List all the characters in the story, the Okkervil River. Tatyana thick "okkervil river". The main idea of the stories
Composition
The book of stories by Tatiana Tolstaya "The Okkervil River" was published in 1999 by the Podkova publishing house and immediately became a great reader success.
The writer solves a difficult artistic task - to fix the very moment of this or that human sensation, impression, experience, to look at everyday life from the point of view of eternity. To do this, she turns to the fabulous and mytho-poetic traditions.
The detailed metaphors of T. Tolstoy turn everyday life into a fairy tale, lead away from the problems of everyday life and thus allow the reader to give scope to his imagination, indulge in nostalgic memories and philosophical reflections.
However, the fairy tale is destroyed when confronted with rough reality, as happens, for example, in the story "Date with a Bird". The mysterious sorceress Tamila turns into a degraded girl with the most prosaic problems for the boy Petya. "The mysterious, sad, magical world" becomes for him "dead and empty, soaked in sulfur, deaf, oozing longing."
The conflict of Tolstoy's stories is often the clash of heroes with themselves, with their own existence in its problems and contradictions. “The world is finite, the world is curved, the world is closed, and it is closed on Vasily Mikhailovich” (“Circle”). “Time flows and sways on the back of the boat of dear Shura, and splashes with wrinkles in her unique face” (“Darling Shura”). “... Locked in his chest, gardens, seas, cities tossed and turned, their master was Ignatiev ...” (“Clean Sheet”).
The author's special interest in the images of children and the elderly attracts attention, since both of them do not feel time, they live in their own special closed world. At the same time, the soul of a child is closer to a fairy tale, the soul of an old man is closer to eternity.
T. Tolstaya creates a variety of metaphors for childhood and old age. For example, in the story "The Most Beloved" childhood is depicted as the fifth season of the year: "...childhood stood in the yard." In the story “They sat on the golden porch ...” it is defined as the beginning of the countdown: “In the beginning there was a garden.
Childhood is a golden time when it seems that “life is eternal. Only birds die.
Old age is portrayed by the author as the end of the countdown, the loss of ideas about the sequence of events and the variability of life forms. So, time in the house of Alexandra Ernestovna from the story "Dear Shura" "lost its way, got stuck halfway somewhere near Kursk, stumbled over nightingale rivers, got lost, blind, on the sunflower plains."
In T. Tolstoy's stories, there are generally many characters who have no future, because they live in the grip of the past - their childhood impressions, naive dreams, old fears. Such, for example, are Rimma ("Fire and Dust"), Natasha ("The month came out of the fog"), Peter from the story of the same name.
However, there are also such heroes who live forever - in their love for people and their memory (Sonya from the story of the same name, Zhenya from the story "The Most Beloved"); in his work (Grisha from The Poet and the Muse, the artist from The Hunt for the Mammoth); in the world of his vivid fantasies (Owl from the story "Fakir"). All these are people who know how to transfer their vital energy to others in its most diverse manifestations - through self-sacrifice, art, the ability to live beautifully.
However, almost all the images of T. Tolstoy are paradoxically bifurcated, life situations are portrayed as ambiguous. For example, it is difficult to come to an unambiguous conclusion about who Owl from the story "Fakir" really is. Is it a "giant", "omnipotent master" of the world of dreams or a slave of one's fantasies, "a miserable dwarf, a clown in a padishah's robe"?
Another example of such a bifurcation of the image is found in the story "Darling Shura". Here, the narrator's bright impressions of communicating with Anna Ernestovna contrast sharply with the derogatory descriptions of the old woman: "The stockings are lowered, the legs are under the gateway, the black suit is greasy and worn."
In the story "Sonya" an ambiguous image of a naive "fool" is also created, over which the author is clearly ironic.
Thus, the connection between T. Tolstoy's prose and the traditions of postmodern literature is manifested, in which there is a constant bifurcation of images and a change in the tone of the narration: from compassion to malicious irony, from understanding to mockery.
Many of the characters in her stories are losers, loners, sufferers. Before us appears a kind of gallery of failed "princes" and deceived "Cinderellas" who did not have a "fairy tale of life". And the greatest tragedy for a person occurs when he is "excluded from the game", as happens with one of the most famous Tolstoy characters - Peters, with whom "no one wanted to play."
However, do the characters always find the sympathy of the author?
T. Tolstaya rather does not sympathize with a person, but regrets the transience of life, the futility of human efforts. This is probably why she is ironic about Vasily Mikhailovich from the story “Circle”, who, in search of personal happiness by the numbers on the linen handed over to the laundry, “simply groped in the dark and grabbed the usual next wheel of fate.”
The writer also laughs at Ignatiev, “the ruler of his world, stricken with longing,” who wants to start life from a “blank slate” (“Clean Slate”). She also mocks Zoya's pursuit of family happiness, in which all means are good ("Hunting for a mammoth").
Moreover, such irony is brought by the author to the grotesque. So, Ignatiev does not just want to change his life. He seriously decides on an operation to remove the soul. Zoya, in her struggle for her husband, comes to the point that she throws a noose around the neck of her chosen one.
In this regard, a symbolic image of the "corridor of life" appears in Tolstoy's work: from the corridor of a communal apartment to the image of the life path.
This image also appears in the story "Darling Shura": "the way back along the dark corridor with two teapots in hands is long."
By the end of life, “the light corridor closes” (“Heavenly Flame”). It narrows down to “a tight pencil case called the universe”, “a cold tunnel with frosty walls” (“Circle”), where every human act is rigidly defined and inscribed in advance in the “book of eternity”. In this closed space, "a man struggles, waking up, in the unambiguous grip of his today" ("The month came out of the fog"). This is the time when "life is gone and the voice of the future sings for others" ("Fire and Dust").
However, such characters as the angelic Seraphim from the story of the same name, who hated people, “tried not to look at pig snouts, camel mugs, hippopotamus cheeks,” do not meet with understanding from the author. At the end of the story, he turns into the ugly Serpent Gorynych.
Probably, the author's position is most accurately formulated in the words of Filin, the hero of the story "Fakir": "Let's sigh about the transience of being and thank the creator for giving us a taste of this and that at the feast of life."
This idea largely explains the writer's close attention to the world of things and its detailed depiction in her work. Therefore, another problem of T. Tolstoy's stories is the relationship between a person and a thing, the inner world of a person and the outer world of objects. It is no coincidence that detailed descriptions of interiors often appear in her works: for example, Filin’s apartment (“Fakir”), Alexandra Ernestovna’s room (“Darling Shura”), Zhenechka’s things (“The Most Beloved”), Tamila’s dacha (“Date with a Bird”).
Unlike L. Petrushevskaya, who most often depicts repulsive objects that expose the "animality" of human nature, T. Tolstaya expresses the idea of the value of a thing. In her stories, special objects appear that "leaked through the years" and did not fall into the "meat grinder of time."
On that day”, “encrypted pass there, to the other side”.
Such are Sonya's enamel dove, "after all, fire does not take doves" ("Sonya"); old photographs from Maryivanna's reticule ("Love - do not love"); unused train ticket to a loved one ("Sweet Shura"); Sergey's charred hat (“Sleep well, son”), etc.
The originality of T. Tolstoy's artistic techniques is determined by the problems of her work. Thus, the theme of memories, the power of the past over the present determines the photographic principle of the image: the writer seeks to capture a fleeting impression, a brief moment of life. This is directly stated in the story "Sonya": "... all of a sudden, a sunny room will open up, as if in the air, with a bright, lively photograph ... "
A special role in Tolstoy's stories is played by an artistic detail, which acquires the meaning of a symbol. For example, the ring with a silver toad in the story "Date with a Bird" expresses the idea of destroying children's perception of the world. Owl's silver beard is a sign of belonging to a different, fairy-tale world ("Fakir"). Peters' plush hare from the story of the same name symbolizes unfulfilled childhood hopes and lost illusions of youth.
The style of T. Tolstoy's stories is also peculiar, which is often defined by critics as “ornamental prose”. This concept implies an exquisite style, the use of detailed metaphors, synonymous repetitions.
We can talk about an unusual verbal game in the writer's stories, when one word "pulls" a chain of associations and accompanying comparisons. This reflects the fragmentation and selectivity of human consciousness, which captures only the most memorable episodes of life.
A striking example of this is the beginning of the story "The Most Beloved": "...
Tolstoy's prose is unusually lyrical; many of her stories resemble poetic sketches. In some of them, like a poetic work, even a sound recording appears: “The dream came ... frightening with closets, women, plague buboes, black tambourines ...” (“Petere”).
So, we can say that in the work of T. Tolstoy, prose is combined with poetry, a fairy tale is intertwined with reality. The philosophy and lyricism of this amazing writer are also reflected in her essays "Tourists and Pilgrims" and "Women's Day", also presented in the peer-reviewed collection.
Development of the problem "hero and time" in the story "The Okkervil River"
As we noted above, the category of time is the most important in the poetics of Tolstoy's prose. Even the first critics of the writer's work drew attention to this. "Permanent combination of time layers, alternation of acceleration and deceleration of time", - noted P. Spivak. The author, according to M. Lipovetsky, creates his own chronotope, in which everything is animated.
It should be noted that time in T. Tolstoy's stories is ambivalent, interpenetrating. Often the past flows into the present, the present into the future, and vice versa. A characteristic feature is the dismemberment of the course of time. Chronological jumps, change of acceleration and deceleration are very frequent. Moreover, it is important that the acceleration of the passage of time is associated with the everyday life of the characters, and the slowdown is associated with the most vivid memories. Time, like a memory, stops at the brightest. The beginning and end of time are in eternity.
In all stories, thanks to the hidden or explicit presence of the narrator, the countdown begins from the end, returning through the beginning again to the end. This is how the eternal circle of time is formed - one of the central concepts of T. Tolstoy's poetics.
And at the same time, one should agree with P. Weil and A. Genis, who note that the author's ideal is time that does not go forward, into the future, but in a circle. Tolstaya enjoys special time. The action in her stories takes place not in the past, not in the present, not in the future, but in the time that is always there.
Consider the specifics of the passage of time in the lives of the characters in one of the best stories "The Okkervil River".
This work, written in 1987, raises the theme "Man and Art", the influence of art on man, the relationship of people in the modern world, these are reflections on the relationship between dreams and reality.
The story is built on the principle of "linking associations", "stringing images". Already at the beginning of the work, a picture of a natural disaster - a flood in St. Petersburg - and a story about a lonely, aging Simeonov and his life are combined. Of course, the author’s postmodernist technique is also noticeable: emphasizing the intertextual connection with the “Bronze Horseman” by A.S. Pushkin, where the theme of the greatness of Peter I, his best creation - the most beautiful city of St. an endless and inescapable need for love, purity, self-realization in love relationships and the tragic unfulfillment of these aspirations. Tolstaya is far from the idea that the world is reasonable, she protests against the romantic illusion that life is unconditionally beautiful. Irony in Tolstoy is not just a way to avoid pathos, not armor that protects the innermost, but a necessary feature of artistry, revealing the most natural and humane. The trouble with many of Tolstoy's heroes is that they do not notice the gift of life itself, they are waiting or looking for happiness somewhere outside of reality, while life passes in the meantime. T. Tolstaya shows that dreamy self-deception and the revelation of dreams are part of the natural self-movement of life. This process is typical for both men and women; not only Simeonov can serve as an example of this, but also Galya from the story "Owl", Alexandra Ernestovna ("Dear Shura").
The hero of the story “The Okkervil River” is self-sufficient (high social status, intense spiritual life), and even loneliness, sometimes pushing a person to extreme actions, is perceived here as an integral part of his spiritual world. Unlike the lack of spirituality of many male heroes of female prose, Simeonov is sentimental and impressionable in a feminine way, for many years he has been in love with the singer Vera Vasilievna, every day he listens to a record with her voice and dreams of meeting her, which does not prevent him from meeting a real a woman - Tamara, who sometimes interrupts "precious dates with Vera Vasilyevna." Hours of loneliness become “blissful” for Simeonov, just when no one bothers him, he enjoys the singing of his beloved woman, a distant and unrealizable happiness, because. the hero is actually in love with his dream (but this, as they say, is not a vice). The refinement, although somewhat deliberate, of the hero's experiences is emphasized.
The story can be divided into three time layers: present, past and future. Moreover, the present is inseparable from the past. The author recalls that time is cyclical and eternal: “When the sign of the zodiac changed to Scorpio, it became very windy, dark and rainy.”
Simeonov's bachelor life is brightened up by reading, enjoying the sounds of an old romance. T. Tolstaya masterfully conveys the sound of the old, “anthracite cast circle”:
No, not you! so fervent! I love! - jumping, crackling and hissing, Vera Vasilyevna quickly spun under the needle; ... a divine, dark, low rushed from a scalloped orchid, first lacy and dusty, then swelling with underwater pressure, swaying with lights on the water, - psh - psh - psh, puffy voice ... - no, Vera Vasilievna did not love him so passionately, but still, in essence, only him alone, and this was mutual with them. H-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh-sh. The singer's voice is associated with a caravel rushing through the “night water splashing with lights, radiance blooming in the night sky. And the details of a modest life fade into the background: “processed cheese or ham scraps fished out of the windows”, a feast on a spread newspaper, dust on the desktop.
The inconsistency present in the hero's life is emphasized by the details of the hero's portrait: "On such days ... Simeonov ... installed the gramophone, feeling especially nosy, balding, especially feeling his young years around his face."
The name of the story is symbolic, it encodes the symbol of time - the river. “The Okkervil River” is the name of the final tram stop, a place unknown to Simeonov, but occupying his imagination. It may turn out to be beautiful, where there is a “greenish stream” with a “green sun”, silvery willows”, “humpbacked wooden bridges”, or maybe there “... some nasty factory throws out mother-of-pearl-poisonous waste, or something else, hopeless, marginal, vulgar." The river, symbolizing time, changes its color - at first it seems to Simeonov to be a "muddy green stream", later - "already blooming poisonous greens."
Having heard from the seller of gramophone records that Vera Vasilievna is alive, Simeonov decides to find her. This decision is not easy for him - two demons are fighting in his soul - a romantic and a realist: “one insisted on throwing the old woman out of my head, locking the doors tightly, living as before, loving in moderation, languishing in moderation, listening in solitude to the pure sound of a silver trumpet , the other demon - a crazy young man with a mind clouded from the translation of bad books - demanded to go, run, look for Vera Vasilievna - a blind, poor old woman ... shout to her through years and hardships that she is a marvelous peri, destroyed and raised him - Simeonova, faithful knight, -and, crushed by her silver voice, crumbled ... all the frailty of the world,
The details accompanying the preparation of the meeting with Vera Vasilievna predict failure. The yellow color of the chrysanthemums bought by Simeonov means some kind of disharmony, some sick beginning. This, in my opinion, is evidenced by the transformation of the green color of the river into poisonous green.
Another trouble awaits Simeonov - someone's fingerprint imprinted on the jelly surface of the cake. The following detail speaks of the disharmony of the upcoming meeting: "The sides (of the cake) were sprinkled with fine confectionery dandruff."
As she approaches Vera Vasilievna, the writer reduces her image, accompanying the hero’s path with everyday details, unsightly realities that the dreamer hero tries in vain to subdue to his imagination: to combine with romance lines a back door, garbage pails, narrow cast-iron railings, uncleanliness, a sniffing cat ... " Yes, that's what he thought. The great forgotten artist should live in just such a yard ... Her heart was beating. They bloomed a long time ago. In my sick heart." The hero did not turn off the path, having entered the apartment of Vera Vasilievna, but the reader understands that his beautiful water castle on the Okkervil River is already collapsing. What awaited the hero outside the door of the apartment of the great singer in the past? "He called. (“Fool,” the inner demon spat and left Simeonov.) The door swung open under the pressure of noise, singing and laughter gushing from the bowels of the dwelling, and Vera Vasilyevna immediately flashed. In real life, she turned out to be a huge, ruddy, thick-browed old woman with a booming laugh, with clearly masculine features of behavior. “She laughed in a low voice over the table heaped with dishes, over salads, cucumbers, fish and bottles, and famously drank, enchantress, and famously turned back and forth with her fat body.” The disappointment of the hero is that he was not alone at Vera Vasilievna's house, she did not expect him. The patriarchal nature of Simeonov's convictions is manifested in his sense of possessiveness, emphasized by the unreality of the situation: this feeling manifests itself when seeing guests at the singer's birthday: "She cheated on him with these fifteen ..." The writer's unrequited feeling of the hero is brought to absurdity: she cheated on him was in the world, only the wind stirred the grass and there was silence in the world.
The meeting with the dream, with the living, but different Vera Vasilievna, completely crushed Simeonov. When he got to the singer's birthday, he saw the routine, lack of poetry and even vulgarity in the person of one of the singer's many guests, Kisses. Despite the romantic surname, this character stands firmly on the ground, is purely businesslike and enterprising.
At the end of the story, Simeonov, along with other fans, helps brighten up the singer's life. This is humanly very noble. But poetry and charm have disappeared, the author emphasizes this with realistic details: “Bent in his lifelong obedience,” Simeonov rinses the bath after Vera Vasilievna, washing off “gray pellets from the dried walls, picking out gray hair from the drain hole.”
The story ends, as it began, with the image of a river. “The gramophone started kissing, a wondrous, growing thunderous voice was heard ... soaring over the steamed body of Verunchik, drinking tea from a saucer, ... over everything that cannot be helped, over the approaching sunset, ... over nameless rivers, flowing backwards, overflowing their banks, raging and flooding the city as only rivers can do.” And this is exactly the feature of Tolstoy's style, which we noted above - the circularity of time, the movement in a circle.
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1 As a manuscript SERGEEVA Elena Alexandrovna Poetics of stories by Tatyana Tolstaya: collection "The Okkervil River" as an artistic system Specialty: Russian literature Abstract of the dissertation for the degree of candidate of philological sciences Saratov 2013
2 The work was carried out at the Department of Russian, Foreign Literature and Methods of Teaching Literature of the Federal State Budgetary Educational Institution of Higher Professional Education "Volga State Social and Humanitarian Academy" Scientific Supervisor Official Opponents Ph.D. Academy of Humanities Doctor of Philology, Professor Vanyukov Alexander Ivanovich, Professor of the Department of Modern Russian Literature, Saratov State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky Candidate of Philology Nemtsev Leonid Vladimirovich, Associate Professor of the Department of Russian Language and Literature of the Samara State Academy of Culture and Arts Leading organization Ulyanovsk State Technical University at a meeting of the dissertation council D on the basis of the Saratov State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky" (410012, Saratov, Astrakhanskaya st., 83) in the XI building. The dissertation can be found in the Zonal Scientific Library of Saratov State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky. The abstract was sent out in 2013. The scientific secretary of the dissertation council Yu.N. Borisov
3 3 GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE WORK This dissertation is devoted to the poetics of Tatyana Tolstaya's "small" prose as a bright representative of the ontological pessimism of the post-Soviet era, the so-called "Soviet Baroque". In the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya there is no detailed picture of Soviet reality and no attempt to describe all layers of social pessimism. Her stories are formed from personal memories, from private stories. The characters of her stories are nannies known from childhood, aged actresses, elderly people... The action takes place in dachas, in Moscow and St. Petersburg living rooms. In T. Tolstoy's stories, human destiny gradually reveals its pathological helplessness and meaninglessness. The concept of "ontological pessimism" arose in philosophical and psychological studies in connection with the phenomenon of "insufficiency", which was studied by two series of philosophers, dividing this concept into two terms: lack (M. Heidegger, J.-P. Sartre, K. Jaspers) and insufficiency (A. Gehlen, H. Plessner, M. Bakhtin). Perhaps, in Soviet practice, the same experience of the “insufficiency of being” led to a general repression of the problem. This state of affairs seemed normal, since it concerned everyone, and a special artistic understanding of the problem was required. Direct forms of expressing pessimism were limited by Soviet censorship, but received priority incarnation in the works of "samizdat" and in the perestroika era. It is this pessimistic mood that is reflected in the stories of T. Tolstoy and influences their poetics. In the stories of T. Tolstoy, a system is revealed, all elements of which reflect ontological pessimism as a formative principle. This term “shaping principle” originates from scientific works on linguistics, music and architecture, since the general understanding of form and its structure affects all elements of poetics and is equated in its meaning with the process of implementing an artistic idea. The term was introduced into modern literary criticism by M.A. Milovzorova in her dissertation “Form formation of Russian drama: Traditions of stage literature of the 1990s and the work of A.N. Ostrovsky" (Ivanovo, 2003). The relevance of the study is caused by the need to study the specifics of the new artistic paradigm that developed in the 1990s. 20th century in Russian prose. The literature of this period demonstrates the diversity of aesthetic structures and trends, the richness of individual artistic systems. One of the general trends should include the ethics of pessimism as the leading philosophical principle in shaping the image of reality. A vivid example of such a beginning is the stories of T. Tolstoy. In this regard, there is an urgent need for a literary analysis of the artistic structure, poetics and problems of the writer's stories, for the development of new approaches and techniques for their interpretation, which would make it possible to determine the philosophical and aesthetic features of the individual author's concept in building an artistic model.
4 4 life in post-Soviet Russia. On the example of T. Tolstoy's "small" prose, we highlight the characteristic artistic principles and elements of poetics that characterize the cultural situation after the era of stagnation. Creativity T. Tolstoy gave rise to a large wave of controversial criticism. Ontological pessimism was assessed in a negative or neutral tone, either as an individual property of the writer, or as the main tone of the era. We proceed from the fact that the author's worldview and the poetics of his works represent an artistic integrity, which means that the writer's work is conducive to the analysis of ontological pessimism as a formative principle. The object of this dissertation research is the "small" prose of T. Tolstoy. The material of the study was a collection of short stories by the writer "The Okkervil River" (1999) in its artistic integrity. Other collections of stories by T. Tolstoy are considered in connection with the fact that they are composed of the same stories on the principle of representing a new aesthetic model. The named collection completes not only fifteen years of the author's creative activity, but also a whole century of Russian culture. The main body of stories was created in the years, the subject matter of the stories refers to the Soviet era, in which the formation of the author's personality took place. We dwell on the collection “The Okkervil River” as a publication that appeared at a significant moment in history, and we believe that the composition of the collection has developed as a well-thought-out and holistic precisely in relation to the era that has ended. We also repeatedly refer to the novel "Kys" (2000) and the author's journalism. The subject of the study is the problematics and poetics of the writer's stories as a special artistic system that expresses the author's original worldview through a number of specific features of poetics. The purpose of this work is to identify and analyze the features of the poetics of the collection "The Okkervil River" by T. Tolstoy as an artistic system. Achieving this goal involves solving the following tasks: - to determine the place of T. Tolstoy's "small" prose in the post-Soviet literary process; - to give a theoretical justification for the concepts of "artistic system" and "collection of stories as an artistic integrity" on the example of T. Tolstoy's stories; - characterize the nature of ontological pessimism in the artistic system of the writer's stories and, in this regard, consider such features of the poetics of her works as detail, portrait, landscape, time and space; - to explore from the point of view of narrative poetics the image of the narrator and the image of the author in the stories of the collection "The Okkervil River"; - to analyze the ways of creating a kind of myth and the specifics of the intertextual game principle in stories. The theoretical basis of this study was the work of M. M. Bakhtin, V. V. Vinogradov, B. O. Korman, E. M. Meletinsky, V. P. Skobelev, I. S. Skoropanova, L. I. Timofeev, V. E. Khalizeva,
5 5 L. V. Chernets; as well as N.L. Leiderman, M.N. Lipovetsky, M. A. Chernyak, etc. The system of scientific terms used in the dissertation work has developed taking into account the fundamental categories developed in fundamental research by S. S. Averintsev, R. Bart, V. M. Zhirmunsky, Yu. M. Lotman , V. Ya. Propp, B. V. Tomashevsky, as well as in the latest collective works on theoretical and historical poetics. In the course of the work, the following research methods were used: a systematic and comparative analysis of a literary text, typological and historical approaches, thanks to which the relationship between the poetics of T. Tolstoy's "small" prose with the modern literary process and the traditions of Russian classics is traced. The scientific novelty and originality of the research lies not only in revealing the end-to-end aesthetic and philosophical mood, which "genetically" determines the birth of a group of works in their structural unity and explains the appearance of each "brick" of the existing art form. For the first time, within the framework of literary research, ontological pessimism is considered as the main worldview of Russian culture at the end of the last century, and the impact of this worldview on the artistic form is studied. Also in the dissertation research, an attempt was made to analyze the multi-aspect collection of stories "The Okkervil River" as an artistic system in comparison with the events of Russian history and culture of the twentieth century. The theoretical significance of the work lies in identifying the formative role of the philosophical mood of the era (ontological pessimism), in comprehending the original artistic world of the writer, in reconstructing the creative dialogue of T. Tolstoy with the literary tradition and at the same time with the aesthetics of postmodernism. The practical significance of the dissertation. The materials and results of the thesis can be used in the development of bachelor's and master's lecture courses on modern Russian prose, special courses on Russian literature of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, courses and electives for the disciplines of specialization "History of Russian literature", "Modern Russian literature", "Theory literature”, as well as school electives. The following provisions are put forward for defense: 1. T. Tolstoy's work is considered as an aesthetic integrity, which is built at the junction of traditional realistic tendencies in Russian prose and Russian postmodernism (as a conventional name for the period of Russian literature in the 1900s of the 20th century). ). 2. The stories of T. Tolstoy in each separate edition represent a new kind of integral artistic structure, and therefore each collection of stories requires a separate interpretation. 3. Ontological pessimism, as the philosophical and artistic mood of the era, is the form-building principle for T. Tolstoy's "small" prose, it gives rise to the search for new artistic means, the elimination of traditional poetics.
6 6 4. The author's position, the images of the narrators, the skaz narration (the tale of the Soviet intelligentsia), along with citation, mythological symbols and folklore motifs in T. Tolstoy's stories, are transformed into the myth of the Russian intelligentsia of the Soviet period. Approbation of the dissertation. The main provisions of the study were presented at scientific conferences: international (Samara, 2003; Stavropol, 2006; Volgograd, 2006), regional (Samara, 2006), interuniversity (Samara, 2005; Saratov, 2005). The results of the study are reflected in 10 publications, of which 3 are in publications recommended by the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Education and Science of Russia. Work structure. The dissertation consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion, a list of references (296 titles). The total volume of the dissertation is 196 pages. THE MAIN CONTENT OF THE THEsis The introduction defines the general direction of the research, formulates the goal and objectives, substantiates the relevance of the work, its scientific novelty, theoretical significance and practical value, outlines the main provisions submitted for defense, describes the material and research methods. An overview of critical works devoted to the work of T. Tolstoy is given, the place of the writer in the modern literary process is determined. The first chapter is titled "The Specificity of the Artistic Integrity of the Collection of Stories by T. Tolstoy "The Okkervil River"". The first paragraph, "The Poetics of the Short Story at the End of the 20th Century," examines the development of the short story genre at the end of the 20th century. It is in this genre that the significance of the culture of postmodernism is most clearly represented. Western postmodernism has marked a dead end: every thesis in art reproduces something that is itself a reproduction. Reality disappears, is dismantled, and therefore philosophy and art do not have time to duplicate life. Russian postmodernism does not mean the end of literature as such, but its release from under the layer of mythical ideas, the emancipation of form. But in this process a new mythology inevitably arises (neomythologism). Russian postmodern prose returns "the humanistic dimension of reality, focusing on the ordinary human destiny and, thereby, undermining the postmodern axiom that reality is just a collection of simulacra" 1. The subject of literature is the previous culture: high and low, sacred and profane, high style and semi-literate vernacular, poetry and thug jargon. Postmodernism is called “a secondary artistic system that explores not reality, but past ideas about it, mixing them chaotically, bizarrely and unsystematically” and 1 Lipovetsky M. Getting rid of death // Znamya S. 197.
7 7 rethinking” 2. The main concepts that define the poetics of postmodern literature are “the world as a text”, “intertext”, “intertextuality”, “simulacrum”, “deconstruction”, etc. All these features of postmodernism are reflected in modern Russian a story in which two contrasting tendencies coexist: the desire for documentary and the violation of plausibility. There is an increase in the role of convention in short stories, the alternation of past, present and future time, there is a lack of spatial certainty, temporal sequence in a number of stories. Many short stories are characterized by a conditionally eccentric principle of plot formation, associative overtones, and fairy-tale elements. The modern story is distinguished by the use of contrast, social antithesis often becomes the basis of the composition. The principle of montage serves as a means of expanding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the work. Hence the frequent spatial breaks, change of scene, event incompleteness. Writers also do not forget about the methods and means of psychological analysis: fixing the hero's moods, describing external actions, artistic details, psychological gestures, and characters' inner speech. The problem of artistic integrity remains especially important in matters of the poetics of a work of art. The principle of aesthetic integrity is based on the requirement to correlate any element with the whole and to express this whole in any detail. That is, the whole is the main thing and it must be seen before the parts. Based on the theory of artistic integrity, the author of the dissertation research comes to the conclusion that the collection of stories requires special consideration in its unity. The artistic unity of the collection of stories is revealed on the basis of its internal structural connections (development of themes, motives, commonality of poetic components). The poetics of a collection of short stories is built on the same principles as the poetics of a single story. The aesthetic integrity of the collection of stories makes it necessary to analyze the book as a system, as a structural organization. The second paragraph “Ontological pessimism as a worldview. The Plot Dominant of the Collection of Short Stories "The Okkervil River"" is dedicated to the consideration of ontological pessimism as a phenomenon of the era of stagnation and the discovery of this philosophical dominant of the era in the plot constructions of the writer: the plot of the story and the "plot" of the collection of stories. In social psychology, the optimism / pessimism of the individual was considered mainly as its "innate" property or as a result of the first stages of socialization (in the classical works of H. Cantril and J. Friedman). Social conditions were described by psychologists as one of the most important circumstances of optimism, not only at the stage of socialization, but also in determining the current state of the individual (Ed Diener). Within the framework of the psychological tradition, the optimism of the individual was associated not so much with the future that she foresaw, but with the level of satisfaction of a person.
8 8 current well-being and its general positive or negative perception of life (N. M. Bradburn, A. H. Maslow). Pessimism, fixing not only the attitude to the current situation, but the expected future, was used extremely rarely in sociological research (L. Keselman, M. Matskevich), but became the content of the literature of the stagnation period and especially the period of perestroika. In the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya, ontological pessimism is manifested in a number of formulas that accompany the vicissitudes or climax of the story: “Goodbye, pink palace, goodbye dream! .. and our god is dead, and his temple is empty” (Fakir, 217) 3 ; “Not everyone in life is happy” (Hunting for a mammoth, 185); “Ignatiev felt tobacco bitterness and knew that it was true” (Clean List, 164); You came into this world by mistake! Get out of here, he's not for you!" (Night, 110); “A spider will braid the keyhole, and the house will fall asleep for another hundred years” (The Most Beloved, 162); “But the consolation was false and weak, because everything is over, life showed its empty face” (Fire and Dust, 90). Pessimism is the main tone of the narrator's consciousness; it acquires the status of an artistic message. In the story "Clean Sheet" (a dystopia that imitates the central theme of Zamyatin's novel "We"), the hero has the power to "want to be healthy" (Clean Sheet, 168), but this does not mean genuine deliverance, we are talking about the amputation of the soul, that is, optimism is possible only as a result of a private operation, after which a person becomes rude, straightforward and cheerful, but no longer carries the Living in himself. The other side of Tatyana Tolstaya's pessimistic story is a broader picture of cultural and political stagnation. Ontological pessimism in art takes the form of an unfinished action: one must reach the bottom in order to begin to rise. In Soviet times, art had practically no internal opportunities for a genuine “take-off”, artists had to recognize and comprehend the ambiguity of the mood of the era. T. Tolstaya feels her creative task in fixing the current situation, in recognizing the catastrophe at the level of worldview, artistic vision and the author's position. As a result, ontological pessimism begins to serve as a "guiding law", a "matrix" for the consistent emergence of a literary text. A literary work is not simply divided into separate interconnected parts, layers or levels, but in it each macro- and microelement bears the imprint of that unique artistic world, of which it is a particle. The formative principle acquires the right to “represent the whole integral artistic world in its structural and content originality”, since in it “one way or another 3 T. Tolstoy's stories are quoted according to the publication: Tolstaya T.N. Okkervil river. M., Further in the text, in parentheses, the title of the story and the page of the indicated edition are given.
9 9 that system-creating spiritual and creative unity is embodied, which gives life to the whole work and is its general artistic idea. Formation is a decisive stage of artistic creativity, in its process both the functional characteristics of the object of creativity and its artistic solution are fixed. In accordance with its purpose, a specific object-spatial environment has specific functional and informational qualities, which are determined by the emotional content of individual processes of activity. Shaping can be viewed mainly as the design of an art form. But it can be argued that forms primarily structure the real environment of life processes and therefore are closely related to the whole complex of socio-economic, functional, technical and other objective factors. In the previous paragraph, we proved that pessimism is a turning point in the awareness of the cultural situation, it is a form of the need to realize one's position. Ontological pessimism, like any other formative principle, has an impact on all levels of a literary text and can significantly help in considering the poetics of Tolstoy's works. The stories that make up the collection "The Okkervil River" contain plot and compositional devices subordinated to ontological pessimism. The study moves from the analysis of plot constructions to smaller elements of poetics, continuing the search for the formative influence of ontological pessimism. The third paragraph “Artistic detail. Portrait. Landscape" considers these elements in the collection of stories "The Okkervil River". Russian postmodernism discovered the misfortune of Russia not just in the devaluation of true values, but in their complete loss. Each writer reflected this situation in his own way, exaggerating its signs, bringing them to the point of absurdity, building his artistic world "on the inconsistency of everything with everything." The world of fundamental alogism, as a terrible legacy of the Soviet era, a global violation of causal relationships, a crazy and soulless world accepted by society as the norm: this is the source of the tragedy of the current situation. Objectivity, love for things, piling up of details, the entire material world of the works of the "Soviet baroque" is shrouded in an atmosphere of ontological pessimism. The details-hints are considered in the stories of Tolstoy in the most detail. It is they who have a special structure-forming role, since the subtext is created through a dispersed, distant repetition, all the links of which enter into complex relationships with each other, from which their new, deeper meaning is born. 4 Girshman M.M. Literary work: the theory of artistic integrity. 2nd ed., add. M., S. 17.
10 10 Portraits in T. Tolstoy's stories are expressive and colorful. Preference is given to ironic or satirical portraits, while only the face of the hero or the whole figure, clothes, gestures, manners can be described. The portrait in the stories of T. Tolstoy is mostly fragmentary, it is refined as the story unfolds: not the whole appearance of the hero is depicted, but only a characteristic detail, a trait; at the same time, the author powerfully influences the reader's imagination, the reader becomes, as it were, a co-author, completing the portrait of the hero in his own mind. The originality of the artistic details of T. Tolstoy is determined by the problems of her work. Thus, the theme of memories, the power of the past over the present determines the photographic principle of the image: the writer seeks to consider the already recorded fleeting impression, a brief moment of life. Tolstoy's artistic detail does not perform the function of preserving memory, stopping or fixing certain time and space. Its aesthetic role marks the disappearance at the level of the object or at the level of symbolic content. The detail masks the mythological destructiveness of the narrative. Artistic details, portrait and landscape equally participate in the structure of the artistic image: not a single detail goes aside from the portrait characterization, conveying the mood of the story and from the ideological formative principle. Touching upon the problems of time and space in the fourth paragraph "Artistic time and artistic space in the stories of T. Tolstoy as a form of spiritual stagnation", it is impossible to avoid the need to determine the historical time in which the stories under study were created. In Tolstoy's stories, the finiteness of existence is the central plot unit. This arranges the time in the stories accordingly. The analysis of artistic time and space in T. Tolstoy's stories has many aspects. Just as the situation of the work is formed by oppositions, differences in the characters of the characters, temporal, spatial oppositions can also be traced: one's own / someone else's, real / unreal (for example, in a dream); the hero of Tolstoy can recall the past with nostalgia or, on the contrary, with horror, etc. The artistic space in Tolstoy's stories is as subjective as artistic time. T. Tolstaya dooms the heroes to the transition from one "narrowly terrible" space to another, which is no better than the previous one. The image of the Okkervil River is an image of a ruthless eternity, into which everything valuable goes, soaring, and everything mundane is flooded by it. The emerging opposition of the real world of “gray habit” and Eternity (the river of time) comes from the formative principle of ontological pessimism and reflects cosmological mythology: everything must perish in order for something new to arise. "Soviet baroque" did not try to substantiate eschatological premonitions. Optimism is recognized as a weak position, while in
In Pushkin's time, he was considered a manifestation of creativity: one had to try to see the value of life, this was the manifestation of a natural gift. Baroque is to the strongest degree a culture that expresses not the fear of death and the search for salvation, but the desire for a historical, "state" death. This culture is reminiscent of Romantic Gothic, it concerns the inevitable death of the individual along with the death of the world. If salvation is possible, then let it happen, but for now we must deal with this world. The reason for this attitude lies in the global cultural phenomenon of the era of stagnation. A model of society arose in which, as if there were no person, all elements of the socio-political system acted as if automatically, and the final result was programmed. Complacency, complacency, total hypocrisy, these moods should be considered the source of the ontological pessimism of the main worldview of the postmodern era. The work of Tatyana Tolstaya emerges from these historical conditions. Its ways of artistic reflection of time and space are subject to the principle of a negative assessment by the intelligentsia of their era. We can say that much in these forms is the result of reflecting the cultural situation. Time has not moved or changed. This created the psychological prerequisites for the realization of one's existence as a dream, a bad fantasy, an endless repetition. The space of the Soviet Union was limited, it was impossible to leave the country, the world was closed by the Iron Curtain, and there was no contact with it. It is this state of time and space that we see in the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya. The phenomenon of "stagnant" chronotope is reflected in the fact that the conceived author of the era of postmodernism, a radical pessimist, influences the author of the biographical one. The artistic system at the level of culture determines the perception of reality, does not pass as a terrible traumatic experience and continues to testify to a global catastrophe in Russian culture. In the Conclusions based on the materials of the first chapter, we identified the leading typological features of the collection of stories "The Okkervil River": - at the level of content, there is a tendency for plots to maintain logical uncertainty through the cult of ambiguities, errors, omissions, hints; - at the level of value oppositions, there is a shift towards decanonization, a constant struggle with traditional values (doubt about the sacred, in culture, in man, in the Logos). The oppositions good evil, love hate, laughter horror, beautiful ugly, life death are blurred or consciously and purposefully destroyed; - at the level of composition, it is possible to reveal the fragmentation of the text and the principle of arbitrary editing, the combination of the incongruous, the use of things for other purposes, disproportion, violation of proportions, disharmony, the establishment of new connections. T. Tolstaya referred to arbitrary montage in the story “The Plot” (meaning a set of quotes from the classics). In the novel "Kys" the alphabet is used as the main compositional principle. Arbitrary montage is a postmodern characteristic, it manifests itself
12 12 in a whole set of characteristic means: polytextuality, intertextuality, saturation of the text with extra-textual allusions, reminiscences, the presence of a wide cultural context. All these signs are present in the collection of stories by T. Tolstoy; - at the level of the character and the author, the idea of a person is manifested from the point of view of ontological pessimism, in the decision of the character of the hero, the primacy of the tragic over the ideal, the triumph of the irrational principle is easily noted; - at the level of aesthetics, shock, outrageous, challenge, brutality, protest against the classical forms of beauty, traditional ideas of harmony and proportionality are emphasized; - at the level of artistic principles and techniques, inversion (the principle of turning over), irony, the destruction of the sign system as a sign of the triumph of chaos in reality, the game as a way of existing in reality and art, a form of interaction between literature and reality, the possibility of hiding true thoughts and feelings, the destruction of pathos are noted . These brightest elements of T. Tolstoy's creativity are considered in detail in the Second Chapter, which refers to the analysis of the artistic narrative and the image of the author. The second chapter "Poetics of narration in the collection of short stories by T. Tolstoy as a manifestation of the artistic system" consists of four paragraphs. The first, titled "Fictional Narrative and the Image of the Narrator", examines the role of the author in the narrative. The accentuation of the author's image, the demonstrativeness of the creative process, exposing the playful nature of artistic reality, all this testified to the fact that, in fact, in the prose of the "new wave" the features of the prose of the 1920s and 30s clearly came to life. Against the backdrop of "late stagnation" literature, these features of postmodern poetics were able to give the impression of radical novelty. In the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya, a figure appears that is synonymous with the author-creator and at the same time is not limited to the functions of the narrator (confirmation of the words of the writer herself: “I am the owner of the theater, I am Karabas Barabas, and I give the dolls the roles that they will play. They are all on strings with me , naturally" 5). This figure emphasizes the demonstrative composition, the madeness of the artistic world, while the figure of the conceived author is dependent on the artistic reality he himself created. The author gets used to his characters, imitates them, and the whole text turns into an artistic act of the author. In the stories of the writer, the narration is often organized by the point of view of a strange hero. Often this is a marginal: a holy fool, a madman, a person who finds himself beyond the boundaries determined by society. Such a choice of the image of the narrator already creates the prerequisite for the grotesque, and this destroys the usual ideas, unites the incompatible, strange metamorphoses occur. A marginal hero, especially if identified with him 5 Postmodernists on postculture: Interviews with contemporary writers and critics. M., S. 158.
13 13 the narrator and the Author himself, get an unprecedented freedom of fantasizing. Such a hero is capable of being not only beyond the bounds of traditional culture, but generally beyond the bounds of modern ethics and beyond the limits of the artistic canon. It is this transition that is mainly exploited by Russian postmodernism. The image of the narrator in Tolstoy's stories, like other elements of poetics, is subject to ontological pessimism as a formative principle. The author's mask involves the removal of the author's position from the text, but, despite the fact that the author's position is reduced, masked in specific cases, in specific stories, it is assembled into a certain whole worldview at the level of basic motives, formal techniques and manifests itself as a holistic ideological and artistic principle in the structure of a storybook. The narrator in Tolstoy's stories, as is typical of the literature of Russian postmodernism, is a "literary mask", which implies a certain communicative connection with the reader, but instead of a writer, a biographical person, a fictitious image is used. Sometimes this image takes on a concrete shape (especially when it is identified with characters): this is an educated and well-read intellectual who is in a state of eschatological revelation. Neither the character nor the narrator in Tolstoy's stories are able to escape from the given coordinate system. And since these coordinates are set by the author, the author himself at all levels of the narrative supports the idea of the categorical conditionality and dependence of the world on its eschatological destiny. The narrative structure is subject to the formal logic of the author's message, it "stagnates", constantly returning the reader to a pessimistic vision. Not a single element of poetics goes beyond the limits of an artistic system built on the principle of ontological pessimism. Further study of the poetics of narrative leads us to the need to consider Tolstoy's narrative form as a way of creating the myth of the "modern time". This is not a hypothetical myth (representation of modernity from the point of view of future generations), but an already established form of mythological consciousness. The era of stagnation, the stopped time, which in itself is productive for the mythological perception of reality, becomes in Tatyana Tolstaya's prose an artistic myth of the Soviet intelligentsia, a myth with an eschatological bias. Only this could lead to the possibility of further existence, to an exit from cyclic determinism, to new forms of consciousness. In Tolstoy's stories, only the myth of the Soviet intelligentsia itself is recreated, and no way out is assumed within the myth. Such a scheme is adequate to the historical and cultural situation, it is a statement and evidence of the humanitarian catastrophe that Russian culture experienced in Soviet reality. The next paragraph is called "Mythologization of the intelligentsia of the era of stagnation at the level of the author's image." The images of the storytellers created in Tatiana Tolstaya's short stories have common features, which allows us to speak of the writer's stories as a metatext and the image of the narrator as a
14 14 a holistic phenomenon, manifested in all the texts of Tatyana Tolstaya's "small" prose. Traditionally, such an image of the narrator is similar to the image of the author, who temporarily gives way to him. The line between narrator and author is never emphasized. If the narrator is a carrier of ontological pessimism, then the author does not argue with him, and if he admits some other vision, then he does not allow the narrator to find out about him. In some stories, the similarity of the narrator with the biographical author is emphasized: a representative of the metropolitan intelligentsia (the action associated with memories takes place mainly in Leningrad, but the events of the 1980s are transferred to Moscow), who grew up in a large family with nannies, a country summer, curious acquaintances with representatives of pre-war or even pre-revolutionary times. The result of Tolstoy's intellectual myth is hopelessness. It is no coincidence that images of a narrowing corridor of the future or a circle appear as a cultural form of stagnation. “The world is finite, the world is curved, the world is closed, and it is closed on Vasily Mikhailovich” (Krug, 51), “... he simply groped in the dark for the usual next wheel of fate and, intercepting the rim with both hands, in an arc, in a circle would get, in the end, to yourself on the other side ”(Circle, 54). The heroes of Tatiana Tolstaya's stories are in for an obligatory eschatological catastrophe at the level of the plot or at the level of ontological revelation, and only the author can keep the idea of the subsequent resurrection of the myth. T. Tolstaya is consistent in the embodiment of ontological pessimism at all levels of poetics, including the image of the author. Demythologization, desacralization and destructive completion of the catastrophe, the destruction of the cultural myth in the final radical act, the recognition of the death of the deity, all these are signs of the approaching eschatological situation. Of course, such desacralization becomes possible only because the myth of the Soviet intelligentsia is exposed in the fact that the intelligentsia ceases to be the guardian of the highest values and turns to the petty-bourgeois ideal. The image of the author Tatyana Tolstaya is based on a paradoxical combination of the demonstrative fabulousness of any, including, and above all, the author's time and space, and a gradually opening ontological convention that has no outcome. This is what the style of postmodern prose looks like, which is focused on playing with the mythologies of creativity and representatives of the creative intelligentsia. The third paragraph "The stream of consciousness and the tale as a way of creating a myth" is devoted to the consideration of the main speech techniques in the poetics of Tatyana Tolstaya's stories. The writer, adhering to the framework of the external plot, constantly uses the narrator's improperly direct speech, the stream of consciousness (of the hero or the narrator), tale forms, internal monologues. The internal monologue is often dramatic. With Tatyana Tolstaya, it is not only dramatic, it is an expression of the worldview, a kind of ideological outcome. It is noteworthy that such a monologue not only borders on the stream of consciousness, but flows into it. Here is one of many examples: “It was getting dark. The autumn wind played with papers, scooped from the urns Beef bones stood at the stale counter,
15 15 Rassvet puree. Well, let's wipe away the tears with our fingers, smear them on our cheeks, spit on the lamps: our god is dead, and his temple is empty. Farewell” (Fakir, 217). The stream of consciousness presupposes an impartial registration of heterogeneous manifestations of the psyche, clothed in a verbal form. In the stream of consciousness, thoughts and semi-conscious volitional impulses, memories and momentary impressions merge, which are most often transmitted without any logical and causal connection on the principle of sound, visual and other associations. Tatyana Tolstaya in this technique not only conveys the state of the hero, but often moves forward in the plot and combines a dream and a memory, moments of the present and the past into one narrative image. And yet the main form of the verbal organization of the text in Tatyana Tolstaya is an unexpected form of a tale. The tale takes the form of expressing "high consciousness", namely, in the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya, the tale of the Soviet intelligentsia unfolds. For Tatyana Tolstaya, the tale has become a completely natural form of conveying the speech, intonation and attitude of the Soviet intelligentsia, with its level of citation of poets of the Silver Age and other poets of the era of modernism. Tatyana Tolstaya's tale has many analogues in the works of her contemporaries: A. Bitov (the main creator of the intellectual myth), E. Schwartz, N. Sadur. But there are especially many calls in "professional dialect" specificity or creative manner with Sasha Sokolov. In the novel "Kys" the narrator is also related to an intelligent environment: the presence of professional vocabulary in the narrator's speech indicates his belonging to the professional environment of "scribe scribes", the use of literary vocabulary indicates his higher cultural level than that of the main characters of the novel (with the exception of Former ones). The form of the tale in the works of Tatyana Tolstaya also has one more specificity - a way of mythologizing what is happening, giving the narrative the status of a poetic chronicle about unknown destinies. In Tolstoy's stories, the "little man" struggles with the elements of life, with the annihilating energy of time. This struggle and this feeling unites the heroes, the narrator and the author, and the poetic tale form becomes a means of tragic escape from the chaos of everyday life into spiritual depths. The construction of the text by Tatiana Tolstaya is subject to the search for verbal fantasy, an exit into myth. The plot, as a rule, is rigidly determined, and there is no exit to a positive ending in the plot. This is not the task of the writer (she, like all Russian postmodernists, considers a happy ending to be in bad taste), but it is important for her to create a situation in which the hero begins reflection, then this reflection is picked up by the narrator, a tale digression is made in order to leave a verbal twist in the spirit of poetic fiction . And in the forms of a tale, as was the case with Gogol’s “lyrical digressions” or Nabokov’s intoxication with the smallest details, the author’s main intention is manifested – the liberating energy of the imagination, a failure into the inner world (of the author or reader) from the framework of a strictly determined plot.
16 16 The fourth paragraph "The role of quotations and intertextual game principle" is devoted to revealing the functionality of literary allusions in T. Tolstoy's texts. The technique of a large concentration of quotations (this is almost a centonal narration) from Tolstoy's story "The Plot" is considered. In this passage, the delirium of the poet, seriously wounded in a duel, is conveyed (in the story, Pushkin will survive after the duel and live to an advanced age). The text of the story consists almost entirely of quotations, and most of them are from works that Pushkin could not have known. Such a game is carried out in line with Russian postmodernism. The picture created by these quotations is a textbook set from the consciousness of the Soviet intellectual. These quotes are typical of an educated person of the late twentieth century. The general character of the story is a "crazy" combination of intertextual elements not by Pushkin, but by the author as a representative of the Soviet intelligentsia. The analyzed text in its lexical composition, rhythm and logical link serves as an example of a parody mythologization of the consciousness of an intellectual, illustrates a new form of a tale. It, despite the obvious quotation, takes the form of an independent text. In T. Tolstoy's stories, quoting acquires a touch of self-parody as a special case of a parody of the postmodern situation in Russian literature, or, more precisely, a parody of the manifestations of postmodern consciousness in the circle of the Soviet intelligentsia. On the one hand, postmodern irony itself has an all-consuming character; it ridicules all authorities, everything that is or could be related to officialdom. On the other hand, irony has the character of assessing the situation, and although the current state of Russian culture as a whole is assessed negatively, in this position there is a desire to sum up, to complete a certain period of Russian culture. Quotations in Tolstoy's stories are a way of communicating with the outgoing culture, an attempt to remember and fix (at least in the form of denial, mockery and parody) what is most valuable, from which a new phenomenon of art can arise. The mythologization of Pushkin's text in modern literature is a necessary form of preserving the lost classical integrity. Literary quotations become the natural material of postmodernist texts because in the current situation, a longing for the harmony and unity of classical Russian literature manifests itself, since classical works remain a natural breeding ground for postmodernist authors. Thus, at the end of the second chapter, we came to the following Conclusions: - the image of the narrator in the stories of T. Tolstoy, like other elements of poetics, is subject to ontological pessimism as a formative principle. Ontological pessimism at the level of the author's image leads to a statement of the current situation as hopeless. Such an organization of the narrative often gives rise to a grotesque image of the narrator, in whose name the story is "pronounced";
17 17 - the narrator in the stories of T. Tolstoy, as is typical for the literature of Russian postmodernism, is a "literary mask", which implies a certain communicative connection with the reader, but instead of a writer, a biographical person, a fictitious image is used. The narrative structure is subject to the formal logic of the author's message, it "stagnates", constantly returning the reader to a pessimistic vision. Not a single element of poetics goes beyond the limits of an artistic system built on the principle of ontological pessimism. Such a narrative structure is characteristic of the myth-making tradition, that is, a form of creating a literary work, the main algorithm of which is a myth; - the images of storytellers created in T. Tolstoy's short stories have common features, which allows us to speak about the writer's stories as a metatext and about the image of the narrator as a holistic phenomenon, manifested in all texts of T. Tolstoy's short prose; - in the artistic world of T. Tolstoy, it is not a new model of harmony that is mythologized, but its fundamental unattainability. Mythologization is based on the picture of the world of a certain stratum of society, the bearer of creative consciousness and the new discourse of the intelligentsia; - at the level of quotations, only a stable image of high culture emerges, preserving some ironic attitude to reality. In T. Tolstoy's stories, quoting takes on the tone of self-parody as a special case of a parody of the postmodern situation in Russian literature, or, more precisely, a parody of the manifestations of postmodern consciousness in the circle of the Soviet intelligentsia; - the endings of Tolstoy's stories, in which even the author does not mean his own salvation, turn these stories themselves into a special kind of confessional dialogues between the author and himself. The confession goes through the characters, through metaphors that accumulate the cultural experience of the Soviet intelligentsia, and this confession speaks of the impossibility of internally overcoming the existential hopelessness of life; - the image of the author T. Tolstoy is based on a paradoxical combination of the demonstrative fabulousness of any, including primarily the author's time and space, and a gradually opening ontological convention that has no outcome. The form of the tale in the works of T. Tolstoy is a way of mythologizing what is happening, giving the narrative the status of a poetic chronicle about unknown destinies. It is the skaz form that preserves in the work of T. Tolstoy the element of salvation from the situation of ontological pessimism; - quotes in Tolstoy's stories are a way of communicating with the outgoing culture, an attempt to remember and fix (at least in the form of denial, mockery and parody) what is most valuable, from which, as from recycled building material, a new phenomenon of art can arise. The Conclusion summarizes the results of the study, draws conclusions reflecting the results of the analysis, and outlines the prospects for further study of the problems.
18 18 The main provisions of the dissertation research are reflected in the following articles, three of which are published in peer-reviewed scientific publications included in the register of the Higher Attestation Commission of the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation: 1. Sergeeva, E. A. Ontological pessimism as a form of stagnation in the collection of stories "The Okkervil River" Tatyana Tolstoy / E. A. Sergeeva // Proceedings of the Samara Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, vol. 13, 2(1). S Sergeeva, E. A. From tale to myth: the image of the narrator in T. Tolstoy’s short prose / E. A. Sergeeva // Proceedings of the Samara Scientific Center of the Russian Academy of Sciences, vol. 13, 2(2). S Sergeeva, E. A. Mythologization of the Soviet intelligentsia in the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya / E. A. Sergeeva // Bulletin of the Saratov University. New series T. 13. Philology series. Journalism, vol. 2. S. Zakharova (Sergeeva), E. A. The principle of contrast in the stories of Tatyana Tolstaya / E. A. Sergeeva, I. V. Nekrasova // “The Third Tolstoy and his family in Russian literature”: Sat. scientific Art. following the results of the International scientific conf. Samara: Izdvo of the Samara region, S. Zakharova (Sergeeva), E. A. On the stylistic features of T. Tolstoy's short stories (on the example of the stories "They sat on the golden porch ..." and "You love not love") / E. A. Sergeeva / / Modern aspects of the study of literature at school and university: Sat. Art. Samara: Publishing House of the SSPU, S Sergeeva, E. A. Peculiarities of artistic speech in Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories / E. A. Sergeeva // Interdisciplinary connections in the study of literature: Sat. materials of interuniversity. scientific and practical. conf. (October 17-19, 2005, Saratov). Issue. 2. Saratov: Scientific book, S Sergeeva, E. A. Transformation of the conflict of duty and feelings in the latest Russian literature (on the example of Tatyana Tolstaya's stories) / E. A. Sergeeva // Problems of studying Russian literature of the 18th century: interuniversity. Sat. scientific tr. Issue. 12. Samara: Publishing House "NTC", S Sergeeva, E. A. Relationships between a person and the world around Tatiana Tolstaya / E. A. Sergeeva // Problems of spirituality in Russian literature and journalism of the XVIII-XXI centuries: materials of the Intern. scientific conf. Stavropol: Stavropol. book. publishing house, S Sergeeva, E. A. The problem of personality and the world in the artistic system of Tatyana Tolstaya’s stories (collection “The Okkervil River”) / E. A. Sergeeva // Classical and non-classical models of the world in domestic and foreign literature: materials of the International . scientific conf. (April 12-15, 2006, Volgograd). Volgograd: VolSU Publishing House, S Sergeeva, E. A. On the ways of depicting characters in Tatyana Tolstaya's short stories / E. A. Sergeeva // Bochkarevsky readings: materials of the XXX Zonal Conf. literary critics of the Volga region (April 6-8, 2006, Samara). T. 2. Samara: Publishing house of SGPU, S
19 SERGEEVA Elena Alexandrovna Poetics of Tatyana Tolstoy's stories: collection "Okkervil River" as an artistic system ABSTRACT of the dissertation for the degree of candidate of philological sciences Signed for printing d. Format 60x84 1/16 Offset paper. The press is digital. Volume 1.25 arb. oven l. Circulation 120 copies. Order 183-T Printing house of the Saratov State University named after N.G. Chernyshevsky Saratov, st. Bolshaya Kazachya, 112a Tel.: (8452)
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Creative research on literature of a student of grade 9 "A"
Kletnina Maria
Research topic : "A gift is life?" (according to the story of T.N. Tolstoy "The Okkervil River").
Purpose of the study :
Through the study of the text of the story by T.N. Tolstoy "The Okkervil River" to find the answer to the questions:
What is life?
What is a sense of life?
Research objectives:
Highlight dreams and reality in the life of the protagonist in the text of the story.
Determine the attitude of the author to his hero.
My attitude to the problem raised in the story.
Every person's life is unique and unrepeatable.
Looking into your eyes for a long time:
Mysterious I'm busy talking
But I'm not talking to you with my heart.
I'm talking to a friend of my early days,
I'm looking for other features in your features.
In the mouth of the living, the mouth has long been mute,
In the eyes of the fire of extinguished eyes.
«… carefully removed Vera Vasilievna, who had fallen silent, shook the disk, clasping it with straightened, respectful palms and, turning it over, again listened, languishing, "
The chrysanthemums in the garden have faded long ago
And love still lives in my sick heart ...
But one day Simeonov's fictional, illusory world collapses to the ground. He faced reality. Vera Vasilyevna turns out to be alive, and he is not happy that there is a real Vera Vasilyevna, and there is no one who filled his world with beauty.
What was the real Vera Vasilievna?
Lively, cheerful, having not lost her taste for life, she is celebrating her birthday surrounded by admirers and close people. Seeing her, hearing her, Simeonov feels disgust. Moreover, he is disgusted when she washed in his bath, but he still washes the bath after her, washes away the last traces of his illusions.
Did he manage to defend his ideals? Does he struggle with the disgusting reality?
He fled from life, shutting the door in front of her, but he could not completely fence himself off from it. He could not resist reality, so life dealt a blow to his illusions. And he is forced to take this blow.
The attitude towards the hero is mixed, ambiguous. On the one hand, he wants to sympathize: it is bad for a person when trouble happens to him and he is lonely, on the other hand, one cannot live only with illusions, although it is not harmful to dream; one must be able to live on our sinful earth, and there are joys in our life.
The hero reminds me Gogol's Akaki Akakievich , for whom the only joy in life is to beautifully display letters (and only everything!) In the office, where he has been serving in the same position for many years, having no friends.
Simeonov looks like on Chekhov's heroes, who live as if in a case, limiting themselves to the smallest ( Belikova people do not love and ... rejoice at his death; like him and another mountain - Alekhin from the story "Oh love" ). I believe that the hero of the story lives a boring and strange life: after all, it depends on the person himself how he builds his life, what he will be interested in, who his friends will be, without whom and without what he cannot live.
About Simeonov, I would say that he does not live, but exists.
And how does Tatyana Tolstaya feel about her hero? What details help answer this question. The hero has no name, only a surname. It seems to me that in our life this happens when a person is treated not quite respectfully.
Work does not bring him any joy: “he translated boring books, unnecessary books from a rare language” (and he had no other occupations), and this was enough for him only to “for a great price” buy a rare record again with voice of his Vera Vasilievna and processed cheese.
In my opinion, the author sympathizes with him, because he, Simeonov, does not communicate with anyone, he has no friends, he lives alone; for some reason he calls the sellers from whom he constantly buys old records crocodiles. I suppose that in our environment there are people who look like the hero of the story, are they not only the fruit of the author's imagination?
Listen to the lines of the poem E. Evtushenko “There are no uninteresting people in the world,” they helped me find the answer to the question posed.
There are no uninteresting people in the world.
Their destinies are like the histories of the planets.
Each has everything special, its own,
And there are no planets like it.
And if someone lived unnoticed
And with this invisibility was friends,
He was interesting among people
By its very lack of interest.
Everyone has their own secret private world.
There is the best moment in this world.
There is the most terrible hour in this world.
But this is unknown to us...
In the explanatory dictionary we find two meanings of the word "interesting":
1. Beautiful, attractive.
2. Exciting interest, entertaining, curious.
Which of the definitions is undoubtedly related to Simeonov?
Of course, the second definition of the word "interesting" - "exciting interest" - fits our mountain. I think they exist in real life. Both among adults and among my peers. These are people “from the outskirts”, as T. Tolstaya calls them, I would call them “little people” of today (this topic is not new in literature). They differ from those around them in their way of life, their attitude towards people and even their appearance, they live alone, without friends, and sometimes without relatives, do not communicate with neighbors, rarely smile, more often gloomy, silent.
Such people are unattractive, uninteresting; they are, and at the same time they are not. We them "perceived as ridiculous", We call them eccentrics or something more painful for them.
I find a deep meaning in the words of T. Tolstoy: we should not be indifferent to such people, and her thoughts coincide with the point of view of the poet Yevtushenko:
There are no uninteresting people in the world ...
Everyone has "everything special, their own." I agree with this; but people like Simeonov are unhappy, because they don’t see a lot in life, they don’t notice, they don’t experience, they “misunderstand something important”, they live in their own fictional, virtual world, which can collapse at any moment. And then what?!..
This story teaches a lot: to be more attentive to people (including eccentrics), to understand them and to help at least with a kind word or attention, not to be callous.
Folk wisdom says: "To live life is not field go; anything happens along the way... And if we are in this life, then we need to live joyfully, go towards our cherished, real goal, have reliable friends and comrades. Writer Alexander Kuprin noted that"The value of life is determined by what a person left behind."
Of course, we all dream, and each of his own. Sometimes dreams take us very high, but no matter how high we rise in dreams, we still need to sink to the ground every time in order to accustom ourselves to comprehend our actions, learn from worldly experience from smart people, meet friends, argue, quarrel and put up In a word, learn from life. Because life gives us many joys: the joy of searching, the joy of discovering, the joy of admiring the beautiful
I would like to give very correct thoughts of the academician D.S. Likhacheva: “Almost every person combines different features. Of course, some traits predominate, others are hidden, crushed. One must be able to awaken in people their best qualities and not notice minor flaws.
Analyzing the story “The Okkervil River”, I was thinking about a person, his character, actions, lifestyle and attitude to life.
How to live? What to be? Life puts these eternal questions before each person, before each of us. And the answer to it : "Need to live! We just need to live smart. Because the gift is life!”
In conclusion, I would like to say a few words about Tatyana Nikitichna Tolstaya. In the process of my research, I realized that this is not an easy writer. Her books are controversial. The attitude of readers towards them is ambiguous. Someone does not like her books seem incomprehensible. Someone is amazed at the skill and boundless imagination of the writer. But what kind of romance is she"Kis",
was awarded an award "Triumph" for 2001,
and is also the winner of the competition
"The best editions of the XIV Moscow
international book fair
in nomination "Prose-2001", says that the work of this writer has a great future, and it should be read.
Research Hypothesis……………………………………………
Research progress……………………………………………………..
Biography of T. Tolstoy……………………………………………….
The story of T. Tolstoy……………………………………………………….
Who is Vera Vasilievna………………………………………
Who was the real Vera Vasilievna……………………..
How T. Tolstaya treats her hero……………..
Definition of the word “Interesting”…………………………
Thoughts of D.I. Likhachev…………………………………………………..
Conclusion………………………………………
Used Books…………….
The hero of the story is Simeonov. We only know about him that he is a bachelor and earns money by translating, he is an anchorite, communicating with one person - the old singer Vera Vasilievna, whose image was created in detail by his imagination. He may even love her. He yearns for her, never seeing her. Tolstaya puts before us the problem of the "little man" who is lonely. But this loneliness is not a burden to him, because it is thanks to him that the hero can go to his ideal "illusory world". For T. Tolstoy, metaphor is a means of an ephemeral and illusory world in which such ridiculous, timid, heroes live - eternal children, this is Simeonov. They are kind and merciful, but at the same time doomed to loneliness. But his myth and dreams are shattered when he learns that the ideal of his dreams is not at all an ideal, but already an old woman hosting the same admirers as him. This is an almost anecdotal situation. However, Mikhail Zolotonosov in his article “Dreams and Phantoms” believes that those who do not feel in this longing for the fulfilled and the desire for the unfulfilled are mistaken. The self-disclosure of the dreamer affirms the dream as the highest value, but the fulfillment of the dream is interpreted as the self-exhaustion of a person, his end, and the desire for love becomes a source of tragedies. Thus, a feature of the comic in Tatyana Tolstaya's short prose is its opposition and simultaneous inseparability with the tragic and sublime.
As we know, intertext in the art of postmodernism is the main way of constructing a text, this is noted by many researchers. The story "The Okkervil River" is no exception. Intertextuality in Tolstoy's stories reveals itself everywhere and at various levels ("reworking" the theme of the pra-text, using elements of a "known" plot, explicit and hidden quotation, allusion, borrowing, parody, etc.). To identify the functionality of literary allusions in the texts of T. Tolstoy devoted the article Alexander Konstantinovich Zholkovsky "In the minus first and minus second mirror: T. Tolstaya, V. Erofeev - Akhmatovian and archetypes."
A. Zholkovsky notes that Simeonov is a typical image of the "little man" of Russian literature, deliberately sewn from Pushkin's Evgeny, whom the river separates from Parasha ("The Bronze Horseman" by Pushkin); Gogol's Piskarev ("Nevsky Prospekt"), whose fantasies are shattered by the brothel prose of the life of a beauty he likes; and the helpless dreamer from Dostoyevsky's White Nights.
From the very first lines, the “Petersburg text”, created by many writers of Russian literature (from Pushkin to Bely), reveals itself. This dark fantasy city forces its inhabitants to exist according to the laws of fictional life. In the context of these manifestations of the “Petersburg myth”, the name of the hero, Simeonov, plays a significant role. On the one hand, going back to the Hebrew name of the Apostle Peter, it puts its bearer, the “little man,” in relation to its duality with its demonic antagonist, Emperor Peter, who appears in the very first paragraph:
"The city ... seemed ... to be the evil intent of Peter, the revenge of a huge, goggle-eyed, gaping-mouthed, toothy tsar-carpenter ..."
This duplicity receives plot development in an episode of Simeonov's imaginary building on the banks of the Okkervil River: On the other hand, the gospel etymology makes Simeonov, so to speak, an apostle of the “faith” he professes in Vera Vasilievna. The very image of Vera Vasilyevna includes another series of intertexts, among them: "The Queen of Spades" and "Ruslan and Lyudmila", which interpret the common motif of a meeting with an old woman who replaces the young heroine in different ways; Flaubert's "Education of the Senses", where the same motif includes the image of gray hair, etc. Among the possible intertexts are also Nabokov's "Invitation to Execution", where the fake scenery in which the whole plot was going on collapses in the finale.
But the story also has more contemporary literary sources. In the image of a St. Petersburg artist who has outlived her ancient glory, has grown unrecognizably fat, buried several life partners, is surrounded by a narrow ring of admirers who have distributed the tasks of her practical service among themselves, and enjoys such a life cheerfully, Zholkovsky recognizes Anna Akhmatova and lists a number of similarities between the heroines in his article . The name of the patronymic of the singer resembles Akhmatov's - with an alliterative beginning with one letter (V.V. - A.A.). However, Akhmatova is not the only female voice heard behind the text of the Okkervil River. The words about "exquisite eccentrics" who collect "the incorporeal ... copy her [Vera Vasilievna's] ... voice on tape recorders", and in general the whole conflict of the story - starting with an elderly admirer, in his wretched home enjoying a voice torn from his body and the personality of its owner, and up to the motifs of angel wings, fog, depth, lips, kiss, etc. - seems to be borrowed from Bella Akhmadulina (the poem "Tape Recorder"). Akhmadulina's involvement in the intertextual orchestration of the story is in no way discordant with his Akhmatovian dominant. Akhmadulina was a kind of new, sixties reincarnation of Akhmatova.
In addition, the story contains quotations and reminiscences from Lermontov (words from Vera Vasilievna's romance) and Nabokov with his "Lolita" (Nabokov's contrast of young Lolita with her mother who once looked like her, but now overripe, and against its background - the image of a common bath in their house).
Elena Nevzglyadova, analyzing the story, draws attention to a large number of details of the objective world, which force the space between Simeonov and the gramophone, but this is not accidental. Since mental states are too connected with the material world, they cannot be from visual and sound images.
Thus, summing up the report, we can say that the main invariant factor for the discourse of Tatyana Tolstaya should be recognized as the conflict of dreams and reality. There is a wonderful dream world where everything is harmonious and there is not the slightest shortage of beauty, spirituality, mutual love and food. This wonderful paradise is opposed by a rough and vulgar empirical reality. Nonna Petrovna Benevolenskaya notes that the characters of Tatyana Tolstaya are most often dreamers living in the space between reality and the world of their unrealizable dreams, while the author's position usually combines a malicious mockery of such romanticism with sincere sympathy for it. The specificity of Tolstoy's discourse is largely determined by the paradoxical interaction of two trends: a utopian impulse towards a beautiful ideal. The thought of the writer and her characters is sometimes carried away into the world of an ephemeral dream, then again returns to the sinful earth. In her best works, Tolstaya, skillfully manipulating these "registers", maintains a dynamic balance between them. Before us is a typically postmodern "debunking apology".