Dobrolyubov - theorist of "real criticism"

Dobrolyubov became famous among his contemporaries as a theorist of "real criticism". He put forward this concept and gradually developed it. “Real Criticism” is the criticism of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, brought by Dobrolyubov to classically clear postulates and methods of analysis with one goal - to reveal the social benefit of works of art, to direct all literature towards a comprehensive denunciation of social orders. The term "real criticism" goes back to the concept of "realism". But the term "realism", used by Annenkov in 1849, has not yet taken root. Dobrolyubov modified it, interpreting it in a certain way as a special concept.

In principle, in all the methodological devices of "real criticism" everything is similar to the methods of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. But sometimes something important was narrowed down and simplified. This is especially evident in the interpretation of the links between criticism and literature, criticism with life, and problems of artistic form. It turned out that criticism is not so much the disclosure of the ideological and aesthetic content of works, but the application of works to the requirements of life itself.

The consistently carried out “real” approach often led not to an objective analysis of what is in the work, but to a judgment on it from inevitably subjective positions, which seemed to the critic the most “real”, the most worthy of attention ... Outwardly, the critic, it seems, nothing imposes, but he relies more on his own competence, his verification, and, as it were, does not fully trust the cognitive power of the artist himself as a discoverer of truths. Therefore, the “norm”, volumes, and angles of what is depicted in the works were not always correctly defined. It is no coincidence that Pisarev, from the standpoint of the same “real criticism”, entered into a polemic with Dobrolyubov about the image of Katerina from The Thunderstorm, dissatisfied with the degree of civic criticism embedded in it ... But where was the merchant Katerina to get him? Dobrolyubov was right in evaluating this image as "a ray of light in a dark kingdom."

"Real Criticism" theoretically took on almost nothing in relation to the study of the biography of the writer, the creative history of the work, the idea, drafts, etc. It seemed like an extraneous matter.

Dobrolyubov was right in rebelling against the "meaningfulness" in criticism. But at first he mistakenly attributed N.S. Tikhonravov and F.I. Buslaev. Dobrolyubov had to revise his statements when he was faced with efficient factual and textual clarifications and discoveries. Reviewing the seventh volume of Annenkov's edition of Pushkin's works, Dobrolyubov stated that Pushkin appeared in his mind somewhat differently; Pushkin's article on Radishchev, critical notes, newly discovered poems "Oh, the muse of fiery satire!" shook the former opinion of Pushkin as a “pure artist”, devoted to religious sentiments, who fled from the “rabble of the uninitiated”.

Although theoretically the question of the analysis of the artistic form of works was posed by Dobrolyubov in insufficient detail - and this is the lack of "real criticism", - in practice, Dobrolyubov can establish several interesting approaches to this problem.

Dobrolyubov often analyzed the form in detail in order to ridicule the emptiness of content, for example, in Benediktov's "effervescent" verses, M. Rosenheim's mediocre "accusatory" verses, N. Lvov's and A. Potekhin's comedies, and M. I. Voskresensky's stories.

In his most important articles, Dobrolyubov seriously analyzed the artistic form of the works of Goncharov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky.

Dobrolyubov demonstrated how "artism took its toll" in Oblomov. The public was indignant at the fact that the hero of the novel did not act during the entire first part, that in the novel the author evaded sharp contemporary issues. Dobrolyubov saw the "extraordinary richness of the content of the novel" and began his article "What is Oblomovism?" from the characteristics of Goncharov's unhurried talent, his inherent enormous power of typification, which perfectly corresponded to the accusatory trend of his time. The novel is "stretched", but this is what makes it possible to describe an unusual "object" - Oblomov. Such a hero should not act: here, as they say, the form fully corresponds to the content and follows from the character of the hero and the talent of the author. Reviews about the epilogue in Oblomov, the artificiality of the image of Stolz, the scene that reveals the prospect of a possible break between Olga and Stolz - these are all artistic analyzes.

And vice versa, analyzing only the activities of the energetic Insarov mentioned, but not shown by Turgenev in "On the Eve", Dobrolyubov believed that "the main artistic shortcoming of the story" lies in the declarative nature of this image. The image of Insarov is pale in outline and does not stand before us with complete clarity. What he does, his inner world, even love for Elena is closed to us. But the love theme has always worked out for Turgenev.

Dobrolyubov establishes that only in one point Ostrovsky's "Thunderstorm" is built according to the "rules": Katerina violates the duty of marital fidelity and is punished for it. But in all other respects, the laws of "exemplary drama" in The Thunderstorm are "violated in the most cruel way." The drama does not inspire respect for duty, passion is not fully developed, there are many extraneous scenes, the strict unity of action is violated. The character of the heroine is dual, the denouement is random. But, starting from the caricatured "absolute" aesthetics, Dobrolyubov perfectly revealed the aesthetics that the writer himself created. He made profoundly correct remarks about Ostrovsky's poetics.

The most complex and not fully justified case of a polemical analysis of the form of a work can be found in the article Downtrodden People (1861). There is no open polemic with Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky reproached Dobrolyubov for neglecting artistry in art.

Dobrolyubov told his opponent the following: if you care about artistry, then from this point of view your novel is worthless or, in any case, is below aesthetic criticism; and yet we shall speak of it because in it there is a "pain about man" that is precious in the eyes of real criticism, i.e., everything redeems the content. But can we say that Dobrolyubov was right about everything here? If such a device could easily be applied to some Lvov or Potekhin, then it looked somehow strange in relation to Dostoevsky, already highly appreciated by Belinsky, and whose novel The Humiliated and Insulted, for all its shortcomings, is a classic work of Russian literature .

In the aesthetic concept of Dobrolyubov, the problems of satire and nationality are of great importance.

Dobrolyubov was dissatisfied with the state of contemporary satire, especially since opportunistic "accusatory" literature appeared. He expressed this in the article "Russian satire in the age of Catherine" (1859). The external reason for considering the issue was the book by A. Afanasyev "Russian satirical magazines of 1769-1774". Afanasiev's book was a response to the period of "glasnost" and exaggerated the social successes of satire in Russian literature of the 18th century, the development of satire in Russian literature. Dobrolyubov noted with praise in the article “Russian satire in the age of Catherine” such works of the 18th century as “An excerpt from a journey to ***”, and now attributed to Novikov, then to Radishchev, the famous “Experience of a Russian Soslovnik” by Fonvizin, which caused a sharp cry from the queen.

Dobrolyubov was right in raising the criteria for evaluating satire in general. But he clearly underestimated the satire of the 18th century. He approached it too utilitarian, not historically. Dobrolyubov proceeded from a scheme that was not fixed in science: "... satire appeared with us as an imported fruit, and not at all as a product developed by the people's life itself" 1 . If Belinsky allowed such a statement in relation to Russian literature with its odes, madrigals, then in any case, the satirical direction, even in the form in which it began with Kantemir, he always considered self-originating, artless.

Dobrolyubov’s generalization was also unhistorical: “... the nature of the entire satire of Catherine’s time is distinguished by the most sincere respect for existing regulations and the prosecution of only abuses alone.” Here clearly the 18th century is judged according to the criteria of the 60s of the 19th century. In Novikov's time, one still had to learn how to attack at least abuses; there was also Catherine's "impersonal" satire on vices in general.

In general, Dobrolyubov's conclusion about satire was as follows: "But her weak side was that she did not want to see the fundamental rubbishness of the mechanism that she was trying to correct."

It is clear that Dobrolyubov's harsh analyzes and sentences regarding the satire of the 18th century had their purpose. He wanted satire not petty, but combative, directed against the social exploitative system. By this he expressed his revolutionary-democratic aspirations, the desire to raise the criteria of modern satire, to oppose it to liberal accusations. But Dobrolyubov solved a difficult question too didactically. These goals should not have violated the concrete historical analysis of what the satire of the 18th century was able to do in its time. Only on the basis of a true generalization of historical experience could one indicate the prospects and tasks for Russian criticism of the 60s of the 19th century. Chernyshevsky was more circumspect and stricter in his assessments of the past.

Somewhat vaguely Dobrolyubov interprets the concept of "nationality", it is vague in the very title of a special article "On the degree of participation of the nationality in the development of Russian literature" (1858). What exactly is meant by nationality? Ethnographic elements, folk aspirations, the people as a theme for writers or the participation of writers from the people in literary life? What was meant by the people themselves? All the peasants, or the middle strata of society along with them? Dobrolyubov used this word in different senses. And the peasants are the people, and Katerina, the merchant's wife, is the heroine of the people.

Extremely strong in this article is the tendency to consider all the literature from one angle. Bestuzhev reviewed it from the point of view of the development of civic motives from Boyan to Ryleev. Belinsky - from the point of view of rapprochement with life and the development of realism. Chernyshevsky surveyed the "school of Gogol" and the "school of ideas" of Belinsky from a sociological angle. Dobrolyubov's aspect is characteristic of the pre-reform years: everything was measured by the yardstick of "people's" life. But some uncertainty of the criterion is evident.

Dobrolyubov’s general principle of understanding the writer’s nationality is as follows: “To be a truly national poet, one must<...>imbued with the spirit of the people, live his life, become on a par with him, discard all the prejudices of classes, book teaching<...>and feel everything with that simple feeling that the people have.

It is quite obvious that Dobrolyubov oversimplified this complex issue.

It seems to Dobrolyubov that there were two processes in literature: the gradual loss of the national, folk principle in the post-Petrine era and then its gradual revival. This process dragged on so much that, in fact, almost no writer Dobrolyubov could call folk. “It is also in vain that we have the loud name of folk writers: the people, unfortunately, do not at all care about the artistry of Pushkin, the captivating sweetness of Zhukovsky’s poems, Derzhavin’s lofty soaring, etc. Let’s say more: even Gogol’s humor and Krylov’s sly simplicity are not at all reached the people."

Everything is decided by the critic too straightforwardly: "Lomonosov did a lot for the success of science in Russia ... but in relation to the social significance of literature, he did nothing." Lomonosov has not a word about serfdom. Dobrolyubov recognizes only direct, visual forms of service. Derzhavin moved only "a little" in his view of the people, their needs and attitudes. Karamzin's point of view is "still abstract and extremely aristocratic." Zhukovsky "reproduced only one of the Russian nationality ... and this one is the superstition of the people" (in "Svetlana" - V. K). Pushkin, with all his enormous merits as an artist, "understood only the form of the Russian nationality" Gogol "found more strength in himself", but his depiction of the vulgarity of life "terrified"; he dumped all the sins not on the government, but on the people. "No, we are decidedly dissatisfied with Russian satire, excluding the satires of the Gogol period."

Of course, such an analysis outlined some higher tasks for literature. "Holy" discontent was seething in Dobrolyubov. But it was doubtful to push the matter forward with such one-sided, extreme judgments that destroyed the accumulated historical experience. After all, Belinsky already knew that almost all of the listed writers were truly folk, each to the extent of his talent and time. The artistic immortality of the work was generally not taken into account by Dobrolyubov.

Its main representatives: N.G. Chernyshevsky, N.A. Dobrolyubov, D.I. Pisarev, as well as N.A. Nekrasov, M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin as authors of critical articles, reviews and reviews.

Printed organs: magazines "Sovremennik", "Russian Word", "Notes of the Fatherland" (since 1868).

The development and active influence of "real" criticism on Russian literature and public consciousness continued from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s.

N.G. Chernyshevsky

As a literary critic, Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (1828 - 1889) appeared from 1854 to 1861. In 1861, the last of Chernyshevsky's fundamentally important articles, "Is not the beginning of a change?"

Chernyshevsky's literary-critical speeches were preceded by the solution of general aesthetic issues, undertaken by the critic in his master's thesis "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" (written in 1853, defended and published in 1855), as well as in a review of the Russian translation of Aristotle's book "On Poetry" (1854) and an author's review of his own dissertation (1855).

Having published the first reviews in “Notes of the Fatherland” by A.A. Kraevsky, Chernyshevsky in 1854 passes at the invitation of N.A. Nekrasov to Sovremennik, where he heads the critical department. The cooperation of Chernyshevsky (and, since 1857, Dobrolyubov) owed much to Sovremennik not only to the rapid growth in the number of its subscribers, but also to its transformation into the main tribune of revolutionary democracy. The arrest in 1862 and the subsequent penal servitude interrupted Chernyshevsky's literary-critical activity when he was only 34 years old.

Chernyshevsky acted as a direct and consistent opponent of A.V. Druzhinina, P.V. Annenkova, V.P. Botkina, S.S. Dudyshkin. The specific disagreements between Chernyshevsky as a critic and "aesthetic" criticism can be reduced to the question of the admissibility in literature (art) of the entire diversity of current life - including its socio-political conflicts ("topics of the day"), in general, social ideology (trends). "Aesthetic" criticism generally answered this question in the negative. In her opinion, socio-political ideology, or, as Chernyshevsky's opponents preferred to say, "tendentiousness" is contraindicated in art, because it violates one of the main requirements of artistry - an objective and impartial depiction of reality. V.P. Botkin, for example, stated that "a political idea is the grave of art." On the contrary, Chernyshevsky (like other representatives of real criticism) answered the same question in the affirmative. Literature not only can, but must be imbued and spiritualized with the socio-political trends of its time, for only in this case will it become an expression of urgent social needs, and at the same time serve itself. After all, as the critic noted in Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature (1855-1856), “only those areas of literature achieve brilliant development that arise under the influence of strong and living ideas that satisfy the urgent needs of the era.” Chernyshevsky, a democrat, socialist and peasant revolutionary, considered the liberation of the people from serfdom and the elimination of autocracy to be the most important of these needs.

The rejection of "aesthetic" criticism of social ideology in literature was justified, however, by a whole system of views on art, rooted in the provisions of German idealistic aesthetics - in particular, Hegel's aesthetics. The success of Chernyshevsky's literary-critical position was determined, therefore, not so much by the refutation of the particular positions of his opponents, but by a fundamentally new interpretation of general aesthetic categories. Chernyshevsky's dissertation "The Aesthetic Relationship of Art to Reality" was devoted to this. But first, let's name the main literary-critical works that students need to keep in mind: reviews ""Poverty is not a vice." Comedy A. Ostrovsky "(1854)," "On Poetry". Op. Aristotle" (1854); articles: “On sincerity in criticism” (1854), “Works of A.S. Pushkin" (1855), "Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature", "Childhood and adolescence. Composition of Count L.N. Tolstoy. Military stories of Count L.N. Tolstoy" (1856), "Provincial essays... Collected and published by M.E. Saltykov. ... "(1857)," Russian man on rendez-vous "(1858)," Is not the beginning of a change? (1861).

In his dissertation, Chernyshevsky gives a fundamentally different definition of the object of art compared to German classical aesthetics. How was it understood in idealistic aesthetics? The subject of art is the beautiful and its varieties: sublime, tragic, comic. At the same time, the absolute idea or the reality embodying it was thought to be the source of beauty, but only in the entire volume, space and extent of the latter. The fact is that in a separate phenomenon - finite and temporal - the absolute idea, by its nature eternal and infinite, according to idealistic philosophy, is unrealizable. Indeed, between the absolute and the relative, the general and the individual, the regular and the accidental, there is a contradiction, similar to the difference between the spirit (it is immortal) and the flesh (which is mortal). It is not given to a person to overcome it in practical (material-production, socio-political) life. The only spheres in which the resolution of this contradiction turned out to be possible were considered religion, abstract thinking (in particular, as Hegel believed, his own philosophy, more precisely, its dialectical method) and, finally, art as the main varieties of spiritual activity, the success of which is to a great extent depends on the creative gift of a person, his imagination, fantasy.

From this followed the conclusion; beauty in reality, inevitably finite and transient, is absent, it exists only in the creative creations of the artist - works of art. It is art that brings beauty to life. Hence the consequence of the first premise: art, as the embodiment of beauty above life. / / “Venus de Milo,” declares, for example, I.S. Turgenev, - perhaps, more undoubtedly than Roman law or the principles of 89 (that is, the French Revolution of 1789 - 1794 - V.N.) years. Summarizing in his dissertation the main postulates of idealistic aesthetics and the consequences arising from them, Chernyshevsky writes: “Defining the beautiful as a complete manifestation of an idea in a separate being, we must come to the conclusion: “beautiful is in reality only a ghost put into it by our facts”; from this it will follow that “in fact, the beautiful is created by our imagination, but in reality ... there is no truly beautiful”; from the fact that there is no truly beautiful in nature, it will follow that "art has as its source the desire of man to make up for the shortcomings of the beautiful in objective reality" and that the beautiful created by art is higher than the beautiful in objective reality - all these thoughts constitute the essence of the dominant now concepts ... "

If in reality there is no beauty and it is brought into it only by art, then creating the latter is more important than creating, improving life itself. And the artist should not so much help improve life as reconcile a person with its imperfection, compensating for it with the ideally imaginary world of his work.

It is to this system of ideas that Chernyshevsky opposed his materialistic definition of the beautiful: “beautiful is life”; “beautiful is the being in which we see life as it should be according to our concepts; beautiful is the object that shows life in itself or reminds us of life.

Its pathos and, at the same time, its fundamental novelty consisted in the fact that the main task of a person was not the creation of the beautiful in itself (in its spiritually imaginary form), but the transformation of life itself, including the current, current one, according to this person’s ideas about its ideal. . Solidarizing in this case with the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, Chernyshevsky, as it were, says to his contemporaries: first of all, make life itself beautiful, and do not fly away in beautiful dreams from it. And second: If the source of the beautiful is life (and not an absolute idea, Spirit, etc.), then art in its search for the beautiful depends on life, generated by its desire for self-improvement as a function and means of this desire.

Chernyshevsky challenged the traditional view of the beautiful as the alleged main goal of art. From his point of view, the content of art is much wider than the beautiful and is "general interest in life", that is, it covers everything. what worries a person, on what his fate depends. Man (and not beauty) became Chernyshevsky, in essence, and the main subject of art. The critic also interpreted the specifics of the latter differently. According to the logic of the dissertation, an artist is distinguished from a non-artist not by the ability to embody the “eternal” idea in a separate phenomenon (event, character) and thereby overcome their eternal contradiction, but by the ability to reproduce life collisions, processes and trends that are of general interest to contemporaries in their individually visual form. Art is conceived by Chernyshevsky not so much as a second (aesthetic) reality, but as a “concentrated” reflection of objective reality. Hence those extreme definitions of art (“art is a surrogate for reality”, “a textbook of life”), which were not without reason rejected by many contemporaries. The fact is that Chernyshevsky's legitimate desire to subordinate art to the interests of social progress in these formulations turned into oblivion of his creative nature.

In parallel with the development of materialistic aesthetics, Chernyshevsky in a new way comprehends such a fundamental category of Russian criticism of the 1940s and 1960s as artistry. And here his position, although it is based on certain provisions of Belinsky, remains original and, in turn, is polemical to traditional ideas. Unlike Annenkov or Druzhinin (as well as such writers as I.S. Turgenev, I.A. Goncharov), Chernyshevsky considers the main condition for artistry not the objectivity and impartiality of the author and the desire to reflect reality in its entirety, not the strict dependence of each fragment of the work ( character, episode, detail) from the whole, not the isolation and completeness of creation, but the idea (social trend), the creative fruitfulness of which, according to the critic, is commensurate with its vastness, truthfulness (in the sense of coincidence with the objective logic of reality) and "consistency". In the light of the last two requirements, Chernyshevsky analyzes, for example, the comedy of A.N. Ostrovsky "Poverty is not a vice", in which he finds "sugary embellishment of what cannot and should not be embellished." The erroneous initial thought underlying the comedy deprived it, Chernyshevsky believes, even of plot unity. “Works that are false in their main idea,” the critic concludes, “are sometimes weak even in a purely artistic sense.”

If the consistency of a truthful idea provides unity to a work, then its social and aesthetic significance depends on the scale and relevance of the idea.

Chernyshevsky also demands that the form of the work correspond to its content (idea). However, this correspondence, in his opinion, should not be strict and pedantic, but only expedient: it is enough if the work is concise, without excesses leading to the side. To achieve such expediency, Chernyshevsky believed, no special author's imagination or fantasy is needed.

The unity of a true and sustained idea with the form that corresponds to it makes a work of art artistic. Chernyshevsky's interpretation of artistry, therefore, removed from this concept that mysterious halo that representatives of "aesthetic" criticism endowed it with. It also freed itself from dogmatism. At the same time, here, as well as in defining the specifics of art, Chernyshevsky's approach sinned with unjustified rationality, a certain straightforwardness.

The materialistic definition of beauty, the call to make the content of art everything that excites a person, the concept of artistry intersect and refract in Chernyshevsky's criticism in the idea of ​​the social purpose of art and literature. The critic here develops and refines the views of Belinsky at the end of the 1930s. Since literature is a part of life itself, a function and a means of its self-improvement, then, the critic says, “it cannot but be a servant of one or another direction of ideas; this is an appointment that lies in her nature, from which she is not able to refuse, even if she wanted to refuse. This is especially true for politically and civilly undeveloped autocratic-feudal Russia, where literature "concentrates ... the mental life of the people" and has "encyclopedic significance." The direct duty of Russian writers is to spiritualize their work with "humanity and concern for the improvement of human life", which have become the dominant need of the time. “A poet,” writes Chernyshevsky in “Essays on the Gogol period ...”, “a lawyer., her (the public. - V.NL) of her own ardent desires and sincere thoughts.

Chernyshevsky's struggle for the literature of social ideology and direct public service explains the critic's rejection of the work of those poets (A. Fet. A. Maikov, Ya. only personal, pleasures and sorrows. Considering the position of “pure art” to be worldly by no means disinterested, Chernyshevsky in his “Essays on the Gogol Period ...” also rejects the argument of the supporters of this art: that aesthetic pleasure “in itself brings a significant benefit to a person, softening his heart, elevating his soul”, that aesthetic experience "directly ... ennobles the soul by the sublimity and nobility of objects and feelings that we are seduced by in works of art." And a cigar, Chernyshevsky objects, softens, and a good dinner, in general, health and excellent living conditions. This, the critic concludes, purely epicurean view of art.

The materialistic interpretation of general aesthetic categories was not the only prerequisite for Chernyshevsky's criticism. Chernyshevsky himself pointed out two other sources of it in "Essays on the Gogol period ...". This is, firstly, the legacy of Belinsky in the 40s and, secondly, the Gogolian, or, as Chernyshevsky clarifies, the “critical trend” in Russian literature.

In "Essays ..." Chernyshevsky solved a number of problems. First of all, he sought to revive the precepts and principles of criticism of Belinsky, whose very name until 1856 was under a censorship ban, and his legacy was hushed up or interpreted by "aesthetic" criticism (in the letters of Druzhinin, Botkin, Annenkov to Nekrasov and I. Panaev) one-sidedly, sometimes negative. The idea corresponded to the intention of the editors of Sovremennik to "fight against the decline of our criticism" and "improve as far as possible" their own "critical department", which was stated in the "Announcement of the publication of Sovremennik" in 1855. It was necessary, Nekrasov believed, to return to the interrupted tradition - to the “straight road” of the “Notes of the Fatherland” of the forties, that is, Belinsky: “... what faith there was in the magazine, what a living connection between him and the readers!” Analysis from the democratic and materialistic positions of the main critical systems of the 20-40s (N. Polevoy, O. Senkovsky, N. Nadezhdin, I. Kireevsky, S. Shevyrev, V. Belinsky) at the same time allowed Chernyshevsky to determine for the reader his own position in the brewing with the outcome of the "gloomy seven years" (1848 - 1855) of the literary struggle, as well as to formulate the modern tasks and principles of literary criticism. "Essays ..." also served polemical purposes, in particular, the fight against the opinions of A.V. Druzhinin, which Chernyshevsky clearly has in mind when he shows the selfish and protective motives of S. Shevyrev's literary judgments.

Considering in the first chapter of "Essays ..." the reasons for the decline of criticism of N. Polevoy, "at first so cheerfully acting as one of the leaders in the literary and intellectual movement" of Russia, Chernyshevsky concluded that for viable criticism, firstly, modern philosophical theory, Secondly. moral sense, meaning by it the humanistic and patriotic aspirations of the critic, and finally, orientation towards truly progressive phenomena in literature.

All these components organically merged in Belinsky's criticism, the most important principles of which were "ardent patriotism" and the latest "scientific concepts", that is, L. Feuerbach's materialism and socialist ideas. Chernyshevsky considers other capital advantages of Belinsky's criticism to be its struggle against romanticism in literature and in life, its rapid growth from abstract aesthetic criteria to animation by the "interests of national life" and writers' judgments from the point of view of "the significance of his activities for our society."

In "Essays ..." for the first time in the Russian censored press, Belinsky was not only associated with the ideological and philosophical movement of the forties, but was made its central figure. Chernyshevsky outlined the scheme of Belinsky's creative emotion, which remains at the heart of modern ideas about the activities of a critic: the early "telescopic" period - the search for a holistic philosophical comprehension of the world and nature of art; a natural meeting with Hegel on this path, a period of "reconciliation" with reality and a way out of it, a mature period of creativity, which in turn revealed two stages of development - in terms of the degree of deepening of social thinking.

At the same time, for Chernyshevsky, the differences that should appear in future criticism in comparison with Belinsky's criticism are also obvious. Here is his definition of criticism: “Criticism is a judgment about the merits and demerits of some literary movement. Its purpose is to grieve with the expression of the opinion of the best part of the public and to promote its further dissemination among the masses ”(“ On Sincerity in Criticism ”).

“The best part of the public” is, without a doubt, the democrats and ideologists of the revolutionary transformation of Russian society. Future criticism should directly serve their tasks and goals. To do this, it is necessary to abandon the guild isolation in the circle of professionals, to enter into constant communication with the public. reader, as well as to gain "every possible ... clarity, certainty and directness" of judgments. The interests of the common cause, which she will serve, give her the right to be harsh.

In the light of the requirements, first of all, of a socially humanistic ideology, Chernyshevsky undertakes an examination of both the phenomena of current realistic literature and its sources in the person of Pushkin and Gogol.

Four articles about Pushkin were written by Chernyshevsky simultaneously with "Essays on the Gogol period ...". They included Chernyshevsky in the discussion started by the article by A.V. Druzhinin "A.S. Pushkin and the last edition of his works": 1855) in connection with the Annenkov Collected Works of the poet. Unlike Druzhinin, who created the image of a creator-artist, alien to the social conflicts and unrest of his time, Chernyshevsky appreciates in the author of "Eugene Onegin" that he "was the first to describe Russian customs and the life of various classes ... with amazing fidelity and insight" . Thanks to Pushkin, Russian literature became closer to "Russian society". The ideologist of the peasant revolution is especially fond of Pushkin's "Scenes from Knightly Times" (they should be ranked "no lower than "Boris Godunov""), the richness of Pushkin's verse ("every line ... affected, aroused thought"). Crete, recognizes the great importance of Pushkin "in the history of Russian education." enlightenment. However, in contradiction to these praises, the relevance of Pushkin's heritage for modern literature was recognized by Chernyshevsky as insignificant. In fact, in assessing Pushkin, Chernyshevsky takes a step back compared to Belinsky, who called the creator of Onegin (in the fifth article of the Pushkin cycle) the first "artist poet" of Russia. "Pushkin was," writes Chernyshevsky, "primarily a poet of form." "Pushkin was not a poet of any particular outlook on life, like Byron, he was not even a poet of thought in general, like ... Goethe and Schiller." Hence the final conclusion of the articles: "Pushkin belongs to a bygone era ... He cannot be recognized as a luminary of modern literature."

The general assessment of the founder of Russian realism turned out to be unhistorical. It also revealed the unjustified in this case sociological bias in Chernyshevsky's understanding of the artistic content, the poetic idea. Willingly or involuntarily, the critic gave Pushkin away to his opponents - the representatives of "aesthetic" criticism.

In contrast to Pushkin's legacy, in the Essays... Gogol's legacy, according to Chernyshevsky, is given the highest appraisal, addressed to the needs of social life and therefore full of deep content. The critic in Gogol especially emphasizes the humanistic pathos, essentially not seen in Pushkin's work. “To Gogol,” writes Chernyshevsky, “those who need protection owe a lot; he became the head of those. who deny the evil and the vulgar."

The humanism of Gogol's "deep nature", however, according to Chernyshevsky, was not supported by modern advanced ideas (teachings), which did not have an impact on the writer. According to the critic, this limited the critical pathos of Gogol's works: the artist saw the ugliness of the facts of Russian social life, but did not understand the connection of these facts with the fundamental foundations of Russian autocratic-serf society. In general, Gogol was inherent in the "gift of unconscious creativity", without which it is impossible to be an artist. However, the poet, adds "Chernyshevsky," will not create anything great if he is not also gifted with a wonderful mind, strong common sense and fine taste. Chernyshevsky explains the artistic drama of Gogol by the suppression of the liberation movement after 1825, as well as the influence on the writer of the protective-minded S. Shevyrev, M. Pogodin and his sympathies for patriarchy. Nevertheless, Chernyshevsky's overall assessment of Gogol's work is very high: "Gogol was the father of Russian prose", "he has the merit of firmly introducing the satirical into Russian literature - or, as it would be fairer to call his critical directions", he is "the first in Russian literature a resolute desire to content and, moreover, striving in such a fruitful direction as critical. And finally: "There was no writer in the world who would be as important for his people as Gogol for Russia", "he awakened in us the consciousness of ourselves - this is his true merit."

Chernyshevsky's attitude towards Gogol and the Gogol trend in Russian realism, however, did not remain unchanged, but depended on what phase of his criticism it belonged to. The fact is that two phases are distinguished in Chernyshevsky's criticism: the first - from 1853 to 1858, the second - from 1858 to 1862. The turning point for them was the emerging revolutionary situation in Russia, which entailed a fundamental disengagement between the democrats and the liberals on all issues, including literary ones.

The first phase is characterized by the struggle of the critic for the Gogol trend, which remains effective and fruitful in his eyes. This is a struggle for Ostrovsky, Turgenev, Grigorovich, Pisemsky, L. Tolstoy, for the strengthening and development of critical pathos by them. The task is to unite all anti-serfdom writers' groupings.

In 1856, Chernyshevsky devoted a large review to Grigorovich, by that time the author of not only The Village and Anton the Goremyka, but also the novels The Fishermen (1853), The Settlers (1856>, imbued with deep participation in life and fate " commoner", especially serfs. Contrasting Grigorovich with his numerous imitators, Chernyshevsky believes that in his stories "peasant life is depicted correctly, without embellishment; strong talent and deep feeling are visible in the description."

Until 1858, Chernyshevsky took under the protection of "superfluous people", for example, from criticism of S. Dudyshkin. who reproached them for the lack of "harmony with the situation", that is, for opposition to the environment. In the conditions of modern society, such “harmony,” Chernyshevsky shows, will come down only to “being an efficient official, a landowner in charge” (“Notes on Journals”, 1857 *. At this time, the critic sees in “superfluous people” still victims of the Nikolaev reaction , and he cherishes that share of protest that they contain in themselves. True, even at this time he treats them differently: he sympathizes with Rudin and Beltov, who are striving for social activity, but not Onegin and Pechorin.

Particularly interesting is Chernyshevsky's attitude towards L. Tolstoy, who, by the way, spoke of the critic's dissertation and his very personality at that time with extreme hostility. In the article “Childhood and adolescence. Composition of Count L.N. Tolstoy...” Chernyshevsky showed an extraordinary aesthetic sensitivity in evaluating the artist, whose ideological positions were very far from the mood of the critic. Chernyshevsky notes two main features in Tolstoy's talent: the originality of his psychological analysis (unlike other realist writers, Tolstoy is not concerned with the result of the mental process, the correspondence of emotions and actions, etc., but “the mental process itself, its forms, its laws , the dialectics of the soul") and the sharpness ("purity") of the "moral feeling", the moral perception of the depicted". The critic rightly understood Tolstoy's mental analysis as an expansion and enrichment of the possibilities of realism (we note in passing that even such a a master, like Turgenev, who called it "picking out the rubbish from under the armpits"). As for the "purity of moral feeling", which Chernyshevsky noted, by the way, in Belinsky, Chernyshevsky sees in it a guarantee of the artist's rejection of social untruth, along with moral falsehood. , public lies and injustice.This was already confirmed by Tolstoy's story "The Morning of the Landowner", showing which was meaningless in the conditions of serfdom of lordly philanthropy in relation to the peasant. The story was highly appreciated by Chernyshevsky in Notes on Journals in 1856. The author was credited with the fact that the content of the story was taken “from a new sphere of life”, which also developed the writer’s view of “life”.

After 1858, Chernyshevsky's judgments about Grigorovich, Pisemsky, Turgenev, as well as about "superfluous people" change. This is explained not only by the gap between the democrats and the liberals (in 1859 - 1860 L. Tolstoy, Goncharov, Botkin, Turgenev left Sovremennik), but also by the fact that in these years a new trend in Russian realism, represented by Saltykov-Shchedrin (in 1856, the Russkiy Vestnik began publishing his Provincial Essays), Nekrasov, N. Uspensky, V. Sleptsov, A. Levitov, F. Reshetnikov and inspired by democratic ideas. Democratic writers had to establish themselves in their own positions, freeing themselves from the influence of their predecessors. Chernyshevsky, who believes that Gogol's direction has exhausted itself, is also involved in the solution of this problem. Hence the overestimation of Rudin (the critic sees in him an unacceptable "caricature" of M. Bakunin, with whom the revolutionary tradition was associated), and other "superfluous people", whom Chernyshevsky no longer separates from the liberal nobles.

The declaration and proclamation of an uncompromising disengagement from noble liberalism in the Russian liberation movement of the 1960s was Chernyshevsky's famous article "The Russian Man on Rendez-vous" (1958). It appears at the moment when, as the critic specifically emphasizes, the denial of serfdom, which united liberals and democrats in the 1940s and 1950s, was replaced by the polar opposite attitude of the former allies towards the coming peasant revolution, Chernyshevsky believes.

The reason for the article was the story of I.S. Turgenev "Asya" (1858), in which the author of "The Diary of a Superfluous Man", "Calm", "Correspondence", "Trips to the woods" depicted the drama of failed love in conditions when the happiness of two young people seemed to be both possible and close . Interpreting the hero "Asia" (along with Rudin, Beltov, Nekrasov's Agarin and other "superfluous people") as a type of noble liberal. Chernyshevsky gives his explanation of the social position ("behavior") of such people - even if it is revealed in an intimate situation of meeting with a beloved and reciprocating girl. Filled with ideal aspirations, lofty feelings, they, says the critic, fatally stop before putting them into practice, unable to combine word with deed. And the reason for this inconsistency is not in their personal weaknesses, but in their belonging to the ruling nobility, the burden of "class prejudice." It is impossible to expect decisive actions from a noble liberal in accordance with “the great historical interests of national development” (that is, to eliminate the autocratic-feudal system), because the main obstacle for them is the nobility itself. And Chernyshevsky calls for a resolute rejection of illusions about the liberating and humanizing possibilities of the noble oppositionist: “The idea is developing in us more and more strongly that this opinion about him is an empty dream, we feel ... that there are people better than him, precisely those whom he offends; that without him we would be better off.”

The incompatibility of revolutionary democracy with reformism explains Chernyshevsky in the article “Polemical Beauties” (1860) of his current critical attitude towards Turgenev and the break with the writer, whom the critic had previously defended from cnpalai attacks “Our way of thinking became clear for Mr. Turgenev so much that he ceased to approve of him . It began to seem to us that Mr. Turgenev's latest stories did not correspond as closely to our view of things as before, when his direction was not so clear to us, and our views were not so clear to him. We parted".

Since 1858, Chernyshevsky’s main concern has been devoted to raznochinsk-democratic literature and its authors, who are called upon to master the art of writing and point out to the public other heroes compared to the “superfluous people”, close to the people and inspired by popular interests.

Hopes for the creation of a "completely new period" in poetry Chernyshevsky connects primarily with Nekrasov. Back in 1856, he wrote to him in response to a request to comment on the recently published famous collection "Poems by N. Nekrasov": "We have not yet had such a poet as you." Chernyshevsky retained the high appreciation of Nekrasov for all subsequent years. Upon learning of the poet's fatal illness, he asked (in a letter on August 14, 1877 to Pypin from Vilyuysk) to kiss him and tell him, “the most brilliant and noblest of all Russian poets. I weep for him” (“Tell Nikolai Gavrilovich,” Nekrasov answered Pypin, “that I thank him very much, I am now comforted: his words are more precious than anyone else’s words”). In the eyes of Chernyshevsky, Nekrasov is the first great Russian poet who has become truly popular, that is, he expressed both the state of the oppressed people (peasantry), and faith in his strength, the growth of national consciousness. At the same time, Nekrasov's intimate lyrics are dear to Chernyshevsky - "poetry of the heart", "plays without a tendency", as he calls it, - embodying the emotional and intellectual structure and spiritual experience of the Russian Raznochinsk intelligentsia, its inherent system of moral and aesthetic values.

In the author of "Provincial essays" M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin, Chernyshevsky saw a writer who went beyond the critical realism of Gogol. In contrast to the author of Dead Souls, Shchedrin, according to Chernyshevsky, already knows “what is the connection between the branch of life in which facts are found and other branches of mental, moral, civil, state life,” that is, he knows how to erect private outrages Russian public life to their source - the socialist system of Russia. The “Provincial Essays” are valuable not only as a “wonderful literary phenomenon”, but also as a “historical fact” of Russian life” on the path of its self-awareness.

In reviews of writers who are ideologically close to him, Chernyshevsky raises the question of the need for a new positive hero in literature. He is waiting for "his speech, a most cheerful, at the same time calm and decisive speech, in which one would hear not the timidity of theory before life, but proof that reason can rule over life and a person can agree with his convictions in his life." Chernyshevsky himself joined in the solution of this problem in 1862, having created in the casemate of the Peter and Paul Fortress a novel about "new people" - "What to do?"

Chernyshevsky did not have time to systematize his views on democratic literature. But one of its principles - the question of the image of the people - was developed by him very thoroughly. This is the subject of the last of Chernyshevsky's major literary-critical articles, "Isn't the Beginning of Change?" (1861), the reason for which was N. Uspensky's "Essays on Folk Life".

The critic opposes any idealization of the people. Under the conditions of the social awakening of the people (Chernyshevsky knew about the mass peasant uprisings in connection with the predatory reform of 1861), he believes that it objectively serves protective purposes, as it reinforces the people's passivity, the conviction that the people are incapable of independently deciding their own destiny. Nowadays, the image of the people in the form of Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin or Anton Goremyka is unacceptable. Literature should show the people, their moral and psychological state “without embellishment”, because only such an image testifies to the recognition of the people as equal to other classes and will help the people get rid of the weaknesses and vices instilled in them by centuries of humiliation and lack of rights. It is equally important, not content with the routine manifestations of folk life and dozens of characters, to show people in whom the “initiative of folk activity” is concentrated. It was a call to create images of folk leaders and rebels in literature. Already the image of Saveliy - the "hero of the Holy Russian" from Nekrasov's poem "To whom it is good to live in Russia" spoke of that. that this testament of Chernyshevsky was heard.

Aesthetics and literary criticism of Chernyshevsky are not distinguished by academic dispassion. They, according to V.I. Lenin, imbued with the "spirit of the class struggle." And also, let's add, and the spirit of rationalism, faith in the omnipotence of reason, characteristic of Chernyshevsky as an educator. This obliges us to consider Chernyshevsky's literary-critical system in the unity of its not only strong and promising, but also relatively weak and even extreme premises.

Chernyshevsky is right in defending the priority of life over art. But he is mistaken, calling art on this basis a "surrogate" (that is, a substitute) for reality. In fact, art is not only a special (in relation to the scientific or social and practical activity of a person), but also a relatively autonomous form of spiritual creativity - an aesthetic reality, in the creation of which a huge role belongs to the holistic ideal of the artist and the efforts of his creative imagination. In turn, by the way, underestimated by Chernyshevsky. “Reality,” he writes, “is not only more alive, but more perfect than fantasy. Images of fantasy are only a pale and almost always unsuccessful reworking of reality. This is true only in the sense of the connection between artistic fantasy and the life aspirations and ideals of a writer, painter, musician, and so on. However, the very understanding of creative fantasy and its possibilities is erroneous, because the consciousness of a great artist does not so much remake the real world as it creates a new world.

The concept of an artistic idea (content) acquires from Chernyshevsky not only a sociological, but sometimes a rationalistic meaning. If its first interpretation is fully justified in relation to a number of artists (for example, to Nekrasov, Saltykov-Shchedrin), then the second actually eliminates the line between literature and science, art and sociological treatise memoirs, etc. An example of an unjustified rationalization of artistic content can be the following statement by a critic in a review of a Russian translation of Aristotle's works: "Art, or, better, POETRY ... distributes a huge amount of information among the mass of readers and, more importantly, acquaintance with the concepts developed by science - - this is the great significance of poetry for life. Here Chernyshevsky voluntarily or involuntarily anticipates the future literary utilitarianism of D.I. Pisarev. Another example. Literature, says a critic elsewhere, acquires authenticity and content when it “talks about everything that is important in any respect that happens in society, considers all these facts ... from all possible points of view, explains, from what causes each fact proceeds, by what it is supported, what phenomena must be called into being to strengthen it, if it is noble, or to weaken it, if it is harmful. In other words, a writer is good if, fixing significant phenomena and trends in social life, he analyzes them and pronounces his “sentence” on them. This is how Chernyshevsky himself acted as the author of the novel What Is to Be Done? But to fulfill the task formulated in this way, it is not at all necessary to be an artist, because it is quite soluble already within the framework of a sociological treatise, a journalistic article, brilliant examples of which were given by Chernyshevsky himself (recall the article “The Russian Man on Rendez-Vous”), and Dobrolyubov, and Pisarev.

Perhaps the most vulnerable spot in Chernyshevsky's literary-critical system is the notion of artistry and typification. Agreeing that "the prototype for a poetic person is often a real person", erected by the writer "to a general meaning", the critic adds: "There is usually no need to erect, because the original already has a general meaning in its individuality." It turns out that typical faces exist in reality itself, and are not created by the artist. The writer can only "transfer" them from life to his work in order to explain them and sentence them. This was not only a step back from the corresponding teaching of Belinsky, but also a dangerous simplification that reduced the work and work of the artist to copying reality.

The well-known rationalization of the creative act and art in general, the sociological bias in the interpretation of literary and artistic content as the embodiment of a particular social trend, explain the negative attitude towards the views of Chernyshevsky not only representatives of "aesthetic" criticism, but also such major artists of the 50s and 60s like Turgenev, Goncharov, L. Tolstoy. In Chernyshevsky's ideas, they saw the danger of "enslavement of art" (N.D. Akhsharumov) by political and other transient tasks.

Noting the weaknesses of Chernyshevsky's aesthetics, one should remember the fruitfulness - especially for Russian society and Russian literature - of its main pathos - the idea of ​​the social and humanistic service of art and the artist. Philosopher Vladimir Solovyov would later call Chernyshevsky's dissertation one of the first experiments in "practical aesthetics". L. Tolstoy's attitude towards her will change over the years. A number of provisions of his treatise "What is art?" (published in 1897 - 1898) will be directly in tune with the ideas of Chernyshevsky.

And the last. It must not be forgotten that under the conditions of the censored press, literary criticism was, in fact, the main opportunity for Chernyshevsky to shed light on the pressing problems of Russian social development and influence it from the standpoint of revolutionary democracy. The same can be said about Chernyshevsky as a critic, as the author of Essays on the Gogol Period ... said about Belinsky: - all the same, good or bad; he needs life, not talk about the merits of Pushkin's poems.

Its definition in the article "Dark Kingdom". [Nedzvetsky, Zykova p. 215]

Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov - the second largest representative real critics in the 1860s. D himself invented the term real criticism.

In 1857, Dobrolyubov became a permanent contributor to the Sovremennik magazine.

Dobrolyubov signed under the pseudonym "Mr. Bov", and he was answered under the same pseudonym. Literary position D was determined in 1857-1858. in the articles “Provincial essays ... from Shchedrin’s notes” and “On the degree of participation of the people in the development of Russian literature”, its completion in the largest works “What is Oblomovism”, “Dark Kingdom”, “Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom”, “When will a new day come? and Downtrodden People.

Serial Ally H:

1) D is a direct ally of Chernyshevsky in the struggle for the “party of the people in literature”, the creation of a movement that depicts Russian reality from the position of the people (`the peasantry) and serves the cause of liberation.

2) Just like Ch, he fights with aestheticians on the role of art and the main subject (according to Ch, the role of art is serving the idea, the political nature of the idea is necessary, the main subject of the image is not the beautiful, but the person). He calls aesthetic criticism dogmatic, dooming art to immobility.

3) It relies, like Ch, on the legacy of Belinsky (Speech on criticism of Belinsky) [for more details, see Question 5, 1) a)]

The originality of Dobrolyubov: materialism is not ideological, but anthropological. (Following the anthropological materialists of France in the 17th century: Jean-Jacques Rousseau). According to Feirbach, the anthropological principle has the following requirements of human nature, nature, nature: 1) a person is reasonable, 2) a person strives for work, 3) a person is a social, collective being, 4) strives for happiness, benefit, 5) is free and freedom-loving. A normal person combines all these points. These demands are rational egoism, that is, egoism subdued by reason. Russian society has nothing to do with this. Conflict of nature and human social environment.

1) Understanding the significance in the act of creativity of the artist's direct feelings in addition to the unequivocal ideological nature of the artist Chernyshevsky. Belinsky called it " the power of direct creativity, those. the ability to reproduce the subject in its entirety.

Ch and D reproached Gogol for failing to rise to the level of an ideological struggle despite his enormous "power of direct creativity." D in the analysis of Ostrovsky and Goncharov indicates how their main advantages are the strength of talent, and not ideological => inconsistency of the ideological requirement. The "feeling" of the artist may come into conflict with the ideology.

Example

The analysis of Ostrovsky's play "Poverty is no vice" (BnP) is indicative.

a) Chernyshevsky in his review article "Poverty is not a vice"[not in the list, for those who have not read the brief retelling] mocks Ostrovsky, calling almost fools those who put Shakespeare and the BNP on a par. The BNP is a pitiful parody of “Our people - let's settle”, it seems that the BNP was written by an imitator-half-educated. The introduction to the novel is too long, the characters act somehow at the will of the author, and not really, everything is unnatural (Tortsova writes a letter to Mitya, reading poetry and Koltsov are obvious inconsistencies). And the main scourge - bad idea chosen by Ostrovsky! Abundantly shit with bricks from the images of mummers - a clear example of decrepit antiquity, no progressiveness. A false thought bleeds even the brightest talent. A little inferior all the same: "some characters are distinguished by genuine sincerity."

boo Dobrolyubova otherwise: article "Dark Realm"

[abstract]

Not a single contemporary Russian writer has undergone, in his literary activity, such a strange fate as Ostrovsky. 1. One party was made up of the young editors of Moskvityanin 3, who proclaimed that Ostrovsky "created the folk theater in Russia with four plays" ["Our people - we will settle", "Poor Bride", "BnP" and other early plays]. Ostrovsky's praisers shouted what he said new word nation! Mostly admiration for the image of Lyubim Tortsov. [gives completely over-sweetened comparisons with Shakespeare and other intoxicating crap] 2. "Notes of the Fatherland" constantly served as an enemy camp for Ostrovsky, and most of their attacks were directed at critics who extolled his works. The author himself constantly remained on the sidelines, until very recently. Thus, the enthusiastic praisers of Ostrovsky [bringing to the point of absurdity] only prevented many from directly and simply looking at his talent. Each presented his own demands, and at the same time each scolded others who had opposite demands, each without fail used some of the merits of one Ostrovsky's work in order to impute them to another work, and vice versa. The reproaches are opposite: either in the vulgarity of merchant life, or in the fact that merchants are not disgusting enough, and so on. Hairpin in Chernyshevsky: not only that - he was even reproached for the fact that he devotes himself too exclusively to the correct depiction of reality (i.e., performance), not caring about idea their works. In other words, he was reproached precisely for the absence or insignificance tasks, which other critics recognized as too broad, too superior to the means of their very implementation.

And one more thing: She [criticism] will never allow herself, for example, such a conclusion: this person is distinguished by attachment to old prejudices

Conclusion: Everyone recognized in Ostrovsky a remarkable talent, and as a result, all critics wanted to see in him an advocate and conductor of those convictions with which they themselves were imbued.

The task of criticism is formulated as follows: So, assuming that readers know the content of Ostrovsky's plays and their very development, we will only try to recall the features common to all of his works or most of them, reduce these features to one result and determine from them the significance of the literary activity of this writer. [Find out what the author wanted from himself and how he successfully / unsuccessfully achieved this].

Real criticism and its features:

1) Recognizing such demands as quite fair, we consider it best to apply criticism to Ostrovsky's works real consisting in a review of what his works give us.

2) There will be no demands here, such as why Ostrovsky does not portray characters like Shakespeare, why he does not develop comic action like Gogol ... after all, we recognize Ostrovsky as a wonderful writer in our literature, finding that he is himself , as it is, is very good-looking and deserves our attention and study ...

3) In the same way, real criticism does not allow the imposition of other people's thoughts on the author. Before her court are the persons created by the author, and their actions; she must say what impression these faces make on her, and she can blame the author only if the impression is incomplete, unclear, ambiguous.

4) Real criticism treats the work of an artist in exactly the same way as it does the phenomena of real life: it studies them, trying to determine their own norm, to collect their essential, characteristic features, but not at all fussing over why it is oats - not rye, and coal is not a diamond.

5) Postulates about Ostrovsky

Firstly, everyone recognizes in Ostrovsky the gift of observation and the ability to present a true picture of the life of those classes from which he took the plots of his works.

Secondly, everyone noticed (although not everyone gave her due justice) the accuracy and fidelity of the folk language in Ostrovsky's comedies.

Thirdly, by the agreement of all critics, almost all the characters in Ostrovsky's plays are completely ordinary and do not stand out as anything special, do not rise above the vulgar environment in which they are staged. This is blamed by many on the author on the grounds that such faces, they say, must necessarily be colorless. But others rightly find very striking typical features in these everyday faces.

Fourthly, everyone agrees that in most of Ostrovsky's comedies "there is a lack (in the words of one of his enthusiastic praisers) of economy in plan and construction of the play" and that as a result of this (in the words of another of his admirers) "dramatic action does not develop in them consistently and continuously, the intrigue of the play does not merge organically with the idea of ​​the play and is, as it were, somewhat extraneous to it.

Fifth, everyone does not like being too cool, random, denouement of Ostrovsky's comedies. In the words of one critic, at the end of the play "as if a tornado were sweeping across the room and turning all the heads of the actors at once" 30 .

6) outlook artist - general, reflected in his works. His own view of the world, which serves as the key to characterizing his talent, must be sought in the living images he creates.

About the feeling of the artist: it is considered dominant. the importance of artistic activity in a number of other areas of public life: the images created by the artist, collecting in themselves, as in a focus, the facts of real life, greatly contribute to the compilation and dissemination among people of the correct concepts of things [greased up to Chernyshevsky].

But a person with a more lively susceptibility, an "artistic nature", is strongly struck by the very first fact of a known kind that presented itself to him in the surrounding reality. He does not yet have theoretical considerations that could explain this fact; but he sees that there is something special, worthy of attention, and with greedy curiosity peers into the very fact, assimilates it.

7) About truthfulness: The main advantage of the writer-artist is truth his images; otherwise there will be false conclusions from them, false concepts will be formed, by their grace. The general concepts of the artist are correct and are in complete harmony with his nature, then this harmony and unity are reflected in the work. There is no absolute truth, but this does not mean that one must indulge in exceptional falsehood bordering on foolishness. Much more often he [Ostrovsky] seemed to retreat from his idea, precisely out of a desire to remain true to reality. The "mechanical dolls" that follow an idea are easy to create, but they are meaningless. U O: fidelity to the facts of reality and even some contempt for the logical isolation of the work.

ABOUT OSTROVSKY'S PLAYS

8) About heroes:

1st type: let's try to peer into the inhabitants inhabiting this dark realm. Soon you'll see that we didn't call it for nothing dark. senseless reigns tyranny. In people brought up under such dominion, a consciousness of moral duty and the true principles of honesty and law cannot develop. That is why the most outrageous fraud seems to them a meritorious feat, the most vile deceit a clever joke. Outward humility and stupid, concentrated grief, reaching the point of complete idiocy and the most deplorable depersonalization, are intertwined in the dark kingdom portrayed by Ostrovsky with slavish cunning, the most vile deceit, the most shameless treachery.

2nd type; Meanwhile, right next to it, just behind the wall, another life goes on, bright, tidy, educated... Both sides of the dark kingdom feel the superiority of this life and are either frightened by it or attracted to it.

Explaining the play in detail "Family Picture" Ostrovsky. Ch. the hero is Puzatov, the apogee of tyranny, everyone in the house treats him like a simpleton and does everything behind his back. He notes the narvous stupidity of all the heroes, their treachery and tyranny. An example with Puzatov - he knocks on the table with his fist when he gets bored of waiting for tea. Heroes live in a state of permanent war. As a result of this order of affairs, everyone is in a state of siege, everyone is busy trying to save themselves from danger and deceive the enemy's vigilance. Fear and incredulity are written on all faces; the natural course of thinking is changed, and in place of sound concepts come special conditional considerations, distinguished by their bestial character and completely contrary to human nature. It is known that the logic of war is completely different from the logic of common sense. "This," says Puzatov, "is like a Jew: he will deceive his own father. That's right. So he looks everyone in the eye. But he pretends to be a saint."

AT "His people" we see again the same religion of hypocrisy and fraud, the same senselessness and tyranny of some, and the same deceptive humility, slavish cunning of others, but only in a greater ramification. The same applies to those of the inhabitants of the "dark kingdom" who had the strength and habit of doing things, so they all, from the very first step, embarked on such a path that could by no means lead to pure moral convictions. A working person has never had a peaceful, free and generally useful activity here; barely having time to look around, he already felt that he somehow found himself in an enemy camp and must, in order to save his existence, somehow cheat his enemies.

9) On the nature of crime in the dark realm:

Thus, we find a deeply true, characteristically Russian feature in the fact that Bolshov, in his malicious bankruptcy, does not follow any special beliefs and does not experience deep mental struggle except for fear, as if not to fall under a criminal ... Dark kingdom paradox: To us, in the abstract, all crimes seem to be something too terrible and extraordinary; but in particular cases they are for the most part performed very easily and explained extremely simply. According to the criminal court, the man turned out to be both a robber and a murderer; seems to be a monster of nature. But look - he is not a monster at all, but a very ordinary and even good-natured person. In a crime, they understand only its external, legal side, which they justly despise if they can somehow get around it. The inner side, the consequences of the committed crime for other people and for society, do not appear to them at all. It's clear: the whole morality of Samson Silych is based on the rule: the better it is for others to steal, it's better for me to steal.

When Podkhalyuzin explains to him that “what a sin” can happen, that, perhaps, they will take away the estate and drag him through the courts, Bolshov answers: “What to do, brother; you will go." Podkhalyuzin replies: "That's right, sir, Samson Silych," but, in essence, it's not "accurate," but very absurd.

10) About what I wanted to say We have already had the opportunity to notice that one of the distinguishing features of Ostrovsky's talent is the ability to look into the very depths of a person's soul and notice not only the way of his thoughts and behavior, but the very process of his thinking, the very birth of his desires. He is tyrannical because he meets in those around him not a firm rebuff, but constant humility; cheats and oppresses others because it only feels like this to him comfortable, but unable to feel how hard it is for them; he decides to go bankrupt again because he has not the slightest idea of ​​the social significance of such an act. [No typing! A look from the inside with an understanding of nature, and not horror from the outside!]

11) Female images, about love: faces of girls in almost all Ostrovsky's comedies. Avdotya Maksimovna, Lyubov Tortsova, Dasha, Nadya - all these are innocent, unrequited victims of tyranny, and that smoothing, cancellation human personality, which life has produced in them, has an almost bleaker effect on the soul than the very distortion of human nature in rogues like Podkhalyuzin. She will love every husband you need to find someone to love her." This means indifferent, unrequited kindness, exactly the kind that is developed in soft natures under the yoke of family despotism and which tyrants like most of all. For a person who is not infected with tyranny, all the charm of love is that the will of another being harmoniously merges with his will without the slightest coercion.That is why the charm of love is so incomplete and insufficient when reciprocity is achieved by some kind of extortion, deceit, bought for money or generally acquired by some external and by outside means.

12) Comic: So is the comedy of our "dark kingdom": the thing itself is simply funny, but in view of the tyrants and the victims, crushed by them in the darkness, the desire to laugh disappears ...

13) "Don't get off your sleigh"- again analyzes the images in detail ..

14) "Poverty is not a vice"

Selfishness and education: And to give up tyranny for some Gordey Karpych Tortsov means to turn into complete insignificance. And now he amuses himself over everyone around him: he pricks their eyes with their ignorance and persecutes them for any discovery of knowledge and common sense by them. He learned that educated girls speak well, and reproaches his daughter for not being able to speak; but as soon as she spoke, she shouted: "Shut up, you fool!" He saw that the educated clerks were dressing well, and he was angry with Mitya that his coat was bad; but the little man's salary continues to give him the most insignificant...

Under the influence of such a person and such relationships, the meek natures of Lyubov Gordeevna and Mitya develop, representing an example of what depersonalization can reach and to what complete incapacity and original activity oppression brings even the most sympathetic, selfless nature.

Why victims live with tyrants: The first of the reasons that keep people from resisting tyranny is - strange to say - sense of legitimacy and the second is the need for material support. At first glance, the two reasons we have presented must, of course, seem absurd. Apparently, quite the contrary: it is precisely the lack of a sense of legality and carelessness regarding material well-being that can explain the indifference of people to all the claims of tyranny. After all, Nastasya Pankratievna, without any irony, but, on the contrary, with a noticeable shade of reverence, says to her husband: "Who dares to offend you, father, Kit Kitsch? You yourself will offend everyone! .." Such a turn of affairs is very strange; but such is the logic of the "dark kingdom". Knowledge here is limited to a very narrow circle, there is almost no work for thought; everything goes mechanically, once for all routine. From this it is quite clear that here children never grow up, but remain children until they mechanically move to the place of their father.

Since 1858, the head of the literary-critical department of Sovremennik has become Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov (1836-186).

Chernyshevsky's closest associate, Dobrolyubov, develops his propaganda initiatives, sometimes offering even sharper and uncompromising assessments of literary and social phenomena, Dobrolyubov sharpens and concretizes the requirements for the ideological content of modern literature: the main criterion for the social significance of a work becomes for him a reflection of the interests of the oppressed classes, which can be achieved with the help of a truthful, and therefore sharply critical portrayal of the "upper" classes, or with the help of a sympathetic (but not idealized) depiction of folk life.

Dobrolyubov became famous among his contemporaries as theorist of "real criticism". He put forward this concept and gradually developed it.

"Real criticism"- this is criticism of Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, brought by Dobrolyubov to classically clear postulates and methods of analysis with one goal - to reveal the social benefit of works of art, to direct all literature to a comprehensive denunciation of social orders. The term "real criticism" goes back to the concept of "realism". But the term "realism", used by Annenkov in 1849, has not yet taken root.

Dobrolyubov modified it, interpreting it in a certain way as a special concept. In principle, in all the methodological methods of "real criticism" everything is similar to the methods of Belinsky and Chernyshevsky. But sometimes something important was narrowed down and simplified. This is especially evident in the interpretation of the links between criticism and literature, criticism with life, and problems of artistic form. It turned out that criticism is not so much the disclosure of the ideological and aesthetic content of works, but the application of works to the requirements of life itself. But this is only one aspect of the criticism. It is impossible to turn a work into a “reason” for discussing topical issues. It has an eternal, generalizing value. Each work has its own, internally harmonized volume of content. In addition, the intentions of the author, his ideological and emotional assessment of the phenomena depicted, should not be relegated to the background.

Meanwhile, Dobrolyubov insisted that the task of criticism is to explain those phenomena of reality that affected a work of art. The critic, like a lawyer or judge, sets out in detail to the reader the “details of the case”, the objective meaning of the work. Then he looks to see if the meaning corresponds to the truth of life. This is where the exit into pure journalism takes place. Having formed an opinion about the work, the critic establishes only the correspondence (degree of truthfulness) to its facts of reality. The most important thing for criticism is to determine whether the author is on a level with those "natural aspirations" that have already awakened among the people or should soon awaken according to the requirements of the modern order of affairs. And then: "... to what extent he was able to understand and express them, and whether he took the essence of the matter, its root, or only the appearance, whether he embraced the generality of the subject or only some of its aspects." Dobrolyubov's strong point is the consideration of the work from the point of view of the main tasks of the political struggle. But he pays less attention to the plot and genre of the work.

The purpose of criticism, as stated, for example, in the articles "Dark Realm" and "A Ray of Light in a Dark Realm", is as follows.

"Real criticism," as Dobrolyubov explained more than once, does not allow and does not impose "alien phenomena" on the author. First of all, let us imagine the fact: the author has drawn the image of such and such a person: “criticism analyzes whether such a person is possible and really; having found that it is true to reality, it proceeds to its own considerations about the reasons that gave rise to it, etc. If these reasons are indicated in the work of the author being analyzed, criticism also uses them and thanks the author; if not, does not stick to him with a knife to the throat, how, they say, he dared to draw such a face without explaining the reasons for its existence? ..
Real criticism treats the work of an artist in exactly the same way as it does the phenomena of real life: it studies them, trying to determine their own norm, to collect their essential, characteristic features, but not at all fussing over why it is oats, not rye, and coal not a diamond.

Such an approach is, of course, insufficient. After all, a work of art is not identical with the phenomena of real life, it is a “second” reality, conscious, spiritual, and it does not require a direct utilitarian approach. The question of the author's indication of the causes of the phenomena depicted by him is interpreted too simplistically; these indications may be the reader's conclusions from the objective logic of the figurative system of the work. In addition, the transition of criticism to “its own considerations” about the causes of phenomena is fraught with a danger that “real criticism” could not always avoid, evading the subject aside, into a journalistic conversation “about” the work. Finally, the work is not only a reflection of objective reality, but an expression of the subjective ideal of the artist. Who will explore this side? After all, “I wanted to say” is related not only to the creative history of the work, but also to what “felt” the work in the sense of the presence of the author’s personality in the work. The task of criticism is twofold.
A characteristic technique of Dobrolyubov's criticism, passing from article to article, is the reduction of all the features of creativity to the conditions of reality. The reason for everything that is depicted is in reality, and only in it.

The consistently carried out “real” approach often led not to an objective analysis of what is in the work, but to a judgment on it from inevitably subjective positions, which seemed to the critic the most “real”, the most worthy of attention ... Outwardly, the critic, it seems, nothing imposes, but he relies more on his own competence, his verification, and, as it were, does not fully trust the cognitive power of the artist himself as a discoverer of truths. Therefore, the “norm”, volumes, and angles of what is depicted in the works were not always correctly defined. It is no coincidence that Pisarev entered into a polemic with Dobrolyubov about the image of Katerina from The Thunderstorm, dissatisfied with the degree of civic criticism embedded in it ... But where was the merchant's wife Katerina to get him? Dobrolyubov was right in evaluating this image as a "beam" in the "dark kingdom".

"Real Criticism" theoretically took on almost nothing in relation to the study of the biography of the writer, the creative history of the work, the idea, drafts, etc. It seemed like an extraneous matter.

Dobrolyubov was right in rebelling against petty criticism. But at first he mistakenly attributed Tikhonravov and Buslaev to krokhoborov. Dobrolyubov had to revise his statements when he was faced with efficient factual and textual clarifications and discoveries.

Although theoretically the question of the analysis of the artistic form of works was posed by Dobrolyubov in insufficient detail - and this is the lack of "real criticism", - in practice, Dobrolyubov can establish several interesting approaches to this problem.

Dobrolyubov often analyzed the form in detail in order to ridicule the emptiness of content, for example, in Benediktov's "effervescent" verses, M. Rosenheim's mediocre "accusatory" verses, N. Lvov's and A. Potekhin's comedies, and M. I. Voskresensky's stories. In his most important articles, Dobrolyubov seriously analyzed the artistic form of the works of Goncharov, Turgenev, Ostrovsky. Dobrolyubov demonstrated how "artistry took its toll" in Oblomov. The public was indignant at the fact that the hero of the novel did not act during the entire first part, that in the novel the author evaded sharp contemporary issues.

Dobrolyubov saw the "extraordinary richness of the content of the novel" and began his article "What is Oblomovism?" from the characteristics of Goncharov's unhurried talent, his inherent enormous power of typification, which perfectly corresponded to the accusatory trend of his time. The novel is "stretched", but this is what makes it possible to describe an unusual "subject" - Oblomov. Such a hero should not act: here, as they say, the form fully corresponds to the content and follows from the character of the hero and the talent of the author. Reviews about the epilogue in Oblomov, the artificiality of the image of Stolz, the scene that reveals the prospect of a possible break between Olga and Stolz are all artistic analyzes. And vice versa, analyzing only the activities of the energetic Insarov mentioned, but not shown by Turgenev in The Eve, Dobrolyubov believed that “the main artistic shortcoming of the story” lies in the declarative nature of this image. The image of Insarov is pale in outline and does not stand before us with complete clarity. What he does, his inner world, even love for Elena is closed to us. But the love theme has always worked out for Turgenev.

Dobrolyubov establishes that only in one point Ostrovsky's "Thunderstorm" is built according to the "rules": Katerina violates the duty of marital fidelity and is punished for it. But in all other respects, the laws of the "exemplary drama" in The Thunderstorm are "violated in the most cruel way." The drama does not inspire respect for duty, passion is not fully developed, there are many extraneous scenes, the strict unity of action is violated. The character of the heroine is dual, the denouement is random. But, starting from the caricatured "absolute" aesthetics, Dobrolyubov perfectly revealed the aesthetics that the writer himself created. He made profoundly correct remarks about Ostrovsky's poetics.

The most complex and not fully justified case of a polemical analysis of the form of a work we meet in the article Downtrodden People (1861). There is no open controversy with Dostoevsky, although the article is a response to Dostoevsky's article "Mr. Bov and the Question of Art", published in the February book "Vremya" for 1861. Dostoevsky reproached Dobrolyubov for neglecting artistry in art. Dobrolyubov stated approximately the following to his opponent: if you care about artistry, then from this point of view your novel is worthless or, in any case, is below aesthetic criticism; and yet we shall speak of it because in it there is a "pain about man" that is precious in the eyes of real criticism, i.e., everything redeems the content. But can we say that Dobrolyubov was right about everything here? If such a device could easily be applied to some Lvov or Potekhin, then it looked somehow strange in relation to Dostoevsky, already highly appreciated by Belinsky, and whose novel The Humiliated and Insulted, for all its shortcomings, is a classic work of Russian literature .One of the most fundamental questions for all "real" criticism was the search in modern literature of new heroes: Dobrolyubov, who did not live to see the appearance of Bazarov, only in Katerina Kaba-nova saw the signs of a person protesting against the laws of the "dark kingdom". The critic also considered Elena from Turgenev's "On the Eve" to be a kind, ready to accept significant changes. But neither Stolz nor Insarov convinced Dobrolyubov of their artistic veracity, showing only an abstract expression of the author's hopes - in his opinion, Russian life and Russian literature have not yet approached the birth of an active nature capable of purposeful emancipatory work.

Analysis: N.A. Dobrolyubov “What is Oblomovism?”

In this article, Dobrolyubov demonstrated how "artistry took its toll" in Oblomov. The public was indignant at the fact that the hero of the novel did not act during the entire first part, that in the novel the author evaded sharp contemporary issues. Dobrolyubov saw the "extraordinary richness of the content of the novel" and began his article "What is Oblomovism?" from the characteristics of Goncharov's unhurried talent, his inherent enormous power of typification, which perfectly corresponded to the accusatory trend of his time: “Apparently, Goncharov did not choose a vast sphere for his images.

Stories about how the good-natured sloth Oblomov lies and sleeps, and how neither friendship nor love can awaken and raise him, is not God knows what an important story. But Russian life is reflected in it, it presents us with a living, modern Russian type, minted with merciless rigor and correctness; it expressed a new word in our social development, pronounced clearly and firmly, without despair and without childish hopes, but with a full consciousness of the truth. The word is - Oblomovism; it serves as a key to unraveling many phenomena of Russian life, and it gives Goncharov's novel a much more social significance than all our accusatory stories have.

In the type of Oblomov and in all this Oblomovism we see something more than just the successful creation of a strong talent; we find in it a product of Russian life, a sign of the times”). The novel is "stretched", but this is what makes it possible to describe an unusual "subject" - Oblomov. Such a hero should not act: here, as they say, the form fully corresponds to the content and follows from the character of the hero and the talent of the author.

Dobrolyubov's critical methodology is based on a kind of socio-psychological typification that separates the heroes according to the degree of their correspondence to the ideals of the "new man". The most frank and characteristic realization of this type for Dobrolyubov was Oblomov, who is more honest in his lazy inactivity, because does not try to deceive others with an imitation of activity. Commenting on the phenomenon of Oblomovism so negatively, the critic thereby transfers the responsibility for the emergence of such social vices to the social system he hates: “The reason for apathy lies partly in his external position, partly in the image of his mental and moral development. According to his external position - he is a gentleman; "he has Zakhar and another three hundred Zakharov," in the words of the author. Ilya Ilyich explains the advantage of his position to Zakhar in this way:

“Do I rush about, do I work? I don't eat much, do I? skinny or miserable looking? Am I missing something? It seems to submit, there is someone to do! I have never pulled a stocking over my legs, as I live, thank God!

Will I worry? from what to me? .. And to whom did I say this? Haven't you followed me since childhood? You know all this, you saw that I was not brought up clearly, that I never endured cold or hunger, I did not know the need, I did not earn my own bread and in general did not do dirty work. And Oblomov speaks the absolute truth. The whole history of his upbringing confirms his words. From an early age, he gets used to being a bobak due to the fact that he has both to file and to do - there is someone; here, even against his will, he often sits idle and sybaritizes. “... Oblomov is not a creature, by nature completely devoid of the ability to voluntarily move. His laziness and apathy are the creation of upbringing and surrounding circumstances. The main thing here is not Oblomov, but Oblomovism.

Further in his article, Dobrolyubov makes artistic analyzes of the artificiality of the image of Stolz (“Stoltsev, people with an integral, active character, in which every thought immediately becomes an aspiration and turns into action, is not yet in the life of our society (we mean an educated society that has access to higher aspirations ; in the mass, where ideas and aspirations are limited to very close and few subjects, such people constantly come across.) The author himself was aware of this, speaking of our society: “Behold, the eyes woke up from slumber, brisk, wide steps, lively voices were heard ... How many Stoltsev must appear under Russian names!

There must be many of them, there is no doubt about it; but now there is no ground for them. That is why, from Goncharov's novel, we only see that Stolz is an active person, he is always busy about something, runs around, acquires, says that to live means to work, etc. But what does he do, and how does he manage to do what anything decent where others cannot do anything - this remains a mystery to us"), about the ideality of Olga's image and her usefulness as a model for the aspirations of Russian women ("Olga, in her development, represents the highest ideal that she can now a Russian artist can be called out of present-day Russian life, because she, with the extraordinary clarity and simplicity of her logic and the amazing harmony of her heart and will, strikes us to the point that we are ready to doubt her even poetic truth and say: “There are no such girls.” But, following her throughout the novel, we find that she is constantly true to herself and her development, that she represents not the maxim of the author, but a living person, only such as we have not yet met. can see a hint of a new Russian life; one can expect a word from her that will burn and dispel Oblomovism ...”).

Further, Dobrolyubov says that “Goncharov, who knew how to understand and show us our Oblomovism, could, however, not pay tribute to the general delusion that is still so strong in our society: he decided to bury Oblomovism and say a laudatory tombstone to her. “Farewell, old Oblomovka, you have lived your life,” he says through the mouth of Stolz, and is not telling the truth. All of Russia, which has read and will read Oblomov, will not agree with this. No, Oblomovka is our direct homeland, its owners are our educators, its three hundred Zakharovs are always ready for our services. A significant part of Oblomov sits in each of us, and it is too early to write a funeral word for us.

Thus, we see that, paying such serious attention to the ideological background of literary creativity, Dobrolyubov does not exclude the appeal to the individual artistic features of the work.

"REAL CRITICISM" AND REALISM

What is "real criticism"?

The simplest answer: the principles of literary criticism by N. A. Dobrolyubov. But on closer examination, it turns out that the essential features of this criticism were characteristic of both Chernyshevsky and Pisarev, and they come from Belinsky. So "real criticism" is democratic criticism? No, the point here is not a political position, although that also plays its role, but, in the shortest possible way, the literary-critical discovery of a new literature, a new type of art. In short, "real criticism" is a response to realism(The text of the article indicates the volume and page of the following collected works: Belinsky V. G. Collected works in 9 volumes. M., "Fiction", 1976--1982; Chernyshevsky N. G. Complete. collected works. M., Goslitizdat, 1939-1953; Dobrolyubov N.A. Collected works in 9 vols. M.-L., Goslitizdat, 1961-1964.).

Of course, such a definition says little. Nevertheless, it is more fruitful than the usual one, according to which it, "real criticism", does nothing but consider a literary work (since it is true) as a piece of life itself, thus bypassing literature and turning into criticism. about her. Here it looks like criticism not at all literary, but journalistic, devoted to the problems of life itself.

The proposed definition ("response to realism") does not stop thought with a peremptory sentence, but pushes for further research: why is the answer specifically to realism? and how to understand realism itself? And what is the artistic method in general? and why did realism require any special criticism? etc.

Behind these and similar questions one or another idea of ​​the nature of art emerges. We will get some answers when by art we mean figurative reflection of reality without other distinguishing features, and completely different when we take art in its real complexity and in the unity of all its special aspects, distinguishing it from other forms of social consciousness. Only then will it be possible to understand the birth, change and struggle of artistic methods in their historical sequence, and thus the emergence and essence of realism, behind it and "real criticism" as a response to it.

If the specific essence of art lies in its figurativeness, and its subject and ideological content are the same as those of other forms of social consciousness, then only two variants of the artistic method are possible - the one that accepts the object of art all reality or rejecting it. And so it turned out the eternal pair - "realism" and "anti-realism".

This is not the place to explain that in fact the specific object of art is human and that it is only through him that art depicts all reality; that its specific ideological content is humanity, humanity, that it illuminates all other (political, moral, aesthetic, etc.) relations between people; that a particular form of art is human image, correlated with the ideal of humanity (and not just an image in general), - only then the image will be artistic. The specific, special aspects of art subjugate in it the common with other forms of social consciousness and thus preserve it as art, while the invasion of art by an ideology alien to it, subjugation of its anti-human ideas, substitution of its subject or the transformation of figurative form into figurative-logical centaurs like allegory or symbol alienate art from itself and ultimately destroy it. Art in this respect is the most sensitive and subtle form of social consciousness, which is why it flourishes when many favorable social conditions coincide; otherwise, defending himself and his object - a person, he enters into a struggle with a world hostile to him, most often into an unequal and tragic struggle ... (For more on this, see my book "The Aesthetic Ideas of Young Belinsky". M. , 1986, "Introduction".)

Since ancient times, the debate continues, what is art - knowledge or creativity. This dispute is as fruitless as its variety - the confrontation of "realism" and "anti-realism": both hover in abstract spheres and cannot reach the truth - the truth, as you know, is concrete. The dialectics of knowledge and creativity in art cannot be understood outside the specifics of all its aspects, and above all, the specifics of its subject matter. A person as a person, as a character - a certain unity of thoughts, feelings and actions - is not open to direct observation and logical considerations, the methods of exact sciences with their perfect instruments are not applicable to him - the artist penetrates into him by methods of indirect self-observation, probabilistic intuitive knowledge and reproduces his image by the methods of probabilistic intuitive creativity (of course, with the subordinate participation of all mental forces, including logical ones). The ability for probabilistic intuitive knowledge and creativity in art is, in fact, what has long been called artistic talent and genius and which the most vigilant champions are unable to refute. consciousness creative process (that is, in their view, its strict logic -- as if intuition and imagination are somewhere outside consciousness!).

The probabilistic nature of the dual (cognitive-creative) process in art is the active side of its specificity; directly from it follows the possibility of various artistic methods. They are based on the general law of probability of the depicted characters in the depicted circumstances. This law was already clear to Aristotle ("... the task of the poet is to speak not about what was, but about what could be, being possible due to probability or necessity" (Aristotle. Works in 4 volumes ., vol. 4. M., 1984, p. 655.)). In our time it was ardently defended by Mikh. Lifshitz under the inaccurate name of realism in the broad sense of the word. But it does not serve as a special sign of realism, even in the "broad sense" - it is law of truth mandatory for all art as knowledge of man. The action of this law is so immutable that intentional violations of probability (for example, idealization or satirical and comic grotesque) serve the same truth, the consciousness of which arises in those who perceive the work. Aristotle noticed this too: the poet portrays people either better, or worse, or ordinary, and portrays them either as better than they really are, or worse, or as they are in life (Ibid., pp. 647-649, 676-679.).

Here one can only hint at the history of artistic methods - these steps of separating art from primitive syncretism and separating it from other, related spheres of social consciousness that claimed to subordinate it to their own goals - religious, moral, political. The law of the probability of characters and circumstances made its way through obscure syncretic images, was formed by anthropomorphic mythology, distorted by religious faith, obeyed the moral and political dictates of society, and all this sometimes approached art from several or even from all sides.

But art, fighting off the attacks of related phenomena, increasingly sought to defend its independence and respond in its own way to their claims - firstly, including them in the subject of its image and illuminating with its ideal, since they are all part of the ensemble of social relations, forming the essence of its subject - man; secondly, choosing among them, sharply contradictory in class antagonisms, close to oneself, humane directions and relying on them as one's allies and defenders; thirdly (and this is the main thing), art itself, in its deepest nature, is a reflection of the relationship between man and society, taken from the side of man, his self-realization, and therefore no oppression of the ruling forces hostile to him can destroy him, it grows and develops. But the development of art cannot be an even progress - it has long been known that it was carried out in periods of prosperity, stopped in periods of decline.

Accordingly, artistic methods, putting forward - at first spontaneously and then more and more consciously (although this consciousness was still very far from understanding the true essence of man and the structure of society) - their own principles, each developing mainly one side of the creative process and taking it for the whole process , or contributed to the flourishing of art and its movement forward, or led it away from its nature to any of the adjacent areas.

Full-blooded realistic works appeared only sporadically in the entire previous history of art, but in the 19th century there came a time when people, in the words of Marx and Engels, were forced to look at themselves and their relationships with sober eyes.

And here, in front of art, accustomed to turning its subject - a person - into an incorporeal image, into an obedient material for expressing stinginess, hypocrisy, the struggle of passion with duty, or all-world denial, a real person appears and declares his independent character and desire to live apart from all ideas and calculations of the author. His words, thoughts and actions are devoid of the usual harmonious logic, sometimes he himself does not know what kind of thing he will suddenly throw out, his attitude towards people and circumstances changes under the pressure of both, he is carried by the stream of life, and she does not take into account any author's considerations and distorts in the hero just revived human. The artist must now, if he wants to understand at least something in people, push his plans, ideas and sympathies into the background and study and study real characters and their actions, trace the paths and paths they have beaten, try to catch patterns and feel for typical characters, conflicts, circumstances. Only then, in his work, built not on an idea taken from outside, but on real connections and conflicts between people, will the ideological meaning that follows from life itself be determined - the true story of gaining or losing oneself as a person.

All the specific aspects of art, previously in rather fluid and indefinite relationships to each other, which caused the vagueness of the former artistic methods and often their confusion, now crystallize in polarity - into pairs of subjective and objective sides of each feature. The person turns out to be not what the author imagines. The ideal of beauty adopted by the artist is also corrected by the objective measure of humanity achieved by the given social environment. The artistic image itself acquires the most complex structure - it captures the contradiction between the subjectivity of the writer and the objective meaning of the images - the contradiction that leads to the "victory of realism" or to its defeat.

Literary criticism faces new challenges. She can no longer formalize the requirements of society for art in any "aesthetic codes" or anything like that. She can't do anything at all. demand from art: now she needs understand its new nature, in order, having penetrated into its humane essence, to contribute to the conscious service of art to its deep humane purpose.

The clearest, classical forms of literary criticism, responding to the complex nature of realism, would have to arise in the most developed countries, where new conflicts took sharp and clear forms. Whether this happened or not, and for what reasons, is the subject, as they say, of a special study. I will note here only a significant change in aesthetic consciousness, accomplished by the two major thinkers of the early 19th century, Schelling and Hegel.

The collapse of the ideals of the Great French Revolution was also the collapse of the enlighteners' well-known belief in the omnipotence of the human mind, that "opinions rule the world." Both Kant, and Fichte, and Schelling, and Hegel - each in his own way - tried to coordinate the objective course of events with the consciousness and actions of people, to find points of contact between them, and, convinced of the impotence of reason, placed their hopes on faith, some on "eternal Will", leading people to the good, some to the final identity of being and consciousness, some to the omnipotent objective Idea, which finds its highest expression in the social activity of people.

In search of the identity of being and consciousness, young Schelling met with stubborn reality, which has been going its own way for an eternity, not listening to good advice. And Schelling discovered this invasion of hidden necessity into freedom "in every human action, in everything that we undertake" (Schelling F.V.Y. The system of transcendental idealism. L., 1936, p. 345.). The leap from the free activity of the spirit to necessity, from subjectivity to the object, from the idea to its embodiment, is accomplished (at first Schelling suggested) by art when, by an incomprehensible force genius from an idea creates a work of art, that is, objectivity, a thing separated from its creator. Schelling himself soon moved away from the ascension of art to the highest level of knowledge and returned this place to philosophy, but nevertheless it played its role in the philosophical justification of romanticism. Miraculous, divine power genius a romantic creates his own world - the most real, opposing everyday and vulgar everyday life; it is in this sense that his art, in his opinion, is creation.

We understand Schelling's mistake (and romanticism behind him): he wants to deduce the objective world from the idea, but again he gets an ideal phenomenon, whether it be art or philosophy. Their objectivity is different, not material, but reflected - the degree of their truthfulness.

But neither Schelling nor the Romantic, being idealists, want to know about this, and their idealism itself is a perverted form in which they do not want to accept the vulgar bourgeois reality that is approaching man.

However, such a position did not solve the problem of new art, at most it posed it: the work is no longer considered as a simple embodiment of the artist’s idea, as the classicists believed, a mysterious, inexplicable activity is wedged into the process. genius the result of which turns out to be richer than the original idea, and the artist himself is not able to explain what and how he did it. In order for this secret to be revealed to the artist and art theorist, both of them are forced to turn from constructing a classic or romantic hero to real people who find themselves in a world that alienates their human essence, to real conflicts between the individual and society. In the theory of art, this step was taken by Hegel, although he did not completely solve the problem.

Hegel brought the idea beyond the limits of the human head, absolutized it and forced the creation of the entire objective world, including the history of mankind, social forms and individual consciousness. Thus, he gave, although a false, but nevertheless an explanation of the gap between consciousness and the objective course of things, between the intentions and actions of people and their objective results, and thus, in his own way, substantiated the artistic and scientific study of the relationship between man and society.

Man is no longer the creator of his own, higher reality, but a participant in social life, subject to the self-development of the Idea, penetrating all objectivity to the last chance. Accordingly, in art, in artistic consciousness, the Idea is also concretized into a special, specific idea - into the Ideal. But the most remarkable thing about this speculative process is that the high ideal of art turns out to be a real earthly human- Hegel puts him even higher than the gods: it is man who faces the "universal forces" (that is, social relations); only man has pathos - justified in itself by the power of the soul, by the natural content of rationality and free will; only belongs to man character -- the unity of a rich and whole spirit; only human valid on their own initiative in accordance with their pathos in a certain situations enters into collision with the forces of the world and assumes the response of these forces in this or that conflict resolution. And Hegel saw that the new art addresses "the depths and heights of the human soul as such, universal in joys and sufferings, in aspirations, deeds and destinies" (Hegel. G. V. F. Aesthetics. In 4 volumes, t 2. M., 1969, p. 318.), that it becomes humane since its content is now openly served human. This pathos of the study of human relations with society and the protection of everything human, this humanistic pathos and becomes the conscious pathos of modern art. Having made such broad generalizations that can serve as a starting point for the theory of realism, Hegel himself did not try to build it, although the prototype of the tragic development of its hero was developed before him in Goethe's Faust.

If here, of all Western thought, I have only touched on Schelling and Hegel, then this is justified by their exceptional significance for Russian aesthetics and criticism. Russian romanticism in theory was under the sign of Schelling, the comprehension of realism at one time was associated with Russian Hegelianism, but in the first and second cases, the German philosophers were understood in a rather peculiar way, and of the features of their interpretation of art noted above, the first was simplified, and the second was completely not seen.

N. I. Nadezhdin perfectly knew and used the romantic aesthetics, although he pretended to be at war with her; in university lectures, following the classicists and romantics (he tried to "reconcile" them on the basis of "average", without extremes, conclusions and conclusions), he argued that "art is nothing more than the ability to realize thoughts that are born in the mind and represent them in forms marked with the seal of grace", and genius is "the ability to imagine ideas ... according to the laws of possibility" (Kozmin N.K. Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin. St. Petersburg, 1912, pp. 265-266, 342.). The definition of art, according to which it was considered only as "the direct contemplation of truth or thinking in images," was attributed to Hegel right up to G. V. Plekhanov, who believed that Belinsky adhered to this definition until the end of his activity. Thus, the fundamental significance of that turn to a real person in his conflict with society, which in the form of a certain secrets designated by Schelling and the romantics and directly pointed out by Hegel, was so overlooked by Russian criticism and aesthetics that this blunder was attributed to Belinsky as well. However, with Belinsky, the situation was quite different.

Belinsky is characterized by pathos human dignity, flared up so brightly in "Dmitry Kalinin" and never faded away from him. The romanticism of this youthful drama did not aspire upward, to the superstellar worlds, but remained surrounded by feudal reality, and the road from it went to a realistic criticism of reality, and a reality in which old and new contradictions were more and more intertwined.

A plebeian and ardent democrat, Belinsky, although he recognizes the general formulas of the classic and romantic theory of art ("the embodiment of an idea in images," etc.), cannot confine himself to them, and from the very beginning - from "Literary Dreams" - considers art how human image, upholding it dignity here on earth in real life. He turns to Gogol's stories, establishes the veracity of these works and puts forward the idea of ​​"real poetry", which is much more in line with modernity than "ideal poetry". He thus divided idea and her embodiment into two types of art and was even inclined not to see the author's idea in "real poetry", but in ideal poetry - images of real life, he limited it to a fantastic or narrowly lyrical subject. This, of course, is not a theory of realism and romanticism as the main opposing methods, but only an approach to the subject of realism - man in his concrete historical relations with society.

And here it must be emphasized once again that the humane idea and the image of a probable person, a "familiar stranger" in themselves, are aspects of art in general as a special form of social consciousness and knowledge. In these signs put forward by the young Belinsky - contrary to what is usually considered among us - there is still no theory of realism. To approach it, it was necessary to study the contradictions between the subjective ideal of the artist and the real beauty of a person of a given time and place, or, as Engels put it, "real people of the future" in modern times. Research should also reveal another side of the contradiction, from the overcoming of which realism grows: between possible, but accidental characters, and typical characters in typical circumstances. Only when the artistic image is the victory of objective human beauty over the subjective ideal in the truthful representation of typical characters in typical circumstances, will realism in its full form, in its own nature, arise before us. This determines the importance of Belinsky's further study of both sides of the contradiction for understanding the nature of realism. And this comprehension formed the basis of what Dobrolyubov later called "real criticism" and what Belinsky already made his critical method.

It is very tempting to present the matter in such a way that Belinsky from the very beginning put forward idea realism and at the end of the road developed a holistic concept this artistic method, so that it was decades ahead of Engels' well-known definition of realism.

Meanwhile, it is still necessary to investigate whether Belinsky has obtained a holistic concept of realism at the level of his own worldview. It seems to me that Belinsky created all the prerequisites for such a concept, and Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, more mature democrats and socialists, completed it.

The process was the opposite of that in which the theory of art steps ahead, summarizing its achievements, and literary criticism hurries after it ("moving aesthetics", as Belinsky put it in an earlier article, or "the practice of literary theory", as it would be more accurate to express it thought). Belinsky the critic went ahead of the literary theory that he himself developed in polemics with the abstract "philosophical aesthetics" he had inherited. It's no wonder that his artistic criticism of the Moscow period developed into “real criticism” of the quite mature period of his activity (Yu. S. Sorokin pointed out this process (see his article and notes to vol. , 1981, pp. 623, 713-714).

Belinsky was in danger here of breaking away from the analysis of a work of literature and being carried away by a direct analysis of reality itself, that is, criticism artistic transform into criticism "about" - into journalistic criticism. But he was not afraid of such a danger, because his numerous and sometimes lengthy "digressions" continued artistic research developed by the writer. Belinsky's "Real Criticism" (as well as the subsequent one, by the way) therefore remained essentially artistic criticism, devoted to literature as art, understood not formally, but in the unity of its special aspects. The analysis of "Tarantas", for example, is rightly regarded as the strongest blow to the Slavophiles, but the blow was dealt not by an analysis of their positions and theories, but by a merciless analysis of the typical character of the Slavophile romantic and his collisions with Russian reality, which follows directly from the pictures drawn by V. A. Sollogub .

The process of the formation of "real criticism" in Belinsky was carried out not by direct intrusions into life in themselves (as the realism of "Eugene Onegin" was created not by lyrical digressions), but by the critic's attention to the process of "the victory of realism", when the structure of the work is eliminated from the structure of the work wedged into it or mixed with to him inhuman "preconceived" ideas and false images and positions. This cleansing process may occupy a substantial part of the critic's article or affect only passing remarks, but it must certainly exist, without it there is no "real criticism".

Solving his problem practically in criticism, Belinsky tried to solve it in theory, rethinking the romantic concept of art. Here he had his own extremes - from an attempt to proclaim the discovery for the Russian reader of the old thesis ("Art is direct contemplation of truth, or thinking in images" -- III, 278) before replacing it with the well-known final definition - "Art is a reproduction of reality, repeated, as it were, a newly created world" (VIII, 361). But the last formula does not achieve concreteness, does not grasp the specificity of art, and the real arena of the struggle against the abstractions of "philosophical aesthetics" remained critical practice, which had gone far ahead and in certain respects outstripped the results of Hegel's reflections on the humanistic essence of art. However, in Belinsky's theory, too, significant changes took place, an explanation was outlined for the contradictions inherent in realism and caught by "real criticism".

It is known that, having said goodbye to "reconciliation" with Russian reality, Belinsky turned from so-called "objectivity" to "subjectivity." But to subjectivity, not in general, but to that pathos human dignity, who owned it from the very beginning and did not leave it even during the years of "reconciliation". Now this pathos has found its justification in "sociality" ("Sociality, sociality - or death!" - IX, 482), that is, in the socialist ideal. Having become more familiar with the teachings of the socialists, Belinsky discarded utopian projects and fantasies and accepted the essence of socialism, its humanistic content. Man is the goal of the objective historical process, and a society that serves man will for the first time be a truly human society, complete humanism, as the young Marx wrote in those same years (Marx K. and Engels F. Soch., vol. 42, p. 116.). And social and artistic thought is equally developing towards the realization of this humanistic goal.

Isn't this the conclusion that Belinsky comes to in his last review, which is rightly considered the critic's theoretical testament? But usually this testament is reduced to a flat formula denoting the concept of an exclusively figurative specificity of art. Isn't it a good time to re-read this famous review and try to trace in it the development of Belinsky's own theoretical thought?

I will try, although I am aware that I am invoking all the inertial force of traditional ideas.

First, Belinsky substantiates the "natural school" as a phenomenon of truly modern art, and the "rhetorical direction" takes it beyond its limits. Pushkin and Gogol turned poetry to reality, they began to depict not ideals, but ordinary people, and thereby completely changed the view of art itself: it is now - "reproduction of reality in all its truth", so that "here the whole point is types, a ideal here it is understood not as an adornment (hence, a lie), but as a relationship in which the author establishes the types created by Him to each other, in accordance with the thought that he wants to develop with his Work "(VIII, 352). people, characters- this is what art depicts, and not "rhetorical personifications of abstract virtues and vices" (ibid.). And this particular object of art is its most important law:"... In relation to the choice of subjects of composition, the writer cannot be guided either by a will alien to him, or even by his own arbitrariness, for art has its own laws, without respect for which it is impossible to write well" (VIII, 357). "Nature is the eternal model of art, and the greatest and noblest object in nature is man", "his soul, mind, heart, passions, inclinations" (ibid.), human and in an aristocrat, and in an educated person, and in a peasant.

Art betrays itself when it either strives to become an unprecedented aimless "pure" art, or becomes didactic art - "instructive, cold, dry, dead, whose works are nothing but rhetorical exercises on given topics" (VIII, 359). It must therefore find its own social content. But "art must first of all be art, and then it can already be an expression of the spirit and direction of society in a certain era" (ibid.). What does it mean to "be art"? First of all, to be poetry create images and faces, characters, typical, phenomena of reality through their imagination. In contrast to the “burying the investigative case described”, which establishes the measure of violation of the law, the poet must penetrate “into the inner essence of the case, guess the secret spiritual impulses that forced these persons to act in such a way, grab that point in this case that constitutes the center of the circle of these events, gives them the meaning of something single, complete, whole, closed in itself" (VIII, 360). "And only a poet can do this," adds Belinsky, thereby once again confirming the idea of ​​a specific subject of art.

In what way does the artist penetrate into this object, into the soul, character, and actions of a person? “They say: science needs mind and reason, creativity needs fantasy, and they think that this has solved the matter completely ...,” Belinsky objects to the usual idea. “But art does not need mind and reason? But a scientist can do without fantasy? Not true! The truth is that in art fantasy plays the most active and leading role, but in science it is the mind and reason" (VIII, 361).

Nevertheless, the question of the social content of art remains, and Belinsky addresses it.

“Art is a reproduction of reality, repeated, as it were, a newly created world,” Belinsky reminds the reader of his original formula. About a special subject of art and about the peculiarity of penetration into this subject has already been said; now the original formula is concretized in relation to other aspects of art. The poet cannot but be reflected in his work - as a person, as a character, as nature - in a word, as a personality. The epoch, "the innermost thought of the whole society", his, society, obscure aspirations, cannot but be reflected in the work, and the poet is guided here most of all by "his instinct, a dark, unconscious feeling, often constituting the whole force of a genius nature", and therefore the poet begins to reason and embark on philosophy - "look, and stumbled, and how! .." (VIII, 362--363). So Belinsky redirects the secret of genius(Schelling) from creativity in general to unconscious reflection public aspirations,

But the reflection of far from all social issues and aspirations has a beneficial effect on art. Utopias are disastrous, forcing to depict "a world that exists only in ... imagination", as was the case in some of the works of George Sand. Another thing is the "sincere sympathies of our time": they do not in the least prevent Dickens's novels from being "excellent works of art". However, such a general reference to humanity is no longer enough; Belinsky's thought goes further.

Comparing the nature of modern art with the nature of ancient art, Belinsky concludes: "In general, the nature of the new art is the preponderance of the importance of content over the importance of form, while the nature of ancient art is the balance of content and form" (VIII, 366). In the little Greek republic life was simple and uncomplicated, and itself gave content to art "always under the obvious predominance of beauty" (VIII, 365), while modern life is completely different. Art now serves "the most important interests of mankind", but "this does not in the least cease to be art" (VIII, 367) - this is its living force, its thought, its content. Is it not this content that Belinsky now considers as general content of science and art? Isn't that the meaning of the critic's judgment quoted and always taken out of context? Let's reread it: "... they see that art and science are not the same, but they do not see that their difference is not at all in the content, but only in the way of processing this content. The philosopher speaks in syllogisms, the poet - in images and pictures, but they both say the same thing" (VIII, 367).

What is it about? That art and science are knowledge and serve humanity reveal the truth and prepare its self-fulfillment, respond to these "most important interests for mankind."

The examples surrounding the above quotation do not speak very clearly about this: with his novels, Dickens contributed to the improvement of educational institutions; the political-economist proves, and the poet shows, due to what reasons the position of such and such a class in society "has improved a lot or worsened a lot." But after all, neither the rods at school, nor the position of the classes are their own subjects of literature and political economy, although both can reflect them in their own way.

However, Belinsky does not want to single out special objects, but a general truth, truth sciences and arts as their general hell. In another place, he says this directly: "... the content of science and literature is the same - truth", "the whole difference between them consists only in the form, in the method, in the way, in the way in which each of them expresses truth" (VII, 354).

Why not understand and accept Belinsky's formula in its broad sense and remove from it a flat interpretation that terribly impoverishes his thought? Indeed, there is always a social phenomenon attitude of people and comprehended in his truth and science and art, but really in different ways, in different ways and methods and in different forms: from the outside relations -- social science, by human- art, and therefore not only forms, but also their own objects, representing the unity of opposites, are both connected and different: this social relations of people in science and person in society at art. And Belinsky himself wrote in 1844: "... since real people live on earth and in society ... then, naturally, the writers of our time, together with people, depict society" (VII, 41). About the fact that the historian is obliged to penetrate into the characters of historical figures and understand them as personalities and within these limits to become an artist, Belinsky said repeatedly. And yet these judgments did not lead him to confuse the special objects of art and science. (Generally speaking, the specificity of objects of reflection does not exclude their generality, in this case, their common truth, just as generality does not exclude their specificity; the specification does not cancel the general relation, but subordinates it to itself.)

In the above formula, as was said, it is not only about knowledge, but also about serving "the most important interests for mankind", which, of course, cannot be reduced to an interest in truth. Perhaps Belinsky defined these interests more precisely? I'll continue the disassembled quote:

"The highest and most sacred interest of society is its own well-being, equally extended to each of its members. The path to this well-being is consciousness, and art can contribute to consciousness no less than science. Here both science and art are equally necessary, and neither science can replace art, nor the art of science" (VIII, 367).

What is implied here is a completely definite consciousness - humanism, growing into a socialist ideal. It has been pointed out in the literature that the formula of "welfare equally extended to everyone" is the formula of socialism. But I have not come across the idea that Belinsky is leading to this ideal. contemporary content genuine science and art, and stands up for such content, and in such content he sees the commonality of science and art of modern times. He could not have said this more clearly in the censored press. Yes, and it would be strange if in the final review Belinsky (and he was aware of its final character) would bypass the question of socialism and engage in a formal comparison of science and art, moreover, ignoring his own paths worked out from the very beginning, in the same review more clearly marked convictions in the specificity of the object of art. By the way, it is the specificity of objects that determines indispensability art as science and science as art in their common service, immediately noted by Belinsky. And of course, Belinsky was not going to return to a romantic comparison of science and art, ignoring their special subjects - he walked along the broad path of enlightenment, along which humanism naturally developed into socialism (See: Marx K. and Engels F. Soch., vol. 2, pp. 145--146.).

Here, however, one must be clear about the what Belinsky could talk about socialism. There is (and then there was) feudal, petty-bourgeois, "true", bourgeois, critical-utopian socialism (see The Manifesto of the Communist Party). Belinsky's ideal does not adjoin any of these currents - and above all because the class struggle in Russia at that time had not yet developed to such an extent that the ground for such a fractional differentiation of socialist doctrines appeared. But even so it does not adjoin that, as was said, Belinsky's acquaintance with the Western teachings of the utopian socialists pushed him away from the socialist recipes and approved him. the most general striving for the protection of human dignity, for the freedom of mankind from oppression and reproach. This common socialist ideal, being a continuation and development of his humanism, separated him from various socialist sects and was a true compass on the path to the real emancipation of mankind.

True, in Belinsky's ideal there is still a hint of equalization (it is said about the well-being of society, equals extended to each of its members) characteristic of immature, pre-scientific forms of socialism. But Belinsky is not alien to the idea of ​​the all-round development of the individual in the society of the future, and this socialist idea became a direct demand of the "industrial" XIX century, put forward against the real alienation of the human essence, into which the bourgeois system of production relations plunges a person; it, this idea, pervades all the realistic literature of this century, whether the writers are aware of it or not. Belinsky's socially incompletely defined ideal was therefore turned forward, into the future, and it comes to us through the heads of the petty-bourgeois "socialists", Narodniks, etc.

The considered theoretical results, which Belinsky arrived at, could not serve as a basis for his "real criticism" if only because all of it was behind us. On the contrary, her experience contributed to the clarification of the theory, and in particular in the paragraph where it is said about unconscious the artist’s service to the “secret thought of the whole society”, and, consequently, about the contradiction that this service enters into with his, the artist’s, conscious position, with his hopes and ideals, with “recipes for salvation”, etc. Such contradictions in the short history of the Russian realism met, and Belinsky's criticism invariably noted them, thereby becoming "real criticism". Pushkin's retreats from the "tact of reality" and "cherishing the soul of humanity" to the idealization of noble life, the "incorrect sounds" of some of his poems; false notes in the lyrical passages of "Dead Souls", which grew into a conflict between the instructiveness of "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" and the critical pathos of Gogol's works of art in the name of humanity; the mentioned "Tarantas" by V. A. Sollogub; the transformation of Aduev Jr. in the epilogue of "Ordinary History" into a sober businessman ...

But all these are examples of a retreat from artistically reproduced truth to false ideas. The opposite case is extremely interesting - the influence conscious humanism on artistic creativity, analyzed by Belinsky on the example of Herzen's novel "Who is to blame?". If artistic talent helps Goncharov in "An Ordinary Story", and deviations from it lead the writer to logical conjectures, then, with all the artistic blunders, Herzen's work is saved by his conscious thought, which became his feeling his passion, pathos his life and his novel: "This thought has grown together with his talent; it is his strength; if he could cool off towards it, renounce it, he would suddenly lose his talent. What kind of thought? This is suffering, illness at the sight of unrecognized human dignity, insulted with intent, and even more so without intent; this is what the Germans call humanity(VIII, 378). And Belinsky explains, throwing a bridge to that consciousness which he called the path to general welfare, equally extended to everyone:"Humanity is philanthropy, but developed by consciousness and education" (ibid.). And further two pages are followed by examples accessible to the censored pen, explaining the essence of the matter ...

So, in his “real criticism”, which practically arose from the consciousness of the contradictions that comprehend realistic art (these contradictions are inaccessible to classic and romantic images, or simply illustrative ones: here the “idea” is directly “embodied” in the image), in theoretical reflections Belinsky brought to the task of making explicit , explain, bring to the consciousness of the public that conscious humanism, which eventually develops into the idea of ​​the liberation of man and humanity. This task falls on criticism, and not on art itself, because now, when real liberation is still very far away, art takes the wrong path and deviates from the truth, if it tries to translate socialist ideas into images, love for a person should deepen truthful pictures of reality, and not to distort the truth of characters and situations by fantasies - that is the result of Belinsky. Following this insightful interpretation of the fate of realistic art, Dobrolyubov will attribute the fusion of art with a scientific, correct worldview to the distant future.

It is natural to assume that Chernyshevsky's path to "real criticism" was the reverse path of Belinsky - not from critical practice to theory, but from the theoretical provisions of the thesis to critical practice, which became "real" from its saturation with theory. Even direct lines are drawn from Chernyshevsky's dissertation to Dobrolyubov's "real criticism" (for example, by B.F. Egorov). In fact, there is nothing more erroneous than to bypass the essence of "real criticism" and take it for criticism "about".

Usually, three concepts are taken from a dissertation: reproduction of reality, explanation of it, and a sentence on it - and then they already operate with these terms isolated from the context of the dissertation. As a result, one obtains the same scheme dear to the heart: art reproduces all reality in images, the artist, to the extent of the correctness of his worldview, explains and judges it (from his class position, he adds “for Marxism,” although classes were open before Marx and Chernyshevsky knew and took into account the class struggle).

Meanwhile, in his dissertation, Chernyshevsky defined the object of art as general interest, and by it meant human, directly pointing to it in a review of the translation of Aristotle's Poetics in 1854, that is, after writing and before the publication of the dissertation. Two years later, in a book about Pushkin, Chernyshevsky gave an exact formula for the subject of literature as art, as if summing up Belinsky's thoughts: "... works of belles-lettres describe and tell us in living examples how people feel and act in various circumstances, and these examples are for the most part created by the imagination of the writer himself", that is, "a work of fine literature tells how it always or usually happens in the world" (III, 313).

Here, from the "whole of reality", which certainly enters the sphere of attention of art, a specific, special object for it, which determines its nature, is singled out - people in circumstances; here is indicated both the probabilistic nature ("as it happens") and the way the artist penetrates the subject, and the way it is reproduced. So Chernyshevsky discovered for himself a theoretical approach to the consciousness of the contradictions that are possible in the creative process and characteristic of realism, and, therefore, to the conscious formation of "real criticism".

And yet Chernyshevsky did not immediately notice this path of literary-critical assimilation of realism. It happened because he adhered to the old idea of ​​artistry as the unity of an idea and an image: this formula, which is not quite fair for defining beauty and a simple thing, distorts the idea of ​​such a complex phenomenon as art, reduces it to the "embodiment" of an idea directly into an image. , bypassing the artistic study and reproduction of the subject - human characters (in this case they are used as an obedient material for sculpting images in accordance with the idea).

While Chernyshevsky was dealing with third-rate writers and their works, as a rule, devoid of vital content, the theory of the unity of idea and image did not let him down. But as soon as he came across a realistic work with an incorrect ideological tendency - A. N. Ostrovsky's comedy "Poverty is not a vice", - this theory misfired. The critic reduced the entire content of the play, both substantive and ideological, to Slavophilism and declared it "weak even in a purely artistic sense" (II, 240), because, as he wrote somewhat later, "if the idea is be out of the question" (III, 663). “Only a work in which a true idea is embodied can be artistic if the form perfectly corresponds to the idea” (ibid.), Chernyshevsky categorically declared then, in 1854-1856. This theoretical error of his, leading to the transformation of art into an illustration of correct ideas, is also relevant for other contemporary theorists and critics who seek to dictate correct (according to their concepts) ideas to writers ...

But soon Chernyshevsky's attention was focused on contradictions, which it was tricky to deal with by recommending true ideas. Compared with these ideas (socialism and communism, which the young Chernyshevsky already professed), the nature of Pushkin's poetry seems "elusive, ethereal", the poet's ideas argue with each other; "This chaotic nature of concepts is even more pronounced" is revealed by Gogol, and yet both of them laid the foundation for the high artistry and truthfulness of Russian literature. What should criticism do in the face of such contradictions?

Having never solved the "Gogol problem" at that time, Chernyshevsky met with another similar phenomenon - with the works of the young Tolstoy, who, having arrived from Sevastopol, struck Nekrasov, Turgenev and other writers with talented and deeply original works and, at the same time, backward and even retrograde judgments. . Chernyshevsky had to leave aside copyright ideas when analyzing the works of Tolstoy and delve into the nature of his artistic penetration into the subject of art - into a person, into his spiritual world. This was how the famous "dialectic of the soul" was discovered in Tolstoy's creative method, and thus Chernyshevsky practically embarked on the path of "real criticism".

At about the same time (late 1856 - early 1857) Chernyshevsky formulates a more flexible relationship between ideology and art: those directions literature and flourish that arise under the influence strong and living ideas - "ideas by which the age moves" (III, 302). There is no longer a rigid direct causal relationship, but an impact on literature as art through its own nature, and above all through its subject matter. With ideas that are capable of influencing art in such a way, Chernyshevsky no longer puts forward "true ideas" in general, but ideas humanity and improvement of human life- two broad ideas that lead to the idea of ​​the liberation of man, people and all mankind. So Chernyshevsky concretizes and develops Belinsky's thoughts about the humanistic essence of art. Before criticism, the tasks of analyzing the work from the point of view of its truthfulness and humanity emerge with complete clarity, so that later it is possible to continue the analysis of images and translate it into an analysis of the social relations that gave rise to them. By fulfilling these tasks, criticism becomes "real".

Since ancient times, we have been accustomed to counting point by point: six conditions, five signs, four traits, etc., although we know that dialectics does not fit into any classification, even "systemic". I will single out three principles of Chernyshevsky's "real criticism" from the article on "Provincial Essays" by M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin (1857) in order to emphasize their lively interaction in the development of critical analysis.

The first principle—the truthfulness of a work and the social demand for truth and truthful literature—two conditions for the very possibility of the appearance of "real criticism." The second is the definition of the features of the writer's talent - and the scope of his images, and the artistic methods of his penetration into the subject, and the humanistic attitude towards him. The third is the correct interpretation of the work, the facts and phenomena presented in it. All these principles presuppose that the critic takes into account the deviations of the writer from truth and humanity, if, of course, they exist - in any case, the attitude towards a realistic work as a complex phenomenon, which in its entirety arose as a result of overcoming all influences contraindicated in the nature of art.

The dialectic of the interaction of these principles naturally grows towards the continuation of artistic analysis in the literary-critical analysis of characters, types and relationships, and ultimately towards the clarification of those ideological results that flow from the work and to which the critic himself comes. Thus, from the truth of a work of art arises the truth of life, the knowledge of the development of reality and the awareness of the real tasks of the social movement. "Real criticism" is criticism not "about", not from the very beginning "publicistic" (that is, imposing on a work of art that social meaning that is not in it), but precisely artistic criticism, devoted to the images and plots of works, only in results of his research, reaching a wide journalistic result. This is how Chernyshevsky's article on "Provincial Essays" is structured; the vast majority of pages in it are devoted to the continuation of artistic analysis, journalistic conclusions are not even formulated, they are given in hints.

Why, then, does one get the impression that a “real critic” gives such an interpretation to a work of art that the author sometimes never dreamed of? Yes, because the critic continues an artistic study of the social essence and possibilities ("readiness", as Shchedrin used to say) of the types presented by the writer. If the artist, in his research, proceeds from characters, creates their types and, establishing the favorable or destructive influence of circumstances, is not obliged to give a social analysis of the latter, then the critic deals precisely with this side of the matter, without digressing from the types themselves. (Political, legal, moral-moral or political-economic analysis of relations goes further and is already indifferent to individual destinies, characters and types.) Such a continuation of artistic analysis is the true vocation of literary criticism.

"Provincial Essays" gave Chernyshevsky grateful material for his analysis and conclusions, and he casually threw only one reproach to the author - about the head office with the funeral of "past times", and even then he removed it, apparently hoping that the author himself would pay off his illusion .

The structure of this article by Chernyshevsky is too well known to refer to here; it is considered, for example, by B. I. Vursov in the book "The Mastery of Chernyshevsky as a Critic", as well as the structure of the article "A Russian Man on Rendezvous".

It is interesting, however, to note that Chernyshevsky himself explained to the reader, not without cunning, that in the first of these articles he "focused" all his attention "exclusively on the purely psychological side of types," so that he was not interested in either "social questions" or " artistic" (IV, 301). He could have said the same about his second article, and about others. From this, of course, it does not follow that his criticism is purely psychological: true to his idea of ​​the subject of art, he reveals the relationship between characters, presented in the work, and the circumstances that surround them, highlighting from them those social relations that formed them. He thus raises the characters and types to a higher level of generalization, considers their role in the life of the people and brings the reader's thought to the highest idea - the need to reorganize the entire social order. This is a critique that analyzes basis artistic fabrics; without a base, the fabric will spread, beautiful patterns and author's high ideas will blur.

It was not "real criticism" (and not criticism in general) that revealed, depicted and traced the development of the type of "superfluous man"—this was done by literature itself. But the social role of this type was established precisely by "real criticism" in a controversy that grew to disputes about the role of advanced generations in the fate of their native country and about ways to transform it.

Our researcher who does not want to notice this character of "real criticism" linking art and life and defends the view of it as purely journalistic criticism "on occasion", is unaware that he thereby dissociates literature and art from their heart and mind - from man and human relations, pushes them towards a bloodless formalistic existence or (which is just the other end of the same stick) to the indifferent subordination of the "purely artistic" form to any ideas, that is, to illustrativeness.

Surprisingly, Dobrolyubov started with the same mistake as Chernyshevsky. In the article "On the Degree of Participation of the People in the Development of Russian Literature" (written at the beginning of 1858, that is, six months after Chernyshevsky's article on the "Provincial Essays"), he looked for revolutionary democracy in Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov and, naturally, did not find it. He considered, therefore, that the truthfulness and humanity of their works are only form nationality, but they have not yet mastered the content of nationality. This, of course, is an erroneous conclusion: although Pushkin, Gogol and Lermontov are not revolutionary democrats, their work is popular both in form and content, and their humanism will inherit our time in a century and a half.

Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov realized their mistakes of this plan very soon and corrected them, but we are cited for their positive and these erroneous judgments, and indeed development the views of our democrats and their self-criticism are often simply ignored.

In his article on the "Provincial Essays" Chernyshevsky was inclined to consider the interaction between characters and circumstances in favor of circumstances - it is they that make people of the most diverse characters and temperaments dance to their own tune, and it takes the heroic persistence of a person like Meyer to, for example, bring to reason malicious bankrupt. In the article about "Ace" he took a step forward - he traced the influence of circumstances on characters and on the formation in life itself. typical traits common to different individuals. If earlier, in a polemic with Dudyshkin, who considered Pechorin to be a scion from Onegin, Chernyshevsky emphasized the difference between these characters, due to the different time in which they appeared, now, when the boundary of Nikolaev timelessness was clearly marked, the images of Rudin, the heroes of Asya and Faust "from the works of Turgenev, Nekrasov's Agarin, Herzen's Beltov, he designated type of the so-called (according to Turgenev's story) "an extra person".

This type, which occupied a central place in Russian realistic literature for almost three decades, served to shape "real criticism" and Dobrolyubov. The first thoughts about him are expressed in the article, again about the "Provincial Essays" - in the analysis of "talented natures." Dobrolyubov gave a journalistic analysis of the entire "old generation" of progressive people in a large and principled article, "Literary trifles of the past year" (early 1859), directed against petty accusations. Although the critic separated from this generation Belinsky, Herzen and the figures of timelessness close to them, the article provoked sharp objections from Herzen, who then placed his hopes on the advanced nobility in the forthcoming reform. "Superfluous Man" acquired a great social resonance, becoming the subject of controversy. Dobrolyubov used Goncharov's newly published novel Oblomov to expand and complete his analysis of this type and to comment on the essential literary and civic aspects of this phenomenon. In the course of the analysis, the principles of "real criticism" were also formed, which at that time had not yet received its name.

Dobrolyubov notes and characterizes peculiarities Goncharov's talent (turning to this side of the artist's talent has become an indispensable requirement of "real criticism" for oneself) and a common feature of truthful writers is the desire to "raise a random image into a type, to give it a generic and permanent meaning" (IV, 311), in contrast to the authors , whose story "turns out to be a clear and correct personification of their thoughts" (IV, 309). Dobrolyubov finds the generic features of the Oblomov type in all "superfluous people" and analyzes them from this "Oblomov" angle of view. And here he makes a most fundamental generalization, relating not only to this type, but in general to the laws of the development of literature as an art.

The "radical, folk" type, which is the type of "superfluous person", "over time, as the conscious development of society ... changed its forms, took on other attitudes to life, acquired a new meaning"; and now "to notice these new phases of its existence, to determine the essence of its new meaning - this has always been an enormous task, and the talent that was able to do this has always made a significant step forward in the history of our literature" (IV, 314).

Can't overestimate this law development of literature, which in our modern literary criticism has somehow receded into the background, although our rich experience clearly shows the considerable positive (and sometimes bitter) role of characters in the life and history of the people. The task of literature—to capture the change in types, to present their new relationship to life—is the central task of literary criticism, which is called upon to fully clarify the social significance of these changes. Dobrolyubov certainly took upon himself such a task, sharing with realism the analysis of "human character" and "phenomena of social life" in their mutual influence and transition from one to another and not being carried away by some "leaves and streams" (IV, 313), dear to supporters "pure art".

Some "profound people," Dobrolyubov foresaw, would find it unlawful parallel between Oblomov and "superfluous people" (you can add: as she appears unhistorical some researchers and now). But Dobrolyubov does not compare in all respects, does not draw a parallel, but reveals change forms like it new relationship to life, his new value in the public consciousness - in a word, "the essence of its new meaning", which was at first "in the bud", expressed "only in an obscure half-word, uttered in a whisper" (IV, 331). This is what it consists historicity, which signs the "superfluous person" in 1859 no harsher sentence than Lermontov expressed in 1838 in the famous "Duma" ("I look sadly at our generation ..."). In addition, as was said, Dobrolyubov did not rank among the "superfluous people" the figures of timelessness - Belinsky, Herzen, Stankevich and others, did not rank the writers themselves, who painted so convincingly and mercilessly the variants of this type, replacing each other. He historical and in this regard.

Dobrolyubov is faithful to the line of "real criticism" already found by Belinsky - to separate unjustified subjective ideas and forecasts of the artist from the truthful image. He notes the illusions of the author of "Oblomov", who hastened to say goodbye to Oblomovka and announce the coming of many Stoltsev "under Russian names." But the problem of the relationship between the realist's objective creativity and his subjective views has not yet been fully resolved, and its solution has not yet become part of the organic composition of "real criticism."

Belinsky sensed here the greatest complexity and the greatest danger to truthful art. He warned against the influence of the narrow views of circles and parties on literature, and preferred them to serve broadly the tasks of the present. He demanded: "... the direction itself should not be in the head only, but first of all in the heart, in the blood of the writer, first of all it should be a feeling, an instinct, and then, perhaps, a conscious thought" (VIII, 368).

But can any trend, any idea, be so close to the artist as to be molded into truthful and poetic images of the work? Even in the articles of the "telescopic" period, Belinsky distinguished true inspiration, which itself comes to the poet, from feigned, tortured inspiration, and, of course, for him there was no doubt that only a truly poetic and vital idea for a poet and poetry is capable of attracting true inspiration. But what is the true idea? and where does it come from? - these are the questions that Dobrolyubov put to himself anew in the articles about Ostrovsky, although in general terms, as was said, they were solved by both Belinsky and Chernyshevsky.

Of fundamental importance for "real criticism" is the very approach to the analysis of the work, without which it is simply impossible to solve the questions posed. This approach is opposed to all other types of criticism of that time. Everyone who wrote about Ostrovsky, notes Dobrolyubov, "wanted to make" him "a representative of a certain kind of convictions and then punished him for being unfaithful to these convictions or elevated him for strengthening them" (V, 16). This method of criticism comes from the belief in the primitive nature of art: it simply "embodies" the idea into an image, and, therefore, as soon as the writer is advised to change the idea, his work will go along the desired path. Advice from various quarters was given to Ostrovsky in a variety of ways, often contradictory; sometimes he got lost and took "a few wrong chords" for the sake of this or that part (V, 17). Real criticism, on the other hand, completely refuses to "guide" the writers and takes the work as it is given by the author. "... We do not set any program for the author, we do not draw up any preliminary rules for him, in accordance with which he must conceive and carry out his works. We consider this method of criticism very offensive for the writer ..." (V, 18--19 ). "In the same way, real criticism does not allow the imposition of other people's thoughts on the author" (V, 20). Her approach to art is radically different. What does it consist of?

First of all, that the critic establishes outlook the artist - that "his view of the world", which serves as "the key to characterizing his talent" and is "in the living images created by him" (V, 22). The worldview cannot be brought "into certain logical formulas": "These abstractions usually do not exist in the very mind of the artist; often, even in abstract reasoning, he expresses concepts that are strikingly opposite" (V, 22). A world view, then, is something different from ideas, both those that are imposed on the artist and those that he himself adheres to; it does not express the interests of the contending parties and trends, but carries some special meaning inherent in art. What is it? Dobrolyubov felt social the nature of this meaning, its opposition to the interests of the ruling estates and classes, but he could not yet determine this character and turned to logic social anthropologism.

The anthropological arguments of our democrats are usually qualified as unscientific and incorrect propositions, and only V. I. Lenin assessed them differently. Noting narrowness term Feuerbach and Chernyshevsky "anthropological principle", he wrote in his summary: "Both the anthropological principle and naturalism are only inaccurate, weak descriptions materialism_ a "(Lenin V.I. Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 29, p. 64.). Here is such imprecise, weak scientifically and descriptive Search materialist and represents an attempt by Dobrolyubov to determine the social nature of the artist's worldview.

"The main advantage of the writer-artist is truth his images." But "unconditional untruth writers never invent" - it turns out to be false when an artist takes "random, false features" of reality, "not constituting its essence, its characteristic features", and "if you make up theoretical concepts based on them, then you can come to ideas that are completely false" (V, 23) What are these random features? This, for example, is "singing of voluptuous scenes and depraved adventures", this is the exaltation of "the valor of warlike feudal lords who shed rivers of blood, burned cities and robbed their vassals" (V, 23-24). And the point here is not in the facts themselves, but in the position of the authors: their praise such exploits are evidence that in their soul "there was no sense of human truth" (V, 24).

This sense of human truth, directed against the oppression of man and the perversion of his nature, is the social basis of the artistic worldview. An artist is a person not only endowed more than others with the talent of humanity, but the talent of humanity given to him by nature participates in the creative process of recreating and evaluating life's characters. The artist is an instinctive defender of the human in man, a humanist by nature, just as the very nature of art is humanistic. Why this is so - Dobrolyubov cannot reveal, but weak description he gives the real fact.

Moreover, Dobrolyubov establishes the social kinship of "an immediate sense of human truth" with "correct general concepts" developed by "reasoning people" (under such concepts, he hides the ideas of protecting people's interests, up to the ideas of socialism, although, he notes, neither we , nor in the West is there yet a "party of the people in literature"). However, he limits the role of these "general concepts" in the creative process only by the fact that the artist who owns them "can indulge more freely in the suggestions of his artistic nature" (V, 24), that is, Dobrolyubov does not return to the principle of illustrating ideas, even if they were the most advanced and correct. "... When the general concepts of the artist are correct and are in complete harmony with his nature, then ... reality is reflected in the work brighter and more vividly, and it can more easily lead a reasoning person to correct conclusions and, therefore, be more important for life" (there g) - this is Dobrolyubov's extreme conclusion about the influence of advanced ideas on creativity; now we would say: the right ideas are a tool for fruitful research, a guide to the artist's action, and not a master key and not a model for "embodiment". In this sense, Dobrolyubov considers the "free transformation of the highest speculations into living images" and in this respect the "complete fusion of science and poetry" as an ideal that has not yet been achieved by anyone and refers it to the distant future. In the meantime, the task of revealing the humane meaning of works and interpreting their social significance is being undertaken by "real criticism."

Here is how, for example, Dobrolyubov implements these principles of "real criticism" in his approach to the dramas of A. N. Ostrovsky.

"Ostrovsky knows how to look into the depths of a person's soul, knows how to distinguish in kind from all externally accepted deformities and growths; that is why the external oppression, the severity of the whole situation that crushes a person, is felt in his works much more strongly than in many stories, terribly outrageous in content, but the external, official side of the matter completely obscures the inner, human side "(V, 29). On this conflict , exposing it, "real criticism" builds its entire analysis, and not, say, on conflicts of tyrants and voiceless, rich and poor in themselves, because the subject of art (and Ostrovsky's art in particular) is not these conflicts, and their influence on human souls, that "moral distortion" of them, which is much more difficult to depict than "a simple fall of a person's inner strength under the weight of external oppression" (V, 65).

By the way, past this humanistic analysis given by the playwright himself and "real criticism", passed Ap. Grigoriev, who considered the work of Ostrovsky and his types from the point of view of nationality, interpreted in the sense of nationality, when the broad Russian soul was assigned the role of arbiter of the fate of the country.

For Dobrolyubov, the artist's humanistic approach to man is deeply fundamental: only as a result of such penetration into the souls of people, he believes, does the artist's worldview arise. In Ostrovsky, "the result of psychic observations ... turned out to be an extremely humane view of the most, apparently, gloomy phenomena of life and a deep sense of respect for the moral dignity of human nature" (V, 56). It remains for "Real Criticism" to clarify this view and draw its own conclusion about the need to change the whole life, causing the distortion of a person both in petty fools and in the dumb.

In the analysis of "Thunderstorm" Dobrolyubov notes the shifts that have occurred in the relationship of characters and circumstances, the change in the essence of the conflict - from dramatic he becomes tragic foreshadowing decisive events in the life of the people. The critic does not forget the law of movement of literature discovered by him following the change in the essence of social types.

With the aggravation of the revolutionary situation in the country, Dobrolyubov generally faced the question of the conscious service of literature to the people, of depicting the people and the new figure, his intercessor, and he really focuses on the consciousness of the writer, even calls literature propaganda. But he does all this not in defiance of the nature of realistic art, and thus not in defiance of "real criticism." Mastering a new subject, literature must reach the heights of artistry, and this is impossible without artistic mastery of its new subject, its human content. Such tasks are put forward by the critic before poetry, the novel and the drama.

“We would now need a poet,” he writes, “who, with the beauty of Pushkin and the strength of Lermontov, could continue and expand the real, healthy side of Koltsov’s poems” (VI, 168). If the novel and drama, which previously had "the task of revealing psychological antagonism," now turn "into the depiction of social relations" (VI, 177), then, of course, not apart from the depiction of people. And especially here, when depicting the people, "... in addition to knowledge and a true look, in addition to the talent of a storyteller, you need ... not only to know, but to deeply and strongly feel it yourself, to experience this life, you need to be vitally connected with these people, you need for some time to look at them through their own eyes, to think with their head, to desire them with their will ... one must have a gift to a very large extent - to try on oneself any position, any feeling and at the same time be able to imagine how it will manifest itself in a person of a different temperament and character - a gift that is the property of truly artistic natures and is no longer replaceable by any knowledge" (VI, 55). Here the writer must cultivate in himself that instinct "for the inner development of the people's life, which is so strong in some of our writers in relation to the life of the educated classes" (VI, 63).

Similar artistic tasks arising from the movement of life itself are posed by Dobrolyubov when depicting the "new man", the "Russian Insarov", who cannot be similar to the "Bulgarian", drawn by Turgenev: he "will always remain timid, ambivalent, will hide, express with various cover-ups and equivocations" (VI, 125). Turgenev partly took these casually thrown words into account when creating the image of Bazarov, endowing him, along with the harshness and unceremoniousness of his tone, with "various covers and equivocations."

Dobrolyubov hinted at the forthcoming "heroic epic" of the revolutionaries' movement and the "epic of people's life" - a nationwide uprising, and prepared literature to depict them, to participate in them. But here, too, he did not deviate from realism and "real criticism." “A work of art,” he wrote at the end of 1860, on the eve of the reform, “can be an expression of a well-known idea, not because the author set himself on this idea when creating it, but because the author was struck by such facts of reality, of which this the idea follows of itself" (VI, 312). Dobrolyubov remained at his conviction that "... the reality from which the poet draws his materials and his inspirations has its own natural meaning, in violation of which the very life of the object is destroyed" (VI, 313). The "natural meaning" of reality went to either epic, but Dobrolyubov nowhere speaks of depicting what has not come, of replacing realism with pictures of the desired future.

And the last thing that needs to be noted, speaking of Dobrolyubov's "real criticism", is his attitude to the old aesthetic theory of "the unity of the idea and the image", "the embodiment of an idea into an image", "thinking in images", etc.: ".. ... we do not want to correct two or three points of the theory; no, with such corrections it will be even worse, more confusing and contradictory; we simply do not want it at all. We have other grounds for judging the worth of authors and works..." (VI , 307). These "other foundations" are the principles of "real criticism" that grow out of the "living movement" of realistic literature, from the "new, living beauty," from the "new truth, the result of a new course of life" (VI, 302).

"What are the features and principles of "real criticism" anyway? And how many of them do you have?" - the meticulous reader will ask, accustomed to the results of the points.

There was such a temptation to end the article with a similar enumeration. But can you cover in a few points the developing literary criticism of developing realism?

Not so long ago, one author of a book about Dobrolyubov for teachers counted eight principles of "real criticism" without much care to separate it from the principles of the old theory. Where does this figure come from - exactly eight? After all, one can count twelve or even twenty and still miss its essence, its vital nerve - the analysis of realistic art in the contradictions of truth and deviations from it, humanity and inhumane ideas, beauty and ugliness - in a word, in all the complexity of what called the victory of realism over everything that attacks him and harms him.

At one time, G. V. Plekhanov counted five (only!) aesthetic laws in Belinsky and considered them unchanging code(See his article "The Literary Views of V. G. Belinsky"). But in fact it turned out that these speculative "laws" (art is "thinking in images", etc.) long before Belinsky were formulated by the pre-Hegelian German "philosophical aesthetics" and our critic did not so much profess them as extricate himself from them, working out his living idea of ​​art, of its special nature. The author of a recent book on Belinsky's aesthetics, P. V. Sobolev, was seduced by Plekhanov's example and formulated five of his own, partly different, laws for the slow-witted Belinsky, thus placing the ingenuous reader in a dilemma: who should be trusted - Plekhanov or him, Sobolev?

The real problem of "real criticism" is not the number of its principles or laws, once its essence is clear, but its historical fate, when, contrary to expectations, in the era of the peak achievements of realism, it actually came to naught, giving way to other literary critical forms, already did not rise to such a height. This paradoxical fate calls into question the definition of "real criticism" with which this article begins. Indeed, what kind of "response to realism" is this if it fell into decline during the greatest flowering of realism? Was there not some flaw in "real criticism" itself, by virtue of which it could not become full a response to realism that has completely penetrated into his nature? And was she even such an answer?

In the last question, the voice of a skeptic is heard, in this case unjustified: the factual discovery by "real criticism" of the objective nature, fundamental properties and contradictions of realism is obvious. It is another matter that the well-known incompleteness of "real criticism" is indeed inherent. But this is not an organic flaw, hidden in the depths and undermining it like a worm, but the mentioned failure of that "weak description of materialism" by which "real criticism" explained the complex nature of artistic realism. For the "response to realism" to become full the principle of materialism was to cover all spheres of reality, from descriptions to become an instrument, a tool for studying the social structure down to its deepest foundation, to explain new phenomena of Russian reality that are not amenable to analysis, although revolutionary, but only democratic and pre-scientific socialist thought. This circumstance has already affected Dobrolyubov's latest articles.

The real weakness of the analysis of the stories of Marko Vovchka, for example, was not in Dobrolyubov's "utilitarianism" and not in the neglect of artistry, as Dostoevsky erroneously thought (see his article "Mr. Bov and the Question of Art"), but in the illusion criticism of the disappearance selfishness with the peasant after the fall of serfdom, that is, in the idea of ​​the peasant as a natural socialist, community member.

Or another example. The problem of “real criticism” that has not been fully resolved was also the contradictory nature of that “middle stratum” from which the raznochintsy revolutionaries were recruited, and the heroes of Pomyalovsky, who come to “petty-bourgeois happiness” and “honest Chichikovism,” and the twisted heroes of Dostoevsky. Dobrolyubov saw that Dostoevsky's hero was so humiliated that he "admits that he is unable or, finally, does not even have the right to be a man, a real, complete, independent man, by himself" (VII, 242), and at the same time he is "all- still firmly and deeply, although secretly even for themselves, keeps in itself a living soul and an eternal consciousness, indelible by any torment, of its human right to life and happiness" (VII, 275). But Dobrolyubov did not see how this contradiction distorts both of its sides, how one twists into the other, throws the hero of Dostoevsky into a crime against himself and humanity, and then into super-self-humiliation, etc., and even more so - the critic did not investigate the social causes of such amazing perversions. However, the "mature" Dostoevsky, who launched an artistic study of these contradictions, was unknown to Dobrolyubov.

So, having arisen and developed as a response to realism, "real criticism" in the achievements it has achieved was not and could not be this complete answer. But not only because of the indicated insufficiency (on the whole it was adequate to contemporary realism), but also because of the subsequent rapid development of realism and its contradictions, which revealed this insufficiency and posed new problems of reality before literary criticism.

In the second half of the century, the main question of the era - the peasant - was complicated by the more formidable question that "caught up" with it - about capitalism in Russia. Hence the growth of realism itself, which in its essence is critical in relation to both the old and the new orders, the growth and its contradictions. Hence the demand for literary criticism - to understand the social situation that has become more complicated and aggravated to the limit and to fully understand the contradictions of realism, to penetrate into the objective foundations of these contradictions and to explain the strength and weakness of new artistic phenomena. To do this, it was necessary not to discard, but just to develop the fruitful principles of "real criticism", its study of the objective aspects of the artistic process and the origins of the humanistic content of creativity, in contrast to the "recipes for salvation" proposed by the writer. Neither the sharp mind of D. I. Pisarev, whose theory of "realism" is ambiguously correlated with "real criticism", nor - all the more - populist criticism with its "subjective sociology" could fulfill this task. Such a task was feasible only for Marxist thought.

It must be said frankly that G. V. Plekhanov, who opened the first glorious pages of Russian Marxist literary criticism, did not quite cope with this task. His attention turned towards the economic basis of ideological phenomena and focused on the definition of their "social equivalents". He relegated the conquests of "real criticism" in the theory of art and in the study of the objective meaning of realistic works into the background. And he did this not out of any thoughtlessness, but quite deliberately: he considered these conquests to be the costs of deliberately wrong enlightenment and anthropologism, so that subsequently Soviet literary criticism had to return a lot to its rightful place. In theoretical terms, Plekhanov therefore returned to the old formula of the pre-Hegelian "philosophical aesthetics" about art as expressing the feelings and thoughts of people in living images, ignoring the specificity of the subject and the ideological content of art, and saw his task as a Marxist only in establishing the economic basis of this "psychideology". However, in the specific works of Plekhanov himself, the one-sided sociological bias, which often leads to erroneous results, is not so noticeable.

Bolshevik critics V. V. Vorovsky, A. V. Lunacharsky, A. K. Voronsky paid much more attention to the heritage of the democrats and their "real criticism". On the other hand, the epigones of "sociologism" brought the principle of "social equivalent" to a rigid social determinism that distorted the history of realistic creativity and rejected its cognitive significance, and at the same time "real criticism". V. F. Pereverzev, for example, believed that in her "naive realism" there is "not a grain of literary criticism", but only "racial publishing on topics touched upon by poetic works" (see: collection "Literary Studies". M., 1928 , p. 14). The antagonists of the "sociologists" - the formalists - did not accept "real criticism" either. One must think that Belinsky, Chernyshevsky, and Dobrolyubov themselves would not have been delighted to be next to either "sociologists" or formalists.

The real Marxist basis for "real criticism" was provided by V. I. Lenin, primarily through his articles on Tolstoy. "Real Criticism" was vital reflection theory in its true application to social phenomena, to literature and art as well. It was she who gave a convincing explanation of those "screaming contradictions" of realism, before which Dobrolyubov's thought was ready to stop. But the development and "removal" (in the dialectical sense) of "real criticism" by Lenin's theory of reflection in our literary thought is a long, complex and difficult process, it seems, not yet completed ...

It's another matter that our current literary critics - consciously or not - turn to the traditions of "real criticism", enrich or impoverish them as they can. But maybe they want to figure it out themselves?

And it is true: it would be good to remember more often the fruitful attitude of "real criticism" to living realistic literature - after all, it was she who created our unsurpassed classical literary-critical works.

August-- December 1986