Gallery of images of landlords in the poem “Dead Souls. What unites the landowners and what is the difference between them (from the poem Dead Souls)!? Unites all landlords

Manilov is a philanthropist, projector, idler. Sobakevich is a misanthrope, a fist, a burnout. Nozdrev is a swindler, a gambler, a spendthrift. The box is a prude, stupid. Plyushkin is a miser, a misanthrope, a hoarder. What different characteristics, right?
The characters of the landlords are described in such a way that they make up pairs of opposites: Manilov - Sobakevich, Nozdrev - Plyushkin. The only landowner in the poem - Korobochka - looks like an intermediate link between them.
It would be natural if the negative traits of one character were balanced by the positive traits of another. But this is not how Gogol does it: the empty philanthropy of Manilov is opposed by the obvious misanthropy of Sobakevich, the wild extravagance of Nozdryov - Plyushkin's insane passion for hoarding. Each landowner is a kind of moralizing illustration, a "passion man", that is, the embodiment of a single negative quality. This is the structural similarity of the characters in Dead Souls. Approximately the same way the images of the comedy of classicism were built. For example, in Moliere: Tartuffe is a hypocrite, Jourdain is a stupid self-lover, etc.
Gogol worked at a time when the method of critical realism was being born, which became a logical continuation of Enlightenment classicism. The new artistic method made it possible not only to develop the characters in detail, but also to make deep generalizations. However, the material of Dead Souls shows that Gogol was not ready to draw far-reaching social conclusions, as Soviet literary critics tried to prove. His abstract "Rus", to which Gogol never tires of referring, is nothing but a utopia, invented by the writer himself in distant Italy. At the same time, what is especially curious, the images of the landlords constitute a kind of dystopia, which bears little resemblance to the real picture of Russian life of that era. The landlords of "Dead Souls" are exotic creations of the writer's imagination, they could only have very remote prototypes. Here the difference between the images of the landowners becomes noticeable, which consists in the extent of harm that each of them is capable of inflicting on society. Manilov and Sobakevich are harmless in and of themselves. Only a multitude of Manilovs and Sobakeviches are capable of causing any noticeable damage: the former by their mismanagement, the latter by their greed.
But Nozdrev and Plyushkin are not like that. They are an active destructive force. Plyushkin's horrifying example, "holes in humanity," can be contagious in a society where there is exploitation of man by man and no firm moral foundations. Nozdryov, with his pathological passion for the game in all its manifestations, is even more dangerous: nothing is sacred to him, and his example is much more contagious than that of Plyushkin. Note that in Russia in the 19th century, gambling among the nobility led to the ruin of the richest estates ...

Almost half of the first volume of the poem "Dead Souls" (five chapters out of eleven) is devoted to characterizing various types of Russian landowners. N.V. Yogol created five different characters, five portraits, not similar to each other. But at the same time, the typical features of a Russian landowner appear in each of them, and all landowners are depicted satirically. Consider this peculiar portrait gallery.

According to the first impression of Manilov, one could say: "What a pleasant and kind person!" He is exceedingly amiable to his friends, gentle to his wife, kind to his serfs. But this pleasantness was "too much transferred to sugar"; Manilov was a man "neither this nor that"; next to him was soon felt "mortal boredom." He loved to think and dream; but under his beautiful soul and dreaminess there was an inner emptiness. Gogol ironically remarks that Manilov's office had a book open at page fourteen, which he had been reading for two years now.

The landowner never took care of the household, trusting the clerk in everything, and did not even know how many serfs had died from him. His mismanagement was emphasized by the fact that his house stood in an uncomfortable place, open to all winds, and expensive furniture in the room was adjacent to the old one. Gogol's hero personifies a whole phenomenon - Manilovism, and his name has become a household name.

Gogol refers the landowner Korobochka to the number of "those small landowners who cry for crop failures, losses, and meanwhile gain a little money in bags placed in chests of drawers." These money are obtained from the sale of a wide variety of products: honey, flour, cereals, etc. The "clubhead" Box is ready to sell everything that is grown on her estate; agrees (truly, after much persuasion) to “give way” even to such a “commodity” as dead souls, although at first it seemed to her too unusual, and at first she was afraid to sell too cheap.

Nozdryov is a completely different type of people, Gogol ironically calls him a "historical person", because some kind of "stories" constantly happened to him. His favorite pastime was playing cards; moreover, he did not play quite honestly, for which he was beaten by his own comrades. His remarkable energy was manifested in the fact that he was ready to go anywhere, with anyone and for anything. Nozdryov did not take care of his household; it went somehow by itself; the only decent place was the kennel; and among dogs Nozdryov felt himself like a father among children. Nozdryov constantly boasts, invents, lies; moreover, his lies are frank and do not bring him any benefit; but he can no longer help cheating, cheating: he manages to cheat even when playing checkers with Chichikov. Nozdryov is depicted by Gogol not only with irony, like Manilov or Korobochka, but already brightly satirically.
Sobakevich is somewhat similar to Korobochka. This, according to the exact definition of Yogol, is a “fist”, a drive. For him, practicality and profit are much more valuable than friendship, beauty, etc. He calls all the officials in the city “swindlers”, and when selling dead souls, he first set an unprecedentedly high price, and then bargained with Chichikov for a long time and at the same time managed to deceive him. Outwardly, he seemed to Chichikov like "a medium-sized bear." And all the things in the house (even the thrush in the cage) somehow resembled their owner: everything looked solid, but clumsy, ugly.

Sobakevich loved and knew how to eat well, but he preferred not gourmet dishes, but simple food, but in large quantities. He could eat one huge sturgeon or a whole ram. The image of Sobakevich is drawn by Gogol sarcastically.

Plyushkin's name has become as common as the names of Manilov or Korobochka. The reader's acquaintance with this hero Gogol, as usual, begins with a description of the village and estate owned by the landowner. He paints a terrible picture of the complete ruin of the once rich landlord economy. The reason for this ruin was the painful stinginess, into which the owner's reasonable thrift gradually turned. Gogol shows the gradual development of this disease, which led to the necrosis of both the economy and the soul of its owner. Plyushkin's economy fell into complete decline; the peasants are starving and fleeing from the landowner, and he himself has long lost any idea of ​​the real side of life: flour spoils in his barns, cloth rots, and he walks around the village and picks up broken horseshoes, torn soles and other unnecessary things and puts them in his room in a special pile. He is suspicious of everyone, believing that everyone robs him; he wears the keys to all the barns and chests on his belt, which is why (and also because of the strange clothes) Chichikov at first mistakes him for a housekeeper. Gogol writes with contempt about Plyushkin and calls him "a hole in humanity."

Thus, the writer displays in the poem not just five images of landowners - he shows five stages of degradation and mortification of the human soul. "Dead souls" in the poem should be considered not the dead peasants bought by Chichikov, but the landowners themselves - the owners of the serfs. From Manilov to Plyushkin, a frightening picture of the gradual extinction of the human in a person is revealed to the reader. This is the principle of the compositional sequence of images of landlords in the poem "Dead Souls".

Having created an unforgettable and truthful gallery of portraits and characters of the feudal lords, Gogol exclaims: “And to what insignificance, pettiness, disgustingness a person could descend! Could have changed! And does it look like it's true? Does everything seem to be true? Everything looks like the truth, everything can happen to a person ... ”After analyzing the images of feudal lords in the poem, we can say that the system is vicious, in which sobakeviches, boxes, manilovs, plushkins and the like are the masters of life, control the fate of people, live national wealth . Thus, the landowners in "Dead Souls" are united by common features: inhumanity, idleness, vulgarity, spiritual emptiness. Gogol does indeed create "typical characters in typical circumstances," but "circumstances" can also be found in the conditions of a person's inner mental life. The fall of Plyushkin is not directly connected with his position as a landowner. Can't the loss of a family break even the strongest person, a representative of any class or estate?! In a word, Gogol's realism also includes the deepest psychologism. This is what makes the poem interesting to the modern reader.

So, the five characters created by Gogol in "Dead Souls" depict the state of the noble-serf class in many ways. Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdrev, Sobakevich, Plyushkin - all these are different forms of one phenomenon - the economic, social, spiritual decline of the class of feudal landowners.

Manilov, Korobochka, Nozdrev, Sobakevich - these heroes are antisocial, their characters are ugly, but each of them has at least something positive left.

The landlords are long gone, but Gogol's poem does not die. The images he created became the property of Russian literature, and the names of these heroes became common nouns. It was not for nothing that Herzen said about his types that "we met them at every step" and with the help of Gogol "we finally saw them without embellishment." In "Dead Souls" Gogol created typical portraits of landowners, reflecting the characteristic features of an entire class, revealed the spiritual impoverishment and moral degeneration of this class, although the writer himself did not think to draw such decisive conclusions.

The world of dead souls is opposed in the poem by faith in the “mysterious” Russian people, in their inexhaustible moral potential. At the end of the poem, an image of an endless road and a troika bird rushing forward appears. In this indomitable movement one can feel the writer's confidence in the great destiny of Russia, in the possibility of the spiritual resurrection of mankind. Gogol endowed each landowner with original, specific features. Whatever the hero, then a unique personality. But at the same time, his heroes retain generic, social characteristics: a low cultural level, lack of intellectual inquiries, the desire for enrichment, cruelty in the treatment of serfs, moral uncleanliness, and the absence of an elementary concept of patriotism. These moral monsters, as Gogol shows, are generated by feudal reality and reveal the essence of feudal relations based on the oppression and exploitation of the peasantry. Gogol's work stunned, first of all, the ruling circles and the landowners. The ideological defenders of serfdom argued that the nobility is the best part of the population of Russia, passionate patriots, the backbone of the state.

Gogol dispelled this myth with images of landowners. Herzen said that the landlords “pass before us without masks, without embellishment, flatterers and gluttons, obsequious slaves of power and ruthless tyrants of their enemies, drinking the life and blood of the people ...“ Dead Souls ”shocked all of Russia.”

The composition of the poem allowed the author to tell about different landowners and their villages. Gogol creates five characters, five portraits that are so different from each other, and at the same time, typical features of a Russian landowner appear in each of them. Our acquaintance begins with Manilov and ends with Plyushkin. This sequence has its own logic: from one landowner to another, the process of impoverishment of the human personality deepens, an ever more terrible picture of the disintegration of serf society unfolds. From Manilov to Sobakevich, the feeling of the necrosis of the landlord's souls intensifies.

Gogol shows them in order of increasing moral degradation. At first it was Manilov, courteous, with pleasant features; dreamy person. But this is only at first glance. In Korobochka, Gogol presents us with another type of Russian landowner. Household, hospitable, hospitable, she suddenly becomes "club-headed" in the scene of the sale of dead souls, afraid to sell too cheap. This is the type of person on his mind. In Nozdryov, Gogol showed a different form of decomposition of the nobility. The writer shows us two essences of Nozdryov: at first he is an open, daring, direct face. But then you have to make sure that Nozdryov's sociability is an indifferent familiarity with everyone you meet and cross, his liveliness is an inability to concentrate on some serious subject or business, his energy is a waste of energy in carousing and debauchery. Sobakevich is akin to Korobochka. He, like her, is a hoarder. Only unlike Korobochka, this is a smart and cunning hoarder. He manages to deceive Chichikov himself. Plyushkin completes this gallery of "dead souls". This is the eternal image of the miser in classical literature. Plyushkin is an extreme degree of economic, social and moral decay of the human personality. Provincial officials adjoin the gallery of landlords, who are essentially "dead souls".

The work of N.V. Gogol is multifaceted and diverse. The writer has the talent to captivate the reader, makes them cry and laugh along with the characters, experience failures and rejoice in successes. He calls on a person to think about the fate of the Motherland, on himself, reveals the shortcomings of society and every citizen. It was in the poem "Dead Souls" that the author raised the most painful and topical questions of contemporary life. He clearly showed the decomposition of the serfdom, the doom of its representatives.

A couple of centuries, flew by headlong,

Our Rus' - mother jumps in three

Difficult road, in the heat and snowstorms...

Some people laugh and some people cry.

We inherited today

The same "living" and "dead" souls,

Purchase and sale ... but, just a little

I believe it got a little better!

The dead souls of the landlords, their repulsive traits, are the lesson that Gogol teaches us. Nikolai Vasilyevich turns into a kind teacher, into an older friend, warning us: “Everything looks like the truth, everything can happen to a person.<...>Take with you on your journey, emerging from your soft youthful years into a stern, hardening courage, take with you all human movements, don’t leave them on the road, don’t pick them up later!” Now there are no landowners, but the character traits that Gogol so vividly captured in the poem "Dead Souls" have remained, scattered in countless quantities of vices of a huge part of society. In the poem "Dead Souls" N.V. Gogol does not accidentally ridicule the local nobility. After all, the Sobakeviches and Plyushkins ruled Russia at that time, decided the fate of the Russian people. Their images are woven so brightly and convexly that the names of Gogol's landowners have become household names. Even today we widely use the concept of Manilovism in everyday life, we compare certain people with Korobochki or Nozdrevs.

Unlike Nozdryov, Sobakevich cannot be counted as people hovering in the clouds. This hero stands firmly on the ground, does not entertain illusions, soberly evaluates people and life, knows how to act and achieve what he wants. With the character of his life, Gogol is in everything ...

Poem N.V. Gogol's "Dead Souls" (1835-1841) belongs to those timeless works of art that lead to large-scale artistic generalizations and raise the fundamental problems of human life. In the necrosis of the souls of the characters (landlords, officials,...

Every era has its heroes. They determine its face, character, principles, ethical guidelines. With the advent of Dead Souls, a new hero entered Russian literature, unlike his predecessors. The elusive, slippery is felt in the description of his appearance....

The episode "Chichikov at Plyushkin's" is interesting from an ideological and artistic point of view. The author managed to draw vivid, vivid pictures of Chichikov's meeting with the most repulsive landowner, with a "hole in humanity." Plyushkin Chichikov Pavel Ivanovich visited the last ...

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Many people hear about the landlords in Dead Souls, which Nikolai Gogol portrayed so vividly, but not everyone knows why these characters were created and how they can be characterized.

So, are landlords in Dead Souls positive or negative characters? In the poem Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol depicted what Russian landowners are like with the help of five characters.

The image of the landowner Manilov in Dead Souls

The first person Chichikov turns to with his vague offer to buy dead souls is the courteous Manilov. With cloying speeches memorized over many years of empty existence, he won over a new acquaintance.

Insensitive Manilov liked to indulge in dreams that led nowhere. He lived in his serene world, in a world without problems and passions.

The image of the landowner Korobochka in Dead Souls

Further, the road led Chichikov to Korobochka, a very thrifty elderly landowner. This is a very interesting character. She conducts business with intelligence and petty extravagance, so the village is in good condition. However, at the same time, Korobochka thinks slowly, is afraid of change: time in her house seems to be frozen.

All this did not give Chichikov the opportunity to immediately agree on a deal. The landowner Korobochka was terribly afraid of selling too cheap, because she could not understand the purpose of buying dead souls.

The image of the landowner Nozdrev in Dead Souls

The next one who was offered to get rid of them was the landowner Nozdrev. This crazy person is full of energy, passion, but directs his stormy flow in the wrong direction.

And again, Nikolai Gogol makes the reader wonder at the worthlessness of the life of the landowner, because the lies and boasting of the landowner Nozdryov have neither limit nor meaning.

Although this and other landowners in Gogol's Dead Souls are very bright characters, they have one thing in common - spiritual emptiness.

The image of the landowner Sobakevich in Dead Souls

The image of the landowner Plyushkin in Dead Souls

Perhaps the most terrifying image in the poem is the image of the landowner Plyushkin. A man who once led a bright, fulfilling life has turned into a fanatical collector, seeking to rule over everything that catches his eye. The surname Plyushkin speaks of an unhealthy passion to have every little thing, considering it a kind of bun, that is, useful.

Because of this blasphemous attitude, the peasants suffer greatly: they have to look at the mountains of rotting grain, when they themselves have nothing on their plate.

As a result, the landowners in Gogol's Dead Souls are very bright characters that cannot be confused. But they all have one thing in common - spiritual emptiness.

We also bring to your attention a summary of Gogol's poem