"Family Thought" - based on the novel "Anna Karenina". "Family Thought" (based on the novel "Anna Karenina") I. Checking homework

He said that his task was to make this woman only miserable and not guilty. S. Tolstaya After finishing work on the novel War and Peace, Lev Nikolaevi became interested in the problems of family and marriage. The reality around him gave a lot of material about family life, and Tolstoy began work on a new novel, Anna Karenina. The theme of the family put forward in the first place turned out to be interconnected with social, social, philosophical issues, the work gradually grew into a major social novel, in which the writer reflected his contemporary life. The plot is simple, even banal. A married woman, mother of an eight-year-old child, is carried away by a brilliant officer. But everything is simple only at first glance. Anna suddenly realized that I cannot deceive myself, she dreams of love, that love and life are synonymous for her. At this decisive moment, she does not think about anyone except Alexei Vronsky. The inability to deceive, the sincerity and truthfulness of the heroine involve her in a serious conflict with her husband and the society in which she lives. Anna compares her husband to a soulless machine, calls him an evil machine. Karenin tests all feelings with the norms established by the state and the church. He suffers from his wife's betrayal, but in a very peculiar way, he wants to shake off the dirt with which she splashed him in her fall, and continue on his way of an active, honest and useful life. He lives with his mind, not his heart. It is his rationality that prompts the path of cruel revenge on Anna. Aleksey Aleksandrovich Karenin separates Anna from her beloved son Serezha. The heroine has to choose, and she takes a step towards Vronsky, but this is a disastrous path, it leads to an abyss. Anna did not want to change anything in her life, it was rock that turned everything. She follows the path prepared for her, suffering and torment. Love for the abandoned son, passion for Vronsky, protest against the false morality of society were intertwined into a single knot of contradictions. Anna is unable to solve these problems. She wants to get away from them. Just live happily: love and be loved. But how unattainable for her is simple human happiness! Talking with her brother's wife, Anna confesses: You must understand that I love, it seems, equally, but both are more than myself, two creatures Seryozha and Alexei. Only these two creatures I love, and one excludes the other. I cannot connect them, but this is one thing I need. And if this is not, then all the same. All, all the same ... Anna realizes with horror that passionate love alone is not enough for Vronsky. He is a man of society. He wants to be useful, to achieve people and prominence. Quiet family life is not for him. For the sake of this Man and his ambitious plans, she sacrificed everything: peace, position in society, her son ... Anna understands that she has driven herself into a dead end. The writer is still in the epigraph: Vengeance is mine and I will repay him, that his heroine should not be judged by secular bigots, but by the Creator. In the novel, this idea is confirmed more than once. Anna's old aunt says in a conversation with Dolly: They will be judged by God, not we. Koznyshev, in a conversation with Vronsky's mother, asserts: It is not for us to judge, Countess. Thus, Tolstoy contrasted state and religious legality and secular morality, which asserted evil, lies and deceit, the wisdom of the biblical saying taken for the epigraph. Originally, the author wanted to portray a woman who lost herself, but was not guilty. Gradually, however, the novel grew into a broad, revealing canvas showing the life of post-reform Russia in all its diversity. The novel presents all strata of society, all classes and estates in the new socio-economic conditions, after the abolition of serfdom. Speaking about Anna Karenina, Tolstoy showed that she is worried only about purely problems: love, family, marriage. Not finding a decent way out of this situation, Anna decides to leave this life. She throws herself under the train, as life in her current position has become unbearable. Unwillingly, Tolstoy passed a harsh sentence to society with its deceitful sanctimonious morality, which drove Anna to suicide. In this society there is no place for sincere feelings, but only for established rules that can be circumvented, but hiding, deceiving everyone and yourself. Society rejects a sincere, loving person like a foreign body. Tolstoy condemns such a society and the laws it has established.

Anna Karenina

After finishing work on the novel "War and Peace" Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy "got carried away" by the problems of family and marriage. The surrounding reality of that time provided a lot of material about family life, and Tolstoy began work on a new novel "Anna Karenina".

The theme of the family, put forward at the beginning, turned out to be interconnected with social, philosophical issues - the work gradually grew into a major novel, in which the writer reflected his contemporary life. The world of goodness and beauty in Anna Karenina is much more closely intertwined with the world of evil. Anna Karenina is an encyclopedic novel. An entire era with its hopes, passions, worries. For Tolstoy, real life is a person's passionate desire and ability to live the life of all people, a common life and every single human life. Only such a life for Anna Karenina seems to be real.

The author of the novel paints his heroine as a married woman, the mother of an eight-year-old son, rather adorable and charming. Anna Karenina is a wonderful image of a whole, spontaneous woman who lives with feeling. In her movements there is decisiveness and grace that amazes herself. Anna, a strong and cheerful person. She is endowed with the most valuable, from the point of view of Tolstoy, human gift: the gift of communication, openness to everyone, understanding everyone and empathy in the literal sense of the word, that is, the ability to share feelings with other people. This creates the poetic world of Anna. Anna Karenina embodies the image of a person created for great love, but who has comprehended the laws of reality that destroyed her.

Anna made the impression that she was unlike a socialite or the mother of an eight-year-old son, but rather resembled a twenty-year-old girl in flexibility of movements, freshness and the animation that was established on her face, beating out now in a smile, now in her eyes, if not for her serious, sometimes sad expression an eye that amazed and attracted Kitty.

She seemed to many, and even to herself wanted to seem quite happy, in reality she was deeply unhappy.

The theme of loneliness in love permeates the entire novel. The whole history of the relationship between Anna and Vronsky is also dedicated to her. The love of Anna and Vronsky is doomed in the novel from the very beginning and this is preceded by a bad omen - the death of the watchman under the wheels of the train, the prototype of the death of the heroine, the death of love. So already the very acquaintance of Anna with Vronsky is colored by the thought of death. And the love story turns out to be a death story. The closeness established between Vronsky and Anna is portrayed by Tolstoy as murder.

With Vronsky, she has an idea of \u200b\u200bherself, as about loving woman, with Karenin - as the impeccable mother of their son, and, about the once faithful wife. Anna wants to be both one and the other at the same time.

The meeting with Vronsky decided Anna's fate. No matter how hard Anna tried upon returning home, to live as before, this was no longer given to come true. Love for Vronsky forced her to reconsider all her views on her married life: "... I realized that I could no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, that I am not guilty, that God made me such that I need to love and live." The inability to deceive other people, sincerity and truthfulness involve her in a difficult conflict with Alexei Aleksandrovich Karenin and secular society. Karenin's fate is undoubtedly tragic, and much in it makes him feel sorry for him. He suffers from his wife's infidelity, but in a very peculiar way. He tries to "shake off the dirt with which she splashed him in her fall," and continues to follow his path of an active, honest and useful life. He lives with his mind, not his heart. His rationality prompts the path of cruel revenge on Anna. Alexey Aleksandrovich Karenin separates Anna from her beloved son Serezha. In a semi-conscious state, she says, referring to Karenin: - “I am still the same ... But there is another in me, I am afraid of her - she fell in love with that one, and I wanted to hate you and could not forget about the one that was before ... That is not me. Now I am real, I am all ... ”The heroine has to choose, and she makes her choice towards Vronsky, but this is a destructive path that can only lead her to the abyss. She follows the path prepared for her, suffering and torment. Love for his beloved son, passion for Vronsky, protest against her by secular society were intertwined into a single knot of contradictions. Anna is unable to solve these problems. She wants to get away from them. She wants to live happily: to love and be loved. But simple human happiness is not attainable for her!

Vronsky passionately fell in love with Anna, this feeling filled his whole life. He protects Anna in front of the world, takes on the most serious obligations in relation to his beloved woman. In the name of love, he sacrifices his military career: he retires and, contrary to secular concepts and morals, leaves with Anna abroad. The more Anna gets to know Vronsky, the more she begins to love him. Despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, he was not quite happy ... Attempts to engage in politics, books, painting did not give results, and, in the end, the solitary life in an Italian city seemed boring to him; it was decided to go to Russia.

The connection between Anna and Vronsky was forgiven him, but not Anna. The houses and societies in which she had previously been a welcome guest became closed to her. Her former acquaintances turned away from her. The whole society that Anna faced was hypocritical. With every turn difficult fate she became more and more convinced of this. She was looking for honest, uncompromising happiness. Around myself I saw lies, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, open and hidden debauchery. And Anna is not judging these people, but these people are judging Anna. Anne's old aunt says to Dolly: "God will judge them, not us." Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, having met with Vronsky's mother, in response to Anna's condemnation, says: "It is not for us to judge, Countess."

Karenin could not and did not want to understand what was going on in Anna's soul, so Vronsky was very far from this. Loving Anna, he always forgot what constituted the most painful side of his relationship to her - her son with his questioning, disgusting, as it seemed to him, look. Having lost a son for herself, Anna remained only with Vronsky. She sacrificed everything for him and his ambitious plans: peace, position in society, son. Consequently, her attachment to life was reduced by half, since her son and Vronsky were equally dear to her. Here is the answer to why she now began to cherish Vronsky's love so much. For her, it was life itself. But Vronsky, with an egoistic nature, could not understand Anna. Anna was with him and therefore interested him little. Between Anna and Vronsky now more and more misunderstandings, conflicts, disputes arose. Moreover, formally, Vronsky, like Karenin earlier, was right, and Anna was wrong. With each departure of Alexei Vronsky, Anna Karenina was tormented by doubts about his loyalty.

The last meeting of Dolly and Anna, as it were, sums up the life of both. Talking to Dolly, Anna confesses: “You must understand that I love, it seems, equally, but both are more than myself, two creatures - Seryozha and Alexei. Only these two creatures I love, and one excludes the other. I cannot connect them, but this is one thing I need. And if this is not, then all the same. All, all the same ... ”The fate of the two heroines as two opposite versions of the fate of Russian women. One resigned herself and therefore is unhappy, the other, on the contrary, dared to defend her happiness and is also unhappy.

She lost everything that she aspired to and that she gained, the surrounding reality appeared before her in all its terrible ruthless appearance, forcing her to step onto the station platform. By her death, she wanted to punish Vronsky for her torment, experiences, suffering: “There! - she said to herself, looking into the shadow of the carriage, at the sand mixed with coal, with which the sleepers were filled, - there, in the very middle, and I will punish him and get rid of everyone and myself. "

Leo Tolstoy devoted ten of the most difficult years in the life of Russia after the abolition of serfdom to "family affairs", and these ten years were perhaps the happiest for him. The writer put into the concept of a family not only a close circle of people, relatives and in-laws, but also his former serfs. He believed that he was morally responsible for this "big family." The writer builds a school, teaches peasant children and writes textbooks for them, methodological developments for other teachers. In addition, during this period of his life, he married Sofya Andreevna. It can be safely asserted that the "family thought" then took possession of the mind of the writer.
Therefore, Tolstoy in the seventies of the nineteenth century conceived the idea of \u200b\u200breflecting this idea in literary work... IN Yasnaya Polyana he fruitfully worked on the novel Anna Karenina about the life of contemporary society. The writer built the composition of the work on the juxtaposition of two plot lines: Anna Karenina's family drama is depicted in direct opposition to the life and well-being of the young landowner Konstantin Levin, who has considerable mental strength to fight for family happiness as an hourly compromise for the sake of general agreement. In the image of Levin, we find so many similarities with the writer himself that he can be considered a conventional portrait of Tolstoy the landowner and caring father of the family. Levin is close to both the writer's lifestyle and his convictions, demeanor in dealing with people and neighbors, and even the psychology of perceiving domestic troubles.
The book turned out to be dynamic, easy to read, as if written in one breath. The apparent simplicity of the syllable of the novel "Anna Karenina" obviously comes to Tolstoy after the experience of teaching in his own rural school, for which he specially wrote "folk stories." Tolstoy wants his thoughts to reach the widest circle of readers, and not become the property of only a select few. The criticism of that time accused the writer, as they say, of deliberately "commercializing" the novel: a love story, simple and intelligible language contributed to the extraordinary popularity of the novel among readers. In fact, in addition to the “family thought”, which also includes the families of Steva Oblonsky, Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, Levin himself, and the exciting “love affair” of Vronsky and Anna Karenina, the novel contains many other narrative layers and themes: from the position of an artist-painter in a society with the personal tragedy of creativity to the fashionable "nihilism", the victim of which fell Levin's brother, dying of consumption.
The second most important thing runs through the whole novel "people's thought". The writer contrasts the meaning of the existence of the "educated estate" deep truth peasant life. Moreover, he clearly exaggerates the moral purity of the common people in comparison with the "licentious" customs of the local nobility and the higher officials. Levin and Anna, the main spokesmen for "popular thought" and "family thought," allow themselves to neglect the conventions and laws of their contemporary life. Anna, in front of the shocked public, leaves her old husband for a young lover, and Levin, not in words, but in fact, acts as an ardent opponent of the serf system, a supporter of capitalist relations in agriculture.
But if Levin, with the flourishing of his landlord economy and family happiness, manages to prove the correctness of his convictions, then Anna Karenina turns out to be crushed by fate in the literal and figurative sense of the word.

Anna Karenina has occupied the writer's creative thought for more than four years. In the process of artistic implementation, its original concept has undergone radical changes. From a novel about an "unfaithful wife", which at first bore the names "Two Marriages", "Two Couples", "Anna Karenina" has turned into a major social novel, reflecting an entire era in the life of Russia in vivid typical images.

At the beginning of 1870, in the creative mind of Tolstoy, there was a plot about a married woman "from high society, but who lost herself", and she was supposed to look "only miserable and not guilty." Numerous ideas and plans that occupied the writer then kept distracting him from this plot. Only after writing The Prisoner of the Caucasus, publishing the ABC and the final decision to refuse to continue the "Peter's novel", Tolstoy returned to the family plot that arose more than three years ago.

From the letters it is clear that Tolstoy himself thought his new work had been roughly completed in the spring of 1873. In fact, however, the work on the novel turned out to be much longer. New characters, new episodes, events, themes and motives were introduced. The image of the title heroine was reworked and rethought, the individual characteristics of other characters were deepened and the emphasis in the author's assessment was shifted. This significantly complicated the plot and composition, led to a modification of the genre nature of the novel. As a result, the work stretched out for a whole four years - until the middle of 1877. During this time, twelve editions of the novel were formed. In January 1875, the publication of Anna Karenina in the Russian Bulletin magazine began, and in 1878 the novel was published as a separate edition.

Initially, the work was thought of as a family and everyday novel. In a letter to N. Strakhov, Tolstoy says that this is his first novel of this kind. The statement is not accurate: Tolstoy's first experience in the genre of a family novel, as you know, was "Family Happiness". The main, basic idea that Tolstoy loved and strove to artistically embody in his new novel was "family thought". It arose and took shape at an early stage of the creation of "Anna Karenina". This thought determined the theme and content of the novel, the relationship between the characters and the essence of the novel's conflict, the dramatic tension of the action, the main plot line and the genre form of the work. The atmosphere surrounding the heroes was intimate and intimate. The social space of the novel looked extremely narrow.

Tolstoy soon felt that within the framework of the family plot, he was cramped. And, continuing to develop the same plot situation - about a "woman who lost herself," Tolstoy gave the story of the intimate experiences of the heroes a deep socio-philosophical meaning, an important topical public sound.

Tolstoy always responded to the demands of modernity with extraordinary sensitivity. In the previous epic novel, there was only the "secret presence of modernity"; the novel "Anna Karenina" is fiercely modern in terms of material, problems and the whole artistic concept. As the novel plot unfolds with increasing intensity, Tolstoy “captures” and introduces into the narrative many questions that worried both the author and his contemporaries. These are not only family relationships, but also social, economic, and civil, and generally human. All the most important aspects and phenomena of our time in their real complexity, entanglement and mutual cohesion are fully and vividly reflected in Anna Karenina. Each of the families depicted in the novel is naturally and organically included in the life of society, in the movement of the era: the private life of people appears in close connection with historical reality and in its causation.

In its final form, Anna Karenina became a socio-psychological novel, which, however, retains all the qualities and genre features of a family romance. Being a multi-problem work, the novel "Anna Karenina" acquired the features of a modern epic - a comprehensive narrative about the fate of the people as a whole, about the state of Russian society in a difficult, critical period of existence, about the future of the country, nation, Russia.

The time of action in Anna Karenina is synchronous with the time of the creation of the novel. This is a post-reform era, even more precisely: the 70s of the XIX century with an excursion into the previous decade. This is a period of strongly shaken and "overturned" Russian social reality, when the end of Russia's patriarchal immobility came.

Tolstoy expressively and aptly defined the essence of the radical changes that have taken place and have taken place in the words of Konstantin Levin: "... we now have, when all this has turned upside down and is just getting it right, the question of how these conditions will be met is only one important question in Russia. ".

Tolstoy's heroes live and act at the very beginning of this period, when life raised before them "all the most difficult and insoluble questions." Neither the writer himself, nor his double Levin, nor the other heroes of Anna Karenina had any clear idea of \u200b\u200bthe answer to them. There was much that was unclear, incomprehensible and therefore alarming. One thing was visibly visible: everything had moved from its place, and everything was in motion, on the road, on the way. And the image of the train, which appears more than once in the novel, symbolizes the historical movement of the era. In the running and rumbling of the train - the noise, rumbling and impetuous running of time and epoch. And no one knew whether the direction of this movement was correctly determined, whether the destination station was chosen correctly.

The crisis, a turning point after the reform era appears in Tolstoy's novel not only as a historical and social background, against which characters appear graphically clearly "drawn" and rich in realistic colors, dramatic narrative shots run and a tragic denouement of the main conflict occurs, but this is a living, objectively given reality, in which the heroes are constantly immersed and which everywhere and everywhere surrounds them. And since they all breathe the air of their era and feel its "tremors", each one has a characteristic imprint of "shaken" time - anxiety and anxiety, self-doubt and distrust of people, a presentiment of a possible catastrophe.

The era was reflected more in the emotions of the heroes of the novel than in their minds. Tolstoy, in all its complexity, completeness and artistic truth, recreated the social, moral and family-everyday atmosphere saturated with thunderstorms, which, sometimes explicitly and directly, sometimes indirectly and hidden, affects the state of mind of his heroes, their subjective world, psyche and warehouse thoughts, on the general moral character of people. Hence the intensity of emotions and the intensity of human passions that the most significant heroes of "Anna Karenina" live with, their sharp reaction - positive or negative - to what is happening in life, the confusion of their relationship.

While rereading Eugene Onegin, Leo Tolstoy thought about what would happen to the heroine if she cheated on her husband. So, "thanks to the divine Pushkin", the idea of \u200b\u200b"Anna Karenina" was born. At the very beginning of work on the novel, Tolstoy, I think, wanted to "whip" his heroine for breaking the sacred bonds of family marriage. But over the four years in which the novel was written (1873-1877), the attitude towards the image he created changed dramatically: yes, Anna Karenina retreated from her sacred duties of mother and wife, but she had no other choice. Anna got married without knowing love, and Karenin held a high position and was a brilliant party. Smart, well-mannered, educated, busy with important state affairs, he hardly bothered her. The birth of a son brought something new into her life, granting the great happiness of motherhood. But this was not enough for Anna, she wanted full-fledged female happiness. Even reading was not a pleasure, because "she too wanted to live herself." The meeting with Vronsky changed her life. His sincere, passionate, all-consuming love for her could not remain unanswered. Anna does not give up immediately. Her spiritual world is bifurcated. She tries to convince herself that she should live in the old way, but nothing comes of it. There is no strength to pretend any longer. Previously, she tolerated her husband, even respected him, but now she hates. Love for Vronsky prevailed over everything else, and Anna goes towards her happiness - and her death, for happiness is now inseparable from unhappiness. The path that Anna took after meeting with Vronsky leads her to a break with her husband, with secular society and, finally, with Vronsky himself. Karenin announced to her that she was a criminal wife and mother, and demanded that outward decency be observed. But external decency worries Anna least of all. In the soul of Anna Karenina, there is a constant struggle between the duty of a mother and the feeling of a loving woman. To leave everything as it was before is to lose Vronsky, to go to a loved one is to lose a son. Anna's suffering was aggravated by the fact that she lost faith in Vronsky's boundless love for herself. But she continued to love him endlessly - to love and suffer. The thought of death originated in Anna's soul already before childbirth. The dying woman's most passionate desire was to get forgiveness from Karenin for herself and for Vronsky, to reconcile her husband and lover. And Karenin forgave them both. Before her death, Anna wants to connect what she could not connect in life. She has associated with Vronsky the idea of \u200b\u200bherself as a loving woman, with Karenin - as an impeccable mother of their son and a once faithful wife. She wants to be both one and the other at the same time. In a semi-conscious state, she says, referring to Karenin: “I am still the same. But there is another in me, I am afraid of her - she fell in love with that one, and I wanted to hate you and could not forget about the one that was before. That is not me. Now I am real, I am all. " "All" - that is, both the one that was before, before meeting Vronsky, and the one that she became later. Only dying Anna could feel happy. But then she was not destined to die. She had not yet had time to experience all the suffering that befell her. After the birth of the girl, Karenin agrees to everything, even to the continuation of the relationship between his wife and Vronsky, "just not to shame the children, not to lose them and not to change their position." But Anna cannot live in an atmosphere of "lies and deception." She goes to Vronsky, goes abroad with him, but even there she does not find happiness and peace. Vronsky is bored of idleness, weighed down by his position, Anna even more so. And most importantly, a son remained in her homeland, in separation from whom she could not feel happy. Returning to Russia, Anna becomes convinced that she has no future. The stage in the theater makes her desperate. She sees lies, hypocrisy and bigotry around. But this sanctimonious and, in general, depraved society judges her! To be at the highest social level, to be respected by everyone and suddenly find yourself in the position of a fallen woman! This is probably impossible to survive. But even more difficult trials await Anna. First, she was deprived of the right to see her son, whom she loved so much and who loved her so much. Secondly, her relations with Vronsky became extremely complicated. Only the love of her son and the love of Vronsky were tied to Anna's life. Having lost the opportunity to see her son, Anna places all her hopes on Vronsky, she especially needs his love now. She became the only meaning of her life. Anna cannot live without love. She does not find this love, and a charming, intelligent, sincere woman in her feelings, “seeking and giving happiness,” kills herself. Why? Because she had no other means to protect her human dignity. M. Tsvetaeva was right when she advised girls not to succumb to passion, like Anna Karenina, "for whom there was nothing else left from the fulfillment of all desires but to lie on the rails."

Introduction …………………………………………………… 3

I. The creative concept of the novel

1. History of creation ……………………………………… .5

2. Predecessors of the work …………………………… ..11

1. The concept of "family" in the work of Tolstoy …………… ..16

2. Development of the theme of family and home in the novel ……. ……… ..... 18

III. The meaning of the novel ……………………………………… 31

Conclusion ……………………………………………… .33

References ……………………………………… .35

Appendix 1 …………………………………………… .37

Introduction

goal this study: to reveal the reflection of "family thoughts" in the novel by Leo Tolstoy "Anna Karenina".

To achieve the goal of the work, it is necessary to decidetasks:

Study critical literature on the novel;

Consider artistic identity the novel "Anna Karenina"

Reveal the manifestation of the hypothesis "family thought".

The study examined the works and articles of famous writers who study the life and work of Leo Tolstoy: NN Naumov, EG Babayev, KN Lomunov, V. Gornaya and others.

So in V. Gornaya's article "Observations on the novel" Anna Karenina "" in connection with the analysis of the work, an attempt is made to show the adherence to Pushkin's traditions in the novel.

In the works of Babaev E.G. the originality of the novel, its plot and compositional line are analyzed.

Bychkov S.P. writes about polemics in the literary environment of that time, caused by the publication of Leo Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina.

The work consists of an introduction, three chapters, a conclusion, a bibliography, an appendix.

In 1878, the article "Karenina and Levin" was published in MM Stasyulevich's journal Vestnik Evropy. The author of this hundredwere A. V. Stankevich, brother of the famous philosopher and poet N. V. Stankevich. He argued that Tolstoy wrote instead of odesleg or two novels. As a "man of the forties", Stankevich openly adhered to the Old Testament concepts of "the rulesnom »genre. He ironically called "Anna Karenina" a novel "a novel of wide breath", comparing it with medieval multivolume narratives that are notwhen they found "numerous and grateful readers." Since then, the philosophical and literary taste has been "purified" so much that "indisputable norms" have been created, the violation of which is not in vain for the writer.

Anna's rebellion against the false morality of the world turns out to be fruitless. She becomes a victim not only of her conflict with society, but also of what is in herself from this very society ("the spirit of lies and deceit") and with which her own moral feeling cannot be reconciled. The tragic feeling of her guilt does not leave her. Reflecting on her relationship with Vronsky, Anna clearly and frankly formulates the very essence of the contradiction, the tragic insolubility of which predetermines all the unbearableness of her situation: “If I could be anything but a mistress passionately loving only his caresses; but I cannot and do not want to be anything else. "

The origins of Anna's tragedy are not only in external obstacles, but also in herself, in the nature of her passion, in the impossibility of avoiding reproaches of conscience. The central problem for the novel is examined using the example of several married couples: Anna - Karenin, Dolly - Oblonsky, Kitty - Levin.

Anna Karenina is a novel that has enslaved the minds of an entire generation, provided topics for controversy and reflected the social era.

I. Creative concept

1. History of creation

Happy is he who is happy at home

L.N. Tolstoy

The largest social novel by L.N. Tolstoy in the history of classicalrussian and world literature- "Anna Kare nina" - has in the most essential, namely in ideasenrichment of the original idea, a creative story typical of the great works of the great writer.

The novel was begun under the direct influence of Pushkin, and in particular his unfinished artnatural excerpt "Guests gathered at the dacha"in the V volume of Pushkin's works published by P. Annenkov. “Somehow after work, wrote Tolstoy in an unsent letter to N. Strakhov, took this volume of Pushkin and, as always (it seems the 7th time), reread everything, unable to tear himself away, and seemed to be reading it again. But more than that, he seemed to have resolved all my doubts. Not only Pushkin before, but nothing I seem to have never admired so much. Shot, Egyptian nights Captain's daughter... And there is an excerpt "Guests were going to the dacha." I involuntarily, unintentionally, without knowing why and what will happen, forthought faces and events, began to continue, then, oncehe was scammed, changed, and suddenly it started so beautifully and abruptly that a novel came out, which I have finished in draft today, the novel is very lively, hot and complete, with which I am very pleased and which will be ready if God willingditch, after 2 weeks and which has nothing to do with everything that I have been struggling with for a whole year. If I finish it, I will publish it in a separate book. "

Excitedly enthusiastic interest in Pushkin and his genius creations in prose remained with the writer in the future. He told SA Tolstoy: "I learn a lot from Pushkin, he is my father, and we need to learn from him."Bearing in mind Belkin's Tale, Tolstoy wroteto the corrected letter to PD Golokhvastov: "The writer must not stop studying this treasure." And later, in a letter to the same addressee, he talked about “the gooddetailed influence "Pushkin, the reading of which" if it is possibleawakens to work, it is unmistakable. " Thus, the numerous confessions of Tolstoy are clearlyindicate that Pushkin was for him a strongthe most stimulating agent for creative work.

What exactly attracted Tolstoy's attention in Pushkin's passage "Guests gathered at the dacha" can be judged by his words: "This is how to write,Tolstoy declared. - Pushkin gets down to business. Another would start describing the guests, rooms, and he puts them into action right away. "So, not the interior, not the portraits of the guests and not the traditionaldescriptions in which the setting of the action was drawn, and the action itself, the direct development of the plot all this attracted the author of Anna Karenina.

The creation of those chapters of the novel, which describes the guests' congress at Betsy Tverskaya's after the theater, is connected with Pushkin's excerpt "Guests gathered at the dacha". So the novel was supposed to begin according to the original plan. The plot-compositional proximity of these chapters and Pushkin's excerpt, as well as the similarity of situations in which the priestgive Pushkin's Zinaida Volskaya and Tolstoy's Anna, are obvious. But even the beginning of the novel in the latest edition is devoid of any "introductory" descriptions; if you do not mean the moralistic maxim, it immediately, in Pushkinski immerses the reader in the thick of events in the Oblone houseskyh. "Everything is confused in the Oblonskys' house"- what is funny elk, the reader does not know, he will find out later,- but this shi a well-known phrase coolly ties the knot of events, whichwhich will unfold afterwards. Thus, the beginning of "Anna Karenina" was written in the artistic manner of Pushkin, and the whole novel was created in an atmosphere of deepthe greatest interest in Pushkin and in Pushkin's prose. And it is hardly by chance that the writer chose as a protolike her heroine, the poet's daughter Maria Alexandrovna Gartung, capturing the expressive features of her appearance in the guise of Anna.

Anna Karenina has occupied the writer's creative thought for more than four years. In the process of artistic implementation, its original concept has undergone radical changes. From the novel about the "unfaithful wife", which at first bore the names "Two Marriages", "Two Couples", "Anna Karenina" has turned into the largest social novel, reflecting an entire era in the life of Russia in vivid typical images.

At the beginning of 1870, in the creative mind of Tolstoy, there was a plot about a married woman "from high society, but who lost herself", and she was supposed to look "only miserable and not guilty." The numerous ideas and plans that occupied the writer at that time kept him distracted from this plot. Only after writing "Prisoner of the Caucasus", publishing "ABC" and the final decision to refuse to continue "Peter's novel" Tolstoy returned to the family plot that had arisen more than three years ago.

From the letters it is clear that Tolstoy himself thought his new work had been roughly completed in the spring of 1873. In fact, however, the work on the novel turned out to be much longer. New characters, new episodes, events, themes and motives were introduced. The image of the title character has undergone revision and rethinking, the individual characteristics of other characters have been deepened and the emphasis in the author's assessment has been shifted. This significantly complicated the plot and composition, led to a modification of the genre nature of the novel. As a result, the work stretched out for a whole four years - until the middle of 1877. During this time, twelve editions of the novel were formed. In January 1875, the publication of Anna Karenina in the Russian Bulletin magazine began, and in 1878 the novel was published as a separate edition.

Tolstoy always responded to the demands of modernity with extraordinary sensitivity. In the previous epic novel, there was only the "secret presence of modernity"; the novel "Anna Karenina" is fiercely modern in terms of material, problems and the whole artistic concept. As the novel plot unfolds with increasing intensity, Tolstoy "captures" and introduces into the narrative many questions that worried the author himself and his contemporaries. These are not only family relationships, but also social, economic, and civil, and generally human. All the most important aspects and phenomena of our time in their real complexity, entanglement and mutual cohesion are fully and vividly reflected in Anna Karenina. Each of the families depicted in the novel is naturally and organically included in the life of society, in the movement of the era: the private life of people appears in close connection with historical reality and in its causation.

Tolstoy expressively and aptly defined the essence of the radical changes that have taken place and have taken place in the words of Konstantin Levin: “... now, when all this has turned upside down and is just getting it right, the question of how these conditions will be met is only one important question in Russia ... ".

Tolstoy's heroes live and act at the very beginning of this period, when life raised before them "all the most difficult and insoluble questions." What answer will be given to them, neither the writer himself, nor his double Levin, nor the other heroes of Anna Karenina had any clear idea. There was much that was unclear, incomprehensible and therefore alarming. Visibly one thing was seen: everything had moved from its place, and everything was in motion, on the road, on the way. And the image of a train, which appears more than once in the novel, symbolizes the historical movement of the era. In the running and rumbling of the train - the noise, rumbling and impetuous running of time and epoch. And no one knew whether the direction of this movement was correctly determined, whether the destination station was chosen correctly.

The crisis, a turning point after the reform era appears in Tolstoy's novel not only as a historical and social background, against which there are graphically clearly "drawn" and rich in realistic colors characters, dramatic narrative frames run and a tragic denouement of the main conflict occurs, but this is a living, objective a given reality in which the heroes are constantly immersed and which surrounds them everywhere and everywhere. And since they all breathe the air of their era and feel its "tremors", each one has a characteristic imprint of "shaken" time - anxiety and anxiety, self-doubt and distrust of people, a premonition of a possible catastrophe.

The era was reflected more in the emotions of the heroes of the novel than in their minds. Tolstoy, in all its complexity, completeness and artistic truth, recreated the social, moral and family-domestic atmosphere saturated with thunderstorms, which, sometimes explicitly and directly, sometimes indirectly and hidden, affects the state of mind of his characters, their subjective world, psyche and warehouse thoughts, on the general moral character of people. Hence the intensity of emotions and the intensity of human passions that the most significant heroes of "Anna Karenina" live with, their sharp reaction - positive or negative - to what is happening in life, the confusion of their relationship.

2. The predecessors of the work.

Literary activity Tolstoy after "War and Peace" is characterized mainly by two trends: the expansion of sociality and the deepening of psychologism. The social coverage of phenomena has expanded significantly and became more diverse, and the psychological analysis of human nature has deepened. This process was interdependent.

While finishing the last pages of the epic novel, Tolstoy, despite the fact that for more than six years he worked to the point of exhaustion, felt the need to turn to new themes and images. Already in the fall of 1869, when the final point was not yet put in the manuscript "War and Peace" and the chapters of the epilogue were being printed, Tolstoy had the idea to write a "folk novel". To the creative imagination of the writer, this novel in general outlines was presented as an epic narration based on the material, motives and images of oral folk art, in particular on epics. The protagonists of the novel Tolstoy was going to make the epic Russian heroes, among whom Ilya Muromets was seen as the main character, only significantly updated and mentally transferred to modern times: this is a Russian intelligent man of the middle of the century, widely educated, well-versed in modern philosophical systems, trends and schools and at the same time closely associated with the folk origins of life.

However, the idea of \u200b\u200bthe "folk novel" was soon replaced by another - a historical novel from the Peter the Great era. Tolstoy began writing a novel about Peter I and the people of his time at the very beginning of 1870 and, sometimes stopping for new urgent literary and social affairs, continued to work for almost three years. But this novel also had to be postponed. The writer himself explained the reason for this as follows: "... I found that it was difficult for me to penetrate into the souls of the people of that time, before that they were not like us." There was, apparently, another important reason: the deeper Tolstoy penetrated into the personality of Peter I, comprehended the originality of his moral appearance and the essence of his practical deeds, the more antipathy he felt towards the tsar as a person and statesman. He was repelled in Petra by cruelty and buffoonery. Later, Tolstoy would say unambiguously: "Tsar Peter was very far from me." Be that as it may, the novel about Peter remained unwritten; numerous sketches of individual chapters have survived, including over thirty versions of the novel's beginnings.

When the first sketches of the future "Peter's" novel were being made, Tolstoy gradually began to think over the plan of a book for children's reading and elementary education of children, and at the same time began to preliminary collect materials. The educational book conceived by Tolstoy, called "ABC", was published at the end of 1872. Three years later, Tolstoy, having significantly altered the "ABC", updated and supplemented its content and, dividing it into two halves, published two separate books - "New Alphabet" and "Russian Books for Reading" (1875). In the midst of work on the ABC, Tolstoy wrote to one of his friends: “My proud dreams about this ABC are as follows: this alphabet will only be used by two generations of Russian children, from tsarist to peasant, and they will get their first poetic impressions from Having written this ABC, I can die in peace. "

"ABC" was an educational and pedagogical book: it is both a school manual for primary school students, and a kind of collection of literary and artistic texts and popular science articles, that is, something like a reader. The ABC is divided into four books, each of which, in turn, consists of four sections: first there is material for reading exercises, then texts in Church Slavonic, then - basic information on arithmetic and natural sciences, and, finally, guidelines for teachers ... Author's advice and instructions addressed to teachers and containing an originally developed methodology for teaching writing and counting, and numerous articles-stories on physics, astronomy and natural science, and literary works proper - everything in this book was written or radically revised by Tolstoy himself. Considering that the "ABC" contains about eight hundred pages, it is easy to imagine what a colossal work the writer spent on its creation.

The target setting of the "ABC", intended mainly for peasant children and the broad masses of the people who are just joining primary education, determined the characteristic features of the artistic form of the literary works included in it. They, as a rule, are small in volume and are built on an entertaining and instructive plot, are distinguished by the utmost conciseness of the narration, clear composition, clarity and simplicity of the author's language and dialogical speech. In the "elementary" stories, there is neither that profound Tolstoyan psychologism, which is called the "dialectic of the soul," nor a syntactically complex phrase structure, nor difficult vocabulary. Poetics, style, language - everything in the ABC is new in comparison with what and how Tolstoy wrote in the previous twenty years. But to his confession, he decisively changed the previous "methods of his writing and language." Talking about new methods of writing and deliberately polemically sharpening his thought, Tolstoy declared at the beginning of 1872 that he now does not write and will never again write such "verbose nonsense" as "War and Peace". Now he strictly demands that in a literary work "everything should be beautiful, short, simple and, most importantly, clear." As for his own "elementary" stories, Tolstoy sees their artistic merit "in the simplicity and clarity of drawing and stroke, that is, language."

It is precisely these qualities - simplicity, conciseness and dynamism of narration - that Tolstoy at that time discovered in Russian folklore, and in Pushkin's prose, and in ancient literature. "... Songs, fairy tales, epics," wrote Tolstoy in March 1872, "everything simple will be read as long as the Russian language remains." And further: "... the language spoken by the people and in which there are sounds for expressing everything that the poet can only wish to say is dear to me<...> I just love the definite, clear and beautiful and moderate, and I find all this in folk poetry and language and life, and the opposite in ours. "According to the writer's wife, Lev Nikolaevich was carried away by the dream" of a work as pure, elegant, where there would be nothing superfluous, like all ancient Greek literature, like Greek art. "It is known that Tolstoy knew ancient literature and ancient art perfectly, and in order to read the works of ancient authors in the original, from the end of 1870 he began to independently study the Greek language and within three months mastered im perfect.

The writer himself recognized the story "Prisoner of the Caucasus" as an example of those "techniques and language" that Tolstoy at that time began to use in his work and was also going to use in the future when writing works not only for children, but also "for big ones" ( 1872). The story was written specifically for the "ABC". Executed in a new style, this work was Tolstoy's outstanding artistic creation of the early 70s. With the story "Prisoner of the Caucasus" and a series of stories in the "ABC" Tolstoy laid the foundation for realistic prose for children in Russian literature.

Simultaneously with the writing of the ABC, Tolstoy devoted a lot of strength and talent to the cause of public education and school-teaching activity, which he resumed after a ten-year break. Tolstoy considered it his duty as a writer and a person to energetically and practically contribute to making the entire population of Russia literate, to familiarize the entire people - and, above all, of course, the peasantry - to education and culture. He was convinced that in Russia the education of the popular masses could and should be "put on a foot on which it does not and did not stand anywhere in Europe." Tolstoy dedicated his article "On Public Education" (1874) to this vital problem, which was published in Nekrasov's "Otechestvennye zapiski" (Fatherland Notes). The article sparked a lively discussion. In the Yasnaya Polyana estate, Tolstoy opened a school in January 1872. Classes with the students were conducted by the whole family - both Lev Nikolaevich himself, and his children Seryozha, Tanya, Ilya.

Tolstoy was alarmed by the abnormal situation in which undoubtedly talented people perish because of poverty and widespread illiteracy among the Russian people! They need to be rescued as soon as possible, to help them show their natural abilities in every possible way. At the end of 1874, Tolstoy wrote: “I do not reason, but when I enter the school and see this crowd of ragged, dirty, thin children, with their bright eyes and so often angelic expressions, anxiety, horror, like the one that I would feel at the sight of people drowning. Oh, priests, how to get them out, and who first, who ate to pull out. And the most precious thing is drowning here, precisely that spiritual, which is so obvious in children. I want education for the people only for to save those Pushkins, Ostrogradskys, Filarets, Lomonosovs drowning there. And they are teeming in every school. " These thoughts and moods, which did not give the writer a day of rest, permeated his greatest work of fiction of the 70s - the novel "Anna Karenina".

II. "Family thought" in the novel

1. The concept of "family" in the work of Tolstoy

The family has always been and will be the "ontological" center of any social and personal upheavals and cataclysms: wars, revolutions, betrayals, quarrels, enmity, as well as peace, love, goodness, joy, and the like. Tolstoy himself called his "family experience" "subjective and universal." He considered the family model of human relations as a universal, universally significant basis of brotherhood, love, forgiveness.and so on, since it is to our relatives that we tend to forgive first of all, endure insults from them, forget the harm they have caused and pity them for this evil, because the very kinship, the very joint life turns their "evil" into their "weakness" the inability to be kind makes us, as it were, "accomplices" of this "evil", since a morally normal person simply cannot but feel guilty that a person close to him is "bad".

And at the same time, only within the framework of family life, family ties can there be obvious deviations from the "law of love", flagrant violations of the principles of humanity and morality, which in other situations do not look so shocking (for example, the envy of a son to his father, from which Tolstoy suffered, hatred of a wife to her husband, etc.), when it can be said with good reason that "a man's enemies are his own household." And Tolstoy deeply experienced all these situations, knowing both aggressiveness, and cunning, and the variety of such evil. Remaining in the family until the last days of his life, Tolstoy acted consistently and on principle. His life, in the midst of the contrast between luxury and poverty, slavery and freedom, "hatred" and "love", proceeded in the most intense, central space of human moral life. No war, no expulsion, no social disasters, etc. could not give him as much experience of dealing with the vices of life as did "family war", "family exile" and "family trouble".

In a family, a person is born and dies, his whole life passes through it. Here he first encounters the requirements of the "common", goes through the first school of relations with people and learns with full evidence to irrefutable certainty that his happiness is inseparable from the happiness of others and that others are himself.

Tolstoy was convinced that "the human race develops only in the family." Consequently, its destruction in his eyes was fraught with the most dire consequences for all mankind. The family is the foundation, the source of both the clan and the personality. It is necessary for the existence of both the "general" and the "personal". If the "common" - the human race, people, society, the state - cannot do without a family, then an individual, according to Tolstoy, lives a full, serious life only in a family. A general need in the form of a deep personal need. And the writer's contemporaries lost a proper understanding of the family, its deepest meaning in the life of an individual and society.

2. Development of the theme of family and home in the novel

Tolstoy gives in the novel a number of views on the family. Yashvin and Katavasov are episodic heroes, but with their own specific and characteristic views on marriage. Both see the family as a hindrance to something more important: one - playing cards, the other - science. For Serpukhovsky, a young, prosperous general, "marriage is the only means of comfortably loving and doing your own thing." And finally, the most fully developed attitude to the family life of secular youth, to which Vronsky belongs. He and his friends see in her something base, prosaic-boring, the lot of gray and ordinary people. Tolstoy showed in the novel many very different people: Oblonsky, Yashvin, Katavasov, Serpukhovskoy, Vronsky, Petritsky, who treat the family as a secondary matter. Moreover, their views on the family are not theoretical, but purely practical. The heroes are guided by them in life, so their beliefs are real, albeit incorrect, from the point of view of the author. They create a spiritual atmosphere that points to the deep trouble of modern society, which was tragically expressed most vividly in the fate of Anna Karenina.

Tolstoy's "family thought" is revealed in a complex combination of all episodes, events, descriptions of the heroes, but nevertheless its core is formed by two storylines: Anna - Vronsky, Kitty - Levin. We must not forget that although the novel is named after one heroine, her story takes up only about a third of the entire volume of the work. Levin, who is not directly related to Anna's fate, has been given no less attention than her.

The stories of the heroes, obviously, develop in parallel and in different directions: Kitty and Levin, from disappointment, difficult experiences, come to lasting and calm family happiness. Anna and Vronsky are steadily and inevitably moving towards the tragedy. The connection between Kitty and Levin is life, the relationship between Anna and Vronsky is developing under the sign of death. “How happy it happened for Kitty that Anna came,” said Dolly, “and how unhappy for her. Quite the opposite,” she added, astonished by her thought. “Then Anna was so happy, but Kitty considered herself unhappy. on the contrary! " ... On the contrary to what? On the contrary, the notions of happiness and welfare that prevail in society. The reason for the opposite fate of the heroes is in their different attitude to family and marriage. These views do not clash in the public arena of disputes and disputes, therefore it is impossible, fundamentally impossible, an event-driven, plot connection between the two lines. But the essence of the heroes' views is fully revealed by their life, their fate. Here Tolstoy follows the philosophical traditions of the Russian realistic novel: Pushkin, Lermontov, Goncharov, Turgenev. Just like his predecessors and contemporaries, the author of Anna Karenina shows the impact of the environment on a person, using the same methods of arranging positive and negative principles: examining how good, honest, just people break the moral law.

The marriage of Anna and Karenin - this is quite obvious - was almost accidental for her and involuntary for her husband, and for both of them, one of those marriages that are rarely lasting and do not give people happiness, because they are made without the living participation of the heart , without mutual love. Anna herself would later hear frequent conversations about such marriages in Betsy Tverskaya's salon. The messenger's wife expressed a view that was widespread in secular society: feelings, passions, love are not needed for a happy marriage. "I only know happy marriages by reason," said the messenger's wife. Vronsky, who took part in the dispute, objected to this: "Yes, but on the other hand, how often the happiness of marriages by reason scatters like dust precisely because the very passion appears that was not recognized ...". This is exactly what happened in the Karenin family.

Anna and Aleksey Karenin lived together for eight years, but very little is said about their marriage life in the novel, and the first years of their marriage are not mentioned at all. It is not known, for example, how long Anna was "governor" in the provinces and when she and her husband moved to St. Petersburg. Having settled in the capital, Anna freely and easily entered the highest aristocratic society. She was given access to three different circles of selected persons of the St. Petersburg world, where, according to the author, she "had friends and close ties." One consisted of high-ranking government officials closely associated with Karenin in service and therefore often visited his house, but this "official, official circle of her husband" was rather boring, and Anna avoided him whenever possible. Anna appeared much more eagerly in the circle, the center of which was Countess Lidia Ivanovna; Anna usually came there accompanied by her husband, who highly valued the Countess. Anna was especially closely connected with the people of the "croquet party" - with the circle of Princess Betsy Tverskaya. In this salon, which united the cream of St. Petersburg light, Anna was introduced by its mistress, Princess Betsy, who was a distant relative of Anna - her wife cousin - and was Vronsky's cousin. Anna willingly and often visited this salon, which later became the place of her meetings with Vronsky.

It is obvious that Anna, in her marriage, indulged in the usual social entertainment and pleasures for which she had a lot of free time. But she did not resemble the young ladies and ladies of the Petersburg world in that she was distinguished by her modest behavior and unconditional marital fidelity. Although there was something "false in the whole warehouse of their family life," however, outwardly the life of Anna and Karenin looked quite prosperous, monotonously calm, as they say, without storms and upheavals. Anna had a child, and she sincerely took up the education of her Seryozha, whom she loved very much. She treated the duties and duties of her wife strictly, and Karenin had no reason or reasons for mistrust of her, for jealousy and family scenes. In that part of the novel, where it is about Anna before her betrayal of her husband, there is not even a mention of the clashes between them, quarrels, mutual reproaches and insults, and even more so about hatred for each other. It is not evident that Karenin was faithful to her during the years of their marriage. In a word, for the time being, Anna absolutely did not express any dissatisfaction with her family life with Karenin, her fate and her position in secular society.

Karenin is far from an ideal husband, and he was not her match. But nevertheless, one should not forget that harsh, derogatory and destructive judgments came to Anna's mind after her betrayal to Karenin and that her words were dictated by hatred for him, which was born of a flared passion for Vronsky. Accusing her husband that he does not know what love is, does not know at all whether it exists in the world, Anna is silent about the fact that she herself, honestly and conscientiously fulfilling marital duties, also had no idea of \u200b\u200blove for a long time. until this feeling was awakened in her by Vronsky.

And just at this time - at the moment of sharp shocks in her soul and the subsequent abrupt change in her behavior, views and lifestyle - Anna appears before the reader in all her proud beauty and feminine fascination.

Often in critical literature one can find an opinion about Vronsky as a person unworthy of Anna's high love, in which they see the main reason death of the heroine. But Tolstoy, not in the least idealizing Vronsky, nevertheless writes that he was a man "with a very kind heart." Charm, beauty, justice, spiritual and intellectual originality of Anna is beyond any doubt. Hence the thought most often follows a stable track: all the best perishes and must perish in this accursed world of bourgeois hypocrisy and lies. Indeed, how many novels we know about the obstacles in the way of lovers suffering from broken hopes. In Anna Karenina, a tragic situation develops after and as a result of the fulfillment of the heroes' desires. The center of gravity has been shifted from courtship, rivalry, and the expectation of love to portraying the lives of lovers.

If, for example, in Turgenev's novels the hero is tested with love, the ability to take one decisive step towards an explanation with his beloved, then in Tolstoy the essence of the hero is revealed in family life, in the process, and not in the moment. In works that tell about the hero's desire for love, happiness is represented as the fulfillment of desire, and the rest of life seems to be deprived of value and meaning. Tolstoy polemically rejected such a view as perverting the essence of a person's life path. According to the author of Anna Karenina, a person's life, so beloved by novelists, is not yet life, but only the threshold of it. For a writer, the most responsible and serious period begins when the lovers, having united, lead a life together, it is then that a person is revealed and the true value of his ideals and beliefs becomes clear.

Undoubtedly, society is guilty of the tragedy of the heroine, but not in the hypocritical condemnation of Anna's connection with Vronsky, but in the actual encouragement of her. As in the novels of Russian writers, Anna Karenina analyzes the impact of social ideals on a person and his destiny. Tolstoy's personality has several levels, and true essence, its core, which determines actions and deeds, is not fully realized by the hero. The ideals of the heroes do not become the subject of reflection, discussion, dispute. They are not theoretical, but organic in nature and are perceived by the heroes as something indisputable, true and poetic, which is recognized by all advanced, real people.

"Vronsky never knew family life" - this is how the chapter begins, telling about his attitude towards Kitty. A key phrase to the image of the hero, defining and explaining the love story of Vronsky and Anna. It is here that one must look for the origins of the tragedy of these heroes.

Vronsky did not receive a true and, although elementary, but the most necessary, according to Tolstoy, education in the family. The kind of education that introduces a person to spiritual foundationslife, not with the help of books, educational institutions, but through direct communication with the mother, father, brothers. He did not go through the elementary school of educating humanity, where the foundation of the personality is laid. "Marriage for him was never an opportunity. He not only did not like family life, but in the family, and especially in her husband, according to the general view of the bachelor world in which he lived, he imagined something alien, hostile, and more - funny ".

Tolstoy, following the precepts of the Russian realistic novel, spoke about the upbringing of the hero, which formed the core of his personality, which consists of sympathies, antipathies and, most importantly, what he loves. Only about the upbringing of two heroes - Levin and Vronsky - is reported in the novel, which speaks of their special significance for revealing and understanding the tragedy of the protagonist. The contrast of the beginnings in which Levin and Vronsky were brought up determines the multidirectionality of their paths in life.

Tolstoy does not tell in detail how they were brought up, what books they read, who their teachers and tutors were. He reports only about one thing, the most important and essential - about the family atmosphere and about the attitude of Levin and Vronsky towards their parents, and above all towards their mothers. Vronsky "in his heart did not respect his mother and, without realizing it, did not love her ...". For Levin, the concept of a mother was "a sacred memory, and his future wife should have been, in his imagination, a repetition of that charming, holy ideal of a woman, which was for him a mother." The line connecting the image of the mother with the wife was drawn by Tolstoy clearly and definitely. Maternal love, which befell a child, forms a true, deep and serious attitude towards a woman. "Love for a woman he (Levin)not only could not imagine without marriage, but before he imagined a family, and then that woman who would give him a family. "And if the general, theoretical views of the heroes of the novel change easily and sometimes even imperceptibly for themselves, then the feelings endured by their nature, theoretical views should change, develop, and Tolstoy lived just in an era when the emergence and development of ideas in Russia made a qualitative leap, when the abundance, contradictions and their rapid change became a new phenomenon in And in the understanding of the family as an institution that is invariably necessary for humanity, a person had to be guided by a reliable, in the eyes of the writer, means - a feeling acquired in life experience. . This is the highest, or rather the deepest knowledge. "

Vronsky was deprived of that positive experience of a happy life in a family that Levin had. Vronsky's mother blamed Karenina for her son's misfortunes, but in reality the blame was largely her own. "His (Vronsky's) motherwas a brilliant socialite in his youth, who during marriage, and especially after, had many novels known to the whole world. "The image of the mother, the feeling of family that Levin received in childhood, guided him in life. Why was he so sure that happiness is achievable "Because he already had it. What should be a family, how to build relationships between a husband, wife, children? Levin knew comprehensive answers to these questions - the way his mother and father built them." Severely ill, homeless, wandering around hotels Nikolai conjures his brother: “Look, don't change anything in the house, but rather get married and start the same thing again.”

The "deepest knowledge" acquired by the heroes in childhood largely predetermined their destinies, gave rise to a special structure of feelings in everyone. Tolstoy shows how something that was inherent in the feelings of the heroes unfolds into fate.

Levin and Vronsky - each in his own way experiences, feels his love. It's like two different, mutually exclusive kinds of love, not understanding and completely closed to each other.

Vronsky's love closes him in on himself, separating him from people and the outside world, and, in fact, impoverishes him. If before he "amazed and worried people unfamiliar to him with his kind of unshakable calmness, now ... he seemed even more proud and self-sufficient. He looked at people as at things.<...> Vronsky saw nothing and no one. He felt like a king, not because he believed that he had made an impression on Anna - he still did not believe this - but because the impression she made on him gave him happiness and pride. "

Tolstoy, even speaking about the feelings of the hero, not only conveys them, but carefully analyzes them. It shows the strength, the attractiveness of Vronsky's feelings and at the same time reveals their egoistic essence, although it does not have anything either repulsive or sinister in its present form. The main subject of Tolstoy's depiction and research is human relationships, which puts an ethical assessment at the center of his artistic world. And it is present even in the description of the love feelings of the heroes, in an implicit, hidden form. Note the percussive words that carry the ethical meaning of the above passage: "proud, self-sufficient", "looked at people as at things", "saw nothing and no one", "felt like a king." In Tolstoy's world, a person, being alone with himself, experiencing the most personal, deeply intimate feeling, reveals himself in relation to all people.

The ethical attitude of the author of Anna Karenina in the analysis of Vronsky's love experiences is fully clarified when they are compared with the feelings of Levin, who was in a special state of mind after Kitty's declaration of love. "It was remarkable for Levin that they (the people around him) were all visible to him today, and by small, previously imperceptible signs, he recognized the soul of everyone, and clearly saw that they were all good." True love makes a person wiser. Levin is not in a state of ecstasy, intoxication, when an illusion arises wonderful world, but in a state of insight, revealing what was hidden from him earlier. In Vronsky, who fell in love with Anna, interest in people and the world around him decreases, the world seems to disappear for him, and he is completely absorbed in a feeling of contentment and pride in himself.

In parallel to tragic fate Anna with her unhappy family life Tolstoy paints the happy family life of Levin and Kitty. This is where the various plot lines of the novel are brought together.

Kitty's image belongs to the best female images of Russian literature. The gentle, truthful eyes, in which the childlike clarity and kindness of her soul were expressed, gave her a special charm. Kitty longed for love as a reward for her beauty and attractiveness; she was all seized by young girlish dreams, the hope of happiness. But Vronsky's betrayal undermined her faith in people, she was now inclined to see in all their actions only one bad thing.

On the waters Kitty meets Varenka and at first perceives her as the embodiment of moral perfection, as the ideal of a girl living some other, hitherto unfamiliar life. From Varenka she learns that, in addition to the "instinctive life", there is a "spiritual life" based on religion, but not an official religion associated with rituals, but a religion of exalted feelings, a religion of sacrificing oneself in the name of love for others; and Kitty became attached with all her heart to her new friend; she, like Varenka, helped the unfortunate, looked after the sick, read the gospel to them.

Here Tolstoy strove to poeticize the religion of "universal" love and moral self-improvement. He tries to show that only on the path of turning to the gospel can one save oneself, get rid of the power of the "instincts" of the body and move on to a higher life, "spiritual." Varenka lives such a life. But this "being without youth", devoid of the "restrained fire of life", looked like "a beautiful ... but already faded, odorless flower." And an equal attitude towards people, and external calm, and her "tired smile" testified that Varenka was deprived of strong passions of life: she did not even know how to laugh, but only "sagged" from laughter. "She is all spiritual," says Kitty about Varenka. Reason has suppressed all normal human feelings in her. Levin contemptuously calls Varenka a "saint." Indeed, all her "love" for her neighbors was artificial and hid her lack of a vocation for real, earthly human love.

Kitty, of course, did not and could not become a second Varenka, she was too devoted to life and quickly felt the "pretense" of all these "virtuous" Varenek and Madame Stahl with their "invented" love for neighbors: "All this is not the same, not that ! .. "She says to Varenka:" I can’t live according to my heart, but you live by the rules. I just fell in love with you, and you, perhaps, only to save me, teach me! " So Kitty condemned Varenka's death and unnaturalness, which at first seemed ideal to her. She recovered from her moral illness and felt again all the charm of real life, not driven into any artificial "rules".

In the subsequent episodes of the novel (an unexpected meeting of the carriage in which Kitty was traveling, Kitty's meeting with Levin at Steva's, an explanation, a new proposal, a wedding), the writer reveals the full power of his heroine's spiritual charm. The chapter devoted to the wedding is imbued with Tolstoy's deep sympathy for the girl's fate and girlish dreams of happiness, which life has often so mercilessly shattered. The women attending the church recalled their weddings, saddened that many of them did not justify their hopes of happiness. Dolly thought about herself, remembered Anna, who, nine years ago, "stood clean in orange flowers and a veil. And now what?" The reply of a simple woman: "No matter how you say it, I feel sorry for our sister," - expressed the sorrowful thoughts of millions of women who, in a private society, could not find true happiness.

In the very first days of her family life, Kitty took up the household, "cheerfully building her future nest." Levin mentally reproached her that "she has no serious interests. Neither interest in my business, in the household, in the peasants, nor in music, in which she is quite strong, nor in reading. She does nothing and is completely satisfied" ( 19.55). Tolstoy, however, defends his heroine from these reproaches and “condemns” Levin, who did not yet understand that she was preparing for an important and responsible period of her life, when “she will be at the same time the wife of her husband, mistress of the house, will wear, to feed and educate children. " And in view of this "terrible work" ahead of her, she had the right to moments of carelessness and happiness of love.

After Kitty's birth - "the greatest event in a woman's life" - Levin, barely restraining his sobs, knelt and kissed his wife's hand, he was immensely happy. "The whole female world, which for him acquired a new, unknown meaning to him after he got married, has now risen so high in his concepts thathe couldn't hug him with his imagination. "

The cult of the woman-mother is at the heart of the image of Daria Oblonskaya. Dolly in her youth was as attractive and beautiful as her sister Kitty. But the years of marriage have changed her beyond recognition. She sacrificed all her physical and mental strength to love for her husband and children. Steve's betrayal shook her to the core, she could no longer love him as before, all the interests of her life were now focused on children. Dolly was “happy” with her children and “proud of them,” here she saw the source of her “glory” and her “greatness”. The mother's tenderness and pride for her children, her touching concerns for their health, her sincere griefs when they committed bad deeds — that was what determined Dolly's mental life.

But once quiet, modest and loving Dolly, exhausted by many children, household chores, her husband's unfaithfulness, thought about her life, about the future of her children and for a minute envied Anna and other women who, as it seemed to her, did not know any torment, but enjoyed life. She thought that she could live just like these women free from children, not knowing the bitterness of life; but already the recognition of the young woman at the inn, who said that she was glad of the death of her child - "God unleashed" - seemed to her "disgusting." And when Anna declared that she did not want to have children, Dolly "with an expression of disgust on her face" answered her: "This is not good." She was horrified at the immorality of her judgments and felt her deep alienation from Anna. Dolly understood that she was living correctly, and her whole past life appeared before her "in a new radiance." So this "very prosaic", according to Vronsky's concepts, woman revealed her moral superiority over the "poetic" world of Vronsky - Anna.

Such Tolstoy heroines as Natasha Rostova, Marya Bolkonskaya, Dolly, Kitty, carry a lot of charm, they captivate with their true femininity, loyalty to marital duty, they are good mothers - and in this positive content the best female images Tolstoy.

So, we see two forces, completely different and, moreover, opposing: the brute force of public opinion, the internal moral law. It is the latter who is personified in God and for the violation of his person, an inevitable punishment befalls, which is expressed in the epigraph to the novel: "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay." Whether we understand by "az" a person who transgressed the law and punishes himself for this, or a god punishing a criminal, both will be true. The point is not that Anna cannot be subject to human judgment, since people are weak and sinful, but that their judgment is an insufficient and unreliable instance protecting the law. Social ideals change, have a historical character and therefore cannot guide a person in what, according to Tolstoy, bears the stamp of eternity.

The society depicted in the novel is hostile to the spiritual and moral principle of a person, it did not condemn, but loved adultery. No one in their hearts condemned either Anna or Vronsky or sympathized with Karenin. The lawyer, to whom Karenin turned for advice on divorce, could not hide his joy. "The lawyer's gray eyes tried not to laugh, but they jumped with irrepressible joy, and Alexey Alexandrovich saw that there was more than one joy of a person receiving a lucrative order - there was triumph and delight, there was a shine similar to the ominous shine that he seen in the eyes of his wife. " The feeling of a lawyer who has learned about the client's misfortune is involuntary, it comes from the very depths of his being, it is real. And this joy is universal. Karenin noticed "in all these acquaintances, with difficulty concealed joy of something." Everyone rejoices in Karenin's misfortune and hates him for being unhappy. "He knew that for this, for the very fact that his heart was tortured, they would be ruthless to him. He felt that people would destroy him, like dogs strangle a tortured dog squealing in pain." The protection of the family, which for millennia has been the source of life and the school of humanity, cannot be entrusted to transitory state institutions or public opinion. The family is preserved by the more powerful and completely inevitable - the inner nature of man, the absolute form of which is God.

III. The meaning of the novel

"Family Thought" is not only the theme of "Anna Karenina", but also an edification. An edification about what a family should be, and since a family is connected with a home, this is also an edification about a home. Let's read the famous beginning of the novel. The very first phrase will contain the word "family". The next noun is "home". Next comes "wife" and "husband". And above these main actors the vengeance of the epigraph soars.

"The thought of the people" in "War and Peace" was revealed as patience, steadfastness, non-violence. Vengeance is out of the question both from the point of view of Karataev and from the point of view of Kutuzov and Bolkonsky. "Do not think that people have done grief. People are His instrument," says Princess Marya in War and Peace. "We have no right to punish."

According to M.S. Sukhotin, Tolstoy himself defined the meaning of the epigraph to the novel "Anna Karenina" as follows: people, but from God, and what Anna Karenina experienced on herself. "

"War and Peace" is a doctrine of nonviolence, and the novel "Anna Karenina" is a work of fiction about modernity, not pretending to be a comprehensive doctrine of life, but instructive in one issue - home and family. However, in these two works, the general idea is that the one who lifts the sword brings misfortune first of all on himself. In War and Peace, this is Napoleon. In Anna Karenina she is the main character. And the sword that she raised- it is her unwillingness to endure, her challenge to fate. She put her passion above everything else. For which she paid.

Tolstoy appeared in Anna Karenina, as in the epic novel, as a brilliant realist artist. Tolstoy called his creative method, which he used to recreate reality in Anna Karenina, “bright realism” (62, p. 139). The realism of images, in the system of which the truth about the person and the era is captured, the authenticity of life, the true psychological depth and variety of uniquely vivid characters, the dynamism of action and the severity of conflict situations, the social richness of the content, the philosophical tension of reflections about modernity and about life in general - this is what distinguishes Tolstoy's novel and makes it an outstanding phenomenon of Russian and world realistic art.

The novel "Anna Karenina", according to Dostoevsky, is "perfection as a work of art<...>, with which nothing similar from European literature in the present era can be compared. "In the creator of this novel, Dostoevsky saw the" extraordinary height of the artist "who has no equal contemporary literature... Extremely important c. the spiritual enrichment and development of self-awareness of Russian society and all mankind have those social, philosophical and moral-ethical ideas that Tolstoy carries out with such passion and artistic conviction in his novel: “People like the author of Anna Karenina are the essence of the teacher of society, our teachers, and we are only their students ... ", wrote Dostoevsky.

Conclusion

Tolstoy called Anna Karenina "a broad, free novel." This definition is based on pushkin's term "free novel". There are no lyrical, philosophical or journalistic digressions in Anna Karenina. But there is an undeniable connection between Pushkin's novel and Tolstoy's novel, which manifests itself in the genre, in the plot and in the composition. It is not the fabulous completeness of the provisions, but the "creative concept" that defines in Anna Kareninoy "choice of material and opens up scope for the development of syline lines.

The free novel genre arose and developed on the basis of overcoming literary schemes and conventions. On the story linethe perfection of the provisions was built on the plot in traditional familiesnovel, for example, in Dickens. It was this tradition that Tolstoy abandoned, although he was very fond of Dickens as a writer. “I could not help imagining- writes Tolstoy, - that death is person only aroused interest in others, and marriage seemed mostly a set, not a denouement of interest.

Tolstoy's innovation was perceived as a deviation from the holeswe. It was essentially that way, but it served not to destroy the genre, but to expand its laws. Balzac in "Letters about Litaratur "very accurately defined the characteristic features of the traditionrational novel: “No matter how large the number of accessorymoat and many images, the modern novelist must, like Walter Scott, Homer of this genre, group them according to their meaning, subject them to the sun of his system intrigue or hero and lead them like a glittering constellation in a certain order. " But in Anna Karenina, as well as in War and Mire ", Tolstoy could not put" known boundaries "for his heroes. And his romance continued after Levin's marriage and even after Anna's death. The sun of Tolstoy's romantic system isthus, it is not a hero or an intrigue, but a "popular thought" or "family thought", which leads many of his images, "like a sparkling constellation, in a certain order."

The post-reform era was reflected more in the emotions of the heroes of the novel than in their minds. Tolstoy, in all its complexity, completeness and artistic truth, recreated the social, moral and family-everyday atmosphere saturated with lightning charges, which, sometimes explicitly and directly, sometimes indirectly and hidden, affects the state of mind of his heroes, their subjective world, psyche and warehouse. thoughts, on the general moral character of people. Hence the intensity of emotions and the intensity of human passions that the most significant heroes of "Anna Karenina" live with, their sharp reaction - positive or negative - to what is happening in life, the confusion of their relationship.

Anna Karenina is the greatest social and at the same time family psychological novel of the 19th century. They were read by the writer's contemporaries, who followed the ever-increasing tension of the human drama in which the heroes were involved in magazine publications. Time has not erased the amazing freshness of the pictures of the past life, brilliantly drawn by Tolstoy.

Thus, the tasks and goals that we faced at the beginning of our work were achieved and implemented.

List of used literature

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Appendix 1 .

In conclusion, I would like to attach an essay by Yakimenko Ekaterina, student of 11 "A" class MBOU secondary school № 2, this essay won a competition among 20 schools. I think it deserves to be in my term paper.

He said that his task was to make
this woman is only pathetic and not guilty. "
S. Tolstaya

After finishing work on the novel "War and Peace" Lev Nikolaevich "got carried away" by the problems of family and marriage. The reality around him gave a lot of material about family life, and Tolstoy began work on a new novel "Anna Karenina".

The theme of the family, put forward at the beginning, turned out to be interconnected with social, social, philosophical issues - the work gradually grew into a large social novel, in which the writer reflected his contemporary life. The plot is simple, even banal. A married woman, mother of an eight-year-old child, is carried away by a brilliant officer. But everything is simple only at first glance. Anna suddenly realized that I cannot deceive myself, she dreams of love, that love and life are synonymous for her. At this decisive moment, she does not think about anyone except Alexei Vronsky. The inability to deceive, the sincerity and truthfulness of the heroine involve her in a serious conflict with her husband and the society in which she lives.
Anna compares her husband to a soulless machine, calls him an “evil machine”. Karenin tests all his senses with the norms established by the state and the church. He suffers from his wife's betrayal, but in a very peculiar way, he wants to “shake off the dirt with which she splashed him in her fall, and continue to follow her path of an active, honest and useful life”. He lives with his mind, not his heart. It is his rationality that prompts the path of cruel revenge on Anna. Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin separates Anna from her beloved son Serezha. The heroine has to choose, and she takes a "step" towards Vronsky, but this is a disastrous path, it leads to an abyss. Anna did not want to change anything in her life, it was rock that turned everything. She follows the path prepared for her, suffering and torment. Love for the abandoned son, passion for Vronsky, protest against the false morality of society were intertwined into a single knot of contradictions. Anna is unable to solve these problems. She wants to get away from them. Just live happily: to love and be loved. But how unattainable is simple human happiness for her!

Talking with her brother's wife, Anna confesses: “You must understand that I love, it seems, equally, but both are more than myself, two creatures - Seryozha and Alexei. Only these two creatures I love, and one excludes the other. I cannot connect them, but this is one thing I need. And if this is not the case, then all the same. All, all the same ... "

Anna realizes with horror that passionate love alone is not enough for Vronsky. He is a man of “society”. He wants to be useful, to achieve ranks and a prominent position. Quiet family life is not for him. For the sake of this man and his ambitious plans, she sacrificed everything: peace, position in society, her son ... Anna understands that she has driven herself into a dead end.

The writer still in the epigraph: "Vengeance is mine and I will repay" said that his heroine is not to be judged by secular bigots, but by the Creator. In the novel, this idea is confirmed more than once. Anna's old aunt says in a conversation with Dolly: "They will be judged by God, not we." Koznyshev in a conversation with Vronsky's mother asserts: "It is not for us to judge, Countess." Thus, Tolstoy contrasted the state and religious legality and secular morality, which affirmed “evil, lies and deceit”, the wisdom of the biblical dictum, taken for the epigraph.

Initially, the author wanted to portray a woman who has lost herself, but is not guilty. Gradually, the novel grew into a broad denunciatory canvas, showing the life of post-reform Russia in all its diversity. The novel represents all strata of society, all classes and estates in the new socio-economic conditions, after the abolition of serfdom.
Speaking about Anna Karenina, Tolstoy showed that she was worried only about purely personal problems: love, family, marriage. Not finding a decent way out of this situation, Anna decides to leave this life. She throws herself under the train, as life in her current situation has become unbearable.
Unwillingly, Tolstoy passed a harsh sentence to society with its deceitful sanctimonious morality, which drove Anna to suicide. In this society, there is no place for sincere feelings, but only for established rules that can be circumvented, but hiding, deceiving everyone and yourself. Society rejects a sincere, loving person like a foreign body. Tolstoy condemns such a society and the laws it has established.