“The theme of freedom and its reflection in one of the works of Russian literature. The theme of freedom and its philosophical sound in the works of Russian poetry of the 19th century The theme of freedom and its reflection in one of the works of Russian literature
Plan
I. Multidimensional and contradictory nature of understanding the concept of freedom in the history of philosophy.
II. Man “migrating”: ontology of path, terrain, space, freedom.
III. The dependence of the hero's freedom on his attachment: to the world, to a place, to things. "Suitcases" of Erofeev and Dovlatov as the main attribute of the trip.
IV. Bibliography.
The problem of freedom is one of the important and complex problems, it has worried many thinkers throughout the centuries-old history of mankind. We can say that this is a global human problem, a kind of riddle that many generations of people have been trying to solve for centuries. The very concept of freedom sometimes contains the most unexpected content, this concept is very multifaceted, capacious, historically changeable and contradictory. Speaking about the complexity of the idea of freedom, Hegel wrote: “No other idea can be said with such full right that it is indefinite, ambiguous, accessible to the greatest misunderstandings and therefore really subject to them, as about the idea of freedom” [Hegel 1956:291]. It is no coincidence that the German philosopher Ernst Cassirer in his work “The Technique of Modern Political Myths” assessed the word “freedom” as one of the most vague and ambiguous not only in philosophy, but also in politics. Evidence of the semantic "mobility" and "vagueness" of the concept is the fact that it arises in different oppositions. In philosophy, "freedom", as a rule, is opposed to "necessity", in ethics - "responsibility", in politics - "order". And the meaningful interpretation of the word itself contains various shades: it can be associated with complete self-will, it can be identified with a conscious decision, and with the subtlest motivation for human actions, and with a conscious necessity.
In every epoch the problem of freedom is posed and solved in different ways, often in opposite senses, depending on the nature of social relations, on the level of development of productive forces, on needs and historical tasks. The philosophy of human freedom was the subject of research in various directions: Kant and Hegel, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Sartre and Jaspers, Berdyaev and Solovyov. In recent years, a number of publications on the problem of freedom have appeared in the philosophical literature. These are the works of G.A. Andreev “Christianity and the problem of freedom”, N.M. Berezhny “Social determinism and the problem of man in the history of Marxist-Leninist philosophy”, V.N. Golubenko “Necessity and Freedom”, etc. Considerable attention is paid to this problem in monographs and chapters by Anisimov, Garandzha, Spirkin, Shlaifer.
Schopenhauer was right when he pointed out that for modern philosophy, as well as for the previous tradition, freedom is the main problem.
The range of understanding of freedom is very wide - from the complete denial of the very possibility of free choice / in the concepts of behaviorism / to the justification of “escape from freedom” in the conditions of a modern civilized society / E. Fromm /.
Schopenhauer presents the problem of the concept of negative freedom, i.e. to reveal the content of FREEDOM as a concept, perhaps only by pointing out certain obstacles that prevent a person from realizing himself. That is, freedom is spoken of as overcoming difficulties: the hindrance disappeared - freedom was born. It always appears as a negation of something. It is impossible to define freedom through oneself, therefore, it is necessary to point to completely different, extraneous factors, and through them to go straight to the concept of FREEDOM. ON THE. Berdyaev, in contrast to the German philosopher, emphasizes that freedom is positive and meaningful: “Freedom is not the realm of arbitrariness and chance” [Berdyaev 1989:369].
Freedom is one of the indisputable universal values. However, even the most radical minds of the past, who defended this shrine, believed that freedom is not absolute. Giving the individual the right to manage his own life will turn our world into a world of chaos. An old story comes to mind that once a trial took place over a man who, waving his arms, accidentally broke the nose of another person, the accused justified himself by saying that no one could deprive him of the freedom to wave his own arms. The court ruled that the defendant was guilty because one man's freedom to wave his arms ends where another's nose begins. A comic example that clearly proves that there is no absolute freedom, freedom is very relative.
The instincts of self-will, selfishness, destructiveness are strong in the individual. Freedom is good as long as a person moderates his impulses. Human freedom has its contradictions. According to Niebuhr, man has a tendency to abuse his freedom, overestimate his importance and strive to become everything. Thus, a person falls into sin. “Consequently, the fall takes place in freedom itself. Moreover, the paradox of evil arises from freedom not as a necessary or inalienable consequence, but as an internal contradiction, as an “illogical fact” [Shlaifer 1983:19].
In practical activities, some people often, overestimating their strengths and capabilities, set themselves HIGH / Beckett / goals. Niebuhr and many other philosophers interpret this problem theologically: when a person, hoping to accomplish a lot, relies only on himself, he focuses on himself and neglects dependence on God; he breaks his connection with God and inevitably falls into sin. Human freedom, Niebuhr argues, can increase any desire for both good and evil, and this unique freedom becomes the source of both destructive and creative powers of the individual. Using Pascal's expression, Niebuhr emphasizes that "the dignity of man and his misery have one and the same source" [Shleifer 1983:19]. Boris Petrovich Vysheslavtsev also discussed freedom as the root of satanic evil and god-likeness. This is freedom, when people turn into "demons", one of the characteristic examples is the myth of the fall. He depicts just two aspects: on the one hand, the diabolical: “do not obey the slightest prohibition - then you will be like gods!”, on the other hand, human attraction. This daring challenge was known not only by Dostoevsky, he was known by the Russian epic. Vysheslavtsev cites as an example the strange death of Vasily Buslaev, who did not believe in sleep or chokh. Once Buslaev was walking with his comrades and saw a black stone, the inscription on which read: do not jump over this stone, and whoever jumps will break his head. Immediately Vasily Buslaev ran up, jumped and ... died. Boldness for permissiveness chains a person to the eternal root of satanic evil. The ultimate point of freedom is the support for temptation.
A similar interpretation of the events that took place in the Garden of Eden was given by Lev Shestov. In the Bible we read: “The serpent was more cunning than all the beasts of the field, which the Lord God created. And the serpent said to the woman: Did God truly say: Do not eat from any tree in paradise? And the woman said to the serpent, We can eat the fruit of the tree. Only the fruits of the tree that is in the middle of paradise, God said, do not eat or touch them, lest you die. And the serpent said to his wife: No, you will not die. But God knows that on the day you eat them, your eyes will be opened, and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil” [Book of Genesis:2,17].
God warned people that on the day you eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, you will die; the serpent says: you will be like gods. Isn't it strange, asks Shestov, that we take the words of the serpent for truth. Shestov writes that before the fall, Adam was involved in divine omnipotence and only after the fall fell under the power of knowledge - and at that moment he lost the most precious gift of God - freedom. “For freedom is not in the possibility of choosing between good and evil, as we are now doomed to think. Freedom is strength and power to keep evil out of the world. God, the freest being, does not choose between good and evil. And the man he created did not choose, because there was nothing to choose from: there was no evil in paradise” [Shestov L.: 147].
So, man did not become free by tasting the fruits, for the freedom to choose between good and evil, which he gained through eating, became his only freedom. Other freedoms departed from man when he chose a life based on knowledge and not on faith.
The desire to follow unkind advice and neglect the prohibitions came to man from Adam. So the story with Vasily Buslaev is more than natural. Does the person yearn for freedom? Is it so? Nietzsche and Kierkegaard drew attention to the fact that many people are simply not capable of personal action. They prefer to be guided by standards. Man's unwillingness to follow freedom is undoubtedly one of the most striking philosophical discoveries. It turns out that freedom is the lot of the few. And here is the paradox: a person agrees to voluntary enslavement. Even before Nietzsche, Schopenhauer formulated in his published work the thesis that man does not have a perfect and established nature. It's not completed yet. Therefore, he is equally free and not free. We often find ourselves slaves to other people's opinions and moods. In other words, we prefer bondage.
Later on this formal dependence of man on sociality will be paid attention to by existentialists. Be that as it may, even Goethe wrote: “Freedom is a strange thing. Everyone can easily find it, if only he knows how to limit himself and find himself. And what do we need an excess of freedom that we are not able to use? As an example, Goethe cites rooms that he did not enter in winter. A small room with little things, books, art objects was enough for him. “What use did I have from my spacious house and from the freedom to walk from one room to another when I had no need to use this freedom” [Goethe 1964:458]. This statement reflects the whole imaginary of human nature. Is it possible to speak of a conscious choice on the part of the individual, if the supporters of psychoanalysis prove that a person's behavior is “programmed” by childhood impressions suppressed by desires. It turns out that any act, the most intimate or completely spontaneous, can be predicted in advance, to prove its inevitability. What then remains of human subjectivity?
The American philosopher Erich Fromm identified and described a special phenomenon of human consciousness and behavior - flight from freedom. This is the title of his book, which was published in 1941. The main idea of the book is that freedom, although it brought a person independence and gave meaning to his existence, but at the same time isolated him, aroused in him a feeling of powerlessness and anxiety. LONELY became the consequence of such isolation. The unbearable moral loneliness of a person and an attempt to avoid it is described by Balzac in “The Sufferings of an Inventor” (III part of the novel “Morning Illusions”): , all his property, all the ardor of his soul” [Fromm 1997:37]. If an individual has achieved maximum or absolute freedom in the world, he begins to understand that freedom has turned into boundless loneliness. Having eliminated all forms of dependence, the individual ends up with his individual self.” Numerous prohibitions disappear, which, although they limited the freedom of a person, made him close to a certain circle of people. In Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov" there is an ideal phrase for describing this state - "Man is free - that means he is alone."
The philosophy of the 20th century has shown that freedom can become a burden that is too much for a person, something that he tries to get rid of. It can be said without exaggeration that Schopenhauer's concept in many respects was of a prognostic, anticipatory nature.
“The last quarter of the twentieth century in Russian literature was determined by the power of evil,” says the famous Russian writer Viktor Erofeev. He recalls Turgenev’s Bazarov, who said an inexpressibly merciful and promising phrase to humanity: “ The person is good, the circumstances are bad ”.
This phrase can be put as an epigraph to all Russian literature. The main pathos of its significant part is the salvation of man and mankind. This is an overwhelming task, and Russian literature has so BRILLIANTly failed to cope with it that it has secured a great success for itself.
The circumstances of Russian life have always been deplorable and unnatural. Writers fought desperately with them, and this struggle largely obscured the question of the essence of human nature. There was simply not enough strength for in-depth philosophical anthropology. As a result, with all the richness of Russian literature, with the uniqueness of its psychological portraits, stylistic diversity, religious searches, its general worldview credo was reduced to the philosophy of HOPE. It was expressed in an optimistic belief in the possibility of changes that would provide a person with a decent existence.
The 19th-century philosopher Konstantin Leontiev spoke of the pink Christianity of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as devoid of metaphysical essence, but resolutely turned towards humanistic doctrines, which are reminiscent of the French Enlightenment. Russian classical literature taught how to remain a free person in unbearable, extreme situations. In general, freedom and humanism are infinitely connected by the character of the Russian people. What is the manifestation of the desire for freedom for a Russian person?
Let's consider the concept of “person migrating” as a sign of the search for change. The desire for freedom or "escape" from it. The phenomenon that constitutes the concept of “migration” is the experience of distinguishing between dynamic and static, sedentary and migratory. A Russian person is a person who moves to the limit, expanding the level of his existence. Wandering is a characteristic Russian phenomenon, it is little known to the West. Bakhtin explained it by the eternal striving of a Russian person for something infinite: “The wanderer walks on the vast Russian land, never settles and is not attached to anything” [Bakhtin 1990: 123].
The vast expanses create such a turn of space that they bring the one who walks closer to the highest. But very often a wanderer becomes infected with the virus of rebellion; he, as it were, nurses him with his own legs. Rebellion is perhaps resentment, a demand for freedom, space as freedom, loneliness as freedom. And somewhere on the edge of the world and on the edge of the body comes the confluence of freedom, moment and eternity. The Japanese call this satori / “illumination”, “flight of the soul” /, this state can be compared with freedom. Western people are more sedentary people, they value their present, they are afraid of infinity, chaos, and therefore they are afraid of freedom. The Russian word “element” is difficult to translate into foreign languages: it is difficult to give a name if reality itself has disappeared.
For a person of the East, the theme of movement is not typical at all. The path for him is a circle, the joined fingers of the Buddha, i.e. isolation. There's nowhere to go when it's all in you. Therefore, Japanese culture is a culture of the inner word, thought, and not action.
The country is small, densely populated - you can’t leave either with your eyes or with your body, only with a thought. The human picture of the world in its origins reveals similarities with a geographical map. The purpose of the map is to provide orientation in space. The geographic map itself is a secondary concept, since the need and problematic orientation arises only in changing the world. A settled existence does not need a map. It only requires travel. But who managed to draw up a map before traveling into the unknown? A person “nurses” many, many distances in order to come or go, the person aspires to freedom to feel, desiring, or directly to possess?
If we remember how the hero in folk tales is shown the way in search of a treasure or a betrothed, then we note the difference between the FAIRY-TABLE and the COMMON. A fairy tale does not provide the hero with maps /unlike an adventure novel/. The road is simply characterized as a test, an obstacle; for example: “you will pass impregnable mountains” or “you will go to distant lands”, “you will cross the ocean seas”. The results of the path can also be predicted to the hero: “when you go to the right - you will be killed”, “you will go to the left - you will be married”, etc., or an indication of the path as an instruction to visit a psychoanalyst / in the fabulous terminology of an oracle or a witch /.
But in general, the path map is a tabula rasa: “you will go there, you don’t know where…” Such indications give not so much a geographical as an emotional orientation.
The traveler has to go almost blindfolded, and he is led, at best, by a magic ball or thread of Ariadne. The readiness of the hero for freedom is confirmed in this way. Will he dare to travel, realize the risk, and the reference point is an abstract goal? The travel map turned out to be not so much a prerequisite for travel as its consequence. It expanded the world coming from the center - the house. If the traveler had a detailed map of the area, then the travel element would be nullified. The freedom of geography would "stupefy" the WAY, would make it simply a movement from one place to another. The pleasure of the antecedent conditions lack of freedom geographical, but the desire for inner freedom. The search for that untried, "satori". Because of this, the understanding of the path is a spatial movement, as if an abstraction. Laying roads from one space to another, changing human life through changing spaces. The landscape of the human world changes under the influence of the terrain. Philosophers of the 19th century divided the heroes into two socio-psychological types: “wanderers” and “homebodies”. Perhaps such a classification was influenced by the “fairy tale” by Konstantin Batyushkov “Wanderers and Homebodies” / 1814 /. Philosophers have outlined two types of Russian people: a product of the great St. Petersburg culture - the "eternal seeker" and the "Moscow couch potato". The wanderers looked rather dangerous: they live in a large space and historical time, they enter into unstable social communities, such as a horde, a crowd, a mass. Stay-at-homes are gullible “manilovs”. They are good and sweet because they are protected from external aggression of the world not by the shell of their own character, but by the shell of the objective world created by them. Such a classification is created through the influence of the city ON CONSCIOUSNESS. The city as a type of consciousness is an old topic. It goes without saying that every city has its own face. It is also known that each city has its own special spirit. Perhaps it is this spirit that gives rise to people, history, relationships in the image and likeness of the city Face. Physiognomy is not a completely scientific area, but just here it is quite appropriate to recall it. “Little man” could be born only in St. Petersburg. Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, A. Bely, Blok, Mandelstam, before and after them, were aware of this “Petersburg myth”, or rather, they painted a hero that only Venice of the North could give birth to, predicted his fate, as if reading from the palm of your hand intricate wrinkles set like fatal barcodes by Petersburg to its unfortunate “child”.
From here came two types of heroes: heroes who are free to manage the lives and desires of other people / Hermann, Raskolnikov / and heroes who are deprived of their will and freedom and are involved in the cycle of events by the mysterious “element of St. Petersburg”.
Solovyov also made a distinction between Western / “mountainous” and “stone” / and Eastern Europe / Russia “plain” and “wooden” /. The first is characterized by early and persistent fragmentation, strong attachment to cities, ecological and cultural settledness; the second - perpetual motion over a wide and boundless space, the absence of durable dwellings. This is the difference between the heirs of the Romans and the heirs of the Scythians / it is no coincidence that the Greeks did not have a word for space /.
However, in Russia itself there are two dominant forms - "forests" and "fields"; they carry out the division in the differences between Northern and Southern Rus'. Describing them, Solovyov writes: “The steppe constantly conditioned this wandering, wild, Cossack life with primitive forms, the forest more limited, determined, more seated a person, made him zemstvo, settled” [Soloviev 1989: 249 - 255]. Hence the firm activity of the northern Russian man and the precariousness of the southern. The image of a folk hero, which has developed in Russian folklore, is molded into an epic hero, who later reincarnated as a Cossack / Ilya Muromets is even called the “old Cossack” /.
The journey often merges with exile, and at the same time proves the commitment of mankind to the “old sins” of their ancestors. There are: exiles by fate, exiles by God, exiles by the country, etc. That is, we are approaching the consideration of the “sad wanderers”, whose descendants we are. Exile teaches us humility: to get lost in humanity, in the crowd, in our loneliness, to LEAVE TO STAY. If we consider the exile as a punishment of God, then numerous examples come to mind: Adam, Lot, Moses, Ahasuerus ... When Christ was led to Golgotha, he, tired by the weight of the cross, wanted to sit at the house of a Jewish artisan, but he, embittered and exhausted by work, pushed him, saying, "Go, don't stop." “I will go,” Christ said, “but you will also walk until the end of time.” Together with Ahasuerus we carry out an important mission to go.
In the story of Lot, God urges him not to look back, and thereby exiles him. Living in a mountain cave near the biblical city of Sigora, the exile Lot is the founder of cosmopolitanism. The cosmopolitan Lot cannot look back, since he is the center of the circle, "forward" does not exist for the exile. It turns out a closed ring, which made a pious and righteous sage - a sinful incest. Exile gives a person some kind of freedom, so the story of daughters is interpreted as a symbol of creation in exile. Lot is able to impregnate his own daughters like his own ideas. Conclusion: creativity is the only form of moral insurance and freedom in exile. The exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the return of Odysseus, the journey of Marco Polo to India, the discovery of America, space flights, the path of life to God.
The structural dimension of the path consists in setting the pace and rhythm: ascent, descent, frequency of stops. Thus, it gives the right to consider on the scale of movement: exodus, search for a road, return, wandering, wandering. Time and distance are the coordinates of the path with knowledge, moral purification, enrichment. Overcoming the path is the most common form in modern computer games. The symbol of the road and the path is the oldest symbol of perfection /characterized by a male phallic image of an arrow/.
Many philosophers have wondered what preceded the journey. I.T. Kasavin claims that this is the “CATCHING” of the moment. After all, the monkeys chose a convenient moment and only because they were able to become people. If you descend from the trees early, then you will remain a four-legged monkey / baboons /, wait a little longer and become a brachiator. So, the first journey of a person is a descent from the trees, the second is settling on the Earth. Since then, each historical epoch has been marked by migrations of peoples. Every time this happened, when the prerequisites were formed. Only when a person became crowded among his own kind, and he felt like a stranger, an outcast, did he leave / i.e. outcome is always justified /.
Moreover, a migrating person is a person who is superior in strength to his fellow tribesmen, the most adapted. The path for him is additional experience, the search for more freedom.
He, as it were, creates, practices with his migration experience, connects worlds and spaces without being a prisoner of any of them.
The locality expands the taboos imposed by society, the boundaries of the locality separate the outer space from the inner one, the locality serves as the basis for the narrative of “ours and others”. Home and hearth are female symbols. The journey is masculine. Travel lengthens space and slows down time. Only the difficulties of travel can lengthen the time. Ivan Tsarevich must wear out his iron boots, erase the iron staff, find his betrothed beyond the three seas, and the return takes three days. The separation of home and body is a very important ontological event. The body is protected by a house. The body often appears as a wound, so it looks for the shell and finds it in the house. Dostoevsky's characters arrive inside a flattened, deformed space: in "corners", "cabins", "coffins", "closets", "rooms", "burrows". The house provides the body with a form suitable for survival. The interior plays the role of a shell, a shell, a snail's house, to which the body grows, otherwise the hostile environment would simply destroy it. “So that the wolves are fed and the sheep are safe” creates a stunning image of the unity of the area and the path: their hybrid is a labyrinth, which is a house that promises an endless journey. The labyrinth is a collapsed image of the various paths of a person in sacred space: the way out and the way in.
The geography of the world suggests itself as a prototype and analogue of the structure of the text. Geography emerges as a consequence of travel and its subsequent interpretation. Text is a migration experience.
Dovlatov gives his characters the opportunity to expand their living space and, along the “steps” of dots, takes them out of the text into another level of EXISTENCE / into metatextual life /. The great writer's humanism created the hero initially free to move. The horizons of “another life” beckon him to travel, and he simply cannot “die without scratching the earth's crust” [Dovlatov 1995:205].
“I have traveled around the world quite a bit,” can boast, like many other heroes of the twentieth century, the hero of Dovlatov. His journey begins right from the cover. Mitok Florensky's drawings are made as if they were drawn by the characters themselves. An external contradiction between rigor and laxity, primitiveness and complexity. People go and leave footprints. Glasha's dogs are moving next to them. Nothing stands still, even the gnarled trees seem to move in their entire entangled mass. “Mitek is also not a simpleton, but a clown who secretly walks on a tightrope” [Genis 1997:11]. The effect of a broken roof is created: the world we look at from above is moving. Changing his time and space, he wanders. And next to it are maps so that, God forbid, no one gets lost. After all, only by making the Great Journey is a person able to master the world, and therefore become free.
The exodus of people from their native places is a distinctive feature of our century. Heroes go either on long journeys, or on very long ones. The main attribute of travel is a suitcase. The philosophizing truth-happiness-seeker and bastard Venechka Erofeev also has a suitcase. Rather, it is not a suitcase, but a briefcase. A tiny receptacle for a bottle arsenal and gifts. Venechka keeps his way to “where heaven and earth merge, where the she-wolf howls at the stars”, where his girlfriend lives with the meekest and most plump baby in the world, who knows the letter “u” and wants to get a glass of nuts for this. He keeps his way to the indescribable, blessed Petushki. He stands thoughtfully at the pharmacy and decides which way to go if all roads lead to the same place. Even without a hint of the fabulous Alice, you can guess that if you go somewhere for a long time, then you will definitely get somewhere. If you want to get to the Kursk railway station, you will get there, go even to the right, even to the left, even straight ahead. Only in fairy tales is there an alternative choice. Initially, your route is conditioned and logical. “Night, street, lantern, pharmacy…” are the well-known lines of Blok's poem. Before our eyes - a night city, reflected in the mirror surface. A man stands on a bridge and looks at the wrinkles of the water, and thinks that life is meaningless, and death is even more meaningless. Vasily Gippius, after listening to this poem, told Blok that he would never forget it, because there was a pharmacy near his house on the corner. Blok did not understand the joke and replied: “Near everyone There is a pharmacy at home. The pharmacy is a symbol, the border of the transition of life to the state of death, the starting point of Venechka's journey. Despite the initial irreversibility of his path / wherever you go, you will still come where you should / the hero chooses the right / “righteous” / direction and keeps his path with God and the Angels.
He sits in a dark car, clutching to his chest the most valuable and expensive thing he has - his suitcase. You might think that his own luggage is dear to him because of the ports and liquors, lined up in a row of curly bottles. But no, just as gently and carefully he pressed this tattered suitcase to his heart even when it was empty. The suitcase is all that he has accumulated in his worthless life. He opened the lid before the Lord, wide, wide open, as soon as he could open his soul, and laid out everything as if in spirit: “from a sandwich to a strong pink one for a ruble thirty-seven.” “Lord, you see what I have. But is This I need? Does my soul yearn for this? This is what people have given me in return for what my soul yearns for” [Ven. Erofeev 1997:96]. The Lord, as he should be, severe / therefore in blue lightning /, but also merciful, generously blesses and shares this Great meal together with his unlucky Child, stupid Venechka.
He trusts his modest and sinful suitcase belongings only to Angels and God. The suitcase is a kind of landmark of the hero, according to it he determines the direction of his own movement, almost in the same way as he measures the distance not in kilometers and miles, but in grams and liters / “from Chekhov Street to the entrance I drank another six rubles” /.
Venechka remembers that “the suitcase should lie on the left along the train” [Ven. Erofeev: 1997]. The suitcase is an arrow pointing, guarded by Angels. And where is he, the suitcase? Stupid angels failed, did not inspect, did not justify Venechka's trust, did not consider this little thing valuable. Lost all landmarks. As in a terrible, tormenting dream, the hero rushes around the empty car, wanting to find his suitcase, lost right in front of Pokrov / the city of Petushinsky district /, but he is not there. It is with the loss of a suitcase / amulet associated with the outside world, a compass / that the hero becomes even more vulnerable. And before him appears a woman in black “inconsolable princess”, valet Peter / traitor - apostle /, hordes of Eriny. All these are messengers of the dark forces. “Leaving your native land, do not look back, otherwise you will fall into the clutches of Erinyes.” The hero does not follow the Pythagorean rule. According to some legends, they are the daughters of the Earth, according to others - the Night. But be that as it may, they come from the depths of the underworld and have wings behind their shoulders, and snakes swirl on their heads. They are the embodied punishment for sins, you can’t convince them of your own innocence by any means. Therefore, the best defense is not to look back, not to regret the missing suitcase, the fading baby who knows how to say the letter “u”, about the girl who is waiting, but it’s better to blame yourself for all mortal sins, turn your right cheek when “they go down the left” , say that he betrayed him seven times seventy or more, think about suicide / take a deep breath forty times ... and that’s it /, wipe your tears and snot after all your sins are weighed, in the hope that on “those scales a sigh and a tear will outweigh calculation and intent” [Ven. Erofeev 1997:117]. And after the angels laugh, and God silently leaves you, to believe in that Virgin Queen, the mother of the baby, “a loving father / THEIR./ as yourself”, that even without a suitcase, crushed in body and soul, they need you. Get up and go, go in the hope that the doors open up that a new star will light up over Bethlehem, that a New Baby will be born, who will also meekly and tenderly say the letter “u”, and your suitcase will be found, your only personal thing, your cross and the sin that you must bear in order to achieve that bright the city, which he languished for so long and finish his righteous / “right” / path in the True refuge of Paradise-Petushka.
It will seem for a long time that the hero nevertheless regretted the past / suitcase / and looked back, like Lot's wife, at the burning city, but this proves to a greater extent that he will not, like Lot, remember his past, he will look directly at the past in the eyes, as it is not the exiles who do it, but the tried ones.
Dovlatov's suitcase is one of the main characters, it is a way to fix everything in one place. Let's remember Korobochka's chest, Shmelev's Gorkin's chest, Chichikov's casket. A. Bely calls her “wife” of Chichikov - the female hypostasis of the image / cf. Bashmachkin's overcoat - “one-night lover” /. Just like Plyushkin, Chichikov collects all sorts of rubbish in a box: a poster torn from a post, a used ticket. As you know, things can tell a lot about their owner. They can take and prove that the "master" not single, he gravitates towards the past and is connected with his past by chains of things. The symbol of freedom is a lonely traveling person. But traveling light. Seeking to equate the freedom of life with the freedom of death: when Alexander the Great was dying, he asked for two hand holes to be made in the lid of the coffin to show the world that he had not taken anything.
Dovlatov's suitcase is not only an attribute of travel, but also an expression of an emotional attitude to the world. The suitcase is a symbol of betrayal and exile. It is no coincidence that the look of the Beloved throwing the hero is compared with a suitcase: “An even more painful pause has come. For me. She was full of calmness. The look is cold and hard, like the corner of a suitcase” [Dovlatov II 1995:232].
The author acts at the level of rethinking: a thing-man /Gogol tradition/, a thing-symbol /symbolism/, a man-symbol /tradition of postmodernism/, that is, he combines the experience of other eras in his prose experience.
But if in the tradition of postmodernism the journey acts as a way to study the universe and the soul of the hero, then for Dovlatov the journey is an unnecessary and painful process. Having received freedom of movement from the author, the hero dreams of static. Comparing with the work of Valeria Narbikova “... and Journey ...”, we understand that for her the journey is not only a way of moving the body, but also the flight of the soul: “Once in the freezing winter time there was a train. There were two gentlemen in the compartment. They were traveling in the same direction…” – “Where is the Russian soul?”, that is, a journey is just an excuse to talk about a person, to recognize his essence, a journey is a test of survival and adaptability to the world. For Dovlatov, for example, in “The Road to a New Apartment”, the move is associated with the idea of loss and catastrophism: faded, port-wine-stained wallpapers, tasteless furnishings, wretched cheap things, human loneliness - everything is put on display for “foreign people”. When all things are taken out of the house, the room begins to resemble a shipwrecked ship: fragments of records, old toys... Hundreds of eyes look at the hero through his things. The person outside the room looks lost and naked. The hostess of the house, Varya Zvyagintseva, began to seem quite middle-aged, not so beautiful, but somehow cheap and empty, like her furniture. It was as if they had thrown off a fake mask and remembered the mysterious and eccentric Bunin heroine / “The Case of Cornet Yelagin” / living in a room with curtains in the form of bat wings, in a mysterious and mysterious world. Only immediately after the murder, the room begins to seem untidy and miserable, the heroine ugly and old, as if after a wonderful ball things that played a brilliant role lose their strength and spiritual content: instead of a priceless diamond, cheap glass beads, instead of a beautiful face, stale makeup. Director Malinovsky casually throws a phrase that fully characterizes what is happening: Things catastrophically devalue the world and the person living in it. Moving destroys a person, when the latter tries to take the whole world / his world / with him, he does not get the right to do so.
Once Sergei Dovlatov compared a cow with a suitcase: “There is something pitiful in a cow, humiliated and repulsive in its obedient reliability. Although, it would seem, both dimensions and horns. Ordinary chicken, and she looks more independent. And this one is a suitcase stuffed with beef and bran” [Dovlatov II 1995:244]. Is this not an allusion to the body, which, like an unbearable burden, pulls a person to temptations and desires? Should I give up things in order to find the desired peace and desired freedom, or hold on to them until death, until the very End?
So, the lack of freedom of a person is determined by the degree of his attachment to the objective world, to a specific time and space. And this lack of freedom does not contradict the desires of the hero.
Literature
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2. Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. - M .: Publishing House "Art", 1986. - 444 p.
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4. Boguslavsky V.M. Man in the mirror of Russian culture, literature and language. - M.: Publishing house "Cosmopolis", 1994. - 238p.
5. Vysheslavtsev B.P. Ethics of transfigured eros. - M.: Publishing house "Republic", 1994. - 368p.
6. Dovlatov S.D. Collection of prose in 3 volumes. - S.-Pb.: Publishing house "Limbus-press", 1995.
7. Erofeev Ven. Leave my soul alone. - M .: Publishing house of A.O. "HGS", 1997. - 408s.
8. Erofeev Vik. Russian flowers of evil. - M .: Publishing House "Podkrva", 1997. - 504 p.
9. Zholtovsky A.K. The art of adaptation. // Literary review. - 1990. - No. 6. - P.46-51.
10. History of modern foreign philosophy. - S.-Pb.: Publishing House "Lan", 1997. 480s.
11. History of philosophy in brief. - M.: Publishing House "Thought", 1997. - 590p.
12. Camus A. Creativity and freedom. - M .: Publishing house "Rainbow", 1990. - 602 p.
13. Kasavin I.T. “The migrating man”: Ontology of the path and the locality // Questions of Philosophy. - 1997. - No. 7. - P.74-84.
14. Kulakov V. After the disaster. // Banner.–1996.-№2. – P.199-211.
15. Ed. Motroshilova N.V. History of Philosophy: West - Russia - East. - M .: Publishing House "Greek-Latin Cabinet" Yu.A. Shigalin, 1995.
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17. Narbikova V. “... And the Journey” // Znamya. - 1996. - No. 6. - P. 5 -36.
18. Nietzsche F. Human is too human; Fun science; Evil wisdom. - Minsk.: Publishing House "Potpourri", 1997. - 704 p.
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Absolute freedom is impossible because
- involves unlimited choice, and unlimited choice makes it difficult to make a decision. In such cases, indecision wakes up in a person.
Phraseologism "Buridanov's donkey"
Dante on the indecisiveness of people:
L.N. Tolstoy in the novel "Sunday" about the indecision of the protagonist:
On the Internal Limiters of Absolute Human Freedom
Christian theologian Clement of Alexandria (Titus Flavius) - II-III centuries. about the inner morality of a person:
On External Restrictions on Absolute Human Freedom
American politician on state and community restraints:
What is a free society?
2 points of view on the problem of a free society or 2 models of a free society from the textbook “Social Science. Grade 11: textbook. for general education institutions: basic level / L.N. Bogolyubov, N.I. Gorodetskaya, A.I. Matveev and others. 2004
a / The role of the state is minimal, the principle of non-interference of the state in people's lives, unlimited individualism of a person.
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Main principles
The main features of a free society
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b/ The role of the state is minimal, the addition is cooperation, responsibility, justice, that is, all those values that society should provide.
Sometimes freedom is understood as permissiveness
At the beginning of the 20th century, in Russian villages they sang such a ditty:
What is permissiveness?
If a person understands freedom as permissiveness, what awaits him?
Subjective opinion expressed in the article
There can be no absolute freedom in society because, What
- there are obligations of the individual to society
The last article in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights mentions that
Well ... and the fire was extinguished,
And I'm dying in smoke.
I. F. Annensky.
Peace and freedom. They are necessary for the poet to release harmony. But peace and will are also taken away. Not external peace, but creative. Not childish will, not freedom to be liberal, but creative will - secret freedom.
And the poet dies, because he has nothing else to breathe, life has lost all meaning.
A. A. Blok.
When A. S. Pushkin in 1834 in his poem “It's time, my friend, it's time! the heart asks for peace ... ”wrote:
There is no happiness in the world
But there is peace and will, -
this corresponded to the spirit of the time when the poet lived, the spirit of the first half of the 19th century. This was what A. S. Pushkin came to, this was his result.
The beginning of the 20th century - a century of catastrophes, a century of suicides - a century that is tragic in its essence. The invention of a large number of machines that replace people, and the atomic bomb - all this led to a person's feeling of his own insignificance, helplessness, loneliness. Under such conditions, nothing but fear, which makes a person aggressive, could appear. Fear and the only idea, the idea of saving one's life, the minimum idea. It is not surprising that, being in constant tension, in constant anticipation of some kind of thunderstorm, an inevitable end that will affect literally everyone, some “hamels”, others became callous and closed in on themselves, giving the former the opportunity to act. And finally, the tangible threat of a third world war finally led to a change in human consciousness. When was it time to think about the salvation of one's soul, about the salvation of morality? When did you have to think about the country if your personal life was under threat? And, of course, it is much easier to go with the flow than to try to direct the flow in a different direction. And, finally, who will take responsibility for everything that happens, for all this confusion and chaos, even if it is impossible to be responsible for oneself, for one's thoughts and actions?
But the Russian intelligentsia did not disappear. A.P. Chekhov determined that “it is not the caretakers who are to blame, but all of us”; and, therefore, they, the Russian intellectuals, still stood above the masses, the crowd, existing on the principle of a chain reaction, if they had the ability to see, understand and evaluate. The same Chekhov was the first to show the collapse of the Russian intelligentsia as a moral force (“Only the spirit can fight the horrors” (A. A. Blok)), as the spiritual core of society, its core. He already then found the reasons that later led to the revolution. Philistinism - that was one of the reasons.
D. S. Merezhkovsky in the article “The Coming Ham” warned: “There is only one step from the noble, well-fed philistinism to the insane hungry atrocity.” "Insane hungry atrocity" - isn't that the whole point of the revolution? After all, one can find confirmation of this in A.A. Blok’s poem “The Twelve”:
Freedom, freedom
Eh, eh, no cross!
Open cellars -
Walking now nakedness!
And they go without the name of a saint
All twelve - away.
Ready for everything
Nothing to be sorry...
But then it still could not be called the end, because there were individuals in society who felt the tragedy of the Motherland, accepted it as their own; individuals who are responsible for everything that happens. A. A. Blok in the article “Intelligentsia and Revolution” wrote: “We are links in a single chain. Or do we not bear the sins of our fathers? - If everyone does not feel this, then the "best" should feel it... It is the "best" who are given to see more, hear more, feel more acutely. So who, if not them? “I am where the pain is, everywhere ...” (V. Mayakovsky). They and only they, and it was they who were to feel the spirit of the time, and the common pain was to become their personal pain. “The century can forgive the artist all sins, except for the only one, he does not forgive anyone for one thing - betrayal of the spirit of the times” (A. Blok). It was something they could be proud of. “In the era of storms and worries, the most tender and intimate aspirations of the poet’s soul are also filled with storm and anxiety” (A. Blok). They felt what others could not feel, for they were the chosen ones. And at a time when chaos reigns in society, the elements are approaching, a whirlwind sweeping away everything in its path, a whirlwind that penetrates every crack, affecting everyone, turning the world inside out and showing all the dirt and vulgarity of its insides, Pushkin's "peace and freedom are literally swept away by this "universal draft".
Let them call: Forget it, poet!
Return to beautiful comforts!
No! It is better to perish in a fierce cold!
Comfort - no. Peace - no.
A. A. Blok.
A. Blok in his article “Intelligentsia and Revolution” says: “Those of us who survive, who “do not be crushed by a noisy whirlwind,” will turn out to be the masters of innumerable spiritual treasures.” So, it means that there is still something with which you can breathe, and, therefore, you need to fight this element, you need to try not only to survive, but also to stand on your feet. “But you, artist, firmly believe in beginnings and ends ...” (A. Blok). And that is why Pushkin's "peace and freedom" are replaced by Blok's "eternal battle", the battle as a state of mind:
The heart cannot live in peace,
Suddenly the clouds have gathered.
The armor is heavy, as before the battle.
Now your time has come. - Pray!
A. Blok.
And if for some, peace is complete harmony, balance, then for others, peace is only in the struggle, in the battle, in the “battle”. Undoubtedly, it depends on the time in which a person lives, and on himself:
And he, rebellious, asks for a storm,
As if there is peace in the storms!
M. Yu. Lermontov.
And in fact, the only thing that could be hoped for, what could be believed in, and what really was some kind of way out, was a revolution - a natural phenomenon, an irreversible element. And that means that it was the artist who had to direct all his strength and try to lead this spontaneous flow. “Great moral forces must enter the world in order to keep it from chaos ...” (A. Blok).
The ideas and goals of the intelligentsia are defined in the article “Intelligentsia and Revolution”: “What is conceived? Redo everything. Arrange so that everything becomes new, so that deceitful,
our dirty, boring, ugly life has become a fair, clean, cheerful and beautiful life.
And what happened? Under whose flag did the revolution take place? What will happen next? And what happened was what A. Blok spoke about: “A revolution, like a thunderstorm, like a snowstorm, always brings something new and unexpected.” And if this is indeed so, then who, if not the intelligentsia, should have been the most sensitive in order to catch even the slightest changes in the flow, in order to hear the “music of the revolution”, in order to understand what this music is about, in order to feel the false notes in this music. “The artist’s business, the artist’s duty is to see what is intended, to listen to the music that thunders“ wind-torn air ... ”(A. Blok).
It is impossible to hear this music without faith in it, without faith in Russia. “Russia is destined to endure torments, humiliations, divisions; but she will come out of these humiliations new and - in a new way - great ”(A. Blok). And only the one who truly loves Russia, who will go through everything that she is destined to go through with her, will be able to see the universal light, only he will understand the greatness of Russia. But to love Russia is not given to everyone, but only to the elect, to those to whom it is dearer than their own lives, to those who breathe it, for Russia is a cross, having put it on one’s shoulders, a person becomes doomed:
I can't pity you
And I carefully carry my cross ...
What kind of sorcerer do you want
Give me the rogue beauty!
A. Blok.
... Together - inextricably - forever together!
Will we resurrect? Shall we perish? Will we die?
A. Blok.
“Russia is a big ship destined for a great voyage” (A. Blok). Russia is a ship. And while the ship is sailing, we are also sailing on it, but if suddenly the ship leaks and goes to the bottom, "that's when, in an extreme situation, Russia will see those chosen ones, because they will stay with her, because only rats will leave the ship" ( M. Bulgakov "White Guard"),
About what was, without regret,
I understand your height:
Yes. You are native Galilee
To me, the unresurrected Christ.
A. Blok.
If the holy army shouts:
"Throw you Rus', live in paradise!"
I will say: “There is no need for paradise,
Give me my motherland."
S. Yesenin.
The revolution is over. Fear, boredom, senseless blood, the collapse of all hopes. “It (the revolution) cruelly deceives many; she easily maims the worthy in her whirlpool; she often brings the unworthy to land unharmed ”(A. Blok).
It is enough to read A. Blok's poem "The Twelve" to understand that the revolution not only did not cleanse the earth, but, on the contrary, dragged all the dirt out and left it like that.
Like a trio of frenzied horses
Rolled all over the country.
Sprayed around. Have accumulated.
And disappeared under the devil's whistle...
S. Yesenin.
The revolution killed Russia, killed the original Russian moral foundations:
Comrade, hold the rifle, do not be afraid,
Let's fire a bullet at Holy Rus'...
- Traitors!
- Russia is dead!
Block.
And she did not die under the "banner" of Mayakovsky:
And when,
his arrival
revolt announcing,
come out to the savior -
you i
I'll take my soul out
trample on
so big! -
and a bloody lady, like a banner, but under the bloody flag of the proletariat, under the flag of free slaves going to “kill” the one who suffered and suffers for them, who takes upon himself all their sins. And more and more sins...
No more music is heard, only the wind is still walking, but soon it will subside. The fire went out - the last hope went out, and only smoke spreads over the earth. There is no more Russia Blok, and there is no more Blok. Suffocated.
I am not the first warrior, not the last,
The homeland will be sick for a long time.
Remember for early lunch
Dear friend, bright wife!
A. Blok.
This selection of poems about freedom includes works that are familiar to absolutely every schoolchild. This means that not a single eleventh-grader who takes the exam in literature will have any difficulties with quoting. So you can not only pick up works of art that touch on the philosophical problem of freedom as an example, but also analyze them, arguing with quotes from the text.
I am sitting behind bars in a damp dungeon.
Captive-bred young eagle
The lyrical hero of Pushkin's poem is imprisoned and unable to get out. But, despite this, his soul and thoughts are free, because a person from birth is free to choose his own path, he is an independent person. The author likens the hero to an eagle, calling both "free birds".
The theme of the poem is the inner freedom of the individual, which no one can limit, even "hiding" him from the outside world. The main thing, according to the poet, is to preserve the independence of beliefs, it is she who makes a person inaccessible even to physical threats.
Marina Tsvetaeva, “Who is created from stone…”
Through every heart, through every net
My willfulness will break through
The poem by Marina Tsvetaeva is a kind of manifesto, it proclaims the rules of life by which the lyrical heroine lives. She is self-willed and does not recognize anything that could somehow limit her freedom. She despises those who are "made of stone", that is, people who set their own boundaries. The main thing for her is the feeling of spiritual freedom, the knowledge that she can do whatever she wants, not only in the physical, material terms, but, first of all, in the spiritual. No prohibitions and prejudices can stop her, she calls herself "mortal sea foam", which symbolizes absolute independence and infinity.
Nikolai Nekrasov, "Freedom"
Since childhood, no one has been intimidated, free,
Choose a job that suits you
Nekrasov's poem is dedicated, perhaps, to one of the most important events of the 19th century - the abolition of serfdom (1861). The work is of a solemn nature, the lyrical hero rejoices at the sight of a child born in his spare time. After all, now he can choose his life path himself, he is not obliged to follow any rules, he is free from the bonds of serfdom and now he will build his own destiny - this is what the author finds most important in the life of every person. Despite the fact that in the middle of the poem the poet mentions that “in place of the networks of serfs, people came up with many others,” he is still sure that society has finally embarked on the true path, and soon all people will be able to call themselves truly free, and therefore happy.
Fedor Tyutchev, Silentium
Only know how to live in yourself -
There is a whole world in your soulThe lyrical hero in Tyutchev's poem finds freedom not outside, not in the environment, but in himself. He calls us to silence, because inside each of us there is a separate world in which one can find true happiness. In order not to lose this harmony and independence, you need to hide your feelings, not allow others to destroy peace of mind and, thereby, limit freedom. In addition, people who like to talk about their experiences become shackled by public opinion and the very fact of its necessity in their personal lives. Tyutchev warns us against this dependence.
Mikhail Lermontov, Three Palms
When the fog rushed to the west,
The caravan made its own way;
And after the sad on barren soil
Only gray and cold ashes could be seen;
And the sun burned the dry remnants,
And then they were blown away by the wind in the steppe.Lermontov's poem "Three Palm Trees" is an oriental story about three palm trees that prayed for someone to see them, but when God heard their request and sent strangers to them, they ruthlessly cut them down. The work leads the reader to the idea that a free person can only be alone. Any society limits the individual, does not give him freedom of choice, opinion, action. Only in solitude can one remain honest with oneself and gain the desired will to choose and decide for oneself what is best, and not seek the truth in gossip and squabbles.
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M. Yu. Chotchaeva
Artistic understanding of the problem of individual freedom in the works of F. M. Dostoevsky, A. P. Chekhov, V. T. Shalamova
(Reviewed)
Annotation:
In this article, the problem of freedom is considered as a necessary condition for the development of a person who finds himself in conditions of lack of freedom. Purpose of the work: to prove that in the works of Russian writers about hard labor freedom is not only a condition of natural existence, but also its qualitative essence, meaning and ideal. But freedom is revealed only when there is non-freedom; in itself, without its antipode, it is not felt.
Keywords:
Freedom, lack of freedom, personality, penal servitude, character, genre, prisoner, character, human essence.
Each historical epoch leaves its mark on the understanding of freedom, summing it up with the previous one. Freedom as an element of the worldview, as a goal and ideal that gives meaning and strength to life in the struggle for survival, begins to excite people's minds from the very moment a person realizes himself as an active subject of transformative activity. It found its mental expression in ancient myths, in atomistic theories, in medieval theology and scholasticism, in the mechanical-metaphysical concepts of modern times, in German classical philosophy and in modern world philosophy. A special position in the development of the problem of human freedom is occupied by Russian literature, which interprets freedom, first of all, as the problem of the foundation of human existence. Such an understanding of this issue allows us to put forward the thesis that positively directed freedom, first of all, is realized within the person himself, in his inner being, in his spiritual nature. And at the same time, freedom is a way of realizing the spiritual nature of a person, will, realizing one's intentions and goals.
The problem of freedom in Russian literature is most vividly embodied in works about hard labor. F. M. Dostoevsky, with his autobiographical Notes from the House of the Dead, paved the way for the theme of hard labor in Russian literature. The main idea of "Notes from the House of the Dead" by F. M. Dostoevsky is the idea of freedom. It is she who underlies the artistic development of the work, determines the value system of the figurative-logical world of Dostoevsky's work. In the very metaphor "Dead House", according to T.S. Karlova, mainly, is a socio-political and ethical subtext: "freedom is an indispensable condition for life."
"Notes from the House of the Dead" is the result of the writer's ten-year reflections in hard labor and in exile, the main idea of which the writer declared the idea of individual freedom. The “Siberian Notebook”, in which Dostoevsky wrote down his impressions, observations, reflections of the period of hard labor and settlement, was for him a kind of abstract, where life situations, characters, stories of convicts were hidden behind individual records, which were later included in “Notes from the House of the Dead” : out of 522 entries in the Siberian Notebook, more than 200 were used.
Dostoevsky both begins and ends his Notes with the theme of freedom: “It happened that you looked through the cracks of the fence at the light of day: wouldn’t you see at least something? - and only you will see that the edge of the sky and a high earthen rampart, overgrown with weeds, and back and forth along the rampart, day and night, sentries pace; and right there
you will think that whole years will pass, and you will go to look through the cracks of the fence in the same way and you will see the same rampart, the same sentries and the same small edge of the sky, not the sky that is above the prison, but another, distant, free sky.
In Notes from the House of the Dead, Dostoevsky shows that freedom is an indispensable condition for living life. He called the prison fortress the House of the Dead because "almost any unauthorized manifestation of personality in a prisoner is considered a crime," which is "forced common cohabitation."
Arguing that freedom is a necessary condition for the normal development of the human personality, a condition for the moral rebirth of a person, Dostoevsky compares life in hard labor with life in freedom in tsarist Russia, where slavery was protected by law, and exclaims with deep sadness: “how much strength and talent perishes in our country.” Russia sometimes almost for nothing, in captivity and hard fate. Dostoevsky argues that no force can kill a person’s thirst for freedom, longing for freedom, and that living life anywhere, even in prison conditions, is unthinkable without “one’s own, inner life,” which takes shape apart from the “official” one. In criminals from the people, he noticed "not at all humiliation, but self-esteem." The author says that “the prisoner loves terribly ... to assure even himself, at least for a while, that he has incomparably more will and power than it seems”, he instinctively strives for “exaltation of his own personality, even if illusory” . Life itself arranged an experiment for Dostoevsky, from which his philosophy grew. The first impressions of hard labor were fright, surprise and despair; It took years to believe in the new reality and understand it. And then gradually - all the terrible, monstrous and mysterious that surrounded him began to clear in his mind. He realized that the whole meaning of the word "prisoner" means a person without a will, and that all the features of hard labor are explained by one concept - "deprivation of liberty." It seemed that he could have known this before, but, notes Dostoevsky, "reality makes a completely different impression than knowledge and rumors." The author does not exaggerate the horrors of hard labor: work in the workshops did not seem too hard to him; the food was tolerable; bosses, with few exceptions, humane and benevolent; in prison it was allowed to engage in any craft, but even this was a burden: “State hard labor serf labor was not an occupation, but an obligation, the prisoner worked out his lesson or served his legal hours of work and went to prison. They looked at work with hatred.
Chekhov gives the same examples in Sakhalin Island, describing a man who flatly refused to work in hard labor: “This is a hard labor, an old man who, from the very first day of his arrival on Sakhalin, refused to work, and before his invincible, purely bestial stubbornness, all coercive measures were saved ; they put him in a dark room, flogged him several times, but he stoically withstood the punishment and exclaimed after each execution: “But still, I won’t work!” . This attitude to work was typical for convicts. Being in conditions of lack of freedom, they hated forced labor, but, hiding from their superiors, they worked willingly if they could earn money for themselves: “There were shoemakers, and shoemakers, and tailors, and carpenters, and carvers, and gilders. There was one Jew, Isai Bumshtein, a jeweler, who is also a usurer. They all worked and got a penny. Work orders were obtained from the city. Money is minted freedom, and therefore for a person who is completely deprived of freedom, they are ten times more expensive.
Without money there is no power and freedom. Dostoevsky writes: “Money ... had a strange meaning in prison, power. It can be positively said that a prisoner who had at least some money in hard labor suffered ten times less than one who did not have it at all, although the latter is also provided with everything state-owned, and why, it seems, would he have money? - as our superiors reasoned ... The prisoner is greedy for money to the point of convulsions, to the clouding of reason, and if he really throws them like chips, when he revels, he throws
for what he considers another degree above money. What is higher than money for a prisoner? Freedom, or at least some dream of freedom.
It is characteristic that people of different classes, who find themselves in hard labor and are forced to live together, show the same attitude towards money and work. The nobleman Goryanchikov has a sharply negative attitude towards work, although physically the work does not seem difficult to him: “The hardest work, for example, seemed to me not at all so hard, hard labor, and only quite a long time later I realized that the severity and hard labor of this work was not so much in difficulty and its continuity, how much in the fact that it is forced, obligatory under duress. A peasant in the wild works, perhaps, and incomparably more, sometimes even at night, especially in summer; but he works for himself, works with a reasonable goal, and it is incomparably easier for him than for a convict in a forced and completely useless job for him. It once occurred to me that if they wanted to completely crush, destroy a person, punish him with the most terrible punishment, so that the most terrible murderer would shudder from this punishment and be frightened of him in advance, then it would only be necessary to give the work the character of complete, utter uselessness and senselessness. » .
One of the writers who, following Dostoevsky, turned to the theme of man in conditions of lack of freedom was Varlam Shalamov, who could not but take into account the literary experience of his predecessor. The leading principles of Shalamov's "new prose" go back to Notes from the House of the Dead. In the Kolyma Tales, the form and plot of the Notes are updated, which is due to the partial similarity of the fates of both writers, the autobiographical nature of their works about hard labor, the commonality of the artistic object and some worldviews.
“My old desire,” recalls Varlam Shalamov, “was to write a commentary on Notes from the House of the Dead.” I held this book in my hands, read and thought about it in the summer of 1949, while working as a paramedic on a forest assignment. I then gave myself a careless promise to expose, if I may say so, the naivety of Notes from the House of the Dead, all their literary content, all their obsolescence. This desire to "debunk" the hard labor authority of Dostoevsky is found in the texts of "Kolyma stories" ("Tatar mullah and clean air", "In the bathhouse", "Red Cross", etc.).
Shalamov's conclusions turned out to be premature: the form of the book about hard labor turned out to be relevant in modern literature as well.
Varlam Shalamov did not create such a vivid image of freedom in Kolyma Tales as Dostoevsky did in Notes from the House of the Dead. In Shalamov's prose, rather, the motive of senseless hope comes through. Few heroes of Shalamov's stories strive to return home, as hope has been killed in them. The hero of the story "Tombstone", on whose behalf the narration is being conducted, only dreams of returning to prison, because he understands that he will bring nothing but fear to the family. The dreams of the former director of Uraltrest Timofeev, once a strong and influential person, do not extend beyond soup with dumplings, and only a complete invalid who is completely dependent on others is capable of protest and striving for freedom. After the war, when yesterday's soldiers began to arrive in the camps, people "with courage, the ability to take risks, who believed only in weapons," armed escapes became possible (the story "Major Pugachev's Last Battle"). Even death does not allow the prisoner to gain freedom, to get rid of the monstrous camp life, so, in the story "Sherry Brandy", the prisoners raised the hand of the deceased when distributing bread.
Labor in the Kolyma Tales becomes torture for the prisoner, both physical and mental. It inspires him only with fear and hatred. Exemption from labor by any means and means, up to self-mutilation, becomes the most desirable goal, since it promises deliverance from forced employment.
People somehow get used to physical suffering in hard labor (noise, fumes, stench, cold, crowding). The torment of hard labor is not in this: she is in captivity. From longing for freedom flow all
character traits of convicts. Prisoners are big dreamers. That is why they are so gloomy and withdrawn, they are so afraid of betraying themselves, and they hate merry talkers so much. There is some kind of convulsive anxiety in them, they never feel at home in prison, they are at enmity and quarrel among themselves, since their cohabitation is forced: “The devil took three bast shoes before he gathered us together!” they said to themselves; and therefore gossip, intrigue, women's slander, envy, strife, anger were always in the foreground in this pitch-black life. "Perfect life," writes Dostoevsky, using the word denoting gloom, hopeless darkness to characterize hard labor.
This impenetrable “poverty” also reigns in hard labor Sakhalin, otherwise how can one explain that the beautiful adventurer Sonya the Golden Hand (Sofya Blyuvshtein) has turned into a gloomy repressed creature: “This is a small, thin, already graying woman with a wrinkled, old woman’s face. She has shackles on her hands; on the bunks there is only one coat made of gray sheepskin, which serves her both as warm clothes and a bed. She walks around her cell from corner to corner, and it seems that she is constantly sniffing the air, like a mouse in a mousetrap, and her expression is mouse-like. Chekhov does not pay much attention to such hardened criminals in his book. He is more interested in such prisoners as Yegor, a modest, hard-working peasant who ended up in hard labor by accident, or the tramp Nikita Trofimov, nicknamed Handsome, whose only fault was that he could not bear the burden of military service. So the story about the life of convicts turns into reflections on the fate of ordinary Russian people, due to circumstances, tragically found themselves in hard labor and longing for freedom. People who find themselves in captivity, dreaming of freedom, even romanticize it a little, which leads to constant escapes and vagrancy, both in the Omsk prison and in hard labor Sakhalin. Chekhov considers the incessant escapes from hard labor to be evidence, the main sign that human feelings and aspirations are alive among convicts: the consciousness of life that does not fall asleep in him. If he is not a philosopher who lives equally well everywhere and under all circumstances, then he cannot and should not not want to run.
People deprived of their liberty languish, start pointless quarrels, work in disgust. But if they are allowed to show their initiative, they are immediately transformed. Especially striking changes occur with convicts on the eve of holidays. The holiday occupies one of the most important places in a person’s life, all peoples had holidays at all stages of their historical development, which allows us to consider the holiday a universal phenomenon of culture and human existence. A holiday is not an abstract idea, but a reality, one way or another accessible to everyone and in any conditions. Both penal servitude and prison do not deprive a person of the desire for a holiday.
For people whose freedom is limited, a holiday is one of its manifestations, an opportunity to get out of the control of power. In prison, a holiday is a temporary deviation from the rules, the admission of some disorder in order to maintain total order, to keep chaos within acceptable limits. Before the meeting of Christmas in the Omsk prison, the mood of the convicts changed dramatically, they remembered the house, the holidays in the wild. The whole day the prisoners did not leave the hope for a miracle. No one could really explain what he was waiting for, but everyone hoped for something bright and beautiful. But the day passed, and nothing changed: “All this poor people wanted to have fun, to have fun on a great holiday - and, Lord! What a heavy and sad day this was for almost everyone. Everyone saw him off as if deceived in some hope.
In the eleventh chapter of Notes from the House of the Dead, art is the way out, giving a sense of celebration. For prisoners, the charm of the theater lies in the fact that on the stage they have the illusion of a full-fledged human life. Describing the hard labor theater, Dostoevsky shows the talent and imagination of the actors. The prisoners themselves
they made scenery, sewed a curtain, which impressed Goryanchikov: “First of all, I was struck by the curtain. It stretched for ten paces across the entire barracks. The curtain was such a luxury that there really was something to marvel at. In addition, it was painted with oil paint: trees, arbors, ponds and stars were depicted.
Among the convicts there were artists, musicians, and singers. And the play of hard labor actors simply shocked Goryanchikov: “Imagine prison, shackles, bondage, long sad years ahead, life, monotonous, like water drops on a gloomy autumn day, and suddenly all these oppressed and prisoners were allowed to turn around for an hour, have fun, forget a heavy sleep, arrange a whole theater, and how to arrange it: to the pride and surprise of the whole city, - know, they say, ours, what prisoners are like! .
A kind of way out for prisoners is everything that somehow connects them with normal life: “What a strange gleam of childish joy, sweet, pure pleasure shone on these wrinkled, branded foreheads and cheeks ...”, Dostoevsky wrote, observing behind the prisoners during a theatrical performance. Everyone is happy, as if even happy. “Only a little they allowed these poor people to live in their own way, to have fun in a human way, to live at least an hour without being guarded - and a person changes morally, even if only for a few minutes.”
Chekhov saw the same “childish joy” on the faces of the exiles during the wedding in Aleksandrovsk: “When the priest placed crowns on the heads of the bride and groom and asked God to crown them with glory and honor, the faces of the women present expressed tenderness and joy, and, it seemed, it was forgotten that the action takes place in a prison church, in hard labor, far, far from the homeland. But this joy is short-lived, it soon gave way to sadness and melancholy: “When the church was empty after the wedding, and there was a smell of burning from the candles that the watchman was in a hurry to extinguish, it became sad.”
Both writers believe that real joy and a festive mood in hard labor are impossible. You can forget for a while, but you can’t truly rejoice, because this requires freedom. The motive of freedom runs through the entire content of the books "Notes from the House of the Dead" and "Sakhalin Island", their construction is largely determined by this ideological concept. Freedom allows a person to realize his spiritual purpose - the transcendence of his own nature and its transformation into another, turning him to the sphere of higher values and ideals, to spirituality.
It is not enough to see in freedom only the absence of external restrictions. In fact, external freedom means nothing more than a condition of normal human existence. You can free yourself only from external fetters. The path to inner freedom has a direction opposite to outer liberation. Independence is achieved by expanding the boundaries, removing obstacles to the realization of one's own freedom, which has been and will be the starting point for writers in describing the human personality.
Notes:
1. Karlova T.S. On the Structural Significance of the Image of the "House of the Dead" // Dostoevsky:
Materials and research. L., 1974.
2. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete Works: In 30 volumes. T. 4. L., 1972-1990.
3. Chekhov A.P. Works: In 18 vols. T. 14-15. M., 1987.
4. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete Works: In 30 volumes. T. 4. L., 1972-1990.
5. Shalamov V. “How little Russia has changed...”: From notes about Dostoevsky // Lit. gas.
6. Dostoevsky F.M. Complete Works: In 30 volumes. T. 4. L., 1972-1990.
Chekhov A.P. Compositions: In 18 volumes. T. 14-15. - M., 1987.
