Garshin analysis. G.n

The main stages of the life and work of Garshin. Russian writer, critic. Born on February 2 (14), 1855 in the estate of Pleasant Valley, Bakhmut district, Yekaterinoslav province. in a family of nobles, leading their ancestry from the Golden Horde Murza Gorshi. Father was an officer, participated in the Crimean War of 1853-1856. Mother, the daughter of a naval officer, took part in the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s. As a five-year-old child, Garshin experienced a family drama that influenced the character of the future writer. The mother fell in love with the teacher of older children P.V. Zavadsky, the organizer of a secret political society, and left the family. The father complained to the police, after which Zavadsky was arrested and exiled to Petrozavodsk on political charges. Mother moved to Petersburg to visit the exile. Until 1864, Garshin lived with his father on an estate near the city of Starobelsk, Kharkov Province, then his mother took him to St. Petersburg and sent him to a gymnasium. In 1874 Garshin entered the St. Petersburg Mining Institute. Two years later, he made his literary debut. His first satirical essay, The True History of the Ensky Zemstvo Assembly (1876), was based on memories of provincial life. In his student years, Garshin appeared in print with articles about the Wanderers. On the day Russia declared war on Turkey, April 12, 1877, Garshin volunteered to join the army. In August, he was wounded in a battle near the Bulgarian village of Ayaslar. Personal impressions served as material for the first story about the war, Four Days (1877), which Garshin wrote in the hospital. After its publication in the October issue of the Otechestvennye Zapiski magazine, Garshin's name became known throughout Russia. Having received a year's leave for injury, Garshin returned to St. Petersburg, where he was warmly received by the writers of the circle of "Notes of the Fatherland" - M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, G.I. Uspensky and others. retired and continued his studies as a volunteer at St. Petersburg University. The war left a deep imprint on the receptive psyche of the writer and his work. Simple in terms of plot and composition, Garshin's stories amazed readers with the extreme nakedness of the hero's feelings. Narration in the first person, using diary entries, attention to the most painful emotional experiences created the effect of the absolute identity of the author and the hero. In the literary criticism of those years, the phrase was often found: "Garshin writes with blood." The writer connected the extremes of the manifestation of human feelings: a heroic, sacrificial impulse and awareness of the abomination of war (Four days); a sense of duty, attempts to evade it and the realization of the impossibility of this (Coward, 1879). The helplessness of man in the face of the elements of evil, emphasized by tragic endings, became the main theme not only of the military, but also of Garshin's later stories. For example, the story Incident (1878) is a street scene in which the writer shows the hypocrisy of society and the wildness of the crowd in condemning a prostitute. Even portraying people of art, artists, Garshin did not find a solution to his painful spiritual searches. The story The Artists (1879) is imbued with pessimistic reflections on the uselessness of real art. His hero, the talented artist Ryabinin, gives up painting and leaves for the countryside to teach peasant children. In the story Attalea princeps (1880), Garshin symbolically expressed his worldview. The freedom-loving palm tree, in an effort to escape from the glass greenhouse, breaks through the roof and dies. Romantically referring to reality, Garshin tried to break the vicious circle of life's questions, but the painful psyche and complex character returned the writer to a state of despair and hopelessness. This condition was aggravated by the events taking place in Russia. In February 1880, the revolutionary terrorist I.O. Mlodetsky made an attempt on the life of the head of the Supreme Administrative Commission, Count M.T. Loris-Melikov. Garshin, as a well-known writer, obtained an audience with the count to ask for pardon for the criminal in the name of mercy and civil peace. The writer convinced the high dignitary that the execution of a terrorist would only lengthen the chain of useless deaths in the struggle between the government and the revolutionaries. After the execution of Mlodetsky, Garshin's manic-depressive psychosis worsened. The trip to the Tula and Oryol provinces did not help. The writer was placed in Orel, and then in Kharkov and St. Petersburg psychiatric hospitals. After a relative recovery, Garshin did not return to creativity for a long time. In 1882, his collection Stories was published, which caused heated debate in the critics. Garshin was condemned for pessimism, the gloomy tone of his works. The Narodniks used the writer's work to show by his example how the modern intellectual is tormented and tormented by remorse. In August-September 1882, at the invitation of I.S. Turgenev, Garshin lived and worked on the story From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov (1883) in Spasskoye-Lutovinovo. In the winter of 1883, Garshin married N.M. Zolotilova, a student of medical courses, and entered the service as secretary of the office of the Congress of Railway Representatives. The writer spent a lot of mental strength on the story The Red Flower (1883), in which the hero, at the cost of his own life, destroys all evil, concentrated, as his inflamed imagination draws, in three poppy flowers growing in the hospital yard. In subsequent years, Garshin strove to simplify his narrative style. There were stories written in the spirit of Tolstoy's folk stories - The Tale of the Proud Haggai (1886), Signal (1887). The children's fairy tale The Traveling Frog (1887) was the writer's last work. Garshin died in St. Petersburg on March 24 (April 5), 1888.

Garshin "Red Flower" and "Artists". His allegorical stories "The Red Flower" became a textbook. a mentally ill person in a psychiatric hospital fights the world's evil in the form of dazzling red poppy flowers in a hospital bed. Characteristic for Garshin (and this is by no means only an autobiographical moment) is the image of the hero on the verge of insanity. It's not so much about illness, but about the fact that the writer's man is unable to cope with the inescapability of evil in the world. Contemporaries appreciated the heroism of Garshin's characters: they are trying to resist evil, despite their own weakness. It is madness that turns out to be the beginning of rebellion, since, according to Garshin, it is impossible to rationally comprehend evil: the person himself is involved in it - and not only by social forces, but also, which is no less, and perhaps more important, internal forces. He himself is partly the bearer of evil - sometimes contrary to his own ideas about himself. The irrational in the soul of a person makes him unpredictable, the outburst of this uncontrollable element is not only a rebellion against evil, but evil itself. Garshin loved painting, wrote articles about it, supporting the Wanderers. He gravitated toward painting and in prose - not only making artists his heroes ("Artists", "Nadezhda Nikolaevna"), but he himself masterfully mastered verbal plasticity. Pure art, which Garshin almost identified with handicrafts, he contrasted with the closer realistic art, rooting for the people. Art that can touch the soul, disturb it. From art, he, a romantic at heart, requires a shock effect in order to hit the "clean, sleek, hated crowd" (Ryabinin's words from the story "Artists").

Garshin "Coward" and "Four days". In the writings of Garshin, a person is in a state of mental confusion. In the first story "Four Days", written in a hospital and reflecting the writer's own impressions, the hero is wounded in battle and is waiting for death, next to him the corpse of the Turk he killed is decomposing. This scene has often been compared to the scene from War and Peace, where Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, wounded in the battle of Austerlitz, looks at the sky. The hero of Garshin also looks at the sky, but his questions are not abstractly philosophical, but quite earthly: why the war? why was he forced to kill this man, to whom he had no hostile feelings and, in fact, was not guilty of anything? In this work, a protest against war, against the extermination of man by man is clearly expressed. A number of stories are dedicated to the same motif: “The orderly and the officer”, “Ayaslyar case”, “From the memoirs of private Ivanov” and “Coward”; the hero of the latter is tormented by heavy reflection and hesitation between the desire to "sacrifice himself for the people" and the fear of an unnecessary and meaningless death. Garshin's military theme is passed through the crucible of conscience, through the soul, bewildered by the incomprehensibility of this premeditated and unnecessary massacre by no one knows. Meanwhile, the Russian-Turkish war of 1877 was started with the noble goal of helping the Slavic brothers get rid of the Turkish yoke. Garshin is concerned not with political motives, but with existential questions. The character does not want to kill other people, does not want to go to war (story "Coward"). Nevertheless, obeying the general impulse and considering it his duty, he signs up as a volunteer and dies. The senselessness of this death haunts the author. But what is essential is that this absurdity is not unique in the general order of being. In the same story, "Coward" dies of gangrene that began with a toothache, a medical student. These two events are parallel, and it is in their artistic conjugation that one of the main Garshin questions is highlighted - about the nature of evil. This question tormented the writer all his life. It is no coincidence that his hero, a reflective intellectual, protests against world injustice, embodied in some faceless forces that lead a person to death and destruction, including self-destruction. It's a specific person. Personality. Face. the realism of the Garshin style. His work is characterized by the accuracy of observation and the certainty of expressions of thought. He has few metaphors, comparisons, instead - a simple designation of objects and facts. A short, polished phrase, with no subordinate clauses in the descriptions. "Hot. The sun burns. The wounded man opens his eyes, sees - bushes, a high sky ”(“ Four Days ”).

1 Biography of V.M. Garshina……………………………….……………………….3

2 The fairy tale “Attalea princeps”………………………………………………………….5

3 The Tale of the Toad and the Rose……………………………………………………….….13

4 Fairy tale "Frog Traveler"…………………………………….……..16

List of sources used……………………………………….…..18

1 Biography

Garshin Vsevolod Mikhailovich is an outstanding Russian prose writer. Contemporaries called him "the Hamlet of our days", the "central personality" of the generation of the 80s - the era of "timelessness and reaction".

Born on February 2, 1855 in the Pleasant Valley estate of the Yekaterinoslav province (now Donetsk region, Ukraine) in a noble officer family. One grandfather was a landowner, the other was a naval officer. Father is an officer of the cuirassier regiment. From the earliest years, the scenes of military life were imprinted in the mind of the boy.

As a five-year-old child, Garshin experienced a family drama that affected his health and greatly influenced his attitude and character. His mother fell in love with the teacher of older children, P.V. Zavadsky, the organizer of a secret political society, and left her family. The father complained to the police, Zavadsky was arrested and exiled to Petrozavodsk. Mother moved to Petersburg to visit the exile. The child became the subject of acute contention between the parents. Until 1864 he lived with his father, then his mother took him to St. Petersburg and sent him to a gymnasium. He described life in the gymnasium in the following words: “From the fourth grade, I began to take part in gymnasium literature ...” “The evening newspaper was published weekly. As far as I remember, my feuilletons ... were a success. At the same time, under the influence of the Iliad, I composed a poem (in hexameter) of several hundred verses, in which our gymnasium life echoed.

In 1874 Garshin entered the Mining Institute. But literature and art interested him more than science. He begins to print, writes essays and art history articles. In 1877 Russia declared war on Turkey; Garshin on the very first day is recorded as a volunteer in the army. In one of his first battles, he led the regiment into the attack and was wounded in the leg. The wound turned out to be harmless, but Garshin no longer took part in further hostilities. Promoted to an officer, he soon retired, spent a short time as a volunteer in the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University, and then devoted himself entirely to literary activity. Garshin quickly gained fame.

In 1883 the writer marries N.M. Zolotilova, a student of women's medical courses.

The writer Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin has several fairy tales. The most popular among readers of primary school age are "The Tale of the Toad and the Rose" (1884), the tale "The Traveler Frog" (1887), this is the last work of the writer.

Very soon another severe depression sets in. On March 24, 1888, during one of the attacks, Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin commits suicide, he rushes into the flight of stairs. The writer is buried in St. Petersburg.

The tales of Vsevolod Garshin are always a little sad, they resemble the sad poetic stories of Andersen, his "manner of transforming pictures of real life with fantasy, doing without magical miracles." At the lessons of literary reading in elementary school, fairy tales are studied: "The Traveler Frog" and "The Tale of the Toad and the Rose." Garshi's fairy tales are closer to philosophical parables in terms of genre features, they provide food for thought. In composition, they are similar to a folk tale (there is a beginning, beginning with the words: “We lived ...”, and an ending).

2 The fairy tale "Attalea princeps"

At the beginning of 1876, Garshin languished in forced inactivity. On March 3, 1876, Vsevolod Mikhailovich wrote the poem "The Captive". In a poetic sketch, Garshin told the story of a rebellious palm tree.

Beautiful high top palm tree

It knocks on the glass roof;

Broken glass, bent iron,

And the way to freedom is open.

And the offspring from the palm tree with a green sultan

Climbed into that hole;

Above the transparent vault, under the azure sky

He proudly looks up.

And his thirst for freedom was quenched:

He sees the sky

And the sun caresses (cold sun!)

His emerald dress.

Among alien nature, among strange fellows,

Among the pines, birches and firs,

He sadly drooped, as if he remembered

About the sky of his homeland;

Fatherland, where nature forever feasts,

Where warm rivers flow

Where there is neither glass nor iron bars,

Where palm trees grow in the wild.

But here he is seen; his crime

The gardener ordered to fix -

And soon over the poor beautiful palm tree

The ruthless knife gleamed.

The royal crown was separated from the tree,

It shook its trunk

And they answered in unison with a noisy trembling

Palm trees all around.

And paved the way to freedom again

And glass patterned frames

Standing on the road to the cold sun

And pale foreign skies.

The image of a proud palm tree imprisoned in a glass cage of a greenhouse came to his mind more than once. In the work "Attalea princeps" the same plot is developed as in the poem. But here the motif of a palm tree striving to break free sounds even sharper and more revolutionary.

"Attalea princeps" was intended for "Notes of the Fatherland". M.E. Saltykov Shchedrin took it as a political allegory full of pessimism. The editor-in-chief of the magazine was embarrassed by the tragic ending of Garshin's work. According to Saltykov Shchedrin, it could be taken by readers as an expression of disbelief in the revolutionary struggle. Garshin himself refused to see a political allegory in the work.

Vsevolod Mikhailovich says that he was prompted to write "Attalea princeps" by a genuine incident in the botanical garden.

"Attalea princeps" was first published in the journal "Russian wealth", 1880, No. 1, p. 142 150 with the subtitle "Fairy Tale". From the memoirs of N. S. Rusanov: “Garshin was very upset that his graceful fairy tale “Attalea princeps” (which was later placed in our artel “Russian Wealth”) was rejected by Shchedrin for its bewildered end: the reader will not understand and will spit on all!".

In "Attalea princeps" there is no traditional beginning "there lived", there is no ending "and I was there ...". This suggests that "Attalea princeps" is an author's, literary tale.

It should be noted that in all fairy tales, good triumphs over evil. In "Attalea princeps" there is no such concept as "good". The only hero that shows a sense of "good" is "sluggish weed".

Events develop in chronological order. Beautiful greenhouse made of glass and iron. Majestic columns and arches shimmered in bright sunlight like precious stones. From the first lines, the description of the greenhouse gives a false impression of the magnificence of this place.

Garshin removes the appearance of beauty. This is where the action begins. The place where the most unusual plants grow is cramped: plants compete with each other for a piece of land, moisture, light. They dream of a bright wide expanse, of a blue sky, of freedom. But glass frames squeeze their crowns, constrain, prevent them from fully growing and developing.

The development of action is a dispute between plants. From the conversation, the characters' replicas, the image of each plant, their character grows.

The sago palm is vicious, irritable, arrogant, arrogant.

The pot-bellied cactus is ruddy, fresh, juicy, contented with its life, soulless.

Cinnamon hides behind the backs of other plants (“no one will rip me off”), a wrangler.

The tree fern as a whole is also pleased with its position, but somehow faceless, not striving for anything.

And among them the royal palm is lonely, but proud, freedom-loving, fearless.

Of all the plants, the reader singles out the main character. This story is named after her. Beautiful proud palm Attalea princeps. She is taller than everyone, more beautiful than everyone, smarter than everyone. She was envied, she was not loved, because the palm tree was not like all the inhabitants of the greenhouse.

One day, a palm tree invited all plants to fall on iron frames, crush glass and break out into the long-awaited freedom. Plants, despite the fact that all the time grumbled, abandoned the idea of ​​a palm tree: “An impossible dream!” They shouted. “I want to see the sky and the sun not through these bars and glasses, and I will see,” answered Attalea princeps. Palma alone began to fight for freedom. Grass was the palm tree's only friend.

The culmination and denouement of "Attalea princeps" turned out to be not at all fabulous: it was deep autumn in the yard, it was drizzling with light rain mixed with snow. The palm tree, which with such difficulty broke free, was threatened with death from a cold. This is not the freedom that she dreamed of, not the sky, not the sun that she so wanted to see the palm tree. Attalea princeps could not believe that this was all she had been striving for for a long time, to which she gave her last strength. People came and, by order of the director, sawed it down and threw it into the yard. The fight turned out to be deadly.

The images taken by him develop harmoniously, organically. Describing the greenhouse, Garshin really conveys its appearance. Everything here is true, there is no fiction. Then Garshin violates the principle of strict parallelism of idea and image. If he had been sustained, then the reading of the allegory would have been only pessimistic: every struggle is doomed, it is useless and aimless. In Garshin, a multi-valued image corresponds not only to a specific socio-political idea, but also to a philosophical thought that seeks to express a universal content. This ambiguity brings Garshin's images closer to symbols, and the essence of his work is expressed not only in the correlation of ideas and images, but also in the development of images, i.e. the plot of Garshin's works acquires a symbolic character. An example is the diversity of comparisons and oppositions of plants. All the inhabitants of the greenhouse are prisoners, but they all remember the time when they lived in freedom. However, only a palm tree tends to escape from the greenhouse. Most plants soberly assess their position and therefore do not strive for freedom ... Both sides are opposed by a small grass, she understands the palm tree, sympathizes with it, but does not have such strength. Each of the plants remains of its own opinion, but they are united by indignation against a common enemy. And it looks like the world of people!

Is there any connection between the palm tree's attempt to be free and the behavior of other inhabitants who grew up in the same greenhouse. Such a connection can be seen in the fact that each of the characters is faced with a choice: whether to continue life in a place that they call “prison”, or prefer freedom to captivity, which in this case means going outside the greenhouse and certain death.

Observing the attitude of the characters, including the director of the greenhouse, to the plan of the palm tree and the method of its implementation allows us to get closer to understanding the very point of view of the author, which he does not express openly. How is the long-awaited victory that the palm tree won in the fight against the iron cage depicted? How did the heroine evaluate the outcome of her struggle? Why did the grass, which so sympathized with and admired its desire for will, die with the palm tree? What does the phrase that concludes the whole story mean: “One of the gardeners, with a deft blow of a spade, tore out a whole armful of grass. He threw it into a basket, carried it out and threw it into the back yard, right on a dead palm tree, lying in the mud and already half covered with snow”?

The image of the greenhouse itself is also ambiguous. This is the world in which plants live; it oppresses them and at the same time gives them the opportunity to exist. The vague memory of plants about their homeland is their dream of the past. It will happen again or not in the future, no one knows. Heroic attempts to break the laws of the world are wonderful, but they are based on ignorance of real life and therefore are groundless and fruitless.

Thus, Garshin opposes both too optimistic and one-sidedly pessimistic concepts of the world and man. Garshin's appeal to the images of symbols most often expressed the desire to refute the unambiguous perception of life.

Some literary critics, regarding the work "Attalea princeps" as an allegorical story, spoke about the political views of the writer. Garshin's mother wrote about her son: “In his rare kindness, honesty, justice, he could not stick to any side. And he suffered deeply for those and for others ... ”He had a sharp mind and a sensitive, kind heart. He experienced every manifestation of evil, arbitrariness and violence in the world with all the tension of his painful nerves. And the result of such experiences was wonderful realistic works that forever approved his name in both Russian and world literature. All his work is imbued with deep pessimism.

Garshin was an ardent opponent of naturalistic protocolism. He strove to write concisely and economically, and not to depict in detail the emotional side of human nature.

The allegorical (allegorical) form of "Attalea Princeps" gives not only political sharpness, but also affects the social and moral depths of human existence. And the symbols (no matter what Garshin says about his neutral attitude to what is happening) convey the author's involvement not only in a specific socio-political idea, but also a philosophical thought that seeks to express the content of the entire human nature.

The reader is given an idea of ​​the world through the experiences of plants associated with memories of their homeland.

Confirmation of the existence of a beautiful land is the appearance in the greenhouse of a Brazilian who recognized the palm tree, named it by name and left for his homeland from a cold northern city. The transparent walls of the greenhouse, which look like a “beautiful crystal” from the outside, are perceived from the inside as a cage for plant characters.

This moment becomes a turning point in the development of events, because after it the palm decides to break free.

The inner space of the story is complexly organized. It includes three spatial spheres opposed to each other. The native land for plants is opposed to the world of the greenhouse not only qualitatively, but also spatially. He is removed from her and introduced in the memories of the plant characters. The “foreign” space of the greenhouse, in turn, is opposed to the outside world and separated from it by a border. There is another closed space in which the "excellent scientist" director of the greenhouse lives. He spends most of his time in "a special glass booth built inside the greenhouse."

Each of the characters is faced with a choice: whether to continue life in a place that they call "prison", or to prefer freedom to captivity, which in this case means going outside the greenhouse and death.

3 "The Tale of the Toad and the Rose"

The work is an example of the synthesis of arts on the basis of literature: the parable of life and death is told in the plots of several impressionist paintings, striking in their distinct visuality, and in the interweaving of musical motifs. The threat of the ugly death of a rose in the mouth of a toad that knows no other use of beauty is canceled at the price of another death: the rose is cut before it withers for a dying boy to console him at the last moment. The meaning of the life of the most beautiful being is to be a comforter for the suffering.

The author prepared for the rose a sad but wonderful fate. She brings the last joy to the dying boy. “When the rose began to wither, they put it in an old thick book and dried it, and then after many years they gave it to me. That is why I know the whole story,” writes V.M. Garshin.

This work presents two storylines that develop in parallel at the beginning of the tale, and then intersect.

In the first story, the main character is the boy Vasya (“a boy of about seven, with big eyes and a big head on a thin body”, “he was so weak, quiet and meek ...”, he is seriously ill. Vasya loved to visit the garden where he grew up rosebush... There he sat on a bench, read "about Robinsons, and wild countries, and sea robbers", liked to watch ants, beetles, spiders, once even "met a hedgehog."

In the second storyline, the main characters are a rose and a toad. These heroes "lived" in the flower garden, where Vasya liked to visit. The rose blossomed on a good May morning, the dew on its petals left a few drops. Rose was crying. She poured around her "a delicate and fresh scent", which was "her words, tears and prayer". In the garden, the rose was "the most beautiful creature", she watched the butterflies and bees, listened to the singing of the nightingale and felt happy.

An old fat toad was sitting between the roots of a bush. She smelled the rose and was worried. Once she saw a flower with her "evil and ugly eyes", she liked it. The toad expressed her feelings with the words: “I will devour you,” which scared the flower. ... Once a toad almost managed to grab a rose, but Vasya's sister came to the rescue (the boy asked her to bring a flower, sniffed it and fell silent forever).

Rosa felt that "she was not cut off for nothing." The girl kissed the rose, a tear fell from her cheek onto the flower, and this was "the best incident in the life of a rose." She was happy that she had not lived her life in vain, that she had brought joy to the unfortunate boy.

Good deeds, deeds are never forgotten, they remain in the memory of other people for many years. This is not just a fairy tale about a toad and a rose, as stated in the title, but about life and moral values. The conflict of beauty and ugliness, good and evil is resolved unconventionally. The author claims that in death, in its very act, there is a guarantee of immortality or oblivion. The rose is "sacrificed", and this makes it even more beautiful and grants it immortality in human memory.

The toad and the rose represent two opposites: terrible and beautiful. The lazy and disgusting toad with its hatred of everything high and beautiful, and the rose as the embodiment of good and joy, are an example of the eternal struggle of two opposites - good and evil.

We see this from the way the author chooses epithets to describe each heroine. Everything beautiful, sublime, spiritualized is connected with the rose. The toad personifies the manifestation of base human qualities: laziness, stupidity, greed, rage.

According to the author of the tale, evil can never defeat good, and beauty, both external and internal, will save our world filled with various human shortcomings. Despite the fact that at the end of the work, both the rose and the boy who loves flowers die, but their departure evokes sad and slightly bright feelings among readers, since they both loved beauty.

In addition, the death of a flower brought the last joy to a dying child, it brightened up the last minutes of his life. And the rose itself was glad that she had died doing good, most of all she was afraid of accepting death from a vile toad that hated her with all its guts. And only for this we can be grateful to the beautiful and noble flower.

Thus, this fairy tale teaches us to strive for beauty and goodness, to ignore and avoid evil in all its manifestations, to be beautiful not only on the outside, but, above all, in the soul.

4 "Frog Traveler"

The fairy tale "The Traveler Frog" was published in the children's magazine "Rodnik" in 1887 with drawings by the artist M.E. Malyshev. It was the last work of the writer. “There is something significant in that,” writes the modern researcher G.A. Bialy, that Garshin's last words were addressed to children and that his last work is light and carefree. Against the background of other works by Garshin, sad and disturbing, this tale is, as it were, living evidence that the joy of life never disappears, that "the light shines in the darkness." Garshin always thought and felt like that. The tale was known to the writer from a collection of ancient Indian tales and from the fable of the famous French fabulist La Fontaine. But in these works, instead of a frog, a turtle goes on a journey, instead of ducks, swans carry it, and, releasing a twig, it falls and breaks to death.

There is no such cruel end in The Frog Traveler, the author was kinder to his heroine. The tale tells about an amazing incident that happened to one frog, she invented an unusual way of transportation and flew south, but did not reach the beautiful land, because she was too boastful. She really wanted to tell everyone how unusually smart she was. And the one who considers himself the smartest, and even likes to “talk” to everyone about it, will certainly be punished for boasting.

This instructive story is written lively, cheerfully, with humor, so that little listeners and readers will forever remember the braggart frog. This is Garshin's only cheerful fairy tale, although it also combines comedy with drama. The author used the technique of imperceptible "immersion" of the reader from the real world into the world of fairy tales (which is also typical for Andersen). Thanks to this, one can believe in the history of the frog flight, “take it for a rare curiosity of nature.” Later, the panorama is shown through the eyes of a frog forced to hang in an uncomfortable position. Not fabulous people from the earth marvel at how ducks carry a frog. These details contribute to the even greater persuasiveness of the fairy tale narrative.

The tale is not very long, and the language of presentation is simple and colorful. The invaluable experience of the Frog shows how sometimes it is dangerous to be boastful. And how important it is not to give in to some of your negative character traits and momentary desires. From the very beginning, the frog knew that the success of the brilliantly invented event depended entirely on the silence of the ducks and herself. But when everyone around began to admire the mind of ducks, which was not true, she could not bear it. She screamed the truth at the top of her lungs, but no one heard her. As a result, the same life, but in another similar to the native, swamp and endless boastful croaking about your mind.

It is interesting that Garshin initially shows us a Frog very dependent on the opinions of others:

“... it was deliciously pleasant, so pleasant that she almost croaked, but, fortunately, she remembered that it was already autumn and that frogs do not croak in autumn - there is spring for this - and that, having croaked, she could drop her frog dignity.

Thus, V.M. Garshin gave fairy tales a special meaning and charm. His stories are unlike any other. The words “civil confession” are most applicable to them. The tales are so close to the structure of thoughts and feelings of the writer himself that they become, as it were, his civil confession to the reader. The writer expresses his innermost thoughts in them.

List of sources used

N.S. Rusanov, "At home". Memoirs, vol. 1, M. 1931.

Tales of Russian writers / Enter, article, comp., and comments. V. P. Anikina; Il. and designed A. Arkhipova.- M.: Det. lit., 1982.- 687 p.

Arzamastseva I.N. Children's literature. M., 2005.

Library of world literature for children. Tales of Russian writers. M., 1980.

Danovsky A.V. Children's literature. Reader. M., 1978.

Kudryashov N.I. The relationship of teaching methods in literature lessons. M.,

Mikhailovsky N.K. Literary-critical articles. M., 1957.

Samosyuk G.F. The moral world of Vsevolod Garshin // Literature at school. 1992. No. 56. S. 13.

(*38) Among the outstanding Russian writers of the last quarter of the 19th century, connected in their ideological development with the general democratic movement, Vsevolod Garshin occupies a special place. His creative activity lasted only ten years. It began in 1877 with the creation of the story "Four Days" - and was abruptly interrupted at the beginning of 1888 by the tragic death of the writer.

Unlike the older democratic writers of his generation - Mamin-Sibiryak, Korolenko - who already had certain social convictions by the beginning of their artistic work, Garshin experienced intense ideological quests throughout his short creative life and the deep moral dissatisfaction associated with them. In this respect he had some resemblance to his younger contemporary, Chekhov.

The ideological and moral quest of the writer for the first time manifested itself with particular force in connection with the beginning of the Russian-Turkish war of 1877 and was reflected in a small cycle of his military stories. They are based on personal impressions (*39) of Garshin. Leaving student studies, he voluntarily went to the front as a simple soldier to take part in the war for the liberation of the fraternal Bulgarian people from centuries of Turkish enslavement.

The decision to go to war was not easy for the future writer. It led him to deep emotional and mental unrest. Garshin was fundamentally against the war, considering it an immoral affair. But he resented the atrocities of the Turks against the defenseless Bulgarian and Serbian population. And most importantly, he sought to share all the hardships of the war with ordinary soldiers, with Russian peasants dressed in overcoats. At the same time, he had to defend his intention before other-minded representatives of democratic youth. They considered such an intention to be immoral; in their opinion, people who voluntarily participate in the war contribute to the military victory and the strengthening of the Russian autocracy, which cruelly oppressed the peasantry and its defenders in their own country. “You, therefore, find it immoral that I will live the life of a Russian soldier and help him in the struggle ... Is it really more moral to sit back, while this soldier will die for us! ..” Garshin said indignantly.

In battle, he was soon wounded. Then he wrote the first military story "Four Days", in which he depicted the long torment of a seriously wounded soldier who was left without help on the battlefield. The story immediately brought the young writer literary fame. In the second military story "Coward" Garshin reproduced his deep doubts and hesitations before the decision to go to war. And then followed a short story "From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov", describing the hardships of long military transitions, the relationship between soldiers and officers, and unsuccessful bloody clashes with a strong enemy.

But the difficult search for a path in life was associated with Garshin not only with military events. He was tormented by the deep ideological discord that wide circles of the Russian democratic intelligentsia experienced during the years of the collapse of the populist movement and intensified government repressions. Although, even before the war, Garshin wrote a journalistic essay against Zemstvo liberals who despise the people, he, unlike Gleb Uspensky and Korolenko, did not know village life well and, as an artist, was not deeply affected by its contradictions. Nor did he have that (*40) spontaneous hostility to the tsarist bureaucracy, to the philistine life of officials, which early Chekhov expressed in his best satirical stories. Garshin was mainly occupied with the life of the urban raznochintsy intelligentsia, the contradictions of its moral and domestic interests. This is reflected in his best works.

A significant place among them is occupied by the image of ideological searches among painters and critics who evaluate their work. In this environment, the clash of two views on art continued, and at the end of the 70s even intensified. Some recognized in it only the task of reproducing the beautiful in life, serving beauty, far from any public interests. Others - and among them was a large group of "Wanderers" painters, headed by I. E. Repin and critic V. V. Stasov - argued that art cannot have a self-contained value and must serve life, which it can reflect in its works the strongest social contradictions, ideals and aspirations of the dispossessed popular masses and their defenders.

Garshin, while still a student, was keenly interested in both contemporary painting and the struggle of opinions about its content and tasks. During this time and later, he published a number of articles on art exhibitions. In them, calling himself a "man of the crowd", he supported the main direction of the art of the "Wanderers", highly appreciated the paintings of V. I. Surikov and V. D. Polenov on historical subjects, but also praised the landscapes, if they depicted nature in an original way, according to the template, "without an academic corset and lacing".

Much deeper and stronger, the writer expressed his attitude to the main trends of contemporary Russian painting in one of his best stories - "Artists" (1879). The story is built on a sharp antithesis of the characters of two fictional characters: Dedov and Ryabinin. Both of them are "students" of the Academy of Arts, both paint from nature in the same "class", both are talented and can dream of a medal and of continuing their creative work abroad for four years "at public expense". But their understanding of the meaning of their art and art is generally the opposite. And through this contrast, the writer reveals something more important with great accuracy and psychological depth.

(* 41) A year before Garshin fought for the liberation of Bulgaria, the dying Nekrasov, in the last chapter of the poem "Who Lives Well in Russia", in one of Grisha Dobrosklonov's songs, posed a question - fatal for all then thinking raznochintsy beginning their lives. This is the question of which of the "two ways", possible "Among the world below / For a free heart", one should choose for oneself. "One is spacious / Road is torn", along which is "huge, / Greedy for temptation / The crowd is walking..." For the bypassed, / for the oppressed ... "

Grisha Nekrasov was clear about his path. The heroes of Garshin's story were just choosing him. But in the sphere of art the antithesis of their choice was immediately revealed by the writer quite distinctly. Dedov is looking for only beautiful "nature" for his paintings; in his "vocation" he is a landscape painter. When he rode a boat along the seaside and wanted to paint with paints his hired rower, a simple "lad", he became interested not in his working life, but only in the "beautiful, hot tones of the kumach lit by the setting sun" of his shirt.

Imagining the picture "May Morning" ("The water in the pond is slightly swaying, the willows bowed their branches to it ... the clouds turned pink ..."), Dedov thinks: "This is art, it tunes a person to a quiet, meek thoughtfulness softens the soul." He believes that "art ... does not tolerate being reduced to the service of some low and vague ideas," that all this masculine streak in art is pure ugliness. Who needs these notorious Repin "Barge Haulers"?

But this recognition of beautiful, "pure art" does not in the least prevent Dedov from thinking about his career as an artist and about the profitable sale of paintings. (“Yesterday I put up a picture, and today they already asked about the price. I won’t give it back for less than 300.”) And in general, he thinks: “You just need to be more direct about the matter; while you are painting a picture - you are an artist, a creator; it is written - you are a merchant, and The more skillful you are in dealing, the better." And Dedov has no discord with the rich and well-fed "public" who buys his beautiful landscapes.

Ryabinin understands the relation of art to life in a completely different way. He has empathy for the lives of ordinary people. (*42) He loves the "hustle and noise" of the embankment, looks with interest at "day laborers carrying coolies, turning gates and winches", and he "learned to draw a working man." He works with pleasure, for him the picture is "the world in which you live and before which you answer", and he does not think about money either before or after its creation. But he doubts the significance of his artistic activity and does not want to "serve exclusively to the stupid curiosity of the crowd ... and the vanity of some rich stomach on his feet" who can buy his picture, "written not with a brush and colors, but with nerves and blood .. .".

Already with all this, Ryabinin sharply opposes Dedov. But before us are only expositions of their characters, and from them follows Garshin's antithesis of the paths that his heroes went on in their lives. For Dedov, these are delightful successes, for Ryabinin, a tragic breakdown. His interest in the "working man" soon shifted from the work of "day labourers, turning gates and winches" on the embankment, to such work that dooms a person to a quick and certain death. The same Dedov - he, at the behest of the author, had previously worked at the plant as an engineer - told Ryabinin about the "grouse workers", riveters, and then showed him one of them holding the bolt from the inside of the "boiler". "He sat curled up in a corner of the cauldron and exposed his chest to the blows of the hammer."

Ryabinin was so amazed and excited by what he saw that he "stopped going to the academy" and quickly painted a picture depicting a "grouse" during his work. It was not for nothing that the artist thought about his "responsibility" before the "world" that he undertook to portray. For him, his new picture is "ripe pain", after which he "will have nothing to write". “I summoned you... from a dark cauldron,” he thinks, mentally addressing his creation, “so that you terrify this clean, sleek, hated crowd with your appearance ... Look at these tailcoats and trains ... Hit them in the heart. .. Kill their peace, as you killed mine..."

And then Garshin creates in his plot an episode full of even deeper and more terrible psychologism. Ryabinin's new painting was sold, and he received money for it, for which, "at the request of his comrades," he arranged a "feast" for them. After it, he fell ill with a serious nervous illness, and in a delusional nightmare the plot of his painting acquired for him (*43) a broad, symbolic meaning. He hears hammer blows on the cast iron of a "huge cauldron", then he finds himself "in a huge, gloomy factory", hears "a frantic cry and frantic blows", sees a "strange, ugly creature" that is "writhing on the ground" under the blows of "a whole crowd ", and among her his "acquaintances with frenzied faces" ... And then he has a split personality: in the "pale, distorted, terrible face" of the beaten Ryabinin recognizes his "own face" and at the same time he "swings a hammer" to inflict a "violent blow" on himself... After many days of unconsciousness, the artist woke up in the hospital and realized that "there is still a whole life ahead", which he now wants to "turn in his own way ...".

And so the story quickly comes to a head. Dedov "received a big gold medal" for his "May morning" and goes abroad. Ryabinin about him: "Satisfied and happy inexpressibly; his face shines like an oil pancake." And Ryabinin left the academy and "passed the exam for a teacher's seminary." Dedov about him: "Yes, he will disappear, die in the village. Well, isn't this a crazy person?" And the author from himself: “This time Dedov was right: Ryabinin really did not succeed.

It is clear which of the two life "paths" outlined in Grisha Dobrosklonov's song went each of Garshin's heroes. Dedov will continue, perhaps, with great talent to paint beautiful landscapes and "trade" them, "cleverly conducting this" business. "And Ryabinin? to work - to the hard and thankless work of a village teacher? Why did he "not succeed" in it? And why did the author, postponing the answer to this question for an indefinite time, never return to it?

Because, of course, Garshin, like so many Russian raznochintsy with spontaneous democratic aspirations, in the 1880s, during the period of the defeat of populism, was at an ideological "crossroads", could not reach any definite understanding of the prospects for Russian national life .

But at the same time, Garshin's denial of Dedov's "spacious" and "thorny" road and his full recognition of Ryabinin's "close, honest" road is easily felt by every thoughtful reader of "Artists". And the painful nightmare experienced by Ryabinin, which is the culmination (*44) of the internal conflict of the story, is not a depiction of madness, it is a symbol of the deepest tragic split of the Russian democratic intelligentsia in its attitude towards the people.

She sees with horror his suffering and is ready to experience them with him. But at the same time she is aware that, by virtue of her position in society, she herself belongs to those privileged strata of society that oppress the people. That is why, in delirium, Ryabinin inflicts a "violent blow" on his face. And just as, leaving for the war, Garshin sought to help ordinary soldiers, distracting himself from the fact that this war could help the Russian autocracy, so now in his story Ryabinin goes to the village to educate the people, to share the hardships of "labor" with them, distracted from " battle" - from the political struggle of his time.

That is why Garshin's best story is so short, and there are so few events and characters in it, and there are no portraits of them and their past. But there are so many images of psychological experiences in it, especially the main character, Ryabinin, experiences that reveal his doubts and hesitations.

To reveal the experiences of the heroes, Garshin found a successful composition of the story: its entire text consists of separate notes by each hero about himself and his fellow artist. There are only 11 of them, Dedov has 6 short ones, Ryabinin has 5 much longer ones.

Korolenko vainly considered this "parallel change of two diaries" a "primitive device." Korolenko himself, who depicted life in stories with a much broader scope, did not, of course, use this method. For Garshin, this technique was quite consistent with the content of his story, which was focused not on external incidents, but on emotional impressions, thoughts, experiences of the characters, especially Ryabinin. With the brevity of the story, this makes its content full of "lyricism", although the story remains, in its essence, quite epic. In this regard, Garshin, of course, walked in a completely different way, along the same inner path as Chekhov did in the stories of the 1890s and early 1900s.

But in the future, the writer was no longer satisfied with short stories (he had others: "Meeting", "Incident", "Night" ...). “For me,” he wrote, “the time has passed ... some kind of prose poetry, which I have been doing until now (* 45) ... you need to depict not your own, but the big outside world.” Such aspirations led him to create the story "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" (1885). Among the main characters in it, artists are again in the foreground, but nevertheless it captures the "big outside world" - Russian life in the 1880s - more strongly.

This life was very difficult and complicated. In the moral consciousness of society, which was then languishing under the sharply intensified oppression of autocratic power, two directly opposite hobbies affected, but they led, each in its own way, to the idea of ​​self-denial. Some supporters of the revolutionary movement - "People's Volunteers" - disappointed by the failures to incite mass uprisings among the peasantry, turned to terror - to armed attempts on the life of representatives of the ruling circles (the tsar, ministers, governors). This path of struggle was false and fruitless, but the people who followed it believed in the possibility of success, selflessly devoted all their strength to this struggle and perished on the gallows. The experiences of such people are beautifully conveyed in the novel "Andrey Kozhukhov", written by the former terrorist S. M. Stepnyak-Kravchinsky.

And other circles of the Russian intelligentsia fell under the influence of the anti-church moralistic-religious ideas of Leo Tolstoy, reflecting the mood of the patriarchal sections of the peasantry - preaching moral self-improvement and selfless non-resistance to evil by violence. At the same time, intense ideological and theoretical work was going on among the most mentally active part of the Russian intelligentsia - the question was discussed whether it was necessary and desirable for Russia, like the advanced countries of the West, to embark on the path of bourgeois development and whether it had already embarked on this path.

Garshin was not a revolutionary and was not fond of theoretical problems, but he was not alien to the influence of Tolstoy's moral propaganda. With the plot of the story "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" he, with great artistic tact, imperceptibly for censorship, responded in his own way to all these ideological demands of the "big world" of our time.

The two heroes of this story, the artists Lopatin and Gelfreich, respond to such requests with the ideas of their large paintings, which they hatch with great enthusiasm (* 46). Lopatin decided to portray Charlotte Corday, the girl who killed one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Marat, and then laid her head on the guillotine. She, too, took the wrong path of terror in her time. But Lopatin does not think about this, but about the moral tragedy of this girl, who, in her fate, is similar to Sofya Perovskaya, who participated in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.

For Lopatin, Charlotte Corday is a "French heroine", "a girl - a fanatic of good." In the already painted picture, she stands "in full growth" and "looks" at him "with her sad eyes, as if smelling execution"; "a lace cape ... sets off her tender neck, along which a bloody line will pass tomorrow ..." Such a character was quite understandable to a thoughtful reader of the 80s, and in such an understanding of him, this reader could not help but see the moral recognition of people, albeit tactically lost their way, but heroically gave their lives for the liberation of the people.

Lopatin's friend, the artist Gelfreich, had a completely different idea for the painting. Like Dedov in the story "Artists", he paints pictures for money - depicts cats of different colors and in different poses, but, unlike Dedov, he has no career and profit interests. And most importantly, he cherishes the idea of ​​​​a big picture: the epic Russian hero Ilya Muromets, unjustly punished by the Kyiv prince Vladimir, sits in a deep cellar and reads the Gospel that "Princess Evprakseyushka" sent him.

In Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, Ilya finds such a terrible moral teaching: "If you are struck on your right cheek, turn your left" (in other words, endure evil patiently and do not resist evil with violence!). And the hero, who all his life courageously defended his native country from enemies, is perplexed: “How is it so, Lord? It’s good if they hit me, but if they offend a woman or a child... "Leave me to rob and kill? No, Lord, I can't obey you! I'll mount a horse, take a spear and go to fight in your name, for I don't understand your wisdom..." Garshin's hero doesn't say a word about L Tolstoy, but thoughtful readers understood that the idea of ​​his painting was a protest against passive moral reconciliation with social evil.

Both of these heroes of the story pose the most difficult moral (*47) questions of their time, but they pose them not theoretically, not in reasoning, but in the plots of their paintings, artistically. And both of them are simple people, morally uncorrupted, sincere, who from the heart are carried away by their creative ideas and do not impose anything on anyone.

In the story, Garshin contrasted the character of the publicist Bessonov with the character of the artists, who was able to read "entire lectures on foreign and domestic policy" to acquaintances and argue about "whether capitalism is developing in Russia or not developing ...".

What Bessonov's views on all such questions are of no interest to either his artist friends or the author himself. He is interested in something else - the rationality and selfishness of Bessonov's character. Semyon Gelfreikh expresses himself clearly and sharply about both. “This man,” he says to Andrey Lopatin, “has all the boxes and compartments in his head; he will put forward one, get a ticket, read what is written there, and act like that.” Or: "Oh, what a callous, selfish ... and envious heart this man has." In both of these respects, Bessonov is a direct antithesis to artists, in particular Lopatin, the protagonist of the story, who seeks to portray Charlotte Corday.

But in order to reveal the antithesis of characters in an epic work, the writer needs to create a conflict between the characters embodying these characters. Garshin did just that. He boldly and originally developed in the story such a difficult social and moral conflict that could interest only a person with deep democratic convictions. This conflict - for the first time in Russian literature - was outlined many years before by N. A. Nekrasov in an early poem:

A similar conflict was portrayed by Dostoevsky in the relationship between Raskolnikov and Sonya Marmeladova ("Crime and Punishment").

But Nekrasov, in order to bring the female (*48) "fallen soul" "out of the darkness of delusion", needed "ardent words of persuasion" from the person who fell in love with her. In Dostoevsky, Sonya herself helps Raskolnikov's "fallen soul" to get out of "the darkness of delusion" and, out of love for him, goes with him to hard labor. For Garshin, the experiences of a woman "entangled in vice" are also of decisive importance. Before meeting Lopatin, the heroine of the story, Nadezhda Nikolaevna, led a dissolute life and was a victim of Bessonov's base passion, sometimes descending "from his selfish activities and arrogant life to revelry."

The artist's acquaintance with this woman occurs because before that he had searched in vain for a model for the image of Charlotte Corday, and at the first meeting he saw in the face of Nadia what he had in mind. She agreed to pose for him, and the next morning, when, having changed into a prepared costume, she stood in her place, “everything that Lopatin dreamed about for his picture was reflected on her face”, “here were determination and longing, pride and fear, love and hatred".

Lopatin did not seek to address the heroine with a "hot word of conviction", but communication with him led to a decisive moral turning point in Nadezhda Nikolaevna's whole life. Feeling in Lopatin a noble and pure person, passionate about his artistic design, she immediately abandoned her former way of life - she settled in a small poor room, sold attractive outfits and began to live modestly on a small salary of a model, earning money by sewing. When meeting with her, Bessonov sees that she has "surprisingly changed," that her "pale face has acquired some kind of imprint of dignity."

This means that the action in the story develops in such a way that Lopatin will have to lead Nadya "out of the darkness of delusion." He is asked about this by his friend Gelfreich ("Get her out, Andrei!"), and Andrei himself finds the strength in himself for this. And what might those forces be? Only love is strong, cordial, pure love, not dark passion.

Although Andrei, by the will of his parents, was engaged from childhood to his second cousin, Sonya, he did not yet know love. Now he first felt "tenderness" for Nadia, "that unfortunate creature", and then a letter from Sonya, to whom he wrote about everything, opened his eyes to (* 49) his own soul, and he realized that he loved Nadia "for life that she should be his wife.

But Bessonov became an obstacle to this. Having recognized Nadia much earlier than Lopatin, he was somewhat carried away by her - "her not quite ordinary appearance" and "remarkable inner content" - and could have saved her. But he did not do this, as he was rationally sure that "they will never return." And now, when he saw the possibility of rapprochement between Andrei and Nadia, he is tormented by "insane jealousy." His rationality and selfishness are manifested here as well. He is ready to call the newly flared feeling love, but he corrects himself: "No, this is not love, this is a crazy passion, this is a fire in which I am all burning. How can I put it out?"

This is how the conflict of the story arises, typically Garshin's - both heroes and the heroine experience it independently of each other - in the depths of their souls. How was the author himself able to resolve this conflict? He quickly brings the conflict to a denouement - unexpected, abrupt and dramatic. He depicts how Bessonov, trying to "put out the fire" of his "passion", suddenly comes to Andrei, at the moment when he and Nadia confessed their love to each other and were happy, and kills Nadia with shots from a revolver, seriously injures Andrei, and he, defending himself, kills Bessonov.

Such a denouement must, of course, be recognized as an artistic exaggeration - a hyperbole. No matter how strong Bessonov's passion was, rationality should have kept him from crime. But writers have the right to plot hyperbole (such is the death of Bazarov from an accidental blood poisoning in Turgenev or the sudden suicide of Anna Karenina in Leo Tolstoy). Writers use such resolutions when it is difficult for them to tell about the further development of the conflict.

Same with Garshin. If his Bessonov, a rational and strong-willed person, could, without meeting more with Andrei and Nadia, overcome his passion (this would elevate him somewhat in the eyes of readers!), Then what would the author have left to tell. He would have to portray the family idyll of Nadia and Andrei with the support of Semochka Gelfreich. And if the family idyll did not work out and each of the spouses would be tormented by memories of Nadia's past? Then the story would have dragged on, and the character (*50) of Lopatin would have morally declined in our, the reader's, perception. And the sharp dramatic denouement created by Garshin greatly reduces the character of the egoist Bessonov before us and elevates the emotional and sympathetic character of Lopatin.

On the other hand, the fact that Bessonov and Nadia died, and Lopatin, shot through the chest, while still alive, makes it possible for the author to strengthen the psychologism of the story - to give an image of the hero’s hidden experiences and emotional thoughts about his life.

The story "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" in general has much in common with the stories "Artists" in its composition. The whole story is made up of Lopatin's "notes", depicting the events of his life in their deeply emotional perception by the hero himself, and in these "notes" the author sometimes inserts episodes taken from Bessonov's "diary" and consisting mainly of his emotional introspection. But Lopatin begins to write his "notes" only in the hospital. He got there after the death of Nadia and Bessonov, where he is being treated for a serious wound, but does not hope to survive (he begins to develop consumption). He is cared for by his sister, Sonya. The plot of the story, depicted in the "notes" and "diaries" of the heroes, also receives a "frame", consisting of the heavy thoughts of the sick Lopatin.

In the story "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" Garshin did not quite manage to make the "big outside world" the subject of the image. The deeply emotional outlook of the writer, who is looking for, but has not yet found a clear path in life for himself, here again prevented him from doing this.

Garshin has another story, "Meeting" (1870), also based on a sharp opposition of different life paths, along which the raznochintsy intelligentsia of his difficult time could go.

It depicts how two former university buddies unexpectedly meet again in a southern seaside town. One of them, Vasily Petrovich, who had just arrived there to take a position as a teacher at a local gymnasium, regrets that his dreams of "professorship" and "journalism" did not come true, and he is thinking about how he could save up for six months. a thousand rubles from the salary and fees for possible private lessons, in order to acquire everything necessary for the upcoming marriage. Another (*51) hero, Kudryashov, in the past a poor student, has long served here as an engineer on the construction of a huge pier (dam) to create an artificial harbor. He invites the future teacher to his “modest” hut, takes him there on black horses, in a “smart carriage” with a “fat coachman”, and his “hut” turns out to be a luxuriously furnished mansion, where they are served foreign wine and “excellent roast beef” at dinner. ", where a footman waits for them.

Vasily Petrovich is amazed by such a rich life of Kudryashov, and a conversation takes place between them, clarifying to the reader the deepest difference in the moral positions of the heroes. The host immediately and frankly explains to his guest where he gets so much money to lead this luxurious life. It turns out that Kudryashov, together with a whole group of clever and impudent businessmen, from year to year deceives the state institution, on whose funds the pier is being built. Every spring, they report to the capital that autumn and winter storms at sea have partly washed away the huge stone foundation for the future pier (which actually does not happen!), And to continue the work they are again sent large sums of money, which they appropriate and on which they live rich and carefree.

The future teacher, who is going to divine the "spark of God" in his students, support natures "strive to throw off the yoke of darkness", develop young fresh forces, "alien to worldly dirt", is embarrassed and shocked by the engineer's confessions. He calls his income "dishonest means", says that it is "painful to look" at Kudryashov, that he is "ruining himself", that he will be "caught doing this" and he will "go along Vladimirka" (that is, to Siberia, to hard labor) that he was formerly an "honest youth" who could become an "honest citizen." Putting a piece of "excellent roast beef" into his mouth, Vasily Petrovich thinks to himself that this is a "stolen piece", that it was "stolen" from someone, that someone was "offended" by this.

But all these arguments do not make any impression on Kudryashov. He says that we must first find out "what is honest and what is dishonest", that "it's all about the look, the point of view", that "one must respect the freedom of judgment ...". And then he raises his dishonest deeds into a general law, into the law of predatory "mutual responsibility." "Am I the only one ... - he says, - am I gaining? Everything around, (* 52) the very air - and it seems to be dragging." And any striving for honesty is easy to cover: "And we will always cover it. All for one, one for all."

Finally, Kudryashov claims that if he himself is a robber, then Vasily Petrovich is also a robber, but "under the guise of virtue." "Well, what kind of occupation is your teaching?" he asks. "Will you prepare at least one decent person? Three-quarters of your pupils will come out the same as me, and one quarter will be like you, that is, a well-intentioned scumbag. Well, don't you take money for nothing, tell me frankly?" And he expresses the hope that his guest "by his own mind" will come to the same "philosophy".

And in order to better explain this "philosophy" to the guest, Kudryashov shows him in his house a huge aquarium lit by electricity, filled with fish, among which the big ones devour the small ones before the eyes of observers. “I,” says Kudryashov, “love this whole creature because it is frank, not like our brother is a man. He eats each other and is not embarrassed.” "They eat - and do not think about immorality, and we?" "Bite, don't bite, and if a piece gets in... Well, I abolished them, these remorse, and I'm trying to imitate this beast." "To the free will," the future teacher could only say "with a sigh" to this analogy of robbery.

As you can see, Vasily Petrovich, at Garshin's, could not express a clear and decisive condemnation of Kudryashov's base "philosophy" - the "philosophy" of a predator, who justifies his theft of state funds by referring to the behavior of predators in the animal world. But even in the story "Artists" the writer failed to explain to the reader why Ryabinin "did not succeed" in his teaching activities in the countryside. And in the story "Nadezhda Nikolaevna" he did not show how the rationality of the publicist Bessonov deprived him of heartfelt feelings and doomed him to the "fire" of passion, which led him to murder. All these ambiguities in the writer's work stemmed from the vagueness of his social ideals.

This forced Garshin to immerse himself in the experiences of his heroes, to draw up his works as their "notes", "diaries" or random meetings and disputes, and with difficulty go out with his plans to the "big outside world".

From this followed Garshin's tendency to (* 53) allegorical imagery - to symbols and allegories. Of course, Kudryashov's aquarium in the "Meeting" is a symbolic image, evoking the idea of ​​the similarity of predation in the animal world and human predation in the era of the development of bourgeois relations (Kudryashov's confessions clarify it). And the nightmare of the sick Ryabinin, and Lopatin's painting "Charlotte Corday" - too. But Garshin also has such works that are entirely symbolic or allegorical.

Such, for example, is the short story "Attalea prinseps" 1 , which shows the futile attempts of a tall and proud southern palm tree to break free from a greenhouse made of iron and glass, and which has an allegorical meaning. Such is the famous symbolic story "The Red Flower" (1883), called by Korolenko the "pearl" of Garshin's work. It symbolizes those episodes of the plot in which a person who has ended up in a lunatic asylum imagines that the beautiful flowers growing in the garden of this house are the embodiment of "world evil", and decides to destroy them. At night, when the watchman is asleep, the patient wriggles out of the straitjacket with difficulty, then bends the iron bar in the window bars; with bloody hands and knees, he climbs over the wall of the garden, plucks a beautiful flower and, returning to the ward, dies. Readers in the 1880s understood the meaning of the story perfectly well.

As you can see, in some allegorical works, Garshin touched upon the motives of the political struggle of the time, in which he himself was not a participant. Like Lopatin with his painting "Charlotte Corday", the writer clearly sympathized with the people who took part in civil clashes, paid tribute to their moral greatness, but at the same time was aware of the doom of their efforts.

Garshin entered the history of Russian fiction as a writer who subtly reflected in his psychological and allegorical stories and stories the atmosphere of timelessness of the reactionary 1880s, through which Russian society was destined to go before it was ripe for decisive political clashes and revolutionary upheavals.

1 Royal palm (lat.).

V.M. Garshin was a sensitive witness to the mournful era, the features of which left a mark on the writer's worldview, giving his works a touch of tragedy. The theme of war is one of the main ones in the work of V.M. Garshin. “Mommy,” he writes in April 1877, “I cannot hide behind the walls of an institution when my peers expose their foreheads and chests to bullets. Bless me." Therefore, after the official declaration of war on Turkey by Russia, V.M. Garshin, without hesitation, goes to fight. Suffering on the pages of his works is considered as a formula for the mental and spiritual development of a person on the path of a collision with evil.

Garshin's military stories - "Four Days" (1877), "A Very Short Novel" (1878), "Coward" (1879), "From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov" (1882) - form a group of stories united by a state of humanistic suffering.

From the point of view of the anthropocentric trend in literary criticism of the early 90s, a person is the center of the universe and has an absolute right to unlimited freedom of thoughts and actions in order to achieve earthly happiness. Viewed in this way, suffering limits the scope of the individual's own Self and prevents the manifestation of the natural individualistic principle. For us, more acceptable in the study of Russian classics is an understanding of humanism, reflecting Christian principles. So, S. Perevezentsev characterizes humanism as "the religion of man-godness (faith in man, deification of man), designed to destroy the traditional Christian faith in God", and Yu. Seleznev, considering the features of the Renaissance in Russian literature of the 19th century, which differ from European, notes that The humanistic worldview is a form of “fundamentally monological, essentially egoistic consciousness”, which elevates a person to an absolute height and opposes him to the entire Universe, therefore humanism and humanity, as is often understood, may not be synonyms.

The early stage of Garshin's work, until 1880, is colored by the writer's humanistic ideas. Suffering on the pages of his stories appears as “experience, the opposite of activity; a state of pain, illness, grief, sadness, fear, anguish, anxiety ”, leading the heroes to the path of spiritual death.

In the stories "Four Days" and "A Very Short Romance" the suffering of the characters is the reaction of an egocentric personality to the tragic circumstances of reality. Moreover, war acts as a form of evil and anti-value (in the understanding of humanism) in relation to the personal beginning of the heroes. V.M. Garshin at this creative stage saw the highest value of being in the uniqueness of human life.

A sense of duty called the hero of the story "Four Days" to go to war. This position, as noted above, is close to Garshin himself. The period on the eve of and during the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-1878 gave rise to "a flurry of sympathy for the" Slav brothers "". F.M. Dostoevsky defined his attitude to this problem in the following way: “Our people know neither Serbs nor Bulgarians; he helps, both with his pennies and volunteers, not to the Slavs and not for Slavism, but only heard that Orthodox Christians, our brothers, are suffering for the faith of Christ from the Turks, from the "godless Hagarians" ... ". However, the aspirations of private Ivanov are far from Orthodox empathy. His impulses should be called romantic, and in a negative sense: only the beauty of his actions seduces Ivanov in battles that will bring him glory. He is driven by the desire to "put his chest under the bullets." The hero of the story “Four Days” gradually realizes that he is wounded, however, apart from a feeling of physical awkwardness (“strange situation”, “terribly awkward”), Ivanov does not experience anything. The restless tone of the narrative intensifies as soon as the hero realizes: "I'm in the bushes: they didn't find me!" . It is from this moment that the understanding of the inhumanity of war and Ivanov's individualistic reflection begin. The thought that he was not found on the battlefield and that he is now doomed to a lonely death leads the hero to despair. Now he is only concerned with his own fate. Private Ivanov goes through several stages in asserting his position: pre-suffering (foreboding of suffering), despair, attempts to restore mental and spiritual balance, outbreaks of a “universal” experience, and actually individualistic anxieties. "I'm going along with thousands, of which there are only a few, like me, who go willingly," the hero singles himself out from the crowd. The hero's patriotism undergoes a kind of test, during which the high civic feelings of a person seized by individualism turn out to be insincere: he says that most of the military would refuse to participate in the massacre, but "they go the same way as we do, " conscious." The hero of the story, it becomes obvious in the finale of the story, doubts the correctness of his views and actions. The triumph of his own "I" does not leave him even at the moment when he sees his victim in front of him - a dead fellah. Awareness of oneself as a killer contributes to the understanding of the inner essence of the hero's experiences. Ivanov discovers that war compels one to kill. However, murder, in the context of the thoughts of an ordinary person, is regarded only as depriving people of the right to life and self-creation. Why did I kill him? - Ivanov does not find an answer to this question, and therefore experiences moral torment. And yet the hero absolves himself of any moral responsibility for what he has done: “And how am I to blame, even though I killed him?” His own physical suffering, fear of death take possession of the hero and reveal his spiritual weakness. Despair intensifies; repeating “it doesn’t matter”, which should express an unwillingness to fight for life, Ivanov, as it were, plays into humility. The desire to live, of course, is a natural feeling in a person, but in the hero it acquires shades of insanity, because he cannot accept death, because he is a Human. As a result, the Garshin hero curses the world, which "invented war for the suffering of people", and, worst of all, comes to the idea of ​​suicide. Self-pity is so strong that he no longer wants to experience pain, thirst and loneliness. Schematically, the spiritual development of the hero can be represented as follows: pain - longing - despair - the thought of suicide. The last link can (and should) be replaced by another - “spiritual death”, which occurs despite physical salvation. Remarkable in this respect is his question to the infirmary officer: "Will I die soon?", which can be regarded as the result of Ivanov's moral quest.

In the essay "A Very Short Romance", the war acts as a backdrop for demonstrating the individualistic tragedy of the protagonist. The author introduces the reader to a man who has already been overcome by despair. "Masha ordered me to be a hero" - this is how the hero of the essay motivates his actions. It was “for Masha” that he became a hero and even “honestly fulfilled his duty regarding his homeland”, which, of course, is quite debatable. On the battlefield, he was guided, as it turns out, only by vanity, the desire to return and stand before Masha as a hero. There are no pictures of the battle in the story, the hero "paints" only pictures of his own suffering. The betrayal of a loved one had such an impact on him that the loss of a leg in the war did not. The war is put as the culprit of his personal drama. Physical and mental suffering served as a test of his spiritual essence. The hero turns out to be unable to endure all life's trials - he loses his self-control and doomedly comprehends his future existence. The Garshi hero reveals his sufferings with such force that it seems that he enjoys them. His sufferings are purely individualistic in nature: the hero is only worried about his own sadness, which becomes even more gloomy against the background of someone else's happiness. He rushes about and seeks relief for himself, therefore he either speaks with particular pity about his position as a “man on a wooden leg”, or proudly ranks himself among the camp of knights who, at the half-word of their beloved, rush to exploits; sometimes he compares himself with a “darn stocking” and a butterfly with singed wings, sometimes he condescendingly and condescendingly “sacrifices” his feelings for the sake of the love of two people; sometimes he seeks to sincerely open himself to the reader, sometimes he is indifferent to the reaction of the public to the question of the veracity of his story. The tragedy of the protagonist lies in the fact that he left his peaceful, happy life, filled with vivid impressions and colors, in order to prove to his beloved in practice that he is an “honest person” (“Honest people confirm their words with deeds”). The concepts of “honor” and “honest”, which are based on “nobility of the soul” and “clear conscience” (following from the definition of V. Dahl), undergo a kind of test in the story, as a result of which the true meaning of these words in the understanding of the characters is distorted. The concept of honor during the war cannot be reduced only to chivalry and heroism: impulses turn out to be too base, the degree of individualism in a person who cares about his honesty is too high. In the finale, a “humble hero” appears, who sacrificed his happiness for the sake of the happiness of two. However, this act of self-sacrifice (let us note, absolutely non-Christian) is devoid of sincerity - it does not experience happiness for others: “... I was the best man. I proudly performed his duties... [emphasis mine. - E.A.]”, - these words, in our opinion, can serve as an explanation of the actions of the hero of the essay and proof of his individualistic position.

The story "Coward" begins with a symbolic phrase: "The war definitely haunts me." It is the state of peace and, in turn, the feelings of freedom, independence and independence associated with it that form the basis of the life of the protagonist of the story. He is constantly absorbed in thoughts about human deaths, about the actions of people who deliberately go to war to kill and deliberately take other people's lives. The absolute right to life, freedom and happiness is violated by the cruelty of people to each other. Bloody pictures flash in his eyes: thousands of wounded, piles of corpses. He is outraged by so many victims of the war, but even more outraged by the calm attitude of people to the facts of military losses, which are full of telegrams. The hero, talking about the victims of the war and the attitude of society towards them, comes to the conclusion that, perhaps, he will have to become a participant in this war that he did not start: he will be forced to leave his former measured life and give it into the hands of those who started it. bloodshed. "Where will your 'I' go? exclaims the Garshin hero. “You protest with all your being against the war, but still the war will force you to take a gun on your shoulders, go to die and kill.” He is outraged by the lack of free choice in managing his own destiny, so he is not ready to sacrifice himself. The main question that sets the direction of the hero’s thoughts is the question “Am I a coward or not?”. Constantly turning to his “I” with the question: “Perhaps all my indignation against what everyone considers a great thing comes from fear for his own skin?”, The hero seeks to emphasize that he is not afraid for his life: “therefore It's not death that scares me... Then the question is logical: what scares the hero? It turns out that the loss of the individual's right to free choice. Pride does not give him rest, the infringed "I", which does not have the opportunity to dictate its own rules. Hence all the torment of the hero of the story. The "coward" does not seek to analyze the social aspects of the war, he does not possess specific facts, or rather: they do not interest him, since he relates to the war "with a direct feeling, indignant at the mass of shed blood" . In addition, the hero of the story does not understand what his death will serve. His main argument is that he did not start the war, which means that he is not obliged to interrupt the course of his life, even if "history needed his physical strength." The long experiences of the hero are replaced by an act of despair when he sees the suffering of Kuzma, "eaten" by gangrene. Garshinsky's hero compares the suffering of one person with the suffering of thousands tormented in the war. The “soul-rending voice” of the hero of the story, presented by the author on the pages of the story, should be called civil grief, which is fully revealed precisely during the period of Kuzma’s illness. It should be noted that F.M. Dostoevsky had a negative attitude towards the so-called "civil grief" and recognized only Christian grief as the only sincere one. The moral torment of the Garshin hero is close to the suffering that F.M. Dostoevsky in relation to N.A. Nekrasov in the article "Vlas": "you did not suffer from a burlak proper, but, so to speak, from a general burlak", that is, from a "common man", an individual. In the finale, the protagonist of the story decides to go to war, guided by the motive "conscience will not torment". He did not have a sincere desire to “learn good things” from him. A sense of civic duty, which has already been developed by society, but has not yet become an internal natural component of the spiritual and moral world of a person, does not allow the hero to avoid war. The spiritual death of the hero comes before physical death, even before leaving for the war, when he calls everyone, including himself, the “black mass”: “A huge organism unknown to you, of which you are an insignificant part, wanted to cut you off and leave you. And what can you do against such a desire, you ... a toe? .. ". In the soul of the hero, the concept of duty and sacrifice has not become a vital need, perhaps that is why he cannot fight evil and inhumanity. The concept of duty for him remained abstract: mixing personal duty with duty in general leads the hero to death.

The idea of ​​suffering finds a different development in the story "From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov", which was written already in 1882. Humanistic pathos does not leave the artistic field of the work, however, it should be pointed out that the idea of ​​suffering is refracted through the concept of altruism. Therefore, here we can talk about altruistic suffering as a form of humanistic suffering. Note that the concept of "altruism" was introduced by positivists (O. Comte), who in their ethics avoided the Christian concept of love for one's neighbor and used the concept of "philanthropy" as opposed to egoism. It is noteworthy that “philanthropy is love for a person as such, as a living being. It presupposes both love for oneself and love for near and far, i.e. to those like themselves, to all mankind. However, philanthropy "does not exclude in some cases a hostile attitude towards a particular person."

The reader is presented with the already familiar volunteer soldier Ivanov. But already from the first lines it becomes obvious that Ivanov differs from the previous heroes in a different attitude towards the war and man as a participant in the "common suffering". Obviously, Ivanov's decision to go to war was conscious and balanced. Here it is interesting to compare the positions of the hero of the story "Coward" and the hero of the analyzed story. The first one, with special emotional tension, says that it is easier to die at home, because there are relatives and relatives nearby, which is not the case in war. The other calmly, affirmatively and without regret exclaims: “We were attracted by an unknown secret force: there is no greater force in human life. Each one would go home separately, but the whole mass walked, obeying not discipline, not the consciousness of the rightness of the cause, not the feeling of hatred for the unknown enemy, not the fear of punishment, but that unknown and unconscious that for a long time will lead humanity to a bloody slaughter - the biggest reason all sorts of human troubles and suffering. This "unknown secret power", as we will see later, is the Christian thirst for self-sacrifice in the name of goodness and justice, which rallied people of different estate groups in a single impulse. The understanding of the war hero changes. At the beginning of the story - "to join some regiment" and "to go to war", then - "try, see".

In the study of the above military stories, we were guided by the scheme of A.A. Bezrukov "torment - despair - doom - death", revealing the humanistic definition of suffering. In the story “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov”, this logical chain cannot be applied, since the content of the concept of “suffering” occupies a border position between humanistic and Christian (“suffering - death - resurrection”): displaying certain signs of the first, it is still sufficiently does not carry the axiological load of the second.

The main character, like the heroes of other military stories by V.M. Garshin, painfully perceives the cruelty of human actions and the evil caused by the war, but the work no longer has that tragic bewilderment that characterizes the stories considered. The war for Ivanov remains a common suffering, but he still comes to terms with its inevitability. He, let's say, is devoid of individualism or egocentrism, which serves as convincing evidence of the deep spiritual and moral growth of Garshin's hero from story to story. His thoughts and actions are now guided by a conscious desire to be part of a flow that knows no obstacles and which "breaks everything, distorts everything and destroys everything" . The hero embraces a sense of unity with the people, capable of selflessly moving forward and endangering themselves for the sake of freedom and justice. Ivanov is imbued with great sympathy for this people and selflessly endures all hardships with them. Under the influence of this "unconscious" force, the hero, as it were, "renounces" his "I" and dissolves in the living human mass. The idea of ​​suffering in the story "From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov" appears as a conscious need for self-sacrifice. Ivanov, having risen to a high stage of spiritual and moral development, strives for self-sacrifice, but understands this as an act of philanthropy, an act of duty of a person fighting for the rights of his own kind. He opens another war. It, of course, brings the same suffering as any war. However, suffering, one's own and others', makes the hero think about the meaning of human life. It should be noted that these reflections are more abstract in nature, and yet the very fact of the idea of ​​self-sacrifice speaks of the spiritual growth of Private Ivanov in comparison with the previous heroes.

Bibliographic list:

1. Balashov L. E. Theses on humanism // Common sense. - 1999/2000. - No. 14. - S. 30-36.

2. Bezrukov A.A. Return to Orthodoxy and the Category of Suffering in the Russian Classics of the 19th Century: Monograph. - M .: Publishing house of the RSSU, 2005. - 340 p.

3. Bokhanov A.N. Russian idea. From St. Vladimir to the present day / A.N. Bokhanov. — M.: Veche, 2005. — 400 p.: ill. (Great Russia).

4. Garshin V.M. Red Flower: Stories. Fairy tales. Poems. Essays. — M.: Eksmo, 2008. — 480 p. Further cited with page number.

5. Garshin V.M. Full coll. op. - T. 3. - M.-L.: Academia, 1934. - 569 p.

6. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete works in thirty volumes. - L .: Nauka, 1972-1990. T. 24.

7. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete works in thirty volumes. - L .: Nauka, 1972-1990. T. 21.

8. Perevezentsev S. The meaning of Russian history. — M.: Veche, 2004. — 496 p.

9. Seleznev Y. Through the eyes of the people // Seleznev Y. Golden chain. — M.: Sovremennik, 1985. — 415 p. - S. 45-74.

10. Philosophical encyclopedic dictionary. Ch. ed. Ilyichev L.F., Fedoseev P.N. and others - M .: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1983. - 836 p.

The creations of Vsevolod Mikhailovich Garshin can be safely put on a par with the works of the greatest masters of Russian psychological prose - Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Chekhov. Alas, the writer was not allowed to live a long life, the biography of V. M. Garshin ends at number 33. The writer was born in February 1855 and died in March 1888. His death turned out to be as fatal and tragic as the whole worldview, expressed in short and poignant stories. Acutely feeling the inescapability of evil in the world, the writer created works of amazing depth of psychological drawing, survived them with his heart and mind and could not protect himself from the monstrous disharmony that reigns in the social and moral life of people. Heredity, a special temperament, a drama experienced in childhood, a keen sense of personal guilt and responsibility for the injustices that are happening in reality - everything led to madness, the point at which, rushing down the flight of stairs, was put by V. M. Garshin himself.

Brief biography of the writer. Children's impressions

He was born in Ukraine, in the Ekaterinoslav province, on an estate with the lovely name Pleasant Valley. The father of the future writer was an officer, a participant. Mom was distinguished by progressive views, spoke several languages, read a lot and, undoubtedly, managed to inspire her son with the nihilistic moods characteristic of the sixties of the 19th century. The woman boldly broke with the family, passionately carried away by the revolutionary Zavadsky, who lived in the family as a teacher of older children. Of course, this event pierced the small heart of five-year-old Vsevolod with a “knife”. Partly because of this, the biography of V. M. Garshin is not without gloomy colors. The mother, who was in conflict with the father for the right to raise her son, took him to St. Petersburg and assigned him to the gymnasium. Ten years later, Garshin entered the Mining Institute, but did not receive a diploma, since his studies were interrupted by the Russian-Turkish war of 1877.

War experience

On the very first day, the student signed up as a volunteer and in one of the first battles fearlessly rushed to the attack, receiving a minor wound in the leg. Garshin received the rank of officer, but did not return to the battlefield. The impressionable young man was shocked by the pictures of the war, he could not come to terms with the fact that people blindly and ruthlessly exterminate each other. He did not return to the institute, where he began to study mining: the young man was imperiously attracted to literature. For some time he attended lectures as a volunteer at the philological faculty of St. Petersburg University, and then began to write stories. Anti-war sentiments and experienced shock resulted in works that instantly made the novice writer famous and desirable in many editions of that time.

Suicide

The mental illness of the writer developed in parallel with his work and social activities. He was treated in a psychiatric clinic. But soon after that (the biography of V. M. Garshin mentions this bright event), his life was illuminated by love. The writer regarded marriage with a novice physician Nadezhda Zolotilova as the best years of his life. By 1887, the writer's illness was aggravated by the fact that he was forced to leave the service. In March 1888, Garshin was going to the Caucasus. Things were already packed and the time was set. After a night tormented by insomnia, Vsevolod Mikhailovich suddenly went out onto the landing, went down one flight below and rushed down from a height of four floors. Literary images of suicide, which burned the soul in his short stories, were embodied terribly and irreparably. The writer was taken to the hospital with serious injuries, and six days later he died. The message about V. M. Garshin, about his tragic death, caused great public excitement.

To say goodbye to the writer at the "Literary bridges" of the Volkovskoye cemetery in St. Petersburg (now there is a museum-necropolis), people of various strata and estates gathered. The poet Pleshcheev wrote a lyrical obituary in which he expressed acute pain that Garshin - a man of a big pure soul - is no longer among the living. The literary heritage of the prose writer still disturbs the souls of readers and is the subject of research by philologists.

Creativity V. M. Garshin. Anti-militarist theme

The liveliest interest in the inner world of a person surrounded by merciless reality is the central theme in Garshin's writings. sincerity and empathy in the author's prose, undoubtedly, feeds on the source of great Russian literature, which since the time of the book "The Life of Archpriest Avvakum" has shown a deep interest in the "dialectics of the soul".

Garshin the narrator first appeared before the reading public with the work "Four Days". A soldier with broken legs lay on the battlefield for so long until his fellow soldiers found him. The story is told in the first person and resembles the stream of consciousness of a person exhausted by pain, hunger, fear and loneliness. He hears groans, but with horror he realizes that it is he who groans. Near him, the corpse of the enemy he killed is decomposing. Looking at this picture, the hero is horrified by the face on which the skin has burst, the grin of the skull is terribly bare - the face of war! Other stories breathe similar anti-war pathos: “Coward”, “Batman and Officer”, “From the Memoirs of Private Ivanov”.

Thirst for harmony

With the utmost frankness, the heroine of the story “The Incident” appears before the reader, earning a living with her body. The narrative is built in the same manner of confession, merciless introspection, characteristic of Garshin. A woman who has met her “support”, a man who unwittingly put her on the path of choosing between a “impudent, rouged cocotte” and “a lawful wife and ... a noble parent”, is trying to change her fate. Such an understanding of the theme of a harlot in Russian literature of the 19th century is perhaps the first time. In the story "Artists" Garshin embodied with renewed vigor the idea of ​​Gogol, who firmly believed that the emotional shock produced by art can change people for the better. In the short story "Meeting" the author shows how the cynical belief that all means are good to achieve well-being takes possession of the minds of the seemingly best representatives of the generation.

Happiness is in the sacrificial deed

The story "Red Flower" is a special event that marked the creative biography of V. M. Garshin. It tells the story of a madman who is sure that the "bloody" flower in the hospital garden contains all the lies and cruelty of the world, and the hero's mission is to destroy it. Having committed an act, the hero dies, and his deadly brightened face expresses "proud happiness." According to the writer, a person is not able to defeat the world's evil, but a high honor to those people who cannot put up with it and are ready to sacrifice their lives to overcome it.

All the works of Vsevolod Garshin - essays and short stories - were accumulated in just one volume, but the shock that his prose produced in the hearts of thoughtful readers is incredibly great.