Tale time night l Petrushevskaya. Life and being in the prose of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

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INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. PROSPECTS FOR STUDYING LITERARY WORKS THROUGH THE CATEGORIES OF ARTISTIC SPACE AND TIME

1.1 Ideas M.M. Bakhtin in the study of literary works through the categories of artistic space and time. The concept of chronotope

1.2 Structuralist approach to the study of works of art through the categories of space and time

1.3 Ways of studying artistic space and time in the literary experience of V. Toporov, D. Likhachev and others

CHAPTER 2

2.1 Apartment as the main topos of domestic space

2.2 Structure and semantics of natural space

CONCLUSION

REFERENCES

INTRODUCTION

Lyudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaya is a modern prose writer, poet, playwright. She stands in the same honorary rank with such modern writers as Tatyana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Victoria Tokareva, Viktor Pelevin, Vladimir Makanin and others. It stands in the same row - and at the same time stands out in its own way, as something, of course, out of this range, not fitting into any rigid framework and not subject to classification.

The appearance of the first publications of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya caused a sharp rejection of official criticism. Recognition and fame came to the writer in the second half of the 1980s, after significant changes in the political and cultural life of the country. In 1992, her story The Time is Night was nominated for the Booker Prize. For her literary activity, Petrushevskaya was awarded the A.S. Pushkin International Prize, the Moscow-Penne Prize for the book The Ball of the Last Man, and finally, she became the owner of the Triumph Prize. Despite all this premium splendor, Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is one of the few Russian prose writers who continue to work without reducing either the pace or the quality of writing.

What is important for us is that at the center of Petrushev's stories is a man living in a special time and space. The writer shows a world that is far from prosperous apartments and official reception rooms. It depicts an awkward life that lacks any meaning. In her stories, she creates an autonomous world that exists according to its own laws, often frightening because of the disastrous and hopeless situation within this world of its inhabitants. Accordingly, access to Petrushevskaya's work through the study of spatio-temporal paradigms of her artistic world seems extremely promising to us. From all of the above it follows relevance our researchaniya.

The work of the prose writer and playwright Lyudmila Petrushevskaya caused lively debate among readers and literary critics as soon as her works appeared on the pages of thick magazines. More than thirty years have passed since then, and during this time numerous interpretations of her work have been published: book reviews, scientific and journalistic articles. In critical assessments, the writer was destined to go from almost "the ancestor of the domestic chernukha" to a recognized classic of literature of recent decades. Despite the recognition Petrushevskaya received, the controversy surrounding her works, which has accompanied the writer from the very first publications, continues to this day. The main body of research is journal and newspaper criticism.

Serious studies of the work of this author appeared relatively recently (1990s - early 2000s), while individual publications began to appear a dozen years earlier, in the late 1980s, after the release of the first works. A. Kuralekh A. Kuralekh turned to the study of Petrushevskaya's creativity in their works. Life and being in L. Petrushevskaya's prose // Literary Review. - M., 1993. - No. 5. - S. 63 -67. , L. Pann Pann L. Instead of an interview, or the experience of reading L. Petrushevskaya's prose. Far from literary life

metropolis // Zvezda. - St. Petersburg, 1994. - No. 5. - P. 197 - 202., M. Lipovetsky Lipovetsky M. Tragedy and who knows what else // New World. - M., 1994. - No. 10. - P. 229 - 231., L. Lebedushkina Lebedushkina O. The Book of Kingdoms and Opportunities // Friendship of Peoples. - M., 1998. - No. 4. - S. 199 - 208. , M. Vasilyeva Vasilyeva M. So it happened // Friendship of peoples. - M., 1998. - No. 4. - S. 208 - 217. etc. In most studies, the prose of L. Petrushevskaya is considered in the context of the work of modern prose writers, such as Y. Trifonov, V. Makanin, T. Tolstaya and others. , and the most studied aspects of the writer's creative heritage include the theme and image of the "little man", the themes of loneliness, death, fate and fate, the features of the image of the family, the relationship of a person with the world, and some others. It is noteworthy that, although artistic space and time were not specifically studied in the works of L. Petrushevskaya, many critics and scientists pointed out the prospects of studying this particular level of poetics. So, for example, E. Shcheglova in the article “A Suffering Man” speaks about the archetypes of Petrushevskaya and focuses on the features of the spatio-temporal paradigm of her artistic world. She writes that the writer, reproducing a lot of the most difficult everyday circumstances, draws not so much a person as precisely these circumstances, not so much his soul as his sinful bodily shell. The author of this article notes: “A person in her falls into the darkness of circumstances, as into a black hole. Hence, apparently, such an addiction of the writer to the accumulation signs these circumstances - from empty plates, holes and stains of all kinds to countless divorces, abortions and abandoned children. The signs reproduced, it must be said directly, aptly, fearlessly and exceptionally recognizable, since we all live in the same painful and oppressive life, but, alas, rarely revealing something (more precisely, someone) worth behind them» [Shcheglova 2001: 45].

Interesting in this direction is the work of N.V. Kablukova "Poetics of dramaturgy of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya". The researcher notes that the categories of space and time, not only in drama, but also in creativity in general, are characterized as follows: “The semantics of artistic space determines the loss of a sense of reality in a person at the end of the Soviet era, leading to the destruction of reality itself; the hierarchy of everyday - social - natural spaces is violated; the values ​​of the material-objective environment are deformed, in which, it would seem, modern man is immersed (lifeless life); what is fundamental is the lack of rootedness of a person of modern civilization - movement in the spaces of reality” [Kablukova 2003: 178]. OA Kuzmenko, studying the traditions of skaz narration in the writer's prose, devotes a separate paragraph to the study of "one's own" and "foreign" worlds in Petrushevskaya's microcosm.

Studying the categories of space and time in the work of a writer, researchers often focus their attention on threshold situations. So M. Lipovetsky in his article "Tragedy and who knows what else" notes that the threshold between life and death is the most stable viewing platform for Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's prose. “Its main collisions are the birth of a child and the death of a person, given, as a rule, in inseparable fusion. Even when drawing a completely passing situation, Petrushevskaya, firstly, still makes it a threshold one, and secondly, inevitably places it in the cosmic chronotope. A typical example is the story “Dear Lady”, which, in fact, describes the silent scene of the parting of failed lovers, an old man and a young woman: “And then a car arrived, ordered in advance, and it was all over, and the problem of her appearance on Earth too late and too early disappeared. him - and everything disappeared, disappeared in the cycle of stars, as if nothing had happened"" [Lipovetsky 1994: 198].

Literary critics and literary scholars quite often in their works turn to the elements of poetics, through which they try to come out both to determine the ways of depicting the artistic world of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, and to the ways of worldview, comprehending the aesthetic position of the author. From our point of view, it is through the categories of artistic space and time that one can understand the artistic world of the writer Petrushevskaya, see the root causes of the tragedies of her hero.

Respectively, novelty our work is determined, firstly, by an attempt to study the features of the artistic world of Petrushevskaya through the categories of artistic space and time on the scale of a special study; secondly, to offer "their own" version of the interpretation of the laws of the world of the heroes of L. Petrushevskaya.

object studies become such works by L. Petrushevskaya as "Your Circle" (1979), "Cinderella's Way" (2001), "Country" (2002), "To the Beautiful City" (2006) and others, already in the titles of which images of spatial - temporary nature. In addition, in choosing an object, we were guided by the fact that we studied works with the most typical situations that characterize the spatial boundaries of Petrushevskaya's heroes, their relationship with the world.

Subject research is the level of spatio-temporal organization of works, i.e. all those elements of the form and content of a work of art that make it possible to reveal the specifics of the writer's artistic world in this aspect.

Target work is to identify the features of the spatio-temporal organization of the artistic world in the stories of L. Petrushevskaya. To achieve the goal, it is necessary to solve the following tasks:

· as a result of the analysis, to reveal the features of the organization of artistic space and time in the works of L. Petrushevskaya - the stories "Country", "Cinderella's Way", "Happy End", etc.;

· describe the semantics of the main chronotopes in L. Petrushevskaya's stories;

· consider the specifics of the artistic space and time underlying L. Petrushevskaya's world modeling.

Theoretical and methodological basis of this study are mainly the works of M.M. Bakhtin, Yu.M. Lotman, D.S. Likhachev, V.N. dedicated to the work of L. Petrushevskaya and writers of her generation (M. Lipovetsky, A. Kuralekh, L. Lebedushkina, etc.)

We consider the system-holistic, structural, textological and comparative-typological approaches to be the main methods of our research; in the process of work, we use elements of motivic analysis.

Practical value The work lies in the possible application of the results of the study in the professional activities of a language teacher in the classroom and extracurricular activities in Russian literature of the twentieth century.

Approbation results was carried out at the "Mendeleev Readings" (2010), the material of this work was published in the collection of student scientific works, was also used during state practice in the preparation and conduct of an extracurricular event in literature (grade 10).

Work structure. The final qualifying work consists of an Introduction, two chapters, a Conclusion and a list of references (51 titles), an Appendix, which proposes the development of an extracurricular reading lesson for 11th grade students.

CHAPTER 1. PROSPECTS FOR STUDYING LITERARY WORKS THROUGH THE CATEGORIES OF ARTISTIC SPACE AND TIME

As you know, in every work of literature, through the external form (text, speech level), an internal form of the work is created - the artistic world that exists in the minds of the author and the reader, reflecting reality through the prism of the creative idea (but not identical to it). The most important parameters of the inner world of a work are artistic space and time.

The interest of literary critics in the categories of space and time at the beginning of the 20th century was natural. By that time, A. Einstein's "theory of relativity" had already been formed, not only scientists, but also philosophers became interested in this problem. It is important to note that interest in the categories of space and time was due not only to the development of science and technology, discoveries in physics, the advent of cinema, etc., but also to the fact of the existence of man in the world, which has extension in space and time.

Interest in these categories in the perspective of knowledge of artistic culture is emerging gradually. In this regard, the works of philosophers and art historians were of great importance (for example, the book by P.A. Florensky “Analysis of space and time in artistic and visual works”, 1924/1993). The fundamental ideas in the study of these categories as elements of the poetics of works of art are developed by M.M. Bakhtin. He also introduces the term “chronotope” into scientific circulation, denoting the relationship of artistic space and time, their “fusion”, mutual conditioning in a literary work.

In the 60-70s. In the twentieth century, the interest of literary scholars in the problem is growing, representatives of various schools and traditions are engaged in it. For example, in line with structuralism, Yu.M. Lotman. Special sections about the nature of artistic space and time appear in the book by D.S. Likhachev on the poetics of ancient Russian literature. V.N. Toporov, M.M. Steblin-Kamensky, A. M. Pyatigorsky. The tendency to interpret spatio-temporal paradigms through myth is also characteristic of V.E. Miletinsky, who continues the mythopoetic tradition.

Modern studies actively use the ideas of M.M. Bakhtin (his “chronotope” has gained extreme popularity), Lotman’s experience in studying literary texts through the category of artistic space, and the approach to studying the spatio-temporal features of the artistic world in line with mythopoetics is also widespread.

1.1 Ideas M.M. Bakhtin in the study of literary works through the categories of artistic space and time. The concept of chronotope

For M.M. Bakhtin, spatial and temporal representations captured in a work of art constitute a kind of unity. A significant relationship between temporal and spatial relations, artistically mastered in literature, M.M. Bakhtin called "chronotope" (which means in literal translation - "time-space"). This term is used in mathematical science, and was introduced and justified on the basis of Einstein's theory of relativity. The scientist transferred it to literary criticism almost as a metaphor; the expression of the continuity of space and time is significant in it (time as the fourth dimension of space). The chronotope is understood by him as a formally substantive category of literature.

In the literary and artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal signs merge into a meaningful and concrete whole.: “Time here thickens, condenses, becomes artistically visible; space is intensified, drawn into the movement of time, plot, history. Signs of time are revealed in space, and space is comprehended and measured by time” [Bakhtin 2000:10].

The chronotope, according to M.M. Bakhtin, performs a number of important artistic functions. So, it is through the image in the product of space and time becomes a visual and plot-visible era, which the artist comprehends aesthetically, in which his characters live. At the same time, the chronotope is not focused on adequately capturing the physical image of the world, it human-oriented: it surrounds the person, reflectsano connection with the world, often refracts in itself the spiritual movements of the Persianaboutpressing, becoming an indirect assessment of the rightness or wrongness of the choice,andby the hero, the solvability or insolubility of his litigation with the actionandvalidity, achievability or unattainability of harmony between personalaboutstu and the world. Therefore, individual space-time images and chronotopes of a work always carry in own value sense.

Each culture has its own understanding of time and space. The nature of artistic space and time reflects the ideas about time and space that have developed in everyday life, in science, in religion, in the philosophy of a certain era. M. Bakhtin studied the main typological spatio-temporal models: chronicle, adventurous, biographical chronotope, etc. In the nature of the chronotope, he saw the embodiment of types of artistic thinking. So, according to Bakhtin, in traditionalist (normative) cultures, the epic chronotope dominates, turning the image into a complete and distant tradition from modernity, while in innovative-creative (non-normative) cultures, the novelistic chronotope dominates, oriented towards living contact with an unfinished, becoming reality. About this M.M. Bakhtin writes in detail in his work "Epos and Novel".

According to Bakhtin, the process of assimilation of the real and historical chronotope in literature proceeded in a complicated and discontinuous way: some certain aspects of the chronotope that were available under given historical conditions were mastered, only certain forms of artistic reflection of the real chronotope were developed. Bakhtin considers several of the most important novelistic chronotopes: the chronotope of the meeting, the chronotope of the road (path), the threshold (the sphere of crises and fractures) and the adjacent chronotopes of the stairs, the entrance and the corridor, the street, the castle, the square, the chronotope of nature.

Consider the chronotope of the meeting. This chronotope is dominated by a temporal shade, and it is distinguished by a high degree of emotional and value intensity. The chronotope of the road associated with it has a wider volume, but somewhat less emotional and value intensity. Encounters in the novel usually take place on the "road". "Road" is a predominant place of chance meetings.

On the road ("high road"), the spatial and temporal paths of the most diverse people - representatives of all classes, states, religions, nationalities, ages - intersect at one temporal and spatial point. Here, those who are normally separated by social hierarchy and spatial distance can accidentally meet, any contrasts can arise here, various destinies can collide and intertwine. This is the point of tying and the place where events take place. Here, time seems to flow into space and flows through it, forming roads.

The metaphorization of the path-road is varied: “life path”, “enter a new road”, “historical path”, but the main core is the passage of time. The road is never just a road, but always either all or part of the life path; choice of road - choice of life path; a crossroads is always a turning point in the life of a folklore person; exit from home to the road with a return to their homeland - usually the age stages of life; road signs are signs of fate [Bakhtin 2000:48].

According to M. Bakhtin, the road is especially beneficial for depicting an event controlled by chance. This explains the important plot role of the road in the history of the novel.

The chronotope of the threshold is imbued with a high emotional and value intensity; it can be combined with the motive of the meeting, but its most significant completion is the chronotope of the crisis and the turning point in life. The very word “threshold” already in speech life (along with the real meaning) received a metaphorical meaning and was combined with a moment of turning point in life, a crisis, a life-changing decision (or indecision, fear of crossing the threshold).

Against the background of this general (formal-material) chronotopicity of the poetic image, as an image of temporary art depicting a spatial-sensory phenomenon in their movement and formation, the peculiarity of genre-typical plot-forming chronotopes is clarified. These are specific novel-epic chronotopes that serve to master the real temporal reality, allowing to reflect and introduce into the artistic plane of the novel the essential moments of this reality.

Each large significant chronotope can include an unlimited number of small chronotopes: each motif can have its own special chronotope.

Within one work and within the work of one author, following Bakhtin, we can observe many chronotopes and relationships between them specific to a given work or author. Chronotopes can include each other, coexist, intertwine, change, compare, contrast or be in more complex relationships. The general nature of these relationships is dialogic, but this dialogue is outside the world depicted in the work, although not outside the work as a whole. He enters the world of the author and the world of readers. And these worlds are also chronotopic.

The author is a person living his biographical life, he is outside the work, we meet him as a creator and in the work itself, but outside the depicted chronotopes, but as if on a tangent to them. The author-creator moves freely in his time: he can start his story from the end, from the middle and from any moment of the depicted events, without destroying the objective course of time in the depicted event.

The author-creator, being outside the chronotopes of the world he depicts, is not just outside, but, as it were, on a tangent to these chronotopes. He depicts the world either from the point of view of the hero participating in the depicted event, or from the point of view of the narrator, or the dummy author, or he leads the story directly from himself as a purely author.

The considered chronotopes can be the organizational centers of the main plot events of the novel. In the chronotope, plot knots are tied and untied, they have the main plot-forming meaning.

At the same time, chronotopes have a pictorial significance. Time acquires a sensuously visual character in them; plot events in the chronotope are concretized, overgrown with flesh, filled with blood. An event can be reported, informed, and precise instructions about the place and time of its occurrence can be given. But the event does not become an image. The chronotope, on the other hand, provides an essential ground for showing and depicting events. And this is precisely due to the special thickening and concretization of the signs of time - the time of human life, historical time - in certain areas of space. This creates the opportunity to build an image of events around the chronotope. It serves as the primary point for the development of scenes in the novel, while other connecting events, located far from the chronotope, are given in the form of dry information and communication.

Thus, the chronotope, as the predominant materialization of time in space, is the center of pictorial concretization, embodiment for the entire work. All the abstract elements of the novel - philosophical and social generalizations, ideas, analyzes of causes and effects gravitate towards the chronotope and through it are filled with "flesh and blood", join the artistic imagery. Such, according to Bakhtin, is the imageandthe real meaning of the chronotope. In addition, M. Bakhtin singled out and analyzedandroved some of the most characteristic types of chronotopes: the chronotope of a meeting, roads, etc.aboutprovincial town, square, etc.

1.2 Structuralist approach to the study of works of art through the categories of space and time

Yuri Mikhailovich Lotman characterized the artistic space as "a model of the world of a given author, expressed in the language of his spatial representations." Namely: "Language of spatial relations" is a kind of abstract model, which includes as subsystems both spatial languages ​​of different genres and types of art, and models of space of varying degrees of abstractness, created by the consciousness of different eras" [Lotman 1988: 252].

According to Lotman, the plot of narrative literary works usually develops within a certain local continuum. A naive reader's perception tends to identify it with the local relation of episodes to real space (for example, to geographic space). The notion that an artistic space is always a model of some natural space, which has grown up in certain historical conditions, is by no means always justified.

The space in a work of art models different connections of the picture of the world: temporal, social, ethical, etc. In one or another model of the world, the category of space is intricately merged with certain concepts that exist in our picture of the world as separate or opposite.

Thus, in Lotman's artistic model of the world "spacen“stvo” sometimes metaphorically assumes the expression of completely non-spatial relations in the modeling streamtotour of the world.

In the classification of Yu.M. Lotman artistic space maboutCan be point, linear, planar or volumetric. The second and third can also have a horizontal or vertical orientation. Linear space may or may not include the concept of directionality. In the presence of this feature (the image of a linear directed space in art is often a road), linear space becomes a convenient artistic language for modeling temporal categories (“life path”, “road” as a means of deploying character in time). The notion of the boundary is an essential differential feature of the elements of the "spatial language", which are largely determined by the presence or absence of this feature both in the model as a whole and in one or another of its structural positions [Lotman 1988:252]. According to the scientist, the concept of a boundary is not characteristic of all types of perception of space, but only those that have already developed their own abstract language and separate space as a certain continuum from its concrete filling.

Yu.M. Lotman argues that "the spatial limitation of the text from non-text is evidence of the emergence of the language of artistic space as a special modeling system" [Lotman 1988: 255]. The scientist proposes to make a thought experiment: take some landscape and present it as a view from a window (for example, a painted window opening acts as a frame) or as a picture.

The perception of a given (same) pictorial text in each of these two cases will be different: in the first it will be perceived as a visible part of a larger whole, and the question of what is in the part that is closed from the observer’s gaze is quite appropriate.

In the second case, the landscape, hung in a frame on the wall, is not perceived as a piece cut out of any larger real view. In the first case, the painted landscape is felt only as a reproduction of some real (existing or able to exist) view, in the second, while retaining this function, it receives an additional one: perceived as an artistic structure closed in itself, it seems to us correlated not with a part of the object, but with some universal object, becomes a model of the world.

The landscape depicts a birch grove, and the question arises: "What is behind it?" But it is also a model of the world, reproduces the universe, and in this aspect the question "What is beyond it?" - loses all meaning. Thus, Lotman's spatial delimitation is closely connected with the transformation of space from the totality of things that fill it into some kind of abstract language that can be used for various types of artistic modeling.

The absence of a boundary sign in texts in which this absence is the specificity of their artistic language should not be confused with a similar absence of it at the level of speech (in a specific text), when stored in the system. Thus, the artistic symbol of the road contains a prohibition on movement in one direction, in which space is limited (“get off the path”), and the naturalness of movement in one in which there is no such border. Since the artistic space becomes a formal system for constructing various, including ethical, models, it becomes possible to morally characterize literary characters through the type of artistic space corresponding to them, which already acts as a kind of two-dimensional local ethical metaphor. So, in Tolstoy one can distinguish (of course, with a high degree of conventionality) several types of heroes. These are, firstly, the heroes of their place (their circle), the heroes of spatial and ethical immobility, who, if they move according to the requirements of the plot, then carry with them their own locus. These are heroes who are not yet able to change or who no longer need it. They represent the starting or ending point of the trajectory - the movement of the characters.

The heroes of the immobile, “closed” locus are opposed by the heroes of the “open” space. Here, too, two types of heroes are distinguished, which can be conditionally called: the heroes of the “path” and the heroes of the “steppe”.

The hero of the path moves along a certain spatial and ethical trajectory. Its inherent space implies a ban on lateral movement. Staying at each point in space (and the moral state equivalent to it) is conceived as a transition to another, following it.

Tolstoy's linear space has the sign of a given direction. It is not unlimited, but represents a generalized possibility of movement from the starting point to the final one. Therefore, it receives a temporal sign, and the character moving in it - a feature of internal evolution. artistic chronotope Petrushevskaya

An essential property of the moral linear space in Tolstoy is the presence of a sign of "height" (in the absence of a sign of "width"); the movement of the hero along his moral trajectory is an ascent, or a descent, or a change of both. In any case, this feature has a structural markedness. It is necessary to distinguish the nature of the space characteristic of the hero from his real plot movement in this space. The hero of the "path" can stop, turn back, or stray to the side, coming into conflict with the laws of his own space. At the same time, the assessment of his actions will be different than for similar actions of a character with a different spatial and ethical field.

Unlike the hero of the path, the hero of the steppe does not have a ban on movement in any lateral direction. Moreover, instead of moving along a trajectory, the free unpredictability of the direction of movement is implied here.

At the same time, the movement of the hero in the moral space is not connected with the fact that he changes, but with the realization of the inner potential of his personality. So movement here is not evolution. It also has no temporal dimension. The functions of these heroes are to cross boundaries that are insurmountable for others, but do not exist in their space.

Artistic space, according to Lotman, is a continuum in which characters are placed and action takes place. Naive perception constantly pushes the reader to identify artistic and physical space.

There is some truth in such a perception, because even when its function of modeling extra-spatial relations is exposed, artistic space necessarily retains, as the first plan of metaphor, an idea of ​​its physical nature.

Therefore, a very significant indicator will be the question of the space into which the action cannot be transferred. The enumeration of where certain episodes cannot occur will outline the boundaries of the world of the modeled text, and the places to which they can be transferred will give variants of some invariant model.

However, artistic space is not a passive receptacle foraboutev and plot episodes. Correlating it with the actors and the general model of the world created by the literary text convinces us that the language of artistic space is not a hollow vessel, but one of the components of the common language spoken by a work of art.

The behavior of the characters is largely related to the space in which they are located, and the space itself is perceived not only in the sense of real extent, but also in a different - usual in mathematics - understanding, as "a set of homogeneous objects (phenomena, states, etc.). ) in which there are space-like relations.

This allows for the possibility for one and the same hero to alternately fall into one or another space, and, moving from one to another, a person is deformed according to the laws of this space [Lotman 1988:252].

In order to become sublime, the space must not only be vast (or limitless), but also directed, being in it must move towards the goal. It must be expensive. "Road" is a certain type of artistic space, "path" is the movement of a literary character in this space. The "path" is the realization (full or incomplete) or non-realization of the "road".

With the advent of the image of the road as a form of space, the idea of ​​the path as the norm of life of a person, peoples and mankind is formed.

The language of spatial relations is not the only means of artistic modeling, but it is important because it belongs to the primary and main ones. Even temporal modeling is often a secondary superstructure on the spatial language.

Since for Lotman, as a structuralist, it was important to defineepour the structural features of the text, he interprets and artistictvein space as a structural element of the text.

Structural bodyandThe captivating nature of artistic space is due to the fact that the center of any space-time paradigm, according to Lotman, isIis the hero of the work. Lotman makes significant additions to the methaboutlogical potential of the category of artistic space and time, pointing to the possibilityandtypology of spatial features in the fabric of the work through a system of antinomies (top - bottom, own - alien, closed - open, everyday - sacred etc.), in terms of quality and charactertoteru directionality (spot, linearnoe, planar, etc.).

1.3 Ways of studying artistic space and time in the literary experience of V. Toporov, D. Likhachev and others

Today, not one scientific literary forum can do without a report on a topic, wherever the categories of artistic space and time appear. This is due to the fact that these categories have a rich methodological potential and open up great opportunities for researchers in the study of both individual personalities and the literary era as a whole.

Vivid examples of the scientific significance of the categories of artistic space and time can be found in works on mythopoetics, where the study of specific mythological schemes involves observing the spatio-temporal parameters of a phenomenon. For example, one of the representatives of the mythopoetic tradition V.N. Toporov in his works actively refers to the category of artistic space. One of the important installations of the scientist is the distinction between "individual" and common space. The scientist writes: “Each literary epoch, each major direction (school) builds its own space, but for those within this era or direction, “their own” is evaluated, first of all, from the point of view of the general, unifying, consolidating, and their “individuality” is “one’s own” reveals only on the periphery, at the junctions with something else that precedes it or threatens it as a replacement in the near future” [Toporov 1995:447]. "Etcaboutspace of childhood”, “space of love”, “new space” - prandmeasures of spatial mythological models that we can meet in Toporov's works and the use of which can be useful in studyingeresearch institute of literature of any period.

According to V.N. Toporov, each writer builds his own space, voluntarily and involuntarily correlating it with general spatial models. At the same time, according to Toporov, is promising study of individual persaboutinfluences precisely through myth and the category of artistic space. It is no coincidence that in one of his works he makes the following reservation: “The author of this article has at his disposal several sketches devoted to individual images of space by a number of Russian writers (Radishchev, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Druzhinin, Konevskoy, Andrei Bely, Mandelstam, Vaginov, Platonov, Krzhizhanovsky, Poplavsky and others) [Toporov 1995:448].

Toporov's observations on the semantics of specific geographical images in literature are interesting. For example, analyzing the image of St. Petersburg as a mythological space, the scientist introduces the concept of "minus-space", i.e. a space that does not exist, or denies, is the opposite of a traditional, habitual space.

Artistic space, according to Toporov, is aesome frame in which the meanings of mythological, archetypal and symbolic nature are fixed. In addition, the art space isIis an important attribute of individual creativity and myth-making, allows the researcher to come to an understanding of the unique phenomena of lettersatours, their structures and mythological fullness.

A review of modern research devoted to the study of artistic space and time in the perspective of studying various historical and literary phenomena allows us to draw some conclusions about the nature of these categories and their methodological significance Rhythm, space and time in literature and art. - L., 1974.; Gabrichevsky A.G. Space and Time // Questions of Philosophy. - 1990. - No. 3. - p. 10 -13.; Prokopova M.V. Semantics of space-time landmarks in L.N. Martynov’s poem “Ermak” // From text to context. - Ishim, 2006, pp. 189-192 - and more. etc. .

Literary works are permeated with temporal and spatial representations, infinitely diverse and deeply meaningful. Here there are images of biographical time (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), historical (characteristics of the change of eras and generations, major events in the life of society), cosmic (the idea of ​​eternity and universal history), calendar (change of seasons, everyday life and holidays) , daily (day and night, morning and evening), as well as ideas about movement and stillness, about the correlation of the past, present, and future.

According to D.S. Likhachev, from epoch to epoch, as ideas about the variability of the world become wider and deeper, the images of time are becoming increasingly important in literature: writers are becoming more and more aware, more and more fully capturing the “variety of forms of movement”, “mastering the world in its temporal dimensions” [Khalizev 2002: 247].

No less diverse are the spatial pictures present in the literature: images of space closed and open, earthly and cosmic, really visible and imaginary, ideas about objectivity near and far.

The location and correlation of spatio-temporal images in the work is internally motivated - there are also "life" motivations in their genre conditionality, there are also conceptual motivations. It is also important that the spatio-temporal organization is systemic, eventually forming the "inner world of a literary work" (D.S. Likhachev).

Moreover, in the arsenal of literature there are such artistic forms that are specially designed to create a spatio-temporal image: a plot, a system of characters, a landscape, a portrait, etc. When analyzing space and time in a work of art, one should take into account all the structural elements present in it andapay attention to the originality of each of them: in the system of characters (tonhardness, specularity, etc.), in the structure of the plot (linear, singleastraightened or with returns, running ahead, spiral, etc.), withaboutto supply the proportion of individual elements of the plot, as well as to identify the nature of the landscape and portrait, to carry out a motivic analysis of the workeniya. It is equally important to look for motivations for the articulation of structural elements and, ultimately, to try to comprehend the ideological and aesthetic semantics of the spatio-temporal image that is presented in the work.

CHAPTER 2

This chapter analyzes the stories of L. Petrushevskaya from the point of view of their spatial and temporal organization, an attempt is made to understand the root causes of the tragedies of the heroes in the special artistic world of the writer.

2.1 Apartment as the main topos of domestic space

Even Bulgakov's Woland said that "the housing problem has spoiled the Muscovites." Both during the years of Soviet power and in the post-Soviet period, housing problems were among the main everyday problems of our fellow citizens (and not only Muscovites). It is no coincidence that the apartment becomes the main topos in the everyday space of the heroes of L. Petrushevskaya.

The heroes of Petrushevskaya are inconspicuous people, tortured by life, suffering quietly or scandalously in their communal apartments in unsightly courtyards. The author invites us to office offices and stairwells, acquaints us with various misfortunes, with immorality and lack of meaning of existence. There are few happy people (heroes) in the world of Petrushevskaya, but happiness is not the goal of their life.

At the same time, everyday everyday problems narrow their dreams, and can significantly limit the space of their life. It is in apartments (with varying degrees of comfort) that events take place in the stories “Your Circle”, “Cinderella's Way”, “Happy End”, “Country”, “To a Beautiful City”, “Children's Party”, “Dark Fate”, “ Life is a theater”, “Oh happiness”, “Three faces” and others. Of the many options for apartments and apartments, communal apartments, etc. a certain generalized topos of the “apartment from Petrushevskaya” is being formed, in which the sophisticated reader can discern the features of other apartments well known in literature and culture (from Dostoevsky to Makanin).

Let's dwell on the most typical examples: the stories "To the Beautiful City", "Country" and "Cinderella's Way" are surprisingly consonant with each other at the level of spatial organization (as if the events take place in the neighborhood), although the content of these two stories is different.

In the story "Country", the apartment is a kind of shelter in which an alcoholic mother lives with her daughter. Here, as such, there is no description of the world of things, objects, furniture, thereby creating a feeling of the emptiness of the space in which its inhabitants live. We read at the beginning of the story: “The daughter usually plays quietly on the floor while the mother drinks at the table or lying on the couch.” We see the same at the end of the story: “The girl really doesn’t care, she quietly plays on the floor with her old toys ...” The story of L. Petrushevskaya "Country" and all other works are quoted from an electronic document with the address: http://www.belousenko.com/wr_Petrushevskaya.htm . The double repetition speaks of the hopelessness of the situation, and the repeated emphasis on the fact that the apartment is quiet further enhances the feeling of emptiness, gloom and even lifelessness. The heroine, being in the closed space of the apartment, does not seek to change her life. The only thing she still cares about is to add up from the evening “Your daughter’s little things for kindergarten, so that everything is at hand in the morning.” She revives only when she goes to visit with her daughter, i.e. leaves the space of his home and finds himself in another space, alien, completely opposite, where there are people, communication, and hence life. She feels like she belongs here, and she seems to be accepted, but when she “carefully calls and congratulatessomeonehappy birthday, pulls, mumbles, asks how life is going ...waiting", until she is invited, then in the end “Hangs up the phone and runs to the grocery store for another bottle, and then to kindergarten for her daughter.”

The heroine of the story "Country" finds herself in a situation of lifelong loneliness, loss of hope. This is a person thrown out of life because of his inability to realize himself, who is outside of society, outside of society, therefore, outside of human ties and communication. This woman has lost confidence in life, she has no friends or acquaintances. The consequence of all this is her loneliness, isolation in space.

Similar events could happen to anyone, anywhere. However, as one Roman philosopher Seneca said, "as long as a man is alive, he must never lose hope." Everyone has his own "country", in which he can plunge "in moments of spiritual adversity."

Very consonant with this story is the story "To the beautiful city." After reading it, one gets the feeling that this is the beginning of the story that is described in the "Country". The image of the mother-alcoholic from the "Country" is correlated with the image of Anastasia Gerbertovna, and the daughter of an alcoholic is reminiscent of Anastasia's daughter, Vika, also Gerbertovna. Petrushevskaya does not skimp on the details in the description of Vika's appearance: “a scarecrow of seven years, everything is crooked, the coat is on the wrong button, the tights have moved out, the boots have been worn down by more than one generation of flat-footed children, inside with socks. Light hair hangs. A mother is not much different from a daughter: “Wow girl, her hair hangs separately like that of a drowned woman, the skull shines, her eyes are sunken.” These two portrait descriptions characterize not only the heroines, but also the space in which they live. It becomes clear that the mother and her daughter live in poverty, they have nothing to wear, nothing even to eat. The story begins with the fact that Alexei Petrovich (a graduate student, a devoted student of Larisa Sigismundovna, Nastya's mother), once again takes Nastya and Vika to the buffet, where the child eats greedily ("as for the last time in his life").

Nastya's family, already at the time when Nastya was still a child, never lived in abundance, but there was always enough for food. After the death of Larisa Sigismundovna, Nastya's life deteriorated significantly. And these deteriorations were primarily reflected at the level of space. Exactly the topos of the apartment becomes an indicator of a person's well-being in the world of Petrushevskaya.

While Nastya's mother was alive, she tried to do everything possible for her daughter and granddaughter: she “She changed her St. Petersburg apartment for a room closer to her father, when she moved in with her child, she also made plans, apparently, to buy one or the other, to make repairs, but no. There was no money, no strength.” Larisa Sigismundovna struggled until the last day, trying to find at least some place where she would be paid. She was a very good teacher, gave lectures, devoted herself to her work, sparing no effort to feed her family. Already knowing about your illness, "Larisa<…>took on more and more new work, wrote a doctoral thesis on her last legs, simultaneously teaching her useless science of cultural studies in three places. Even when she was in the hospital, after the radiation sessions, Larisa ran away to finish her lectures, because. " paid precisely for the allotted hours, and not for the absence of an employee due to illness» . Everything that we learn in the story about Nastya's mother speaks of her active life position, which cannot be said about Nastya herself.

The time had come when the Herbertovnas were left alone. With the departure of Larisa Sigismundovna, life in the apartment stops, to some extent it even dies. This is clear from the following passage: “When there was a commemoration, Lara’s friends set a table in the house of the deceased, and genuine poverty reigned there, no one even suspected that this could be, broken furniture, cracked wallpaper.” There is an image of a space where objects, furniture not only lost their purpose, became unclaimed by man, they changed their quality (“ broken furniture, cracked wallpaper”). This suggests that the heroine's world is in decline. The outer world of things is a reflection of her inner world. The image of the space in which Nastya lives with her daughter explains the behavior of the heroine. Nastya does not strive for an active life, she has no desire to correct the situation in which she and Vika find themselves. This “natural habitat” has so depressed Nastya that she doesn’t even have the strength to get up on time: “The poor have few opportunities and often do not even have the strength to even get up on time, it turned out that because the young mother Nastya went to bed late and got up when she got up, she already had a natural habitat in the company of the same poor people who cannot lie down all night, stay awake, they roam, smoke and drink, and during the day they sleep five by five on the couch.

It is noteworthy that the apartment near Petrushevskaya is a space of a special type of people: as a rule, the unfortunate owner of the apartment receives guests as unfortunate as himself. The space of Nastya's apartment attracts the same "poor and unfortunate" as Nastya herself. She is a “kind soul,” as Valentina said, so she can’t refuse anyone, kick anyone out of the house. From here, the apartment turned into an "ugly nest" full of "lounging guys in shorts and girls in underwear because of the heat." L. Petrushevskaya writes in her story that “This rookery vividly resembled either a dugout in the taiga, where it was heated hot, or the last day of Pompeii, only without any tragedy, without these masks of suffering, without heroic attempts to take someone out and save. On the contrary, everyone tried not to be taken out of here. They indirectly glanced in the direction of Valentina fussing around the child, waiting for this aunt to disappear.

All mother's friends and acquaintances are trying to help Nastya: they are trying to find at least some work for her, they bring food home (but "you can't get enough for a whole abyss"), they help with housing, etc. In return, they receive sidelong glances not only from her "friends", but also from Nastya herself. She is embarrassed to let people into her space who want to do good for her and Vikochka, but she freely lets in those who eat the last supplies in the house that there is even nothing to feed the child with. Those. the space in which the heroine of the story lives is more open to "strangers" who have already become "their own" for Nastya.

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From the outside it may seem that there was no night at all - that beautiful night time when everything begins and unfolds so slowly, smoothly and majestically, with great anticipation and expectations of the very best, with such a long, unceasing darkness all over the world - it may seem that it was precisely such a night that did not exist at all, everything turned out to be so crumpled and consisting of continuously replacing each other periods of waiting and preparing for the most important thing - and, thus, the precious night time passed like that, while, expelled from the same house, the strollers rode in three cars to another house, so that from there, as if frightened, they scatter ahead of time to their homes, while it is not yet dawn, with the only thought of sleeping before work, before getting up at seven in the morning - and this is precisely the argument that we need get up at seven in the morning, and was decisive in the cry that accompanied the expulsion of walkers from the house number one, in which they gathered from eight o'clock in the evening to celebrate a big the event is the defense of the dissertation of Ramazan, an oppressed father of two children.

Thus, it cannot be said that it was precisely the desire to get enough sleep before having to get up at seven in the morning that separated everyone - this consideration, so often repeated in the cry of Ramadan's relatives, did not touch anyone and did not settle in anyone's subconscious, so that later, an unidentified to rise from the depths and dispel the lukewarm company that has held together so fiercely all this long night, expelled from one respectable family home and flown in three taxis to seek shelter in another house; no, the thought of seven o'clock in the morning would not stop anyone, especially since at the moment when it was so often pronounced by the relatives of Ramadan, it sounded ridiculous, absurd, helpless and smacked of old age and imminent death, a desire, above all, to fall asleep and rest, and that’s all. the walkers were full of hopes and a childish desire to unwind, to swing all night long, to talk and dance and drink at least until morning.

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And Ramazan, swearing helplessly, then yelled that why yesterday, in his defense, a certain Pankov got out all night as he wanted, and no one said a word to him, because it was his night, you understand? His night. And right there, Ramazan’s wife, quiet and mournful Ira, was pale from humiliation, from the shame of taking part in all this fuss of Ramazan’s relatives and Ramazan himself, from the shame of being exposed to all these people, in whose eyes the pale Ramadan was helplessly screaming, that he loves his Irka, from the other end of the table, and shouted that he was sending to f ... all his relatives, who on his night do whatever they want with him, but they all went to f ...

At this time, one of the guests of Ramadan, the most drunken and noisy, was already descended from the stairs and went off to no one knows where, leaving his corduroy jacket on a hanger, since he was forcibly put on a coat directly on a festive white shirt, and he did not understand anything, it is obvious that they do to him, and did not say a word that he still had his jacket hanging somewhere. This guest was also mourned by Ramadan in his mournful speeches, periodically rounded off by the same phrase that he sends everyone to hell ...

Chronicle of the life of a late Soviet family, written on behalf of the mother - an elderly poetess. Petrushevskaya plunges the reader into the small-sized hell of the 1980s: lack of money, shortages, family squabbles, screaming children and feeble-minded old people - and in her presentation these everyday details begin to look like signs of fate, symbols of human fate, which no one can escape.

comments: Polina Ryzhova

What is this book about?

The story is written on behalf of the elderly poetess Anna Andrianovna, who shares in her diary the details of her family squabbles. Her life is spent in caring for relatives: daughter Alena, who gave birth to three children from three men, son Andrey, who had just returned from prison, mother Sima, who is in a psychiatric hospital, and her ardently adored grandson Timochka, whose curls “smell of phloxes”, and urine - "chamomile meadow". An extremely specific, private situation here takes on the character of a parable, and everyday troubles rise to the level of fatal predestination.

Ludmila Petrushevskaya. 1991 Photo for the German publishing house Rowohlt, where the book "Time is Night" was first published

When was it written?

Petrushevska began writing "Time is Night" in 1988 in Stockholm, where she came to playwrights' congress, and finished in 1990 in Krakow. The end of perestroika is the time when fame comes to the writer. After decades of existence outside the official literary field, she releases her long-awaited first book, a collection of stories "Immortal Love", and is in demand abroad: her prose is translated, plays are staged, invitations to festivals come, in 1991 she is awarded a German Pushkin Prize of the Alfred Töpfer Foundation One of the most prestigious literary awards in Russia in the 1990s. Established by the foundation of the German entrepreneur Alfred Töpfer. In addition to Petrushevskaya, Bella Akhmadulina, Sasha Sokolov, Andrey Bitov, Dmitry Alexandrovich Prigov, Timur Kibirov, Yuri Mamleev became its laureates. The cash reward was 40,000 German marks (at the rate of 2001 - about half a million rubles). The award closed in 2005. ⁠ . In order not to lose herself and preserve her creative independence, Petrushevskaya goes to work on a new text, the story “Time night" 1 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 458-463. ⁠ .

Museum ART4

How is it written?

In the form of a continuous monologue: one topic clings to another, the text turns into a continuous stream of memories, maxims, confessions. Logical pauses occur only a few times along with the mention of the onset of a new night - it is at night that the heroine keeps a diary. Anna Andrianovna includes in her text excerpts from the diary of her daughter Alena, which she read without asking, and individual passages written on behalf of her daughter (“as if her memories”). In terms of language, “Time is Night” reproduces ordinary oral speech, the speech of “crowds and gossip” (to use the wording of Petrushevskaya), but adorned with purely literary “irregularities”. It is stylistic shifts that create a mythological dimension in Petrushevskaya's realistic text, or, in the words of the literary critic Mark Lipovetsky, "the effect of metaphysical drafts."

They didn't need my love. Or rather, without me, they would have died, but at the same time, I personally interfered with them. Paradosk! As Nyura says, the bones are gouging neighbor

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

For the first time, "Time is Night" was published in 1991 in German, by the Berlin publishing house Rowohlt. The story was published in Russian in 1992 in the Novy Mir magazine. For the Novomir version, Petrushevskaya adds a telephone prologue to the text - a scene of a conversation with Alena, Anna Andrianovna's daughter, who asks the author to publish the dead mother's notes and then sends them by mail. Petrushevskaya mentions the death of the heroine, fearing that readers will take the text of the work for her personal diary. It had already been like this several years earlier, after the publication of the story “Own Circle”, also written in the first person: “After finishing“ Time is Night ”, I thought hard, and if embittered readers would kill me for such deeds? For Anna Andrianovna in the first person and for all her thoughts and words? And I thought, thought, and finally, in the Russian version, I took her life and thereby covered problem" 2 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 454. ⁠ . In 1993, “Time is Night” was published in the book “On the Road of the God Eros” and later repeatedly reprinted as part of collections.

Moscow, 1986

Moscow, 1988

Peter Turnley/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images

What influenced her?

Most of all - the poetics of Mikhail Zoshchenko. In Petrushevskaya's story, as in Zoshchenko's stories, ordinary heroes act, the everyday, seemingly unremarkable side of life becomes the subject of artistic reflection: kitchen gossip, vulgar scandals, petty intrigues. Poetic tropes are absurdly mixed with clichés and stationery, giving rise to linguistic oxymoronism. The influence of the 1960s and 70s is noticeable: “Moscow stories” by Yuri Trifonov and plays by Alexander Vampilov. Anna Andrianovna herself, with her outbursts of self-abasement and at the same time painful pride, is a kind of hybrid of Gogol's Akaky Akakievich and the lyrical heroine of Anna Akhmatova's poems, and the foolish irony that emerges through the stream of suffering makes the heroine also a literary relative. Petrushevskaya's personal experience also influenced the creation of the story. Before perestroika, the writer lived with three children in a small two-room apartment, just like Anna Adrianovna, fleeing hunger, worked as a magazine reviewer and conducted seminars in creative houses - there “they fed and could secretly bring and feed the child, or even two" 3 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 238. ⁠ .

Lyudmila Petrushevskaya with children Fedor, Natalya and granddaughter Anya. 1985

From the personal archive of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya

How was it received?

Readers perceived the story as "darkness", a shocking text about the unsightly aspects of life in the USSR. In the early 1990s, Petrushevskaya is seen as an accusatory writer who reveals the whole truth about the beggarly existence of the Soviet "little man." In a similar way, the story is treated abroad, for a Western audience “Time is Night” - one of the first frank descriptions of life in the late USSR: “They perceived my things purely as Russian exotics. Well, there are Chinese eyes, Mongolian salt tea with bacon, Korean dog food, Eskimos generally live in the snow, shamans spin and howl. Well, Petrushevskaya also sings something. Heavy Russian trawl-wali life, don't be scared, it has nothing to do with you! This is about an exceptionally heavy share of Russian women. On the amateur" 4 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 461. ⁠ .

However, the artistic merits of the story were immediately obvious to literary scholars. Znamya critic Natalya Ivanova called Petrushevskaya's text "publication of the year" and noted that an ancient tragedy is hidden behind the everyday story about an unsettled life: "It is not people who act here, but Rock" 5 Ivanova N. Unsaid // Banner. 1993. No. 1. C. 143. ⁠ . In 1992, "Time is Night" was shortlisted for the first non-state literary award "Russian Booker", along with "Laz" by Vladimir Makanin and "Hearts of Four" by Vladimir Sorokin. Petrushevskaya is the favorite, but the victory was awarded to Mark Kharitonov for his novel The Line of Fate, or Milashevich's Chest, which caused violent indignation in the literary environment. According to critics, in the first year of its existence, Booker missed the mark, and this miss set off a long string of controversial jury decisions.

"Time is Night" becomes the canonical text of Petrushevskaya, literary critics discover metaphysical depths behind the "black" naturalism and fit it into the context of Russian and Western European literature. Petrushevskaya herself is gaining a reputation as a classic, and her prose is included in the school curriculum. True, discussions about her work do not stop, sometimes the most curious ones: for example, in 2017, Siberian Orthodox activists demanded that the story “Glitch” be removed from the school curriculum as allegedly containing “drug propaganda”.

Petrushevskaya does not confine herself to the tradition of realistic prose, but constantly experiments: either she writes mystical stories (the cycles “Where I was”, “Songs of the Eastern Slavs”), then “linguistic” fairy tales (the cycle “Byatye Puski”), then poems (the collection “Paradoski ”), then a series of children's books about Peter the pig, which became a meme on the Russian Internet. By the end of the 2000s, her experiments went beyond literature - Petrushevskaya paints pictures, makes cartoons, sings and makes hats.

Semyon Faibisovich. Family portrait in the interior. Diptych. 1982 Regina Gallery

When does the story take place?

During the period of Soviet stagnation, probably in the 1980s. But there is no need to talk about any historical accuracy of Anna Andrianovna's stories. Literally on the first pages of the diary, the heroine describes an incident that happened to a friend: “She, then a student, ran after the car and cried, then he threw an envelope out of the window, and in the envelope (she stopped to pick it up) there were dollars, but not a lot. He was a professor on Lenin's theme." The episode, based on the logic of the story, is 15 years away from the real Anna Andrianovna (when she still had a husband and a little daughter). But in the USSR, before perestroika, strict currency legislation was in effect, foreign currency could be in the hands of diplomats, international journalists, artists and athletes traveling abroad, but it is unlikely that a “professor on the Lenin topic” would have it. And even more so, it is unlikely that the professor would have dared to throw dollars out of the car window - everything related to the currency caused special alertness in Soviet society and tension 6 Ivanova A. Shops "Birch": paradoxes of consumption in the late USSR. M.: New Literary Review, 2017. C. 54-63. ⁠ . Anna Andrianovna generally has a difficult relationship with time - for example, she says that for a part-time job she once wrote an article about the "bicentenary of the Minsk Tractor Plant", after which she was driven away - the first Russian tractor could not come off the assembly line in the 18th century .

Critic Boris Kuzminsky, in his review of The Time is Night, concludes that it is impossible to determine the exact time of the action of the story: “The incredibly concrete world of this prose is indifferent to historical specifics. It is as if laid under the course of epochs by a layer of damp foam rubber, it always exists. “Time is night” incorporates the sum of the features of the Soviet era, a conditional zeitgeist. At the same time, Petrushevskaya is not interested in the Soviet myth, she is interested in life itself, shaped by this myth.

Everything hangs, flutters, everything is in balls, lobules, veins and rods, as if on ropes. This is not old age yet, burnt sweetness, yesterday's curd mass, the wort of foreign kvass, as I wrote in my youth from fright when I saw the neckline of my friend

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Does the heroine really have no money for anything, or is she shying away?

According to the stories of Anna Andrianovna, it seems that she lives in extreme poverty: she keeps a diary in pencil because she cannot afford a fountain pen, goes to neighbors to feed her grandson and eat a little herself, begs for a potato from the props of a children's theatrical performance, because from it you can cook a "second course". In general, the heroine is fixated on food, on who eats how much and at whose expense, for example, she accuses her son-in-law that he eats her family, driving her daughter Alena into a frenzy. The same claim was once made to the husband of Anna Andrianovna herself by her mother (Baba Sima). “There was always something wrong with food among members of our family, poverty is to blame,” the heroine sums up.

In the meantime, if we sum up the income that Anna Andrianovna mentions, a not so hopeless picture emerges: she receives a pension for herself, as well as for Baba Sima, who is in the hospital, works part-time in a magazine (“a ruble is a letter, there are sixty letters in month") and performs twice a month in front of children in the houses of creativity ("performance eleven rubles"). Even if we take the minimum amount of pensions for calculation, then the total monthly income of Anna Andrianovna is still approaching the size of the average salary in the USSR. Svetlana Pakhomova in the Zvezda magazine compares the heroes of Petrushevskaya with the socially close heroes of Yuri Trifonov, who are also preoccupied with everyday problems, but they never face the question of survival: and secretly eaten by someone from the household. By and large, poverty and hunger appearing in Petrushevskaya's texts have nothing to do with the traditionally realistic depiction of Soviet and post-Soviet reality. Probably, Anna Andrianovna's obsession with food should not be regarded as a marker of social trouble or proof of her greed, but as a subconscious desire to be needed by her family. In her world, feeding children is the only way to express love for them, and the more difficult it is to get food, the more significant this feeling seems.

Crush in line for cakes. Moscow, 1985

A shelf in a store, typical of the last year of Soviet history. 1991

Dick Rudolph/TASS

Is Anna Andrianovna a real poetess?

It depends on what is considered confirmation of this status. A poetess - more precisely, a poet ( as bequeathed by Tsvetaeva Tsvetaeva preferred to call herself not a poetess, but a poet. “There are signs of division in poetry more significant than belonging to the male or female sex, and being disdainful of everyone bearing any stigma of female (mass) separateness, such as: female courses, suffragism, feminism, the Salvation Army, all the notorious female question, with the exception of its military resolution: the fabulous kingdoms of Penthezileia - Brunnhilde - Marya Morevna - and the no less fabulous Petrograd women's battalion (I stand for the cutting schools, however) ”- from the memoirs of Tsvetaeva. ⁠ ) - the heroine considers herself. Those around this opinion partly share: Anna Andrianovna speaks with poems in the houses of creativity, publishes two poems in a poetry magazine by the Eighth of March (“a fee of eighteen rubles together”), is waiting for the release of her book of poems (“They will recalculate my pension, I will receive more”). She is constantly in dialogue with high culture: in place and out of place she recalls Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Pushkin, inserts literary allusions (“the guests did not let the folk trail dry up in our apartment”). Petrushevskaya plays on contrasts: the purely everyday content of the diaries is combined with the pathetic mood of its author. “The most vile thing in “Time is Night” is not the pictures of urban life, adjusted according to the drawings of an experienced designer of torture machines, but the pathos that the narrator imposes on everyday life,” remarks Boris Kuzminsky.

Anna Andrianovna quotes herself several times in her diary. Here, for example, is one of her poems:

"Terrible dark power, blind insane passion - to fall at the feet of a beloved son like a prodigal son"

The fragment is very short in order to draw far-reaching conclusions from it, but you can see that the verses are made quite professionally: good assonant rhymes, rhythmic play, aphoristic comparisons. However, the lines are excessively pretentious and sententious, in fact, like her diary.

Anna Andrianovna herself feels a deep kinship with Anna Andreevna Akhmatova, her "mystical namesake". It was during perestroika, when Petrushevskaya wrote "The Time is Night", that Akhmatova's "Requiem" was first printed, and Akhmatova's poetry became known to a large circle of Soviet readers and turned into a symbol of high literature. Parody, at first glance, the comparison of Anna Andrianovna with Anna Andreevna gradually acquires an ever deeper meaning. The diaries of Petrushevskaya's heroine are titled "Notes on the edge of the table" - an obvious reference to Anatoly Naiman's memoirs about Akhmatova ("One of the guests began to complain to her that her friend, a writer worthy of all respect, was given a small two-room cottage in Maleevka, while a mediocre, but to the secretary of the Union - a luxurious five-room apartment. When the door closed behind her, Akhmatova said: "Why did she tell me this? I wrote all my poems on the windowsill or on the edge of something") 7 Nyman A. Stories about Anna Akhmatova. M.: Fiction, 1989. S. 163. ⁠ . Like her namesake, Anna Andrianovna is forced to fight for survival every day, proudly confront adversity, she is also waiting for her son from prison. For the heroine of The Time is Night, the status of a poet has nothing to do with poetry itself; rather, it is a way of being. In the world of Petrushevskaya, art tends to be brought to life in the most literal way, everyday vulgarity, and in the meantime, everyday vulgarity itself becomes art.

Anna Akhmatova. Komarovo, 1963. Photo of Joseph Brodsky

akhmatova.spb.ru

Why is the relationship between mother and daughter so important in the story?

In “Time is Night”, Baba Sima and Anna Andrianovna, Anna Andrianovna and Alena repeat each other’s life paths so much that they practically merge into one character. The mother here perceives her daughter as an extension of herself, therefore she constantly violates the personal boundaries of the child. One of the strongest points in the story is Anna Andrianovna's detailed commentary on the scene of her daughter's first sex, taken from her personal diary. Unceremonious interference in personal life, of course, causes anger on the part of Alena and, at the same time, a desire to take revenge: while the mother advises her daughter to “wash her panties”, the daughter warns her mother against being infected with “pubic lice”. Alena is the only character who convicts the main character of "Time is Night" of graphomania, while the accusation is dictated by the spirit of rivalry - Alena herself has literary ambitions, judging by the diary.

In Petrushevskaya's prose, the relationship between mother and daughter is one of the central motifs. For example, in the story “There is someone in the house”, the author combines mother and daughter in one character, calling him “mother-daughter”, “md”. In the play Befem, the metaphor is realized: a two-headed woman, a daughter and a mother in one body, enters the stage. In the texts of Petrushevskaya, the inseparable existence of mother and daughter is associated with mutual torment. But there is still hope for release: Alyona’s desire to posthumously publish Anna Andrianovna’s manuscript, in which her text is also present, can be regarded both as recognition of her mother’s literary abilities (“she was a poet”), and as recognition of their mutual right to selfhood.

Semyon Faibisovich. Garbage dumped near the neighboring apartment number 1. 1987. Regina Gallery

Courtesy of Regina Gallery

Is “Time to Night” a feminist or anti-feminist work?

In Petrushevskaya's prose, with rare exceptions, female heroines always act. Therefore, her texts are defined as "women's prose" (along with the texts of Tatyana Tolstaya, Lyudmila Ulitskaya, Dina Rubina, Victoria Tokareva), as well as "anti-feminine version of women's prose" 8 Wall Josephine. The Minotaur in the Maze: Remarks on Lyudmila Petrushevskaya // World Literature Today: A Literatury Quarterly of the University of Oklahoma. Vol. 67. No. 1. 1993. P. 125-126. ⁠ , since the heroines of Petrushevskaya resemble little feminine women.

The family in the “Time is Night” is arranged according to the principle of matriarchy. A man in this system either leaves voluntarily (sometimes out the window, as in the case of Andrei's son), or he is kicked out by the matriarch, accusing him of parasites: Baba Sima outlives Anna Andrianovna's husband, Anna Andrianovna outlives Alena's husband. Petrushevskaya grotesquely reproduces the pseudo-egalitarian model of the family, common in the Soviet and post-Soviet times. The gender equality officially proclaimed in the USSR did not endow the woman with equal rights, but rather added a new burden - in addition to caring for children and doing housework, she also had to earn money (sociologists called this situation a “working mother’s contract”). In such a system, a man often finds himself out of work, so the need for his stay in the family from an economic point of view is rightly called into question. In Vremya Noch, Petrushevskaya literally embodies the joke that half of Russian children were raised in same-sex families by mothers and grandmothers. “And I saw such female families, a mother, a daughter and a small child, a full-fledged family!” - Anna Andrianovna bitterly sneers.

Despite the fact that the heroines of Petrushevskaya are mostly unhappy, wretched and comical (or even resemble “genderless, asexual, tortured by everyday life, “shabby” creatures, tending to zero in the limit”), Petrushevskaya can well be called one of the first post-Soviet feminist writers, since she explores a woman not from the point of view of external settings, but from the inside of her world.

Why is Anna Andrianovna so obsessed with her grandson? This is fine?

Not really. Her feelings for the boy Tima border on romantic passion: she constantly enthusiastically describes his curls, legs, arms, eyelashes, asks the boy to call himself Anna and is jealous of him for her daughter. At the same time, Anna Andrianovna herself suspects that her feelings for her grandson are somewhat unhealthy: “Parents in general, and grandparents in particular, love small children with carnal love that replaces everything for them. Sinful love, I will tell you, the child from it only becomes callous and loosens his belt, as if he understands that the matter is unclean. She boldly convicts those around her that “the matter is unclean”: noticing that a man in a tram kisses his daughter on the lips, she makes a scandal (“I can imagine that you are doing things with her at home! This is a crime!”), accuses her son-in-law of pedophilia because he became too attached to his son (“Keep in mind,” I said to Alena, somehow going out into the corridor. “Your husband has the makings of a pederast. He loves the boy”). But this does not mean that the heroine has bad plans for her grandson, Anna Andrianovna's "carnal love" for Tim is, first of all, admiration for his purity. In the world of Anna Andrianovna, full of “blood, sweat and mucus”, it is purity that is the greatest value, and bodily purity is equal to spiritual purity. It is not for nothing that the heroine stands under the shower for hours and constantly asks the already adult son Andrey and the adult daughter Alena to wash, which, of course, infuriates both of them.

Children are the embodiment of conscience. Like angels, they anxiously ask their questions, then stop and become adults. Shut up and live. They understand that they are powerless. Nothing can be done and no one can do anything

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Is there anything good and bright in "Vremya noch" at all?

The editor of Novy Mir Alexander Tvardovsky asked a similar question in relation to Petrushevskaya's first stories. In 1968, he did not publish them, accompanying the refusal with the comment “Talented, but painfully gloomy. Can't it get brighter? - BUT. T." 9 Petrushevskaya L. Stories from my own life: an autobiographical novel. St. Petersburg: Amphora, 2009. C. 286. ⁠ .

Nevertheless, for all the gloom and repulsive naturalism of the world described in it, the story "Time is Night" can be perceived as a text about enduring love and eternal order. Mark Lipovetsky and Naum Leiderman discover traces of idyll 10 Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Modern Russian Literature - 1950-90s. In 2 vols. M.: Academy, 2003. S. 622-623. ⁠ . If we rely on the definition given by Mikhail Bakhtin, one of the main signs of an idyll is the inseparability of life from “a specific spatial corner where fathers and children lived, children and grandchildren will live” (in “Vremya noch” such a corner is a two-room small apartment). Another feature of the idyll is “its strict limitation only to the few basic realities of life. Love, birth, death, marriage, work, food and drink, ages” (the content of “The Time is Night” is by and large limited to these topics). And finally, “the neighborhood of food and children is typical of an idyll” (food and children are the central motifs of the story). In relation to “The Time is Night”, Lipovetsky and Leiderman use the term “anti-idyll” and come to the conclusion that the signs of the repetition of events in combination with the techniques of the idyllic genre form the main paradox of the story and all Petrushevskaya’s prose as a whole: “What seems to be the self-destruction of the family turns out to be repeated , the cyclic form of its stable existence" 11 Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Modern Russian Literature - 1950-90s. In 2 vols. M.: Academy, 2003. C. 623. ⁠ .

Petrushevskaya expressed the same paradoxical thought in one of her poetic “parados”, published in 2007:

a family
this is the place
where can
slap in the face for free

where you will be insulted
issuing it
for the truth

but where you will not be given out
where they will lay
will feed
caress
quench their thirst

heal and bury
and will visit
for Easter
and at least
twice

Boris Turkish. figurative series. 1965–1970 Museum ART4

Museum ART4

Boris Turkish. figurative series. 1965–1970 Museum ART4

Auction and Museum ART4 ⁠ of Russian realism, Petrushevskaya's texts bring together only common themes and characters, but hardly an artistic method, since there is no directly critical component in Petrushevskaya's prose. Due to naturalism and special accuracy in reproducing reality, her prose is also correlated with hyperrealism Hyperrealism is a trend in art of the second half of the 20th century that imitates photographic accuracy in depicting reality. ⁠ , but such a correlation, alas, narrows the Petrushevskaya method to one technique. Theater expert Viktor Gulchenko uses a less expected but more accurate reference to the aesthetics of neorealism, Italian post-war cinema, in which the everyday world of the urban poor is filmed with sympathy, compassion and minimal distance between the author and the characters. Petrushevskaya herself expressed herself in a similar way about her creative method: “Completely hide behind the characters, speak in their voices, do nothing to make it clear to the viewer who is good and who is bad, do not insist on anything at all, everyone is equally good, only life New Year in the Kashchenko Psychiatric Hospital. 1988

answer Elena Makeenko

“As there are different weather and different times of the day, so there are different genres,” Petrushevskaya wrote in the preface to her autobiographical book “The Little Girl from the Metropol” (2006), a kind of guide and collection of keys to the “Petrushev text”. Ideally, it is worth compiling an idea of ​​​​the work of the writer according to this principle - collecting a complete picture from prose, dramaturgy, poetry and fairy tales. Thus, the topics important for Petrushevskaya and her creative method come out more clearly and more voluminously.

Among the stories, it is worth starting with one of the earliest and most famous - "Own Circle" (1988). A woman talks about a group of friends who gather at the same table on Fridays to drink and dance after a hard week. A stream of revelations, awkward questions, and witty misanthropy ends with a dramatic finale involving the seven-year-old son of the narrator. Painful relationships between children and parents is one of the main themes in the work of Petrushevskaya, but "Own Circle" reveals this topic from an atypical angle. In contrast to the same “Time is Night”, here it is shown how the callousness and alienation of the mother can be signs of sacrificial love. At the same time, it was “My Circle” that aroused indignation among many readers: they decided that this was an autobiographical story about how the writer hates and beats her child.

Acquaintance with Petrushevskaya the playwright - and many, such as Nikolai Kolyada, believe that she made a real revolution in dramaturgy - can be started with the play "Moscow Choir" (1984). This play is a social portrait of the capital at the beginning of the thaw, written with Chekhov's intonation; a mold of the time when everyone has to learn how to live somehow in a new way. Through the story of a family that simultaneously reunites, falls apart and shares a living space, not sparing each other's nerves, Petrushevskaya tells about the era of her childhood and youth, from the mid-1930s to the mid-1950s. An important place in the play is occupied by another constant theme for the writer - the dehumanization that occurs with people who are forced to live together for years, in cramped conditions and, as a rule, in poverty. As one of the heroines of the Moscow Chorus pointedly says: “Everyone is placed in conditions by life,” and Petrushevskaya could have written this phrase on her literary coat of arms.

From the tragicomic everyday life, for which the texts of Petrushevskaya were long branded "dark", one step to a terrible fairy tale. “Number One, or In the Gardens of Other Possibilities” (2004) is a whole fairy tale novel in which the conditional post-Soviet reality, with the smell of poverty and a dangerous housing problem, acts only as a backdrop for an adventurous story with the transmigration of souls. Scientists, shamans, bandits and cannibals operate here, portals open to the sanctuary of the northern people, predict the future and resurrect the dead. In addition to the dashing plot in the novel, the writer's ability to mix styles and speech flows works at full capacity (for example, the inner speech of one character can noticeably split into two voices). New philosophical questions about religion, the golden age and the role of the media are unobtrusively added to the "family and everyday" topics. A rare abundance these days.

Well, the linguistic fairy tales "Bat Puski", inheriting the glorious kuzdra Academician Shcherba Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba (1880-1944) - linguist. Since 1916, he became a professor at the Department of Comparative Linguistics at St. Petersburg University, teaching there until 1941. Shcherba is one of the founders of the phoneme theory and the founder of the Leningrad phonological school. Studied questions of language norm, interaction of languages, delimitation of language and speech. Shcherba became the author of the phrase “Glokay kuzdra shteko budlanula bokra and kurdyache bokrenka”, illustrating the idea that the approximate meaning of words can be understood due to their morphology. ⁠ , fortunately, have long been included in the school curriculum.

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• Leiderman N., Lipovetsky M. Life after death, or New information about realism // New World. 1993. No. 7 // http://magazines.russ.ru/novyi_mi/1993/7/litkrit.html
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All bibliography

Abstract

The collection of Lyudmila Petrushevskaya includes her new stories and novels, as well as works already known to readers. The heroes of Petrushevskaya are people we meet at work, ride the subway, live in the same building. Each of them is a whole world that fits into one story, and therefore each such story contains the dramatic and emotional charge of the whole novel. Lyudmila Petrushevskaya is the most traditional and most modern phenomenon in our current literature. It is traditional to archaic and modern to shock. The eternal and the momentary are connected in her work like a root and leaves.

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Ludmila Petrushevskaya

Night time

They called me, and a woman's voice said: - Sorry for the trouble, but here after my mother, - she was silent, - after my mother there were manuscripts. I thought you might read it. She was a poet. Of course, I understand you are busy. A lot of work? Understand. Well then, excuse me.

Two weeks later, a manuscript arrived in an envelope, a dusty folder with a lot of scribbled sheets, school notebooks, even telegram forms. Subtitled Notes on the edge of the table. No return address, no last name.

He does not know that when visiting, one cannot greedily rush to the mirror and grab everything, vases, figurines, bottles, and especially boxes with jewelry. You can't ask for more at the table. He, having come to a strange house, fumbles everywhere, a child of hunger, finds somewhere on the floor a little car that has driven under the bed and believes that this is his find, is happy, presses it to his chest, beams and tells the hostess that he has found something for himself, and where - drove under the bed! And my friend Masha, it’s her grandson who rolled her own gift, an American typewriter, under the bed, and forgot, she, Masha, rolls out of the kitchen on alarm, her grandson Deniska and my Timochka have a wild conflict. A good post-war apartment, we came to borrow money until retirement, they were all already swimming out of the kitchen with oily mouths, licking their lips, and Masha had to return to the same kitchen for us and think about what to give us without prejudice. So, Denis pulls out a little car, but this one grabbed the unfortunate toy with his fingers, and Denis has just an exhibition of these cars, strings, he is nine years old, a healthy tower. I tear Tima away from Denis with his typewriter, Timochka is embittered, but they won’t let us in here anymore, Masha was already thinking when she saw me through the peephole in the door! As a result, I lead him to the bathroom to wash himself, weakened from tears, hysteria in a strange house! That's why they don't like us, because of Timochka. I behave like an English queen, I refuse everything, everything from everything: tea with crackers and sugar! I drink their tea only with my brought bread, I involuntarily pinch it out of the bag, because the pangs of hunger at someone else's table are unbearable, Tim leaned on crackers and asked if it was possible with butter (the butter dish was forgotten on the table). "And you?" - Masha asks, but it is important for me to feed Timofey: no, thanks, anoint Timochka more, do you want Tim, more? I catch the sidelong glances of Deniska, who is standing in the doorway, not to mention the son-in-law Vladimir and his wife Oksana, who went up the stairs to smoke, who comes immediately to the kitchen, knowing my pain perfectly, and right in front of Tim says (and she looks great), says:

And what, Aunt Anya (it's me), Alena comes to you? Timochka, does your mother visit you?

What are you, Dunechka (this is her childhood nickname), Dunyasha, didn’t I tell you. Alena is sick, she constantly has breasts.

Mastitis??? - (And it was almost like that from whom did she have a baby, from whose such milk?)

And I quickly, grabbing a few more crackers, good creamy crackers, lead Tim from the kitchen to watch TV in the big room, let's go, let's go, "Good night" soon, although there is at least half an hour left before that.

But she follows us and says that it is possible to apply for Alena's work, that the mother left the child to the mercy of fate. Is it me, or what, an arbitrary fate? Interesting.

What kind of work, what are you, Oksanochka, she is sitting with a baby!

Finally, she asks, is it, or what, from the one about which Alena once told her on the phone that she did not know that this happens and that this does not happen, and she cries, wakes up and cries with happiness? From that? When Alena asked for a loan for a cooperative, but we didn’t have it, did we change the car and repair it in the country? From this? Yes? I answer that I don't know.

All these questions are asked with the aim that we no longer go to them. But they were friends, Dunya and Alena, in childhood, we rested side by side in the Baltic States, I, young, tanned, with my husband and children, and Masha and Dunya, and Masha was recovering from a cruel run after one person, had an abortion from him, and he stayed with his family without giving up anything, neither from the fashion model Tomik, nor from the Leningrad Tusi, they were all known to Masha, and I added fuel to the fire: because I was also familiar with another woman from VGIK, who was famous for her wide hips and the fact that she later got married, but a summons came to her house from the dermatovenerological dispensary that she missed another infusion due to gonorrhea, and with this woman he broke out of the window of his Volga, and she, then still a student, ran after the car and cried, then he threw an envelope to her from the window, and in the envelope (she stopped to pick it up) there were dollars, but not a lot. He was a professor on the Leninist theme. But Masha stayed with the Dun, and my husband and I entertained her, she languidly went with us to a tavern hung with nets at the Maiori station, and we paid for her, we live alone, despite her earrings with sapphires. And she said to my plastic bracelet of a simple modern form 1 ruble 20 kopecks Czech: “Is this a napkin ring?” “Yes,” I said, and put it on my arm.

And the time has passed, I'm not talking about how I was fired, but I'm talking about the fact that we were at different levels and will be with this Masha, and now her son-in-law Vladimir is sitting and watching TV, that's why they are so aggressive every evening, because now Deniska will have a fight with his father to switch to Good Night. My Timochka sees this program once a year and says to Vladimir: “Please! Well, I beg you!" - and folds his hands and almost kneels, he copies me, alas. Alas.

Vladimir has something against Tima, and Denis is generally tired of him like a dog, son-in-law, I’ll tell you a secret, he’s clearly running out, he’s already melting, hence Oksanina’s poisonousness. My son-in-law is also a graduate student on Lenin's topic, this topic sticks to this family, although Masha herself publishes anything, the editor of the calendars, where she gave me extra money languidly and arrogantly, although I helped her out by quickly scribbling an article about the bicentenary of the Minsk Tractor Plant, but she wrote me a fee, even unexpectedly small, apparently, I imperceptibly spoke with someone in collaboration, with the chief technologist of the plant, as they are supposed to, because competence is needed. Well, then it was so hard that she told me not to appear there for the next five years, there was some kind of remark that what could be the bicentenary of the tractor, in 1700 what year was the first Russian tractor produced (came off the assembly line)?

As for the son-in-law of Vladimir, at the moment described, Vladimir is watching TV with red ears, this time some important match. Typical joke! Denis is crying, his mouth gaped, he sat on the floor. Timka climbs to help him out to the TV and, inept, blindly pokes his finger somewhere, the TV goes out, the son-in-law jumps up with a scream, but I’m ready for anything right there, Vladimir rushes to the kitchen for his wife and mother-in-law, he didn’t stop, thank God, Thank you, I came to my senses, did not touch the abandoned child. But already Denis drove away the alarmed Tim, turned on what was needed, and already they were sitting peacefully watching the cartoon, and Tim was laughing with a special desire.

But not everything is so simple in this world, and Vladimir slandered the women thoroughly, demanding blood and threatening to leave (I think so!), and Masha enters with sadness on her face as a person who has done a good deed and completely in vain. Behind her is Vladimir with the physiognomy of a gorilla. A good masculine face, something from Charles Darwin, but not at this moment. Something vile is manifested in him, something despicable.

Then you can not watch this movie, they are yelling at Denis, two women, and Timochka, he has heard enough of these cries ... He is just starting to twist his mouth. Such a nervous tic. Shouting at Denis, they shout, of course, at us. You are an orphan, an orphan, such a lyrical digression. It was even better in the same house, where we went with Tima to very distant acquaintances, there was no telephone. They came, they entered, they are sitting at the table. Tima: “Mom, I want to eat too!” Oh, oh, we walked for a long time, the child is hungry, let's go home, Timochka, I just want to ask if there is any news from Alena (the family of her former colleague, with whom they seem to call back). A former colleague gets up from the table as if in a dream, pours us a plate of fatty meat borscht, oh, oh. We did not expect this. There is nothing from Alena. - Are you alive? - I didn’t come, there is no phone at home, but she doesn’t call at work. Yes, and at work, a person is here and there ... Then I collect contributions. What. - Oh, what are you, bread ... Thank you. No, we won't have a second one, I see you're tired from work. Well, except for Timothy. Tima, will you have meat? Only to him, only to him (suddenly I cry, this is my weakness). Suddenly, a shepherd bitch rushes out from under the bed and bites Tim on the elbow. Tima yells wildly with a mouth full of meat. The father of the family, who also vaguely resembles Charles Darwin, falls out from behind the table with a scream and threats, of course, pretends that in ...

The story "Time is night"

In the whole motley dance of the myth cast roles, the central

the position at Petrushevskaya is most often occupied by Mother and Child.

Her best texts about this: “My circle”, “Daughter of Xenia”, “Case

Mother of God”, “Poor heart of Pani”, “Motherly greetings”,

"Little Terrible", "Never". Finally - her story "Time

night". Namely "Time is night" (1991), the largest prose

the work of the writer, allows you to see the characteristic

Petrushevskaya's interpretation of the relationship between mother and child

topics with maximum complexity and completeness.

Petrushevskaya always, and in this story in particular, brings

everyday, everyday collisions to the last edge. Everyday

life in her prose is located somewhere on the verge of non-existence and requires

from a man of colossal efforts in order not to slip

over this edge. This motif is persistently drawn by the author of the story,

starting with the epigraph, from which we learn about the death of the story

the patroness, Anna Andrianovna, who considered herself a poet and

left after death "Notes on the edges of the table", which, in fact,

and form the body of the story. It seems to us that the story

this death, not directly announced - one can guess about it - her

the arrival is prepared by the constant sensation of the winding down of life,

the steady reduction of its space - to a patch on

edges, to a point, to collapse at last: “It is white, muddy

morning of execution.

The plot of the story is also built as a chain of irreversible losses.

The mother loses contact with her daughter and son, husbands leave their wives,

grandmother is taken to a distant boarding school for psychochronics, daughter vomits

all relations with the mother, and the most terrible, beating to death:

daughter takes grandchildren from grandmother (her mother). Everything to the limit

it is also heated because life, according to outward signs, is completely

intelligent family (mother collaborates in the editorial office of the newspaper, daughter

studies at the university, then works at some scientific institute)

proceeds in a permanent state of absolute poverty,

when seven rubles is a lot of money, and a free potato

A gift of fate. In general, the food in this story is always

event, because each piece counts, but on what! "Shark

Glotovna Hitler, I called her that once in my thoughts at parting,

when she ate two supplements of the first and second, and I did not

knew that at that moment she was already heavily pregnant, and she

there was nothing at all ... ”- this is how a mother thinks of her daughter.

Oddly enough, "Time is Night" is a story about love. About sizzling

mother's love for her children. Characteristic of this love

Pain and even torment. It is the perception of pain as a pro-

the manifestation of love determines the relationship of a mother with children, and before

just with my daughter. Anna's telephone conversation is very revealing

Andrianovna with Alena, when the mother deciphers her every rudeness

in relation to his daughter as words of his love for her. "Will you

to love - they will torment, ”she formulates. Even more

frankly, this theme sounds at the end of the story, when Anna Andri-

anovna returns home and finds that Alena is with children

left her: “They left me alive,” he sighs with relief.

Anna Andrianovna steadily and often unconsciously strives

to dominate is the only form of its self-realization. But

the most paradoxical thing is that it is the authorities that she understands

like love. In this sense, Anna Andrianovna embodies

a kind of "domestic totalitarianism" - historical models

which was imprinted at the level of the subconscious, reflex, instinct1.

The ability to inflict pain is proof of maternal

power, and therefore love. That's why she's despotic

trying to subjugate his children to himself, jealous daughter of her men,

son to his women, and grandson to his mother. In this love

gentle "my little one" pulls the rough: "relentless bastard

". Petrushevskaya's mother's love is monologue in nature.

For all life losses and failures, the mother demands compensation for herself.

love - in other words, the recognition of its unconditional power.

And naturally, she is offended, hates, rages when

children give their energy of love not to her, but to others. love in such

understanding becomes something terribly materialistic, something

like a money debt that must be paid back,

and better - with interest. "Oh mother-in-law's hatred, you are jealousy

and nothing else, my mother herself wanted to be the object of her love

daughters, i.e. me so that I only love her, the object of love and

trust, this mother wanted to be the whole family for me. Replace

everything, and I saw such women's families, mother, daughter and small

a child, a complete family! Horror and nightmare, ”so Anna

Andrianovna describes her own relationship with her mother,

not noticing that her relationship with her daughter is completely within

into this model.

However, despite the "horror and nightmare", Anna Andrianovna's love

never ceases to be great and immortal. Actually go-

1 This interpretation of Petrushevskaya's story was substantiated in most detail

X. Goshchilo. See: Goscilo Helena. Mother as Mothra: Totalizing Narrative

and Nurture in Petrushevskaya / / A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist

Literature / Ed. Sona Stephan Hoisington. - Evanston, 1995. - P. 105-161; Goscilo

Helena. Dexecing Sex: Russian Womanhood During and After Glasnost. - Ann Arbor:

Univ. of Michigan Press, 1996. - P. 40-42. Goshchilo H. Not a single ray in the dark

kingdom: Artistic optics of Petrushevskaya / / Russian literature of the XX century:

Directions and currents. - Issue. 3. - S. 109-119.

telling is an attempt to live by responsibility, and only by it. This attempt

sometimes looks monstrous - like noisy remarks

to a stranger on the bus, who, in the eyes of Anna Ande-

Rianovna caresses her daughter too passionately: “And again I saved

baby! I save everyone all the time! I am alone in the whole city in our

microdistrict I listen at night, if anyone will scream! But one thing is not

cancels the other: the opposing assessments here are combined together.

The paradoxical duality of evaluation is also embodied in

the structure of the story.

"Memory of the genre", shining through "notes on the edge

table," is an idyll. But if Sokolov in Palisandria has a genre

the archetype of the idyll becomes the basis of metaparody, then

Petrushevskaya, idyllic motifs arise quite seriously,

as a hidden, repetitive rhythm underlying the family

collapse and permanent scandal. So, "specific

a spatial corner where fathers lived, children and grandchildren will live

» (Bakhtin), an idyllic symbol of infinity and wholeness

being, Petrushevskaya is embodied in the chronotope of a typical two-room

apartments. Here the meaning of "secular attachment to

life" acquires everything - from the inability to retire anywhere and

never, except at night, in the kitchen (“my daughter ... there will be

celebrate loneliness, as I always do at night. I have no place here!

"") up to the sagging on the sofa ("... my

turn to sit on the couch with a mink").

Moreover, Petrushevskaya's grandmother - mother - daughter repeat

each other "literally", stepping footsteps, coinciding even in

little things. Anna is jealous and torments her daughter Alena, just like

how her mother Sima was jealous and tormented her. "Debauchery" (in terms of

Anna) of Alena is completely similar to Anna's adventures in her

younger years. Even the spiritual intimacy of a child with a grandmother, and not with

mother, already was - with Alena and Sima, as now with Tima

Anna. Even the mother's claims about the allegedly "excessive"

son-in-law's appetite are repeated from generation to generation: "... grandmother

openly reproached my husband, “gobbles everything up in children,” etc. ”1.

Even Alena's jealousy for her brother Andrey responds in hostility

six-year-old Tima to one-year-old Katenka. They all shout the same:

"...carrying an open mouth...on the inhale: and...Aaaah!"). This repeatability

the characters of the story themselves notice, “... what other

1 It is interesting that these eternal scandals between different generations due to

meals in their own way are also justified by the "memory" of the idyllic genre: "Eating and drinking

are idyllic or social in nature (Anna Andrianovna's campaigns with

grandson Tima visiting guests in the hope of a free treat, a trip with a performance

to the pioneer camp - for the same purpose. - Auth.), or - most often - family

character: generations, ages converge for food. Typical of an idyll

and aesthetics. - M., 1975. - S. 267).

rye, old songs,” Anna Andrianovna sighs. But surprisingly

no one is trying to learn at least some lessons from already

made mistakes, everything is repeated anew, without any

no attempt was made to go beyond the painful circle. Can

explain this by the blindness of the heroes or the burden of social circumstances.

The idyllic archetype aims at a different logic: "Unity

places of generations weakens and softens all temporal boundaries

between individual lives and between different phases

the same life. The unity of the place brings together and merges the cradle

and the grave... childhood and old age... It is determined by unity

place, the softening of all facets of time also contributes to the creation of a characteristic

for the idyll of the cyclic rhythm of time" (Bakhtin)

In accordance with this logic, we have before us not three characters, but

one: a single female character in different age stages -

from cradle to grave. It is impossible to gain experience here, because

that in principle the distance between the characters is impossible -

they smoothly flow into each other, belonging not to themselves, but to this

cyclical flow of time, bearing only losses for them,

only destruction, only loss. Moreover, Petrushevskaya emphasizes

bodily character of this unity of generations. Cradle

These are "the smells of soap, phlox, ironed diapers." Grave -

"our shit and piss-smelling clothes." This bodily unity

It is also expressed in confessions of the opposite nature. From one

side: "I love him carnally, passionately," - this is a grandmother about her grandson.

And on the other hand: “Andrei ate my herring, my potatoes,

my black bread, drank my tea, having come from the colony, again, as

before, ate my brain and drank my blood, all cobbled together from my

food ... "- this is a mother about her son. An idyllic archetype in this interpretation

devoid of traditional idyllic semantics. Before

us an anti-idyll that nevertheless retains the structural frame

old genre.

Signals of recurrence in the life of generations, developing into

this frame, form the central paradox of "Time is night" and the whole

Petrushevskaya's prose as a whole: what seems to be self-destruction

family, turns out to be a repeatable, cyclic, form of its sustainable

existence. Order - in other words: illogical, "crooked

"("Crooked family," says Alena), but in order. Petrushevskaya

deliberately blurs the signs of time, history, society

This order is, in essence, timeless, i.e. eternal.

That is why the death of the central heroine inevitably comes

at the moment when Anna falls out of the chain of addicts

relationships: when she discovers that Alena has left with everyone

three grandchildren from her, and therefore, she no longer cares about anyone

1 Ibid. - S. 266.

huddle. She is dying from the loss of a burdensome dependence on

their children and grandchildren, carrying the only tangible meaning

her terrible existence. Moreover, as in any "chaotic

system, there is a mechanism in the family anti-idyll

feedback. A daughter who hates (and not without reason) her mother

throughout the story, after her death - as follows from the epigraph

mother is a graphomaniac, she now gives these notes a few

different meaning. This, in general, trivial literary

gesture in Petrushevskaya's story is filled with a special meaning

It contains both reconciliation between generations and recognition

transpersonal order that unites mother and daughter. Themselves "Notes

» acquire the meaning of formulas of this order, precisely because

its transpersonal nature, requiring going beyond the family