The couplet from the cycle of "Poems on Divorce" by Byron, selected as the epigraph of the eighth chapter, is permeated with elegiac moods, metaphorically conveying the author's sadness of parting with the novel and the heroes, of Onegin's parting with Tatiana.
The aesthetics of epigraphs, along with other artistic solutions of Pushkin, forms the discussion and dialogical potential of the work, colors artistic phenomena in special semantic intonations, prepares a new scale for generalizing classical images. final exams. When forming an educational ...
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The role of epigraphs in Eugene Onegin
Epigraphs play a significant role in the composition of the novel in verse "Eugene Onegin". It should be noted that A.S. Pushkin took the Byronic system of epigraphs as a basis. The epigraph to the first chapter is taken from P. Vyazemsky's poem "The First Snow", in the content of which A.S. Pushkin discerned the features of his hero. Choosing the poems of P. Vyazemsky for the epigraph, A. Pushkin encouraged the readers to take a closer look at his hero and find out how Eugene Onegin lived in his youth, what mental losses he experienced, what he believed in, what he loved, and what, in the end, he was expected in future. The second chapter is preceded by an epigraph from Horace: “O rus! ... ", which recreates the conventional image of the village. The poet made his readers see the whole truth of reality, which directly contradicts the romantic image of the village. He reproduced the contradictions between the tradition of the conventional literary image of the village and the real province, which was dominated by vulgarity, hypocrisy and moral decline. The epigraph to the third chapter is taken from Malfilatra's poem Narcissus, or the Island of Venus. THESE lines emphasize the romantic nature, Tatiana's love, but this epigraph contains a hidden hint of selfishness, narcissism of Eugene Onegin (he is directly compared with the mythical Narcissus). For the fourth chapter, an epigraph is selected from J. Stael's book "Reflections on the French Revolution", in which the author says that morality is the basis of human life and society. And here again we observe the clash of romantic and realistic principles in the intertext. The novel "Eugene Onegin" shows the processes of destruction of morality, spiritual transformation of man and society. The epigraph to the fifth chapter is taken from V. Zhukovsky's ballad “Svetlana. This epigraph creates an additional characterization of Tatiana, emphasizing the romantic nature of the heroine. At the same time, the epigraph contains a hint of the subsequent terrible events that will take place in the novel - the duel and the death of Lensky. In addition, the epigraph has and ...
