In the cemetery, above a fresh earthen mound, stands a new oak cross, strong, heavy, smooth. April, the days are gray; the monuments of the cemetery, spacious, county, are still far visible through the bare trees, and the cold wind rings and tinkles with a porcelain wreath at the foot of the cross. A rather large, convex porcelain medallion is embedded in the cross itself, and in the medallion is a photographic portrait of a schoolgirl with joyful, amazingly lively eyes. This is Olya Meshcherskaya. As a girl, she did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown gymnasium dresses: what could be said about her, except that she was one of the pretty, rich and happy girls, that she was capable, but playful and very careless about the instructions given to her by the class lady ? Then she began to blossom, develop by leaps and bounds. At fourteen years old, with a thin waist and slender legs, her breasts and all those forms, the charm of which had never been expressed by a human word, were already well outlined; at fifteen she was already reputed to be a beauty. How carefully some of her friends combed their hair, how clean they were, how they watched over their restrained movements! And she was not afraid of anything - not ink stains on her fingers, not a flushed face, not disheveled hair, not a knee that got stuck when she fell on the run. Without any of her worries and efforts, and somehow imperceptibly, everything that had so distinguished her in the last two years from the entire gymnasium came to her - grace, elegance, dexterity, a clear gleam of eyes ... No one danced at balls like Olya Meshcherskaya, no one ran on skates as much as she did, no one was cared for at balls as much as she was, and for some reason no one was loved as much by the younger grades as her. Imperceptibly she became a girl, and imperceptibly her grammar school fame was strengthened, and rumors began to circulate that she was windy, could not live without admirers, that the grammar school student Shenshin was madly in love with her, that she seemed to love him too, but was so changeable in her treatment of him. that he attempted suicide. During her last winter, Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun, as they said in the gymnasium. The winter was snowy, sunny, frosty, the sun went down early behind the high spruce forest of the snowy gymnasium garden, invariably fine, radiant, promising frost and sun for tomorrow, a walk on Cathedral Street, a skating rink in the city garden, a pink evening, music and this in all directions the crowd sliding on the rink, in which Olya Meshcherskaya seemed the most carefree, the happiest. And then one day, at a big break, when she was rushing around the assembly hall in a whirlwind from the first-graders who were chasing and blissfully screaming after her, she was unexpectedly called to the boss. She stopped at a run, took only one deep breath, with a quick and already familiar feminine movement straightened her hair, tugged at the corners of her apron to her shoulders and, with shining eyes, ran upstairs. The headmistress, youthful but gray-haired, was quietly sitting with knitting in her hands at the writing table, under the tsar's portrait. “Hello, mademoiselle Meshcherskaya,” she said in French, without looking up from her knitting. - Unfortunately, this is not the first time I have been forced to call you here to talk to you about your behavior. “I’m listening, madame,” Meshcherskaya answered, going up to the table, looking at her clearly and vividly, but without any expression on her face, and sat down as lightly and gracefully as she alone could. “You’ll listen to me badly, unfortunately, I’m convinced of this,” said the boss, and pulling the thread and wrapping a ball on the lacquered floor, which Meshcherskaya looked at with curiosity, she raised her eyes. “I will not repeat myself, I will not speak at length,” she said. Meshcherskaya really liked this unusually clean and large office, which breathed so well on frosty days with the warmth of a shiny Dutch woman and the freshness of lilies of the valley on the writing table. She looked at the young tsar, painted to his full height in the middle of some brilliant room, at the even parting in the milky, neatly crimped hair of the boss, and was expectantly silent. “You’re not a girl anymore,” the boss said pointedly, secretly beginning to get annoyed. “Yes, madame,” Meshcherskaya answered simply, almost cheerfully. “But not a woman either,” the boss said even more meaningfully, and her matte face turned slightly red. - First of all, what is this hairstyle? This is a woman's hairstyle! “It’s not my fault, madame, that I have good hair,” Meshcherskaya answered and slightly touched her beautifully tucked head with both hands. - Oh, that's how, you are not to blame! - said the boss. - You are not to blame for the hairstyle, you are not to blame for these expensive combs, it is not your fault that you ruin your parents for shoes of twenty rubles! But, I repeat to you, you completely lose sight of the fact that you are still only a schoolgirl ... And here Meshcherskaya, without losing her simplicity and calmness, suddenly interrupted her politely: - Sorry madame, you are wrong: I am a woman. And do you know who is to blame for this? Dad's friend and neighbor, and your brother is Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin. It happened last summer in the village ... And a month after this conversation, a Cossack officer, ugly and plebeian, who had absolutely nothing to do with the circle to which Olya Meshcherskaya belonged, shot her on the platform of the station, among a large crowd of people who had just arrived by train. And the incredible confession of Olya Meshcherskaya, which stunned the boss, was completely confirmed: the officer told the investigator that Meshcherskaya had lured him, was close to him, swore to be his wife, and at the station, on the day of the murder, escorting him to Novocherkassk, she suddenly told him that she and she never thought to love him, that all this talk about marriage was just her mockery of him, and she gave him to read that page of the diary where it was said about Malyutin. “I ran these lines and right there, on the platform where she was walking, waiting for me to finish reading, I shot her,” said the officer. - This diary, here it is, look what was written in it on the tenth of July last year. The diary read as follows: “It's 2:00 am now. I fell fast asleep, but immediately woke up ... Today I have become a woman! Dad, mom and Tolya, all left for the city, I was left alone. I was so happy to be alone! In the morning I walked in the garden, in the field, was in the forest, it seemed to me that I was alone in the whole world, and I thought as well as never in my life. I dined alone, then played for an hour, to the music I had the feeling that I would live endlessly and be as happy as no one else. Then I fell asleep in my dad's office, and at four o'clock Katya woke me up and said that Aleksey Mikhailovich had arrived. I was very happy with him, I was so pleased to accept him and keep him busy. He arrived in a pair of his very beautiful Vyatkas, and they stood at the porch all the time, he stayed because it was raining and he wanted it to dry out in the evening. He regretted that he had not found dad, was very lively and behaved with me as a gentleman, joked a lot that he had been in love with me for a long time. When we walked in the garden before tea, the weather was lovely again, the sun shone through the whole wet garden, although it became quite cold, and he led me by the arm and said that he was Faust and Margarita. He is fifty-six years old, but he is still very handsome and always well dressed - I just didn’t like the fact that he came in a lionfish - he smells of English cologne, and his eyes are very young, black, and his beard is gracefully divided into two long parts and is completely silver. For tea we sat on the glass veranda, I felt as if unwell and lay down on the couch, and he smoked, then moved to me, began to say some courtesies again, then examine and kiss my hand. I covered my face with a silk handkerchief, and he kissed me several times on the lips through the handkerchief ... I don’t understand how this could happen, I lost my mind, I never thought I was like that! Now I have only one way out ... I feel such disgust for him that I cannot survive it! .. " During these April days the city has become clean, dry, its stones have turned white, and it is easy and pleasant to walk along them. Every Sunday after Mass, a little woman in mourning, in black kid gloves, with an ebony umbrella, walks along Cathedral Street leading to the exit from the city. She crosses a dirty square along the highway, where there are many smoky forges and the field air blows freshly; further, between the monastery and the prison, the cloudy slope of the sky turns white and the spring field turns gray, and then, when you make your way through the puddles under the wall of the monastery and turn left, you will see, as it were, a large low garden surrounded by a white fence, above the gate of which the Assumption of the Mother of God is written. The little woman crosses herself with small baptism and habitually walks along the main alley. Having reached the bench opposite the oak cross, she sits in the wind and in the spring cold for an hour or two, until her feet in light boots and her hand in a narrow husky are completely chilled. Listening to the spring birds singing sweetly even in the cold, listening to the sound of the wind in a porcelain wreath, she sometimes thinks that she would give half her life if only this dead wreath were not in front of her eyes. This wreath, this mound, the oak cross! Is it possible that beneath him is the one whose eyes shine so immortally from this convex porcelain medallion on the cross, and how to combine with this pure gaze that terrible thing that is now connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya? - But in the depths of her soul, a little woman is happy, like all people devoted to some passionate dream. This woman is the classy lady of Olya Meshcherskaya, a middle-aged girl who has long lived with some kind of fiction that replaces her real life. At first, such an invention was her brother, a poor and in no way remarkable warrant officer - she united her whole soul with him, with his future, which for some reason seemed to her brilliant. When he was killed near Mukden, she convinced herself that she was an ideological worker. The death of Olya Meshcherskaya captivated her with a new dream. Now Olya Meshcherskaya is the subject of her persistent thoughts and feelings. She goes to her grave every holiday, keeps her eyes on the oak cross for hours, recalls the pale face of Olya Meshcherskaya in the coffin, among the flowers - and what she once overheard: once, at a big break, walking in the gymnasium garden, Olya Meshcherskaya quickly, quickly said to her beloved friend, plump, tall Subbotina: - I’m in one of my father’s books, - he has many old, funny books, - I read what beauty a woman should have ... There, you know, so much has been said that you don’t remember everything: well, of course, black eyes boiling with resin, - by God, that's what it says: boiling resin! - black as night, eyelashes, softly playing blush, thin waist, longer than an ordinary hand - you know, longer than usual! - a small leg, a moderately large chest, correctly rounded caviar, shell-colored knees, sloping shoulders - I have learned a lot almost by heart, so all this is true! - but most importantly, do you know what? - Easy breath! But I have it - you listen to how I sigh - isn't it true? Now this light breath has scattered again into the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind. 1916

A. Childhood.

B. Youth.

S. Episode with Shenshin.

D. Talk about light breathing.

E. Arrival of Malyutin.

F. Connection with Malyutin.

G. Diary entry.

N. Last winter.

I. An episode with an officer.

K. Conversation with the boss.

L. Murder.

M. Funeral.

N. Interrogation by the investigator.

O. Grave.

II. Cool lady

a. Cool lady

b. Dream of brother

with. The dream of an ideological worker.

d. Conversation about light breathing.

e. The dream of Olya Meshcherskaya.

f. Walking in the cemetery.

g. At the grave.

Let us now try to outline schematically what the author did with this material, giving it an artistic form, that is, we ask ourselves, how then will the composition of this story be indicated in our drawing? To do this, we connect, in the order of the compositional scheme, the individual points of these straight lines in such a sequence in which the events are actually given in the story. All this is shown in graphic diagrams (see p. 192). In this case, we will conventionally denote by a curve from below any transition to an event chronologically earlier, that is, any return of the author backward, and by a curve from above any transition to a subsequent event, chronologically more distant, that is, any leap of the story forward. We will get two graphical schemes: what does this complex and confusing at first glance curve, which is drawn in the figure, represent? It means, of course, only one thing: the events in the story do not develop in a straight line. {51} 59 , as would be the case in everyday life, and unfold in leaps. The story jumps back and forth, connecting and juxtaposing the most distant points of the narrative, often moving from one point to another, completely unexpectedly. In other words, our curves clearly express the analysis of the plot and plot of a given story, and if we follow the compositional order of the individual elements, we will understand our curve from start to finish as a symbol for the movement of the story. This is the melody of our short story. So, for example, instead of telling the above content in chronological order - how Olya Meshcherskaya was a schoolboy, how she grew up, how she turned into a beauty, how her fall happened, how her relationship with the officer began and her murder suddenly broke out, how she was buried, what was her grave, etc. - instead, the author begins immediately with a description of her grave, then moves on to her early childhood, then suddenly talks about her last winter, after which he tells us during a conversation with the boss about her fall, which happened last summer, after that we learn about her murder, almost at the very end of the story we learn about one insignificant, seemingly episode of her high school life, relating to the distant past. It is these deviations that our curve depicts. Thus, graphically, our diagrams depict what we called above the static structure of the story or its anatomy. It remains to move on to the disclosure of his dynamic composition or his physiology, that is, to find out why the author has designed this material in exactly the same way, for what purpose he starts from the end and at the end speaks as if about the beginning, for the sake of which he rearranged all these events.

We must define the function of this permutation, that is, we must find the expediency and direction of that seemingly senseless and confused curve, which in our case symbolizes the composition of the story. To do this, it is necessary to move from analysis to synthesis and try to unravel the physiology of the story from the meaning and from the life of its whole organism.

What is the content of the story or its material, taken by itself - as it is? What does the system of actions and events that stands out from this story as its obvious plot tell us? It is hardly possible to define more clearly and simply the nature of all this, as in the words "mundane of life." In the very plot of this story, there is absolutely not a single bright line, and if we take these events in their life and everyday meaning, we have before us just nothing wonderful, insignificant and meaningless life of a provincial schoolgirl, a life that clearly rises on rotten roots and , from the point of view of assessing life, gives a rotten color and remains completely sterile. Maybe this life, this mundane muck is at least somewhat idealized, embellished in the story, maybe its dark sides are shaded, maybe it is elevated to the "pearl of creation", and maybe the author simply depicts it in a rosy light as they usually say? Maybe he even, who himself grew up in the same life, finds a special charm and charm in these events, and maybe our assessment simply differs from that which the author gives to his events and his heroes?

We have to say bluntly that none of these assumptions come true when examining the story. On the contrary, the author not only does not try to hide this mundane muck - he is naked everywhere, he depicts it with tactile clarity, as if letting our senses touch it, touch, feel, see with our own eyes, put our fingers into the ulcers of this life. The emptiness, meaninglessness, insignificance of this life are emphasized by the author, as it is easy to show, with a tactile force. Here is how the author says about his heroine: “... her grammar school fame has imperceptibly strengthened, and rumors have already begun that she is windy, that she cannot live without admirers, that the schoolboy Shenshin is madly in love with her, that she seems to love him too, but so changeable in his treatment of him that he attempted suicide ... "Or in these rough and harsh expressions that reveal the naked truth of life, the author says about her relationship with the officer:" ... Meshcherskaya lured him, was with him, vowed to be his wife, and at the station, on the day of the murder, escorting him to Novocherkassk, she suddenly said that she never thought of loving him, that all this talk about marriage was just her mockery of him ... " the very truth in the entry in the diary, which depicts a scene of rapprochement with Malyutin: “He is fifty-six years old, but he is still very handsome and very well dressed, - I just didn’t like the fact that he came in a lionfish, - he all smells of English cologne, and his eyes very young, black, and bo genus is gracefully divided into two long parts and is completely silver. "

In this whole scene, as it is recorded in the diary, there is not a single feature that could hint to us about the movement of living feeling and could somehow illuminate that difficult and hopeless picture that develops in the reader when reading it. The word love is not even mentioned, and it seems that there is no more foreign and inappropriate word for these pages. And so, without the slightest lumen, in one muddy tone, all decisively material about the life, everyday situation, views, concepts, experiences, events of this life is given. Consequently, the author not only does not hide, but, on the contrary, reveals and makes us feel in all its reality the truth that lies at the heart of the story. We repeat once again: its essence, taken from this side, can be defined as the muck of life, as the muddy water of life. However, this is not the impression of the story as a whole.

It is not for nothing that the story is called "Light Breathing", and one does not need to look at it especially carefully for a long time in order to discover that as a result of reading we have an impression that cannot be characterized otherwise than to say that it is the complete opposite of the impression that give the events that are told, taken by themselves. The author achieves just the opposite effect, and the true theme of his story, of course, is a light breath, and not the story of the confused life of a provincial schoolgirl. This story is not about Olya Meshcherskaya, but about light breathing; its main feature is that feeling of liberation, lightness, detachment and perfect transparency of life, which cannot be deduced from the very events that underlie it. Nowhere is this duality of the story presented so clearly as in the story of the class lady Olya Meshcherskaya that frames the whole story. This cool lady, who is astonished, bordering on stupidity, is the grave of Olya Meshcherskaya, who would have given half her life, if only there was not this dead wreath in front of her eyes, and who, deep down in her soul, is still happy, like all people in love and devoted to a passionate dream , - suddenly gives a completely new meaning and tone to the whole story. This classy lady has long been living on some kind of fiction that replaces her real life, and Bunin, with the merciless ruthlessness of a true poet, quite clearly tells us that this impression of light breathing coming from his story is an invention that replaces real life for him. Indeed, the bold comparison that the author makes is striking here. He names in a row three fictions that replaced this cool lady's real life: at first, such an invention was her brother, a poor and not remarkable warrant officer - this is reality, and the fiction was that she lived in a strange expectation that her fate was somehow will fabulously change thanks to him. Then she lived with the dream that she was an ideological worker, and again it was an invention that replaced reality. “The death of Olya Meshcherskaya captivated her with a new dream,” says the author, very closely moving this new invention to the two previous ones. With this technique he again completely doubles our impression, and, forcing the whole story to be refracted and reflected as in a mirror in the perception of a new heroine, he decomposes, as in a spectrum, his rays into their component parts. We clearly feel and experience the split life of this story, what is in it from reality and what is from dreams. And from here our thought easily passes by itself to the analysis of the structure that we made above. The straight line is the reality contained in this story, and that complex curve of the construction of this reality, with which we designated the composition of the story, is his light breath. We guess: events are connected and linked so that they lose their everyday burden and opaque dullness; they are melodically linked to each other, and in their growths, resolutions and transitions, they seem to untie the threads that are pulling them together; they are released from those ordinary bonds in which they are given to us in life and in the impression of life; they are detached from reality, they are connected to one another, as words are combined in a verse. We already dare to formulate our guess and say that the author drew a complex curve in his story in order to destroy his mundane life, to turn its transparency, to detach it from reality, to transform water into wine, as a work of art always does. The words of a story or verse carry its simple meaning, its water, and the composition, creating over these words, on top of them, a new meaning, puts all this in a completely different plane and turns it into wine. This is how the everyday story of a dissolute schoolgirl is transformed here into the light breath of Bunin's story.

It is not difficult to confirm this with completely visual objective and indisputable indications, references to the story itself. Let us take the basic technique of this composition and we will immediately see what purpose the first leap that the author allows himself when he begins with a description of the grave meets the goal. This can be explained by somewhat simplifying the matter and reducing complex feelings to elementary and simple ones, approximately like this: if we were told the story of Olya Meshcherskaya's life in chronological order, from beginning to end, what extraordinary tension would be accompanied by our learning about her unexpected murder! The poet would create that particular tension, that dam of our interest, which German psychologists, like Lipps, called the law of a psychological dam, and theorists of literature call "Spannung." This law and this term only mean that if some psychological movement encounters an obstacle, then our tension begins to increase exactly in the place where we met the obstacle, and this is the tension of our interest, which each episode of the story pulls and directs to subsequent permission would of course overwhelm our story. He would have been full of inexpressible tension. We would find out in approximately the following order: how Olya Meshcherskaya lured the officer, how she entered into a relationship with him, how the twists and turns of this relationship replaced one another, how she swore love and talked about marriage, how she later began to mock him; together with the heroes, we would have lived through the whole scene at the station and its final resolution, and we, of course, with tension and anxiety would have remained following her those short minutes when the officer with her diary in his hands, having read the entry about Malyutin, went out on the platform and shot her unexpectedly. Such an impression would have been produced by this event in the disposition of the story; it juxtaposes the true culmination point of the entire narrative, and all the rest of the action sits around it. But if from the very beginning the author puts us in front of the grave and if we constantly learn the story of an already dead life, if then we already know that she was killed, and only after that we find out how it happened, then it becomes clear to us that this the composition carries in itself the resolution of the tension that is inherent in these events, taken by themselves; and that we read the murder scene and the diary entry scene with a completely different feeling than we would have done if the events were unfolding in front of us in a straight line. And so, step by step, moving from one episode to another, from one phrase to another, it would be possible to show that they are matched and linked in such a way that all the tension contained in them, all the heavy and cloudy feeling is resolved, released, communicated then and in such a connection that it produces a completely different impression from what it would have produced, taken in the natural course of events.

It is possible, following the structure of the form indicated in our scheme, to show step by step that all the skilful leaps of the story have ultimately one goal - to extinguish, destroy the immediate impression that comes to us from these events, and turn it into something else, completely opposite and opposite to the first.

This law of destruction by the form of content can be very easily illustrated even by constructing separate scenes, individual episodes, and individual situations. For example, in what amazing combination we learn about the murder of Olya Meshcherskaya. We were already with the author at her grave, we just learned from a conversation with the boss about her fall, I had just named Malyutin's surname for the first time, “and a month after this conversation, a Cossack officer, ugly and plebeian, did not have exactly nothing to do with the circle to which Olya Meshcherskaya belonged, he shot her on the platform of the station, among a large crowd of people who had just arrived by train. " It is worth taking a closer look at the structure of this phrase alone in order to reveal the entire teleology of the style of this story. Pay attention to how the most important word is lost in the pile of descriptions that have surrounded it from all sides, as if extraneous, secondary and unimportant; how the word “shot” is lost, the most terrible and terrible word of the whole story, and not just this phrase, how it gets lost somewhere on the slope between a long, calm, even description of a Cossack officer and a description of the platform, a large crowd of people and a train that has just arrived ... We will not be mistaken if we say that the very structure of this phrase drowns out this terrible shot, deprives it of its strength and turns it into some kind of almost mimic sign, into some kind of barely noticeable movement of thoughts, when all the emotional coloring of this event is extinguished, pushed aside, destroyed ... Or pay attention to how we learn for the first time about the fall of Olya Meshcherskaya: in the boss's cozy office, where it smells of fresh lilies of the valley and the warmth of a shiny Dutch woman, amid a reprimand about expensive shoes and a hairdo. And again the terrible or, as the author himself says, “incredible confession that stunned the boss” is described as follows: “And here Meshcherskaya, without losing her simplicity and calmness, suddenly interrupted her politely:

Sorry madame, you are wrong: I am a woman. And do you know who is to blame for this? Dad's friend and neighbor, and your brother, Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin. It happened last summer, in the village ... "

The shot is narrated as a small detail of the description of the train that has just arrived, here the overwhelming confession is reported as a small detail of the conversation about shoes and hair; and this very thoroughness - "a friend and neighbor of the Pope, and your brother, Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin" - of course, has no other meaning than to extinguish, destroy the stunnedness and improbability of this confession. And at the same time, the author immediately emphasizes the other, real side of both the shot and the recognition. And in the scene at the cemetery itself, the author again calls the life meaning of events with real words and tells about the amazement of the classy lady, who in no way can understand "how to combine this terrible what is now connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya? " terrible, which is connected with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya, is given in the story all the time, step by step, its horror is not underestimated at all, but the story does not make the very impression of a terrible thing on us, this terrible thing is experienced by us in some completely different feeling, and this very story about the terrible for some reason it bears the strange name of "light breathing", and for some reason everything is permeated with the breath of a cold and thin spring.

Let's dwell on the title: the title is given to the story, of course, not in vain, it carries the disclosure of the most important topic, it outlines the dominant that determines the entire structure of the story. This concept, introduced into aesthetics by Christiansen, turns out to be deeply fruitful, and it is absolutely impossible to do without it when analyzing any thing. Indeed, every story, picture, poem is, of course, a complex whole, composed of completely different elements, organized to varying degrees, in a different hierarchy of subordination and connection; and in this complex whole there is always a certain dominant and dominant moment, which determines the construction of the rest of the story, the meaning and name of each of its parts. And such a dominant feature of our story is, of course, "light breathing" {52} 60 ... It appears, however, towards the very end of the story in the form of a recollection of a class lady about the past, about a conversation she once overheard between Olya Meshcherskaya and her friend. This conversation about female beauty, told in the semi-comic style of "old funny books", serves as the pointe of the whole novel, that catastrophe in which its true meaning is revealed. In all this beauty, the "old funny book" assigns the most important place to "light breathing." "Easy breath! But I have it, - you listen to how I sigh, - don't I really have it? " We seem to hear the very sigh, and in this comic-sounding and funny style written story we suddenly discover its completely different meaning, reading the final catastrophic words of the author: “Now this light breath has again scattered into the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind ... ”These words seem to close the circle, bringing the end to the beginning. How much can sometimes mean and how much meaning can a small word breathe in an artistically constructed phrase. Such a word in this phrase, which carries the whole catastrophe of the story, is the word "this is" easy breath. it: we are talking about the air that has just been named, about that light breath that Olya Meshcherskaya asked her friend to listen to; and then again the catastrophic words: "... in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind ..." These three words completely concretize and unite the whole idea of ​​the story, which begins with a description of the cloudy sky and the cold spring wind. The author, as it were, says in closing words, summarizing the whole story, that everything that happened, everything that made up the life, love, murder, death of Olya Meshcherskaya - all this, in essence, is only one event, - this is light breath scattered again in the world, in this cloudy sky, in this cold spring wind. And all the previous descriptions of the grave given by the author, and the April weather, and gray days, and the cold wind - all of this is suddenly combined, as if collected at one point, included and introduced into the story: the story suddenly gets a new meaning and a new expressive meaning - this is not just a Russian uyezd landscape, this is not just a spacious uyezd cemetery, this is not just the ringing of the wind in a porcelain wreath, this is all the light breath scattered in the world, which in its everyday meaning is all the same shot, all the same Malyutin, all that terrible , which is combined with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya. It is not for nothing that pointe is characterized by theorists as an ending on an unstable moment or an ending in music on a dominant. This story at the very end, when we already learned about everything, when the whole story of Olya Meshcherskaya's life and death passed before us, when we already know everything that might interest us, about a cool lady, suddenly with unexpected poignancy throws at everything we heard a completely new light, and this leap that the story makes - jumping from the grave to this story about light breathing, is a decisive leap for the composition of the whole, which suddenly illuminates the whole whole from a completely new side for us.

And the final phrase, which we called above catastrophic, resolves this unstable ending on the dominant - this is an unexpected funny admission about easy breathing and brings together both plans of the story. And here the author does not in the least obscure reality and does not merge it with fiction. What Olya Meshcherskaya tells her friend is funny in the most precise sense of the word, and when she retells the book: “... well, of course, black eyes boiling with resin, by God, it’s written like that: boiling with resin! - black as night, eyelashes ... "and so on, all this is simple and definitely funny. And this real real air - "listen how I sigh" - too, since it belongs to reality, just a funny detail of this strange conversation. But he, taken in a different context, now helps the author to unite all the disparate parts of his story, and in catastrophic lines suddenly, with extraordinary conciseness, the whole story runs through before us from of this a light sigh and before of this cold spring wind on the grave, and we are really convinced that this is a story about light breathing.

It could be shown in detail that the author uses a number of auxiliary means that still serve the same purpose. We have pointed out only one of the most noticeable and clear method of decoration, namely the plot composition; but, of course, in that processing of the impression that comes to us from the events, which, we think, is the very essence of art's action on us, not only the plot composition plays a role, but also a number of other moments. In how the author tells these events, in what language, in what tone, how he chooses words, how he builds phrases, whether he describes scenes or gives summary their results, whether he directly cites the diaries or dialogues of his heroes, or simply introduces us to the event that has passed, - in all this, the artistic development of the topic is also reflected, which has the same meaning with the technique we have discussed and analyzed.

In particular, the very choice of facts is of the greatest importance. For the convenience of reasoning, we proceeded from the fact that we opposed the disposition of composition as a natural moment to an artificial moment, forgetting that the very disposition, that is, the choice of facts to be formalized, is already a creative act. In the life of Olya Meshcherskaya there were a thousand events, a thousand conversations, the connection with the officer contained dozens of twists and turns, there was more than one Shenshin in her gymnasium hobbies, she not only let her boss slip about Malyutin, but for some reason the author chose these episodes, discarding thousands of others , and already in this act of choice, selection, elimination of the unnecessary, of course, the creative act affected. In the same way, as an artist, drawing a tree, does not write out at all, and he cannot write out each leaf separately, but gives either a general, summary impression of a spot, or several separate sheets, - just like a writer, selecting only the ones that are necessary for him features of events, in the strongest way it processes and rebuilds life material. And, in essence, we begin to go beyond this selection when we begin to extend our life assessments to this material.

Blok perfectly expressed this rule of creativity in his poem, when he contrasted, on the one hand, -

Life is without beginning or end.

We all have a chance ...

and on the other:

Erase the random traits -

And you will see: the world is beautiful.

In particular, special attention is usually paid to the organization of the writer's speech itself, his language, structure, rhythm, melody of the story. In that unusually calm, full-fledged classical phrase in which Bunin unfolds his novella, of course, all the elements and forces necessary for the artistic implementation of the theme are contained. Later we will have to talk about the paramount importance that the structure of the writer's speech has on our breathing. We made a number of experimental recordings of our breathing while reading prose and poetic passages with different rhythmic patterns, in particular, we recorded the entire breath while reading this story; Blonsky quite rightly says that, in essence, we feel the way we breathe, and that breathing system is extremely indicative of the emotional effect of each piece. {53} 61 that matches it. Forcing us to waste our breath sparingly, in small portions, to hold it back, the author easily creates a general emotional background for our reaction, the background of a melancholy undercurrent. On the contrary, forcing us, as it were, to throw out all the air in the lungs at once and energetically replenish this supply, the poet creates a completely different emotional background for our aesthetic reaction.

We will separately still have the opportunity to talk about the meaning that we attach to these records of the respiratory curve, and what these records teach. But it seems to us appropriate and significant that our very breathing while reading this story, as the pneumographic record shows, is lung breath that we read about murder, about death, about dregs, about everything terrible that has combined with the name of Olya Meshcherskaya, but at this time we breathe as if we do not perceive the terrible, but as if each new phrase carries illumination and resolution from this terrible thing. And instead of excruciating tension, we experience an almost painful lightness. This marks, in any case, the affective contradiction, the clash of two opposite feelings, which, apparently, constitutes the amazing psychological law of the fictional story. I say - amazing, because with all the traditional aesthetics we are prepared for the opposite understanding of art: for centuries, aesthetics have been talking about the harmony of form and content, that the form illustrates, complements, accompanies the content, and suddenly we discover that this is the greatest the delusion that form is at war with content, fights against it, overcomes it, and that this dialectical contradiction of content and form seems to contain the true psychological meaning of our aesthetic reaction. Indeed, it seemed to us that, wishing to portray light breathing, Bunin had to choose the most lyrical, serene, most transparent that can only be found in everyday events, incidents and characters. Why didn't he tell us about some first love, transparent, like air, pure and not darkened? Why did he choose the most terrible, rough, heavy and muddy when he wanted to develop the topic of light breathing?

We come to the conclusion that in a work of art there is always some contradiction, some internal inconsistency between material and form, that the author selects, as it were, deliberately difficult, resisting material, one that resists with its properties all the efforts of the author to say that he is wants to say. And the more insurmountable, stubborn and hostile the material itself, the more it appears to be more suitable for the author. And the formal that the author gives to this material is not aimed at revealing the properties inherent in the material itself, to reveal the life of a Russian schoolgirl to the end in all its typicality and depth, to analyze and overlook events in their real essence, but precisely in the other side: to overcome these properties, to make the terrible speak the language of "light breath", and to make the muck of life ring and ring like a cold spring wind.

ChapterVIII

The tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

The riddle of Hamlet. "Subjective" and "objective" decisions. Hamlet's character problem. The structure of the tragedy: plot and plot. Hero identification. Catastrophe.

The tragedy of Hamlet is unanimously considered mysterious. It seems to everyone that it differs from other tragedies of Shakespeare himself and other authors, first of all, in that the course of action in it is unfolded in such a way that it certainly causes some misunderstanding and surprise of the viewer. Therefore, research and critical works about this play are almost always interpretive, and they are all built on the same model - they try to solve the riddle posed by Shakespeare. This riddle can be formulated as follows: why Hamlet, who must kill the king immediately after speaking with the shadow, can not do this in any way and the whole tragedy is filled with the history of his inaction? To solve this riddle, which really confronts the mind of every reader, because Shakespeare in the play did not give a direct and clear explanation of Hamlet's slowness, critics look for the reasons for this slowness in two things: in the character and feelings of Hamlet himself or in objective conditions. The first group of critics reduces the problem to the problem of Hamlet's character and tries to show that Hamlet does not immediately take revenge either because his moral feelings oppose the act of revenge, or because he is indecisive and powerless by his very nature, or because, as Goethe pointed out, that too big a job is placed on too weak shoulders. And since none of these interpretations explains the tragedy to the end, we can say with confidence that all these interpretations have no scientific significance, since the exact opposite of each of them can be equally defended. Researchers of the opposite kind are gullible and naive to a work of fiction and try to understand Hamlet's slowness from his warehouse. mental life as if this is a living and real person, and in general their arguments are almost always the essence of arguments from life and from the significance of human nature, but not from the artistic construction of the play. These critics go as far as asserting that Shakespeare's goal was to show a weak-willed person and to unfold the tragedy that arises in the soul of a person who is called to accomplish a great deed, but who does not have the necessary strength for this. They understood "Hamlet" for the most part as a tragedy of powerlessness and lack of will, completely disregarding a whole series of scenes that depict features of a completely opposite character in Hamlet and show that Hamlet is a man of exceptional determination, courage, courage, that he does not hesitate in the least for moral reasons etc.

Another group of critics looked for the reasons for Hamlet's sluggishness in those objective obstacles that lie in the path of achieving the goal set before him. They pointed out that the king and the courtiers had a very strong opposition to Hamlet, that Hamlet did not kill the king immediately, because he could not kill him. This group of critics, following in the footsteps of Werder, claims that Hamlet's task was not to kill the king, but to expose him, prove his guilt to everyone, and only then punish him. Many arguments can be found to defend such an opinion, but an equally large number of arguments taken from the tragedy easily refute this opinion. These critics fail to notice two main things that make them cruelly mistaken: their first mistake boils down to the fact that we nowhere in the tragedy, either directly or indirectly, find such a formulation of the task facing Hamlet. These critics are inventing new complicating tasks for Shakespeare, and again they use arguments from common sense and everyday plausibility more than the aesthetics of the tragic. Their second mistake is that they miss a huge number of scenes and monologues, from which it becomes completely clear to us that Hamlet himself is aware of the subjective nature of his slowness, that he does not understand what makes him procrastinate, that he cites several completely different reasons for this and that none of them can withstand the burdens of serving as a support for the explanation of the whole action.

Both groups of critics agree that this tragedy is highly mysterious, and this confession alone completely deprives all their arguments of the credibility.

After all, if their considerations are correct, then one would expect that there will be no riddle in the tragedy. What a mystery, if Shakespeare deliberately wants to portray a hesitant and indecisive person. After all, then from the very beginning we would see and understand that we have slowness due to hesitation. A play on the theme of lack of will would be bad if this very lack of will was hidden in it under a mystery and if the critics of the second direction, that the difficulty lies in external obstacles, were right; then it would have to be said that Hamlet is some kind of Shakespeare's dramatic mistake, because this struggle with external obstacles, which constitutes the true meaning of tragedy, Shakespeare was unable to present distinctly and clearly, and it is also hidden under a mystery. Critics try to solve the riddle of Hamlet by introducing something from the outside, from the outside, some considerations and thoughts that are not given in the tragedy itself, and they approach this tragedy as an incidental life event, which must certainly be interpreted in terms of common sense. In the beautiful expression of Berne, a veil is thrown over the picture, we are trying to raise this veil in order to see the picture; it turns out that the fleur is drawn on the picture itself. And this is absolutely true. It is very easy to show that the riddle is drawn in the tragedy itself, that the tragedy is deliberately constructed as a riddle, that it must be comprehended and understood as a riddle that defies logical interpretation, and if critics want to remove the riddle from the tragedy, then they deprive the tragedy of its essential part.

Let us dwell on the most mysteriousness of the play. Almost unanimous criticism, despite all the differences of opinion, notes this darkness and incomprehensibility, incomprehensibility of the play. Gessner says Hamlet is a tragedy of masks. We are facing Hamlet and his tragedy, as Kuno Fischer expresses this opinion, as if before a veil. We all think that there is some kind of image behind it, but in the end we are convinced that this image is nothing but the veil itself. According to Berne, Hamlet is something incongruous, worse than death, not yet born. Goethe spoke of a grim problem with this tragedy. Schlegel equated it with an irrational equation, Baumgardt talks about the complexity of the plot, which contains a long series of diverse and unexpected events. “The tragedy of Hamlet is really like a maze,” agrees Kuno Fischer. “In Hamlet,” says G. Brandes, “there is no 'general meaning' or the idea of ​​the whole hovering over the play. Certainty was not the ideal that was worn before Shakespeare's eyes ... There are many mysteries and contradictions here, but the attractive power of the play is largely due to its very darkness ”(21, p. 38). Speaking about “dark” books, Brandes finds that such a book is “Hamlet”: “In places in the drama there is a kind of chasm between the shell of the action and its core” (21, p. 31). “Hamlet remains a secret,” says Ten-Brink, “but an irresistibly attractive secret due to our consciousness that it is not an artificially invented secret, but a secret that has its source in the nature of things” (102, p. 142). “But Shakespeare created a mystery,” says Dowden, “which has remained for thought an element that forever excites it and is never fully explained by it. idea or a magic phrase could solve the difficulties presented by the drama, or suddenly illuminate everything that is dark in it. Ambiguity is inherent in a work of art, which does not have any task in mind, but life; but in this life, in this story of the soul, which passed along the gloomy border between night darkness and daylight, there is ... much that escapes any study and confuses it "(45, p. 131). Extracts could be continue indefinitely, since all decisively critics, with the exception of individual units, stop at this. Shakespeare's detractors, like Tolstoy, Voltaire and others, say the same thing. Voltaire, in the preface to the tragedy "Semiramis", says that "the course of events in the tragedy Hamlet is the greatest confusion ", Rumelin says that" the play as a whole is incomprehensible "(see 158, pp. 74-97).

But all this criticism sees in the darkness a shell behind which the core is hidden, the veil behind which the image is hidden, the veil that hides the picture from our eyes. It is completely incomprehensible why, if Shakespeare's Hamlet is really what the critics say about him, he is surrounded by such mystery and incomprehensibility. And I must say that this mystery is often infinitely exaggerated and is even more often based simply on misunderstandings. This kind of misunderstanding should include the opinion of Merezhkovsky, who says: "To Hamlet, the shadow of his father appears in a solemn, romantic atmosphere, with thunder and earthquakes ... The shadow of his father tells Hamlet about secrets beyond the grave, about God, about revenge and blood" (73, p. 141). Where, apart from the operatic libretto, one can read this, remains completely incomprehensible. Needless to say, nothing of the kind exists in real Hamlet.

So, we can discard all the criticism that tries to separate the mystery from the tragedy itself, remove the veil from the picture. However, it is curious to see how such criticism responds to the mysterious character and behavior of Hamlet. Berne says: “Shakespeare is a king who is not subject to rule. If he were like any other, one could say: Hamlet is a lyrical character that contradicts any dramatic treatment ”(16, p. 404). Brandes notes the same discrepancy. He says: “We must not forget that this dramatic phenomenon, the hero who does not act, was to a certain extent required by the very technique of this drama. If Hamlet had killed the king immediately after receiving the revelation of the spirit, the play would have to be limited to one act. Therefore, it was positively necessary to allow decelerations to arise ”(21, p. 37). But if this were so, it would simply mean that the plot is not suitable for tragedy, and that Shakespeare artificially slows down such an action that could be finished immediately, and that he introduces four extra acts in such a play that could be great fit in one single. The same is noted by Montague, who gives an excellent formula: "Inaction and represents the action of the first three acts." Beck is very close to the same understanding. He explains everything from the contradiction between the plot of the play and the character of the hero. The plot, the course of action, belongs to the chronicle, where Shakespeare poured the plot, and the character of Hamlet - to Shakespeare. There is an irreconcilable contradiction between the one and the other. “Shakespeare was not the complete master of his play and did not dispose of its individual parts quite freely,” the chronicle makes. But this is the whole point, and it is so simple and true that you do not need to look for any other explanations around. This brings us to a new group of critics who are looking for clues to Hamlet either in terms of dramatic technique, as Brandes crudely expressed it, or in the historical and literary roots on which this tragedy grew up. But it is quite obvious that in this case it would mean that the rules of technology won over the writer's abilities or the historical character of the plot outweighed the possibilities of its artistic processing. In either case, “Hamlet” would mean a mistake by Shakespeare, who failed to choose a suitable subject for his tragedy, and from this point of view, Zhukovsky is absolutely right when he says that “Shakespeare's masterpiece Hamlet seems to me a monster. I don’t understand him. Those who find so much in Hamlet prove their own wealth of thought and imagination rather than the superiority of Hamlet. I cannot believe that Shakespeare, composing his tragedy, thought everything that Tieck and Schlegel thought when reading it: they see in it and in its striking oddities all human life with its incomprehensible riddles ... I asked him to read it to me "Hamlet" and so that after reading he would tell me in detail his thoughts about it monstrous ugly. "

Goncharov was of the same opinion, who argued that Hamlet could not be played: “Hamlet is not a typical role - no one will play it, and there has never been an actor who would play it ... He must be exhausted in it like an eternal Jew ... phenomena elusive in the ordinary, normal state of the soul ”. It would be a mistake, however, to believe that literary-historical and formal explanations, which seek the reasons for Hamlet's slowness in technical or historical circumstances, invariably tend to conclude that Shakespeare wrote a bad play. A number of researchers also point to a positive aesthetic meaning, which consisted in the use of this necessary slowness. Thus, Volkenstein defends an opinion opposite to that of Heine, Berne, Turgenev and others, who believe that Hamlet is a weak-willed being in himself. The opinion of these latter is perfectly expressed by the words of Goebbel, who says: “Hamlet is a carrion even before the start of the tragedy. What we see are roses and thorns that grow out of this fall. " Volkenstein believes that the true nature of a dramatic work, and, in particular, tragedy, lies in the extraordinary tension of passions and that it is always based on the inner strength of the hero. Therefore, he believes that the view of Hamlet as a weak-willed person “rests ... on that blind gullibility of verbal material, which sometimes the most profound literary criticism was distinguished ... A dramatic hero cannot be trusted at his word, it is necessary to check how he acts. And Hamlet acts more than energetically, he alone leads a long and bloody struggle with the king, with the entire Danish court. In his tragic quest to restore justice, he decisively attacks the king three times: the first time he kills Polonius, the second time the king is saved by his prayer, the third time - at the end of the tragedy - Hamlet kills the king. Hamlet, with splendid ingenuity, dramatizes the "mousetrap" - a performance, checking the indications of the shadow; Hamlet cleverly removes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern from his path. Indeed, he is waging a titanic struggle ... The flexible and strong character of Hamlet corresponds to his physical nature: Laertes is the best swordsman in France, and Hamlet defeats him, turns out to be a more dexterous fighter (as contradicts Turgenev's indication of his physical looseness!). The hero of the tragedy is the maximum of will ... and we would not feel the tragic effect of Hamlet if the hero were indecisive and weak ”(28, p. 137, 138). What is curious about this opinion is not that it indicates the features that distinguish Hamlet's strength and courage. This was done many times, just as the obstacles that faced Hamlet were emphasized many times. What is remarkable about this opinion is that it interprets in a new way all the material of the tragedy that speaks of Hamlet's lack of will. Volkenstein considers all those monologues in which Hamlet reproaches himself for lack of decisiveness, as a self-whipping of the will, and says that they least of all testify to his weakness, if you like, on the contrary.

Thus, according to this view, it turns out that all of Hamlet's self-accusations of lack of will serve as further evidence of his extraordinary willpower. Leading a titanic struggle, showing maximum strength and energy, he is still dissatisfied with himself, demands even more from himself, and thus this interpretation saves the situation, showing that the contradiction was not introduced into the drama in vain and that this contradiction is only apparent. Words about lack of will should be understood as the strongest proof of will. However, even this attempt does not solve the problem. Indeed, it only gives a visible solution to the question and repeats, in essence, the old point of view on the character of Hamlet, but, in essence, it does not explain why Hamlet hesitates, why he does not kill, as Brandes demands, the king in the first act , immediately after the message of the shadow, and why the tragedy does not end with the end of the first act. With such a view, willy-nilly, one must adhere to the direction that comes from Werder, and which points to external obstacles as the true reason for Hamlet's slowness. But this means clearly contradicting the direct meaning of the play. Hamlet is waging a titanic struggle - one can still agree with this, if we proceed from the character of Hamlet himself. Let us assume that it really contains great forces. But with whom is he waging this struggle, against whom is it directed, in what way is it expressed? And as soon as you raise this question, you will immediately discover the insignificance of Hamlet's opponents, the insignificance of the reasons holding him back from killing him, his blind yielding to the machinations directed against him. Indeed, the critic himself notes that the king is saved by prayer, but are there any indications in the tragedy that Hamlet is a deeply religious person and that this reason belongs to the spiritual movements of great strength? On the contrary, it pops up quite by accident and seems incomprehensible to us. If, instead of the king, he kills Polonius, thanks to a simple accident, then his resolve has matured immediately after the performance. The question is, why does his sword fall on the king only at the very end of the tragedy? Finally, no matter how planned, random, episodic, the struggle that he wages is limited every time by local meaning - for the most part it is a parrying of blows directed at him, but not an attack. And the murder of Guildenstern and everything else is only self-defense, and, of course, we cannot call such a human self-defense a titanic struggle. We will still have the opportunity to point out that all three times when Hamlet tries to kill the king, which Volkenstein always refers to, that they indicate exactly the opposite of what the critic sees in them. The production of "Hamlet" at the 2nd Moscow Art Theater, which is closely related in meaning to this interpretation, also gives little explanation. Here, in practice, we tried to implement what we just got acquainted with in theory. The directors proceeded from the clash of two types of human nature and the development of their struggle with each other. “One of them is a protester, heroic, fighting to assert what constitutes his life. This is our Hamlet. In order to more clearly reveal and emphasize its overwhelming significance, we had to greatly shorten the text of the tragedy, throw out from it everything that could stop the whirlwind ... From the middle of the second act, he takes the sword in his hands and does not release it until the end of the tragedy; We also emphasized the activity of Hamlet by the thickening of the obstacles that are encountered on the way of Hamlet. Hence the interpretation of the king and his associates. The King of Claudia personifies everything that hinders the heroic Hamlet ... And our Hamlet is constantly in a spontaneous and passionate struggle against everything that personifies the king ... In order to thicken the colors, it seemed to us necessary to transfer the action of Hamlet to the Middle Ages. "

This is what the directors of this play say in the art manifesto, which they released about this production. And with all their frankness they point out that for the stage embodiment, for understanding the tragedy, they had to perform three operations on the play: first, to throw out of it all that interferes with this understanding; the second is to thicken the obstacles that oppose Hamlet, and the third is to thicken the colors and transfer the action of Hamlet to the Middle Ages, while everyone sees in this play the personification of the Renaissance. It is quite clear that after these three operations any interpretation can succeed, but it is equally clear that these three operations turn the tragedy into something completely opposite to the way it is written. And the fact that such radical operations on the play were required to implement such an understanding is the best proof of the colossal discrepancy that exists between the true meaning of history and between the meaning interpreted in this way. As an illustration of the colossal contradiction of the play into which the theater falls, it is enough to refer to the fact that the king, who actually plays a very modest role in the play, in this situation turns into the heroic opposite of Hamlet himself {54} 62 ... If Hamlet is the maximum of heroic will, light is its one pole, then the king is the maximum of anti-heroic will, dark is its other pole. To reduce the role of the king to the personification of the entire dark beginning of life - for this, it would be necessary, in essence, to write a new tragedy with completely opposite tasks than those that faced Shakespeare.

Much closer to the truth are those interpretations of Hamlet's slowness, which also proceed from formal considerations and really shed a lot of light on the solution of this riddle, but which were made without any operations on the text of the tragedy. Such attempts include, for example, an attempt to understand some of the features of the construction of "Hamlet" based on the technique and construction of Shakespeare's scene {55} 63 , dependence on which in no case can be denied and the study of which is deeply necessary for the correct understanding and analysis of the tragedy. Such a meaning, for example, is the law of temporal continuity established by Prels in Shakespeare's drama, which demanded from the viewer and from the author a completely different stage convention than the technique of our modern stage. Our play is divided into acts: each act conventionally denotes only that short period of time, which is occupied by the events depicted in it. Long-term events and their changes occur between acts, the viewer learns about them later. An act can be separated from another act by an interval of several years. All this requires some writing techniques. The situation was completely different in Shakespeare's time, when the action lasted continuously, when the play, apparently, did not disintegrate into acts and its performance was not interrupted by intermissions and everything was performed before the eyes of the viewer. It is quite clear that such an important aesthetic convention had a colossal compositional significance for any structure of the play, and we can understand a lot for ourselves if we get acquainted with the technique and aesthetics of Shakespeare's contemporary stage. However, when we overstep the boundaries and begin to think that with the establishment of the technical necessity of some technique, we have thereby already solved the problem, we fall into a deep mistake. It is necessary to show to what extent each technique was conditioned by the technique of the stage of that time. Necessary - but far from enough. It is also necessary to show the psychological significance of this technique, why Shakespeare chose this one from a multitude of similar techniques, because it cannot be admitted that any techniques were entirely explained by their technical necessity, because this would mean admitting the power of bare technique in art. In fact, the technique, of course, certainly determines the construction of the play, but within the limits of technical capabilities, each technique and fact is, as it were, elevated to the dignity of an aesthetic fact. Here's a simple example. Silversvan says: “The poet was pressed by a certain arrangement of the scene. actors from the stage, resp. the impossibility of ending a play or a scene with any troupe, there are cases when, in the course of the play, corpses appear on the stage: it was impossible to force them to get up and leave, and so, for example, in Hamlet, an unnecessary Fortinbras appears with different people, in the end only to proclaim:

Remove the corpses.

In the midst of the battlefield they are conceivable,

And here it is out of place, like traces of a massacre,

And everyone leaves and takes the bodies with them.

The reader will be able to increase the number of such examples without any difficulty by reading carefully at least one Shakespeare "(101, p. 30). Here is an example of a completely false interpretation of the final scene in Hamlet using only technical considerations. curtain and unfolding the action on a stage open all the time in front of the listener, the playwright had to finish the play every time so that someone carried away the corpses. In this sense, the drama technique undoubtedly put pressure on Shakespeare. the scene of "Hamlet", but he could have done it in different ways: they could have been carried away by the courtiers on the stage, and simply by the Danish guard. From this technical necessity, we can never conclude that Fortinbras appears only then, to carry away the corpses, and that this Fortinbras is not needed by anyone. One has only to turn to such, for example, the interpretation of the play, which is given by Kuno Fischer: he sees one theme of revenge embodied in three different images - Hamlet, Laertes and Fortinbras, who are all avengers for their fathers - and we will now see a deep artistic meaning in that with the final appearance of Fortinbras, this theme receives its fullest completion and that the procession of the victorious Fortinbras is deeply meaningful where the corpses of two other avengers lie, whose image was always opposed to this third image. This is how we easily find the aesthetic meaning of a technical law. We will have to turn to the help of such a study more than once, and, in particular, the law established by Prels helps us a lot in the matter of clarifying the slowness of Hamlet. However, this is always only the beginning of the study, and not the entire study as a whole. The task will be each time in that, having established the technical necessity of any method, at the same time to understand its aesthetic expediency. Otherwise, together with Brandes, we will have to conclude that technique is wholly owned by the poet, and not the poet's technique, and that Hamlet hesitates four acts because the plays were written in five, and not in one act, and we will never be able to understand why one and the same the same technique, which pressed in exactly the same way on Shakespeare and on other writers, created one aesthetics in the tragedy of Shakespeare and another in the tragedies of his contemporaries; and even more, why the same technique made Shakespeare compose Othello, Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet in completely different ways. Obviously, even within the limits assigned to the poet by his technique, he still retains the creative freedom of composition. We find the same lack of explanatory discoveries in those premises to explain Hamlet on the basis of the requirements of the artistic form, which also establish perfectly correct laws necessary for understanding tragedy, but completely insufficient for explaining it. Here is how Eichenbaum casually says about Hamlet: “In fact, the tragedy is not delayed because Schiller needs to develop a psychology of slowness, but quite the opposite - because Wallenstein hesitates, that the tragedy must be delayed, and this detention must be hidden... It's the same with Hamlet. It is not for nothing that there are directly opposite interpretations of Hamlet as a person - and everyone is right in their own way, because everyone is equally wrong. Both Hamlet and Wallenstein are presented in two aspects necessary for the development of a tragic form - as a driving force and as a retarding force. Instead of a simple movement forward in a plot scheme, it is something like a dance with complex movements. From a psychological point of view, it is almost a contradiction ... Quite right - because psychology serves only as a motivation: the hero seems to be a person, but in reality he is a mask.

Shakespeare introduced the ghost of his father into the tragedy and made Hamlet a philosopher - the motivation for movement and detention. Schiller makes Wallenstein a traitor, almost against his will, in order to create a movement of tragedy, and introduces an astrological element that motivates detention "(138, p. 81). A whole series of perplexities arises here. art form it is really necessary that the hero develop and delay the action at the same time. What will explain this to us in Hamlet? No more than the need to remove the corpses at the end of the action will explain the appearance of Fortinbras; precisely not in the least, because the technique of the stage and the technique of form, of course, put pressure on the poet. But they pressed on Shakespeare as well as on Schiller. The question is, why did one write Wallenstein, and the other Hamlet? Why did the same technique and the same requirements for the development of the art form once lead to the creation of Macbeth, and another time of Hamlet, although these plays are directly opposite in their composition? Let us assume that the psychology of the hero is only an illusion of the viewer and is introduced by the author as a motivation. But the question arises, is the motivation chosen by the author completely indifferent to the tragedy? Is it accidental? Does it say something by itself, or is the operation of tragic laws exactly the same, in whatever motivation, in whatever concrete form they appear, just as the correctness of an algebraic formula remains completely constant, no matter what arithmetic meanings we substitute into it?

Thus, formalism, which began with extraordinary attention to a specific form, degenerates into the purest formalism, which reduces individual individual forms to well-known algebraic schemes. No one will argue with Schiller when he says that the tragic poet "must prolong the torture of the senses," but even knowing this law, we will never understand why this torture of the senses is dragged out in Macbeth at the frantic pace of development of the play, and in "Hamlet" with just the opposite. Eichenbaum believes that with the help of this law we have completely clarified Hamlet. We know that Shakespeare introduced the ghost of his father into the tragedy - this is the motivation behind the movement. He made Hamlet a philosopher - this is the reason for the detention. Schiller resorted to other motivations - instead of philosophy, he has an astrological element, and instead of a ghost, he has treason. The question is why, for the same reason, we have two completely different consequences. Or we must admit that the reason indicated here is not real, or rather, insufficient, explaining not everything and not completely, more correctly, not even explaining the most important thing. Here is the simplest example: “We love very much,” says Eichenbaum, “for some reason 'psychology' and 'characteristics'. We naively think that the artist writes in order to “portray” psychology or character. Racking our brains over the question of Hamlet - “did Shakespeare want to depict slowness in him or something else? In fact, the artist does not depict anything of the kind, because he is not at all occupied with questions of psychology, and we are not at all looking at Hamlet in order to study psychology ”(138, p. 78).

All this is absolutely true, but does it follow from this that the choice of character and psychology of the hero is completely indifferent to the author? It is true that we are not watching Hamlet in order to study the psychology of slowness, but it is also quite true that if Hamlet is given a different character, the play will lose all its effect. The artist, of course, did not want to give psychology or characterization in his tragedy. But the psychology and characterization of the hero is not an indifferent, random and arbitrary moment, but something aesthetically very significant, and to interpret Hamlet as Eichenbaum does in the same phrase means simply to interpret him very badly. To say that action is delayed in Hamlet because Hamlet is a philosopher is simply to accept and repeat the opinion of those very boring books and articles that Eichenbaum refutes. It is the traditional view of psychology and characterization that claims that Hamlet does not kill the king because he is a philosopher. The same flat view suggests that in order to compel Hamlet to act, it is necessary to introduce a ghost. But Hamlet could have learned the same thing in a different way, and one has only to turn to the tragedy in order to see that the action in it is delayed not by the philosophy of Hamlet, but by something completely different.

Whoever wants to investigate Hamlet as a psychological problem must abandon criticism altogether. We tried to show above in total how little it gives the researcher the right direction and how it often leads completely aside. Therefore, the starting point for psychological research should be the desire to rid Hamlet of those N000 volumes of commentaries that crushed him with their weight and about which Tolstoy speaks with horror. We must take the tragedy as it is, look at what it says not to a philosophical interpreter, but to an ingenuous researcher, we must take it in an uninterpreted form. {56} 64 and look at her the way she is. Otherwise, we would risk turning, instead of studying the dream itself, to its interpretation. We know of only one such attempt to look at Hamlet. It was made with ingenious courage by Tolstoy in his most beautiful article on Shakespeare, which for some reason still continues to be considered stupid and uninteresting. Here is what Tolstoy says: “But on none of Shakespeare’s faces is he so strikingly noticeable, I’ll not say his inability, but complete indifference to imparting character to his faces, as in Hamlet, and in none of Shakespeare’s plays is that blind adoration so strikingly noticeable Shakespeare, that unreasoning hypnosis, as a result of which even the thought is not allowed that any work of Shakespeare might not be genius and that some main person in his drama might not be a depiction of a new and deeply understood character.

Shakespeare takes a very pretty old story ... or a drama written on this topic 15 years before him, and writes his own drama on this plot, putting completely inappropriate (as he always does) into the lips of the protagonist all of his seeming noteworthy thoughts. Putting these thoughts into the mouth of his hero ... he does not at all care about the conditions under which these speeches are made, and, naturally, it turns out that the person expressing all these thoughts becomes Shakespeare's phonograph, loses all characteristic, and actions and speeches its not consistent.

In the legend, Hamlet's personality is quite understandable: he is outraged by the deed of his uncle and mother, wants to take revenge on them, but is afraid that his uncle would not kill him like his father, and for this he pretends to be crazy ...

All this is understandable and follows from the character and position of Hamlet. But Shakespeare, inserting into the mouth of Hamlet those speeches that he wants to express, and forcing him to perform the actions that the author needs to prepare spectacular scenes, destroys everything that makes up the character of Hamlet of the legend. Throughout the continuation of the drama, Hamlet does not what he might want, but what the author needs: he is horrified at the shadow of his father, then he begins to tease her, calling him a mole, then he loves Ophelia, then he teases her, etc. No no way to find any explanation for the actions and speeches of Hamlet, and therefore no way to ascribe any character to him.

But since it is recognized that the genius Shakespeare cannot write anything bad, then learned people all the forces of their mind are directed to find extraordinary beauty in what constitutes the obvious, cutting eyes, especially sharply expressed in Hamlet, a defect that consists in the fact that the main person has no character. And now, profound critics declare that in this drama, in the person of Hamlet, an unusually strongly completely new and deep character is expressed, consisting precisely in the fact that this face has no character and that this lack of character is the genius of creating a profound character. And, having decided this, scholarly critics write volumes after volumes, so that praises and explanations of the greatness and importance of portraying the character of a person who has no character make up enormous libraries. True, some of the critics sometimes timidly express the idea that there is something strange in this face, that Hamlet is an inexplicable riddle, but no one dares to say that the tsar is naked, that it is clear as daylight that Shakespeare failed, yes and did not want to give any character to Hamlet and did not even understand that it was necessary. And scholarly critics continue to research and praise this mysterious work ... "(107, pp. 247-249).

We rely on this opinion of Tolstoy not because his final conclusions seem correct and extremely reliable to us. It is clear to any reader that Tolstoy ultimately judges Shakespeare on the basis of non-artistic points, and the decisive judgment in his assessment is the moral judgment he pronounces over Shakespeare, whose morality he considers incompatible with his moral ideals. Let us not forget that this moral point of view led Tolstoy to reject not only Shakespeare, but almost all of fiction in general, and that at the end of his life Tolstoy considered his own works of art to be harmful and unworthy works, so that this moral point of view lies generally outside the plane art, it is too broad and all-embracing in order to notice particulars, and there can be no talk of it in a psychological examination of art. But the whole point is that, in order to draw these moral conclusions, Tolstoy gives purely artistic arguments, and these arguments seem to us so convincing that they really destroy the non-judgmental hypnosis that was established in relation to Shakespeare. Tolstoy looked at Hamlet with the eye of an Andersen child and was the first to dare to say that the king was naked, that is, that all those virtues - profundity, accuracy of character, penetration into human psychology, and so on - exist only in the imagination of the reader. In this statement that the tsar is naked, lies the greatest merit of Tolstoy, who exposed not so much Shakespeare as a completely absurd and false idea of ​​him, by opposing him with his own opinion, which he not without reason calls completely opposite to that which was established in everything European world. Thus, on the way to his moral goal, Tolstoy destroyed one of the most cruel prejudices in the history of literature and was the first to express with all boldness what has now been confirmed in a number of studies and works; precisely the fact that Shakespeare's not all the intrigue and not the entire course of action are sufficiently convincingly motivated from the psychological point of view, that his characters simply do not stand up to criticism and that there are often outrageous and, for common sense, absurd inconsistencies between the character of the hero and his actions. So, for example, So directly asserts that Shakespeare in Hamlet was more interested in the situation than in the character, in which Hamlet should be viewed as a tragedy of intrigue, in which the connection and cohesion of events plays a decisive role, and not the disclosure of the character of the hero. Rygg is of the same opinion. He believes that Shakespeare does not confuse the action in order to complicate the character of Hamlet, but complicates this character in order for it to better fit the dramatic concept of the plot, which he received by tradition. {57} 65 ... And these researchers are far from alone in their opinion. As for other plays, there the researchers name an infinite number of such facts that testify with irrefutability that Tolstoy's assertion is fundamentally correct. We will still have a chance to show how fair Tolstoy's opinion is when applied to such tragedies as Othello, King Lear, etc. and the meaning of Shakespeare's language.

Now we take as a starting point for our further reasoning the opinion, completely consistent with the obviousness, that it is impossible to attribute any character to Hamlet, that this character is composed of the most opposite features, and that it is impossible to come up with any plausible explanation for his speeches and actions. However, we will begin to argue with the conclusions of Tolstoy, who sees in this a continuous flaw and Shakespeare's pure inability to portray the artistic development of action. Tolstoy did not understand or, rather, did not accept Shakespeare's aesthetics and, having recounted his artistic techniques in a simple retelling, translated them from the language of poetry into the language of prose, took them outside the aesthetic functions that they perform in drama - and the result, of course, was , complete nonsense. But exactly the same nonsense would result if we performed such an operation with every decisive poet and made his text meaningless by a continuous retelling. Tolstoy retells King Lear scene after scene and shows how ridiculous their connection and mutual connection is. But if the same exact retelling were performed over Anna Karenina, it would be easy to bring Tolstoy's novel to the same absurdity, and if we recall what Tolstoy himself said about this novel, we will be able to apply the same words and to King Lear. It is absolutely impossible to express the thought of both the novel and the tragedy in the retelling, because the whole essence of the matter lies in the cohesion of thoughts, and this cohesion itself, as Tolstoy says, is composed not of thought, but something else, and this something else cannot be conveyed directly in words, and can only be conveyed by a direct description of images, scenes, positions. It is just as impossible to retell King Lear, just as it is impossible to retell the music in your own words, and therefore the retelling method is the least convincing method of artistic criticism. But we repeat once again: this fundamental mistake did not prevent Tolstoy from making a number of brilliant discoveries, which for many years will constitute the most fruitful problems of Shakespeare, but which, of course, will be elucidated in a completely different way from what Tolstoy did. In particular, with regard to Hamlet, we must fully agree with Tolstoy when he asserts that Hamlet has no character, but we have the right to ask further: does this lack of character involve any artistic task, does it make any sense? and whether it is just a mistake. Tolstoy is right when he points out the absurdity of the argument of those who believe that the depth of character lies in the fact that a characterless person is depicted. But maybe the purpose of the tragedy is not at all to reveal the character of oneself but to itself, and perhaps she is generally indifferent to the portrayal of the character, and sometimes, perhaps, she even deliberately uses a character that is completely inappropriate for the events in order to extract from is there any special artistic effect?

In what follows, we will have to show how false it is, in essence, to think that Shakespeare's tragedy is a tragedy of character. Now we will accept as an assumption that the absence of character may not only stem from the explicit intention of the author, but that he may need it for some very definite artistic purpose, and we will try to reveal this with the example of Hamlet. To do this, let us turn to the analysis of the structure of this tragedy.

We immediately notice three elements from which we can proceed in our analysis. Firstly, the sources used by Shakespeare, the initial design, which was given to the same material, and secondly, we have before us the plot and plot of the tragedy itself and, finally, a new and more complex artistic education - the characters. Let us consider in what relation these elements stand to each other in our tragedy.

Tolstoy is right when he begins his consideration by comparing the saga of Hamlet with the tragedy of Shakespeare. {58} 66 ... Everything in the saga is clear and understandable. The prince's motives are revealed quite clearly. Everything is consistent with each other, and every step is justified both psychologically and logically. We will not dwell on this, since this has already been sufficiently revealed by a number of studies and the problem of the riddle of Hamlet could hardly arise if we were dealing only with these ancient sources or with the old drama about Hamlet that existed before Shakespeare. There is absolutely nothing mysterious about all these things. From this one fact alone, we have the right to draw a conclusion completely opposite to that which Tolstoy draws. Tolstoy argues as follows: in the legend everything is clear, in Hamlet everything is unreasonable - therefore, Shakespeare spoiled the legend. The reverse course of thought would be much more correct. In the legend, everything is logical and understandable, Shakespeare had, therefore, ready-made possibilities of logical and psychological motivation in his hands, and if he processed this material in his tragedy in such a way that he omitted all these obvious bonds that support the legend, then, probably, he had a special intent in this. And we are much more willing to assume that Shakespeare created the mystery of Hamlet, proceeding from some stylistic tasks, than that it was caused simply by his inability. This comparison alone compels us to pose the problem of the riddle of Hamlet in a completely different way; for us this is no longer a riddle that needs to be solved, not a difficulty that needs to be bypassed, but a well-known artistic device that needs to be comprehended. It would be more correct to ask, not why Hamlet hesitates, but why Shakespeare makes Hamlet hesitate? Because any artistic device is learned much more from its teleological orientation, from the psychological function that it performs, than from causal motivation, which in itself can explain to the historian a literary, but in no way an aesthetic fact. In order to answer this question, why Shakespeare makes Hamlet hesitate, we must move on to the second comparison and compare the plot and plot of Hamlet. Here it must be said that the basis of the plot design is the already mentioned above obligatory law of the dramatic composition of that era, the so-called law of temporal continuity. It boils down to the fact that the action on the stage flowed continuously and that, therefore, the play proceeded from a completely different concept of time than our contemporary plays. The stage did not remain empty for a single minute, and while some conversation was taking place on the link, long events often took place behind the stage at that time, sometimes requiring several days to be performed, and we learned about them several scenes later. Thus, real time was not perceived by the viewer at all, and the playwright always used conditional stage time, in which all scales and proportions were completely different than in reality. Consequently, Shakespeare's tragedy is always a colossal deformation of all time scales; usually the duration of the events, the necessary life-time, the temporal dimensions of each deed and action - all this was completely distorted and brought to some common denominator of stage time. From this it is already quite clear how absurd it is to pose the question of Hamlet's slowness from the point of view of real time. How long is Hamlet slow and in what units of real time will we measure his slowness? We can say that the real terms in the tragedy are in the greatest contradiction, that there is no way to establish the duration of all the events of the tragedy in units of real time, and we absolutely cannot say how much time passes from the minute the shadow appears until the minute the king is killed - a day, a month , year. Hence it is clear that it is absolutely impossible to solve the problem of Hamlet's slowness psychologically. If he kills in a few days, there is generally no question of any slowness from the point of view of everyday life. If time drags on much longer, we must look for completely different psychological explanations for different periods - some for a month and others for a year. Hamlet in tragedy is completely independent of these units of real time, and all the events of the tragedy are measured and correlated with each other in conventional time {59} 67 , scenic. Does this mean, however, that the question of Hamlet's slowness disappears altogether? Perhaps, in this conditional stage time, there is no slowness at all, as some critics think, and the author has given only as much time for the play as it needs, and everything is done on time? However, we can easily see that this is not so if we recall the famous monologues of Hamlet, in which he himself blames himself for the delay. The tragedy clearly emphasizes the slowness of the hero and, what is most remarkable, gives it completely different explanations. Let's follow this main line of the tragedy. Now, after the disclosure of the secret, when Hamlet learns that he is entrusted with the duty of revenge, he says that he will fly to revenge on wings as fast as thoughts of love, from the pages of his memories he erases all thoughts, feelings, all dreams, all his life. and remains with only one secret covenant. Already at the end of the same action, he exclaims under the unbearable weight of the discovery that fell on him that time had gone out of the grooves and that he was born to a fatal feat. Now, after talking with the actors, Hamlet reproaches himself for the first time for inaction. He is surprised that the actor flared up in the shadow of passion, with an empty fiction, and he is silent when he knows that the crime has ruined the life and kingdom of the great ruler - his father. In this famous monologue, it is remarkable that Hamlet himself cannot understand the reasons for his slowness, reproaches himself with shame and shame, but he alone knows that he is not a coward. The first motivation for delaying the murder is also given here. The motivation is that, perhaps, the words of the shadow are not credible, that perhaps it was a ghost and that the testimony of the ghost should be checked. Hamlet starts his famous "mousetrap", and he has no more doubts. The king betrayed himself, and Hamlet no longer doubts that the shadow told the truth. He is called to his mother, and he conjures himself that he must not raise his sword at her.

Now is the time for night witchcraft.

The graves creak, and hell breathes with infection.

Now I could drink living blood

And he is capable of deeds, from which

I staggered back in the afternoon. Mother called us.

No brutality, heart! Whatever happens,

Do not put the soul of Nero in my chest.

I will tell her the whole truth without pity

And, perhaps, in words I will kill.

But this is a dear mother - and hands

I will not give will, even in a rage ... (III, 2) 68

Murder is ripe, and Hamlet is afraid that he might raise his sword to his mother, and, what is most remarkable, this is followed by another scene right now - the prayer of the king. Hamlet enters, takes out his sword, stands behind - he can kill him now; do you remember what you just left Hamlet with, how he implored himself to spare his mother, you are ready for the fact that he will now kill the king, but instead you hear:

He is praying. What a lucky moment!

A blow with a sword - and he will rise to the sky ... (III, 3)

But Hamlet, after a few verses, sheathes the sword and gives a completely new motivation for his slowness. He does not want to destroy the king when he prays, in a moment of repentance.

Back, my sword, until the most terrible meeting!

When he is angry or drunk

In the arms of sleep or unclean bliss,

In the heat of excitement, with abuse on the lips

Or in thoughts of new evil, on a grand scale

Chop it up to go to hell

Kicks up, all black with vices.

... Reign more.

Delay is just, not a cure.

In the next scene, Hamlet kills Polonius, eavesdropping behind the carpet, quite unexpectedly striking the carpet with his sword with an exclamation: "Mouse!" And from this exclamation and from his words to the corpse of Polonius further it is absolutely clear that he meant to kill the king, because it is the king who is the mouse that has just fallen into the mousetrap, and it is the king who is that other, "more important" whom Hamlet received Polonius. There is no question of the motive that removed the hand of Hamlet with the sword, which had just been raised above the king. The previous scene seems to be logically completely unrelated to this one, and one of them must contain some visible contradiction, if only the other is true. This scene of the murder of Polonius, as Kuno Fisher explains, is very much agreed by almost all critics as evidence of Hamlet's aimless, thoughtless, unplanned course of action, and it is not for nothing that almost all theaters and very many critics completely pass over in silence the scene with the king's prayer, skip it altogether, because they refuse to understand how it is possible for such a clearly unprepared person to introduce a motive for detention. Nowhere in the tragedy, neither before nor after, is there more that new condition for murder that Hamlet sets for himself: to kill without fail in sin, so as to destroy the king beyond the grave. In the scene with his mother, a shadow appears again to Hamlet, but he thinks that the shadow has come to reproach his son for his slowness in revenge; and yet he does not offer any resistance when he is sent to England, and in the monologue after the scene with Fortinbras he compares himself to this brave leader and again reproaches himself for lack of will. He again considers his slowness a shame and ends the monologue decisively:

Oh my thought, henceforth be in blood.

Live by a thunderstorm or do not live at all! (IV, 4)

We find Hamlet further in the cemetery, then during a conversation with Horatio, finally, during a duel, and until the very end of the play there is not a single mention of the place, and the promise just given by Hamlet that his only thought will be blood is not is justified in no verse of the following text. Before the fight, he is full of sad forebodings:

“You have to be above superstition. All the will of the Lord. Even in the life and death of a sparrow. If something is destined to happen now, then it will not have to wait ... The most important thing is to be always ready ”(V, 2).

He foresees his death, and the viewer with him. And until the very end of the fight, he has no thought of revenge, and, what is most remarkable, the catastrophe itself happens in such a way that it seems to us spurred on for a completely different line of intrigue; Hamlet does not kill the king in fulfillment of the basic covenant of the shadow, the viewer learns earlier that Hamlet is dead, that the poison is in his blood, that there is no life in him for half an hour; and only after that, already standing in the grave, already lifeless, already in the grip of death, does he kill the king.

The scene itself is constructed in such a way that it leaves not the slightest doubt that Hamlet is killing the king for his latest atrocities, because he poisoned the queen, because he killed Laertes and him - Hamlet. There is not a word about the father, the viewer seems to have forgotten about him altogether. Everyone considers this denouement of Hamlet to be completely surprising and incomprehensible, and almost all critics agree that even this murder still leaves the impression of an unfulfilled duty or a duty performed completely by accident. It would seem that the play was always mysterious, because Hamlet did not kill the king; at last the murder was committed, and, it would seem, the mystery should end, but no, it has just begun. Mézières says with absolute certainty: "Indeed, in the last scene, everything excites our surprise, everything is unexpected from beginning to end." It would seem that we have been waiting for the whole play only for Hamlet to kill the king, finally he kills him, where does our surprise and misunderstanding come from again? “The last scene of the drama,” says Sokolovsky, “is based on a collision of accidents that merged so suddenly and unexpectedly that commentators with the same views even seriously accused Shakespeare of unsuccessfully ending the drama ... accidental and reminded, in the hands of Hamlet, a sharp weapon, which is sometimes given into the hands of children, at the same time controlling the handle ... ”(127, pp. 42-43).

Berne correctly says that Hamlet kills the king not only to avenge his father, but also for his mother and himself. Johnson rebukes Shakespeare for the fact that the murder of the king does not take place according to a deliberate plan, but as an unexpected accident. Alfonso says: "The king was killed not as a result of a well-considered intention of Hamlet (thanks to him, perhaps, he would never have been killed), but due to events independent of Hamlet's will." What does a consideration of this main line of intrigue in Hamlet establish? We see that in his conventional stage time, Shakespeare emphasizes the slowness of Hamlet, then obscures it, leaving entire scenes without mentioning the task before him, then suddenly reveals and reveals it in Hamlet's monologues so that it can be said with perfect accuracy that the viewer perceives Hamlet's slowness not constantly, evenly, but in explosions. This slowness is obscured - and suddenly there is an explosion of monologue; the viewer, when looking back, especially sharply notes this slowness, and then the action again drags on, obscured until a new explosion. Thus, in the mind of the viewer, two incompatible ideas are always connected: on the one hand, he sees that Hamlet must take revenge, he sees that no internal or external reasons prevent Hamlet from doing this; moreover, the author plays with his impatience, he makes him see with his own eyes when Hamlet's sword is raised over the king and then suddenly, completely unexpectedly, lowered; on the other hand, he sees that Hamlet hesitates, but he does not understand the reasons for this slowness and he constantly sees that the drama develops in some kind of internal contradiction, when a goal is clearly outlined in front of it, and the viewer is clearly aware of those deviations from the path that tragedy commits in its development.

In such a plot structure, we have the right to immediately see our plot form curve. Our plot unfolds in a straight line, and if Hamlet had killed the king immediately after the shadow was revealed, he would have traveled these two points along the shortest distance. But the author acts differently: he constantly forces us with perfect clarity to be aware of the straight line along which the action should have proceeded, so that we could more sharply feel the inclinations and loops that it actually describes.

Thus, here, too, we see that the task of the plot is, as it were, to deviate the plot from the straight path, to force it to follow crooked paths, and, perhaps, here, in this very curvature of the development of the action, we will find those necessary for the tragedy. concatenation of facts for the sake of which the play describes its crooked orbit.

In order to understand this, one must again turn to synthesis, to the physiology of tragedy; from the meaning of the whole, one must try to figure out what function this curved line has and why the author, with such exceptional and unique courage, makes tragedy deviate from the straight path.

Let's start at the end, with disaster. Two things here easily catch the eye of a researcher: first, the fact that the main line of the tragedy, as noted above, is here obscured and obscured. The murder of the king takes place in the midst of a general dump, this is only one of four deaths, they all break out suddenly, like a tornado; a minute before this, the viewer does not expect these events, and the immediate motives that determined the murder of the king are so obviously embedded in the last scene that the viewer forgets that he has finally reached the tone of the point to which his tragedy has been leading all the time and could not bring. As soon as Hamlet learns of the queen's death, he now cries out:

Betrayal among us! - Who is the culprit?

Find him!

Laertes reveals to Hamlet that these are all tricks of the king. Hamlet exclaims:

How, and a rapier with poison? So go

Poisoned Steel, Designed!

So on, the impostor-murderer!

Swallow your pearl in solution!

Follow your mother!

Nowhere is there a single mention of the father, everywhere all the reasons rest on the incident of the last scene. This is how the tragedy comes to its end point, but it is hidden from the viewer that this is the point towards which we have been striving all the time. However, next to this direct obscuration, it is very easy to reveal another, directly opposite, and we can easily show that the scene of the murder of the king is interpreted precisely in two opposite psychological planes: on the one hand, this death is obscured by a number of immediate causes and other concomitant deaths, with on the other hand, it is singled out from this series of general killings in a way that seems to be the case nowhere in any other tragedy. It is very easy to show that all other deaths occur, as it were, imperceptibly; the queen dies, and now no one mentions this more, Hamlet only says goodbye to her: "Farewell, unfortunate queen." In the same way, Hamlet's death is somehow obscured, extinguished. Again now, after the mention of Hamlet's death, nothing else is directly said about it. Laertes also dies imperceptibly, and, most importantly, before his death, he exchanges forgiveness with Hamlet. He forgives Hamlet and his father's death, and he himself asks forgiveness for the murder. This sudden, completely unnatural change in the character of Laertes, who was always burning with revenge, is completely unmotivated in the tragedy and most clearly shows us that it is needed only in order to extinguish the impression of these deaths and against this background again highlight the death of the king. This death is highlighted, as I have already said, with the help of a completely exceptional technique, which is difficult to indicate an equal in any tragedy. What is extraordinary about this scene (see Appendix II) is that Hamlet, for no reason at all, kills the king twice - first with a poisoned sword blade, then makes him drink poison. What is it for? Of course, in the course of the action, this is not caused by anything, because here before our eyes both Laertes and Hamlet die only from the action of one poison - the sword. Here a single act - the murder of the king - is, as it were, split in two, as if doubled, emphasized and highlighted in order to make the viewer especially vividly and sharply feel that the tragedy has come to its last point. But maybe this double murder of the king, so methodically incongruous and psychologically unnecessary, has some other plot meaning?

And it is very easy to find it. Let us recall the significance of the whole catastrophe: we come to the end point of the tragedy - to the assassination of the king, whom we have been expecting all the time, starting from the first act, but we come to this point in a completely different way: it arises as a consequence of a completely new plot series, and when we get to this point, we do not immediately realize that this is exactly the point to which the tragedy has been rushing all the time.

Thus, it becomes quite clear to us that at this point two rows that diverged before our very eyes converge, two lines of action, and, of course, these two different lines also correspond to a split murder, which, as it were, ends one and the other line. And now the poet again begins to mask this short circuit of two currents in the catastrophe, and in a short afterword to the tragedy, when Horatio, according to the custom of Shakespeare's heroes, briefly retells the entire content of the play, he again conceals this murder of the king and says:

I will publicly tell about everything

What happened. I'll tell you about the scary

Bloody and ruthless deeds,

Vicissitudes, murders by mistake

Punished duplicity and by the end -

About the intrigues before the denouement, which ruined

The culprits.

And in this common heap of deaths and bloody deeds, the catastrophic point of the tragedy is again blurred and drowned. In the same scene of the catastrophe, we can clearly see what tremendous power the artistic shaping of the plot achieves and what effects Shakespeare draws from it. If we look closely at the order of these deaths, we will see how Shakespeare alters their natural order solely in order to turn them into an artistic series. Deaths form a melody, like sounds, in fact, the king dies before Hamlet, and in the plot we have not heard anything about the death of the king, but we already know that Hamlet died and that there is no life in him for half an hour, Hamlet survives everyone, although we know that he had died, and although he had been wounded before everyone else. All these rearrangements of the main events are caused by only one requirement - the requirement of the desired psychological effect. When we learn about the death of Hamlet, we finally lose all hope that the tragedy will ever reach the point where it aspires. It seems to us that the end of the tragedy took exactly the opposite direction, and precisely at the moment when we least expect it, when it seems impossible to us, then this is exactly what happens. And Hamlet, in his last words, directly points to some secret meaning in all these events, when he ends up asking Horatio to retell how it all happened, what caused it all, asks him to convey an external outline of events, which the viewer also retains. and ends: "Further - silence." And for the viewer, the rest really happens in silence, in that remainder unsaid in the tragedy that arises from this amazingly constructed play. New researchers willingly emphasize the purely external complexity of this play, which eluded the previous authors. “Here we see several parallel plot chains: the story of the murder of Hamlet’s father and Hamlet’s revenge, the story of the death of Polonius and the revenge of Laertes, the story of Ophelia, the story of Fortinbras, the development of episodes with actors, with Hamlet’s trip to England. During the tragedy, the scene changes twenty times. Within each scene, we see rapid changes in themes, characters. The game element abounds ... We have a lot of conversations not on the topic of intrigue ... in general, the development of episodes interrupting the action ... "(110, p. 182).

However, it is easy to see that the point here is not at all in thematic diversity, as the author believes, that the interrupting episodes are very closely connected with the main intrigue - both the episode with the actors, and the conversations of the gravediggers, who, in a comic way, again talk about the death of Ophelia, and the murder of Polonius. and everything else. The plot of the tragedy is revealed to us in its final form as follows: from the very beginning, the entire plot underlying the legend is preserved, and the viewer always has before him a clear skeleton of the action, those norms and paths along which the action developed. But all the time the action deviates from these paths outlined by the plot, strays into other paths, draws a complex curve, and at some of the highest points, in Hamlet's monologues, the reader, as if by explosions, suddenly learns that the tragedy has deviated from the path. And these monologues with self-reproaches in sluggishness have the main purpose that they must make us clearly feel how not what should have been done is being done, and must once again clearly present before our consciousness the final point where the action should still be. directed. Each time after such a monologue, we again begin to think that the action will straighten up, and so on until a new monologue, which again reveals to us that the action has again been twisted. In fact, the structure of this tragedy can be expressed using one extremely simple formula. Plot formula: Hamlet kills the king to avenge his father's death. Plot formula - Hamlet does not kill the king. If the content of the tragedy, its material tells about how Hamlet kills the king in order to avenge his father's death, then the plot of the tragedy shows us how he does not kill the king, and when he does, it does not come out of revenge at all. Thus, the duality of the plot-plot - a clear course of action in two planes, all the time a firm consciousness of the path and deviations from it - an internal contradiction - are laid in the very foundations of this play. It seems that Shakespeare chooses the most suitable events in order to express what he needs, he chooses material that finally rushes to the denouement and makes him painfully avoid it. Here he uses that psychological method, which Petrazhitsky beautifully called the method of teasing the senses and which he wanted to introduce as an experimental method of research. Indeed, tragedy constantly teases our feelings, it promises us the fulfillment of a goal that stands before our eyes from the very beginning, and all the time rejects and diverts us from this goal, straining our striving for this goal and making us painfully feel every step in side. When, finally, the goal is achieved, it turns out that we are led to it in a completely different way, and two different paths, who, it seemed to us, were going in opposite directions and were at enmity during the entire development of the tragedy, suddenly converge on one common point, in the bifurcated scene of the murder of the king. In the end, what led to murder is that which has always diverted from murder, and the catastrophe thus reaches again the highest point of contradiction, a short circuit of the opposite direction of the two currents. If we add to this that during the entire development of the action it is interrupted by completely irrational material, it becomes clear to us how much the effect of incomprehensibility lay in the very tasks of the author. Let's recall the madness of Ophelia, recall the repeated madness of Hamlet, recall how he fools Polonius and the courtiers, recall the pompously meaningless recitation of the actor, recall the cynicism of Hamlet's conversation with Ophelia, which has not been translated into Russian until now, recall the clownery of the gravediggers - and we will see everywhere and everywhere, that all this material, as in a dream, processes the same events that have just been given in the drama, but thickens, intensifies and emphasizes their nonsense, and then we will understand the true purpose and meaning of all these things. These are, as it were, lightning rods of nonsense, which, with ingenious prudence, were placed by the author in the most dangerous places of his tragedy in order to bring the matter somehow to the end and make the improbable possible, because the tragedy of Hamlet itself is incredible as it was constructed by Shakespeare; but the whole task of tragedy, like art, is to make the las experience the incredible, in order to perform some extraordinary operation on our feelings. And for this poets use two interesting techniques: firstly, they are lightning rods of nonsense, as we call all these irrational parts of Hamlet. The action develops with ultimate improbability, it threatens to seem ridiculous to us, internal contradictions thicken to the extreme, the divergence of two lines reaches its climax, it seems that they are about to burst, leave one another, and the action of the tragedy will crack and it will all split - and into these the most dangerous moments suddenly the action thickens and quite openly turns into insane delirium, into repeated madness, into pompous declamation, into cynicism, into open buffoonery. Alongside this sheer madness, the play's improbability, as opposed to it, begins to seem plausible and real. Madness is introduced so abundantly into this play in order to save its meaning. Nonsense is diverted like a lightning rod {60} 69 , whenever she threatens to break the action, and resolves a catastrophe that must arise every minute. Another technique that Shakespeare uses to force us to put our feelings into an incredible tragedy comes down to the following: Shakespeare admits, as it were, conventionality in a square, introduces a scene on a stage, forces his characters to oppose themselves to actors, the same event gives twice , first as real, then as played out by the actors, doubles its action and its fictitious, fictional part, the second convention, obscures and hides the improbability of the first plan.

Let's take the simplest example. The actor recites his pathetic monologue about Pyrrhus, the actor cries, but Hamlet now in the monologue emphasizes that these are only the actor's tears, that he is crying because of Hecuba, to whom he has nothing to do, that these tears and passions are only fictitious. And when he opposes his passion to this fictitious passion of the actor, it seems to us no longer fictitious, but real, and we are transferred into it with extraordinary force. Or the same method of dividing the action and introducing a fictitious action into it in the famous scene with the "mousetrap" was applied in the same exact way. The king and queen on stage depict a fictitious picture of the murder of their husband, and the king and queen - the audience is horrified by this fictitious image. And this bifurcation of the two plans, the opposition of actors and spectators, makes us with extraordinary seriousness and strength feel the king's embarrassment as real. The improbability underlying the tragedy has been saved because it is surrounded on both sides by reliable guards: on the one hand, a lightning rod of outright delirium, next to which the tragedy acquires a visible meaning; on the other hand, a lightning rod of outright fictitiousness, acting, the second convention, next to which the foreground seems to be real. It resembles that as if the picture was an image of another picture. But not only this contradiction lies at the heart of our tragedy, it also contains something else that is no less important for its artistic effect. This second contradiction lies in the fact that the characters chosen by Shakespeare somehow do not correspond to the course of action that he outlined, and Shakespeare, with his play, provides a clear refutation of the general prejudice that the characters of the characters should determine the actions and actions of the heroes. But it would seem that if Shakespeare wants to portray a murder that cannot take place in any way, he must act either according to Werder's recipe, that is, to surround the execution of the task with the most complex external obstacles in order to block the path of his hero, or he must would follow Goethe's prescription and show that the task entrusted to the hero exceeds his strength, that the impossible, incompatible with his nature, titanic is demanded of him. Finally, the author had a third way out - he could follow Berne's recipe and portray Hamlet himself as a powerless, cowardly and whiny person. But the author not only did neither one nor the other, nor the third, but in all three respects he went in the opposite direction: he removed all objective obstacles from the path of his hero; in the tragedy it is absolutely not shown what prevents Hamlet from killing the king immediately after the words of the shadow, further, he demanded from Hamlet the most feasible task of murder for him, because during the play Hamlet becomes a murderer three times in completely episodic and random scenes. Finally, he portrayed Hamlet as a man of exceptional energy and enormous strength and chose a hero for himself, the exact opposite of the one who would answer his storyline.

That is why the critics had to, in order to save the situation, make the indicated adjustments and either adapt the plot to the hero, or adapt the hero to the plot, because they always proceeded from the false belief that there should be a direct relationship between the hero and the plot, that the plot is derived from the character of the heroes, as the characters of the heroes are understood from the plot.

But all this is clearly refuted by Shakespeare. He proceeds precisely from the opposite, namely from the complete discrepancy between the heroes and the plot, from the fundamental contradiction of character and events. And for us, already familiar with the fact that the plot design also proceeds from a contradiction with the plot, it is not difficult to find and understand the meaning of this contradiction that arises in the tragedy. The fact is that according to the very structure of the drama, in addition to the natural sequence of events, another unity arises in it, this is the unity of the character or hero. Below we will have the opportunity to show how the concept of the character of the hero develops, but even now we can assume that a poet who plays all the time on the internal contradiction between the plot and the plot can very easily use this second contradiction - between the character of his hero and between development of action. Psychoanalysts are quite right when they argue that the essence of the psychological impact of tragedy lies in the fact that we identify with the hero. It is absolutely true that the hero is the point in the tragedy, from which the author forces us to consider all the other characters and all the events that take place. It is this point that brings together our attention, it serves as a fulcrum for our feelings, which would otherwise be lost, endlessly deviating in their assessments, In their worries for each character. If we had the same assessment of the king's excitement, and Hamlet's excitement, and the hopes of Polonius, and the hopes of Hamlet, our feeling would get lost in these constant fluctuations, and the same event would appear to us in completely opposite senses. But tragedy acts differently: it gives our feeling unity, makes him accompany the hero all the time and through the hero to perceive everything else. It is enough to look only at any tragedy, in particular at Hamlet, in order to see that all the faces in this tragedy are depicted as Hamlet sees them. All events are refracted through the prism of his soul, and thus the author contemplates the tragedy in two ways: on the one hand, he sees everything through the eyes of Hamlet, and on the other hand, he sees Hamlet himself with his own eyes, so that every spectator of the tragedy immediately and Hamlet and his beholder. From this it becomes completely clear that huge role that falls on the character in general and on the hero in particular in the tragedy. We have here a completely new psychological plan, and if in a fable we discover two directions within the same action, in a short story - one plot plan and another plot plan, then in a tragedy we notice another new plan: we perceive the events of the tragedy, its material, then we perceive the plot design of this material and, finally, thirdly, we perceive another plan - the psyche and experiences of the hero. And since all these three plans ultimately refer to the same facts, but only taken in three different respects, it is natural that there must be an internal contradiction between these plans, if only in order to outline the divergence of these plans. To understand how a tragic character is built, one can use an analogy, and we see this analogy in the psychological theory of the portrait that Christiansen put forward: for him, the problem of a portrait lies first of all in the question of how a portraitist conveys life in a painting, how he makes a face live in a portrait and how he achieves the effect that is inherent in only one portrait, namely that he depicts a living person. Indeed, if we begin to look for the difference between a portrait and a painting, we will never find it in any external formal and material features. We know that a painting can depict one face and several faces can be depicted in a portrait, a portrait can include both landscapes and still life, and we will never find the difference between a painting and a portrait, if we do not take that very life as a basis that distinguishes every portrait. Christiansen takes as the starting point of his research the fact that “inanimateness is interconnected with spatial dimensions. The size of the portrait increases not only the fullness of his life, but also the decisiveness of its manifestations, above all the calmness of her gait. Portrait painters know from experience that a larger head speaks easier ”(124, p. 283).

This leads to the fact that our eye is detached from one specific point from which it examines the portrait, that the portrait loses its compositional fixed center, that the eye wanders back and forth through the portrait, “from eye to mouth, from one eye to another and to all the moments that include the facial expression ”(124, p. 284).

From various points of the picture, at which the eye stops, it absorbs a different facial expression, a different mood, and from here there arises that life, that movement, that sequential change of unequal states, which, in contrast to the numbness of immobility, constitutes a distinctive feature of the portrait. The picture is always in the form in which it was created, the portrait is constantly changing, and hence his life. Christiansen formulated the psychological life of a portrait in the following formula: “This is a physiognomic discrepancy between different factors of facial expression.

It is possible, of course, and, it seems, arguing abstractly, it is even much more natural to make the same emotional mood reflected in the corners of the mouth, in the eyes and in the rest of the face ... Then the portrait would sound in one single tone ... But it would be like a thing sounding, devoid of life. That is why the artist differentiates the emotional expression and gives one eye a slightly different expression than the other, and in turn another to the folds of the mouth and so on everywhere. But simple differences are not enough, they must relate harmoniously to each other ... The main melodic motive of the face is given by the relationship of the mouth and the eye to each other: the mouth speaks, the eye responds, excitement and willpower are concentrated in the folds of the mouth, the resolving calmness of the intellect dominates in the eyes ... The mouth gives out instincts and everything that a person wants to achieve; the eye opens what it has become in a real victory or in a tired resignation ... "(124, p. 284-285).

In this theory, Christiansen interprets the portrait as a drama. The portrait conveys to us not just a face and the mental expression frozen in it, but something much more: it conveys to us a change of moods, the whole story of the soul, its life. We think that the viewer approaches the problem of the nature of the tragedy in a completely analogous way. Character in the precise sense of the word can only be sustained in an epic, like spiritual life in a portrait. As for the nature of the tragedy, in order for it to live, it must be composed of contradictory features, it must transfer us from one spiritual movement to another. Just as in a portrait the physiognomic discrepancy between different factors of facial expression is the basis of our experience - in tragedy, the psychological discrepancy between different factors of character expression is the basis of a tragic feeling. Tragedy can have incredible effects on our feelings precisely because it makes them constantly turn into opposites, deceive in their expectations, run into contradictions, split in two; and when we experience Hamlet, it seems to us that we have experienced thousands of human lives in one evening, and, for sure, we managed to experience more than in whole years of our ordinary life. And when we, together with the hero, begin to feel that he no longer belongs to himself, that he is not doing what he should have done, then it is precisely the tragedy that takes effect. Hamlet expresses this wonderfully when, in a letter to Ophelia, he swears eternal love to her as long as "this car" belongs to him. Russian translators usually convey the word "machine" with the word "body", not realizing that this word is the very essence of the tragedy 70. Goncharov was deeply right when he said that Hamlet's tragedy was that he was not a machine, but a man.

Indeed, together with the tragic hero, we begin to feel ourselves in tragedy as a machine of feelings, which is guided by the tragedy itself, which therefore acquires a very special and exclusive power over us.

We come to some conclusions. We can now formulate what we have found as a threefold contradiction underlying the tragedy: contradicting plots and plot and characters... Each of these elements is directed, as it were, in completely different directions, and for us it is perfectly clear that the new moment introduced by tragedy is the following: already in the novel we dealt with a split of plans, we simultaneously experienced events in two opposite directions: one, which gave him the plot, and the other, which they acquired in the plot. These two opposite planes are preserved in the tragedy, and we pointed out all the time that, reading Hamlet, we move our feelings in two planes: on the one hand, we are more and more clearly aware of the goal towards which the tragedy is heading, on the other hand, we can see just as clearly how far it deviates from this goal. What does it bring new tragic hero? It is quite clear that he unites both of these planes at any given moment and that he is the highest and constantly given unity of the contradiction that lies in the tragedy... We have already pointed out that the whole tragedy is being built all the time from the point of view of the hero, and this means that he is that force that unites two opposite currents, which all the time collects into one experience, attributing both opposite feelings to the hero. Thus, the two opposite planes of tragedy are always felt by us as a unity, since they are united in the tragic hero with whom we identify ourselves. And that simple duality, which we found already in the story, is replaced in the tragedy by an immeasurably sharper and higher order of duality, which arises from the fact that, on the one hand, we see the whole tragedy through the eyes of the hero, and on the other hand, we see the hero with our own eyes. ... That this is really so and that, in particular, this is how Hamlet should be understood, we are convinced by the synthesis of the scene of the catastrophe, the analysis of which we presented earlier. We showed that at this point two plans of tragedy converge, two lines of its development, which, as it seemed to us, were taken in completely opposite directions, and this unexpected coincidence of them suddenly refracts the whole tragedy in a very special way and presents all the events that have taken place in a completely different form. ... The viewer is deceived. All that he considered deviating from the path led him exactly where he was striving all the time, and when he got to the final point, he is not aware of it as the goal of his journey. The contradictions not only converged, but also changed their roles - and this catastrophic exposure of contradictions unites for the viewer in the experience of the hero, because in the end he only accepts these experiences as his own. And the viewer does not feel satisfaction and relief from the murder of the king, his feelings strained in the tragedy do not suddenly receive a simple and flat resolution. The king is killed, and now the viewer's attention, like lightning, is transferred to the future, to the death of the hero himself, and in this new death, the viewer feels and experiences all those difficult contradictions that tore apart his consciousness and unconsciousness during all the time he was contemplating the tragedy.

And when the tragedy - both in the last words of Hamlet and in the speech of Horatio - seems to describe its circle again, the viewer quite clearly feels the dichotomy on which it is built. Horatio's story brings his thought back to the external plane of the tragedy, to her "words, words, words." The rest, as Hamlet says, is silence.

OLGA Meshcherskaya is the heroine of IA Bunin's story "Easy Breathing" (1916). The story is based on material from a newspaper chronicle: an officer shot a schoolgirl. In this rather unusual incident, Bunin caught the image of an absolutely natural and relaxed young woman, who entered the world of adults early and easily. O. M. - a sixteen-year-old girl, about whom the author writes that "she did not stand out in any way in the crowd of brown gymnasium dresses." The point is not at all in beauty, but in inner freedom, unusual and unusual for a person of her age and gender. The charm of the image lies precisely in the fact that O.M. does not think about his own life. She lives in full force, without fear and caution. Bunin himself once said: “We call it uterine, and there I called it light breathing. Such naivety and lightness in everything, in insolence, and in death, is “light breathing”, “non-thinking”. " O. M. She has neither the lazy charm of an adult woman, nor human talents, she only has this freedom and ease of being, not constrained by decency, and also - a rare human dignity for her age, with which she sweeps away all the reproaches of the headmistress and all the rumors around her name. O. M. - personality is precisely the fact of his life.

Psychologist LSVygotsky especially emphasized the heroine's love conflicts in the story, emphasizing that it was this frivolity that "led her astray." KG Paustovsky argued that "this is not a story, but an insight, life itself with its trepidation and love, the writer's sad and calm reflection - an epitaph to maiden beauty." Kucherovsky believed that this was not just an "epitaph to maiden beauty", but an epitaph to the spiritual "aristocratic" of life, which is opposed by the brute force of "plebeianism".

• - See Meschera ...

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• - MESCHERSKAYA Ekaterina Nikolaevna, the eldest daughter of N.M. Karamzin, since 1828 - the wife of the prince. P.I. Meshchersky ...

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• - Meshchera lowland Meschera, in the center, part of the East-Europe. plains ...

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• - 1st abbot. and the founder of Anosina Borisoglebskiy mon. Moscow ep., genus. February 18, 1774 tonsured on September 14. 1823 ...
• - poetess 1860-1870, b. 1841, daughter is known. breeder S. I. Malkova ...

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• - nee Vsevolozhskaya. comp. and transl. spirits-morals. brochures. active Bible. obsch., wife of seconds-major, b. 19 November 1775 † 4 Oct. 1848 ...

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• - Princess - a writer, nee Vsevolozhskaya. She took part in the compilation and translation of various brochures printed in the 1920s and 1930s by the Bible Society and intended for edifying reading ...

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• - a writer, was in the 30s the chairman of the ladies' guardianship committees of prisons in St. Petersburg ...
• - poetess. Many of her poems remain in manuscript, others have been published separately abroad ...

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• - a writer of the early 19th century. She was an ardent supporter of the biblical society and, with the aim of spreading its ideas, she wrote, translated and altered many books and brochures of mystical and spiritual edifying ...

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"OLGA Meshcherskaya" in books

Olga Meshcherskaya aka Guest Publisher's introduction to the novel by Lily Enden

From the book Traitors to the Motherland by Enden Lilya

Olga Meshcherskaya aka Guest introduction the publisher for the novel by Lily Enden This novel was found among family archives in our family nest, located 101 km near St. Petersburg. By that time, the entire older generation of a large and unusual family, born still

Glama-Meshcherskaya (nee A.O. Barysheva) Alexandra Yakovlevna (1859-1942)

From the book The Path to Chekhov the author Gromov Mikhail Petrovich

Glama-Meshcherskaya (nee A. O. Barysheva) Alexandra Yakovlevna (1859–1942) Famous dramatic actress; in 1887 she played the role of Anna Petrovna (Sarah) in Chekhov's comedy "Ivanov" on the stage of the F. A. Korsh Russian Drama Theater. Chekhov wrote to his brother the day after

Olga

From the book Where the earth ended in heaven: Biography. Poetry. Memories the author Gumilev Nikolay Stepanovich

Olga "Elga, Elga!" - sounded over the fields, Where they broke each other's sacrum With blue, fierce eyes And sinewy hands well done. "Olga, Olga!" - yelled the Drevlyans With hair as yellow as honey, Scratching out a course in a hot bath With bloody nails. And beyond the distant

OLGA

From the book Russian fate, confession of a renegade the author Zinoviev Alexander Alexandrovich

OLGA In 1965, nineteen-year-old Olga Sorokina joined the Institute of Philosophy. She has just graduated from high school and a typing and stenography course at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She should have been hired by the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the USSR as the best

Olga

From the book Liquidator. Book two. Get through the impossible. Confessions of a Legendary Hitman the author Alexey Sherstobitov

Olga Any thoughts that come to mind while reading the case, meticulously collected by investigators in numerous volumes, appear between the lines and the fate of relatives. Nobody knew and will not know about them, except those who are concerned. But it’s useless for them to tell

Chapter 14. Ekaterina Meshcherskaya: a former princess, a former janitor ...

From the book My Great Old Women the author Medvedev Felix Nikolaevich

Chapter 14. Ekaterina Meshcherskaya: a former princess, a former janitor ... - I want to introduce you to a man of extraordinary, fantastic fate, - said Bella Akhmadulina. - The former princess. Alas, a former janitor. Her father was friends with Lermontov (Fantastic! My father

Olga

From the book Stories the author Listergarten Vladimir Abramovich

Olga Olga was born and lived in a small village near Arkhangelsk. She did not study well at school, but the teachers dragged her from class to class, and she, in the end, received a certificate of maturity. She went to work at the post office, her ardent desire, her dream was to get married, but

[Olga M.]

the author Borisov Sergey Borisovich

[Olga M.] Did we know? As always, the girls and I went out into the street. It was an ordinary day, although it might not have been such an ordinary day at all. The sun shone high in the blue sky. It gave warmth to all living beings. Everything around was shining, and there was something inexplicable in my soul,

Olga N.

From the book Handwritten Girl's Story the author Borisov Sergey Borisovich

Olga N. [untitled] It's hot. The sun beats down unbearably. “If only it could rain. Look, even a fly is too lazy to move ... Dombik does not even come out of the booth. My poor little dog, it's hot for you. You need to pour some water into the bowl. What a study here! Brains will soon melt completely. Even if

Princess Ekaterina Nikolaevna Meshcherskaya (1805-1867)

From the author's book

Princess Ekaterina Nikolaevna Meshcherskaya (1805-1867) Born Karamzina, daughter of the historian and Ekaterina Andreyevna Karamzin. VP Titov reports that in 1828, before the marriage of Ekaterina Nikolaevna, Pushkin was one of her “adorers”. Tyutchev called the conversation of the princess

Olga

From the book The Big Book of Secret Sciences. Names, dreams, lunar cycles author Schwartz Theodor

Olga Nezavisimaya. Stubborn, in eternal problems. Outwardly active and at the same time closed. Diplomatic and calculating person, constant self-control. Great pride, often painful. Patient and capable of routine

Olga

From the book The Secret of the Name the author Zima Dmitry

Olga The meaning and origin of the name: from the Scandinavian name Helga - sacred. In the male version it reads as Oleg. Energetics and Karma of the name: Olga is a somewhat cautious name, while it quite interestingly combines sufficient isolation with external activity.

CHAPTER FOUR. Farewell Meshchersky Cast Iron

From the book In the footsteps of disappeared Russia the author Muzafarov Alexander Azizovich

CHAPTER FOUR. Farewell, Meshcherskaya Cast Iron A Country That Isn't On The Map If you happen to visit ancient Vladimir on the Klyazma, I highly recommend starting your tour of the city from the Golden Gate and the ancient Kozlov Val adjoining them on the south side. On the shaft itself is convenient

Princess Olga (Holy Olga)

From the book Strategies for Genius Women the author Badrak Valentin Vladimirovich

Princess Olga (Holy Olga) In her body, the wife of a being, has masculine wisdom, is enlightened by the Holy Spirit, understanding God ... 969) One of the founders of the Russian

Meshchera lowland

From the book Great Soviet Encyclopedia (ME) of the author TSB

A person's life is short, not more than one century more often, but it is even more offensive when they die young. The image and characterization of Olya Meshcherskaya in Bunin's story "Light Breath" with quotations is an example of the tragic fate of a young beauty from a wealthy noble family.

Olya's appearance was amazing. At first she is an ordinary schoolgirl. The happy schoolgirl from a wealthy noble family was just pretty. Careless, naughty girl

"... began to flourish, develop by leaps and bounds."

Fourteen-year-old Olya is already a girl with a thin waist, clearly visible breasts. Body shape could be summed up in one word - charm. At fifteen:

"I was already known as a beauty."

Olya possessed special properties: she was not spoiled:

"Ink stains on fingers, disheveled hair that has become visible from a fall on the knee while running."

The girl conquered with her sincerity and cuteness, attractiveness and singularity. She had good hair that allowed for bright hairstyles. The beautifully tucked head was envious.

The author reveals this feeling not among peers, but among older women. It becomes clear how sad it was for the headmistress of the gymnasium to see in front of her something that does not exist and that she never had. The noblewoman Meshcherskaya knows how to behave:

"... sat down as lightly and gracefully as she could."

The movements set her apart from the crowd, the schoolgirl is always in sight, she likes it and becomes an ideal to follow.

The girl is passionate about reading. She found in her father's books what a real woman should be. From the descriptions Olya created her ideal, which she aspired to:

"Eyes boiling with resin ... eyelashes as black as night ... a small leg ... a moderately large chest ... sloping shoulders ...".

But the girl caught the main quality of the beauties - easy breathing. Olya asked her friend to determine if she was breathing like that.

A carefree attitude to life and the world around us can be compared to the wind sweeping over the earth and human passions. Young woman

"... playful and very careless to the instructions that she ..."

They do. For her childlike spontaneity, sincerity and openness, Olya is loved by her peers and junior high school students, especially first graders.

Fans surround the beauty, she likes it, she begins to play with the fate of men: schoolboy Shenshin, a Cossack officer. Shenshin tried to commit suicide, an angry officer kills Olya in front of the crowd.

"... the officer told the investigator that Meshcherskaya had lured him, was close to him, swore to be his wife ..."

Olya just mocks men. Why does Meshcherskaya have such an attitude towards the opposite sex? The reason is probably that she became a woman early, and not because of her desire, but by the will of circumstances and excessive emancipation. 56-year-old Malyutin used his strength and took possession of the beauty. From the first intimacy, only a feeling of disgust remained:

"Now I have only one way out ... I feel such disgust for him that I cannot survive it!"

The girl writes down everything she experiences. The diary proves that outward recklessness is only a shell. In fact, Olya is a thoughtful and holistic person. She assesses what happened, realizes that her life is over and begins to behave as if every moment is the last:

"... Last winter Olya Meshcherskaya went completely crazy with fun ...".

He leaves life happy, releasing his "light breath" in order to refresh the life around him, take away the tragedy and resentment. The last breath of the schoolgirl stands for a long time before the eyes of the reader. Feels like a cloud enveloping the soul, taking it far from earthly problems. You need to live with an open mind, clean breath and faith in a happy ending.

This story allows us to conclude that it belongs to the genre of the short story. The author managed to convey in a short form the life story of the schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya, but not only her. According to the definition of the genre, a novel in a unique, small, concrete event should recreate the entire life of the hero, and through it - the life of society. Ivan Alekseevich, through modernism, creates a unique image of a girl who is still only dreaming of true love.

This feeling was written not only by Bunin ("Light Breathing"). The analysis of love was carried out, perhaps, by all the great poets and writers, very different in character and worldview, therefore many shades of this feeling are presented in Russian literature. Opening the work of the next author, we always find something new. Bunin also has his own. In his works, tragic endings are not uncommon, ending with the death of one of the heroes, but it is more bright than deeply tragic. We come across a similar ending when we finish reading "Light Breathing".

First impression

At first glance, the events seem dirty. The girl plays in love with an ugly officer, far from the circle to which the heroine belonged. In the story, the author uses the so-called method of "proof from return", because even with such vulgar external events, love remains something intact and light, does not touch everyday dirt. Arriving at Olya's grave, the class teacher asks herself how to combine all this with a pure view of "that terrible" that is now associated with the name of the schoolgirl. This question does not require an answer, which is present in the entire text of the work. Bunin's story "Light Breath" is permeated through it.

The character of the main character

Olya Meshcherskaya seems to be the embodiment of youth, thirsty for love, a living and dreamy heroine. Her image, contrary to the laws of public morality, captivates almost everyone, even the younger grades. And even the guardian of morals, teacher Olya, who condemned her for her early growing up, after the death of the heroine comes to the cemetery to her grave every week, constantly thinks about her and even feels, "like all people devoted to a dream," happy.

Character trait the main character the story is that she longs for happiness and can find it even in such an ugly reality in which she had to find herself. Bunin uses "light breathing" as a metaphor for naturalness, vital energy. the so-called "ease of breathing" is invariably present in Olya, surrounding her with a special halo. People feel this and therefore are drawn to the girl, while not even being able to explain why. She infects everyone with her joy.

Contrasts

Bunin's work "Light Breathing" is built on contrasts. From the very first lines, a double feeling arises: a deserted, sad cemetery, a cold wind, a gray April day. And against this background - a portrait of a schoolgirl with lively, joyful eyes - a photograph on a cross. Olya's whole life is also built on contrast. Cloudless childhood is opposed to the tragic events that occurred in Last year life of the heroine of the story "Light Breathing". Ivan Bunin often emphasizes the contrast, the gap between the real and the apparent, the inner state and the outer world.

The plot of the story

The plot of the work is quite simple. The happy young schoolgirl Olya Meshcherskaya first becomes the prey of her father's friend, an elderly voluptuary, after which she becomes a living target for the aforementioned officer. Her death prompts a classy lady - a single woman to "serve" her memory. However, the apparent simplicity of this plot is violated by a vivid opposition: a heavy cross and lively, joyful eyes, which involuntarily makes the reader's heart shrink. The simplicity of the plot turned out to be deceiving, since the story "Light Breathing" (Ivan Bunin) is not only about the fate of a girl, but also about the unhappy lot of a cool lady who is used to living someone else's life. Oli's relationship with the officer is also interesting.

Relationship with an officer

The already mentioned officer in the plot of the story kills Olya Meshcherskaya, involuntarily deluded by her game. He did this because he was close to her, believed that she loved him, and could not survive the destruction of this illusion. Not every person can evoke such a strong passion in another. This speaks of Oli's bright personality, says Bunin ("Light Breathing"). The act of the main character was cruel, but after all, as you might guess, possessing a special character, she unintentionally intoxicated the officer. Olya Meshcherskaya was looking for a dream in a relationship with him, but she could not find it.

Is Olya to blame?

Ivan Alekseevich believed that birth is not the beginning, and therefore death is not the end of the existence of the soul, the symbol of which is the definition that Bunin used - "light breathing". Analysis of it in the text of the work allows us to conclude that this concept is a soul. She does not disappear without a trace after death, but returns to the source. About this, and not only about the fate of Olya, the work "Light Breathing".

It is no coincidence that Ivan Bunin delays in explaining the reasons for the death of the heroine. The question arises: "Maybe she is to blame for what happened?" After all, she is frivolous, flirting with the schoolboy Shenshin, then, albeit unconsciously, with her father's friend Alexei Mikhailovich Malyutin, who seduced her, then for some reason promises to the officer to marry him. Why did she need all this? Bunin ("Light Breath") analyzes the motives of the heroine's actions. It gradually becomes clear that Olya is as beautiful as the elements. And just as immoral. She strives in everything to reach the depth, to the limit, to the innermost essence, and the opinion of others does not interest the heroine of the work "Light Breathing". Ivan Bunin wanted to tell us that in the actions of the schoolgirl there is no feeling of revenge, no meaningful vice, no firmness of decisions, no pain of remorse. It turns out that the feeling of fullness of life can be destructive. Even an unconscious longing for her is tragic (like a class lady). Therefore, every step, every detail of Olya's life threatens with disaster: prank and curiosity can lead to serious consequences, to violence, and frivolous play with the feelings of other people - to murder. Bunin brings us to such a philosophical thought.

"Light breath" of life

The essence of the heroine is that she lives, and not just plays a role in the play. This is also her fault. To be alive without observing the rules of the game is to be doomed. The environment in which Meshcherskaya exists is completely devoid of a holistic, organic sense of beauty. Life here is subject to strict rules, the violation of which leads to inevitable retribution. Therefore, the fate of Olya turns out to be tragic. Her death is natural, says Bunin. "Light breath", however, did not die with the heroine, but dissolved in the air, filling it with itself. In the finale, the thought about the immortality of the soul sounds in this way.