Real criticism of the revolutionary democrats. Russian literary-critical and philosophical thought of the second half of the 19th century

REVOLUTIONARY-DEMOCRATIC AESTHETICS in Russia - an outstanding achievement of Russian and world philosophical and aesthetic thought, an organic component of the revolutionary democratic ideology, which was a reflection of the anti-serfdom revolutionary sentiments in Russian society in the 40-60s. XIX century, the real needs of democratic reforms and the revolutionary situation in pre-reform Russia.

Its revolutionary-democratic character was expressed in the substantiation of the principles of realistic art, which not only truthfully reflects social reality, but also pronounces a sentence on it from the standpoint of the masses. The founder of revolutionary democratic aesthetics, VG Belinsky, overcoming the well-known limitations and speculation of Hegelian aesthetics, paved the way for a materialistic solution of fundamental philosophical and aesthetic problems. N. G. Chernyshevsky systematically outlined the main categories of aesthetics in his dissertation "The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality" and in other works. N. A. Dobrolyubov made a significant contribution to revolutionary-democratic materialistic aesthetics, applying its methodological principles to the analysis of artistic practice, to the critical analysis of works of art.

Critically rethinking German philosophical and aesthetic thought, the aesthetics of romanticism, the Western European and Russian Enlightenment of the 18th - early 19th centuries, relying on the great Russian literature, which, starting with Pushkin, sought to reach the root of all social issues, the revolutionary democrats created a doctrine, covering almost all major aesthetic problems. These, first of all, should include: analysis of art as a specific form of reflection (reproduction) of reality; substantiation of realism, nationality, ideology, artistry; the role of fantasy, talent, worldview in the creative process. They paid much attention to the consideration of the subject of artistic creativity, the accuracy of the writer, his social significance. For the first time in the history of aesthetics, Russian revolutionary democrats made all aesthetic problems derivatives of the fundamental, cardinal question - the relation of aesthetic consciousness to reality. They created a system of materialistic views on art, on the category of aesthetics, which they opposed to idealistic concepts and theories.

Belinsky persistently argued that "poetry does not invent anything that would not be in reality itself." He put Pushkin in particular credit for the fact that he, “holding firmly to reality, being its organ, always said something new.” Art, according to Chernyshevsky, should depict life "in the forms of life itself." It borrows its forms not from inner subjective or some kind of supersensible life, but uses forms that are organically created by real life.

In an effort to uncover the roots and causes of social evil, the revolutionary democrats formulated the idea of ​​the typical in art as a reflection of the essential features and aspects of reality, concrete historical, social circumstances, the economic and social status of estates and groups and their psychology.

M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin has a great merit in the development of revolutionary democratic aesthetics. His humanism and revolutionary democratism expressed itself in the defense of the aesthetic principles of highly ideological realistic art, in the criticism of naturalism.

One of the central problems of Russian aesthetics is the nationality of art. Belinsky demanded from writers the ability to raise the public self-consciousness of the people, to write truthfully about his life, avoiding "sweet embellishment of the national character." These ideas were developed by Chernyshevsky. He proved that the idea of ​​the veracity of a work of art is impossible without revealing its nationality. He considered N. A. Nekrasov, the poet of "revenge and sorrow", to be the best poet, and he appreciated in his work the highly artistic expression of the revolutionary democratic way of thinking and feeling. Based on the analysis of Russian literature, he concluded that truly great art derives its ideological and artistic power from serving the people and the Motherland. The talent of a truly people's writer, according to the revolutionary democrats, is inherent in "guessing the general needs and thoughts of the era." The very scale of talent depends on the versatility and breadth of its vital and aesthetic ties with folk life, which enriches his creations with a truly sublime content.

In revolutionary democratic aesthetics, the problem of the unity of form and content, the unity of thought and feeling as the truth of human characters, the artistry of the work was developed. Works that are false in their main idea, Chernyshevsky believed, are also weak in artistic terms.

A truly artistic work, in the conviction of democratic revolutionaries, can never become obsolete. “It will always excite people and serve as an inexhaustible source of high pleasure” (Belinsky).

The revolutionary democrats sought to comprehend the complex problems of the artistic consciousness of the era, to find ways and forms of social self-determination of art in the revolutionary struggle, to theoretically substantiate the place of artists in the life of society, their moral and aesthetic mission. A. I. Herzen was an outstanding representative of revolutionary democratic materialism and dialectics, whose moral and aesthetic quests were embodied in the works of art he created, as well as in philosophical and aesthetic studies and literary critical articles.

The judgments of revolutionary democrats about art as a force that educates and shapes the human personality, capable of making a person a conscious participant in social transformations, are imbued with revolutionary humanistic content.

The moral content of art, according to Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, is connected with the problem of the positive hero. Through it, progressive historical ideals can be expressed. Chernyshevsky embodied his artistic idea of ​​a positive hero in the novel What Is To Be Done?, on which more than one generation of revolutionaries was brought up.

"New People" and Problems of the Future of Russia in the Poetry and Prose of Revolutionary Democrats

The 1860s went down in the history of our country as the years of the high rise of the democratic movement. Already during the Crimean War, a wave of peasant uprisings against the arbitrariness of the landowners was growing. The political situation in the country became especially aggravated after 1855. The defeat of tsarism in the Crimean War, which revealed a deep crisis in the feudal serf system, the unbearable oppression of the landlords, which lay with all its weight on the shoulders of millions of peasants, and the police arbitrariness that reigned in the country, gave rise to a revolutionary situation. During these years, during the preparation and implementation of the "peasant reform" on February 19, 1861, the peasant movement received a particularly wide scope. The largest was the performance of the peasants, led by Anton Petrov, in the village of Bezdne in the Kazan province in April 1861, which was brutally suppressed by the tsarist troops. The year 1861 also saw the fall of serious student protests in St. Petersburg and in some other cities, which had a pronounced democratic character. In 1861, the revolutionary organization "Land and Freedom" arose and expanded its activities. Proclamations are drawn up and distributed, addressed to the democratic youth, peasants, soldiers, and calling for an uprising, for resistance to the tsarist authorities and the feudal landowners. The Bell by Herzen and Ogarev and other publications of the uncensored press are widely distributed in Russia and contribute to the development of the democratic movement.

During these years, the most important question for revolutionary democrats was the question of preparing for a democratic peasant revolution, of merging the disparate actions of the peasants and democratic youth into a general offensive against the existing system. The ideological leaders of the unfolding movement, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, were preparing the democratic forces of society for this.

On the originality of Russian literary criticism.“As long as our poetry is alive and well, until then there is no reason to doubt the deep health of the Russian people,” wrote the critic N. N. Strakhov, and his associate Apollon Grigoriev considered Russian literature “the only focus of all our highest interests.” V. G. Belinsky bequeathed to his friends to put in his coffin an issue of the journal "Domestic Notes", and the classic of Russian satire M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin said in a farewell letter to his son: "Most of all, love your native literature and prefer the title of a writer to any other" . According to N. G. Chernyshevsky, our literature was elevated to the dignity of a national cause that united the most viable forces of Russian society. In the mind of the 19th century reader, literature was not only "belle literacy", but also the basis of the spiritual existence of the nation. The Russian writer treated his work in a special way: it was not a profession for him, but a service. Chernyshevsky called literature "a textbook of life", and Leo Tolstoy was later surprised that these words did not belong to him, but to his ideological opponent. The artistic development of life in Russian classical literature has never turned into a purely aesthetic pursuit, it has always pursued a living spiritual and practical goal. "The word was perceived not as an empty sound, but as a deed - almost as "religious" as the ancient Karelian singer Veinemeinen, who "made a boat with singing." Gogol also concealed this belief in the miraculous power of the word, dreaming of creating such a book that itself, by the power of the only and undeniably true thoughts expressed in it, should transform Russia," notes the modern literary critic G. D. Gachev. Belief in the effective, world-changing power of the artistic word also determined the characteristics of Russian literary criticism. From literary problems, she always rose to social problems, having a direct relation to the fate of the country, people, nation. The Russian critic did not limit himself to discussions about the art form, about the skill of the writer. Analyzing a literary work, he came to the questions that life put before the writer and reader. The orientation of criticism to a wide circle of readers made it very popular: the authority of the critic in Russia was great and his articles were perceived as original works, enjoying success on a par with literature. Russian criticism of the second half of the 19th century develops more dramatically. The public life of the country at that time became extraordinarily complicated, many political trends arose that argued with each other. The picture of the literary process also turned out to be motley and multilayered. Therefore, criticism has become more discordant compared to the era of the 30s and 40s, when the whole variety of critical assessments was covered by the authoritative word of Belinsky. Like Pushkin in literature, Belinsky was a kind of generalist in criticism: he combined sociological, aesthetic, and stylistic approaches in evaluating a work, embracing the literary movement as a whole with a single glance. In the second half of the 19th century, Belinsky's critical universalism proved to be unique. Critical thought specialized in certain directions and schools. Even Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, the most versatile critics, who possessed a broad public view, could no longer claim not only to cover the literary movement in its entirety, but also to holistically interpret an individual work. Their work was dominated by sociological approaches. Literary development as a whole and the place in it of the individual work were now revealed by the totality of critical trends and schools. Apollon Grigoriev, for example, arguing with Dobrolyubov's assessments of A. N. Ostrovsky, noticed in the work of the playwright such facets that eluded Dobrolyubov. Critical reflection on the work of Turgenev or Leo Tolstoy cannot be reduced to the assessments of Dobrolyubov or Chernyshevsky. N. N. Strakhov's works on "Fathers and Sons" and "War and Peace" significantly deepen and clarify them. The depth of understanding of I. A. Goncharov's novel "Oblomov" is not limited to Dobrolyubov's classic article "What is Oblomovism?": A. V. Druzhinin introduces significant clarifications into the understanding of Oblomov's character.

Literary and critical activity of revolutionary democrats . The social, socially critical pathos of the articles of the late Belinsky with his socialist convictions was picked up and developed in the sixties by revolutionary-democratic critics Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov. By 1859, when the government program and the views of the liberal parties became clear, when it became obvious that the reform "from above" in any of its variants would be half-hearted, the revolutionary democrats moved from a shaky alliance with liberalism to a break in relations and an uncompromising struggle against it. The literary-critical activity of N. A. Dobrolyubov falls on this, the second stage of the social movement of the 60s. He devotes a special satirical section of the Sovremennik magazine called Whistle to denouncing liberals. Here Dobrolyubov acts not only as a critic, but also as a satirical poet. Criticism of liberalism then alerted A. I. Herzen, (*11) who, being in exile, unlike Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, continued to hope for reforms "from above" and overestimated the radicalism of the liberals until 1863. However, Herzen's warnings did not stop the revolutionary democrats of Sovremennik. Beginning in 1859, they began to carry out the idea of ​​a peasant revolution in their articles. They considered the peasant community to be the core of the future socialist world order. Unlike the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov believed that the communal ownership of land rested not on the Christian, but on the revolutionary-liberation, socialist instincts of the Russian peasant. Dobrolyubov became the founder of the original critical method. He saw that the majority of Russian writers do not share the revolutionary-democratic way of thinking, do not pronounce sentence on life from such radical positions. Dobrolyubov saw the task of his criticism in completing the work begun by the writer in his own way and formulating this sentence, based on real events and artistic images of the work. Dobrolyubov called his method of comprehending the work of the writer "real criticism". Real 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 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? In this case, the critic takes the initiative in his own hands: he explains the reasons that gave rise to this or that phenomenon from revolutionary-democratic positions and then pronounces a sentence on him. Dobrolyubov positively evaluates, for example, Goncharov's novel Oblomov, although the author "does not even , apparently, does not want to give any conclusions. "It is enough that he" presents you with a living image and vouches only for its resemblance to reality. "For Dobrolyubov, such authorial objectivity is quite acceptable and even desirable, since he takes the explanation and sentence real criticism often led Dobrolyubov to a kind of reinterpretation of the writer's artistic images in a revolutionary-democratic way. assumed by the author himself. On this basis, as we shall see later, there was a decisive break between Turgenev and the journal "S contemporary", when Dobrolyubov's article about the novel "On the Eve" saw the light in it. In Dobrolyubov's articles, the young, strong nature of a talented critic comes to life, sincerely believing in the people, in which he sees the embodiment of all his highest moral ideals, with whom he connects the only hope for the revival of society. "His passion is deep and stubborn, and obstacles do not frighten him when they need to be overcome in order to achieve the passionately desired and deeply conceived," Dobrolyubov writes about the Russian peasant in the article "Features for Characterizing the Russian Common People." All the activity of criticism was aimed at the struggle for the creation of "the party of the people in literature." He devoted four years of vigilant labor to this struggle, writing nine volumes of works in such a short time. Dobrolyubov literally burned himself on the ascetic journal work, which undermined his health. He died at the age of 25 on November 17, 1861. Nekrasov said heartfeltly about the premature death of a young friend: But your hour struck too early And the prophetic pen fell from your hands. What a lamp of reason has gone out! What heart stopped beating! The decline of the social movement of the 60s. Disputes between "Sovremennik" and "Russian Word" . At the end of the 1960s, dramatic changes took place in Russian public life and critical thought. The Manifesto of February 19, 1861 on the emancipation of the peasants not only did not mitigate, but even more exacerbated the contradictions. In response to the upsurge of the revolutionary-democratic movement, the government launched an open offensive against progressive ideas: Chernyshevsky and D. I. Pisarev were arrested, and the publication of the Sovremennik magazine was suspended for eight months. The situation is aggravated by a split within the revolutionary-democratic movement, the main reason for which was the disagreement in assessing the revolutionary-socialist possibilities of the peasantry. The activists of Russkoye Slovo, Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev and Varfolomey Aleksandrovich Zaitsev, sharply criticized Sovremennik for (*13) its alleged idealization of the peasantry, for its exaggerated idea of ​​the revolutionary instincts of the Russian muzhik. Unlike Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, Pisarev argued that the Russian peasant was not ready for a conscious struggle for freedom, that for the most part he was dark and downtrodden. Pisarev considered the "intellectual proletariat", revolutionary raznochintsev, carrying natural science knowledge to the people, as the revolutionary force of modernity. This knowledge not only destroys the foundations of official ideology (Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality), but also opens the eyes of the people to the natural needs of human nature, which are based on the instinct of "social solidarity." Therefore, enlightening the people with the natural sciences can lead society to socialism not only in a revolutionary ("mechanical"), but also in an evolutionary ("chemical") way. In order to make this "chemical" transition faster and more efficient, Pisarev suggested that Russian democracy be guided by the "principle of economy of forces." The "intellectual proletariat" must concentrate all its energy on destroying the spiritual foundations of the society that exists today by propagating the natural sciences among the people. In the name of the so-understood "spiritual liberation", Pisarev, like Turgenev's hero Yevgeny Bazarov, proposed to abandon art. He really believed that "a decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet," and recognized art only to the extent that it participates in the promotion of natural science knowledge and destroys the foundations of the existing system. In the article "Bazarov" he glorified the triumphant nihilist, and in the article "Motives of Russian Drama" he "crushed" the heroine of A. N. Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm" Katerina Kabanova, erected on a pedestal by Dobrolyubov. Destroying the idols of the "old" society, Pisarev published the infamous anti-Pushkin articles and the work The Destruction of Aesthetics. The fundamental disagreements that emerged in the course of the controversy between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo weakened the revolutionary camp and were a symptom of the decline of the social movement. Public uplift in the 70s. By the beginning of the 1970s, the first signs of a new social upsurge associated with the activities of the revolutionary Narodniks began to appear in Russia. The second generation of revolutionary democrats, who made a heroic attempt to rouse the peasants to (*14) revolution by "going among the people," had their own ideologists, who developed the ideas of Herzen, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov in the new historical conditions. “Faith in a special way, in the communal system of Russian life; hence, faith in the possibility of a peasant socialist revolution, this is what inspired them, raised tens and hundreds of people to a heroic struggle against the government,” V. I. Lenin wrote about the populists of the seventies . This belief, to one degree or another, permeated all the works of the leaders and mentors of the new movement - P. L. Lavrov, N. K. Mikhailovsky, M. A. Bakunin, P. N. Tkachev. Mass "going to the people" ended in 1874 with the arrest of several thousand people and the subsequent trials of the 193rd and 50th. In 1879, at a congress in Voronezh, the populist organization "Land and Freedom" split: "politicians" who shared Tkachev's ideas organized their own party, "Narodnaya Volya", proclaiming the main goal of the movement to be a political coup and terrorist forms of struggle against the government. In the summer of 1880, the Narodnaya Volya organized an explosion in the Winter Palace, and Alexander II miraculously escaped death. This event causes shock and confusion in the government: it decides to make concessions by appointing the liberal Loris-Melikov as a plenipotentiary ruler and appealing to the country's liberal public for support. In response, the sovereign receives notes from Russian liberals, in which it is proposed to immediately convene an independent assembly of representatives of the zemstvos to participate in the government of the country "in order to develop guarantees and individual rights, freedom of thought and speech." It seemed that Russia was on the verge of adopting a parliamentary form of government. But on March 1, 1881, an irreparable mistake is made. The Narodnaya Volya, after repeated assassination attempts, kill Alexander II, and after this, a government reaction sets in in the country.

It is precisely at this time that the most intense literary

Pisarev's activities. He came into the democratic movement towards the end of the revolutionary situation of 1859-1861. Shortly after starting his work in democratic journalism, he was subjected to a lengthy prison sentence. His release coincided with an even more violent reaction after the shooting of Karakozov in 1866. The journal, in which he had worked until that time, was closed, new repressions rained down on democratic literature. And just two years after his release, a tragic death ended the life of a young critic.

The difficult conditions in which Pisarev's brilliant but short-lived activity in the democratic press unfolded, and especially the general difficult situation for the democratic movement, starting from 1862, but could not affect the direction of this activity, could not but affect the individual contradictions inherent in Pisarev.

But for all that, Pisarev was a characteristic "man of the sixties", a leading fighter of the democratic movement. The main thing that catches the eye in his works, often written under the vivid impression of the heavy losses, defeats and difficulties experienced by the democratic movement, is a feeling of deep, militant optimism, a firm conviction in the inevitability of moving forward, confidence in the final victory of the forces of democracy, constant fighting the spirit and youthful enthusiasm of a fighter.

We cannot but be struck by the intensity of Pisarev's literary activity, the diversity of his interests as a thinker and critic, which are so indicative of the revolutionary democratic writers of the 1860s in general. In a little over seven years of work in the democratic press, he wrote more than fifty major articles and essays, not counting reviews, and meanwhile, during this time, his journal activity was interrupted twice.

Throughout his activities in 1861-1868, Pisarev remained in the ranks of conscious fighters for a better future for his homeland. Turgenev He began as a poet. V. G. Belinsky, with whom Turgenev later became friends and who had a spiritual influence on him, highly appreciated his poetic work. The first poetic work approved by critics was the poem Parasha (1843). In 1844 - 1845, Turgenev wrote the first novels, tried his hand at dramaturgy. In the plays "The Freeloader", "Provincial Woman", "A Month in the Country" Turgenev touches on topics that he will turn to later: the quirkiness of human destinies, the transience of human happiness. These plays were successful on the stage, critics spoke favorably about them. “Turgenev made an attempt to elevate the drama to the height where it comes into contact with the realm of the tragedy of everyday life,” wrote years later the historian of the Russian theater N. N. Dolgov.

Belinsky in conversations constantly urged the writer to turn to the image of peasant life. “The people are the soil,” he said, “keeping the vital juices of all development; personality is the fruit of this soil.” Turgenev spent the summer months in the countryside, hunting, communicating with peasant hunters who retained their dignity, independent mind, sensitivity to the life of nature, and revealed to the writer the daily life of ordinary people. Turgenev came to the conclusion that serfdom did not destroy the living forces of the people, that "in the Russian man the germ of future great deeds, of great national development, lurks and ripens." For the writer, hunting has become a way of studying the whole structure of folk life, the inner warehouse of the folk soul, which is not always accessible to an outside observer.

At the beginning of 1847, the journal Sovremennik published a short essay by Turgenev, Khor and Kalinich, which the publisher published under the title From the Notes of a Hunter. The success of the essay was great and unexpected for the author. Belinsky explained it by the fact that in this work Turgenev "... came to the people from the side from which no one had come to him before him." The economic Khor with the “facial makeup” of the ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, with practical sense and practical nature, with a strong and clear mind, and the poetically gifted “idealist” Kalinich are the two poles of the peasant world. They were not just representatives of their environment, but bright and original characters. In them, the writer showed the fundamental forces of the nation, which determine its viability, the prospects for its further growth and development.

Turgenev decided to write more stories, united in the general cycle of "Notes of a Hunter", most of which were written abroad. They were published as a separate book in 1852 and became not only a literary event. They played a prominent role in preparing public opinion for future reforms in Russia. Readers saw in Turgenev's book a sharp criticism of the life of the landowners in Russia. The Hunter's Notes convinced them of the need to abolish serfdom as the basis of the entire social system in Russia. The censor who let the book go to print was removed from his post, and the writer himself was first arrested: formally - for violating censorship rules when publishing an article dedicated to the memory of Gogol, truly - for "Notes of a Hunter" and connections with progressive circles of revolutionary Europe - Bakunin, Herzen, Herweg. Later he was exiled to Spasskoe-Lutovinovo.

Turgenev was not the first Russian writer to write about the people. But a truly artistic discovery was the depiction of a simple Russian peasant as a person, a “man”. Peasant heroes of Turgenev are by no means idealized people, inseparable from their way of life with their worries and needs, and at the same time they are always unique, and often bright individuals. The writer depicted ordinary peasants with great sympathy, showed that in conditions of poverty and oppression, the peasants were able to preserve their mind, self-esteem, poetic and musical talent, faith in a better life. At the same time, Turgenev discovered in Russian literature the theme of contradictions and contrasts in the consciousness and morality of the Russian peasantry. Rebelliousness and servility, dreams of freedom and worship of the master's power, protest and humility, spiritual talent and indifference to one's own fate, worldly sharpness and complete lack of initiative - all these properties existed side by side, often turning one into another.

F. I. Tyutchev, after reading the “Notes of a Hunter”, especially emphasized the book’s inherent “combination of reality in the depiction of human life with everything that is hidden in it, and the hidden nature with all its poetry.” Nature, indeed, is the second hero of the book, equal in rights with man. It crowns the living, integral image of people's Russia. The accuracy of Turgenev's landscape, its volume, has long been noted. In the “Notes of a Hunter”, the description of nature is conditioned, firstly, by the plot - we look at everything as if through the eyes of the “hunter” author, and secondly, by Turgenev’s own philosophy of nature: the peasant lives one life with nature, peasant life is inseparably connected with it ; all nature is alive, in every blade of grass there is a special world with its own laws and secrets. The best heroes of the book are not simply depicted "against the background" of nature, but act as a continuation of its elements.

The anti-serfdom pathos of "A Hunter's Notes" lies in the fact that the writer added a gallery of living souls to Gogol's gallery of dead souls. The peasants in the "Notes of a Hunter" are serfs, dependent people, but serfdom did not turn them into slaves: spiritually they are freer and richer than their miserable masters. The existence of strong, courageous, bright folk characters turned serfdom into a disgrace and humiliation of Russia, into a social phenomenon incomparable with the moral dignity of a Russian person. The official order in which strong and gifted people are controlled by cruel, inhuman and narrow-minded petty tyrants-landlords looks wild and terrible. At the same time, in subsequent stories (“Mumu”, “Inn”), Turgenev notes that centuries of serfdom weaned the people from feeling like the owner of their native land, a citizen, that the Russian peasant is ready to resign himself to evil. And this is another reason for the denunciation of serfdom.

The Hunter's Notes contrasts two Russias: official, serf-owning, deadening life, on the one hand, and folk-peasant, lively and poetic, on the other hand. But the image of "Russia Alive" in social terms is not homogeneous. There is a whole group of nobles endowed with national Russian traits. The book repeatedly emphasizes that serfdom is hostile to both the human dignity of the peasant and the moral nature of the nobleman, that it is a nationwide evil that adversely affects the life of both estates.

In "Notes of a Hunter" Turgenev for the first time felt Russia as a single artistic whole. The central thought of the book is the harmonious unity of the viable forces of Russian society. His book opens the 60s in the history of Russian literature, anticipates them. A direct connection from the "Notes of a Hunter" goes to "Notes from the House of the Dead" by Dostoevsky, "Provincial Essays" by Saltykov-Shchedrin, "War and Peace" by Tolstoy.

The range of Turgenev's creativity is extraordinarily wide. He writes works (novels, short stories, plays) in which he illuminates the life of various strata of Russian society. The writer is looking for ways leading to the transformation of the social structure of Russia. Will and mind, righteousness and kindness, discovered by him in the Russian peasant, already seem to him insufficient for this purpose. The peasantry moves to the periphery of his work. Turgenev is addressing people from the educated class. In the novel "Rudin", written in 1855, its characters belong to the intelligentsia, who were fond of philosophy, dreamed of a bright future for Russia, but practically could not do anything for this, and the main character is largely autobiographical: he received a good philosophical education in Berlin university. Rudin is a brilliant speaker, he conquers society with brilliant philosophical improvisations about the meaning of life, about the high purpose of a person, but in everyday life he does not know how to clarify himself clearly and accurately, he feels badly those around him. This is a novel about the failure of noble idealism.

Once again, Turgenev tries to find a hero of his time in a noble society in the novel about the historical fate of the Russian nobility "The Nest of Nobles", written in 1858, when the revolutionary democrats and liberals were still fighting together against serfdom, but there was already a split between them. Turgenev sharply criticizes the groundlessness of the nobility - the separation of the class from their native culture, from the people, from Russian roots. For example, the father of the hero of the novel Lavretsky spent his whole life abroad, in all his hobbies he is infinitely far from Russia and the Russian people. He is a supporter of the constitution, but at the same time he cannot stand the sight of "fellow citizens" - peasants. Turgenev feared that the groundlessness of the nobility could cause Russia many troubles, he warned of the catastrophic consequences of those reforms that "are not justified either by knowledge of their native land, or by faith in an ideal."

Lavretsky greets the younger generation in the finale of the novel: “Play, have fun, grow young forces ...” At that time, such a finale was perceived as Turgenev’s farewell to the noble period of the Russian liberation movement and the coming to replace it with a new one, where the raznochintsy become the main characters. These are people of action, fighters for the enlightenment of the people. Their mental and moral superiority over representatives of the noble intelligentsia is undeniable. Turgenev was called "the chronicler of the Russian intelligentsia." He sensitively captured the underlying movements, feelings and thoughts of the "cultural layer" of the Russian people and in his novels embodied not only existing types and ideals, but also barely emerging ones. Such heroes appear in Turgenev's novels "On the Eve" (1860) and "Fathers and Sons" (1862): the Bulgarian revolutionary Dmitry Insarov and the democrat raznochinets Yevgeny Bazarov.

The hero of the novel "On the Eve" by Dmitry Insarov completely lacks the contradiction between word and deed. He is not busy with himself, all his thoughts are aimed at achieving the highest goal: the liberation of his homeland, Bulgaria. Even his love proved incompatible with this struggle. Public issues are in the foreground in the novel. “Note,” says Insarov, “the last peasant, the last beggar in Bulgaria and I - we want the same thing. We all have the same goal."

The novel "Fathers and Sons" is saturated with democratic ideology. In it, Turgenev portrayed a person in diverse and complex relationships with other people, with society, touching on both social and moral conflicts. In the work, not only representatives of different social groups - liberals and revolutionary democrats - collide, but also different generations. The central place in the novel is occupied by the conflict of ideological opponents: Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov - the representative of the "fathers", and Evgeny Bazarov - the representative of the "children". In the image of the protagonist Yevgeny Bazarov - a man of extraordinary intelligence and abilities, with high moral qualities and a noble soul - we see an artistic synthesis of the most essential aspects of the worldview of raznochinny democracy. At the same time, Bazarov is an extreme individualist, mercilessly denying morality, love, and poetry. In the novel, he is characterized as a nihilist.

Turgenev dreamed of uniting social forces to prepare for the coming changes. He wrote these novels with a secret hope that Russian society would listen to his warnings, that the “rights” and “lefts” would come to their senses and stop the fratricidal disputes that threatened tragedy for himself and the fate of Russia. He believed that his novels would serve to rally social forces. This calculation was not justified. The revolutionary democrats interpreted these novels in their own way. Publication in the Sovremennik magazine of Dobrolyubov's article "When will the real day come?" with criticism of the novel "On the Eve" led to Turgenev's break with the magazine, with which he had collaborated for many years. And the appearance of the novel "Fathers and Sons" only accelerated the process of ideological delimitation of Russian society, causing an effect opposite to what was expected. The theme of two generations, two ideologies turned out to be very relevant, and a heated controversy unfolded in the press. Friends and like-minded people accused Turgenev of exalting Bazarov and belittling the "fathers", currying favor with the younger generation. The critic Pisarev, on the contrary, found in him all the best and necessary traits for a young revolutionary who does not yet have room for his activities. In Sovremennik they saw in the image of Bazarov an evil caricature of the younger generation. In the context of the mobilization of democratic forces for a decisive struggle against the autocracy, Turgenev's critical attitude to the ideas of raznochintsy democracy, which affected the development of the image of Bazarov, was perceived by the figures of Sovremennik as an emphatically hostile act. Insulted by the rude and tactless controversy, Turgenev goes abroad. He intends to complete his literary career and writes the last stories - "Ghosts" (1864) and "Enough" (1865). They are imbued with deep sorrow, thoughts about the frailty of love, beauty and even art.

All Turgenev's works assert faith in the world-changing power of beauty, in the creative power of art. With Turgenev, not only literature, the poetic image of the companion of the Russian hero, the “Turgenev girl,” entered life. The writer chooses the period of a woman’s heyday, when a girl’s soul starts up in anticipation of the chosen one, such an excess of vitality radiates that will not receive a response and earthly incarnation, but will remain a tempting promise of something infinitely higher and more perfect, a guarantee of eternity. In addition, all Turgenev's heroes are tested by love. Turgenev wrote lyrical, largely autobiographical stories - a kind of trilogy about evil fate that pursues lovers, about the fact that a man in love is a slave to his feelings - the stories "Asya" (1858), "First Love" (1860) and "Spring Waters" (1872). It must be said that in many of Turgenev's works, inexplicable higher powers triumph over a person, controlling his life and death.

The last major works of the writer were the novels "Smoke" (1867) and "Nov" (1876). In the novel "Smoke" the extreme Westernizing views of Turgenev appeared, who expressed in the monologues of the hero Potugin many evil thoughts about the history and significance of Russia, whose only salvation is to tirelessly learn from the West. The protagonist of the novel, Litvinov, watching the smoke from the window of the carriage, suddenly felt that everything Russian, his own life, was smoke that "disappears without a trace, achieving nothing ...". This novel deepened the misunderstanding between Turgenev and the Russian public. The writer was accused of slandering Russia, criticizing the revolutionary emigration.

In the novel "Nov" Turgenev publicly spoke out on a topical topic: the birth of a new social movement - populism. The main thing in the novel is the clashes of different parties and strata of Russian society, in the first place, revolutionary agitators and peasants. The Narodniks have never been close to the people, but they are trying to serve them. Therefore, their attempts to "rake out the propaganda" of the dense peasants, to call them to rebellion inevitably lead to bitter disappointments and even to the suicide of one of the heroes. According to Turgenev, the future does not belong to impatient troublemakers, but to sober supporters of slow changes, people of action.

In the late 60s - early 80s, Turgenev created a number of novels and stories in which he refers to the historical past of Russia ("The Brigadier", "The Steppe King Lear", "Punin and Baburin"), such mysterious phenomena of the human psyche, as hypnosis and suggestion (“Klara Milic”, “Song of Triumphant Love”), supplemented “Notes of a Hunter” with several stories conceived back in the 40s (“The End of Chertopkhanov”, “Living Powers”, “Knocking!”), thereby strengthening the artistic unity of the book.

With the cycle of "Poems in Prose" (the first part was published in 1882), Turgenev, as it were, summed up his life and work. All the leading motifs of his work are reflected in lyrical miniatures: from the song of Russian nature (“Village”), thoughts about Russia, about love, about the insignificance of human existence, about the meaningfulness and fruitfulness of suffering, to the hymn to the Russian language: “But you can’t help but believe, lest such a language be given to a great people!” ("Russian language").

Turgenev's literary merits were highly valued not only in Russia. In the summer of 1879, he received word that Oxford University in England awarded him a Ph.D.

Chernyshevsky

New people . What distinguishes the "new people" from the "vulgar" ones, such as Marya Aleksevna? A new understanding of human "benefit", natural, unperverted, corresponding to human nature. Marya Aleksevna's advantage is that which satisfies her narrow, "unreasonable" petty-bourgeois egoism. New people see their "benefit" in something else: in the social significance of their work, in the enjoyment of doing good to others, of benefiting others - in "reasonable egoism." The morality of the new people is revolutionary in its deep, inner essence, it completely denies and destroys the officially recognized morality, on the foundations of which modern Chernyshevsky society is based - the morality of sacrifice and duty. Lopukhov says that "the victim is soft-boiled boots." All actions, all the deeds of a person are only truly viable when they are performed not under compulsion, but out of inner attraction, when they are consistent with desires and beliefs. Everything that is done in society under compulsion, under the pressure of duty, ultimately turns out to be inferior and stillborn. Such, for example, is the reform of the nobility "from above" - ​​the "sacrifice" brought by the upper class to the people. The morality of new people releases the creative possibilities of the human personality, joyfully realizing the true needs of human nature, based, according to Chernyshevsky, on the "instinct of social solidarity." In accordance with this instinct, Lopukhov is pleased to engage in science, and Vera Pavlovna is pleased to mess around with people, to start sewing workshops on reasonable and fair socialist principles. New people solve love problems and problems of family relations that are fatal for humanity in a new way. Chernyshevsky is convinced that the main source of intimate dramas is the inequality between a man and a woman, the dependence of a woman on a man. Emancipation, Chernyshevsky hopes, will significantly change the very nature of love. Excessive concentration of a woman on love feelings will disappear. Her participation on a par with a man in public affairs will remove the drama in love relationships, and at the same time destroy the feeling of jealousy as purely selfish in nature. (*151) New people differently, less painfully resolve the conflict of the love triangle, the most dramatic in human relations. Pushkin's "how, God forbid, you be loved to be different" becomes for them not an exception, but a daily norm of life. Lopukhov, having learned about Vera Pavlovna's love for Kirsanov, voluntarily makes way for his friend, leaving the stage. Moreover, on the part of Lopukhov, this is not a sacrifice - but "the most profitable benefit." Ultimately, having made a "calculation of benefits", he experiences a joyful feeling of satisfaction from an act that brings happiness not only to Kirsanov, Vera Pavlovna, but also to himself. It is impossible not to pay tribute to Chernyshevsky's belief in the limitless possibilities of human nature. Like Dostoevsky, he is convinced that man on Earth is an unfinished, transitional being, that he contains enormous creative potentials that have not yet been revealed, which are destined to be realized in the future. But if Dostoevsky sees the ways of revealing these possibilities in religion and not without the help of the higher forces of grace that stand above humanity, then Chernyshevsky trusts the forces of reason, capable of recreating human nature. Of course, the spirit of utopia breathes from the pages of the novel. Chernyshevsky has to explain to the reader how Lopukhov's "reasonable egoism" did not suffer from his decision. The writer clearly overestimates the role of reason in all human actions and actions. Lopukhov's reasoning gives off rationalism and rationality, the self-analysis carried out by him causes the reader to feel some invention, implausibility of human behavior in the situation in which Lopukhov found himself. Finally, it is impossible not to notice that Chernyshevsky facilitates the decision by the fact that Lopukhov and Vera Pavlovna do not yet have a real family, no child. Many years later, in the novel Anna Karenina, Tolstoy would rebut Chernyshevsky with the tragic fate of the main character, and in War and Peace he would challenge the excessive enthusiasm of democratic revolutionaries for the ideas of women's emancipation. But one way or another, in the theory of "reasonable egoism" of Chernyshevsky's heroes there is an undeniable attraction and an obvious rational grain, especially important for the Russian people, who for centuries lived under the strong pressure of autocratic statehood, which held back the initiative and sometimes extinguished the creative impulses of the human person. The morality of Chernyshevsky's heroes, in a certain sense, has not (*152) lost its relevance even in our times, when the efforts of society are aimed at awakening a person from moral apathy and lack of initiative, at overcoming dead formalism. "Special person" . New people in Chernyshevsky's novel are intermediaries between vulgar and superior people. “The Rakhmetovs are a different breed,” says Vera Pavlovna, “they merge with the common cause so that it is a necessity for them that fills their lives; for them it even replaces personal life. But for us, Sasha, this is not available. We are not eagles , How is he". Creating the image of a professional revolutionary, Chernyshevsky also looks into the future, in many ways ahead of his time. But the writer defines the characteristic properties of people of this type with the maximum possible completeness for his time. First, he shows the process of becoming a revolutionary, dividing Rakhmetov's life path into three stages: theoretical training, practical familiarization with the life of the people, and the transition to professional revolutionary activity. Secondly, at all stages of his life, Rakhmetov acts with full dedication, with an absolute strain of spiritual and physical strength. He goes through a truly heroic hardening both in mental studies and in practical life, where for several years he performs hard physical work, earning himself the nickname of the legendary Volga barge hauler Nikitushka Lomov. And now he has "an abyss of cases" about which Chernyshevsky specifically does not expand, so as not to tease the censorship. The main difference between Rakhmetov and new people is that "he loves more sublimely and wider": it is no coincidence that for new people he is a little scary, but for ordinary people, like the maid Masha, for example, he is his own person. Comparison of the hero with an eagle and with Nikitushka Lomov is simultaneously intended to emphasize both the breadth of the hero's views on life, and his extreme closeness to the people, sensitivity to understanding the primary and most urgent human needs. It is these qualities that make Rakhmetov a historical figure. "The mass of honest and kind people is great, and there are few such people; but they are in it - theine in tea, a bouquet in noble wine; strength and aroma come from them; this is the color of the best people, these are the engines of engines, this is the salt of the salt of the earth." Rakhmet's "rigorism" should not be confused with "sacrifice" or self-restraint. He belongs to that breed of people for whom the great common cause of historical (*153) scale and significance has become the highest need, the highest meaning of existence. There is no sign of regret in Rakhmetov's refusal of love, because Rakhmetov's "reasonable egoism" is larger and fuller than the rational egoism of new people. Vera Pavlovna says: “But is it possible for a man, such as we, not an eagle, to care for others, when he himself is very hard? Is he interested in convictions when he is tormented by his feelings?" But here the heroine expresses her desire to move to the highest stage of development that Rakhmetov has reached. "No, you need a personal matter, a necessary matter on which your own life would depend, which ... for my whole fate would be more important than all my hobbies with passion ... "This is how the novel opens up the prospect of new people moving to the higher level, a successive connection is built between them. But at the same time, Chernyshevsky does not consider Rakhmetov's "rigorism" the norm of everyday human existence. Such people are needed on the steep passes of history as individuals who absorb the nation's needs and deeply feel the nation's pain.That is why in the chapter "Change of scenery" the "lady in mourning" changes her outfit for a wedding dress, and next to her is a man of about thirty. love returns to Rakhmetov after the revolution. The fourth dream of Vera Pavlovna. The key place in the novel is occupied by Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream, in which Chernyshevsky unfolds the picture of a "bright future". He paints a society in which the interests of each are organically combined with the interests of all. This is a society where a person has learned to rationally control the forces of nature, where the dramatic division between mental and physical labor has disappeared, and the personality has acquired the harmonious completeness and completeness lost over the centuries. However, it was in Vera Pavlovna's Fourth Dream that the weaknesses typical of utopians of all times and peoples were revealed. They consisted in excessive "regulation of details", which caused disagreement even in the circle of Chernyshevsky's like-minded people. Saltykov-Shchedrin wrote: “Reading Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is To Be Done?, I came to the conclusion that his mistake was precisely that he was too preoccupied with practical ideals. forms of life final? After all, Fourier was also a great thinker, and the entire applied part of his theory turns out (*154) to be more or less untenable, and only undying general propositions remain. Hard labor and exile . Novel "Prologue". After the publication of the novel What Is to Be Done? the pages of legal publications were closed for Chernyshevsky forever. Following the civil execution stretched long and painful years of Siberian exile. However, even there Chernyshevsky continued his persistent fiction work. He conceived a trilogy consisting of the novels "Old Man", "Prologue" and "Utopia". The novel "Starina" was secretly transported to St. Petersburg, but the writer's cousin A. N. Pypin was forced to destroy it in 1866, when, after Karakozov shot at Alexander II, searches and arrests began in St. Petersburg. The novel "Utopia" Chernyshevsky did not write, the idea of ​​the trilogy went out on the unfinished novel "Prologue". The action of the "Prologue" begins in 1857 and opens with a description of the Petersburg spring. This is a metaphorical image, clearly hinting at the "spring" of public awakening, at a time of great expectations and hopes. But the bitter irony immediately destroys the illusion: "admiring the spring, he (Petersburg. - Yu. L.) continued to live in winter, behind double frames. And in this he was right: the Ladoga ice had not yet passed." This feeling of the impending "Ladoga ice" was not in the novel "What is to be done?". It ended with the optimistic chapter "A Change of Scenery", in which Chernyshevsky hoped to wait for a revolutionary upheaval very soon... But he never did. The pages of the novel Prologue are permeated with a bitter consciousness of lost illusions. Two camps are opposed to each other in it, the revolutionary democrats - Volgin, Levitsky, Nivelzin, Sokolovsky - and the liberals - Ryazantsev and Savelov. The first part of the "Prologue of the Prologue" deals with the private lives of these people. Before us is the story of the love relationship between Nivelzin and Savelova, similar to the story of Lopukhov, Kirsanov and Vera Pavlovna. Volgin and Nivelzin, new people, are trying to save the heroine from "family slavery". But nothing comes of this attempt. The heroine is not able to surrender to the "reasonable" arguments of "free love". She loves Nivelzin, but "she has such a brilliant career with her husband." It turns out that the most reasonable concepts are powerless in the face of complex reality, which does not want to fit into the Procrustean bed of clear and precise logical schemes. Thus, using a particular example, new people begin to realize (*155) that it is extraordinarily difficult to move life on the basis of lofty concepts and reasonable calculations. In the everyday episode, like in a drop of water, the drama of the social struggle of the sixties revolutionaries is reflected, who, according to V. I. Lenin, "remained alone and, apparently, suffered a complete defeat." If pathos "What to do?" - an optimistic statement of a dream, then the pathos of the "Prologue" is a collision of a dream with a harsh reality of life. Along with the general tone of the novel, its characters also change: where Rakhmetov was, now Volgin appears. This is a typical intellectual, strange, short-sighted, absent-minded. He is always ironic, bitterly joking with himself. Volgin is a man of "a suspicious, timid nature", the principle of his life is "to wait and wait as long as possible, to wait as quietly as possible." What caused such a strange position for a revolutionary? The liberals invite Volgin to make a radical speech at a meeting of the provincial nobles so that, frightened by it, they will sign the most liberal draft of the upcoming peasant reform. Volgin's position at this meeting is ambiguous and comical. And so, standing aside by the window, he falls into deep thought. “He recalled how, it used to be, a crowd of drunken barge haulers was walking along the street of his native city: noise, screaming, remote songs, robber songs. the door of the booth opens a little, from which a sleepy old face, with a gray, half-faded mustache, pops out, a toothless mouth opens and either screams, or groans with a decrepit wheeze: “Cattle, why are they roaring? Here I am!" The daring gang fell silent, the front one is buried behind the back - there would still be such a shout, and the daring fellows would have fled, calling themselves "not thieves, not robbers, Stenka Razin workmen", promising that as they "wave the oar", then "Moscow will be shaken" - they would have fled, wherever their eyes look ... "Pitiful nation, miserable nation! A nation of slaves, from top to bottom, all slaves…” he thought, and frowned. How to be a revolutionary, if he does not see a grain of that revolutionary spirit in the nikushkas of the drowsmen, which he dreamed of during the period of work on the novel What Is To Be Done? A question that has already been answered is now put in a new way. "Wait," Volgin replies. The most active in the novel "Prologue" are the liberals. They really (*156) really have an “abyss of deeds”, but they are perceived as empty dances: “They talk:“ Let’s free the peasants. ”Where is the strength for such a thing? And you see what it’s going to: they’ll release you. What will come out? Reproaching the people in slavery for the lack of revolutionary spirit in them, Volgin, in disputes with Levitsky, suddenly expresses doubts about the expediency of revolutionary ways to change the world in general: “The smoother and calmer the progress of improvements, the better. It is a general law of nature: a given amount of force produces the greatest amount of motion when it acts smoothly and constantly; action by jerks and jumps is less economical. Political economy has revealed that this truth is just as immutable in social life. We should wish that everything went off quietly, peacefully. The calmer, the better." It is obvious that Volgin himself is in a state of agonizing doubts. This is partly why he restrains the young impulses of his friend Levitsky. But Volgin's call to "wait" cannot satisfy the young romantic. It seems to Levitsky that now when the people are silent, and it is necessary to work to improve the fate of the peasant, to explain to society the tragedy of his situation. But society, according to Volgin, "does not want to think about anything but trifles." And in such conditions, one will have to adapt to his views, exchange great ideas on petty trifles. One warrior in the field is not an army, why fall into exaltation. What to do? There is no clear answer to this question in the Prologue. The novel ends on a dramatic note of an unfinished dispute between the characters and goes into a description of Levitsky's love interests, which, in turn, are interrupted in mid-sentence. Such is the result of Chernyshevsky's artistic work, which by no means reduces the significance of the writer's legacy. Pushkin once said: "A fool alone does not changes, because time does not bring him development, and experiences do not exist for him. At hard labor, persecuted and persecuted, Chernyshevsky found the courage to face the truth, which he told himself and the world in the novel Prologue, directly and harshly. This courage is also a civil feat of Chernyshevsky, a writer and thinker. Only in August 1883 Chernyshevsky was "mercifully" (*157) allowed to return from Siberia, but not to St. Petersburg, but to Astrakhan, under police supervision. He met Russia, engulfed in government reaction after the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya. After a seventeen-year separation, he met with the aged Olga Sokratovna (only once, in 1866, she visited him for five days in Siberia), with adult sons completely unfamiliar to him ... Chernyshevsky lived alone in Astrakhan. The whole Russian life has changed, which he hardly understood and could no longer enter. After much trouble, he was allowed to move to his homeland, to Saratov. But shortly after arriving here, on October 17 (29), 1889, Chernyshevsky died.

Dobrolyubov

By 1857, when Dobrolyubov devoted himself entirely to journal work, his first major article on a purely literary topic, about Shchedrin's "Provincial Essays," dates back. This is already a typical Dobrolyubov article "about", where the author of the work being analyzed remains almost on the sidelines, and the whole task of the critic is to discuss the conditions of our social life on the basis of the material given by the work. Opponents of Dobrolyubov see in this method the complete destruction of aesthetics and the abolition of art. They look at Dobrolyubov as one of the founders of that extremely utilitarian view of art, which reached later in the 60s in the person of Pisarev. There is a complete misunderstanding in this very widespread understanding of the Dobrolyubov method. One cannot deny, of course, the genetic connection between the two leaders of the new generation, but Dobrolyubov's boundless respect for Pushkin alone shows that there is no way to establish any close connection between them.

In complete contrast to Pisarev, who dreamed of a journalistic art that would carry out ideals that he liked, Dobrolyubov laid the foundation for exclusively journalistic criticism with his articles. Not an artist, but only a critic, he turned into a publicist. In art, he directly pursued rational tendentiousness; for example, he refused to analyze Pisemsky's "A Thousand Souls" because it seemed to him that the content in it was adapted to a well-known idea. Dobrolyubov demanded only one thing from a literary work: the truth of life, which would make it possible to look at it with complete confidence. Art, therefore, for Dobrolyubov is something completely self-sufficient, only as interesting as it is independent. The complete groundlessness of Dobrolyubov's accusations of destroying art will become even more obvious if we turn to the actual consideration of what exactly in the sphere of Russian art he destroyed. Yes, Dobrolyubov really destroyed the inflated reputations of Countess Rostopchina, Rosenheim, Benediktov, Sollogub with his witty ridicule. But isn't the fame of the two largest representatives of the "aesthetic" generation of the 1940s closely connected with the name of Dobrolyubov? Who more than Dobrolyubov contributed to Goncharov's fame with his famous article: "What is Oblomovism"? It was only thanks to Dobrolyubov that the deep meaning that lurked in the novel, which so fully reflected the life of serf Russia, was revealed. The interpretation given by Dobrolyubov in The Dark Kingdom to Ostrovsky's works is disputed by some; but it has not yet occurred to anyone to dispute the fact that it was the “whistle-blower” Dobrolyubov who created real all-Russian fame for Ostrovsky, which his closest literary friends in the Slavophilizing Moskvityanin were powerless to deliver to him. In The Dark Kingdom and What is Oblomovism, Dobrolyubov's talent reached its climax.

Particularly remarkable in terms of the power of talent is The Dark Kingdom, which stands completely apart not only in Russian, but also in European critical literature. This is no longer an auxiliary analysis, but a completely independent, purely creative synthesis, which from disparate features has created a logical construction that is striking in its harmony. Apollon Grigoriev himself, who for ten years went round and round about Ostrovsky, entangled in mystical distractions and narrow-circle interpretations, was blinded by the light thrown on the work of his idol by a man of the “party” opposite to Ostrovsky. But the fact of the matter is that Dobrolyubov drew the high animation and fiery indignation penetrating the "Dark Kingdom" not from adherence to one or another literary circle, but from a deep humane feeling that penetrated his entire being. It was it that gave him that foresight of the heart, with the help of which he managed to paint a stunning picture of tyranny, humiliated lawlessness, spiritual darkness and a complete lack of concept of human dignity, in their totality forming a world branded by Dobrolyubov with the name of "dark kingdom".

There are also a number of other writers who also received nothing but the warmest greetings from Dobrolyubov. He was extremely sympathetic towards Zhadovskaya, Polonsky, Pleshcheev, Marko-Vovchka; he gave genuinely sympathetic comments on Turgenev's "On the Eve" ("When will the real day come") and Dostoevsky's "Humiliated and Insulted" ("The Downtrodden People"). Going through all this long series of literary reputations that have found powerful support in the authoritative word of Dobrolyubov, one asks oneself with bewilderment: why is Dobrolyubov a "negative"? Is it really only because the general meaning of his work is a protest against lawlessness and a denial of the dark forces of our life, which did not allow the “real day” to come? This is usually answered by pointing to the "Whistle" - a satirical supplement to the "Contemporary", instituted in 1858 by Dobrolyubov together with Nekrasov. Dobrolyubov was the most active contributor to the "Whistle" and, under the pseudonym of Konrad Lilienschwager, Jacob Ham and others, wrote many poems and satirical articles, occupying a whole half of volume IV of his collected works. Even people who are generally friendly to Dobrolyubov blame him for the Whistle, which supposedly laid the foundation for the "whistle dance", that is, the gross mockery of authorities and the unbridled tone that took root in our journalism in the 1860s.

This accusation is the result of mixing Dobrolyubov with the later phenomena of Russian literary life. One has only to take a closer look at what Dobrolyubov wrote in "The Whistle" to make sure that, with the exception of a very few and very mild mockery of Pogodin and Vernadsky, almost all of Dobrolyubov's "whistle-dance" is not only not directed against "authorities", but, on the contrary, he sneers at people almost "his own". Dobrolyubov was indignant at the herd nature of our suddenly born "progress"; his sincere nature was disgusted by the parade of progressiveness. "Whistle" laughs at Benediktov, Rosenheim, Kokorev, Lvov, Semevsky, Sollogub, who "blew our ears, crying out about truth, openness, bribery, freedom of trade, the dangers of farming, the vileness of oppression," etc. As for the imaginary rudeness of Dobrolyubov's " pandemonium", then this has nothing to do with reality. Possessing a rare wit and remarkable poetic talent, Dobrolyubov ironically remarkably subtly. And if, as someone put it, the polemists of the 1860s went out to battle armed with dirty mops, then Dobrolyubov always went to the duel with the thinnest Toledo sword in his hand. - A simple look at the weather distribution of Dobrolyubov's articles is enough to make sure that such work is beyond the power of even the most talented person.

Russian early Hegelianism, as we have seen it so far, was associated with circles influenced by German culture - but in the person of Herzen, we meet with another type of Russian Hegelianism - adjoining not to German, but to French culture. True, Herzen in his youth experienced the extraordinary influence of Schiller, which he recalls many times in his memoirs ("Past and Thoughts"); German romance and even mysticism was also not alien to him. Nevertheless, the main features of Herzen's spiritual structure were formed under the influence of French literature, both of the 18th and 19th centuries. The general revolutionary attitude, the religious-utopian striving for the establishment of truth on earth, socialist dreams - all this was formed by Herzen under French influence. In this sense, it is not accidental that the disappointment in Western culture, which sharpened Herzen's "spiritual drama", is connected precisely with his French impressions and should be attributed in its essential content precisely to French culture. The acute aversion to the bourgeois (“petty-bourgeois”) psychology, which Herzen depicts with such inimitable force in the works of the period abroad, is caused mainly by his French impressions.

Russian early Hegelianism almost completely ignored the general provisions of Hegel's philosophy and concentrated on questions of the philosophy of history. However, special attention to the problem of personality led thought beyond the limits of historical existence and prompted the raising of questions of a general philosophical nature. So it was with Bakunin, even more vividly with Belinsky, so it was in the last year of his life with Stankevich, but in essence we will find the same thing with Herzen. And for Herzen, the philosophy of history at first acquires paramount importance, but for him a critical attitude and partial overcoming of Hegelianism is also connected with the problem of personality. All this is very typical of the paths of Russian philosophy - it gradually absorbs certain elements from the constructions of Western philosophers, relies on them, but then goes into problems that focus all attention, all creative searches. As for Herzen, his original philosophical work, his special genuine "philosophical experience" were concentrated both on the topic of personality and on the socio-ethical topic. Herzen received a very solid natural science education in his youth, in a certain sense he can even be considered the founder of Russian positivism (with its main focus on natural science), but Herzen's main philosophical searches are anthropocentric. In this sense, Herzen is close to the vast majority of Russian thinkers.

At the same time, Herzen is moving along the paths of the Russian secular thoughts, he is one of the brightest and even passionate spokesmen of Russian secularism. But that courageous truthfulness, which passes through all the years of Herzen's searches, leads to the fact that in Herzen, more brightly than in anyone else, secularism reaches its dead ends. We shall see that it is precisely from here that the stamp of tragedy is explained, which fell on Herzen's entire ideological work during the period of his life abroad.

Herzen's brilliant literary talent, which placed him in the group of first-class Russian writers, helped him find his own special Herzenian style, his own special manner of presenting and developing his thoughts. But for the historian of philosophy, this manner of writing is more difficult than helpful. Herzen really constantly, even when developing the most abstract propositions, turns from pure analysis to an artistic manner of writing, interrupts his reasoning with a lively, almost always very bright and successful dialogue with someone, turning reasoning into an "exchange of opinions." Herzen's philosophical ideas are often expressed to him "en passant" and they must be collected, systematized, for him sometimes formulate general provisions. Let us note, by the way, that already in Herzen's work (as it was partly in Prince Odoevsky's before him) the internal inseparability philosophical and artistic thinking - which we will find later in Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and even Vl. Solovyov, not to mention dii minores,<<*1>> like Rozanov, Leontiev and others. In Herzen, the artist constantly broke into the work of the thinker and turned, so to speak, to his advantage what was obtained in the work of pure thought. Although Herzen's artistic talent never rose to the heights to which the work of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky rose, yet Herzen was undoubtedly a real artist, as evidenced by his stories and especially his memoirs Past and Thoughts.

Herzen was "saved from moral ruin" by faith in Russia. Of course, the ardent love for Russia, which was always inherent in Herzen, had an effect here, but also faith in Russia (as faith in Western Europe used to) much more determined by social aspirations than by national feeling. Herzen pinned all his social hopes on the Russian community (in this sense, Herzen, even more than the Slavophiles, is the creator of the so-called populism (see below, in Chapter VIII). Together with Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Leontiev, Herzen renounces the former "eon" of history (i.e., its European era) and surrenders to the thought of a "new aeon". Herzen's criticism of European culture is gradually freed from captiousness and is entirely determined only by reflection on the mistakes and untruths of the past. Herzen's literary activity is entirely goes into journalism, but this is philosophical journalism, all permeated with general (new) views on history, on the problem of progress. In the last period of his activity, Herzen considers himself a "nihilist, but in an interpretation that does not bring him closer to his contemporary Bazarovs, but, on the contrary, it separates them from them. generation defended realism (in its rather primitive form), but Herzen, although he was a positivist, although he gravitated towards philosophical realism, he always was and remained to the end romantic. The spiritual attitudes of both sides, for all their similarity in certain points of outlook, were profoundly different, and Herzen was not the only one who painfully experienced the break that followed from this.

On the ideological line, the heirs of Belinsky.

Chernyshevsky: "The beautiful is life" - the main pathos - literature must serve life, therefore, the main requirement: the authors must serve the public needs of readers ("Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom").

The most active and popular literary trend of the 1860s, which set the tone for the entire social and literary life of the era, was the "real" criticism of the radical democratic orientation. Its main publications were the magazines Sovremennik and Russkoe Slovo.

The irreversibility of the ideological delimitation was clearly manifested in the fate of Nekrasov's Sovremennik. Extreme in their latent anti-government orientation, the statements of that circle of writers, behind whom the ideologically oriented collective designation of “revolutionary democrats” was fixed for many decades in Soviet historiography - Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, their followers and successors: Saltykov-Shchedrin, Antonovich, Zhukovsky - forced even such Belinsky's propagandists, like Turgenev, Botkin, Annenkov, leave the magazine.

In 1854 he made his debut in Sovremennik Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky, who, after the very first speeches, attracted attention with his directness and boldness of judgments. In articles and reviews, Chernyshevsky appears as a truly faithful follower of Belinsky’s ideas as a theorist of the “natural school”: following the author after the author of the famous “letter to Gogol”, the critic of Sovremennik demands from writers a truthful and meaningful depiction of the realities of the surrounding reality, revealing modern social conflicts and demonstrating the hardships of the life of the oppressed classes. Chernyshevsky's creed as a journalist and writer is revealed by his polemical work "On Sincerity in Criticism". The main task of critical activity, the author of the article recognizes the spread among the "mass of the public" of understanding the social and aesthetic significance of a work, its ideological and substantive merits - Chernyshevsky brings to the fore the educational, educational possibilities of criticism. In pursuing the goals of literary and moral mentoring, the critic should strive for "clarity, certainty and directness" of judgments, for the rejection of ambiguity and ambiguity of assessments. These principles were practically implemented by many like-minded people and followers of Chernyshevsky.

"Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature" can be regarded as the first major development of the history of Russian criticism in the 1830s-1840s. Positively assessing the work of Nadezhdin (for the principle of anti-romantic speeches) and N. Polevoy (for convinced democracy), Chernyshevsky focuses on the activities of Belinsky, who outlined the true routes for the progressive development of Russian art literature. Following Belinsky, Chernyshevsky recognizes the critical image of Russian life as the key to literary and social progress in Russia, taking Gogol's work as a standard for such an attitude to reality.

The desire to demonstrate the change in social needs can also explain Chernyshevsky's harsh attitude towards the moderate liberal ideology that originated in the 1840s: the journalist believed that a sober and critical understanding of reality at the present stage is not enough, it is necessary to take concrete actions aimed at improving the conditions of public life. These views found expression in the famous article "The Russian Man on Rendez-Vous", which is also remarkable from the point of view of Chernyshevsky's critical methodology. Turgenev's short story "Asya" became the occasion for large-scale journalistic generalizations of the critic, which did not aim to reveal the author's intention. In the image of the protagonist of the story, Chernyshevsky saw a representative of the widespread type of “best people”, who, like Rudin or Agarin (the hero of Nekrasov’s poem “Sasha”), have high moral virtues, but are not capable of decisive actions. The deep accusatory pathos of the article is directed not against individuals, but against the reality that gives rise to such people.

In 1862, Chernyshevsky was arrested on charges of having relations with the political emigrant Herzen and in drawing up a proclamation “Bow to the lord peasants from their well-wishers ...”, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul Fortress of St. Petersburg, spent more than 20 years in hard labor, in the Nerchinsk mines.

N. Chernyshevsky "Russian man onrendez- vous»

Since 1858, the head of the literary-critical department of Sovremennik became Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov. 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 is the reflection of the interests of the oppressed classes, which can be achieved with the help of a truthful, and therefore sharply critical image of the "higher" classes, or with the help of a sympathetic (but not idealized) depiction of folk life. In the article "On the degree of participation of the people in the development of Russian literature", Dobrolyubov outlined the historical and literary guidelines for radical criticism. According to the critic, only the earliest, pre-literary (i.e., folklore) works of Russian literature can be considered truly folk.

Dobrolyubov does not exclude the idea of ​​the unconscious nature of artistic creativity. From this point of view, a special role belongs to criticism, which, by subjecting the picture of life to analytical comprehension by the artist, formulates the necessary conclusions. As a source for lengthy publicistic reasoning, Dobrolyubov used the works of Ostrovsky (the articles "The Dark Kingdom", "A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom"), Goncharov ("What is Oblomovism?"), Turgenev ("When will the real day come?"), Dostoevsky ("The Downtrodden People"). However, despite such a variety of objects of literary criticism, due to the desire for broad generalizations, these articles can be considered as a single metatext, the pathos of which boils down to proving the inferiority of Russian socio-political foundations.

Dobrolyubov's critical methodology is based on a kind of socio-psychological typification that separates literary heroes according to the degree of their correspondence to the ideals of the "new man".

N. Dobrolyubov "What is Oblomovism?"

The leading employee of the "Russian Word" quickly became Dmitry Ivanovich Pisarev. Having managed to abandon the traditional role of the critic as a modest and courteous interpreter of literature, which developed during his short work in the "magazine for adult girls" "Dawn", Pisarev the writer found himself in the image of a fearlessly mocking skeptic, questioning any, even the most authoritative and popular teachings, shocking the reader with deliberate straightforwardness and unexpected paradoxical judgments. The modern “realist” thinker, according to Pisarev, needs to overcome the traditional, a priori schemes of world perception and subject the established social and ideological programs to a merciless analysis. At the same time, the only criterion for their evaluation should be the factor of utility, understood from a natural-scientific, empirical point of view, including through the prism of human physiological needs.

Pisarev subordinates his aesthetic and literary reasoning to extremely utilitarian ideas about human activity. The only purpose of fiction is declared to be the promotion of certain ideas, based on the tendentious reproduction of social conflicts and on the image of "new heroes". Not surprisingly, Pisarev's favorite works of the 1860s were Turgenev's "Fathers and Sons" and "What Is to Be Done?" Chernyshevsky, realizing Pisarev's innermost ideas about conscious rational work aimed at creating personal and public good. Among other novelists of the 1860s, Pisemsky, Pomyalovsky, Dostoevsky received condescending praise from Pisarev, but by the middle of the decade, the critic was becoming more and more convinced of the absolute futility of aesthetic activity.

The essential features of the stylistic handwriting of the critic of the Russkoye Slovo are an ironic tone, aphoristic sharpness, satirical imagery, often supplemented by confessional-lyrical and pathetic motifs.

D. Pisarev "Motives of Russian drama"

17. "Organic Criticism"

Apollon Grigoriev(1822 - 1864) Russian poet, literary and theater critic, translator, memoirist, author of a number of popular songs and romances. Apollon Alexandrovich Grigoriev, who quickly became the main critic of The Mosvityanin, long before the formulation of his concept of "organic" criticism, sought to combine ideas about the historical conditioning of literature, about its faithful adherence to "reality as it is" with the need to reflect eternal moral ideals.

Grigoriev himself most often and more willingly called his criticism "organic", in contrast to both the camp of "theoreticians" - Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov, Pisarev, and "aesthetic" criticism, which defends the principle of "art for art's sake", and from criticism "historical" , by which he meant Belinsky.

Belinsky Grigoriev put unusually high. He called him "an immortal fighter of ideas", "with a great and powerful spirit", with "truly ingenious nature". But Belinsky saw in art only a reflection of life, and the very concept of life for him was too direct and "holological." According to G. “life is something mysterious and inexhaustible, an abyss that absorbs every finite mind, an immense expanse in which the logical conclusion of any smart head often disappears like a wave in the ocean - something even ironic and at the same time full of love that produces from itself worlds after worlds. Accordingly, “the organic view recognizes creative, immediate, natural, vital forces as its starting point. In other words: not one mind, with its logical requirements and the theories generated by them, but the mind plus life and its organic manifestations. However, Grigoriev strongly condemned the "serpentine situation: what is - it is reasonable."

He recognized the mystical admiration of the Slavophiles for the Russian folk spirit as “narrow” and only A. S. Khomyakov put it very highly, and that because he “one of the Slavophiles combined the thirst for the ideal in an amazing way with faith in the infinity of life and therefore did not calm down on ideals” Konstantin Aksakov in others. In Victor Hugo's book on Shakespeare, Grigoriev saw one of the most complete formulations of the "organic" theory, of which he also considered Renan, Emerson and Carlyle to be followers. And the "original, huge ore" of organic theory, according to Grigoriev, is "Schelling's works in all phases of his development." Grigoriev proudly called himself a student of this "great teacher."

From admiration for the organic power of life in its various manifestations follows Grigoriev's conviction that abstract, bare truth, in its pure form, is inaccessible to us, that we can only assimilate truth in color, the expression of which can only be national art. Pushkin is by no means great because of the size of his artistic talent: he is great because he has transformed in himself a whole range of foreign influences into something completely independent. In Pushkin, for the first time, "our Russian physiognomy, the true measure of all our social, moral and artistic sympathies, a complete outline of the type of the Russian soul" was isolated and clearly identified. With special love, therefore, Grigoriev dwelled on the personality of Belkin, almost completely uncommented by Belinsky, on The Captain's Daughter and Dubrovsky. With the same love he dwelled on Maxim Maksimovich from "A Hero of Our Time" and with particular hatred - on Pechorin, as one of the "predatory" types that are completely alien to the Russian spirit.

ORGANIC CRITICISM- the direction of the Russian. critics of the 1860s, developed by A. Grigoriev and continued by N. Strakhov. A. Grigoriev saw in the suit an integral synthetic phenomenon and oriented criticism towards revealing in the artist. prod. the specifics of the author's intention, the "thought of the heart" embodied in it. The position of A. Grigoriev (to understand what the artist wanted to say) was opposed both to journalistic objectivism and the "didacticism" of real criticism (analysis of what was said in the work), and to the artist. objectivism of "purely technical", aesthetic criticism. In semiotic terms, O.K. can be characterized as an orientation towards the pragmatics of lit. image, i.e. as one of the necessary aspects of lit. analysis.

A. Grigoriev "On Truth and Sincerity in Art", "Paradoxes of Organic Criticism"

The social, socially critical pathos of the articles of the late Belinsky with his socialist convictions was picked up and developed in the sixties by revolutionary-democratic critics Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Alexandrovich Dobrolyubov.

By 1859, when the government program and the views of the liberal parties became clear, when it became obvious that the reform "from above" in any of its variants would be half-hearted, the revolutionary democrats moved from a shaky alliance with liberalism to a break in relations and an uncompromising struggle against it. The literary-critical activity of N. A. Dobrolyubov falls on this, the second stage of the social movement of the 60s. He devotes a special satirical section of the Sovremennik magazine called Whistle to denouncing liberals. Here Dobrolyubov acts not only as a critic, but also as a satirical poet.

Criticism of liberalism then alerted A. I. Herzen, (*11) who, being in exile, unlike Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, continued to hope for reforms "from above" and overestimated the radicalism of the liberals until 1863. However, Herzen's warnings did not stop the revolutionary democrats of Sovremennik. Beginning in 1859, they began to carry out the idea of ​​a peasant revolution in their articles. They considered the peasant community to be the core of the future socialist world order. Unlike the Slavophiles, Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov believed that the communal ownership of land rested not on the Christian, but on the revolutionary-liberation, socialist instincts of the Russian peasant.

Dobrolyubov became the founder of the original critical method. He saw that the majority of Russian writers do not share the revolutionary-democratic way of thinking, do not pronounce sentence on life from such radical positions. Dobrolyubov saw the task of his criticism in completing the work begun by the writer in his own way and formulating this sentence, based on real events and artistic images of the work. Dobrolyubov called his method of comprehending the work of the writer "real criticism".

Real 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 uses them and thanks the author; if not, he does not stick to him with a knife to his throat - how, they say, he dared to draw such a face without explaining the reasons for its existence? In this case, the critic takes the initiative in his own hands: he explains the causes that gave rise to this or that phenomenon from revolutionary-democratic positions and then pronounces a sentence on him.

Dobrolyubov positively evaluates, for example, Goncharov's novel Oblomov, although the author "does not and, apparently, does not want to give any conclusions." It is enough that he "presents to you a living image and vouches only for its resemblance to reality." For Dobrolyubov, such authorial objectivity is quite acceptable and even desirable, since he takes the explanation and the verdict on himself.

Real criticism often led Dobrolyubov to a kind of reinterpretation of the writer's artistic images in a revolutionary democratic way. It turned out that the analysis of the work, which developed into an understanding of the acute problems of our time, led Dobrolyubov to such radical conclusions that the author himself did not in any way assume. On this basis, as we shall see later, there was a decisive break between Turgenev and the Sovremennik magazine, when Dobrolyubov's article on the novel "On the Eve" saw the light of day in it.

In Dobrolyubov's articles, the young, strong nature of a talented critic comes to life, sincerely believing in the people, in which he sees the embodiment of all his highest moral ideals, with whom he connects the only hope for the revival of society. "His passion is deep and stubborn, and obstacles do not frighten him when they need to be overcome in order to achieve the passionately desired and deeply conceived," Dobrolyubov writes about the Russian peasant in the article "Features for Characterizing the Russian Common People." All the activity of criticism was aimed at the struggle for the creation of "the party of the people in literature." He devoted four years of vigilant labor to this struggle, writing nine volumes of works in such a short time. Dobrolyubov literally burned himself on the ascetic journal work, which undermined his health. He died at the age of 25 on November 17, 1861. About the premature death of a young friend, Nekrasov said heartfeltly:

But your hour has struck too soon
And the prophetic feather fell from his hands.
What a lamp of reason has gone out!
What heart stopped beating!

The decline of the social movement of the 60s. Disputes between "Sovremennik" and "Russian Word"

At the end of the 1960s, dramatic changes took place in Russian public life and critical thought. The Manifesto of February 19, 1861 on the emancipation of the peasants not only did not mitigate, but even more exacerbated the contradictions. In response to the upsurge of the revolutionary-democratic movement, the government launched an open offensive against progressive ideas: Chernyshevsky and D. I. Pisarev were arrested, and the publication of the Sovremennik magazine was suspended for eight months. The situation is aggravated by a split within the revolutionary-democratic movement, the main reason for which was the disagreement in assessing the revolutionary-socialist possibilities of the peasantry. The activists of Russkoye Slovo, Dmitri Ivanovich Pisarev and Varfolomey Aleksandrovich Zaitsev, sharply criticized Sovremennik for (*13) its alleged idealization of the peasantry, for its exaggerated idea of ​​the revolutionary instincts of the Russian muzhik.

Unlike Dobrolyubov and Chernyshevsky, Pisarev argued that the Russian peasant was not ready for a conscious struggle for freedom, that for the most part he was dark and downtrodden. Pisarev considered the "intellectual proletariat", revolutionary raznochintsev, carrying natural science knowledge to the people, as the revolutionary force of modernity. This knowledge not only destroys the foundations of official ideology (Orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality), but also opens the eyes of the people to the natural needs of human nature, which are based on the instinct of "social solidarity." Therefore, enlightening the people with the natural sciences can lead society to socialism not only in a revolutionary ("mechanical"), but also in an evolutionary ("chemical") way.

In order to make this "chemical" transition faster and more efficient, Pisarev suggested that Russian democracy be guided by the "principle of economy of forces." The "intellectual proletariat" must concentrate all its energy on destroying the spiritual foundations of the society that exists today by propagating the natural sciences among the people. In the name of the so-understood "spiritual liberation", Pisarev, like Turgenev's hero Yevgeny Bazarov, proposed to abandon art. He really believed that "a decent chemist is twenty times more useful than any poet," and recognized art only to the extent that it participates in the promotion of natural science knowledge and destroys the foundations of the existing system.

In the article "Bazarov" he glorified the triumphant nihilist, and in the article "Motives of Russian Drama" he "crushed" the heroine of A. N. Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm" Katerina Kabanova, erected on a pedestal by Dobrolyubov. Destroying the idols of the "old" society, Pisarev published the infamous anti-Pushkin articles and the work The Destruction of Aesthetics. The fundamental disagreements that emerged in the course of the controversy between Sovremennik and Russkoye Slovo weakened the revolutionary camp and were a symptom of the decline of the social movement.

Source: Guralnik U.A. Revolutionary-democratic aesthetics and criticism of the 60s. Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov // History of World Literature: in 9 volumes / USSR Academy of Sciences; Institute of world literature. them. A. M. Gorky. Moscow: Nauka, 1983-1994. T. 7. 1991. S. 29-33.

REVOLUTIONARY-DEMOCRATIC
AESTHETICS AND CRITIQUE OF THE 60s.
CHERNYSHEVSKY, DOBROLUBOV

The authority and effectiveness of literary criticism especially increased on the eve of the peasant reform, in the early 60s, at a time when indignation against the feudal-serf system reached its climax in the country. For the revolutionaries, great publicists and critics of the sixties Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, aesthetic questions were truly a "battlefield". V. I. Lenin emphasized that N. G. Chernyshevsky (1828-1889) “knew how to influence all the political events of his era in a revolutionary spirit, passing through the obstacles and slingshots of censorship the idea of ​​a peasant revolution, the idea of ​​the struggle of the masses to overthrow all the old authorities" ( Lenin V.I. Full coll. op. T. 20. S. 175). The same can rightly be said about his colleague - N. A. Dobrolyubov (1836-1861).

Nikolai Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (like Nikolai Aleksandrovich Dobrolyubov) was born into the family of a clergyman. Both studied in theological seminaries. Chernyshevsky, after graduating from St. Petersburg University (1850), served as a teacher of literature at the Saratov gymnasium. Having defended in 1855 the dissertation “Aesthetic

relationship of art to reality”, collaborated in the Nekrasov magazine “Sovremennik”, soon becoming its leading author and de facto editor. In 1862 he was arrested and sentenced to hard labor and life imprisonment in Siberia, where he spent over 20 years.

Dobrolyubov graduated in 1857 from the St. Petersburg Main Pedagogical Institute. Since 1856, he actively participated in Sovremennik. As editor of the criticism and bibliography department, along with Chernyshevsky, he determined the direction of the journal, which at that time became the tribune of Russian revolutionary democracy. In 1860 he went abroad to be treated for tuberculosis, lived in Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, intensively continued his literary-critical and journalistic activities. He returned to Russia and died in 1861 at the age of twenty-five.

Materialistic aesthetics served as a theoretical springboard for democratic criticism. Its cornerstone provisions were developed by Chernyshevsky in his master's thesis "Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality". In it, in the language of "abstract" aesthetic categories, the idea was carried out of the need for a radical reorganization of social life, bringing it into line with the ideal.

Defending the ideas of materialistic aesthetics (and she saw the source of poetry in life itself), Chernyshevsky put new content into the concept of the essence of beauty, which was put forward by Schelling and Hegel, but did not deny continuity with the classical aesthetics of the past - Russian and Western European, primarily German . Following Belinsky, he established the closest connection between the aesthetic ideal of a person, his ideas about beauty, all his artistic activity with other areas of spiritual, physical and social life. Aesthetics as a science stood on solid earthly soil. The beautiful is life, Chernyshevsky insisted, the highest beauty is precisely the beauty born from the world of reality.

Chernyshevsky explained that from the standpoint of the materialist theory of knowledge, “the development of thinking in a person does not in the least destroy the aesthetic feeling in him,” that “abstract concepts alone are not enough for a living solution to the problems of life, because the human mind is not yet the whole person, but the whole person needs to live , and not by reason alone," that "true life is the life of the mind and heart." Considering fantasy as an inalienable quality of thinking, he emphasized that "fantasy really participates very much in the fact that we find a well-known object beautiful." A realist artist creates his works based on real life experiences. But the creative reproduction of nature is not its copying - fantasy, imagination are an important shaping factor in the creative process. "The essence of poetry is to concentrate the content." The generalizing power of art is its "superiority": the artist is given, by enlarging the real features of reality, typing its most essential manifestations, to reveal the objective logic of its development in life-specific images.

Based on these theoretical premises, Chernyshevsky, as a historian of literature and literary critic, evaluated a specific artistic practice. Analyzing the work of the greatest Russian writers, he proved, revealing the logic of the Russian historical and literary process of the 19th century, that the key to artistic development is the connection between art and life.

At that time, adherents of the theory of "pure art" were especially active in trying to use the name of Pushkin as their banner, declaring him a poet detached from worldly fuss, allegedly far from transient social interests. This largely explains the polemical one-sidedness of the initial assessments given by the critic to Pushkin.

But soon, following Belinsky, he recognized that "Eugene Onegin" forever affirmed an original national content in Russian poetry. From a narrow understanding of Pushkin as predominantly a "poet of form," the critic comes to recognize him as the first realist in Russian poetry.

Chernyshevsky's attitude to Gogol's work also evolved noticeably. In the period preceding the revolutionary situation in Russia, the critic passionately fought for the further development and purity of the traditions of the author of The Government Inspector and Dead Souls against his imaginary friends and heirs. Due to tragic circumstances, Gogol, according to Chernyshevsky, found himself in a camp alien to him. However, in conjunction with a deeply truthful, analytical depiction of the bearers of social evil, Gogol's "energy of indignation" acquired the force of an objectively revolutionary significance. The critic supported realist writers who developed the socio-critical trend of Gogol's work, fought for Turgenev, Pisemsky, Ostrovsky, Grigorovich against critics like Druzhinin

and Botkin, who were alien to the progressive traditions of the "Gogol school". He also spoke out against the epigones of the "natural school".

In the mid-1950s, at the time of the creation of Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature and the work on Lessing, the critic believed that the Gogol trend in Russian literature had not yet said its last word, had not exhausted its potential. However, the work of many adherents of the Gogol trend no longer fully met the new requirements of life. He stated this already in an article on "Provincial Essays" (1857), pointing out the fundamental, from his point of view, difference between Gogol and Shchedrin, the qualitative differences in their satire. In the famous article “Is the Change Starting?” (1861), the critic calls on democratic writers to overcome the inertia of the literature of the past, to portray the people not as an object, but as the subject of history, not to idealize the patience and humility of the “little man”, but to call for a struggle for a decisive and radical change in social conditions that crippled and humiliated a person.

Opponents of revolutionary democratic criticism unfairly reproached it for inattention and indifference to the aesthetic nature of literary and artistic creativity. Meanwhile, both Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, in their best works, demonstrated a phenomenal ability to predict the artistic process, the ability to reveal the aesthetic features of the largest creative individuals. In this regard, one of the masterpieces of critical thought is Chernyshevsky's article on Leo Tolstoy - a review of the early works of the great writer "Childhood", "Adolescence", "Military Tales", which appeared in 1856 in a separate edition.

Speaking about the rare mastery of Tolstoy as a narrator, the critic subtly defined the nature of his psychologism: “Psychological analysis can take on various manifestations; one poet is most occupied with the outlines of characters, another with the influence of social relations and everyday conflicts on characters, a third with the connection of feelings with actions, a fourth with the analysis of passions, Count Tolstoy is most concerned with the mental process itself, its forms, its laws, the dialectics of the soul, in order to be expressed in a certain term. Further, it was about the "image of the internal monologue", which, according to the critic, "must, without exaggeration, be called amazing." He argued that "the purity of moral feeling" is the force that gives Tolstoy's works "a very special dignity." Socio-ethical problems, questions of morality, the life of the human spirit in all its interweaving - this is one of the main "nerves" of the artistic and journalistic work of the mature Tolstoy. Chernyshevsky laid bare this “nerve” already at the initial stage of the ideological and artistic development of the brilliant writer.

N. G. Chernyshevsky

Photo

In "Essays on the Gogol Period of Russian Literature", in articles and reviews about Ostrovsky and Turgenev, Tolstoy, Shchedrin, N. Uspensky and others, Chernyshevsky developed and substantiated the integral concept of Russian realism. Historicism of thinking allowed him to “mount” modern literary phenomena in the general process of artistic development. Thus, uncompromisingly revealing the idealistic nature of the views of the romantics on reality, at the same time he did not take the position of nihilistic denial of the significance of this stage in the history of the aesthetic understanding of life.

Speaking about the aesthetic nature of realism, its originality, the difference from classicism and romanticism, from the didacticism of the Enlightenment, the critic first of all insisted on "objectivity"

realistic method. For, according to him, to pronounce a sentence on the phenomena of life does not mean to blame someone for something, but it means to understand the circumstances in which a person finds himself, to consider which combinations of living conditions are convenient for good actions, which are inconvenient. And in this regard, the problem of the relationship between truth and life and artistic truth, fact and fiction, typical and individual was posed.

Making a "revaluation of values", sometimes very severe, determining the place and significance of this or that phenomenon of art and literature in the history of national artistic culture, in the spiritual life of the nation, he was invariably guided by the requirements of the people. “The point of view of the people” is the main condition set by “real criticism”, its ideological inspirer and theoretician Chernyshevsky, to literature.

The main postulates of "real criticism" received their further, full development in the critical and journalistic work of Dobrolyubov. In its main provisions, the epistemological concept of Dobrolyubov, his aesthetic credo coincides with the teachings of Chernyshevsky: both critics fought hand in hand for the establishment of materialistic methodological principles in the approach to the phenomena of literature, in their analysis and evaluation. The main requirement of real criticism is the truth of life, without which no other artistic merit of a work is conceivable. Dobrolyubov judged the significance of a work of art, in accordance with his materialistic concept of cognition, revolutionary and educational convictions, and belief in the socially transforming possibilities of art, by “how deeply the artist’s gaze penetrated into the very essence of the phenomenon, how widely he captured in his images various side of life." Only in this way can one decide how great the artist's talent is.

Dobrolyubov began with the history of literature. His first article (1856) in Sovremennik was devoted to the book published by Catherine II in the 80s of the 18th century. magazine "Interlocutor of Lovers of the Russian Word". His other works were also of a research nature: “On the degree of participation of the people in the development of Russian literature” (1858), “Russian satire in the age of Catherine” (1859). However, turning to the past, he thought about the present, and in his historical and literary writings, with all the acuteness available in a censored edition, he raised questions about the social role of art and literature, was concerned about socio-political problems that were relevant for his time.

But, of course, this direction of his critical work was most obvious in articles and reviews devoted to contemporary literature. The classic example of "real criticism", demonstrating its undoubted power and revealing its specifics, was the analysis of Goncharov's novel "Oblomov" and Ostrovsky's drama "Thunderstorm". Dobrolyubov's interpretation of Oblomov and "Oblomovism" in the article "What is Oblomovism?" (1859), which struck even the creator of the novel with its depth and insight, joins Chernyshevsky's series of speeches against Russian liberalism and marks the beginning of a new stage in the ideological struggle of the era.

Analyzing Turgenev's "Asya" and the image of the hero of this story in the article "Russian man on rendez-vous", Chernyshevsky puts forward the problem of "superfluous people" in life and literature. The coming revolutionary situation exposed the weakness of yesterday's heroes. The writers of the sixties, primarily Chernyshevsky, tried to realistically embody the hero, not reflective, not "jammed" by the conservative environment, but actively influencing the world around him. They were not always able to overcome the well-known schematism, predeterminedness and speculation of the proposed solutions. But in principle, this search was fruitful and, as the further development of the literature showed, promising. The "model" of the new hero was theoretically substantiated in the critical and theoretical works of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov. A “positive person” was recognized as one who consciously rebuilds life, based on its internal laws.

In addition to the article on Oblomov, Dobrolyubov’s articles on Ostrovsky’s Thunderstorm, A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom (1860), on Turgenev’s story The Eve, “When will the real day come?” (1860). In them, "real criticism" demonstrated all the fruitfulness of its methodology, so that its opponents were forced to reckon with its experience in the future.

The article "Dark Kingdom" (1859) carefully analyzes the ideological and figurative content of Ostrovsky's plays, determines the life sources of his works. At the same time, we are talking about the initial principles of “real criticism”, a wide range of aesthetic problems is being developed: about the relationship between literature and life, about tendentiousness, folk art, the specifics of the artistic reflection of reality, about the typicality of the image, the dialectical unity of content and form.

Directly adjacent to the article "The Dark Kingdom", the article "A Ray of Light in the Dark Kingdom" -

a response to the drama "Thunderstorm" - gives a clear idea of ​​​​the socio-political program and aesthetic views of Dobrolyubov on the eve of the era of reforms. The critic showed in her an amazing sensitivity to new trends in life and literature. He shrewdly assessed the image of the heroine of "Thunderstorm" Katerina as a sign of a spontaneous protest against violence and arbitrariness that has awakened in the midst of the masses, sometimes not yet realized. In aesthetic terms, Ostrovsky's drama is highly regarded as an expression of "the natural aspirations of a certain time and people" - it "designates several new stages of human development."

Just as consistently Dobrolyubov in the article “When will the real day come?” revealed the objective meaning of Turgenev's novel "On the Eve". Lenin argued that from the analysis of "On the Eve" the great revolutionary democrat made "a real revolutionary proclamation, so written that it is not forgotten to this day" (V. I. Lenin on Literature and Art. M., 1969. P. 655) . Highlighting the problem of the positive hero, Dobrolyubov was preoccupied with educating such a type of fighter and revolutionary figure who could lead the movement of the masses against autocratic police arbitrariness in the country. The pathos of the article is determined by the expectation of a peasant revolution and faith in its proximity. Hence the heightened interest of the critic in the “Russian Insarov”, a man of “real, serious heroism”, who, according to Dobrolyubov, had already appeared in Russian reality, but who still remained unnoticed by Turgenev.

Both Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov paid close attention to the history of Western European literatures, considering the development of Russian literature in the 19th century. in the context of the development of world literature. Thus, Chernyshevsky compared the special role of Russian literature and criticism in the development of society in his work “Lessing, his time, his life and work” (1856-1857) with the role of aesthetics, literature and criticism in the Enlightenment, as well as during the heyday of the German classical literature. literature.

The study of Lessing contains not only fundamentally important judgments about the outstanding German educator of the 18th century, including such a work of his on the theory of art as "Hamburg Dramaturgy". In Russian conditions on the eve of the reforms, this work acquired an urgent importance. Chernyshevsky in it substantiates and develops ideas about the active social role of artistic creativity, about the place of literature and art in the struggle of the people for radical social transformations.

In the literary activity of Lessing, Diderot, Rousseau, Godwin, the critic singled out features close to him as an educator and revolutionary democrat. Chernyshevsky made many profound judgments about Shakespeare, Balzac, J. Sand, Hugo, Thackeray and other writers of the West. Dobrolyubov wrote articles about the civil poetry of Beranger and Heine and their Russian translators.

Revolutionary-democratic criticism in the second stage of the liberation movement in Russia became the vanguard of the "party of the people in literature." The aspiration to the future, inherent in the ideologists of the revolutionary class, was also reflected in the requirement for literature to go “ahead of public consciousness”, and not to plod along already laid paths.

From the literary-critical articles of Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, one breathed the proximity of revolutionary upheavals, in the name of which the Russian writers of the sixties lived, fought and created - people of the era in whose ideology democracy and socialism merged into one inseparable whole.