The role of fantasy in the works of Gogol briefly. Fantasy is a genre in literature

>Compositions based on the work Portrait

The role of fiction

One of the main features of the works of N.V. Gogol is the vision of the world through fantasy. For the first time, elements of fantasy appeared in his well-known "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", written around 1829-1830. The story "Portrait" was written a few years later with the same elements of inexplicable mysticism. Gogol liked to portray the characters of people from the people and to confront his heroes with fantastic phenomena. In his works, reality intertwined with fiction in some interesting way.

The original version of the story "Portrait" was published in 1835, but after the author's corrections it was printed again in 1842. The protagonist is a young, budding artist named Chartkov, who lives in poverty and tries his best to achieve perfection in his art. Everything changes after the purchase of an unusual portrait, which he met in one of the St. Petersburg art shops. The portrait looked so vivid that it seemed that the sitter was about to come to life and start talking. It was this liveliness that attracted the young Chartkov, as well as the high skill of the artist.

According to the plot, the portrait possessed supernatural power and brought misfortune and misfortune to the lives of its owners. It depicted an old man of Asian appearance with piercing, almost "alive" eyes. The day after the purchase, Chartkov found in the frame of the portrait a bag of gold coins with which he was able to pay for the apartment and rent luxurious apartments for himself. It should be noted here that a strange dream preceded the happy discovery. The night before, it seemed to him that the portrait came to life, and the old man, coming out of the frame, was holding in his hands just this bag with the inscription "1000 chervonets".

In the second part, the author reveals to us the secret of these mystical phenomena and the picture itself. As it turned out, she was painted by a talented Kolomna master, who once painted temples. Having started work on this portrait, the master did not know that the usurer-neighbor was the real personification of evil, and having learned, he left the picture unfinished and went to the monastery to atone for his sins. The fact is that the evil usurer indirectly brought misfortune to everyone to whom he lent money. These people either went crazy, or became terribly envious and jealous, or committed suicide, or lost loved ones.

Anticipating his imminent death, the usurer wished to remain alive in the portrait, and therefore turned to a self-taught artist living in the neighborhood. According to the author, the now unfinished painting traveled from hand to hand, bringing first wealth and then misfortune to its new owners. In the first edition, at the end of the story, the image of the usurer disappeared from the portrait, leaving those around him in bewilderment. In the second edition, the author decided to make the portrait completely disappear from view and continue to wander around the world.

The main function of fantasy in works of art is to bring this or that phenomenon to its logical limit, and it doesn’t matter which phenomenon is depicted with the help of fantasy: it can be, say, a people, as in the images of epic heroes, a philosophical concept, as in the plays of Shaw or Brecht , a social institution, as in the "History of a City" by Shchedrin, or life and customs, as in Krylov's fables.

In any case, fantasy makes it possible to identify in the phenomenon under study its main features, and in the most pointed form, to show what the phenomenon will be like in its full development.

From this function of science fiction another directly follows - the prognostic function, that is, the ability of science fiction, as it were, to look into the future. On the basis of certain features and traits of today, which are still hardly noticeable or they are not given serious attention, the writer builds a fantastic image of the future, forcing the reader to imagine what will happen if the sprouts of today's trends in the life of a person, society, mankind develop after some time. time and will show all their potencies. E. Zamyatin's dystopian novel "We" can serve as an excellent example of predictive fiction.

Based on the trends that Zamyatin observed in the public life of the first post-revolutionary years, he was able to draw an image of the future totalitarian state, anticipating in fantastic form many of its main features: the erasure of human individuality up to the replacement of names with numbers, the complete unification of the life of each individual, the manipulation of public opinion , a system of surveillance and denunciations, the complete sacrifice of the individual to a falsely understood public interest, etc.

The next function of fiction is the expression of different types and shades of comic - humor, satire, irony. The fact is that the comic is based on inconsistency, incongruity, and fantasy is the inconsistency of the world depicted in the work with the real world, and very often also incongruity, absurdity.

We see the connection of fantasy with various varieties of the comic in Rabelais' novel "Gargantua and Pantagruel", in "Don Quixote" by Cervantes, in Voltaire's story "The Innocent", in many works by Gogol and Shchedrin, in Bulgakov's novel "The Master and Margarine" and in many others. works.

Finally, one should not forget about such a function of fiction as entertainment. With the help of science fiction, the tension of the plot action increases, an opportunity is created to build an unusual and therefore interesting artistic world.

This arouses the reader's interest and attention, and the reader's interest in the unusual and fantastic has been stable for centuries.

Esin A.B. Principles and methods of analysis of a literary work. - M., 1998

Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol is a completely unique writer, unlike other masters of the word. In his work there is a lot of amazing, admirable and surprising: the funny is intertwined with the tragic, the fantastic with the real. It has long been established that the basis of Gogol's comic is carnival, that is, such a situation when the characters, as it were, put on masks, show unusual properties, change places and everything seems confused, mixed up. On this basis, a very peculiar Gogol's fantasy arises, rooted in the depths of folk culture.

Gogol entered Russian literature as the author of the collection Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. The material of the stories is truly inexhaustible: these are oral stories, legends, tales on both modern and historical topics. “If only they listened and read,” says the beekeeper Rudy Panko in the preface to the first part of the collection, “but I, perhaps, are too lazy to rummage through, and there will be ten such books.”

The past in "Evenings ..." appears in the halo of the fabulous and wonderful. In it, the writer saw the spontaneous play of good and evil forces, morally healthy people, not affected by the spirit of profit, pragmatism and mental laziness. Here Gogol depicts the Little Russian folk-festive, fair life.

The holiday, with its atmosphere of freedom and fun, the beliefs and adventures associated with it, take people out of the framework of their usual existence, making the impossible possible. Previously impossible marriages are concluded (“Sorochinsky Fair”, “May Night”, “The Night Before Christmas”), all evil spirits are activated: devils and witches tempt people, trying to prevent them.

A holiday in Gogol's stories is all kinds of transformations, disguises, hoaxes, and the revelation of secrets. Gogol's laughter in "Evenings ..." is genuine fun, based on juicy folk humor. It is possible for him to express in words comic contradictions and incongruities, of which there are many in the atmosphere of a holiday, and in ordinary everyday life.

The originality of the artistic world of stories is connected, first of all, with the wide use of folklore traditions: it was in folk tales, semi-pagan legends and traditions that Gogol found themes and plots for his works. He used a belief about a fern that blooms on the night before Ivan Kupala; a legend about mysterious treasures, about selling the soul to the devil, about flights and transformations of witches, and much, much more. In a number of his novels and stories, mythological characters act: sorcerers and witches, werewolves and mermaids, and, of course, the devil, to the tricks of which popular superstition is ready to ascribe any evil deed.

"Evenings ..." is a book of truly fantastic incidents. For Gogol, the fantastic is one of the most important aspects of the people's worldview. Reality and fantasy are bizarrely intertwined in the people's ideas about the past and the present, about good and evil. The writer considered the propensity for legendary-fantastic thinking to be an indicator of the spiritual health of people.

The fantasy in Evenings is ethnographically authentic. Heroes and narrators of incredible stories believe that the whole area of ​​the unknown is inhabited by wickedness, and the “demonological” characters themselves are shown by Gogol in a reduced, everyday appearance. They are also "Little Russians", they just live on their own "territory", from time to time fooling ordinary people, interfering in their life, celebrating and playing with them.

For example, the witches in The Missing Letter play the fool, offering the narrator's grandfather to play with them and return, if they're lucky, their hat. The devil in the story "The Night Before Christmas" looks like "a real provincial attorney in uniform." He grabs a month and burns, blowing on his hand, like a man who accidentally grabbed a hot frying pan. Declaring his love for the "incomparable Solokha", the devil "kissed her hand with such antics, like an assessor at the priest's." Solokha herself is not only a witch, but also a villager, greedy and loving admirers.

Folk fantasy is intertwined with reality, clarifying the relationship between people, dividing good and evil. As a rule, the heroes in Gogol's first collection defeat evil. The triumph of man over evil is a folklore motif. The writer filled it with new content: he affirmed the power and strength of the human spirit, capable of curbing the dark, evil forces that rule in nature and interfere in people's lives.

The second period of Gogol's work opened with a kind of "prologue" - "Petersburg" stories "Nevsky Prospekt", "Notes of a Madman" and "Portrait", which were included in the collection "Arabesques". The author explained the name of this collection as follows: "Muddle, mixture, porridge." Indeed, a variety of material was included here: in addition to novels and short stories, articles and essays on various topics are also placed here.

The first three of the "Petersburg" stories that appeared in this collection seem to link different periods of the writer's work: "Arabesques" came out in 1835, and the last story, completing the cycle of "Petersburg" stories, "The Overcoat" was written already in 1842.

All these stories, different in plot, theme, characters, are united by the place of action - St. Petersburg. With him, the theme of a big city and the life of a person in it enters the writer's work. But for the writer, St. Petersburg is not just a geographical space. He created a bright image-symbol of the city, both real and ghostly, fantastic. In the fates of the heroes, in the ordinary and incredible incidents of their lives, in the rumors, rumors and legends that fill the very air of the city, Gogol finds a mirror image of the St. Petersburg "phantasmagoria". In St. Petersburg, reality and fantasy easily change places. Everyday life and the fate of the inhabitants of the city - on the verge of believable and wonderful. The unbelievable suddenly becomes so real that a person cannot stand it - he goes crazy, gets sick and even dies.

Gogol's Petersburg is a city of incredible events, ghostly absurd life, fantastic events and ideals. Any metamorphosis is possible in it. The living turns into a thing, a puppet (such are the inhabitants of the aristocratic Nevsky Prospekt). A thing, object or part of the body becomes a “face”, an important person, sometimes even with a high rank (for example, the nose that disappeared from a collegiate assessor Kovalev has the rank of state councilor). The city depersonalizes people, distorts their good qualities, sticks out the bad, changing their appearance beyond recognition.

The stories "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" depict two poles of Petersburg life: absurd phantasmagoria and everyday reality. These poles, however, are not as far apart as it might seem at first glance. The plot of "The Nose" is based on the most fantastic of all urban "stories". Gogol's fantasy in this work is fundamentally different from the folk-poetic fantasy in "Evenings ...". There is no fantastic source here: the nose is part of St. Petersburg mythology that arose without the intervention of otherworldly forces. This is a special mythology - bureaucratic, generated by the almighty invisible - the "electricity" of the rank.

The nose behaves as befits a "significant person" with the rank of state councilor: he prays in the Kazan Cathedral, walks along Nevsky Prospekt, calls in the department, makes visits, is going to leave for Riga on someone else's passport. Where it came from, no one, including the author, is interested. It can even be assumed that he "fell from the moon", because according to Poprishchin the madman from Notes of a Madman, "the moon is usually made in Hamburg", but is inhabited by noses. Any, even the most delusional, assumption is not excluded. The main thing is different - in the "two-facedness" of the nose. According to some signs, this is definitely the real nose of Major Kovalev, but the second “face” of the nose is social, which is higher in rank than its owner, because the rank is seen, but the person is not. Fantasy in The Nose is a mystery that is nowhere to be found and which is everywhere. This is a strange unreality of Petersburg life, in which any delusional vision is indistinguishable from reality.

In The Overcoat, the "little man", "eternal titular adviser" Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin becomes part of St. Petersburg mythology, a ghost, a fantastic avenger who terrifies "significant persons". It would seem that a completely ordinary everyday story - about how a new overcoat was stolen - grows not only into a vividly social story about the relationship in the bureaucratic system of St. Petersburg life of a "little man" and a "significant person", but develops into a mystery which raises the question: what is a person, how and why does he live, what does he encounter in the world around him.

This question remains open, as does the fantastic ending of the story. Who is the ghost who finally found "his" general and disappeared forever after tearing off his overcoat? This is a dead man avenging the insult of a living person; the sick conscience of a general who creates in his brain the image of a person offended by him, who died as a result of this person? Or maybe this is just an artistic device, “a bizarre paradox,” as Vladimir Nabokov believed, arguing that “the man who was mistaken for the ghost without an overcoat of Akaky Akakievich is the man who stole his overcoat”?

Be that as it may, along with the mustachioed ghost, all the fantastic grotesque disappears into the darkness of the city, resolving in laughter. But a very real and very serious question remains: how in this absurd world, the world of alogism, bizarre interlacing, fantastic stories that claim to be quite real situations of ordinary life, how in this world can a person defend his true face, save a living soul? Gogol will search for the answer to this question until the end of his life, using completely different artistic means for this.

But Gogol's fantasy forever became the property of not only Russian, but also world literature, entered its golden fund. Contemporary art openly recognizes Gogol as its mentor. Capacity, the crushing power of laughter are paradoxically combined in his work with a tragic shock. Gogol, as it were, discovered the common root of the tragic and the comic. The echo of Gogol in art is heard in the novels of Bulgakov, and in the plays of Mayakovsky, and in the phantasmagories of Kafka. Years will pass, but the mystery of Gogol's laughter will remain for new generations of his readers and followers.

Gogol's fantasy is unusual. On the one hand, it is based on deep national, folk roots, on the other hand, it relies on well-known Western European traditions. Before us is an amazing combination of Ukrainian folk material and German romanticism. In addition, it acquires a special color in connection with the worldview of the author himself. Moreover, fantasy evolves from story to story.

All Gogol's works, in which fantasy is present in one way or another, are divided into two types. The division depends on what time the action of the work refers to - to the present or to the past (the prescription of the past: half a century or several centuries - it does not matter; it is important that this is the past) In each of the works, Gogol implements his own, special approaches to depicting the unreal , highlighting with the help of these "oddities" the very real problems of human life.

"Sorochinsky Fair" and "May Night . . ." , time reader Gogol. “Isn't it true, aren't those same feelings that will instantly seize you in the whirlwind of a country fair? "(" Sorochinskaya Fair "). The reader can take part in the fair as its contemporary and eyewitness.

"Sorochinsky Fair" In the story "Sorochinsky Fair" at the very beginning, there is an expectation of some terrible events and troubles: a "cursed place" is allotted for the fair, "devilry got involved" in the case. There are rumors about everything strange. The merchant says that the volost clerk saw how a pig's snout stuck out in the barn window and grunted so that frost hit his skin. An old woman selling bagels; Satan felt…”

There is no direct indication of the unreality of events in the narrative. But a fantastic reflection is noticeable: both in the figure of a gypsy and in the image of Khivri. “In the swarthy features of the gypsy there was something vicious, caustic, low and arrogant at the same time ... The mouth that completely fell between the nose and the sharp chin, the ever-overshadowed by a caustic smile, small, but alive, like fire, eyes, constantly changing on the face of the lightning of enterprises and intentions , all this seemed to require a special, equally strange costume for itself. Elsewhere, "gypsies" are associated with gnomes: "... they seemed like a wild host of gnomes, surrounded by heavy underground steam, in the darkness of a deep night" . Gnomes (unknown to Ukrainian and Russian demonology) were suggested to Gogol by German sources, moreover, precisely as a fantastic image of an evil force.

Dually built in the "Sorochinsky fair" and the image of Khivri. At that time, Cherevik's wife appears simply as an evil, grumpy woman, and is not named anywhere as a witch, the way she is described strongly convinces of the opposite. “Something so unpleasant, so wild slipped through her face that everyone immediately hurried to translate an alarmed look ...” The lad, upon meeting with Khivrey, throws her: “And here ... and the devil is sitting!” Cherevik is afraid that "an angry cohabitant will not be slow to grab his matrimonial claws into his hair." Khivrya is very reminiscent of a typical rural witch, as Gogol saw her.

"May night, or a drowned woman" The fantastic and real are also correlated in "May night ...". The head comes to the conclusion: "No, here Satan interfered in earnest." There are rumors again. “You never know what women and stupid people will not tell,” Levko prefaces his story about the evil stepmother-witch and the drowned mermaid. In addition to the fantastic undertone, "May Night ..." demonstrates the material remnant of fiction. A secondary fantastic plan appears in the "May Night ..." in the form of a dream, and the transition from reality to sleep is disguised. But here the events of the dream are canceled by the awakening of Levko, and in his hands is a note from the mermaid panno in an incomprehensible way.

Thus, the first stage in the development of Gogol's fiction is characterized by the fact that the writer pushed the carrier of fiction into the past, leaving his influence, "trace" in the modern plan.

"The Night Before Christmas" In "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka," Gogol's descriptions of devilry are built on a frank similarity to the demonic. Witch Solokha, after traveling through the air, appeared in her hut as an ordinary “forty-year-old gossip”, “talkative and obsequious hostess”, where you can warm up and “eat fatty dumplings with sour cream”.

Many episodes are a clear reduction in ideas about evil spirits. Suffice it to recall the devil in hell from The Night Before Christmas, who, “putting on a cap and standing in front of the hearth, as if he really was a cook, fried ... sinners with such pleasure with which a woman usually fries sausage for Christmas ".

The story of how Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich In “The Tale of how Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich from the Mirgorod cycle, we observe the evolution of science fiction. Alogism in the narrator's speech. Some quality of the characters is asserted, requiring confirmation, but instead it is asserted something completely different. “Wonderful man Ivanovich! What a house he has”, “Wonderful man Ivanovich! He loves melons very much."

There is something strange and unusual in the names and surnames of the characters. The accepted logical basis of the comparison is violated "Ivanovich is very angry if he gets a fly in the borscht" - "Ivan Nikiforovich is extremely fond of swimming." There is something unusual in terms of the image. Surprisingly, an animal intervenes in the course of the case. The brown pig of Ivan Ivanovich “ran into the room and grabbed, to the surprise of those present, not a pie or a bread crust, but Ivan Nikiforovich’s petition ...”

"Overcoat" There are two kinds of "Overcoat": non-fiction and veiled fiction. The story implements the principle of "the world inside out". Forms of non-fantastic fiction: alogism in the narrator's speech, strange and unusual in the names and surnames of the characters. Gogol puts forward the concept of "face" to the fore. Gogol's "face", if it is "significant", appears as a particular designation of the hierarchy. The "face" motif is an integral part of Gogol's grotesque style.

Here is another version of Gogol's fantasy - life after death, carnivalization: the dead comes to life, the humiliated becomes an avenger, and the offender becomes humiliated. Veiled fantasy is concentrated in the epilogue of the story. A special type of message from the narrator is introduced - a message about a fact that allegedly took place in reality, but did not have a complete result. This translates the story of the life and death of the "little man" into a reflection on the inevitability of punishment and the triumph of supreme justice.

Gogol developed the principle of parallelism between the real and the fantastic. An important feature of Gogol's fantasy is that the divine in Gogol's concept is natural, it is the world that develops naturally, and the demonic is the supernatural, the world that goes out of the rut. So, Gogol pushed the carrier of fantasy into the past, then parodied the poetics of the romantic mystery of sleep. Fantasy has gone into everyday life, into things, into the knowledge of people and into their way of thinking and speaking.

RUSSIAN FANTASY OF THE FIRST HALF OF THE 19TH CENTURY

General characteristics of N.V. Gogol

N. V. Gogol is the first major Russian prose writer. In this capacity, according to many contemporaries, he stood above Pushkin himself, who was recognized primarily as a poet. For example, Belinsky, praising Pushkin's "History of the village of Goryukhin", made a reservation: "... If there were no Gogol's stories in our literature, then we would not know anything better."

The flowering of realism in Russian prose is usually associated with Gogol and the “Gogolian trend” (a later term of Russian criticism, introduced by N. G. Chernyshevsky). It is characterized by special attention to social issues, depiction (often satirical) of the social vices of Nikolaev Russia, careful reproduction of socially and culturally significant details in a portrait, interior, landscape and other descriptions;

appeal to the themes of Petersburg life, the image of the fate of a petty official. Belinsky believed that Gogol's works reflected the spirit of the "ghostly" reality of the then Russia. Belinsky, on the other hand, emphasized that Gogol's work cannot be reduced to social satire (as for Gogol himself, he never considered himself a satirist).

At the same time, Gogol's realism is of a very special kind. Some researchers (for example, the writer V.V. Nabokov) do not consider Gogol a realist at all, others call his style "fantastic realist." The fact is that Gogol is a master of phantasmagoria. In many of his stories there is a fantastic element. There is a feeling of a "displaced", "curved" reality, reminiscent of a distorted mirror. This is due to hyperbole and the grotesque, the most important elements of Gogol's aesthetics. Much connects Gogol with romantics (for example, with E. T. Hoffmann, in whom phantasmagoria is often intertwined with social satire). But, starting from romantic traditions, Gogol directs the motifs borrowed from them into a new, realistic direction.

There is a lot of humor in Gogol's works. It is no coincidence that the article by V. G. Korolenko about the creative fate of Gogol is called "The Tragedy of the Great Humorist." In Gogol's humor, the absurd beginning prevails. Gogol's traditions were inherited by many Russian humorists of the late 19th and 20th centuries, as well as those writers who focused on the aesthetics of the absurd (for example, the Oberiuts: D. Kharms, A. Vvedensky, and others).

Gogol himself was in some way an idealist and passionately desired to "learn" to depict a positively beautiful world, truly harmonious and sublimely heroic characters. The tendency to portray only the funny and ugly psychologically burdened the writer, he felt guilty for showing only grotesque, caricatured characters. Gogol repeatedly admitted that he passed on to these heroes his own spiritual vices, stuffing them with his "rubbishness and nastiness." This topic is especially acute, for example, at the beginning of Chapter VII of "Dead Souls" (find her) as well as in journalism (see “Four letters to different persons about “Dead Souls” from the cycle “Selected passages from correspondence with friends”). In the later years of his work, Gogol experienced a deep mental crisis and was on the verge of a mental breakdown. During these years, the writer gave his previously written works an unexpected paradoxical interpretation. Being in severe depression. Gogol destroyed the second and third volumes of Dead Souls, and one of the reasons for this act was the writer's painful rejection of his work.

The real in Gogol's stories coexists with the fantastic throughout the writer's work. But this phenomenon is undergoing some evolution - the role, place and methods of including the fantastic element do not always remain the same.

In Gogol's early works ("Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka", "Viy"), the fantastic comes to the forefront of the plot (wonderful metamorphoses, the appearance of evil spirits), it is associated with folklore (Little Russian fairy tales and legends) and with romantic literature , which also borrowed such motifs from folklore.

Note that one of the "favorite" characters of Gogol is "devil". Various evil forces often appear in the plots of "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" in a popular farcical, not terrible, but rather funny form (there are exceptions, for example, the demonic sorcerer in "Terrible Revenge"). In the works of a later period, the author's mystical anxiety, the feeling of the presence of something sinister in mi-, is more strongly felt. re, the craving to conquer it with laughter. D. S. Merezhkovsky in his work "Gogol and the Devil" expresses this idea with a good metaphor: the goal of Gogol's work is "to ridicule the devil."

In the St. Petersburg stories, the fantastic element is sharply relegated to the background of the plot, fantasy, as it were, dissolves into reality. The supernatural is present in the plot not directly, but indirectly, indirectly, for example, as a dream (“The Nose”), delirium (“Notes of a Madman”), implausible rumors (“The Overcoat”). Only in the story "Portrait" really supernatural events occur. It is no coincidence that Belinsky did not like the first edition of the story "Portrait" precisely because of the excessive presence of a mystical element in it.

Finally, in the works of the last period (The Inspector General, Dead Souls), the fantastic element in the plot is practically absent. The events depicted are not supernatural, but rather strange and extraordinary (although in principle possible). But the manner of narration (style, language) is becoming more and more bizarrely phantasmagorical. Now the feeling of a crooked mirror, a “displaced” world, the presence of sinister forces arises not due to fairy-tale plots, but through the medium of absurdity, alogisms, and irrational moments in the narrative. Yu. V. Mann, the author of the study Gogol's Poetry, writes that Gogol's grotesque and fantasy are gradually moving from plot to style.

(See also the cross-cutting topic: "The Role of the Fantastic Element in Russian Literature.")