Pravmir continues to publish a series of interviews with those who today create Russian culture in the broadest sense of the word. These are scientists, artists, writers, philosophers, poets, priests. Among them there are those who remember almost the entire 20th century, and young people. The genre of unhurried conversation allows you to closely acquaint the reader with the interlocutor. This project, prepared jointly with the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, will be our contribution to the formation of a body of oral history of Russia and its culture, a history that has voices and faces. Each interview is accompanied by a video, photographs and other illustrations. Today our interlocutor is Yuri Vladimirovich Mann.

Yuri Vladimirovich Mann is one of the largest domestic literary critics, a specialist in the culture of romanticism and the work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Doctor of Philology (1973). Author of the monograph "Gogol's Poetics" and many others.

About fears: Stalin, state secrets, "scrapping" and sanitary checkpoints

I am a native Muscovite, and, basically, I have lived all my life in this city. My parents are people, as they say, of low rank. Father is an engineer-economist, mother was a typist-stenographer. This profession is considered not very prestigious, but she was a master of her craft.

I don’t know how it is now, but before the war, the engineer could not provide for a family of three, so my mother decided to earn extra money and went to stenographer courses. Prior to that, she entered a medical institute, and I remember that Professor Kablukov, a chemist, drew attention to her and urged her to study in every possible way. In general, all my ancestors are musicians or doctors. But I had to leave the institute and take up shorthand.

And she was a high-class typist-stenographer, they were called "parliamentary" ones. As you understand, this had nothing to do with parliament - we didn’t even have it at that time. It’s just that parliamentary is a special qualification: typists write for five minutes at a meeting, and then immediately decipher it. Then they write and transcribe again, so that at the end of the meeting there is a ready-made text. Therefore, they are called parliamentary - this is aerobatics in shorthand.

My parents are non-party, although I cannot say that they were against the Soviet regime. An ordinary family, we didn’t talk about politics, if something was said, then, probably, secretly from me.

The family was not subjected to repression, although distant relatives still ended up in the camps, but they were distant relatives, and the father and mother were just small people, no one touched them.

Although my mother, as a stenographer of a very high rank, was invited to work at the Ministry of the Tank Industry, and not for anyone, but for the minister. First it was Zaltsman, and then Malyshev. And I remember my mother told me that he had outstanding organizational skills.

They often worked at night, because they were always waiting for Stalin's call - he liked to call at night and did sometimes call. But even regardless of these calls, they worked around the clock - and secretaries-stenographers usually worked according to such a schedule - they work a day, they rest for two days. With this night work, my mother acquired severe hypertension, which they did not know how to treat at that time, and she died of a stroke before she reached the age of sixty.

When I compare modern life with the past, and when everyone says that they lived in fear all the time, this, of course, was. But at the same time, there are many factors involved. On the one hand, everyone was afraid, but on the other hand, a lot of things that, from a modern point of view, should have frightened, did not frighten anyone.

For example, my mother worked as a secretary and stenographer for the Minister of Tank Industry. We lived not far from here in a communal apartment, and we did not have central heating - it was installed only after the war. And before that there was a “Dutch” stove and, accordingly, firewood.

But during the war there was no firewood. The room was small and another slightly larger. How were they heated? They closed the door and lived in this dark room. In the same place, they cooked on a kerosene stove or stove. Thus, the room warmed up to about eight or ten degrees Celsius. Then they bought an iron stove "potbelly stove", which they put in the room, a pipe immediately went out, and tea was boiled on this stove.

There is no firewood. What to do? And my mother brought full string bags of draft paper, just think, from the office of the Minister of Tank Industry. And neither her mother nor the guards who let her through had the thought to see what was there. But there could be some military secrets.

That is, on the one hand, they were afraid, and, on the other hand, they did not understand anything at all, and those criteria that today give rise to fear and fear did not work then.

By analogy, also to the question of fear, I recall another episode. I am a student of the ninth or eighth grade, we are accepted into the Komsomol. What is needed for this? To do this, you need to listen to one or two lectures about the Komsomol, then we learned the charter, passed the corresponding, if not an exam, then a test. That's all.

And then I take it, and blurt out: “Well, we did everything, we only have to go through the sanitary checkpoint.”

Now it doesn't say anything, but then it was very important. Because everyone who came to Moscow from the evacuation was taken through the sanitary checkpoint and looked for lice. Fleas are nothing. The most dangerous is lice. Passed - that means everything, you can live in peace.

And I take it and blurt out this, so to speak, “joke”. So what? I wasn't afraid of anything. Can you imagine if I had been denounced for such anti-Soviet statements, what would have happened to me? But nobody did. I successfully survived.

I didn't know what to be afraid of? I am for Soviet power. Well, guess what, it's an innocent joke. And only when the Komsomol committee of the school approved me, the secretary of the Komsomol organization, Bondarchuk (he later entered the history department of Moscow State University and became a prominent scientist, studied Italy) said: “Yurka, what are you talking about the sanitary inspection room?” Everyone knew, and all the bureau members laughed. That's all.

We also had an old house. Now, by the way, there is a bank there, no one lives there anymore. And, despite the fact that our house was to be demolished, we were waiting for this event with horror all the time. After all, what did it mean to break a house in Moscow? They didn’t give apartments, but gave two thousand rubles in the teeth - go and build somewhere near Moscow. In part, it was even a plan to free Moscow from superfluous people, not checked and not nomenklatura.

But in the end we were not relocated anywhere. Mom ran all the time to the executive committee, found out if our house was “on the red line”. This special expression meant that the house was to be demolished. I don’t remember what they told her: either she is, or she will be placed there.

But the war began, and it was no longer up to that. And after the war, imagine, I discovered that this house was being restored. It was rebuilt: now there are long corridors and this is a bank. And if you drive along the Garden Ring, you will see that it even says: Ulansky lane, building 13, bank.

"Picked out"

Our evacuation was very short and peculiar. Even before the ministry, my mother worked in the Administration of the Moscow-Ryazan Railway, then it was called Leninskaya. And, since she worked in the Road Administration, they took us not far from Moscow.

First in Zemetchino, Penza region, and then in Sasovo, Ryazan region. We lived in freight cars, in the so-called vans. Why in Sasovo? Because the Directorate is a necessary institution, and everyone was waiting for the moment when it could be returned to Moscow.

For about a month we lived in vans, then we were placed in some kind of family, of course, by way of coercion. Then, as soon as the Germans were driven a little away from Moscow, we were again settled in tepushushki, we lived there for a certain number of days and went to Moscow. There were potbelly stoves in the teplushkas, but it was cold everywhere, and in Moscow too.

Our situation was the same as in the capital: complete blackout, all the strictness of wartime. If the Germans somehow changed direction, then they could completely capture Sasovo as well.

I remember that the locals, who did not like the evacuees very much, called us “picked out”. And so a group of such “picked out” gathered, and this council discussed the problem of leaving for Tashkent.

My mother immediately said: “No, I will not go to any Tashkent, we will sit here.” And indeed, as soon as the Germans were driven literally a hundred or two hundred kilometers, we were returned to Moscow. It was the beginning of 1942.

War: nights on the subway, chess and a globe

I remember very well the snowy Moscow, the city was not cleaned, the orders of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief hung everywhere. In these orders, the first and last lines made a special impression on me. The first line was: "Sim declared a state of siege in Moscow." I was impressed by the word "sim", that is, "real", I have never heard such a word and looked with respect.

The last line also fully corresponded to the situation: “Alarmists and provocateurs should be shot on the spot” And the signature: Supreme Commander-in-Chief Marshal (then still Marshal, not Generalissimo) of the Soviet Union Stalin.

And now, Moscow, the schools did not work. What did we do? They collected fragments of shells and bombs, I even kept them until recently. The Germans bombed, but even before the bombing began, we went to the bomb shelter.

On June 22, the war began; on July 22, bombings began. Moreover, the Germans had everything so precisely and accurately that it was possible to compare watches. "Citizens, air raid, citizens, air raid!" - everyone was waiting for this message, and then they fled to the bomb shelter.

Mom took my hand, and in the other she carried a typewriter, I still have it, “Remington Portable”. This machine was bought at the cost of incredible savings, my mother needed this production tool. It was the most expensive thing in our house.

And so my mother took the typewriter in one hand, me in the other, and dragged me to the Krasnye Vorota metro station, then it was called Lermontovskaya. Closer to us was Kirovskaya, but it was closed: there was an underground building of the general staff.

The hall was separated by special shields; it was not visible what was going on there. The trains passed by without stopping. Someone said that they heard Stalin enter the subway. Well, Stalin was often seen - how such a hallucination arose; maybe so, maybe not.

We went to the subway every evening for a while. We took some pillows, light blankets with us, wooden flooring was made in the tunnel, we slept or dozed there until the same Levitan's voice sounded: "The threat of a military attack has passed, lights out."

Once a group of children's writers came to us to support the little one. And I still remember Marshak's performance.

And my father put out firebombs. He worked in a design organization, and was a white-ticketer - he was not taken into the army. He stayed in Moscow, but did not go to the subway with us. They found bombs, they had to be put in boxes of sand so that there would be no fire.

And at the end of 1942 - in 1943, everything was already tired, and no one went to the bomb shelter. I can’t vouch for everyone, but we definitely didn’t go, we stayed at home and waited. I must say that Moscow was not heavily bombed, they defended it very well. And so I, for example, remember only two or three hits.

Once it happened on Kirov Street, where there was a telephone exchange. Imagine, such a huge gray building, then it was almost the only station, and the pilots, apparently, were aiming at it, but ended up in some house.

Another time, a bomb fell on Sretensky Boulevard, and it was a ton bomb, that is, the largest one, it did not explode, but a huge hole was dug; and we boys were not afraid and ran to look at her.

Even during the war, I ran to the Turgenev reading room. Now it is in a different place, but before it was on the square that goes to the Kirovskaya metro station. Such an old building. I remember noticing how badly the librarians were dressed. We, too, could not boast of prosperity, and our teachers were poor, but these library workers were especially distinguished. I remember one librarian, an old man, he always walked in galoshes, and, in my opinion, on his bare feet.

The products were all on the cards, there were no other sources, although they bought something on the market. And they bought, of course, in exchange for things.

For example, before the war, as a boy, I played chess, and for my age I probably played quite well. Just before the start of the war, we decided to organize an official tournament in order to get a rank.

The lowest rank was fifth. And so we had to officially lose a certain number of games in order for the winner to receive this fifth category. We agreed with the House of Pioneers, which was then nearby, on Stopani Street (this is next to Kirov Street, as Myasnitskaya Street was then called), but the war had already begun, and these circles were no business.

And my chess was exchanged for a loaf of bread. And with that, in general, my chess career ended. I no longer touched chess.

I remember another thing dear to me: I had a globe. So this globe was also replaced, I don’t remember, for one or two loaves of bread; I still remember the name of the family where he went.

Of course, you can’t complain, because after all, it’s not Leningrad, we didn’t die of hunger here. But I wanted to eat all the time. The norm was as follows: a dependent, including children, - 400 grams of bread, employees - 600 grams, and workers - 800 grams of bread.

Now I don’t even eat a hundred grams of bread, but then it was the main food, especially such a limited one. So, of course, I dreamed all the time: when the war ends, I will buy myself one loaf - 400 grams, and eat it myself from beginning to end.

About the Italian surname, the Jewish pogrom and the Stirlitz family

I said that my ancestors were either doctors or musicians. My grandmother graduated from the Berlin Conservatory, her surname Pinetti is Clara Matveevna Pinetti. Her surname was Italian, but she was Jewish.

When I was in Venice with Vittorio Strada, I asked: my grandmother had an Italian surname, although it seems that we did not have Italian blood. He answered: yes, yes, we have a Jewish surname in northern Italy - namely Pinetti.

And then something amazing happened...

Grandmother, although she graduated from the Berlin Conservatory, never played music. She married a doctor - this is another branch of our family name - doctor Dunayevsky.

Yakov Dunayevsky was a prominent physician, and they came to Russia, and since he was a certified physician and a very prominent specialist, the family was allowed to live not beyond the Pale of Settlement, but in Orel.

Then it was a typical noble city and a typical Russian city, but, nevertheless, they lived there until the beginning of the revolution.

Dunayevsky had his own balneary, but they lost everything during Denikin's campaign. We now idealize whites, everyone blames the reds, but, of course, both were good.

When Denikin was in Orel, a Jewish pogrom took place. The Reds did not suit, but the Whites did. And now my grandfather, respectively, my mother's father was left without everything, the hydropathic was taken away. And then my mother came to Moscow, I was born in Moscow, and I never saw my grandfather: he died.

So, an incredible, almost detective story: when my memoirs came out, I suddenly receive a letter from Israel .. It turns out that my relative, second cousin, Viktor Moiseev, was found.

His grandmother and my grandmother are sisters. This is a pretty close relative. And he, unlike me, is very interested in our family tree.

And, in particular, he told me: “Your grandmother was considered the smartest among the four sisters in our family. And my grandmother was considered the most stupid, ”he was not afraid to say this.

And he also wrote that there were different people in our family. And among these people is one of the greatest intelligence officers of the 20th century. His surname is Pinto, a modified form of Pinetti. He was a Dutch subject, so he was sent to England, and he was engaged in exposing German spies.

Moreover, there is a book dedicated to him, which was called “Spy Hunters”, it was translated into Russian, and I found it on the Internet. You can also find it, it was republished during the Soviet period, just like an episode of the war years.

I told a friend about this story:

- You know, I still have a very hard time believing that it really was our relative.
-Why?.
- Because neither in my relatives whom I knew - my mother, father, nor, moreover, in myself - I do not see the qualities for such work.

The answer was: I'm sorry, first of all, you don't know all your relatives. And, secondly, each family can hide its own Stirlitz.

About a German grandmother, uncle and that the world is small

I knew my grandmother from my mother's side, she was a very colorful figure. She graduated from the Berlin Conservatory, knew German literature very well, and I often saw her with a German book in her hands.

By the way, when the war began, even before the attack on us, she was worried about Germany. Like, the Nazis are just a small group, and the people have nothing to do with it. Then, of course, there was no trace of these iridescent ideas.

Usually the grandmother lived with her son, Uncle Leni. Or in the summer she lived with her son, and in the winter she came to us in Moscow, on Ulansky Lane. And my uncle was a doctor, then he was drafted into the army, and he rose to the rank of chief physician of the hospital.

At first he was in Tikhvin, and then the famous Tikhvin operation happened and the hospital was moved to Cherepovets, Vologda region, where he lived with his family. Aunt Avrusya is his wife, Galya is a daughter whom I have never seen, my cousin, and that's it.

And now, about the fact that the world is small: once Leonid Parfyonov was at my house. He was filming a picture about Gogol, it was a big anniversary, 200 years since his birth. And he came to me to consult, to discuss some things according to the script.

And after the conversation, we were sitting at coffee, and I told him:

- Tell me, please, are you from Cherepovets?
- Yes, he says, my mother still lives there.

And I say: My uncle was the chief physician of the hospital in Cherepovets.

- What's his last name?
- Dunaevsky.

And Leonid Parfyonov says: If you hadn't given me that last name, I would have given it myself. Because my family used to live next to them and he was a very famous person.

And indeed, they sent me a clipping from the Cherepovets newspaper, which, unfortunately, I lost ... There was a huge article with a portrait of my uncle, and the title was: "Thank you, doctor." This was followed by letters from people treated by Leonid Dunayevsky.

They also told such an episode: after the war, his hospital was turned into a hospital for German prisoners of war. The head physician remained, the doctors are the same. And once one of the Germans saved him from certain death.

The uncle bent over the bed of some sick person, and at that moment one sick man waved the crutch with all his strength over his head, and the other put his hand under this crutch. His arm was broken, but he saved my uncle.

So, Leonid Parfyonov says: “I would have told you everything myself. I remember when your grandmother could no longer walk, she was taken out in a chair into the yard, and German prisoners of war came to her in order to speak German.

There are still tragic pages and episodes ... I actually did not know my only cousin. We have not been to Cherepovets, but her life somehow turned out unsuccessfully. She gave birth to a child, it is not known from whom - a single mother, and this served as some kind of moral irritant.

In short, Parfyonov takes a mobile phone and, in front of me, calls his mother in Cherepovets directly from the kitchen and asks: “Tell me, please, what was the last thing you heard about Gala Dunaevskaya?” It turned out that by that time my sister had died seven years ago.

About school

My first school, even before the war, was in Ulansky Lane, 281st. Education then was mixed. And in front of our school was the famous, as they said, “Armenian house”. But in fact, Assyrians lived there, who cleaned boots all over Moscow.

It was terribly poor and crowded there, but I, as a family boy, immediately fell under the influence of the hooligan Danila Zumaev: he immediately took me into his turn. He was a hooligan, disrupted the lessons, and I was with him. And I remember how my mother came home from parent-teacher meetings mortally upset, because, as they say, I was persuaded.

But, thank God, it all ended because he stayed in the first grade for the second year, and then even for the third, so he safely disappeared from my field of vision, and I was saved.

And one episode occurred many years after the war. I lived then at the Losinoostrovskaya station, and every day I passed by a kiosk where these Assyrians cleaned their boots. And once the shoe shiner recognized me, rather, even guessed it, and said: “You must have studied, you became an engineer. And my Zumayka is still cleaning his boots.” By that time, I had really learned, although I had not become an engineer. But I don't know anything else about this family.

Schools were closed in 1941 and 1942, and all my peers missed class, but I didn't. Then all this was almost not controlled, and my mother enrolled me in the fifth grade, although I did not pass the fourth. So I did not lose a year, but at the beginning it was very difficult.

Because algebra began, and I didn’t understand anything about it. And I still wanted to eat all the time. Although it’s a sin to complain: I was supposed to have 400 grams, my mother 600, my father 800 grams of bread a day.

It was worse for those who stood in the bakery. Bread was always cut strictly according to cards with attachments. And there was always a grandmother or grandfather near the seller, they collected weights in a bag. And sometimes they announced that the card was lost, sometimes they simply collected it for food.

As I said, education was still co-ed then, and there were a lot of very attractive girls in my class. One girl is of striking beauty, Lera Vasilyeva. She was early matured, she didn’t pay any attention to us, small fry, and, it seems, even before she graduated from school, she married the famous football player Konstantin Beskov.

And not very long ago, when Beskov was buried, Moskovsky Komsomolets placed her profile picture under a mourning veil. It was she, I recognized Lera Vasilyeva in this woman.

And I also remember another girl - Zhenya Tanaschishina. She was a slightly different type, plump, we sat at the same desk with her. I think she liked me, and I liked her too.

One day she came to school crying. Her father, Tanaschishin, lieutenant general of the tank troops, was mentioned more than once in Stalin's orders. These orders were heard on the radio, printed in the newspapers. They usually ended with the words: "Eternal memory to the heroes, death to the German invaders." And then one day the news came that General Tanaschishin had died.

Victory: a joyful day with bitterness

In the spring of 1945, when they already felt that victory was coming, the mood was completely different.

During the war, there were no receivers, they were taken away at the beginning of the war so that enemy voices would not be heard on the radio. In fact, receivers at that time were a luxury, only wealthy people had them, and I remember how, with the beginning of the war, they were brought from everywhere in wheelchairs and handed over to the main post office on Kirovskaya. (After the war, the receivers, of course, were returned).

And we did not have a receiver, there was only a radio station. Moreover, the radio stations were of two sizes - one large, the size of a dinner plate, and the other small, slightly larger than a saucer. But both plates accepted only one program. At night, the radio was turned off to hear the air raid announcement, and at the end of the war they waited for news of victory.

Everyone rejoiced, many ran out into the street, some, including me, ran to Red Square. There were a lot of people, but it was not filled at all - there were such handfuls. Moreover, there were two such favorite activities: when a car drove up to the Spassky Gates, everyone ran headlong to it, because they thought they would see Stalin. We did not wait for Stalin. And another favorite pastime - when they met a military man, they began to download him. And there were a dozen such swings on Red Square, if not more.

I myself did not take part in the swing - I simply would not have reached out. In the group in which I stood, they rocked a naval officer, and then, when he landed, looked around, felt around, it turned out that his dagger had been cut off and stolen. From annoyance and grief, he even sat down on the paving stones. At that time I did not understand what it was: what it was a personal weapon, and what was the threat of losing it.

Moscow University: the habit of thinking, the national question and social work

I entered the university in 1947. At school, I studied in different ways, because, as I said, I missed one class and was not very diligent, but in the ninth grade I took up my mind and decided to earn a medal, which I eventually succeeded in.

Even then I decided that I would go to the Faculty of Philology. There were several reasons. I went to paid lectures for schoolchildren entering Moscow State University. They were read by famous scientists, Nikolai Kiryakovich Piksanov, Abram Alexandrovich Belkin, Dmitry Dmitrievich Blagoy and others.

All this made a great impression on me, moreover, the very manner of reading: not memorized formulations, but when a person stands in front of you, sometimes leaves the pulpit and returns - and reflects. I realized then that I could think too, after all. Why am I worse?

But not everyone liked this style. I remember Piksanov, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, the greatest expert on Griboyedov, received the following note: "Tell me, how long have you been preparing for this lecture?" Those who were waiting for this lecture are accustomed to memorized phrases, but here a person corrects himself, thinks on the go. I liked it, but not everyone.

Here Piksanov stood up, straightened up and said: "Professor Piksanov has been preparing for today's lecture all his life." And they applauded him, supported him. These lectures were one of the factors that influenced me: I decided to enter the Faculty of Philology.

Then I did not know that the recruitment on a national basis had already begun. He was not yet so strict, but he was already beginning. And two people took the exam with me, I, Vladislav Zaitsev, who later became a professor at Moscow State University, and Ostrovsky. We both had gold medals, Ostrovsky - silver.

As medalists, we only had an interview. I was asked several questions on philosophy, according to Hegel, I answered. Examined Arkhipov, an odious figure. At that time he was just a graduate student, and then he denounced Ehrenburg and Turgenev for not understanding the revolution.

Zaitsev was also questioned and made it clear that he was accepted. But Ostrovsky, who had a silver medal, was not accepted. True, he later entered the Maurice Thorez Institute of Foreign Languages. He successfully graduated from it and then taught English at school, they only asked to change his middle name: he was Daniil Izrailevich, and the students introduced themselves as Daniil Ilyich.

I was a personal scholarship holder: I had a Mayakovsky scholarship. In addition, after the first semester of my second year, I began to actively engage in social work, which I now regret, because I clearly did not play my role - I did not have and do not have any organizational abilities.

And it all happened this way. I passed the first session perfectly, much to my surprise. At the seminars, I was not very active, and in general I saw that many were better than me. But it turned out that I was even noted at the exams, and my classmate Remir Grigorenko, a participant in the war, approached me. He was instructed to create a Komsomol bureau, he came up to me and said: "I'm tired of the threesomes in the members of the bureau, I want there to be successful people." And I was elected to the Komsomol bureau of the course, they entrusted me with the patronage sector.

What it is? This patronage of vocational schools, FZO. What were we doing there? They organized various circles, conducted political information, organized amateur performances. And I, not possessing any organizational skills, gave a lot of time and energy to this work.

What was driving me? Of course, there was also a share of vanity and self-affirmation, but there were - how many will now believe in it? - sincerity, Komsomol enthusiasm and faith, but was it only me who had this feeling?

Here is a dedicatory inscription made by my classmate Gennady Gachev on the book “Family Comedies”: “To dear Yuri Mann, in memory of our student years, when we were not academic colleagues, but Komsomol members, restless hearts. I smile and wish you the same. Yours Gena Gachev. And I smile, but not without a hint of sadness and regret. Like this.

Moscow University: professors and authorities

Leonid Efimovich Pinsky made a very strong impression on me. He taught Western Literature, for one semester only. A very prominent scientist, partly like-minded Bakhtin. He visited him when he was still living in Saransk.

Pinsky made a strong impression on me: I really like people who think. He did just that: he walked from wall to wall, pondered, corrected himself, and a school of thought opened up before you. Then he became the author of fundamental works - about Shakespeare, about the realism of the Renaissance, then they did not yet exist.

And a year later he was imprisoned, repressed. And he was planted by none other than Yakov Efimovich Elsberg, professor. Least of all we thought he was capable of doing it. Such a pure intellectual, surprisingly delicate, he brought boxes of sweets with him to the institute where he worked and treated the watchmen. But it turned out that he had written a denunciation against Pinsky. I do not presume to judge him, I was not in such a position.

Pinsky and I had a mutual friend, Rozalia Naumovna Shtilman, she worked in the journal Soviet Literature in Foreign Languages. And after the release of Pinsky, when it became clear who had denounced him, she, having met Elsberg in the House of Writers, gave him a slap in the face.

And then I met Pinsky at home. Rosalia Naumovna was friendly with him, and for some time we even sat at the same table in the House of Creativity in Peredelkino. I remember his witticisms, they were so caustic. For example, he said how a Soviet journalist differs from a Soviet writer: a writer is a prostitute who gives herself up in luxurious surroundings, she needs dinner, courtship, gifts, etc., and a journalist is a prostitute who stands on the panel. Like this.

I also liked Dmitry Dmitrievich Blagoy. True, Blagoy did not teach us. He had colossal knowledge, although he was opportunistic - he was influenced by the situation. His second volume of Pushkin's biography (it must be said, unlike the first), attracts with remarkable thoroughness and good quality.

I can't name many. Abram Alexandrovich Belkin is a bright figure, but, unfortunately, subject to all sorts of influences. He studied Dostoevsky and extolled him in every possible way. And then a campaign against Dostoevsky began, he began to scold him. But what can you do.

In the famous wall newspaper of the philological faculty of Moscow State University "Komsomolia" there was a huge article that exposed Belkin in revisionism, cosmopolitanism, etc. The article was called "What is Associate Professor Belkin Thinking About?". This article was written by one of the critics, who later became a prominent liberal critic. It is clear, from the title it is clear that he is thinking about something not very good.

Belkin was not arrested, thank God, they did not have time. And then I met him already in the editorial office of the Encyclopedia, where I got a job.

After university: "not our man."

After university, I worked at a school - I could not get a postgraduate course, although I was recommended. I even tried several times to pass the exams in absentia, once at the city pedagogical Potemkin Institute. As a school teacher, I had the right to pass the candidate's minimum, and then write a dissertation in such a correspondence order.

I came to the exam, the commission was headed by Professor Revyakin. He asked me a few questions - I answered, he a few more questions - I answered, he a few more questions. And he began to ask such questions, which, I think, he would not have answered himself. In short, he said, “Well, what are you? I can't give you more than a two."

This was done on purpose: I was simply objectionable on the “fifth point”. Moreover, one of the members of the commission - Leonid Grossman, also, as they said then, a disabled person of the fifth group, Revyakin said before the exam: "You can go home."

But I do not blame Revyakin: I found out later that he protected Grossman with all his might. They demanded from him that he fired him, but he kept it. Well, I'm an unknown boy. So, they put two.

And then, at the end of the episode, when I defended my doctoral thesis at the Institute of World Literature, I was not allowed to defend myself there, but for a different reason. Because I was a revisionist, the author of Novy Mir, and generally a dubious person.

This was already a campaign against Tvardovsky, of course. In short, no, no, not our man.

And then, independently of me, people, first of all, the late Ulrich Focht and Georgy Panteleimonovich Makagonenko, agreed that I would defend myself at St. Petersburg University, it was then Leningrad University. I defended myself there.

And then, to finish this story with Revyakin… Revyakin was a member of the VAK, and Focht, apparently, asked him to make sure that I went through there normally. Revyakin called me himself: “Here, I inform you that yesterday you were unanimously approved.” Everything went great. I did not remind him, and he forgot that before I had somehow not been very lucky with him.

In general, it is interesting that the HAC held my Ph.D. thesis for almost eleven months. They didn't claim.

Employment biography: "New World" and beyond ...

In Novy Mir, I collaborated and worked as an author, there was no need to assert myself here. I brought the article "New World", they said: "You are ours." And I enjoyed writing to them.

I remember Askoldov, later a famous film director, he signed this letter as a student. He was expelled from the students, and we were required to repent. Because Alexei Surkov spoke in the assembly hall of Moscow State University with a report on the ideological vacillation of writers, and we had to speak, say that we were wrong, and so on.

We refused, except for one. He spoke, it was placed in the newspaper, in Literaturka. Thank God, only on his own behalf he said that he did not understand the perniciousness of this very phenomenon.

I do not blame him, he is a very decent, gifted person, he was simply threatened that he would be expelled from graduate school. It turned out that my position was the safest. I worked at a school for working youth, and my acquaintance, a very well-known language teacher at that time, Semyon Gurevich, told me: do not be afraid, you will not be sent further than the front.

(Just the other day I learned that Alexander Tvardovsky drew attention to our letter. A wonderful book was published: Alexander Tvardovsky. Diary. 1950-1959. M. 2013; compilers and commentators are Tvardovsky's daughters, Olga Alexandrovna and Valentina Alexandrovna. And here on the pages 140, 469 speaks of this episode).

And I ended up in the school of working youth because they didn’t take me anywhere. I was in ten, if not more, organizations, schools or literary museums, filled out a questionnaire, I was told: no. And I came to the school of working youth - and they took me. One woman there said: "You can sit with us for a while, everything will calm down." And there I worked for four years, the last year I combined - I was invited to the House of Children's Books under Detgiz, as a junior editor.

The students at the school were different - those who for some reason did not study at an ordinary school. Someone wanted to study less, someone wanted to work, someone - because they knew that the requirements in the school of working youth are not so high. In addition, there were many overgrown people: they did not have certificates and they could acquire a certificate from us with parallel service.

I was a teacher of literature, and taught only the tenth grade. They put me in to prepare them for graduation, that is, exams.

Like this. School, House of Children's Books, magazine "Soviet Literature", graduate school, then the Institute of World Literature - junior researcher to chief, and then the Russian State University for the Humanities.

School of working youth: crooks and liberals

- So, I worked at the School of Working Youth, which, by the way, was not far from my house on Domnikovka. Lane Vokzalny, Vokzalny district.

My students were different. Some simply left school to get better grades - because it was believed that the requirements here were not as serious as in a regular school. There were some that worked. There were, finally, those who were forced by necessity to obtain a matriculation certificate.

Therefore, there were a lot of policemen in my classes - in order to continue their careers, they had to have a matriculation certificate, which not everyone had. Here they are learning.

But the most interesting thing is that in my class there were also swindlers, this is a big word, but still people who are dishonest in their hands and paid for it, in particular, by being expelled from school. They were minors, so they were not prosecuted.

I must say that I am not very observant - I did not distinguish those who should catch crooks from those who were crooks. Well, besides, within the school they behaved very tolerantly, as they say now. Tolerated each other, and everything was fine.

However, there were many interesting episodes. For example, like this. I must say that classes at school ended at half past eleven at night. They started at 7 o'clock with a little, at half past eleven the last lesson ended. The school on Domnikovka, I have already said, is a thieves' district. Three stations.

And so I return at night, and I hear: several teenagers and girls are standing in the distance, and they are swearing in such a foul language that I have never heard before, I don’t know on which floor. Although I got used to it, because Ulansky Lane, where I lived, was also not an elite area, as they would say now. And of course, since childhood, I knew all these words. But then I even got a little confused, because such sophisticated abuse, such perfection, I never dreamed of.

With some trepidation, I decided to cross over to the other side so as not to face them face to face. And when I had already put my foot on the sidewalk, I suddenly heard an exclamation: “Yuri Vladimirovich, do not be afraid! It's us, your students!"

By the way, I must say that the people, in general, were quite good-natured, and it was easy for me to get along with them. It may not speak in my favor, but I'm honest, and they treated me well too.

Apparently, they were especially disposed in my favor by such a circumstance: during classes I was rather strict, and during examinations I was a liberal, a completely rotten liberal. And this, apparently, made an impression on them. They expected reprisals from me, but I did not suit her.

By the way, I still can’t stand exams, so I try to evade them. So, when I came to the Russian State University for the Humanities and I had to take exams, I asked them to give me some kind of alternative service. Maybe wash the glass, whatever.

I can't stand these exams. Therefore, on the one hand, they tell you what you told them, and in such a style that it becomes uncomfortable for you: as if you are saying it.

And, secondly ... I have never been able to keep track of who uses cheat sheets, who does not. It's just, like, not mine. And so I always had some doubts: suddenly he cheated; or suddenly did not write off - and I will be unfair. That's why I preferred to be a liberal.

By analogy, I can recall a case at the university, at Moscow State University, where I studied at the philological faculty. And there was Kuznetsov, professor of the history of the Russian language. Such a little out of this world, absent-minded, not paying attention to whether students cheat or not cheat, suggest or do not suggest. And he could hand over as he liked - one person handed over for several. He did not notice this at all and put the appropriate mark.

And it must also be explained that this was immediately after the war. Once Professor Kuznetsov, without looking up from the table, said: "If I see these felt boots again, I'll put a deuce." That is, he noticed by the felt boots that this same student came many times. This, of course, could not fail to draw the attention of Professor Kuznetsov to him. Although it would be possible to change boots - and everything worked out.
So I'm a little close to that type.

About anti-Semitism and concussion

An interesting detail: I taught at this school when the so-called cosmopolitan company was gaining strength. Then it had an even more specific designation - "The Case of Doctors", who wanted to kill Stalin, and a lot of party leaders were killed there.

Lists of those who were to be evicted from Moscow were already being prepared. We were already on the approach of the heating trucks. True, I didn't see it myself. I only know one thing: we then lived in a communal apartment and a responsible tenant, I can already name her name now, since she is no longer alive, Pokrovskaya Tatyana Fedorovna ...

She was close to the management of the house and started every morning by calling her friends and saying: "Very soon, many, many apartments and rooms will be vacant" - referring to the upcoming expulsion. But that did not happen.

Why am I saying this? In my school, I did not feel the slightest anti-Semitic spirit. They say that in general there is no anti-Semitism among convicted people in the zone. I don't know, I, thank God, was not in the zone. And here is the fact that in our school, since it simply fell out of the general system, educational work was carried out there differently, or not at all, there was no other then. But there was such, if we use the old term, the friendship of peoples.

Here is another typical example. It so happened that during my teaching, my friend and I were very fond of skiing. And every Sunday - along Domnikovka down to three stations, then on the train, and to some such nearby area where there were mountains.

And now I remember: there were such high mountains in Skhodnya, and I landed very badly. So how did you land? I drove down the mountain, there was a springboard that I didn't notice. Fell, lost consciousness.

Came home in the evening. By that time everything was gone, I did not pay attention to it. The only thing: I had a healthy scratch on my forehead. And I decided: how can I go to school tomorrow? My students will think I got into a fight! So it needs to be done somehow. And he went to Sklifosovsky (we lived nearby) to the emergency room.

And in the emergency room, the doctor showed me his finger: so, so, so. And he said, “No. We won't let you out. You have a concussion." And I spent two weeks in Sklifosovsky. It's next to the house where I lived, and next to the school where I worked, not far.

And imagine, I did not expect this at all: almost the whole class came to see me every day. They could still pass, because one of my students, I even remember her last name, Senatova, was a nurse at Sklifosovsky. She gave them a pass and they all got through.

I was extremely moved, of course.

It's just for you to appreciate the degree of responsiveness and even in this case, you can say the internationalism of my students.

Literary work ... in six hundred characters

However, I am very grateful to the school because I had a lot of free time. Only evening classes. Moreover, I did not use homework, once I tried to do a homework, and they say: “We don’t go home: either at work or for a walk.” And I realized that they don't need any homework. All the same, they write off and therefore they wrote only at school, mostly at school.

And so I had a lot of free time. I then thought about what I should do, because, as I already said, I was recommended for graduate school, but they didn’t take me.

The recommendation was made by a special graduation committee. This commission was headed by an associate professor named Pochekuev. This commission was engaged in strictly separating the faithful from the infidels. Even the name went “pochekutsiya”. But the school of working youth suited me by the fact that there was a lot of time. I began to slowly engage myself - well, something had to be done.

And then I had this idea: very often I passed by the editorial office of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia - this is on Pokrovka, a little lower, it still exists there. I kept passing by and thought: “Someone is writing these articles in an encyclopedia. They don't create themselves." I decided not to try to apply my forces in this area. And went without any advice.

It was already evening, an elderly man was sitting in one of the rooms, as I later found out Viktor Vladimirovich Zhdanov, head of the editorial board for literature and language. "What do you want?" I said that I work at a school and that I would like to offer you my services. He looked at me and said: "Well, you know, we pay very little money." I wanted to say that I was ready to work for free, but I said: "That's nothing." Then he looked at me and said: "You know, we are going out very slowly." I say: "I can wait, I have a lot of time." - "Well, well, what to do."

He took the dictionary. I didn't know then that it was called a dictionary. I began to leaf through and found one last name - Dmitry Timofeevich Lensky. "Do you know this?" I heard something. Famous vaudevillian and actor, the first performer of the role of Khlestakov in the Moscow Theater; in St. Petersburg - Dyur, in Moscow - Lensky. And also Dmitry Timofeevich is the author of wonderful vaudevilles, including Lev Gurovich Sinichkin. Famous character. I knew something about him then, but, frankly, not much.

And so Zhdanov said: "Well, write an article about Lensky, just keep in mind - no more than 600 characters." And then, when I was already leaving the room, I was at the door, he shouted to me: “No more than six hundred characters!”

These “six hundred characters” made such an impression on me that at home, when I wrote the article, I myself counted the characters, and replaced some too long words with shorter ones; For some reason, I decided that if I have more, then no one will simply look at the article.

I brought this article, Zhdanov looked, nodded his head, said: “Good. Good". Zhdanov did not read, but immediately assigned me the next article - about Nikolai Ivanovich Nadezhdin.

This is a wonderful critic, I studied him during my university years, wrote a term paper about him, so I gladly agreed to write the article proposed by Zhdanov.

And I must say that this was almost my first publication. You can look it up in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, a little blue one, big thick volumes; the previous ones, in my opinion, are red, and this one is blue. "Lensky" was written by me and "Nadezhdin" too. So I got, so to speak, not into science, but, in any case, I came close to this profession. As Khlestakov said: “Why far? When can you get closer?

True, all this came out later, but in fact it was my first, if I can use such a big word - a literary work that I nurtured for a very long time, because I mainly counted signs.

By magazines

In general, it must be said that all my literary undertakings did absolutely without anyone's help, that is, patronage. I didn’t even have people to whom I could turn with such a request, and it didn’t even occur to me. And I didn't know that this happens. I thought everything was valued at its own cost. Well, I don’t know, I won’t talk about the cost, but that’s exactly what happened to me - without any, so to speak, without guarantee, without pushing, without protégés, and so on.

Since I was a teacher, I myself came to the journal Literature at School, where I wrote one or two reviews. Then he came to Ogonyok, and the head of the department there was Andrey Mikhailovich Turkov, a wonderful critic. Literary critic, author of books about Tvardovsky, about Blok. By the way, he impresses with his creative energy - he is soon 90 years old, and he is full of energy, writes like a young man.

We did not know each other, I came, as they say, "from the street" and offered an article about Batyushkov. There was an anniversary. Andrei Mikhailovich says: "Write." I wrote and it was printed. Recently, when I was selecting my old works for the collection, I came across this publication in the Ogonyok magazine. I read it, and although I would have written now, don’t take it for impudence, it’s better, but I was not ashamed of a single word. There were no opportunistic things, just as I wanted, so I wrote. Moreover, I repeat once again, now I would write better.

Then I published in October, but even before Kochetov. Because when the war between "New World" and "October" began, of course, the path here was ordered to me, but I would not have gone myself. In Znamya he published one article. But most of all I published in Novy Mir.

A lot of things are connected with the "New World" in my life. I remember this team with warmth, about the employees. Of course, Tvardovsky, Dementiev - deputy editor, Lakshin - a member of the editorial board. And many others.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself, I remember when Novy Mir was closed, it was actually destroyed. Then, literally late at night, I ran to the editorial office, because it seemed to me that something unexpected, terrible was happening there. The situation was very difficult.

I remember that Kaleria Nikolaevna Ozerova, head of the department of criticism, was in the editorial office, someone else was sitting, two or three people, sorting out papers. Something was thrown away, as before some kind of departure, expecting some kind of disaster, which actually happened. But until then, I am very glad that I managed to publish several articles in Novy Mir, and it is very pleasant now.

You know, by analogy, I recall the following episode: Ivan Sergeevich Aksakov, the son of Sergei Timofeevich, has such a remark - I will put it in my own words. “When I come to a province, some county town in Russia, I look closely at the local intelligentsia. And I know for sure: if a person respects, loves to read Belinsky, then this is certainly an honest, decent person. And he is against bribe-takers, against all sorts of bastards and so on.”

Thus, the passion for Belinsky became for Aksakov an indicator of the decency of a person. And this despite the fact that the views of Aksakov and Belinsky were different. One is a Westerner, the other is a Slavophil, now Belinsky is already customary to trample on, such is now the fashion. While forget that it is really a huge figure. He had his shortcomings, this is understandable, he was not right in everything ...

This is such an à propos digression. So that's why I'm saying this? Because the same could be said about the New World. When you came to the province, you could say for sure: if a person reads Novy Mir, he is a decent person.

And you could say the same about the so-called people's democracies, I have seen it with my own eyes. True, I have met only with literary critics and philologists, but this is quite revealing in its way. If they found out that I was collaborating in Novy Mir, they already had a good attitude towards me in advance.
Because they knew it was a liberal magazine. They themselves stood on the positions of socialism with a human face, they believed in it, I think many believed. And for this, the magazine was, in this sense, a guideline that, under socialism, in spite of all the offensives and antics, it is still possible to adhere to humanistic demands and positions.

About the "New World" and Tvardovsky

One episode associated with the "New World" is of a personal nature.

At this time, an article by Smirnova-Chikina “The Legend of Gogol” appeared in the October magazine, in which she argued that the writer did not burn or destroy the second volume of Dead Souls. That he was allegedly kidnapped by people formally close to Gogol, that is, Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy, in whose house the writer lived, and other reactionaries.

And why did they do it? Because after receiving the famous “Salzbrunn letter” from Belinsky, Gogol corrected himself. And he began to write the second volume in the spirit of the struggle against serfdom, against autocracy, and so on. In the spirit in which, according to Smirnova-Chikina, Belinsky urged Gogol to write.

Although this is not entirely accurate, because Belinsky at that time was no longer any revolutionary. He was worried about the most important issues in Russia: the elimination of serfdom, the observance of at least those laws that already exist - there is nothing revolutionary here. If this program had been carried out, Russia would have more successfully followed the path of bourgeois development, along which in reality it was difficult and slow.

Congratulations from the New World. On the postcards, among others, there is an autograph of A.T. Tvardovsky

And it is not for nothing that Belinsky is the leader, and the forerunner of not a revolutionary, but, above all, a liberal direction. Turgenev was not a revolutionary, however, he considered Belinsky his leader, his idol. Apollon Grigoriev ...

Why am I saying all this? So, here Smirnova-Chikina wrote such an article - and they stole the manuscript of the second volume, stole it and hid it. That is, in other words, they committed a criminal offense. In the text of the article, it was said: "Criminal offense." And in order to hide their crime, they invented a legend about the burning of the second volume. Like, this legend is still in circulation, and everyone believes in it.

But, Smirnova-Chikina finally exposed the criminals and brought them to clean water. She showed that, in fact, Gogol did not encounter reactionaries at all - with the same Pogodin, Shevyryov, Alexander Petrovich Tolstoy, with whom he lived, with whom he died, where the Gogol Museum is now.

This article appeared in October, and it had such a rather noisy, loud resonance. I then worked in the journal Soviet Literature in Foreign Languages. I read it, it really pissed me off. And I wrote a response article, it was called "The pathos of simplification."

This article appeared in the same year, literally two or three months after its publication in October, and received the full approval of Tvardovsky and Alexander Grigoryevich Dementiev, who was Tvardovsky's deputy. Personally, I did not speak with Tvardovsky about this, but Dementyev told me his reaction.

True, Tvardovsky did not say “okaya”, but Dementyev “okal”, so it looked like this: “Look, what did you come up with. That the manuscript was stripped of paper. Duck, they were honest people, they were nobles. They didn’t read other people’s letters,” Tvardovsky said.

Well, of course, the nobles were different. Some read letters, figuratively speaking, strangers, and others. But, those who surrounded Gogol, indeed, figuratively speaking, did not read other people's letters. These were highly decent people, and, moreover, they had a completely different idea of ​​the direction of Gogol's work, and did not at all consider that he was a revolutionary, a rebel.

They believed that all creativity was permeated with humane Christian ideas, and there was no need to destroy it. So here is the first case of a conversation with Tvardovsky, at which I was not present, but which I heard, as they say, from reliable sources.

Otherwise, I might be a little more careful. In any case, these are my interpretations, so maybe they will forgive me if I say something like this not very accurately.

They say that Tvardovsky was quite critical of the work of Andrei Voznesensky. To what extent, how, I don't know. But, they say that after all he was not the favorite poet of his soul. And then, suddenly, a campaign against Voznesensky began in the press: they began to scold him for various reasons.

And at this time, Isakovsky brought to Novy Mir an article that contained critical remarks about Voznesensky. Tvardovsky said: "No, we will not publish this article." Isakovsky says: “Yes, why? You are the first, you said that you do not like Voznesensky's poems. And then Tvardovsky uttered the following phrase: "Yes, that's right, but don't bark." Good? I think it's wonderful. Well, what can I say?

About censorship and "people's avengers"

Remembering censorship, it must be said that everyone faced censorship in their own way, and without fail, at least several times, during their creative activity. Moreover, these meetings were so, almost virtual, using modern language. Because personally the author, for example, here I am, never communicated with the censor, and never even saw the censor with my own eyes.

There was the so-called Glavlit system, when literally everything that was printed was censored. That is, it had to be “poured”, have the appropriate permission.

Censorship was carried out, but at the same time, these chief lieutenants themselves remained in the shadows. That is, they were sitting, and no one saw them. In large publishing houses, Glavlit even had his own rooms - "Fiction", in "Soviet Writer", in the publishing house "Art", "Book" even. And we did not communicate with them, we are the authors, we did not communicate. I don't know if the editor even talked. Communication with them took place at some higher level.

In general, it must be said that censorship was of various kinds. In scientific institutes - I worked at the Institute of World Literature - many people actually carried it out. Some by position, and some - just in order to satisfy their own desires and ambitions.

Any bosses put forward some of their own requirements, and it was necessary to carry out the publication through their watchful eye. There were also such people at the Institute of World Literature - the director, deputy, head of the department, I will not name his last name. He is a very kind person, well-known, studied Tolstoy.

The man is very kind, but, nevertheless, he was afraid of everything, and when, during one meeting, an employee of the department, Lira Mikhailovna Dolotova, asked: “Why should we be afraid of something?” He says: "We should be afraid of everything." That's what he did, he was afraid of everything.

But at the same time, it must be said that it was still possible to live in the era of the thaw or the later era of stagnation. Why? Because censorship was strictly formal. They did not understand the essence of the problem and the meaning of the content. They caught the words. And as they said, in the publishing house "Fiction": "Our deputy editor-in-chief dived on such and such a word."

They did not understand the meaning, and therefore it was possible to say the same thing using other words. And this was even to some extent beneficial, because we found the appropriate phrases, synonyms, and our colors were enriched. In addition, this kind of mutual understanding was established between the reader and the author: You understood what the author wants to say. The author understands what the reader understands. And at the same time everyone was glad that the censor did not notice this.

This is also a special feeling, the same Aesopian language that Saltykov-Shchedrin spoke, and without which, of course, it must be said, he would have lost a lot. So, there is no bad without good, and no good without bad.

Of course, this is a special sign, because the time was already after the Stalin era. Under Stalin, in any publication they saw not what they hide, but what is not there at all, at that time no Aesopian language would have saved you. And then he saved.

Examples? At one time, the word "humanism" was out of fashion for some reason. Say, this concept is not class, bourgeois. But if you express this concept in some other words, even more colorful ones, that's it, the censor sees nothing.

And “common human values” was also an expression that fell under suspicion. What does "common human values" mean? There are class, bourgeois values. These are not values, false values, or false values. There are proletarian values ​​- these are real values. What are the common human values? But if you express the same thought without the help of the word "universal" - everything passes.

And the authors already knew this, and tried to express their thoughts as picturesquely and colorfully as possible. And this, I must say, is the greatest strength - on the one hand, censorship, and on the other hand, the Aesopian language, which corresponded to censorship.

I have had several instances of such an indirect clash with censorship, because, I repeat, as an author, I have never been directly allowed to go to the censors. Here is such a case. It was, I think, in 1986, when the first edition of my book In Search of a Living Soul came out.

It was published by the publishing house "Book". I had a wonderful editor Gromov. (I must say that I had wonderful editors who completely took my side. Editors are different - some take the side of the authorities, others the side of the author. I came across those with whom we thought together how we could trick the authorities. For the most part it worked.)

Such a case. My book “In Search of a Living Soul” is at work, and it must happen that at that time, just some pensioner wrote a letter to the Central Committee of the CPSU about Nathan Eidelman’s book, dedicated to the era of Paul I. Nathan Eidelman is a wonderful historian, very talented writer. And the author of this letter saw the propaganda of the ideas of monarchism in this book.

I must say that monarchist aspirations are quite tangible, and at that time I did not meet, did not hear of a single person who would like to restore the monarchy. Maybe he wanted to, but somehow he did not publicly express it. But, nevertheless, for some reason, the authorities then were afraid of this particular trend, as they would say now, the trend of restoring the monarchy. And what?

The censors received the appropriate instructions. This book was published by the same publishing house "Kniga", pardon the tautology. And now my editor Gromova calls me and says: “Look at your text, this is already a layout and all the names of the tsars are underlined there - Alexander I, Nicholas I and so on.” I say: “But how can I manage without them? Gogol had a relationship with them, he even knew them. How is it here? Nicholas I even blessed the Inspector General. Without his permission, The Inspector General would not have been staged. How will I?” "You can't prove it to her." "Let me go and explain what's going on." - "It is forbidden".

"Poetics of Gogol" (Japanese edition)

I have already said that the author had no way out, and the editor did not. Somehow the communication there took place in the higher strata. What should I do? I had to commit such an act: they removed all the reigning persons from the name index, they simply destroyed it. Alexander I flew, and Nicholas I. But, thank God, four years later, either this letter from the pensioner was forgotten, or the threat of the restoration of the monarchy disappeared, but it became possible to publish the book in full form.

She came out, you can compare the two editions. In the second edition, everything is in place - both Nicholas I and Alexander I.

One more, maybe two episodes of such personal experiences. They made a movie based on Dead Souls. And I must say that this pensioner, who wrote a letter to the Central Committee, was considered a "people's avengers"...

Why the people's avengers? I'll explain now. There was the first studio in Ostankino, in the main building. Filmed the first film "Dead Souls". I was asked to give an introductory speech before the beginning of the film, to talk about this film, which I did. But while I was there, I learned and heard a lot of things. In particular, it was there that I first heard this expression - "people's avengers."

I asked, “What is this? What kind of avengers can now, and even in Moscow, and even on television? They told me: “These are pensioners or old Bolsheviks who have nothing to do, and they constantly write to the Central Committee of the CPSU or to another body - parallel - and denounce, find all sorts of shortcomings and attempts at sabotage - hidden or more or less open. We call them the people's avengers."

"What do they write?" “Everything is written. But we were especially annoyed (in modern terms) by one people's avenger, who writes all the time to the Central Committee that “in the Vremya program you show the house behind the mausoleum on Red Square, and there is a dome, and snow lies on the dome all the time. I explain, after all, this is the main square of the country and, in fact, the main house of the country. Well, they don't remove the snow there, you mean? How do you allow all this?

I then decided to joke, I say: “You know, if he writes like that, you answer him, write: this is the main square of the country, and the snow that lies there is also the main snow in the country and cannot be removed.” I don't remember if I could console people with my joke, because they were, of course, tortured by this people's avenger who pursued them from day to day.

In addition, then such a decision was issued that all letters from the workers had to be answered within a certain time. Can you imagine: instead of doing creative work, people wrote these answers.

Now I will tell you about how now the Ministry of Education or Science is flooding educational institutions with instructions and reports, report forms. Instead of working, the poor heads of departments and professors (thank God, I am saving myself a little from this disaster) write reports from morning to evening. What it is? The same thing - the people's avengers, only in a different place.

Love for Gogol: would-be speculators and would-be military

The scope of my studies is quite wide - it is Russian literature, and Western, and Russian theater, and Western. But I devoted most of my time to Gogol. Probably, here everyone has some kind of psychological predisposition, biographical moments.

I remember, back in school, I showed a certain penchant for parody; of course, it was all very helpless, but there was some gravity. So, Gogol's works found in me, if not a prepared reader, then a reader who would like to be suitably prepared.

I remember what impression the performance of the Artistic Theater “Dead Souls” made on me. True, we got on it in a rather peculiar way.

This was shortly after the war. I am a ninth grade high school student; education then was already separate - a student of a male school.

My friend, I remember his last name, Kazarovitsky made me the following offer: "Let's go, let's buy tickets for the entire decade to the Art Theater, then we'll sell it and earn money." Now it's called a business, then it was called...

- Speculation.

And we didn't see anything wrong with that. We decided to earn some money. I repeat, these are the last years of the war. Moscow is still under martial law. We queued up to get tickets. We got up first, when there was still a curfew, and went to Kamergersky Lane. I remember that we were stopped once or twice by a policeman. I already had a passport, I showed it, and he let us go.

And so we came to the pre-sale box office of the Art Theater, stood for a while, then the box office opened, we bought ten, maybe even more tickets.

But our business was very unsuccessful. Because, it turns out, in order to sell a ticket, not only do you want to sell it. It is also necessary that someone had a desire to buy it, but no one showed such a desire.

Maybe we didn’t look like resellers very much, they didn’t trust us, because if you contact some punks, they will put something on you. In a word, we did not sell a single ticket, not a single one.

What should I do? I was sorry the tickets were gone. And for a decade, day after day, we went to all the performances of the Moscow Art Academic Theatre.

I must say, we were lucky: we reviewed almost the entire repertoire, or at least most of it. And I saw "Dead Souls" twice, it coincided.

I will say for sure that I had a huge impression, because the actors were brilliant - Kachalov, Livanov (Chichikov), then, in my opinion, Sobakevich - Gribov. In general, the actors are brilliant. This left me with such a strong impression that the next day I began to play individual scenes to myself, of course, without any artistic aspiration or ability. He just lost, as everyone did when he liked something.

Moreover, I learned another useful plot from this: I assigned the names of Gogol's characters to all my friends in the class. One became, say, Sobakevich, the other - Chichikov, the third ... Ladies, no ... There were no ladies, because it was a men's school.

The third became Plushkin and so on. And one, also a listener, Kasparov, his name was Rubik Kasparov ... I named him Mizhuev, Mizhuev's son-in-law. Why? At the same time, I somehow didn’t really like Nozdryov’s phrase, who (this was the difference between the production and Gogol’s text), as soon as some new character came, let him down and said: “Meet me, this is my son-in-law Mizhuev.”

"Poetics of Gogol" (Italian edition)

I repeated this phrase all the time: "Meet my son-in-law Mizhuev." “And this, meet my son-in-law Mizhuev.” My friend Kasparov had some kind of predisposition here, he was somehow very suitable for this type - some of the same naivety, innocence, reaching even a certain persistence, to what is now called "jammed". In a word, it suited him so well that not only I, but everyone began to call him "son-in-law Mizhuev" or simply "Mizhuev", Mizhuev and that's it.

He was not offended, he agreed that he was Mizhuev, and I became a father-in-law - he is a son-in-law, I am a father-in-law. True, he didn’t call me “Nozdryov,” because I didn’t really look like Nozdryov. That hefty one, healthy fists, blood and milk, and jokingly approached. But nowhere did others call me father-in-law, but he called me father-in-law. And others asked me: “Where is your son-in-law?” I said: "The son-in-law is there, around that corner." Like this.

This story has a truly Gogol ending, I will tell it. We were sent to a military camp at the university once, and at school once between the ninth and tenth grade.

Do you know where Chelyuskinskaya station is? There was a military camp there. We lived in tents. They practiced the Mosin rifle - disassembled, assembled - by the end of the semester at the university, they finally mastered this art. And the next day they forgot again, and again, and then the whole year: the shutter, and so on ...

So, the end of the shift, we live in tents, we had to leave that day, we were being taken to Moscow. And suddenly, when everyone is still sleeping or awake, but lying in tents, an excited envoy from the company commander runs out and says in a nervous voice: “Private Zyatev and Mizhuev immediately to the company commander!”

Do you understand what's the matter? The company commander heard these expressions so often - son-in-law and Mizhuev, that he decided that he had some unrecorded fighters whom he could not find - some kind of impostors or even unknown enemies who had sneaked into the military camp of schoolchildren? He was very excited.

I do not remember how I managed to calm him down, I think it was easy, I remember that there were no complications. Here is Gogol's finale. How can one not fall in love with Gogol after this!

About friends

- In the lower grades, I was not very friendly, besides, the war, everything was upset. In addition, I fell under the influence of hooligans, I even mentioned Zumaev. But in high school, I really found this precious state of friendship.

We have formed a circle. We did not consider that this was a circle, so, spontaneously. We never called ourselves a circle or anything else. Several people, classmates. I will call them all by their first names, because they all became very famous, (maybe one is an exception) famous people.

This is Seryozha Kurdyumov, Sergei Pavlovich Kurdyumov - physicist, corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences, director of the Keldysh Institute of Applied Mathematics, the same institute that is located next to the RSUH, the Institute of the Academy of Sciences. There was the head of Keldysh, then Samara, then someone else, Tikhonov, it seems, and then Kurdyumov headed the institute, was a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Here is one very remarkable person.

The other is Kolya Vasiliev. Lieutenant General, laureate of the State Prize, Honored Scientist, Doctor of Chemical Sciences. This is also my classmate, and was also part of our company. When we were friends together, and then everyone got a job, he did not say where he worked, and we did not know, did not ask. Only later, much later, after his death, did I learn that he was working on the creation of Soviet bacteriological weapons.

An article about Nikolai Vasiliev in the directory “Worthy of fame”

The third remarkable character, also such a member of our circle, is Ershov, Valentin Gavrilovich Ershov, an astronaut. True, not an accomplished astronaut.

Why not held? Therefore, he worked at the Institute of Applied Mathematics with Serezha, Serezha was his main boss, and he was being trained to fly on a satellite. He passed all the tests. He had an ideal vestibular apparatus, which is very important in these cases. His teeth were treated by the chief dentist of the Soviet Union, he cured his teeth perfectly. We knew that he was an astronaut.

We were all waiting for him to fly, because there had never been an astronaut in our ranks. And we all asked him ... But he still does not fly and does not fly. With my inclination, I tease, I tell him: "Prince - she had the nickname Prince - sing the song" We have 14 minutes left before the start "". He did not sing a song, but he did not fly.

Why didn't you fly? He told us because he refused to join the party. And then, during the years of perestroika, an article about cosmonauts who did not take place appeared in the magazine either Kommersant Dengi or Kommersant Vlast.

One did not succeed because he fell ill, the second cosmonaut did not succeed because he committed some kind of disciplinary offense, and the third because he refused to join the party. Moreover, he said: “I would join the party, but I don’t want to at such a price.” And that's it. Maybe he could send... Do you remember how someone sent a telegram from a satellite or somewhere else with a request to join the party? But he did not want to do this, so he remained on Earth.

Why Prince? This was his nickname. He comes from a simple family, his tastes were peculiar - at first he was deaf to works of art, literature, theater, but he was amazingly talented in the field of mathematics, physics, and technical sciences. He first entered, graduated from the Moscow Aviation Institute, was preparing to be a pilot, that is, not a pilot, but an aircraft designer. Then he entered the university, and there he designed our aircraft.

They also wanted to send him into space for the reason that he was a scientist. And there, among the cosmonauts, it seems to me, only Feoktistov at that time was both an astronaut and a scientist. They also wanted to send him, but it did not work out.

I don't think I said why Prince. I repeat, he was from a very simple family, but with precisely such princely manners - such a very important, ceremonial one. In addition, he had blue veins or blue legs. I do not know how it was established, I was not present at this act of establishment. But here he was called the Prince, the Prince-Cosmonaut. And he did not mind, he was both a prince, though not a real one, and an astronaut, though not a successful one. Third person.

The fourth - you probably also know him - is Vladislav Alekseevich Zaitsev, professor at Moscow University, doctor of philological sciences at the Soviet department. He dealt mainly with Mayakovsky.

Finally, the last one is Daniil Ostrovsky, Danya. He also graduated from high school with a silver medal. Then we lost sight of him. What happened to him, what happened, is unknown. And with others we were friends to the last.

Unfortunately, I was the only one left of this group.

About undeciphered Gogol, sense of humor, fight against formalism and Homer's publications

Gogol is an amazingly modern writer, and this is felt more and more every year. A writer of colossal, enormous power of charm and influence on others. Modern writer. What used to seem like a manifestation of aimless and light laughter, in fact, revealed such deep meanings in itself that Gogol was unraveled and will always be unraveled as long as he exists.

There is such a book called "Gogol Deciphered", deciphered already, completely. Not "deciphering Gogol", although it does not sound very good, but simply "deciphering". So, when will it be decoded to the end? Never.

Gogol is now remembered as one of the most relevant writers not only in our country, but also in the West. At the same time, this difference in understanding and approach to literature on Gogol, with the help of Gogol, I feel that everything can be achieved.

Because there was a Nose, the Nose ran away - a joke. Some will laugh, some won't even laugh. What's so funny?

Gogol can be perceived in different ways. Joke? Pushkin wrote that this was a joke, although, probably, he did not put into this concept the content that modern jokers put into it.

Then it was discovered that this is one of the greatest works of world art. This is a harbinger of Kafka, this is a harbinger of Nabokov - the greatest writers of the 20th century already. It's all combined in one.

Of course, Gogol in this sense is such a touchstone, you know, on which the disengagement takes place. Yes, it saddens me: I often meet people who do not understand him. When you tell something funny, they don't understand what's funny in it, they don't see anything.

Those who understand Gogol, unfortunately, are in the minority. What can you do? This has to be put up with. God grant that they become more and more. But such a stratification is a real fact, nothing can be done here. It depends on the general culture, the general mentality, the warehouse of the psyche, even the development of this psyche. Therefore, this can be faced all the time.

Here you just need, as they say, to work on the top bar. The upper bar is for those who perceive art very deeply, subtly, creatively, sincerely and feel it. This is also great art.

I will tell you such a case, this is my purely personal. I sometimes arrange a little experiment. I suggested a comparison that I didn’t come up with myself, I don’t want to plagiarize. I ask: "What is a surgeon?" “That,” I reply, “is an armed therapist.” I say this to four or five people; four will smile, but the fifth will look at me and say, "That's not entirely accurate."

Well, what do you say after that? Nothing, right? So I want to say this: I was lucky, I met amazingly talented comedians in my life. The same Irakli Luarsabovich Andronikov, a wonderful, talented person. Zinovy ​​Samoilovich Paperny. In America - Aleshkovsky.

It is a great happiness when you communicate with people who understand humor, because there is such a sociological explanation and statement that people who understand humor find a common language with each other more easily. Thus, when we strive to develop a sense of humor, we strengthen the unity of our society.

About three kinds of jokers and Irakli Andronikov

In the book that I showed you, there are several letters from Andronikov to me. How did this acquaintance happen? For some time I worked in the journal Soviet Literature (in Foreign Languages) on Kirov (Myasnitskaya) Street, and Andronikov lived in the same house. He often came to our editorial office, because, firstly, we printed it. And, secondly, because he was always received very warmly, he was a person who aroused sympathy.

When he came, he usually began to tell all sorts of funny stories. Moreover, everyone gathered around him, there was incessant laughter, he even said: “I came to ruin your work.” And indeed, he managed to do this for two, three hours, depending on how much time it was.

According to my observations, there are three kinds of comic performers and authors. The first category of people are those who make you laugh and laugh yourself. You laugh, and they laugh, and you laugh, as they say, vying with each other, competing with each other and amplifying the comic reaction.

In Russian literature and history, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin possessed such art. On this occasion, one of his contemporaries even uttered this, perhaps not very delicate comparison, cautious, but, nevertheless, it is real: “When Pushkin laughs,” he said, “you can see Pushkin’s guts.” This is one kind of those who laugh and mingle.

Another kind is this: when a person laughs himself, but you do not laugh. And sometimes there are even people who start laughing when they have not yet said anything - not a single word, but they are already laughing.

It's understandable why. Because you do not know what he will say, but he already knows what he will say, he laughs in advance. But he will not be able to make him laugh, because there is something funny only for himself.

And the third kind, when everyone laughs, but the originator of this triumph of laughter does not laugh. He remains completely serious, he is even somewhat indifferent or surprised, cannot understand what is funny about it. You laugh, but there is nothing funny here - and he continues to lead his party with the same seriousness and equanimity.

He possessed such humor, such a position ... Can you tell me? Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. He laughed to the point that people clutched their tummies, could not resist. But he didn’t laugh, he just looked in surprise: “Wow, why are they laughing?” And he didn't laugh.

Sometimes, however, it was laughter without witnesses, he laughed to himself. From his letter to Zhukovsky: “I wrote three pages. Before that I laughed, but this laughter was enough to brighten my whole day.
This is a laugh to yourself, maybe it was. And he read unusually seriously, and this contrast acted in the strongest way. He allowed to discover everything comic in real life. This is connected with a whole philosophy - Gogol's behavior, his laughter, his comic.

For example, Gogol said that in our country an actor or artist is completely incapable of lying. Why can't they lie? It seems that everyone knows how to lie actors. Because they think that to lie is to carry some kind of nonsense in advance.

No, to lie is to say meaningless things in such a tone (I convey a little freely) as if it were the true truth, this is the effect of that very comic lie. This Gogolian humor, both in behavior and in the text, reveals the depths of meaning.

And Andronikov personally helped me a lot, because he was one of those who recommended me to the Writers' Union.

I must say that joining the Writers' Union was the same as entering graduate school, somewhat dramatic for me, although not as much.

At this time, my article “Artistic Convention and Time” was published in Novy Mir. And at that time we had such a persecution of conventionality, the grotesque, fantasy. Maybe you remember this episode when Nikita Sergeevich visited the famous exhibition in the Manege. I saw modern cubists there. “Who are they drawing for, what is it?”

After that, the persecution of formalists, symbolists, whoever you want began, and off we went. By the way, the persecution was not always carried out for ideological reasons, nothing like that. What was incomprehensible was persecuted. If it is not clear, it is already bad, it is, therefore, hostile. The devil knows what is hidden there. This is where the company started.

My article had a great response. I was credited with promoting the ideas of Roger Garaudy, a French writer, theorist, his book is called Realism without Shores.

How can there be realism without shores, what can be without shores? Everything is limited. They began to scold him, and at the same time they began to scold me too - because, it turns out, I am his agent. Because of this, my entry into the Union was postponed.

Petr Nikolaev, Academician, Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences, Editor-in-Chief of Philological Sciences, Professor at Moscow University. Doctoral dissertation defense at Moscow University, room 66.

There is a defense. A thesis dedicated to Plekhanov is being defended. From Plekhanov, the speaker moved to modern philosophers, and did not speak very approvingly, drawing conclusions about the same Roger Garaudy. Not about me, about Roger Garaudy.

And the opponent was Shcherbina, deputy director of the Institute of World Literature. Of course, he praises Pyotr Nikolaev for adhering to Marxist positions, and gave in the teeth, as they say, the revisionist Roger Garaudy and the same as Garaudy.

He does not know that I am in the hall, but then he suddenly makes such a digression: “What is there for Roger Garaudy! We have Yuri Mann here, so he said it all much earlier and better. Can you imagine? There was some pride in his phrase, because he wanted to say that even in terms of revisionism, we overtook our ideological enemies and said it all better. Although it was not very easy for me, because at that time, my Ph.D. thesis was being approved.

I was less worried about the Writers' Union, because one of the members of the commission told Dementyev, who was my other recommender (I had three recommenders - Andronikov, then Turkov and Dementyev: “Don't worry, the campaign against formalism will calm down, we will accept it Indeed, the campaign has faded away, but another campaign has arisen.

It was decided to accept only those who have books into the Writers' Union. I didn't have any books at that time. In 1966, the first two books "On the Grotesque in Literature" and "Gogol's Comedy" The Inspector General "" were published. This was two years later. And then I didn’t have books, there were only articles. This applied not only to me, it applied to everyone, including storytellers, not just critics. If only the stories are separate, then we'll wait for the book. Like this.

Once, in my presence in my apartment on Myasnitskaya, Irakli Luarsabovich was talking on the phone with some important member of the commission. He talked to him and obviously this person said the same thing: that a book is needed.

Andronikov literally said the following: “Why is it so important? Not only did Homer not have books, but he did not even have publications.” Agree that it was a witticism in the spirit of Irakli Luarsabovich. After that, I was supposed to fall into megalomania, but I didn’t, to be honest. This is the phrase I remember for the rest of my life.

On the unifying role of Gogol: Bayara Arutyunova and Bogdan Stupka

One unexpected occurrence. It is usually believed that Gogol is a factor that does not contribute to rapprochement, which does not smooth out, but exacerbates contradictions. There is even such a thesis: Pushkin is harmony, Gogol is disharmony. There are reasons for this, I do not refute all this.

But at the same time, an extraordinary phenomenon that I often had to deal with, especially in our world, is when Gogol begins to unite, at least, scientists, specialists.

I want to demonstrate this with one example. Here is a work written by Bayara Arutyunova. This is a famous scientist, a collaborator of Roman Yakobson, she made a wonderful, valuable publication in one of the American journals, and I want to read the inscription she left.

And one more thing that sounds particularly relevant. The great Ukrainian actor is Bogdan Stupka, we met with him several times in Rome, in connection with the awarding of the Gogol Prize in Italy. And now, with special emotion, I will read his inscription (there are some epithets that apply to me, you can omit them):

"To the great scientist, literary critic, friend of Gogol with the lowest bow, reverence, deep respect, Stupka."

I remember what a feeling of sympathy he had for the other members of our Russian delegation, and how everyone loved him. Unfortunately, he is no longer alive.

We are talking about the philosopher and literary critic Georgy Dmitrievich Gachev. As follows from the letters of his father, musicologist Dmitry Gachev, in the family of little George in childhood they called him "Gena". Subsequently, the same name was used in the circle of friends.

Alexander Trifonovich Tvardovsky, the author of the poem "Vasily Terkin" in 1950-1954 and 1958-1970, was also the editor-in-chief of the Novy Mir magazine. In the early 1960s, the magazine became the center of public reconsideration of attitudes towards Stalinism. In particular, by permission of N.S. Khrushchev, A.I. Solzhenitsyn’s story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” was published there.
In 1961-1973, Vsevolod Kochetov, the author of the later filmed novel Zhurbiny (1952), was the editor-in-chief of the Oktyabr magazine. After Kochetov's novel "What do you want?" was published in October 1969, in which the author advocated the rehabilitation of I.V. Stalin, a number of intellectuals came out with a collective letter against this publication. The publishing position of Oktyabr at that time was in confrontation with the policy of Novy Mir, whose editor-in-chief A.T. Tvardovsky obtained permission to publish two stories by A.I. Solzhenitsyn.

If everyone who reads Pravmir subscribes to 50 rubles. per month, it will make a huge contribution to the opportunity to spread the word about Christ, about Orthodoxy, about meaning and life, about family and society.

Yu.V.Mann
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol
GOGOL Nikolai Vasilievich, Russian writer.
Literary fame for Gogol was brought by the collection "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" (1831-1832), saturated with Ukrainian ethnographic material, romantic moods, lyricism and humor. The stories from the collections "Mirgorod" and "Arabesques" (both - 1835) open the realistic period of Gogol's work. The theme of the humiliation of the "little man" was most fully embodied in the story "The Overcoat" (1842), which is associated with the formation of the natural school. The grotesque beginning of "Petersburg tales" ("The Nose", "Portrait") was developed in the comedy The Inspector General (staged in 1836) as a phantasmagoria of the bureaucratic-bureaucratic world. In the poem-novel "Dead Souls" (1st volume - 1842), satirical ridicule of landowner Russia was combined with the pathos of the spiritual transformation of man. The religious-journalistic book Selected Places from Correspondence with Friends (1847) provoked a critical letter from V. G. Belinsky. In 1852 Gogol burned the manuscript of the second volume of Dead Souls. Gogol had a decisive influence on the establishment of humanistic and democratic principles in Russian literature.
Family. Childhood
The future classic of Russian literature came from a middle-class landlord family: the Gogols had about 400 serf souls and over 1,000 acres of land. The writer's ancestors on his father's side were hereditary priests, but the writer's grandfather Afanasy Demyanovich left the spiritual career and entered the service of the hetman's office; it was he who added to his surname Yanovsky another - Gogol, which was supposed to demonstrate the origin of the family from Colonel Evstafiy (Ostap) Gogol, well-known in Ukrainian history of the 17th century (this fact does not find sufficient confirmation). Father, Vasily Afanasyevich, served at the Little Russian Post Office. Mother, Marya Ivanovna, who came from the Kosyarovsky landlord family, was known as the first beauty in the Poltava region; she married Vasily Afanasyevich at the age of fourteen. In the family, in addition to Nikolai, there were five more children. The future writer spent his childhood in his native estate Vasilyevka (another name is Yanovshchina), visiting with his parents the surrounding places - Dikanka, which belonged to the Minister of Internal Affairs V.P. Kochubey, Obukhovka, where the writer V.V. Kapnist lived, but especially often in Kibintsy, the estate of a former minister, a distant relative of Gogol on his mother's side - D. P. Troshchinsky. With Kibintsy, where there was an extensive library and a home theater, early artistic experiences of the future writer are connected. Another source of strong impressions for the boy were historical legends and biblical stories, in particular, the prophecy about the Last Judgment told by his mother with a reminder of the inevitable punishment of sinners. Since then, Gogol, in the words of the researcher K. V. Mochulsky, constantly lived "under the terror of the afterlife retribution."
"I started thinking about the future early..." Years of study. Moving to Petersburg
At first, Nikolai studied at the Poltava district school (1818-1819), then took private lessons from the Poltava teacher Gabriel Sorochinsky, living in his apartment, and in May 1821 he entered the newly founded Nizhyn High School of Higher Sciences. Gogol studied rather averagely, but he distinguished himself in the gymnasium theater - as an actor and decorator. The first literary experiments in verse and prose belong to the gymnasium period, mainly "in a lyrical and serious kind", but also in a comic spirit, for example, the satire "Something about Nizhyn, or the law is not written for Fools" (not preserved). Most of all, however, Gogol was occupied at this time with the idea of ​​public service in the field of justice; such a decision arose not without the influence of Professor N. G. Belousov, who taught natural law and was subsequently dismissed from the gymnasium on charges of "free-thinking" (during the investigation, Gogol testified in his favor).
After graduating from the gymnasium, Gogol in December 1828, together with one of his closest friends A. S. Danilevsky, arrived in St. Petersburg, where a number of blows and disappointments lay in wait for him: he could not get the desired place; the poem "Hanz Küchelgarten", written, obviously, back in the gymnasium time and published in 1829 (under the pseudonym V. Alov), meets with murderous responses from reviewers (Gogol immediately buys up almost the entire edition of the book and sets it on fire); to this, perhaps, love experiences were added, which he spoke about in a letter to his mother (dated July 24, 1829). All this makes Gogol suddenly leave Petersburg for Germany.
Upon returning to Russia (in September of the same year), Gogol finally manages to decide on a service - first in the Department of State Economy and Public Buildings, and then in the Department of Appanages. Bureaucratic activity does not bring satisfaction to Gogol; but his new publications (the story "Bisavriuk, or Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala", articles and essays) pay more and more attention to him. The writer makes extensive literary acquaintances, in particular, with V. A. Zhukovsky, P. A. Pletnev, who introduced Gogol to A. S. Pushkin at home in May 1831 (obviously on the 20th).
"Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka"
In the autumn of the same year, the 1st part of the collection of stories from Ukrainian life "Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka" was published (the 2nd part appeared next year), enthusiastically received by Pushkin: "Here is real gaiety, sincere, laid-back, without affectation, without stiffness And in some places what poetry!...". At the same time, the "gaiety" of Gogol's book revealed various shades - from carefree banter to gloomy comedy, close to black humor. With all the fullness and sincerity of the feelings of Gogol's characters, the world in which they live is tragically conflicted: natural and family ties are being terminated, mysterious unreal forces invade the natural order of things (fantastic relies mainly on folk demonology). Already in "Evenings..." Gogol's extraordinary art of creating an integral, complete and living artistic cosmos manifested itself.
After the release of the first prose book, Gogol became a famous writer. In the summer of 1832 he was met with enthusiasm in Moscow, where he met M. P. Pogodin, S. T. Aksakov and his family, M. S. Shchepkin and others. Gogol's next trip to Moscow, equally successful, took place in the summer of 1835. By the end of that year, he left the field of pedagogy (from the summer of 1834 he held the post of associate professor of general history at St. Petersburg University) and devoted himself entirely to literary work.
"Mirgorod" and "Petersburg" cycles. "Inspector"
The year 1835 is unusual in terms of the creative intensity and breadth of Gogol's ideas. This year the following two collections of prose works are published - "Arabesques" and "Mirgorod" (both in two parts); work began on the poem "Dead Souls", the comedy "Inspector General" was basically completed, the first edition of the comedy "Grooms" (the future "Marriage") was written. Reporting on the writer's new creations, including the forthcoming premiere of The Inspector General at the Alexandrinsky Theater in St. Petersburg (April 19, 1836), Pushkin noted in his Sovremennik: "Mr. about him in our magazine. By the way, Gogol also actively published in Pushkin's journal, in particular, as a critic (the article "On the Movement of Journal Literature in 1834 and 1835").
"Mirgorod" and "Arabesques" marked new artistic worlds on the map of Gogol's universe. Thematically close to "Evenings ..." ("Little Russian" life), the Mirgorod cycle, which combined the stories "Old-world landowners", "Taras Bulba", "Viy", "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich", reveals a sharp change in perspective and pictorial scale: instead of strong and harsh characteristics, there is the vulgarity and facelessness of the townsfolk; instead of poetic and deep feelings - sluggish, almost reflex movements. The ordinariness of modern life was set off by the colorfulness and extravagance of the past, but the more strikingly manifested in it, in this past, deep internal conflict (for example, in "Taras Bulba" - a collision of an individualized love feeling with communal interests). The world of "Petersburg stories" from "Arabesques" ("Nevsky Prospekt", "Notes of a Madman", "Portrait"; they are adjoined by "The Nose" and "The Overcoat" published later, respectively in 1836 and 1842) - this is the world of modern cities with its sharp social and ethical collisions, breaks in character, disturbing and ghostly atmosphere. Gogol's generalization reaches its highest degree in The Inspector General, in which the "prefabricated city" seemed to imitate the life of any larger social association, up to the state, the Russian Empire, or even humanity as a whole. Instead of the traditional active engine of intrigue - a rogue or an adventurer - an involuntary deceiver (the imaginary auditor Khlestakov) was placed at the epicenter of the conflict, which gave everything that happened an additional, grotesque illumination, amplified to the limit by the final "silent scene". Freed from the specific details of the "punishment of vice", conveying primarily the very effect of a general shock (which was emphasized by the symbolic duration of the moment of petrification), this scene opened up the possibility of a variety of interpretations, including the eschatological one - as a reminder of the imminent Last Judgment.
main book
In June 1836 Gogol (again together with Danilevsky) went abroad, where he spent a total of more than 12 years, except for two visits to Russia - in 1839-40 and in 1841-42. The writer lived in Germany, Switzerland, France, Austria, the Czech Republic, but for the longest time in Italy, continuing to work on Dead Souls, the plot of which (like The Inspector General) was suggested to him by Pushkin. The generalization of scale characteristic of Gogol was now given a spatial expression: as the Chichikov scam developed (the purchase of the "revision souls" of dead people), Russian life was to be revealed in many ways - not only from the side of its "lower ranks", but also in higher, significant manifestations. At the same time, the entire depth of the key motif of the poem was revealed: the concept of "dead soul" and the antithesis "living" - "dead" that followed from this, from the sphere of concrete word usage (dead peasant, "revision soul") moved into the sphere of figurative and symbolic semantics. The problem arose of the mortification and revival of the human soul, and in connection with this, of society as a whole, of the Russian world, first of all, but through it, of all modern humanity. The complexity of the idea is connected with the genre specificity of "Dead Souls" (the designation "poem" indicated the symbolic meaning of the work, the special role of the narrator and the author's positive ideal).
The second volume of Dead Souls. "Selected places from correspondence with friends"
After the publication of the first volume (1842), work on the second volume (begun in 1840) proceeded with particular intensity and pain. In the summer of 1845, in a difficult state of mind, Gogol burned the manuscript of this volume, later explaining his decision precisely by the fact that "ways and roads" to the ideal, the revival of the human spirit, did not receive a sufficiently truthful and convincing expression. As if compensating for the long-promised second volume and anticipating the general movement of the poem's meaning, Gogol in "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (1847) turned to a more direct, journalistic explanation of his ideas. With special force was emphasized in this book the need for internal Christian education and re-education of everyone and everyone, without which no social improvements are possible. At the same time, Gogol was also working on works of a theological nature, the most significant of which was Meditations on the Divine Liturgy (published posthumously in 1857).
In April 1848, after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land to the Holy Sepulcher, Gogol finally returned to his homeland. He spends many months of 1848 and 1850-51 in Odessa and Little Russia, in the autumn of 1848 he visits St. Petersburg, in 1850 and 1851 he visits Optina Pustyn, but most of the time he lives in Moscow.
By the beginning of 1852, the edition of the second volume was re-created, chapters from which Gogol read to his closest friends - A. O. Smirnova-Rosset, S. P. Shevyrev, M. P. Pogodin, S. T. Aksakov and members of his family and others . The Rzhev archpriest father Matvey (Konstantinovsky), whose preaching of rigorism and tireless moral self-improvement largely determined Gogol's state of mind in the last period of his life, disapproved of the work.
On the night of February 11-12, in the house on Nikitsky Boulevard, where Gogol lived with Count A.P. Tolstoy, in a state of deep spiritual crisis, the writer burns a new edition of the second volume. A few days later, on the morning of February 21, he dies.
The funeral of the writer took place with a huge gathering of people at the cemetery of the St. Danilov Monastery (in 1931, Gogol's remains were reburied at the Novodevichy cemetery).
"Four-Dimensional Prose"
In the historical perspective, Gogol's creativity was revealed gradually, exposing its deeper levels with the passage of time. For its immediate successors, representatives of the so-called natural school, social motives, the lifting of all prohibitions on the subject and material, everyday concreteness, as well as humanistic pathos in the depiction of the "little man" were of paramount importance. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Christian philosophical and moral problems of Gogol's works were revealed with particular force; subsequently, the perception of Gogol's work was supplemented by a sense of the special complexity and irrationality of his artistic world and the visionary courage and unconventionality of his pictorial manner. "Gogol's prose is at least four-dimensional. He can be compared with his contemporary mathematician Lobachevsky, who blew up the Euclidean world..." (V. Nabokov). All this determined the huge and ever-increasing role of Gogol in modern world culture.
Yu. W. Mann
N. Piksanov. Gogol
Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich - one of the greatest writers of Russian literature (1809 - 1852). He was born on March 20, 1809 in the town of Sorochintsy (on the border of Poltava and Mirgorod counties) and came from an old Little Russian family; in the troubled times of Little Russia, some of his ancestors molested the Polish gentry, and Gogol's grandfather, Afanasy Demyanovich, wrote in an official paper that "his ancestors, with the surname Gogol, of the Polish nation", although he himself was a real Little Russian, and others considered him prototype of the hero of "Old World Landowners". Great-grandfather, Yan Gogol, a pupil of the Kyiv Academy, "went out to the Russian side", settled in the Poltava region, and the nickname "Gogol-Yanovsky" came from him. Gogol himself, apparently, did not know about the origin of this increase and subsequently rejected it, saying that the Poles invented it. Gogol's father, Vasily Afanasyevich, died when his son was 15 years old; but it is believed that the stage activity of the father, who was a man of a cheerful nature and a wonderful storyteller, did not remain without influence on the tastes of the future writer, who showed an early penchant for the theater. Life in the village before school and after, during the holidays, went on in the fullest atmosphere of Little Russian life, pan and peasant. In these impressions was the root of Gogol's later Little Russian stories, his historical and ethnographic interests; subsequently, from St. Petersburg, Gogol constantly turned to his mother when he needed new everyday details for his Little Russian stories. The influence of his mother is attributed to the inclinations of religiosity, which later took possession of Gogol's entire being, as well as the shortcomings of his upbringing: his mother surrounded him with real adoration, and this could be one of the sources of his conceit, which, on the other hand, was early generated by the instinctive consciousness of the genius power hidden in him. At the age of ten, Gogol was taken to Poltava for preparation at the Gymnasium, to one of the local teachers; then he entered the gymnasium of higher sciences in Nizhyn (from May 1821 to June 1828), where he was at first a private student, then a boarder at the gymnasium. Gogol was not a diligent student, but he had an excellent memory, in a few days he prepared for exams and moved from class to class; he was very weak in languages ​​and made progress only in drawing and Russian literature. Apparently, the Gymnasium of Higher Sciences, which at first was badly organized, was also to blame for the poor teaching; for example, the teacher of literature was an admirer of Kheraskov and Derzhavin and an enemy of the latest poetry, especially Pushkin. The shortcomings of the school were made up for by self-education in a friendly circle, where there were people who shared literary interests with Gogol (Vysotsky, who apparently had a considerable influence on him then; A. S. Danilevsky, who remained his friend for life, like N. Prokopovich; Nestor Kukolnik, with whom, however, Gogol never got along). The comrades subscribed to magazines; started their own handwritten journal, where Gogol wrote a lot in verse. With literary interests, a love for the theater also developed, where Gogol, already distinguished by unusual comedy, was the most zealous participant (from the second year of his stay in Nizhyn). Gogol's youthful experiments developed in the style of romantic rhetoric - not in the taste of Pushkin, whom Gogol already admired then, but rather in the taste of Bestuzhev-Marlinsky. The death of his father was a heavy blow to the entire family. Gogol also takes care of business, he gives advice, reassures his mother, he must think about the future organization of his own affairs. By the end of his stay at the gymnasium, he dreams of a wide social activity, which, however, he does not see at all in the literary field; no doubt, under the influence of everything around him, he thinks to come forward and benefit society in a service for which in fact he was completely incapable. Thus plans for the future were unclear; but it is curious that Gogol was possessed by a deep conviction that a wide field lay ahead of him; he is already talking about the instructions of providence and cannot be satisfied with what simple "existents" are content with, as he puts it, as most of his Nizhyn comrades were. In December 1828 Gogol left for Petersburg. Here, for the first time, a cruel disappointment awaited him: his modest means turned out to be very meager in the big city; brilliant hopes were not realized as soon as he expected. His letters home during that time are a mixture of this disappointment and broad expectations for the future, albeit vague. In reserve he had a lot of character and practical enterprise: he tried to enter the stage, become an official, surrender to literature. He was not accepted as an actor; the service was so empty of content that he immediately became weary of it; the more attracted his literary field. In Petersburg, for the first time, he found himself in a little Russian circle, partly from his former comrades. He found that Little Russia arouses interest in society; experienced failures turned his poetic dreams to his native Little Russia, and from here arose the first plans for a work that was supposed to give an outcome to the need for artistic creativity, and at the same time bring practical benefits: these were the plans for Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka. But before that, under the pseudonym of V. Alov, he published that romantic idyll: "Hanz Kühelgarten" (1829), which was written back in Nizhyn (he himself marked it in 1827) and the hero of which was given those ideal dreams and aspirations, which he itself was performed in the last years of Nizhyn life. Soon after the publication of the book, he himself destroyed it when the critics reacted unfavorably to his work. In a restless search for a life's work, Gogol at that time went abroad, by sea to Lübeck, but a month later he returned again to Petersburg (in September 1829) and then mysteriously justified this strange trick by the fact that God showed him the way to a foreign land, or referred to some hopeless love: in fact, he fled from himself, from the discord of his high, as well as arrogant, dreams with practical life. "He was drawn to some fantastic land of happiness and reasonable productive labor," says his biographer; America seemed to him to be such a country. In fact, instead of America, he ended up in the service of the appanage department (April, 1830) and remained there until 1832. Even earlier, one circumstance had a decisive influence on his future fate and on his literary activity: it was a rapprochement with the circle of Zhukovsky and Pushkin . The failure of the Hanz Küchelgarten was already some indication of the need for another literary path; but even earlier, from the first months of 1828, Gogol besieged his mother with requests to send him information about Little Russian customs, traditions, costumes, as well as to send "notes kept by the ancestors of some ancient family, ancient manuscripts," etc. All this there was material for future stories from Little Russian life and legends, which became the first beginning of his literary glory. He already took some part in the publications of that time: at the beginning of 1830, in the old "Notes of the Fatherland" by Svinin, "Evening on the eve of Ivan Kupala" was printed, with revisions of the editorial board; at the same time (1829) "Sorochinsky Fair" and "May Night" were started or written. Gogol published other works then in the publications of Baron Delvig, Literary Newspaper and Northern Flowers, where, for example, a chapter from the historical novel Hetman was placed. Perhaps Delvig recommended him to Zhukovsky, who received Gogol with great cordiality: apparently, the mutual sympathy of people kindred in love for art, in religiosity, inclined towards mysticism, showed up between them from the first time - after that they became very close. Zhukovsky handed over the young man to Pletnev with a request to attach him, and, indeed, already in February 1831 Pletnev recommended Gogol for the post of teacher at a patriotic institute, where he himself was an inspector. Getting to know Gogol better, Pletnev waited for an opportunity to "bring him under Pushkin's blessing"; it happened in May of that year. Gogol's entry into this circle, soon appreciating in him a great novice talent, had a great influence on his whole fate. Before him, finally, the prospect of a wide activity, which he dreamed of, was revealed - but in the field not of an official, but of a literary one. In material terms, Gogol could be helped by the fact that, in addition to a place at the institute, Pletnev gave him private lessons with the Longvinovs, Balabins, Vasilchikovs; but the main thing was the moral influence that met Gogol in the new environment. He entered the circle of people who stood at the head of Russian fiction: his long-standing poetic aspirations could now develop in all their breadth, an instinctive understanding of art could become a deep consciousness; Pushkin's personality made an extraordinary impression on him and forever remained an object of worship for him. Service to art became for him a high and strict moral duty, the requirements of which he tried to fulfill sacredly. Hence, among other things, his slow manner of work, the long definition and development of the plan and all the details. The society of people with a broad literary education was generally useful for a young man with meager knowledge taken out of school: his observation becomes deeper, and artistic creativity increased with each new work. At Zhukovsky's, Gogol met a select circle, partly literary, partly aristocratic; in the latter, he began a relationship that later played a significant role in his life, for example, with the Vielgorskys, at the Balabins he met with the brilliant maid of honor A. O. Rosset, later Smirnova. The horizon of his life observations was expanding, long-standing aspirations were given ground, and Gogol's lofty conception of his destiny was already falling into extreme conceit: on the one hand, his mood became sublime idealism, on the other, the possibility of those profound mistakes that marked recent years arose. his life. This time was the most active era of his work. After small works, the above part of which was named, his first major literary work, which marked the beginning of his fame, were: "Evenings on a farm near Dikanka. Stories published by the beekeeper Rudy Pank", published in St. Petersburg in 1831 and 1832, in two parts (in the first were placed "Sorochinsky Fair", "The Evening on the Eve of Ivan Kupala", "May Night, or the Drowned Woman", "The Missing Letter"; in the second - "The Night Before Christmas", "A Terrible Revenge, an Old True Story", "Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt", "The Enchanted Place"). It is known what impression these stories made on Pushkin, depicting pictures of Little Russian life in an unprecedented way, shining with gaiety and subtle humor; for the first time, the full depth of this talent, capable of great creations, was not understood. The next collections were first "Arabesques", then "Mirgorod", both published in 1835 and compiled partly from articles published in 1830-1834, partly from new works that appeared here for the first time. Gogol's literary fame has now been finally established. He grew up in the eyes of his inner circle, and especially in the sympathy of the younger literary generation; it already discerned in him a great force which was to make a revolution in the course of our literature. In the meantime, events were taking place in Gogol's personal life that in various ways influenced the inner warehouse of his thoughts and fantasies and his external affairs. In 1832, he was at home for the first time after completing a course in Nizhyn. The path lay through Moscow, where he met people who later became his more or less close friends: Pogodin, Maksimovich, Shchepkin, S. T. Aksakov. Staying at home first surrounded him with impressions of his beloved environment, memories of the past, but then with severe disappointments. Household affairs were upset; Gogol himself was no longer the enthusiastic youth he had left his homeland; life experience taught him to look deeper into reality and to see its often sad, even tragic basis behind its outer shell. Soon his "Evenings" began to seem to him a superficial youthful experience, the fruit of that "youth during which no questions come to mind." Little Russian life even now provided material for his imagination, but the mood was already different: in the stories of Mirgorod this sad note constantly sounds, reaching high pathos. Returning to St. Petersburg, Gogol worked hard on his works: this was generally the most active time of his creative activity; he continued at the same time to make plans for life. From the end of 1833, he was carried away by an idea as unrealizable as his previous plans for the service were: it seemed to him that he could enter the scientific field. At that time, the opening of Kyiv University was being prepared, and he dreamed of taking the department of history there, which he taught to girls at the Patriotic Institute. Maksimovich was invited to Kyiv; Gogol thought of settling with him in Kyiv, he wanted to invite Pogodin there as well; in Kyiv, he finally imagined Russian Athens, where he himself thought of writing something unprecedented in world history, and at the same time studying Little Russian antiquity. To his chagrin, it turned out that the chair of history had been given to another person; but on the other hand, he was soon offered the same department at St. Petersburg University, thanks to the influence of his high literary friends. He really took this chair: once or twice he managed to deliver an effective lecture, but then the task proved beyond his strength, and he himself resigned from the professorship in 1835. This was, of course, great arrogance; but his guilt was not so great, if we recall that Gogol's plans did not seem strange either to his friends, among whom were Pogodin and Maksimovich, the professors themselves, or to the Ministry of Education, which found it possible to give a professorship to a young man who had finished the course of the gymnasium with sin in half ; the entire level of university science at that time was still so low. In 1832, his work was somewhat suspended due to all sorts of household and personal chores; but already in 1833 he was again hard at work, and the result of these years were the two collections mentioned above. First came "Arabesques" (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835), which contained several articles of popular scientific content on history and art ("Sculpture, Painting and Music"; a few words about Pushkin; about architecture; about Bryullov's painting; about teaching general history; a look at the state of Little Russia; about Little Russian songs, etc.), but at the same time new stories: "Portrait", "Nevsky Prospekt" and "Notes of a Madman". Then in the same year he published: "Mirgorod. Tales that serve as a continuation of Evenings on a farm near Dikanka" (two parts, St. Petersburg, 1835). A number of works were placed here, in which new striking features of Gogol's talent were revealed. In the first part of "Mirgorod" appeared "Old World Landowners" and "Taras Bulba", in the second - "Viy" and "The Tale of how Ivan Ivanovich quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich." "Taras Bulba" appeared here in the first sketch, which was developed much more widely by Gogol later (1842). These first thirties include the ideas of some other works by Gogol, such as the famous "Overcoat", "Carriage", perhaps "Portrait" in its reworked version; these works appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836) and Pletnev (1842); a later stay in Italy includes "Rome" in Pogodin's "Moskvityanin" (1842). By 1834, the first concept of the Inspector General is also attributed. The surviving manuscripts of Gogol generally indicate that he worked extremely carefully on his works: from what has survived from these manuscripts, it is clear how the work, in its finished form known to us, grew gradually from the original sketch, becoming more and more complicated with details and reaching finally, that amazing artistic fullness and vitality with which we know them at the end of a process that sometimes dragged on for years. It is known that the main plot of The Government Inspector, like the plot of Dead Souls, was communicated to Gogol by Pushkin; but it is clear that in both cases, the entire creation, from the plan to the last details, was the fruit of Gogol's own creativity: an anecdote that could be told in a few lines turned into a rich work of art. The Inspector General, it seems, in particular provoked in Gogol this endless work of determining the plan and the details of execution; there are a number of sketches, in whole and in parts, and the first printed form of the comedy appeared in 1836. Gogol's old passion for the theater took possession of Gogol to an extraordinary degree: the comedy never left his head; he was tormented by the thought of being face to face with society; he took great pains to ensure that the play was performed in complete accordance with his own idea of ​​characters and action; the production met various obstacles, including censorship, and, finally, could only be realized at the behest of Emperor Nicholas. The Inspector General had an extraordinary effect: the Russian stage had never seen anything like it; the reality of Russian life was conveyed with such force and truth that although, as Gogol himself said, it was only about six provincial officials who turned out to be rogues, the whole society rebelled against him, which felt that it was about a whole principle, about a whole order life, in which it itself abides. But, on the other hand, the comedy was greeted with the greatest enthusiasm by those best elements of society who were aware of the existence of these shortcomings and the need for denunciation, and especially by the young literary generation, who saw here once again, as in the previous works of a beloved writer, a whole revelation, a new, emerging period of Russian art and Russian society. This last impression was probably not entirely clear to Gogol: he was not yet preoccupied with such broad social aspirations or hopes as his young admirers; he was completely on the point of view of his friends in the Pushkin circle, he only wanted more honesty and truth in the given order of things, and for this reason he was especially struck by the cries of condemnation that rose against him. Subsequently, in "Theatrical tour after the presentation of a new comedy", he, on the one hand, conveyed the impression that the "Inspector General" made in various sectors of society, and on the other hand, expressed his own thoughts about the great significance of theater and artistic truth. Gogol's first dramatic plans appeared even earlier than The Inspector General. In 1833 he was absorbed in the comedy "Vladimir of the 3rd degree"; he did not finish it, but its material served for several dramatic episodes, such as "The Morning of a Businessman", "Litigation", "Lakey's" and "Fragment". The first of these plays appeared in Pushkin's Sovremennik (1836), the rest in his first collected works (1842). In the same meeting appeared for the first time: "Marriage", the first drafts of which date back to the same 1833, and "Players", conceived in the mid-thirties. Tired of the intense work of recent years and the moral anxieties that The Government Inspector had cost him, Gogol decided to rest away from this crowd of society, under a different sky. In June 1836, he went abroad, where he later stayed, with interruptions of visits to Russia, for many years. Staying in the "beautiful far away" for the first time strengthened and calmed him, gave him the opportunity to complete his greatest work, "Dead Souls", but became the germ of deeply fatal phenomena. Dissociation from life, increased withdrawal into oneself, exaltation of religious feeling led to pietistic exaggeration, which ended with his last book, which amounted, as it were, to a denial of his own artistic work ... Having gone abroad, he lived in Germany, Switzerland, spent the winter with A Danilevsky in Paris, where he met and became especially close to Smirnova, and where he was caught by the news of Pushkin's death, which struck him terribly. In March 1837, he was in Rome, which he fell extremely fond of and became for him, as it were, a second home. European political and social life has always remained alien and completely unfamiliar to Gogol; he was attracted by nature and works of art, and the then Rome only represented these interests. Gogol studied ancient monuments, art galleries, visited artists' studios, admired the people's life and liked to show Rome, "treat" them to visiting Russian acquaintances and friends. But in Rome he worked hard: the main subject of this work was "Dead Souls", conceived back in St. Petersburg in 1835; here in Rome he finished "The Overcoat", wrote the story "Anunziata", later altered into "Rome", wrote a tragedy from the life of the Cossacks, which, however, he destroyed after several alterations. In the autumn of 1839, together with Pogodin, he went to Russia, to Moscow, where he was enthusiastically greeted by the Aksakovs. Then he went to Petersburg, where he had to take the sisters from the institute; then he returned to Moscow again; in St. Petersburg and Moscow he read the completed chapters of Dead Souls to his closest friends. Having arranged some of his affairs, Gogol again went abroad, to his beloved Rome; he promised his friends to return in a year and bring the finished first volume of Dead Souls. By the summer of 1841 this first volume was ready. In September of this year, Gogol went to Russia to print his book. He again had to endure the severe anxieties that he had once experienced when staging The Inspector General on stage. The book was first presented to the Moscow censorship, which was going to ban it altogether; then the book was submitted to the St. Petersburg censorship and, thanks to the participation of influential friends of Gogol, was, with some exceptions, allowed. She was published in Moscow ("The Adventures of Chichikov, or Dead Souls, a poem by N. Gogol", M., 1842). In June Gogol went abroad again. This last stay abroad was the final turning point in Gogol's state of mind. He lived first in Rome, then in Germany, in Frankfurt, Düsseldorf, then in Nice, then in Paris, then in Ostend, often in the circle of his closest friends, Zhukovsky, Smirnova, Vielgorsky, Tolstoy, and that pietistic direction mentioned above. A lofty idea of ​​his talent and the duty lying in it led him to the conviction that he was doing something providential: in order to denounce human vices and look at life broadly, one must strive for inner perfection, which is given only by contemplation of God. Several times he had to endure serious illnesses, which still increased his religious mood; in his circle he found a favorable ground for the development of religious exaltation - he adopted a prophetic tone, self-confidently instructed his friends and, in the end, came to the conclusion that what he had done so far was unworthy of the lofty goal to which he now considered himself called. If before he said that the first volume of his poem is nothing more than a porch to the palace that is being built in it, now he was ready to reject everything he wrote as sinful and unworthy of his high mission. Once, in a moment of heavy reflection on the fulfillment of his duty, he burned the second volume of "Dead Souls", offered it as a sacrifice to God, and the new content of the book, enlightened and purified, presented itself to his mind; it seemed to him that he now understood how to write in order to "direct the whole society towards the beautiful." New work began, and in the meantime another thought occupied him: he rather wanted to tell society what he considered useful for him, and he decided to collect in one book everything that he had written in recent years to friends in the spirit of his new mood, and instructed publish this book to Pletnev. These were "Selected passages from correspondence with friends" (St. Petersburg, 1847). Most of the letters that make up this book date from 1845 and 1846, the time when this mood of Gogol reached its highest development. The book made a heavy impression even on Gogol's personal friends with its tone of prophecy and teaching, with its preaching of humility, which, however, showed extreme conceit; condemnations of former works, in which Russian literature saw one of its best ornaments; complete approval of those social orders, the failure of which was clear to enlightened people without distinction of parties. But the impression of the book on literary admirers of Gogol was depressing. The highest degree of indignation aroused by Selected Places was expressed in Belinsky's well-known letter, to which Gogol was unable to answer. Apparently, he was not fully aware of this meaning of his book. He partly explained the attacks on her by his own mistake, an exaggeration of the teacher's tone, and by the fact that the censors did not miss several important letters in the book; but he could explain the attacks of former literary adherents only by the calculations of parties and vanities. The public meaning of this controversy eluded him; he himself, having left Russia long ago, retained those indefinite social concepts that he had acquired in the old Pushkin circle, was a stranger to the literary and social ferment that had arisen since then and saw in it only the ephemeral disputes of writers. In a similar sense, he then wrote "Preface to the second edition of Dead Souls"; "The Examiner's Denouement", where he wanted to give a free artistic creation the strained character of some kind of moralizing allegory, and "Forewarning", where it was announced that the fourth and fifth editions of the "Inspector General" would be sold in favor of the poor ... The failure of the book produced an overwhelming effect on Gogol action. He had to confess that a mistake had been made; even friends like S.T. Aksakov, they told him that the mistake was gross and pitiful; he himself confessed to Zhukovsky: "I swung in my book with such Khlestakov that I do not have the spirit to look into it." In his letters from 1847 there is no longer the former haughty tone of preaching and teaching; he saw that it was possible to describe Russian life only in the midst of it and by studying it. Religious feeling remained his refuge: he decided that he could not continue work without fulfilling his long-standing intention to bow to the Holy Sepulcher. At the end of 1847 he moved to Naples and at the beginning of 1848 sailed to Palestine, from where he finally returned to Russia via Constantinople and Odessa. The stay in Jerusalem did not produce the effect he expected. “Never before have I been so little satisfied with the state of my heart, as in Jerusalem and after Jerusalem,” he says. a lot of selfishness and selfishness." Gogol calls his impressions of Palestine sleepy; caught in the rain one day in Nazareth, he thought he was just sitting in Russia at the station. He spent the end of spring and summer in the village with his mother, and on September 1 he moved to Moscow; spent the summer of 1849 at Smirnova's in the countryside and in Kaluga, where Smirnova's husband was governor; in the summer of 1850 he lived again with his family; then he lived for some time in Odessa, was once again at home, and in the autumn of 1851 he settled again in Moscow, where he lived in the house of Count A.P. Tolstoy. He continued to work on the second volume of "Dead Souls" and read excerpts from it from the Aksakovs, but it continued the same painful struggle between the artist and the pietist that had been going on in him since the early forties. As was his wont, he redid what he had written many times, probably succumbing to one or another mood. Meanwhile, his health was getting weaker and weaker; in January 1852 he was struck by the death of Khomyakov's wife, who was the sister of his friend Yazykov; he was seized by the fear of death; he gave up literary studies, began to fast at Shrove Tuesday; One day, when he was spending the night in prayer, he heard voices saying that he would soon die. One night, in the midst of religious contemplation, he was seized by a religious horror and a doubt that he had not so fulfilled the duty imposed on him by God; he woke the servant, ordered him to open the chimney of the fireplace, and taking the papers from the briefcase, burned them. The next morning, when his consciousness cleared up, he repentantly told Count Tolstoy about this and believed that this was done under the influence of an evil spirit; since then, he fell into gloomy despondency and died a few days later, on February 21, 1852. He was buried in Moscow, in the Danilov Monastery, and the words of the prophet Jeremiah are placed on his monument: "I will laugh at my bitter word." The study of the historical significance of Gogol has not been completed to this day. The present period of Russian literature has not yet escaped from under his influence, and his activity represents various aspects that are revealed with the course of history itself. At the first time, when the last facts of Gogol's activity took place, it was believed that it represented two periods: one, where he served the progressive aspirations of society, and the other, when he openly took the side of immovable conservatism. A more careful study of Gogol's biography, especially his correspondence, which revealed his inner life, showed that no matter how seemingly opposite, the motives of his stories, "The Government Inspector" and "Dead Souls", on the one hand, and "Selected Places", on the other hand, in the personality of the writer there was not that turning point that was supposed to be in it, one direction was not abandoned and another, opposite, was adopted; on the contrary, it was one whole inner life, where already at an early time there were the makings of later phenomena, where the main feature of this life did not stop: service to art; but this personal life was broken by the contradictions with which she had to reckon in the spiritual principles of life and in reality. Gogol was not a thinker, but he was a great artist. He himself said about the properties of his talent: “The only thing that came out well for me was what was taken by me from reality, from data known to me” ... “My imagination still has not given me a single wonderful character and has not created any one such thing that somewhere my gaze in nature did not notice. It could not have been easier and stronger to point out the deep foundation of realism that lay in his talent, but the great property of his talent lay in the fact that he erected these features of reality "into the pearl of creation." And the faces depicted by him were not a repetition of reality: they were whole artistic types in which human nature was deeply understood. His heroes, as rarely among any other Russian writers, became household names, and before him in our literature there was no example of such an amazing inner life being revealed in the most modest human existence. Another personal trait of Gogol was that from the earliest years, from the first glimpses of a young consciousness, he was excited by lofty aspirations, a desire to serve society with something lofty and beneficial; from an early age he hated a limited self-satisfaction, devoid of inner content, and this trait later, in the thirties, showed itself with a conscious desire to denounce social ulcers and corruption, and it also developed into a lofty idea of ​​the significance of art, standing above the crowd as the highest enlightenment of the ideal. .. But Gogol was a man of his time and society. He took little out of school; no wonder that the young man did not have a certain way of thinking; but for this there was no deposit in his further education. His opinions on the fundamental questions of morality and social life remained even now patriarchal and simple-hearted. A powerful talent was maturing in him—his feeling and powers of observation penetrated deeply into the phenomena of life—but his thought did not stop at the causes of these phenomena. He was early filled with a generous and noble desire for the human good, sympathy for human suffering; he found for their expression sublime, poetic language, deep humor and stunning pictures; but these aspirations remained at the level of feeling, artistic insight, ideal abstraction - in the sense that, with all their strength, Gogol did not translate them into the practical idea of ​​improving society, and when they began to show him a different point of view, he could no longer understand it. .. All Gogol's fundamental ideas about life and literature were the ideas of the Pushkin circle. Gogol entered it as a young man, and the people of this circle were already people of mature development, a more extensive education, a significant position in society; Pushkin and Zhukovsky are at the height of their poetic fame.
The old legends of Arzamas developed into a cult of abstract art, which led, in the end, to the removal from the questions of real life, with which the conservative view in public subjects naturally merged. The circle bowed before the name of Karamzin, was carried away by the glory of Russia, believed in its future greatness, had no doubts about the present, and, indignant at shortcomings that could not be overlooked, attributed them only to a lack of virtue in people, to the failure to comply with laws. By the end of the thirties, even during Pushkin's lifetime, a turn began, showing that his school had ceased to satisfy the new aspirations of society that had arisen. Later, the circle more and more retired from new trends and was at enmity with them; according to his ideas, literature should have hovered in lofty regions, shunned the prose of life, stood “above” social noise and struggle: this condition could only make its field one-sided and not very wide ... The artistic feeling of the circle was, however, strong and appreciated the peculiar Gogol's talent; the circle also took care of his personal affairs ... Pushkin expected great artistic merit from Gogol's works, but he hardly expected their social significance, as Pushkin's friends later did not fully appreciate him, and how Gogol himself was ready to deny him ... Later Gogol became close to the Slavophile circle, or actually with Pogodin and Shevyrev, S.T. Aksakov and Yazykov; but he remained completely alien to the theoretical content of Slavophilism, and it had no effect on the form of his work. In addition to personal affection, he found here an ardent sympathy for his works, as well as for his religious and dreamy-conservative ideas. But then, in the elder Aksakov, he also met with a rebuff to the mistakes and extremes of "Selected Places" ... The sharpest moment of the collision of Gogol's theoretical ideas with reality and the aspirations of the most enlightened part of society was Belinsky's letter; but it was already too late, and the last years of Gogol's life passed, as has been said, in a hard and fruitless struggle between the artist and the pietist. This internal struggle of the writer is not only of interest to the personal fate of one of the greatest writers of Russian literature, but also to the wide interest of a socio-historical phenomenon: the struggle of moral and social elements - the dominant conservatism, and the demands of personal and social freedom and justice - was reflected in Gogol's personality and activities. , the struggle of old tradition and critical thought, pietism and free art. For Gogol himself this struggle remained unresolved; he was broken by this internal discord, but nevertheless the significance of Gogol's main works for literature was extremely deep. The results of his influence are reflected in many different ways in all subsequent literature. Leaving aside the purely artistic merits of performance, which, after Pushkin, still raised the level of possible artistic perfection in later writers, his deep psychological analysis was unparalleled in previous literature and opened up a wide path of observations, of which so many were made later. Even his first works, so severely later condemned by him "Evenings", no doubt, contributed a lot to strengthening that loving attitude towards the people, which developed later. "The Inspector General" and "Dead Souls" were again unprecedented in this measure until then, a fiery protest against the insignificance and corruption of public life; this protest broke out of personal moral idealism, had no definite theoretical basis, but this did not prevent it from making a striking impression on the moral and social side. The historical question of this significance of Gogol, as has been noted, has not yet been settled. They call it prejudice the opinion that Gogol was the founder of realism or naturalism among us, that he made a revolution in our literature, the direct consequence of which is modern literature; they say that this merit is the work of Pushkin, and Gogol only followed the general course of the then development and represents only one of the steps in the approximation of literature from transcendental heights to reality, that the brilliant accuracy of his satire was purely instinctive, and his works are striking in the absence of any conscious ideals , - as a result of which he later became entangled in the labyrinth of mystical-ascetic speculations; that the ideals of later writers have nothing to do with this, and therefore Gogol, with his brilliant laughter and his immortal creations, should in no way be placed ahead of our century. But there is an error in these judgments. First of all, there is a difference between the reception, the manner of naturalism and the content of literature. A certain degree of naturalism among us goes back to the eighteenth century; Gogol was not an innovator here, although even here he went further than Pushkin in approaching reality. But the main thing was in that bright new feature of the content, which before him, to this extent, did not exist in literature. Pushkin in his stories was a pure epic; Gogol - at least semi-instinctively - is a social writer. Needless to say, his theoretical outlook remained obscure; a historically noted feature of such genius talents is that often they, without realizing themselves in their work, are profound expressions of the aspirations of their time and society. Artistic merits alone cannot explain either the enthusiasm with which his works were received by the younger generations, or the hatred with which they were met in the conservative crowd of society. How can the inner tragedy in which Gogol spent the last years of his life be explained, if not by the contradiction of his theoretical worldview, his repentant conservatism, with that unusual social influence of his works, which he did not expect and did not assume? Gogol's works exactly coincided with the birth of this social interest, to which they greatly served and from which literature no longer emerged. The great significance of Gogol is also confirmed by negative facts. In 1852, for a short article in memory of Gogol, Turgenev was arrested in part; the censors were ordered to strictly censor everything written about Gogol; even a complete ban was announced on talking about Gogol. The second edition of "Works", begun in 1851 by Gogol himself and unfinished, due to these censorship obstacles, could only come out in 1855-56... Gogol's connection with subsequent literature is beyond doubt. The defenders of the mentioned opinion, which limits Gogol's historical significance, themselves admit that Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" seem to be a continuation of "Dead Souls". The "spirit of humanity" that distinguishes the works of Turgenev and other writers of the new era, in the environment of our literature was not brought up by anyone more than Gogol, for example, in "The Overcoat", "Notes of a Madman", "Dead Souls". Similarly, the depiction of the negative aspects of landowner life comes down to Gogol. Dostoevsky's first work is obviously related to Gogol, and so on. In later life, the new writers made independent contributions to the content of literature, just as life posed and developed new questions, but the first impulses were given by Gogol. By the way, definitions were made of Gogol from the point of view of his Little Russian origin: the latter explained to a certain extent his attitude towards Russian (Great Russian) life. Gogol's attachment to his homeland was very strong, especially in the first years of his literary activity and up to the completion of the second edition of Taras Bulba, but the satirical attitude to Russian life, no doubt, is explained not by his tribal properties, but by the whole character of his internal development. There is no doubt, however, that tribal traits also affected the nature of Gogol's talent. These are the features of his humor, which still remains the only one of its kind in our literature. The two main branches of the Russian tribe happily merged in this talent into one, highly remarkable phenomenon. A. N. Pypin. The article reproduced above by the late academician A. N. Pypin, written in 1893, summarizes the results of Gogol's scientific studies over the forty years that have elapsed since the poet's death, being at the same time the result of Pypin's own many years of studies. And although a lot of detailed studies and materials have accumulated over this forty years, there have not yet been any general codes. So, from editions of Gogol's works, Pypin could only use the old ones: P. Kulish, 1857, where the last two volumes were occupied by letters from Gogol, and Chizhov, 1867; Tikhonravov's edition had just begun. Of the biographical and critical materials, the main ones were: Belinsky's writings "Notes on the life of Gogol, compiled from the memoirs of his friends and from his own letters" P.A. Kulish, "Essays on the Gogol period of Russian literature" by N. G. Chernyshevsky ("Contemporary", 1855 - 56, and St. Petersburg, 1892), a long series of memoirs published later than Kulish's books (Annenkov, Grot, Sollogub, Berg, etc. ), bibliographic reviews by Ponomarev ("Proceedings of the Nezhinsky Institute", 1882) and Gorozhansky ("Russian Thought", 1882). On the basis of these materials, and with the general extensive knowledge and understanding that Pypin possessed, he gave the above excellent, not outdated to this day, general description of Gogol's personality, the main points of his biography and work, and an assessment of his historical significance. But twenty new years have passed since the writing of his article, and during this time a huge amount of new materials have been accumulated, new extensive scientific research has been carried out, and the historical understanding of Gogol and his era has changed. The classic tenth edition of Gogol's works, begun by N. S. Tikhonravov and completed by V. I. Shenrok (1889-97, seven volumes; a separate edition of The Inspector General, 1886), was completed, where the text was corrected according to manuscripts and Gogol's own editions and where given extensive commentaries, outlining the history of each work in its successive editions, based on surviving autographs, correspondence indications and other data. Subsequently, textual materials continued to arrive from public and private archives, as well as editorial techniques became even more complicated, and in modern times new collections of Gogol's works were undertaken: under the editorship of V. V. Kallash (St. Petersburg, 1908 - 1909, 9 vols.; a second edition with new additions is being printed) and edited by another expert on Gogol, N. I. Korobka (since 1912, in nine volumes). A huge mass of Gogol's letters, which appeared in the press in a continuous stream, was finally collected by the tireless researcher of Gogol, V. I. Shenrok, in four volumes, provided with all the necessary notes: "N.V. Gogol's Letters", edited by V. I. Shenrok , edition of A. F. Marx (St. Petersburg, 1901). Great labor and the most extensive knowledge of the editor have been invested in the publication, but the matter has not been without major blunders; see N. P. Dashkevich’s analysis in the “Report on the Award of Count Tolstoy Prizes” (St. Petersburg, 1905, pp. 37 - 94); cf. review by V. V. Kallash in "Russian Thought", 1902, No 7. Another extensive collection undertaken by the same V. I. Shenrock was "Materials for the biography of Gogol", in four volumes (M., 1892 - 98) ; rich data on the assessment of Gogol's personality and work, and indeed of his entire environment and era, are carefully collected and systematized here, often from unpublished sources. Thus, by the beginning of the 1900s, literary historiography received three huge Gogol collections: 1) writings, 2) letters, and 3) biographical materials. Later, these codes were replenished and are constantly replenished until now (see the bibliographic reviews named below); but the main thing was already done, and from here new generalizing works on Gogol come. In the anniversary year of 1902, four such studies immediately appeared: N. A. Kotlyarevsky "N. V. Gogol. additions, separately; 3rd revised ed. 1911); D. N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky - "Gogol" ("Bulletin of Education", 1902 - 04, then several separate supplemented editions, the last - as part of the collected works of Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, vol. I, St. Petersburg, 1913); S. A. Vengerova - "Writer-citizen" ("Russian Wealth", 1902, No 1 - 4, then in "Essays on the History of Russian Literature", St. Petersburg, 1907, and, finally, a separate book, in a revised form , as part of the collected works of Vengerov, vol. 4, St. Petersburg, 1913); Professor I. Mandelstam - "On the nature of Gogol's style. A chapter from the history of the Russian literary language" (Helsingfors, 1902). Considering that through the efforts of former researchers "both the biography of the poet, and the artistic value of his works, and, finally, the very methods of his work have been sufficiently clarified and described," N. A. Kotlyarevsky defines the task of his research as follows: "it is necessary, firstly, to restore with the possible completeness of the history of the mental movements of this mysterious soul of the artist and, secondly, to investigate in more detail the mutual connection that unites Gogol's work with the work of writers who preceded and contemporary him. However, the researcher does not go further in his analysis than 1842, i.e., the time when the first volume of Dead Souls was completed, and after that the poet's spiritual life begins to incline towards morbidity, and his literary activity passes from art to preaching. The author tells the history of Gogol's artistic work in connection with the main moments of his spiritual development and, in parallel with this, outlines the history of the Russian story and drama from the end of the 18th century to the end of the 18th century. and to the forties, linking Gogol with the artistic production of Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lazhechnikov, Bestuzhev, Polevoy, Prince V. F. Odoevsky, Kukolnik, Narezhny, Griboedov, Kvitka and other first-class and minor writers and playwrights. At the same time, Kotlyarevsky revises the judgments of Russian criticism, which grew up along with fiction. Thus, Gogol is evaluated in connection with the general course of Russian literature, which is the main value of Kotlyarevsky's book. In contrast to Kotlyarevsky, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky explores mainly the "artistic value" of Gogol's works, and especially the "methods of work" of Gogol, on the basis of a general assessment of his mind and genius. The author offers a special understanding of Gogol as an artist - an experimenter and egocentric, studying and depicting the world from himself, as opposed to Pushkin, an observer poet. Analyzing the peculiarities of Gogol's mind-talent, the level of his spiritual interests and the degree of intensity of his spiritual life, Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky comes to the conclusion that Gogol's mind was a deep, powerful, but "dark" and "lazy" mind. To the "torments of the word", familiar to Gogol as an artist, he also had the "torments of conscience" of a moralist-mystic, who laid on himself the enormous burden of a special "spiritual work" - preaching, which brings Gogol closer to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Ch. Uspensky. Analyzing the national elements in Gogol's work, the author comes to the conclusion that, despite the presence of undoubted Little Russianisms in his personal character, language and creativity, Gogol was a "general Russian", i.e., he belonged to that group of Russian people who create a national culture that unites all tribal varieties. A peculiar assessment of Gogol's artistic method and the peculiarity of his mind-talent constitute the main merit of Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky's book. A no less original assessment is given to Gogol in S. A. Vengerov's book, but from a different point of view. Vengerov studies Gogol not from a literary or psychological point of view, but from the point of view of his social views - as a "citizen writer" and puts forward the thesis that "Gogol's spiritual being was directly overflowing with civic aspirations and, moreover, not at all as unconsciously as is usually thought" . The author rejects the common mistake that connects "the concept of a civil order of thought without fail with one or another definite, socio-political worldview", i.e., most often with a liberal one. "A citizen is one who, in one form or another, but passionately and intensely, thinks about the good of the motherland, looks for ways to achieve this good and subordinates all his other aspirations to this supreme guiding principle." "Gogol was such a citizen all his life." This rejects the previous view, which claimed that Gogol's work was unconscious. Vengerov sees certain social interests and consciousness even in Gogol's youthful letters and then in special chapters devoted to Gogol's professorship, his critical articles and views, the ideas of The Inspector General and other works of art, studies of history and Russian ethnography, "Correspondence with Friends", proves that everywhere Gogol showed great consciousness and public interests. In a special excursus, Vengerov considers the question: did Gogol know the true Great Russian province, which he described in his works, especially in "Dead Souls", and by revising the exact biographical data, he comes to the conclusion that he did not know, or knew very little, which was reflected in obscurity and inconsistency of everyday details. Professor Mandelstam's book studies a special issue, only hinted at in Ovsyaniko-Kulikovskii's work, that of Gogol's language and style, and is the only one of its kind not only in Gogol's literature, but in general in scientific literature about Russian writers, since none of Russian artists of the word have not been studied monographically from this side. In separate chapters, the author follows the influence on Gogol of the language of previous writers, for example, Pushkin, and the language of Little Russian, the common people of Great Russian, traditional poetic images in the style of Gogol; tells the history of Gogol's work on his poetic style, analyzes the formal irregularities of his language, characterizes the role of epithets and comparisons in Gogol, the epic nature of his style, and finally, gives a special digression on Gogol's humor. The study is valuable both in terms of rich factual material and original observations, and in terms of the author's methodological techniques. It was met with approval in journalism, but also caused objections, curious in essence (A. Gornfeld in "Russian Wealth", 1902, No 1, reprinted in the book "On Russian Writers", vol. 1, St. Petersburg, 1912; P. Morozov in the journal "The World of God", 1902, No 2; N. Box in the "Journal of the Ministry of Public Education", 1904, No 5). The four books outlined give a new general revision of Gogol's work, personality and historical significance, based on the vast material that had accumulated by the beginning of the 1900s. The rest of Gogol's literature of the last twenty years provides a good deal of very important but fragmentary material and research. In the field of textual discoveries, the collection "In Memory of V. A. Zhukovsky and N. V. Gogol", published by the Academy of Sciences, issues 2 and 3 (St. Petersburg, 1908 and 1909), in which G. P. Georgievsky published songs collected by N. V. Gogol, and a large number of Gogol's texts, never published, although they were in the hands of Tikhonravov and Shenrok; among these texts, some are of great value, for example, the first edition of the Sorochinskaya Fair, the manuscript of May Night, versions of The Government Inspector, Gogol's prayers, so that sometimes they require a revision of old views and assessments. Mention should also be made of "The Newly Found Manuscripts of Gogol", reported by K. N. Mikhailov in Historical Bulletin, 1902, No. 2 (with photographs from them). Many of Gogol's letters that appeared after the publication of Shenrok are registered in the indexes mentioned below. As for new biographical studies, here we should name the names of V. I. Shenrok, who continued to work on Gogol even after his consolidated capital works, V. V. Kallash, A. I. Kirpichnikov, N. I. Korobka, M. N. Speransky, E. V. Petukhov, P. A. Zabolotsky, P. E. Shchegolev, who developed special biographical questions on the basis of unpublished or unexamined materials. Of general use here is the "Experience of a chronological outline for the biography of Gogol" in the "Complete Works of N. V. Gogol", published by the association of I. D. Sytin, edited by Professor A. I. Kirpichnikov (Moscow, 1902). A special group included investigations and disputes about Gogol's illness (V. Chizh, G. Troshin, N. Bazhenov, Dr. Kachenovsky), articles about Gogol's ancestors, parents and school years (N. Korobka, P. Shchegolev, V. Chagovets, P. Zabolotsky, M. Speransky and others), and here we should especially note the autobiography of the poet's mother, M. I. Gogol ("Russian Archive", 1902, No 4) and the memoirs of O. Gogol-Golovnya (Kyiv, 1909). Of the special historical and literary studies, G. I. Chudakov’s work stands out: “The Relationship of N. V. Gogol’s Creativity to Western European Literature” (Kyiv, 1908), in which all the factual data on the issue are carefully compared, and in the appendices there are pointers: 1) foreign authors known to Gogol, 2) works of Western European literature in Russian translations of the 20s and 30s of the 19th century. , 3) historical books in foreign languages ​​donated to G. Danilevsky, 4) translated works in the library of D. P. Troshchinsky, which Gogol used as a high school student. Among the general psychological and literary assessments stand out: Aleksey N. Veselovsky's articles about "Dead Souls" and the relationship between Gogol and Chaadaev in "Etudes and Characteristics" (4th ed., M., 1912), the paradoxical book of D.S. Merezhkovsky "Gogol and the devil" (Moscow, 1906; another edition: "Gogol. Creativity, life and religion", "Pantheon", 1909; also - as part of the collected works of Merezhkovsky); a brilliant study by Valery Bryusov: "Incinerated. To the characterization of Gogol" (Moscow, 1909); book by S.N. Shambinago: "The Trilogy of Romanticism. N. V. Gogol". (M., 1911); sketches by V. V. Rozanov in the book "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" and in the journal "Balance" (1909, No. 8 and 9). For the needs of the school and self-education, the best publications are: 1) the first issue of the "Historical and Literary Library" edited by A. E. Gruzinsky: "N. V. Gogol in the memoirs of his contemporaries and correspondence. Compiled by V. V. Kallash"; there is an introductory article and bibliographical references by the compiler, one of Gogol's prominent connoisseurs, and an excellent selection of memoirs about Gogol and his letters; 2) "Russian critical literature about the works of N.V. Gogol. Collection of critical and bibliographic articles. Collected by V. Zelinsky. Three parts" (4th ed., M., 1910); 3) "N. V. Gogol. Collection of historical and literary articles. Compiled by V. I. Pokrovsky" (3rd ed., M., 1910); 4) "Dictionary of literary types", issue 4, edited by N. D. Noskov (St. Petersburg, 1910). The bibliography of extensive Gogol's literature is exhausted in the following works, mutually supplementing each other: P. A. Zabolotsky "N. V. Gogol in Russian literature (bibliographic review)"; "Gogol Collection" of the Nezhin Institute, Kyiv, 1902; cf. his own "Experience of a review of materials for the bibliography of N.V. Gogol in his youth" ("Izvestiya II Branch of the Academy of Sciences", 1902, vol. VII, book 2); N. Box "Results of Gogol's anniversary literature" ("Journal of the Ministry of National Education", 1904, No. 4 and 5); S. A. Vengerov "Sources of the Dictionary of Russian Writers", vol. I (St. Petersburg, 1900); S. L. Bertenson "Bibliographic index of literature about Gogol for 1900 - 1909" ("News of the II Branch of the Academy of Sciences", 1909, vol. XIV, book 4); additions for 1910 - ibid., 1912, v. XVII, book. 2); A. Lebedev "Christian Poet. Bibliographic Monograph" (Saratov, 1911).
N. Piksanov.

Yu.V. MANN. GOGOL'S COMEDY "The Inspector". "ASSEMBLY CITY"

Shortly before The Government Inspector, Gogol wrote the article The Last Day of Pompeii. The article is devoted to the famous painting by Bryullov. What could be in common between the satirical, accusatory trend that Gogol's work was taking more and more decisively and the exotic plot of The Last Day of Pompeii? Between ordinary, vulgar, gray “existents” and “luxuriously proud” heroes of the ancient world, who retained their beauty and grace even at the moment of a terrible blow? But Gogol resolutely proclaimed The Last Day of Pompeii a burning modern, as we would say, topical work. "Bryullov's painting can be called a complete, universal creation." The writer did not consider it necessary to explain the content of the picture to the Russian reader: “I will not explain the content of the picture and give interpretations and explanations of the events depicted. ...This is too obvious, too touching on human life.” These are residents of central Russia who did not know earthquakes or other geological cataclysms!

But Gogol saw behind the exotic plot of the picture its deeply modern artistic thought. “Her thought belongs entirely to the taste of our age, which in general, as if feeling its terrible fragmentation, strives to aggregate all phenomena into common groups and chooses strong crises that are felt by the whole mass.” These are very intimate lines, revealing the warehouse of Gogol's own artistic worldview, the interweaving in him of two - at first glance, incompatible - tendencies.

On the one hand, the understanding of the "terrible fragmentation" of life. Gogol was one of those artists who had an unusually deep sense of the progressive disunity, the disunity of people in the new era. Perhaps Gogol saw one of the directions of this process more sharply than other great realists: the extinction of the common concern, the cause of the whole people, based on the coordinated and disinterested participation of individual wills. Not without bitterness and instructive reproach to his contemporaries, he painted in the article "On the Middle Ages" a colorful (and, of course, idealized) picture of the crusades: "the dominion one thought encompasses all nations"; "none of the passions, not one of his own desires, nor one personal gain are not included here."

In Gogol's works, descriptions of mass and, moreover, certainly disinterested actions play a special, so to speak, poetic title role. Whether the mortal fight of the Cossacks with foreign enemies, the mischievous tricks of the lads, whether the wedding celebration or just a dance - in all this, the writer's gaze is eagerly looking for a glimpse of "one" driving thought that excludes "personal gain". “Sorochinsky Fair” ends with the famous dance scene: “A strange, inexplicable feeling would take possession of the viewer at the sight of how, from one blow with a bow of a musician in a homespun scroll, with a long twisted mustache, everything turned, willy or not, to unity and passed into harmony .. Everything rushed. Everything danced." But why the "strange", "inexplicable" feeling? Because Gogol is well aware of how unusual this agreement is in modern times, among "mercantile souls."

To characterize human relations that "fit" into the new century, Gogol found another capacious image. “In a word, it was as if a huge stagecoach arrived at the tavern, in which each passenger sat all the way closed and entered the common room only because there was no other place.” No common concern, no common cause, not even superficial curiosity for each other! In Nevsky Prospekt, it seems to Piskarev that “some demon has crumbled the whole world into many different pieces and mixed all these pieces together senselessly, uselessly.”

Commercialism, in Gogol's view, is a kind of universal quality of modern life - both Russian and Western European. Back in Hanz Kuchelgarten, Gogol lamented that the modern world is "squared all over for miles." In the bourgeois mindset, the writer most acutely felt those features that were intensified by Russian conditions. The police and bureaucratic oppression of backward Russia made it more painful to perceive the fragmentation and coldness of human relations.

Iv. Kireevsky wrote in 1828, referring to Russia's attitude towards the West, that the people "do not grow old by other people's experiences." Alas, he grows old if this experience finds any analogy in his own ...

It would seem that the most simple and logical thing to take out of the fragmentation of the “mercantile” age is the idea of ​​the fragmentation of the artistic image in contemporary art. The romantics really leaned towards this decision. However, Gogol draws a different conclusion. Patchwork and fragmentation of the artistic image is, in his opinion, the lot of secondary talents. He appreciates Bryullov's picture for the fact that, despite the "terrible fragmentation" of life, it nevertheless "strives to aggregate all phenomena into common groups." “I don’t remember, someone said that in the 19th century it was impossible for a world genius to appear that would embrace the whole life of the 19th century,” writes Gogol in The Last Day of Pompeii. “This is completely unfair, and such an idea is filled with hopelessness and responds - some cowardice. On the contrary: the flight of a genius will never be as bright as in modern times ... And his steps will surely be gigantic and visible to everyone. The more oppressed Gogol was by the thought of the fragmentation of life, the more resolutely he declared the need for a broad synthesis in art.

And here another (unfortunately, not yet appreciated) feature of Gogol's worldview is revealed to us. But only Gogol the artist, but also Gogol the thinker, the historian, because it was precisely at this point that the direction of his artistic and actually scientific, logically shaped, thoughts coincided as much as possible.

Much has been written about the gaps in the education of Gogol, who was superficially familiar with the most important phenomena of his contemporary intellectual life. Indeed, it would be difficult to call Gogol a European-educated person, like, for example, Pushkin, Herzen or even Nadezhdin. But with his deep mind, some kind of purely Gogolian gift of insight and artistic intuition, Gogol very accurately captured the main direction of the ideological searches of those years.

In the article “On the Teaching of General History,” Gogol wrote: “General history, in its true meaning, is not a collection of private histories of all peoples and states without a common connection, without a common plan, without a common goal, a bunch of incidents without order, in a lifeless and dry the form in which it is often presented. Its subject is great: it must embrace suddenly and in a complete picture all of humanity.., It must gather into one all the peoples of the world, scattered by time, chance, mountains, seas, and unite them into one harmonious whole; from them to compose one majestic complete poem ... All the events of the world must be so closely connected with each other and cling to one another, like rings in a chain. If one ring is torn out, the chain is broken. This relationship should not be taken literally. It is not that visible, material connection with which events are often forcibly connected, or a system that is created in the head independently of the facts and to which the events of the world are then arbitrarily attracted. This connection should be in one general thought: in one inseparable history of mankind, before which both states and events are temporary forms and images! These are the tasks that Gogol the historian set himself, who considered at one time (just on the eve of the creation of The Inspector General) the field of historical research, perhaps the most interesting and important. It would be possible to make detailed extracts, clarifying the degree of closeness of Gogol's views to contemporary progressive trends in historical science (Guizot, Thierry, etc.), but such work is partly already done - would take us far away. Here it is important to emphasize the main goal of Gogol - to find a single, all-encompassing pattern of historical development. According to Gogol, this pattern is revealed and concretized in a system, but one that does not crush the facts, but follows naturally and freely from them. Gogol's maximalism is characteristic, setting the broadest tasks for history and believing in their solution. To embrace the destinies of all peoples, to feel for the driving spring of the life of all mankind - Gogol does not agree to anything less.

Gogol's thoughts on the tasks of history are close to the idea of ​​"philosophy of history" - an idea that was formed in the late 18th - early 19th centuries under the strong influence of German classical philosophy. The names of Kant, Schelling, Hegel and Oken, appearing in one of Gogol's reviews of 1836, are named by him with a full understanding of their historical mission - as "artists" who processed "into a unity a great field of thinking."

On the other hand, Gogol calls Hegel and Schelling "artists" and above we saw that he also likens universal history to “a majestic complete poem." These are not slips of the tongue or poetic symbols, but an expression of the close connection between art and science. Both areas of spiritual activity were always as close as possible in Gogol's mind. It always seemed to him that, in carrying out his mission as an artist, he thereby obtained reliable, socially valuable knowledge about life for his compatriots.

When Gogol approached The Inspector General, in the depths of his consciousness the idea of ​​a wide grouping of persons in the work of a great artist (as in The Last Day of Pompeii) and the idea of ​​a comprehensive synthesis carried out by a historian of our time were joined.

But how complicated was Gogol the artist his task! After all, he had to find such an image that would convey the “whole of life” with its terrible fragmentation, without obscuring this fragmentation ...

In the article “On the Teaching of General History”, speaking of the need to present students with a “sketch of the entire history of mankind”, Gogol explains: city, going out all its streets: for this you need to climb to an elevated place where would he be seen all at a glance". In these words, the contours of the stage platform of the Inspector General are already showing through.

Gogol's artistic thought gravitated towards a broad generalization before, which, in turn, explains his desire for cyclization of works. Dikanka, Mirgorod - these are not just places of action, but some centers of the universe, so you can say, as in "The Night Before Christmas": "... both on the other side of Dikanka, and on this side of Dikanka."

By the mid-1930s, the tendency of Gogol's thought to generalize had increased even more. “In the Auditor, I decided to collect in one heap all the bad things in Russia, what I knew then all the injustices what are done in those places and in those cases where most of all justice is required of a person, and to laugh at everything at once, ”we read in the “Author's Confession”. Immediately, as you know, Gogol speaks of a change in his work by the mid-30s, which later, retrospectively, seemed to him even a radical turning point: “I saw that in my writings I laugh for nothing, in vain, without knowing why. If you laugh, it's better to laugh hard and at what is really worthy ridicule of the general.

Thus, the city of the "Inspector General" arose, - according to Gogol's later definition, "the prefabricated city of the entire dark side."

Let us ponder the significance of the fact that Russian life is comprehended in The Inspector General in the image of the city. First of all, it expanded the social aspect of comedy.

If you look for a place where, in the words of Gogol, injustice was done most of all, then first of all the look turned to the court. Gogol was convinced of this back in the Nizhyn Gymnasium, dreaming of devoting himself to justice: "Injustice, the greatest misfortune in the world, most of all tore my heart." Injustice fed the tradition of Russian revealing comedy dedicated to extortion and judicial arbitrariness: Sokolov's "Judges' Name Day", Kapnist's "Yabeda", Sudovshchikov's "An Unheard-of Wonder, or the Honest Secretary" and others.

But in The Inspector General, "judicial cases" occupy only a part - and, in general, not the largest part - of the picture. Thus, Gogol immediately expanded the scale of the anti-judicial, "departmental" comedy to a universal comedy, or - for the time being, we will stick to our own concepts of "The Government Inspector" - to an "all-city" comedy.

But even against the background of works that depicted the life of the whole city, The Inspector General reveals important differences. Gogol's city is consistently hierarchical. Its structure is strictly pyramidal: "citizenship", "merchants", above - officials, city landowners and, finally, at the head of everything - the mayor. The female half, also subdivided according to ranks, is not forgotten either: the family of the mayor is above all, then - the wives and daughters of officials, like the daughter of Strawberry, with whom the daughter of the mayor should not take an example; finally, below - a non-commissioned officer, a locksmith Poshlepkina, carved by mistake ... Only two people stand outside the city: Khlestakov and his servant Osip.

We will not find such an arrangement of characters in Russian comedy (and not only comedy) before Gogol. The most indicative thing here is to turn to works with a similar plot, that is, to those that depict the appearance of an imaginary auditor in the city (although we will not talk about the very topic of “auditor” and “revision” for now). So, in Veltman's story "Provincial Actors", published shortly before the "Inspector General", in 1835, in addition to the mayor, the commander of the garrison district, and the mayor, etc. is not at all the main and autocratic ruler of the city, as he appears in The Inspector General.

Gogol's city is closest in structure to the city from Kvitka-Osnovyanenko's comedy "A Visitor from the Capital, or Turmoil in a County Town". (As you know, it has been suggested that this comedy, published in 1840, but written in 1827, Gogol met in the manuscript.) Trusilkin, the mayor, personifies the highest power in the city in Kvitka-Osnovyanenko. Three officials, almost like Gogol's "six officials", represent various aspects of city government: the court (judge Spalkin), the post office (the postal forwarder Pechatalkin), education (the superintendent of the Uchenosvetov schools). To them we must also add the police in the person of the private bailiff Sharin. However, Kvitka-Osnovyanenko does not have the lower links of this pyramid - “merchants” and citizenship.” In addition, there is a large group of people who fall out of the city hierarchy: in addition to the “auditor” Pustolobov, this includes two more visiting (and virtuous) heroes: Otchetin and Major Milon. Their actions, aimed as if in opposition to the actions of city officials, weaken the isolation and integrity that distinguishes the city in The Government Inspector.

The choice of characters in The Examiner reveals a desire to embrace maximum all aspects of public life and government. Here and legal proceedings (Lyapkin-Tyapkin), and education (Khlopov), and health care (Gibner), and post office (Shpekin), and a kind of social security (Zemlyanika), and, of course, the police. Russian comedy has never known such a broad view of official, state life. At the same time, Gogol takes various aspects and phenomena of life without excessive detail, without purely administrative details - in their integral, "universal" expression. Here it is interesting to dwell on some of the “mistakes” of The Inspector General, in which the writer was often accused.

Already Gogol's contemporaries noted that the structure of the county town was not reproduced in the comedy quite accurately: some important officials were forgotten, while others, on the contrary, were added. The son of the mayor of the city of Ustyuzhna A.I. Maksheev wrote: "There was no trustee of charitable institutions, at least in cities like Ustyuzhna, because there were no charitable institutions themselves." “On the other hand, in comedy there are no major figures in the pre-reform court, like a police chief, secretaries, leaders of the nobility, a solicitor, a farmer, and so on.” “The district judge, elected in pre-reform times from the most respected nobles, for the most part did not know the laws and limited his activities to signing papers prepared by the secretary, but he was not Lyapkin-Tyapkin. The Lyapkins-Tyapkins were a police officer, although also elected, but from the nobles of a different warehouse than judges, secretaries of courts and a large class of clerks, whom the comedy is silent about.

The train of thought of Maksheev, reflected in his note, is symptomatic. Maksheev compared depicted in The Inspector General with one, real county town (to refute rumors that his hometown of Ustyuzhna is shown in the comedy). And Gogol painted his own, “prefabricated” city in the “Inspector General”!

Why did the writer need judges, secretaries of courts and a large class of clerks, if this side of life was successfully represented by one Lyapkin-Tyapkin? Strawberry, the trustee of charitable establishments, is another matter: without him, a significant part of the “city” life would have remained in the shadows. In both cases, Gogol's retreat from the real structure of the city (unconscious or conscious - it doesn't matter) has its own logic.

Of course, for Gogol, it is not the abstract social function of the character that is important (in this case, it would be possible to give several functions to one person), but his special, individual character. As far as the system of job functions of comedy characters is developed, the scale of their spiritual properties is just as wide. It includes a wide variety of colors - from the good-natured naivety of the postmaster to the trickery and deceit of Strawberry, from the swagger of Lyapkin-Tyapkin, proud of his mind, to the humility and intimidation of Khlopov. In this respect, the city of the "Inspector General" is also multifaceted and, within certain limits (within the limits of the comic possibilities of the character), is encyclopedic. But it is indicative that the psychological and typological differentiation of characters in Gogol goes along with the differentiation of the actual social.

Only two aspects of state life were not touched upon in the comedy: the church and the army. It is difficult to judge the intentions of the author of The Inspector General with regard to the church: the clergy were generally excluded from the sphere of stage representation. As for the army, then, according to G. Gukovsky, Gogol left the "military part of the state machine" aside, since he "considered it necessary." But after all, Gogol wrote about the military, and with a clearly comical, reducing intonation, in other works, for example, in The Carriage! Apparently, the reason must be seen elsewhere. The inclusion of military characters would violate the integrity of the "prefabricated city" - from the public to the actual psychological. The military - one character or group - so to speak, extraterritorial. It is characteristic, for example, that in Veltman's "Provincial Actors" the commander of the garrison district, Adam Ivanovich, not only acts independently of the local authorities, but also, in the hour of turmoil caused by the appearance of an imaginary governor-general, calls the mayor to him, gives him advice, etc. Thus, the idea of ​​a strict hierarchy is inevitably undermined. And according to their interests, skills, social functions, military characters would violate the unity of the city, representing the whole as a whole.

It is interesting that initially the "military theme" - although muffled - sounded in the "Inspector General": in the scene of Khlestakov's reception of the retired second major Rastakovsky. But very soon Gogol felt that Rastakovsky's reminiscences from the Turkish and other campaigns in which he had participated were undermining the "unity of action" of the comedy. This scene is no longer in the first edition of The Inspector General; later Gogol published it among "Two scenes turned off as slowing down the flow plays." It must be said that the "slowdown" of action here, in Gogol's understanding, is a broader sign. It rather means inorganic of these scenes to the general plan of The Inspector General.

The “military”, whose functions were directed inward, whose position is entirely included in the system of a given city, is another matter - that is, the police. There are plenty of them in Gogol's comedy - four!

What is the conclusion to be drawn from all that has been said? That the city in The Government Inspector is a transparent allegory? No, it's not.

In scientific literature about Gogol, it is sometimes emphasized that The Inspector General is an allegorical depiction of those phenomena that Gogol could not, for censorship reasons, speak directly about, that behind the conditional decoration of a county town one should see the outlines of the royal capital. Censorship, of course, interfered with Gogol; the metropolitan bureaucracy, of course, strongly teased his satirical pen, as evidenced by the well-known confession of the writer after the presentation of The Inspector General: “The capital is ticklishly offended by the fact that the morals of six provincial officials are deduced; what would the capital say if its own customs were at least slightly deduced? However, reducing The Inspector General to an allegorical denunciation of the "higher spheres" of Russian life, we make a substitution (very often in artistic analysis), when what is is judged on the basis of what could or, according to the researcher's ideas, should have been . Meanwhile, what is important is what is.

Sometimes they also count how many times Petersburg is mentioned in The Government Inspector to show that the "theme of Petersburg" constitutes the second address of Gogol's satire. Say, this increases the "critical beginning" of comedy.

In all these cases we go to detour the artistic thought of The Inspector General and, wishing to raise the “critical beginning” of the play, in fact we belittle it. For the strength of the "Inspector General" is not in how administratively high the city depicted in it is, but in the fact that it special city. Gogol created such a model that, due to the organic and close articulation of all components, all parts, suddenly came to life, turned out to be capable of self-movement. According to the exact word of V. Gippius, the writer found "the minimum necessary scale." But in doing so, he created favorable conditions for applying this scale to other, larger phenomena - up to the life of the all-Russian, all-state.

It arose from the writer's desire for a broad and complete grouping of phenomena, in which they would adjoin each other so closely, "like rings in a chain."

Before this property of the artistic thought of The Inspector General, talents with a clearer political purposefulness than Gogol's, with a more frank journalistic coloring, lost their advantage. In The Inspector General, strictly speaking, there are no accusatory invectives, which were generous in the comedy of the Enlightenment and partly in the comedy of classicism. Only a replica of the Governor: “What are you laughing at? wash over yourself!" - could recall such invectives. In addition, as already noted in the literature on Gogol, the malfeasance committed by the heroes of The Inspector General is relatively small. The greyhound chips charged by Lyapkin-Tyapkin are a trifle in comparison with the exactions imposed, say, by the judges from Kapnist's Yabeda. But as Gogol said, on another occasion, "the vulgarity of everything together frightened the readers." What scared me was not the exaggeration of "details" of vulgarity, but, to use Gogol's expression, the "rounding off" of the artistic image. “Rounded”, that is, the sovereign city from the “Inspector General”, became the equivalent of broader phenomena than its objective, “nominal” meaning.

Another property of the Inspector General enhanced its generalizing power. The integrity and roundness of the "prefabricated city" was combined with its complete homogeneity with those vast spaces that lay beyond the "city limits". In Russian comedy before Gogol, usually the scene - be it a manor, a court or a city - loomed as an isolated island of vice and abuse. It seemed that somewhere outside the scene, real “virtuous” life was in full swing, which was about to flood over the nest of malevolent characters and wash it away. The point here is not the triumph of virtue at the end of the play, but the heterogeneity of the two worlds: the stage, the visible, and the one that was implied. Let's just remember Fonvizin's "Undergrowth": this brightest and most truthful Russian comedy of the 18th century is nevertheless built on revealing such a contrast. Griboyedov's "Woe from Wit" does not completely break with this tradition, but tries to adapt it to new tasks. Here, it is not the visible world of negative characters - Famusovs and Khlestovs - that is "isolated", opposed to the flow of life, but the off-stage lonely figures of Prince Grigory and other "enemies of the search" along with Chatsky, who is on the stage, but just as lonely. However, be that as it may, there are two worlds and between them - a line of demarcation.

Gogol is the first Russian playwright to erase this line. From the city in the "Auditor" to the border - "at least three years of galloping" - you won’t get there, but is there at least one place in all this space where life would proceed according to other standards? At least one person over whom other laws would have power? In comedy, everything speaks for the fact that there is no such place and such people. All the norms of the hostel, the appeals of people to each other look in the play as ubiquitous. They also operate during the stay in the city of an unusual person - the "auditor". None of the heroes of the play has a need for other norms, or even for a partial modification of the old ones. From the very first minutes of the opening of the “auditor”, a long chain of bribe givers almost reflexively reached out to him - from the mayor and officials to merchants. Of course, it could also be that the "auditor" would not take it. But the one with whom this would happen would know that this was his personal bad luck, and not the victory of honesty and law over untruth.

But where does the characters of the play (and the audience along with them) get such a conviction? From my personal, "urban" experience. They know that their norms and customs will be close and understandable to others, like the language they speak, although, probably, most of them have not been further than the county or, in extreme cases, the province.

In a word, the city of the "Inspector" is arranged in such a way that nothing limits the spread of currents coming from it in breadth, to adjacent spaces. Nothing interferes with the "self-promotion" of a wonderful city. As in The Night Before Christmas about Dikanka, so now about the nameless city of the Inspector General, the writer could say: “And on the other side of the city, and on this side of the city ...”

As I try to show in another bridge, the grotesque inevitably leads to increased generality. Thanks to fantasy and other forms of estrangement, its “meaning” is extracted from an entire historical epoch (or several epochs). "History of a City" by Saltykov-Shchedrin - it's not just a story one city ​​(Glupov or any other), but - in a certain context - the whole of Russian life, that is, those "characteristic features of Russian life that make it not quite comfortable." The range of what can be generalized in the grotesque can expand even further, up to a "summing up" of the entire history of mankind, as in Swift's Lemuel Gulliver's Travels.

On the other hand, those grotesque works that, like Nevsky Prospekt or The Nose, are concentrated on a single, exceptional, anecdotal case, also lead to increased generalization. Precisely because the subject of the image here is "strange", single, it - as an exception - confirms the rule.

The Inspector General is a rare case of a work in which increased generalization is achieved neither in the first nor in the second way. In The Inspector General, strictly speaking, the basis is quite “earthly”, prosaic, ungrotesque, in particular, there is no fantasy in comedy at all. The grotesque is only an additional tone, a "glow", which we will talk about in its place. This grotesque "reflection" reinforces the generalizing nature of the comedy, but it is born already in the very structure of the "prefabricated city". It is as if a secret is hidden in Gogol's comedy, thanks to which all its colors and lines, so ordinary and everyday, double, acquire additional meaning.

Comprehending his creative experience as a playwright, primarily the experience of The Inspector General, Gogol twice referred to Aristophanes: in The Theater Journey... and in the article What, finally, is the essence of Russian poetry and what is its peculiarity.

In "Theatrical Journey ..." there is a dialogue between two "art lovers". The second advocates such a construction of the play, which covers all the characters: "... not a single wheel should remain as rusty and not included in the case." The first objected: "But it turns out to give comedy some meaning more universal." Then the second “art lover” proves his point of view historically: “But isn’t this its [comedy’s] direct and real meaning? In the beginning, comedy was social, national creation. At least that's how he showed it her father, Aristophanes. After that, she entered the narrow gorge of a private tie ... ".

The name of Aristophanes is also named by Gogol in the article “What, finally, is the essence of Russian poetry ...”, but in a slightly different context. The "public comedy" of which Aristophanes was the forerunner turns against "a lot of abuse, against evasion whole society from the straight road.

In Gogol's reflections on Aristophanes, interest in two, of course, interrelated questions is noticeable: about the nature of generalization in comedy and about its construction, about the "setting". It is more appropriate to dwell on the last question a little lower. But the first is directly related to the topic of this chapter.

There is no doubt that Gogol's interest in Aristophanes was stimulated by the well-known similarity of their artistic thought. Gogol was close to the desire for extreme generalization, which distinguished the ancient Attic comedy and made it a "public, folk creation."

This similarity was first substantiated by V. Ivanov in the article "Gogol's 'Inspector General' and Aristophanes' Comedy". The difference between The Inspector General and the traditional European comedy and the similarity with Aristophanes is that its action “is not limited to the circle of private relations, but, presenting them as components of collective life, embraces a whole, self-contained and self-satisfying social world, symbolically equal to any social union. and, of course, reflecting in itself, as in a mirror ... precisely that social union, for the amusement and edification of which the comedy action is ruled. "The depiction of an entire city in exchange for the development of personal or domestic intrigue is the root idea of ​​an immortal comedy." In accordance with this, "all everyday and philistine elements of the play are illuminated from the side of their social significance ... all litigation and squabbles, slander and sneaks go from the sphere of civil into the area of ​​public law."

Gogol's comedy, V. Ivanov concludes, "in Aristophanes' way" depicts Russian life in the form of "a kind of social cosmos" that suddenly shakes to its full extent.

It must be said, however, that this subtle juxtaposition of Gogol with Aristophanes imperceptibly turns into an identification of the two artists. The author of the article does not take into account that Gogol looks at the nature of generalization in the ancient playwright through the prism of contemporary demands and contemporary artistic experience.

The place of action for Aristophanes is an open area, not only in The Birds, where events in the very share take place in the bird policy, between heaven and earth, but also in other comedies. We can say that the scene in Aristophanes is not closed, not cosmically limited.

Gogol also has a very specific "unit" of generalization - his city. The experience of the latest art, and, in particular, classicism and the Enlightenment, did not go unnoticed for Gogol. His city is locally limited, and at the same time it is "prefabricated". This is a concretely designed, tangible city, but bottomless and deep in its meaning. In a word, Gogol goes to generalization, breadth through a close and strictly purposeful study of this “piece of life” - a feature that is possible only for a new consciousness, artistic and scientific.

I am not saying here in detail that Gogol combined social concreteness with psychological concreteness. Gogol, as a writer of the 19th century, an artist of critical realism, does not fit the remark that he removes his heroes from the sphere of civil law in favor of public law. Gogol's "law" is a special "law", in which both public and civil aspects are linked into one whole (of course, in a sense free from the prevailing official legal concepts).

As you know, in 1846-1847 Gogol attempted to rethink The Inspector General. In "The Examiner's Denouement" through the mouth of the First comic actor, it was reported that the nameless city is the inner world of a person, our "soul city"; ugly officials are our passions; Khlestakov - "windy secular conscience"; finally, a real auditor - a true conscience, which appears to us in the last moments of life ... Mystical interpretation, reducing almost to nothing the entire public, social meaning of the comedy. However, the method of the "Revizor's Decoupling" is interesting, as if reflecting in a distorted mirror the method of the "Inspector General" of the present.

According to V. Ivanov’s subtle remark, The Inspector’s Denouement again “denounces Gogol’s unconscious attraction to large forms of popular art: just as in the original plan we saw something in common with the“ high ”comedy of antiquity, so through the prism of later conjecture, characteristic features appear in the werewolf play medieval action" .

Returning to The Inspector General, one more - perhaps the main - feature that makes the generalization of Gogol's comedy modern should be singled out. We remember that the writer called Bryullov's painting modern because "it aggregates all phenomena into general groups" and chooses "crises felt by the whole mass." Gogol's "prefabricated city" is a variant of the "general group", but the thing is that its existence in modern times is almost impossible. It may be possible, but ephemeral, short-lived. After all, the dominant spirit of the new time is fragmentation (“terrible fragmentation,” says Gogol). This means that it inevitably threatens to disintegrate, to disperse - according to interests, inclinations, aspirations - everything that the writer collected "word by word" into one whole.

But the whole is urgently necessary and important for Gogol. This is not only an artistic, structural and dramatic issue, but also a vital one. Outside the whole, Gogol does not conceive of the knowledge of modernity. But apart from the whole, Gogol does not conceive of the correct development of mankind. What is the way to keep the "general group" from disintegration?

Obviously, two artistic solutions were possible. Or connect "all phenomena into common groups" despite the spirit of the times, the spirit of separation. But such a path was fraught with the danger of idealization and concealment of contradictions. Or, look for such moments in life when this wholeness arises naturally - even if not for long, like a flash of magnesium - in a word, when wholeness does not hide, but exposes the "terrible fragmentation" of life.

And here we must pay attention to the second part of Gogol's phrase: "... and he chooses strong crises, felt by the whole mass." According to Gogol, such a choice is dictated by the "thought" of the picture. About the "thought" of the work - in particular, dramaturgical - Gogol does not tire of reminding from year to year. So, in “Theatrical journey ...” it is said: “... the idea, the thought, rules the play. Without it, there is no unity in it. Gogol's formula of "thought" is interpreted solely as an indication of the "ideological nature" of the work, while in reality it has a more specific meaning.

In "Portrait" (edition of "Arabesques") Gogol wrote that sometimes the artist was overshadowed by "a sudden ghost great thought, imagination saw something in the dark perspective, what you grabbed and threw on the canvas, could be made extraordinary and at the same time accessible to every soul.

So, this is not the idea of ​​a work in general, but rather finding a certain current situation(“strong crisis”), which would allow closing the group of actors into one whole.

In the article “The Last Day of Pompeii” this position is expressed even more clearly: “The creation and setting your thoughts he produced [Bryullov] in an unusual and daring way: he grabbed lightning and threw it in a flood on his picture. His lightning flooded and drowned everything, as if in order to show everything, so that not a single object was hidden from the viewer. "Lightning" - that is, a volcanic eruption - this is the force that closed the "common group" of people even with a terrible and progressive fragmentation of life.

But wasn't it so that Gogol unusually and boldly "threw" onto the canvas the idea of ​​the "auditor", which flooded and drowned the whole city? In a word, Gogol created in comedy a completely modern and innovative situation in which the City, torn apart by internal contradictions, suddenly turned out to be capable of an integral life - exactly as much time as it took to reveal its deepest, driving springs.

Mann Yuri Vladimirovich- (b. 1929), Russian literary critic. Works on the history of Russian literature of the XIX century. (mainly about N.V. Gogol), Russian philosophical aesthetics of the 30-50s, the poetics of romanticism, including studies on the types of romantic conflict. * * * MANN… encyclopedic Dictionary

Mann- (German Mann) German surname. Mann, Alexander: Mann, Alexander (bobsledder) (b. 1980) German bobsledder, world champion. Mann, Alexander (artist) (1853-1908) Scottish Post-Impressionist painter. Mann, Heinrich German ... ... Wikipedia

MANN Yuri Vladimirovich- (b. 1929) Russian literary critic. Works on the history of Russian literature of the 19th century. (mainly about N. V. Gogol), Russian philosophical aesthetics, poetics of romanticism, including studies on the types of romantic conflict ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Mann, Yuri

Mann Yuri Vladimirovich- Yuri Vladimirovich Mann (born June 9, 1929, Moscow), Russian literary critic. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (1952). Doctor of Philology (1973). Professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities (since 1991). Specialist, ... ... Wikipedia

Yuri Vladimirovich Mann- (born June 9, 1929, Moscow) Russian literary critic. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (1952). Doctor of Philology (1973). Professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities (since 1991). Specialist, first of all, in ... ... Wikipedia

Mann Yu.V.- MANN Yuri Vladimirovich (b. 1929), literary critic, doctor of philology. Sciences (1973). Employee of IMLI and RSUH. Tr. on the history of Russian lit ry 19th c. (ch. arr. about N.V. Gogol), rus. philosophy aesthetics, poetics of romanticism ... Biographical Dictionary

MANN Yuri Vladimirovich- Yuri Vladimirovich (b. 1929), literary critic, doctor of philology. Sciences (1973). Employee of IMLI and RSUH. Tr. on the history of Russian lit ry 19th c. (ch. arr. about N.V. Gogol), rus. philosophy aesthetics, poetics of romanticism ... Biographical Dictionary

Mann, Yuri Vladimirovich- Yuri Vladimirovich Mann (born June 9, 1929 (19290609), Moscow), Russian literary critic. Graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (1952). Doctor of Philology (1973). Professor of the Russian State University for the Humanities (since 1991) ... Wikipedia

Mann, Yuri Vladimirovich- Professor of Russian Literature at the Russian State University for the Humanities since 1991; was born on June 9, 1929 in Moscow; graduated from the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University in 1952, postgraduate studies at the Institute of World Literature (IMLI) in 1964, doctor ... ... Big biographical encyclopedia

Books

• History of Russian literature of the first third of the 19th century. Textbook for Academic Baccalaureate, Yuri Mann. The textbook introduces one of the brightest stages of Russian classical literature, the era of romanticism, represented by the names of Zhukovsky and Batyushkov, Pushkin and Lermontov, Baratynsky and Gogol and ... Buy for 839 rubles electronic book
• Nests of Russian culture (circle and family), Yuri Mann. The development of literature and culture is usually regarded as the activity of its individual representatives - often in line with a certain direction, school, trend, style, etc. If it comes ...