"On the work of Gorky", a collection of articles, ed. I.K. Kuzmicheva
Gorky book publishing house, 1956
OCR site

Continuation of the book...

T. A. MAPAXOBA. THE ORIGINS OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHIC TRILOGY IN THE EARLY WORKS OF M. GORKY

M. Gorky's trilogy is the first classic work of the autobiographical genre in the literature of socialist realism. Due to the enormous cognitive and educational significance of this work and its fundamentally new qualities as an autobiography of socialist realism, not only the analysis of the trilogy is of great interest, but also the question of how the genre of this work was born and formed, what is the ideological, thematic and artistic relationship between the first drafts autobiographies dated 1893 and 1894, and the already established artistic and autobiographical canvas of the trilogy.
These questions are the main subject of this article.
The classical literature of the past and the literature of socialist realism knows many such literary talents, whose work is unusually characterized by an element of autobiography. One of them is Gorky. Autobiographical works occupy a very large place in the work of the proletarian writer. It is worth at least pointing out the autobiographical trilogy, the attempts to create it in the 90s, the collection of short stories "Across Russia", as well as many essay and autobiographical stories written at different times.
Highlighting specifically in the work of Gorky memoirs and autobiographical works, we can notice that the author's interest in them is uneven. There are periods when there are almost no works of this kind in the writer's work (from the beginning of the 900s to 1911). And there are periods when the subjective-lyrical authorial principle is present in many, and sometimes even in most, works. In this regard, the 1990s, 1912-1917 should be highlighted in particular, and Gorky's work of the Soviet years (1917-1936) should be noted with an emphasis on the 20s.
The absence of a subjective-lyrical beginning in the period from 1900 to 1912 is explained by one of the circumstances that for a long time prevented Gorky from starting to implement the plan to write an autobiography. He did not want to be anything, even from afar, like the bourgeois hacks of his day, who suppressed everything important and significant in life with tediously long, tedious conversations about their inner devastated personality. In a letter to Vengerov dated May 5, 1912, Gorky wrote: “It’s embarrassing to talk about yourself at a time when the modern writer’s “I” has swelled up in literature with our gray cloud and completely closes the social horizons and everyday landscape.”
In the period from 1912 to 1917, Gorky returned to the autobiographical genre. This is determined by the conditions of a new revolutionary upsurge in the country, when it was necessary to resort to especially convincing material in order to help contemporaries realize the vileness of the "lead abominations" of tsarist Russia, to inspire hatred for this "tenacious, vile truth", to convince the reader that in life after all, “bright, healthy and creative” should win. This material was the writer's memories of his past. Therefore, in a letter to Nevedomsky dated December 1911, Gorky wrote: “Never before have the honest people of Russia faced so many grandiose tasks, and a good image of the past would have been very timely in order to illuminate the paths to the future.”
Gorky's interest in the autobiographical genre did not fade even after October 1917. This is explained by the writer's desire to tell the Soviet youth how cruel and inhuman the past of their fathers and grandfathers was, so that they, these youth, learn to appreciate the present. This is evidenced by Gorky's statements scattered through various letters of those years.
The essential feature of Gorky's autobiography is that the writer tells not only and not so much about the hero himself, but about his environment. Thanks to Gorky's "vision of the world", the autohero does not obscure the diversity of human types and dramas that he encountered on his life path with his personality. On the contrary, in Gorky's interpretation they became especially convex and bright. This feature is visible not only in the mature works of the writer, but also in the stories of the 90s.
Speaking about the "passing", wandering through the boundless expanses of Russia, the author defines his place among the suffering people. This idea is especially clearly expressed in the collection of short stories "Across Russia". Gorky writes in the story "Hero" that the threads connecting "his heart with the world" are innumerable, and that with this "barefoot heart" he walked "through petty malice and the nasty things of life, like sharp nails, crushed glass," and all these he felt people “as his body, and himself as the heart of these people” (M. I. Kalinin).
It should also be noted that Gorky's trilogy, as a classic example of socialist autobiography, went through a complex process of its "construction" in those small and medium autobiographical narrative genres that frame it, as it were, from all sides. All these stories, together with the trilogy, form an integral autobiographical system.
In this work, we will focus on the works written by Gorky in the 90s, since it is in them that the trilogy originates.
Even in the early period of creativity, Gorky tried to create a coherent autobiographical canvas, as evidenced by the "Statement of facts and thoughts ..." (vol. 1, pp. 61-78), "Biography" (pp. 78-86). But these attempts were not destined to be fully completed. However, the idea of ​​an autobiography in the initial period of the writer's work was not an accident. He testifies that already in the 90s, young Gorky, apparently, began, albeit vaguely, to realize that his life path had a lot in common with the path of development of young Russia. But he was not yet able to express this great general in the socio-philosophical plane due to insufficient creative maturity. In the autobiographical trilogy, A. M. Gorky has already appeared as a well-established writer who managed to merge into one whole "the truth of artistic and the truth of scientific thought." And thus he made his trilogy not only a great fact of art, but also a very important source of knowledge of the world, a source based on a deep understanding of the laws of socio-historical development.
But can we say the same about the first types of the autobiographical genre? Could the young Gorky always turn the phenomenon of fact into a phenomenon of great art? These questions cannot be answered positively. In this regard, the attitude of the autohero towards his grandmother and mother is very indicative.
Both in the "Statement ..." and in the "Biography" the grandmother's path has not yet been comprehended as the path of a long-suffering Russian woman. In the autobiographical trilogy, however, this is presented through the prism of the great social challenge. Thanks to this, the image of the grandmother becomes the image of a folk storyteller who knows how to awaken the best sides of the soul in a person. Her tales turn into a source of folk wisdom, from which Alyosha Peshkov draws spiritual strength.
The attitude of the autohero towards his mother was dictated by his personal resentment towards her, severe towards his son and even leaving him with his grandfather. Therefore, having told in the “Statement ...” about a mother’s accidentally overheard confession that she cannot love her son because he interferes with her life (“And with such a block on your foot, you won’t jump far”), Gorky immediately remarks: “It’s hardly when I loved her, but respected her, probably because I was afraid.
While creating the story "Childhood", Gorky managed to reproduce in memory and place around the mother other material that characterizes her comprehensively, deeply, psychologically convincingly. Everything random, uncharacteristic was omitted. Thanks to this, the fact of reality turned into a fact of art.
In turn, this also testified to the expansion of the role of fiction in the trilogy, which made it a truly artistic work. The artist and the autobiographer are already on an equal footing here. Gorky already treats facts and persons not just as reserves of memory, but as material to which a certain artistic value can be attached.
"Statement ..." and "Biography" should be considered to a greater extent a phenomenon of fact than a phenomenon of art. The predominance of the truth of fact over the truth of art in these first drafts of an autobiography is so significant that they are closer to a memoir than to an artistic autobiography. As the spiritual growth of the proletarian writer, who matured along with the most revolutionary, to the end consistent class, the relationship between the author and the material, between the truth of the fact and the truth of art, changed. The fact is that Gorky more and more deeply comprehended his stock of knowledge about the world as a great social material, more and more firmly and confidently became in the position of a fighter and judge of the world doomed to destruction. That is why his autobiography became more and more offensive and effective. The author's "I" from a simple eyewitness and listener has turned into a hero of active revolutionary action. The relationship between the author and the material has changed in such a way that judgment, story and action have already begun to come from the narrator himself, and he himself has become very closely fused with the material being narrated. Attention to the depicted world not only did not decrease, but, on the contrary, increased. This can be seen both in the autobiographical trilogy and in the collection of short stories "Across Russia".
Let's move on to the question of the relationship between the early autobiographical stories and sketches and the trilogy in terms of content, and partly in terms of artistic form.
As a starting point, we point out that the autobiographical works of young Gorky, reproducing certain moments of the writer's life, complement the material of the trilogy, sometimes being a variation of its entire pieces, or represent a direct continuation of the My Universities period. The works supplementing the trilogy include the first autobiographical experiments, of which "Statement of facts and thoughts ..." corresponds in material to the period of "Childhood", "Biography" - to the period described in the story "In People". These two works are, in a certain sense, variants of the first two parts of the trilogy. The story "Konovalov" should be attributed to the complementary third part of the autobiography. This work expands the reader's understanding of the Kazan period of A. Peshkov's life. It should not be embarrassing that this work was written almost 20 years before the appearance of My Universities, which, by the way, says nothing about the story told in Konovalov. It is not without reason to assume that the genre of autobiography, like any other genre, has its limits, and therefore it cannot absorb all the abundance of impressions about life with which the autohero was oversaturated.
Most of the autobiographical stories of the 90s are connected with the impressions of the Gorky period of wandering around Russia and are built on the material of his personal acquaintance with the gifted, talented, beautiful soul of the Russian people. These are the stories: “Veselchak” and “Malva” (the period of work of A. Peshkov in fishing artels in the Caspian Sea), “Conclusion”, “Ma-scarlet”, “Crimean sketches”, partly “Konovalov”, “On salt”, “My Sputnik", "Makar Chudra" and others, telling about the wanderings of the autohero across the Ukrainian expanses, the Black Sea coast, across the Caucasus up to Tbilisi. The extreme concreteness and persuasiveness of these stories is evidenced by the fact that the author sometimes gives dates and indicates the places where this or that incident took place. So in the story "Conclusion", telling about the cruel punishment of a peasant who cheated on his wife, Gorky remarks: "I saw this in 1901 on July 15 in the village of Kandybovka, Kherson province of the Nikolaevsky district." According to the ideological content, the object of the image, the persuasiveness and concreteness of the narrative, these stories are correlated with the cycle of stories "Across Russia", written almost simultaneously with the first two parts of the trilogy.
Some of the stories, which have varying degrees of autobiography, tell about the Nizhny Novgorod and Samara periods of the writer's life - "Grandmother Akulina", "Notch", "The Woman with Blue Eyes", "Several Days as an Editor of a Provincial Newspaper".
A considerable number of Gorky's autobiographical stories of the 1990s are devoted to the writer's philosophical reflections on the meaning of life ("Overboard"), on the tasks and qualities of genuine folk literature and the fight against the literature of lies and deceptions ("Reader", "On the Devil", "More about the devil ", etc.).
Particular attention should be paid to the works that complement the trilogy, because they were the first step in the writer's determination of the principles of approach to autobiographical material, in the matter of understanding his attitude to those characters, many of whom were included in the autobiographical trilogy.
In terms of these arguments, let us dwell on the story "Grandma Akulina", which, in our opinion, is also largely autobiographical (vol. 2, pp. 142-153). If we compare the image of the grandmother in this story with her image in the "Statement of Facts and Thoughts ..." and "Biography", then we can note that in the last two passages the image of the grandmother has not yet acquired a complete outline of character, there remains a touch of some uncertainty in it . In these passages, we see only a hint of what kind of truth the grandmother professed and what was her principle of relating to people. We never see her as a participant in wild quarrels over the inheritance, she does not condemn the behavior of her daughter Barbara and is even ready to accept her illegitimate child, she always had affectionate eyes.
In the story "Grandma Akulina" the image of the heroine is already distinguished by the concreteness and clarity that brings her closer to how she will be depicted in an autobiographical trilogy. A small beggar, hunched over by old age, she does not live for herself, but in order to feed the hungry inhabitants of the barefoot rooming house. It is no coincidence that policeman Nikiforych calls her "a holy soul on crutches", the "mother" of homeless people. Even dying, she said to the greedy people who did not love and mocked her "bottom" people: "I loved you."
In all this we see grandmother Akulina's all-forgiving blind love for people indiscriminately, her abstract humanism. “We are all the same people,” she said. It is no coincidence that Gorky himself writes at the end of this story: “So they buried grandmother Akulina, a thief, a beggar and a philanthropist from the back of Wet Street.” We see that her unreasonable, all-forgiving humanism destroys her in the end - after all, she broke down, collecting alms for a tramp squalor, "hostile to everything" and looking at everything from the point of view of "embittered skepticism."
In the story "Grandma Akulina" we see the completion of the fate of the heroine. The material and pathos of the autobiographical trilogy Gorky would later assert that the life of Akulina Ivanovna should have taken exactly this, and not another, path. A mature autobiographer, he condemned his grandmother for the fact that she equally pitied all people and asked God for mercy for all of them.
However, it should be emphasized that Gorky looked at the world already from the point of view of the experience of the first Russian revolution and the new revolutionary upsurge ripening in the country. Therefore, the condemnation of the class-amorphous psychology of the grandmother in the stories "Childhood" and "In People" is given more sharply and irreconcilably than in the 90s, and her image itself has become more full-blooded and complete than in the original works.
The image of the grandmother in early work was the primary source of this image in the trilogy and in terms of portrait characteristics. Here and there it is a woman of small stature, with “a huge red, wrinkled nose, with an abundance of thick black hair on her head. And she also had black eyes, large, always, even when she was angry with me, affectionate "(" Statement ... ").
However, we note that only in the autobiographical trilogy in the portrait of grandmother Gorky emphasized that soft, spherical, whole that was inherent in her. Describing the grandmother in the story “Childhood”, Gorky wrote: “She is all dark, but shone from the inside - through her eyes - with an unquenchable, cheerful and warm light. She was stooped, almost hunchbacked, very plump, but she moved easily and dexterously, like a big cat - she is soft, just like this affectionate beast ”(vol. 13, p. 15).
The profound humanity and nobility of the grandmother's character is evidenced by her enormous beneficial influence on the spiritual growth of A. Peshkov, which we see both in the first versions of the autobiography and in its final text. Gorky even wanted to call the first part of the trilogy “Grandmother”. In Childhood, Gorky directly speaks of this influence of hers: “Before her, it was as if I was sleeping, hidden in the dark, but she appeared, woke me up, brought me to the light, tied everything around me into a continuous thread, wove it into multi-colored lace and immediately stood on all my life a friend, the closest to my heart, the most understandable and dear person - it was her disinterested love for the world that enriched me, saturating me with strong strength for a working life ”(vol. 13, p. 15).
The image of the grandfather in the first autobiographical sketches is also the starting point in his interpretation in the trilogy. We see this both in his portrait characteristics - in both cases he is drawn as an angry, red-haired old man with prickly green eyes - and in his inner qualities of a person in whom Alyosha "immediately felt ... an enemy ..." ("Childhood ").
The images of grandfather and grandmother were for Alyosha the embodiment of those two principles that helped the autohero determine his attitude to the surrounding reality, taught him to appreciate everything reasonable and fair in it and to hate everything that prevented a person from living and breathing freely. This brought him up, forcing him to come into conflict with dark, evil forces as early as childhood. True, in the "Exposition..." the social interpretation of these evil forces is extremely weak; there is not even a history of the grandfather's ascent from a barge hauler to the owner-owner. In the "Biography" the social side of the issue becomes clearer. However, in these two texts as a whole, the main tendency of the two beginnings of life in the images of grandmother and grandfather is fully indicated, although it is developed only in the trilogy.
As in the trilogy, in the "Statement ..." and "Biography" the leading problem is the formation of the character of A. Peshkov as a "continuously growing person." However, in the trilogy, this growth is shown in terms of the formation of the character of the future fighter, writer, a person of a new spiritual warehouse, who is the spokesman for the interests of the progressive Russian nation. Considering the spiritual development of the author's "I" in the variants, we still cannot say with all certainty that we have before us the future leading representative of the Russian nation, although progressiveness and a militant spirit are already inherent in him now. This lack of certainty is explained primarily by the fact that everything around Gorky is given in refraction through personal resentment, and this obscures the growth of social vision in the hero. Therefore, its "conflict" with the environment is still partial. And Alyosha himself felt himself a victim of his relatives, rather than of society.
Characteristic in this regard is the incident that occurred during the wedding of his mother. Even before the arrival of the guests, Alyosha climbed under the sofa, wanting to check whether he would be remembered on this solemn day. Thus, he wanted to dispel the mood of abandonment and loneliness in himself. They really remembered him, but after many hours. However, no one ran to look for him, on the contrary, his mother and grandfather spoke of him unfriendly, calling him a "tomboy" and "absurd guy." In the trilogy, however, the hero's encounters with those around him are comprehended in terms of the social conflict of the individual with society.
But already in the outlines of the "Biography" in the author's "I" the features of the future advanced person are sometimes felt. Gorky writes: “I filled space with pictures of my future life. It has always been tailored all of instructively good deeds. So I wander from place to place and help everyone, teaching reading and writing and something else. Everyone loves and caresses me” (“Biography”). But so far, the autohero still felt like a "little, powerless boy" who "has nowhere to wait for help ...". However, the merit of the autohero and the symptom of the awakening in him of a person of a new spiritual warehouse was that he did not want to put up with his impotence and loneliness. He understood even during childhood and especially work in people that a person creates his resistance to the environment. This idea is present with ever-increasing force both in the "Statement ..." and in the "Biography". Using the technique of some hyperbolicity, Gorky even suggests that the first cry of Alyosha, who had just been born, contained indignation and protest against unfair reality. Alyosha strove to do and say everything in defiance of this petty-bourgeois, self-serving type of life. Sometimes it was childishly naive, sometimes even quite serious. The story of the theft of painted eggs is curious. When Alyosha was suspected of participating in this theft, he refused and even swore - they believed him. When the grandfather flogged Sasha Yakovov for what he had done and for slandering Alyosha, the latter unexpectedly confessed, inwardly protesting that the grandfather was right about anything. In the "Biography" the author notes that he "had to be crushed by life in speed." To avoid this, he sought "to learn something and gain a foothold."
However, the content that was invested in the concept of the environment opposing Alyosha was too narrow in the first sketches, being limited, for example, in the “Statement ...”, to an idea almost only of the surrounding relatives. So, recalling how Alyosha, having run away from home, was lying in the garden, Gorky writes: “I liked this aloofness - there is something in it that flatters pride and raises a person above his fellows. And always after two or three hours of such solitude, my relatives seemed to me worse than me ”(“ Statement ... ”). In the "Biography", the concept of the environment is somewhat expanded, its social composition becomes clearer. On the one hand, these are the owners for whom Alyosha, his greedy grandfather, worked, and on the other hand, “those interesting people” whom he first met on the ship. And in the stories of these people, "and in their tone there was so much warmth, sincerity, good and kind, teaching me to understand and love a person."
But only in the autobiographical trilogy, from the height of the achievements of the proletarian revolution, Gorky opposed the environment, which meant the entire bourgeois-noble society. Therefore, in the first part of the Childhood trilogy, he declares: “... Truth is higher than pity, and after all, I’m not talking about myself, but about that close, stuffy circle of terrible impressions in which I lived - and to this day lives a simple Russian person » (vol. 13, p. 19). In "My Universities", feeling behind him a huge life and creative experience, the writer even more deeply comprehended the resistance of his autohero to a socially hostile environment as the most important law of the development of a healthy human personality in a class-antagonistic society. He wrote: “I did not expect help from outside and did not hope for a lucky chance, but strong-willed obstinacy gradually developed in me, and the more difficult the conditions of life were, the stronger and even smarter I felt. I realized very early that a person is created by his resistance to the environment” (ibid., p. 516).
Thanks to such resistance, Peshkov, even in childhood, managed to defend his personality from all harmful influences. This was facilitated by the fact that from an early age he had broken out of the philistine environment that gave birth to him, although in the "Statement ...", in comparison with "Childhood", this process of "breaking out" the hero was less pronounced. Gorky writes that his autohero, like all the boys of the philistine circle, walked in the yard, learned to read the book of hours and the psalter and write on a slate board, and ran into the street to fight. However, the main thing in Alyosha's character was still the ability to break himself so as not to be like others or become their victim. For example, in the Biography, the author writes: “This (thoughts about life) brought me to tears, which I carefully concealed, and gave rise to a dull, unsociable mood that made me avoid people, but I did not avoid them and my reputation as a cheerful and I didn’t spoil a living guy, - vaguely feeling that I’m not doing badly, breaking myself.
Although the concept of the environment is limited in the first versions of the autobiography, nevertheless one cannot agree with Gorky; who writes in the "Statement ..." that Alyosha "lived the most stereotyped life of a child of a prosperous-petty-bourgeois circle." The life of a little hero was more like a protest against petty-bourgeois norms and rules of life. Therefore, when Uncle Mikhail, during a quarrel over an inheritance, swings at Varvara, Alyosha's mother, the latter bites him painfully on the calf of his leg. And from that moment, Gorky begins "the story of the development of his independence and self-respect" ("Statement ..."). The boy always actively protested against the beatings of his grandmother by his grandfather. Once, protecting his grandmother, he rushed at his grandfather with his fists, knocking over a lit lamp along the way. “And there were many such cases,” writes Gorky, “and I always played an active role in them, as a result of which my grandmother fell in love with me even more, and my grandfather did not love me even more” (“Statement ...”). It is no coincidence that V. Kashirin called his grandson a "robber".
In the "Biography" the hero is already trying to "understand, understand, decompose" life in order to understand its injustices. Therefore, the sailors said about him: "Sneaky boy, this Lenka." The result of this protest and reflection was only that Alyosha sometimes "painfully contracted his heart," because he still could not understand the roots of social evil.
All this as a whole testified to the awakening in the autohero of a new truth, already different from the truth of the grandmother, although not yet completely spun off from her, especially in the "Statement ...". The latter is confirmed by "Childhood", in which the author recalls that he then "really liked the grandmother's god." In the "Statement ..." it is also said that Alyosha ardently hated that god, whose "vile truth" was professed by the philistines.
The growth of a new truth in the autohero was facilitated by his ever-growing powers of observation. Even the first nightmarish impressions of childhood awakened in him a sensitive attentiveness to people. All this filled his memory with impressions that M. Gorky would later comprehend as the “lead abominations” of tsarist Russia, and strengthened his energy of resistance to the environment. This observation not only distinguished Alyosha from the bourgeois environment, but also raised him above her.
The hero of the trilogy became especially sensitive not only and not so much to personal pain, but to the pain of other people. The author writes in "Childhood": "... it was as if the skin had been torn off my heart, it became unbearably sensitive to any insult and pain, my own and someone else's." Thanks to this social observation, the hero of the trilogy realized, for example, that the grandfather was angry not by nature, but due to some special life circumstances. These circumstances of the grandfather's life are revealed as the past of a barge hauler and water-pipe. And the grandfather, in the boy's imagination, "grew quickly, like a cloud ... turning from a small dry old man into a man of fabulous strength - he alone leads a huge gray barge against the river." Alyosha realized that the conditions of the bourgeois world had made him evil. In the variants of the trilogy, the grandfather is only an unpleasant person, irritable for some unknown reason.
In excerpts and in the trilogy, we see that Alyosha grew up, not being able to forget anything, although the protest ripening in him poured out in boyish mischief. In the first part of the trilogy, he simply will not accept his grandmother's instructions to live only with a "childish mind", not to delve into the question of "who is to blame for what."
Thus, both in the first versions of the trilogy and in it itself, the hero went to truly human truth not through the path of his fathers and grandfathers, but in his own special way. Moreover, the incomparably greater consciousness and clarity of this path in the trilogy is based on the rich revolutionary experience of the writer himself. The hero of the "Statement ..." and "Biography" felt life more than reflected on it. Therefore, only in "Childhood" is there such a strong, so significant discrepancy with grandmother's truth. In the variants it is only outlined.
Stopping at the “Biography”, we note that here, although sketchy, the main facts that determine the development of the character of Alyosha Peshkov, a teenager, are still indicated, which are detailed in the story “In People”. Speaking about these factors that form the personality of an autohero, let us single out, first of all, labor. Being the only means of subsistence, work testified to the special social path of Alyosha Peshkov, which is incomparable with the life of the heroes of all the classic autobiographies of the past. Indeed, for N. Irtenyev (L. Tolstoy), Bagrov-grandson (Aksakov), the hero of Korolenko’s “History of my Contemporary” and even for Herzen (“The Past and Thoughts”), to whose traditions Gorky was especially attentive, adolescence was time of systematic acquisition of knowledge in the gymnasium or at home. The heroes themselves were patronized and protected by their parents from any kind of labor, and there was no need for it due to the good financial security of the family.
According to the "Biography" we learn that Peshkov worked as a boy in the house of a draftsman, as a cook on a steamer, then, by the will of circumstances, he ends up as a boy in an icon-painting workshop.
In the story "In People" the list of works through which the autohero went through is somewhat wider. But the point is not in the size of the list, but in the fact that no matter how sometimes humiliating and ungrateful work may be, it nevertheless tempered Alyosha’s character, increased his resistance to the environment, taught him to value people in their attitude to work, to draw a line between workers and owner.
After going through many varieties of physical labor, the teenager felt serious and mature beyond his years. This is evidenced by those thoughts about life, which are especially numerous in the "Biography". The author himself recalls: "... I knew her (life) more than anyone else in my years" ("Biography"). In the story “In People”, this idea is developed further: “I have just passed 15 years old, but sometimes I felt like an elderly person. I somehow internally swelled and became heavy from everything that I had experienced, read, and thought about restlessly.
Labor also expanded Alyosha's connections with the outside world, introduced him to people of different social status. Especially much was given by communication with people from the lower classes of society, with whom he became close friends while working on the ship. Gorky writes about this period of his life: "I liked this lively life, varied with impressions, with a constant change of faces and pictures of nature." Alyosha considered conversations with people on the ship "indescribably good and uplifting."
Communication with this diverse Russia allowed Peshkov to know life in a way that no book could tell him about it. It, this communication, also gave rise to a great sense of collectivism in him, reducing to zero even the slightest signs of isolation, which, although to a very small extent, were nevertheless felt in the "Statement ...". He had already begun to dream of being "native to all" and that everyone was "native and dear" to him. The hero begins to dream of making his life useful to the people. “I filled the space with pictures of my future life. She was always modest and all of instructive good deeds,” recalls Gorky, “so I wander from place to place and help everyone, teaching reading and writing and something else” (“Biography”).
Thanks to all this, Peshkov's protest against the exploitative world begins to take on a social dimension. The internal, combative pathos of the "Biography", although not yet in full growth, but becomes the thought that sounded in the "Song of the Old Oak": "I came into the world to disagree." But the autohero did not yet know the real means of struggle, so he sometimes comes to despair, he becomes "nauseous and sad", thoughts of suicide sometimes stirred in his head. He was still unable to unravel the "muddy bubbles of human relations" in this socially unjust world.
But still, it was not these gloomy moods that were the main thing in Peshkov, a man of labor, but his deep faith and the triumph of a good, kind person, “... public repentance,” the author recalls the stories of people on the ship, “made it clear and simple, - how they won’t give 50 volumes of books - that a person is still good, and if he is dirty and vulgar, then it’s as if it’s not his fault, but it’s so required by someone or something ... ”(“ Biography ” ).
The second decisive and guiding moment in the development of the character of the autohero was the book. True, in contrast to the story "In People", in the "Biography" the role of the cook Smury in introducing Alyosha to reading is not emphasized. From this passage we can see that he loved to read books even before meeting the cook. Obviously, subsequently the material of memory was more ordered.
Telling about a different life, other people, the books did not tear Alyosha Peshkov away from reality, did not turn him into a dreamy romantic, but on the contrary, helped him understand life, taught him what to love and what to hate. Although in the "Biography" these thoughts are still only outlined, nevertheless they served as the source for detailed development in the second part of the trilogy. However, even here it is clearly indicated the enormous educational value of books that called for being equal to their noble heroes.
Alyosha already realized then that not all books are good, there are some that distort life. Gorky wrote that "they did not give the slightest idea about life ..." ("Biography").
Only in the story “In People” Gorky was able to deeply realize that real books helped him understand, while working with the owners, that he was “not alone on earth” and would not disappear, that there were many like him on earth.
Finally, the third determining principle in the development of Alyosha Peshkov was nature. Nature aroused in the boy an extraordinary susceptibility to the beautiful beginnings in life, even more sharply set off the world of social injustices. Therefore, the author notes that "... nowhere is it so good and easy to think like in the field."
While working on the ship, Alyosha observed that the people with whom he talked, contemplating the pictures of nature, became better, more beautiful, cleaner. Gorky writes: “And the later it got, the more the conversation lost its rough, bestial character and took on a purer, more human one. This was due to the fact that the moon always so kindly and gently poured over the river, and it splashed on the banks with a soft, reconciling sound ”(“ Biography ”).
However, unlike the trilogy, in the "Biography" the importance of nature for Peshkov's spiritual growth is too exaggerated. This does not at all deny its importance for the hero, but the leading factors were still the factors of the social order - work and reading books. Thus, although less concretely than in the autobiographical trilogy, Gorky nevertheless managed in the "Statement ..." and in the "Biography" to consider in Alyosha Peshkov, a child and a teenager, those positive life principles that would later lead him to the camp revolutionary fighters. This was undoubtedly a creative success for a young writer who knew how to approach reality from the standpoint of the philosophy of an active attitude to life.
However, the first symptoms of the awakening of a creative personality in Peshkov fell out of the author's field of vision. In the trilogy, this question occupies a significant place.
Finally, we will dwell very briefly on some moments of the artistic form of the initial sketches of the autobiography. First of all, speaking about the artistic method of these works, it should be noted that they are one of the first stages on M. Gorky's path to socialist realism. Therefore, along with a realistic depiction of reality, which was the origin of the autobiographical trilogy, elements of romance are also found here. After all, both the "Statement ..." and the "Biography" were written during the period when the author was most passionate about the romantic plan of creativity.
Some romanticism of these works is evidenced by the lack of clarity of the social characteristics of the characters, sometimes the preponderance of private truth over public truth, which we saw in previous chapters. In this regard, one should also point out a certain summation, abstraction in the analysis of specific life processes. Therefore, for example, the history of the grandfather and grandmother is not sufficiently disclosed in the variants. It is not clear why the grandfather is so angry, and the grandmother drinks wine.
In the passages there is even a conditionally romantic image of a certain Adele, parodying the inhumane petty-bourgeois literature and satirically scourging everything that is servile, base, petty, which makes it difficult to see a person in a person. This characterization of Adele is contained in three or four phrases. With all the breadth of the typical properties of this image, it is impossible to single out a single specifically unique feature in it. Gorky writes: “Adel! You, who always misrepresent everything I say to you! Your long nose, stretched out to you by authorities and prejudices, habits and prejudices - your unfortunate nose, slavishly sniffing the judgments of great minds - your pitiful nose, by which various charlatans so often lead you - this phenomenally dull nose always sneezes when judging about your neighbor loud and harsh and almost never sneezes right!
Oh Adele, Adele! Once upon a time in my pure love for you there was neither pity nor contempt, once I, a fool, believed that you are something independent, not only in the nasty and petty, but also in the beautiful and great, and oh, Adele, Adele! how bitter I was when I was convinced that you do not do honor to the beautiful and great by your participation in it ”(“ Presentation ... ”).
The elements of romance in the variants are also evidenced by the fact that the writer pays too much attention to nature, as the most important beginning in the formation of the character of the autohero. He found solace from the troubles of the selfish world only by running closer to the birds, the grass, the rustle of leaves, or contemplating the beauty of his native Volga. So it was in those days when he lived in his grandfather's house and when he worked for the owners. The writer recalls: “I lay and sometimes cried about something, and sometimes I clenched my teeth and, holding my breath, listened to the rustle of the garden trees” (“Statement ...”). Or, speaking about the period of his work on the ship, the author remarks: “And the devil knows how stupid and good life was to the sweet music from the poems of nature with the whisper of the wave and sonorous, childishly pure dreams” (“Biography”).
In terms of romance, one should also note some randomness in the development of events and even the nebula of their image. So, one night Alyosha sees his mother unusually affectionate, attentive both to him and to some mysterious guest who came to her. And the boy cannot understand, and the reader is somewhat at a loss, whether this is happening in a dream or in reality.
In the plot of the "Statement ..." and "Biography" we must note a certain fragmentation, fragmentation in the development of the events of the author's life. Sometimes this gives them the character of a partial compositional disorder, which is explained by the insufficient experience of the writer.
The plot of classic autobiographies is usually a series of life circumstances through which the autohero passes at certain periods of his life, circumstances familiar to the author from his life experience. It is this plot that underlies the autobiographical trilogy of Gorky himself.
In the sketches of the autobiography of the 90s, many circumstances are omitted, due to which we see obvious gaps in the presentation of the event outline of the work. Here, for example, we learn little about the details of the grandfather's ruin. One might even think that the action in the Narrative ... takes place only at the Congress, while it is known that, having become poor, the grandfather moved to Polevaya, then to Kanatnaya, then to the Kanavin slums, nothing is said about evening gatherings where grandmother told tales. The Sormovo period of the hero's life is completely absent. The "biography" begins with the return of Alyosha to the house of the draftsman Sergeev from the hospital, and what happened before the hospital, how he got into it - this remains unknown. His work in a fashionable shoe store as a boy at the door is not mentioned at all, as well as many other things. The passage itself ends with an unfinished phrase.
Many images that occupy an important place in the trilogy are not even mentioned in the sketches being analyzed. These are: the images of the Gypsy, the master Gregory, the Good Deed, Queen Margot, and others. Obviously, the young writer has not yet clearly thought out their significance in his life.
A large place in the plot fabric of the trilogy is occupied by the writer's stories, reproducing the memories of his relatives and friends about the past and recent times, for example, about the young years of his grandfather and grandmother, about the short-term happiness of his father and mother. This emphasized the correspondence of the plot to the natural course of life, in which memories are born involuntarily or in contrast with reality, or by analogy with it.
In the "Statement ..." and the "Biography" the memories of relatives and friends are still only outlined. They are here in small numbers. Such, for example, are the memories of the grandmother and mother about Alyosha's father.
Thanks to a small number of digressions about the past, the chronicle sequence of events in the outlines of the autobiography almost coincides with the plot arrangement of the material in them. This peculiarity of the plot of "Statements..." and "Biographies" brings them closer to memoirs, where the chronicle sequence of events is so important.
Thus, the plot structure of these works is poorer than that of the autobiographical trilogy.
Only in it the writer will be able to convey the complexity of life itself, built on the relationships of various classes and social groups, through the complexity of the plot. For an artistic depiction of this complexity, Gorky in the early 1990s did not yet possess a clear proletarian consciousness.
So, we see that "Statement of facts and thoughts ..." and "Biography" are the starting point in the creation of an autobiographical trilogy. While working on it, Gorky discarded much of what had previously been depicted, re-introduced much, while he finalized what was saved, expanded it, thought it over more deeply and set it out in a clearer artistic form.

We discussed several important topics. They talked about the roads that literary heroes choose. You know which work takes the journey as the basis for the plot for the first time. We talked about how the travel genre itself changes from the Middle Ages to the new time, about how literature reveals the human personality, which becomes the main subject of the image, even if the story is about new impressions received in wanderings. They talked about a lyrical hero, about fantastic travels, about science fiction. Today we will talk about the main thing - the path to yourself.

Two works of classical literature will help us in this - "Childhood" by Leo Tolstoy, written in 1853, and another work of the same name, written in 1913 by Maxim Gorky. These are two autobiographical works. They reflect the life of the authors, circumstances, episodes of their fate. We analyzed similar books by Ivan Shmelev, Valentin Rasputin ("French Lessons"), many other works, they simply did not use the word "autobiographical".

Leo Tolstoy talks about the childhood of his hero Nikolenka, he looks like the author himself. Lev Nikolaevich also endured some of the circumstances of his life: the death of his mother, a portrait of his father, a homely atmosphere (see Fig. 1).

Rice. 1. Boris Diodorov. Illustration for the story by L.N. Tolstoy "Childhood"

Maxim Gorky also tells about the boy Alyosha, who grew up with a cruel grandfather, a loving grandmother, and a strange mother. The circumstances of the author's life are transferred to the pages of the story. These works are trilogies.

Trilogy- three works united by the common characters, life circumstances and plot.

Other works included in the trilogy of authors are already called differently: Leo Tolstoy has “Childhood. Adolescence. Youth”, Maxim Gorky “Childhood. In people. My Universities.

Lev Nikolayevich, with the help of names, draws attention to the stages of the life path, the entry of a person into adulthood.

Maxim Gorky talks about the meeting of a person with society (see Fig. 2).

Rice. 2. Boris Dekhterev. Illustrations for M. Gorky's trilogy “Childhood. In people. My Universities »

"Childhood" is a short time when a person is left to himself. Then he is "In people" - he goes to work, leaves the family as a teenager, begins his work. "My Universities" is a story about how life's trials shaped the character's personality.

The authors have different tasks. Tolstoy writes about the human way, Gorky - about social influence. This allows writers to talk not only about themselves, but also about any person who can identify themselves in their characters.

Tolstoy's "Childhood" is constructed in an interesting way. Remember: Ivan Shmelev does not hide the fact that his narrator is a mature person. He explains to the young emigrant how life was arranged before, in the Russia of his childhood. When we read Tolstoy, we feel that the little boy Nikolenka himself tells about what is happening to him here and now - this is not nostalgia or recollection.

“August 12, 18 ..., exactly on the third day after my birthday, on which I was ten years old and on which I received such wonderful gifts, at seven o’clock in the morning - Karl Ivanovich woke me up by hitting a cracker over my very head - from sugar paper on a stick - on a fly.

Lev Tolstoy

This is the point of view of a boy, but gradually the intonation of a mature person begins to appear. Tolstoy explains how a happy time in the life of every person ends tragically, how childhood leaves. His hero's childhood ends when his mother dies. He enters a life for which he is not ready. The intonation of a mature person appears.

“Happy, happy, irretrievable time of childhood! How not to love, not to cherish the memories of her? These memories refresh, elevate my soul and serve as a source of the best pleasures for me.

Lev Tolstoy

Let's return to the concept of "autobiography". Does this mean that the authors directly tell us what they saw in childhood, reproduce the events one by one? Truth and fiction in an autobiographical work are in a complex interaction.

Autobiography- a literary genre, a description by the author of his life; a work where, under the guise of describing the life of a hero, the life of the writer himself is displayed.

The hero's name is Nikolenka, the author's name is Lev. If Tolstoy were talking about himself, the hero would be named after him. Lev Nikolaevich lost his mother when he was very small, almost a baby, the hero Nikolenka - at 11 years old. Why does the writer, talking about himself, change the name of the hero and the circumstances of the life drama? This is his literary task. The hero must face the death of his mother when he is ready to comprehend this tragedy. The theme of Leo Tolstoy is painful growing up, parting with a happy life sometimes (see Fig. 3).

Rice. 3. Sergei Sokolov. Illustration for the story by L.N. Tolstoy "Childhood"

And in Alexei Maksimovich, much is reproduced authentically, and much is composed. Modern literature combines truth and fiction, otherwise it will not be possible to express the deep content, to tell about the maturation of the human soul, about the path to oneself.

In the stories of the autobiographical trilogy "Childhood", "In People" (1913-1916) and "My Universities" (1925), M. Gorky portrays a hero capable of spiritual self-development. The process of human formation was new in the literature. In well-known works about the childhood years of S. Aksakov, L. N. Tolstoy, A. N. Tolstoy, the main attention was paid to depicting the inner world of the child. Researchers of Gorky's work believe that the social nature of the hero of the trilogy, the common fate with the people distinguish this work from other examples of the autobiographical genre. Childhood, depicted by Gorky, is far from being a wonderful period of life. This is not only the story of the soul of a child, but also Russian life in a certain era.

The hero of "Childhood" peers into this life, into the people around him, tries to understand the origins of evil and hostility, reaches for the light. The writer himself saw and experienced a lot in childhood. He wrote: “Remembering these leaden abominations of wild Russian life, I ask myself for minutes: is it worth talking about this? And, with renewed confidence, I answer myself: it's worth it; for it is tenacious, vile, it has not died to this day. This is the truth that must be known to the root, in order to root it out of memory, from the soul of a person, from our whole life, heavy and shameful. And there is another, more positive reason that prompts me to draw these abominations. Although they are disgusting, although they crush us, crushing many beautiful souls to death, the Russian person is still so healthy and young in soul that he overcomes and overcomes them.

Despite the fact that these statements are given by the writer only in the 12th chapter, they are the leading thread of the story. Not in chronological order, the narration moves consistently and calmly: the pictures drawn by the writer arise as a result of the strongest impressions left in the mind of the child from collisions with reality.

Knowing the peculiarities of the child's psyche, Gorky shows the gloomy and tragic in contrast to the bright and joyful, which makes the strongest impression on the child. So, the heavy impression from the pictures of the tragic death of the father is replaced by a feeling of happiness from closeness with an extraordinary person - grandmother; the picture of the inhuman cruelty of the grandfather during the punishment of children is adjacent to the description of the heart-to-heart conversation between the grandfather and Alyosha; The inquisitorial amusements of the uncles are contrasted with the kind and witty amusements of the Gypsy. It is important to see the "close, stuffy circle of eerie impressions" in which Alyosha lived in the Kashirin family, how the hero's ideas about the mores of his own world expanded outside his grandfather's house.

A huge influence on Alyosha was exerted by those "beautiful souls" with whom he met in his grandfather's house and in the world around him and who inspired "hope for a rebirth ... to a light, human life." The peculiarity of "Childhood" is that the narration is conducted on behalf of the narrator. This character of presentation is not new, but the difficulty lies in the fact that what is depicted in the story is seen both through the eyes of a child, the main character, who is in the thick of things, and through the eyes of a wise person who regards everything from the standpoint of great life experience.

It is precisely the fact that the narrator retains in the story the ardent immediacy of a child's perception of the world and at the same time gives a deep socio-psychological analysis that allows us to conclude that Gorky tried to arouse disgust for the "abominations of life" and instill love for the spiritually generous, steadfast and talented Russian people.

During the years of reaction Bitter started writing autobiographical trilogy. First part - The story "Childhood"- appeared in 1913-1914.

The second part- "In people"- was published in 1916, and the third - "My Universities"- after the revolution, in 1923.

Gorky's autobiographical trilogy- one of the best, most interesting works of the writer. The first part of it is devoted to the description of the life of Alyosha Peshkov in the family of his grandfather until the time when the boy was given into service in a shoe store. The second part tells about the life of the hero of the trilogy "in people" - from 1878 to 1884. The third part is devoted to the Kazan period - from 1884 to 1888.

The autobiographical genre in Russian literature of the 19th century was represented by such outstanding works as “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth” by L. N. Tolstoy, “Past and Thoughts” by Herzen, “Family Chronicle” and “Childhood of Bagrov-grandson” Aksakov, "Essays of Bursa" by Pomyalovsky, "Poshekhonskaya antiquity" by Saltykov-Shchedrin. The creative experience of the classics of Russian literature was inherited by Gorky.

Gorky's trilogy is of great value for studying his life path, for understanding the process of his spiritual development. Gorky talks about his childhood years in the Kashirin family, about all the humiliations and sorrows that he had to experience, about the difficult and joyless life "in people", about his ordeals and intense ideological searches.

But in the Gorky trilogy, not only dark and cruel morals are depicted. The writer glorified the wonderful moral strength of the Russian people, their passionate desire for justice, their spiritual beauty and steadfastness.

AT The story "Childhood" He wrote: “Our life is amazing not only because a layer of all animal rubbish is so prolific and fat in it, but because bright, healthy and creative nevertheless triumphantly sprouts through this layer, good - human grows, arousing unshakable hope for our rebirth to a light, human life.

Before the reader passes a gallery of simple and good Russian people. Among them: the adoptee in the Kashirins' house - Gypsy, a brave, cheerful person with a big and kind heart; master Gregory with his warmth and love for his work; a man given the odd nickname "Good Deed"; the steamship cook Smury, who got Alyosha interested in reading; Romas and Derenkov, who brought him closer to the revolutionary intelligentsia, and many others.

Akulina Ivanovna Kashirina, Gorky's grandmother, plays a special role in the trilogy. Initially The story "Childhood" Gorky, even intended to call it "Grandma". Akulina Ivanovna is a person of great intelligence, bright artistic talent and sensitive cordial responsiveness.

The protagonist of the book Alyosha Peshkov. Bitter with exceptional depth reveals the process of his moral maturation, the growth in him of a resolute protest against the vulgar, senseless and cruel life of the bourgeoisie, the thirst for a different life, reasonable, beautiful and just.

The protest against the wild mores of the environment gradually develops in the hero of the trilogy into a conscious struggle against the foundations of autocratic power, against the exploitative system as a whole. Impressions of harsh reality, books, revolutionaries, "the music of working life", sung by the writer in Story "My Universities", bring Alyosha Peshkov close to revolutionary conclusions. Trilogy in this sense, it becomes a story about a talented Russian man from the bottom of the people, who overcomes all obstacles on his way to the heights of culture, joining the revolutionary struggle for socialism.

In this way, Bitter and in the pre-revolutionary decade he vigorously and passionately fought for the victory of the revolution, asserting the traditions and ideas of progressive literature.

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Gorky Maxim

Maksim Gorky(1868-1936)

M. Gorky is certainly one of the greatest Russian writers of the 20th century. His creative heritage is still of great interest. The writer worked in various types and genres of literature, did a lot in journalism, left a mark as a publisher (created the famous book series "Life of Remarkable People", "Poet's Library") and editor.

Gorky's role in the development of the Russian theater is great. Many of his plays still attract the attention of theaters and are included in the repertoire of metropolitan and provincial groups.

In the Soviet period, Gorky was called the founder of socialist realism. He was considered a cultural figure who unconditionally accepted the revolution and served it with his talent as an artist. This is a simplified representation. One of the steps towards a more adequate perception of Gorky's views and his talent was the publication in the early 1990s of his essays on the revolution, Untimely Thoughts. The essays were published in 1918 in the New Life newspaper published by Gorky. They express the anxiety of the writer and the citizen about the ongoing events and give a completely ambiguous assessment of the revolution. Gorky in "Untimely Thoughts" came into conflict with the image of the writer created by Marxist criticism - "the petrel of the Russian revolution." The task of modern researchers and readers is to try to understand Gorky's work as an artistic phenomenon, freed from ideological bias.

Gorky's fundamental innovation is connected with the concept of personality in his work. Already in the early romantic period, the writer's hero is an active creative person who realizes himself in the public arena (Danko is one of the first heroes of this type). Subsequently, in the autobiographical story "Childhood", Gorky quite clearly formulated a new principle of the relationship between the hero and the environment: “I realized very early that a person is shaped by resistance to the environment.". The hero - the bearer of the author's ideals - must overcome and defeat the power of the society to which he belongs. It is no coincidence that in the play "The Philistines" the machinist Neil says so with conviction: “Yes, the master is the one who works ... And I will satisfy my desire to intervene in the very thick of life ... to knead it this way and that ...”. He does not just leave the petty-bourgeois house of the Bessemenovs: he builds his life on "resistance" to the environment.

The concept of a socially and spiritually active person stemmed from Gorky's system of views, from his world outlook. The writer was convinced of the omnipotence of the human mind, the power of knowledge, the experience of life. In the same story "Childhood", a work extremely important for understanding Gorky's artistic world, we read: “As a child, I imagine myself as a beehive, where various simple, gray people carried, like bees, their knowledge and thoughts about life, generously enriching my soul in whatever way they could. Often this honey was dirty and bitter, but all knowledge is still honey.. This position determined Gorky's inclination towards realism, the desire to reflect the typical phenomena of life, to create typical characters, thereby avoiding subjectivism. Nevertheless, despite the richness of life impressions, reliance on reality, romantic utopianism is obvious in Gorky's concept of a man.

In the poem "Man" the generalized conditional hero is directed to the future. Armed with the power of thought, he heroically overcomes all obstacles: "Thus marches the rebellious Man - forward!" and higher! everything - go ahead! and higher!" Rhythmic prose, exclamatory intonation of this poem convey the pathos of Gorky's concept of personality.

The writer's idea of ​​a person, his role and place largely determined Gorky's ideological and artistic searches and the drama of his fate. On the one hand, the writer's faith in man, his strength gave birth to optimism. The hero of Gorky, a man with a capital letter, learned to straighten his back, to realize his dignity. Gorky's hero is a personality in the full sense of the word. These are Pavel Vlasov and Pelageya Nilovna in the novel "Mother". Reflecting on the phenomenon of Gorky, one of the most interesting contemporary writers A. Remizov noted: “The essence of Gorky’s charm lies precisely in the fact that in the circle of beasts, inhumanity and subhumanity, he spoke in a loud voice and in new images about the most necessary thing for human life - about the dignity of man”. On the other hand, Gorky's reassessment of the possibilities of man, his idealization of the new man led him to compromise with the Stalinist regime, to moralizing and teaching in literature.

Despite the contradictions of Gorky's worldview, his work is an artistically significant phenomenon, it deserves careful study and analysis.

The writer's creative path began in 1892, when his first story "Makar Chudra" was published in the newspaper "Caucasus" (A.M. Peshkov was in Tiflis at that time, where he was led by wanderings in Russia). Then a pseudonym was born - M. Gorky.

And in 1895, three April issues of the Samara Newspaper introduced readers to the story " Old Isergil". It became obvious that a new bright writer had come to literature. Gorky began his literary career as a romantic. His first works fit perfectly into the philosophy and poetics of romanticism as a creative method. The hero in the works of the romantics is an exceptional personality, entering into a struggle with the whole world. He approaches reality from the standpoint of his ideal. The people around the romantic hero do not understand him. The romantic hero is alone. He sees an equal beginning only in the elemental forces of nature. Therefore, a landscape plays a huge role in a romantic work, conveying the mysterious, powerful and indomitable power of nature. Only it can be adequate to the romantic consciousness. The romantic hero does not correlate with real life circumstances. He rejects reality, living in the world of his ideal aspirations. This principle of the romantic artistic world is called the principle of romantic duality. The confrontation between the hero and reality is one of the most important features of romanticism as a literary method. The heroes of the above stories of the writer are precisely romantic. All artistic means are subject to the disclosure of a romantic character.

Both Makar Chudra and Izergil (both works are named after them) are not accidentally in the center of the author's attention. They are storytellers. From their lips we hear amazing legends about the beautiful people Loiko Zobar and the beautiful Radda (“Makar Chudra”), about the hero who saved his people, Danko (“Old Woman Izergil”). But, perhaps, these stories in the story (the use of legends, legends, true stories, fairy-tale elements is a characteristic technique in the work of romantic writers) primarily express ideas about the ideal and anti-ideal in the person of the narrators and the author themselves.

Makar Chudra and Izergil like romantic heroes are directed towards the same goal, they are carriers of the same dream, passion. For Makar Chudra, this is an unbridled desire for freedom, will; Izergil subordinated her whole life to love. And the heroes of the legends told by them are also carriers of a single beginning, brought to the maximum extent. Danko embodies the extreme degree of self-sacrifice in the name of love for people. Larra is his romantic antipode - extreme individualism, egocentrism (according to the author's ideas - an anti-ideal).

The romantic hero is an integral nature, under no circumstances capable of compromise. When life tempts, “provokes”, an insoluble contradiction arises in his mind. This is what happens with Loiko and Radda. They are unable to choose between pride, freedom and love. True to their ideal, they prefer death. And the hero-narrator, Makar Chudra, himself a romantic, perceives such a solution as natural and the only possible one. According to Makar, only in this way it was possible to preserve their freedom, which is dearer to Loiko and Radda than nothing. The conclusion of the narrator from the romantic story about the proud gypsies is logical: “Well, falcon, ... you will be a free bird for your life”- but on one condition - you need to remember the story of young gypsies for life. Thus, we can say that the ideal of the characters and the narrator is the same. The composition of the narrative - inserted legends and were - helps to reveal ideas about the values ​​of life, the ideals of the author and the narrator.

An important role is played by the composition in creating the image of Izergil. The two legends told by her - about Danko and Larra - are like two expressions of an ideal and an anti-ideal. Between them, the author places Izergil's story about his rebellious life, in which love was the main beginning. Izergil believes that she herself is close to Danko by the power of love, but in her story about former lovers, the reader sees the selfish nature of the heroine's love. She completely indifferently answers the narrator's questions about the fate of her beloved. Even about their death he speaks indifferently. This brings Izergil closer to Larra. Her love, truly all-consuming, carried no light in itself either to those whom she loved, or to herself. It is no coincidence that in old age she is shown as incinerated and devastated, she even resembles a shadow. As we remember, Larra also roams the world like an eternal shadow. In the portrait, given through the eyes of the narrator, Izergil's personality is assessed by means of poetic imagery, which emphasize her closeness to Larra: “... Sitting next to me alive, but withered by time, without a body, without blood, with a heart without desires, with eyes without fire, is also almost a shadow”. The anti-aesthetic details of the portrait “dim black eyes”, “black pits of the cheeks” speak of the author's attitude towards the heroine. He does not consider her life a service to the ideal of love. On the contrary, Izergil is just as selfish as Larra. And therefore lonely, far from people.

It is obvious that the idea of ​​the ideal of the narrator in this story is associated with the image of Danko. It is such a hero, whose love for people leads him to the feat of self-sacrifice, that is close to the author. The light of his feat from ancient times has reached our days. His heart scattered sparks across the steppe, and these blue sparks, as if alive, appear to people before a thunderstorm.

In addition to the composition of the narrative, as already noted, the landscape plays a special role in Gorky's romantic stories. Gorky's nature is animated. She breathes freedom and mystery. The old gypsy Makar is shown in the "darkness of the autumn night". The night, as if alive, "shuddered and fearfully moved away, opening for a moment on the left - the boundless steppe, on the right - the endless sea." Even more solemn and expressive is the landscape in the story "Old Woman Izergil": “The wind flowed in a wide, even wave, but sometimes it seemed to jump over something invisible, and giving birth to a strong gust, blowing the women's hair into fantastic manes that billowed around their heads. It made women weird and fabulous.". The landscape also plays the role of a background for the hero.

Gorky's language is the most important means of creating an image and an unusual atmosphere. The language and style of narration is expressive, full of figurative and expressive means. The same applies to the language of the hero-narrator. The technique of inversion (in this case, the location of the epithet after the word being defined) enhances the expressiveness of the tropes: "Their hair, silk and black", "the wind, warm and gentle." Comparisons are characterized by a tendency to hyperbolization, the identification of the exceptional; “Stronger than thunder, Danko shouted”; the heart "blazed as brightly as the sun." Often the portrait of a character is built on a comparison: “the eyes, like clear stars, burn, and the smile is the whole sun ... it stands all, as if in the fire of blood, in the fire of a fire” (portrait of Loiko Zobar in the story “Makar Chudra”).

The role of syntax should also be noted: the repetition of syntactic constructions of the same type makes the narrative rhythmic, enhances the emotional impact on the reader of the entire work.

Gorky's romantic work, his dream of a free man, the hero he sang, performing the feat of self-sacrifice in the name of love for people, had a certain revolutionary effect on Russian society of that time, although the author did not put a direct revolutionary meaning into the image of his Danko.

The romantic period in Gorky's work was rather short, but integral in terms of content and style. Gorky's ideal of a free, active, creative personality was embodied in the romantically upbeat style of his stories. They are characterized by a generalized lyrical characterization of the heroes, the use of fabulously legendary images and plots, and solemn vocabulary.

The play "At the Bottom" (1902)- one of the best plays by M. Gorky. In his article On Plays, he wrote: “It was the result of my almost twenty years of observation of the world of “former people”, among which I include not only wanderers, inhabitants of a rooming house, the lumpen proletariat in general, but also some of the intellectuals, “demagnetized”, disappointed, insulted and humiliated by failures in life. I realized very early that these people are incurable.. The performance at the Moscow Art Theater was at first banned by censors, but after a stubborn struggle, it was nevertheless released onto the stage. It brought fame to the author and became a real event in the social and cultural life of Russia. An eloquent review of a contemporary Shchepkina-Kupernik: “The real impression of an exploding bomb was made by “At the Bottom”. The spectator was whipped like a whip. "At the bottom" sounded like a real cry for justice. Many did not sleep at night after him ... And this play roared over Russia like a real petrel..

The play struck contemporaries not only with the characters unexpected for the theater - "former people" thrown out of life, tramps - with the gloomy and hopeless coloring of Kostylev's rooming house, but also with a bold experiment in dramatic form. Gorky in this play continued the innovative experiments of Chekhov the playwright.

Criticism of social reality, bringing a person to the position of a lumpen who has lost living connections with his environment, was undoubtedly in the play. "The horror of life" is felt in the variants of the title of the play - "Without the sun", "Bunkhouse", "At the bottom of life." There is social conflict in the play. Thus, the relations between the hosts of the hostel, the Kostylevs, and the hostels are antagonistic. But it is hardly possible to say that it is precisely these relations that determine the dramatic action. Both sides have their own role, which has become familiar, and they perform it monotonously, only from time to time there is a certain tension in their eternal confrontation. Every inhabitant of the rooming house has its own social dramas, for example, Vaska Pepel. His father was a thief, and this determined the fate of his son. But these stories are in the past, behind the scenes. In dramatic action we have the result. The social conflict is not the main one, despite the impressive statement of social trouble in Russia, the obvious fact of which is the very existence of the Kostylevo rooming house and its inhabitants, thrown out of people's lives. There are also love stories in the play: the love triangle Vasilisa - Ashes - Natasha and the other - Kostylev - Vasilisa - Ashes. The resolution of the love conflict is tragic: Natasha is mutilated, Ash is waiting for hard labor (he killed Kostylev). Only Vasilisa can triumph. She took revenge on Ashes, who had cheated on her, dealt with her rival (crippled her own sister) and freed herself from her hated husband. But the love plot is peripheral in this drama. It does not capture all the characters, they are just outside observers of the drama that has played out.

Apparently, the conflict of the play is not connected with external action, is not directly determined by the social contradictions of life. The exposition is frankly static, all the characters, except for Klesch, resigned themselves to their position. The internal movement in the drama begins with the appearance of Luka in the rooming house. This is the beginning of the conflict. It is Luke - beaten by life, a condescending person - who awakens the consciousness of the overnight stays. It would seem that hopelessly lost people (an actor without a name, an aristocrat without a past, a woman without love, a worker without a job) under the influence of Luka, his interest in everyone, his ability to regret and support, gain hope. They think about the meaning of their life, about the possibility of getting out of the social impasse into which their life has driven them. Thus, the philosophical problems of the play become obvious. The action is driven by a philosophical dispute about a person, his dignity, about truth and lies. Carriers of various ideas about a person - Bubnov, Luka, Satin. But in one way or another, all the characters are involved in the dispute.

It is important to understand Luke's philosophical position. It is complex and contradictory, as is the attitude of the author towards it. Desiring good, he is not able to fight for it. Luke is a type of passive comforter. He does not think about the true state of things, about their objective essence: "What you believe is what you are..." The main thing, in his opinion, is to treat a person with kindness and compassion. He sincerely wants to help people. And it is hardly possible to call his advice a deliberate lie. Theoretically, it is possible to recover from alcoholism, and finally find true love... The shelters, supported by the compassionate word of Luke, reveal the best sides of their personality. They gain the opportunity, at least for a while, to become people who have a future. But as soon as Luka disappears, they lose their newfound hope. The noble aspirations of the overnight stays, and even Luke himself, do not turn into actions. The overnight shelters do not have enough strength to deal with the difficult circumstances of their lives. Throughout the course of the plot, Luke's position is called into question, and his disappearance at the climax of the action demonstrates the failure of this hero in a collision with real life conflicts. He himself prefers to hide, foreseeing the inevitable dramatic denouement. And in the case of the Actor, the dramatic contradiction turns out to be insoluble, and he commits suicide. The author's point of view is expressed precisely in the plot development. Everything promised by Luke leads to exactly the opposite results. The actor strangled himself, as did the hero of the parable of the righteous land told by Luke. Although Luke spoke in it about the need for hope. The life of the overnight stays returns to its former terrible course.

At the same time, it cannot be said that the play "At the Bottom" unequivocally condemns the consoling position, Luke's lie for salvation, and affirms the merciless truth. This opposition would narrow the philosophical meaning of the play. It is no coincidence that the antagonist of Luka, the truth-seeker Bubnov, smart and vicious, is shown negatively by the author. He speaks the truth, wanting to convict, expose and humiliate a person. In his position there is no place for love for a person and faith in him. Such truth is unacceptable and denied by the author. Gorky is convinced that a person needs love, but only connected with truth. Love and truth that transform life.

According to the author, the very possibility of a humanistic attitude towards a person, faith in the value of the individual, which form the basis of Luke's worldview, awaken the ability to active consciousness. No wonder Satin says: "Old man? He is smart! .. He acted on me like acid on an old and dirty coin ... " In the author's attitude to Luke, we feel a contradiction: an undoubted rejection of the hero's philosophy and sympathy for his personality. it is no coincidence that Luke's speech is so colorful, it is full of proverbs and sayings, melodic.

The call for a new attitude towards man was voiced in the play, however, among its characters there is no one who could bring it to life. In the famous monologue about a man, Satin, as a reasoning hero, only voices the author's thought.

The play "At the Bottom" is a realistic socio-philosophical drama. Its main subject is the social conflicts of Russian reality and their reflection in the minds of the characters. In the contradictory consciousness of the overnight stays - dissatisfaction with life and inability to change it - some features of the Russian national character were reflected. Of particular importance is philosophical problems - a philosophical dispute about a person. In "At the Bottom" Gorky demonstrated the brilliant art of dialogue, speech ensemble. And although the author did not find the bearer of his positive ideal among the characters of the play, in real life he already saw people with an active life position.

In the article “On Plays”, reflecting on his experience in dramaturgy, Gorky wrote: “A play-drama, comedy is the most difficult form of literature, difficult because it requires that each unit operating in it be characterized both in word and deed on its own, without prompting from side of the author. In the play "At the Bottom" he continued and developed the Chekhov drama tradition. This drama has an "undercurrent": it has two planes - social and philosophical. Just like in Chekhov, the fate of society, the state of the world is the source of dramatic action. The clashes of the characters in the play are more likely in the sphere of differences in worldview, different understanding of the values ​​of life than in the sphere of actions. The process of action is essentially a process of reflection of the characters, which is why the role of speech characteristics, the speech ensemble, is so great in Gorky's play.

The play "At the Bottom" has a happy stage fate, attracting various directors so far. Its versatility, the acuteness of the philosophical problems make it relevant today.