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Pushkin. Thesis: The image of the narrator and the features of the narration in “Tales of Belkin” by A.S.

“Belkin's Stories” are built on the principle of climactic tensions with “shooting” endings.

Russian prose of the 18th century, and especially the end of the century, gravitates towards moralizing, love and adventure novels,

Pushkin's prose was a qualitatively new stage in the development of Russian literature in general and Russian prose in particular.

Pushkin became an innovator in the Boldino autumn and as the author of the cycle “The Tale of the Late Ivan Petrovich Belkin” (five stories): “The Shot”, “The Blizzard”, “The Undertaker”, “The Station Agent” and “The Young Lady-Peasant”. But can it be said that the “naked simplicity” of style characteristic of these stories is an absolute innovation in Pushkin? Even in the Lyceum passage “My Thoughts about Shakhovsky,” one is struck by Pushkin’s purely laconicism: clarity, simplicity. Thoughts and thoughts - all this is already in his letters to friends, in the unfinished story “Arap of Peter the Great”. Of course, in “Belkin’s Stories” these qualities are brought to the highest level; Pushkin assures that Belkin did not compose these stories, but only wrote them down from other people, whose initials would have been a waste of effort to decipher. The caretaker was told by titular adviser A.G.N., Shot by Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P., Undertaker by clerk B.V., Blizzard and Young Lady by maiden K.I.T. These are random people, but their relationship with the subject of the story is clearly not random. And their voice is heard, as well as the voice of Belkin and Pushkin himself.

In these stories, the reader has to deal with all the narrators at once, and he cannot remove a single one. “Reality appears in changing forms of understanding” (V.V. Vinogradov). The plot and the process of telling it itself are told (S.G. Bocharov). Pushkin's main goal is to make the very lives of ordinary people who adhere to simple, common sense speak in prose. Gogol would soon resort to the same manner as the author of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka,” stories allegedly told not by himself, but by the deacon of the Dikan Church, Foma Grigorievich, preceded by a preface by “the beekeeper Rudy Panka.”

The success of Belkin's Tales was extraordinary. Pushkin hid his authorship for a long time, and to the question of a later graduating lyceum student who adored him: “Whose stories are these?” - He answered that he didn’t know, but emphasized at the same time: the story should be written exactly like this: “briefly, simply, clearly.”

We can say that Pushkin reformed Russian prose. Karamzin’s prose was considered the best before him, but it was already outdated. Marlinsky’s prose did not have much future either - patterned, pompous, verbose.

Unlike “Little Tragedies,” where everything begins happily and ends unhappily, in “Belkin’s Tales,” on the contrary, events unfold with obstacles, troubles, and end happily. Pushkin uses romantic plots and reduces them to everyday endings, thereby wanting to say that no romantic fantasy can compete with the entertainingness of simple life situations, which it is time for literature to learn to appreciate.

The image of the ingenuous storyteller - Ivan Petrovich Belkin - is a whole event in literature. The birth of such a perspective on life will be picked up by the “natural school” and especially by Dostoevsky. And the image of Samson Vyrin in “The Station Agent”, a “little man” experiencing the tragedy of lonely old age, full of his insecurity, is continued in Gogol’s “The Overcoat”, in Dostoevsky’s “Poor People” and will become the subject of heated debate in literature for many years.

The problems of a work of art are always connected with the goal that the author sets for himself and with the genre of the work of art. Pushkin, as a transformer of Russian prose, was interested in both specific problems of Russian life and universal problems. Moreover, when developing more specific problems, Pushkin uses the genre of the short story, and more general ones - the genres of the novel and story. Among such problems it is necessary to name the role of the individual in history, the relationship between the nobility and the people, the problem of the old and new nobility (“The History of the Village of Goryukhina”, “Dubrovsky”, “The Captain’s Daughter”).

Pushkin's hero is, first of all, a living person with all his passions; moreover, Pushkin demonstratively refuses the romantic hero. Alexey from “The Young Lady-Peasant Woman” appears to have all the features of a romantic hero: “He was the first to appear gloomy and disappointed in front of them (the young ladies), the first to tell them about lost joys and about his faded youth; Moreover, he wore a black ring with the image of a death’s head.”

Pushkin's prose is characterized by a variety of plots: from the everyday descriptive “Arap of Peter the Great” to the fantastic “Undertaker” and “Queen of Spades”. The principle of depicting reality in Pushkin’s prose was objectivity. If a romantic, describing this or that event, seemed to pass it through the prism of his own imagination, thus enhancing the tragic or heroic effect of the work, then for Pushkin such a path was unacceptable. Therefore, he abandons the romantic plot and turns to everyday material. But at the same time, he does not follow the path of the authors of moralizing novels of the 18th century, sentimentalists or “didactics”; he refuses any sentimentalist plot.

: “If I had only obeyed my desire, I would certainly have begun to describe in all detail the meetings of young people, the growing mutual inclination and gullibility, activities, conversations; but I know that most of my readers would not share my pleasure with me. These details should generally seem cloying, so I’ll skip them...” (“The Young Lady-Peasant”). Thus, Pushkin, as a rule, refuses a detailed depiction of the feelings of the heroes, so characteristic of the prose of his predecessors. Pushkin is interested in life not only in any of its individual manifestations, but in all of life as a whole. That is why the plots of Pushkin’s prose are so far from the plots of the “didactics” and romantics. Most of Pushkin’s prose works tend to have an acute plot “with accumulation of weight towards the denouement”

Yu. N. Tynyanov even notes that the basis of some of Pushkin’s prose works is an anecdote (“Belkin’s Tales”, “The Queen of Spades”). But at the same time, Pushkin deliberately slows down the development of the plot, using a complicated composition, the image of the narrator, and other artistic techniques. All this is necessary to create a special tense atmosphere in the work, in which the effect of surprise is even stronger.

The conciseness of the plot presupposes the conciseness of the work itself. Indeed, Pushkin does not have large works: the largest, “The Captain's Daughter,” takes up just over a hundred pages. Most of Pushkin's prose works are characterized by clarity of composition: they are divided into chapters or these works can be easily divided into several parts, each of these parts can be perceived as a complete passage. This division is often carried out using special storytelling techniques. For example, “The Station Agent” can easily be divided into parts based on the narrator’s three meetings with the station agent Samson Vyrin. Often in Pushkin's prose one can distinguish an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction gives either the background history of the work or the characteristics of the main characters (in the first case - “Dubrovsky”, in the second - “The Young Lady-Peasant”). The conclusion always tells about the further fate of the heroes.

It has already been said that Pushkin opposed descriptiveness in prose. But nevertheless, descriptions of nature and interiors appear repeatedly in Pushkin’s prose. There is no doubt that Pushkin needs them to create a special atmosphere in the story, to characterize the hero’s state of mind. It should be noted that descriptions of nature in Pushkin’s prose always correspond to the general mood of the narrative.

“PV” (1830) is the first completed prose work of P, consisting of five stories: “The Shot”, “Blizzard”, “The Undertaker”, “The Station Agent”, “The Young Lady-Peasant”.

Innovation: In the preface “From the Publisher,” P. took on the role of publisher and publisher of Belkin’s Tales. The authorship of the stories was attributed to the provincial landowner Ivan Petrovich Belkin. I.P. Belkin, in turn, put on paper the stories that other people told him (“The Caretaker” was told to him by a titular adviser, “the shot” by a lieutenant colonel, “the undertaker” by a clerk, “blizzard” and “young lady” by a girl). Thus, P. created the illusion of the actual existence of Belkin’s manuscript, attributes authorship to him, and documents that the stories are not the fruit of Belkin’s own invention, but actually happened. P. removed himself from the narrative, transferring authorial functions to people from the provinces. Belkin unites all the storytellers and retells their stories.

In "Belkin's Stories" Belkin's compositional function is manifested in the "self-elimination" of the author from the stories (the image of the author is included only in the preface).

Belkin speaks for the entire province. His voice is the voice of the entire province. Belkin's speech typifies, or rather generalizes, the speech of the provinces. "Belkin's Tales" are built on the combination of two different views. One belongs to a person of low spiritual development, the other to a national poet. The stories had to convince of the veracity of the depiction of Russian life through documentation, references to witnesses and eyewitnesses, and most importantly, through the narrative itself. The life material that formed the basis of the stories is stories, incidents, incidents of provincial life. The events that took place in the provinces attracted Pushkin before. But usually they were narrated by the author himself. The independent “voices” of small landowners, officers, and ordinary people were not heard. Now Pushkin gives the floor to Belkin, a native of the local depths of Russia. In "Belkin's Tales" there are no people as a collective image, but characters from different social strata are present everywhere. The degree of comprehension of reality for each character is limited by his horizons: Samson Vyrin perceives life differently than Silvio, and Muromsky or Berestov - in a different way than Minsky.

It seems natural that all the stories were told by Belkin, who lived for a long time in the provinces, made acquaintances with his neighbors - landowners, was in close contact with ordinary people, occasionally went to the city on some business, and led a quiet, measured existence. It was the provincial landowner, at leisure or trying to write out of boredom, who could hear about incidents and write them down. Indeed, in the conditions of the province, such cases are especially valued, retold from mouth to mouth and become legends. Belkin's type was, as it were, put forward by local life itself.

Ivan Petrovich is attracted to poignant subjects, stories and incidents. They are like bright, quickly flashing lights in a dim, monotonous series of days of provincial life. There was nothing remarkable in the fate of the storytellers who shared the events known to them with Belkin, except for these stories.

There is another important feature of these stories. They all belong to people of the same worldview. They have different professions, but they belong to the same provincial environment - rural or urban. The differences in their views are minor and may not be taken into account. But the commonality of their interests and spiritual development is significant. It just allows Pushkin to unite the stories with one narrator - Ivan Petrovich Belkin, who is spiritually close to them.

The “stories” have a multi-stage stylistic structure. Throughout the entire space of the stories, the “play” with various styles does not disappear. This gives a special artistic polyphony to the work. For example, in “The Shot” we learn about the hero Silvio from the words of the hero himself, from the words of his antagonist, the observer-narrator.

The artistic-narrative concept of the cycle lies in the parodic opposition of Belkin's Tales to established norms and forms of literary reproduction. Belkin tries to fit his characters into certain roles, book stereotypes known to him, but at the same time he is constantly “corrected” by Pushkin. Through parody and ironic interpretation of sentimental-romantic plots, Pushkin moved towards realistic art.

Researchers are inclined to believe that the cycle of “Belkin’s Tales” is close in genre to the novel and consider it an artistic whole of the “novelized type,” although some go further, declaring it a “sketch of a novel” or even a “novel.”

If the cycle is a single whole, then it should be based on one artistic idea, and the placement of stories within the cycle should provide each story and the entire cycle with additional meaningful meanings compared to the meaning of individual stories taken in isolation.

Pushkin imposes a certain leveling on the diversity of Belkin’s stories, assigns himself the modest role of “publisher.” In these stories, the reader has to deal with all the faces of the narrators at once. He cannot throw any of them out of his consciousness. Pushkin strove for maximum objectivity, realistic depth of depiction , which explains the complex style system of Belkin's Tales.

Stories of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin" - Pushkin’s 2nd cycle. The first prose cycle he completed. He turned to prose because, firstly, he was losing popularity as a poet, and after the Decembrists there was no one to write prose. Secondly, the publication of books became widespread , fiction arose. Easy reading for relaxation. Pushkin cannot find a niche in this reading. Pushkin is trying to win back the reader. At that time, Bulgarin and Marlinsky (Bestuzhev) were thundering - fiction writers. Pushkin's poetry ceases to be in demand. Pushkin writes "PB". Belinsky writes to this: “Fairy tales and fables". He didn’t understand a damn thing! Pushkin wrote prose like poetry, which cannot be exhausted by the plot, thereby trying to set the standard for how to write prose, if you really do write it. The first example of such prose is Karamzin. And then immediately - Pushkin. But Pushkin differs from Karamzin in terms of ideology. Firstly, these stories were not written by Pushkin, but by Belkin, who was a retired military man, sat alone on his estate, he had nothing to do, he began to write. His neighbor After Belkin’s death, the estate sent them to the publisher AP. Belkin is not a professional writer; he collects stories and writes them down. Each story has an informant, and it turns out that the author is not even Belkin, but those who told him. A gallery of authors who refer to each other all the time. And it turns out that from the fact to the reader there is a huge number of authorities. And the motivation for the facts is given by the storytellers, and not by the author. There is neither truth of fact nor psychological truth. motivation. What happened to Dunya in the SS? What is the movie about? The fact is flickering and the meaning is flickering. Semantic gaps arise, which are up to the reader to fill. Pushkin published “PB” under the name of Belkin and wrote to Pletnev: “You still start a rumor in St. Petersburg that I wrote this...”.

PB heroes do not set great goals. They want happiness, but this happiness is either not given, or is given at the cost of grief. Dunya and Minsky are happy, but Vyrin became an alcoholic and died. The heroes of "Blizzard" are happy, but Vladimir is dead and forgotten. Pushkin deduces the law of life: happiness is given only at the cost of terrible losses and thus depreciates. In the world of PB, social rules. fate.

"Blizzard" is an anti-novel. Similar to Washington Irving's "The Phantom Bridegroom", where chance works for the character. Here chance works against the hero Vladimir, not to mention the fact that Burmin generally acted crazy. Fate, it turns out, is on the side of Burmin, who already has everything. This is the truth of life. Samson Vyrin, of course, is the first MCH in Russian literature, but as Devushkin will later say in “Poor People” - “This could happen to the count.”

"SS" - everything happens against the backdrop of pictures of the Prodigal Son. This is the story of the prodigal daughter. But if you can always have time to return to God the Father, then Dunya did not have time to return to her father. She is not forgiven. But God sees her return and forgives her. Pushkin is getting closer and closer to legitimate reality. Pushkin plays with the unconditionality of literary reality.

“Belkin's Tales” are conceived as a parody of the canons of romantic literature. Pushkin takes common romantic plot cliches and “turns” them around. The conflict in “The Stationary Caretaker” is deliberately banal. A military man visits the permanent yard, seduces the daughter of the station superintendent and takes her away with him. According to all the canons of romantic literature, the story must certainly end tragically. Pushkin follows this tragedy almost to the very end, intensifying the tragedy. But at the very end it turns out that Dunya is happy, she has

Children and loving husband. “The Peasant Young Lady” takes another common plot - the enmity of two families. The situation is escalated, but then also resolved in a completely non-romantic way - everything turns out to be as good as possible. In Belkin's Tales, the romantic view of reality is contrasted with real life and common sense. Pushkin ridicules the “romantic inclinations” of his heroes, contrasts them with a normal life, in which there is joy, pleasant everyday little things, and “rich estates”, and “connections”, which is not so little for a normal, fulfilling life.

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Essay on literature on the topic: Ideological and artistic originality of “Belkin’s Tales”

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Ideological and artistic originality of “Belkin’s Tales”

Federal Agency for Education

Buryat State University

Faculty of Philology

Department of Russian Literature

Allow for protection:

Head Department of Russian Literature

Doctor of Philology sciences, prof.

S.S. Imikhelova

"___"______________ 2009

The image of the narrator and the features of the narration in "Belkin's Tales" by A.S. Pushkin

(graduate work)

Scientific adviser:

Doctor of Philology Sciences, Professor S.S. Imikhelova

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER I. The image of the narrator in prose

1.2 The image of the narrator in the prose of A.S. Pushkin

CHAPTER II. Features of the narration in "Tales of Belkin" by A.S. Pushkin

2.1 The originality of the narrative in "Belkin's Tales"

2.2 Images of narrators in "Belkin's Tales"

2.3 "The Station Agent": narrative features

CONCLUSION

NOTES

LIST OF REFERENCES USED

INTRODUCTION

The prose of A.S. Pushkin is characterized by a breadth of coverage of phenomena and a variety of characters. As a prose artist, Pushkin published at the end of October 1831 “Tales of the late Ivan Petrovich Belkin.” A precious acquisition of the Boldino autumn, Belkin's Tales represent the first completed work of Pushkin's prose.

The originality and originality of "Belkin's Tales" lies in the fact that Pushkin revealed in them a simple and artless, at first glance, attitude to life. The realistic method of Pushkin the prose writer developed under conditions that required an emphatic contrast of his stories with the sentimental and romantic tradition that occupied a dominant position in the prose of this period.

This was also reflected in Pushkin’s desire to portray life as he found it in reality, to objectively reflect its typical aspects, to recreate the images of ordinary people of his time. An appeal to the life of the middle-class landed nobility ("Blizzard", "The Young Lady-Peasant"), the army environment ("Shot"), attention to the fate of the "martyr of the fourteenth class" ("Station Warden"), and finally, to the life of small Moscow artisans ( "The Undertaker") clearly demonstrates this aspiration of "Belkin's Tales". Recreating the life of his unremarkable heroes, Pushkin does not embellish it and does not hide those aspects of it that seemed subject to overcoming. The poet chooses irony as a tool for criticizing reality.

"Belkin's Tales" are interesting for researchers for their artistic device - narration on behalf of a fictional narrator.

Were the stories created as "Belkin's stories"? Is Belkin connected with “his” stories? Is Belkin a real significant quantity or is it an imaginary quantity that has no important meaning? These are the questions that make up the “Belkin problem” in Pushkin studies. No less important is the question of the whole system of storytellers, since in “Belkin’s Stories” Belkin’s compositional function is manifested in his “self-elimination” from the stories (the image of the author is included only in the preface).

The question “Why Belkin?”, asked by researchers of Pushkin’s work, arose for a long time in Russian literature and historical and literary science. And there is still no serious and satisfactory answer to this question; not because it is insoluble, but because the tradition of prejudice towards this Pushkin image is too strong (1). Since this problem is still interesting and relevant, we set the goal of the study to give a more extensive description of the concept of “storyteller of Pushkin’s stories”, from which the following follows: tasks research:

1) determine the modern literary status of the “image of the narrator”;

2) identify the specifics of the narrator’s image, his position and the positions he occupies in the text of “Belkin’s Tales”;

3) identify the features of the narrative and the images of the narrators in one of “Belkin’s Stories” - “The Station Agent.

Object of study– the originality of A.S. Pushkin’s prose.

Subject of study- a system of images of storytellers in Belkin's Tales.

Methodological basis The work was based on the works of famous domestic scientists: M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Vinogradova, S.G. Bocharova et al.

Research methods: historical-literary and structural-semantic .

Work structure: the thesis consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography of used literature.

CHAPTER I . IMAGE OF A NARRATOR IN PROSE

1.1 The content of the concept “image of the narrator” in the structure of the work

As you know, the image of the author is not a simple subject of speech; most often it is not even named in the structure of the work. This is a concentrated embodiment of the essence of the work, uniting the entire system of speech structures of the characters in their relationship with the narrator, storyteller or storytellers and through them being the ideological and stylistic focus, the focus of the whole. The image of the author usually does not coincide with the narrator in the tale form of narration. In this case, the narrator is a conventional image of the person on whose behalf the story is narrated in the work.

V.V. Vinogradov writes: “The narrator is the speech creation of the author, and the image of the narrator is a form of the author’s literary artistry. The image of the author is seen in him as the image of an actor in the stage image he creates. The relationship between the image of the narrator and the image of the author is dynamic even within one story composition, this variable value" (2). The structure of the author's image is different in different types of fiction. Thus, the story as a form of literary narration is realized by the narrator - an intermediary between the author and the world of literary reality.

The image of the narrator leaves an imprint of its expression, its style, and on the forms of depiction of the characters: the characters no longer “reveal themselves” in speech, but their speech is conveyed to the taste of the narrator - in accordance with his style in the principles of his monologue reproduction. The narrator receives his own “sociological” characteristics in the fabric of speech. Of course, for a writer, when making social-stylistic differentiation of characters, it is not necessary to follow the social-expressive stratifications of everyday, pragmatic speech. Here the question of the artist’s dependence on literary traditions, on the structural peculiarities of the language of literature comes up acutely. But in general, the fewer “socially expressive” restrictions in a literary story, the weaker its “dialectal” isolation, i.e. The stronger his attraction to the forms of a common literary language, the more acutely the moment of “writing” appears in him. And the closer the convergence of the image of the narrator with the image of the writer, the more versatile the forms of dialogue can be, the more opportunities for expressive differentiation of the speech of different characters. After all, the narrator, placed at a distant verbal distance from the author, objectifying himself, thereby leaves the stamp of his subjectivity on the speech of the characters, leveling it.

The image of the narrator, to which the literary narrative is attached, fluctuates, sometimes expanding to the limits of the image of the author. At the same time, the relationship between the image of the narrator and the image of the author is dynamic within one literary composition. The dynamics of the forms of this relationship constantly changes the functions of the main verbal spheres of the story, making them fluctuating and semantically multifaceted. The faces of the narrator and the author, covering (or rather: overlapping) and replacing one another, entering into different relationships with the images of the characters, turn out to be the main forms of organization of the plot, give its structure an intermittent asymmetrical “layering” and at the same time form the unity of the tale “subject” .

Unlike the image of the author, which is always present in any work, the image of the narrator is optional; it may or may not be introduced. Thus, a “neutral”, “objective” narration is possible, in which the author himself steps aside and directly creates pictures of life in front of us (of course, the author is invisibly present in every cell of the work, expressing his understanding and assessment of what is happening). We find this method of seemingly “impersonal” narration, for example, in Goncharov’s “Oblomov.”

More often the narration is told from a specific person; in the work, in addition to other human images, the image of the narrator also appears. This may be, firstly, the image of the author himself, who directly addresses the reader (cf. “Eugene Onegin” by A.S. Pushkin). Very often, a work creates a special image of the narrator, who acts as a separate person from the author. This narrator can be close to the author, related to him, and very far from him in character and social status. The narrator can act both as just a narrator who knows this or that story, and as an active hero of the work. Finally, the work sometimes features not one, but several narrators, covering the same events in different ways.

The image of the narrator is closer to the images of the characters than the image of the author. The narrator acts as a character and enters into relationships with the characters. The position of the narrator between the author and the characters can be different. He can be separated from the author by means of language, character traits, biographical circumstances, or he can be close to the author by these same characteristics. In this case, the image of the narrator almost merges with the image of the author. But still there cannot be a complete merging of these images. The position of the narrator's image in relation to the author's image and the characters' images can be flexible. Either the narrator retreats into the background or even finds himself “behind the scenes,” and the image of the author dominates the narrative, dictating the “distribution of light and shadow,” “transitions from one style to another,” then the image of the author retreats and the narrator comes forward, actively interacting with characters and expressing judgments and assessments that cannot be attributed to the author. Such a narrator should be interpreted only as one of the semantic and linguistic lines, which only in their entirety, in all the complexity of their interweavings, reflect the author’s position.

E.A. Ivanchikova identifies several types of narrators in works belonging to minor genres:

a) The anonymous narrator performs a “service”, compositional and informative function: in a short preface he introduces another – the main – narrator into the story and gives his characteristics.

b) A special – “experimental” – form of narration with an anonymous narrator (he is revealed using the pronouns “we”, “our”). The story is told from the position of a direct observer and is permeated with irony.

c) An anonymous narrator-observer - an eyewitness and participant in the scenes and episodes described. He gives characteristics of the characters, conveys and comments on their speeches, observes what is happening around him, expresses his judgments in a free, uninhibited form, distributes his personal assessments, and addresses the readers.

d) The narration is told on behalf of a specific (named or not) narrator, who is at the same time one of the characters in the work. Everything that happens is refracted through his consciousness and perception, he not only observes and evaluates, but also acts, he talks not only about others, but also about himself, conveys his own and other people’s statements, shares his impressions and assessments (3).

If a particular narrator is limited in his knowledge and capabilities, then both the subjective and objective author's narration conveys the point of view of an omniscient author who does not indicate and is not obliged to indicate the sources of his knowledge about the world and characters. First of all, the character’s inner life is open to him. Different types of first-person narration differ in the degree of concreteness of the narrator, the nature of the narrator’s position, the nature of the addressee and compositional design, and linguistic appearance. One of the varieties of a specific narrator is a narrator who has life experience close to the experience of the writer (for example, “Childhood”, “Adolescence”, “Youth” by L.N. Tolstoy).

The narrator’s speech and its stylistic form not only outline and evaluate the objects of artistic reality, but also create images of the narrators themselves, their social types. Thus, one can find a storyteller - an observer, merging with the character he describes, and a storyteller - an accuser and moralist, and a storyteller - a mocker and satirist, and a storyteller - an official, and a storyteller - a layman, while different “faces” of storytellers sometimes appear in one and the same work.

An open narrator is recognized by the presence in the text of the pronouns “I”, “we”, possessive pronouns “my”, “our”, and verbal forms of the 1st person. The hidden narrator, compared to the open one, owns a significantly larger space of the novel's text. The hidden narrator is “impersonal,” which brings him closer to the objective author. It is found in texts with an absent narrative self. These are texts of the main narrative, descriptive fragments, scenes. Signals of the invisible presence of the narrator are different ways of expressing the meaning of approximateness, incomplete knowledge, lack of awareness (for example, “The Overcoat” by N.V. Gogol).

Mixed systems are also possible. Usually, in an abstract story, the narrator follows the fate of an individual character, and we get to know the character. Then one character is left, attention moves to another - and again we learn sequentially what this new character did and learned.

In a story, a character may be one of the narrators, that is, in a hidden form, he may be a kind of narrative thread, in which case the author takes care to communicate only what his hero could tell. Sometimes only this moment of attaching the narrative thread to a particular character determines the entire structure of the work. Such a character leading the narrative is most often the main character of the work.

The variety of storytellers' masks corresponds to the variety of tale forms of epic narration, the variety of psychological and social types of the storytellers themselves and, accordingly, the variety of angles for illuminating objects of artistic reality, the variety of evaluative positions.

There is also a clear genre comparison of texts with the narrator: mono-subjectivity, stylistic integrity of the narrative form, and modal-evaluative unambiguity are typical for works of small genres; for large novels - the duality of the narrator, the stylistic differentiation of the corresponding texts, the distribution of visual functions between different subjects and, thanks to this, achieving certain ideological and artistic results.

1.2 The image of the narrator in the prose of A.S. Pushkin

The question of Belkin was first raised in Russian criticism by A. Grigoriev. His concept was that Belkin was presented as the bearer of the common sense of Russian society and the humble beginning of the Russian soul. This caused the opposite reaction among some critics. N.I. Chernyaev most clearly formulated Belkin’s problem in the title of his article: “Is there anything Belkin in “Belkin’s Tales”” (4)? The author's answer was negative. Following him, scientists such as A. Iskoz (Dolinin), Yu.G. denied the significance of Belkin’s image for the stories themselves. Oksman, V.V. Gippius, N.L. Stepanov and others. The main argument for these researchers was the assumption that the preface “From the Publisher”, the only evidence of Belkin’s authorship, was written later than the stories themselves. This assumption was based on Pushkin’s letter to Pletnev dated December 9, 1830, in which Pushkin reports that he is going to publish “5 stories in prose,” while mentions of Belkin appear only in a letter dated July 3, 1831, that is, much later.

Proponents of a different point of view, asserting the “Belkin principle” in “Belkin’s Tales,” were D.N. Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky, D.P. Yakubovich, M.M. Bakhtin, V.V. Vinogradov and others. The point of view of these researchers was that Belkin acts as a “type” and as a “character”: everything that is discussed in the “Tales” is told as Belkin, and not Pushkin, should have told it. Everything is filtered through Belkin's soul and viewed from his point of view. “Pushkin not only created the character and type of Belkin, but also turned into him. When this happened, there was no longer Pushkin, but there was Belkin, who wrote these stories “out of the simplicity of his soul”” (5).

V.V. Vinogradov writes: “The image of Belkin was... included in the stories later, but having received a name and social characteristics, it could no longer help but affect the meaning of the whole” (6). According to the researcher, Belkin’s invisible presence in the “Tales” themselves plays a significant role in understanding their meaning.

We are closer to the point of view of S.G. Bocharova. In his opinion, “the first persons of the storytellers... speak from the depths of the world about which the stories are told,” and Belkin plays the role of a “mediator”, with the help of which “Pushkin is identified and becomes related to the prosaic world of his stories” (7).

In the fictional prose of A.S. Pushkin's techniques for constructing characters are largely related to the form of the narrative. Thus, in the story “The Queen of Spades” - a work that marks a new, mature stage in the development of his prose and which posed the most important social problems of its time, the nature of the narrative is determined by the personality of Hermann, its central hero.

The very character of the story is determined by the personality of Hermann, its central hero, and therefore it has repeatedly caused controversy and doubt.

The creative history of "The Queen of Spades" can be traced back to 1828. An anecdote heard by chance in the summer of 1828 later became the plot of the story. The first evidence of the beginning of work on the story about the player (so, in contrast to the final text of “The Queen of Spades,” we will call the initial edition of the story, because it is unknown whether the “Queen of Spades” motif was present in it at this stage) dates back to 1832. These are two fragments of its draft edition.

One of the fragments is the beginning of the story, the initial lines of its first chapter, which is already preceded by an epigraph, known from the printed text of “The Queen of Spades” and setting the tone of light irony for the story. The content of the sketch is a description of “young people connected by circumstances” of the environment in which the action of the story was supposed to take place: the last words of the passage introduce the theme of a card game. The main thing that characterizes the style of the fragment, in contrast to the final text, is the first-person narrative, with the narrator appearing as a member of the community of young people he describes. His presence among the characters gives the narrative a touch of special authenticity, expressing itself with the accuracy of realities that speak of the time of action and the life of the St. Petersburg aristocratic youth (“Four years ago we gathered in St. Petersburg...” . Subsequently, Pushkin abandoned the descriptive accuracy of the early sketch in favor of a different type of narrative, where the author is “immersed in the world of his heroes” and at the same time distanced from it.

"The Queen of Spades" is not redirected to a specific narrator, whose personality would be directly reflected in the narrative; nevertheless, the subject of the narrative is represented here in a hidden form. However, this “image of the author” in “The Queen of Spades” is more complex, and its motivation for the narrative, which is objective in nature, is not directly revealed. The narrative combines the points of view of the “author” and the characters, intricately intertwined, although not merging together (8). The narration is so casual, so concentrated and dynamic that the description is given from the point of view of a person walking through the room, without lingering in it. The complex solution of the “image of the author” also predetermines the complexity of the composition: transitions from one sphere of consciousness to another motivate the movement of the narrative in time; the constant return to chronological segments preceding those already achieved earlier determines the peculiarities of the construction of the story.

Following the initial scene, which forms the content of the first chapter, a scene in the countess's dressing room is introduced (the beginning of chapter two), then it is replaced by a characterization of Lizaveta Ivanovna. The transition to the latter’s point of view is accompanied by a return to an earlier time (“two days after the evening described at the beginning of this story, and a week before the scene on which we stopped,” - the establishment of Lizaveta Ivanovna’s acquaintance with German, the “young engineer” until not yet called by name"). This explains the appeal to the hero of the story, whose characterization goes into a description - from his point of view - of his first meeting with Lizaveta Ivanovna: in the window of the countess's house "he saw a black-haired head, probably tilted over a book or at work. The head rose. Hermann saw a fresh face and black eyes. This minute decided his fate" (9).

The beginning of the third chapter directly continues the scene interrupted earlier: “Only Lizaveta Ivanovna managed to take off her hood and hat when the countess sent for her and ordered the carriage to be brought again” (10), etc.

"The Queen of Spades", developing the principles of Pushkin's realism outlined in "Belkin's Tales", is at the same time, to a greater extent than the latter, "romantic". The image of the hero of the story, a man endowed with “strong passions and a fiery imagination”, the mysterious story of three cards, Hermann’s madness - all this seems to be marked with the stamp of romanticism. However, both the heroes of the story and the events depicted in it are taken from life itself, the main conflict of the story reflects the most important features of Pushkin’s contemporary reality, and even the fantastic in it remains within the limits of the real.

The entire text of the story speaks of Pushkin’s negative attitude towards his hero, but he sees in him an unusual, strong, strong-willed person, obsessed with his idea and firmly on the path to a certain goal. Hermann is not a “little man” in the usual sense of the word; True, he is not rich and modest, but at the same time he is an ambitious man, paving the way to independence. This trait of his character turns out to be stronger. Hermann does not rebel against society and its conditions, does not protest against them, as Samson Vyrin does in “The Station Agent” and Evgeny in “The Bronze Horseman”; on the contrary, he himself strives to take a place in this society, to secure a position in it. He is confident in his right to this and wants to prove it by any means, but in a collision with the old world he crashes.

Showing the death of Hermann, Pushkin also thinks about the fate of that society, which in his story is represented by the old countess - the owner of the secret of three cards, personifying in the story the Russian high-ranking aristocracy of the era of its heyday. The contrast between Hermann and the most characteristic representative of the brilliant nobility of that time, his collision with her further emphasized the contrast between the position of the poor engineer and his ambitious dreams, and determined the inevitability of the tragic denouement of the story.

The final chapter of The Queen of Spades, introducing the reader to one of the high-society gambling houses, logically completes the story. Both Chekalinsky, with his constant affectionate smile, and the “society of rich players” gathering in his house show great interest in Hermann’s extraordinary game; however, they all remain completely indifferent to his death. “Nicely sponsored!” the players said. “Chekalinsky shuffled the cards again: the game went on as usual” (11).

In describing secular society, Pushkin does not resort to satire or moralization and maintains the tone of sober objectivity characteristic of his prose. But his critical attitude to the world is manifested both in this final chapter of the story, and in his attention to the fate of the poor pupil of the old countess (it is in her attitude towards Lizaveta Ivanovna that the image of the countess is directly revealed), and in the depiction of the frivolous, although not stupid, young rake Tomsky , and finally, in the funeral scene of the old countess noted by researchers

The complex content of "The Queen of Spades" cannot be reduced to unambiguous definitions. For the first time in Pushkin's completed prose we encounter such a deep development of the character of the main character. Pushkin chooses an exceptional character, solves it by means of realistic typification, excluding the traditional interpretation of the romantic hero. In “The Queen of Spades,” Pushkin sought to take an inside look at a person of a new type, the type of which he noticed in modern reality: the hero of the story hopes, through enrichment, to take a strong position at the top of the social hierarchy. Hermann’s personality is at the center of the story, and the complexity of his image therefore predetermines its understanding (12).

The story is written in third person. The narrator is not identified by a name or a pronoun, but he tells the story from within the society to which he belongs. S. Bocharov, developing the observations of V.V. Vinogradov, gives the following definition: “Speech in the third person not only narrates about the world, but seems to sound from the world about which it narrates; this Pushkin narrative speech is at the same time someone’s, a certain narrator’s, it is placed at a certain distance, as partly someone else's speech" (13). But the narrator does not always speak from himself - he often introduces the floor to the characters. The narrator finds himself in a certain relationship with the author of "The Queen of Spades", who is not indifferent to what the narrator reports. The narrator seems to become closer to the author - he is not just a storyteller, but a writer who knows how to select facts, calculate the time in a story, and most importantly, convey not only the facts, but also the conversations of the characters. The narrator in "Belkin's Tales" looks like the same writer trying to write.

But in “The Queen of Spades” it is important for Pushkin that the author be present at all times during the events described. And Pushkin needs a narrator close to the author to document his view. In the 1830s, Pushkin firmly took the position of documenting his works. That is why he needs a narrator-memoirist, a narrator-witness. This is exactly the kind of narrator who will appear in his “The Captain's Daughter.”

Thus, in Pushkin’s prose, the narrator (“The Queen of Spades”), like the narrator (“Belkin’s Tales”), acts as an intermediary between the author and the world of the entire work. But in both cases, his figure reflects the complexity and ambiguity of the author’s attitude towards the depicted. Reality in Pushkin's prose appears on its real, life scale, not complicated by romantic ideas.

CHAPTER II. FEATURES OF THE NARRATOR IN "BELKIN'S STORIES" BY A.S. PUSHKIN

2.1 The originality of the narrative in "Belkin's Tales"

Boldinskaya in the fall of 1830, on the last page of the draft manuscript of “The Undertaker,” Pushkin jotted down a list of five titles: “The Undertaker. The peasant young lady. The stationmaster. The suicide. Notes of an elderly man.” B.V. Tomashevsky considered it possible that behind the “Notes of an Elderly” are hidden “Notes of a Young Man,” in other words, that at the time of compiling the list, Pushkin intended to implement the idea of “Notes” within the framework of the planned collection (1).

Having outlined the composition of the collection, Pushkin settled on the theme of “The Caretaker” as the next one, sketched out a plan for this story to the left of the list and, apparently, at the same time noted the titles “The Peasant Young Lady” and “The Suicide” with vertical strokes, which mean, one can assume, that after “ Caretaker" these plans were next in line. When the story about the caretaker was finished, the poet once again returned to the list, crossed out the names of the two finished stories with a straight line, and crossed out the line before the item “Suicide” with a horizontal line.

There is no other information about the plan for the story “Suicide”. SOUTH. Oksman considered it likely that this name corresponded to the concept of "The Shot". Still, it seems that the above considerations allow us to make a hypothesis regarding the nature of the connection that existed between the creation of “The Caretaker” and Pushkin’s refusal to include the story of a suicide in the collection.

By the same time B.V. Tomashevsky took the first draft of the biography of Pyotr Ivanovich D. (the prototype of the future I.P. Belkin), the author of a manuscript “worthy of some attention” (2). His biography has already taken the form of a letter from a friend of the deceased. On this basis, Tomashevsky believed that the idea of Belkin's Tales could presumably be dated back to the fall of 1829 (3).

These Pushkin stories for the first time recreated the appearance of Russia in its complex social diversity, from various angles, shown not in the light of the usual moral and aesthetic criteria of noble culture, but in revealing the processes that took place behind the façade of this culture, undermined the inviolability of the entire social order of the feudal state. As N. Berkovsky notes, “Belkin’s Tales”, “although not directly and from afar, they introduce into the world of provincial, invisible mass Russia and the mass man in it, concerned about his basic human rights - he is not given them, and he seeks them” ( 4). The main thing that was new in the stories was the depiction of characters. Behind the fates of individual heroes of Pushkin's stories stands the Russia of that time, with its stagnant way of life and acute contradictions and contrasts between different layers.

"Belkin's Tales" is not a random collection of "anecdotes", but a book of stories interconnected by internal unity. This unity lies not only in the fact that they are all united by the image of their collector - the provincial landowner Belkin, but also in the fact that they collectively paint a picture of Russia, the birth of a new way of life that violates the established foundations, the inert immobility of life.

In "Belkin's Tales" Pushkin abandoned the "exceptional", intellectual hero and the narrative techniques associated with him, and instead discovered and completely exhausted the possibilities of a simple and infinitely complex form of story about "average" people and the events of their private lives.

V.V. Gippius wrote: “In Belkin’s Tales, human life acquired artistic independence, and the world of “things” sparkled with its “own light” (and not the “reflected” light of the genre, characteristic of sentimental and romantic prose of the 1800-1820s). And in The basis of this new artistic organization is the “complete removal of all moralization,” the liberation of “narrative prose from didactic ballast” (5).

A big innovation was the introduction in “Belkin’s Tales” of the image of a simple, unlucky storyteller, who, although not alien to the vain desire to be known as a writer, is, however, limited to writing down on paper certain “everyday stories.” He did not compose them himself, but heard them from other people. The result is a rather complex interweaving of stylistic manners. Each of the narrators is very different from the others, and in their own way merges with the heroes of the stories they tell. Above them all rises the image of the simple-minded Ivan Petrovich Belkin.

In "Belkin's Stories" Belkin's compositional function is manifested in his "self-elimination" from the stories (the image of the author is included only in the preface).

The role of Ivan Petrovich Belkin, the author of five Pushkin stories, has long been the subject of controversy among Pushkin scholars. As already mentioned, at one time A. Grigoriev placed Belkin at the center of Pushkin’s prose cycle, he was echoed by Dostoevsky, who believed that “in Belkin’s stories, Belkin himself is most important.” Opponents of this point of view, on the contrary, considered Belkin to be a purely compositional person, do not find “anything Belkin” in the stories, and the very unification of the stories under his name is called accidental.

The reason why Pushkin decided to publish the stories under someone else’s name is known; he named it himself in a letter to Pletnev dated December 9, 1830, when it was still planned to publish the stories anonymously. He did not want to publish the stories under his own name, as this could displease Bulgarin. The literary situation of 1830 was commented on in his time by V. Gippius: “Bulgarin, with his evil and petty pride, would, of course, perceive Pushkin’s debuts in prose as a personal attack on his – Bulgarin’s – laurels as the “first Russian prose writer” (6). In a tense in the atmosphere created in 1830 around the "Literary Gazette" and Pushkin personally, this could have been dangerous. The hoax was, however, short-lived: three years later (in 1834) "Belkin's Tales" were already included in the "Tales" published Alexander Pushkin" (7).

The life material that formed the basis of the stories is stories, incidents, incidents of provincial life. The events that took place in the provinces attracted Pushkin before. But usually they were narrated by the author himself. The independent “voices” of small landowners, officers, and ordinary people were not heard. Now Pushkin gives the floor to Belkin, a native of the local depths of Russia. In "Belkin's Tales" there are no people as a collective image, but characters from different social strata are present everywhere. The degree of comprehension of reality for each character is limited by his horizons: Samson Vyrin perceives life differently than Silvio, and Muromsky or Berestov - in a different way than Minsky.

IN AND. Korovin writes: “Pushkin sought to assure that everything told in “Belkin’s Tales” are true stories, not fictional at all, but taken from real life. He was faced with the task of motivating fiction. At this stage of Russian prose, motivating the narrative was almost obligatory If Pushkin began to explain how he learned about all the stories told in the stories, then the deliberateness of such a technique would be obvious. But how natural it looks that all the stories were told by Belkin, who lived for a long time in the provinces, made acquaintances with his neighbors - landowners, was in close contact with the common people, rarely went to the city on some business, led a quiet, measured existence. It was the provincial landowner, at his leisure or trying to write out of boredom, who could hear about incidents and write them down. Indeed, in the conditions of the province, such cases are especially valued , are retold from mouth to mouth and become legends. Belkin’s type was, as it were, put forward by local life itself" (8).

Pushkin imposes a certain leveling on the diversity of Belkin’s narratives, assigning himself the modest role of “publisher”. He is far from the narrators and from Belkin himself, maintaining a somewhat ironic attitude towards him, as can be seen from the epigraph taken from D.I. Fonvizin at the title of the cycle: “Mitrofan for me.” At the same time, the “publisher’s” sympathetic concern for the release of “stories of the deceased” and the desire to briefly tell about Belkin’s personality are emphasized. This is evidenced by a letter enclosed by the “publisher” from the Nenaradov landowner, Belkin’s neighbor on the estate, who willingly shared information about Belkin, but stated that he himself resolutely refuses to assume the title of writer, “indecent at my age.”

In these stories, the reader has to deal with all the faces of the narrators at once. He cannot get any of them out of his mind.

Pushkin strove for maximum objectivity and realistic depth of image, which explains the complex stylistic system of Belkin's Tales.

V.V. Vinogradov, in his study of Pushkin’s style, wrote: “In the very presentation and coverage of the events that make up the plots of various stories, the presence of an intermediate prism between Pushkin and the depicted reality is noticeable. This prism is changeable and complex. It is contradictory. But without seeing it, one cannot understand the style stories, it is impossible to perceive the full depth of their cultural, historical and poetic content" (9).

In “The Shot” and “The Station Agent,” the author depicts events from the point of view of different narrators, who bear strong features of everyday realism. Fluctuations in the reproduction and reflection of everyday life, observed in the style of other stories, for example, in "The Blizzard" and "The Undertaker", also lead to the assumption of social differences in the images of their narrators. At the same time, the presence in the entire cycle of stories of a common stylistic and ideological-characteristic core, which cannot always be considered as a direct and immediate expression of the worldview of Pushkin himself, is also undeniable. Along with differences in language and style, a tendency towards leveling of style is outlined, realistically motivated by the image of Belkin as a “mediator” between the “publisher” and individual storytellers. The history of the text of the stories and observations of the evolution of their style give this hypothesis complete credibility. After all, the epigraphs for the stories were drawn up later. In the surviving manuscript they are not placed in front of the text of each story, but are collected together - behind all the stories. Of course, in the process of reworking the stories, the image of the dummy author evolved. Before this image was consolidated with a name, he was only anticipated as a “literary personality” and was perceived more as a unique point of view, as a “half mask” of Pushkin himself.

All this suggests that the style and composition of the stories must be studied and understood as they are, that is, with the images of the publisher, Belkin and the storytellers. Pushkin needs storytellers who are very distant in their cultural level from the author in order to simplify and make his perception of the world and his thoughts closer to the people. And these narrators are often more primitive than those about whom they talk, they do not penetrate into their sphere of thoughts and feelings, they are not aware of what the reader guesses from the nature of the incidents described.

V.V. Vinogradov writes that the “multiplicity of subjects” of the narrative creates a multifaceted plot and a variety of meanings. These subjects, forming a special sphere of the plot, the sphere of literary and everyday “writers” - the publisher, the author, and the storytellers - are not isolated from each other as typical characters with a clearly defined range of properties and functions. During the course of the story, they either merge or contrast with each other. Thanks to this mobility and change of subjective faces, thanks to their stylistic transformations, there is a constant rethinking of reality, its refraction in different consciousnesses" (10).

Russian life had to appear in the image of the storytellers themselves, that is, from the inside. It was very important for Pushkin that the understanding of history should come not from the author, already familiar to readers, not from the position of high critical consciousness, evaluating life much deeper than the character of the stories, but from the point of view of an ordinary person. Therefore, for Belkin, all stories, on the one hand, go beyond the boundaries of his interests, feel extraordinary, and on the other, highlight the spiritual immobility of his existence. The events that Belkin narrates look “romantic” in his eyes; they have everything: love, passion, death, duels, etc. Belkin looks for and finds something poetic in his surroundings, something that stands out sharply from the everyday life in which he is immersed. He wants to join a bright, varied life. He feels a craving for strong feelings. In the stories he recounts, he sees only out-of-the-ordinary cases that exceed the power of his understanding. He just tells stories in good faith. The Nenaradovsky landowner informs Pushkin the publisher: “The above-mentioned stories were, it seems, his first experience. They, as Ivan Petrovich said, are for the most part fair and he heard from different people. However, the names in them were almost all invented by him, and the names of villages and villages were borrowed from our area, which is why my village is mentioned somewhere. This did not happen from any evil intention, but solely from a lack of imagination" (11).

Entrusting the role of the main narrator to Belkin, Pushkin, however, is not removed from the narrative. What seems extraordinary to Belkin, Pushkin reduces to the most ordinary prose of life. Thus, the narrow boundaries of Belkin’s view are expanded immeasurably. For example, the poverty of Belkin’s imagination acquires a special semantic content. The fictional narrator cannot invent or invent anything, except perhaps change people's surnames. He even leaves the names of villages and villages intact. Although Ivan Petrovich’s fantasy does not break out beyond the villages - Goryukhino, Nenaradovo. For Pushkin, this seemingly flaw contains the idea: the same cases described by Belkin are happening or can happen everywhere: exceptional cases become typical thanks to intervention in Pushkin’s narrative. The transition from Belkin's point of view to Pushkin's takes place imperceptibly, but precisely in the comparison of different literary styles - from extremely stingy, naive, to crafty, funny, sometimes lyrical. This is the artistic originality of "Belkin's Tales" (12).

Belkin puts on a generalized mask of a writer of everyday life, a narrator, in order to highlight his manner of speech and distinguish it from other narrators who are introduced into the work. This is difficult to do, since Belkin’s style merges with the general opinion to which he often refers (“They say...”, “In general, they loved him...”). . Belkin's personality seems to be dissolved in other narrators, in the style, in the words that belong to them. For example, from Pushkin’s narrative it is unclear who the words about the stationmasters belong to: either the titular adviser A.G.N., who told the story about the station superintendent, or Belkin himself, who retold it. Pushkin writes: “You can easily guess that I have friends from the venerable class of caretakers” (13). The person on whose behalf the narrator writes can easily be mistaken for Belkin. And at the same time: “For 20 years in a row, I traveled across Russia in all directions” (14). This does not apply to Belkin, since he served for 8 years. At the same time, the phrase: “I hope to publish a curious stock of my travel observations in a short time” (15) - seems to hint at Belkin.

Pushkin persistently attributed the stories to Belkin and wanted readers to know about his own authorship. The stories are built on the combination of two different artistic views. One belongs to a person of low artistic spiritual development, the other to a national poet who has risen to the heights of public consciousness and the heights of world culture. Belkin, for example, talks about Ivan Petrovich Berestov. The narrator's personal emotions are excluded from the description: " IN On weekdays he wore a corduroy jacket, on holidays he wore a frock coat made of homemade cloth" (16). But the story concerns a quarrel between landowners, and here Pushkin clearly intervenes in the story: "The Angloman endured criticism as impatiently as our journalists. He was furious and called his zoil a bear and a provincial" (17). Belkin, of course, had nothing to do with journalists; he probably did not use words such as “Anglomaniac” or “zoil” in his speech.

Pushkin, formally and openly accepting the role of publisher and refusing authorship, simultaneously performs a hidden function in the narrative. He, firstly, creates a biography of the author - Belkin, draws his human appearance, that is, clearly separates him from himself, and, secondly, makes it clear that Belkin the man is not equal, not identical to Belkin the author. For this purpose, he reproduces in the very style of presentation the author’s appearance of Belkin - the writer, his outlook, perception and understanding of life. “Pushkin invents Belkin and, therefore, also a storyteller, but a special storyteller: Pushkin needs Belkin as a storyteller - a type, as a character endowed with a stable outlook, but not at all as a storyteller with a peculiar individualized speech” (18). Therefore, Belkin’s actual voice is not heard.

At the same time, despite all the similarities between Belkin and his provincial acquaintances, he still differs from both the landowners and the storytellers. His main difference is that he is a writer. Belkin's narrative style is close to oral speech and storytelling. His speech contains many references to rumors, legends, and rumors. This creates the illusion that Pushkin himself was not involved in all events. It deprives him of the opportunity to express his literary bias and at the same time does not allow Belkin himself to interfere in the narrative, since his voice has already been given to the narrator. Pushkin “removes” what is specifically Belkin and gives the style a general, typical character. Belkin's point of view coincides with the point of view of others.

Numerous epithets, often mutually exclusive, attached by critics to Belkin raise the question: do Ivan Petrovich Belkin embody the specific traits of a person from a certain country, a certain historical period, a certain social circle? We do not find a clear answer to this question. We find only assessments of a general moral and psychological order, while the assessments are sharply opposite. These interpretations lead to two mutually exclusive positions:

a) Pushkin regrets, loves Belkin, sympathizes with him;

b) Pushkin laughs (irons or mocks) at Belkin.

2.2 Images of narrators in "Belkin's Tales"

In "Belkin's Tales" the narrator is named by last name, first name, patronymic, his biography is told, character traits are indicated, etc. But “Belkin’s Tales,” offered to the public by the publisher, were not invented by Ivan Petrovich Belkin, but “heard by him from various persons.” Each of the stories is narrated by a special character (in “The Shot” and “The Station Agent” this appears naked: the story is told in the first person); reasoning and insertions can characterize the narrator or, at worst, the transmitter and recorder of the story, Belkin. Thus, “The Caretaker” was told to him by the titular adviser A.G.N., “The Shot” by Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P., “The Undertaker” by clerk B.V., “Blizzard” and “The Peasant Young Lady” by the girl K. I.T. A hierarchy of images is built: A.G.N., I.L.P., B.V., K.I.T. – Belkin – publisher – author. Each narrator and characters in stories have certain language features. This determines the complexity of the linguistic composition of Belkin's Tales. Its unifying principle is the image of the author. He does not allow stories to “scatter” into pieces that are heterogeneous in language. The peculiarities of the language of the narrators and characters are indicated, but do not dominate the narrative. The main space of the text belongs to the “author’s” language. Against the background of general accuracy and clarity, the noble simplicity of the author's narrative, stylization of the language of the narrator or character can be achieved by few and not very prominent means. This allows Pushkin, in addition to language styles that correspond to the images of the author, to reflect in his artistic prose also language styles that correspond to the images of the characters (19).

The area of “literary” images, allusions and quotes in the style of Belkin’s stories does not form a separate semantic and compositional plan. It is merged with the “reality” that is portrayed by the narrator. Belkin's style now becomes an intermediary link between the styles of individual storytellers and the style of the “publisher”, who has put the imprint of his literary style and his writer’s individuality on all these stories. It embodies a number of transitional shades between them. Here, first of all, the question arises about the cultural and everyday differences in the environment reproduced by different storytellers, about the social differences between the storytellers themselves, about the differences in their worldview, in the manner and style of their stories.

From this point of view, “Belkin’s Tales” should fall into four circles: 1) the story of the girl K.I.T. (“Blizzard” and “Peasant Young Lady”); 2) the story of clerk B.V. ("Undertaker"); 3) the story of the titular adviser A.G.N. ("Stationmaster"); 4) the story of Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. ("Shot"). Belkin himself emphasized the social and cultural boundary between different narrators: while the initials of the three narrators indicate a first name, patronymic, and last name, the clerk is indicated only by the initials of his first and last name. At the same time, it is also striking that the stories are not arranged according to the narrators (the story of the girl K.I.T. “The Snowstorm” and “The Young Lady-Peasant” are separated). It is clear that the order of the stories was not determined by the images of the narrators.

"The Shot", in addition to the self-characterization of the narrator (Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P.), stands out sharply from a number of other stories by the homogeneity of all three story styles, which are merged in the composition of this story. The language of the narrator, Silvio and the Count - with all the expressive individual characteristic differences in their speech - belongs to the same social category. True, the count once uses an English expression (the honey moon - “the first month”), but the narrator also speaks French (“Silvio stood up and took out of the cardboard a red cap with a gold tassel with galloon”). The narrator not only knows the customs and morals of the officer environment, but has mastered its concepts of honor and courage. The entire verbal structure of his story is based on a concise and precise phrase, characteristic of a military man, devoid of emotional connotation, briefly, even rather dryly, conveying only the very essence, the external side of the events witnessed by “Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P.” Pushkin does not “equip” the lieutenant colonel’s story with any specific, “officer” vocabulary. Professional vocabulary is interspersed very rarely, imperceptibly, without sticking out against the background of the entire language system (playpen, “to put in an ace”). These jargons are on a par with card terms ("ponter", "cheat"). But the very structure of the short, somewhat abrupt phrase, the energetic intonation depicts a person who is used to commanding, who does not like to talk for a long time, who clearly formulates his thoughts. Already the first energetic phrases seem to set the tone for the entire narrative: “We were standing in a small town***. The life of an army officer is known. In the morning there is training, a riding arena; lunch with the regimental commander or in a Jewish tavern: in the evening punch and cards” (20).

At the same time, the narrator is not a limited service officer, but an educated, well-read person who understands people and has a “naturally romantic imagination.” Let us remember his story about the attitude of others towards Silvio after the incident with Lieutenant R*** and his confession: “... I could no longer approach him alone.” That is why Silvio abandoned his slander in conversations with him, and that is why he truthfully revealed the story of his past life to him alone. The lieutenant colonel often resorts to literary and bookish expressions: “Having a naturally romantic imagination, I was most strongly attached to a man whose life was a mystery and who seemed to me the hero of some mysterious story” (21). Hence the complicated syntax and book archaisms: “whom”, “that”, etc.

Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. - a sober and reasonable person, accustomed by life to look at things realistically. But in his youth, under the influence of his “romantic imagination,” he was ready to look at the world through the eyes of Marlinsky and his heroes. The image of Silvio is akin to the heroes of Marlinsky. But in realistic lighting it looks different - more lifelike and complex. The image of Silvio seems “literary” to the narrator due to his everyday exclusivity and due to the distance of his character from the character of the narrator himself. Thus, in “The Shot” the narrator acts as a character contrasting with the image of the main character (Silvio), as a narrative prism, sharpening and emphasizing the romantic reliefs of the image of Silvio with the realistic style of the everyday environment.

The narrator of "The Shot" is portrayed in almost the same colors as I.P. himself. Belkin. Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. endowed with some Belkin character traits. Some facts of his “biography” also coincide. Even the outer outline of the biography of Lieutenant Colonel I.L.P. similar to the facts of I.P.’s “life” Belkin, known from the preface. I.L.P. served in the army, retired “due to domestic circumstances” and settled “in a poor village.” Just like Belkin, the lieutenant colonel had a housekeeper who kept her master busy with “stories.” Just like I.P., the lieutenant colonel differed from those around him in his sober lifestyle.

Thus, Belkin’s style here is quite close to the lieutenant colonel’s story, albeit told in the first person and bearing a clear imprint of a military environment. This rapprochement between the author and the narrator justifies the free dramatization of the narrative style, which includes, as it were, two inserted short stories: the story of Silvio and the story of the Count. Both of these stories stand out little from the general background of the narrative. After all, both Silvio and Count B. basically belong to the same social circle of officers and nobles as the narrator himself. But Pushkin also provides the corresponding stylistic and intonation nuances here.

Silvio's own story is even more laconic and straightforward than the lieutenant colonel's story. Silvio says with almost aphoristic brevity: “They decided to cast lots: the first number went to him, the eternal favorite of happiness. He took aim and shot through my cap. The turn was behind me” (22). These short, precise phrases reveal the history of the duel. Silvio does not embellish anything and does not justify himself: “I should have shot first; but the excitement of anger in me was so strong that I did not rely on the fidelity of my hand and, in order to give myself time to cool down, I conceded the first shot to him; my enemy did not agree.” (23). Silvio's speech portrays him as a brave and at the same time selflessly enthusiastic and sincere person.

The count's story, even as conveyed by the lieutenant colonel, retains the flavor of aristocratic speech, although it is very brief and conveys only the actual episode of the duel. “Five years ago I got married. I spent the first month here in this village” (24). However, in general, the count’s story does not change the rapid intonation rhythm of the story, the laconic dynamics of the narrative that determine its style. This intonational energy and conciseness of the phrase convey the internal tension of the action, highlighting the drama of the events, emphasized by the external dryness and efficiency of the story.

The narrator, the owner of a poor village, appears in the second chapter as the same intelligent observer of life. In his story about himself and about the surrounding village life, about the count, we hear different notes than in the story about Silvio and the army environment. With sad irony he speaks about himself, about his wild shyness and timidity.

The story "Shot" is the first socio-psychological story in Russian literature; in it, Pushkin, anticipating Lermontov, his novel “A Hero of Our Time,” depicted human psychology through a multifaceted image: through his actions, through behavior, through the perception of him by others and, finally, through his self-characterization. At the same time, in this story Pushkin embodied the idea that a person’s character is not something given once and for all.

The pathos of Pushkin's story lies not only in the depth of the psychological revelation of the characters. The story is given an alarming start by the historical connections and associations it evokes.

Imbued with the pathos of the pre-Decembrist years, Pushkin’s story “The Shot,” which tells about Russian life before 1825 and the fate of three officers, conceals Pushkin’s post-Decembrist thoughts and thoughts about the typical destinies of representatives of the Russian nobility, about how their lives developed and changed throughout the first third of the 19th century in connection with the events of 1812 and 1825.

The individual originality of the style of the narrator of “The Snowstorm” and “The Young Peasant Lady” most of all depended on the methods of expressing her personal image, her ideology and her assessments. It is characteristic, first of all, that the central figures of both stories are female characters. In “The Peasant Young Lady” this is the image of Lisa-Akulina, classified as a “Darling” type with the epigraph: “You, Darling, are good in all your outfits.” This image is, according to the concept of the story, an artistic concentration of an entire social category of “county young ladies”: “What a delight these county young ladies are! Brought up in the clean air, in the shade of their garden apple trees, they draw knowledge of the world and life from books. Solitude, freedom and reading early develops in them feelings and passions unknown to our absent-minded beauties.” This peculiar literary consciousness - the literary taste of a district young lady - is the motivation for the plot in the direction of which the story of the girl K.I.T. moves.

"Blizzard", built as an "adventurous" short story, amazes the reader with unexpected turns in the narrative and the ending - the lovers turned out to be husband and wife. The art of the story here lies in the fact that the author, interrupting the thread of the narrative, switches the reader’s attention from one episode to another. And the reader does not understand until the end of the story what made Vladimir, in love and faithful to his bride, write a “half-crazy” letter and abandon her after the parents’ consent to the marriage had already been given. This letter sounds a child’s resentment towards both Marya Gavrilovna and her parents, offended pride and hopeless despair. Vladimir could not defeat either the elemental force of nature or the elemental egoistic feelings within himself.

Pushkin talks differently about each of the characters in the story, and this is the key to the ideological basis of the entire work.

Marya Gavrilovna is included in the everyday sphere and is depicted more fully than other characters. The story is devoted, at first glance, to the story of her life; but Pushkin, as we will see later, is concerned not only with her fate.

From the very beginning of the story, the description of the peaceful, complacently vacuous life of the inhabitants of the Nenaradov estate and the mention of “an era memorable to us” speaks of the author’s pointedly ironic attitude towards the serene life of the family of the good Gavrila Gavrilovich R. Throughout the story - where it comes about Marya Gavrilovna and Burmin, as well as about Nenaradov’s life and existence, the ironic intonation does not leave the author. The story about the poor army ensign Vladimir is told differently, in a different intonation. True, at the beginning of the story, when it comes to Vladimir’s love for Marya Gavrilovna, the ironic intonation does not leave the author. But the pages devoted to the description of the blizzard and Vladimir’s struggle throughout the night with the raging elements that took him by surprise are the most important moment in revealing his character, and it is no coincidence that these pages are given in a different emotional coloring. “Pushkin,” writes V.V. Vinogradov, “makes the snowstorm a recurring theme in his narrative polyphony.” Analyzing the “image” of a blizzard in each part and based on the position that “in Pushkin’s style the main narrator is multifaceted and changeable,” the scientist comes to the conclusion that “in the semantic picture of the story, the play of colors is focused on different images of a blizzard, on heterogeneous subjective reflections of one symbol " (25).

In the ironic word of the girl K.I.T. the position of an intelligent and educated person is expressed. She is “familiar with Russian and foreign literature, with Greek mythology... quotes Griboedov.” But until now, researchers have not taken into account that the narrator is precisely the “maiden,” i.e. an unmarried woman, apparently an old maid from Belkin’s circle of acquaintances. This is precisely what can psychologically explain her tone, permeated with irony, her condescending “adult” mockery of the young heroes of the story. This irony reveals the instinct of self-preservation, which helps a single woman, smart and well-read, but apparently ugly and poor and therefore without children and family, not to lose peace of mind and self-respect and even feel superior to others. The narrator’s tone also reveals her own disappointment in the romantic hopes of her youth.

The narrator is very close to the world of her characters, often thinks and feels the same way as them. This closeness is illustrated by the admixture of a sentimental-rhetorical style into the realistic narrative as the main and original form of development of the theme of the peasant young lady. Against this background, the choice of “Natalia, the Boyar’s Daughter” as reading material for lovers takes on special significance. This is a kind of literature within literature. The result is a complex system of literary reflections. In the plot of "Natalia, the Boyar's Daughter" we look for correspondences, parallels and contrasts with the love story of Akulina-Liza and Alexei. The same kind of stylistic picture can be seen in "Blizzard". And here the central character of the story is a female image, the image of Marya Gavrilovna. It is here that the separation of the style of the author and publisher from the style of the narrator (the girl K.I.T.) is outlined. The narrator in "The Snowstorm", as in "The Young Peasant Lady", is surrounded by an atmosphere of sentimental "romanticism". She is immersed in it together with Marya Gavrilovna. The image of Marya Gavrilovna is conceived as an artistic realistic embodiment of the Russian national female character. This is a Russian type of noblewoman, surrounded by the atmosphere of French novels.

The “author” emphasizes that Marya Gavrilovna perceived and built her destiny under the influence of literature. So, expecting a declaration of love from Burmin and having taken a number of “military actions” to speed up events, she was looking forward to the moment of a romantic explanation. “Blizzard” has it all: a secret escape of lovers and a romantic blizzard in the spirit of Zhukovsky’s ballads, the separation of lovers before the wedding. Marya Gavrilovna gets married by chance to an unknown person. But the story ends with the characters meeting again, in a purely everyday setting. The misunderstanding is cleared up. The young people fell in love with each other: the romantic “plot” had to be replayed again. They truly become husband and wife.

The heroine's dreams are of particular importance for understanding "Blizzard". She had two terrible dreams. The first dream is about the father and the second, which turned out to be prophetic, predicting the imminent death of the groom. It was in a dream that she discovered what she apparently felt on a subconscious level (and what her smart parents perhaps understood) - the egoistic character of Vladimir (“the soul sees what the mind does not notice”). But despite her dreams, despite her pity for her parents, Masha, true to her word to her groom, goes to church in a sleigh with Vladimir’s coachman.

The striking uniformity in the manner of reproduction, characteristic of “The Snowstorm” and “The Peasant Young Lady” and distinguishing them from other “Belkin’s Tales” into a special group, justifies the indication of the unity of the narrator’s style. Girl's style K.I.T. is not like the style of other storytellers. The literary style of the narrator here serves only as a means of characterization and realistic depiction of local life.

Different styles of literary expression are organically intertwined with different forms of cultural, historical and social ways of life. Therefore, the “literariness” of the narrator and the sentimental-romantic bent of the heroines are perceived not as a manifestation of the author’s literary imitation or the dependence of the plot on the prevailing literary patterns, but as forms of experience and understanding characteristic of the reproduced world itself, as an essential feature of the depicted reality itself. This realistic ambiguity of the literary form is created by the unique techniques of its application and the original methods of its synthesis with other narrative styles. This is where Belkin’s style comes into play as the main realistic element that transforms the plot. In relation to this style, the story of the girl K.I.T. is just a material. In the first phrase of the novella (“At the end of 1811, in an era memorable to us...”) in the word us three voices sound: the girls K.I.T., Belkin and Pushkin. The next two sentences are dominated by Belkin's voice, simply talking about the idyllic life of the good Gavrila Gavrilovich's family.

"Blizzard" is a work about the happy fate of Marya Gavrilovna and Burmin and the sad fate of Vladimir Nikolaevich. Why did their destinies turn out this way? Why does fate take away one’s beloved, deprive one of family happiness and, finally, life, while giving everything to another? How is a person’s fate determined - by chance, social laws of everyday life, fate or Providence?

The pathos of “The Peasant Young Ladies” lies in the character traits, in the originality of the cheerful, cheerful Liza of Muromskaya, whom Pushkin talks about without the slightest shade of irony or grin.

The author's "I" in "The Young Peasant Lady" is far from the personality of the narrator. This is the image of a writer who is guided by advanced reader tastes and subjects the stylistic style of the narrator to a literary and critical assessment: “...readers will relieve me of the unnecessary obligation to describe the denouement.” Against this background, all hints and indications of the writer’s “I”, of his relationship to the world of the story, are separated from the personality of the narrator and attributed to the “author.”

In "The Blizzard" there is no such sharp personal separation of the author from the narrator as in "The Peasant Young Lady". Here the narrator includes himself and his readers in the collective plural “we”: “At the end of 1811, in an era memorable to us...”, “we have already said...”.

The story told by the girl K.I.T. about a peasant young lady ends happily, but the story is prompted by the thought - enmity between landowners can be smoothed out more easily than class enmity.

The trinity of aspects of perception and image - the narrator, Belkin and the publisher - can also be found in the composition of "The Undertaker". Story style of clerk B.V. affects the professional, industrial coloring of the narrative.

The methods of depiction and assessment of reality here retain the imprint of the point of view of the original narrator. The style of the narrator (the clerk B.V.), his manner of looking at things and events, his method of grouping and evaluating objects and phenomena are used as material for literary presentation. The plot of Belkin's story is built on them. Its figurative and ideological system is based on them. But the point of view of the narrator in "The Undertaker" (as opposed to the sentimental and romantic preferences of the narrator of "Blizzard" and "Peasant Young Ladies") is the social and everyday support of the realistic style.

The social and everyday circle in which the sphere of action and image in The Undertaker is closed is distant from literary mannerisms, from the styles of sentimentalism and romanticism. In its flow, it is completely “natural” and, therefore, contrasts with those pictures and images that have developed about it, its themes and plots in world literature. That is why, in the clerk’s story, the depiction of the undertaker’s life and adventures, the presentation of the events that accompanied his housewarming, is assumed to be naive, everyday, artless and free from any literary tradition. A clerk familiar to Belkin becomes an involuntary participant in the destruction of the traditions of world literature in the methods of reproducing the images of “grave diggers.”

Understood and realized through the prism of Belkin’s transmission, the clerk’s story about the undertaker is placed in a contrasting parallel with the images of world literature, with the “grave diggers” of Shakespeare and W. Scott. The gravediggers of Shakespeare and Scott philosophize, discussing and condemning others from the standpoint of folk ethics, but Hamlet or Edgar Ravenswood reflect on themselves and their relationships to the world of other people. In Pushkin, the old undertaker faces the question of the “honesty” of his craft and his life and judges himself with the court of conscience, which takes forms accessible to his consciousness.

“The Undertaker” is a completely different work both in tone and in imagery, but it is about the same thing as Belkin’s other stories: they contain a philosophy of life. Adrian allows a deviation from the law of the Lord - and receives a kind of warning in the form of a “ball of the dead.” In the epilogue, the hero returns to everyday reality, which is not so bad. If you don’t sin, don’t wish your neighbor to die, but simply live, fulfilling your duty to God and people. Adrian's dream is a metaphor for an unrighteous life - with lies, deception. Even in his sleep, he is ashamed of his work and does not participate in the general ball of the dead. Such a life is worse than death, and therefore the hero “faints.” Also a metaphor is the awakening from the sleep of an unrighteous life (26). The shock experienced in a dream reveals to Adriyan that the living have a place among the living. The nightmare made the hero appreciate both the sunlight and the friendliness of the neighbors, heard in the chatter of the busy worker. The horror of the dream prompted the hero to pay tribute to living life and cheerfully respond to the joys of simple earthly existence, which were hidden from him behind the bustle of business, calculations of profit, petty squabbles and worries.

N.N. Petrunina writes: “The narrator distances himself from the hero, but his voice does not drown out Adrian’s voice” (27). But clerk B.V. close to the undertaker in his human type. The “incident” from the life of Prokhorov, not comprehended in all its multi-valued fullness by the hero of the incident himself, could become a fact of literature only through the mediation of the narrator, who sees and understands much more than the hero, perceives the world and the experiences of the undertaker against the broad background of cultural and historical life, while maintaining the ability to delve into the daily worries of a Moscow artisan, and into the essence of the housewarming drinks that shocked him.

Adrian’s work does not connect him with people, but, on the contrary, divides him. During the celebration of the silver wedding of the German Gottlieb Schultz, guests drink to the health of those for whom they work, and “the guests began to bow to each other, the tailor to the shoemaker, the shoemaker to the tailor... but to Adriyan - no one.” Instead, Yurko shouted: “What? Drink, father, to the health of your dead.” Everyone laughed, but the undertaker was offended. He shares his work with people, and he is aware of this: “What is it, really,” he reasoned out loud, “what makes my craft more dishonest than others? Is the undertaker a brother to the executioner?..”

The life of an undertaker, both external and internal, is inserted into the clear framework of his profession: this is evidenced by the range of his interests, his communication with other people and even the everyday details of his life: having bought a new house, he continues to huddle in the back room, and in the kitchen and the living room he placed coffins and cabinets. All this dominates the house and pushes the living out of it. That is, death displaces life. And the same thing happened in my soul. That is why there is no joy in buying this house. The pursuit of profit - profit from death - gradually crowded out life from Adrian himself: that’s why he is so gloomy. The word “house” in the story has a double meaning: it is the house where Adrian lives, and the “houses” where his clients, the dead, live. The color of the house also has its meaning. The yellow house is associated with a madhouse. The abnormality of the hero’s life is emphasized by such artistic details as a strange sign above the gate of the house, with the inscription: “Here, simple and painted coffins are sold and upholstered, old ones are also rented and repaired.”

In The Undertaker, Pushkin portrayed a representative of the lower class, outlining, as it were, the prospect of his growth, his development. A. Grigoriev saw in this story “the seed of the entire natural school.” The meaning of Pushkin's story is that its modest hero is not exhausted by his craft, that in the undertaker he sees a person. Confused by the hardships of his existence, a man rose above the trifles of life, perked up, saw the world, people and himself in this world anew. At this moment, the narrator parts with his hero, parting, making sure that the “housewarming” was not in vain for him (28).

2.3 "The Station Agent": narrative features

In the list of stories, “The Caretaker” (as it was originally called) is listed in third place, after “The Undertaker” and “The Young Peasant Lady.” But he was written second, before "The Young Lady-Peasant". This is a socio-psychological story about a “little man” and his bitter fate in a noble society. The fate of the “little”, simple man is shown here for the first time without sentimental tearfulness, without romantic exaggeration and moralistic orientation, and is shown as a result of certain historical conditions and the injustice of social relations.

In terms of its genre, "The Station Agent" differs in many ways from other stories. The desire for maximum truth in life and the breadth of social coverage dictated to Pushkin other genre principles. Pushkin here moves away from the plot sharpness of the intrigue, turning to a more detailed description of the life, environment, and especially the inner world of his hero.

In the introduction to The Station Agent, Pushkin strives to maintain the character of the narrator. Titular Councilor A.G.N., who tells the Boldino story about the caretaker, is wise with years and life experience; he remembers his first visit to the station, enlivened for him by the presence of the “little coquette,” as if it were a long time ago; With new eyes, through the prism of the changes brought by time, he sees Dunya, and the caretaker caressed by her, and himself, “who was in minor ranks,” “fightingly” taking what, in his opinion, was rightfully due him, but so excited by the kiss of the caretaker's daughter. The narrator himself characterizes himself, describing his temper: “Being young and hot-tempered, I was indignant at the baseness and cowardice of the caretaker when this latter gave the troika he had prepared for me under the carriage of the official master...”. He reports some facts of his biography (“for twenty years in a row I have traveled Russia in all directions; almost all postal routes are known to me”). This is a fairly educated and humane person, with warm sympathy for the stationmaster and his fate.

In addition, he discovers and consolidates his position in language and style. The linguistic characterization of the narrator is given in very restrained strokes. His language gravitates towards old-fashioned bookish expressions: “These much-maligned caretakers are generally peaceful people, naturally helpful, inclined towards community, modest in their claims to honor and not too money-loving...”. Only in the language of “The Station Agent” does the clerical, archaic-order stream of speech appear as a separate, broad stylistic layer; in the language of other stories, clericalisms are felt as a general normal property of book expression of that era. (“What is a stationmaster? A real martyr of the fourteenth class, protected by his rank only from beatings...”).

The narrator's language is subordinate to the "author's" language. This is determined by the hierarchy of images of the narrator and the author. The image of the author stands above the image of the narrator. And if in the aspect of the image of the narrator the discussion about the station guards is quite “serious”, then in the aspect of the image of the author it parodies the scientific presentation that the titular adviser is encroaching on. The irony accompanying this technique contributes to the subsequent switch to the “author’s” style of presentation. The simple-minded reasoning of A.G.N. turn into maxims, which from the author’s point of view can only be understood in the opposite sense. Further, the reasoning is replaced by a narration, which is already in the “author’s” channel: “In 1816, in the month of May, it happened to me to pass through the *** province, along the road now destroyed...” .

In the story, the speech style of Samson Vyrin is most different from the “author’s” language. Vyrin is a former soldier, a man of the people. In his speech, colloquial expressions and intonations are often found: “So you knew my Dunya?” he began. “Who didn’t know her? Oh, Dunya, Dunya! What a girl she was! It used to be that whoever passed by, everyone would praise her, no one will judge. The ladies gave her gifts, sometimes with a scarf, sometimes with earrings. Passing gentlemen stopped on purpose, as if to have lunch or dinner, but in fact only to take a closer look at her...”

Pushkin does not reproduce the story in full. This would lead to a fantastic form of narration, would violate the conciseness that, above all, characterizes the method of his prose. Therefore, the main part of Vyrin’s story is conveyed by the narrator, whose style and style are close to the author’s: “Then he began to tell me in detail his grief. Three years ago, one winter evening, when the caretaker was ruling a new book, and his daughter was sewing behind the partition himself a dress, the troika drove up, and a traveler in a Circassian hat, in a military overcoat, wrapped in a shawl, entered the room, demanding horses.”

The point here is not only in a more concise presentation of the caretaker’s story, but also in the fact that, narrating about him in the third person, the narrator, “titular adviser A.G.N.”, simultaneously conveys both the experiences of Samson Vyrin himself and his attitude towards his story, to his sad fate: “The poor caretaker did not understand how he himself could allow his Duna to ride with the hussar...”. This form of narration allows not only to condense the presentation of Vyrin’s story, but also to show it as if from the outside, more deeply meaningful than it was in the caretaker’s incoherent story. The narrator gives literary form to his complaints and incoherent memories: “He walked up to the open door and stopped. In the beautifully decorated room, Minsky sat in thought. Dunya, dressed in all the luxury of fashion, sat on the arm of his chair, like a rider on her English saddle ". She looked at Minsky with tenderness, wrapping his black curls around her sparkling fingers. Poor caretaker! Never had his daughter seemed so beautiful to him; he could not help admiring her." It is clear that this elegant description (“sat... like a cowgirl,” “glittering fingers”) was not given through the eyes of the caretaker. This scene is presented simultaneously in the perception of the father and in the perception of the narrator. This creates a stylistic, linguistic “polyphony”, a combination in the unity of a work of art of many linguistic parts, expressing these aspects of the perception of reality. But the final words of the narrator: “I thought about poor Duna for a long time” - conceal the same thought as the words of her father: “There are many of them in St. Petersburg, young fools, today in satin and velvet, and tomorrow, you’ll see, sweeping the street together with the naked tavern."

The escape of the caretaker's daughter is just the beginning of the drama, which is followed by a chain extended in time and transferred from one stage to another. From the postal station the action moves to St. Petersburg, from the caretaker’s house to the grave outside the outskirts. Time and space in “The Caretaker” lose continuity, become discrete and simultaneously move apart. Reducing the distance between the hero’s level of self-awareness and the essence of the plot conflict opened up the opportunity for Samson Vyrin to think and act. He is unable to influence the course of events, but before bowing to fate, he tries to turn back history and save Dunya. The hero comprehends what happened and goes to his grave from the powerless consciousness of his own guilt and the irreparability of the misfortune. In a story about such a hero and such incidents, the omniscient author, who is behind the scenes, observing events from a certain distancing distance, did not provide the opportunities that the narrative system chosen by Pushkin revealed. The titular adviser either turns out to be a direct observer of the events, or restores their missing links according to the stories of eyewitnesses. This serves as a justification for both the discreteness of the story and the continuous change in the distance between the participants in the drama and its observers, and each time the point of view from which certain living pictures of the caretaker’s story are perceived turns out to be optimal for the final goal, imparts to the story the artlessness and simplicity of life itself, the warmth genuine humanity.

The narrator sympathizes with the old caretaker. This is evidenced by the repeated epithets “poor” and “kind”. Other verbal details that emphasize the severity of the caretaker’s grief give an emotional and sympathetic coloring to the narrator’s speeches (“He waited in painful excitement...”). In addition, in the narration of the narrator himself, we hear echoes of the feelings and thoughts of Vyrin, a loving father, and Vyrin, a trusting, helpful and powerless person. Pushkin showed in his hero the traits of humanity, protest against social injustice, which he revealed in an objective, realistic depiction of the fate of the common man. The tragic in the ordinary, in the everyday is presented as a human drama, of which there are many in life.

While working on the story, Pushkin used the description of pictures with the story of the prodigal son that already existed in the text of “Notes of a Young Man”. The new idea, which adopted the most important artistic idea that was defined in the exhibition of “Notes,” was implemented in a few days. But “Notes,” along with the description of the pictures, lost the main nerve on which the idea of their plot movement was based. It is possible that Pushkin did this because the topic of the fate of a young man involved in the uprising of the Chernigov regiment and who came to the idea of suicide as the only way out of the situation was hardly possible in the censored press of the 1830s. The narrative is built on this significant artistic detail: in the biblical parable, the unhappy and abandoned prodigal son returns to his happy father; in the story, the happy daughter does not return to her unhappy lonely father.

“M. Gershenzon, in his analysis of Pushkin’s “Station Warden,” was the first to draw attention to the special significance of the pictures on the wall of the post station, illustrating the biblical story of the prodigal son. Following him, N. Berkovsky, A. Zholkovsky, V. Tyupa and others saw in the hero of Pushkin’s short stories of the real prodigal son and laid the blame for his unhappy fate on himself. Samson Vyrin did not have the humility and wisdom of the father from the Gospel parable, when he prevented Dunya from leaving home, when he called her a “lost sheep.” They refuted the opinion of those who explained the hero's tragedy by the social "general way of life", saw the reasons for the unfortunate fate of the "little man" in the social inequality of the hero and his offender Minsky.

The German Slavist W. Schmid gave his interpretation of this work. In Vyrin’s expression about Duna - “lost sheep” and Minsky’s angry cry “... why are you sneaking after me everywhere like a robber?” he discovered a connection with the parable of the good shepherd, the sheep and the wolf that “plunders” them. Vyrin appears in Schmid in the role of the gospel robber and thief who made his way into Minsky’s house - the “sheep” yard - in order to destroy and steal Dunya’s happiness” (29).

There is a further refutation of the “humanity” of the “little man” who died from his own selfish love, and the author’s idea is reconstructed: misfortune and grief are rooted in the person himself, and not in the structure of the world. Thus, the discovery of biblical allusions in the story (thanks to pictures from a biblical parable) helps to overcome the stereotype of its previous perception. And the point is not that Pushkin argues with biblical ideology, questions the indisputability of the parable, but that he is ironic about the hero’s blind, uncritical attitude to the professed clichés, about the rejection of the living truth of life.

But the ideological “polyphony” is also manifested in the fact that the author also emphasizes the social essence of the hero’s drama. The main personality trait of Samson Vyrin is fatherhood. Abandoned and abandoned, he does not stop thinking about Duna. That is why the details of the story (pictures about the prodigal son) are so significant, acquiring a symbolic meaning. That is why individual episodes are so significant, for example, the episode with the money received from Minsky. Why did he return to this money? Why did he “stop, think… and turn back…”? Yes, because he again thought about the time when he would need to save the abandoned Dunya.

The hero's paternity is also manifested in his relationships with peasant children. Already drunk, he still works with the kids, and they are drawn to him. But somewhere he has a beloved daughter, and grandchildren whom he does not know. For some people it’s time to become embittered, but he is still both a loving father and a kind “grandfather” for the peasant children. The circumstances themselves could not eradicate his human essence. Social prejudices have so distorted the human nature of all the characters that simple human relationships are inaccessible to them, although human feelings are not alien to either Duna or Minsky, not to mention the father. Pushkin speaks about this ugliness of class relations at the very beginning of the story, ironizing over the veneration of rank and certainly taking the side of the “humiliated and insulted.”

There is no literary stylization in The Station Agent. The leisurely description of the narrator’s meetings with the caretaker Vyrin emphasizes the vital truthfulness and artlessness of the story. Reality and typical situations appear in their natural, unvarnished form. The figure of such a narrator in the narrative system once again emphasizes the democratic pathos of the story - the awareness of the injustice of the social system from the point of view of a person from the people. Yes, Pushkin does not idealize Vyrin, just as he does not make Minsky a villain. His narrators (including Belkin) do not try to explain the stationmaster’s misfortune as a random cause, but state the commonness and typicality of such a situation in given social conditions.

V. Gippius noticed the main thing in Pushkin’s story: “... the author’s attention is focused on Vyrin, and not on Duna” (30). The story does not clarify whether Dunya is happy or not, having left her father’s house, whether she found her destiny or whether this destiny was not so successful. We don’t know about this, since the story is not about Duna, but about how her departure with Minsky affected her father.

The entire narrative system testifies to the multiplicity and ambiguity of points of view. But at the same time, the position of the author is felt; he is the “guarantor of the integrity” of the story and the entire cycle. This complexity of the compositional, ideological and narrative structure of Belkin's Tales marked the affirmation of realistic principles and the rejection of the monological subjectivity of sentimentalism and romanticism.

CONCLUSION

“The Stories of Ivan Petrovich Belkin” still remains a mystery. Always considered "simple", they have nevertheless become the object of constant interpretation and acquired a reputation for mystery. One of the mysteries of "Belkin's Tales" is that the narrator escapes, does not directly reveal himself anywhere, but only occasionally reveals himself.

The stories had to convince of the truthfulness of the depiction of Russian life through documentation, references to witnesses and eyewitnesses, and most importantly, through the narration itself, entrusted to Belkin. The Belkin problem has divided researchers into two camps: in one, Belkin’s artistic reality is denied, and in the other, it is recognized. Ivan Petrovich Belkin, the “author” of the stories, is an oscillation between a ghost and a face; this is a literary game; this is a person and a character, but not a character “in the flesh” and not an embodied storyteller with his own word and voice.

In his stories, Pushkin turns to the widespread form of prose storytelling at that time, which contains not so much a direct depiction of events as a story about these events. This form, associated with oral narration, presupposes a specific narrator, regardless of whether he coincides with the author or not, whether he is named or not named in the work itself. The fact that Pushkin, in the preface to Belkin's Stories, attributes each of them to a specific narrator is a kind of tribute to the traditional manner he chose; however, these narrators have a predominantly conventional meaning, having minimal influence on the construction and character of the stories themselves. Only in “The Shot” and “The Station Agent” the narration is told directly from the first person, who is himself a witness and participant in the events; the compositional solution of these stories is complicated by the fact that their main characters also act as narrators. In "The Shot" it is Silvio and the Count, whose stories complement each other; in “The Station Agent” - Samson Vyrin, whose narrative about his sad fate, begun in the form of direct speech, is then conveyed by the main narrator (in the preface to “Belkin’s Tales” he is called the titular adviser A.G.N.).

In the remaining three stories, the author's narration dominates: the dialogue in them (as in the stories mentioned above) plays a minor role and is only one of the secondary elements in the description of the actions and state of the heroes, where necessary, accompanying the speech of the conventional narrator and subordinate to it. The dialogue in “The Peasant Young Lady” is more independent, but even here it is not yet a way of directly depicting events. However, even while maintaining this traditional form of narration, Pushkin, unlike other writers in whom it promotes the author’s intervention in the narration and its subjective coloring, strives here for objectivity in the story of the events that make up the plot of his stories. This, in turn, affects the nature of these stories. .

The depiction of the life of different layers of society, the social uniqueness of the environment, which also determines the uniqueness of characters, was the new thing that Pushkin introduced into Russian literature.

The characteristics of the narrators of "Belkin's Tales" are significant for the organization of Pushkin's cycle. The semantics of romantic contrasts is replaced by semantic diversity and depth. Thanks to the development and transformation of the images of the authors, storytellers, and the entire narrative structure of the cycle, a new realistic art form, high in its aesthetic merits, is born in Pushkin’s work.

LIST OF REFERENCES USED

1) Afanasyev E.S. "Belkin's Tales" by A.S. Pushkin: ironic prose // Russian literature. – 2000. – No. 2.

2) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. - M., 1999.

3) Vinogradov V.V. About the language of fiction. - M., 1959.

5) Vinogradov V.V. On the theory of artistic speech. – M., 1971.

6) Vinokur G.O. About the language of fiction. – M., 1991.

7) Vlashchenko V.I. The riddle of the "Blizzard" // Russian literature. – 2001. – No. 1.

8) Gay N.K. The artistry of literature. Poetics. Style. – M., 1975.

9) Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. – M.-L., 1966.

10) Grigoriev A. A look at Russian literature since the death of Pushkin // Works: In 2 volumes. T. 2. - M., 1990.

11) Gorshkov A.I. A.S. Pushkin in the history of the Russian language. – M., 1993.

12) Gukasova A.G. Boldinsky period in Pushkin's works. – M., 1973.

13) Esipov V.V. What do we know about Ivan Petrovich Belkin? // Questions of literature. – 2001. – No. 6.

14) Zuev N.N. One of the pinnacles of Russian prose is "Belkin's Tale" by A.S. Pushkin. // Literature at school. – 1998. – No. 8.

15) Ivanchikova E.A. The narrator in the narrative structure of Dostoevsky’s works // Philological collection. – M., 1995.

16) Imikhelova S.S. Biblical allusions as a subject of modern literary hermeneutics. // Literature and religion: problems of interaction in a general cultural context. – Ulan-Ude, 1999.

17) Kozhevnikova N.A. Types of narration in Russian literature of the 19th-20th centuries. – M., 1994.

19) Korovin V.I. Soul-nurturing humanity. – M., 1982.

20) Kuleshov V.I. Life and work of A.S. Pushkin. – M., 1987.

21) Lezhnev A.Z. Pushkin's prose. – M., 1966.

22) Likhachev D.S. Poetics of Old Russian Literature. – L., 1971.

23) Makagonenko G.P. The work of A.S. Pushkin in the 1830s. – L., 1974.

24) Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D.N. Collection op. T.4. – M.–Pg., 1924.

25) Petrunina N.N. Pushkin's prose (paths of evolution). – L., 1987.

26) Pushkin A.S. "Belkin's Tales" // Complete. collection op.: A 10 vol. T.6. – M., 1962-1966.

27) Sazonova S.S. About Belkin and his role in "Belkin's Tales". – Riga, 1976.

28) Sidyakov L.S. Fictional prose of Pushkin. – Riga, 1973.

29) Stepanov N.S. Pushkin's prose. – M., 1962.

30) Khrapchenko M.B. The creative individuality of the writer and the development of literature. – M., 1970.

31) Chernyaev N.I. Critical articles and notes about Pushkin. – Kharkov, 1990.

32) Chicherin A.V. Essays on the history of Russian literary style. – M., 1977.

NOTES

Chapter 1

1) Makagonenko G.P. The work of A.S. Pushkin in the 1830s. – L., 1974, p.122.

2) Vinogradov V.V. On the theory of artistic speech. – M., 1971.

3) Ivanchikova E.A. The narrator in the narrative structure of Dostoevsky’s works // Philological collection. – M., 1995, p.187.

4) Chernyaev N.I. Critical articles and notes about Pushkin. – Kharkov, 1900, p.299.

5) Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky D.N. Collected works T.4. – M. - Pg., 1924, p.52.

6) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. – M., 1941, p.538.

7) Bocharov S.G. Poetics of Pushkin. – M., 1974, p. 120.

8) Sidyakov L.S. Fiction by A.S. Pushkin. – Riga, 1973, p. 101.

9) Pushkin A.S. Full collection Op.: in 10 volumes. Ed. 2nd. – M., 1956-1958. T. 6, p. 332.

10) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 333.

11) Ibid., vol. 8, p. 252.

12) Sidyakov L.S. Fiction by A.S. Pushkin, p. 188.

13) Bocharov S.G. Poetics of Pushkin, p.114.

Chapter 2

1) Pushkin A.S. Full collected works in 10 volumes. T. 8, p. 581.

2) Ibid., vol. 8, p. 581.

3) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 758.

4) Gukasova A.G. Boldinsky period in Pushkin's works. – M., 1973, p. 68.

5) Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. - M.-L. 1966, p.238.

6) Ibid., p.240.

7) Ibid., p.240.

8) Korovin V.I. Soul-nurturing humanity. - M. 1982, p.86.

9) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. - M. 1999, p.601.

10) Ibid., p.607.

11) Pushkin A.S. Complete, collected. op. T. 6, p.81.

12) Korovin V.I. Soul-Nursing Humanity, p.94.

13) Pushkin A.S. Full collection op. T. 6, p.97.

14) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 115.

15) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 89.

16) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 93.

17) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 95.

18) Korovin V.I. Soul-Nursing Humanity, p.94.

19) Gorshkov A.I. All the richness, strength and flexibility of our language, p.143.

20) Pushkin A.S. Belkin's stories // Complete. collection cit.: In 10 volumes. T.6, p.32.

21) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 88.

22) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 93.

23) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 95.

24) Ibid., vol. 6, p. 95.

25) Vinogradov V.V. Pushkin's style. - M. 1946, pp. 455-459.

26) Zuev N.N. One of the peaks of Russian prose "Belkin's Tale" by A.S. Pushkin // Literature at school. - 1998. - No. 8, p. 30.

27) Petrunina N.N. Pushkin's prose. - L. 1987, p. 99.

28) Ibid., p. 100.

29) Quote. By: Imikhelova S.S. Biblical allusions as a subject of modern literary hermeneutics // Literature and religion: problems of interaction in a general cultural context. – Ulan-Ude, 1999, pp. 43-44.

30) Gippius V.V. From Pushkin to Blok. – M. – L., 1966, p. 245.

Pushkin. Thesis: The image of the narrator and the features of the narration in “Tales of Belkin” by A.S.

Essay on literature on the topic: Ideological and artistic originality of “Belkin’s Tales”

Other writings:

"Belkin's Tales" are interesting for researchers for their artistic device - narration on behalf of a fictional narrator.

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