Introduction

Interest A.S. Pushkin and drama can be traced at all stages of his creative activity, but in no other literary genre is there such a sharp disproportion between an impressive number of ideas and a small number of their implementation.

Having formulated a recipe for subjectivist opposition to "low truths", Pushkin suddenly realized the danger of voluntarism lurking in such an approach, the danger of imposing his lofty schemes. And there were Little Tragedies. By the way, small not at all because the volume of these works is small. small they are because they are very ordinary , projected onto each of us - each one who tries to impose on the world his need for love, separation, justice. And by imposing, he goes to the end and, going to the end, becomes a monster. In fact, the poet consistently considers in his plays the main temptations of individualistic consciousness.

“The dramatic legacy of Pushkin,” rightly believes D.P. Yakubovich - it is difficult to consider outside the rest of his work. Pushkin was not a playwright and was not even a playwright par excellence. However, as it was already clear to the poet's contemporaries, Pushkin's appeal to drama was determined by the essential principles of his creative manner.

The great merit in revealing for the Russian society the significance of Pushkin's dramatic heritage belongs to V.G. Belinsky. His classic articles on Pushkin, while retaining their great significance for our time, bear, however, certain features due to the time and the nature of the socio-political struggle of his era.

"Pushkin's talent," Belinsky believed, was not limited to the narrow sphere of one of some kind of poetry: an excellent lyricist, he was already ready to become an excellent playwright, as a sudden death stopped his development.

“Pushkin was born for the dramatic kind,” he wrote in 1928. I. Kireevsky - he is too versatile, too objective to be a lyricist; in each of his poems, an involuntary desire to give a special life to individual parts is noticeable, a desire that often tends to the detriment of the whole in epic works, but necessary, precious for the dramatist.

In Pushkin, his characters are both terrifying and grandiose. They are beautiful because they are possessed by an unalloyed, pure passion, not available to anyone. The passion that we encounter is noble and unfortunate in its origin: in something - in gold, in glory, in pleasure - the hero sees an enduring value and serves it with all the zeal of the soul. They idealize their world and themselves. They are imbued with faith in their heroic destiny, asserting their right to satisfy their desires, logically convincingly and even poetically convincing of the validity of their positions. But their rightness is one-sided: they do not bother trying to understand the life position of another person. The heroes' belief in their chosenness, in the absolute justification of their own view of the world as the only correct one, comes into irreconcilable conflict with the real world. The world is a complex system of social relations, which inevitably suppresses the slightest attempt to encroach on its foundations. The individualistic self-consciousness of the characters and the hostile world order are the basis of the conflict of small tragedies.

Exploring typical European conflicts, Pushkin thinks of them autobiographically. The background of the Baron's conflict with his son and heir is Pushkin's relationship with his own father. Pushkin passed on the experience of his own heart to both Guan and the Commander. The Mozartian type is both creatively and personally close to Pushkin, but Salieri is not alien to him in all his manifestations. In the dispute between the Priest and Valsingam, one can hear an echo of Pushkin's poetic dialogue with Metropolitan Philaret. "Little Tragedies" is filled with a huge number of smaller autobiographical touches. Pushkin recognizes his personal involvement in the European heritage, which by the beginning of the nineteenth century. became Russian. Personal involvement - and therefore, personal responsibility. This is the recognition of one's own tragic guilt that resolves the conflict and, at the same time, its comprehension as a generic guilt. It occurs at the level of historical awareness, is realized in the poetics of dramas and becomes a personal experience of overcoming individualism, the transition from "I" to "we".

The articles of Chernyshevsky N.G., which appeared in the midst of the most acute struggle between representatives of revolutionary democracy and liberal-gentry criticism, which sought to see in Pushkin the most complete expression of the artistic ideal of "pure art", developed the main provisions of Belinsky's articles and contained a number of new valuable judgments about Pushkin's dramatic works. .

Chernyshevsky emphasizes his succession from Belinsky with all certainty: “The criticism that we are talking about has so fully and correctly determined the nature and significance of Pushkin’s activity that, by common agreement, its judgments still remain fair and completely satisfactory.”

By now, "Little Tragedies" has been studied in more or less detail. Their theatrical nature and stage background are examined in the works of S.M. Bondi, M. Zagorsky, S.K. Durylin and others. A number of special studies are devoted to the problems of musical culture related to the study of the creative history of Mozart and Salieri. Sayings about "Little Tragedies", as well as about "Boris Godunov", are present in almost all works of a general nature in Pushkin's work.

The purpose of the thesis is the study of "Little Tragedies" by A.S. Pushkin in terms of their problems and compositional features.

In this regard, the work has the following structure - an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion.

Chapter 1. Compositional features of "Little Tragedies"

tragedy Pushkin catharsis

Pushkin, the playwright, focused on the problem of life's truth. “The main theme of all small tragedies is the analysis of human passions, affects,” wrote S. Bondy.

“Little Tragedies” is the conditional name of the cycle, which consists of four dramatic works: “The Miserly Knight”, “Mozart and Salieri”, “The Stone Guest”, “Feast during the Plague”. "Little tragedies" Pushkin called them in a letter to P.A. Pletnev dated December 9, 1830 - but he was also looking for other options for the common title: "Dramatic Scenes", "Dramatic Essays", "Dramatic Studies", "Experience in Dramatic Studies". The ideas of the first three works date back to 1826, but there is no evidence of work on them before the Boldin autumn of 1830, when the cycle was created: only white autographs of all dramas have survived, except for Mozart and Salieri.

The implementation of the idea of ​​"Little Tragedies" in 1830. It is customary to associate with the fact that in Boldino Pushkin got acquainted with the collection "Poetic Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall." The dramatic poem “City of the Plague” by J. Wilson, published there, served as an impetus for the creation of “A Feast in the Time of Plague”, and “Dramatic Scenes” by Barry Cornwall were the prototype of the poetic form of “Little Tragedies” - wrote N.V. Belyak.

If you arrange the dramas included in it in the order corresponding to the chronological sequence of the epochs described in it, then the following picture will open: “The Miserly Knight” is dedicated to the crisis of the Middle Ages, “The Stone Guest” is dedicated to the crisis of the Renaissance, “Mozart and Salieri” is the crisis of Enlightenment, “Feast ... ." - a fragment of Wilson's dramatic poem, belonging to the romantic lake school - the crisis of the romantic era, contemporary to Pushkin himself" - N.V. Belyak also wrote.

Creating his own cycle, Pushkin did not think in terms of specific dates, but in cultural epochs of European history. Thus, the "little tragedies" appear as a large historical canvas.

"An unresolved conflict is inherited by each subsequent era - and therefore the antagonist and protagonist of each subsequent drama inherit the features of those whose conflict was not overcome in the previous one." Baron and Albert, Commander and Guan, Salieri and Mozart, Priest and Walsingam - all of them are connected by historical kinship. This is a confrontation between acquisitiveness and wastefulness, the subject of which can be material goods, spiritual values, a heavenly gift, and the cultural tradition itself. Until the last drama, the antagonist and protagonist do not enter into a genuine interaction, they are almost deaf to each other, because each of them builds his own individualistic cosmos based on one or another sacred idea. And the hero seeks to spread the laws of this cosmos to the whole world - inevitably colliding with the equally expansive will of his antagonist.

"The abundance of sources involved by Pushkin in the creation of "little tragedies" will not seem surprising, given that they are an epic canvas dedicated to the great European culture."

"The Miserly Knight" draws on the richest literary tradition of depiction of avarice, which goes back to Plautus and has received its classical expression in "The Miserly" by Molière. Baron Philip conceals in his heart a “resentment”. Nothing is said about his childhood and youth in the tragedy. But since the baron clearly remembered everything connected with the young duke, his father and grandfather, he never mentioned either his grandfather or his father, it can be assumed that he, having lost his parents, was brought up at the Court out of mercy. According to the young duke, Philip "was a friend" of his "grandfather". Philip, not without pride, recalls that the father of the current duke "spoke" to him always "for you."

Molière's comedy Don Giovanni and Mozart's opera Don Giovanni served as direct sources for The Stone Guest.

The plot of "Mozart and Salieri" was drawn by Pushkin not so much from printed sources as from oral communication: rumors that Salieri confessed to poisoning Mozart, which arose after the suicide attempt made by Salieri in 1823, flared up with renewed vigor immediately after his Pushkin’s death could have been passed on by such interlocutors as A.D. Ulybyshev, M.Yu. Vielgorsky, N.B. Golitsyn and others.

The poetics of the cycle is based on a strictly sustained historical principle - the artistic universe of each tragedy is built according to the laws of the picture of the world that each of the epochs depicted in the cycle formed and captured.

““Little Tragedies” are plays designed primarily for one tragic actor, but an actor of very great talent and a wide range that can keep the viewer in suspense both during a long monologue and in a rapidly developing scene, i.e. designed for tragedians like Karatygin or Mochalov, who then shone.

“The first scene of The Miserly Knight takes place in the tower, the second in the basement, the third in the palace. These are clearly defined top, bottom and middle, which form the device of a medieval theatrical action in accordance with the medieval picture of the world. In the classical Middle Ages, spatial coordinates are also value coordinates: top - heaven, bottom - hell, middle - earth. But Pushkin depicts the moment when the developed system of values ​​collapses and a person puts himself in the place of the religious ideal of chivalrous service. The revolution that took place in the cultural cosmos is expressed in the poetics of the space of tragedy. The heavens of the Baron, the place of his bliss - underground, the tower is the hell of Albert, where he suffers tantalum torments, suffocating from poverty in a castle filled with gold.

As in medieval dramaturgy, the main formative beginning of The Miserly Knight is not the plot, not the plot, but the composition. The drama is built as a strictly symmetrical triptych: scene - monologue - scene. Three actors - one - again three. The events of the second picture (in the basement) do not continue the events of the first (in the tower) - they are correlated precisely in terms of composition, they mutually comment on each other according to the principle of simultaneity, characteristic of medieval painting and theater.

In "The Stone Guest" the word "here" is pronounced twenty-one times, each time accentuating the spatial opposition. The opposition "here - there" becomes the main shaping thrust of the tragedy. And the change of places of action serves as an expression of the extreme extensiveness of the life of the hero, who violently rushes to the future, trying to subjugate time, space, and circumstances. This is the expansion of the renaissance will, this is Renaissance anthropocentrism: a person has placed himself in the center of the world and acts in it as he wants. But the opposition "here - there", originally set as a horizontal, confirming the freedom of action and movement of the hero, who does not believe in other dimensions, in the last scene of the tragedy unfolds into a fatal vertical for him: this comes into force the law of Catholic Spain, violated by him, the law of immutable punishment for sins.

The time of action of "Mozart and Salieri" is the end of the 18th century, when enlightenment, failing, retreating before sentimentalism, romanticism, still coexisted with them. The mode of this coexistence is embodied in the poetics of tragedy. Not only is the romantic character of Mozart opposed to the rationalist Salieri - in strict accordance with this duality of culture, the two scenes of the tragedy are framed in two opposite ways.

The word as a full-fledged representative, as a full-fledged equivalent of reality, is the law of classicism, the law of enlightenment rationalism, and this is Salieri's law. Mozart exists according to the laws of romantic speech, tragically ambiguous, knowingly and deliberately keeping back, not encroaching on replacing the whole polysemy of being. In the first scene, Salieri's monologues absorb two-thirds of her poetic text, they frame and loop it, put it entirely under the sign of Salieri, into whose spiritual space Mozart bursts like an "illegal comet". This scene is contrastingly opposite to the second - open, unfinished, cut off at the question. The poetics of the second scene is organized according to the laws of Mozart, in it no one speaks to the end, although it is in it that the mystery of life and death is accomplished.

The equivalent of Salieri's monologues here is the musical element, which, according to the hierarchy of values ​​put forward by romanticism, is the supreme expression of the essence of being. This is Mozart's "Requiem", for the performance of which the poetic text parted on the stage, freeing up dramatic time. And although Mozart sits down at the piano even in the first scene, there, as if exposed to the laws of her poetics, he first retells, puts his music into words.

The poetics of "A Feast in the Time of Plague" is already entirely organized according to the laws of the romantic era. First of all, it is the poetics of the fragment; apparently, the reason why the text of the tragedy is woven from someone else's text is also connected with it. The fragment was valued by the romantics for the fact that, devoid of boundaries and frames, it remained, as it were, not withdrawn from the world, or, on the contrary, “embedded” directly into the world. In the work of N.V. white is written - in any case, unlike the completed self-sufficient text, the fragment was connected with the world as if by a single circulatory system.

The deep consonance of the "Little Tragedies" with the whole atmosphere of the thirties of the XIX century was very accurately felt by A. I. Herzen.

“This Russia,” he wrote, “begins with the emperor and goes from gendarme to gendarme, from official to official, to the last policeman in the most remote corner of the empire. Each step of this ladder acquires, as in Dante's pits of hell everywhere, the forces of evil, a new step of depravity and cruelty ... The terrible consequences of human speech in Russia, of necessity, give it a special power ... When Pushkin begins one of his best creations with these strange words.

Everyone says there is no truth on earth,

But there is no more truth!

For me, it is as clear as a simple gamma ....

The heart shrinks and through this apparent calmness the broken existence of a person already accustomed to suffering is guessed. Internal drama permeates the entire atmosphere of "Little Tragedies". Every image, every detail, every replica is clear and definite, and all of them are in sharp contrast to each other.

Sharply contrasting with each other and detailed episodes, scenes developing in parallel. Let us compare the dialogue between the Usurer and Albert, where Solomon cunningly but insistently brings the conversation to the main topic, and the dialogue between the Miser and the Duke, where the Baron just as cunningly and just as persistently seeks to get away from the main topic.

“It could be compared,” remarks S.M. Bondu, are two scenes of “Mozart and Salieri” that are completely different in character, in which the characters change places: in the first scene, the gloomy Salieri reigns, and Mozart, in the spirit of his characterization given by Salieri, is a cheerful, frivolous “idle reveler”, meanwhile in the second scene, Mozart grows colossally: we see a brilliant artist, the author of the Requiem, a man with an amazing sensitivity of the soul, expressing serious and deep thoughts about art. Here, on the contrary, he is sad, and Salieri is trying in every possible way to dispel this sadness.

And in this atmosphere, as if devoid of halftones, every time we face such a tangle of contradictions, such an intensity of passions, which must inevitably and immediately be resolved by a catastrophe, an explosion!

However, the internal drama is not exhausted by the tension of the situation in which the characters of the work find themselves. The essence of this drama lies in the fact that the heroes of "Little Tragedies" are constantly faced with the need to choose between two possible moral decisions. And the decision being made is all the more significant and formidable in terms of its consequences, the more opposition is caused by the act of the hero and his antagonists.

Pushkin, in his dramatic sketches, first of all explores the state of a person at the moment he chooses a path. But for Pushkin, as a dramatic author, a synthesis of the psychological and effective characteristics of the characters is characteristic. The situations in which his heroes are placed are heated to the limit even at the moment the curtain is raised. In fact, all the heroes of "Little Tragedies" stand on the verge of life and death. They can still think before making a decision, but by making it, they thereby cut off all the possibilities of retreat. It is no longer possible for them to stop, to turn off the once chosen path - they are forced to follow it to the end.

Of course, the relationship between the characters, determined by their characters and the circumstances in which the characters are placed, is the driving force behind the conflict of the play - this is one of the basic, most general laws of drama. However, in order for these relations to grow into direct action, a sufficiently strong impulse, an external or internal push, is needed. This impetus is determined not only by the relations that have already developed between the actors, but by the relationship between the characters of the characters and the circumstances in which they act. The characters of the heroes, prompting them to new actions, which in turn lead to the emergence of new, each time more and more stressful situations.

If you read the text of The Miserly Knight, it is not difficult to see that the beginning of it, although it testifies to the extremely aggravated relations between Albert and the old Baron, does not yet portend a tragic denouement. Approximately a third of the first scene - Albert's conversation with Ivan before the arrival of the usurer - is an exposition that paints a picture of the humiliating poverty in which the young knight lives. And only with the arrival of Solomon, a cunning dialogue begins, in which each of the interlocutors pursues their own goals: Albert - to immediately get money for the future tournament, the usurer - to hasten the death of the old Baron and thereby more than return everything given earlier to the young heir to the treasures stored in the basements of the castle .

Solomon's proposal to contact the pharmacist is the impetus, that is, to perform an action that will lead to the death of the Baron. Thus, only the Sami end of the first scene is the dramatic plot of the tragedy. In the same way, Salieri's first monologue does not give us any reason to suspect him of intent to poison Mozart. This decision matures in him only towards the very end of the first scene, after he heard the blind musician play and Mozart's new creation.

Mozart and Salieri are, as it were, in different dimensions. A direct collision between them does not occur and cannot occur. Pushkin consciously emphasizes this with the peculiarity of the dramatic conflict (one attacks, but the other does not even suspect the attack). Mozart responds to Salieri's long and coldly rational monologues with music.

In The Stone Guest, we again have an “idle reveler” and an inspired poet. But this is no longer the brilliant Mozart, who knows the joy of hard and deep work, but only the "improviser of a love song" - Don Juan, that Don Juan, whom almost all of Spain knows as "a shameless debaucher and atheist." A new turn, a new shift in the dramaturgical conflict, exploring the tragic fate of the hero, who entered into a confrontation with the "terrible age". And we can trace the patterns of change in the very foundation, the dramatic essence of this conflict.

In The Miserly Knight, as has already been established, there is no ideological dispute between the Baron and Albert; their duel over chests of gold is so common in the world of the cleansing man, in the world of money, where

... the young man sees nimble servants in them

And not sparing sends there, here.

The old man sees in them reliable friends

And he keeps them like the apple of his eye.

And the ideological dispute between Salieri and Mozart is painful and stubborn, but it is carried on in the soul of one Salieri. Mozart is not even aware of this struggle, he simply refutes all the cunning arguments of Salieri by his behavior, his creativity. Don Juan, on the other hand, throws down a direct challenge to the world of hypocrisy and hypocrisy.

In the last of the Little Tragedies, a fundamentally different situation arises. There, the heroes were involved in disaster as a result of the feast, this was their tragic mistake and tragic guilt. Here the feast is a direct dramatic consequence of the catastrophe. In essence, he does not change anything in the fate of the heroes and cannot change it. The theme of the feast as a celebration, as the highest tension of the hero's moral strength, runs through all the "Little Tragedies", but the feast in them each time turns into death for the hero, this feast turned out to be the direct dramatic cause of the disaster.

I want to arrange a feast for myself today:

I will light a candle before every chest

And I will open them all, and I will become myself

Among them look at the shining heaps, -

said the miserly knight. But after all, it is precisely the contemplation of the “shiny heaps” that gives rise to a feeling of fear and uncertainty in him, a disease of the future and fear of the heir-robber of countless treasures. The Baron suffers a moral defeat precisely in this scene, a direct clash with Albert only finishes him off.

The highest feast of art affirms Salieri the need to poison Mozart, but also brings moral death to him.

All heroes are doomed to die. They know it. Awareness of the inevitable gives birth in ordinary people to a fatalistic reconciliation with fate, with the inevitability of fate. This fatalism can be very different - here is the thoughtless carelessness of a young man offering a drink in honor of the already deceased Jackson "with a cheerful clink of glasses, with an exclamation", and the selfless generosity of tender Mary, and the callous selfishness of Louise, who is trying to assert herself in misanthropy, but "gentle weaker cruel, and fear lives in the soul, tormented by passions, ”writes D. Ustyuzhanin.

The moral battle theme runs through all of Little Tragedies.

Full of fighting zeal, a young man in the prime of life accepts the challenge of an old man who is ready to draw a sword with a trembling hand. ... Careless Mozart, not even suspecting Salieri's treachery ... The statue of the Commander and fearlessly looking into the face of fate, but immediately realizing the senselessness of resistance, Don Juan ...

But here in "A Feast in the Time of Plague" man and Death clashed on an equal footing. The strength of the hero's spirit really resists the Plague, which, by the way, loses the traits of fate in the Chairman's anthem - the killer and acquires other warriors, even attractive in their own way.

The first remarks of the Priest: “Godless feast, godless madmen!” make us remember the Monk from The Stone Guest, Salieri and the old Baron.

The theme of "the madman-squanderer" also runs through all the "Little Tragedies". So they called Albert and Mozart and Don Juan. However, these words are perhaps less suitable for Walsings than for anyone else. And the words about debauchery, which the Priest repeats with such stubbornness, do not find such a solid foundation in the text of the tragedy.

Indeed, in what does the Priest see debauchery? In "hateful raptures", "mad songs" resounding among the "dead silence", "prayers of the saint and heavy sighs".

The priest, like Walsingam, seeks to "encourage the fading gaze", but only in order to prepare the doomed to death. And the voice of the Priest, the whole structure of his speech is the voice of death itself, as if resounding from behind a tombstone. The priest incessantly recalls the dead on behalf of the dead.

Is it significant that the Priest addressed the name of the deceased Matilda as the last, decisive argument in the dispute with Valsingam? The image of Matilda - the embodiment of pure and selfless love - directly merges with the image of Jenny from Mary's song. However, there is not and cannot be such a close internal connection between Walsingam and Edmond. Walsingam does not follow the path of Edmond, he does not run in order to epicly visit - the collapse of his beloved after the danger has passed.

“The feast continues. The chairman remains, immersed in deep thought,” reads the final note of “Little Tragedies”.

Chapter 2 Pushkin

The psychologism of "Little Tragedies" was never disputed by Pushkinists. So S. Bondi wrote about them: "The main theme of all small tragedies is the analysis of the human soul, human passions, affects." And in his further reasoning, the depth of the psychology of Pushkin's masterpieces was reduced to the depiction of "stinginess" as "passion, to collecting the accumulation of money in The Miserly Knight, and envy" in "Mozart and Salieri" "as a passion capable of bringing a person seized by it to a terrible crimes." In this interpretation, Pushkin looks like a registrar of the external symptoms of the phenomenon. Modern researchers most often consider "Little Tragedies" as "the history of the new time, taken at its crisis points, all of a tragic hypostasis, as a grandiose transition from happiness to misfortune."

Pushkin is concerned about the "fate of culture", but, above all, he is concerned about the "fate of the personality" and why the fate of a richly gifted personality becomes tragic in this world. For Pushkin, it was not the affects themselves that were important - stinginess, envy, voluptuousness. He realized that affects are the "key" that opens the secret of the human soul. “The secret, according to Pushkin, lies in the fact that a person does not even suspect what a volcano of passions is dormant for the time being at the bottom of his soul.” "Resentment" gives rise to pride, which they, like a shield, hope to protect themselves from the world around them that has offended them. Pride pushes a person into loneliness, into isolation (monastery, cellar, tavern, cemetery, etc.). Grandiose projects of revenge on the "terrible world" are ripening there. There, a thirst for “great power” is born, to which different paths lead - money (power over the world), fame (power over souls), passion (power over bodies),” writes Zvonnikova L.A. in your article.

Pushkin's heroes are highly characteristic of such a feature as the transfer of guilt to the inexorability of time forcing him to transfer the heritage. Albert transfers the blame to his father, and himself, appearing on stage, opens the tragic cycle with words that are nothing more than a formula for obsession with passion: “Whatever happens.” The duke, whose power was powerless to resolve the conflict entrusted to her, considers only both conflicting parties to be the culprits. Salieri transfers the blame to heaven, to Mozart, in the end - to the crowd. Walsingam shifts the blame to the failure of all former values ​​in the face of the plague. Until the very end of the cycle, the heroes think that the conflict is between them and the world, while the main tragic conflict is in themselves, in the fundamental internal contradiction of their passion, their consciousness, their personality, their individually built cosmos. The tragic agon is a movement towards the goal at all costs, it is the conquest of happiness at any cost, it is a manifestation of the orgiastic principle. Therefore, as a result, the ancient hero will definitely recognize himself as a "goat" - one who has broken the law, gone over the limit. Pushkin's hero initially manifests himself precisely as a "goat" and persists in his right and viability on this path, believing this to be a law, in principle denying the law of the general measure, the law of the objective. And the objective order of the cultural cosmos, even destroying the hero, puts no boundaries to his passion. The atom of the tragic paradox remains in the world and, like a pinch of fermentation yeast, rebuilds its structure,” notes Fomichev S.A.

For each of the tragic heroes of the cycle, he was the object of the transfer of guilt, his own personality was the object of service. The priest turns out to be the only one who corrects this colossal distortion generated by a secularized culture: he bears the service of the world, he takes the blame - such is the result of his meeting with the one who, in his apostasy, turned out to be the heir of grandiose substitutions that the church was unable to correct. And only thanks to the Priest, Valsingam has a chance: he met with that norm, with that truth of the big world, of an irreplaceable culture, which is the only guarantee of resolving the tragic conflict.

Recognizing in himself the seeds of tragic conflicts, Pushkin overcomes the eternal mechanism of generating tragedy: the mechanism of the transfer of guilt. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this act in a world where conflicts are already inherited, where everyone is to blame, and therefore, as it were, no one, where it is so easy for everyone to give up guilt, to transfer it to the world, to history, to others, and therefore to abandon the latter. a chance for purification, for an exit from the tragic space.

So, to understand the laws of tragic plot formation, not to become a tragic victim, not to go further along the path of the hero who gives rise to tragedy, to move, to go to a different way of life and mode of action - such was the task that Pushkin solved in Boldin in the autumn of 1830, on the eve of his marriage. Autobiographically, intimately, personally partaking of what was done by the subject of the drama, seeing in the fate of his heroes a distortion of his own nature, the poet went through the cleansing action of the tragic genre: through the recognition of tragic guilt. Individualism as a quality of one's own soul and as a phenomenon of culture was not only stigmatized, something immeasurably more was done towards it. The four cultural cosmos of the tetralogy seem to be isolated from each other; the tragic heroes who build them and act in them, it would seem, are independent of each other. But the cycle as a whole reveals that these individualists, who do not remember kinship, are subject to immutable laws of inheritance and succession. They all have a common cultural ancestor - the Baron, the first whose falling away from the clan determined the course of modern European history. And he is recognized by Pushkin as his own cultural ancestor. And this meant that history, split by individualistic consciousness, was restored, as the history of ancestral and tragic guilt was understood and experienced as ancestral guilt. This was the transition from "I" to "we", opening up the possibility of a completely new way of being in the world. It is with him that the leitmotifs of the rejection of happiness sounding in Boldino's letters are connected. It is caused by a feeling much deeper than superstition. This is a rejection of the tragic background, this is the humility of a proud person, this is his genuine readiness to recognize other paths and other laws on the threshold of a new life.

"Stingy Knight". The appearance of the protagonist on the stage is preceded by our acquaintance with him in absentia through the conversations of Albert with the servant and with the usurer Solomon, from which, without much resistance on our part, the impression of the Baron as a mean man to the point of meaninglessness is formed. True, the servant does not say a word about the old master, and Solomon, apparently, is not familiar with him, so in fact the “glory” of the Baron is created by the son, and we are not indifferent, because we sympathize with the difficult situation of the son. Prejudiced against the Baron, we are surprised to see him in the second scene alone with himself, a completely different person in terms of temperament and power, and are forced to make significant adjustments to what we tuned in with the words “one side”.

That the baron, his father, is rich, that his father's gold is calm in chests / lies to itself , Pushkin's Albert is well informed. Someday, - he thinks about his future inheritance, - It will serve me, forget to lie . But such dreams are not able to sweeten his bitter reality. And it just consists in the fact that every time he is forced to rack his brains in search of funds for acquiring the most necessary things.

Well, for example, quite recently:

Last time

All the knights were sitting here in the atlas

Yes, velvet; I was alone in armor

At the ducal table. dissuaded

I mean that I got to the tournament by accident.

And then, as if on purpose, a new misfortune befalls him, incomparable even with that humiliation: he came out of the fight that had just taken place, though triumphant, according to the audience, the winner, but with a pierced helmet and a lame horse. And this for him is equal to a sensitive defeat, because he does not put his victory for a penny next to the spoiled and worn out knightly equipment. More precisely, he explains his powerful blow, which knocked the opponent out of the saddle and made him fly twenty steps away from the horse, with motives that are far from the notions of chivalry: I was pissed off for the damaged helmet... , and from ideas about knightly honor: What was the fault of heroism? - stinginess...

That is, if the enemy had not pierced his helmet, Albert would not have had a reason to be furious. And that means that he would not have shown such heroism, which, if Albert is understood literally, should be characteristic of that (and many interpreters seized on this), whom Pushkin described by the very title of his play - Stingy Knight.

That such a title is an oxymoron, many have written. And of course, it is fair: chivalry is incompatible with stinginess. But what is Albert talking about? What was the reason for his heroism? Avarice? He pronounces this word, but immediately clarifies: Yes! it is not difficult to get infected here / Under the same roof with my father . And such a clarification, as the text of Pushkin's tragedy shows, is an obvious proof of self-incrimination: neither Albert nor his servant Ivan picked up the stinginess bacilli in the baron's house. And the point is not that Albert does not perform sacred duties over chests of gold, like his father, and does not engage in usury, like Solomon, the point is that Albert's very human nature is such that he will not be able to do this.

Therefore, he will throw himself up in response to the reasonable assertion of the usurer that no one can know when he comes into possession of his father's inheritance: The Baron is healthy. God willing - ten years, twenty / And twenty-five and thirty he will live , therefore, at the same time, he will show innocence that has not been spoiled by anything and no one:

Yes, in thirty years

I hit fifty, then the money

What will be good for me?

And no reason for a usurer that it’s good to have money precisely in old age, when a person has already subdued passions, knows the price of everything and therefore will not waste in vain, Albert will not seem convincing: before his eyes is the example of a father who serves his gold, according to Albert, not just as a slave, but as the most disenfranchised, the most obsequious creature, which were found only in ancient pirate Algeria, - like an Algerian slave , and who guards his gold, again according to Albert, like a dog on a chain:

In an unheated kennel

Lives, drinks water, eats dry crusts,

He does not sleep all night, everything runs and barks ...

No, miserly knight It would be unfair to name Albert: stinginess is one of the human traits he despised. It was not stinginess that increased his strength tenfold in a knightly duel, but the realization that he had nothing and nothing to replace the equipment damaged by the enemy.

He himself, with undisguised bitterness, assesses his current situation in this way:

Oh, poverty, poverty!

How it humiliates our hearts! -

and we have no reason not to trust this assessment, not to believe this characterization of him. For does not the heart humiliated by poverty make Albert, in response to the admiration of the servant, with his most powerful blow, which knocked out the opponent from the saddle: He lay dead for a day - and is unlikely / Recovered , - turn onto the rut that depresses him with a knurled consciousness: And yet he is not at a loss; / His breastplate is intact Venetian, / And his chest: it doesn’t cost him a penny ... And what, if not humiliating poverty, caused Albert's regret: Why didn't I take off his helmet right there! ? That he would not have removed the helmet from his opponent, Albert himself testifies, although he seems to claim the opposite: And I would have taken it off if I hadn't been ashamed / I have ladies and a duke . For his very saying ashamed shows that he would not do anything like that - shame does not get along next to robbery or looting! Again, we are faced with self-incrimination, unflattering for a young knight, based on the same bitter annoyance: he, Albert, and not his rival, is at a loss, he just has to lie down, and he has to get money somewhere for new equipment, a new horse. ..

And with whom Albert would definitely not have dealt, if not for the same poverty, it was with the usurer Solomon.

Although at first he welcomes him sincerely and from the bottom of his heart: Ah, buddy! / Damned Jew, venerable Solomon, / Come here... His damn kike should not embarrass us: he does not swear, but speaks only of Solomon's belonging to the people cursed by Christians, and he speaks jokingly, it is not for nothing that immediately after this he shows his respect to the usurer.

But, looking after the departing Solomon, he will quite seriously recall Judas, cursed by Christianity, with whom he will compare the usurer who terrified him, from whom he was ready to take money on any conditions and from whom he will not take them now under any circumstances:

His gold coins will smell of poison,

Like the pieces of silver of his ancestor...

At one time, N. O. Lerner decided that poison here is Pushkin's blunder that the pieces of silver of Judas smell like hell, not poison, because he did not receive them for poisoning like the ancestral pieces of silver . Once (in 1935) they agreed with Lerner: they printed hell in Volume VI of the Complete Works of Pushkin, published in Academy . And, in my opinion, they did it in vain. The monstrous, villainous act of Judas is poisonous in its spiritual nature. His kiss of the Teacher - a sign for the guards who seized Christ, for which Judas received his pieces of silver - is poisoned with the poison of betrayal. Undoubtedly, this is what Albert meant when he likened the money of Judah to the money of Solomon.

After all, the usurer did not immediately, not out of the blue, offer his son to poison his father. A person who is not prone to risk will measure many times before cutting off a piece for himself. Moreover, he knows well the generous, riotous nature of Albert, whom he often lent at interest, he is convinced that at the baron's funeral / More money will be shed than tears , and therefore sincerely wishes to his debtor, from whom he hopes to benefit very well: God send you an inheritance soon.

And in this his desire coincides with Alberov. After all, that is why he agrees to any usurious interest, that my father / is rich and himself as a Jew, that it’s too early, too late / I inherit everything.

(Of course, for us who know about the Dreyfus case and the Beilis case, who live after the Holocaust and remember the Soviet policy of state anti-Semitism, it is wild to read this like a Jew , the wildly constant naming of Solomon in Pushkin's tragedy as a Jew. But let's not, like the founding fathers of Zionism, accuse Pushkin of anti-Semitism. Pushkin does not deviate from the tradition of his time, when a Jew was not an abusive nickname for a Jew, but a symbolic representative of commercial capital, usually usurious, usually Jewish, because there was nowhere for Jews to go except as merchants and pharmacists: scattered around the world, they were not allowed foreign rulers, not only to state, but also to ordinary civil positions.)

Their desires coincide, discrepancies only in terms. His father will not survive, - the young knight nonchalantly waves off the Jew, who does not want, as before, to lend him for a future inheritance. How to know? our days are not numbered by us... - he answers thoughtfully and very fairly. And immediately draws Albert's attention to the excellent health of the baron, who is quite capable of living for another thirty years. Then the money / What will I need? - naively-ingenuously, as we remember, the rich heir asks. And the usurer, though still just as thoughtfully and justly, remarks: ... money / Always, at any age, are suitable for us ... , - will detect that the young knight is not at all averse to using his father's gold as soon as possible.

But the conclusion that the Jew will draw from this observation of his will strikingly not coincide with the nobility of Albert, with his style of behavior, which we are accustomed to call chivalrous, regardless of whether the person belongs to this chosen circle or not.

That Albert is a knight by nature, and not only by origin, is proved, in particular, by his reaction to Solomon's story about the miraculous deadly drops that his friend Tobius makes:

Well? borrowing instead of money

You will offer me two hundred bottles of poison

For a bottle of gold. Is it so, or what?

You want to laugh at me... - the Jew will react, completely sincerely not understanding the purity of Albert's bewilderment, - after all, he, Solomon, explained in such an accessible way how drops of Tobias work:

Pour into a glass of water ... there will be three drops,

No taste in them, no color is not noticeable;

And a man without pain in the stomach,

Dies without nausea, without pain.

But Albert something that with these drops? The young knight needs money, for which he meets with a moneylender, not poison - borrow instead of money!

However, it turns out that the lender is offering poison at the place with the Baron's money: No; I wanted... maybe you... I thought / It's time for the baron to die.

I thought , - the Jew says about when the baron should die, as if forgetting about his own prudence, which he demonstrated a very short time ago: ...our days are not numbered by us... , - or rather, of course, not forgetting anything, but once again testifying that he then uttered not worldly wisdom, but vulgarity, into which human meanness turns any life postulate.

The baseness and dishonesty of the usurer give Albert another reason to reproach his father, who forced his son to enter into business and almost partnership relations with the Jew: This is what stinginess drives me to / my own Father! The Jew dared me / What to offer! , but it will also encourage the knight to break them off with the usurer, not to take money from the Jew, with which he is ready to lend Albert in order to pay off his monstrous proposal to poison the baron.

On the other hand, Albert's credulity, perhaps, is also emphasized by the significance of the names of the characters in Pushkin's tragedy. Solomon (from the Hebrew shalom - peace to you ) is a desire (wish) to be well. The creator of his own well-being, he brings well-being to others. Tobiy translates as my happiness god therefore, the main feature of the owner of this name is to make others happy. This is the kind of company enticed gullible Albert. Of course, he is not so naive as not to understand the value of Solomon. No wonder he interrupts him when he just started talking about his friend Tobias: The same as you, or more honest? But he would not under any circumstances get involved with the treacherous hypocrisy, which, as it turned out, Solomon and Tobias embody. This is directly indicated by his name, which is translated not only as noble , But brilliantly noble , that is, his nobility of the highest standard!

In the end, he also wants to resolve the issue of the maintenance due to him, as a knight, from his father within the strict framework of the law, which in the Middle Ages (and in Pushkin's tragedy) was personified by the ruler:

I'm going to look for justice

At the duke: let the father be forced

Hold me like a son, not like a mouse,

Born underground.

Of course, it is no coincidence that after these words of Albert, which ends scene I, there follows scene II, designated by Pushkin as Basement : not hungry mice live in the baron's underground.

True, knowing about his father's gold, Albert hardly guesses where the baron hides it. My secret cellar , - the baron calls his vault, and the text Miserly Knight leaves no doubt that Albert did not even try to discover his father's hiding place: why does he need it?

But the same text of Pushkin's tragedy shows that the baron hides his cherished chests First of all, it is from his son, with whom he does not feel any relationship. Not without reason, having gone down to the basement, having finally waited for the sweet moment to pour another handful of gold into the chest, which he collects, like a dwarf, - doubloon after doubloon, experiencing such spiritual excitement at the sight of his wealth that he will utter a long monologue - for the whole stage - at 118 poems, and not all of them are white :

Obedient to me, my power is strong;

Happiness is in it, my honor and glory are in it! -

showing by the acquired rhyme that he has finally reached complete harmony with the world, the baron will slip on the rhyme, as soon as he remembers to whom he should leave his state:

I reign - but who will follow me

Will he take over her? My heir!

Fool, young squanderer,

Debauched riotous interlocutor! -

because immediately after these words, the rhyme from the baron's speech will disappear, never to appear again.

One can hardly agree with D.P. Yakubovich that the white verse of the tragedy, precisely at the moment of its apotheosis, turns into a rhymed verse , because it is hardly fair to declare the apotheosis of the tragedy of the baron's stay near his chests, which he opened, placed a burning candle in front of each and revels in the brilliance of gold, imagining himself as a kind of ruler of the world. After all, it is not tragedy that glorifies its hero here, but he glorifies himself. He is seized with euphoria, which, by the way, is very short-lived, just as his feeling of harmonious unity with the world, which informs the baron of the gold he has accumulated, and which the same gold takes away from the baron, reminding him of the heir, is short-lived and fragile.

That is why the rhyme disappears from his speech, because the baron's harmonic connections with the world break off almost immediately after they arise.

Of course, the fact that they occur to him at all proves that the baron is able, albeit not for long, but really to establish himself in his own feeling: I reign... By the way, his name is Philip - a very common name in the most august families. But how many distractions await the baron on the way to his sweet sense of his own omnipotence! And how many will be dragged down, not allowing him to properly establish himself on the throne! He will tell about both of them in his long monologue, revealing both his own baseness, which allows him to take away the last things from people or not disdain stolen goods, and his own stinginess, with which he, a born knight, outdid even the despicable Jew Solomon, and his staunch hostility , dislike for his son, whom he will convict in the same monologue of a terrifying, from his point of view, sin - the wastefulness of a future inheritance and, in this regard, he will lift to heaven the groaning, expected, but unrealizable:

Oh, if only from the grave

I could come, guard shadow

Sit on the chest and away from the living

Keep my treasures as now! ..

I think that it is no coincidence that the baron ends his monologue with these words, summing up everything that he has just said. And this result unequivocally shows that Albert did not exaggerate so much when characterizing his father’s attitude to gold: if even after death he is ready to protect his wealth from any encroachment, if he dreams of coming from the grave and preventing the living from using his money, then is this not the best evidence that he serves his gold, like an Algerian slave that he guards him, like a chained dog!

That is why, in my opinion, there is no truth in G. A. Gukovsky's statement that the baron's stinginess is his sublimated, so to speak, lust for power. Before, in his youth, writes Gukovsky, Baron lived at the court of the duke and was close to the duke, the first among equal barons ... , Now power began to seize the chest of money . In other words, having evolved from a brilliant fighting knight into an unsociable miser, the baron retained his former love of power, which is now nourished and strengthened in him by his gold.

But, firstly, the words of the duke, outwardly full of friendly memories: You were a friend to your grandfather; my father / respected you. And I have always considered you a faithful, brave knight... - they can also point out, as V. E. Recepter noted, to the gradual separation of the baron from the ruling dynasty , but do not give any reason to assume in the baron a special lust for power. And secondly, stinginess is not necessarily an acquired trait, the baron could have been stingy in his youth and, most likely, he was, because it is impossible to imagine that the passion for hoarding seized him suddenly, suddenly, and did not accumulate in him gradually, squeezing out from his soul human feelings and freeing up space in it for non-human ones.

And most importantly, because the moment of his euphoria is so short: I reign - that he does not feel himself the sovereign ruler of his subjects. I just want , - says the baron about his own opportunities to purchase anything with his gold. I whistle , - the baron says that anyone will answer his call to complete any orders he paid for. But neither to want to acquire anything, nor to give someone orders for which you will have to pay, the baron will not. What he himself will announce, asserting his position on an unshakable, as it seems to him, theoretical foundation:

Everything is obedient to me, but I - to nothing;

I am above all desires; I am calm;

I know my strength: I've had enough

This consciousness ... -

but which, in fact, will turn out to be surprisingly unsteady: in the very next scene (and it, we note, is called Pushkin In a palace - probably in contrast basement , the kingdom of the baron) he will appear to the duke as to his overlord, to whom he is obliged to be obedient and will be obedient until the duke speaks to him about a worthy maintenance, which, according to knightly customs, the baron must assign to his son. But the baron will not dare to declare his disobedience to the duke: he will die like a slave at the feet of his master, who did not dare to contradict him and at the same time did not fulfill his order, for it turned out to be literally beyond the baron's vitality to fulfill it.

Isn't that why he feels above all desires that they are associated with spending money, which the baron will not categorically go for: he will not be attracted, in contrast to the same Solomon, by the possibility of increasing his capital, because the baron will not let him into circulation: having tenaciously grabbed the doubloon, he will open his hand only to to put money in the chest:

It's enough for you to scour the world,

Serving the passions and needs of man.

Sleep here with a sleep of strength and peace,

How the gods sleep in deep skies...

Such deification of gold in itself refutes the opinion of very many (especially Soviet) Pushkinists about the usury of the baron. And in general, how well he wrote in his book Muse and mammon A. V. Anikin, in the Miserly Knight not only the power of money is expressed, but, if I may say so, the mysticism of money . However, it is not given to everyone to perceive both in their authenticity, in their true guise in Pushkin's tragedy. For Pushkin's characters have to face the power of money, personified by the same Solomon - to appeal to it, to hope for it, to be disappointed in it, to resent it - in a word, they have to feel it as a reality, as a given. The mystique of money does not fascinate anyone except the baron in Pushkin's tragedy. But it will affect his son: Albert, who refused to deal with a Jew because his gold pieces will smell like poison , does not even suspect what his father's gold smells like. Earnestly replenishing his chests, the baron remembers the history of each doubloon that got there, in which the tragedy of impoverishment, or theft, or even murder, and neither one nor the other, nor the third does not bother him:

Yes! if all the tears, blood and sweat,

Shed for all that is stored here

From the bowels of the earth all suddenly came out,

That would be a flood again - I would choke b

In my cellars of the faithful.

He says this not at all because he is ashamed. Although, if you believe him, his conscience once gnawed at him. But, apparently, he believes that this humiliated him, and therefore he now rewards this feeling with the scolding that, in his opinion, deserves: ... conscience, / A clawed beast, scratching the heart, conscience, / An uninvited guest, a bothersome interlocutor, / A rude lender, this witch, / From which the moon and graves fade / They are embarrassed and the dead are sent ....

We remember with what bitterness Albert spoke about how easy it is, living under the same roof with his father, to become infected with stinginess from him. We remember that in relation to himself, he worried about this in vain: you cannot pick up what you despise. But he does not know how for him, a quick-tempered man ( I was furious for a damaged helmet - his review of the true cause of his heroism that struck everyone), the bacilli of paternal hatred are contagious.

The former knight, or rather, as Pushkin called him, mean knight , that is, no longer a knight, the baron is unscrupulous and as unscrupulous in means as the Jew Solomon. Just like a Jew towards debtors, he is merciless towards his tributaries, towards his quitrents, but, unlike a Jew, he lies on his face before a golden calf and, although he swaggers, he assures that he is not afraid of anything and no one: whom should I be afraid of? / I have my sword with me: responsible for the gold / Honest damask steel , in fact, freezes with fear at the thought of death and what his son, his heir, with his kingdom, with his subjects will do in this case:

Having stolen the keys from my corpse,

He will open chests with laughter.

And my treasures will flow

In satin, tear pockets.

Having established a mystical connection with his gold, he would like, as already mentioned, to remain in this connection with him forever, but he knows and hates in advance the one who is able to break this connection. And I must say that here he is not far from the truth. Albert himself confirms that the gold he inherited from his father serve me, forget to lie down . So both of them think the same about the fate of the baron's inheritance. Another thing is that in the language of a miser-father, this means that the moth-son was going to rob him .

Even though I know

What exactly he longs for my death,

Even though I know what he tried

Rob.

(Albert rushes into the room.)

Baron, you are lying.

Duke (son).

How dare you...

Are you here! you, you dare me!

You could say such a word to your father! ..

I lie! and before our sovereign!

Me, me... or am I not a knight?

And the thunder has not yet struck, God is right!

So rise, and judge us with a sword!

(Throws down glove, son picks it up hastily.)

Thank you. Here is the first gift of the father.

And before that, the baron, answering the duke's question about Albert: Why can't I see him? - and on the proposal to send a son to his court and appoint him decent content , first told his overlord that his son was unsociable. We will immediately accustom / Him to fun, to balls and tournaments ' replied the duke. Then the father said the exact opposite about his son: He spends his youth in a riot, / In the vices of low ... . That's because, /Baron, he's alone, - the duke remarked judiciously. - Solitude / And idleness ruins young people . And finally, the baron said about his son that he wanted to kill him. Kill! - the duke is indignant, - so I will judge / I will betray him, like a black villain . Why, then, did Albert, who was eavesdropping on their conversation in the next room, not reveal his indignation all this time and stop his obviously lying father?

Because the first two arguments of the baron are easily refuted by the duke himself, and the charge of attempted murder requires hard evidence, which, as he himself understands, the baron cannot provide: I won't prove...

But now, when the baron finally decided to trust the duke, to tell him the secret, suffered, endured in his secret basement, Albert explodes and accuses him of lying.

Is this not proof for the baron, how correctly he assessed his son, who undertook to deny the obvious, as right in his suspicions, in his dislike, hatred for him.

Superimposed on the insult - on the baron's accusation of lying in the presence of the duke himself - paternal hatred boils and seeks an outlet, and the baron gives it an outlet, throwing down his gauntlet like a knight - challenging his son to a mortal duel.

Naturally, the duke is horrified. But not so much because of the act of the father, but because of the act of the son: What did I see? what was before me? / The son accepted the challenge of the old father! / On what days did I put on myself / The chain of dukes!

The receptor astutely noted that the sovereign called the baron to him before he heard Albert's complaint against his father. True, the explanation of the reasons why the duke wished to see the baron in his place, in my opinion, led Recepter away from the real Pushkin's text. Pushkin's text does not confirm the opinion that the duke is not averse to replenishing his treasury with the baron's treasures, who, moreover, suspects this, going down to the basement to his cherished chests and arranging for himself, as it were, a farewell feast, for he received, according to the critic, a very meaningful, ominous invitation to come to court 7. Such an amusing hypothesis is unable to explain an important and even key detail for understanding the meaning of the tragedy - the baron's euphoria in the basement. Could the baron achieve even a very brief harmonious unity with the world if he knew about the duke's intention to correct the shaken financial position in the state at the expense of his, the baron's, gold? I doubt. And where in Miserly knight Are we talking about any financial difficulties in the state ruled by the duke, or that the ruler, like the miserly Solomon or the humiliated by poverty Albert, looks longingly at the baron's huge inheritance? And in this case, will not the duke come out, looking all alone at the just deceased baron, talking to himself, and not to others about the deceased and his son: terrible hearts! , a monstrous Pharisee who does not want to see the beam in his own eye and willingly examines the straw in someone else's?!

But the text of the Pushkin tragedy quite clearly indicated something completely different: the duke was present at the very tournament that glorified Albert. So it may well be that the bitter annoyance of the young knight, feeling his helmet and feeling that the horse under it was lame, did not hide from him - in short, his far from triumphant mood did not hide. Perhaps the observant ruler before that also didn’t believe Albert too much that he supposedly, by pure chance, got to the duke’s table and therefore was forced to sit at him in armor, while the other knights were dressed in satin and velvet. If all this is so (and only Pushkin’s text speaks of this), the meaning of inviting the baron to the court will not discredit the ruler, but only emphasize his humane sensitivity: yes, the father was called to talk with him about his son (Is that why, having seen the baron hurrying towards him through the window, the duke does not make a secret of their upcoming conversation for Albert, ordering him not to leave the palace, but to hide in the next room?), they want to talk with their father about their son, who, like a knight, manifests himself from the best side and worth it to support him financially.

But Albert did not appear at the duke's at all in order to violate knightly etiquette, in order to demonstrate to the ruler the disregard for one of the main knightly commandments - to honor one's parents. Complaining to the duke about his father for Albert is the torment of death, as he himself says: Believe me, sir, I endured for a long time / The shame of bitter poverty. If not for the extreme, / You would not have heard my complaints . And the duke hurries to calm him down, hurries to relieve his suffering: I believe, I believe: a noble knight, / Such as you, he will not blame his father / Without extreme . And what Albert says at the same time about complaint , and the duke - about accusations (significant difference , - comments Receptor 8), shows how seriously and severely takes the power of those who are able to without extremes disrespect your parents. There are few such depraved ... - the ruler will note, as if mentally surveying his subjects and as if convinced that decent morals reign in the state entrusted to him. And now he is forced to doubt Albert, angrily call him tiger cub , take away from him hastily picked up his father's glove, to declare his disgrace to him.

Does this mean that the duke believed the baron? Certainly not: the inconsistency and inconsistency of his son's father's accusations could not hide from the vigilant gaze of the ruler. AND depraved - that is, immoral - the Duke of Albert will not consider him a knight: it is the baron's winding explanations why he does not want to keep his son at the ruler's court that will prove to the duke that the son would not complain about his father, when not extreme.

But the sovereign called Albert noble knight - confirmed the function that his very name prescribes for him to perform. Recall that it is translated as nobility of the highest standard. And the nobility will not respond to hatred, will not let it into itself, and even more so will not raise its hands against the father, the very thought of killing whom until recently so terrified his son.

The baron, thank God, does not die from his son's sword. He dies, even more strengthened in his suspicions about the intentions of his son, which is confirmed by his dying words: Where are the keys? / Keys, my keys... , because the first thing that, in his opinion, the heir should do after his death is to encroach on the keys - to steal the keys are at my corpse.

But the duke did not intervene - and Albert's conscience could be burdened with the gravest sin of parricide. So he dug his claws into her! - a monster! - the ruler is violently indignant, taking away his father's glove from Albert.

Wise ruler, he is his final remark Terrible age, terrible hearts! equated the son with the father, whose heart was revealed to the duke in all its terrifying disgust: loyal, brave knight , as the duke of the baron thought, turned out to be a miser, ready to litigate with his own son, not stopping at slander and lies. Undoubtedly, this was what the duke had in mind when, having declared disgrace to Albert and waiting for his departure, he turned to the baron with indignant, reproaching words, appealing to shame - the last refuge of knightly honor:

You poor old man

Aren't you ashamed...

No, of course, the ruler perceives Albert's heart terrible for a different reason. His disgrace is declared to the nobility that has tarnished its reputation. Or, better to say, nobility, which could not withstand the collision with baseness, descended to it, ceased to be nobility.

And yet, sternly reprimanding Albert: monster! , severely parting with him: Come: do not dare to my eyes / Appear until I myself / Do not call you , the duke does not part with the hope that we, the readers, who have followed Albert throughout the entire Pushkin tragedy, develops into confidence: the young knight was not reborn, but only stumbled, and therefore the cruel life lesson taught will not be in vain for Albert, who will called to the court and who will appear before the ruler in all his former brilliant nobility!

"Mozart and Salieri" is a tragedy about friendship, its initial title is "envy". Pushkin used the figures of two composers to embody in them the images crowded in his creative mind. “The true theme of his tragedy is not music, not art, and not even creativity, but the very life of creators and, moreover, not Mozart and Salieri.” Salieri's friendship (but it was!) from the very beginning of the action is poisoned by envy.

Who will say that Salieri was proud

Ever envious despicable,

A snake, trampled by people, alive ...

Nobody!.. And now - I'll say it myself - now

Envious. I envy; deep,

I'm painfully jealous. - About the sky!

Where is the truth, when the sacred gift,

When an immortal genius is not a reward

Burning love, selflessness,

Works, zeal, prayers sent -

And illuminates the head of a madman,

Idle revelers?.. Oh Mozart, Mozart!

Salieri's envy is a special kind, This is not a petty household, but a high ideological feeling. Salieri envies a genius whose laws are incomprehensible to him, a rationalist to the marrow of his bones.

Mozart is a bird of paradise a certain cherub , who with his songs opposes art as a consistent accumulation of skill, a steady movement towards artistic heights. Salieri defends the great, which is understandable and achievable for him, and wants to stop the creator of the incomprehensible, inaccessible to him great art, which violates the priestly laws of the caste. He perceives his plan as a heavy, but necessary duty, a sign of fate.

The relationship between Mozart and Salieri in Pushkin is captured by the exclusive choice of friendship; they are much more clearly outlined in relation to Salieri and remain less clear in Mozart, perhaps due to their disadvantage in one and well-being in another. For Salieri, Mozart is the embodiment of a creative genius, what he yearned for and powerlessly dreamed of all his life, what he knew in himself as his true essence, but was powerless to reveal himself. Mozart is Salieri's highest artistic self, in the light of which he judges and values ​​himself. Salieri is inherent in the true task of genius, her thirst, intransigence on nothing less. That's why Salieri is mistaken, slandering himself, saying: "I was happy: I peacefully enjoyed my work, success, fame," such people are incapable of either happiness or peaceful enjoyment, which would be only a sign of decline and stagnation. Salieri's genius is purely negative, it is given to him only as an aspiration. This ascetic of art, who put craft as his footstool, disintegrated music like a corpse, and believed harmony with algebra, in reality wants only one thing - to be Mozart, yearns only for Mozart, and he himself in a sense is Mozart, even more than himself. Mozart. So a light-winged moth flies out of an ugly larva, and the ugly duckling suddenly recognizes in itself a beautiful swan. So from the mortal nature of Salieri, Mozart, triumphant in his liberation, must soar to heaven! Salieri is not an envious person by nature, as he himself testifies to this. Salieri has a trait of true nobility of spirit - the ability to admit one's mistakes and consciously learn from another, recognizing his superiority.

When the great glitch

Appeared and revealed new secrets to us

(Deep, captivating secrets!) -

Have I abandoned everything I used to know

What I loved so much, what I believed so passionately,

And did not go cheerfully after him,

Resignedly, like one who was mistaken,

And sent to the opposite direction?

How many of those who have gone through the art of creativity are able to make such a confession even to themselves? In Salieri, consciousness and honesty of thought are extremely sharpened: he thinks clearly, knows a lot. And he cannot fail to know that his delights, inspirations, his art are only a call, only a promise or a hint: his soul loves Mozart like a flower a sunbeam; "when I'm not up to you" - this groan of Salieri's soul is the cry of his artistic self-consciousness.

That is why Salieri knows so well the real value of Mozart. After all, not out of courtesy, but with tragic torment, he pronounces his judgment on Mozart's "trifle", after his game, during which the fateful decision finally ripens in him:

What depth!

What courage and what grace!

You, Mozart, are a god, and you yourself do not know it:

I know I!

Yes, he knows this, and in a certain sense, better than Mozart, he hears in him the long-awaited "cherub", bringing him "heavenly songs". Oh, how many times during the hours of creative exhaustion he called to himself, to himself this cherub, and now he came to him, but in the face of a friend. Anyone who recognizes and appreciates genius in such a way, of course, is himself involved in this genius, but this powerless and fruitless, joyless participation weighs heavily on his shoulders, burning his soul. In friendship with Mozart, Salieri had to acquire the genius of life, but at a high price, for the only way here could be only the self-denial so familiar to him earlier, which is so difficult and painful for the sinful, selfish heart of man. But it was enough to oppose oneself with hostility to the one whom Salieri reliably knew as his higher self, and the terrible demon of envy entered his heart and began to whisper to him crafty blasphemy and slander against God, the world, and a friend. Salieri did not follow Mozart, how could he still follow Gluck (and even then there was something to envy!). Pushkin's drama catches Salieri already surrendered to the evil demon, and his slanders sound in the very first words: "everyone says: there is no truth on earth, but there is no truth above." But the highest truth is not to demand immediate payment for "burning love and self-sacrifice" with cash talent: "God gives the spirit beyond measure," and even "caring" we cannot add to ourselves even a cubit of growth. Directly in itself, only love always finds its reward, only self-denial, which "does not want its own" and "rejoices in someone else's."

A crooked, distorting mirror is also substituted by envy when evaluating Mozart's personality; after all, of course, this favorite of the muses does not deserve the definition of "a madman, an idle reveler", for Mozart in his own way is no less serious in art than Salieri, as the latter himself well understands. And his self-assurance that he was “chosen to stop him” sounds like pitiful sophism, otherwise Mozart will harm art with his inspiration. Above all these assurances reigns one anxiety of the envious that "I am not a genius"; yes, with these feelings it is no longer a genius! .. Mozart is right: "genius and villainy" in one plane are "two things incompatible", for genius is the highest nobility of the spirit.

And Mozart? There is nothing unhealthy in his relationship with Salieri. He is a friend of Salieri, gullible and clear, there is neither envy nor self-exaltation in him: "after all, he was a genius, like you and me," Salieri will not say this. Mozart brings his things to his court and admires his love of art. Undoubtedly, Salieri also represents for his friend in a certain respect the highest authority, also the highest self, and one cannot but believe the sincerity of Mozart's confessions and praises. And from this it follows that with such a high appreciation of a friend, envy would be quite possible for Mozart, and this is not because Mozart remains above envy and is impeccable in friendship. If you look closely at the construction of the play, it is not difficult to see a subtle parallelism in the characteristics of both friends, the opposition of a healthy and sick friendship. A prophetic child, in his immediacy Mozart hears what is happening in Salieri, his spiritual strife reaches his sensitive ear, but he did not offend his friendship with impure suspicion and did not connect his experiences with their source; it may seem naive to the point of stupidity, but, at the same time, it is noble to the point of genius. Mozart is tormented by the thought of the black man who ordered the requiem for him: "I think he is sitting with us a third," and yet he does not allow the thought that this is the black conscience of Salieri himself. Mozart answers the latter to the silent agony of his questions whether he is a genius and villainy is compatible with genius. Mozart hears these questions, and yet, in connection with the story of Beaumarchais, he rejects in advance any suspicion against his friend. And when, in response to this friendship, Salieri poisons him, he gives him his last trust, and in Salieri's desperate crying he sees only a manifestation of his exceptional love for music. Mozart did not betray friendship and dies a winner. He meets an untimely end, and yet it is not he who perishes, but the murderer. Pushkin lowers the curtain at the moment when Salieri already had a fatal and final doubt about his genius. He clings to the legend of Bonarotti, but the ground is slipping away from under his feet: "or is this a fairy tale of an empty, senseless crowd, and the creator of the Vatican was not a murderer?" Salieri's further life path is already indicated in these mean words - a well-known fate awaits him: "go strangle yourself." He had already committed spiritual suicide when he poured in the "last gift of Izora" that had been stored up for a rainy day, for it was not Mozart, but Salieri who poisoned himself. Exhausted in the feat of friendship, he became an instrument of evil power, the nature of which is dark Envy.

The Stone Guest is a treatment of the world theme of retribution, and predecessors dealing with this theme have had no shortage of direct moralizing.

The play is called "The Stone Guest", and not by the name of the protagonist. The Mozartian theme of joyful service to art is refracted in its own way in this play:

Pushkin goes the other way. He needs, from the very first lines and without resorting to moralization, to convince the reader of the need for the death of his hero. That for Pushkin, "The Stone Guest" is a tragedy of retribution, is proved by the very title he has chosen ("The Stone Guest", and not "Don Juan"). Therefore, all the characters - Laura, Leporello, Don Carlos and Dona Anna - do nothing but prepare and hasten the death of Don Juan. The hero himself tirelessly worries about the same:

Everything is for the best: accidentally killed

Don Carlos, humble hermit

I hid here... (VII, 153).

Well, we had fun.

The dead do not disturb us for long. (VII, 140).

The statue of the Commander, dragging Don Juan into the underworld, is a materialized punishment, retribution, as they were understood in that era when freethinking was just in its infancy, and religious consciousness was strong. The legendary finale recreated the flavor of the times. But the real content of the play led the reader to the idea of ​​the inevitability of retribution, when the true ideals of human existence were subjected to defilement and abuse, when human nature itself turned out to be desecrated.

With the tragic denouement of The Stone Guest, Pushkin affirms the moral purity of genuine human love. And it is precisely the living human feeling that the dead and soulless world cannot forgive Don Juan. Commander and the dead claims his rights to what he bought during his lifetime.

How characteristic that the first to hear the steps of Commander Donna Anna, and she is the first to die. But in none of the literary adaptations of the legend of Don Juan did retribution extend to women seduced by him!

It is also characteristic that Don Juan at that very terrible moment does not think about himself - he rushes to Dona Anna. But it's really over. Death comes to the heroes of the tragedy at the moment when they are on the threshold of complete happiness. And this - according to Pushkin - is always a moment of absolute spiritual insecurity ...

In the game of love, Don Juan more than once brought death to others, more than once he went to meet death himself. But now, when the game is over, retribution nevertheless came, moreover, retribution caused by himself, however, not by the present, but by the former Don Juan. However, now Don Juan has to fight not with a small, puny man, but with a "stone giant"! In Pushkin's tragedy, everything immoral and soulless puts on coats and dresses in a toga, justifying its actions with the highest goals of spiritual independence, knightly honor, the ideals of high art and justice. And now the statue of the Commander is executing the "godless seducer" Don Juan in the name of "conjugal duty", "fidelity", "morality" and "morality".

Don Juan is not able to endure this direct battle with the whole worldview, the philosophy of the world of property, hypocrisy and hypocrisy. He dies like a knight with Donna Anna's name on his lips.

The "cruel age" takes revenge on Don Juan for awakening a man in him.

In studies devoted to the "Stone Guest", the very fact of inviting the statue is unduly emphasized as the tragic guilt of Don Juan, which led to his death. But in this invitation - only the passion of the player, which is the core of the hero's character, is the driving force behind all his actions. Don Juan constantly plays a love game on the verge of life and death, a game in which many died, and he himself more than once put his own life at stake.

The motif of mortal danger, the close proximity of life and death sounds all the time in the tragedy, the victims pass in a string in it, rather not even Don Juan, but all the same game of life and death.

It has long been noticed that "The Stone Guest" is a "night", "twilight" play: in two almost symmetrically constructed parts, its time goes from evening to night. And the pale light of the moon (and the moon in Spanish folklore associatively means death) casts a tragic glow on everything.

Poor Inesa... Commander... Don Carlos...

"Wait, at the dead!" exclaims the second Laura in the scene.

"Oh my God, and here, with this coffin!" - as an echo echoes in the third scene of Dona Anna.

But all this is included in the ritual of the love game, in the ritual of Don Juan's life. And all this has never brought him into great conflict with the world that gave birth to him.

Revealing the tragedy of Don Juan, Pushkin put forward the problem of the moral freedom of the individual. The tragedy of Don Juan - he entered the world of symbolist poets as a tragic figure - is comprehended there as a loss of faith. In the unfinished lyric poem "Don Juan" (written in 1897), of which only five fragments remained, Konstantin Balmont used as an epigraph the lines of S. Turner's "Tragedy of the Atheist" (composition of 1611): "... now I am the lord over the whole world , / Above this small world of man...».

The characters of the tragedy "A Feast in the Time of Plague", excluding the Priest, arrange a feast during the plague. People close to them are dying, a cart with corpses is passing by, and they are feasting. What brought these people to the feast and forced them to unite? What is a feast - a blasphemous act or consciousness of the greatness of the human spirit and its immortality? The tragic situation is set from the very beginning, but its outcome is far from a foregone conclusion. Unlike other tragedies in A Feast in the Time of Plague, the external dramatic action is even more weakened, but this did not rule out the internal tension of the duel of heroes with rock and private conflicts - between Louise and Mary, Walsingham (Chairman) and the Priest. The characters utter monologues, sing songs, engage in dialogue, but do not perform any actions that can change the situation. Drama is transferred to the motives of their behavior.

The reasons that brought the participants to the feast are profoundly different. The young man came to the feast to lose himself in Bacchic pleasures. He twice asks the Chairman for a cheerful jubilation: in memory of the deceased Jaxon (“I propose to drink in his memory, with a cheerful clink of glasses, with an exclamation ...”), and then after Louise’s fainting (“... a violent, Bacchic song born over a cup of boiling ..,"). The feast for the Young Man is only a means of oblivion: he prefers not to think about the darkness of the grave and indulge in pleasures. Here nature itself, youth itself rebels against death. But the motives of rebellion in the Young Man are sensual, devoid of conscious force. Louise came to the feast out of fear of loneliness. She needs to be with people in order to lean on them. Internally, she is not prepared for the confrontation with death. Through the apparent cruelty and obvious cynicism of Louise, who rejects high sacrifice, fear emerges. In the face of death, she is spiritually weak. No wonder the Chairman says:

Aha! Louise is ill; in it, I thought

Judging by the language, a man's heart.

But so-and-so - gentle weaker cruel,

And fear lives in the soul, tormented by passions!

Unlike the Young Man, Louise is not in the mood for fun.

Only Mary and Valsingam find the strength to confront the raging elements. Mary's song reproduces the attitude of the people to the disaster. The "dull and pleasant" shepherd's song has its own wisdom: the consciousness of people's grief and the glorification of self-sacrifice. Giving up one's life for the sake of the life and happiness of a close and beloved person is the ideal affirmed in Mary's song. Forgetting yourself is combined in Mary's song with an exceptional feeling of love. And the stronger the self-denial, the sharper the love that does not fade even after death:

And Jenny will not leave Edmond even in heaven!

Mary expresses the truth that love can overcome death. She sings about how love-hungry Jenny dreams of being reunited with her beloved beyond earthly existence. The song ends with words of love that the soul doomed to death finds in itself. In Mary's song, one can hear touching concern for loved ones, and sadness about the once prosperous side. Mary dreams of a rebirth of life. However, Mary herself is deprived of the "voice of innocence." Only the desire for purity and beauty of self-denial lives in it. Mary's song is the song of a penitent sinner. Only Walsingam is aware of the severity of the situation and boldly defies death. In the solemnly tragic anthem of the Chairman, a person opposes his will to death and danger. The more formidable the blows of fate, the more violent the resistance to it. Not death glorifies Pushkin in the guise of Winter and Plague, but the ability and readiness of a person to confront. The call to the blind elements brings a person enjoyment of his power and puts him on a par with them. A person, as it were, overcomes his earthly existence and enjoys his power:

There is rapture in battle

And the dark abyss on the edge,

And in the angry ocean

Amid the stormy waves and stormy darkness,

And in the Arabian hurricane

And in the breath of the Plague.

The "mortal heart" in fatal moments of danger acquires "immortality, perhaps a pledge." The song of Walsingama is the anthem of a fearless man. Mary and Walsingam have much in common in their life goals. However, there is also a difference between them. Mary sings about submission to fate, about sacrifice and self-denial in the name of her beloved. Mary's song is imbued with folk motives. The Chairman dedicates his anthem to the heroism of the lonely individual. He rejects religious consciousness even in its folk content, which sounds in Mary's song. If Mary sings about Jenny's request not to touch the "mouths of the dead" for the sake of love, then Walsingham sees this as a courage that elevates a person:

And the maidens-roses drink the breath, - Perhaps ... full of the Plague!

At the same time, Pushkin put the hymn into the mouth of the "fallen spirit." The chairman is the most vulnerable and most unprotected character in the tragedy. He is more depressed and shaken by despair than others. Like Mary, the Chairman repents of arranging a blasphemous feast (“Oh, if this spectacle were hidden from the eyes of immortals! ..”). Walsingam is far from the winner, as he appeared in the anthem. His mind is defeated. No wonder he sings: "Let's drown our minds merrily," and then returns to the same thought in response to the Priest:

…I am kept here

Despair, a terrible memory,

Consciousness of my iniquity,

And the horror of that dead emptiness,

Which I meet in my house -

And the news of these crazy fun,

And the blessed poison of this cup,

And caresses (forgive me, Lord)

A dead but sweet creature...

The priest knows about the grief that has befallen the Chairman, but appeals to his conscience. There is a simple and wise truth in his words. The feast breaks the mourning for the dead, "confuses" the "silence of the coffins." It is contrary to custom. The priest, demanding respect for the memory of the departed, seeks to lead the feasting on the path of religious humility, partly repeating Mary's song:

Stop the monstrous feast when

Do you wish to meet in heaven

Lost beloved souls...

He insists on respecting traditional moral

Go to your homes!

And although the Priest does not achieve success with his preaching and incantations, Valsingam nevertheless recognizes his "lawlessness". There is something in the very behavior of the Priest that makes the Chairman think. Singing the heroism of loneliness, contempt for death, a dignified death, the Chairman, along with other participants in the feast, fenced himself off from the common people's misfortune, while the Priest, not caring about himself, strengthens the spirit of the dying. He is among them:

In the midst of the horror of a mournful funeral,

Among the pale faces I pray in the cemetery...

One of the deadly sins is despondency. In Pushkin's tragedy, we have before us not just despondency, but the ultimate despair of a person who has lost all his loved ones and no longer believes in God. Before us is a version of Job, who does not understand the meaning of the catastrophe that happened to him. But Job, even from the depths of despair, appeals to the Creator, as if calling him to judgment, because he knows no sin behind him. And then God comes. His arrival is, in fact, the answer to the desperate. For, of course, it is important for us not so much to know why, but to feel that we are loved, we are responded to. The priest from "A Feast in the Time of Plague", alas, is too weak a replacement for the Almighty. And besides, Walsingam does not want to enter into explanations with anyone. He is too offended by the "deception" of Heaven and now heroically hopes only for himself.

From the point of view of Valsangam, you can only bet on this (mother, wife died, that is, as if changed). At our disposal is one stubborn, proud, self-affirming in any of its passions, despising the world and God, the human spirit. The monstrous reality of the plague city is contrasted with a feast, that is, the stubborn continuation of a young cheerful life despite the fact that it no longer corresponds to the circumstances of the present or the prospects for the future. "Low truths" are grossly ignored, although they constantly intrude into the feasting revelry with the multiplying corpses of the participants in the "fun".

However, Pushkin is extremely ambiguous in his assessment. “The intoxication in battle” is the intoxication proclaimed by the hero of the human self, but at the same time, the chanting of the determination of the spirit to take risks, to be, as Christ called, “hot” or “cold” is also ambivalent:

Everything, everything that threatens death,

For the heart of a mortal conceals

Inexplicable pleasures -

Immortality, maybe a pledge,

And happy is he who is in the midst of excitement

They could acquire and know.

But the tragedy of Valsingam is not only in detachment from God. His irreconcilable position, oddly enough, does not allow him to fully experience the separation from loved ones and loved ones, thereby making the loss final. His tragedy is that, having completely relied on himself, on the assigned freedom to rule a feast on the bones, for some reason he now cannot remember those who were dear to him. The proud and courageous words from the Chairman's song are exposed as "the consciousness of my iniquity."

The model of a potential reader's reaction is presented, in our opinion, in the tragedies "The Stone Guest" (Dona Anna) and "Feast During the Plague" (Priest). The initial reaction of these characters to the actions of the protagonist is moral horror, fear of his violation of absolute ethical norms, of his encroachment on moral values. Such a perception of the actions of the protagonist evokes emotions of condemnation, reproach, accusation, threat (Priest: "Stop the monstrous feast when / You wish to meet in heaven / Lost beloved souls").

Such a reaction to the actions of the protagonist is associated with the external perception of the situation, and not with understanding it. So, Dona Anna knows about Don Juan from rumors, which she repeats: "You, they say, are a godless corrupter, / You are a real demon ..."; "I know, I heard..." Her initial refusal to communicate with Don Juan is connected with the fulfillment of a normative pattern of behavior: "A widow must be faithful to her grave."

The Priest is horrified by the outward discrepancy between Walsingam's grief from the loss of loved ones and his presidency at the feast, which the Priest perceives as a desecration of the memory of the dead ("Is that you, Walsingam?").

As a result of the confessional self-disclosure of the protagonist in the course of the dialogue with the hero, the latter's initial emotions change. Namely: as a result of comprehending the innermost essence of the actions of the protagonist ("So this is Don Juan ..."), there is a spiritual overcoming of fear and the formation of the opposite emotion - compassion. Dona Anna, having overcome the "external" idea of ​​Don Juan and the stereotype of behavior of a widow, who "in debt of honor" should feel hatred for her husband's killer, discovering in him not a desire for self-assertion, but a desire to find inner harmony, tries to protect him, prevent the inevitability of death, already heralded by the steps of the Commander ("But how could you come / Here, you could recognize you here, / And your death would be inevitable ... But how / how can you get out of here, careless!").

The compassionate reaction of the Priest manifests itself initially in an attempt to take Walsingam away from the feast (he offers Walsingam a pledge of salvation in repentance), then, after recognizing the moral ability of the protagonist for independent personal atonement of guilt and free self-determination, in blessing him ("God save you!").

Thus, the processes of dialogic recognition of the protagonist by the hero in Dona Anna and in the Priest are similar and consist in the formation of a complex ethical reaction as a result of the transformation of opposite feelings: fear of the hero is transformed into compassion, which is associated with fear for the hero. (Note that here there is a transformation of those feelings that were mentioned by Aristotle as affects that underlie the cathartic reaction caused by tragedy.) In both cases, this transformation is associated with the liberation from the stereotype of perceiving the situation and the stereotype of reaction to it. This liberation is carried out in a seemingly paradoxical act: the widow cares about the salvation of her husband's murderer, and not about revenge; the priest pronounces the word of blessing, not cursing. This reaction of the hero only formally does not correspond to logic (the logic of the behavioral pattern), but deeply corresponds to human logic, the logic of Christian compassion and trust. Basically, this reaction is cathartic, as it is a consequence of the experienced catharsis, "cleansing" from the original false emotion.

The formation of such an ethical reaction of the characters is considered by us as a potential model of reader's perception, offering a kind of receptive pattern, for the following reason. In our opinion, the receptive structure of "Little Tragedies", implied in the text of Pushkin's tetralogy, is similar in its dynamics to the process of overcoming the hero's initial moral fear of the protagonist and penetrating into his innermost essence, that is, similar to the dynamics of the formation of the ethical reaction of Dona Anna and the Priest.

The receptive model of "Little Tragedies" suggests a similar conflict between the initial perception of the actions of the protagonist and subsequent understanding of the underlying motives of his behavior. Such a receptive mechanism found its most vivid expression precisely in the tragedy "The Stone Guest", since its perception is associated with overcoming the comedic interpretation of the image of Don Juan known to the reader. In the process of reading Pushkin's play, there is a release from the negative assessment of the protagonist, provoked by the powerful action of the comedy tradition, and penetration into his disharmonious consciousness. However, such a receptive model is manifested in all "Little Tragedies", including the tragedy "A Feast in the Time of Plague", where the reader is also forced to overcome his initial impression of Walsingam as a rebel, allegedly refuting absolute moral values. Valsingam's confession and his refusal to demand the Priest to leave the feast testify to him as a person capable of responsibility for desecrating the ideal, since he does not accept the idea of ​​impersonal redemption and is ready for redemption by the pangs of conscience.

Thus, the readership of these tragedies also implies the formation of a complex attitude towards the protagonist on the basis of overcoming the initial, external and erroneous impression. The dynamic model of this perception is presented in the image of the emergence of the reaction of compassion in the image of Dona Anna and the Priest.

In Pushkin's tragedy, the cathartic transformation of the opposing feelings of the hero and the reader (that is, the formation of the reader's aesthetic reaction and the hero's ethical reaction) takes place sequentially, dynamically: first, one feeling is formed; then - overcoming it by another (according to the principle of antithesis, the destruction of the initial feeling by the subsequent one); and finally - their transformation into a more complex spiritual emotion through their synthetic interpenetration.

Receptive catharsis is presented in the final tragedy of the cycle - in "A Feast in the Time of Plague". The moment of its formation is connected with the perception of the open ending of the tragedy. The state of deep thought of the protagonist can be perceived by the reader as evidence of the intense spiritual activity of the hero, on the paths of which only hope is likely to be found for the possibility of resolving the damned issues. In the final immersion of the hero in thoughtfulness, the previous aesthetic reaction associated with the achievement of deep spiritual harmony between the Priest and Valsingam (which we defined as a complex ethical and aesthetic reaction formed as a result of overcoming fear with compassion), finds its reinforcement, due to which the feeling of enlightenment, purification is enhanced. from the seemingly painful insolubility of the conflict.

Thus, if in the tragedy "The Stone Guest" a receptive cathartic reaction is associated with the exposure of a tragic contradiction, then in the tragedy "A Feast in the Time of Plague" we encounter that variant of the catharsis of the aesthetic reaction, which can be described in terms of the Aristotelian definition of tragedy - "purification of affects" or "cleansing from affects" (both versions of the translation of Aristotle's phrase are acceptable for describing the aesthetic reaction in the final tragedy of the Boldino cycle).

In the first two tragedies of the cycle (The Miserly Knight and Mozart and Salieri), the structure of the aesthetic response is less complex. If in "The Stone Guest" and "A Feast in the Time of Plague" the receptive structure accentuates the reader's comprehension of the true innermost essence of the character of the protagonist and his tragedy, then in the first two tragedies the reader follows the hero - trail after trail - making his way from self-deception to insight. The protagonist's cathartic acquisition of tragic knowledge is formed before the eyes of the reader, and the reader's aesthetic reaction finds its cathartic satisfaction in the finale of each tragedy: in "The Miserly Knight" - at the moment Baron Philip realizes the truth that he is "not a knight", and the affective death that followed him ; in "Mozart and Salieri" - at the moment Salieri clarifies his doubts and thoughts about the possible rightness of Mozart.

The death of one hero and the doubt of another carry the theme of retribution, which underlies the aesthetic reaction of receptive liberation in these tragedies. There is a release of the reader from the initial false emotion of trust in the logic of the protagonists, caused by the logical persuasiveness of their ideological constructions: in the second scene of The Miserly Knight and in the first scene of Mozart and Salieri, the reader was forced to experience the "charm" of the philosophical systems of the protagonists, which was opposed by the feeling moral horror. The resolution of this conflict corresponds to cathartic enlightenment.

Thus, the analysis of Pushkin's "Little Tragedies" makes it possible to productively use the concept of catharsis both in describing the ethical reaction of the hero to a tragic event and in describing the ethical and aesthetic reaction of the reader experiencing the experience of perceiving a tragic action.

List of used literature

1.Belyak N.V. Virolainen M.N. "Little Tragedies", "Star", 1999, No. 3.

2.Zvonnikova L.A. "Little Tragedies" A.S. Pushkin / literature at school. 2005, No. 4.

3.Fomichev S.A. Dramaturgy A.S. Pushkin / History of Russian Dramaturgy. L. Science. 1982.

.Krasukhin G. Above the pages of Pushkin's Little Tragedies. Questions of Literature. 2001. No. 5

5.S. Bondy. Pushkin's dramaturgy and Russian dramaturgy of the 19th century. M. 1941.

6.Pushkin A.S. Full composition of writings. Dramatic works. L., 1935.

7.Bulgakov S.N. Mozart and Salieri // Quiet Thoughts. M., 1996.

8.D.L. Ustyuzhanin. Little tragedies of A.S. Pushkin. - M. Fiction. 1974.

9.Trofimov E. Metaphysical poetics of Pushkin. - Ivanovo. 1999.

10.Belinsky V.G. Full coll. op. v.VII. M. 1955.

11.Baroti T. Motifs of Death and Combinations of "Two Worlds" in Russian Romantic Lyrics and in Pushkin's Little Tragedy "A Feast During the Plague" // From Pushkin to Bely. - St. Petersburg, 1992.

12.Bondy S. The Miserly Knight // Pushkin A.S. Sobr. op. M., 1975.

Compositional features of "Little Tragedies"

tragedy Pushkin catharsis

Pushkin, the playwright, focused on the problem of life's truth. “The main theme of all small tragedies is the analysis of human passions, affects,” wrote S. Bondy.

“Little Tragedies” is the conditional name of the cycle, which consists of four dramatic works: “The Miserly Knight”, “Mozart and Salieri”, “The Stone Guest”, “Feast during the Plague”. "Little tragedies" Pushkin called them in a letter to P.A. Pletnev dated December 9, 1830 - but he was also looking for other options for the common title: "Dramatic Scenes", "Dramatic Essays", "Dramatic Studies", "Experience in Dramatic Studies". The ideas of the first three works date back to 1826, but there is no evidence of work on them before the Boldin autumn of 1830, when the cycle was created: only white autographs of all dramas have survived, except for Mozart and Salieri.

The implementation of the idea of ​​"Little Tragedies" in 1830. It is customary to associate with the fact that in Boldino Pushkin got acquainted with the collection "Poetic Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall." The dramatic poem “City of the Plague” by J. Wilson, published there, served as an impetus for the creation of “A Feast in the Time of Plague”, and “Dramatic Scenes” by Barry Cornwall were the prototype of the poetic form of “Little Tragedies” - wrote N.V. Belyak.

If you arrange the dramas included in it in the order corresponding to the chronological sequence of the epochs described in it, then the following picture will open: “The Miserly Knight” is dedicated to the crisis of the Middle Ages, “The Stone Guest” is dedicated to the crisis of the Renaissance, “Mozart and Salieri” is the crisis of Enlightenment, “Feast ... ." - a fragment of Wilson's dramatic poem, belonging to the romantic lake school - the crisis of the romantic era, contemporary to Pushkin himself" - N.V. Belyak also wrote.

Creating his own cycle, Pushkin did not think in terms of specific dates, but in cultural epochs of European history. Thus, the "little tragedies" appear as a large historical canvas.

"An unresolved conflict is inherited by each subsequent era - and therefore the antagonist and protagonist of each subsequent drama inherit the features of those whose conflict was not overcome in the previous one." Baron and Albert, Commander and Guan, Salieri and Mozart, Priest and Walsingam - all of them are connected by historical kinship. This is a confrontation between acquisitiveness and wastefulness, the subject of which can be material goods, spiritual values, a heavenly gift, and the cultural tradition itself. Until the last drama, the antagonist and protagonist do not enter into a genuine interaction, they are almost deaf to each other, because each of them builds his own individualistic cosmos based on one or another sacred idea. And the hero seeks to spread the laws of this cosmos to the whole world - inevitably colliding with the equally expansive will of his antagonist.

"The abundance of sources involved by Pushkin in the creation of "little tragedies" will not seem surprising, given that they are an epic canvas dedicated to the great European culture."

"The Miserly Knight" draws on the richest literary tradition of depiction of avarice, which goes back to Plautus and has received its classical expression in "The Miserly" by Molière. Baron Philip conceals in his heart a “resentment”. Nothing is said about his childhood and youth in the tragedy. But since the baron clearly remembered everything connected with the young duke, his father and grandfather, he never mentioned either his grandfather or his father, it can be assumed that he, having lost his parents, was brought up at the Court out of mercy. According to the young duke, Philip "was a friend" of his "grandfather". Philip, not without pride, recalls that the father of the current duke "spoke" to him always "for you."

Molière's comedy Don Giovanni and Mozart's opera Don Giovanni served as direct sources for The Stone Guest.

The plot of "Mozart and Salieri" was drawn by Pushkin not so much from printed sources as from oral communication: rumors that Salieri confessed to poisoning Mozart, which arose after the suicide attempt made by Salieri in 1823, flared up with renewed vigor immediately after his Pushkin’s death could have been passed on by such interlocutors as A.D. Ulybyshev, M.Yu. Vielgorsky, N.B. Golitsyn and others.

The poetics of the cycle is based on a strictly sustained historical principle - the artistic universe of each tragedy is built according to the laws of the picture of the world that each of the epochs depicted in the cycle formed and captured.

““Little Tragedies” are plays designed primarily for one tragic actor, but an actor of very great talent and a wide range that can keep the viewer in suspense both during a long monologue and in a rapidly developing scene, i.e. designed for tragedians like Karatygin or Mochalov, who then shone.

“The first scene of The Miserly Knight takes place in the tower, the second in the basement, the third in the palace. These are clearly defined top, bottom and middle, which form the device of a medieval theatrical action in accordance with the medieval picture of the world. In the classical Middle Ages, spatial coordinates are also value coordinates: top - heaven, bottom - hell, middle - earth. But Pushkin depicts the moment when the developed system of values ​​collapses and a person puts himself in the place of the religious ideal of chivalrous service. The revolution that took place in the cultural cosmos is expressed in the poetics of the space of tragedy. The heavens of the Baron, the place of his bliss - underground, the tower is the hell of Albert, where he suffers tantalum torments, suffocating from poverty in a castle filled with gold.

As in medieval dramaturgy, the main formative beginning of The Miserly Knight is not the plot, not the plot, but the composition. The drama is built as a strictly symmetrical triptych: scene - monologue - scene. Three actors - one - again three. The events of the second picture (in the basement) do not continue the events of the first (in the tower) - they are correlated precisely in terms of composition, they mutually comment on each other according to the principle of simultaneity, characteristic of medieval painting and theater.

In "The Stone Guest" the word "here" is pronounced twenty-one times, each time accentuating the spatial opposition. The opposition "here - there" becomes the main shaping thrust of the tragedy. And the change of places of action serves as an expression of the extreme extensiveness of the life of the hero, who violently rushes to the future, trying to subjugate time, space, and circumstances. This is the expansion of the renaissance will, this is Renaissance anthropocentrism: a person has placed himself in the center of the world and acts in it as he wants. But the opposition "here - there", originally set as a horizontal, confirming the freedom of action and movement of the hero, who does not believe in other dimensions, in the last scene of the tragedy unfolds into a fatal vertical for him: this comes into force the law of Catholic Spain, violated by him, the law of immutable punishment for sins.

The time of action of "Mozart and Salieri" is the end of the 18th century, when enlightenment, failing, retreating before sentimentalism, romanticism, still coexisted with them. The mode of this coexistence is embodied in the poetics of tragedy. Not only is the romantic character of Mozart opposed to the rationalist Salieri - in strict accordance with this duality of culture, the two scenes of the tragedy are framed in two opposite ways.

The word as a full-fledged representative, as a full-fledged equivalent of reality, is the law of classicism, the law of enlightenment rationalism, and this is Salieri's law. Mozart exists according to the laws of romantic speech, tragically ambiguous, knowingly and deliberately keeping back, not encroaching on replacing the whole polysemy of being. In the first scene, Salieri's monologues absorb two-thirds of her poetic text, they frame and loop it, put it entirely under the sign of Salieri, into whose spiritual space Mozart bursts like an "illegal comet". This scene is contrastingly opposite to the second - open, unfinished, cut off at the question. The poetics of the second scene is organized according to the laws of Mozart, in it no one speaks to the end, although it is in it that the mystery of life and death is accomplished.

The equivalent of Salieri's monologues here is the musical element, which, according to the hierarchy of values ​​put forward by romanticism, is the supreme expression of the essence of being. This is Mozart's "Requiem", for the performance of which the poetic text parted on the stage, freeing up dramatic time. And although Mozart sits down at the piano even in the first scene, there, as if exposed to the laws of her poetics, he first retells, puts his music into words.

The poetics of "A Feast in the Time of Plague" is already entirely organized according to the laws of the romantic era. First of all, it is the poetics of the fragment; apparently, the reason why the text of the tragedy is woven from someone else's text is also connected with it. The fragment was valued by the romantics for the fact that, devoid of boundaries and frames, it remained, as it were, not withdrawn from the world, or, on the contrary, “embedded” directly into the world. In the work of N.V. white is written - in any case, unlike the completed self-sufficient text, the fragment was connected with the world as if by a single circulatory system.

The deep consonance of the "Little Tragedies" with the whole atmosphere of the thirties of the XIX century was very accurately felt by A. I. Herzen.

“This Russia,” he wrote, “begins with the emperor and goes from gendarme to gendarme, from official to official, to the last policeman in the most remote corner of the empire. Each step of this ladder acquires, as in Dante's pits of hell everywhere, the forces of evil, a new step of depravity and cruelty ... The terrible consequences of human speech in Russia, of necessity, give it a special power ... When Pushkin begins one of his best creations with these strange words.

Everyone says there is no truth on earth,

But there is no more truth!

For me, it is as clear as a simple gamma ....

The heart shrinks and through this apparent calmness the broken existence of a person already accustomed to suffering is guessed. Internal drama permeates the entire atmosphere of "Little Tragedies". Every image, every detail, every replica is clear and definite, and all of them are in sharp contrast to each other.

Sharply contrasting with each other and detailed episodes, scenes developing in parallel. Let us compare the dialogue between the Usurer and Albert, where Solomon cunningly but insistently brings the conversation to the main topic, and the dialogue between the Miser and the Duke, where the Baron just as cunningly and just as persistently seeks to get away from the main topic.

“It could be compared,” remarks S.M. Bondu, are two scenes of “Mozart and Salieri” that are completely different in character, in which the characters change places: in the first scene, the gloomy Salieri reigns, and Mozart, in the spirit of his characterization given by Salieri, is a cheerful, frivolous “idle reveler”, meanwhile in the second scene, Mozart grows colossally: we see a brilliant artist, the author of the Requiem, a man with an amazing sensitivity of the soul, expressing serious and deep thoughts about art. Here, on the contrary, he is sad, and Salieri is trying in every possible way to dispel this sadness.

And in this atmosphere, as if devoid of halftones, every time we face such a tangle of contradictions, such an intensity of passions, which must inevitably and immediately be resolved by a catastrophe, an explosion!

However, the internal drama is not exhausted by the tension of the situation in which the characters of the work find themselves. The essence of this drama lies in the fact that the heroes of "Little Tragedies" are constantly faced with the need to choose between two possible moral decisions. And the decision being made is all the more significant and formidable in terms of its consequences, the more opposition is caused by the act of the hero and his antagonists.

Pushkin, in his dramatic sketches, first of all explores the state of a person at the moment he chooses a path. But for Pushkin, as a dramatic author, a synthesis of the psychological and effective characteristics of the characters is characteristic. The situations in which his heroes are placed are heated to the limit even at the moment the curtain is raised. In fact, all the heroes of "Little Tragedies" stand on the verge of life and death. They can still think before making a decision, but by making it, they thereby cut off all the possibilities of retreat. It is no longer possible for them to stop, to turn off the once chosen path - they are forced to follow it to the end.

Of course, the relationship between the characters, determined by their characters and the circumstances in which the characters are placed, is the driving force behind the conflict of the play - this is one of the basic, most general laws of drama. However, in order for these relations to grow into direct action, a sufficiently strong impulse, an external or internal push, is needed. This impetus is determined not only by the relations that have already developed between the actors, but by the relationship between the characters of the characters and the circumstances in which they act. The characters of the heroes, prompting them to new actions, which in turn lead to the emergence of new, each time more and more stressful situations.

If you read the text of The Miserly Knight, it is not difficult to see that the beginning of it, although it testifies to the extremely aggravated relations between Albert and the old Baron, does not yet portend a tragic denouement. Approximately a third of the first scene - Albert's conversation with Ivan before the arrival of the usurer - is an exposition that paints a picture of the humiliating poverty in which the young knight lives. And only with the arrival of Solomon, a cunning dialogue begins, in which each of the interlocutors pursues their own goals: Albert - to immediately get money for the future tournament, the usurer - to hasten the death of the old Baron and thereby more than return everything given earlier to the young heir to the treasures stored in the basements of the castle .

Solomon's proposal to contact the pharmacist is the impetus, that is, to perform an action that will lead to the death of the Baron. Thus, only the Sami end of the first scene is the dramatic plot of the tragedy. In the same way, Salieri's first monologue does not give us any reason to suspect him of intent to poison Mozart. This decision matures in him only towards the very end of the first scene, after he heard the blind musician play and Mozart's new creation.

Mozart and Salieri are, as it were, in different dimensions. A direct collision between them does not occur and cannot occur. Pushkin consciously emphasizes this with the peculiarity of the dramatic conflict (one attacks, but the other does not even suspect the attack). Mozart responds to Salieri's long and coldly rational monologues with music.

In The Stone Guest, we again have an “idle reveler” and an inspired poet. But this is no longer the brilliant Mozart, who knows the joy of hard and deep work, but only the "improviser of a love song" - Don Juan, that Don Juan, whom almost all of Spain knows as "a shameless debaucher and atheist." A new turn, a new shift in the dramaturgical conflict, exploring the tragic fate of the hero, who entered into a confrontation with the "terrible age". And we can trace the patterns of change in the very foundation, the dramatic essence of this conflict.

In The Miserly Knight, as has already been established, there is no ideological dispute between the Baron and Albert; their duel over chests of gold is so common in the world of the cleansing man, in the world of money, where

... the young man sees nimble servants in them

And not sparing sends there, here.

The old man sees in them reliable friends

And he keeps them like the apple of his eye.

And the ideological dispute between Salieri and Mozart is painful and stubborn, but it is carried on in the soul of one Salieri. Mozart is not even aware of this struggle, he simply refutes all the cunning arguments of Salieri by his behavior, his creativity. Don Juan, on the other hand, throws down a direct challenge to the world of hypocrisy and hypocrisy.

In the last of the Little Tragedies, a fundamentally different situation arises. There, the heroes were involved in disaster as a result of the feast, this was their tragic mistake and tragic guilt. Here the feast is a direct dramatic consequence of the catastrophe. In essence, he does not change anything in the fate of the heroes and cannot change it. The theme of the feast as a celebration, as the highest tension of the hero's moral strength, runs through all the "Little Tragedies", but the feast in them each time turns into death for the hero, this feast turned out to be the direct dramatic cause of the disaster.

I want to arrange a feast for myself today:

I will light a candle before every chest

And I will open them all, and I will become myself

Among them look at the shining heaps, -

said the miserly knight. But after all, it is precisely the contemplation of the “shiny heaps” that gives rise to a feeling of fear and uncertainty in him, a disease of the future and fear of the heir-robber of countless treasures. The Baron suffers a moral defeat precisely in this scene, a direct clash with Albert only finishes him off.

The highest feast of art affirms Salieri the need to poison Mozart, but also brings moral death to him.

All heroes are doomed to die. They know it. Awareness of the inevitable gives birth in ordinary people to a fatalistic reconciliation with fate, with the inevitability of fate. This fatalism can be very different - here is the thoughtless carelessness of a young man offering a drink in honor of the already deceased Jackson "with a cheerful clink of glasses, with an exclamation", and the selfless generosity of tender Mary, and the callous selfishness of Louise, who is trying to assert herself in misanthropy, but "gentle weaker cruel, and fear lives in the soul, tormented by passions, ”writes D. Ustyuzhanin.

The moral battle theme runs through all of Little Tragedies.

Full of fighting zeal, a young man in the prime of life accepts the challenge of an old man who is ready to draw a sword with a trembling hand. ... Careless Mozart, not even suspecting Salieri's treachery ... The statue of the Commander and fearlessly looking into the face of fate, but immediately realizing the senselessness of resistance, Don Juan ...

But here in "A Feast in the Time of Plague" man and Death clashed on an equal footing. The strength of the hero's spirit really resists the Plague, which, by the way, loses the traits of fate in the Chairman's anthem - the killer and acquires other warriors, even attractive in their own way.

The first remarks of the Priest: “Godless feast, godless madmen!” make us remember the Monk from The Stone Guest, Salieri and the old Baron.

The theme of "the madman-squanderer" also runs through all the "Little Tragedies". So they called Albert and Mozart and Don Juan. However, these words are perhaps less suitable for Walsings than for anyone else. And the words about debauchery, which the Priest repeats with such stubbornness, do not find such a solid foundation in the text of the tragedy.

Indeed, in what does the Priest see debauchery? In "hateful raptures", "mad songs" resounding among the "dead silence", "prayers of the saint and heavy sighs".

The priest, like Walsingam, seeks to "encourage the fading gaze", but only in order to prepare the doomed to death. And the voice of the Priest, the whole structure of his speech is the voice of death itself, as if resounding from behind a tombstone. The priest incessantly recalls the dead on behalf of the dead.

Is it significant that the Priest addressed the name of the deceased Matilda as the last, decisive argument in the dispute with Valsingam? The image of Matilda - the embodiment of pure and selfless love - directly merges with the image of Jenny from Mary's song. However, there is not and cannot be such a close internal connection between Walsingam and Edmond. Walsingam does not follow the path of Edmond, he does not run in order to epicly visit - the collapse of his beloved after the danger has passed.

“The feast continues. The chairman remains, immersed in deep thought,” reads the final note of “Little Tragedies”.

Composition and artistic features

The basis of the dramatic composition of "Hamlet" by W. Shakespeare is the fate of the Danish prince. Its disclosure is constructed in such a way that each new stage of the action is accompanied by some change in Hamlet's position, his conclusions, and the tension increases all the time, right up to the final episode of the duel, ending with the death of the hero. The tension of the action is created, on the one hand, by the expectation of what the hero's next step will be, and, on the other hand, by the complications that arise in his fate and relationships with other characters. As the action develops, the dramatic knot becomes more and more aggravated all the time.

At the heart of any dramatic work is conflict, in the tragedy "Hamlet" it has 2 levels. Level 1 - personal between Prince Hamlet and King Claudius, who became the husband of the prince's mother after the treacherous murder of Hamlet's father. The conflict has a moral nature: two life positions collide. Level 2 - the conflict of man and era. (“Denmark is a prison”, “the whole world is a prison, and excellent: with many gates, dungeons and dungeons ...”

In terms of action, the tragedy can be divided into 5 parts.

Part 1 - the plot, five scenes of the first act. Hamlet's meeting with the Ghost, who entrusts Hamlet with the task of avenging the vile murder.

The plot of the tragedy is two motives: the physical and moral death of a person. The first is embodied in the death of his father, the second in the moral fall of Hamlet's mother. Since they were the closest and dearest people to Hamlet, then with their death that spiritual breakdown occurred, when for Hamlet all life lost its meaning and value.

The second moment of the plot is the meeting of Hamlet with a ghost. From him, the prince learns that the death of his father was the work of Claudius, as the ghost says: “Murder is vile in itself; but this is more vile than all and more inhuman than all.

Part 2 - the development of the action arising from the plot. Hamlet needs to lull the king's vigilance, he pretends to be crazy. Claudius takes steps to learn about the reasons for this behavior. The result is the death of Polonius, father of Ophelia, the beloved of the prince.

Part 3 - the climax, called the "mousetrap": a) Hamlet is finally convinced of the guilt of Claudius; b) Claudius himself is aware that his secret has been revealed; c) Hamlet opens his eyes to Gertrude.

The culmination of this part of the tragedy and, perhaps, of the whole drama as a whole is the episode "scene on stage". The accidental appearance of actors is used by Hamlet to put on a performance depicting a murder similar to that committed by Claudius. Circumstances favor Hamlet. He gets the opportunity to bring the king to such a state when he will be forced to betray himself by word or behavior, and this will happen in the presence of the whole court. It is here that Hamlet reveals his intention in the monologue that concludes Act II, at the same time explaining why he has so far hesitated:

"The spirit that appeared to me,

Perhaps there was also a devil; the devil is powerful

Put on a cute image; and, perhaps,

That, since I am relaxed and sad, -

And over such a soul he is very powerful, -

He leads me to death. I need

Return support. The spectacle is a loop,

To lasso the king's conscience" (5, p. 29)

But even having made a decision, Hamlet still does not feel solid ground under his feet.

4th part: a) sending Hamlet to England; b) the arrival of Fortinbras in Poland; c) Ophelia's madness; d) death of Ophelia; e) conspiracy of the king with Laertes.

Part 5 - denouement. Duel of Hamlet and Laertes, Death of Gertrude, Claudius, Laertes, Hamlet.

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Introduction

Interest A.S. Pushkin and drama can be traced at all stages of his creative activity, but in no other literary genre is there such a sharp disproportion between an impressive number of ideas and a small number of their implementation.

Having formulated a recipe for subjectivist opposition to "lower truths", Pushkin suddenly realized the danger of voluntarism lurking in such an approach, the danger of imposing his lofty schemes on the world. And there were Little Tragedies. By the way, they are small not at all because the volume of these works is small. They are small because they are very ordinary , projected onto each of us - each one who tries to impose on the world his need for love, separation, justice. And by imposing, he goes to the end and, going to the end, becomes a monster. In fact, the poet consistently considers in his plays the main temptations of individualistic consciousness.

“The dramatic legacy of Pushkin,” rightly believes D.P. Yakubovich - it is difficult to consider outside the rest of his work. Pushkin was not a playwright and was not even a playwright par excellence. However, as it was already clear to the poet's contemporaries, Pushkin's appeal to drama was determined by the essential principles of his creative manner.

The great merit in revealing for the Russian society the significance of Pushkin's dramatic heritage belongs to V.G. Belinsky. His classic articles on Pushkin, while retaining their great significance for our time, bear, however, certain features due to the time and the nature of the socio-political struggle of his era.

"Pushkin's talent," Belinsky believed, was not limited to the narrow sphere of one of some kind of poetry: an excellent lyricist, he was already ready to become an excellent playwright, when a sudden death stopped his development.

“Pushkin was born for the dramatic kind,” he wrote in 1928. I. Kireevsky - he is too versatile, too objective to be a lyricist; in each of his poems, an involuntary desire to give a special life to individual parts is noticeable, a desire that often tends to the detriment of the whole in epic works, but necessary, precious for the dramatist.

In Pushkin, his characters are both terrifying and grandiose. They are beautiful because they are possessed by an unalloyed, pure passion, not available to anyone. The passion that we encounter is noble and unfortunate in its origin: in something - in gold, in glory, in pleasure - the hero sees an enduring value and serves it with all the zeal of the soul. They idealize their world and themselves. They are imbued with faith in their heroic destiny, asserting their right to satisfy their desires, logically convincingly and even poetically convincing of the validity of their positions. But their rightness is one-sided: they do not bother trying to understand the life position of another person. The heroes' belief in their chosenness, in the absolute justification of their own view of the world as the only correct one, comes into irreconcilable conflict with the real world. The world is a complex system of social relations, which inevitably suppresses the slightest attempt to encroach on its foundations. The individualistic self-consciousness of the characters and the hostile world order are the basis of the conflict of small tragedies.

Exploring typical European conflicts, Pushkin thinks of them autobiographically. The background of the Baron's conflict with his son and heir is Pushkin's relationship with his own father. Pushkin passed on the experience of his own heart to both Guan and the Commander. The Mozartian type is both creatively and personally close to Pushkin, but Salieri is not alien to him in all his manifestations. In the dispute between the Priest and Valsingam, one can hear an echo of Pushkin's poetic dialogue with Metropolitan Philaret. "Little Tragedies" is filled with a huge number of smaller autobiographical touches. Pushkin recognizes his personal involvement in the European heritage, which by the beginning of the nineteenth century. became Russian. Personal involvement - and therefore, personal responsibility. This is the recognition of one's own tragic guilt that resolves the conflict and, at the same time, its comprehension as a generic guilt. It occurs at the level of historical awareness, is realized in the poetics of dramas and becomes a personal experience of overcoming individualism, the transition from "I" to "we".

The articles of Chernyshevsky N.G., which appeared in the midst of the most acute struggle between representatives of revolutionary democracy and liberal-noble criticism, which sought to see in Pushkin the most complete expression of the artistic ideal of "pure art", developed the main provisions of Belinsky's articles and contained a number of new valuable judgments about Pushkin's dramatic works. .

Chernyshevsky emphasizes his succession from Belinsky with all certainty: “The criticism that we are talking about has so fully and correctly determined the nature and significance of Pushkin’s activity that, by common agreement, its judgments still remain fair and completely satisfactory.”

By now, "Little Tragedies" has been studied in more or less detail. Their theatrical nature and stage background are examined in the works of S.M. Bondi, M. Zagorsky, S.K. Durylin and others. A number of special studies are devoted to the problems of musical culture related to the study of the creative history of Mozart and Salieri. Sayings about "Little Tragedies", as well as about "Boris Godunov", are present in almost all works of a general nature in Pushkin's work.

The purpose of the thesis is the study of "Little Tragedies" by A.S. Pushkin in terms of their problems and compositional features.

In this regard, the work has the following structure - an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion.

Chapter 1. Compositional features of "Little Tragedies"

tragedy Pushkin catharsis

Pushkin, the playwright, focused on the problem of life's truth. “The main theme of all small tragedies is the analysis of human passions, affects,” wrote S. Bondy.

“Little Tragedies” is the conditional name of the cycle, which consists of four dramatic works: “The Miserly Knight”, “Mozart and Salieri”, “The Stone Guest”, “Feast during the Plague”. "Little tragedies" Pushkin called them in a letter to P.A. Pletnev dated December 9, 1830 - but he was also looking for other options for the common title: "Dramatic Scenes", "Dramatic Essays", "Dramatic Studies", "Experience in Dramatic Studies". The ideas of the first three works date back to 1826, but there is no evidence of work on them before the Boldin autumn of 1830, when the cycle was created: only white autographs of all dramas have survived, except for Mozart and Salieri.

The implementation of the idea of ​​"Little Tragedies" in 1830. It is customary to associate with the fact that in Boldino Pushkin got acquainted with the collection "Poetic Works of Milman, Bowles, Wilson and Barry Cornwall." The dramatic poem by J. Wilson "City of the Plague" published there served as an impetus for the creation of "A Feast in the Time of Plague", and "Dramatic Scenes" by Barry Cornwall were the prototype of the poetic form of "Little Tragedies" - wrote N.V. Belyak.

If you arrange the dramas included in it in the order corresponding to the chronological sequence of the epochs described in it, then the following picture will open: “The Miserly Knight” is dedicated to the crisis of the Middle Ages, “The Stone Guest” is dedicated to the crisis of the Renaissance, “Mozart and Salieri” is the crisis of Enlightenment, “Feast ... ." - a fragment of a dramatic poem by Wilson, belonging to the romantic lake school - the crisis of the romantic era, contemporary to Pushkin himself" - also wrote N.V. Belyak.

Creating his own cycle, Pushkin did not think in terms of specific dates, but in cultural epochs of European history. Thus, the "little tragedies" appear as a large historical canvas.

“An unresolved conflict is inherited by each successive era – and therefore the antagonist and protagonist of each subsequent drama inherit the features of those whose conflict was not overcome in the previous one.” Baron and Albert, Commander and Guan, Salieri and Mozart, Priest and Walsingham - all of them are connected by historical kinship. This is a confrontation between acquisitiveness and wastefulness, the subject of which can be material goods, spiritual values, a heavenly gift, and the cultural tradition itself. Until the last drama, the antagonist and protagonist do not enter into a genuine interaction, they are almost deaf to each other, because each of them builds his own individualistic cosmos based on one or another sacred idea. And the hero seeks to spread the laws of this cosmos to the whole world - inevitably colliding with the equally expansive will of his antagonist.

"The abundance of sources involved by Pushkin in the creation of "little tragedies" will not seem surprising, given that they are an epic canvas dedicated to the great European culture."

"The Miserly Knight" draws on the richest literary tradition of depiction of avarice, which goes back to Plautus and has received its classical expression in "The Miserly" by Molière. Baron Philip conceals in his heart a “resentment”. Nothing is said about his childhood and youth in the tragedy. But since the baron clearly remembered everything connected with the young duke, his father and grandfather, he never mentioned either his grandfather or his father, it can be assumed that he, having lost his parents, was brought up at the Court out of mercy. According to the young duke, Philip "was a friend" of his "grandfather". Philip, not without pride, recalls that the father of the current duke "spoke" to him always "for you."

Molière's comedy Don Giovanni and Mozart's opera Don Giovanni served as direct sources for The Stone Guest.

The plot of "Mozart and Salieri" was drawn by Pushkin not so much from printed sources as from oral communication: rumors that Salieri confessed to poisoning Mozart, which arose after the suicide attempt made by Salieri in 1823, flared up with renewed vigor immediately after his Pushkin’s death could have been passed on by such interlocutors as A.D. Ulybyshev, M.Yu. Vielgorsky, N.B. Golitsyn and others.

The work "Boris Godunov" is dedicated to the difficult relationship between ordinary people and the king. It was this poem that was a turning point in Pushkin's work. It symbolizes, in its own way, the transition from lyricism to historical realism.

The plot of the work is based on the description of the Time of Troubles, during which Boris Godunov ruled. Pushkin took the materials contained in the History of the Russian State as the basis for his legendary work. These materials were written by the famous Russian historian Karamzin. Pushkin tried to convey his own idea about all the uprisings that took place at that time.

The entire poem is divided into twenty-three scenes. These scenes cover the whole six years, during the reign of Godunov. All the heroes of Pushkin's work "Boris Godunov" are divided into groups. All groups represent well-known historical figures, fictional characters and people of the time who did not affect history in any way. In general, the characters there were for every taste.

The whole poem was written in the genre of tragedy. It revealed the foundations of the spiritual death of the Russian people. All the horror that happened in troubled times.

Boris Godunov himself is depicted in the work as a tragic and unhappy person. He was ready to do anything to achieve his goal. He was no stranger to conspiracies, intrigues and gossip, which he dissolved. People did not trust him and did not want such a person to rule Russia. However, the author describes Godunov as a rather smart man, he still tried to do something positive for Russia. Godunov dreamed of lifting the country from its knees.

Such an image as Grigory Otrepyev is a complete opposition to Boris Godunov. He is depicted in the poem as a brave, cheerful, determined adventurer. He attracted people with his simplicity, positive and cheerfulness. People believed him and thought that he was the real son of Ivan the Terrible - Dmitry.

This work is different from other works of Pushkin. After all, it is more suitable for being shown in the theater, and not just read and re-read. It doesn't matter what the characters say, what matters is what they do. In order to understand the essence of many characters, you need to see their actions, gestures and facial expressions. This is the only way to understand the emotional experiences of the characters, to know them better. Boris Godunov is a historical drama that really describes important events for Russia. The Time of Troubles left a black imprint on the future of the great power.

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