She was already far away from him, when, hearing this voice, she rushed to him with all her might. Joy, haste and impatience made her tangled in the grass and would have fallen if Kaib had not supported her. What a pleasant burden he felt when Roxanne's breasts touched his breasts. What a heat spread through all his veins when the innocent Roxanne, refraining from falling, clasped him in her arms, and he, supporting her light and thin figure with his, felt a strong trembling of her heart. “Take, beautiful Roxana, this portrait,” Kaib told her, “and sometimes remember this day, which returned your precious loss, and deprived me of my liberty forever.” Roxanne said nothing, but the lovely blush that adorned her face explained more than she could have said. “Stranger,” she said to Kaib, “visit our hut and allow me to show my father the one who returned to me the portrait of my mother that I lost.”
They entered the house, and Kaib saw a venerable old man reading a book. Roxanne told him the adventure, and the old man didn't know how to thank Kaib. He was asked to stay with them for a day - you can guess that he did not refuse; this was not enough: in order to stay longer, he pretended to be ill and had the pleasure of seeing how much Roxanne regretted him and how she tried to please him ... Can love be hidden for a long time? Both of them learned that they were loved mutually; the old man saw their passion: he gave a lot of excellent moralizing for this occasion, but he felt how fruitless they were; and Kaib himself, who saw with admiration how the beautiful Roxana was sensitive to moralizing and how her tender heart respected virtue, Kaib himself would not want her now to listen to moralizing against love. The old man, loving his daughter and captivated by the kindness, modesty and prudence of Kaiba, decided to dissuade him from hunting for wandering and increase his family.
Roxana asked him tenderly that he would prefer a quiet life and love to her desire to wander. "Oh! Gasan, - she once told him, - if you knew how dear you are to me, you would never leave our hut for the most magnificent palaces in the world ... I love you as much as I hate our Kaiba. - “What do I hear? cried the Caliph, “you hate Kaib!” - “Yes, yes, I hate him as much as I love you, Gasan! He is the cause of our misfortunes; my father was a qadi in a rich city; he fulfilled his rank with all honesty; once, judging the relatives of one courtier with a poor artisan, he decided the case, as justice demanded, in favor of the latter. The accused sought vengeance; he had noble relatives at court; my father was slandered; it was ordered to take away his property, to destroy his house to the ground and take his life; he managed to run away, picking me up in his arms. My mother, unable to endure this misfortune, died in the third month after our resettlement here, and we stayed to end our lives here in poverty and in oblivion from the whole world.
“Oracle, you are fulfilled! - cried the caliph, - Roxana, you hate me! Oh! in the whole world I hate only one Kaiba. - "Kaiba! Kaiba! You love him, Roxana, and with your love you raise him to the highest degree of bliss! “My dear Gasan has gone mad,” Roxana said quietly, “you need to notify the priest.” She rushed to her father: “Father! father! she screamed, help! our poor Gasan went crazy in his mind, ”and tears welled up in her eyes. She rushed to help him, but it was already too late, Gasan disappeared from them, leaving their hut.
The old man was sorry for him, and Roxana was inconsolable. "Sky! - said the old man, - until you stop persecuting me? By the intrigues of slander, I lost my dignity, my estate, I lost my wife and shut myself in the desert. I was already beginning to get used to my misfortune, I was already recalling the city pomp with indifference, the rural state was beginning to captivate me, when suddenly fate sends a wanderer to me; he disturbs our solitary life, becomes kind to me, becomes the soul of my daughter, becomes necessary for us and then runs away, leaving behind tears and contrition.
Roxana and her father were spending deplorable days in this way, when they suddenly saw a huge retinue entering their deserts. “We are dead! - cried the father, - our refuge is recognized! Save yourself, dear daughter! Roxanne fainted. The old man would rather die than leave her. Meanwhile, the head of the retinue approaches him and gives him a paper. "Oh sky! isn't this a dream? - the old man cries out, - whether to believe my eyes. My honor is returned to me, the dignity of a vizier is given; they want me to court!” Meanwhile Roxanne came to her senses and listened with astonishment to her father's speech. She rejoiced at seeing him happy, but the memory of Gasan poisoned her joy; without him, and in the very bliss, she saw only misfortune.
They got ready to go, arrived in the capital, - the command was given to present the father and daughter to the caliph in the inner rooms; they are introduced; they fall to their knees; Roxana does not dare to raise her eyes to the monarch, and he sees her sadness with pleasure, knowing the reason for it and knowing how easily he can stop it.
“Venerable old man,” he said in an important voice, “forgive me that, blinded by my viziers, I have sinned against you: I have sinned against virtue itself. But with my good deeds I hope to make amends for my injustice, I hope that you will forgive me. But you, Roxana, - he continued in a gentle voice, - will you forgive me and will the hated Kaib be as happy as the beloved Gasan was happy?
Here only Roxana and her father in the greatest caliph recognized the wanderer Gasan; Roxana could not utter a word: fear, admiration, joy, love divided her heart. Suddenly, a fairy appeared in a magnificent dress.
"Kaib! - she said, taking Roxanne by the hand and leading him to him, - this is what was lacking to your happiness; this is the object of your journey and the gift sent to you by heaven for your virtues. Know how to respect its preciousness, know how to use what you saw on your journey - and you will no longer need any magic. Sorry!" At this word, she took the enchanted collection of odes from him and disappeared.
The Caliph placed Roxana on his throne, and these spouses were so faithful and loved each other so much that in this century they would be considered crazy and would point fingers at them.
The story "Kaib" was a parodic use of the genre form of the traditional literary and political utopia - the oriental story. Compositionally, the story is divided into two parts: the first contains a characterization of Kaib as an enlightened monarch, the second develops a conditionally fantastic motif of the monarch's journey through his country incognito, drawn from the Arab tales about Harun al Rashid; moreover, during this journey, seeing with his own eyes the life of his subjects, Kaib gets rid of his delusions and becomes an ideal ruler. And in both parts of the story, the systematic discrediting of stable literary techniques for creating the image of an ideal ruler is obvious.
In the eyes of the Russian enlighteners, patronage of the sciences and arts was an inalienable feature of the ideal monarch. Kaib patronizes sciences and arts in his own special way:
<...>it is necessary to do justice to Kaib, that although he did not let learned people into the palace, but their images did not last adorn its walls. True, his poets were poor, but his immense generosity rewarded their great shortcoming: Kaib ordered them to be painted in a rich dress and their images placed in the best rooms of his palace, for he sought to encourage science in every way; and indeed there was not a single poet in the Kaibovy possessions who would not envy his portrait (I; 368-369).
Ideally, the institution of a constitutional monarchy involves the division of legislative and executive power between the monarch and an elected representative body, or at least the presence of such an advisory body under the monarch. Kaib has a state council - a divan, and between Kaib and the sages of the divan (Dursan, Oslashid and Grabilei, whose virtues are a long beard, a head designed to wear a white turban, and the ability to “tear from one in order to transfer to another” - I; 382 ) perfect agreement reigns, achieved in a very simple way:
It should be noted that Kaib did not start anything without the consent of his divan; but as he was peaceful, then, to avoid disputes, he began his speeches like this: “Lord, I want someone who has an objection to this, he can freely declare it: this very minute he will receive five hundred blows with an ox-vein on the heels, and then we will consider his voice” (1.375).
the discrepancy between the meaning of the epithets "great", "wise", "scientist", "immensely generous" and the real actions of Kaiba, which are determined by these epithets, becomes the strongest means of discrediting the image of an enlightened monarch, which the hero of the oriental story seems to be, but is not in fact. It is also easy to see that, in terms of intonation, this the allegedly ingenuous positive manner of negation is very close to the hidden slyness of "grandfather Krylov" - the fabled narrative mask of the writer's late work.
The second compositional part of the story develops the conditionally fairy-tale plot of Kaiba's wanderings in his kingdom. There are all the traditional motifs of an Arabian fairy tale here: the transformation of a mouse into a beautiful fairy, a magic ring with a prophecy about the conditions under which its owner will be happy. all these intensified reminders of the fabulousness of the changes taking place with Kaib bring to the fore the problem of the conventionality of stable literary forms and their inconsistency with the appearance of material life.
The systematic discrediting of the idea of an enlightened monarch is accompanied by an equally systematic parody of traditional literary genres dealing with ideal reality: ode as a form of embodiment of the ideal of being, and idyll as a form of embodiment of the ideal of everyday life:
If I want to write a satire on one of the viziers, then<… >often compelled to go into the smallest details so that he recognizes himself; as for the ode, there is a completely different order: you can collect as many praises as you like, offer them to anyone;<...>Aristotle somewhere very wisely says that actions and heroes should be described not as they are, but as they should be - and we imitate this prudent rule in our odes, otherwise the odes would turn into lampoons here.< >(I,387) For a long time already, reading idylls and eclogues, he [Kaib] wanted to admire the golden age reigning in the villages; long wanted to be a witness to the tenderness of shepherdesses and shepherdesses< >The caliph was looking for a brook, knowing that a pure spring was as sweet to the shepherdess as the front nobles were dragging happiness; and indeed, having gone a little further, he saw a soiled creation on the bank of the river, tanned from the sun, covered with mud (I, 389).
"Oriental Tale" I.A. Krylov's "Kaib" (1792) is a vivid example of pre-romantic prose. It clearly showed the transitional nature of the literary period at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. Then the role of the author's personality in the process of creativity increased more and more. The process of freeing the genre from strict thematic and stylistic regulation and its formation as a developing formal-substantial category was actively going on. The story "Kaib" was traditionally interpreted in our literary criticism as "the most politically sharp satirical work of Russian literature of the 18th century", they saw in it, first of all, a harsh exposure of the negative manifestations of autocratic power in the reign of Catherine II. In modern science, the attitude to the work is changing, as V.I. Korovin, it "shines through a very serious and, moreover, positive content." Joining the opinion of the scientist, we note that in the course of a detailed examination of the text of the story "Kaib", not only its polemical orientation, determined by the parody of the form, is revealed, but a combination of several relatively independent semantic levels and, accordingly, an internally complex structural organization.
The work leaves the impression of original and original, is not perceived only as a parody, largely due to the whole, formed from the collision of various ideas and opinions of the author's concept of the world and society.
The "Oriental Tale" as a prose genre became widespread in Russian literature of the last quarter of the 18th century. Experts associate his popularity, which had grown by this time, with the translation into Russian of the cycle of Arabic fairy tales "A Thousand and One Nights", Montesquieu's "Persian Letters", Voltaire's philosophical and satirical stories.
Translated into Russian or freely retold "oriental" stories, love, magical adventure, fairy tales, most of which were printed without indicating the source, literally flooded Russia in the 1770s. These were works of popular literature, had an entertainment orientation and were severely criticized in serious publications. Then the Russian writers
the rich possibilities of the "eastern" story in the creation of a philosophical and satirical genre were discovered. This path was first indicated in the Pre-Notification to the Translation of Voltaire's Zadig (1765) by Iv. Golenishchev-Kutuzov. The translator wrote that "the glorious works of Voltaire" have only an outward resemblance to "ordinary love tales" and "contain incomparably more sharp thoughts, subtle criticism and reasonable instructions." The didactic possibilities of the genre attracted N.I. Novikov, in whose journals of the 1780s many works of this kind by European authors, translated or remade, were published.
According to the expert, the two most common genre models have taken shape - "story-program" and "story-journey". From one author to another passed "stencil" images-masks. The sovereign, bored "from gaiety," knows nothing about the true state of the people subject to him. The royal minister (vizier) is hated by court flatterers for his nobility and honesty. A self-serving representative of the clergy (mufti) or a judge (qadi) uses the trust of the ruler for his own purposes. At the center of the narrative was invariably the image of the monarch, who became the cause of misfortune and evil deeds out of ignorance or out of ignorance and complete inability to think.
In the narrative basis of "Kaiba" it is not difficult to find all the plot elements of the "oriental story". The action develops according to the genre model of "journey". Being in the dark about the true state of affairs in the state, the monarch experiences an inexplicable dissatisfaction with the whole way of his life. He goes on a journey, learns about the plight of his people, begins to see clearly and is convinced that he was a bad ruler. Returning, the monarch corrects the mistakes made earlier, becomes wise and fair. The characters of the story are created according to the type of images-masks. The caliph is separated from the people by the walls of his palace and lives in an artificial world of illusion. His viziers-ministers and courtiers, flattering, mercenary and limited people, lead an idle existence at the expense of the oppressed people. The poor worker suffers under the burden of worries. A just and honest Qadi who performed his duty is persecuted and unhappy. The narrative elements of the genre that has become traditional make up the semantic layer of the work lying on the surface, while the content of Krylov's story is not limited to genre, the scheme familiar to the reader is used by the author to express his own literary and life position.
Using Voltaire's techniques of a satirical depiction of monarchical power, Krylov gives an ironic description of palace life. The real here is replaced by the apparent, the object itself is replaced by its copy or image. Kaib "did not let learned people into the palace, but their images did not last adorn its walls"; "his poets were poor", but the portraits depicted them in rich clothes, since the enlightened ruler "sought in every possible way to encourage science"; his academicians "fluently read gossip" and in eloquence were clearly inferior to parrots; the calendar according to which the court lived was "made up of some holidays." Life in the palace goes according to fictitious rules; Caliph, having fun, controls the illusory world.
The fate of the people living outside the walls of the palace depends not so much on the decrees issued by the caliph, but on the activities of ministers who take advantage of his human weaknesses. The despotism of power is represented in the story by the images of viziers. The "sofa" is headed by "a man of great virtues" Dursan, who "serves the fatherland with his beard", and this is his main "dignity". He is a supporter of the most stringent enforcement of state law. In order to get the execution of any decree from the people, it is necessary, in his opinion, only "to hang the first dozen curious" (357). "Descendant of Mohammed" and "faithful Muslim" Oslashid talks with pleasure about power and law, not understanding and not trying to understand their true purpose. He "without examining his rights, tried only to use them." Oslashid's idea of life in the state is based on religious dogma: he equates the will of the ruler with "the right of Mohammed himself", "for whose slavery the whole world was created." The robber, who grew up in the family of a shoemaker, personifies bureaucratic arbitrariness. He prospers because he has learned to "tenderly embrace the one whom he wanted to strangle; to cry about those misfortunes of which he himself was the cause; by the way he knew how to slander those whom he had never seen; to attribute virtues to those in whom he saw only vices" (360). Those whose direct purpose is to directly exercise power in the state pursue only selfish goals, they are cruel, stupid, hypocritical and selfish. Their malevolence is encouraged by the monarch.
Evilly ridiculing the courtiers, the author changes his intonation when it comes to the ruler himself. The caliph knows the true value of his advisers, so he makes all decisions on his own, without allowing discussion and disputes. He, like the author-narrator, understands how important balance and stability are for the existence of the state, therefore, "usually he planted one wise man between ten fools," since he was sure that smart people are like candles, of which too many "can cause a fire" (361). The "Eastern ruler" does not accept hasty, untested decisions, testing the firmness of the intention of the vizier, who dared to declare his dissenting opinion, "with five hundred blows of an ox sinew on the heels." The author agrees with his hero that "we need such viziers whose mind, without the consent of their heels, would not start anything" (354). Keeping the general ironic tone of the narrative, Krylov uses the image of Kaib to express his ideas regarding state power. The image of the monarch, as analysis of the text shows, is included in the sphere of philosophical irony.
The story uses the traditional for Russian literature of the XVIII century. the technique of "dialogization" of the author's speech, which undoubtedly leads to the expansion of the semantic field of the work. A certain fictitious image of a "historian" is introduced into the text, who sincerely admires the imaginary virtues of the reign of the "great caliph". The judgments of the "historian" in the retelling of the author acquire the opposite meaning from their original meaning, the "dialogization" of the author's speech leads to the combination of obvious antitheses. An opposition "then-now" that does not require resolution arises: the skepticism characteristic of the representative of the new century is directly opposed to the idealization of the past by the "historian". The author refers to this opposition repeatedly, but each time his comparison is not in favor of the "enlightened age". The patriarchal way of life is attractive to the storyteller for its stability, while the new age, in which the will of each person has the ability to influence the world, has lost this stability. It is the changing nature of irony that makes it possible to reveal the true attitude of the author to the phenomena of life depicted, and suggests the evaluative nature of the narrative. In the field of "absolute synthesis of absolute antitheses" (F. Schlegel), the author, the "historian" and the hero of the story meet. The description of the courtiers and the entire palace life reveals a sharply negative attitude of the author, while in the depiction of the central character the accusatory tone is replaced by a sympathetic and ironic one.
Kaib is young and does not yet have an established worldview. He looks at the world with the help of mirrors donated by the sorceress, "having the gift of showing things a thousand times more beautiful than they are," and believes that everything around him was created for his pleasure (348). The young man is entertained by the most ugly manifestations of cringing and rivalry reigning at the court. At the same time, any impulses of evil will are completely alien to him, he does not wish anyone and does nothing bad - existence in the world of illusion is simply convenient and pleasant for the time being. The feigned well-being of palace life became for the caliph a kind of continuation of the tales of Scheherazade, in which he believed more "than Alkoran, because they deceived incomparably more pleasantly" (351).
Kaib is quite educated, among his books are "a complete collection of Arabic tales in morocco binding" and "translation of Confucius", he knows not only the tales of Scheherazade and Alkoran, but also reads "idylls and eclogues". As it turned out, this is not enough to be a good ruler and a happy person. Court life arranged according to the rules of rational illusion soon creates a feeling of its incompleteness, gives rise to unconscious desires. All the ways available to the hero endowed with unlimited power and wealth to feel happy were tested by him, but did not allow him to get rid of the inexplicable emptiness. The soul does not respond to the artificial, learned greetings and caresses of the charming inhabitants of the seraglio. Admiration from the first victories in the war, started for the sake of entertainment, is replaced by longing, "and he looked, not without envy, that his half-naked poets felt more pleasure in describing its abundance than he did in eating it" (350). It turns out that there is something in a person that does not fit into logically verified scientific schemes. A wonderful meeting with a sorceress pushes the hero to an active search for the true, and not fictional, meaning of life, to gain real, not illusory bliss. The appearance of a fairy in the caliph's palace is quite natural and artistically plausible. It should be noted that only this episode is limited to the intervention of a fairy-tale character in the action of the story, and this intervention concerns not so much the development of the plot action, but rather the internal dynamics of the image of the central character.
Having gone on a journey, the hero ceases to be a ruler and becomes just a man. From that moment on, the story of the "epiphany" of the autocratic despot turns into a traditional for folk art, not only for literature, the plot of the search for happiness. "Having laid down all the splendor," Kaib is faced with a life that does not at all depend on his will and imaginary power. In the future, Krylov builds the narrative already contrary to the logic of the "oriental story" genre. Elements of parody appear, directed at literature, in which, "the idea does not grow out of the depicted life itself, but is introduced into it."
In the very first minutes of the journey, the “great caliph” unexpectedly encountered the inconveniences of practical life: “It was at night; the weather was rather bad; the rain was pouring so hard that it seemed to threaten to wash away all the houses to the ground; lightning, as if in laughter , shining from time to time, showed only to the great caliph that he was knee-deep in mud and everywhere surrounded by puddles, like England by the ocean; thunder deafened him with its impetuous blows "(363). The description of the night storm, performed in an "Ossian", solemnly sublime and melancholy tone, by the time the story was written, had already become a cliché in sentimental-romantic literature, where it served as a means of expressing the lofty passions of the hero. Krylov's description is prosaic, and the mention of England, the birthplace of sentimentalism and pre-romanticism, Jung, Thomson, MacPherson, in an ironic context is clearly polemical.
The raging elements force Kaiba to seek refuge in a poor hut. In the description of the owner and the interior of the hut, one can also read a symbolic image common in the poetry of that time, expressing the opposition of the artist to society. Yu.V. Mann interpreted this opposition as "a kind of psychological flight or ... moral rejection of the generally accepted and generally accepted" and classified it as "the harbinger of a romantic conflict." Intentionally reducing the image of the poet, Krylov is ironic, showing the weakness of his conventionally poetic idea of the world. The fictional, aestheticized world of contemporary Krylov literature is presented in the story as akin to the illusory well-being of palace life rejected by Kaib.
The meeting with the “odist” and later with the shepherd convinces the unrecognized monarch that truth is the most important and indispensable condition for human life, the successful activity of the ruler, and artistic creativity. "That's right, it's godless!" - exclaims the wandering caliph, mentally comparing the idyllic images of shepherd life known to him with the miserable image of a poor man who met on the way. A lie is "godless" and unnatural, in whatever form it may exist. The use of the technique of improperly direct speech in this part of the narration imparts lyricism to the ironic tone of the author. The narrator agrees with his hero and shares his outrage.
Turning into a private person, Kaib, with the onset of night, experiences the fear that is natural for a lonely wanderer and persistently seeks refuge for himself. At the cemetery, he thinks about life and death, about the frailty of earthly glory and about what needs to be done in order to leave a long and kind memory of himself. The unusual situation and a special state of mind leads to the appearance of a ghost, "the majestic shadow of a certain ancient hero", "his height towered until then, as long as a light smoke can rise in a quiet summer time. What is the color of the clouds surrounding the moon, such was his pale face. Eyes his were like the sun, when, at its sunset, it sinks into thick fogs and, changing, is covered with a bloody color ... His hand was burdened with a shield that emits a dim light, similar to that which rippling water emits at night, reflecting the dead rays of pale stars "(370 ).
Masterfully using the technique of artistic stylization, creating the illusion of a romanticized image, Krylov, step by step, dissuades
reader in the seriousness of his intentions. The fear experienced with the onset of night turns out to be completely unrelated to the sublime and mysterious world of Jung's "Nights", Kaib simply does not want to "be eaten by hungry wolves" (368). The phenomenon of the ghost also finds a natural explanation: he dreams and communicates the thoughts that came into the mind of the hero under the influence of everything he experienced at the grave of the once glorious, and now forgotten by all warrior. However, the aspiration to the sublime and mysterious, unusual and inexplicable, characteristic of pre-romantic thinking, with the invariable irony of the narrator's tone, is not completely denied. It is the night spent in the cemetery and all the semi-mystical surroundings associated with it that help Kaib to understand important things. He understands that in the world of material values, each of the living needs very little, "two pounds of bread for a day and three arshins of earth on a bed during life and death." But, most importantly, the hero comes to the conclusion that "the right of power consists only in making people happy" (371).
Having become just a man, Kaib sympathizes with the poor shepherd, regrets the fate of the once famous, but now forgotten hero. He understands that the reason for oblivion was the fact that all the exploits of the ancient warrior were aimed at destruction. Having got rid of the illusion of his greatness, the caliph learned to notice the beauty of nature, to appreciate the simplicity and naturalness of feelings. Without hesitation, he comes to the aid of an unfamiliar girl looking for something in the grass. “It was necessary then to look at the greatest caliph, who, almost crawling, was looking in the grass, perhaps for some kind of toy to please a fourteen-year-old child,” notes the ironic author (371). This natural impulse to concrete action for the sake of good is rewarded. The hero for the first time in his life learned what love is. Talking about the first meeting of a young man and a girl who fell in love with each other forever, the author emphasizes that the true feeling does not correlate with reason, its expression is "joy, haste, impatience." The author again resorts to the technique of improperly direct speech, the narrative acquires melody and lyrical excitement: “What a pleasant burden he felt when Roxanne’s chest touched his chest! hands, and he, supporting her light and thin frame with his own, felt a strong trembling of her heart" (372). Love fills the void that previously existed in the soul of Kaiba, and this happens only when he gains a new experience of life and is freed from a false understanding of its values. True bliss and the highest wisdom of life are acquired by the hero on his own, without the participation of a sorceress-fairy. He finds happiness as a result of his empirical experience, following his natural essence, surrendering to feelings and following the innate moral sense. Kaib understood that his purpose is to do good, that earthly glory is short-lived, autocracy is lawless and selfish. Only after this did the transformation of the soulless despot into a reasonable and virtuous ruler take place.
Upon careful examination of the text, it becomes clear that the story of Kaiba only superficially repeats the well-known plot. The transformation of the hero occurs through intense mental work. The experience and love gained in the journey change his behavior and attitude towards life. At the same time, the reader has no doubt that the essence of his human nature has remained unchanged. The truth of life, extracted from its depths, is for Krylov the most important content of literature. That is why the straightforward didacticism of the “oriental story” is ridiculed, the world of “descriptors” built on the rules of “imitation of decorated nature” and the “elegant” fiction of idyllic poetry are criticized. The naivety of the mystical forms of comprehension of the ideal essences of being, characteristic of pre-romanticism, is shown. The superficial rationalism and speculative progressiveness of power based on bookish knowledge are subjected to satirical exposure.
Krylov's ironic combination of essentially opposite life phenomena leads to the denial of the rationally one-sided idea of the laws of being that underlies the enlightenment "Eastern story". He does not accept another extreme - the denial by Masonic Gnosticism of the possibility of a person's free preference for good and truth. Following a stable literary tradition turns out to be only external and leads to "an explosion of the genre from within." Of course, Krylov "laughed at the naive belief of the enlighteners in the ideal sovereign." But he saw the possibility of approaching the ideal, which is given not by "head" delights, but by the natural participation of a morally healthy person in practical life.
Krylov's story is about things that are important for the author, and therefore the story of Kaib's wanderings takes on an emotionally expressive form. At the same time, the lyric is combined in the story with philosophical content. However, the philosophy of the author of the story is alien to bookish wisdom, it directly goes back to popular, practical knowledge of life. Using the techniques of fairy tale narration, referring the action of the story to an indefinite, long past time, conditional oriental flavor - all this gives the image of the main character mythological features. It is extremely concrete and at the same time embodies the most essential - the combination of personal, spiritual and social hypostases.
The author's irony about human weaknesses is devoid of sarcastic indignation. One can only smile with surprise at what happened in ancient times, somewhere in a distant eastern kingdom, and even with the participation of a kind sorceress. But a fairy tale is not only a "lie", but also a "lesson", it contains a figuratively mythologized expression of natural entities that are not subject to time, the knowledge that we now call substantial. Thus, the positive content of the story is easily revealed from the text, stylistically built entirely on irony.
The author's irony is directed not only at social vices, but also at imperfect human nature, prone to lofty aspirations and harmful passions. The image of the author, thinker and poet becomes the center uniting all the main semantic spheres of the story: literary-polemical and satirical, lyrical and philosophical. The author's irony acts as the main shaping factor.
The story "Kaib" serves as an expression of the original ideological position and not without attractiveness of the writer's philosophy of life. As in the work of the Romantics, irony acquires a "philosophical and aesthetic meaning" from Krylov and becomes a "fundamental artistic principle." At the same time, his worldview remains alien to romantic individualism and disappointment in real life. Pointing to the obvious imperfection of human nature and society, the writer does not oppose life to some absolute ideal remote from reality. The ideal content is extracted from life itself, therefore Krylov's irony does not lead to the "self-negation" of man and life in general. It is this kind of irony that we tend to define as pre-romantic.
Notes:
1. Issues of the genre development of Russian literature at the turn of the century were considered in ongoing publications: "Problems in the Study of Russian Literature of the 18th Century", "XVIII Century", etc.
2. See: Gukovsky G.A. Russian literature of the 18th century. M., 1939. S. 473; Kochetkova N.D. Krylov's satirical prose // Ivan Andreevich Krylov. Problems of creativity. L., 1975. S. 53-112; Stennik Yu.V. Satirical prose of the 18th century // Satirical prose of the 18th century. L., 1986. S. 5-20.
3. See a brief description of previously common estimates in the book by V. I. Korovin. C 154-155.
4. See: Kubacheva V.N. "Eastern" story in Russian literature of the XVIII century. // XVIII century. Sat. 5. M.-L., 1962. S. 295-315.
5. Ibid. pp. 303-304.
6. Ibid. pp. 306-307.
7. Krylov I. A. Works. T. 1 / Ed. text and notes by N.L. Stepanova. M., 1945. S. 347. Further pages are indicated in parentheses.
8. Ibid. S. 154.
9. Mann Yu.V. Dynamics of Russian romanticism. M., 1995. S. 16-20.
10. See: Kubacheva V.N. Decree. op. S. 311.
11. "A detailed definition of irony, see: Literary Encyclopedia / Compiled by A.N. Nikolyukin. M., 2002. Column. 315-317.
12. On "non-romantic" irony, see: Gordin M.A., Gordin Ya.A. Theater of Ivan Krylov. L., 1983. S. 145.
Fedoseeva T.V. Philological sciences №5 (..2005)
The story "Kaib" was a parodic use of the genre form of the traditional literary and political utopia - the oriental story. Compositionally, the story is divided into two parts: the first contains a characterization of Kaib as an enlightened monarch, the second develops a conditionally fantastic motif of the monarch's journey through his country incognito, drawn from the Arab tales about Harun al Rashid; moreover, during this journey, seeing with his own eyes the life of his subjects, Kaib gets rid of his delusions and becomes an ideal ruler. And in both parts of the story, the systematic discrediting of stable literary techniques for creating the image of an ideal ruler is obvious.
In the eyes of the Russian enlighteners, patronage of the sciences and arts was an inalienable feature of the ideal monarch. Kaib patronizes sciences and arts in his own special way:
<...>it is necessary to do justice to Kaib, that although he did not let learned people into the palace, but their images did not last adorn its walls. True, his poets were poor, but his immense generosity rewarded their great shortcoming: Kaib ordered them to be painted in a rich dress and their images placed in the best rooms of his palace, for he sought to encourage science in every way; and indeed there was not a single poet in the Kaibovy possessions who would not envy his portrait (I; 368-369).
Ideally, the institution of a constitutional monarchy involves the division of legislative and executive power between the monarch and an elected representative body, or at least the presence of such an advisory body under the monarch. Kaib has a state council - a divan, and between Kaib and the sages of the divan (Dursan, Oslashid and Grabilei, whose virtues are a long beard, a head designed to wear a white turban, and the ability to “tear from one in order to transfer to another” - I; 382 ) perfect agreement reigns, achieved in a very simple way:
It should be noted that Kaib did not start anything without the consent of his divan; but as he was peaceful, then, to avoid disputes, he began his speeches like this: “Lord, I want someone who has an objection to this, he can freely declare it: this very minute he will receive five hundred blows with an ox-vein on the heels, and then we will consider his voice” (1.375).
the discrepancy between the meaning of the epithets "great", "wise", "scientist", "immensely generous" and the real actions of Kaiba, which are determined by these epithets, becomes the strongest means of discrediting the image of an enlightened monarch, which the hero of the oriental story seems to be, but is not in fact. It is also easy to see that, in terms of intonation, this the allegedly ingenuous positive manner of negation is very close to the hidden slyness of "grandfather Krylov" - the fabled narrative mask of the writer's late work.
The second compositional part of the story develops the conditionally fairy-tale plot of Kaiba's wanderings in his kingdom. There are all the traditional motifs of an Arabian fairy tale here: the transformation of a mouse into a beautiful fairy, a magic ring with a prophecy about the conditions under which its owner will be happy. all these intensified reminders of the fabulousness of the changes taking place with Kaib bring to the fore the problem of the conventionality of stable literary forms and their inconsistency with the appearance of material life.
The systematic discrediting of the idea of an enlightened monarch is accompanied by an equally systematic parody of traditional literary genres dealing with ideal reality: ode as a form of embodiment of the ideal of being, and idyll as a form of embodiment of the ideal of everyday life:
If I want to write a satire on one of the viziers, then<.. >often compelled to go into the smallest details so that he recognizes himself; as for the ode, there is a completely different order: you can collect as many praises as you like, offer them to anyone;<...>Aristotle somewhere very wisely says that actions and heroes should be described not as they are, but as they should be - and we imitate this prudent rule in our odes, otherwise the odes would turn into lampoons here.< >(I,387) For a long time already, reading idylls and eclogues, he [Kaib] wanted to admire the golden age reigning in the villages; long wanted to be a witness to the tenderness of shepherdesses and shepherdesses< >The caliph was looking for a brook, knowing that a pure spring was as sweet to the shepherdess as the front nobles were dragging happiness; and indeed, having gone a little further, he saw a soiled creation on the bank of the river, tanned from the sun, covered with mud (I, 389).
If a person has everything, then he has no happiness. And for this happiness he has to go in search. Pass tests and understand that happiness does not lie in the presence of a person himself, but in the fact that happiness is available to others. Such a person at Krylov was the eastern ruler Kaib, who lived without sorrow and did not know what happiness was. He did not pay attention to the needs of his subjects, just as he did not seek to understand people in general. Instead of bestowing gifts on those who deserved approval, he richly decorated their images with jewels. There were no people in the state who would not envy the statues and portraits endowed with the grace of the ruler. One joy was found by the inhabitants of the country of Kaiba when they looked into crooked mirrors and for a brief moment realized their inherent dignity.
The country will not be left unattended. Kaib needed to find a vizier during his absence. And no matter what he finds, people will not get better. Everyone in the role of ruler experiences the burden of power, striving to comply with it. With a capable vizier, the figure of the ruler is necessarily likened to a doll that is seen and considered responsible for what is happening, while in the shadow is the unnoticed true ruler. In the case of Kaiba, this situation was forced. He went in search of happiness and he was not to rule. He never descended to the thoughts of the people.
On the way, Kaib will meet a warrior of antiquity, whose grave was visited by admirers for a long time. Kaib will understand how ephemeral power is. The once formidable ruler will be forgotten after death. A virtuous ruler will also be subjected to it, and much sooner. The reader should not be informed about this, so as not to violate the fabulousness of the story being told. Attitude towards subjects is an overly subtle topic for conversation. The Eastern worldview insists on the need for a ruler to be beneficent, while a rare ruler aspired to the same. And for some reason they remember those who caused suffering, forgetting everyone else, on the contrary, starting to doubt the necessity of the good deeds done. But to talk about this means to encourage the independence of power from the needs of the people who elected it.
Without knowing any of this, trusting the warrior, Kaib will understand the need to make others happy in order to achieve his own happiness. He will finally be convinced of the correctness of his opinion when fate brings him to a girl who is dissatisfied with the policy of the ruler of the state. In an effort to please her, Kaib will once again come to an understanding of happiness for everyone, having lost faith in his previous beliefs. It is worth accepting Krylov's position, there could not be anything else as a final edification of the story: as one passion is replaced by another, so is conviction - by another conviction. Let this be at odds with what is actually happening.
Kaib will find happiness. He will become a virtuous ruler. Crooked mirrors will disappear: people need to see the truth, even bitter. Those who are worthy will be rewarded and tirelessly begin to praise Kaiba for his wisdom and understanding of human needs. The poets of the medieval East wrote about all this, imagining the rulers of the past only as virtuous and caring sovereigns. The reader knows that any good ruler rarely lived to old age, being killed by disgruntled fellow citizens.
It remains to dream and believe in the possibility of the existence of an ideal society, which seems impossible to achieve. The rulers can think about happiness for the people, they can make the people happy, put happiness and the people in the first place among the priorities, but there will be no happiness, because there will be those who will be against it, understanding happiness as something else. Should Kaibu go in search of something he had no idea about?
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