Pigasova Guzyaliya Sharibzyanovna -
teacher of the Russian language and literature of the Municipal Educational Institution "Basic School No. 7" in Chusovoy, Perm Territory;
winner of the competition for the best teachers in Russia, 2006;
honorary worker of general education of the Russian Federation
Extracurricular Reading Lessons Summaries
based on the works of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
I would like to offer notes of extracurricular reading lessons on the works of L. Petrushevskaya in grades 5-11.
The works of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya tell not only about the "leaden abominations of life", about the pain and suffering of the "little man", they teach to love people, to sympathize with them. Reading the stories of Petrushevskaya, you remember the words of A.P. Chekhov: "It is necessary that at the door of every happy person there should be someone with a hammer and remind of the unfortunate and disadvantaged, of the vulgarity of our life ...".
Petrushevskaya remains where people feel bad and ashamed, but bad and ashamed, at least sometimes, happens to everyone. Therefore, Petrushevskaya writes about each of us. In addition, the writer's works teach to love life and live in seemingly unbearable conditions: "in this world, however, one must endure everything and live ...".
Petrushevskaya is a professional who works in a wide variety of genres, so the writer's works can be used when we talk about fairy tales, myths, parables, dystopias and other genres in our lessons.
Summary of the lesson based on the story of L. Petrushevskaya "Time for Night"
(the lesson was held in grade 10 after studying the novel by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin "The Lord Golovlevs")
During the lessons, it was said why the story of the Golovlev family turns into a “story of deaths”; the entire Golovlev family is dying out, historical extinction enters the bloodstream, penetrates into nature, and is passed on from generation to generation. Saltykov-Shchedrin's novel warns: where there is unlimited power, there is a cruel attitude towards a person; where there is no love, where hypocrisy, greed, lies reign, where they reproach with a piece of bread - there is no Family, no Life. The family will also be discussed in the story "Time for Night" by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya.
Lesson topic "Crooked family"
The purpose of the lesson: analysis of the story "Time is Night", moral lessons, artistic skill of L. Petrushevskaya.
Equipment: multimedia projector, screen, presentation in Power Point on the creativity of L. Petrushevskaya.
Everything hung in the air like a sword, our whole life,
ready to collapse. The trap was slammed
how it slams behind us every day,
but sometimes a log still fell from above, and in the coming
silence all crawled crushed ...
L. Petrushevskaya
…where is everyone?
M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
Today in the lesson we will again talk about the family, because in our difficult times the role of the family has never been so important. Even Leo Tolstoy said: "Happy is he who is happy at home." It depends on the family how we will go out into the big life - able to overcome difficulties and hardships, enjoy life and love it, or we will feel hateful, unnecessary, superfluous in this life.
- What do you think the family is based on (at this time on the screen the presentation "Happy Moments" with images of happy moments of family life)?
A note appears on the board:
Respect
Love
Care
Kindness
Thanks
Honesty towards each other and people
May God save you love, respect, gratitude for the rest of your life, remember the biblical commandment: "Honor your father and your mother, may it be good and may you be long on earth." And God forbid that at one moment, looking back and seeing only emptiness and complete ruin, you exclaim: "What is, what has become? .. where is everything?"
The "crooked family" will be discussed in today's lesson.
- How do you understand the meaning of the title of the story?
Before us are notes made at night, when everyone is asleep, when there is an opportunity to collect thoughts, to ponder what has been lived. The heroine of the story Anna Andrianovna says: "... my time is night - a date with the stars and with God, the time of conversation, I write everything down" (hereinafter, the text is quoted from the publication of L. Petrushevskaya. Collected works, volume 1. Prose. Of five books. M ., 1996, pp. 311-398).
But, in addition, the heroes of Petrushevskaya are nocturnal residents. They, as if on command, wake up closer to the night. "Time is night" - a prearranged signal, a password for heightened feelings, increased heart rate, revitalization of the plot, events and incidents. And the catastrophic blindness of the heroes in relations with each other, misunderstanding, tragic disunity are due to the fact that they live in the darkness of the night.
But the story, or rather the heroine's diary entries, are subtitled “Notes on the edge of the table.
- How would you explain this name?
The table has long been considered a symbol of life in Russia, at home. These are notes "on the edge of life", notes between life and death "... here after my mother there were manuscripts."
- Define the genre of the work?
Before us is a diary, or rather, two diaries - a mother and a daughter. This means that the story is inherent in the utmost sincerity, confession. The diary, as a genre variety of prose, attracts the author by its ease of choosing a topic, great compositional possibilities, it allows you to create the illusion of free expression of thoughts and impressions, as well as fully and deeply reveal the character of the heroine.
Anna Andrianovna's diary allows Petrushevskaya to step aside from the story, to observe the life of the Golubev family from the sidelines, but Petrushevskaya herself in Karamzin will say:
life in general
can't
watch from the side
she is indecent
defenseless
The "indecent and defenseless" life of the Golubev family rises before us from the pages of a diary that has no beginning or end.
- Can the story "Time for Night" be called a family chronicle? Tell us about the main characters of the story.
There are three central female characters in the story: Anna, Seraphima and Alena. Their fates are mirrored, their lives repeat each other with fatal inevitability.
Anna Andrianovna is a typical mother, but in the recent past and in her memories she is a typical daughter. At one time, the same thing happened to her as is now happening to her “fool” Alenka: “it was the madness of one archaeological expedition and my next grandiose mistake, an affair with a married man, the birth of children, then the departure of my husband. It is interesting that the heroine herself is absolutely not aware of this similarity, which the author emphasizes all the time. Anna Andrianovna is constantly affirming her superiority over her daughter: “what is she and what is I”, not realizing that her daughter is exactly repeating her fate. It is as if there is some kind of wall in her mind that prevents her from seeing the truth. In their fates, the same episodes, the same faces flicker, the same phrases sound.
“What was wrong with food was always among our family members, poverty was to blame for that, some scores, claims, my grandmother openly reproached my husband,“ she eats everything from children ”and so on. And I never did that, except that Shura pissed me off, really, a parasite and bloodsucker. " And in many years, he will probably also reproach his son-in-law Alena, not noticing, perhaps, that in anger he repeats the words of his mother and grandmother.
- What words are repeated most often in Anna Andrianovna's diary?
These are the words IS, FEED, EAT IN THREE THROATS. A gradual necrosis occurs, and, oddly enough, nutrition becomes a sign of the dead. Anna Andrianovna speaks about her son Andrei, a weak-willed man: “... he ate my brain and drank my blood, all cobbled together from my food, but yellow, dirty, deadly tired”. It is no coincidence that at the end of the story and at the end of the diary, the image of death appears: “The steps of fate ... They sleep in a deadly dream. Are they still alive ... I can't predict about four coffins, small and small, and how to bury all this ?! ”.
The bond of any family is love. Love in the family kindles a fire in a person's soul that burns in him all his life, which should burn in him, despite the cold that can surround a person. Maybe Anna Andrianovna is a person whose all feelings are atrophied: love, compassion, pity.
- Refute or confirm this assumption.
The heroine retains an inescapable need for spiritual warmth, although she cannot find it in the world: “twice a day showers and for a long time: someone else's warmth! Heat from CHP for lack of a better one. " He retains the ability and need to love. “Love, love and again love and pity for him guided me when he left the colony,” the heroine recalls.
But in her ability and need to love, some kind of inferiority is felt. Love is perceived as a debt that must be returned with high interest. “My mother herself wanted to be an object of love for her daughter, that is, me, so that I only loved her, an object of love and trust, this mother wanted to be the whole family for me, to replace everything,” the heroine says about her mother. But these words can be attributed to Anna Andrianovna herself. She passionately loves her grandson, "sinful love ... the child from her only hardens and unbelts." Love that only demands does not hold together, but destroys the family. Anna Andrianovna turned out to be “superfluous in life”.
- Can the heroine of the story be called a woman with a thirst for destruction? If so, why?
The main character persistently and deliberately breaks the threads connecting her with the outside world, with the people around her: “we are at different levels”. First, the husband leaves. A mother, a sick old woman who has gone out of her mind, is sent to the mental hospital. The son-in-law, whom Anna Andrianovna once forcibly married to her daughter, leaves, and then mercilessly persecuted, reproaching with a piece of bread. The daughter leaves for a new man to be abandoned again. A son leaves, a drunken man, broken after prison. Anna Andrianovna remains close to her only native being - her grandson Timofey. But in the end he will leave her too.
The heroine will be left alone within the walls of her impoverished apartment, alone with her thoughts, alone with the night. And looking around the "ashes", listening to the dead silence, she could, like the hero of the novel by Saltykov-Shchedrin Judushka, exclaim: "We must forgive me! For everyone ... both for themselves and for those who no longer exist. What? What has happened ?! where is everyone ?! "
The story of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya warns us: where there is no mutual understanding, kindness, love, care, gratitude, there is no Family, no life.
Homework: write a miniature essay "My family" or create an electronic presentation "My family".
Author's note: the basis for the preparation and conduct of the lesson on the topic "Crooked family" in the humanitarian class was based on the group method of work on the study of the text. Two weeks before the lesson, the class was divided into three groups, the groups were asked the following questions and tasks:
1st group
Why immediately after studying the novel by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin "The Lord Golovlevs" we turned to the story "Time for Night" by L. Petrushevskaya?
Can L. Petrushevskaya's story "Time for Night" be called a family chronicle?
Tell us about the fate of three generations of the Golubev family: Baba Seraphim, Anna Andrianovna, Alena and Andrei.
What struck you the most in the description of everyday life, relationships in the Golubev family, what episodes shocked you?
What, in your opinion, is the reason for the tragic disunity of the heroes of the story?
2nd group
Explain the meaning of the title of the story "Time for Night"?
Define the genre features of the story "Time for Night"?
Why does L. Petrushevskaya refer to such a genre as a diary?
How do you understand the meaning of the title of the heroine's diary "Notes on the edge of the table"?
Why didn't Anna Andrianovna's family become salvation in this disharmonious world?
Group 3
Heroes' speech as a means of creating artistic images. Observe the characters' speech, what phrases and words the characters use when describing family relationships, attitudes towards people, towards the world. Find the keywords of the story.
How does speech characterize heroes?
What other artistic techniques does Petrushevskaya use (grotesque, slang, stream of consciousness, an unexpected end, or rather, its absence, etc.)? Give examples.
The lesson discusses the proposed questions.
Note: this lesson can also be taught in grade 11 when studying modern prose.
List of references
N. Agisheva. Sounds "Mu", magazine "Theater", 1988, No. 9, p.21
S.P. Bavin. Ordinary stories (Lyudmila Petrushevskaya): B13. Bibliographic sketch. Moscow RSL, 1995.
N. Ivanova. Go through despair, magazine "Youth", 1990, №2, p.94.
T. Kasatkina. “But I'm scared: you will change your appearance…”, Novy Mir magazine, 1996, no. 4, pp. 212-219.
A. Kuralekh. Life and Being in L. Petrushevskaya's prose, Literaturnoye Obozreniye magazine, 1993, No. 5, pp. 63-66.
O. Lebedushkina. Book of Kingdoms and Opportunities, Druzhba Narodov magazine, 1998, No. 4, pp. 199-207.
L. Pann. Instead of an interview, or the experience of reading prose by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya far from the literary life of the metropolis, Zvezda magazine, 1994, No. 5, p.197-201
L. Petrushevskaya. Collected works, vols. 1,2, Moscow, 1996.
M. Remizova. Catastrophe theory or a few words in defense of the night, literary newspaper, 1996, №11, p.4.
O. Slavnikova. Petrushevskaya and emptiness, Voprosy literatury magazine, 2000, No. 2, pp. 47-61.
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya has long been an integral part of Russian literature, standing on a par with other Russian classics of the 20th century. Her early texts were banned for publication in the Soviet Union, but, fortunately, Petrushevskaya's talent was appreciated by Roman Viktyuk and Yuri Lyubimov, then still very young, and they began to stage performances based on her plays with pleasure. The pledge of friendly relations with another star of Russian culture, with, was the work on the cartoon "Tale of Fairy Tales", for which she wrote the script. The long period of silence for the writer ended only in the 1990s, when she began to be published truly freely (and a lot): the literary glory of Petrushevskaya overtook instantly.
"Time is night"
If you still think that "", then we hasten to disappoint you: there are more terrible stories, and many of them were written by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. In her bibliography there are few major works, so the story "Time for Night" stands out: it contains all the themes that the writer touches on in her other texts. The conflict between mother and daughter, poverty, domestic disorder, love-hatred between loved ones - Lyudmila Stefanovna is a master of "shock prose", as critics often write about her, and this is true.
She is never shy about details, naturalistic details, obscene language, if required by the text and her vision of the literary world being created. In this sense, the story "Time for Night" is the purest example of Petrushevskaya's classical prose, and if you want to get acquainted with her work, but do not know where to start, you should choose her: after ten pages of text you will know for sure whether you should continue reading or not.
To retell the plot, as is often the case with her works, does not make any sense: the canvas in this case is far from the most important. Before us are the scattered diary entries of the poetess Anna Andriyanova, who talks about her life's vicissitudes, and from these notes grows an epic - and terrible - canvas of an unfulfilled, destroyed human life. Reading her memoirs, we learn how she was endlessly at enmity with her mother, who did not understand her, and how she later oppressed her children, and then, unexpectedly, became attached to her grandson, calling him an "orphan." The gallery of scary images causes shock and rejection in many readers, but the main thing is to be able to overcome oneself, and not turn away from them, but to regret: the ability to compassion against, as you know, is a key skill for reading Russian literature.
Only from print:
Guzel Yakhina, "My Children"
It seems that even people who are far from the world of modern literature have heard: her first novel "Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes" became a sensation in Russian culture and a rare example of a talented intellectual bestseller. Naturally, everyone was waiting with special trepidation for the release of her second book, the novel "My Children", which appeared on store shelves quite recently.
The story of the life of Jacob Bach, a Russian German living in the Volga region and raising an only daughter, would be most correctly attributed to magical realism: on the one hand, it contains many real details of the life of the Volga Germans, on the other, mysticism and "otherworldlyness" are present everywhere. So, for example, Jacob writes bizarre fairy tales that are now and then embodied in life, and not always lead to good consequences.
Unlike the first novel, the book is written in a much more florid and complex language, which was not at all in "Zuleikha ...". The opinions of critics were divided into two camps: some are sure that the book is in no way inferior to the opening, while others reproach Guzel Yakhina for excessive attention to the form at the expense of the content: we will not take sides in the dispute, but rather we will advise you to read the novel ourselves - in the coming months only he will be discussed by all fans of Russian writers.
If you haven't read it yet:
Alexey Salnikov, "Petrovs in the Flu and Around It"
It is unlikely that Alexei Salnikov could have assumed that his novel would cause such a major resonance in the world of Russian literature, and critics of the first magnitude would argue about it, and would decide to stage a performance based on the sensational work. The amazing text, the plot of which is almost impossible to retell - the main character of the work gets sick with the flu, which begins a series of his absurd adventures - bewitches with the language in which it was written. A distinctive and vivid syllable, where every word seems to regain its meaning, takes you deep into history, and does not let it back out: only Andrei Platonov and Nikolai Gogol could boast of such a colorful language.
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INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1. PROSPECTS FOR STUDYING LITERARY WORKS THROUGH THE CATEGORY OF ART SPACE AND TIME
1.1 Ideas of M.M. Bakhtin in the study of literary works through the categories of artistic space and time. Chronotope concept
1.2 Structuralist approach to the study of works of art through the categories of space and time
1.3 Ways of studying artistic space and time in the literary experience of V. Toporov, D. Likhachev and others
CHAPTER 2. FEATURES OF SPATIAL-TIME ORGANIZATION OF STORIES BY L. PETRUSHEVSKAYA
2.1 The apartment as the main topos of the living space
2.2 Structure and semantics of natural space
CONCLUSION
LIST OF REFERENCES
INTRODUCTION
Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a modern prose writer, poet, playwright. She is on a par with such modern writers as Tatiana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Victoria Tokareva, Victor Pelevin, Vladimir Makanin and others. It stands in the same row - and at the same time stands out in its own way, as something, of course, out of this row, does not fit into any rigid framework and is not subject to classification.
The appearance of the first publications of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya caused a sharp rejection of the official criticism. Recognition and fame came to the writer in the second half of the 1980s, after significant changes in the political and cultural life of the country. In 1992, her novel "Time for Night" was nominated for the Booker Prize. For her literary activity, Petrushevskaya was awarded the International Pushkin Prize, the Moscow-Penne Prize for the book The Ball of the Last Man, and finally she won the Triumph Prize. Despite all this premium splendor, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is one of the few Russian prose writers who continue to work without slowing down either the pace or the quality of their writing.
It is important for us that in the center of Petrushev's stories is a person living in a special time and space. The writer shows the world, far from prosperous apartments and official receptions. She depicts an awkward life in which there is no meaning. In her stories, she creates an autonomous, existing world according to her own laws, often terrible from the disastrous and hopeless situation within this world of its inhabitants. Accordingly, access to the work of Petrushevskaya through the study of the space-time paradigms of her artistic world seems to us extremely promising. From all of the above it follows relevanceour researchandniya.
The work of the prose writer and playwright Lyudmila Petrushevskaya caused lively debates among readers and literary critics, as soon as her works appeared on the pages of thick magazines. More than thirty years have passed since then, and during this time numerous interpretations of her work have been published: book reviews, scientific and journalistic articles. In his critical assessments, the writer was destined to go from almost "the ancestor of Russian chernukha" to the recognized classic of literature of recent decades. Despite the recognition that Petrushevskaya received, the controversy around her works, accompanying the writer from the very first publications, continues to this day. The main body of research is magazine and newspaper criticism.
Serious studies of the work of this author appeared relatively recently (1990s - early 2000s), while individual publications began to appear ten years earlier, in the late 1980s, after the first works were published. A. Kuralekh A. Kuralekh A. Life and being in L. Petrushevskaya's prose addressed to the study of Petrushevskaya's creativity // Literary Review. - M., 1993. - No. 5. - P. 63 -67. , L. Pann Pann L. Instead of an interview, or the experience of reading L. Petrushevskaya's prose. Far from literary life
metropolis // Star. - SPb., 1994. - No. 5. - P. 197 - 202., M. Lipovetsky, Lipovetsky M. Tragedy and you never know what else // New world. - M., 1994. - № 10. - P. 229 - 231., L. Lebedushkina Lebedushkina O. Book of kingdoms and opportunities // Friendship of peoples. - M., 1998. - No. 4. - pp. 199 - 208., M. Vasilyeva M. Vasilyeva It happened // Friendship of peoples. - M., 1998. - № 4. - pp. 208 - 217. et al. In most of the studies, the prose of L. Petrushevskaya is considered in the context of the work of modern prose writers such as Y. Trifonov, V. Makanin, T. Tolstaya and others. , and the most researched aspects of the writer's creative heritage include the theme and image of the "little man", themes of loneliness, death, fate and destiny, features of the image of the family, human relationships with the world and some others. It is noteworthy that, although the artistic space and time in the works of L. Petrushevskaya was not specially studied, many critics and scientists pointed out the prospects of studying this particular level of poetics. So, for example, E. Shcheglova in her article "The Suffering Man" speaks about the archetypes of Petrushevskaya and focuses on the features of the space-time paradigm of her artistic world. She writes that the writer, reproducing a mass of the most difficult everyday circumstances, depicts not so much a person as these very circumstances, not so much his soul as his sinful bodily shell. The author of this article notes: “Her man falls into the darkness of circumstances, like a black hole. Hence, apparently, the writer’s addiction to accumulation signsthese circumstances - from empty plates, holes and all kinds of stains and ending with countless divorces, abortions and abandoned children. Signs reproduced, I must say directly, aptly, fearlessly and exceptionally recognizable, since we all live in the same painful and oppressive life, but, alas, rarely revealing something (more precisely, someone) worthwhile followed by"[Shcheglova 2001: 45].
Interesting in this direction is the work of N.V. Kablukova "The Poetics of Drama by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya". The researcher notes that the categories of space and time, not only in drama, but also in creativity in general, are characterized as follows: “The semantics of artistic space determines the loss of a sense of reality in a person at the end of the Soviet era, leading to the destruction of reality itself; the hierarchy of everyday - social - natural spaces is violated; the values \u200b\u200bof the object-object environment in which it would seem that modern man is immersed (a lifeless life) is deformed; fundamental is the unrootedness of a person in modern civilization - movement in the spaces of reality ”[Kablukova 2003: 178]. OA Kuzmenko, studying the traditions of fairy-tale narration in the writer's prose, devotes a separate paragraph to the study of "his" and "alien" world in the Petrushevskaya microcosm.
Studying the categories of space and time in the work of a writer, researchers often focus their attention on threshold situations. So M. Lipovetsky in his article "Tragedy and you never know what else" notes that the threshold between life and death is the most stable observation deck of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's prose. “Its main collisions are the birth of a child and the death of a person, given, as a rule, in inseparable unity. Even drawing a completely passable situation, Petrushevskaya, firstly, still makes it a threshold, and secondly, inevitably places it in the cosmic chronotope. A typical example is the story "Sweet Lady", which, in fact, describes a mute scene of the parting of failed lovers, an old man and a young woman: "And then a car, ordered in advance, came, and everything ended, and the problem of her appearance on Earth too late and too early disappeared. him - and everything disappeared, disappeared in the circle of stars, as if nothing had ever happened ”” [Lipovetsky 1994: 198].
Literary critics and literary critics quite often in their works turn to the elements of poetics, through which they try to reach both the definition of ways of depicting the artistic world of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, and the methods of worldview, comprehending the author's aesthetic position. From our point of view, it is through the categories of artistic space and time that one can understand the artistic world of the writer Petrushevskaya, see the root causes of the tragedies of her hero.
Respectively, noveltyour work is determined, firstly, by an attempt to study the features of the artistic world of Petrushevskaya through the categories of artistic space and time on the scale of a special study; secondly, to offer "his" version of interpretation of the laws of the world of the heroes of L. Petrushevskaya.
Objectresearches become such works of L. Petrushevskaya as "Own Circle" (1979), "The Way of Cinderella" (2001), "Country" (2002), "To the Beautiful City" (2006) and others, already in the names of which there are images spatially -temporal nature. In addition, in choosing an object, we were guided by the fact that we studied works with the most typical situations that characterize the spatial boundaries of Petrushevskaya's characters, their relationship with the world.
Subjectresearch is the level of spatio-temporal organization of works, i.e. all those elements of the form and content of a work of art that make it possible to reveal the specifics of the writer's artistic world in this aspect.
goalthe work consists in identifying the features of the spatio-temporal organization of the artistic world in the stories of L. Petrushevskaya. To achieve the goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:
· As a result of the analysis to reveal the peculiarities of the organization of artistic space and time in the works of L. Petrushevskaya - the stories "Country", "The Way of Cinderella", "Happy End", etc .;
· Describe the semantics of the main chronotopes in the stories of L. Petrushevskaya;
· To consider the specificity of artistic space and time, which are the basis of L. Petrushevskaya's world modeling.
Theoretical and methodological basis This research is mainly composed of the works of M.M. Bakhtin, Yu.M. Lotman, D.S. Likhachev, V.N. Toporov, in which general theoretical and methodological issues of the study of artistic space and time, as well as studies of domestic critics and literary critics are considered dedicated to the work of L. Petrushevskaya and writers of her generation (M. Lipovetsky, A. Kuralekh, L. Lebedushkina, etc.)
We consider the main methods of our research to be systemic-holistic, structural, textological and comparative-typological approaches, in the process of work we use elements of motivational analysis.
Practical value of the work consists in the possible application of the obtained research results in the professional activity of a teacher-language teacher in the lessons and optional classes in Russian literature of the twentieth century.
Approbationresults were carried out at the "Mendeleev Readings" (2010), the material of this work was published in a collection of student scientific papers, and was also used during state practice in the preparation and conduct of extracurricular activities on literature (grade 10).
Work structure... The final qualifying work consists of an Introduction, two chapters, a Conclusion and a list of used literature (51 titles), an Appendix, where it is proposed to develop an extracurricular reading lesson for students of grade 11.
CHAPTER 1. PROSPECTS OF STUDYING LITERARY WORKS THROUGH THE CATEGORY OF ART SPACE AND TIME
As you know, in each work of literature, through the external form (text, speech level), the internal form of the work is created - the artistic world existing in the minds of the author and reader, reflecting real reality through the prism of creative intention (but not identical to it). The most important parameters of the inner world of a work are artistic space and time.
The interest of literary scholars in the categories of space and time at the beginning of the twentieth century was natural. By that time, A. Einstein's "theory of relativity" had already been formed, and not only scientists, but also philosophers became interested in this problem. It is important to note that the interest in the categories of space and time was due not only to the development of science and technology, discoveries in physics, the emergence of cinema, etc., but also to the actual fact of the existence of man in the world, which has length in space and time.
Interest in these categories in the perspective of cognition of artistic culture arises gradually. In this regard, the works of philosophers and art critics were of great importance (for example, the book by PA Florensky "Analysis of spatiality and time in works of art", 1924/1993). The fundamental ideas in the study of these categories as elements of the poetics of works of art are developed by M.M. Bakhtin. He also introduces the term "chronotope" into scientific circulation, denoting the interconnection of artistic space and time, their "cohesion", mutual conditionality in a literary work.
In the 60s and 70s. In the twentieth century, the interest of literary scholars to the problem is growing, representatives of various schools and traditions are engaged in it. For example, in the mainstream of structuralism, Yu.M. Lotman. Special sections on the nature of artistic space and time appear in the book by D.S. Likhachev on the poetics of ancient Russian literature. In the mainstream of mythopoetics, V.N. Toporov, M.M. Steblin-Kamensky, A.M. Pyatigorsky. The tendency to interpret spatio-temporal paradigms through myth is also characteristic of V.E. Miletinsky, who continues the mythopoetic tradition.
In modern research, the ideas of M.M. Bakhtin are actively used (his "chronotope" has gained extreme popularity), Lotman's experience of studying literary texts through the category of artistic space, and an approach to studying the spatio-temporal features of the artistic world in line with mythopoetics is also widespread.
1.1 Ideas of M.M. Bakhtin in the study of literary works through the categories of artistic space and time. Chronotope concept
For M.M. Bakhtin's spatial and temporal representations captured in a work of art form a kind of unity. The essential interconnection of temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, M.M. Bakhtin called it "chronotope" (which literally means "time-space"). This term is used in mathematical natural science, and was introduced and substantiated on the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity. The scholar transferred it to literary criticism almost as a metaphor; the expression of the continuity of space and time (time as the fourth dimension of space) is significant in it. The chronotope is understood by him as a formally meaningful category of literature.
In the literary and artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal signs merge into a meaningful and concrete whole: “Time here thickens, becomes denser, becomes artistically visible; space, however, is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time ”[Bakhtin 2000: 10].
Chronotop, according to M.M. Bakhtin, performs a number of important artistic functions. So, it is through the image in the product of space and time the epoch becomes visual and plot-oriented, which the artist comprehends aesthetically, in which his heroes live. At the same time, the chronotope is not focused on adequately capturing the physical image of the world, it is person-oriented: it surrounds the person, reflectsandhis connections with the world, often refracts in himself the spiritual movements of the Persianaboutpressing, becoming an indirect assessment of the right or wrong choice,andwhat the hero wants, whether or not his litigation with theandthe attainability, attainability or unattainability of harmony between personalaboutstew and peace. Therefore, separate spatio-temporal images and chronotopes of works are always carried in self value sense.
Each culture understood time and space in its own way. The nature of artistic space and time reflects those ideas about time and space that have developed in everyday life, in science, in religion, in the philosophy of a particular era. M. Bakhtin investigated the main typological spatio-temporal models: chronicle chronotope, adventurous, biographical, etc. In the character of the chronotope, he saw the embodiment of types of artistic thinking. Thus, according to Bakhtin, an epic chronotope dominates in traditionalist (normative) cultures, transforming the image into a complete and distant legend from modernity, and in innovative and creative (non-normative) cultures, a novel chronotope dominates, focused on living contact with an unfinished, becoming reality. About this M.M. Bakhtin writes in detail in his work "Epic and Novel".
According to Bakhtin, the process of mastering the real and historical chronotope in literature was complicated and intermittent: they mastered some specific aspects of the chronotope that were available in given historical conditions, only certain forms of artistic reflection of the real chronotope were developed. Bakhtin examines several of the most important chronotopes of novels: the chronotope of the meeting, the chronotope of the road (path), the threshold (the sphere of crises and fractures) and the adjacent chronotopes of the staircase, front hall and corridor, street, castle, square, and the chronotope of nature.
Consider the chronotope of the meeting. This chronotope is dominated by a temporal tone, and it is distinguished by a high degree of emotional-value intensity. The associated chronotope of the road has a wider volume, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity. Meetings in the novel usually take place on the "road." The “road” is a predominant place for casual encounters.
On the road ("high road"), the spatial and temporal paths of the most diverse people intersect at one point in time and space - representatives of all classes, states, religions, nationalities, ages. Here you can accidentally meet those who are normally separated by social hierarchy and spatial distance, here any contrasts can arise, different fates collide and intertwine. This is the tying point and the place of events. Here time, as it were, flows into space and flows through it, forming roads.
The metaphorization of the path-road is varied: "life path", "embark on a new road", "historical path", but the main pivot is the flow of time. The road is never just a road, but always either for everyone or part of a life path; the choice of the road is the choice of the life path; the crossroads are always a turning point in the life of a folklore person; leaving home on the road with returning home - usually age stages of life; road signs are signs of fate [Bakhtin 2000: 48].
According to M. Bakhtin, the road is especially beneficial for depicting an event controlled by chance. This makes clear the important plot role of the road in the history of the novel.
The chronotope of the threshold is imbued with high emotional-value intensity; it can be combined with the motive of the meeting, but its most essential replenishment is the chronotope of the crisis and the turning point in life. The very word "threshold" already in speech life (along with its real meaning) acquired a metaphorical meaning and was combined with the moment of a turning point in life, a crisis, a life-changing decision (or indecision, fear of crossing the threshold).
Against the background of this general (formal-material) chronotopic nature of the poetic image, as an image of temporary art, depicting a spatial-sensory phenomenon in their movement and formation, the peculiarity of genre-typical plot-forming chronotopes becomes clear. These are specific romance-epic chronotopes that serve to master the real temporal reality, allowing the essential moments of this reality to be reflected and introduced into the artistic plane of the novel.
Each large significant chronotope can include an unlimited number of small chronotopes: each motif can have its own specific chronotope.
Within one work and within the creative work of one author, following Bakhtin, we can observe a multitude of chronotopes and relationships between them specific to a given work or author. Chronotopes can turn on each other, coexist, intertwine, change, compare, contrast, or be in more complex relationships. The general nature of these relationships is dialogical, but this dialogue is outside the world depicted in the work, although not outside the work as a whole. He enters the world of the author and the world of readers. And these worlds are also chronotopic.
The author is a person living his own biographical life, he is outside the work, we meet with him as the creator in the work itself, but outside the depicted chronotopes, but as if on a tangent to them. The author-creator moves freely in his time: he can begin his story from the end, from the middle and from any moment of the depicted events, without destroying the objective course of time in the depicted event.
The author-creator, being outside the chronotopes of the world he depicts, is not just outside, but, as it were, on a tangent to these chronotopes. He depicts the world either from the point of view of the hero participating in the depicted event, or from the point of view of the narrator, or a dummy author, or leads the story directly from himself as a purely author.
The considered chronotopes can be the organizational centers of the main plot events of the novel. In the chronotope, plot knots are tied and untied, they belong to the main plot-forming meaning.
Along with this, chronotopes have a pictorial meaning. Time takes on a sensually visual character in them; plot events in the chronotope are concretized, overgrown with flesh, filled with blood. An event can be reported, informed, and precise indications of the place and time of its occurrence can be given. But the event does not become an image. The chronotope, on the other hand, provides an essential basis for showing and depicting events. And this is precisely due to the special condensation and concretization of the signs of time - the time of human life, historical time - in certain areas of space. This creates an opportunity to build an image of events around the chronotope. It serves as a prime point for unfolding scenes in the novel, while other connecting events, far from the chronotope, are given in the form of dry information and message.
Thus, the chronotope, as the predominant materialization of time in space, is the center of pictorial concretization, embodiment for the entire work. All the abstract elements of the novel - philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and effects - gravitate towards the chronotope and through it are filled with "flesh and blood", become involved in artistic imagery. Such is, according to Bakhtin, the imageandthe ultimate value of the chronotope. In addition, M. Bakhtin identified and analyzedandhe identified some of the most characteristic types of chronotopes: meeting chronotope, roads, etc.aboutvincial city, square, etc.
1.2 Structuralist approach to the study of works of art through the categories of space and time
Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman described the artistic space as "a model of the world of a given author, expressed in the language of his spatial representations." Namely: "The language of spatial relations" is a kind of abstract model, which includes as subsystems both spatial languages \u200b\u200bof different genres and types of art, and models of space with different degrees of abstractness, created by the consciousness of different eras "[Lotman 1988: 252].
According to Lotman, the plot of narrative literary works usually develops within a certain local continuum. The naive reader's perception tends to identify it with the local attribution of episodes to real space (for example, geographic). The idea that an artistic space is always a model of some natural space, which has grown in certain historical conditions, is far from always justified.
Space in a work of art simulates different connections of the picture of the world: temporal, social, ethical, etc. In this or that model of the world, the category of space is difficult to merge with certain concepts that exist in our picture of the world as separate or opposite.
Thus, Lotman's artistic model of the world “Spacenstate "sometimes metaphorically takes on the expression of completely non-spatial relations in the modeling streamtoworld tour.
In the classification of Yu.M. Lotman art space maboutcan be point, linear, planar or volumetric... The second and third can also have horizontal or vertical directivity. Linear space may or may not include directionality. In the presence of this feature (the image of linear directed space in art is often a road), linear space becomes a convenient artistic language for modeling temporal categories ("life path", "road" as a means of character development in time). The concept of the border is an essential differential feature of the elements of "spatial language", which are largely determined by the presence or absence of this feature both in the model as a whole, and in certain of its structural positions [Lotman 1988: 252]. According to the scientist, the concept of a border is not characteristic of all types of space perception, but only those that have already developed their own abstract language and separate space as a certain continuum from its concrete filling.
Yu.M. Lotman argues that “the spatial limitation of text from non-text is evidence of the emergence of the language of artistic space as a special modeling system” [Lotman 1988: 255]. The scientist proposes to make a thought experiment: take some landscape and imagine it as a view from a window (for example, a drawn window opening acts as a frame) or as a picture.
The perception of this (one and the same) pictorial text in each of these two cases will be different: in the first, it will be perceived as a visible part of a larger whole, and the question of what is in the part closed from the view of the observer is quite appropriate.
In the second case, the landscape, framed on the wall, is not perceived as a piece cut out of any larger real-life view. In the first case, the painted landscape is felt only as a reproduction of some real (existing or capable of existing) species; in the second, while retaining this function, it receives an additional one: being perceived as an artistic structure closed in itself, it seems to us correlated not with a part of the object, but with some a universal object, becomes a model of the world.
The landscape depicts a birch grove, and the question arises: "What is behind it?" But he is also a model of the world, reproduces the universe, and in this aspect the question "What is outside of it?" - loses all meaning. Thus, Lotman's spatial delimitation is closely related to the transformation of space from a collection of things filling it into some abstract language that can be used for different types of artistic modeling.
The absence of a border feature in texts in which this absence is the specificity of their artistic language should not be confused with a similar absence of it at the speech level (in a specific text), while retaining it in the system. Thus, the artistic symbol of the road contains a prohibition on movement in one direction, in which the space is limited (“go out of the way”), and the naturalness of movement in that in which there is no such border. Since the artistic space becomes a formal system for the construction of various, including ethical, models, the possibility arises of the moral characterization of literary characters through the corresponding type of artistic space, which already acts as a kind of two-dimensional local-ethical metaphor. So, in Tolstoy one can distinguish (of course, with a great degree of convention) several types of heroes. These are, firstly, the heroes of their place (of their circle), the heroes of spatial and ethical immobility, who, if they move according to the requirements of the plot, then carry along with them their characteristic locus. These are heroes who are not yet able to change or who no longer need it. They represent the starting or ending point of the trajectory - the movement of the heroes.
The heroes of the motionless, "closed" locus are opposed by the heroes of the "open" space. Here, too, two types of heroes are distinguished, which can be conventionally called: heroes of the “path” and heroes of the “steppe”.
The hero of the path moves along a certain spatial and ethical trajectory. Its inherent space implies a ban on lateral movement. Staying at every point in space (and the equivalent moral state) is thought of as a transition to another, followed by the next.
Tolstoy's linear space has a sign of a given direction. It is not unlimited, but represents a generalized possibility of movement from the starting point to the final one. Therefore, it receives a temporal sign, and the character moving in it receives a trait of internal evolution. artistic chronotope petrushevskaya
An essential property of moral linear space in Tolstoy is the presence of the sign of "height" (in the absence of the sign of "width"); the hero's movement along his moral trajectory is an ascent, or a descent, or a change in both. In any case, this feature has a structural distinction. It is necessary to distinguish the character of the space characteristic of the hero from his real plot movement in this space. The hero of the "path" can stop, turn back or go astray, coming into conflict with the laws of his inherent space. At the same time, the assessment of his actions will be different than for similar actions of a character with a different spatial and ethical field.
Unlike the hero of the "path", the hero of the "steppe" has no prohibition on movement in any lateral direction. Moreover, instead of moving along a trajectory, it means the free unpredictability of the direction of movement.
At the same time, the movement of the hero in the moral space is connected not with the fact that he is changing, but with the realization of the inner potency of his personality. Therefore, movement here is not evolution. It also has no temporary sign. The function of these heroes is to cross borders that are insurmountable for others, but do not exist in their space.
Artistic space, according to Lotman, is a continuum in which characters are placed and an action is performed. Naive perception constantly pushes the reader to identify the artistic and physical space.
There is a grain of truth in such a perception, because even when its function of modeling non-spatial relations is exposed, the artistic space necessarily retains, as the foreground of the metaphor, the idea of \u200b\u200bits physical nature.
Therefore, a very significant indicator will be the question of the space into which the action cannot be transferred. The enumeration of where certain episodes cannot occur will outline the boundaries of the world of the modeled text, and the places where they can be transferred will give variants of some invariant model.
However, artistic space is not a passive receptacle for a hero.abouts and plot episodes. Correlation of it with the characters and the general model of the world created by the artistic text convinces us that the language of the artistic space is not a hollow vessel, but one of the components of the common language spoken by the artistic work.
The behavior of the characters is largely related to the space in which they are, and the space itself is perceived not only in the sense of real extension, but also in a different - common in mathematics - understanding, as “a set of homogeneous objects (phenomena, states, etc.). ), in which there are spatially similar relationships. "
This allows the possibility for one and the same hero to alternately fall into one or another space, and, passing from one to another, a person is deformed according to the laws of this space [Lotman 1988: 252].
In order to become sublime, the space must be not only vast (or limitless), but also directed, being in it must move towards the goal. It must be expensive. “Road” is a certain type of artistic space, “path” is the movement of a literary character in this space. The "path" is the realization (complete or incomplete) or non-realization of the "road".
With the emergence of the image of the road as a form of space, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe path as a norm for the life of a person, peoples and humanity is formed.
The language of spatial relations is not the only means of artistic modeling, but it is important, as it belongs to the primary and basic. Even temporal modeling is often a secondary superstructure over spatial language.
Since for Lotman as a structuralist, it was important to determineecasting the structural features of the text, he interprets and artistictmilitary space as a structural element of the text.
Structureorganandthe underlying nature of the artistic space is due to the fact that the center of any spatio-temporal paradigm, according to Lotman, isithe hero of the work is. Lotman makes significant additions to the metaboutprelogical potential of the category of artistic space and time, indicating the possibilityfnew typologies of spatial features in the fabric of the work through the system of antinomies (top - bottom, one's own - someone else's, closed - open, everyday - sacred etc.), in terms of quality and charactertodirectivity (point, linearched, planar, etc.).
1.3 Ways of studying artistic space and time in the literary experience of V. Toporov, D. Likhachev and others
Today, not one scientific literary forum is complete without a report on a topic, wherever the categories of artistic space and time appear. This is due to the fact that these categories have a rich methodological potential and open up great opportunities for researchers in the study of both individual personalities and the literary era as a whole.
We find vivid examples of the scientific significance of the categories of artistic space and time in works on mythopoetics, where the study of specific mythological schemes involves observing the space-time parameters of the phenomenon. For example, one of the representatives of the mythopoetic tradition V.N. Toporov in his works actively refers to the category of artistic space. One of the scientist's important attitudes is the distinction between “individual” and common space. The scientist writes: “Each literary era, each major direction (school) builds its own space, but for those within this era or direction,“ their own ”is assessed, first of all, from the point of view of a common, uniting, consolidating, and their“ individuality ”is “His own” discloses only on the periphery, at the junctions with the other that precedes or threatens him as a replacement in the near future ”[Toporov 1995: 447]. "Etcaboutthe journey of childhood "," space of love "," new space "- prandmeasures of spatial and mythological models that we can find in Toporov's works and the use of which can be useful in studyingestudies of literature of any period.
According to V.N. Toporov, each writer builds his own space, voluntarily and involuntarily correlating it with general spatial models. Moreover, according to Toporov, is promising study of individual Persiansaboutnaliy precisely through the myth and the category of artistic space... It is no accident that in one of his works he makes the following reservation: “At the disposal of the author of this article there are several sketches dedicated to the individual images of space by a number of Russian writers (Radishchev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Druzhinin, Konevskaya, Andrei Bely, Mandelstam, Vaginov, Platonov, Krzhizhanovsky, Poplavsky, etc.) [Toporov 1995: 448].
Interesting are Toporov's observations on the semantics of specific geographical images in the literature. For example, analyzing the image of Petersburg as a mythological space, the scientist introduces minus space concept, i.e. space that does not exist, or denies, is the opposite of traditional, familiar space.
Art space, according to Toporov, isea frame in which the meanings of the mythological, archetypal and symbolic nature are fixed. In addition, the art space isiis an important attribute of individual creativity and mythmaking, allows the researcher to come to an understanding of the unique phenomena of lettersandtours, their structure and mythological content.
A review of modern studies devoted to the study of artistic space and time in the perspective of studying various historical and literary phenomena allows us to draw some conclusions about the nature of these categories and their methodological significance. Rhythm, space and time in literature and art. - L., 1974 .; Gabrichevsky A.G. Space and Time // Questions of Philosophy. - 1990. - No. 3. - p. 10 -13 .; Prokopova M. V. Semantics of spatio-temporal landmarks in the poem by L. N. Martynov "Ermak" // From text to context. - Ishim, 2006, pp. 189-192 - and many others. etc.
Literary works are permeated with temporal and spatial representations, infinitely diverse and deeply significant. There are images of biographical time (childhood, adolescence, maturity, old age), historical (characteristics of the change of eras and generations, major events in the life of society), cosmic (idea of \u200b\u200beternity and universal history), calendar (change of seasons, weekdays and holidays) , daily (day and night, morning and evening), as well as ideas about movement and immobility, about the correlation of the past, present, future.
According to D.S. Likhachev, from era to era, as ideas about the changeability of the world become wider and deeper, the images of time acquire more and more significance in literature: writers more and more clearly and tensely realize, more and more fully capture the "diversity of forms of movement", "mastering the world in its time dimensions ”[Khalizev 2002: 247].
No less diverse are the spatial pictures present in the literature: images of closed and open space, terrestrial and cosmic, really visible and imaginary, ideas of near and distant objectivity.
The location and relationship of spatio-temporal images in the work is internally motivated - there are also “life” motivations in their genre conditioning, there are also conceptual motivations. It is also important that the spatio-temporal organization is of a systemic nature, eventually forming the “inner world of a literary work” (DS Likhachev).
Moreover, in the arsenal of literature there are such artistic forms that are specifically designed to create a spatio-temporal image: a plot, a system of characters, a landscape, a portrait, etc. When analyzing space and time in a work of art, one should take into account all the structural elements and artifacts present in it.andpay attention to the originality of each of them: in the character system (contrust, mirroring, etc.), in the structure of the plot (linear, oneanddirected or with backtracking, running ahead, spiral, etc.), withaboutsupply the proportion of individual elements of the plot, as well as identify the nature of the landscape and portrait, carry out a motivational analysis of the workeniya. It is no less important to look for motivations for the articulation of structural elements and, ultimately, to try to comprehend the ideological and aesthetic semantics of the space-time image that is presented in the work.
CHAPTER 2. FEATURES OF SPATIAL-TIME ORGANIZATION OF STORIES BY L. PETRUSHEVSKAYA
This chapter analyzes the stories of L. Petrushevskaya from the point of view of their spatio-temporal organization, an attempt is made to understand the root causes of the heroes' tragedies in the writer's special artistic world.
2.1 The apartment as the main topos of the living space
Even Bulgakov's Woland said that "the housing problem has spoiled the Muscovites." Both during the years of Soviet power and in the post-Soviet period, housing problems were among the main everyday problems of our fellow citizens (and not only Muscovites). It is no coincidence that the apartment becomes the main topos in the everyday space of the heroes of L. Petrushevskaya.
The heroes of Petrushevskaya are inconspicuous people tortured by life, quietly or scandalously suffering in their communal apartments in unsightly courtyards. The author invites us to office offices and stairwells, introduces us to various misfortunes, immorality and lack of meaning in existence. There are few happy people (heroes) in the world of Petrushevskaya, but happiness is not the goal of their life.
At the same time, everyday everyday problems also narrow their dreams, and can significantly limit the space of their life. It is in the apartments (with varying degrees of coziness) that events take place in the stories "Own Circle", "The Way of Cinderella", "Happy End", "Country", "To the Beautiful City", "Children's Party", "Dark Fate", " Life is theater ”,“ Oh, happiness ”,“ Three faces ”and others. Of the many options for apartments and flats, communal apartments, etc. a certain generalized topos of “an apartment from Petrushevskaya” is formed, in which a sophisticated reader can discern the features of other apartments well known in literature and culture (from Dostoevsky to Makanin).
Let us dwell on the most typical examples: the stories “To a Beautiful City”, “Country” and “Cinderella's Way” are surprisingly consonant with each other at the level of spatial organization (as if events are taking place next door), although the content of these two stories is different.
In the story "Country" the apartment is a kind of refuge where the mother of an alcoholic lives with her daughter. Here, as such, there is no description of the world of things, objects, furniture, thus the reader has a feeling of the emptiness of the space in which its inhabitants live. We read at the beginning of the story: "The daughter usually plays quietly on the floor while the mother drinks at the table or lying on the couch." We see the same thing at the end of the story: "The girl really doesn't care, she is quietly playing on the floor with her old toys ..." L. Petrushevskaya's story "Country" and all other works are cited from an electronic document with the address: http://www.belousenko.com/wr_Petrushevskaya.htm . A double repetition speaks of the hopelessness of the situation, and the repeated emphasis on the fact that it is quiet in the apartment further enhances the feeling of emptiness, gloom and even lifelessness. The heroine, being in the confined space of the apartment, does not seek to change her life. The only thing she still cares about is to fold in the evening "Things for her daughter for kindergarten, so that in the morning everything is at hand."She comes alive only when she goes to visit with her daughter, i.e. leaves the space of his home and finds himself in another space, alien, completely opposite, where there are people, communication, and therefore life. She feels here as if she were hers, and she was kind of accepted, but when she «Gently calls and congratulatessomeone happy birthday, pulls, mumbles, asks how life is going ...waiting ", until she is invited, then in the end "Hangs up and runs to the grocery store for another bottle, and then to the kindergarten for her daughter."
The heroine of the story "Country" finds herself in a situation of lifelong loneliness, loss of hope. This is a person who is thrown overboard of life because of his inability to realize himself, who is outside of society, outside of society, therefore, outside of human ties and communication. This woman has lost confidence in life, she has no friends or acquaintances. The consequence of all this is her loneliness, isolation in space.
Similar events could happen to anyone, anywhere. However, as one Roman philosopher Seneca said, "as long as a person is alive, he should never lose hope." Each has its own "country" in which he can plunge "in moments of mental hardship."
The story "To a beautiful city" is very consonant with this story. After reading it, one gets the feeling that this is the beginning of the story described in "Strana". The image of an alcoholic mother from "Strana" is correlated with the image of Anastasia Gerbertovna, and the daughter of an alcoholic is reminiscent of Anastasia's daughter, Vika, also Gerbertovna. Petrushevskaya does not skimp on details in describing Vika's appearance: “A scarecrow of seven years old, everything is crooked and oblique, the coat is not on the right button, the tights have slipped out, the boots have been worn down by more than one generation of flat-footed children, inside with socks. Light shags hang. "The mother is not much different from the daughter: "Wow, girl, hair like a drowned woman's hanging separately, the skull shines, her eyes are sunken."These two portrait descriptions characterize not only the heroines, but also the space in which they live. It becomes clear that a mother and her daughter live in poverty, they have nothing to wear, nothing to even eat. The story begins with Alexey Petrovich (graduate student, devoted student of Larisa Sigizmundovna, Nastya's mother), once again takes Nastya and Vika to the buffet, where the child eats greedily ("like the last time in his life").
Nastya's family, already at the time when Nastya was still a child, never lived in abundance, but there was always enough for food. After the death of Larisa Sigismundovna, Nastya's life deteriorated significantly. And these deteriorations were primarily reflected at the level of space. Exactly the topos of the apartment becomes an indicator of human well-being in the world of Petrushevskaya.
While Nastya's mother was alive, she tried to do everything possible for her daughter and granddaughter: she “I changed my St. Petersburg apartment for a room closer to my father, when she moved in with the child, she also made plans, apparently, to buy both, to make repairs, but no. There was no money, no energy. "Larisa Sigismundovna fought until the last day, trying to find at least some place where she would be paid. She was a very good teacher, gave lectures, gave all of herself to work, sparing no effort to feed her household. Already knowing about my illness, "Larissa<…> she took on more and more new work, wrote her doctoral dissertation on her last legs, at the same time teaching her useless science of cultural studies in three places ”. Even lying in the hospital, Larisa ran away after the radiation sessions to finish reading her lectures, because " paid specifically for the allotted hours, and not for the absence of an employee due to illness» ... Everything that we learn in the story about Nastya's mother speaks of her active life position, which cannot be said about Nastya herself.
The time came when the Herbertovns were left alone. With the departure of Larisa Sigismundovna, life in the apartment stops, to some extent even dies. This can be seen at least from the following passage: “When there was a commemoration, Lara's friends set a table in the house of the deceased, and there was genuine poverty, no one even suspected that this could be a broken piece of furniture, cracked wallpaper.” An image of a space arises where objects, furniture have not just lost their purpose, have become not in demand by man, they have changed their quality (“ broken furniture, cracked wallpaper ").This suggests that the heroine's world is in decline. The outer world of things is a reflection of her inner world. The image of the space in which Nastya lives with her daughter explains the behavior of the heroine. Nastya does not strive for an active life, she has no desire to correct the situation in which she and Vika found themselves. This "natural habitat" overwhelmed Nastya so much that she does not even have the strength to get up on time: “The poor have few opportunities and often do not have the strength to even get up on time, as it turned out, because the young mother Nastya went to bed late and got up when she got up, she has already formed a natural habitat in the company of the same poor people who cannot lie down all night, are awake, they talk, smoke and drink, and during the day they sleep in five on the sofa. "
It is noteworthy that the apartment at Petrushevskaya is a space of a special type of people: as a rule, the unfortunate owner of the apartment receives guests as unfortunate as himself. The space of Nastya's apartment attracts the same "poor and unfortunate" as Nastya herself. She is a “kind soul,” as Valentina said, so she cannot refuse anyone, drive out of the house. From here the apartment turned into an "ugly nest" full of "Sprawling guys in shorts and girls in underwear because of the heat."L. Petrushevskaya writes in her story that “This rookery vividly resembled either a dugout in the taiga, where it was heatedly heated, or the last day of Pompeii, only without any tragedy, without these masks of suffering, without heroic attempts to take someone out and save. On the contrary, everyone tried not to be carried out of here. They looked indirectly towards Valentina, who was busy around the child, waiting for this aunt to disappear. "
All my mother's friends and acquaintances try to help Nastya: they try to find at least some kind of work for her, bring food home (but "you can't get enough food"), help with housing, etc. In return, they receive sidelong glances not only from her “friends”, but also from Nastya herself. She is embarrassed to let in her space people who want to do good for her and Vikochka, but freely lets those who eat the last supplies in the house, that there is even nothing to feed the child with. Those. the space in which the heroine of the story lives is more open to “strangers” who have already become “theirs” for Nastya.
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Deformation of the personality, lowering the level of morality, loss of the culture of human relations in the family and society. "True Tales" by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya. Stylistic polyphony as a trademark. Analysis of the collection of stories "On the road of the god Eros".
abstract, added 06/05/2011
Features of the interaction of artistic space and time. The combination of fantasy and artistic time in the poems of the English romantic Samuel Coleridge. Features of the organization of the fantastic in the poem "The Tale of the Old Sailor" and "Christabel".
term paper, added 04/23/2011
Features of the creative individuality of M. Weller, the inner world of his characters, their psychology and behavior. The originality of Petrushevskaya's prose, the artistic embodiment of images in stories. Comparative characteristics of the images of the main characters in the works.
abstract, added 05/05/2011
Analysis of the semantic space in the prose of N.V. Gogol from the point of view of conceptual, denotative and emotive aspects. Spatio-temporal organization of artistic reality in the works of the author. Concept words of the artistic world.
term paper added 03/31/2016
The personality and creative destiny of the writer L.N. Andreeva. The concept of title, character, space and time in works. Analysis of the stories "Judas Iscariot", "Elezar", "Ben-Tobit". Differences and similarities between Andreev's stories and the Gospel texts.
thesis, added 03/13/2011
The concept of a chronotope in literary criticism. The historicity of the chronotope in F. Gorenstein's story "With a purse". A bright toponymic map is a feature of the story. Essential interconnection, inseparability of time and space in the artistic world.
Alexey Kuralekh
The story "Time is Night" and the cycle of stories "Songs of the Eastern Slavs" seem to be two opposite principles in the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, two poles, between which her artistic world balances.
In the cycle "Songs of the Eastern Slavs" we have a series of strange stories, "cases" - dark, terrible, night. As a rule, someone's death is at the center of the story. Death is unusual, causing a sense of the fragility of the border between the real and the unreal world, between the existence of the dead and the living.
At the beginning of the war, one woman receives a funeral for her husband, a pilot. Soon after, a strange young man appears at her house, thin, haggard. The young man turns out to be her husband, who deserted from the army. One day he asks a woman to go into the forest and bury the uniforms that he left there when he left the unit. A woman buries some scraps of a pilot's overalls lying at the bottom of a deep funnel. After that, the husband disappears. Then he appears to a woman in a dream and says: "Thank you for burying me" ("The Case in Sokolniki").
And here is another case.
A colonel's wife dies during the war. After the cemetery, he discovers that he has lost his party card. In a dream, the deceased comes to him and says that he dropped the ticket when he kissed her in the coffin. Let him dig out the coffin, open it and get the ticket, but he does not remove the cover from her face. The colonel does just that. Only removes the veil from his wife's face. At the airfield, a pilot approaches him and offers to deliver him to the unit. The Colonel agrees. The pilot flies into a deep dark forest. Bonfires are burning in the clearing. People are walking around, burned, with terrible wounds, but clean faces. And the woman sitting by the fire says: "Why did you look at me, why did you lift the veil, now your hand will dry up." The colonel is found unconscious in the cemetery at the grave of his wife. His arm is "badly damaged and will probably dry up now" ("Hand").
Gradually, these unusual, strange plots create a picture of a special artistic world, a particularly perceived life. And there is something subtly childish in this perception. In fact, this is an echo of those "scary" stories that we have heard more than once and told ourselves at school or in kindergarten, where even death is not a mystery, but only a riddle, just an interesting terrible incident of life. The more interesting the plot, the better, and the worse it is, the more interesting. The feeling of fear in this case turns out to be purely external.
Petrushevskaya is fluent in this "childish" material. At the right moment, we will be on our guard, in the right place a slight chill will pass down the back, as once upon a time in the dark room of a pioneer camp. (Of course, this will happen if the reader is not an inveterate skeptic and accepts the conditions of the game.) Mastery of the genre is so virtuoso that at some point you begin to think about the similarities not only in the manner of the narration of the child and the narrator, but also on the commonality of the children's worldview and worldview of the author ...
In the artistic world of these stories, the same "childish" sense of distance between events and the author is clearly felt. It seems that the emotions of the heroes, their character, fates in general are indifferent to him, only the vicissitudes of the relations of the characters inhabiting the stories, their copulation, their death are interesting - the author is not in life, does not merge with it, does not feel it as something of his own, consonant, blood, close ...
But such a view from the outside is fraught with a serious problem, carries a shade of artificiality. Indeed, the child's detached view of the adult world is natural; it does not violate the general harmony of the child's inner life. For a child has its own hidden life, different from the life of an adult. Harmony, beauty reigns in it, and all the absurdity and all the horror of the external, adult world is nothing more than an interesting game that can be interrupted at any moment, and its end will inevitably be happy. A child is unfamiliar with the painful feeling of the mystery of life - he keeps this secret in himself as something originally given and, only having matured, forgets it. By the way, it is precisely this perception of life that is characteristic of Petrushevskaya's children's plays - strange, absurd, but bearing in themselves the natural harmony of play.
Unlike a child, an adult is deprived of the happy harmony of a closed inner life. His outer being and his inner world develop according to the same I, the same laws. And death is not a game, but death in earnest. And absurdity is not a funny performance, but a painful sense of the meaninglessness of existence. The characteristic conventionality, absurdity, theatricality of many adult works by Petrushevskaya, both plays and stories, turns out to be devoid of that natural lightness and inner harmony that is inherent in her children's works. An attempt by a child to remove himself from life on adult material, on an adult feeling of life, inevitably leads to the loss of the unity of the world, to its breakdown, to rigidity. Not the childish harshness of the game, where everything is not for real, where everything is pretend, but the cold, rational harshness of an adult who consciously abstracts from the world and ceases to perceive its pain.
This can be easily seen in the cycle "Songs of the Eastern Slavs". In the story “New District”, a woman gives birth to a premature baby, “and the baby, after a month of life in an incubator, you think that it contained two hundred and fifty grams of a pack of cottage cheese - he died, he was not even given to bury ...”. Comparison of a child with a pack of cottage cheese will be repeated more than once, with enviable persistence in the story. It will be repeated in passing, as if by the way, as a matter of course ... “My wife opened milk, she went to the institute four times a day to give up, and her milk was not necessarily fed exactly to their pack of cottage cheese, there were other thieves children ... . "" Finally, Vasily's wife got pregnant, she really wanted a baby, to blot out the memory of a pack of cottage cheese ... "In this indifferent assimilation of a human being to a food product, there is something grossly destroying certain moral laws, laws of life, life itself. And not only the life of that everyday world in which the heroes of Petrushevskaya revolve, but also the world of the story itself, the artistic world of the work.
Of course, there is an inevitable dissonance in art: sometimes it is through discord, through dirt and blood that the higher is cognized. Art seems to stretch life between the two poles of tension - chaos and harmony, and the sensation of these two points at once gives rise to a breakthrough called catharsis. But the "pack of cottage cheese" from Petrushevskaya's story is not the pole of life and its extreme point, for it is outside of life, outside of artistry. Being is so "stretched" between the two poles that at last some thread inevitably breaks - only fragments of the artistic fabric of the work remain in the hands. This gap is inevitable, the process of inventing more and more "horrors" is underway, life is being tested for strength, an experiment is being put on life ...
But here we have before us the story "Time for Night". The main character Anna Andrianovna, on whose behalf the narration is being conducted, consciously and persistently tears the shaky threads connecting her with the outside world, with the people around her. First, her husband leaves. Then the remaining family gradually disintegrates. A mother, a sick old woman who has gone out of her mind, is sent to the mental hospital. The son-in-law, whom Anna Andrianovna once forcibly married to her daughter, leaves, then ruthlessly persecuted, reproaching with a piece of bread, harassing slowly, stubbornly and aimlessly. A daughter leaves for a new man, in order to be abandoned in turn. Not a single meeting between mother and daughter is now complete without scandals and disgusting scenes. A son, a drunken man, broken after prison, leaves. Anna Andrianovna remains close to her only native being - her grandson Timofey, a capricious and spoiled child. But in the end he will leave her too.
The heroine will be left alone within the walls of her impoverished apartment, alone with her thoughts, alone with her diary, alone with the night. And the package of sleeping pills, taken from the daughter, makes it possible to guess about her future fate.
At first it may seem that Anna Andrianovna herself is to blame for her inevitable loneliness. With unexpected harshness and even cruelty, she is ready to suppress any impulse, any manifestation of warmth from her, loved ones .. When, during the next return, her daughter suddenly sat down helplessly in the hallway and muttered: “How did I live. Mama!" - the heroine will interrupt her deliberately rude: "There was nothing to give birth, went and scraped it out." “One minute between us, one minute in the last three years,” the narrator admits, but she herself will destroy this fleeting possibility of harmony and understanding.
However, gradually, in the disunity of the heroes, we begin to feel not so much the tragedy of an individual as a certain fatal inevitability of peace. The life that surrounds the heroes is hopeless in everything: both in large and in small, in existence and in individual details. And the loneliness of a person in this life, in the midst of a beggar hopeless life, is predetermined from the outset. The heroine's mother is lonely, her daughter is lonely, Andrei's son is lonely, who is driven from the house by his wife. Lonely is the casual fellow traveler of the heroine Ksenia - a youthful "storyteller" who, like Anna Andrianovna, earns a pittance with her performances in front of children.
But the most amazing thing is that in this eerie, hopeless, forgotten world, in this city, where you forget about the existence of trees and grass, the heroine retained in her soul a strange naivety and a talent for believing people. Her son deceives her, taking the last money, a random stranger deceives her on the street, and this middle-aged woman, experienced in lies and deceit, caustic and sarcastic, trustingly opens up to meet the outstretched hand. And in this movement of her there is something touching and helpless. The heroine retains an inescapable need for spiritual warmth, although she cannot find it in the world: “Twice a day, showers and for a long time: someone else's warmth! warmth of the thermal power station, for lack of anything better ... ”She retains the ability and need to love, and all her love is poured out on her grandson. An unusual, somewhat painful, but completely sincere pathos of salvation lives in her.
“I save everyone all the time! I am the only one in the whole city in our neighborhood listening at night, if anyone is screaming! Once I heard a stifled cry at three in the summer in the summer: “Lord, what is this! Lord, what is it! " Female stifled powerless half-cry. I then (my hour came) leaned out the window and barked solemnly: “What is happening ?! I'm calling the police! ””
The tragic disunity of people in the world of Petrushevskaya turns out to be generated not by the cruelty of an individual person, not soullessness, not coldness, not atrophy of feelings, but by his absolute, tragic isolation in himself and detachment from life. Heroes cannot see an echo of their own in someone else's loneliness and equate someone else's pain with their own, unite their life with the life of another person, feeling that common circle of being in which our destinies, merged into an indissoluble unity, revolve. Life disintegrates into separate fragments and debris, into separate human existences, where everyone is alone with his pain and longing.
But the life of the protagonist in the story becomes both a statement and an overcoming of this state. The entire course of the author's narration gives the feeling of a slow, difficult entry into life, merging with it, the transition from feeling from the outside, from outside to feeling from within.
The story has three central female characters: Anna, Seraphima and Alena. Their fates are mirrored, their lives repeat each other with fatal inevitability. They are lonely, men go through their lives, leaving disappointment and bitterness, children are moving away more and more, and a hopeless, cold old age, surrounded by strangers, looms ahead. Episodes are repeated in their lives, the same faces flash, the same phrases sound. But the heroines do not seem to notice this in their endless enmity.
“Something was always wrong with the food our family members had, poverty was to blame for that, some scores, claims, my grandmother reproached my husband openly,“ she eats everything from children, ”etc. But I didn’t do that. never, except that Shura pissed me off, really a parasite and bloodsucker ... "
And after many years, he will probably also reproach his son-in-law Alena, not noticing, perhaps, that in anger he repeats the words of his mother and his grandmother.
But at some point something will subtly change in the course of the narrative, some invisible twist will make Anna suddenly clearly feel what, perhaps, she has long felt latently. Feel the unstoppable cycle of life and see your own destiny in the fate of your mother, sent to a psychiatric hospital. This feeling will come without will and desire, with the inevitability of insight.
“I burst into her room, she sat powerlessly on her sofa (now it's mine). Going to hang yourself? What are you ?! When the orderlies came, she silently, wildly cast a glance at me, tripled with a tear, threw up her head and walked, walked forever. " “It was me who was sitting now, I was now sitting alone with bloody eyes, it was my turn to sit on this sofa. This means that my daughter will now move here, and there will be no place for me here and no hope. "
She is equal to her mother, she is already on the verge of insanity, she is also capable of burning down a house, hanging herself, not finding her way. She is also an old woman, "granny," as her sister calls her in the mental hospital. But until recently, the heroine seemed to forget about it, happily telling how on the street from the back she was mistaken for a girl. And the end of her mother's life in a mental hospital becomes for Anna the end of “our life” and the life of Andrei, who was sitting in a pit with bars like her grandmother, and the life of Alena. No wonder the heroine will suddenly think about the old age of her daughter, about how she will show her grandmother's dresses, surprisingly suitable both in height and in figure.
It was then that Anna would rush in a desperate rush to rescue her mother from the mental hospital. At first - as if against desire, out of a feeling of contradiction of the daughter. But then the fate of her mother at some moment will become her fate, the mother's life will merge with her life - and the mother's doom will become her own doom.
The attempt to save the mother is hopeless. For this is an attempt to stop time, to stop life. But after the collapse of hopes, something very important comes to the heroine, and the end of the story, breaking off in mid-sentence, devoid of even the last punctuation mark, leaves a feeling of something understood, some kind of secret, if not realized, then suddenly felt.
“She took them away, complete ruin. No Tima, no children. Where to? Found it somewhere. This is her business. It is important that you are alive. The living ones left me. Alena, Tima, Katya, tiny Nikolai also left. Alena, Tima, Katya, Nikolay, Andrey, Serafima, Anna, forgive tears. "
The heroine calls her relatives by the names: daughter, son, mother. He calls himself the last. Also by name. All - young, old, children - are equated to each other; there are only names in the face of Eternity. All are included in a single existential circle, endless in their movements, all are inseparably fused in this unstoppable change of faces and times ...
In the story, as in the cycle "Songs of the Eastern Slavs", we will find a lot of what is commonly called "chernukha". There is nothing less in it, but maybe; and more than that everyday filth that Petrushevskaya so actively introduces into the fabric of her works. But unlike the stories of the cycle, this filth and ugliness of being is, as it were, passed through life, experienced from the inside, and not mechanically, in passing, introduced into the general plot outline. As a result, the narrative is devoid of artificiality and cold indifference; it becomes naturally and artistically organic.
And only harmony (not organic, but harmony) is still not felt in him. Harmony, which repels from everyday life, interrupts the course of the usual life and gropes for the unity and wholeness of the world in something unearthly. The works of Petrushevskaya are devoid of harmony as an echo of the higher, divine principle, which we are looking for in the anxiety and vanity of everyday life. And in the new story, and in the old stories of the author, there is no expected decisive breakthrough, a decisive ending, albeit tragic, albeit fatal, but still a way out. At the end - not an ellipsis that opens the way to the unknown, at the end - a cliff, immobility, emptiness ...
Many of Petrushevskaya's stories have one characteristic feature. Either in the titles themselves, or at the beginning of the story, a kind of claim is given for something more and more significant that awaits the reader ahead. "Nets and Traps", "Dark Fate", "Thunderbolt", "Elegy", "Immortal Love" ... The reader flips through the boring pages, finding in them familiar faces, simple plots, banal everyday stories. He expects the promised at the beginning - the sublime, large-scale, tragic - and suddenly stops before the emptiness of the end. No nets, no traps, no dark destinies, no immortal love ... Everything drowns in everyday life, everything is absorbed by it. It seems that the narrative in Petrushevskaya's prose seems to be spreading in different directions, stratifying, moving in one direction or the other, without a strict plot, without clear, thoughtful lines; the narrative seems to strive to break through the sintered crust of everyday life, to find a crack, to break out of it, to realize the original claim to the significance of life, the secret of life hidden by everyday life. And it almost always fails. (And if it succeeds, then somehow inorganic, artificial, with the internal resistance of the material.)
But at some point, when reading another, at first glance, the same boring, clogged, forgotten story, a different, new in tonality sensation comes to the reader. Perhaps the expected breakthrough never happens ?! Perhaps the meaning is not in a breakthrough, but in merging with everyday life, in immersion in it ?! Perhaps the secret does not disappear in everyday life, is not drowned out by it, but dissolves in it as something natural and organic ?!
The story "Elegy" tells about a strange, funny love. His name is Paul. She has no name, she is just his wife. Wherever he went, she followed him everywhere. She came to his work with the children, and he fed them in a cheap government dining room. She continued in marriage her old student life, poor, carefree, unlucky. She was a bad housewife and a bad mother. Pavel was surrounded on all sides by her tiresome love, annoying, intrusive, somewhat childishly funny. Once he climbed onto the roof to install the TV antenna and fell off the icy edge.
“... And Paul's wife with two girls disappeared out of the city, not responding to anyone’s invitations to live and stay, and the history of this family remained unfinished, it remained unknown what this family really was and how everything could really business end, because everyone at one time thought that something would happen to them, that he would leave her, unable to withstand this great love, and he left her, but not like that ”.
We cannot but feel in the last words some obvious deliberation. “Great love” for such a heroine is clearly ironic and theatrical. But in the light of the tragedy of the finale, it suddenly turns out that it is precisely this funny, ridiculous relationship with dinners in the state dining room, with student parties in an impoverished apartment that there is love and in its true meaning, that same great, "immortal" love, after which a book of stories by Petrushevskaya ... Heroes live two lives - external everyday life and internal life, but these two principles are not just linked - they are inconceivable without each other, they are one in their meaning.
The word Petrushevskaya acquires a kind of double sound associated with her special, easily recognizable manner of writing. The author's word is, as it were, disguised as everyday consciousness, everyday thinking, while remaining the word of an intellectual. It descends to the level of banality, stencil, pompous, sublime declamation - and retains its true, high meaning.
The perception of Petrushevskaya's life is a woman's feeling of the world. It is in the world of women that everyday life and being are inseparable. The mind of a man, starting from the prose of life, finds its embodiment and outlet in something else, the prosaic life is not the only, and perhaps not the main sphere of his existence. And this gives a man the opportunity to accept this life as something secondary and abstract from the dirt inside it. A woman's feelings are too closely tied to the real world; it is too "vital". And disharmony, the hopelessness of everyday life is for her the hopelessness of life as such. Is this not the origin of that hypertrophied, painful stream of "chernukha" that falls on the reader from the pages of women's prose? Petrushevskaya is no exception. This stream is not born of acceptance, not masochistic delight from the filth of life, but on the contrary - rejection, a protective reflex of non-involvement and detachment. A woman artist seems to take herself out of the brackets of this world - and all the horrors that happen and will happen to heroes and to life no longer concern her ...
This path is chosen by Petrushevskaya in the cycle of stories "Songs of the Eastern Slavs." But there is another path - a painful immersion in life, which the heroine of the story "Time for Night" goes through, and with her the author and the reader.
This path carries with it inescapable pain. But the feeling of pain is nothing more than the feeling of life, if there is pain, a person lives, the world exists. If there is no pain, but only calmness, cold and indifferent, life leaves, the world collapses.
Living life from the inside, in the unity of painful everyday life and being, through pain, tears, perhaps, is the movement to the higher, which we are so eager to find? To rise above life, you need to merge with it, to feel the significance and significance of ordinary things and ordinary human destiny.
The living of the world is the formation of the artistic world. And the artistry in the best works of Petrushevskaya becomes that sensitive barometer that captures and proves the authenticity and depth of such a feeling of life. Life as an indivisible unity of everyday life and being.
Keywords: Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, "Songs of the Eastern Slavs", criticism of the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, criticism of the plays of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, analysis of the work of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, download criticism, download analysis, free download, Russian literature of the 20th century
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya
Time is night
They called me, and a woman's voice said: - Sorry to bother you, but here after mom, - she paused, - after mom there were manuscripts. I thought you might read it. She was a poet. Of course I understand you're busy. A lot of work? I see. Well then, sorry.
Two weeks later, a manuscript arrived in an envelope, a dusty folder with many sheets of paper, school notebooks, even telegram forms. Subtitle "Notes on the edge of the table." No return address, no last name.
He does not know that when visiting, one cannot greedily rush to the mirror and grab everything, vases, figurines, bottles and especially boxes with jewelry. You can't ask for more at the table. He, having come to someone else's house, fumbles everywhere, a child of hunger, finds somewhere on the floor a little car drove under the bed and believes that this is his find, is happy, presses it to his chest, shines and tells the mistress that he has found what he has found for himself, and where - drove under the bed! And my friend Masha, it was her grandson who rolled her present, an American car, under the bed, and forgot that she, Masha, rolls out of the kitchen in alarm, her grandson Deniska and my Timochka have a wild conflict. Nice post-war apartment, we came to borrow until retirement, they all already floated out of the kitchen with oily mouths, licking their lips, and Masha had to return for us to the same kitchen and think about what to give us without damage. So Denis pulls out the little car, but this one clung to the unfortunate toy with his fingers, and Denis has just an exhibition of these cars, strings, he is nine years old, a healthy watchtower. I tear Tim away from Denis with his typewriter, Timochka is embittered, but they won't let us here anymore, Masha was already thinking when she saw me through the peephole! As a result, I take him to the bathroom to wash, weakened from tears, hysterical in someone else's house! That's why they don't like us, because of Timochka. I behave like an English queen, I refuse everything, from which everything: tea with crackers and sugar! I drink their tea only with my own bread, I pluck it out of the bag involuntarily, because the pangs of hunger at someone else's table are unbearable, Tim leaned on crackers and asks if it is possible with butter (a butter dish is forgotten on the table). "And you?" - Masha asks, but it's important for me to feed Timofey: no, thanks, anoint Timochka thicker, would you like Tim, more? I catch the sidelong glances of Deniska, who is standing in the doorway, not to mention his son-in-law Vladimir and his wife Oksana who has gone down the stairs to smoke, who comes right there to the kitchen, knowing my pain perfectly, and right in front of Tim says (and she looks great), says:
And what, aunt Anya (it's me), is Alena coming to you? Timochka, does your mother visit you?
What are you, Dunechka (that's her childhood nickname), Dunyasha, didn't I tell you? Alena is sick, she constantly has babies.
Mastitis??? - (And it was almost like, from whom is this her baby, from whose milk?)
And I quickly, grabbing a few more biscuits, good creamy crackers, take Tim out of the kitchen to watch TV into a large room, let's go, "Good night" soon, although at least half an hour before that.
But she follows us and says that it is possible to apply for Alena's work that the mother abandoned the child to the mercy of fate. Is it me, or what, the mercy of fate? Interesting.
What work, what are you, Oksanochka, she's sitting with a baby!
Finally, she asks, is it something that Alena once told her about on the phone, that she did not know that it happens and that it does not happen, and she cries, wakes up and cries with happiness? From that? When Alena asked for a loan for a cooperative, but we did not have it, did we change the car and repairs in the country? From this? Yes? I answer that I do not know.
All these questions are asked with the aim of not going to them anymore. But they were friends, Dunya and Alena, in childhood, we rested nearby in the Baltic States, I, young, tanned, with my husband and children, and Masha with Dunya, and Masha was recovering after a cruel running after one person, had an abortion from him, and he stayed with his family, not giving up anything, neither Tomik's fashion model, nor the Leningrad Tusya, they were all known to Masha, and I added fuel to the fire: because I was also familiar with another woman from VGIK, who was famous for her wide hips and the fact that she later got married, but a summons came to her house from a dermatovenerologic dispensary that she missed another infusion for gonorrhea, and with this woman he broke from the window of his Volga, and she, then a student, ran after the car and cried, then he threw an envelope out of the window, and in the envelope (she stopped to pick it up) there were dollars, but not much. He was a professor on Lenin's subject. And Masha stayed with Duna, and my husband and I entertained her, she languidly walked with us to the tavern, hung with nets, at Majori station, and we paid for her, we live once again, despite her earrings with sapphires. And she said to my plastic bracelet of a simple modern shape 1 ruble 20 kopecks Czech: "Is this a napkin ring?" “Yes,” I said, and put it on my arm.
And time has passed, I'm not talking about how I was fired, but I'm talking about the fact that we were and will be with this Masha at different levels, and now her son-in-law Vladimir is sitting and watching TV, which is why they are so aggressive every evening, because now Deniska will have a struggle with his father to switch to "Good night". My Timochka sees this program once a year and says to Vladimir: “Please! Well, I beg you! " - and folds his pens and almost kneels down, he copies me, alas. Alas.
Vladimir has something against Tima, and he is generally tired of Denis like a dog, my son-in-law, I tell you a secret, is clearly running out, is already melting, hence Oksanina's poisonousness. The son-in-law is also a graduate student on the Leninist topic, this topic sticks to this family, although Masha herself publishes whatever she likes, the editor of the calendar editorial office, where she gave me some money too languidly and arrogantly, although I helped her out by quickly scribbling an article about the bicentennial of the Minsk Tractor Plant, but she wrote me a fee, even unexpectedly small, apparently, imperceptibly for myself, I spoke with someone in co-authorship, with the chief technologist of the plant, as they rely on, because they need competence. Well, then it was so hard that she told me not to appear there for the next five years, there was some kind of remark that what could be the bicentennial of the tractor, in what year was the first Russian tractor produced (rolled off the assembly line)?
As for Vladimir's son-in-law, then at the described moment Vladimir is watching TV with red ears, this time some important match. Typical anecdote! Denis is crying, opened his mouth, sat on the floor. Timka climbs to help him out to the TV and, clumsy, blindly pokes his finger somewhere, the TV goes out, the son-in-law jumps up with a yell, but I’m ready for anything, Vladimir rushes into the kitchen for his wife and mother-in-law, he didn’t stop himself, thank God, Thank you, I came to my senses, did not touch the abandoned child. But already Denis drove the alarmed Tim, turned on whatever was needed, and they were already sitting, peacefully watching the cartoon, and Tim laughs with a special desire.
But not everything is so simple in this world, and Vladimir pounded the women thoroughly, demanding blood and threatening to leave (I think so!), And Masha enters with a sadness on her face like a person who has done a good deed and completely in vain. Behind her is Vladimir with the face of a gorilla. Nice man's face, something from Charles Darwin, but not at such a moment. Something base is shown in him, something despicable.
Then you can not watch this movie, they yell at Denis, two women, and Timochka, he heard enough of these screams ... He just starts to wry his mouth. A nervous tic like that. Shouting at Denis, they shout at us, of course. You are an orphan, an orphan, here is such a lyrical digression. It was even better in the same house, where Tima and I went to see very distant acquaintances, there is no telephone. They came, entered, they are sitting at the table. Tim: "Mom, I want to eat too!" Oh, oh, we walked for a long time, the child is hungry, let's go home, Timochka, I just ask if there is any news from Alena (the family of her former colleague, with whom they seem to be calling back). A former colleague gets up from the table as in a dream, pours us a plate of fatty meat borscht, oh, oh. We didn't expect this. There is nothing from Alena. - Is she alive? - She didn’t come, there’s no phone at home, and she doesn’t call to work. Yes, and at work, a person here and there ... I collect contributions. What. - Oh what you, bread ... Thank you. No, we will not be a second, I see you are tired, from work. Well, maybe only Timofeyka. Tim, would you like meat? Only for him, only for him (suddenly I cry, this is my weakness). Suddenly, a shepherd bitch rushes out from under the bed and bites Tim's elbow. Tim screams wildly with a mouth full of meat. The father of the family, also somewhat vaguely reminiscent of Charles Darwin, falls out from the table screaming and threatening, of course, pretending to be about the dog. That's it, there is no more road for us here, I kept this house in reserve, for a very last resort. Now that's all, now, as a last resort, you will need to look for other channels.
