The real world of the characters in the poem attracts the reader. Wanderers seek the happy among those who are close to them. One of these people are the clergy.

The image and characterization of the priest in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is similar to reality, but there is also a consonance with famous fairy-tale characters in the text.

First person

Of the seven arguing, the opinion that the pop is happy belongs to Luke. The man's name means light. The name Luka is given to people who see a positive beginning in everyone. Luke inspires faith in the divine destiny of man. Why did the author decide to show the butt first? The answer can be sought in the real life of a peasant. Birth, death, holidays in Rus' began with priests. They accompanied all the main events in the life of a person of any class. Priests were responsible for the connection of the earthly with the heavenly, the real with the other world, the material with the spiritual.

The life of a pop

The village church is the place of service of the character of the poem. The author does not give individual features of appearance in the description. Pop is typical and almost faceless. The only epithet is a stern face. The income of a clergyman is income from peasants. He is not much different from the beggars: he begs, asking for his work. The pop does not require payment, everyone gives him as much as he can. The character understands that the villages are impoverished, and his life becomes more difficult. He wants happiness for the man. It's easier to "cash in" on the rich. The priest explains to the wanderers why he takes from the peasants: it is payment for work, means for the subsistence of his family members. If you take payment only with words of gratitude, the priest's family will go around the world. It is hard for conscientious clergymen to take nickels from the bony hands of the sick and the poor. The calloused hands of those who give themselves ask for help. Wealthy merchants and landlords move to the cities, leaving the villages under the care of their servants, managers.

The life and demeanor of the clergy often became the subject of ridicule. Pop knows this. In songs, fairy tales, ditties, not only the pop himself is ridiculed, but also his wife, daughter, and children. This is not always fair, but the fame of them runs ahead. Even the signs among the people do not please the priest: "Whom are you afraid of meeting." A bad sign if a priest appears on the way. There is no respect among the people for the servants of faith in God, they have lost respect for themselves.

Positive character traits of the hero

The wanderers met a priest who cannot be unambiguously called a negative character. He sincerely tells the walkers that one cannot be indifferent to human grief. Death cannot upset. The pop is experiencing, seeing orphans, widows. The habit is not formed:

"There is no heart that can endure ... death rattle, grave sobbing, orphan sorrow ...".

The soul hurts, breaks, but does not get stale.

Patience. Priests often receive a parish by inheritance. From infancy they get used to life in the Faith, they do not grumble at God.

Ability to listen and support. The priest finds words for peasant women who lose their breadwinner, for a mother who buries her children, for the sick and the poor.

Courage. The priest must come to the dying or the sick at any time of the day. It goes in rain, wind, snow. We have to go at night, through the forest. There are no priests accompanying, there is only faith.

Negative Traits of Priests

Among the priestly class there are different characters. Most of them are negative, and therefore the people treat them with such disdain. Priests live at the expense of other people's labor. They, like merchants, take servants into the house, make them work for their family.

What traits are most typical for priests:

• cynicism;
• parasitism;
• money-grubbing;
• greed;
• coarseness;
• gluttony.

Such, in the main, were the highest church circles. The wanderers met an ordinary village minister of the church. The author compares his story about happiness with a confession, a trial of his own life. It hurts to understand that you live on the tears and pain of a man. It is strange, but understandable, that there is no money in the story that the priest received at the baptism of infants, the wedding. Birth often takes place in the harvest, during work, there is no time to call the priest. And the weddings in the poem are even more unhappy.

There is another pop on the pages of the poem - Ivan. He is the hero of Matrena's story. From his words, one can understand that there is nothing to pay the people for sacred rituals:

"... for a wedding, for a confession, they owe for years."

Ivan is indifferent, cruel and cynical. He jokes about the mother's grief, sees no sin in torturing the baby's body in front of a suffering woman. He drinks with the authorities, scolds the poor parish. There is no sympathy in Ivan's priest.

What is happiness for a priest? People's trust in religion, humility, humility. But all this goes into the distant past. Life has changed. People's poverty, the disappearance of the class of landowners undermined the priestly well-being. The feelings of the priest are opposite. He feels sorry for the man, but where to get the money. You will not be fed up with sympathy for the people's grief. The class of priests is heterogeneous. Not everyone was compassionate, the majority hypocritically and cruelly robbed the peasants who believed in the need for religious rituals.

The poem “To whom it is good to live in Rus'” is the central work of N.A. Nekrasov. This is a monumental lyric-epic creation, covering a whole historical period in the life of the Russian people.

One of the central problems of the poem is the problem of understanding happiness: the heroes are looking everywhere for a happy person, trying to understand "who lives happily, freely in Rus'." This issue is complex, multifaceted, considered by Nekrasov from various points of view - social, political, moral, philosophical, religious.

In the prologue to the poem, wandering peasants line up a whole series of happy, in their opinion, people: an official, a merchant, a landowner, a priest, a king ... The author treats the very essence of this dispute with irony: you won’t get out of there ... ". He does not agree with the peasants in the correctness of the system of well-being built by them, believing that the happiness of these people is limited, it comes down to material security.

The formula of such happiness is called by the "pop" despised by the poet: "peace, wealth, honor." The men agree with him because of their ignorance, naive

Innocence. It is this character, with his story about a “happy life”, that brings discord into the way of thinking of the wanderers and changes the nature of their behavior: from the role of abstractly arguing contemplators of life, they move on to the role of its direct participants.

We find the most striking manifestation of this in the chapter "Rural Fair", which depicts the dissonance of a multilingual, riotous, drunken folk "sea". Here there is a dialogue of wanderers with the entire peasant "world" which is involved in a dispute about happiness. In this part of the poem, there is a sharp turn of the wandering peasants towards the life of the people.

What is happiness in the minds of the people? Are there happy people in this environment? The questions raised are revealed by the author in the chapter "Happy". In which, on their own initiative, “lucky ones” from the lower ranks approach the wanderers. We are faced with generalized, but limited pictures of the happiness of the peasant (“rep up to a thousand on a small ridge”), the soldier (“... in twenty battles I was, and not killed!”), the worker (“to hammer rubble a day for five silver”) , servile ("Prince Peremetyev had my favorite slave"). However, the outcome of this conversation is unacceptable neither for the author nor for his meticulous heroes, it evokes their common irony: “Hey, peasant happiness! Leaky with patches, hunchbacked with corns, get the hell out of here!

However, the finale of this part of Nekrasov's work contains a truly serious and deep story about a happy man - Yermila Girin, which marks a higher level of popular ideas about happiness. “Not a prince, not an illustrious count, but simply he is a man!” - in terms of his authority, influence on peasant life, this person turns out to be stronger than the prince and count. And this strength lies in the trust of the people's "peace" and in Yermil's reliance on this "peace". This is clearly manifested in his lawsuit with Altynnikov over the mill.

Girin is endowed with a sense of Christian conscience and honor, invaluable in its universal significance - this is his happiness, in the author's understanding. Ermil Girin's conscientiousness, according to the poet, is not exceptional - it expresses one of the most characteristic features of the Russian peasant community, and this character is one of the best representatives of his people.

Thus, Yermil refutes the wanderers' initial idea of ​​the essence of human happiness. It would seem that he had everything that is necessary for a happy life according to the proposed formula: peace, wealth, and respect. However, he sacrifices these benefits for the sake of the truth of the people and ends up in prison, thereby preserving his honor, his Christian conscience. This is one of the most striking examples of understanding true happiness in Nekrasov's work.

Gradually, as events change and new heroes appear, a generalized, collective image of a happy person is formed in the poem. Such a lucky man turns out to be a fighter for the people's interests with Nekrasov. As if in response to the growth of national self-consciousness, from the discordant choir of peasant voices, the songs of Grisha Dobrosklonov, a Russian intellectual, a true ascetic, for whom “fate prepared ... consumption and Siberia” begin to sound louder and louder. The image of a person who sees the possibility of achieving "people's happiness" as a result of a general and active struggle for an "ungutted province" is a cross-cutting one for all Nekrasov's work. This is the village of Izbytkovo, according to the author's intention, and now spiritually grown wanderers are looking for, who have long forgotten about the original purpose of their journey.

Thus, Nekrasov's wanderers act as a symbol of a post-reform people's Russia that has started off, longing for changes for a better life. However, the poem does not oppose the happiness of the "tops" and "bottoms", it brings the reader to the idea of ​​the embodiment of universal happiness - "a feast for the whole world."

The first chapter tells about the meeting of the truth-seekers with the priest. What is its ideological and artistic meaning? Assuming to find a happy "at the top", the peasants are primarily guided by the opinion that the basis of the happiness of every person is "wealth", and as long as they meet "artisans, beggars, / Soldiers, coachmen" and "his brother, a peasant-bast-worker", there does not arise and thoughts to ask

How is it easy for them, is it difficult

Lives in Rus'?

Clearly: "What happiness is here?"

And the picture of a cold spring with poor seedlings in the fields, and the sad appearance of Russian villages, and the background with the participation of a poor, suffering people - all evoke disturbing thoughts about the fate of the people to the wanderers and the reader, thereby preparing them internally for a meeting with the first "lucky" - the priest. Priestly happiness in Luke's view is drawn like this:

Priests live like princes...

Raspberry - not life!

Popova porridge - with butter,

Popov pie - with filling,

Popovy cabbage soup - with smelt!

etc.

And when the peasants ask the priest if the priest's life is sweet, and when they agree with the priest that "peace, wealth, honor" are the prerequisites for happiness, it seems that the priest's confession will follow the path outlined by Luke's colorful sketch. But Nekrasov gives the movement of the main idea of ​​the poem an unexpected twist. The priest took the question of the peasants very seriously. Before telling them the "truth-truth", he "looked down, thought" and began to talk not at all about "porridge with butter."

In the chapter "Pop" the problem of happiness is revealed not only in terms of social ("Is the priest's life sweet?"), but also moral and psychological ("How are you - at ease, happily / Do you live, honest father?"). Answering the second question, the priest in his confession is forced to talk about what he sees as the true happiness of a person. The narrative in connection with the story of the priest acquires a high teaching pathos.

The men-truth-seekers met not a high-ranking shepherd, but an ordinary rural priest. The lower rural clergy in the 1960s constituted the most numerous stratum of the Russian intelligentsia. As a rule, rural priests knew the life of the common people well. Of course, this lower clergy was not homogeneous: there were cynics, and bastards, and money-grubbers, but there were also those who were close to the needs of the peasants, their aspirations were understandable. Among the rural clergy there were people who were in opposition to the higher church circles, to the civil authorities. It must not be forgotten that a significant part of the democratic intelligentsia of the 1960s came from the milieu of the rural clergy.

The image of the priest met by wanderers is not without a peculiar tragedy. This is the type of person characteristic of the 60s, the era of historical rift, when the feeling of the catastrophic nature of modern life either pushed honest and thinking people of the ruling environment onto the path of struggle, or drove them into a dead end of pessimism and hopelessness. The priest painted by Nekrasov is one of those humane and moral people who live an intense spiritual life, observe the general ill-being with anxiety and pain, painfully and truthfully striving to determine their place in life. For such a person, happiness is impossible without peace of mind, satisfaction with oneself, with one's life. There is no peace in the life of the “explored” priest, not only because

Sick, dying

Born into the world

Do not choose time

and the pop at any time must go where they call. Much more difficult than physical fatigue is moral torment: “the soul gets soaked, it hurts” to look at human suffering, on the mountain of a poor, orphaned, family that has lost its breadwinner. With pain remembers pop those moments when

The old woman, the mother of the deceased,

Look, stretching with a bony

Callused hand.

The soul will turn

How they tinkle in this hand

Two copper coins!

Drawing before the audience a stunning picture of people's poverty and suffering, the priest not only denies the possibility of his own happiness in an atmosphere of nationwide grief, but inspires an idea that, using Nekrasov's later poetic formula, can be expressed in the words:

Happiness of noble minds

See contentment around.

The priest of the first chapter is not indifferent to the fate of the people, nor is he indifferent to the opinion of the people. What is the honor of the priest among the people?

Who do you call

Foal breed?

... About whom you compose

You are fairy tales

And obscene songs

And all the bullshit? ..

These direct questions of the priest to the wanderers reveal the disrespectful attitude towards the clergy found in the peasant environment. And although the men-truth-seekers are embarrassed in front of the priest standing next to him for such an offensive opinion of the people (wanderers “groan, shift”, “looks down, are silent”), they do not deny the prevalence of this opinion. The well-known validity of the hostile and ironic attitude of the people towards the clergy is proved by the priest's story about the sources of the priest's "wealth". Where is it from? Bribes, handouts from the landowners, but the main source of priestly income is the collection of the last pennies from the people (“Live from the peasants alone”). Pop understands that "the peasant himself needs", that

With such works pennies

Life is hard.

He cannot forget those copper nickels that tinkled in the old woman's hand, but even he, honest and conscientious, takes them, these labor pennies, because "do not take, there is nothing to live with." The story-confession of the priest is built as his judgment on the life of the class to which he himself belongs, the judgment on the life of his "spiritual brethren", on his own life, for collecting the people's pennies is a source of eternal pain for him.

As a result of a conversation with a priest, men-truth-seekers begin to understand that “a man does not live by bread alone”, that “porridge with butter” is not enough for happiness if you have it alone, that it’s hard for an honest person to live in the backbone, and those who live on someone else’s labor, falsehood, are worthy only of condemnation and contempt. Happiness based on untruth is not happiness - such is the conclusion of the wanderers.

Well, here's your praise

Popov's life

they pounce "with selective strong abuse / On poor Luka."

Consciousness of the inner correctness of one's life is an indispensable condition for a person's happiness, the poet teaches the reader-contemporary.