The image and characteristics of satin in the play at the bottom of a bitter essay. The image and characteristics of Satin in the play “At the Bottom” by Gorky: the role of Satin in the play, materials for writing What is the name of satin from the play at the bottom

At the lesson of literature, we got acquainted with Gorky's work At the Bottom. Having studied the play, we got acquainted with different images of people who are difficult to attribute to any of the strata of society. These are superfluous people whom it was not fate that made them, but they themselves, having lost all meaning of life, having failed to return to it, sank to the very bottom. One of these people is Satin, whose image Gorky describes in his play At the Bottom.

And the image of Satin is not difficult to make. After all, for this it is enough to get at least a little acquaintance with Gorky's work. From it we learn part of the past life of the hero Satin and his present. In the past, he was not at the bottom of society. Satin was a well-read man who worked as a telegraph operator. He could be called sociable, cheerful and cheerful, but in his life everything changed dramatically when standing up for his sister, Satin kills a man. Thus, he ends up in prison, and after the prison term, he could not or simply did not want to realize himself anew, and therefore he sank to the very bottom.

Image of Satin

Getting acquainted with Satin, we see the unusualness and uniqueness of this hero. He stands out from the crowd, and above all with his clever words. If not for one case, maybe he never ended up in a rooming house, but fate sent a test that he could not pass. Thus, Satin from a successful person who had prospects for the future turns into the dregs of society. He falls to the bottom and becomes an unnecessary person who now prefers doing nothing.

Feature Satin

Continuing to characterize Sateen according to Gorky's work At the Bottom, we see how he ends up in a rooming house, becomes a cheater, he loses the desire to work honestly. Sateen advises others to do nothing, but only to burden life. After leaving prison, he falls into apathy, and shuts himself off from reality. And he's so comfortable. He sinks to the bottom of his own free will, burning through his abilities in wine and card games. Sateen is indifferent to others and for him there are no moral values. Like other heroes, he talks about life and the truth. According to Satin, lies and compassionate words make a person miserable, and do not alleviate suffering in any way. Therefore, he does not support the views of Luke, who scattered comforting words and promises of a better life.

The role of Sateen in the play

Speaking about the role of Sateen in the play, it is safe to say that it is one of the most important. After all, it was Satin who expressed the author's position in many aspects. Therefore, only this cheater was able to entrust the writer with the famous monologue about a person, and that this word sounds proudly. A person must be respected, and not humiliated with pity. Reading the work, you understand that Satin's speech does not quite fit with his role. Somehow it does not fit in my head that it is the cheater who is entrusted with singing the truth. But everything is explained here. Satin himself says that even a sharpie has the right to speak beautifully. After all, decent people can afford to talk like a card sharper.

Satin is one of the central images of M. Gorky's play "At the Bottom", the opposite of the wanderer Luka. Before the rooming house, Satin worked as a telegraph operator, performed on stage, then spent 4 years in prison for standing up for his sister: “I spent four years and seven months in prison ... and after prison, I don’t go.”

Now he is a card cheat. From the replicas of the hero and the comments of other characters, it is clear that Satin is more educated than the others, smarter, read and knows a lot.

He is cruel in his assessments of the “neighbors”, exposes Luke’s “fictions”: Tick, who sold all the tools (and with them the hope for a normal life), is advised to calm down and simply “burden the earth”, he says to the Actor that there are no free hospitals for alcoholics. However, Satin ardently stands up for Luka when the roomers accuse the elder of lying. The hero admits that the wanderer had an effect on him, like acid on an old rusty coin.

Characteristics of the hero

(K.S. Stanislavsky in the role of Satin, a scene from the performance of the Moscow Art Theater based on the play by M. Gorky "At the Bottom", 1902)

Unlike others, Satin no longer dreams of changing something, he understands the depth and hopelessness of the fall. Therefore, he is cheerful, does not whine or complain, is indifferent to people: “People are not ashamed that you live worse than a dog ...” - which means that there is nothing to be ashamed of them: live as you like.

It seems that Satin sees little difference between the rooming house and the rest - prosperous - world. In a rooming house, people suffer from idleness, homelessness, the consciousness of their worthlessness. In a “prosperous” world, people are slaves, slaves of conventions, orders, work: “Work? Make it so that the work is pleasant for me - maybe I will work ... When work is pleasure, life is good! When work is a duty, life is slavery!”

Satin is tired of the whole world order - too monotonous, unfair, predictable. This is manifested symbolically in his play with words: he loves to pronounce little-used words, change them: “I’m tired of all human words, brother… I heard each of them… probably a thousand times… I love incomprehensible, rare words…”

(Old postcard with dialogues from the play "At the Bottom" by Gorky)

Satin is a reasoning hero who migrated from the plays of classicism to realism. Gorky, at that time a romantic, puts many lofty phrases into the hero's mouth, the apotheosis of which is: "Man - it sounds proud."

What kind of person is Sateen talking about? About Bubnov? About Nastya? About Tick? There are no “objects” for pride around him, and we are not talking about the inhabitants of the rooming house. Satin speaks of something else - a free and proud person who "pays for everything himself", "who is his own master."

High and - what is there to be ashamed of - empty so far the words are addressed to some distant future. In Satin - the beginnings of revolutionary sentiments, because the existing world and "people" are hopeless for the hero.

The image of the hero in the work

Satine is the only hero who is able to push off from the "bottom" in order to get to the surface. There is strength in him, he just doesn’t want to “rise” yet, unlike the others.

He is the only one who does not deceive himself about his position, does not dream in vain and does not despise others because of his troubles - he is simply indifferent to rooming houses. Luke Satin is skeptical about the voluntary “mission”: “The dead do not feel ... Shout ... roar ... the dead do not hear!” But Luke interested him: the elder, encouraging others, indirectly awakens in Satine the already forgotten sense of his own importance and strength.

Then these monologues arise about the freedom, pride of a person, about his limitless possibilities, about the desire for creative, not slave labor. Satin speaks for Gorky, expresses his romantic, yet airy and groundless, but inspiring thoughts.

Something in life must change so that people like Satin “break away” from the bottom, begin to work, create, and not just rob and deceive people.

What?.. The structure of society. Satin veiledly recites revolutionary slogans. And it is easy to imagine him in the ranks of sailors, soldiers, workers who will destroy the familiar world with its familiar words.

In the play "At the Bottom" Gorky wanted to describe the real life of people who had descended to the lowest rung of society. To do this, the writer visited shelters, rooming houses, communicated with lost personalities. All of his characters are based on real people whom Gorky met during his travels in Russia. In Moscow at that time there was a Khitrov market, which was a gathering of beggars, thieves, prostitutes and murderers. He became the prototype of the rooming house. In the play, people with different characters and outlooks on life meet under one roof: the gullible Actor, the dreamy Nastya, the terminally ill Anna, the hard-working Kleshch, the compassionate Luka, and the skeptical Satin. Gorky wrote "At the Bottom" to show the life of the lower classes, their hopelessness.

Mistakes of the past and no future

Previously, Satin was a very cheerful and sociable guy, he played on stage, loved to dance, make people laugh. A smart and well-read person could have a wonderful future, but fate decreed otherwise. Defending his sister, Satin killed a man, for which he went to prison, which crossed out his whole life, because no one needs him with a criminal record. The hero does not consider himself alive, he simply exists in Kostylev's rooming house. Drunk, addicted to cards, lost interest in life - that's how Satin ended up at the bottom.

The characteristic of Konstantin shows how apathetic and passive he is in life. Its main motto is "Do nothing". This hero was not just thrown to the bottom, he himself came here, ruined life with his own hands. Hiding from everyone, hiding in the basement, playing cards, drinking money is much more convenient and easier than trying to make your way into the world of normal people, but Konstantin himself wished to stay at the bottom. Sateen's characterization shows that this is a character with a special philosophy of a "free man", for him the truth is most important.

Confrontation of bitter truth and sweet lies

Konstantin Satin is the antagonist of Luke, a wanderer who takes pity on all the inhabitants of the rooming house and invents his own truth for everyone. The new resident instills in others faith in a better future, although he himself does not believe that life can be somehow changed. Luka promises the Actor to give the address of a free hospital for alcoholics, calms the dying Anna, and supports Nastya's illusions. He pities the people who find themselves at the bottom for some reason. Satin, whose characteristic betrays a sane person in him, calls everything a "mirage". It seems that he alone understands the hopelessness of such a life and does not believe the sweet speeches of the wanderer.

The truth sets a man free

From the speeches of the hero and his actions, we can conclude that Satin ended up at the bottom quite by accident. The characterization shows how kind he is in his soul, because he loved his sister, he was the first to run to protect Natasha. The hero does not accept lies, believing that it humiliates him and makes him a slave. Konstantin speaks the right speeches, but it is so difficult to be strong, courageous and independent, because it is much easier to meet Luka and succumb to the temptation to invent an illusory world for yourself. Human weaknesses and what they can lead to are discussed in Gorky's play "At the Bottom". Satin (the characterization speaks of him as an intelligent, but skeptical person looking at the world) does not build an illusory world for himself, he would be happy to believe Luke, but he has no hope for a better future.

"At the bottom"

"philosophy of consolation" Luke. However, Luke not only comforted, but also inspired hope, and sometimes even urged the roommates to change their lives, and there is much in common in the philosophy of Luke and Satine.

"Lie is the religion of slaves and masters. Truth is the god of a free man." Konstantin Satin is one of the inhabitants of the rooming house, a former telegraph operator. In his own words, in his youth he played on the stage, danced well and was a cheerful person; but, having killed the man who deceived his sister, he went to prison and completely changed. Satin is a card sharper and a drunkard, in whose speech the remnants of the former "intelligence" sometimes appear, albeit in a grotesque form. Satin tells the actor that Luka "lied" about the free clinic. Klesh, Anna's husband, who sold all the tools to bury his wife, Satin advises "to do nothing" and "just burden the earth": "Think about it - you won't work, I won't ... hundreds more ... thousands. .. everyone! - you understand? Everyone quits working!" Satin jokingly advises Pepl to kill Kostylev and marry Vasilisa. When the murder does occur, Satine calms Cinder down by volunteering to be a witness for the defense. Despite the ironic attitude towards Luka, after his disappearance, Satin says that he was not a charlatan: "Man, that's the truth! He understood this. He lied ... but this is out of pity for you." Although Satin declares that "lie is the religion of slaves and masters", but, according to him, Luke acted on him, "like acid on an old and dirty coin." Satin pronounces an abstract-“revolutionary” monologue about man as the highest value: “Everything is in a person, everything is for a person. There is only a person, everything else is the work of his hands and his brain! Man! This is magnificent! It sounds. "Proudly! Man! One must respect a man! Do not pity, do not humiliate him with pity... A man is higher than satiety!" Satin owns the last line in the play; to Bubnov's words that the Actor hanged himself, he replies: "Spoiled the song ... fool!"

"Old man? He's smart! He's had an effect on me like acid on an old and dirty coin... Let's drink to his health!" He does not allow a single bad word to be said about Luka: "Be silent! You are all cattle! Dubye ... be silent about the old man! .. The old man is not a charlatan ... I understand the old man ... yes! He lied ... but "It's out of pity for you, damn it! There are many people who lie out of pity for their neighbor... There are lies that are comforting, lies that reconcile..." However, he not only admires Luka, but actually argues with him at the same time. Nevertheless, it is surprising that it is Satin, a drunkard and a card sharper, who pronounces the famous words in this play: "A man - it sounds proud ..." In the first productions, the role of Satin was played by the wonderful Russian artist and theater figure Konstantin Sergeevich Stanislavsky. In his memoirs, he spoke about how Gorky worked on this image, how the image of Satin was created: “He spoke about his wandering life, his meetings, about the prototypes of the characters and about my role as Satin - in particular. It turns out that a tramp, with whom he wrote this role, suffered because of selfless love for his sister. She was married to a postal official. The latter squandered public money. He was threatened by Siberia. Satin got the money and thereby saved his sister's husband, and he brazenly betrayed him, assuring that Satin not clean-handed. Accidentally overhearing slander, in a fit of rage, Satin hit the traitor on the head with a bottle, killed him and was sentenced to exile. His sister died. Then the convict returned from exile and was engaged in walking around the city with his hand outstretched and in French he begged for alms from the ladies, who willingly served him for his picturesque romantic appearance.

"artificiality", "fiction". Leo Tolstoy also told him about this: "You are a romantic, a writer ... You embellish everything: both people and nature, especially people!" But this hardly applies to the play "At the Bottom". After all, Sateen's monologue is the words of a drunken, downtrodden person, in whom the awareness of his own human pride awakens only for a moment. Therefore, the end of the play, realistic and truthful, is the despair of a former person who has become a victim of his fate. This affected Gorky's sense of time, the writer's idea of ​​the tragic era in which he lived.

"Contemporary", the key figure for the play, Sateen, was redrawn. Here, too, the theater tried to return "philosophy" to the real ground of concrete human life. Yevgeny Evstigneev played Satin with rare grace, not being afraid of harsh "reducing" colors and at the same time feeling some kind of spiritual purity of a drunken telegrapher. The words about the "proud man" were born in the rooming house, and it was not at all the proclamation that Gorky proposed to throw into the heated auditorium at the beginning of the century. The modern actor, as it were, followed the advice of Stanislavsky, the first performer of the role, who stubbornly sought a balance between the real figure of a rooming house and the philosophical journalism that he had to throw into the public. Evstigneev spoke "drunkenly and gradually inspired", his voice sounded "not yet completely broken, but for a long time silent strings, the best in his soul." After the phrase "man, this sounds proud," the actor paused, in which, according to the laws of theatrical perception, the viewer put a huge generalizing meaning. The audience saw the ruined life of this sobbing Socrates-Satin sitting on the bunk, the fate of the deceased Luke (it was about him that Satin relentlessly thought), they managed to see during this long pause a lot of other ruined lives that wanted and had to "sound proudly". Sateen's monologue literally lit up with participation in a real, living person.

"Gorky's work is part of the general process of democratization of life. If we imagine the enormous distance that, for example, dramatic art had to go in order to descend from its former, once the only legitimate and possible heroes, from kings and rulers, to the bottom of the sea of ​​life and take as the object of our image slavishly humiliated people, standing on the very border of animal vegetation and, like ears of corn in a field, crumpled and beaten by external blows of fate; if we imagine those barriers that the growing life had to stubbornly break, in order to in order for dramaturgy to be able to divert its attention from the strong to the weak, from the satiated to the hungry, and to embrace with a love picture the backyards of society, the wasteland fenced off from sky and air, the shameless rags that barely cover the tortured human body, then we will have to recognize in this expansion of the sphere artistic reproduction is a deeply significant social fact, a great achievement of justice.

The spiritual life in the Kostylevo basement became more intense with the appearance of the wanderer Luka, the most significant personality among the heroes of the play.

The image of Luke is an image of a wandering common people's philosopher, unprecedented in Russian literature, an image that embodied the search and wanderings of a certain part of the social lower classes, the desire for truth, for "order in life" and for "purity" (that is, for high morality) and confusion of concepts, sober realism of thinking and a fantastic escape to utopian countries created by the imagination of tired workers... consolation, but there is also a share of true sensitivity, there is both its own ethics and its own irony; there is extreme individualism and the desire for a team, there are their own concepts of the state.

There have always been plenty of wanderers in Rus'. When analyzing the play at the bottom, the character of Luka is not quite an ordinary wanderer: he is much smarter, sharper, more insightful than many of his fellows; he is a pretty subtle psychologist. And most importantly, his wanderings took place in an unusual period of history, when the spiritual life of the people took on an increasingly intense character. This desire to comprehend social being and being in general also affected the Gorky hero.

Luka is a tireless observer, he really wants to know how this motley, interesting, terrible, full of injustice and evil life works and how it will work in the future. In it, as Franz Mehring remarked, "there is something philosophical."

In a complex set of concepts and moods of this wandering philosopher, there is a clear hostility to the owners, to the police state, and elements of a skeptical attitude towards the idea of ​​"the existence of God."

However, in the mind of Luke, in his ethical concepts, the Christian principle still makes itself felt. Luke spreads evangelical ethics both in the form of a direct call to “endure”, as Christ commanded, and in the form of a repetition of the thesis beloved by Christians that “we are all strangers on earth”, and especially in the form of an affirmation of universal, indiscriminate pity (“Christ is from felt sorry for everyone...”, “not a single flea is bad”, etc.). Luke's sermon in defense of patience objectively corresponds to Kostylev's "program". That is why Borovsky called Luka a "charlatan of humanity." One should not only reduce Luke to this formula. It is much more complex, more interesting. By the way, in relation to such types as Kostylev, Luke does not at all show Christian meekness, here he is clearly betraying Christianity ...

In an essay on the topic, the image of Luke is a vivid and holistic artistic generalization of the features of the common folk form of Christianity, still clinging to life and trying to fulfill its social function of reconciling slaves with their bitter fate, but already devoid of inner conviction, already corroded by skepticism.

At the same time, the image of Luke is also evidence of the talents hidden among the people. For this man is undoubtedly gifted, original. It has a huge supply of vivacity, healthy humor and poisonous irony, which manifests itself in collisions with the masters of life. The finest Russian artist Nesterov said very well about Luka: “Luke - a peasant, a wanderer, a holy soul, a joker - brings an unusually Russian note to the action, he is a complete optimist and, most importantly, an optimist - alive.”

It is unlikely that we will agree that the image of Luke is a “holy soul”, but a kind of folk optimism is really inherent in him. The life of mankind is presented to Luke as an intricate and complex process, with a variety of aspirations. “And that’s all, I look, people are becoming smarter, more and more interesting ... and even though they live, it’s getting worse, but they want it, everything is better ... stubborn!” Luke encourages such “stubbornness” and believes that sooner or later people (“Everyone is looking for people, everyone wants - the best ...”) will find what they need. Although Luke's belief in the future is abstract, it was socially useful.

In relation to the inhabitants of the rooming house, Luke acts both as a preacher of Christian patience - this, of course, is a harmful part of his philosophy, and as a humanist who has come to a kind of cult of man ("man can do anything") - this Luke, of course, is useful, and simply as smart and cheerful connoisseur of worldly affairs.

Usually condemned by literary critics for hostile attitude to the harsh truth, Luke - that's the paradox of his work! - in each specific situation acts as the most sober, business-like consultant. His practical advice is a kind of minimum program for the inhabitants of the rooming house. He advises the actor to get into a hospital for alcoholics, but for now, “prepare”, that is, stop drinking. The wandering sage advises Ash to take Natasha and leave for Siberia to start a working life there. He advises Natasha to get away from the Kostylevs as soon as possible and reasonably, psychologically subtly explains to her that she can trust Vaska Pepl, since he is “nothing, good guy” and, moreover, he needs her more than she needs him. And he recommends to all the inhabitants of the rooming house (however, this is already beyond the scope of purely practical advice) to respect each other a little more.

In combination with reasonable practicality, Luke's opinion that one should not stun a person with a "butt" of truth lost a significant part of social harmfulness. And in some cases, Luke's artistic fantasies, perhaps, brought some benefit. Couldn’t, for example, the simple-hearted romantic dream of a “righteous land” serve as an impulse for some of the declassed, desperate people to rise above the nightmare and filth of the “Bottom” and reach for a more spiritualized life?

The practical advice received by the Actor, Vaska Pepel and Natasha from Luka was not implemented, but not because the advice was bad, but because the inhabitants of the “bottom” lacked the energy and will to implement them. But the soul of the inhabitants of the rooming house was agitated by the wanderer, their mind began to work more intensively. So, Vaska Pepel - under the influence of Luka - utters words in which the usual nihilism in relation to moral values ​​is already combined with new aspirations and, apparently, gives way to them: “I don’t repent ... I don’t believe in conscience ... But - I feel one thing: we must live ... otherwise! It is better to live! It is necessary to live in such a way ... so that I can respect myself ... "

The most intelligent and intelligent person of the "bottom" - Satin received the strongest spiritual impulses from Luke. Everything that remained in the depths of his soul, serious, real, suddenly stirred up. This is how Sateen's famous tirades about truth, about a man, arise, in which he, somewhat confusedly, but brightly and passionately, takes up arms against the narrow, blind truth of Bubnov or even more insignificant, anecdotal truth of the Baron, who lives as in a dream, weakly and thoughtlessly floating with the flow of life. , and against the gospel suggestions of Luke, covering up the oppression of man by man.

At the same time, Satin, as it were, picks up and raises to the height of the sacred principle Luke’s humanistic thought about the value of a person (“He - whatever he is, but always worth his price”, “Man - can do anything ... if only he wants to ...”, “Respect man..."). What Luke expressed fragmentarily and inconsistently (the theory that large human contingents are valuable not in themselves, but only as material for the best, smacks somewhat of Nietzscheanism), Satin was cleaned up and minted in the form of an aphorism: a person sounds proud .

By nature, Sateen is not a hero of deeds, he is only a hero of his word. However, the excited speeches of Sateen testified that the spark of living life, the spark of the spirit, did not go out on the social “day”. This was evidenced by the painful doubts of other inhabitants of the rooming house. And Luke's intricate sermon, which combined both useful and harmful and soberly realistic and conservative utopian elements, also spoke in its own way about a living spark that flares up in the lower strata of the people. It should not be forgotten that Luke is not a professor, not a publicist, not a priest, he is a simple peasant, an uneducated person, perhaps illiterate. It is all the more remarkable that he lives such an intense spiritual life, is seized by such a restless desire to understand social relations, in various human characters. (“I want to understand human affairs ...”), in what Gorky would later call “hellish turmoil » century.