There are a million such towns in the world. And in everyone it is just as dark, just as lonely, everyone is just as detached from everything, each has its own horrors and its secrets.
Ray Bradbury. Dandelion Wine
L. Andreev is not one of the writers whose multi-colored play of tones creates the impression of living life. He prefers the contrast of black and white. We see this contrast in the story "The City". Reading the description of the city, one gets the impression that the city is saturated with cold and darkness, grayness. We also notice that the city is not just big, but "huge" ("The city was huge and crowded, and there was something stubborn, invincible and indifferently cruel in this crowdedness and enormity"). And upon a detailed and careful reading, the city appears to us as a kind of "living" being: we see its physiological characteristics "(with the weight of his bloated stone houses he crushed the earth", "high and low, then reddening with cold and liquid blood of fresh brick"), we can trace the state of his soul ("stubborn, invincible and indifferently cruel"), we even see his attitude and influence on the inhabitants ("the person became scared, they met and saw off indifferently"). Therefore, we can conclude that the city appears as a kind of living substance, dead inside.
As for the time in the work, it is "compressed" by events, it feels like Andreev is bored in the current time, he is attracted by eternity. And that eternity permeates this city, the life of this city.
The story "The City" tells about a small official, depressed by both everyday life and life, flowing in the stone sack of the city ("But the worst thing was that people lived in all the houses. There were many they lived their own hidden life ”). It would seem that he is surrounded by a hundred thousand people, but he suffocates from loneliness, from a meaningless existence, against which he protests in a pitiful comic form. In my opinion, here Andreev continues the theme of the "little man" set by Nikolai Gogol, however, the writer changes the interpretation of this theme: in Gogol, the "little man" is suppressed by the wealth and power of the "big man", and in Andreev's financial position and rank do not play the most important role, loneliness prevails in him ("I was sitting in my room alone", "I felt so infinitely lonely among many strangers", "when he spoke about his loneliness, he began to cry ...").
The motive of loneliness, which grew out of the indifference of the city and its inhabitants in relation to each other, generates another motive - the motive of alienation. The city is like a mountain of sand, every inhabitant is a grain of sand, but without interaction with each other, it is just a mountain or a "pile" of unnecessary sand. The author sees a tragedy in the fact that individuals do not constitute a community, society, or a single whole.
It is impossible not to pay attention to some of the details that we meet at the very beginning, namely the names of the heroes. Petrov and "that other". Why is that different? But then we see a dialogue:
“To your health!” He said amiably and held out a glass. “To your health!” He answered, smiling, and he held out his glass.
There is an echo feeling. As if the hero alone in an empty room is talking to himself, and if you look further at the rest of the dialogues, of which there are not so many, one gets the impression that the conversation is not just with himself, but with himself in the mirror. This mirror function indicates the sameness of each of the inhabitants: their speech, their way of life, their life itself ("... they became similar to one another - and the walking person became scared") ... But is there life in this city? Is there life in the story? The author says that behind the thickness of stone houses, there is a wide field, which the hero felt while walking, and he unbearably wanted to run to where there is the sun, free land, there is life. But only the city is so ruthless to its inhabitants that this "piece of freedom" is getting smaller. The city grows every day, and there are more and more lonely and indifferent people. Perhaps, not only city residents see their mirror image in others, but the city itself looks in its mirror and grows, expands….

The hero of L. Andreev's story "Angel" is a man with a rebellious soul. He cannot calmly regard evil and humiliation and takes revenge on the world for suppressing his own personality, individuality. Sasha does it in the ways that come to his mind: he hits his comrades, is rude, tears up textbooks. With all his might, he is trying to attract attention to himself and make him reckon with.
Against the background of the description of Sashka's life, Andreev shows the complex relationships in the family of his parents. Spouses, instead of supporting each other, take out annoyance on each other. Having married Feoktista Petrovna, Ivan Savich began to drink and sank down. But once he was a teacher, he was appreciated and respected. This is evidenced by the fact that the rich Svechnikovs continue to support him with money, although he no longer works for them.
Sashka's attempt to find freedom led to the fact that he was expelled from the gymnasium. And suddenly fate unexpectedly sent him a gift: he was invited to a rich house for a Christmas tree.
Even at the holiday, the hero behaves arrogantly. Anger reigns in his soul. “Sashka was gloomy and sad - something bad was going on in his little ulcerated heart. The Christmas tree dazzled him with its beauty and the loud, brazen gleam of countless candles, but it was alien to him, hostile, like the clean, beautiful children gathered around it, and he wanted to push it so that it fell on these bright heads, ”writes L. Andreev. And suddenly Sasha sees on this hated tree something without which his life was empty - a wax angel. The author does not skimp on artistic details when describing the wax angel, emphasizing its pink handles, dragonfly wings. However, with all this detailing, the expression on the face of the angel remains elusive. This is not joy or sadness, but some other feeling, for which the author has not found a name for a long time. Sasha, seeing the angel, whispers only one word: "Darling." The hero asks for an angel, and when they try to refuse him, he falls to his knees, forgetting his pride, and begs for a toy. Having received it, the hero literally transforms. In his movements, softness and caution appear. The angel personifies in the work that wonderful world where there is no abuse, dirt and selfishness, but the soul is pure, joyful and light: “The smell of wax coming from the toy was mixed with an imperceptible aroma, and it seemed to the dead person how they touched the angel ... dear fingers , which he would like to kiss one at a time and so long, until death closes his lips forever ”. This feeling is love, happiness and the desire to live. In the finale of the piece, Sashka falls asleep happy, while the angel, hanged by the stove, begins to melt and eventually turns into a shapeless ingot.
"Angel" is dedicated to Alexandra Mikhailovna Veligorskaya, who became the wife of the writer. The work has an autobiographical basis: as a child, the writer once melted such an angel. Emphasizing the fragility of the image of the wax angel, Andreev thereby shows how ghostly the happiness of the humiliated and disadvantaged in this world is. Yes, probably, not only the social plane of the perception of reality is important in this regard, but also the universal one: each of us needs love, because only then a feeling of happiness comes to him. But each of us must understand what a fragile and fleeting sensation it is. The image of a toy angel also correlates with the image of a guardian angel.
A. Block, who highly appreciated the work of JI. Andreeva, in 1909 he wrote the poem “Angel in foil” based on this story: “At the decorated Christmas tree And at the playing children The tinsel angel looks through the crack of the doors tightly closed / And the nanny stokes the stove in the nursery, The fire bursts, burns light ... But the angel melts. He is German. He is not hurt and warm. "

Essay on literature on the topic: Analysis of the story "Angel" Andreeva L. N

Other compositions:

1. Two thousand years ago, distant Judea was under the rule of the all-powerful Rome. Armed Roman legionaries roamed the streets of Jewish cities, the cruel king Herod ruled the country, and the descendants of Abraham and Isaac, the great kings David and Solomon, lived in poverty and contempt. And Read More ......
2. The story "Petka at the Dacha" was first published in the "Journal for Everyone" in 1899. It is based on the story of the writer Ivan Andreev, the writer with the same name. He was considered the most fashionable hairdresser in Moscow. The story refers to highly social works and is often compared in criticism with those close to Read More ......
3. The little angel Sashka - the hero of Andreev's “Christmas story” - possessed a rebellious and courageous soul, he could not calmly take evil and took revenge on life. For this purpose, he beat his comrades, rude to his superiors, tore up textbooks and lied to his teachers and his mother all day ... Read More ......
4. The story is based on newspaper reports and eyewitness recollections of the Russian-Japanese war. L. Andreev showed the “madness and horror” of any war through the irrational image of Red Laughter, created by the painful fantasy of the protagonist, who is constantly in mental stress. Pay attention to the verbs, Read More ......
5. Great authors sometimes write their works under the impression of reading other people's creations. So Alexander Blok, under the impression of Leonid Andreev's story "Angel", wrote his poem "Tinsel Angel". They have a very similar plot. In both works, the theme of Christmas and holiday slips. Read More ......
6. The main motives of the story The story contains three main themes - woman, death, “plague”: “But she did not turn around, and again it became empty, dark and scary in her chest, as in an extinct house through which a gloomy plague passed, and killed all living things with planks nailed up Read More ......
7. "The psychology of betrayal" - the main theme of L. Andreev's story "Judas Iscariot" -. Images and motives of the New Testament, ideal and reality, hero and crowd, true and hypocritical love - these are the main motives of this story. Andreev uses the gospel story about the betrayal of Jesus Christ by him Read More ......
8. In 1904, the story "Red Laughter" was written - an acutely emotional response to the Russian-Japanese war. This, according to the author, “is a daring attempt, sitting in Georgians, to give the psychology of a real war. However, Andreev did not know the war, and therefore, despite his extraordinary intuition, Read More ......

Analysis of the story "Angel" Andreeva L. N

“The Story of the Seven Hanged” by L. Andreev is a deep, psychologically subtle and original work. This is a story about seven people waiting to be hanged and eventually executed. Five of them are political criminals, terrorists. One is a thief and a failed rapist, and the seventh is just a robber.
The writer traces the “path” of these, so different, criminals from trial to execution. Andreev is interested not so much in their outer life as in their inner life: the awareness of these people that they will soon die, that death awaits them, their behavior, their thoughts. All this develops into the author's philosophical reflection on death in general, its essence, manifestations, and its deep connection with life.
One of the hanged men, Sergei Golovin, belonged to the five terrorists. He was still a very young man. Its main quality, which the author emphasizes, was youth, youth and health. This young man loved life in all its manifestations: he enjoyed the sun, light, delicious food, his strong and dexterous body, the feeling that he had a whole life ahead of him, which could be devoted to something high and beautiful.
Golovin was the son of a retired colonel, himself a former officer. And he, who had taken an oath of allegiance to the sovereign, now chose a different field for himself - to fight the tsarist regime. But it seems to me that it was not his conviction in the correctness of the ideas of terrorism that led him to this, but simply the desire for something romantic, sublime, worthy. And now Golovin is paying for his actions - he was sentenced to be hanged.
At the trial, this hero behaved calmly and even somehow detached. He looked at the spring-blue sky, at the sun breaking through the court window, and thought about something. Golovin thought intently and intensely, as if not wishing to hear what was happening in court, fencing off from it. And only for moments he lost control and returned to real events. Then “an earthy, deathly blue appeared; and the fluffy hair, tearing away from the nest with pain, clenched, as in a vice, in the whitened at the tip of the fingers. " But the love of life and the joy of youth immediately won. And again Golovin's gaze became joyful.
Interestingly, even the judges felt the purity and the wonderful cheerfulness of this hero. The author writes that they “pitied” Golovin. Sergei reacted calmly to the verdict, but with a kind of naive annoyance, as if he did not expect him: “So the devil take them, they have been hanged”.
Golovin had to endure many difficult trials in anticipation of death. Perhaps the most difficult thing for him was going through a date with his family. Sergey loved his parents very much, respected and pitied. He could not imagine how he would see his father and mother for the last time, how they would survive this pain. Golovin's heart was simply breaking. On a date, Sergei's father strengthened himself, tried to alleviate the suffering of his son, to support him. Therefore, he stopped the hero's mother when she could not stand it and began to break down in tears or lamentations. But Nikolai Sergeevich himself could not endure this torture to the end: he burst into tears on his son's shoulder, saying goodbye to him and blessing him to death.
Golovin also held on and strengthened himself with all his might. And only when the parents left, he lay down on the bed and cried for a long time until he fell asleep.
Further, the author describes the moment the hero waits for death in the cell, the moments of waiting and thinking. Golovin never thought about death, he was immersed in life. He was loved by his comrades for his purity, naivety, romance, strength. And he himself made big plans. And suddenly - a death sentence, death inexorably approaching. At first, the hero was rescued by the thought that another stage of his life had come, the goal of which was “to die well”. For a while, this distracted Sergey from his painful thoughts. He was engaged in training, moving, that is, drowning out the fear of death with life. But gradually it became not enough.
The fear of death began to haunt the hero. At first, these were short moments, "gradually and somehow in jerks." Then the fear began to grow to enormous proportions. The body, the young healthy body of the hero did not want to die. And then Sergei decided to weaken it so that it would not give such strong signals about its desire to live. But this helped only for a while. Golovin began to have such thoughts that he had not even thought about before. The young man began to think about the value of life, about its unbearable beauty.
When only a few hours remained until the execution, Sergei fell into a strange state - it was not yet death, but not life either. The state of emptiness and detachment from the thought that now he, Sergei Golovin, exists, and after a while he will not be. And from this began the feeling that you were going crazy, that your body was not your body, and so on. Andreev writes that Golovin reached a state of some kind of insight - he touched in his fear something incomprehensible, to God himself. And after that, the hero felt some kind of calmness, he became cheerful again, returned to the exercises, as if he had discovered some secret for himself.
Until the very end, until his death, Golovin remained true to himself: calm, childishly naive, pure in spirit and cheerful. He rejoiced at the good weather, the spring day, the unity, albeit the last, with his comrades.
The hero leaves to die first, silently, with dignity, supporting his comrade Vasily Kashirin.
The ending of the story is scary and lyrical at the same time. Life went on - the sun rose over the sea, and at this time the bodies of the hanged heroes were taken out. The disfigured bodies of these people were taken away along the same road along which they were brought alive. And nothing has changed in nature. Only life is already flowing without these people, and they will never enjoy its beauty anymore.
Such a detail as the lost galosh of Sergei Golovin becomes piercingly sad. Only she sadly accompanied the terrible procession on the last journey.
I think that in this story Andreev appears as a humanist and philosopher. He shows that death is the most terrible and incomprehensible thing that can be in human life, the most difficult for human consciousness. Why and why do people strive for it, and so inevitably approaching?
The writer puts his characters in a critical situation and observes how they behave in it. Not everyone meets their death with dignity. I think that Sergei Golovin is exactly among the “worthy” ones. Having survived the crisis, he decided something for himself, understood something and accepted death with dignity.
It is curious that there are seven of those executed. This number carries a lot of meaning in Orthodoxy, for example. This is a mystical number, and it is he who Andreev chooses for his observation of people, human nature. It seems to me that the writer himself draws the following conclusion: not everyone withstands the test of death. Only those who have some kind of support, an idea for which he is ready to die, pass it. And this idea is life and death for the sake of people, the good of mankind.

Essay on literature on the topic: Analysis of the work of L. Andreev "The Story of the Seven Hanged" (Sergei Golovin)

Other compositions:

1. During the period of reaction, Andreev created a number of works, in one way or another, related to the theme of the 1905 revolution. Among them are “From a story that will never end” (1907) and “Ivan Ivanovich” (1908), imbued with the romance of barricade battles. In the second story, the writer Read More ......
2. The Story of the Seven Hanged An old, obese man, exhausted by illness, sits in someone else's house, in someone else's bedroom, in someone else's chair and looks at his body in bewilderment, listens to his feelings, struggles and cannot quite master the thoughts in his head: “Fools! Read More ......
3. The question of life and death has occupied a lot of Russian writers. It is especially vividly expressed in the works of F.M.Dostoevsky and L.N.Tolstoy, later Bulgakov will worry. I remember Dostoevsky's story of Prince Myshkin's story about a person's condition before execution. (Tolstoy dedicated Read More ......
4. My favorite story by Andreev is “Bargamot and Garaska”. This is the first story of the writer, which brought him the recognition of readers and which was noted by Maxim Gorky. But this is also the most perfect story of Leonid Andreev, in which he expressed himself as a true Russian realist and in Read More ......
5. Leonid Andreev is a wonderful writer, author of many stories that are close to children on the topic. For example: "Petka at the dacha", "Gostinets", "Kusaka" and others. One of the character traits that a kind person should have, according to L. Andreev, is a careful attitude towards animals. Andreev emphasizes Read More ......
6. The main motives of the story The story contains three main themes - woman, death, “plague”: “But she did not turn around, and again it became empty, dark and scary in her chest, as in an extinct house through which a gloomy plague passed, and killed all living things with planks nailed up Read More ......
7. The hero of L. Andreev's story "Angel" is a man with a rebellious soul. He cannot calmly regard evil and humiliation and takes revenge on the world for suppressing his own personality, individuality. Sasha does it in the ways that come to his mind: he hits his comrades, is rude, Read More ...
8. "The psychology of betrayal" - the main theme of L. Andreev's story "Judas Iscariot" -. Images and motives of the New Testament, ideal and reality, hero and crowd, true and hypocritical love - these are the main motives of this story. Andreev uses the gospel story about the betrayal of Jesus Christ by him Read More ......

Analysis of the work of L. Andreev "The Tale of the Seven Hanged" (Sergei Golovin)

"Human Life" Andreeva L.N.

“I want to reform the drama,” Andreev wrote to A. Serafimovich in November 1906 after finishing work on the play “The Life of a Man”. In a letter to G. Chuikov, Andreev also noted the innovation of his idea: "The fact is that I took a completely new form for the play - neither realistic, nor symbolist, nor romantic, - that I do not know ..." In working on the play, the writer experienced considerable difficulties. “I'll tell you frankly,” he confessed to Vl. Nemirovich-Danchenko, - I myself am dissatisfied with "Human Life". I had to groping positively, my thoughts stubbornly strayed into the old, familiar, and for a minute there was no way to figure out whether you were doing well or badly. In the very process of work, the form developed and became clear, and only finishing the play, I understood its essence ... Let this be the first experience. "

As conceived by the author, "The Life of Man" was to be the first in a cycle of philosophical plays "linked by the one-sidedness of form and the indissoluble unity of the main idea." "The Life of Man" is followed by "Human Life", which will be depicted in four plays: "Tsar-Hunger", "War", "Revolution" and "God, the Devil and Man," Andreev wrote to Nemirovich-Danchenko in May 1907 of the year. “Thus, The Life of a Man is a necessary introduction, both in form and in content, into this cycle, to which I dare attach very great importance.” And although this plan in its original version was not implemented (of those named, only the play "Tsar-Hunger" was written), the very intention of Andreev to create a cycle of dramatic works in which the destinies of individuals were to be linked to the destinies of mankind clearly correlated with the most acute philosophical demands of the time and in its own way reflected the need for a new level of philosophical, historical and artistic thought.

Themes and problems of the play. In the prologue to the play, its main theme is immediately declared - the timeless tragedy of a person dependent on the will of fate. Someone in gray, called Him, is a conventional character personifying everything that hinders human freedom, fixes the orbit of human life: “Irresistibly drawn by time, he will inevitably go through all the stages of human life, from bottom to top, from top to bottom. Limited by sight, he will never see the next step, to which his unsteady leg will no longer rise; limited by knowledge, he will never know what the coming day, the coming hour or minute brings him. And in his blind ignorance, tormented by forebodings, he will obediently complete the circle of iron destiny. " All five pictures of the play ("The Birth of a Man and the Torment of a Mother", "Love and Poverty", "Ball at a Man", "Misfortune of a Man", "Death of a Man"), showing respectively five stages of a person's life from birth to death - "from the bottom to the top, from top to bottom ”- illustrate this thesis.

The emphasis in the dramatic action is placed on the vicissitudes of the collision of a person with the "immutable". And the tragic outcome of the conflict is due to the fact that a person's attempts to break this "circle of iron destiny" are futile, invariably come across the stony indifference of Someone in gray with a burning candle in his hands, repeating monotonously: "Ho wax eaten by fire decreases. - Ho wax decreases. "

Ho, recognizing the power of fatally irresistible forces over a person, the writer did not resign himself to reality, did not abandon attempts - albeit doomed to failure - to resist the blows of fate. In the second scene of the play, the Man, shown as young, energetic, believing in the power of reason, challenges fate itself when it gets in its way. Addressing the Someone standing in the corner of the room, the Man exclaims: “Hey, what is your name there: fate, devil, or life, I throw you a glove, I call you to fight! .. from which the earth will tremble! Hey, go to the fight! " Alexander Blok, literally "shocked" by his own admission, "The Life of a Man" (in February 1907 he happened to see the performance of Be. Meyerhold on the stage of the St. Petersburg Theater of V. F. Komissarzhevskaya), felt the true greatness and tragedy precisely in the fact that Andreevsky the person does not give up, but fights to the end. At that time, Blok was close to the sentiments of “the last despair” expressed in “The Life of Man”, the artist’s furious, albeit fruitless, hatred of the surrounding “terrible world”, and in this aspect he comprehended the rebelliousness of a man who had challenged “inexorable, accursed Destiny. " In Andreev's drama, Blok saw "a vivid proof that Man is a man, not a doll, not a pitiful creature doomed to decay, but a wonderful phoenix that overcomes the" icy wind of boundless spaces. " “Wax melts, but life does not decrease,” he concluded his thought.

Features of the dramatic form. The large-scale philosophical content of "Human Life" is embodied in an innovative dramatic form. “If in Chekhov ... the scene should give life,” Andreev pointed out in one of his letters to KS Stanislavsky, “here - in this performance - the scene should give only a reflection of life. The viewer should not forget for a single minute that he is standing in front of the picture, that he is in the theater and in front of him are actors depicting such and such. " In contrast to the traditional theater of direct emotional experience, Andreev creates his own theater of "performance", the theater of philosophical thought, rejecting the likeness of life and resorting to conventionally generalized images. "From the outside, this is stylization," Andreev explained the concept of "The Life of a Man" in a letter to Vl. I. Nemirovich-Danchenko. - The characters, positions and conditions should be brought to their main ideas, simplified and at the same time deepened due to the absence of trifles and secondary ”.

Several types of characters are represented in the figurative system of "Human Life". There are individual characters, but extremely distant from the individual, concrete, devoid of a name (Man, Man's Wife, Doctor, Old Woman). There are choral images that embody the collective - moral or social - essence of a large group of people (Relatives, Neighbors, Guests at the ball). The functions of these images are commenting on events, setting the stage action, instilling a certain mood in the audience, which is necessary according to the author's intention. For example, in the second picture, which depicts youth, poverty, the beauty of a Man, the Neighbors' remarks are filled with touching attention and love, and contain many good wishes. On the contrary, the dialogues of Drunkards and ominous Old Women in the 5th scene foreshadow the darkness of nothingness, into which the dying Man is about to plunge. Finally, there is also a character that carries an abstract symbolic meaning (Someone in gray).

In connection with the general idea of \u200b\u200bthe theater of "performance" there is another artistic principle used in "The Life of a Man". “Due to the fact that here is not life, but only a reflection of life, a story about life, an idea of \u200b\u200bhow one lives, - in certain places there should be underlining, exaggeration, bringing a certain type, property to its extreme development,” Andreev noted in his letter K. S. Stanislavsky. "There is no positive, calm degree, but only excellent ... Sharp contrasts." The very state of the world depicted in The Life of a Man prompted the author, instead of "quiet, gentle, subtle moods", to turn to "harsh, distinct, angry trumpet sounds."

In Andreev's play, there really is no place for a "calm degree": either a satirical grotesque is used (3rd picture "Ball at a Man"), or hopeless horror is whipped up (5th picture "Death of a Man"), or a sublimely bright structure of feelings and thoughts is transmitted (2nd picture "Love and Poverty"). Exaggeration, grotesque, contrasts are needed by the writer in order to neutralize the possibility of emotional empathy, to express purely intellectual philosophical content with the utmost clarity.

For the same purpose, Andreev widely uses in "The Life of Man" the means of allied kinds of art - painting, music, elements of plastic. LN Andreev's enthusiasm for the art of the great Spanish artist Francisco Goya, especially for the series of etchings "Caprichos" and "The Disaster of War", was reflected in the techniques of depicting stylized characters, the emotional stage "background". Such properties of Goya's graphic writing as grotesque, hyperbolization, unrestrained fantasy, contrasting "play" of light and dark colors, the absence of particulars, "shadows", the desire to expose contradictions to the highest degree - were originally embodied in Andreev's collection of "animated paintings" representing human life. The color palette in the play is very flexible: each picture, imbued with a certain mood and recreating a certain stage in a person's life, has its own range of colors. So, in the second picture, the theme of the youth of a Man and his wife is enhanced by "bright, warm light", "completely smooth light pink walls", "bright, cheerful dresses", "a beautiful bouquet of wild flowers." On the contrary, in the 5th picture, the theme of death is, as it were, accompanied by "indefinite, wavering, blinking gloomy light", "smooth dirty walls", "an endless variety of disgusting and terrible."

The symbolism of music is just as essential in The Life of Man. A short, in two musical phrases, shouting "polka with quivering, cheerful and extremely empty sounds", to which "girls and young people" diligently dance, expressively emphasizes the complete impersonality of the guests gathered at the ball - puppets, covered by the expression of "complacency, arrogance and stupid respect for the wealth of Man. " And the geometrically correct room in which the action takes place and through the windows of which the night always looks, deepens the idea of \u200b\u200bthe depressing monotony of life: the forever given form of the world - the cell.

Each picture is preceded by a special exposition that clarifies the connection between all parts of the play. These expositions, introducing into the atmosphere of what is happening on the stage, are built either in the form of dialogues of secondary characters (for example, the conversation of the Old Women in the 1st scene, the conversation of the Neighbors in the 2nd), or a monologue of some character (for example, in the 4th a picture where the maid tells that “Man has again fallen into poverty”). The unity of the plot line in the play is achieved only by the prologue, the idea of \u200b\u200bwhich is consistently revealed by all the pictures, and by the figure of Someone in gray, invariably present on the stage with a candle, whose wax gradually melts, as if marking the stages of life.

Many of the features of the dialogue in "The Life of a Man" are also explained by the author's setting for the utmost generalization in the depiction of the characters and the stage setting. Within each thematic section, the dialogue is built according to a given scheme and usually explains the attitude of the characters to a particular statement, an event that usually takes place behind the scenes. These are, in particular, the remarks of the guests at the ball: “How rich! How magnificent! How light! How rich! " - pronounced monotonously and languidly. For the most part, the same are the author's remarks. For example, Someone in Gray speaks "in a firm, cold voice, devoid of excitement and passion"; The guests at the ball talk “without whispering, without laughing, almost without looking at each other ... abruptly pronouncing, as if chopping off ... words”; the Human's servant speaks "in an even voice, addressing an imaginary interlocutor."

The artistic features of the play are subordinated to one task - to reveal the tragedy of all mankind in the relationship between Man and fate. This basic idea of \u200b\u200bthe play is associated with the rejection of the intense dynamics of plot action, from the disclosure of the inner experiences of the characters. For the author, this or that combination of specific life positions cannot be of interest - before eternity, everything is insignificant and predetermined in advance, therefore, in The Life of a Man there are no psychological or other “real” motivations for plot events. The actions of the heroes, the situations in their lives seem to them to be accidental: by chance a Man gets rich, by accident they kill his son, by chance he becomes poor again. All events in the hero's life are motivated only by spontaneous, "blind" laws of fate. The person in Andreev's play does not torment, does not suffer, does not feel joy or despair - he makes only marks, signs of his emotions, reports to the audience about what he is experiencing at the given moment. However, the randomness of the plot situations is external: it is justified in the prologue by the fact that the Man “dutifully performs” the “Circle of Iron Destiny” determined by his fate. To show the “blind ignorance” of a Man, Andreev eliminates realistic motivations, depersonalizes characters, and develops stage action solely as an expression of the author's main idea. That is why Andreev's man is not endowed with the motive of tragic guilt - doom, suffering, death are the result not of an internal spiritual struggle, but of an external irrevocable fate.

In The Life of a Man (as in some subsequent plays) Andreev succeeded in anticipating the characteristic features of expressionist dramaturgy, which developed most strongly in German literature of the 1910-1920s (in the plays of G. Kaiser, E. Toller and other writers). Like the German Expressionists, he sharply perceived the tragedy of the existence of an alienated human "I", helpless before the power of fate. By highlighting not the reflection of events, but the emotional, subjective attitude towards them, Andreev created the “art of experiencing”, in which pictures of reality were deformed under the pressure of the stormy, confused feelings of the artist, who reacted anxiously to the blatant dissonances of history.

A wonderful story by LN Andreev entitled "Angel". It was first presented and read by readers in the Moscow newspaper under the name "Courier" in 1899. The direction of the daily publications was closer to democratic politics than this story suited them completely. The main idea in the sketch written by the author, not only corresponded to reality from all the unsightly manifestations, but to a greater extent the expression of the emotional general state of all the characters. The author was distinguished by such a feature in describing Russian life, showing to a large extent the aesthetics of Russian expressionism, thanks to which he became the pioneer in the literature of this direction.

In the center of the events of this story, there is a 13-year-old boy Sashka. His life is like hedgehog's gloves, because his parents were alcoholics and who interrupted with difficulty somehow from day to day. Sasha was already used to the gray everyday life of his life, but he wanted to change something and did not want to come to terms with all this.

The boy entered the gymnasium and, in conflict with his comrades, who showed their dislike and whom he looked down on in general, immediately rude, drew various cartoons and tore textbooks for them. Coming home for all this, his mother beat him. There came such moments when he did not want to live in such moments at all, in the absence of positive moments and emotions in his life.

It all happened at Christmas. The boy was expelled from the gymnasium, but he was invited to the Christmas tree. Where, to his surprise, Sashka touched the miracle. There he met a girl whom Sasha's father had looked after and worked for her. She wanted to put an end to the boy's ill-humor towards life and tried to reason with him.

Everyone was called into the hall, where there was a tree, which he immediately wanted to throw on the floor. He came closer to her and saw a small wax toy in the shape of an angel swinging between the branches. In an instant, she cooled down all the boy's pressure about the Christmas tree and in some magical way transformed Sasha's soul. It seemed to him that the angel was alive and he wanted to fly away, from which the baby seemed to be in a fairy tale, and this is exactly what the boy lacked so much.

For a long time Sashka begged the hosts of this holiday to be allowed to take her to his home, where he showed her to his father. The angel also influenced the father with its power. Two people from this unknown force from the outside received tremendous mental therapy - one tired of life, and the other seeing only the negative in this life.

Their souls rejoiced, their hearts beat with joy. Until they fell asleep. They hung the angel near the stove, which melted by the morning, and their souls filled with strength from the upper world, which filled their thoughts, did not remain in vain and aimless.

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