Poor Lisa main characters summary. poor lisa

Liza (Poor Liza) is the main character of the story, which, along with other works published by Karamzin in the Moscow Journal (Natalya, the Boyar's Daughter, Frol Silin, a Benevolent Man, Liodor, etc.), is not just brought literary fame to its author, but made a complete revolution in the public consciousness of the 18th century. Karamzin, for the first time in the history of Russian prose, turned to a heroine endowed with emphatically mundane features. His words "... and peasant women know how to love" became winged.

The poor peasant girl Liza is left an orphan early. She lives in one of the villages near Moscow with her mother - "a sensitive, kind old woman", from whom she inherits her main talent - the ability to love. To support himself and his mother, L. takes on any job. In the spring she goes to town to sell flowers. There, in Moscow, L. meets the young nobleman Erast.

Tired of the windy secular life, Erast falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the "love of a brother." So it seems to him. However, soon platonic love turns into sensual. L., “completely surrendering to him, she only lived and breathed them.” But gradually L. begins to notice the change taking place in Erast. He explains his cooling by the fact that he needs to go to war. To improve things, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, L. drowns himself in the pond.

Sensitivity - so in the language of the late XVIII century. determined the main merit of Karamzin's stories, meaning by this the ability to sympathize, to discover "the tenderest feelings" in the "bends of the heart", as well as the ability to enjoy the contemplation of one's own emotions. Sensitivity is also a central character trait of L. She trusts the movements of her heart, lives by "gentle passions." Ultimately, it is ardor and ardor that lead L. to death, but morally it is justified.

Karamzin was one of the first to introduce the opposition of the city and the countryside into Russian literature. In Karamzin's story, a village man - a man of nature - turns out to be defenseless, falling into an urban space, where laws operate that are different from the laws of nature. It is not for nothing that L.'s mother says to her (thereby indirectly predicting everything that will happen later): “My heart is always out of place when you go to the city; I always put a candle in front of the image and pray to the Lord God that he save you from all trouble and misfortune.

It is no coincidence that the first step on the road to disaster is the insincerity of L.: for the first time she “retreats from herself”, hiding, on the advice of Erast, their love from her mother, to whom she had previously confided all her secrets. Later, it was in relation to his dearly beloved mother that L. would repeat the worst act of Erast. He tries to "pay off" L. and, driving her away, gives her one hundred rubles. But L. does the same, sending her mother, along with the news of her death, those "ten imperials" that Erast gave her. Naturally, L.’s mother needs this money just as much as the heroine herself: “Lizina’s mother heard about the terrible death of her daughter, and her blood cooled with horror - her eyes closed forever.”

The tragic outcome of the love of a peasant woman and an officer confirms the correctness of her mother, who warned L. at the very beginning of the story: “You still don’t know how evil people can offend a poor girl.” The general rule turns into a specific situation, poor L. herself takes the place of the impersonal poor girl, and the universal plot is transferred to Russian soil, acquiring a national flavor.

For the arrangement of characters in the story, it is also essential that the narrator learns the story of poor L. directly from Erast and himself often comes to be sad at Liza's grave. The coexistence of the author and the hero in the same narrative space before Karamzin was not familiar to Russian literature. The narrator of "Poor Liza" is mentally involved in the relationship of the characters. Already the title of the story is built on the combination of the heroine’s own name with an epithet characterizing the sympathetic attitude of the narrator towards her, who at the same time constantly repeats that he has no power to change the course of events (“Ah! Why am I writing not a novel, but a sad story?”).

"Poor Lisa" is perceived as a story about true events. L. belongs to the characters with a "registration". “... Increasingly, it attracts me to the walls of the Si ... new monastery - a memory of the deplorable fate of Liza, poor Liza,” - this is how the author begins his story. For a gap in the middle of a word, any Muscovite guessed the name of the Simonov Monastery, the first buildings of which date back to the 14th century. (to date, only a few buildings have survived, most of them were blown up in 1930). The pond, located under the walls of the monastery, was called Lisiny Pond, but thanks to the story of Karamzin, it was popularly renamed Lizin and became a place of constant pilgrimage for Muscovites. In the minds of the monks of the Simonov Monastery, who zealously guarded the memory of L., she was, first of all, a fallen victim. In essence, L. was canonized by sentimental culture.

First of all, the same unfortunate girls in love as L. herself came to cry at the place of Liza's death. According to eyewitnesses, the bark of the trees growing around the pond was mercilessly cut with the knives of the "pilgrims". The inscriptions carved on the trees were both serious (“In these streams, poor Liza passed away for days; / If you are sensitive, a passerby, take a breath”), and satirical, hostile to Karamzin and his heroine (the following couplet gained special fame among such “birch epigrams”: "Erast's bride died in these streams. / Drown yourself, girls, there is enough space in the pond").

Karamzin and his story were certainly mentioned when describing the Simonov Monastery in guidebooks around Moscow and special books and articles. But gradually these references began to take on an increasingly ironic character, and already in 1848 in the famous work of M.N. heroine. As sentimental prose lost the charm of novelty, "Poor Lisa" ceased to be perceived as a story about true events, and even more so as an object for worship, but became in the minds of most readers (primitive fiction, a curiosity, reflecting the tastes and concepts of a bygone era.

The image of "poor L." immediately sold out in numerous literary copies of Karamzin's epigones (compare at least Dolgorukov's "Unfortunate Lisa"). But the image of L. and the ideal of sensitivity associated with it received serious development not in these stories, but in poetry. The invisible presence of "poor L." tangibly in Zhukovsky's Rural Cemetery, published ten years after Karamzin's story, in 1802, which laid, according to V. S. Solovyov, "the beginning of truly human poetry in Russia". Three major poets of the Pushkin era turn to the very plot of a seduced peasant woman: E. A. Baratynsky (in the plot poem "Eda", 1826, A. A. Delvig (in the idyll "The End of the Golden Age", 1828) and I. I. Kozlov (in the "Russian story" "Mad", 1830).

In Belkin's Tales, Pushkin twice varies the plot outline of the story about "poor L.", intensifying its tragic sound in "The Stationmaster" and turning it into a joke in "The Young Lady-Peasant Woman". The connection between "Poor Lisa" and "The Queen of Spades", whose heroine is named Lizaveta Ivanovna, is very complex. Pushkin develops the Karamzin theme: his “poor Liza” (like “poor Tanya”, the heroine of “Eugene Onegin”) is experiencing a catastrophe: having lost hope for love, she marries another, quite worthy person. All the heroines of Pushkin, who are in the "force field" of the heroine of Karamzin, are destined to be happy or unhappy - but life. “Back to the Origins,” P. I. Tchaikovsky returns Pushkin’s Lisa to Karamzin, in whose opera The Queen of Spades, Liza (no longer Lizaveta Ivanovna) commits suicide by throwing herself into the Winter Canal.

The fate of L. in different versions of its resolution is carefully spelled out by F. M. Dostoevsky. In his work, both the word "poor" and the name "Lisa" acquire a special status from the very beginning. The most famous among his heroines - the namesakes of the Karamzin peasant woman - are Lizaveta ("Crime and Punishment"), Elizaveta Prokofievna Yepanchina ("The Idiot"), Blessed Lizaveta and Liza Tushina ("Demons"), and Lizaveta Smerdyasha ("The Brothers Karamazov"). But the Swiss Marie from The Idiot and Sonechka Marmeladova from Crime and Punishment would also not exist without Lisa Karamzin. The Karamzin scheme also forms the basis of the history of the relationship between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha Maslova - the heroes of Leo Tolstoy's novel "Resurrection".

In the XX century. "Poor Lisa" has by no means lost its significance: on the contrary, interest in Karamzin's story and his heroine has increased. One of the sensational productions of the 1980s. became the theatrical version of "Poor Lisa" in the theater-studio of M. Rozovsky "At the Nikitsky Gates".

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"Poor Liza" - perhaps the calling card of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin. This story was written at the end of the 18th century - in the era of the heyday of the literary fashion for sentimentalism.

A few words about the plot of the story

Lisa's story is definitely a sad one. Having lost her father, Liza, the main character of the story, is forced to part with her usual way of life at one moment. She has no one else to rely on but herself.

Lisa is forced to sell flowers in order to be able to feed herself. Once, while selling lilies of the valley on the streets of Moscow, the girl meets her love - Erast.

A handsome young aristocrat, Erast falls in love with Lisa. In a fit of passion, he is ready to do anything for her, even to lose his position in the social hierarchy of their environment. However, having received Lisa's innocence and her heart, Erast realizes that she is no longer of his former interest to him.

The girl is left alone, and her lover leaves with the regiment. But one day - after a few months - Lisa again finds herself in Moscow and accidentally notices Erast: he drives by in a luxurious carriage in the company of a certain rich widow. From the text of the story it becomes clear that the young man squandered all his fortune, lost his estate and was forced to agree to a profitable party for marriage. Desperate, Liza throws herself into the pond and dies. All that remains are memories of how once - not so long ago - lovers walked here, near this very pond, naive and happy.

On the originality of sentimentalism

Of course, it is impossible to characterize the work, designated as one of the brightest examples of sentimentalism, without a few words about the originality of this trend. Its very name speaks of the importance of feelings, which are declared here as the highest value. Much attention is paid to the daily life of people, to what, before this turn in literature, remained behind the scenes. What kind of person is interesting to a sentimentalist writer? This is, of course, a simple person and his inner world.

The main characters of the story

It is curious that there are not so many main characters in this work. The main character is a peasant girl Lisa, reflections on which are associated with landscapes of decline and dilapidation, the abandonment of the monastery monastery. Lisa is a vivid example of the ideal heroine of a sentimental novel. She is materially poor, but spiritually rich. Her inner world, like the world of romance, is directly opposite to the limitations of the outer world: a bottomless, deep, sensual, open and limitless inner world.

The girl lives with her mother in a village near Moscow. Once upon a time, Lisa's family was not so poor, because the most difficult times for Lisa and her mother came in connection with the death of the breadwinner - the girl's father.

Lisa's mother is also, one way or another, at the center of the story. She is an elderly woman who sincerely hopes that Lisa will be able to profitably marry.

Actually, Lisa's mother is not a selfish woman: she simply wishes her daughter happiness, which at that time was thought inseparably from the ability to make a successful party. The unfortunate woman was already too weak to work as in the past, and therefore Lisa did not shun any work: she was a jack of all trades - she knew how to weave, knit stockings, picked and sold berries in the fall, and flowers in the spring.

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Along with the lack of egocentric qualities, one can note such Lisa traits as purity, devoted love and the ability to care, not wanting to receive anything in return. These features of Lisa, as well as her openness to the world, prevent her from seeing darkness in people: she believes that all people are good and cannot accept her mother’s words that the world consists of polarities, and good is always complemented by bad. The mother was very kind and sensitive, like her daughter, but she could not make Lisa's life easier: her health no longer allowed her to work, in addition, her eyesight was weakening, and gradually her daughter took the place of a nurse in the family. It is curious that after meeting Erast Lizin, his mother spoke of him extremely warmly and affably, as the young man suggested that Liza take the work done on her own so that she would not go to the city too often. After the death of her daughter, the old woman dies, unable to withstand the blow.

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Finally, Erast is Lisa's lover, who later betrayed her, like the girl's love. Erast is an extremely ambivalent character. He has his own merits: this is an outstanding and sharp mind, a noble origin, external attractiveness and a kind, soft heart. But these virtues were sometimes blocked by his shortcomings: windiness and frivolity, weak will, which pushed the young man to gambling, secular pleasures and a depraved, morally reprehensible way of life. His frivolity does not allow him to find peace of mind with any one girl. Liza does not know that the young nobleman falls in love and is carried away just as easily as she is later disappointed.

So it happened with Lisa: when he won the heart and body of the girl, she lost her former charm for him. Lisa, however, had a chance to have a completely different life: one day a wealthy peasant wooed her - a couple of a girl by status. However, Erast made enough efforts to dissuade Lisa from this marriage, showering her with promises to stay with her forever. Thus, Erast's ambivalence affects not only his life, leading to destructive processes in his inner world, but also affects the lives of the people around him.

A separate figure is the narrator. He is kind and sentimental, as if he collects images, but only those that evoke tenderness and a special kind of pain, sorrow and sadness. However, he builds a specific topography of the story.

So, the topography of "Poor Liza"

The work begins with a description of the abandoned atmosphere of the hill on which the old monastery stands. The Simonov Monastery, standing on a hill, thus opens up an amazing view of Moscow. The narrator draws us a map on which the events of the story will unfold. A dilapidated hut that is about to collapse, because the walls are all that is left of the former life. Its inhabitants have died, and the place in which their everyday life proceeded no longer causes anything but melancholic sadness. For more than thirty years no one else has lived here: however, the narrator remembers all the sad and mournful events that took place here. This is a place of memory and eternity.

Moscow, which is overlooked from the hill we have already mentioned, is a place of raging life, oblivion in the short duration of everything that happens here. Transience, brightness, "great hopes" and quickly forgotten disappointments - this is what Moscow brings to people.

The binarity of oppositions permeates all the structures of this story.

Results

Nikolai Karamzin, creating "Poor Liza", sought to look down and in depth: down - because the center of the work is not the nobles and high society, the heroes of past texts of Russian literature, but deep - because we are not talking about external events, not about the dynamics of successive circumstances, but about the development of the inner world. In fact, sentimentalist authors are making the same revolution in the question of anthropology that the Sophists and Socrates once did in antiquity. But the result remains simple - no matter what origin a person has, he is equally worthy of happiness.

Many people remember N.M. Karamzin based on his historical works. But he also did a lot for literature. It was through his efforts that a sentimental novel was developed, which describes not just ordinary people, but their feelings, suffering, experiences. brought together ordinary people and the rich as feeling, thinking and experiencing the same emotions and needs. At the time in which Poor Liza was written, namely in 1792, the emancipation of the peasants was still far away, and their existence seemed something incomprehensible and wild. Sentimentalism, however, brought them into full-fledged feeling heroes.

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History of creation

Important! He also introduced the fashion for little-known names - Erast and Elizabeth. Practically unused names quickly became common nouns, defining the character of a person.

It was this seemingly simple and uncomplicated completely fictional story of love and death that gave rise to a number of imitators. And the pond was even a place of pilgrimage for unfortunate lovers.

It's easy to remember what the story is about. After all, her story is not rich or vicissitudes. Annotation to the story allows you to find out the main events. Karamzin himself would have conveyed the summary as follows:

1. Left without a father, Lisa began to help her impoverished mother by selling flowers and berries.
2. Erast, conquered by her beauty and freshness, offers her to sell the goods only to him and then asks her not to go out at all, but to give him the goods from home. This rich but windy nobleman falls in love with Lisa. They begin to spend evenings alone.
3. Soon a wealthy neighbor woo Lizaveta, but Erast comforts her, promising to marry himself. There is closeness, and Erast loses interest in the girl he ruined. Soon the young man leaves for service. Lizaveta is waiting and afraid. But by chance they meet on the street, and Lizaveta throws herself on his neck.
4. Erast announces that he is engaged to another, and orders the servant to give her money and take her out of the yard. Lizaveta, having handed over the money to her mother, rushes into the pond. Her mother dies from a stroke.
5. Erast is ruined by losing at cards and forced to marry a wealthy widow. He does not find happiness in life and blames himself.

Selling flowers to the city

Main characters

It is clear that the characterization of one of the heroes of the story "Poor Lisa" will be insufficient. They must be evaluated together, influencing each other.

Despite the novelty and originality of the plot, the image of Erast in the story "Poor Liza" is not new, and a little-known name does not save either. Rich and bored nobleman tired of accessible and cutesy beauties. He is looking for bright sensations and finds an innocent and pure girl. Her image surprises him, attracts and even awakens love. But the very first closeness turns the angel into an ordinary earthly girl. He immediately remembers that she is poor, uneducated, and her reputation has already been ruined. He runs from responsibility, from crime.

He runs into his usual hobbies - cards and festivities, which leads to ruin. But he does not want to lose his habits and live with his beloved work life. Erast sells his youth and freedom for the wealth of a widow. Although a couple of months ago he dissuaded his beloved from a successful marriage.

Meeting with his beloved after separation only tires him, interferes. He cynically throws money at her and forces the servant to take the unfortunate woman out. This gesture shows the depth of the fall and all its cruelty.

But the image of the main character of Karamzin's story is fresh and new. She is poor, works for her mother's survival, and yet is gentle and beautiful. Its distinctive features are sensitivity and nationality. In Karamzin's story, poor Liza is a typical village heroine, poetic and with a tender heart. It is her feelings and emotions that replace her upbringing, morality and norms.

The author, generously endowing the poor girl with kindness and love, seems to emphasize that such women are inherent in natural that does not require restrictions and teachings. She is ready to live for her loved ones, to work and keep joy.

Important! Life has already tested her for strength, and she withstood the test with dignity. Behind her image, honest, beautiful, gentle, it is forgotten that she is a poor, uneducated peasant woman. That she works with her hands and sells what God has sent. This should be remembered when the news of the ruin of Erast becomes known. Lisa is not afraid of poverty.

The scene describing how the poor girl died is full of despair and tragedy. A believing and loving girl undoubtedly understands that suicide is a terrible sin. She also understands that her mother will not live without her help. But the pain of betrayal and the realization that she is disgraced is too hard for her to experience. Lisa took a sober look at life and honestly told Erast that she was poor, that she was not a match for him, and that her mother had found her a worthy groom, albeit an unloved one.

But the young man convinced her of his love and committed an irreparable crime - he took her honor. What for him was an ordinary boring event turned out to be the end of the world for poor Lisa and the beginning of a new life at the same time. Her most tender and pure soul plunged into the mud, and a new meeting showed that her beloved appreciated her deed as licentiousness.

Important! The one who wrote the story "Poor Liza" realized that he was raising a whole layer of problems and in particular the theme of the responsibility of rich bored noblemen to unfortunate poor girls, whose destinies and lives are broken by boredom, which later found its response in the work of Bunin and others.

Scene near the pond

Reader reaction

The audience received the story ambiguously. Women sympathized and made a pilgrimage to the pond, which became the last refuge of the unfortunate girl. Some male critics shamed the author and accused him of excessive sensitivity, of abundant tears that flow constantly, of the picturesqueness of the characters.

In fact, behind the external cloying and tearfulness, in which every critical article is full of reproaches, lies the true meaning, understood by attentive readers. The author pushes not only two characters, but two worlds:

• Sincere, sensitive, painfully naive peasantry with its touching and stupid, but real girls.
• Good-natured, enthusiastic, generous nobility with pampered and capricious men.

One is hardened by the difficulties of life, the other is broken and frightened by the same difficulties.

Genre of the work

Karamzin himself described his work as a sentimental fairy tale, but it received the status of a sentimental story, since it has heroes acting for a long time, a full-fledged plot, development and denouement. Heroes live not in separate episodes, but a significant part of their lives.

Poor LISA. Nikolai Karamzin

Retelling Karamzin N. M. "Poor Lisa"

Conclusion

So, the question: "Poor Liza" - is it a story or a story, was decided long ago and unambiguously. The summary of the book gives the exact answer.

Frame from the film "Poor Lisa" (2000)

In the outskirts of Moscow, not far from the Simonov Monastery, once a young girl Liza lived with her old mother. After the death of Lisa's father, a rather prosperous peasant, his wife and daughter became impoverished. The widow grew weaker day by day and could not work. Only Lisa, not sparing her tender youth and rare beauty, worked day and night - weaving canvases, knitting stockings, picking flowers in the spring, and selling berries in the summer in Moscow.

One spring, two years after her father's death, Liza came to Moscow with lilies of the valley. A young, well-dressed man met her on the street. Upon learning that she was selling flowers, he offered her a ruble instead of five kopecks, saying that "beautiful lilies of the valley plucked by the hands of a beautiful girl are worth a ruble." But Lisa refused the offered amount. He did not insist, but said that from now on he would always buy flowers from her and would like her to pick them only for him.

Arriving home, Liza told her mother everything, and the next day she picked the best lilies of the valley and again came to the city, but this time she did not meet the young man. Throwing flowers into the river, she returned home with sadness in her soul. The next evening, a stranger himself came to her house. As soon as she saw him, Liza rushed to her mother and excitedly announced who was coming to them. The old woman met the guest, and he seemed to her a very kind and pleasant person. Erast - that was the name of the young man - confirmed that he was going to buy flowers from Lisa in the future, and she did not have to go to the city: he himself could call on them.

Erast was a rather wealthy nobleman, with a fair mind and a naturally kind heart, but weak and windy. He led a distracted life, thinking only about his own pleasure, looking for it in secular amusements, and not finding it, he got bored and complained about his fate. The immaculate beauty of Liza at the first meeting shocked him: it seemed to him that in her he found exactly what he had been looking for for a long time.

This was the start of their long relationship. Every evening they saw each other either on the banks of the river, or in a birch grove, or under the shade of hundred-year-old oaks. They embraced, but their embrace was pure and innocent.

So several weeks passed. It seemed that nothing could interfere with their happiness. But one evening Lisa came to the meeting sad. It turned out that the groom, the son of a rich peasant, was wooing her, and the mother wanted her to marry him. Erast, comforting Lisa, said that after the death of his mother, he would take her to him and would live with her inseparably. But Liza reminded the young man that he could never be her husband: she is a peasant woman, and he is of a noble family. You offend me, Erast said, for your friend, your soul is most important, sensitive, innocent soul, you will always be closest to my heart. Liza threw herself into his arms - and in this hour, purity was to perish.

The delusion passed in one minute, giving way to surprise and fear. Liza cried, saying goodbye to Erast.

Their dates continued, but how everything had changed! Liza was no longer an angel of purity for Erast; platonic love gave way to feelings that he could not be "proud of" and which were not new to him. Liza noticed a change in him, and it saddened her.

Once, during a date, Erast told Lisa that he was being drafted into the army; they will have to part for a while, but he promises to love her and hopes to never part with her upon his return. It is not difficult to imagine how hard Liza felt the separation from her beloved. However, hope did not leave her, and every morning she woke up with the thought of Erast and their happiness upon his return.

So it took about two months. Once Lisa went to Moscow and on one of the big streets she saw Erast passing by in a magnificent carriage, which stopped near a huge house. Erast went out and was about to go to the porch, when he suddenly felt himself in Liza's arms. He turned pale, then, without saying a word, led her into the study and locked the door. Circumstances have changed, he announced to the girl, he is engaged.

Before Lisa could come to her senses, he led her out of the study and told the servant to escort her out of the yard.

Finding herself on the street, Liza went aimlessly, unable to believe what she heard. She left the city and wandered for a long time, until suddenly she found herself on the shore of a deep pond, under the shade of ancient oaks, which, a few weeks before, had been silent witnesses of her delights. This memory shocked Lisa, but after a few minutes she fell into deep thought. Seeing a neighbor girl walking along the road, she called her, took all the money out of her pocket and gave it to her, asking her to give it to her mother, kiss her and ask her to forgive the poor daughter. Then she threw herself into the water, and they could not save her.

Liza's mother, having learned about the terrible death of her daughter, could not stand the blow and died on the spot. Erast was unhappy until the end of his life. He did not deceive Lisa when he told her that he was going to the army, but instead of fighting the enemy, he played cards and lost all his fortune. He had to marry an elderly rich widow who had been in love with him for a long time. Upon learning of Liza's fate, he could not console himself and considered himself a murderer. Now, perhaps, they have already reconciled.

retold

Characteristics of the hero

Lisa is a poor peasant girl. She lives with her mother (a "sensitive, kind old woman") in the countryside. To earn a living, Lisa takes on any job. In Moscow, while selling flowers, the heroine meets the young nobleman Erast and falls in love with him: "having completely surrendered to him, she only lived and breathed with him." But Erast betrays the girl and marries another for money. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns herself in the pond. The main feature in the character of the heroine is sensitivity, the ability to love devotedly. The girl does not live by reason, but by feelings (“gentle passions”). Lisa is kind, very naive and inexperienced. She sees only the best in people. Her mother warns her, "You don't know yet how evil people can offend a poor girl." Lisa's mother associates evil people with the city: “My heart is always out of place when you go to the city ...” Karamzin shows bad changes in Lisa’s thoughts and actions under the influence of the depraved (“urban”) Erast. The girl hides from her mother, whom she used to tell everything, her love for the young nobleman. Later, Lisa, along with the news of her death, sends the old woman the money that Erast gave her. "Lizina's mother heard about the terrible death of her daughter, and ... - her eyes were closed forever." After the death of the heroine, pilgrims began to walk to her grave. To the place of Liza's death came to cry and grieve the same unfortunate girls in love, as she herself was.