Nikolai Pomyalovsky essays on bursa. Genre originality of the work of N.G.

Huge dirty school room. Classes are over, and the students are having fun with games.

Quite recently, the "period of forced education" ended, when everyone, regardless of age, had to take a full course of science. Now the “law of great age” has begun to operate - upon reaching a certain age, a student is expelled from school, and he can become a scribe, deacon, or novice. Many cannot find a place for themselves. There are rumors that such people will be taken as soldiers.

There are over a hundred people in the class. Among them are twelve-year-old children and adults. They play "pebbles", "shvychki", "lean", "fast". All games are necessarily associated with causing each other pain: pinching, clicking, hitting, and so on.

Nobody wants to play with Semyonov, a sixteen-year-old boy, the son of a parish priest. Everyone knows that Semyonov is a fiscal. It gets dark in the classroom. The Bursaks amuse themselves by singing, arrange noisy games in the "small pile", but suddenly everything subsides. In the darkness you can hear: someone is being whipped. It is the comrades who are punishing the fiscal Semyonov. An embittered Semyonov runs to complain.

Classes begin. Someone is sleeping, someone is talking... The main method of student learning is meaningless "dumming", cramming. Therefore, no one wants to learn.

An inspector and Semyonov appear in the classroom, complaining about their offenders. One of them, on the orders of the inspector, is flogged and they promise to flog every tenth student the next day. The Bursaks decide to take revenge on Semyonov. At night, they insert “pfimfu”, that is, a cone with burning cotton, into his nose. Semyonov ends up in the hospital, and he himself does not know what happened to him. By order of the authorities, many are flogged, and many in vain.

Early morning. Bursatskaya bedroom. The students are awakened and taken to the bath. They go through the city with noise, quarreling with all passers-by. After the bath, they scatter around the city in search of what is bad. Particularly distinguished are the Bursaks, nicknamed Aksyuta and Satan. Having eaten stolen goods, the Bursaks are in a good mood and tell each other stories about the old times of the Bursa: about the tricks of the Bursaks, about how they used to flog ...

Classes begin. Teacher Ivan Mikhailovich Lobov first flogs Aksyuta, who did not learn the lesson, then asks others, distributing punishments. During class, he eats breakfast. Lobov never explains the lesson. The next lesson - Latin - is taught by the teacher Dolbezhin. He also flogs everyone in a row, but his students love: Dol-bezhin is honest, does not take bribes and does not favor fiscals. The third teacher, nicknamed Old Man, is especially ferocious when drunk: along with whipping, he also uses other, more sophisticated physical punishments.

Aksyutka is hungry: Lobov ordered to leave him without lunch until he moves to Kamchatka. Aksyutka either studies well and sits at the first desk, or she doesn’t study at all. Lobov is tired of such changes: he prefers that Aksyutka never study.

In the courtyard of the school, two women - an old woman and a thirty-year-old woman - are waiting for the director and throw themselves at his feet. It turns out that this is a “fixed bride” with her mother, who came “for the grooms”. The fact is that after the death of a clergyman, his place is “assigned” to the family, that is, it passes to the one who agrees to marry his daughter. The clerk and her daughter have to go to the bursa to find a "breadwinner".

A new type of teacher is emerging in the bursa. Among them, Petr Fedorovich Krasnov. He, in comparison with others, is a kind and delicate person, opposes too cruel punishments, however, he abuses moral punishments, mocking ignorant students in front of the whole class.

Aksyutka, together with another student nicknamed Satan, manages to steal bread from the Bursat baker Tsepka. Aksyutka infuriates Tsepka, he chases after the impudent student, while Satan steals bread.

The attendant calls the grooms - to look at the bride. The authorities recognize Vasenda, Azinus, Aksyutka as fit suitors. The first two are the inhabitants of "Kamchatka", who are engaged only in ecclesiastical sciences. Vasenda is a practical, solid person, Azinus is a stupid, careless person. Bursaks go to the bride. Vasenda does not like both the bride and the place, but Azinus decides to marry, although the bride is much older than him. Aksyutka simply called himself a groom to eat from the bride and steal something.

And in the bursa they start a new game - a parody of a wedding ...

Karas from early childhood dreamed of a bursa, for his older brothers were bursaks and were very proud of him. When a novice Karas is brought to the bursa, he rejoices. But ridicule, various bullying from his comrades immediately poured on him. On the first day he is whipped. Karas enters the seminary choir. Instead of singing, he only tries to open his mouth. The comrades “christen” him Karas, the ceremony of “reproaching” is very offensive, Karas fights with offenders, and Lobov, who caught the fight scene, orders Karas to be whipped. This cruel flogging produces a fracture in the soul of Karas - a terrible hatred for the bursa appears, dreams of revenge.

A student nicknamed Silych, the first hero of the class, declares that he will patronize Karas so that no one dares to offend him. Under this protection Karashu becomes easier to live. He himself tries to protect the "oppressed", especially the bursat fools. Karas resolutely denies the Bursak science, does not want to study.

Vsevolod Vasilyevich Razumnikov, a teacher of church singing, the law of God and sacred history, is a rather progressive teacher: he introduces a system of mutual teaching. But Karas cannot comprehend church singing, and Razumnikov punishes him: he does not let him go home on Sundays. The danger hangs over Karas that they will not let him go home for Easter.

Arithmetic teacher Pavel Alekseevich Livanov arrives. He is helpless when drunk, and the Bursaks mock him.

On Saturday, Karas does all sorts of outrages out of annoyance that he is not allowed to go home. Sunday passes in the bursa, and Karas begins to think about escaping. He heard that some of the younger "runners" were caught, but forgiven, others were flogged, but still they did not notice that the fugitives were "rescued" somewhere in the wood yard. But on the same day they bring the captured "runner" Menshinsky. He is whipped half to death, and then taken to the hospital on a matting. Crucian leaves thoughts of flight. He decides to "escape" from church singing in the hospital. He manages to get sick, the terrible lesson passes without him, and on Easter Karas is sent home...

A new caretaker appears in the bursa. The former, nicknamed the Astrologer, was a kind man and, unable to endure the horrors of the Bursa, preferred to retire to his apartment, which gave him great mystery in the eyes of the Bursaks. In general, by that time, a lot had changed in the bursa: punishments were mitigated, there were fewer overgrown bursaks ...

retold

Pomyalovsky was born into the family of a deacon. He studied at the Alexander Nevsky Theological School. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Theological Seminary (1857). At the end, while waiting for a place, he read about the dead, sang in church. At the same time, he was engaged in self-education, was a volunteer at St. Petersburg University, worked in a Sunday school. Early death is explained by apathy and drunkenness caused by the onset of the reaction and failures of a personal nature.

Starts literary work already during his studies - he takes part in the handwritten journal "Seminarsky List" (publishes several articles and the beginning of the story "Machilov"). He made his debut in print with the essay Vukol, published in 1859 in the Journal for Education. In 1861, in the journal Sovremennik, he published the stories Petty-bourgeois Happiness and Molotov. In 1862-1863, his Essays on Bursa were published in the journal Vremya and Sovremennik. The novel "Brother and Sister" and the story "Porechane" remained unfinished.

The writer's worldview was formed under the influence of revolutionary democrats, in particular N.G. Chernyshevsky. Pomyalovsky is characterized by a sharply negative attitude towards the culture of the nobility as a whole, an aversion to bourgeois hoarding. The hero of Pomyalovsky is a plebeian, a raznochinets, fighting for his place in life, hating the nobility, idleness, liberal chatter; however, class self-consciousness, self-esteem do not save him from capitulation to reality.

In Essays on the Bursa, Pomyalovsky sharply posed the problem of education, with great critical pathos branded soullessness, the use of corporal punishment, conservatism - features characteristic not only of theological educational institutions, but of all Russian life under conditions of autocracy and despotism.

Pomyalovsky is a convinced realist, a successor to the traditions of N.V. Gogol.

In 1862 - 1863 the magazines "Vremya" and "Sovremennik" published 4 parts of the work "Essays of the Bursa", the 5th part is unfinished, will be published after the death of Pomyalovsky. Initially, the writer thought about 20 essays in which he would like to tell in more detail about the life of the students of the bursa. But in September 1863, the writer falls ill and dies of gangrene.

Bursa is depicted by P. (Pomyalovsky) as part of a hated social whole, as one of the sides of a musty life that kills and corrupts the individual. The essays contain many harsh words about religion and the church, covering up abuses and violence. Religious hypocrisy P. openly opposed his atheism in places not allowed by the censors, although not as consistent as the active, militant atheism of Chernyshevsky. Many "blasphemous" passages about religious rites, the clergy, the Bursat authorities, etc. were thrown out by the censors.

Bursaks appeared in literature even before P., but the cheerful adventures of the Bursaks Narezhny and Gogol, the clean and virtuous pupils of the seminary, depicted in V. Krestovsky’s (Khvoshchinsky’s) Baritone, had nothing in common with the heroes of P. Hostile to revolutionary democratic literature -re criticism met "Essays of the Bursa" with hostility. Annenkov believed that the gloomy, hopeless paintings of Pomyalovsky, despite his talent, were outside the bounds of art; other critics accused P. of slander, "drunk with mud", flaunting cynicism, etc. But there were also many voices claiming that P. did not say a word of untruth. Now, on the basis of a whole series of reminiscences about the bursa, we know that not only the general coverage is correct in the Essays: they are documented correct. A detailed knowledge of the whole ins and outs of the bursa and a burning hatred for it determined, on the one hand, a realistic depiction of the bursa, and on the other, the angry journalistic tone of the author. An essential stylistic feature of the work, related to its theme, is the abundance of Church Slavonicisms and quotations from "sacred texts", which are repeatedly used in a comic, parodic way. In the Essays of the Bursa, P.'s ability to show people, human character, has significantly increased; in the first things there is, nevertheless, a certain schematism in the manner of their representation.

The ratio of social and human in man give essays of Bursa. This is a theological seminary. The institution is depicted on the same principles as Podlipovtsy:

• animals (bursaks - a flock, despise the weak and sick)
• social (bureaucratic hierarchy)

These two principles are opposed to each other. This is not a break, but a synthesis of these two principles. Bursaks also have their own social system. The authorities also have a cult of strength: they despise the bursaks, who are pitiful.

In practice, the social and biological in a real person is not so easy to distinguish. A person finds himself in captivity: to be like in a pack, to be among the authorities is also bad. Violence is needed everywhere.

Pomyalovsky has an answer on how to slip away. This idea of ​​salvation is connected with 4 essays - "Runners and Saved Burses". An autobiographical hero appears, nicknamed Karas (this is Pomyalovsky himself). The essay is dedicated to the Bursaks who tried to escape. Karas is watching this. At first, he himself wants to study in the bursa: he is ready to go through humiliation. But his initiation is interrupted by an unjust and cruel punishment.

The 2nd step to liberation is hatred for the authorities. But this is not enough. There is a danger of "becoming a good bursak." In part, Karas becomes one, but he has a feeling of shame: when he talked with his superiors, he wants to spit in the eyes.

This shame is the realization that such a situation is wrong, unworthy of a person, the very participation in this humiliates him. Shame leads to the next step. He begins to help the most humiliated Bursaks, those who are at the bottom of both hierarchies. He talks to them: that he is sad, that he wants to go home, and so on. Maybe, since these people do not understand him, he models other relationships: you can speak like a human being and admit your weaknesses.

Caring for the downtrodden is the acquisition of another world.

The essay is optimistic. Karas doesn't want to stay there, he wants to go home. He thinks about running away, but he sees that such a way out is impossible. Decides to get sick, falls ill with pneumonia before Easter.

Bottom line: there is salvation, another world and other people.

About poetics.

Among the works of Pomyalovsky, an important place is occupied by "Essays of the Bursa", built largely on autobiographical material. The essays, remarkable in strength and artistic expressiveness, create colorful images of the students and their teachers, reveal the world of stagnation and inertia that prevailed in theological schools. The value of the "Essays of the Bursa" is great not only in terms of purely cognitive. Pomyalovsky created a work polemically opposed to memories of the childhood of noble writers. There are no good feelings and bright memories in his essays, only anger and bitterness sound there at the thought of spiritually crippled people, of ruined childhood and youth.

In the "Essays of the Bursa" there is no single consistently developing plot, and there is no main character. Separate sketches, brilliantly constructed dialogues, scenes, everyday details create a whole and expressive picture in total, which makes a strong impression on readers, moreover, by the absence of external literary “smoothness”. The veracity of what is depicted is also emphasized by the peculiar language of the essays, which includes the Bursat jargon, elements of church-style speech, forms of colloquial speech, etc.

Pomyalovsky is one of the artists who refused to follow the beaten paths in art. He was a true innovator and experimenter. At the same time, the genre forms of his works, for all their originality, are very characteristic of the literature of the 1960s, expressing tendencies in the development of genres typical of this era.

There is a tendency in the literature of the 60s to create a public, social novel and story, free from "family" and "love-psychological" plot schemes. But at the same time, one should not forget that in these years the novel, resorting to the scheme of a "family" and "love-psychological" plot, did not fall into decay. On the contrary, this form shows its viability. It becomes very informative, covering complex social problems.

Pomyalovsky is one of the artists who most clearly expressed the peculiarities of the development of revolutionary-democratic, as well as that democratic prose of the 60s, which was strongly influenced by revolutionary democrats.

The genre of the essay, which occupied an important place among other genres, testified to the maturity of realistic literature. Having survived its initial flowering in the 40s, the essay had a noticeable influence on all the great literature of the 60s.

Gorky remarked that "an essay stands somewhere between research and storytelling." This characteristic especially accurately expresses the nature of a realistic essay. Undoubtedly, all genre forms in realistic literature serve the study of life. But in the essay, the study, making up its pathos, also determines the specific features of its artistic structure.

The appearance of a realistic artistic essay with its tendency to research, freedom from a "romantic" plot, and unlimited scope for the author-analyst's thought opened up new additional means for artistic cognition and reflection of reality. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Pomyalovsky, Gleb Uspensky, and later Gorky perfectly understood its exploratory nature, the artistic possibilities inherent in it and not yet used in the entire volume of previous literature and realized in different ways.

The indomitable spirit of cognition, the study of social life in its many faces: manifestations were particularly striking in Russian literature of the 1940s and 1960s in the heyday of the essay genre. At the same time, the approach to the material of reality from the position of a thinker-analyst, a researcher, manifested in the work of a number of writers, gave a peculiar coloring to other genres as well. Already in the 1940s, these tendencies were quite pronounced. Thus, Lermontov's "reflection" was an individual expression of this striving for analysis and research.

Pomyalovsky differs, in particular, from such democratic writers as N. Uspensky, Reshetnikov or Levitov, that for him the study of social types and phenomena is a deeply conscious task, the pathos of creativity. When A. Zeitlin, referring to "Essays of the Bursa", writes that "Pomyalovsky retained that special feeling of the" physiological "genre, which had already been lost by Sleptsov, and Levitov, and Melnikov-Pechersky, and Nikolai Uspensky, and Leskov" , then here we should see an indirect confirmation of the research nature of his works. At the same time, Pomyalovsky differs from such realist artists as Goncharov or Turgenev, who explore life like him, in that the research setting in his works is molded into an art form, making up its specificity, defining genre and composition.

In the village of Milyukov, in the remote Sychevsky district of the Smolensk province, a third son was born to the priest Vasily Dokuchaev, named after his father Vasily.

The village of Milyukovo, where Vasily Dokuchaev spent his childhood, is located on the banks of a small river Kachnya. The whole day the boy, along with his friend, Grigory Piukov, spent on the river. They went to the Holy well, to the Gridnevsky stream and other places along the banks of the Kachnya. The boys followed with interest the work of the peasants, who were digging out of the loose coastal sediments the massive trunks of fossil oak, strong as stone, preserved there; it was used for crafting all sorts of things needed in the household. Sometimes some bones were found next to the tree trunk. Friends envied one of the boys, whose father found a huge tooth of an unknown animal in the river sediments. It was later determined that it was a mammoth's tooth.

In the spring, when, after the flood of the Kachnya, the entire valley of the river was covered with lush grasses, the guys disappeared into flood meadows, where blue lakes teeming with small fish and tadpoles hid between the grasses.

But this free life did not last long. The boy grew up, and it was time to think about teaching. The priest, after consulting with his wife, decided to take the youngest son, as well as the eldest, to Vyazma, to a religious school. A large family of nine people was in constant need. The sons of a multi-family rural priest had one way - free "state-owned" education in the bursa, and then - either as a priest or as a deacon.

They served a prayer service in the Dokuchaevs' house, sat down, as was customary according to tradition, on the benches, sat silently for a minute, got up, kissed each other and, after listening to parting words from their mother, got on the cart and set off. The father took his son to the city of Vyazma to hammer out a psalter and chapels in the bursa.

Theological schools in Russia have long been in a deplorable state. Even at the beginning of her reign, Catherine II noted that "the episcopal seminaries consisted of a very small number of students, in a poor institution for the sciences and in meager content." Repeated attempts to reform the bursa, especially active at the beginning of the 19th century, despite the participation of such figures as M. M. Speransky, did not lead to anything positive.

At the time when Dokuchaev got into the bursa, it strongly resembled the bursa described by Pomyalovsky. Dokuchaev himself spoke about this more than once. Dokuchaev's life during these years was not much different from the life of Karas and other heroes of Pomyalovsky's Essays on the Bursa. Newcomers were subjected to bullying according to all the rules carefully developed by the bursaks, who boasted of their rude morals. This was the first test, and whoever passed it won a certain respect from his comrades. Thus, the students tried to develop a hardening in themselves that would help endure all the bullying and flogging that fell to the lot of everyone, even exemplary, from the point of view of their superiors. Therefore, the neglect of physical pain was most valued. The comrades could safely rely on such a student, who is silent even when he is whipped "in the air", he will not let you down, he will not become a fiscal. And the spiritual authorities diligently propagated treachery, started special "black books", where everything that informers reported about each was entered. From among the students, the authorities appointed seconds, whose duty was to flog their comrades, censors who observed order in the class, and auditors who had to check the preparation of lessons daily and put the appropriate scores in special notebooks - notations. In addition to them, there were also senior dormitories and senior attendants from the dormitories. This whole complex system of subordination was created by the authorities to combat the camaraderie organized from time immemorial by the first bursaks, who were forcibly imprisoned for scholastic cramming and bequeathed to their descendants a fierce resistance to the authorities and hatred for him. But the efforts of the leaders of the bursa to corrupt the students by the despotic power of one over the other did not always lead to the desired results. Of course, there were bribe takers and extortionists among the censors, auditors and other persons of the Bursak hierarchy, but honest, albeit harsh, traditions of partnership helped the Bursaks defend their rights in these terrible conditions. Of course, only the strongest and most hardened could defend them. Most of the pupils of the bursa were crippled both physically and morally.

Dokuchaev passed the first test relatively easily - this was usually the case with all newcomers who arrived from the village. Courage and resourcefulness, developed in games and fights with village boys, endurance and independence, acquired in communion with nature, tempered their characters, made them more independent and persistent. It was different with the city newcomers. According to the cruel traditions of the bursa, they were tested for a long time and without indulgence in order to wean them from “veal tenderness”. And according to the unwritten bursat code, “veal tenderness” was considered conversations and memories of the house, family, and relatives. In everything related to her personal life, over the long years of her stay in the bursa, isolation was developed, which for the rest of her life left an imprint on the character of her pupils. After the first step, Dokuchaev had to take the second step - to get into the number of "inveterate". Inveterate, according to Pomyalovsky's definition, he is a zealot of antiquity and traditions, he stands for the freedom and freedom of the bursak, he is the main pillar of camaraderie. The inveterate ones were divided into three types: the good ones - “foolish gentlemen”, the daring ones - “they were not stupid at all, but reckless lazy people” and, finally, the third type is the head - the first in teaching and the last in behavior. Dokuchaev was a head. Despite his distaste for the subjects he studied and especially for the methods of teaching, he had brilliant marks. But the successes did not save from the "May", as the Bursaks called fresh birch rods. If during the school year the teacher had nothing to complain about, then at the end of the year, as a true adherent of "sectional pedagogy", he flogged the student precisely because he had never been flogged.

Dokuchaev hated in the bursa both teaching methods, and the studied scholastic subjects, and measures of influence. There was only one method of teaching - cramming, or, as they said in the bursa, gouging. The teaching of incomprehensible theological subjects became even more absurd because the teachers did not consider it necessary to explain to the students the meaning of the sciences being hammered in, but simply asked "from now to now." Naturally, such a teaching brought only suffering to the unfortunate Bursaks, who composed a song on this occasion:

How blessed are those nations

Of which strong natures

They did not know our torments,

They didn't know the sciences.

In some subjects, teachers allowed the so-called "objections": students were allowed to argue and speak on the same issue from different positions, but strictly defined by the authorities. The topics were: “Can the devil sin?”, “Does original sin contain, as in embryo, mortal sins, arbitrary and involuntary?”, “Will Socrates and other pious philosophers of paganism be saved or not?”.

Such scholastic exercises, filled with empty, worthless sophistry, were considered the crown of wisdom and therefore were very rarely allowed. Dokuchaev's special hatred was caused by the so-called "homiletics" - the doctrine of church preaching. Dokuchaev renamed it "gummy rubber", apparently, it resembled rubber with its malleability. "Gummilastika" haunted him for more than one year. Its long-term course was divided into several large independent parts: fundamental or principled homiletics, material homiletics, formal or constructive homiletics, evangelical homiletics, apostolic homiletics. This vast scholastic subject had to be crammed day after day, year after year.

Many bursaks, having despaired of overcoming such wisdom, wrote down in "eternal zeros" - the auditor, without asking them a lesson, every day put a zero in front of their names in the nogat. They moved to Kamchatka, played, or even just slept under their desks. They were not afraid of Rozog and were waiting for a happy day when they, who had been in each class for several years, would be expelled from the bursa on the basis of the “law on overage” and they would go in search of a suitable place - a sexton, a bell ringer, a church watchman. Dokuchaev did not belong to the number of eternal zeros. His natural abilities and brilliant memory gave him the opportunity to overcome these hated objects with relative ease. But if he differed from the eternal zeros in his success in the sciences, then in behavior he followed all the traditions of the bursat camaraderie. The main thing in these traditions was to cause all sorts of trouble to the authorities, to make any sacrifices, if this could annoy the inspector.

The strictest prohibition in the bursa was drunkenness and playing cards. But out of hatred for the oppressors, both were considered especially honorable among the Bursaks. After it was announced that drunkenness would be expelled from the seminary, it began to take on large proportions and subsequently had a detrimental effect on the fate of very many bursaks. To a certain extent, Dokuchaev did not escape this vice either.

The last years of Dokuchaev's stay at the seminary coincided with turbulent years in the history of Russia and Russian social thought. The problems of liquidating serfdom, which worried all the progressive minds of the country, turned out to be unresolved even after the peasant reform of 1861. But all the revolutionary-democratic forces of the country had already set in motion and had a fruitful influence on the development of Russian science. The works and articles of A. I. Herzen, V. G. Belinsky, N. G. Chernyshevsky, N. A. Dobrolyubov, and D. I. Pisarev gave a great impetus to the materialistic development of the natural sciences in Russia. In one form or another, the revolutionary-democratic ideas of the Russian enlighteners reached the recluses of theological seminaries. A curious testimony of one of the reactionary churchmen, Archbishop Nikanor of Kherson, who wrote: “... in the early sixties there were communities of liberals who caught seminarians in their nets, imposed on them books of their spirit for development, books primarily of natural scientific content.” Indeed, even the Bursaks during this period took part in the discussion of social and scientific problems. Hatred of scholasticism and all methods of student education, which had previously manifested itself only in all sorts of “exploits” directed against the authorities, began to pour out into other, more mature forms: “freethinking started even inside the seminary,” Archbishop Nikanor said with regret.

Dokuchaev graduated from the seminary with honors and, as the best student, was sent at public expense to St. Petersburg, to the Theological Academy.

V. V. Dokuchaev is a seminarian.

ESSAYS OF BURSA

“No, you will find out what kind of life created our brother; I will show you what bursak means, I will make you think about this life.”

N. Pomyalovsky.

“I am reading Bursa by Pomyalovsky and am also surprised: it is strangely similar to the life of an icon-painting workshop; I am so familiar with desperate boredom, boiling over into cruel mischief. It was good to read Russian books, they always felt something familiar and sad, as if a magnificent ringing froze hidden among the pages - as soon as you open the book, it already sounds softly.

M. Gorky.

Bursa Essays" made a terrific impression on contemporaries. Pomyalovsky showed the monstrous "site of life" of tsarist Russia. He showed teachers who were not inferior in their cruelty even to the royal jailers. He portrayed educational institutions more terrible than hard labor "dead houses". The parallel between penal servitude and bursa suggested itself then to everyone due to the fact that in the journal Vremya, next to the Essays on Bursa, F. M. Dostoevsky's Notes from the Dead House were published.

Needless to say, the serpentine hissing of the guardians of the bursac pedagogical system, exposed by Pomyalovsky, knew no bounds. A liar, a traitor Judas, a drunken slanderer - such abuse fell on Pomyalovsky. Church publicists came out with malice, criticizing these essays. They created a version that Pomyalovsky was expelled from the seminary for drunkenness. In retaliation, they say, he wrote his first essay, from which the press was delighted, declaring the author a brilliant writer, demanding that he continue these essays. And so the "poor slave of the press" continued to write, needing money ... for vodka.

This is how the priestly anthill reacted to the truth that Pomyalovsky courageously and openly threw in the face of the tsarist government and the princes of the church. The public reaction turned out to be so sharp that even the spiritual department was forced to move and began another reform of its educational institutions ...

The essays of the bursa were considered by the then critics mainly from the point of view of their revealing value and photographic quality.

Thus, the critic of the "Library for Reading" (1863, March), appreciating the work of Pomyalovsky, was inclined to see in the "Essays of the Bursa" only daguerreotypically true pictures of the former student life, written by a talented person, "so to speak, in between times", The Notes of the Fatherland (1862, November) held the same point of view: “Essays”, they say, are not artistic creativity and not scientific research, but only photography ... The journal polemically disputed the attribution of “Essays of Bursa” to the genre of Pomyalovsky, they are called physiological essays), indicating that the corner of life depicted by Pomyalovsky is so prone to decay that there is no sound organism there: only pus on pus and an ulcer on an ulcer. And therefore, "Essays on this rot" are more pathological than physiological.

No doubt, the overall picture of the bursa is pathological. But Pomyalovsky needs this picture not only for pathology, but precisely for “physiology”, to show what original natures are crippled here.

Pomyalovsky, drawing this or that hero of the bursa as the embodiment of a certain vice, always shows this vice as a product of the entire system of the bursa. That is why, next to this main “vicious trait” of his hero, there is always another one - for example, fidelity to camaraderie among the wild despot Goroblagodatsky, Aksyutka’s virtuosity and talent, etc.

This was perfectly shown by D. I. Pisarev.

In his article "The Lost and Perishing" (about "Notes from the House of the Dead" and "Essays on the Bursa"), he wrote:

“The death of such smart, gifted, brilliant and energetic personalities as Aksyutka is inevitable, but it is inevitable only because the fiery stream of great people, who purify and carry with them everything that is capable of thinking, wishing and captivating, has not yet paved to the lowest, poorest and dirtiest strata of our society.

But until the sun rises, until then the dew will eat away the eyes and many hundreds of Aksyutki will rot on the bunk beds of dead houses, waiting for cleansing, renewing and captivating ideas. Pisarev speaks of Goroblagodatsky as the purest and most beautiful embodiment of the wild Bursat ideal, of his boundless hatred for the oppressive routine and boundless honesty towards his comrades, noting how the bursa perverts this hatred, directing it to the path of despotism.

Indeed, all the heroes of Pomyalovsky are characterized by a sense of protest, a sense of independence. Yes, not only students, but also teachers are brought out by Pomyalovsky as victims of the system.

In Essays on Bursa we have, of course, not only photography. Before us, on the contrary, is a genuine work of art. By selecting certain typical features and showing characters, it is clear how the gloomy reality of the bursa was refracted through creative fiction into a socio-pedagogical trend. Emphasis was placed not only on showing the dungeon character of the bursa itself, but also on those sprouts of talent that break through the dirt and bloody cruelty of this terrible institution.

Pomyalovsky tirelessly reveals the originality of the Bursaks, bordering at the same time on a kind of savagery and talent. With a different system of education, instead of the "outcasts", candidates for hard labor, highly talented people would come out.

A characteristic feature of the bursa - stupid cruel bureaucracy - was associated with the entire system of the tsarist autocracy. This explains the amazing impression that the Essays made on contemporaries.

Such an impression, of course, could not be left by a simple photograph from a relatively small corner of Russian life.

"Essays of Bursa" are full of bright colors and lively life. Artistic in execution, they are extraordinary and true. Even some churchmen had to admit this.

“Pomyalovsky,” wrote Bishop Nikodim, “has been accused more than once of an overly caricature depiction of the theological school of his time. But this accusation is not entirely fair. School affairs of that time confirm much of what he said. In one, for example, contract of 1848, we read that bed linen was washed “at least three times a year” ... In the statements of behavior, there are often indications of the vices that Pomyalovsky wrote about ”(“ Niva ”1911, p. 594 ). in the same article it is reported that one of the main characters of the bursa, Satan, was a real person who bore the name of Izot Ivanovich Eliseev. This factuality permeates the image of the most intimate hero of the "essays" Karas.

So, "Essays of the Bursa" is not at all a photograph, but an integral part of a large autobiographical story of the same plan as "The History of My Contemporary" by V. G. Korolenko, "Childhood", "In People", "My Universities" by M. Gorky and etc.

The autobiographical genre always takes on a certain class coloration, as the topical features of a given social stratum are revealed.

Pomyalovsky understood this better than many of his other contemporaries. That is why he approaches this or that phenomenon historically. Let us recall the historical genealogy of the Dorogovs, a detailed history (beginning with John III) of the family of the princes Remnishchev (“Brother and Sister”). He observed the same historicity of phenomena in his Essays on the Bursa.

Pomyalovsky always thought of himself as a man of his social group. In this direction, a number of his aphorisms are sustained, such as “Where can we climb into the nobility”,

“Here, it’s ours that are moving”, “But, wait, ours will put up forces, it won’t be.” “You will find out what kind of life created our brother”, “We are now a force” (everything is taken from Pomyalovsky’s conversations with Nikolai Uspensky and N. A. Blagoveshchensky).

Conceived by Pomyalovsky, the autobiographical story of the type "History of a Contemporary" was supposed to show through the personal biography of Karas the path and crossroads of the generation of the sixties. In this regard, the testimony of N.A. Blagoveshchensky is very interesting.

“Even after leaving the seminary,” says the latter, “he (Pomyalovsky) began to write a long story “Danilushka”, intending to lead the hero of the story through the entire bursa and thus depict a complete picture of the bursat upbringing.” Pomyalovsky was guided by this story when compiling the Essays on the Bursa.

We have already had reason to talk about the form in which Pomyalovsky's childhood and adolescence are reflected in Danilushka. It is known that the "Essays of the Bursa" were supposed to contain twenty essays. But the original idea was closed only within the "Winter Evening in Bursa", as part of an autobiographical story.

The enormous impression made by this first picture of the bursa, the passionate controversy around it, pushed Pomyalovsky to expand and deepen his original idea.

The main part of the autobiographical story is the fourth essay - “Runners and Saved Burses”, the main person of which is Karas. Here Karas is the central character. The story of Karas begins here with his “baptism of fire”, with beatings, torment by his comrades, and also by flogging by teachers. This scene ends with the arrival of the teacher Lobov, subjecting Karas to a terrible flogging "in the air."

This scene of the Inquisition is one of the most tragic scenes known to world literature. The pages describing that dead hopelessness and dull despair that fell on the heart of Karas after this flogging still “burn and burn” with the power of their psychological penetration and tragic hopelessness. The experiences of the boy Karas are much more real than Dostoevsky's "children's tears". Deeply tragic is the boy's consciousness that "neither in the outer nor in the inner world there is no place left where one could hide." And he is left with one thing - to dream of death. These pages about Karas are interesting both as a psychological document (Pomyalovsky's biography) and as an artistic reproduction of the plebeian humanism of the best representatives of the raznochintsy Bursaks. This partly resolves the question of how some figures of the 60s, such people as Dobrolyubov and Pomyalovsky, nevertheless came out of the bursa.

With the penetration of the teacher-artist, Pomyalovsky follows the process of turning the capable boy Karas into the “eternal zero” (nickname), explaining all this with an aversion to slotting science.

Pomyalovsky does not hide the shady sides of Karas' character, generated by the bursa. He substantiates those impulses that lead Karas to scandal for the sake of scandal, to provoking this or that hated teacher to be whipped "in the air." “The thirst to be flogged” and the wild anger that accompanies it become Karas’ mania… Explaining this experience of Karas, Pomyalovsky reveals the entire pathological system of the barbarian pedagogy of the bursa.

Sharply and excitingly, Pomyalovsky draws an unbearable longing that grips Karas when he throws himself, sobbing, into bed, covering his head with a pillow. These childhood sorrows were deep and strong to such an extent that "a person cannot forgive them even when he becomes an adult."

Not only sadness and suffering, but also hatred penetrate deep into the soul of Karas: "Bursa gave Karas strong lessons of hatred, anger and revenge." “If a person had not learned to hate in childhood, he would not have been able to hate in adulthood.”

Undoubtedly, here Pomyalovsky also explains his personal hatred for the “cleansed humanity”, caused by the emotions that the bursa engendered in him. That is why, later, in 1863, during the period of the advancing reaction, having made sure that “the same bursa is in life,” Pomyalovsky again began to acutely experience the same longing and apathy that so tormented the bursak Karas.

In the character of Karas, Pomyalovsky shows those features that make him susceptible to truth-seeking, to intercession for the oppressed, to assimilating with his mind everything that is unlike "official science", "dumbing", etc.

And in this direction the spiritual interests of Karas are developing.

Be that as it may, but according to this essay about Karas, one can judge, firstly, in what aspect Pomyalovsky would give his contemporary, freed from the Bursat barbarism. This "contemporary" would, of course, be a representative of the "colour of the youth of the bourgeoisie", already in the seminary attached to the advanced ideas of his time.

He would have been shown during a period of fermentation of ideas and the emergence in his soul of "pillar questions", hobbies for literature, the influence of the forbidden book of Feuerbach on him, parting with all sorts of mystical and metaphysical categories and embarking on the path of "honest denial".

One must think that such was the plot of the essays conceived, but not carried out.

The need to create such a work was recognized by A.P. Chekhov.

“What noble writers took from nature for nothing,” Chekhov wrote in one of his letters, “raznochintsy buy at the cost of youth. Write a story about how a young man, the son of a serf, a former shopkeeper, singer, high school student and student, brought up on servility, kissing priests' hands, worshiping other people's thoughts, thanking for every piece of bread, cut many times, going to lessons without galoshes who fought, tortured animals, loved to dine with rich relatives, hypocrites both to God and people without any need, only from the consciousness of his own insignificance - write how this young man squeezes a slave out of himself drop by drop and how he, waking up one fine morning , feels that it is no longer slave blood that flows in his veins, but real.

Such would be the path of Karas to Feuerbach and honest "labor" atheism - such a plot would complete the Essays of the Bursa.

Not a revealing essay, but the genre of an autobiographical story, which later found its wonderful form in Gorky, was the basis of Pomyalovsky's Essays on Bursa. It must be remembered here that Pomyalovsky, like Dobrolyubov, always speaks with a certain irony about the then current accusatory essay (Cherevanin sarcastically ridicules the essay as a simple litigation).

The artistic essay, unlike the accusatory one, is marked by a serious cognition of reality and artistic reproduction of life. Elements of such an artistic essay are also included in Petty-bourgeois Happiness and Molotov, etc. Let us recall, for example, the pages of Molotov dedicated to the institute where Nadya Dorogova studies. The combination of such essay material with a purely narrative genre is the basis of the new revolutionary democratic novel of the 60s. The artistic essay of the 60s is distinguished by the display of social and everyday ways through specific characters, through a certain gallery of types.

All this, of course, was not in the accusatory essay. Even before Pomyalovsky, in the 1950s, books of essays appeared that painted in gloomy colors the order in religious educational institutions. Such was the anonymous book of the priest Bellyustin, Description of the Rural Clergy (published abroad), which, by the way, was defended by N. A. Dobrolyubov. These were the books of Prof. D. I. Rostislavov (ed. in Leipzig), who also exposed the order of these "gardens of science." In terms of purposefulness of their “Essays on the Bursa” they are undoubtedly related to the works of Bellustin, Rostislavov, Moroshkin, and others. and Narezhny is looking for the genesis of Pomyalovsky's "essays"). The “Essays of the Bursa” are distinguished precisely by the fact that Pomyalovsky clothed the purely accusatory material of his predecessors in an artistic display of types and characters. He created this unforgettable gallery of the Bursaks in their living everyday life, with all their terrible games, theft, despotism. These biographies of the bursa sounded like great artistic truth. All these Tavli, Aksyutki, Goroblagodatsky, with their colorful vocabulary, are still visible in all details. In this sense, before Pomyalovsky, this “section of life” was not depicted so truthfully, nakedly. That is why all subsequent attempts to portray the bursa pale before the skill of Pomyalovsky. Bursa, as a socio-pedagogical phenomenon, is associated only with the name of Pomyalovsky. It is not for nothing that critics-teachers consider Pomyalovsky the greatest defender of children in Russian literature, noting in his work the most extensive pedagogical psychology and stunning pictures of Russian pedagogical outrage. With these deeply truthful pictures of an ugly upbringing, imbued with such a deeply mournful pathos of a teacher and poet of a child's and youthful soul, Pomyalovsky revived the traditions of Dickens in our country. Reading Pomyalovsky about children and the royal school, one recalls Dickensian pages about David Copperfield, Dombey, Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, and about the ugly upbringing of children that Dickens castigated in England at that time.

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ESSAYS AT ADMIRAL ISAKOV For a long time I was going to write about my only meeting with Admiral Ivan Stepanovich Isakov. I cannot forgive myself that this meeting was brief. Ivan Stepanovich himself wished to see me. This was conveyed to me at the Writers' Union of the USSR in Moscow, and I

Nikolai Gerasimovich POMYALOVSKY

ESSAYS OF BURSA

Dedicated to N. A. Blagoveshchensky

WINTER EVENING IN BURSA

Essay one

The class is over. Kids are playing.

We take the school at the time when it ended period of forced education and started to act law of great age. There were years - they have long passed - when not only minors, but also bearded children, on the orders of their superiors, were forcibly driven out of the villages, often from deacon and sexton places, to teach them in the bursa writing, reading, counting and the church charter. Some were betrothed to their brides and sweetly dreamed of a honeymoon, as a thunderstorm descended and married them with Pozharsky, Memorsky, Psalter and the everyday life of church singing, introduced them to May(with rods), starved to death and cold. In those days, even in the parish class, the majority were adults, and there is nothing to say about other classes, especially seminary ones. Enough of the elderly were not kept for a long time, but after teaching literacy for a year three four, released deacon; and students younger and more diligent in science in their thirties, often in excess, reached theological course (seminary senior class). Relatives with crying, howling and lamentations sent their chicks to science; the chicks with deep hatred and disgust for the place of education returned home. But that was a very long time ago.

Time has passed. Little by little, consciousness penetrated society - not the benefits of science, but its inevitability. It was necessary to pass at least a parish study in order to have the right even to a ponomarsky place in the countryside. The fathers themselves drove the children to school, the desks were quickly replaced, the number of students increased and finally grew to the point that it did not fit in the school. Then they invented the famous law of great age. Fathers have not yet abandoned the habit of sending their children to science as adults and often brought sixteen-year-old guys. Having studied in four classes of the school for two years, these were made overage; this reason was mentioned in title student (in the certificate) and sent beyond the gate(excluded). The school had up to five hundred students; of them, a hundred or more people annually received the title; to replace a new mass arrived from villages (most) and cities, and a year later went beyond the gate new hundred. Those who received the title became novices, deacons, church watchmen and consistory scribes; but they half wandered around the diocese without definite occupations, not knowing where to go with their titles, and more than once the menacing news swept through that all the unemployed would be made into soldiers. Now it is clear how the school set was maintained, and it is clear why in a dark and dirty classroom we meet half-strong adults.

It's slushy and windy outside. The disciples do not even think of going into the yard; at first glance it is noticeable that there are more than a hundred of them in a huge class. What a diverse population of the class, what a mixture of clothes and faces! .. There are twenty-four-year-olds, there are also twelve-year-olds. The disciples were divided into many heaps; there are games - original, like everything is original in bursa; some walk alone, some sleep, despite the noise, not only on the floor, but also at their desks, over the heads of their comrades. A groan stands in the classroom from the voices.

Most of the people who will meet in our essay will bear the nicknames that they called them in the partnership, for example: Mitakha, Elpakha, Tavlya, Six-eared Chabrya, Polecat, Spit, Omega, Yerra-Koksta, Katka etc., but we can’t do this with Semyonov: the students gave him a nickname that no censorship would pass through - extremely indecent.

Semyonov was a pretty boy, sixteen years old. The son of a city priest, he behaves decently, dressed neatly; it is immediately clear that the school did not have time to completely erase from him the traces of home life. Semyonov feels that he urban, and the urban partnership looked contemptuously, called women: they love mama and mama's buns and gingerbread, they do not know how to fight, they are afraid of rods, the people are powerless and are under the protection of