Did Gogol manage to convey the meaning of the work of the overcoat? The meaning of the overcoat image in the story of the same name by Gogol

A post that will be interesting to my mother, probably, will not be interesting to everyone else, although there is something to discuss here☺

We have an ancient story in our family about how Masha (that's me) wrote an essay based on the work of M. Yu. Lermontov “Mtsyri”, it was called “Happiness in the understanding of Mtsyri”. I wrote outright nonsense, but among this nonsense, there was one phrase that everyone laughed at, and I thought it was then a genius: "Happiness is a loose concept," and it doesn't matter that the authorship did not belong to me. Well, mom, I re-read "Mtsyri" and wrote a new composition :)

Since this essay is not fiction and I do not expect that they will evaluate me, I will try to write it briefly and to the point.

Happiness in Mtsyri's understanding is a free life in all its manifestations. Until those happy three days, he did not live, existed. Is it possible to call life an aimless existence? After all, this is how it was, for a boy who was taken prisoner as a child. In the monastery he was a novice, not a monk, that is, his life is an existence in confinement. He had nothing to call his own, and he did not know himself. He was sad about his homeland, which he did not remember, about his mother and father, whom he did not know, he dreamed of love, which he had never known! And now three days of the longed-for freedom, whatever happens in these three days, whatever he sees, experiences - happiness! Even a deadly fight with a mighty leopard because he is free!

But I am also interested in something else. Lermontov wrote this work shortly before his death, as if anticipating it, he chose the epigraph also difficult: "Having tasted, I have tasted a little honey, and I'm dying" from the "First Book of Kings" of the Bible. Its meaning is that a person, not knowing all life in its diversity, will soon die. Whether Lermontov wrote about himself, we are unlikely to know whether he regretted that he did not have time to learn much in life - too ... but the fact that the epigraph, reflecting the main idea of ​​the poem, makes the work relevant for all time is indisputable.
After all, life is made up of a series of events that, like a spectrum of colors, reveal its different facets.

But for some reason I don't remember being told this then, at school. If I were now sitting in that lesson, at the first desk, I would like to hear not reflections on what happiness is in the understanding of Mtsyri, but questions that would prompt me to think about what happiness is in my understanding. Maybe then, I would not be so afraid to take risks, make mistakes, sometimes act recklessly and not be afraid of defeat, because Mtsyri was not afraid to run away into the unknown in order to experience feelings that were previously unknown to him. Maybe then I would have understood much earlier that without pain, disappointment, and most importantly, mistakes, you cannot find out about what you are capable of. And, finally, this is the only way to find your happiness, having experienced pain, disappointment, having lost something, thereby finding yourself.

Unfortunately, I found out about this much later :)
That's it, I wrote the essay, closed the gestalt, so to speak :))))

For those who have read this far. What is happiness for you? What would you write about?))

"Mtsyri" is a romantic poem by M. Yu. Lermontov. The plot of this work, its idea, conflict and composition are closely related to the image of the protagonist, with his aspirations and experiences. Lermontov is looking for his ideal hero-fighter and finds him in the image of Mtsyri, in which he embodies the best features of the progressive people of his time.

Mtsyri is a person thirsting for life and happiness, striving for people who are close and dear in spirit. Lermontov paints an exceptional personality, endowed with a rebellious soul, a powerful temperament. Before us appears a boy, doomed from childhood to a dull monastic existence, which was completely alien to his ardent, fiery nature. We see that from a very young age Mtsyri was deprived of everything that makes up the joy and meaning of human life: family, loved ones, friends, homeland. The monastery became a symbol of captivity for the hero, life in it Mtsyri perceived as captivity. The people around him - the monks were hostile to him, they could not understand Mtsyri, They took away the boy's freedom, but they could not kill the desire for her.

One involuntarily draws attention to the fact that at the beginning of the poem the author only outlines the character of the hero. The external circumstances of the boy's life only slightly reveal the inner world of Mtsyri. Talking about the “painful illness” of a captive child, his physical weakness, M. Yu. Lermontov emphasizes his endurance, pride, distrust, “mighty spirit” that he inherited from his ancestors. The character of the hero is fully revealed in his confession to the monk, which forms the basis of the poem.

The agitated monologue of the dying Mtsyri introduces us to the world of his innermost thoughts, secret feelings and aspirations, explains the reason for his escape. It's simple. The thing is that “the soul of a child, the fate of a monk,” the young man was possessed by a “fiery passion” for freedom, a thirst for life, which called him “into that wonderful world of troubles and battles, where rocks hide in the clouds, where people are free, like eagles ”. The boy wanted to find his lost homeland, to find out what real life is, “is the earth beautiful”, “for the will or prison, we will be born into this world”:

I've seen others

Fatherland, home, friends, relatives.

But I didn’t find

Not only sweet souls - graves!

Mtsyri also strove to know himself. And he was able to achieve this only in the days spent in the wild:

You wanna know what i did

In the wild? Lived - and my life

Without these three blissful days

Was 6 sadder and darker

Your impotent old age.

During the three days of his wanderings, Mtsyri became convinced that a man was born free, that he “could have been in the land of fathers not of the last daredevils”. For the first time a world was revealed to the young man, which was inaccessible to him within the monastery walls. Mtsyri pays attention to every picture of nature that appears to his gaze, listens attentively to the polyphonic world of sounds. And the beauty and splendor of the Caucasus simply dazzle the hero, in his memory "lush fields, hills covered with a crown of trees growing all around", "mountain ranges, whimsical, like dreams." Brightness of colors, variety of sounds, splendor of the infinitely blue vault in the early morning - all this richness of the landscape filled the hero's soul with a feeling of merging with nature. He feels that harmony, unity, brotherhood, which he was not given to know in the society of people:

The garden of God bloomed all around me;

Plants rainbow outfit

Kept traces of heavenly tears

And the curls of the vines

Curled up, flaunting among the trees ...

But we see that this delightful world is fraught with many dangers. Mtsyri had to experience fear of “the threatening abyss on the edge”, and thirst, and “suffering of hunger”, and a mortal fight with a leopard. Dying, the young man asks to be transferred to the garden:

By the radiance of a blue day

I'll get drunk for the last time.

The Caucasus is also visible from there!

Perhaps he is from his heights

He will send me a farewell hello ... Lermontov shows that in these last minutes for Mtsyri there is nothing closer to nature, for him the breeze from the Caucasus is his only friend and brother.

At first glance, it may seem that the hero has been defeated. But this is not the case. After all, he was not afraid to challenge his monastic existence and managed to live his life exactly as he wanted - in struggle, search, in the pursuit of freedom and happiness. Mtsyri wins a moral victory.

Thus, the happiness and meaning of the life of the protagonist of the poem lies in overcoming the spiritual prison, in the passion for struggle and freedom, in the desire to become the master, not the slave of fate.

In the image of Mtsyri, Lermontov reflected the real features of the best people of the epoch of the 30s of the XIX century, tried to force his contemporaries to abandon passivity, apathy, indifference, glorified the inner freedom of man.

"Overcoat"- the story of Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol. Included in the cycle "Petersburg Stories". The first publication took place in 1842.

About the story itself:

· Bashm has no words of his own: he rewrites, but says ... that ... "Leave me, why are you offending me?" against the background of this inarticulateness it sounds so clear, we hear the inner voice of the hero and the author's sermon of compassion and brotherhood. But Bashm is not deprived of this inner voice, saying “this, really, absolutely that ...”, he does not continue, because it seems to him that he “ I've already said everything". The hero is opposed to the whole world in this way: he does not notice anything, everything does not matter to him, he lives in these letters and his thoughts, this is a powerful incomprehensible dimension, separated from ordinary life!

· In the first edition of the story (1839), it had a different title: "The Story of an Official Stealing an Overcoat" (3, 446). It indisputably follows that the innermost ideological core of the story reveals itself in its fantastic epilogue - in the posthumous rebellion of Akaki Akakievich, his revenge on the “significant person” who neglected the despair and tearful complaint of the robbed poor man. And just like in "The Tale of Kopeikin", the transformation of a humiliated person into a formidable avenger for his humiliation is correlated in "The Overcoat" with what led to December 14, 1825. In the first edition of the epilogue of "short stature", a ghost, recognized by everyone as the deceased Akaki Akakievich, "looking for some kind of lost overcoat and, under the guise of his, stripping all overcoats from all shoulders, without disassembling the rank and rank of all overcoats," finally taking possession of the overcoat of "a significant person "," Became taller and even [wore] an enormous mustache, but ... soon disappeared, heading straight to the Semyonov barracks ”(3, 461). "An enormous mustache" is an attribute of a military "face", and the Semyonov barracks is an allusion to the mutiny of the Semyonovsky regiment in 1820. Both leads to Captain Kopeikin and makes him see in him the second version of Bashmachkin's titular adviser. In this regard, it becomes obvious that the overcoat itself is not just a household item, not just an overcoat, but a symbol of bureaucratic society and rank.

· And the fact that "the poor story gets a fantastic ending" is Gogol's fantasy, again. The splash of this world.

· It is very difficult, sophisticated, written about the simplest, for example: “But if Akaky Akakievich looked at anything, he saw all his clean, even handwriting lines, and only if, from nowhere, the horse's muzzle was placed on his shoulder and blew a whole wind on her cheek with her nostrils, then he only noticed that he was not in the middle of the line, but rather in the middle of the street. " This wind is emphasized, in the place where it was robbed, the wind generally blew from four sides. Can this be compared to Lear's storm? Not a bad idea in my opinion.

· As Dostoevsky said in one of his articles, Gogol was a "colossal demon" who "made us a terrible tragedy out of an overcoat that was missing from an official."

About her influence:

Petersburg tales, especially the Overcoat, were of great importance for all subsequent Russian literature, the assertion of social humanism and "natural" direction in it. Herzen considered the Overcoat to be a colossal work of Gogol. And Dostoevsky is credited with the famous words: We all came out of Gogol's Overcoat.

Gogol develops here the theme of the "little man" outlined by Pushkin in The Station Keeper, and the theme of the Overcoat is continued and developed by Dostoevsky's novel Poor People (1846). In general, the "little man" is a very important type for Dostoevsky, for Chekhov, and for all Russian literature.

Again comparison and about the impact:

· The description of Petersburg in "The Overcoat" is very similar to the description of Petersburg by Dostoevsky: o small people dissolve in a crowded crowd o parallel there are streets where it is light at night as in day, where generals and others like them live, and streets on which slop is poured directly from the windows where shoemakers and other artisans live o if we remember how Raskolnikov's clothes and dwellings are described, we will find a lot in common Next to him are even those who are usually called "little ones" - both Pushkin's Semyon Vyrin, who had a wife and daughter, and Makar Devushkin of Dostoevsky, who corresponded with his beloved Varenka, are people of a larger category who managed to attract someone's heart, shield a share of the living space in which they also mean something. Akaki Akakievich does not mean anything to anyone - the only "nice friend" who "agreed to go along the road of life with him ... was none other than the same greatcoat ...". (M. Epstein "Prince Myshkin and Akaki Bashmachkin - to the image of a scribe") · By the way, in this article Epstein says that Myshkin is also a passionate calligrapher. It is very interesting when you consider what is above - about your own and not your own words. And your world. In general, what we read in Dostoevsky's, we compare with that - everything will almost fit)) · The little man in Chekhov's, Chervyakov from "Death of an Official", who sneezed at the state general in the theater, apologized and apologized to him, and then finally, yelled and he died. The petty personality can be both comical and tragic. A very typical type for the Russian mentality in principle. (Probably because of the long serfdom, because of the bureaucratic hierarchy, because of poverty and the opposition of a small person who does not influence anything and whom no one hears to a large and complex world). And it was Gogol who was able to represent him so fully.

Sources:

IRL, volume two; ZhZL about Gogol; Emets D.A. “What feelings did Akaki Bashmachkin have with his greatcoat?” Briefley - the content of the Poor People; M. Epshtein "Prince Myshkin and Akaki Bashmachkin - to the image of a scribe"

History of creation

Gogol, according to the Russian philosopher N. Berdyaev, is "the most mysterious figure in Russian literature." To this day, the writer's works are controversial. One of these works is the story "The Overcoat".

In the mid-30s. Gogol heard an anecdote about an official who lost a gun. It sounded like this: there was one poor official who was a passionate hunter. He saved up for a long time for a gun, which he had long dreamed of. His dream came true, but while sailing on the Gulf of Finland, he lost it. Returning home, the official died of frustration.

The first draft of the story was titled "The Tale of an Official Stealing an Overcoat." In this version, some anecdotal motives and comic effects were seen. The official bore the surname Tishkevich. In 1842 Gogol completes the story and changes the hero's surname. The story is being printed, completing the cycle of "Petersburg Tales". This cycle includes stories: "Nevsky Prospect", "The Nose", "Portrait", "Carriage", "Notes of a Madman" and "Overcoat". The writer worked on the cycle between 1835 and 1842. The stories are combined in a common place of events - St. Petersburg. Petersburg, however, is not only a place of action, but also a kind of hero of these stories, in which Gogol paints life in its various manifestations. Usually writers, talking about St. Petersburg life, illuminated the life and characters of the capital's society. Gogol was attracted by petty officials, artisans, beggar artists - "little people". Petersburg was not chosen by the writer by chance, it was this stone city that was especially indifferent and merciless to the "little man". This topic was first discovered by A.S. Pushkin. She becomes the leading one in the work of N.V. Gogol.

Rod, genre, creative method

In the story "The Overcoat" one can see the influence of hagiographic literature. It is known that Gogol was an extremely religious person. Of course, he was well acquainted with this genre of church literature. Many researchers have written about the influence of the life of the Monk Akaki of Sinai on the novella "The Overcoat", among whom are well-known names: V.B. Shklovsky and G.P. Makogonenko. Moreover, in addition to the striking external similarity of the fate of St. Akaki and the hero Gogol traced the main common points of the plot development: obedience, stoic patience, the ability to endure various kinds of humiliation, then death from injustice and - life after death.

The genre "Overcoat" is defined as a story, although its volume does not exceed twenty pages. It received its specific name - a story - not so much for its volume as for its enormous, which you cannot find in any novel, semantic richness. The meaning of the work is revealed by some compositional and stylistic techniques with the extreme simplicity of the plot. A simple story about a beggar official, who invested all his money and soul in a new overcoat, after the theft of which he dies, under the pen of Gogol found a mystical denouement, turned into a colorful parable with a huge philosophical implication. "The Overcoat" is not just an accusatory satirical story, it is a wonderful work of fiction that reveals the eternal problems of being, which will not be lost either in life or in literature as long as humanity exists.

Sharply criticizing the dominant system of life, its inner falsity and hypocrisy, Gogol's work prompted the idea of ​​the need for a different life, a different social order. The "Petersburg stories" of the great writer, including "The Overcoat", are usually attributed to the realistic period of his work. Nevertheless, they can hardly be called realistic. The sorrowful tale of the stolen greatcoat, according to Gogol, "unexpectedly takes on a fantastic ending." The ghost, in which the deceased Akaky Akakievich was recognized, tore off the greatcoats from everyone, "without disassembling rank and rank." Thus, the ending of the story turned it into a phantasmagoria.