The novel takes place around the 1840s of the 19th century, during the Caucasian War. We can talk about this quite accurately, since the very title of the novel “Hero of Our Time” clearly indicates that in collective image the author, according to, collected the vices of his contemporaries.
So what do we know about the society of that time?
The time of the novel coincides with the era of the reign of Emperor Nicholas I, who became famous for his protective and conservative views. Having marked the beginning of his reign by suppressing the speech of the Decembrists, the emperor pursued all subsequent policies to strengthen the previous order.
This is how historian V.O. assessed the situation. Klyuchevsky: “the emperor set himself the task not to change anything, not to introduce anything new in the foundations, but only to maintain the existing order, fill in the gaps, repair revealed dilapidations with the help of practical legislation, and do all this without any participation from society, even with the suppression of social independence, only government means."
40s years XIX th century - time of ossification public life. Educated people of that time, to which both Lermontov himself and Pechorin undoubtedly belonged - the descendants of people who visited Europe during the foreign campaign of the Russian army in 1813, who saw with their own eyes the grandiose transformations that took place in Europe at that time. But all hopes for a change for the better died on December 26 during the suppression of the Decembrists’ speech on Senate Square.
Young nobles, due to their youth, possessed unbridled energy, and due to their origin, free time and education, often had no practical opportunity to realize themselves other than through satisfying their own passions. Society, due to the internal policy of the state, found itself locked within the already tight framework of autocracy. This was obvious to the previous generation, the generation of “victors of Napoleon,” inspired not only by military victory, but also by a fresh, hitherto unimaginable thought about the social order in the works of Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire and others. These were people already new era who sincerely wanted to serve new Russia. However, instead, there was total stagnation, the “suffocating atmosphere” of the Nicholas era, which stopped Russia for 30 years.
The decline of Russian public life during the time of Nicholas I was caused by total censorship and thoughtless preservation of the dilapidated. The author collected the moral and moral degeneration of the nobility, who did not have the opportunity for self-realization in creation, in the image of the hero of our time - Pechorin. Grigory Alexandrovich, according to his inclinations capable person, instead of creation, he exchanged his life for the elimination of passions, ultimately not seeing any satisfaction or benefit in this. Throughout the entire novel there is a feeling of the meaninglessness of existence, uselessness, and the impossibility of accomplishing something truly important. He is looking for meaning, he quickly gets bored with everything, he does not see anything truly important in his own existence. For this reason, the hero is not afraid of death. He plays with her, plays with other people's feelings. Because of this inner emptiness the hero goes from one story to another, along the way breaking other people's destinies. The moment after Bela’s death is indicative, when Grigory, instead of grief, bursts into laughter in the presence of Maxim Maksimych, leaving the latter dumbfounded.
A wild desire to experience the taste of life leads the hero to distant Persia, where he...
The image of Pechorin is the image of the enlightened part of Russia, which, due to objective reasons, was unable to realize its potential for creative purposes, for the benefit of society, throwing out energy into self-destruction, through the search for the meaning of life in the fall, allowing the previously unacceptable. The tragedy of the novel's hero lies in meaninglessness and indifference. Thoughtless recklessness, readiness to die for any reason is a manifestation of an unhealthy society. These qualities can be admired, but we should not forget that they could only appear when one’s own life has low value for its owner.
For Russia, the stagnation of social life and thought resulted in collapse Crimean War mid 50s of the 19th century. The failed protective policy of Nicholas I was replaced by the era of a more liberal sovereign, Alexander II. In place of Pechorin - heroes of new times, such as, for example, central character story “Fathers and Sons” Evgeny Bazarov is a revolutionary and democrat, who is also far from creating, but realizes his energy not on his own vices, but on the vices of society.
Man and society in the literature of the Enlightenment
Educational novel in England: “Robinson Crusoe” by D. Defoe.
The literature of the Enlightenment grew out of the classicism of the 17th century, inheriting its rationalism, the idea of the educational function of literature, and attention to the interaction of man and society. Compared to the literature of the previous century, in educational literature there is a significant democratization of the hero, which corresponds to the general direction of educational thought. The hero of a literary work in the 18th century ceases to be a “hero” in the sense of possessing exceptional properties and ceases to occupy the highest levels in the social hierarchy. He remains a “hero” only in another meaning of the word - central actor works. The reader can identify with such a hero and put himself in his place; this hero is in no way superior to an ordinary, average person. But at first, this recognizable hero, in order to attract the reader’s interest, had to act in an unfamiliar environment, in circumstances that awakened the reader’s imagination. Therefore, with this “ordinary” hero in the literature of the 18th century, things still happen extraordinary adventures, extraordinary events, because for the reader of the 18th century they justified the story about an ordinary person, they contained the entertainment of a literary work. The hero's adventures can unfold in different spaces, close or far from his home, in familiar social conditions or in a non-European society, or even outside society in general. But invariably literature XVIII centuries sharpens and places, shows close up problems of state and social structure, the place of the individual in society and the influence of society on the individual.
England in the 18th century became the birthplace of the Enlightenment novel. Let us recall that the novel is a genre that arose during the transition from the Renaissance to the New Age; this young genre was ignored by classicist poetics because it had no precedent in ancient literature and resisted all norms and canons. The novel is aimed at an artistic exploration of modern reality, and English literature turned out to be particularly fertile ground for the qualitative leap in the development of the genre, which the educational novel became due to several circumstances. Firstly, England is the birthplace of the Enlightenment, a country where in the 18th century real power already belonged to the bourgeoisie, and bourgeois ideology had the deepest roots. Secondly, the emergence of the novel in England was facilitated by the special circumstances of English literature, where over the course of the previous century and a half, various genres gradually took shape. aesthetic prerequisites, individual elements, the synthesis of which on a new ideological basis gave the novel. From the tradition of Puritan spiritual autobiography, the habit and technique of introspection, techniques for depicting subtle movements came into the novel. inner world person; from the travel genre, which described the voyages of English sailors - the adventures of pioneers in distant countries, the plot based on adventures; finally, from English periodicals, from the essays of Addison and Style early XVIII century, the novel has mastered the techniques of depicting everyday customs and everyday details.
The novel, despite its popularity among all layers of readers, was considered a “low” genre for a long time, but the leading English critic of the 18th century, Samuel Johnson, a classicist by taste, in the second half of the century was forced to admit: “Works of fiction that especially appeal to the present generation, are, as a rule, those that show life in its true form, contain only such incidents that happen every day, reflect only such passions and properties that are known to everyone who deals with people.”
When the almost sixty-year-old famous journalist and publicist Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) wrote “Robinson Crusoe” in 1719, the last thing he thought about was what was coming out of his pen innovative work, the first novel in Enlightenment literature. He did not imagine that posterity would prefer this text out of the 375 works already published under his signature and earning him the honorary name of “the father of English journalism.” Literary historians believe that in fact he wrote much more, but it is not easy to identify his works, published under different pseudonyms, in the wide flow of the English press at the turn of the 17th–18th centuries. At the time of writing the novel, Defoe had a huge life experience behind him: he came from the lower class, in his youth he was a participant in the rebellion of the Duke of Monmouth, escaped execution, traveled around Europe and spoke six languages, knew the smiles and betrayals of Fortune. His values - wealth, prosperity, man's personal responsibility before God and himself - are typically Puritan, bourgeois values, and Defoe's biography is a colorful, eventful biography of a bourgeois from the era of primitive accumulation. All his life he started various enterprises and said about himself: “Thirteen times I became rich and poor again.” Political and literary activity led him to civil execution pillory. For one of the magazines, Defoe wrote a fake autobiography of Robinson Crusoe, the authenticity of which his readers were supposed to believe (and did).
The plot of the novel is based on a true story told by Captain Woods Rogers in an account of his voyage that Defoe may have read in the press. Captain Rogers told how his sailors were taken from an uninhabited island in Atlantic Ocean a man who had spent four years and five months there alone. Alexander Selkirk, mate on an English ship, distinguished violent temper, quarreled with his captain and was landed on the island with a gun, gunpowder, a supply of tobacco and a Bible. When Rogers' sailors found him, he was dressed in goatskins and “looked more wild than the horned original owners of this attire.” He forgot how to speak, on the way to England he hid in secluded places the ship was cracked, and it took time for it to return to a civilized state.
Unlike real prototype Defoe's Crusoe has not lost his humanity in twenty-eight years on a desert island. The narrative of Robinson's deeds and days is permeated with enthusiasm and optimism, the book radiates an unfading charm. Today, Robinson Crusoe is read primarily by children and teenagers as an exciting adventure story, but the novel poses problems that should be discussed in terms of cultural history and literature.
The main character of the novel, Robinson, an exemplary English entrepreneur who embodies the ideology of the emerging bourgeoisie, grows in the novel to a monumental image of the creative, constructive abilities of man, and at the same time his portrait is historically completely specific.
Robinson, son of a merchant from York, with youth dreams of the sea. On the one hand, there is nothing exceptional in this - England at that time was the leading maritime power in the world, English sailors sailed all the oceans, the sailor profession was the most common and was considered honorable. On the other hand, it is not the romance of sea travel that draws Robinson to the sea; he does not even try to join the ship as a sailor and study maritime affairs, but in all his voyages he prefers the role of a passenger paying the fare; Robinson trusts the traveler’s unfaithful fate for a more prosaic reason: he is attracted by “a rash idea to make a fortune for himself by scouring the world.” Indeed, outside of Europe it was easy to get rich quickly with some luck, and Robinson runs away from home, neglecting his father's admonitions. Robinson's father's speech at the beginning of the novel is a hymn to bourgeois virtues, the “middle state”:
Those who leave their homeland in pursuit of adventure, he said, are either those who have nothing to lose, or ambitious people eager to occupy a higher position; by embarking on enterprises that go beyond the framework of everyday life, they strive to improve matters and cover their name with glory; but such things are either beyond my power or humiliating for me; my place is the middle, that is, what can be called the highest level of modest existence, which, as he was convinced from many years of experience, is for us the best in the world, the most suitable for human happiness, freed from both need and deprivation, physical labor and the suffering that befalls the lower classes, as well as from the luxury, ambition, arrogance and envy of the upper classes. How pleasant such a life is, he said, I can judge by the fact that everyone placed in other conditions envy him: even kings often complain about the bitter fate of people born for great deeds, and regret that fate did not place them between two extremes - insignificance and greatness, and the sage speaks out in favor of the middle as the measure of true happiness, when he prays to heaven not to send him either poverty or wealth.
However, young Robinson does not heed the voice of prudence, goes to sea, and his first merchant enterprise - an expedition to Guinea - brings him three hundred pounds (characteristically, how accurately he always names sums of money in the story); this luck turns his head and completes his “death.” Therefore, Robinson views everything that happens to him in the future as a punishment for filial insubordination, for not listening to “the sober arguments of the best part of his being” - reason. And on desert island At the mouth of the Orinoco he finds himself, succumbing to the temptation to “get rich sooner than circumstances allowed”: he undertakes to deliver slaves from Africa for the Brazilian plantations, which will increase his fortune to three to four thousand pounds sterling. During this voyage, he ends up on a desert island after a shipwreck.
And here the central part of the novel begins, an unprecedented experiment begins, which the author carries out on his hero. Robinson is a small atom of the bourgeois world, who does not imagine himself outside this world and treats everything in the world as a means to achieve his goal, who has already traveled across three continents, purposefully walking his path to wealth.
He finds himself artificially torn out of society, placed in solitude, brought face to face with nature. In the “laboratory” conditions of a tropical uninhabited island, an experiment is being conducted on a person: how will a person torn from civilization behave, individually faced with the eternal, core problem of humanity - how to survive, how to interact with nature? And Crusoe repeats the path of humanity as a whole: he begins to work, so that work becomes main theme novel.
For the first time in the history of literature, an educational novel pays tribute to work. In the history of civilization, work was usually perceived as punishment, as evil: according to the Bible, God imposed the need to work on all the descendants of Adam and Eve as punishment for original sin. In Defoe, labor appears not only as the real main content human life, not only as a means of obtaining what is necessary. Puritan moralists were the first to talk about work as a worthy, great occupation, and in Defoe’s novel work is not poeticized. When Robinson ends up on a desert island, he doesn’t really know how to do anything, and only little by little, through failure, he learns to grow bread, weave baskets, make his own tools, clay pots, clothes, an umbrella, a boat, raise goats, etc. It has long been noted that Robinson is more difficult in those crafts with which his creator was well acquainted: for example, Defoe at one time owned a tile factory, so Robinson’s attempts to fashion and burn pots are described in great detail. Robinson himself is aware of the saving role of labor:
Even when I realized the full horror of my situation - all the hopelessness of my loneliness, my complete isolation from people, without a glimmer of hope for deliverance - even then, as soon as the opportunity opened up to stay alive, not to die of hunger, all my grief disappeared as if by hand : I calmed down, began to work to satisfy my immediate needs and to preserve my life, and if I lamented my fate, then least of all I saw in it heavenly punishment...
However, in the conditions of the author’s experiment on human survival, there is one concession: Robinson quickly “opens up the opportunity not to die of hunger, to stay alive.” It cannot be said that all of its ties with civilization have been cut off. First, civilization operates in his skills, in his memory, in his life position; secondly, from a plot point of view, civilization sends its fruits to Robinson in a surprisingly timely manner. He would hardly have survived if he had not immediately evacuated from the wrecked ship all food supplies and tools (guns and gunpowder, knives, axes, nails and a screwdriver, a sharpener, a crowbar), ropes and sails, bed and clothes. However, civilization is represented on the Island of Despair only by its technical achievements, and social contradictions do not exist for the isolated, lonely hero. It is from loneliness that he suffers most, and the appearance of the savage Friday on the island is a relief.
As already mentioned, Robinson embodies the psychology of the bourgeois: it seems completely natural to him to appropriate for himself everything and everyone for which no European has the legal right of ownership. Robinson’s favorite pronoun is “mine,” and he immediately makes Friday his servant: “I taught him to pronounce the word “master” and made it clear that this is my name.” Robinson does not ask himself whether he has the right to appropriate Friday for himself, to sell his friend from captivity, the boy Xuri, or to trade in slaves. Other people are of interest to Robinson insofar as they are partners or the subject of his transactions, trading operations, and Robinson does not expect any other attitude towards himself. In Defoe's novel, the world of people, depicted in the narrative of Robinson's life before his ill-fated expedition, is in a state of Brownian motion, and the stronger its contrast with the bright, transparent world of the uninhabited island.
So, Robinson Crusoe is a new image in the gallery of great individualists, and he differs from his Renaissance predecessors in the absence of extremes, in that he completely belongs to the real world. No one would call Crusoe a dreamer, like Don Quixote, or an intellectual, a philosopher, like Hamlet. His sphere is practical action, management, trade, that is, he does the same thing as the majority of humanity. His egoism is natural and natural, he is aimed at a typically bourgeois ideal - wealth. The secret of the charm of this image lies in the very exceptional conditions of the educational experiment that the author performed on him. For Defoe and his first readers, the interest of the novel lay precisely in the exceptionality of the hero’s situation, and detailed description his everyday life, his daily work was justified only by the thousand-mile distance from England.
Robinson's psychology is fully consistent with the simple and artless style of the novel. Its main property is credibility, complete persuasiveness. The illusion of the authenticity of what is happening is achieved by Defoe using such a variety small parts which, it seems, no one would undertake to invent. Taking the original incredible situation, Defoe then develops it, strictly observing the boundaries of plausibility.
The success of “Robinson Crusoe” among the reader was such that four months later Defoe wrote “The Further Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,” and in 1720 he published the third part of the novel, “Serious Reflections During Life and the Amazing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.” Throughout the 18th century different literatures About fifty more “new Robinsons” were released, in which Defoe’s idea gradually turned out to be completely upside down. In Defoe, the hero strives not to go wild, not to unify himself, to tear the savage out of “simplicity” and nature - his followers have new Robinsons, who, under the influence of the ideas of the late Enlightenment, live one life with nature and are happy with the break with an emphatically vicious society. This meaning was put into Defoe’s novel by the first passionate denouncer of the vices of civilization, Jean-Jacques Rousseau; for Defoe, separation from society was a return to the past of humanity - for Rousseau it becomes an abstract example of the formation of man, an ideal of the future.
The most perfect examples from Balzac are the novels “Lost Illusions” and “The Peasants”. In these works, society itself truly becomes the historian. In “Lost Illusions,” for the first time, the writer and the literature of that time began to see the “self-movement” of society: in the novel they began to live independently, showing their needs, their essence, and the most diverse social strata.
The provincial bourgeoisie, represented by the Cuente brothers and Father Sechard, was able to ruin and disgrace the honest, talented inventor David Sechard.
Provincial aristocrats and provincial bourgeoisie penetrate Parisian salons, borrow their methods of making a career, destroying their rivals. The Parisians themselves... are bloodless, but in a fierce struggle, states of arrogance, political, and salon intrigues gain a privileged position, thereby causing the envy and hatred of the vanquished.
Balzac shows how success is bought and sold in personal life, art, politics, and commerce. We see that only strength and unscrupulousness, which create external brilliance, are valued in this world. Humanity, honesty, talent are not needed in this society. Most notable
For the laws of social life, the story of David Sechard, a talented inventor who had to give up work on his discovery, and - especially - the poet Lucien Chardon.
This is their path - the path of loss of illusions, a characteristic phenomenon in France. Lucien is similar to the young Rastignac, but without willpower and cynical readiness to sell himself, and to Raphael de Valentin - who is carried away, but does not have enough strength to conquer this world himself.
Lucien immediately differs from David Séchard in his craving for respect and selfishness. His naivety, daydreaming, ability to fall under other people's influences lead to disaster: he actually renounces his talent, becomes a corrupt journalist, dishonorable acts and ends up committing suicide in prison, horrified by the chain of actions he committed. Balzac shows how illusions dissipate young man, who learned the inhuman laws of the modern world.
These laws are the same for both the provinces and the capital - in Paris they are more cynical and at the same time more hidden under a cloak of hypocrisy.
Balzac's novels indicate that society dooms a person to renounce illusions. For honest people this means delving into one's personal life, as happened with David Seshar and his wife Evoyou. Some heroes learn to trade their convictions and talents to their advantage.
But only those who, like Rastignac, have a strong will and are not tempted by sensuality can win. The exception is the members of the Commonwealth, to whom certain time Lucien Chardon joins. This is an association of selfless and talented servants of science, art, and public figures who live in cold attics, who live from hand to mouth, but do not renounce their beliefs.
These people help each other, do not seek fame, but are inspired by the idea of benefiting society and developing their field of knowledge or art.
The basis of their life is work. The Commonwealth is headed by Daniel D'Artez, a writer and philosopher whose aesthetic program is similar to that of Balzac himself. The Commonwealth includes the republican Michel Chrétien, who dreams of a European federation. But the author himself is aware that the Commonwealth is a dream, because of this its members are mostly depicted only schematically, the scenes of their meetings are somewhat sentimental, which is unusual for the talent of the author of “The Human Comedy”.
Balzac himself called the novel “The Peasants” a “research”; he explored the confrontation between the new nobility, which appeared during the time of Napoleon, the bourgeoisie and the peasantry, and this for him is a class that “will someday swallow the bourgeoisie, just as the bourgeoisie in its time gobbled up the nobility.”
Balzac does not idealize the peasants - however, for him they are not only petty extortionists and deceivers: they remember 1789 well, they know that the revolution did not liberate them, that all their wealth, as once upon a time, is a hoe, and that master the same, although it is now called Work. The dishonest, deceitful and shady peasant Fourchon appears before the readers as a kind of philosopher, a revolutionary at heart, who remembers the years of the revolution: “The curse of poverty, your Excellency,” he says, turning to the general, “is growing quickly and is growing much higher than your tallest oaks.” , and gallows are made from oak trees...”
The spirit of the revolution lived in the memory of the people. It is because of this that the oppressed peasant finds himself the accuser of masters who do not respect him. This is the result of the “research” carried out by Balzac in this novel.
The melodramatic ending of the work does not belong to its author, but was added at the request of the writer’s widow Evelina Ganskaya.
Having visited St. Petersburg in 1843, Balzac did not meet with any of the Russian writers; the names of A. Pushkin, N. Gogol, M. Lermontov were not known to him. Those who could have accidentally met him left poor and illiterate testimonies, in the manner of the one sent by the niece of V.K. Kuchelbecker: “We recently saw Balzac, who came to Russia for several months; no, you can’t imagine what kind of disgusting face this is. Mother noticed, and I completely agree with her, that he is similar to the portraits and descriptions that we read about Robespierre, Danton and other persons similar to them french revolution: he is short, fat, his face is fresh, ruddy, his eyes are intelligent, but the whole expression on his face has something animalistic.”
The cultural level of the “author” of the letter according to the preserved style of presentation. Official Russia expressed its rejection of the French writer even more clearly: secret police surveillance was established over him, and the books that came to him from France were subjected to lengthy and thorough checks. The attitude of critics towards Balzac was also ambiguous.
In the 30s in Russia, he was perceived mainly as an expert on the human heart, master psychologist V. Belinsky, who at first admired the works of the French novelist, seeing the writer’s skill in depicting the most complex impulses of the soul, in creating a gallery of never-repeated characters, and soon time became sharply hostile to him because of his legitimacy.”
T. Shevchenko recalls Balzac’s works in the story “The Musician”. I. Franko, in numerous articles, considered Balzac one of the greatest representatives of the realistic tradition in world literature. Lesya Ukrainka, in a letter to her brother M. Kosach at the end of 1889, submitted a detailed prospectus of works by outstanding writers, which it would be desirable to translate into Ukrainian.
In particular, she advised members of the “Pleiades” circle to translate Balzac’s novels “The Thirty-Year-Old Woman,” “Lost Illusions,” and “The Peasants.”
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- Reference. Henriette de Castries (1796-1861), marquise, then duchess, beloved of Balzac, “The Illustrious Gaudissart” (1843) is dedicated to her. If we take Balzac's own testimony on faith, his story with Madame de Castries was a tragedy that left him with incurable wounds. “I hate Madame de Castries, she ruined my life by not giving me a new loan,” he wrote. And to the unknown correspondent [...]
- The image of the miser and hoarder is not new in world literature. A similar type is depicted in the drama “The Merchant of Venice” by W. Shakespeare and in the comedy “The Miser” by J. B. Moliere. The author was led to the creation of the image of Gobsek by observations of the life of bourgeois society; certain moments of the story are autobiographical. Balzac's hero studies at the Faculty of Law at the Sorbonne and works as a clerk in a lawyer's office, […]...
- Honore de Balzac was born on May 20, 1799 in Tours. His grandfather, a farmer, had the surname Balsa, but his father, having become an official, changed it to the aristocratic one - Balzac. From 1807 to 1813, Balzac studied at the College of Vendôme, and it was here that his love for literature manifested itself. Having moved with his father to Paris in 1814, [...]
- Each of us becomes acquainted with the works of Honore Balzac at different ages. That's why they are perceived differently. After all, it is possible to comprehend all the complexities of human life only with time. However, Balzac’s “Human Comedy” belongs to those works of human genius that concern, first of all, eternal values. “The Human Comedy” by Honoré de Balzac was and still remains barely [...]
- Philosophical sketches give an idea - the most general - about the author’s attitude to creativity (“Unknown Masterpiece”), passions and the human mind (“Search for the Absolute”), reflections on the “social mover of all events” (“Shagreen Skin”). Scenes of customs in the forms of life itself recreate reality, revealing its true essence. Due to his biased portrayal of modernity, critics often called Balzac an immoral writer, to which [...]
- “Robinson Crusoe”, “Gulliver’s Travels” They are interesting because both give some idea about the world and about man, about his abilities, capabilities, behavior, perception of the world around him. These concepts are polar opposites, but both relate to Enlightenment principles. Defoe is optimistic, Swift is pessimistic. Neither choose the adventure genre, which in the 18th century was […]...
- These words belong to one of Honore Balzac’s heroes - Gobsek. Gobsek is the hero of the short story of the same name. His name became a household name, as a symbol of the unbridled desire for hoarding. The passion for hoarding led Gobsek to near insanity at the end of his life. Lying on his deathbed, he hears gold coins rolling somewhere nearby and tries to find them. “Zhivoglot”, “bill man”, “golden [...]
- Wells wrote about social changes and world cataclysms, about the cruelty of wars and colonial conquests, about the possibilities of science and the power of the human mind. Back at the beginning of the 20th century. he foresaw a great future discovery related to space exploration, interplanetary travel, wrote about the role that aviation would play, about the responsibility of scientists for the consequences of what they did scientific discoveries. Having accepted […]...
- Honore Balzac entered world literature as an outstanding realist writer. Balzac was the son of a petty bourgeois, the grandson of a peasant; he did not receive the upbringing and education that nobles give their children (the particle “de” was assigned to them). The writer set the main goal of his work “to reproduce the features of the grandiose face of his century through the depiction of the characters of its representatives.” He created hundreds, thousands […]...
- In “Père Goriot,” completed in forty days of frantic work, so much content was concentrated that its three main characters seemed cramped in the relatively small space of this novel. A former flour merchant who passionately and blindly loves his two daughters; they sold him crumbs of their daughter's attention while he could still pay, then they threw him out; they tormented him “like […]...
- A page or two of the text by Vladimir Semenovich Makanin, read for the first time, is unlikely to attract a lover of coldly rational constructions in the spirit of V. Pelevin or the brilliantly slow poetics of Sasha Sokolov. His favorite brackets are not the limit of stylistic work with a phrase. But these same brackets are also a sign of a special, immediate completeness of the statement, a “brand” sign, a “logo” of Makanin’s prose. Critics have long found a fairly accurate definition of Makanin’s [...]
- It is difficult to disagree with the words of a famous critic, and even more difficult to refute them. A person comes into this world with a clean, clear head and heart, unencumbered by the pressure of social norms, orders and stereotypes. He does not yet know such concepts as evil, betrayal, honor, nobility... All this will be embedded in his consciousness as the boundaries of the environment of influence expand. […]...
- “Human Comedy” by Balzac. Ideas, concept, implementation The monumental set of works by Honore de Balzac, united by a common concept and title - “The Human Comedy”, consists of 98 novels and short stories and is a grandiose history of the morals of France in the second quarter of the 19th century. It represents a kind of social epic in which Balzac described the life of society: the process of formation and enrichment of the French bourgeoisie, the penetration […]...
- 1. Probable reasons for the dissolute behavior of Countess Resto. 2. What goes around comes around: the consequences of sin. 3. Redemption. Never commit bad deeds, So that you don’t have to blush, burning with shame: You will repent, and yet rumor will condemn you, And the world will become small from this judgment. O. Khayyam In the story “Gobsek” O. de Balzac showed a situation very typical […]...
- The image of a miser and a hoarder is not new in world literature. A similar type is depicted in the drama “The Merchant of Venice” by W. Shakespeare in the comedy “The Miser” by J. B. Moliere. The author was led to the creation of the image of Gobsek by observations of the life of bourgeois society; certain moments of the story are autobiographical. Balzac's hero studies at the Faculty of Law at the Sorbonne and works as a clerk in a solicitor's office, where […]...
- Rolland, like other artists, was looking for a form to reveal the inner world of man. But Rolland strove to ensure that his hero was at the level of the new, revolutionary century, was not a dependent, as Proust’s heroes became, but a creator, capable of taking on the burden public responsibility. Rolland saw such heroes in Christophe, and in Cola, and in Beethoven, […]...
- Having finished the novel “Père Goriot” in 1834, Balzac came to a fundamentally important decision: he decided to create a grandiose artistic panorama of the life of French society post-revolutionary period, consisting of novels, novellas and stories related to each other. For this purpose, he includes previously written works, after appropriate processing, in “ The human comedy” – a unique epic cycle, concept and name […]...
- In world literature we know many examples when writers comprehensively depicted contemporary society, with all its shortcomings and positive features. Writers reacted sharply to the events that happened to his people, depicting them in their novels, stories, short stories and poems. Honore de Balzac - outstanding French writer XIX centuries. All his life he tried to realize [...]
- The work of Honoré de Balzac became the pinnacle of the development of Western European realism of the 19th century. Creative manner the writer has absorbed all the best from such masters artistic word, like Rabelais, Shakespeare, Scott and many others. At the same time, Balzac introduced a lot of new things into literature. One of the most significant monuments of this outstanding writer became the story “Gobsek”. In the story […]...
- The first of the mechanisms of self-awareness is the ability to recognize mental phenomena. Already in the first year of life, a child is able to realize the fact that the world lives independently of him, but it is perceived with the help of images. Thus, a person is able to realize that he is separated from the world and other people, he can highlight his own “I”. But despite the allocation [...]
- Madame Girardin's literary salon is buzzing like a beehive. How many celebrities are there! Poems flow, music sounds, debates flare up, witticisms shine. Someone's sonorous voice suddenly bursts out of the steady hum, someone's booming laughter drowns out the measured small talk. This is Balzac laughing. He stands in the center of one of the circles and says something, gesticulating furiously. He is wearing a bright blue tailcoat with gold buttons, [...]