Gogol's language, the principles of his style, his satirical manner had an undeniable influence on the development of the Russian literary and artistic language from the mid-30s. Thanks to Gogol’s genius, the style of everyday speech was freed from “conventional constraints and literary cliches,” Vinogradov emphasizes.
Gogol’s extraordinary, surprisingly natural language and his humor had an intoxicating effect, notes Vinogradov. Absolutely appeared in Rus' new language, distinguished by its simplicity and accuracy, strength and closeness to nature; figures of speech invented by Gogol quickly came into general use, Vinogradov continues. The great writer enriched the Russian language with new phraseological units and words that originated from the names of Gogol’s heroes.
Vinogradov claims that Gogol saw his main purpose in “bringing the language of fiction closer to the living and apt colloquial speech of the people.”
One of characteristic features Gogol's style was Gogol's ability to skillfully mix Russian and Ukrainian speech, high style and jargon, clerical, landowner, hunting, lackey, gambling, petty bourgeois, the language of kitchen workers and artisans, interspersing archaisms and neologisms in his speech, like characters, and in the author's speech.
Vinogradov notes that the genre of Gogol’s earliest prose is in the style of the Karamzin school and is distinguished by a high, serious, pathetic narrative style. Gogol, understanding the value of Ukrainian folklore, really wanted to become a “truly folk writer” and tried to involve a variety of oral folk speech in the Russian literary and artistic narrative system.
The writer connected the reliability of the reality he conveyed with the degree of mastery of class, estate, professional style language and dialect of the latter. As a result, Gogol's narrative language acquires several stylistic and linguistic planes and becomes very heterogeneous. gogol literature speech
Russian reality is conveyed through the appropriate linguistic environment. At the same time, all existing semantic and expressive shades of official business language are revealed, which, when ironically describing the discrepancy between the conventional semantics of social clerical language and the actual essence of phenomena, appear quite sharply.
Gogol's vernacular style is intertwined with clerical and business style. V. Vinogradov finds that Gogol sought to introduce literary language the vernacular of different layers of society (small and middle nobility, urban intelligentsia and bureaucrats) and by mixing them with the literary and book language, find a new Russian literary language.
As a business official language in Gogol’s works, Vinogradov points to the interweaving of clerical and colloquial bureaucratic speech. In “Notes of a Madman” and in “The Nose,” Gogol uses clerical business style and colloquial official speech much more than other styles of vernacular.
Official business language ties together the various dialects and styles of Gogol, who simultaneously attempts to expose and remove all unnecessary hypocritical and false forms of expression. Sometimes Gogol, to show the conventionality of a concept, resorted to an ironic description of the content put by society into a particular word. For example: “In a word, they were what is called happy”; “There was nothing else on this secluded or, as we say, beautiful square.”
Gogol believed that the literary and book language of the upper classes was painfully affected by borrowings from foreign, “foreign” languages; it was impossible to find foreign words that could describe Russian life with the same accuracy as Russian words; as a result, some foreign words were used in a distorted sense, some were assigned a different meaning, while some original Russian words disappeared irrevocably from use.
Vinogradov points out that Gogol, closely connecting the secular narrative language with the Europeanized Russian-French salon language, not only denied and parodied it, but also openly opposed his narrative style to the linguistic norms that corresponded to the salon-lady language. In addition, Gogol also struggled with the mixed half-French, half-popular Russian language of romanticism. Gogol contrasts the romantic style with a realistic style, reflecting reality more fully and believably. According to Vinogradov, Gogol shows the confrontation between the style of romantic language and everyday life, which only naturalistic language can describe. “A mixture of solemn bookish with colloquial, with vernacular is formed. The syntactic forms of the former romantic style are preserved, but the phraseology and structure of symbols and comparisons sharply deviate from romantic semantics.” Romantic style narrative does not disappear entirely from Gogol’s language, it is mixed with a new semantic system.
As for the national scientific language - a language that, according to Gogol, is intended to be universal, national-democratic, devoid of class limitations, the writer, as Vinogradov notes, was against the abuse of philosophical language. Gogol saw the peculiarity of the Russian scientific language in its adequacy, accuracy, brevity and objectivity, in the absence of the need to embellish it. Gogol saw the significance and strength of the Russian scientific language in the uniqueness of the very nature of the Russian language, writes Vinogradov, the writer believed that there was no language similar to Russian. Gogol saw the sources of the Russian scientific language in Church Slavonic, peasant and the language of folk poetry.
Gogol sought to include in his language the professional speech of not only the nobility, but also the bourgeois class. Attaching great importance to the peasant language, Gogol replenishes his vocabulary, recording the names, terminology and phraseology of accessories and parts of a peasant costume, equipment and household utensils of a peasant hut, arable farming, laundry, beekeeping, forestry and gardening, weaving, fishing, folk medicine, that is, everything related to the peasant language and its dialects . Language of crafts and technical specialties was also interesting to the writer, notes Vinogradov, as was the language of noble life, hobbies and entertainment. Hunting, gambling, military dialects and jargon attracted Gogol's close attention.
Gogol especially closely observed administrative language, its style and rhetoric, Vinogradov emphasizes.
In oral speech, Gogol was interested, first of all, in the vocabulary, phraseology and syntax of noble-peasant vernacular, spoken language urban intelligentsia and bureaucratic language, Vinogradov points out.
In the opinion of V. Vinogradov, Gogol’s interest in the professional language and dialects of merchants is characteristic.
Gogol sought to find ways to reform the relationship between the literary language of his day and the professional language of the church. He introduced church symbols and phraseology into literary speech, notes Vinogradov. Gogol believed that the introduction of elements church language in literary it will bring life to the ossified and deceitful business and bureaucratic language. .
Artistic features in Gogol's works
INTRODUCTION
A fundamentally important role in the formation of a person of the 21st century, who will participate in the process of development of a civilized community of people, is played by literature as a special type of art. She fills the spiritual niche, responding to the internal needs of the individual. It is literature that shapes an individual capable of solving creative problems and striving for search. Accordingly, the demand for the reader and the quality of reading increases. As is known, reading activity is the ability to “assemble an imaginary whole of meaning without eliminating its complexity or moving away from it” (H.L. Borges).
To the creativity of N.V. Numerous literary studies have been devoted to Gogol, and considerable methodological experience has been accumulated, varied in interpretations and ways of understanding the material. However, schoolchildren, in search of the “final meaning”, “integrity”, are still faced with one motif of mystery that permeates all the texts of N.V. Gogol.
The aesthetic, poetic complexity of the artistic world of the 19th century writer creates content and stylistic barriers when reading, without overcoming which it is impossible to comprehend the “paradoxes” of N.V.’s work. Gogol, full of contradictions and charm inner world. The stylistic imbalance and metaphorical nature of Gogol’s writing first of all alarms students, amuses them, and sometimes causes protest and a feeling of rejection.
The purpose of this course work is to study techniques for analyzing the characters in N.V.’s play. Gogol "The Inspector General"
1. Study educational and methodological literature on this topic.
2. Analyze the problem of the play “The Inspector General”.
3. Consider and characterize the characters in the play “The Inspector General”.
4. Draw conclusions on the topic studied and make recommendations.
5. Make a plan for a literature lesson in 8th grade based on the play “The Inspector General”
A study of the artistic features of the writer V.N. Gogol
Characteristics of the features of N.V.’s creativity Gogol in the works of Russian scientists
The appearance of Gogol's work was historically natural. In the late 20s and early 30s of the last century, new, great tasks arose before Russian literature. The rapidly developing process of the disintegration of serfdom and absolutism evoked in the advanced strata of Russian society an increasingly persistent, passionate search for a way out of the crisis, awakening the idea of further paths of historical development of Russia. Gogol's work reflected the people's growing dissatisfaction with the serfdom, its awakening revolutionary energy, its desire for a different, more perfect reality. Belinsky called Gogol “one of the great leaders” of his country “on the path of consciousness, development, progress.”
Gogol's art arose on the foundation that was erected before him by Pushkin. In "Boris Godunov" and "Eugene Onegin", "The Bronze Horseman" and " The captain's daughter"The writer made the greatest discoveries. The amazing skill with which Pushkin reflected the fullness of contemporary reality and penetrated into the recesses of the spiritual world of his heroes, the insight with which in each of them he saw a reflection of the real processes of social life, the depth of his historical thinking and the greatness of his humanistic ideals - all these With the facets of his personality and his creativity, Pushkin opened a new era in the development of Russian literature and realistic art.
Gogol was convinced that in the conditions of contemporary Russia, the ideal and beauty of life can be expressed, first of all, through the denial of ugly reality. This is exactly what his work was like, this was the originality of his realism [Mashinsky S.I. The artistic world of Gogol - M.: Enlightenment, p.5.].
Of all the variety of literature about Gogol created by Russian writers (emigrants of the first wave), the most significant are the books by K.N. Mochulsky " Spiritual path Gogol" (1934), professor protopresbyter V.V. Zenkovsky "N.V. Gogol" (1961) and V.V. Nabokov's Nikolai Gogol (1944).
They largely determined Gogol's thought not only in the West, but also in Russia. Along with these studies there is a whole series less voluminous works, which also contributed to the study of the life and work of the great Russian writer. These are the works of S.L. Frank, Archpriest G.V. Florovsky, I.A. Ilyina, D.M. Chizhevsky, P.M. Bicilli, V.N. Ilyina. Let us also mention publications by V.K. Zaitseva, V.F. Khodasevich, A.M. Remizova, G.I. Gazdanova, G.A. Meyer, Yu.P. Annenkova, A.L. Bema, R.V. Pletnev, abbot Konstantin (Zaitsev) - articles in which there are observations useful for the science of Gogol. Note that almost all those who wrote about Gogol in exile used V. Veresaev’s book “Gogol in Life” (1933) as one of the most important sources, which, for all its merits, does not contain documents in the necessary completeness [Voropaev V. Gogol in criticism of Russian emigration. - p.19.].
On the basis of his research “The Spiritual Path of Gogol” (Paris: YMCA-Press, 1934; 2nd ed., 1976; republished in the book: Mochulsky K. Gogol. Solovyov. Dostoevsky. - M., 1995) K. V. Mochulsky put the words of the writer expressed in a letter to his mother in 1844: “Try better to see in me a Christian and a person than a writer.” Considering Gogol not only a great artist, but also a teacher of morality and a Christian ascetic, Mochulsky sets the goal of his research to assess the religious feat of the writer. Speaking about Gogol's childhood, the author makes a number of comments relating primarily to the features of his spiritual appearance. “Gogol did not belong to those chosen ones who are born with the love of God,” writes Mochulsky, “the patriarchal religiosity that surrounded his childhood remained alien and even hostile to him. Faith had to come to him in a different way, not from love, but from fear” (K. Mochulsky “Gogol. Solovyov. Dostoevsky”). From this position, the researcher concludes: “In Gogol’s soul, the experience of cosmic horror and elemental fear of death are primary...” [Voropaev V. Gogol in criticism of Russian emigration. - p.18.]
Gogol's creativity is socially determined. His views were formed among small-scale nobles, oppressed both “from above” and “from below”: “from above” - by large feudal lords, who treated their nearly ruined fellow class members arrogantly, and sometimes simply mockingly (remember Pushkin, his Dubrovsky and Troekurov). From here, “from above,” the threatening new development of some kind of industry was approaching the ill-fated small landowners. But there, “above”, in a public sphere inaccessible to the small landowner, high education was concentrated, and the treasures of world philosophy and world art were mastered there. Pushkin’s Troyekurov labored there, but there, even higher up, were the princes Trubetskoy and the princes Volkonsky—the leaders of the Decembrists. The small landowner peered into the life of the “tops” with inquisitiveness, concern, and apprehension, and with a natural desire to learn from these “tops” the best that they possessed, to compete with them on equal terms. And “from below” are the peasants, whose murmurs are different forms and to varying degrees disturbed him, frightened him, or pushed him into naive attempts to reconcile everyone and everything [Turbin V.N. Heroes of Gogol. - Moscow “Enlightenment”, 1983. - p.22].
But the small landowner was also necessary for our history; and this necessity arose precisely from the intermediate position of his position in society. While living, so to speak, “below the highs,” he also lived “above the lows.” Be that as it may, the rays of spiritual wealth that the “tops” possessed reached him. At the same time, the small landowner, unlike his brother, the city dweller, the aristocrat, communicated with the people directly, every day. The voice of the people, the precepts of popular thought were not an abstraction for him. The people in his eyes appeared in the person of those 20-30 “souls” who fed him and whom, in any case, he also fed, who made up his fortune and for whom he was responsible to himself and to the empire. The complex agricultural cycle, the annual and daily cycle of the sun, bad weather or a bucket and the hopes and tragedies associated with them - the small landowner experienced all this in the same way as the people experienced it from time immemorial. Proximity to the primordial and primordial in human life made his world very simple. This simplicity contained remarkable spiritual strength [Turbin V.N. Heroes of Gogol. - M.: Education, 1983. - p. 23.].
The more complexities around us, the closer Gogol is to us. The clearer is the beauty and depth of its simplicity, which becomes more relevant day by day.
The original family. Happiness to those who have a large and friendly life; It's bad for those who don't have it. But even if for some reason it doesn’t exist, some family, albeit the smallest one, that arose and then disappeared, unable to preserve itself, gave birth to us. And there are families around us: in nature, in society. And we simply cannot help but imagine ourselves as part of some kind of family.
Our neighbor is finally the original. It is original even now, because the neighbor accompanies us from the place of birth to the place of our last peace: we were barely born, and this one was already placed next to us, and this was our first neighbor, then involuntarily forgotten by us. And in our conscious life? Friendship between neighbors, enmity between them, love of neighbor for neighbor. The neighborhood of schoolboys in the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, the mournful neighborhood of prisoners in royal prisons and fortresses, the wary neighborhood of landowners in landholdings of different sizes, the neighborhood of peasants in the countryside - an innumerable tangle of neighborhoods. Neighborhood is also a concrete historical phenomenon, the social content here is very changeable; but the very fact of neighborhood, the very necessity of it for a person, has an enduring character. [Ibid., p. 34.]
In everyday life, laughter lives in different qualities. When a person surrenders himself to the life of the spirit, “the laughter in him dies.” Art is a spiritual matter. Gogol is “permeated with sincerity” not only in his works of art, but also when he concerns “moral and religious issues.” He has two main means at his disposal - “fiction and laughter.” Rushing towards the spiritual, Gogol breaks “the frames of art, not fitting into them.” There is a “duel between the “poet” and the “moralist”.” “Gogol’s laughter is carefree, Gogol’s fantasy is carefree. But how much it already contains and how much even this laughter and this fantasy teach.” In terms of spirituality, Gogol’s laughter already partly possesses “great religious and moral power, invariably greater than Gogol’s fiction.” Explaining “The Inspector General,” Gogol reduces the “educational” power of his laughter, giving it the functions of a “religiously colored highest moral court.” In the Christian church consciousness, the role of satire and laughter is insignificant. “Human art, no matter how convincingly it speaks about the heavenly, no matter how attractively it paints, remains earthly. At best, it only leads a person to the spiritual world.” Gogol “takes the vulgarity of life he observed to the extreme - and reconciles the reader with it. At least - while the reader is under the spell of his artistic gift.” [Voropaev V. Gogol in criticism of Russian emigration. - p.19.]
There is a completely natural logic in how the assessment of Gogol’s works has changed historically. At the first stage of the functioning of works, the subject of discussion, discussion and even struggle (democratic and aesthetic criticism) becomes what distinguishes the text from the background of generally accepted literary norms, and at the same time - the question of the right of creativity to recognition, to a certain niche in the literary space. At the next stage, the attention of readers moves to another plane: aspects of the relationship between creativity and real life are revealed (gallery of recreated types, positions of heroes, the meaning of conflicts). At the same time, the artistic form, features of language, and style aroused interest. The complexity and integrity of the artistic structure of the work was clarified: genre, stylistic specificity. [Esin A.B. Principles and techniques of analyzing a literary work. - M.: Vlados, 1998. - p. 112.
Gogol began his creative career as a romantic. However, he soon turned to critical realism and opened a new chapter in it. As a realist artist, Gogol developed under the beneficial influence of Pushkin. But he was not a simple imitator of the founder of new Russian literature.
Gogol’s originality was that he was the first to give the broadest image of the district landowner-bureaucratic Russia and the “little man”, a resident of the corners of St. Petersburg.
Gogol was a brilliant satirist who castigated the “vulgarity of a vulgar man” and extremely exposed the social contradictions of contemporary Russian reality.
This social orientation of Gogol is also reflected in the composition of his works. The plot and plot conflict in them are not love and family circumstances, but events of social significance. At the same time, Gogol’s plot serves only as a pretext for a broad depiction of everyday life and the disclosure of character types.
Deep penetration into the essence of the main socio-economic phenomena of contemporary life allowed Gogol, a brilliant artist of words, to draw images of enormous generalizing power.
The names of Khlestakov, Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdryov, Sobakevich and others became household names. Even the minor characters depicted by Gogol on the pages of his works (for example, in “Dead Souls”): Pelageya, the serf girl Korobochka, or Ivan Antonovich, the “jug’s snout,” have great power of generalization and typicality. Gogol emphasizes one or two of his most significant features in the character of the hero. Often he exaggerates them, which makes the image even more vivid and prominent.
The purposes of a bright, satirical portrayal of the characters are served by Gogol’s careful selection of many details and their sharp exaggeration. For example, portraits of the heroes of “Dead Souls” were created. These details in Gogol are mainly everyday: things, clothes, the hero’s home.
If in Gogol’s romantic stories there are emphatically picturesque landscapes that give the work a certain uplifting tone, then in his realistic works, especially in “Dead Souls,” landscape is one of the means of depicting types and characteristics of heroes.
The subject matter, social orientation and ideological coverage of life phenomena and people's characters determined the originality of Gogol's literary speech.
The two worlds depicted by Gogol - the people's collective and the "existents" - determined the main features of the writer's speech: his speech is sometimes enthusiastic, imbued with lyricism, when he talks about the people, about the homeland (in "Evenings", in "Taras Bulba", in lyrical digressions of “Dead Souls”), then it becomes close to a live conversational one (in everyday pictures and scenes of “Evenings” or when the story is told about bureaucratic and landowner Russia).
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the wider use of common speech, dialectisms, and Ukrainianisms than that of his predecessors and contemporaries. Gogol loved and had a keen sense of folk speech and skillfully used all its shades to characterize his heroes and phenomena of public life.
1) the periodic structure of a phrase, when many sentences are connected into one whole (“Taras saw how vague the Cossack ranks became and how despondency, indecent for the brave, began to quietly embrace the Cossack heads, but was silent: he wanted to give time to everything, so that they would get used to despondency brought on by farewell to his comrades, and meanwhile in the silence he was preparing to wake them all up at once and suddenly, whooping like a Cossack, so that again and with greater force than before, cheerfulness would return to everyone’s soul, which only the Slavic breed, the wide one, is capable of. a mighty rock is to others as the sea is to shallow rivers");
2) the introduction of lyrical dialogues and monologues (for example, the conversation between Levko and Ganna in the first chapter of “May Night”, monologues - appeals to the Cossacks of Koshevoy, Taras Bulba, Bovdyug in “Taras Bulba”);
3) an abundance of exclamation marks and interrogative sentences(for example, in the description of the Ukrainian night in “May Night”);
4) emotional epithets that convey the power of the author’s inspiration, born of love for his native nature (description of a day at the “Sorochinskaya Fair”) or for a folk group (“Taras Bulba”).
Gogol uses everyday speech in different ways. In early works (in “Evenings”) its bearer is the narrator. The author puts into his mouth both vernacular words (everyday words and phrases), and such appeals to listeners that are of a familiar, good-natured nature, characteristic of this environment: “By God, I’m already tired of telling! What are you thinking
The character of a person social status, profession - all this is unusually clearly and accurately revealed in the speech of Gogol’s characters.
Gogol's strength as a stylist lies in his humor. Gogol's humor - “laughter through tears” - was determined by the contradictions of the Russian reality of his time, mainly by the contradictions between the people and the anti-people essence of the noble state. In his articles about “Dead Souls,” Belinsky showed that Gogol’s humor “consists in the opposite of the ideal
life with the reality of life." He wrote: “Humor is the most powerful weapon of the spirit of negation, destroying the old and preparing the new.”
N.V. Gogol is the first major Russian prose writer.
The flowering of realism in Russian prose is usually associated with Gogol and the “Gogolian movement.” It is typical for him special attention to social issues, depiction (often satirical) of the social vices of Nicholas Russia, careful reproduction of socially and culturally significant details in portraits, interiors, landscapes and other descriptions;
Realism Gogol is of a very special kind. Some researchers do not consider Gogol a realist at all, others call his style “fantastic realism.” The fact is that Gogol is a master of phantasmagoria. There is a fantastic element to many of his stories. A feeling of “curved” reality is created, reminiscent of a distorting mirror. This is associated with hyperbole and grotesque - the most important elements Gogol's aesthetics. Much connects Gogol with the romantics. But, starting from romantic traditions, Gogol directs the motifs borrowed from them into a new, realistic direction.
There is a lot of humor in Gogol's works . In Gogol's humor the absurd beginning prevails. The tendency to depict only the funny and ugly psychologically weighed on the writer; he felt guilty for showing only caricatured characters. Gogol repeatedly admitted that he passed on his own spiritual vices to these heroes. This theme sounds especially acute, for example, at the beginning of Chapter VII of Dead Souls. In his later years of creativity, Gogol experienced a deep mental crisis and was on the verge of a mental breakdown.
The real in Gogol's stories coexists with the fantastic throughout the writer's career. But this phenomenon is undergoing some evolution - the role, place and methods of including the fantastic element do not always remain the same.
In Gogol's early works (“Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”, “Viy") it's fantastic to the foreground plot (wonderful metamorphoses, the appearance of evil spirits), it is associated with folklore (fairy tales and legends) and romantic literature.
One of Gogol's "favorite" characters is the "devil". Various evil spirits often appears in the plots of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka”, not scary, but rather funny. In the works of a later period, the author’s mystical anxiety, the feeling of the presence of something sinister in the world, is more strongly felt. re, a passionate desire to overcome this with laughter.
In St. Petersburg stories the fantastic element moves away sharply to the background plot, fantasy seems to dissolve in reality. The supernatural is present in the plot not directly, but indirectly, for example, like a dream (“ Nose"), nonsense (" Notes of a Madman"), implausible rumors ("Overcoat").
Finally , in works of the last period (“The Inspector General”, “ Dead souls») The fantastic element in the plot is practically absent. The events depicted are not supernatural, but rather strange.
The role of descriptions. Gogol is a universally recognized master artistic descriptions. Descriptions in prose are valuable in their own right, their manner and style are very expressive, primarily due to the abundance of everyday life, portrait, linguistic and other details. Detailing - important aspect Gogol's realistic writing.
Image of St. Petersburg- one of the important motifs in Gogol’s work (it is present in the fairy tale “The Night Before Christmas”, in “The Inspector General”, in “The Tale of Captain Kopeikin” from “Dead Souls”). Gogol also has a cycle of St. Petersburg stories, which can serve as the most typical example of this theme.
St. Petersburg in Gogol's stories is a phantasmagoric, semi-ghost city, in which the strange is intertwined with the everyday, the real with the fantastic, the majestic with the base.
At the same time, Gogol’s works contain a deeply realistic vision of St. Petersburg. Most often, the writer depicts the world of officials and their specific relationships.
Evenings on a farm near Dikanka- the first book of Gogol's stories. Two of its parts appeared in 1831-1832. This book is about Ukraine, where G. was born in 1809. The stories express love for the native land, its nature and people, its history and folk tales. The theme of the rich and generous Ukrainian nature, among which the heroes live, plays a special role in the book, not quite common in narrative prose. The fullness of being, the strength and beauty of the spirit are characteristic of the writer’s heroes. The young heroes are beautiful, cheerful, and full of mischief. These heroes feel not just farmers, but “free Cossacks”, who are characterized by a sense of honor and personal dignity. Gogol not only retold traditional stories from folk tales, he created new and original patterns, as if he continued the work of folk storytellers, creating a book in which literary and folklore traditions, truth and fiction, history and modernity are organically combined.
The originality of Gogol's creative style is clearly revealed both in the nature of the artistic details he recreated and in the method of their selection. Pushkin's prose, for example, is distinguished by the dynamic disclosure of the hero's actions, the events in which he participates, and on this basis his psychological appearance; artistic detail in Pushkin’s prose is an integral element of the characters in their intentions and actions, in “event” relationships. Gogol was interested in the totality of details that expressively characterize the hero’s mental structure, his social and everyday environment, and the type of people to which he belongs.
Based on the principle of highlighting characteristic, memorable details, Dead Souls describes various aspects of the characters’ way of life and psychology. In Manilov’s house, “something was always missing: the living room was filled with beautiful furniture, covered in dandy silk fabric, which, probably, was very expensive; but there wasn’t enough for two chairs, and the chairs were simply upholstered in matting; however, the owner, and for several years, each time warned his guest with the words: “Do not sit on these chairs, they are not ready yet...” In the evening, a very smart candlestick made of dark bronze with three antique graces, with a mother-of-pearl dandy shield, and next to him stood some simple copper invalid, lame, curled up to one side and covered in fat, although neither the owner, nor the mistress, nor the servants noticed this.”
In the examples given, we encounter objective, “material” details. There are a lot of them in Dead Souls, and they are always very expressive. Who doesn’t remember Chichikov’s box, which he carried with him everywhere, carefully hiding its contents from prying eyes? Which reader of Dead Souls will not remember his lingonberry-colored tailcoat with a sparkle; and his silver snuff-box, at the bottom of which were placed two violets for scent, and the fried chicken, which was a constant companion of his travels? Each image is associated with many such details that remain in the reader’s memory.
But Gogol uses not only objective details; he saturates the narrative with details of a different kind that have “general meaning.” How remarkable, for example, is the character of Sobakevich in the fact that on the list of dead souls he sold to Chichikov, Elizaveta Vorobei appeared under the guise of a man. Surprisingly clearly reveals Nozdryov’s character traits and such detail as showing him his possessions. “Here is the border!” said Nozdryov. “Everything you see on this side is all mine, on that side, all this forest that is turning blue, and everything beyond the forest is all mine.”
Artistic details were never an end in themselves for Gogol; they are always included in the narrative not due to the writer’s excessive interest in details, but because of their significance for the embodiment of ideas and images. Therefore, despite the abundance of details in “Dead Souls,” the narrative is not fragmented into a description of insignificant, unimportant objects, but unfolds as an amazingly vivid story about human characters and their relationship to reality. The depiction of individual characters in “Dead Souls” is strictly subordinated to the general concept. From beginning to end, the work is permeated by a single general thought, a coherent ideological and artistic concept, which determines both the very choice of characters in the poem and the depiction of each individual image. One of the main internal lines of the first volume of “Dead Souls” is the demonstration of the insignificance and vulgarity of the “masters of life” to an ever-increasing degree.
Need to download an essay? Click and save - "The originality of Gogol's creative style. And the finished essay appeared in my bookmarks.The extraordinary, surprisingly natural language of Gogol. Gogol's language, the principles of his style, his satirical manner had an undeniable influence on the development of the Russian literary and artistic language from the mid-30s. Thanks to Gogol’s genius, the style of everyday speech was freed from “conventional constraints and literary cliches,” Vinogradov emphasizes. A completely new language has appeared in Rus', distinguished by its simplicity and accuracy, strength and closeness to nature; figures of speech invented by Gogol quickly came into general use, Vinogradov continues. The great writer enriched the Russian language with new phraseological units and words that originated from the names of Gogol’s heroes.
Vinogradov claims that Gogol saw his main purpose in “bringing the language of fiction closer to the living and apt colloquial speech of the people.”
One of the characteristic features of Gogol’s style, which A. Bely points out, was Gogol’s ability to skillfully mix Russian and Ukrainian speech, high style and jargon, clerical, landowner, hunting, lackey, gambler, bourgeois, the language of kitchen workers and artisans, interspersing archaisms and neologisms in the speech of both characters and in the author’s speech.
The writer connected the authenticity of the reality he conveyed with the degree of proficiency in the class, estate, and professional style of the language and dialect of the latter. As a result, Gogol's narrative language acquires several stylistic and linguistic planes and becomes very heterogeneous.
Russian reality is conveyed through the appropriate linguistic environment. At the same time, all existing semantic and expressive shades of official business language are revealed, which, when ironically describing the discrepancy between the conventional semantics of social clerical language and the actual essence of phenomena, appear quite sharply.
Gogol used colloquial speech more widely and deeply than all his predecessors. Gogol masterfully combined various, sometimes almost opposite, “stylistic elements of the Russian language.” His use of the jargon of petty officials, nobility, landowners and army officers not only enriched the literary language, but also became a means of satire in the style of Gogol himself and his followers.
When describing the spiritual world, the actions of heroes, and everyday life, characteristic features of speech are invariably highlighted, complementing and clarifying various aspects of what is depicted. Speech is the hero’s self-disclosure.
This is how the author describes the director, Sophie’s father, a man filled with penny-wise ambition: “... a very strange man. He is more silent. Speaks very rarely; but a week ago I was constantly talking to myself: “Will I get it or not?” He will take a piece of paper in one hand, fold the other empty and say: “Will I receive it or not?” .
One of the characteristic features of Gogol’s poetics is that the writer likes to talk about serious things casually, jokingly, humor and irony, as if wanting to reduce the importance of the subject. Many stories from the St. Petersburg cycle, in particular “Notes of a Madman,” are based on this technique.
Already in his first stories, Gogol depicts the people through the realistic atmosphere of folk language, beliefs, fairy tales, proverbs and songs.
So in “Notes of a Madman” there are elements of Russian folk art: “Does my house turn blue in the distance? Is my mother sitting in front of the window? Mother, save your poor son! Drop a tear on his sore little head! Look how they torture him! Hold the poor orphan to your chest! He has no place in the world! They're chasing him! Mother! Have pity on your sick child!..”
Gogol wanted to find new methods and means of “figurative expressiveness” and strove for “concrete, expressive, saturated with life colors and details, figuratively expressive oral narration.”
In Vinogradov’s opinion, the principle of metaphorical animation played an important role for Gogol. In addition, Gogol increasingly uses words and images characteristic of oral folk speech, brings the “verbal fabric” of the narrative into line with the image of the narrator, describes the course of actions sequentially and gives the language a subjective character, writes Vinogradov.
In “Notes of a Madman” the narrator is more personified, Gukovsky emphasizes. He is not just a storyteller, but an author, a writer speaking about himself and addressing his reader, and this writer is not just a writer, he is Gogol. The narrator shares with the reader detailed description habits and individual moments in the lives of heroes and their relatives, thus acting as omniscient.
Gogol's language most naturally combines simplicity, capacity and diversity of living colloquial speech and the language of fiction, Russian and Ukrainian. Gogol masterfully uses the language of various social strata and classes, professional language, jargon and high style.
We observe a variety of language styles and dialects both in Gogol’s characters and in the speech of the narrators. The difference is that the language of the characters depends on their class affiliation.
The originality of Gogol's language lies in the fact that he deliberately uses tautology, syntactic synonymy, unusual words and phrases, metaphorical and metonymic displacements and allogism. The writer piles up verbs and nouns, lists completely incompatible things and objects in one row, and even resorts to grammatical inaccuracy of expressions.
Gogol widely uses the technique of tautology in his work: “His entire office is lined with cabinets with books. I read the names of some: all learning, such learning that our brother doesn’t even have an attack”; “Your Excellency,” I wanted to say, “do not order execution, but if you already want to execute, then execute with your general’s hand.”
Culinary and everyday vocabulary is also included in the structure of literary and artistic presentation (the author’s speech, revealing the evaluative orientation of the character’s remarks; Medzhi’s speech), which reveals a characteristic feature of Medzhi’s prudently greedy nature: “I drink tea and coffee with cream. Oh, I have to tell you that I don’t see any pleasure in the big gnawed bones that our Polkan eats in the kitchen. Bones are only good from game, and that too when no one has yet sucked the brains out of them. It is very good to mix several sauces together, but only without capers and without herbs; but I don’t know anything worse than the habit of giving dogs balls rolled out of bread. Some gentleman sitting at the table, who held all sorts of rubbish in his hands, will begin to knead the bread with these hands, call you over and put a ball in your teeth. It’s somehow rude to refuse, so eat; with disgust, but eat..." “If I hadn’t been given hazel grouse sauce or roast chicken legs, then... I don’t know what would have happened to me. The sauce with porridge is also good. But carrots, or turnips, or artichokes will never be good...”
In Gogol's style, it is easy to distinguish two streams that run through all of his work. On the one hand, the speech is measured, rounded, and solemn. It seems that in no other Russian writer can you find such regularity and solemnity as in him. Something songlike can be heard in the rhythm and turns of this speech. On the other hand, Gogol does not narrate, but recites. The tone of his stories is not calm and measured, but impetuous and stormy. His speech flows in wide lyrical streams, is interrupted by exclamations, sprinkles with jokes, falls into buffoonery and even rises again to lush lyricism.
Gogol often uses such a turn of epic poetry, which is not found in other Russian writers - an epic comparison. The essence of the phrase is that, having compared the thing being described, the artist is so carried away by the object taken for comparison, describes it in such detail that he no longer explains, but obscures the thing being compared with it: “I pressed myself against the wall. The footman opened the doors, and she fluttered out of the carriage like a bird. How she looked to the right and to the left, how she flashed her eyebrows and eyes...” “Holy saints, how she was dressed! Her dress was white, like a swan: wow, so lush! And how I looked: the sun, by God the sun!” “What a car! What people don’t live there: how many cooks, how many visitors! And our brotherhood of officials is like dogs, one sits on top of the other. I also have a friend there who plays the trumpet well.” “Damn it, his face looks like an apothecary bottle, and there’s a tuft of hair on his head, curled with a tuft, and he holds it up, and smears it with some kind of rosette, so he already thinks that he alone can do anything.” “The hair on his head is like hay.” “Ay, ah, ah! What a voice! Canary, right canary."
Words with diminutive suffixes: “frachishka”, “feather”, “rain”, “droshki”, “quiet”, “umbrella”.
French phrases and individual words are quite rare: “Sophie”, “ma chire”, “papa”, “Fidel”, “equivoques”, “dana” acquire a satirical connotation.
But in Gogol’s language there are many provincial, sometimes rude, but bright and characteristic words and expressions, like no one else. There are also specific words here, like: “kike”, “mug”, “rags”, “little dog”, “damn”, “collapsed”, “stupid serf”, “drag”, “pigs”, “trashy”, “vile” ", "swindle", "rude", "boob", "insolent", "lies", "donkey", "scoundrels", "you can't fool me!"
Here there are such expressions as: “Damned heron!”, “Oh my God, hurry up.” doomsday will come”, “ask, even crack, even if you’re in need, the gray-haired devil won’t give it away”, “the face is such that you want to spit”, “caught your eye”, “so that I don’t receive a salary!”, “damn it “,” “I didn’t let my nose stick out,” “after all, you’re zero, nothing more,” “not a penny to my name,” “I spit on him,” “having my nose plugged, I ran at full speed,” “not completely bad-looking,” “loves without memory”, “what a vulgar tone”, “he will start as expected, and end with a dog’s tongue”, “disgusting tongue”, “after all, his nose is not made of gold”, “make a mess”, “this insidious creature is a woman”, “went incognito”, “got into a scam”, etc.
And finally, the original proverbs: “Sometimes you get things so mixed up that Satan himself can’t figure it out,” “Sometimes you rush around like crazy,” “love is a second life,” “you won’t get a third eye on your forehead,” “When England takes snuff, then France is sneezing."
Since the end of the 20s. a number of journal articles and individual books appear on issues of Russian, Ukrainian and all-Slavic ethnography, and one after another editions of monuments of folk art appear: “Little Russian songs” by M. A. Maksimovich (1827-1834), “Zaporozhye antiquity” Rev. Iv. Sreznevsky (1834, 1835, and 1838), the three-volume “Tales of the Russian People” by I. P. Sakharov (1836-1837) and many others. etc. At the same time, the “Collection of Russian Songs” by Pyotr Kireevsky was being prepared, published later.
In line with this still nascent folk studies movement, Gogol finds himself as an artist, creates and publishes his first narrative cycle, “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka.”
Gogol was born and raised in Ukraine and until the end of his life he considered it his micro-homeland, and himself a Russian writer with a “Khokhlatsky” sourdough.
Coming from among the middle-class Ukrainian nobility, he knew their rural and urban life well, from a young age he was burdened by the provincial-serf “scarcity” and “earthiness” of this life, admired the folk-poetic legends of the “Cossack antiquity”, which then lived not only among the people, but also revered in some “old world” noble families, including in the house of a noble and highly educated distant relative of the future writer - D. P. Troshchinsky, an ardent admirer and collector of Ukrainian “antiques”.
“Evenings” amazed contemporaries with its incomparable originality, poetic freshness and brightness. Pushkin’s review is well known: “...everyone was delighted with this lively description of the singing and dancing tribe, these fresh pictures of Little Russian nature, this gaiety, simple-minded and at the same time crafty.
How amazed we were at the Russian book, which made us laugh, we, who had not laughed since the time of Fonvizin! The mention of Fonvizin is not accidental. This is a hint that the simple-minded gaiety of “Evenings” is not as simple-minded as it might seem at first glance.
Belinsky, who greeted “Belkin’s Tale” very coldly, welcomed “Evenings”, also - and before Pushkin - noting in them the combination of “gaiety, poetry and nationality.”
“Merry People” sharply distinguished “Evenings” from the usual naturalistic depiction of serf life in the Russian and Ukrainian villages in the so-called “common folk” stories of that time, in which Belinsky rightly saw a profanation of the idea of nationality.
Gogol happily avoided this danger and did not fall into the other extreme - the idealization of “folk morals”, having found a completely new angle for their depiction. It can be called a mirror reflection of the poetic, life-affirming consciousness of the people themselves. A “living”, as Pushkin put it, “a description of a tribe singing and dancing” is literally woven from motifs of Ukrainian folklore, drawn from its most diverse genres - heroic-historical “thoughts”, lyrical and ritual songs, fairy tales, anecdotes, nativity scenes.
This is the artistic authenticity of the cheerful and poetic folk of Gogol’s first narrative cycle. But his poetic world is permeated with a hidden longing for the former Zaporozhye freedom of the enslaved, like all “tribes” Russian Empire, “Dikan Cossacks,” which forms the epic beginning and ideological unity of all the stories included in it.
Romantically bright in its national coloring, the poetic world of “Evenings” is devoid of another mandatory attribute of a romantic epic - historical, temporal locality. The historical time in each story is different, special, sometimes definite, and in some cases, for example in “May Night,” conditional. But thanks to this, the national character (according to the philosophical and historical terminology of the 30-40s - “spirit”) of the Cossack tribe appears in “Evenings” from its ideal, invariably beautiful essence.
Its immediate reality is in all the stories of the cycle the linguistic consciousness of the people. The predominantly speech-based characterization of the characters gives the fairy-tale style of “Evenings” a “picturesque style of syllable” previously unknown to Russian prose, noted by Belinsky, and is one of Gogol’s most promising innovations.
The tale is a means of separating the author’s speech from the speech of his heroes, in “Evenings” - from the vernacular, which thereby becomes both a means and a subject of artistic depiction. Russian prose did not know anything like this before Gogol’s Evenings.
The stylistic norm of the vernacular element of “Evenings” is rustic innocence, under the mask of which lies an abyss of “Khokhlatsky” cheerful slyness and mischief. The combination of one with the other is where the entire comedy of “Evenings” lies, mainly verbal, motivated by the artistic fiction of their “publisher”, “pasichnik” Rudy Panka, and a number of related storytellers.
The preface to “Evenings,” written on behalf of Rudy Panko, characterizes their “publisher” as the bearer of the speech norm not of the author, but of his storytellers and heroes. And this norm remains unchanged in all the stories of the cycle, which also emphasizes the constancy of the fundamental properties of the national character of the “Dikan Cossacks” in all historical circumstances.
So, for example, the vernacular, and thereby the spiritual appearance of the characters in “Sorochinskaya Fair” and “The Night Before Christmas” are no different from one another, despite the fact that the action of the first story is related to modern times, takes place before the eyes of the author, and the action of the second dated to the end of the 18th century, to the time when the government decree promulgated in 1775 was being prepared, according to which the Zaporozhye army was deprived of all its liberties and privileges.
In the breadth of historical time covered by “Evenings,” their lyrical and ethnographic principles merge together and acquire an epic scale.
“The Night Before Christmas” opens the second part of “Evenings”, published at the beginning of 1832. And if the epic of the first part (“ Sorochinskaya fair", "The evening before Ivan Kupala", " May night") declares itself only with the historical overtones of folk fantasy, oral poetic “truths” and “fables”, then the stories of the second part, together with the “Missing Letter” that concludes the first part, have a fairly clearly defined historical space - from the era of the struggle of the “Cossack people” against the Polish domination (" Terrible revenge") to its feudal modernity ("Ivan Fedorovich Shponka and his aunt").
Thus, history merges with modernity on the principle of contrasting the beauty of the heroic past of the freedom-loving “tribe” with the ugliness and dullness of its serf existence.
Exactly the same ideological and artistic connection exists between the stories of Gogol’s second cycle - “Mirgorod” (1835). If two of them - "Old World Landowners" and especially "The Tale of How Ivan Ivanovich Quarreled with Ivan Nikiforovich" - are stylistically and thematically adjacent to the story about Shponka, then the other two - "Viy" and "Taras Bulba" - stand in one along with the overwhelming majority of the stories in “Evenings”, they have in common with them a bright poetic flavor.
It is no coincidence that Gogol gave “Mirgorod” the subtitle “Continuation of evenings on a farm near Dikanka,” thereby emphasizing the ideological and artistic unity of both cycles and the very principle of cyclization. This is the principle of contrast between the natural and the unnatural, the beautiful and the ugly, high poetry and low prose of national life, and at the same time its two social poles - popular and small-scale.
But both in “Evenings” and in “Mirgorod” these social polarities are attached to various eras of national existence and are correlated with one another as its beautiful past and ugly present, and the present is depicted in its immediate feudal “reality”, and the past - so , as it was imprinted in the national consciousness, deposited in the national “spirit” of the people and continues to live in their legends, beliefs, tales, and customs.
Here the most important feature of Gogol’s artistic method is revealed - his philosophical historicism, the Walter Scott origin of the writer’s creativity.
The depiction of popular movements and customs is one of the most promising innovations in W. Scott's historical novels. But this is only the historical background of their action, the main “interest” of which is the love affair and the associated fates of the personal heroes of the story, voluntary or involuntary participants in the depicted historical events.
The nationality of Gogol's Ukrainian stories is already significantly different.
National specificity and the historical projection of their Cossack world act as a form of critical understanding of the “scarcity” and “earthiness” of contemporary Russian life for the writer, which the writer himself recognizes as a temporary “sleep” of the national spirit.
History of Russian literature: in 4 volumes / Edited by N.I. Prutskov and others - L., 1980-1983.
At the beginning of his creative activity, the famous writer Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol established himself as a writer who supported the flow of romanticism. However, critical realism soon took the place of romanticism in Gogol’s works.
Features of Gogol's creativity
The work of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was significantly influenced by Alexander Pushkin. However, one should not assume that Gogol was an imitator of Alexander Sergeevich.
He brought to his works that elusive literary charisma that made them truly unique. The uniqueness of Gogol’s language lies in the fact that it was this writer who, for the first time in the history of Russian literature, was able to depict all aspects of the life of bureaucratic landowner Russia and the “little man” who lives in it.
Thanks to his amazing literary talent, Gogol managed to reveal the whole essence of Russian reality of those times. The social orientation can be traced in all his works.
Heroes of Gogol's works
Reading Gogol's works, we notice that most of his heroes are typical - the author specifically focuses on one character trait, often exaggerating it in order to maximally emphasize the hero's advantages or disadvantages.
This was the first time such a literary device was used in Russian literature.
The originality of Gogol's language
Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol was not afraid to use common expressions in his works, which were characteristic of the inhabitants of the hinterlands of the Russian Empire.
Reading “The Night Before Christmas” we cannot help but notice many old Ukrainian words, most of which have already fallen out of use in modern speech. Thanks to this, the author seems to take us to a real Ukrainian village, where we can get acquainted with the life, customs and morals of ordinary people.
Gogol’s works also feature the following literary devices:
1. One sentence consists of many simple sentences, some of which are not always connected by meaning. This technique can be seen especially clearly in the works “Taras Bulba” and “May Night or the Drowned Woman”.
2. The presence of lyrical dialogues and monologues in the works. Thanks to lyrical monologues, the author reveals to the reader the inner essence of his literary heroes.
3. A large number of words and sentences of increased emotionality.
