Gogol's fantastic story "Portrait. The Functions of Science Fiction The Role of Science Fiction in Works
- Expanding students' ideas about Gogol's work, helping to see the real and fantastic world in the story "Portrait".
- Formation of research skills, comparative analysis.
- Strengthen faith in the high purpose of art.
Equipment: a portrait of N.V. Gogol, two versions of the story, illustrations for the story.
Preparing for the lesson. In advance, students are given the task to read the story "Portrait": the first group - the version of "Arabesque", the second group - the second version. Prepare answers to questions:
- What is the ideological content of the story?
- How did the hero's portrait appear?
- Who is in the portrait?
- How did the artist try to get rid of the terrible portrait?
- How does the artist's spiritual fall occur?
- What is the fate of the portrait?
During the classes
organizational part. Message about the topic and purpose of the lesson.
Introduction by the teacher.
One of the features of N.V. Gogol's vision of the world through fantasy. As a romantic, he was fascinated by fantastic stories, strong characters of people from the people. The stories beloved by many readers "The Night Before Christmas", "May Night, or the Drowned Woman", "Viy", "Terrible Revenge", "The Enchanted Place" are like a fairy tale, because in them the world is divided into ordinary, real and unusual, "other world ". In his works, reality is intricately intertwined with fantastic fiction.
We see such a connection between reality and fantasy in the story "Portrait". It is considered one of the most controversial and complex stories of the St. Petersburg cycle; is interesting not only as a peculiar expression of the writer's aesthetic views, but also as a work in which the contradictions of Gogol's worldview have affected. The world of St. Petersburg in Gogol is real, recognizable and at the same time fantastic, eluding understanding. In the 1930s, stories about people of art, musicians, and artists were especially popular. Against the background of these works, Gogol's "Portrait" stood out for the significance of the ideological concept, the maturity of the writer's generalizations.
A conversation about the history of the creation of the story.
Teacher. Pay attention to the date of publication of the story.
The original version of the story was published in the collection "Arabesques" in 1835. The second, revised version was published in 1942 in the Sovremennik magazine. They are both similar and different.
It turns out that the original version of the story caused a number of negative reviews from critics. The great critic V.G. Belinsky. In the article "On the Russian story and the stories of Mr. Gogol" he writes: "Portrait" is an unsuccessful attempt by Gogol in a fantastic way. Here his talent falls, but even in the fall he remains a talent. The first part of this story is impossible to read without enthusiasm; even, in fact, there is something terrible, fatal, fantastic in this mysterious portrait, there is some kind of invincible charm that makes you forcefully look at it, although you are afraid of it. Add to this a multitude of humorous pictures and essays in the style of Mr. Gogol: But the second part of it is worth absolutely nothing; Mr. Gogol is not at all visible in it. This is an obvious adaptation in which the mind worked, and fantasy did not take any part: In general, it must be said that the fantastic is somehow not quite given to Mr. Gogol.
Under the influence of Belinsky's criticism, Gogol revised the story in 1841-1842 during his stay in Rome and sent it to Pletnev for publication, accompanied by the words: "It was published in Arabesques, but don't be afraid of that. Read it: you will see that you are left alone only the canvas of the old story, that everything was embroidered on it again. In Rome, I redid it completely, or, better, wrote it again, as a result of remarks made back in St. Petersburg, "he wrote to Pletnev.
Comparative analysis of the work.
Teacher. What is this story about?
The writer focuses on the tragic fate of the artist in modern society, where everything is for sale, up to beauty, talent and inspiration. The clash of the ideals of art, beauty with reality forms the basis of the content of both the first and second editions.
A talented but poor young artist bought an old portrait with his last money. The strangeness of the portrait is in the eyes, the piercing gaze of the mysterious person depicted in it. “The portrait, it seemed, was not finished; but the power of the brush was striking. The most extraordinary thing were the eyes: it seemed that the artist used all the power of the brush and all the diligent care of his artist. They just looked, looked even from the portrait itself, as if destroying its harmony with their strange liveliness ... They were alive, they were human eyes! They were motionless, but, it’s true, they wouldn’t be so terrible if they moved. The young artist spent a night full of nightmares. He saw, either in a dream or in reality, how the terrible old man depicted in the portrait jumped out of the frames: So he began to approach the artist, began to unfold the bundles, and there - gold coins: "My God, if only some of this money!" - the artist dreamed, and his dream came true. But from that day on, strange changes began to occur in the soul of the young man. Flattered by wealth, not without the intervention of a portrait, he gradually turned from a promising talented artist into a greedy, envious artisan. "Soon it was impossible to recognize a modest artist in him: His fame grew, works and orders increased: But even the most ordinary virtues were no longer visible in his works, and yet they still enjoyed fame, although true connoisseurs and artists only shrugged their shoulders, looking at his latest works. Gold became his passion and ideal, fear and pleasure, goal. Bunches of banknotes grew in his chests. " Chartkov sank lower and lower, reached the point that he began to destroy the talented creations of other masters, went crazy and, finally, died. After his death, his paintings were put up for auction, among them was that portrait. Recognized by one of the visitors, the mysterious portrait disappeared to continue its destructive influence on people.
Teacher. Let's compare the two versions of the story. What difference can you find between the stories of the two editions?
How did the hero's portrait appear?
Who is in the portrait?
How did the artist try to get rid of the terrible portrait?
How does the artist's spiritual fall occur?
What is the fate of the portrait?
| Edition "Arabesque". | Second edition. |
| 1. The painting appeared to the artist Chertkov in a mysterious way. Chertkov paid 50 rubles for the portrait, but, horrified by his eyes, he ran away. In the evening, the portrait mysteriously appeared on his wall. (mystical element) | 1. Chartkov bought a portrait in a shop for the last two kopecks and "dragged it with him." (Very real event) |
| 2. The portrait depicts a mysterious usurer, either a Greek, or an Armenian, or a Moldavian, whom the author called "a strange creature." But he has a specific surname - Petromikhali. Before his death, he begged, conjured the artist "to paint a portrait of him." Half of his life passed into a portrait. | 2. An unknown usurer, "an extraordinary creature in every respect." Nobody knows his name, but there is no doubt about the presence of evil spirits in this person. "The devil, the perfect devil! - the artist thinks of him, - that's who I should write the devil from." As if learning about his thoughts, the terrible usurer himself came to order a portrait from him. "What a diabolical power! It will simply jump out of my canvas, if only I will be true to nature at least a little:" - How right he was, this artist! |
| 3. The author of the portrait burned it in the fireplace, but the terrible portrait reappeared, and the artist experienced many misfortunes. | 3. A friend begged the author for a picture, and the portrait began to bring misfortune to people one after another. |
| 4. Clients somehow mysteriously learn about the glorious artist Chertkov. The spiritual fall of the artist occurs as a result of the intervention of the "devil". | 4. Chartkov himself orders an advertisement in the newspaper "On the extraordinary talents of Chartkov." Because of the penchant for secular life, panache, love of money, he sinks lower and lower. |
| 5. At the end, the portrait mysteriously and without a trace disappeared from the canvas. (Mysticism again!) | 5. The portrait is stolen. But it continues to exist and destroy people. (Realistic sense) |
Teacher. What is the ideological content of the story?
If in the first edition "Portrait" is a story about the invasion of mysterious demonic forces into the work and life of an artist, then in the second edition it is a story about an artist who betrayed art, who suffered retribution for the fact that he began to treat creativity as a profitable craft. In the second story, Gogol significantly weakened the fantastic element and deepened the psychological content of the story. The moral fall of the artist was not at all accidental, it was explained not by the magical power of the portrait, but by the inclinations of the artist himself, who discovered "impatience", "excessive brilliance of colors", love of money. Thus, the ending in the second edition acquired a realistic meaning.
Teacher. In the story, Gogol condemned the commercialization of creativity, when the author and his talent are bought. How does the author prevent the death of the artist's talent?
The death of the painter Chartkov is predetermined at the very beginning of the story in the words of the professor: “Look, brother, you have a talent; it would be a sin if you ruin it: Beware: the light is already beginning to pull you: It is tempting, you can set off to write fashionable pictures, portraits for money But this is where talent is ruined, not developed: ". However, the young man did not pay much attention to the mentor's warning.
Teacher. Art is called upon to reveal to man the holiness, the mystery of life, its justification. The reconciling mission of art is spoken of in the "Portrait" by the artist who painted the mysterious portrait. With years of solitude and humility, he atones for the evil he has done unwittingly. He passes on his new understanding of art to his son, also an artist. These ideas are especially close and dear to Gogol. He tries to comprehend the most complex nature of creativity; therefore, the fates of three artists are correlated in the story. Name them.
First, Chartkov, endowed with a spark of God and lost his talent; secondly, the artist who created in Italy a picture that strikes everyone with harmony and silence; thirdly, the author of the ill-fated portrait.
Summing up the lesson.
Teacher. In the story, Gogol gradually unfolds the cause of the death of not only talent, but also the artist himself. In pursuit of wealth, Gogol's character loses the integrity of the spirit, can no longer create by inspiration. The soul destroyed by the "light" seeks salvation in material wealth and worldly fashionable glory. The reader believes that there is also the participation of mystical forces in this. The result of such a deal, and Gogol considers it a deal with the devil, is the death of a talent, the death of an artist. This is the fusion of the fantastic and the realistic in the story.
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 exposure 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, sharing 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, themes, heroes, are united by the place of action - 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 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 and absurd life, fantastic events and ideals. Any metamorphoses are 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 Petersburg mythology that arose without the intervention of otherworldly forces. This mythology is special - 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 the 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 not found anywhere 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 person who was mistaken for the overcoatless ghost of Akaky Akakievich is the man who stole his overcoat from him”?
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 interweaving, 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.
One of the most significant critics of his time, V.G. Belinsky, disapprovingly commented on the story “Portrait”: “this is Mr. Gogol’s unsuccessful attempt in a fantastic way. Here his talent falls, but he remains a talent even in the fall.”
Probably, the success of Pushkin's The Queen of Spades prompted Gogol to tell the story of a man who was killed by a thirst for gold. The author called his story "Portrait". Is it because the portrait of the usurer played a fatal role in the fate of his heroes - artists, whose fates are compared in two parts of the story? Or because Gogol wanted to give a portrait of modern society and a talented person who perishes or is saved despite hostile circumstances and the humiliating properties of nature? Or is it a portrait of the art and soul of the writer himself, who is trying to escape from the temptation of success and prosperity and purify his soul by high service to art?
Probably, there is a social, moral, and aesthetic meaning in this strange story by Gogol, there is a reflection on what a person, society, and art are. Modernity and eternity are intertwined here so inseparably that the life of the Russian capital in the 30s of the 19th century goes back to biblical reflections about good and evil, about their endless struggle in the human soul.
At first, we meet the artist Chartkov at that moment in his life when, with youthful ardor, he loves the height of the genius of Raphael, Michelangelo, Correggio and despises handicraft fakes that replace art for the layman. Seeing in the shop a strange portrait of an old man with piercing eyes, Chartkov is ready to give the last two kopecks for him. Poverty did not take away from him the ability to see the beauty of life and work with enthusiasm on his sketches. He reaches for the light and does not want to turn art into an anatomical theater, to expose the “disgusting person” with a knife-brush. He rejects artists whose "nature itself ... seems low, dirty," so that "there is nothing illuminating in it." Chartkov, according to his teacher in painting, is talented, but impatient and prone to worldly pleasures, fuss. But as soon as the money, which miraculously fell out of the frame of the portrait, gives Chartkov the opportunity to lead a scattered secular life and enjoy prosperity, wealth and fame, and not art, become his idols. Chartkov owes his success to the fact that, drawing a portrait of a secular young lady, which turned out bad for him, he was able to rely on a disinterested work of talent - a drawing of Psyche, where a dream of an ideal being was heard. But the ideal was not alive, and only by uniting with the impressions of real life did it become attractive, and real life acquired the significance of the ideal. However, Chartkov lied, giving the insignificant girl the appearance of Psyche. Flattering for the sake of success, he betrayed the purity of art. And the talent began to leave Chartkov, betrayed him. “Whoever has a talent in himself, he must be the purest of all in soul,” the father says to his son in the second part of the story. And this is an almost verbatim repetition of Mozart's words in Pushkin's tragedy: "Genius and villainy are two incompatible things." But for Pushkin, good is in the nature of genius. Gogol, on the other hand, writes a story that the artist, like all people, is subject to the temptation of evil and destroys himself and his talent more terrible and faster than ordinary people. Talent that is not realized in true art, talent that parted with good, becomes destructive for the individual.
Chartkov, who for the sake of success conceded truth to goodness, ceases to feel life in its multicoloredness, variability, and trembling. His portraits comfort customers, but do not live, they do not reveal, but close the personality, nature. And despite the fame of a fashionable painter, Chartkov feels that he has nothing to do with real art. A wonderful painting by an artist who had perfected himself in Italy caused a shock in Chartkow. Probably, in the admiring outline of this picture, Gogol gave a generalized image of the famous painting by Karl Bryullov “The Last Day of Pompeii”. But the shock experienced by Chartkov does not awaken him to a new life, because for this it is necessary to give up the pursuit of wealth and fame, to kill the evil in himself. Chartkov chooses a different path: he begins to expel talented art from the world, to buy up and cut magnificent canvases, to kill good. And this path leads him to madness and death.
What was the cause of these terrible transformations: the weakness of a person in the face of temptations or the mystical sorcery of a portrait of a usurer who gathered the evil of the world in his burning gaze? Gogol answered this question ambiguously. A real explanation of Chartkov's fate is as possible as a mystical one. The dream that leads Chartkov to gold can be both the fulfillment of his subconscious desires, and the aggression of evil spirits, which is remembered whenever it comes to the portrait of a usurer. The words “devil”, “devil”, “darkness”, “demon” turn out to be the speech frame of the portrait in the story.
Pushkin in The Queen of Spades essentially refutes the mystical interpretation of events. The story, written by Gogol in the year of the appearance and universal success of The Queen of Spades, is a response and objection to Pushkin. Evil offends not only Chartkov, who is subject to the temptations of success, but also the father of the artist B., who painted a portrait of a usurer who looks like the devil and who himself has become an evil spirit. And “a firm character, an honest straight person”, having painted a portrait of evil, feels “incomprehensible anxiety”, disgust for life and envy for the successes of his talented students.
An artist who has touched evil, painted the usurer's eyes, which "looked demonically crushing", can no longer paint good, his brush is driven by "an impure feeling", and in the picture intended for the temple, "there is no holiness in the faces."
All people associated with the usurer in real life perish, betraying the best properties of their nature. The artist who reproduced evil expanded its influence. The portrait of a usurer robs people of the joy of life and awakens “such anguish ... just as if he wanted to kill someone.” Stylistically, this combination is characteristic: “exactly as if...” Of course, “exactly” is used in the sense of “as” in order to avoid tautology. At the same time, the combination of “exactly” and “as if” conveys Gogol’s manner of detailed realistic description and illusory, fantastic meaning of events.
The story "Portrait" does not bring reassurance, showing how all people, regardless of the properties of their character and the height of their convictions, are subject to evil. Gogol, having remade the ending of the story, takes away the hope of eradicating evil. In the first edition, the appearance of the usurer mysteriously evaporated from the canvas, leaving the canvas blank. In the final text of the story, the portrait of the usurer disappears: evil again began to roam the world.
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, fiction 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 instantly engulfing 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, forever overshadowed by a caustic smile, small, but alive, like fire, eyes, constantly changing on the face of lightning 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 emerges in "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 fantasy 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. The 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 that needs to be confirmed, but instead, something completely different is asserted. “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 comparison is violated "Ivanovich is very angry if he gets a fly in 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.
2009 is the year when the entire literary country will celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of the great writer.
This work was prepared primarily to help students and is a literary analysis of works, which reveals the basic concepts of the topic.
The relevance of the topic is demonstrated by the choice of works by the great Russian science fiction writer.
This work is dedicated to the works of N.V. Gogol - "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka", "Nose", "Portrait". To understand Gogol's method of presenting a text, where fantastic plots and images play the main role, it is necessary to analyze the structure of the work.
The choice of texts is based on the “school curriculum +” principle, that is, a small number of texts are added to the school curriculum, which is necessary for general humanitarian development
This work is based on sections from the book by Yu. V. Mann "Gogol's Poetics".
The purpose of the work: to understand, see the complexity and versatility of the writer, to identify and analyze the features of poetics and various forms of the fantastic in the works.
In addition to materials devoted to Gogol's work, the work contains a kind of literary glossary: for the convenience of the student, the main terms and concepts are highlighted for each work.
I would like to hope that our work will help students explore works from the point of view of a fantastic worldview.
Fiction in literature is the depiction of implausible phenomena, the introduction of fictitious images that do not coincide with reality, a clearly felt violation of natural forms, causal relationships, and laws of nature by artists.
The term fantasy comes from the word "fantasy" (in Greek mythology Phantasus is a deity that causes illusions, apparent images, the brother of the god of dreams Morpheus).
All the works of N.V. Gogol, 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 belongs to - to the present or the past.
In works about the "past" (five stories from "Evenings" - "The Missing Letter", "Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala", "The Night Before Christmas", "Terrible Revenge", "The Enchanted Place", and also "Viy") has common features.
Higher powers openly intervene in the plot. In all cases, these are images in which an unreal evil principle is personified: the devil or people who entered into a criminal conspiracy with him. Fantastic events are reported either by the author-narrator or by a character acting as a narrator (but sometimes based on a legend or on the testimony of ancestors - "eyewitnesses": grandfather, "my grandfather's aunt").
In all these texts there is no fantastic backstory. It is not needed, since the action is homogeneous both in temporal captivity (the past) and in relation to fantasy (not collected in any one time period, but distributed over the course of the work).
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 time plan.
In Gogol's fiction there is:
1. Alogism in the narrator's speech. (“Portrait” - “First of all, he took up finishing the eyes”, “as if an impure feeling led the artist’s hand”, “You just didn’t hit him in the eyebrow, but climbed into his very eyes. So eyes never looked into life like they looking at you", etc.).
2. Strange-unusual in terms of the depicted. The strange intervention of an animal in action, the revival of objects. (“Nose” - the nose is a living character, “Portrait” - “looked at him, leaning out from behind the set canvas, someone's convulsively distorted face. Two terrible eyes stared directly at him, as if preparing to devour him; there was a threatening command to be silent")
3. Unusual names and surnames of the characters. (Solokha, Khoma Brut and others; "Portrait" - in the first edition - Chertkov, in subsequent editions - Chatrkov).
Let us pay attention, first of all, to the fact that in the story such concepts as “line” and “border” quite often appear. The semantics of the name Chertkov includes not only associations with the bearer of an unreal (not existing in reality) force, with the devil, but also with the trait both in the artistic sense (stroke, stroke) and in a wider sense (border, limit).
This may be the boundary of age, separating youth and maturity from withering and old age, separating artistic creativity from mechanical labor.
Under the surname already Chartkov lies a lie, idealization, adaptation to the tastes and whims of his rich and noble customers; work without inner and creative insight, without an ideal; there is a self-exaltation of a hero who destroys his spiritual purity, and at the same time his talent.
4. Involuntary movements and grimaces of characters.
In folk demonology, involuntary movements are often caused by a supernatural force.
The story "The Nose" is the most important link in the development of Gogol's fiction. The carrier of the fantastic has been removed, but the fantastic remains; the romantic mystery is parodied, but the mystique remains.
In The Nose, the function of the “rumor form” is changed, which now does not serve as a means of veiled fantasy, it operates against the backdrop of a fantastic incident presented as reliable.
In "Portrait", as in "Sorochinsky Fair" and in "May Night", the fantastic is presented in such a way that supernatural forces in their "tangible" appearance (witches, devils, etc.) are relegated to the back, "yesterday's" plan.
In today's time plan, only a fantastic reflection or some fantastic remnant is preserved - a tangible result of strange events that took place in reality: “He saw how the wonderful image of the deceased Petromichaly went into the frame of a portrait”
Only this portrait passes into reality, and personified fantastic images are eliminated. All strange events are reported in a tone of some uncertainty. Chertkov, after the appearance of the portrait in his room, began to assure himself that the portrait was sent by the owner, who found out his address, but this version, in turn, is undermined by the narrator's remark: “In short, he began to give all those flat explanations that we use when we want, so that what happened will certainly happen the way we think” (but that it did not happen “the way” that Chertkov thought, is definitely not reported).
Chartkov’s vision of a wonderful old man is given in the form of half-sleep-half-awake: “he fell into a dream, but into some kind of half-oblivion, into that painful state when with one eye we see the oncoming dreams of dreams, and with the other - in an obscure cloud surrounding objects.” It would seem that the fact that it was a dream is finally confirmed by the phrase: "Chartkov was convinced that his imagination presented him in a dream with the creation of his own indignant thoughts."
But here a tangible “residue” of the dream is discovered - money (as in “May Night” - a letter from a lady), which, in turn, is given a real everyday motivation (in “the frame was a box covered with a thin board”).
Along with the dream, such forms of veiled (implicit) fantasy are generously introduced into the narrative, such as coincidences, the hypnotizing effect of one character (here, a portrait) on another.
Simultaneously with the introduction of veiled fantasy, the real-psychological plan of Chertkov the artist emerges. His fatigue, need, bad inclinations, thirst for quick success are noted. A parallelism is created between the fantastic and the real-psychological concept of the image. Everything that happens can be interpreted both as a fatal influence of the portrait on the artist, and as his personal surrender to forces hostile to art.
In the "Portrait" the epithet "hellish" is applied several times to Chertkov's actions and plans: "the most infernal intention that a person has ever harbored was revived in his soul"; “an infernal thought flashed in the artist’s head” Here, this epithet was correlated with Petromichaly, a personified image of an unreal evil force (“The victims of this hellish spirit will be countless,” it is said about her in the second part).
So, in his searches in the field of fantasy, N.V. Gogol develops the described principle of parallelism between the fantastic and the real. Gogol's priority was prosaic-everyday, folklore-comic fiction.
We see that the writer, introducing in parallel with the “terrible” comic treatment of “devilry”, realized the pan-European artistic trend, and the devil from “The Night Before Christmas”, blowing on burned fingers, dragging after Solokha and constantly getting into trouble.
In the “Portrait” the religious painter says: “For a long time the Antichrist has wanted to be born, but he cannot, because he must be born in a supernatural way; but in our world everything is arranged by the Almighty in such a way that everything happens in a natural order.
But our earth is dust before the Creator. According to his laws, it must be destroyed, and every day the laws of nature will become weaker and, from that, the boundaries that hold the supernatural more criminal.
With the words of a religious painter about the loosening of world laws, Chertkov’s impressions of the portrait completely coincide. "What is this"? he thought to himself. - "Art or supernatural what kind of magic that looked past the laws of nature?"
The divine in Gogol's concept is natural, it is a world that develops naturally.
On the contrary, the demonic is the supernatural, the world getting out of the rut.
By the middle of the 1930s, the science fiction writer especially clearly perceives the demonic not as evil in general, but as alogism, as "a disorder of nature."
The role of fantastic backstory is played by the story of the artist's son.
Some of the fantastic events are presented in the form of rumors, but some are covered by the introspection of the narrator, who reports miraculous events as if they had actually taken place.
The fantastic and the real often go into one another, especially in art, because it does not simply depict life, but reveals, objectifying what is happening in the human soul.
Fantastic story by Gogol - "The Nose". First of all, we note that the fantastic must not and cannot give illusions here. Not for a minute will we imagine ourselves in the position of Major Kovalev, who had a completely smooth place where his nose should have been. However, it would be a big mistake to think that the fantastic is used here in the sense of an allegory or an allusion in a fable or some modern pamphlet, in a literary caricature. It serves neither teaching nor denunciation here, and the author's aims were purely artistic, as we shall see in further analysis.
The tone and general character of the fantastic in the story "The Nose" is comic. Fantastic details should reinforce the funny.
There is a very common opinion that "The Nose" is a joke, a kind of game of the author's fantasy and author's wit. It is wrong, because in the story one can see a very specific artistic goal - to make people feel the vulgarity around them.
“Every poet, to a greater or lesser extent, is a teacher and a preacher. If a writer doesn't care and doesn't want people to feel the same as him, want the same as him, and see good and evil where he is, he is not a poet, although perhaps a very skillful writer. "(Innokenty Annensky "On the forms of the fantastic in Gogol").
Therefore, the thought of the poet and the images of his poetry are inseparable from his feeling, desire, his ideal. Gogol, drawing Major Kovalev, could not act with his hero as with a beetle, which the entomologist will describe, draw: look at it, study it, classify it. He expressed in his face his animated attitude towards vulgarity, as to a well-known social phenomenon, with which every person must reckon.
Vulgarity is pettiness. Vulgarity has only one thought about itself, because it is stupid and narrow and sees and understands nothing but itself. Vulgarity is selfish and selfish in all forms; she has both ambition, and fanaberia (arrogance), and swagger, but there is neither pride nor courage, and nothing noble at all.
Vulgarity has no kindness, no ideal aspirations, no art, no god. Vulgarity is formless, colorless, elusive. It is a muddy life sediment in every environment, in almost every person. The poet feels all the terrible burden of hopeless vulgarity in the environment and in himself.
"Fantastic is that drop of aniline that stains the cells of organic tissue under a microscope - thanks to the extraordinary position of the hero, we better see and understand what kind of person he was." (Innokenty Annensky "On the forms of the fantastic in Gogol").
Kovalev is not an evil or kind person - all his thoughts are focused on his own person. This person is very insignificant, and now he is trying in every possible way to enlarge and embellish her. "Ask, darling, Major Kovalev." "Major" sounds prettier than "college assessor". He does not have an order, but he buys an order ribbon, wherever possible, he mentions his secular successes and acquaintance with the family of a staff officer and a state adviser. He is very busy with his appearance - all his "interests" revolve around a hat, hairstyle, clean-shaven cheeks. He is also proud of his rank.
Now imagine that Major Kovalev would have been disfigured by smallpox, that a piece of cornice would have broken his nose while he was looking at pictures in the mirror glass or at another moment of his idle existence. Wouldn't anyone be laughing? And if there were no laughter, what would be the attitude towards vulgarity in the story. Or imagine that Major Kovalev's nose would disappear without a trace, so that he would not return to his place, but would continue to travel around Russia, posing as a state adviser. Major Kovalev's life would have been ruined: he would have become both an unhappy and useless harmful person, he would have become embittered, he would have beaten his servant, he would have found fault with everyone, and perhaps even started to lie and gossip. Or imagine that Gogol would have portrayed Major Kovalev as corrected when his nose returned to him - a lie would be added to the fantasticness. And here the fantastic only intensified the manifestation of reality, colored the vulgarity and increased the ridiculous.
The detail of the imposture of the nose, which pretends to be a state councilor, is extremely characteristic. For a Caucasian collegiate assessor, the rank of state councilor is something extraordinarily high, enviable and offensive in its unattainability, and suddenly this rank goes to Major Kovalev's nose, and not to the major himself, the rightful owner of the nose.
Here, in fantastic forms, a very close to us and the most ordinary phenomenon is drawn. The Greeks made a goddess out of him - Rumor, the daughter of Zeus, and we call him Gossip.
Gossip is condensed lies; each adds and jumps a little, and the lie grows like a snowball, sometimes threatening to turn into a snow avalanche. Often no one is guilty of gossip separately, but the environment is always guilty: better than Major Kovalev and Lieutenant Pirogov, gossip shows that pettiness, empty thinking and vulgarity have accumulated in this environment. Gossip is the real substratum of the fantastic.
In general, the strength of the fantastic in the story "The Nose" is based on its artistic truth, on its elegant interweaving with the real into a living bright whole.
In conclusion of the analysis, one can define the form of the fantastic in "The Nose" as everyday.
And from this side, Gogol could not choose a better, more vivid way of expression than the fantastic.
We will take Viy as a representative of another form of the fantastic in Gogol. The main psychological motive of this story is fear. Fear is twofold: fear of the strong and fear of the mysterious - mystical fear. So here it is precisely mystical fear that is depicted. The author's goal, as he himself says in a note, is to tell the legend he heard about Wii as simply as possible. Tradition is indeed conveyed simply, but if you analyze this story, which develops so naturally and freely, you will see the complex mental work and see how immeasurably far it is from tradition. A poetic creation is like a flower: simple in appearance, but in reality it is infinitely more complicated than any steam locomotive or chronometer.
The poet had, first of all, to make the reader feel that mystical fear, which served as the psychic basis of the legend. The phenomenon of death, the idea of life after the grave, has always been especially willingly colored by fantasy. The thought and imagination of several thousand generations rushed intently and hopelessly into the eternal questions of life and death, and this intent and hopeless work left in the human soul one powerful feeling - the fear of death and the dead. This feeling, while remaining the same in its essence, changes infinitely in the forms and groupings of those representations with which it is associated. We must be led into the realm, if not the one that produced the tradition (its roots often run too deep), then at least the one that sustains and nourishes it. Gogol points at the end of the story to the ruins, the memory of the death of Khoma Brutus. Probably, these decayed and mysterious ruins, overgrown with forest and weeds, were precisely the impetus that prompted the fantasy to produce a legend about Viya in this form.
The first part of the story seems to constitute an episode in the story. But this is only apparently - in fact, it is an organic part of the story.
Here we can see the environment in which the tradition was supported and flourished.
This Wednesday is bursa. Bursa is a kind of status in statu *, the Cossacks on the school bench, always starving, physically strong, with courage, hardened by a rod, terribly indifferent to everything except physical strength and pleasures: scholastic science, incomprehensible, sometimes in the form of some unbearable appendage to existence , then transferring to the world of metaphysical and mysterious.
On the other hand, the bursak is close to the people's environment: his mind is often full of naive ideas about nature and superstitions under the bark of learning; romantic vacation wanderings further maintain the connection with nature, with the common people and the legend.
Khoma Brut believes in devilry, but he is still a scientist.
The monk, who had seen witches and unclean spirits all his life, taught him spells. His fantasy was brought up under the influence of various images of hellish torments, diabolical temptations, painful visions of ascetics and ascetics. In the midst of naive mythical traditions among the people, he, a bookish person, introduces a bookish element - a written tradition.
Here we see a manifestation of that primordial interaction of literacy and nature, which created the motley world of our folk literature.
What kind of person is Khoma Brut? Gogol liked to portray average ordinary people, what this philosopher is like.
Homa Brut is strong, indifferent, careless, likes to eat well and drinks cheerfully and good-naturedly. He is a direct person: his tricks, when, for example, he wants to take time off from his business or run away, are rather naive. He lies without even trying; there is no expansiveness in him - he is too lazy even for that. N.V. Gogol, with rare skill, placed this indifferent person at the center of fears: it took a lot of horrors for them to finish off Khoma Brut, and the poet could unfold the whole terrible chain of devilry in front of his hero.
* State within the state (lat.).
The greatest skill of N. V. Gogol was expressed in the gradualness with which the mysterious is told to us in the story: it began with a semi-comic ride on a witch and rightly developed to a terrible denouement - the death of a strong man from fear. The writer makes us go through step by step with Homa all the stages of development of this feeling. At the same time, N.V. Gogol had a choice of two ways: he could go analytically - to talk about the state of mind of the hero, or synthetically - to speak in images. He chose the second way: he objectified the state of mind of his hero, and left the analytical work to the reader.
From this came the necessary weaving of the fantastic into the real.
Starting from the moment when the centurion sent for Khoma to Kiev, even comical scenes (for example, in a britzka) are sad, then there is a scene with a stubborn centurion, his terrible curses, the beauty of the dead, the talk of the servants, the road to the church, the locked church, the lawn in front of it , flooded with the moon, futile efforts to encourage themselves, which only develop a stronger sense of fear, Khoma's morbid curiosity, the dead one wag her finger. Our tense feeling rests somewhat during the day. Evening - heavy forebodings, night - new horrors. It seems to us that all the horrors have already been exhausted, but the writer finds new colors, that is, not new colors - he thickens the old ones. And at the same time, no caricature, no artistic lies. Fear is replaced by horror, horror - confusion and longing, confusion - numbness. The boundary between myself and those around me is lost, and it seems to Khoma that it is not he who speaks the spell, but the dead one. Khoma's death is the necessary end of the story; if for a moment imagine his awakening from a drunken sleep, then all the artistic significance of the story will disappear.
In "Viya" the fantastic developed on the basis of the mystical - hence its special intensity. A characteristic feature of the mystical in N.V. Gogol in general is the major tone of his supernatural creatures - the witch and the sorcerer - vengeful and evil beings.
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 time plan.
The writer, parodying the poetics of a romantic mystery, refused to give any explanation of what was happening.
Reading the works of N.V. Gogol, you involuntarily show your imagination, ignoring its boundaries between the possible and the impossible.
Turning to the work of N.V. Gogol, one can be a priori sure that we will find in it many elements of fantasy. After all, if the latter determined a whole type of folk culture, then, as emphasized by M. Bakhtin, its influence extends over many eras, practically up to our time.
