Turgenev in "Notes of a Hunter" showed the peasants on a par with the landowners. It turned out that the peasants, like people, are often better than the landowners, that they are smart, quick-witted, and sometimes endowed with a poetic soul.

Let us turn to the story "Khor and Kalinich". One of the heroes, a polecat, is an economic one, everything is soundly with him, and his house and family are big.

He is on his own mind, it is impossible to deceive him. Ferret could have bought himself a free one a long time ago, but he does not want to do this, he is already fine.

Kalinich is a different nature. He looks different. The ferret is stocky and dense. Kalingch is tall and thin. He knows the forest perfectly, without him the landowner does not go hunting. Kalinich knows how to treat with folk remedies, and brings various herbs from the forest.

Khor and Kalinich are attracted as two opposites. There is such a detail in the text: Kalinich brings a bunch of wild strawberries from the forest to his friend.

Turgenev treats his heroes with attention and even love. Before him, no one portrayed the peasants like that.

The story "Bezhin Meadow" shows peasant children. Turgenev describes five boys who spent the night by the fire, grazed horses. Of all the children, he immediately singles out Paul. This is a clear leader among children, although among the children there are also children from non-poor families.

Pavel is prudent, bold (he rode alone into the darkness when danger arose, not thinking that there might be wolves there). Children tell each other bylichki, from which the spirit of folk poetry breathes.

Types of peasants and peasant life in I.S. Turgenev

Introduction

Main part

Conclusion

Bibliographic list

Introduction

In Russian literature, the genre of rural prose differs markedly from all other genres. What is the reason for this difference? One can talk about this for an exceptionally long time, but still not come to a final conclusion. This is because the scope of this genre may not fit within the description of rural life. This genre can also include works that describe the relationship between the people of the city and the village, and even works in which the main character is not a villager at all, but in spirit and idea, these works are nothing more than village prose.

In Russia, since ancient times, the peasantry has played the most important role in history. Not by the power of power (on the contrary - the peasants were the most disenfranchised), but in spirit - the peasantry was and probably still remains the driving force of Russian history. It was from the dark, ignorant peasants that Stenka Razin, and Emelyan Pugachev, and Ivan Bolotnikov came out, it was precisely because of the peasants, more precisely because of serfdom, that cruel struggle took place, the victims of which were both tsars, and poets, and part of the outstanding Russian intelligentsia of the 19th century. Due to this, works covering this topic occupy a special place in the literature.

The famous Russian writer Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev was born on October 28, 1818 in Orel. It is difficult to imagine a greater contrast than the general spiritual appearance of Turgenev and the environment from which he directly emerged.

Without the name of Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, we cannot imagine the existence of a Russian national culture. His works have entered the treasury of world literature, they cannot be confused with anyone else, they contain the author's individuality, his character, worldview, feelings and experiences. When reading his works, clear associations arise with the time in which the writer lived and worked, he, as it were, conveys to us events, new trends in contemporary life, passing through the prism of his own feelings and views on various problems. In the true masterpieces of Turgenev, the characters of the heroes are revealed with great psychological certainty. The writer tries to explain their actions and thoughts. Heroes do not exist in isolation from the world around them, they are closely connected with it, are influenced by it, imbued with newfangled ideas, and sometimes reject them after long searches and mistakes.

To his true vocation in literature, Turgenev made his way, as it were, by touch. He began as a poet, had some success in this field and did not suspect himself of being a prose writer. The first story Turgenev published almost by accident, succumbing to the persuasion of friends. But it was this story that brought him fame and indicated the right direction of the path. Together with Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Turgenev entered the top three Russian writers-titans, who for the first time spoke about the secret life of the human soul. But if for Tolstoy and Dostoevsky the image of psychology was most important, then in Turgenev's things, through events and faces, the aroma of time invariably appeared. He became a chronicler of the outgoing noble era in Russia, its way of life and addictions, its hobbies and delusions. Turgenev took first place among the literary youth of that time, because he directed all the power of his high talent to the most sore spot of the pre-reform public - to serfdom.

Main part

In 1846, when the Sovremennik magazine passed into the hands of N.A. Nekrasov and V.G. Belinsky, and turned into one of the brightest magazines of the era, Ivan Panaev, the editor of the transformed magazine, turned to Turgenev with a request to give something for the "Mixture" section. Turgenev gave an essay "Khor and Kalinich". From that day, Turgenev's cooperation with the magazine began, which continued for many more years - until Turgenev broke with the editors of the magazine in 1860 due to ideological differences . In the meantime, Panaev supplies the young writer's essay with the subtitle “From the notes of a hunter”, in the first issue of Sovremennik for 1847 “Khor and Kalinich” is published and accepted by readers with enthusiasm. The reader's success of "Khorya and Kalinych" prompted Turgenev to create new stories, which were later published as a separate book (1852). Turgenev finally entered the firm path of prose, which led him to new artistic discoveries, to a new, unusually plastic artistic language. "Notes of a hunter" - a cycle of hunting stories. The narrator, a passionate hunter, wanders around the Russian provinces, shoots game, and at the same time meets with the surrounding peasants, talks with them, observes their life, listens to their conversations. Like it's nothing special. Why, then, did contemporaries wait for the release of each next story of the Notes with such impatience? Yes, because they were interested. “Notes” is an endless portrait gallery, only those who look from these portraits are not brilliant generals, not disappointed young men, not thoughtful young ladies, not landowners, not officials - simple peasants. Men, women, children. Cheerful, cunning, gloomy, generous, crying, yearning, miserable, affectionate, cruel, desperate heads and humble people are very different. And very real. This was new to the reader, he had never met such heroes in literature. Among the enlightened Russian public, there has long been a weariness from bizarre romantic fantasies, and indeed from any fiction, from fiction - the public hungered for the truth. Not the truth of art and life, which is already present in any good literary work, but the truth of a document, the truth about what to speak and write about, was still not accepted. The answer to this need was the emergence of a “natural school”, the main genre of which was a physiological essay. It described the life and lifestyle of people of the lower stratum of society - a janitor, a street organ grinder, a woman selling her body, a beggar, a merchant, a petty employee. "Notes of a Hunter" in many respects met the requirements of the "natural school", Turgenev coincided with the literary fashion of the time. This is also the reason for his success. He spoke to the audience on topics that they had missed for a long time. At the same time, his view of his main character - the peasantry, the people - turned out to be much broader than the “physiological” one. Ten years after the release of the first story "Notes" in Goncharov's novel, Ilya Ilyich Oblomov will turn to the writer of the "natural school" with an angry speech: "Depict a thief, a fallen woman, an inflated fool, and don't forget the person right away. Where is the humanity?<.>Love him, remember yourself in him and treat him as if you were yourself - then I will read you and bow my head to you. "This is exactly what Turgenev succeeded in portraying the peasant not as a naked social function but as a person. The people, about whose welfare the thinking part of society spoke with such fervor, nevertheless, remained for it an unsolved sphinx. The distance between the peasantry and the nobility was enormous. Of course, attempts to overcome or at least reduce it have already been made. Examples of this are well known. “Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow” A.N. Radishcheva pointed out that the peasantry was suffering, that it was crushed by the unfreedom and arbitrariness of the landowners. But the "Journey" was rather a description of peasant hardships and troubles than the appearance, face of the peasant himself. “Poor Liza” N.M. Karamzina reminded the reader of the equality of all people before feeling, that simple peasant women can feel deeply and strongly. At one time, this was a discovery, but by the middle of the 19th century, it had become an obvious one. Another step towards overcoming the abyss between the nobles and the common people was made by the romantics. It was they who began to record folk songs, fairy tales, and customs. But, firstly, songs and fairy tales exposed only one, in general, the front side of peasant life, and secondly, the romantics looked at folk culture as a curious object of study, as exotic, and this inevitably led to distortions. They wanted to see a role model in the peasant. The “natural man”, a child of nature, had a much more harmonious and integral worldview in the romantic system of values ​​than the “man of civilization”, exhausted by reflection. By the middle of the 19th century, the peasant world was still a closed area. Turgenev opened before the reader's eyes a whole unknown country - with its own laws, language, ideals; but what is even more amazing - a country inhabited by people. Not peasants “are also people”, as was the case with Radishchev and Karamzin, not peasants “better than us”, as it was with the romantics, but even simpler, more humane: peasants are people. The peasant is a man. Judging by the success of the stories, this generally trivial truth stunned Turgenev's contemporaries.

"Khor and Kalinich", the first story, immediately shows the originality of the character of an ordinary peasant. Here there is a parallel comparison of two peasants. The first of them, Khor, was a prosperous peasant who embarked on the path of socio-economic development. main feature lies in the fact that he himself transferred himself into the hands of the landowner and agreed to pay dues. The conditions were set by the landowner. In this case, the agreement goes on a bilateral basis, that is, each of the parties mutually accepts the agreement that they themselves have concluded. Khor managed to get rich and now lives for his own pleasure, regularly fulfilling his obligations. He lives at a distance from the rest of the peasants, which brings him closer to the nature of farming with landownership. That is why he is presented in the story as a man who is self-confident, a man who is free to pay off the status of a peasant. But he doesn't want to pay off. It follows that Khor is not going to continue to grow economically. He is simply satisfied with his condition and wants to live a measured life, because the quitrent does not affect him with ruin.

Kalinich appears to us quite differently. This is a typical representative of the peasant population. He lives according to old peasant customs, in a poor hut, wears old clothes. He doesn't care about advanced ideas. He resigned himself to his position. Kalinich is a simple Russian peasant who does not look far ahead. He cares about today. That is why Turgenev treats him with great condescension as a person related to nature. But, no matter how big the differences may be, both Khor and Kalinich are not going to part with their landowner. The first does not want to because he has found his own benefit, and the second is simply far from legal labyrinths and realizes that he is not in his power to change anything.

“Khor and Kalinych” are two peasant portraits - a squat, broad-shouldered Khor and a long, thin Kalinych. feet, is well versed in reality, gets along with the master, is eagerly interested in life abroad.The last detail is Turgenev's injection of the Slavophiles; in defiance of his ideological opponents, the writer wanted to emphasize: the Russian person "does little about his past and boldly looks forward." Interesting in this story also the fact that Turgenev in it enters into an argument with the Slavophiles, who argued that the reforms of Peter the Great tore Russia away from the original Russian people and that the main virtue of the Russian people is obedience and humility.In the story, it turns out that Khor and Peter the Great are kindred spirits From conversations with Khorem, the author made the conviction that “Peter the Great was predominantly a Russian person, Russian precisely in his formations. The Russian man is so sure of his strength and strength that he is not averse to breaking himself; he is little concerned with his past and boldly looks forward. That was the nature of Khor.

Kalinich is touched only by descriptions of foreign nature, he is dreamy, enthusiastic, idolizes his eccentric and tight-fisted master (Khor has no illusions about him), is well versed in herbs, knows how to speak blood, fear, rabies, breeds bees, “his hand is light” . The difference in characters does not prevent the peasants from being friends and does not interfere with internal, spiritual kinship - they both sing the same songs. In one of the last scenes of the story, Kalinich plays the balalaika, and Khor sings his favorite song “You are my share, share!” A common song suddenly unites them, so dissimilar, and its mournful meaning brings new color to Khor’s portrait: and he, despite for its practicality, it turns out to be no stranger to daydreaming. The story "Khor and Kalinich" begins with a lengthy author's discussion of how the peasant of the Oryol province differs from the peasant of the Kaluga province. It seems that already at the very beginning of the story, the writer wants to penetrate the secret of the Russian folk character. Turgenev specifically compares two psychological types: the judicious, practical Khory and the dreamy, poetic Kalinich. These are, as it were, two sides of the same coin, two components of a single Russian character. Both externally and internally, Turgenev's heroes are very different people. Ferret - “bald, short, broad-shouldered and dense. The complexion of his face was reminiscent of Socrates: the same high, knobby forehead, the same small eyes, the same snub-nosed nose. Khor was a practical man, a rationalist. He "understood reality, that is, he settled down, saved up a coin, got along with the master." He spoke little, understood a lot about himself. Khor has a large family, submissive and unanimous: wife, six sons, daughter-in-law. The polecat, as it were, personifies the prose of life, its very foundation.

Kalinich, this is a dreamy, enthusiastic, romantic nature. Kalinich was a man of the most cheerful, most meek disposition, constantly sang in an undertone, carelessly looked in all directions. He has no family, almost no household. But on the other hand, Kalinich had talents that Khor himself recognized. Kalinich embodies, as it were, the poetry of life. He is closer to nature than Khor: Kalinich comes to his friend with a bunch of strawberries, as an “ambassador of nature”. Khor understood people better, Kalinich - nature. But this difference did not interfere with their sincere, devoted friendship: "they constitute a unity, whose name is humanity." We can say that in this story by Turgenev, the peasants act as bearers of the best features of the Russian national character. The author admires his characters, is proud of them. The super-task of this seemingly unpretentious description of two peasants is clear: in both of them there are unknown depths into which it is worth looking into, which are worth being amazed at. Turgenev knew the price of the song (“There was a time that I went crazy with folk songs,” he admitted in a letter to Nekrasov), he knew how much she could say to the Russian consciousness: not tenderness, not pity and compassion for the creator people, - not only these feelings gave birth to Turgenev's "Singers", but that feeling that elevates the consciousness and soul of a person, which moved him to an act, to an act, for it was no longer possible to consider himself a man while such spiritual beauty was in a "slave form". Yashka Turk, one of the folk nuggets, sang about this.

The writer vividly and vividly draws folk images in one, perhaps, of the most penetrating stories - “Singers”. The image of the folk singer Yashka Turk is striking, who “sang, and from every sound of his voice there was something native and immensely wide. The Russian, truthful, broad soul sounded and breathed in him and grabbed your heart, grabbed you right by his Russian strings. Not prettiness, but precisely beauty, a living fusion of the soul of the performer and the soul of the people-creator into a single creative impulse - such beauty shakes the very foundations of consciousness and heart, gives rise to a chain in a person that connects beginnings and ends; restores the truth, the deep truth about the Russian people.

Nekrasov, who loved folk songs so much, only said after reading the story "Singers": "A miracle." “This thing of the beloved writer is truly brilliant,” Dostoevsky responded. The heroes of this story are extraordinary, talented and at the same time tragic people. Among the listeners of Yashka is “Hercules”, whom everyone used to call the Wild Master, although no one knew who he was and where he came from. The Wild Master is an obscure, mysterious figure, but, undoubtedly, fraught with some powerful, elemental forces. It is no coincidence that Turgenev makes the Wild Master the judge in the competition of singers. This is a remarkable person who, as it were, “broke out” from his environment.

At the same time, Turgenev's heroes are people, not gods. The writer also notices their weaknesses. His hero, Jacob the Turk, has an amazing gift - he sings in such a way that it becomes “both sweet and creepy” for everyone. “I confess,” the narrator notes, “I rarely heard such a voice: it was slightly broken and rang like cracked; but there was genuine deep passion in him, and youth, and strength, and sweetness, and some kind of fascinatingly carefree, sad sorrow.<.>He sang, and from every sound of his voice there was something familiar and immensely wide, as if the familiar steppe was opening up before you, going into the endless distance. In the singing competition arranged by the peasants, Yashka easily re-sings his rival, who sings masterfully, but without a soul. The competition ends with a general revelry, Yakov noisily celebrates his victory and soon becomes dead drunk. “He sat bare-chested on a bench and, singing in a hoarse voice some kind of street dance song, lazily plucked and plucked the strings of the guitar. Wet hair hung in tufts over his terribly pale face. Turgenev deliberately gives a parallel to the scene of Yashka's daytime singing. Nothing remains of the former piercing and depth. Not a great singer in front of us - a pitiful, drunken peasant. However, in the "Notes of a Hunter" another thought flashes - a peasant drinks from grief (see the story "Ovsyannikov's Odnodvorets"). Grief, innocent torment is an integral part of peasant life in Turgenev's stories. His heroes sing, joke, laugh, but cry much more often, their life is very difficult, they are forced not to live - to survive. They are harassed, offended, not allowed to love their loved ones, given to soldiers for accidentally spilled chocolate, whipped. Constant, invisible suffering permeates their entire existence, although most of them do not understand the cause of their misfortunes. The characters themselves do not blame anyone. But there is a guilty one, and Turgenev knows his name well - serfdom. The writer knew firsthand about the terrible consequences that distorted peasant life; even in his youth, he repeatedly tried to soften the wayward heart of his own mother, who felt like a full-fledged mistress of her serfs, and alleviate the peasant's fate. In his own words, the writer gave the “Annibal oath” (that is, the oath of Hannibal, the Carthaginian commander who swore to fight Rome to the last drop of blood) to fight this sworn enemy to the end.

In 1852, “Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev came out as a separate edition and immediately attracted attention. As L.N. Tolstoy, the essential significance and merit of the "Notes of a Hunter" primarily lies in the fact that Turgenev "managed in the era of serfdom to illuminate peasant life and set off its poetic sides," in the fact that he found "more good than bad" in the Russian people. Yes, Turgenev knew how to see the beauty of the peasant's soul, and it was this beauty that was the writer's main argument against the ugliness of serfdom. Turgenev did not poeticize the peasant, did not embellish his life, he wrote the truth about him. And in this truth, resting on the deep conviction of the writer that “in the Russian man lies and ripens the germ of future great deeds, great national development,” and there was the main convincing force of his works.

It can be said that the "Notes of a Hunter" opened up a new world for the Russian reader - the peasant world. Turgenev undoubtedly continues the traditions of N.V. Gogol, who in his immortal poem “ Dead Souls” showed not only the Russia of the Chichikovs, Manilovs, Plyushkins, but also the Russia of the people. Let us recall, for example, the carriage maker Mikheev, the carpenter Stepan Cork, and many others. But in Turgenev, the peasants appear not as dead, but as living souls, the true support of the nation; they sharply oppose the world of masters. Ivan Sergeevich describes the peasants with great warmth, adhering to his main principle - the reliability of the image. He often drew from nature, his images had real prototypes. And this emphasized naturalism makes Turgenev’s stories especially valuable and interesting for us. The great truth about the plight of the Russian people, the glorification of their love of life and talent, everything that, according to Turgenev, constituted the Russian national character, was reflected in the “Notes of a Hunter” .

"Notes of a Hunter" served Turgenev as a wonderful school of writing. Describing the peasants, their relationships and their own hunting trips, Turgenev hones his two main writing talents - a psychologist and a landscape painter. Already here he learns to depict a subtle play of feelings, without directly naming them, guessing them in external actions and gestures (for example, the story "Date") is a wonderful psychological miniature. Purely Turgenev's landscapes appear in Notes of a Hunter, painted with amazing vigilance. “The river rolled dark blue waves; the air was thick, weighed down by night moisture." ("Yermolai and the Miller's Woman"). "The pale gray sky brightened, grew cold, turned blue; the stars either blinked with a faint light, then disappeared; the earth became damp, the leaves were sweating, in some places living sounds began to be heard, vote." (“Bezhin Meadow”).

Turgenev's descriptions are extremely specific, we can easily determine from them not only the season, the month, but also the time of the day. At the same time, the world of nature is densely populated here, it sounds, rings, whistles, it is full of movement and colors: “Hawks, falcons, kestrels whistled over the motionless tops, motley woodpeckers pounded hard on the thick bark; the sonorous melody of the blackbird was suddenly heard in the dense foliage following the iridescent cry of the oriole; below, in the bushes, robins, siskins, and warblers chirped and sang; finches ran nimbly along the paths; the hare crept along the edge of the forest, cautiously “crutching”; a red-brown squirrel briskly jumped from tree to tree and suddenly sat down, raising its tail above its head" ("Death"). Such an attentive attitude to nature is understandable, the narrator of the "Notes" is a hunter, nature is his first assistant and adviser in his business, and the life of Turgenev's main characters, the peasants, is also completely dependent on the natural cycle. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev plunged much deeper into the life of the common people than Pushkin. He can rightly be awarded the title of an honorary researcher of the peasant class. essay, a special place is occupied by the life of a simple peasant, a peasant.It is this feature that gives us a chance to look at their life without embellishment.Turgenev's patriotism can be traced in every story. short story, which is part of this cycle, reflects, to one degree or another, a separate side of peasant life. We will consider those stories that most clearly illuminate the topics of interest to us.

In Yermolai and the Miller's Woman, the anti-serfdom line is drawn more strongly. In the person of Yermolai, Turgenev shows the fullness of the injustice of the bitter peasant life. Yermolai actually works for free. The landowner does not perceive him as a living object or part of his household, but does not forget to demand game from him. There is no question of any content of Yermolai. They don’t even supply him with shot, not to mention the fact that he spends the night and lives, where and how it will turn out.

The fate of women is even worse. They are used as they wish. They do not have the right to refuse the invitation of the landowner to serve him. This detail is revealed in the scene in which Mr. Zverkov explains to the narrator why his wife does not keep married maids.

"Raspberry Water" is notable for the fact that it mentions the concept of a freed peasant. Turgenev here wanted to recall or note the decree of Alexander I "On free cultivators", issued in 1803. The most important thing is that the peasant still lives with the landowner, but with another one. This detail shows the fragility and ill-conceivedness of previous solutions to the peasant question.

The legal insecurity of the peasants is revealed in the last scene of Raspberry Water, in which poor Stas tells of his deplorable situation. After the death of his son, he was no longer able to pay the dues alone and therefore asked the owner to reduce the dues or transfer him to corvée, but he sent him to the clerk, who, in turn, stated that the peasant was still due. It turns out that the peasants, already ignorant of the entire bureaucratic procedure, found themselves mired in debt, and therefore, to any request to ease their payment, they receive an answer: pay the arrears. Another question immediately arises: where to pay these arrears to the peasant, if he himself asks for help with financial resources? Here it is the snag pointed out by Turgenev.

And yet, it is not worth reducing the “Notes of a Hunter” to an anti-serfdom pamphlet; we have already seen that the meaning of these stories is much deeper, anti-serfdom pathos is dissolved here in the universal, social problems - in the eternal. In addition, the writer repeatedly emphasizes: how indelibly the nobility dissolved in the life of the landowners - so much did slavery enter the flesh and blood of the peasant. Many peasants recall with reverent awe and nostalgia the times when the master was truly self-willed and strict, and they consider any punishment received from his hands to be deserved and fair (“Raspberry Water”, “Two Landowners”). It is worth mentioning the story "The District Doctor" if only because it expresses the idea described in the previous paragraph about the quality of life of a peasant, coming from the wealth of the landowner. The doctor tells about his method of recognizing the person who calls him, according to the peasants of the caller. He argues that if a peasant behaves impudently and is decently dressed, then his owner owns a good estate and is wealthy himself: "If the coachman is sitting as a prince, but he does not break his hats ... feel free to hit for two deposits."

"Odnodvorets Ovsyannikov" is unique in that it shows us the same landlord and bureaucratic lawlessness in relation to defenseless peasants. Ovsyannikov tells about several landowners. One of them likes to mock serf women, forcing them to sing and dance until the morning, forgetting that they also need to sleep, and work began in the early morning. The other is constantly shouting that every landowner should think about the peasant, that demarcation, first of all, should help and make life easier for the peasants. But in fact, he himself did not donate the smallest amount of land from himself, although he did not do anything on it and was not going to do it. No less interesting scene of the appearance of Ovsyannikov's nephew Mitya. In Mita, Turgenev personifies a fighter for a fair attitude towards peasants, working people. He stands up for the workers of the bakery, who are pressed by the official, who decided to profit at the expense of the poor workers. He counted on a bribe, saying that the results of the check were unsatisfactory, which did not correspond to the truth. Only he did not receive a bribe, and therefore got angry and wrote a report. Other peasants suffer because, in the absence of the owner, another landowner has plowed up part of his land, declaring that now it is his property. But the peasants who are on dues are not satisfied with this state of affairs. How will they pay the rent to the owner if they were deprived of their land? Another landowner simply does not want to let the peasant woman go, although she is ready to give him money for herself. And Mitya stands up for all these poor people, without thinking about the bad end of the game against the masters. In this way, Turgenev shows us that there are people who can go against the serfdom that existed then, only there are very few of them, and therefore their efforts are doomed to failure until there are enough like-minded people to overthrow slavery in Russia. Therefore, censorship especially looked at Turgenev. Indeed, by the end of the 1840s, anti-serfdom thoughts and movements were taking shape, and this story clearly called for a struggle against serfdom.

In "Lgov" the humiliation of a person is even more reflected. We see all this in the fate of Bitch. During his life, he was in the service of various masters, and by whom only they did not appoint him. He was a fisherman, and a coachman, an actor, a shoemaker, etc. Once he was even called not by his native name. Surprisingly, Knot was adapted to none of the professions assigned to him. He was just trying to follow exactly what they were saying. This atrophied his ability to work, as can be seen in the story. The knot appears before us absolutely incompetent for any work. He is unable to do anything right. Thus, it can be said that the free exploitation of the peasants by the landlords leads to a decline in the working capacity of the labor force. And this confidently led to the desolation of the landlord economy.

"Bezhin Meadow" illustrates the exploitation of child labor. One of the boys by the fire mentions that he works with his brother in a factory. This statement aroused envy in one of those sitting next to him, obviously, his life was even worse. Here Turgenev draws our attention to the difficult childhood life in peasant families.

The story "The Burmister" shows a real picture of the cruel treatment of the peasants. The owner entrusted his land to the steward Sofron. He is satisfied with the work of his man. However, the landowner did not see the real picture at all, due to the fact that every time on the day of his arrival in his possessions, the steward carefully hid objectionable people. However, the story describes the moment when Sofron failed to cover all traces. The peasant still waited for a meeting with the master. The poor peasant complains to the master about the poor accommodation and the terrible tricks of the steward. The owner cannot believe that the person appointed by him would arrange such a thing, so all the anger goes to the peasant. Only at the end of the story is the true face of the “respectable” official revealed to us: “The peasants around him owe him; they work for him like laborers: he sends some with a convoy, some where ... he completely slowed down.”

The story "Office" tells about the cruelty and immorality of the landowners. In one of the scenes, the office attendant explains to the narrator why life is better with merchants, arguing that the merchants care, at least a little. Speaking of the landowners, he highlights in them unreasonable aggression, pettiness, excessive pickiness, in general, those conditions under which it is impossible to live.

The landowner Stegunov from the story "Two landowners" illustrates the words of the duty office. Stegunov, who lives according to his father's old traditions and signs, does not spare his peasants. His principle is that the peasant will never wait for the mercy of the master. After all, Stegunov believes that whoever was born a peasant, let him live like a peasant, and whoever is a master, he lives as befits a master. The worst thing lies in the fact, as Turgenev emphasizes in the story, that Stegunov himself does not intend to change for the better, and considers his lifestyle ideal.

The peasants expelled by the landlords turned into homeless drunkards, regulars in establishments where one could drown grief in an alcoholic sea. This side is reflected in the "Singers" in one of the characters, called the Stupid. He is one of those who were abandoned by the owners on the street without a livelihood. And where should he go, if not to drinking establishments, where someone will treat him to a glass of wine? The folly of the landowners is demonstrated in "Chertop-hanov and Nedopyuskin". We are talking about the father of Chertophanov, a terrible person. He carried out his architectural ideas with the houses of peasants. He made them memorize articles. And the most inhuman act depicted in the story is his idea to number the peasants. This shows that the peasant was not considered a man. It was Nobody, a vessel without a soul.

The story "Living Powers" continues this theme. The old woman Lukerya is forced to wait in silence for her death. They refused to treat her, because not a single remedy helped, and it did not make sense to leave an incompetent woman in the service. And she died alone, praying humbly.

Tracing the formation of the image of a Russian farmer - a peasant and a landowner - in Russian classical literature, how the way of his existence, his worldview is refracted on the pages of the works of Turgenev, Goncharov, Leskov, Saltykov-Shchedrin, Nekrasov, L. Tolstoy, Chekhov and other writers, you remain , like Bazarov, in the conviction that the Russian peasant does not cease to be for the Russian writer "that same mysterious stranger" whom neither educated gentlemen nor himself understand. And this is despite the indisputable position that Russian literature of the nineteenth century. is inconceivable without an invoking, questioning, pathos-compassionate look "into the depths of Russia", where "that same mysterious stranger" is found.

I.S. Turgenev is one of the first writers among us, in whose works the Russian peasant appeared as a kind of individuality, as a special world of life and contemplation. Of course, we still remember Radishchev's peasants from the artistic and journalistic wanderings of the Russian enlightener, brought up on Western European ideological "bread" from the school bench; remember "The Village" by A.S. Pushkin and his remark in the textbook novel that Onegin, finding himself in the village, out of boredom, "replaced the yoke ... corvee with an old dues with a light one; And the slave blessed fate."

But most of the images of Russian peasants did not go beyond the framework of enlightenment-classic abstractions, in any case, all these images were devoid of an individual face. In contrast to this approach, the world of Turgenev's peasants is a special, real world, with its own gesture and word, even exotic in its own way. We are talking, of course, first of all about the "Notes of a Hunter", a book, more precisely and deeper than which, perhaps nothing has been written about the Russian farmer - peasant and landowner. In any case, the continuation of the "peasant" theme in Chekhov, and then in Bunin, and, finally, in the prose of our current "village people", in our opinion, does not go beyond the boundaries outlined by Turgenev's "Notes ...". Let's try to define these boundaries.

An inevitable condition for the construction of an artistic image in the collection of stories by Turgenev is that the image of the peasant world is formed, so to speak, in the field of influence of the world of the master, the landowner-nobility. The angle offered by the writer implies showing the peasant attitude through the vision of a real or former landowner, nobleman. The muzhik's word, and most often a gesture, is the master's word reflected and transformed. Undoubtedly, Turgenev's peasant world is not the world of Karamzin's "Poor Liza", entirely built according to the standards of the world consciousness of the noble intelligentsia of the late 18th - early 19th centuries, which was not slow to "expose" and parody A.S. Pushkin in "The Young Lady-Peasant Woman" ("Tales of the late I.P. Belkin"). Nevertheless, the peasant in Turgenev, for all the concreteness and volume of the image, is not at all the subject of the narration, but its object, shown from the point of view of the narrator, an enlightened, democratically oriented nobleman of the mid-nineteenth century. And if for him the peasant world is still largely exotic, attracting not so much an analytical as a sincerely interested look, then the master's world is seen by a much more sober, and sometimes merciless eye.

The world of the landlords, as it appears in Notes..., and in Turgenev's prose in general, is a shattered world, on the verge of transformations, moreover, radical, irreversible and, for the most part, catastrophic. This is a world marked by degeneration. Symbolic, from this point of view, perhaps, one of the most attractive and at the same time tragic characters in the collection is the landowner Pantelei Chertopkhanov, an indefatigable, spontaneous and, in this sense, very Russian figure, whose nature cannot come to terms with the insidious transformations of his contemporary peace. Tchertop-hanov would rather leave this world than accept its shaky, unfounded values.

The noble world of the middle of the century, as having lost its support, also appears in a kind of gallery of landowners, drawn by one of Turgenev's heroes - the seventy-three-year-old single-palace Ovsyanikov. Luka Petrovich will not praise the "old times", no matter how you provoke him to do so. He will more willingly accept the present, where the former power is no longer given to the landowner. But, on the other hand, in his opinion, the new times also have a considerable flaw: all the small locals "have either been in the service or are not sitting still," and who are larger, although "sociable, polite," unlike the "old times "Although "they have learned all the sciences, they speak so fluently that the soul is touched", but "they do not understand the present, they do not even feel their own benefit: their serf, the clerk, bends them wherever he wants, like an arc." “It’s time to take up the mind,” continues Ovsyanikov. “Only here’s the grief: young gentlemen are painfully wise. They treat a peasant like a doll: they turn, turn, break and even leave. And the clerk, a serf, or a manager from German natives, again he will take the peasant into his paws. And at least one of the young gentlemen set an example, showed: here, they say, how to dispose of it!. How will it end? Am I really going to die and not see the new order?. What kind of parable? Old died out, and the young is not born!

"Borderliness" marks each of the noble characters of the collection. Such is Vasily Nikolaevich Lyubozvonov - an image that looks far and, as it were, promises the appearance of that catastrophic mutual misunderstanding between peasants and gentlemen, which will mercilessly appear in Chekhov's late prose ("New Dacha", "Men", "In the ravine", etc.). And the figure of the Narrator himself is very ambiguous, since he is not a master and hardly an enterprising landowner. He is a wanderer who does not know his place, permanent, soil. "Borderline", the shift of the landowner's world comes around in the peasant world, where the same loss of supports, soil, or rather, natural labor attachment to it, is felt. But here's what is curious: in the depiction of this side of the peasant worldview, Turgenev, as already mentioned, is much more condescending than when it comes to the landowners. It happens this way, perhaps because the way of life of a peasant, seen so closely by the writer, strikes him as something still not very familiar, since it was partly observed from the outside, from afar. Does Turgenev notice in the "close-ups" of his essays that the "shift" of the peasant deprives him of positive labor attachment to the object of his labor? Perhaps only a few of the peasant characters in "Notes ..." are seriously engaged in productive work.

Such - from the few - Khor. But after all and he "marginal"! He went somewhere to the swamps, where he enthusiastically works with his mighty sons. He is "a positive, practical, administrative head, rationalist." But he also leans towards Kalinych, the "idealist", "romantic", "enthusiastic and dreamy" person. Khor is very inclined to tighten, to the balalaika accompaniment of Kalinych, in a plaintive voice his beloved "You are my share, share!" And for all his practicality, he is friends with a person of an absolutely opposite character! Who knows, maybe he would like to become such a romantic!?

Conclusion

So, what could be called the world consciousness of the Russian peasant, as Turgenev's "Notes of a Hunter" model it, is something that is being formed on the border between the textbook Khor and Kalinich, with a clear bias towards the latter. The whole artistic world of the collection - from Khorya with Kalinych to Lukerya from "Living Relics" and not villainously kind robbers from "Knocks!" - this whole world, which appears before the reader through the attitude and world consciousness of its heroes, could in the most direct sense be called marginal, that is, developing "along the edges" of a certain integral and integral world.

Already in Turgenev's stories it is clear that the integral and integral world he depicts, which begins beyond the boundaries of the real world, is only an idealization, a myth that lives in the minds of the Russian landowner and peasant. So, for Ovsyanikov's one-palace, as we remember, these are some "new orders", to which, naturally, he does not live up to, about which he grieves desperately. Even more definitely, in its mythical otherworldly, the dreamed-up world by Kasyan with a Beautiful Sword is indicated. In his description, these are the steppes beyond Kursk, which go "to the warmest seas, where the sweet-voiced Gamayun bird lives, and leaves do not fall from the trees either in winter or in autumn, and golden apples grow on silver branches, and every person lives in contentment and justice..." And this peace, longed for and long-awaited, is sought and cannot be found by the peasants, who "walk around in bast shoes, roam the world, looking for the truth." The earthly destiny of the Russian peasant, in Turgenev's understanding, is wandering, the search for truth, or, as Nekrasov says, those "who live well in Russia." A search that exhausts earthly existence. Hence - a certain oddity, the eccentricity of Turgenev's men and women, which turned into the so-called "Shukshin eccentrics" already in the middle of the twentieth century.

The striving for the unreal, longed-for world is revealed through singing. Yashka the Turk from Turgenev's "Singers" sings, the Khor and the holy fool Kasyan, already mentioned by us, sing. A sad song sounds in "Raspberry Water". Fedor Mikheich from My Neighbor Radlov sings the song in a "hoarse and wild" voice. The motionless and almost holy Lukerya from Living Relics sings. Among the heroes of Turgenev, singing is not fun, but almost the only way to have an impact, to make public their impulse there, to those lands where the Kursk steppes go and where, according to Pavel from Bezhin Meadows, the little streets fly. This is an impulse devoid of a rational-activity basis, an irrational aspiration of the soul staggering "on the edges" of the heavenly world. And as if people are following the song, moving incessantly, spontaneously, wandering, restless, not attached to the earth and cultivating it only to the minimum necessary degree to which it is required for their own meager subsistence, and to fulfill obligations in relation to landowner. In this shaky, unattached world, there is no housing, no thing, no other object that has a complete, rationally advanced form and suitability for economic use. A thing in a shaky world is also quicksand, who knows what it rests on. Here, for example, is Yermolai's hunting rifle, which accompanies the Narrator of the Hunter's Notes from the first to the last page as a peculiar and, at the same time, very eccentric huntsman. "He had a single-barreled gun, with a flint, endowed, moreover, with a bad habit of cruelly" giving away ", which is why Yermolai's right cheek was always puffier than his left." Or, for example, a plank, borrowed by the narrator from a peasant with the nickname Knot and necessary for hunting ducks. At the very height of the hunt, this dilapidated ship begins to sink into the water and in a moment the hunters find themselves up to their necks in the water, surrounded by the floating bodies of dead birds ... It is noteworthy that none of the owners of these boats, tools and other things with any of their almost primitive things would never will not want to part, like the same Yermolai with his amazing gun. Why? Because such is the consciousness of these people and their ideas about their things as particles of that special world in which they live - peasants and landlords. For them, the rejection of familiar things, replacing them with something more rational, would mean a shift in a holistic worldview, in which the real world is something unimportant, not basic, transient. Turgenev showed us a picture of the decline of Russia because of serfdom. Defenseless peasants made up a huge proportion of the country's population. Therefore, Ivan Sergeevich draws our attention to what will happen if the landowners and the emperor himself do not take up the solution of the peasant question. Summing up, Pushkin and Turgenev together make an excellent duet in the study of serfdom in the literature of the 19th century. Pushkin leans on the nobles, and Turgenev is more concerned about the peasant fate, which, in general, provides comprehensive material on the relationship between peasants and landowners.

Bibliographic list

1. Pumpyansky L.V. Turgenev's novels and the novel "On the Eve". Classical tradition // Collection of works on the history of Russian literature. M., 2000. S.381-402.

2. Turgenev I.S. Fathers and Sons. SPb., 2000 / Preparation of the text, article and comments by A.I. Batyuto.

3. Roman I.S. Turgenev "Fathers and Sons" in Russian criticism. L., 1986.

4. A collection of critical articles of the 19th and early 20th centuries dedicated to Turgenev's novel. A.G. Zeitlin "The Mastery of Turgenev the Novelist". M.; 1958

5. I.S. Turgenev. - M.: Artist. lit., 1983.

6. History of Russian literature of the XIX century. Part 2. -M.; VLADOS, 2005.

7. Turgenev I. S. "Notes of a hunter". - M.; Artistic lit., 1979.

And observes their life. Much surprises him, he is pleasantly surprised. Although many literary critics believe that the people in the "Notes of a Hunter" are embellished, "this imaginary embellishment" of the image of the peasants is deciphered as a feature of Turgenev's creative realistic method, associated with his desire to artistically exaggerate the main and fundamental in the spiritual image of the people, enlarged to reveal it...

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Interest in the depiction of peasant life is clearly visible in "Notes of a hunter" by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev. They are documented with precise indications of the place of action: Orel, Kursk, Zhizdra. However, this is not factographic essay documentary with a pronounced descriptive nature of what the author saw, indicating consistently geographical places, as in travel literature. At the same time, the image is concretized within the limits of the Tula and Oryol provinces with their socio-economic conditionality, the peculiarities of the area, nature, the peculiarity of life and types of peasants as carriers of the national national idea. Goncharov noticed these features of the broad movement of life, of artistic space: "... as these Russian people came in front of me, birch groves, fields, fields were full of flowers ... Orel, Kursk, Zhizdra, Bezhin meadow - they walk around" 1 .

Folklore is transformed in the plot-figurative system of essays, as in Dahl, it correlates with folklore and poetic genres (tales, folk songs), their artistic imagery, poetics, plot ("Singers", "Yermolai and the Miller's Woman", "Date", " living relics). However, all of the listed elements are quite specific in Turgenev, since there is no ethnographic essay as such in his work, the writer moves away from essay to story, and yet ethnographic elements can be found in them.

Already in the first story "Khor and Kalinich" the writer includes specific ethnographic elements in the developing plot, although he does not set himself the task of presenting accurate documentary material. The ethnographic drawing is given by Turgenev at the beginning of the story. The writer notices a sharp difference between the "breed" of people: "The Orlovsky peasant is small in stature, round-shouldered, gloomy, looks askance, lives in wooden aspen huts, goes to corvee, does not engage in trade, eats poorly, wears bast shoes; the Kaluga quitrent peasant lives in spacious pine hut, tall, looks bold and cheerful, his face is clean and white, he sells oil and tar, and on holidays he walks in boots. Turgenev also gives the location of the villages: “The Oryol village ... is usually located among the plowed fields, near the ravine ... The hut is molded to the hut, the roofs are thrown over with rotten straw ... Kaluga village, on the contrary, is mostly surrounded by forest; the huts stand freer and straighter, covered with boards ... "2.

In the spirit of ethnographic literature, Turgenev gives a description of the peasant hut of the prosperous Khor and the hut of Kalinich. "We entered the hut. Not a single Suzdal picture covered the clean log walls; in the corner, in front of a heavy image, a lamp was glowing in a silver frame; the linden table had recently been scraped and washed." "Kalinych opened for us a hut, hung with bunches of dry fragrant herbs, laid us down on fresh hay" 3 .

in the story "Singers" narrating about the "Russian, truthful, hot" soul of the otkhodnik peasant Yashka-Turk, which sounded and breathed in him "and grabbed his heart, grabbed right by his Russian strings", with the help of the song the national character of the hero is revealed. The writer makes the hero a kind of carrier of the folk element. Turgenev reproduces the life of the village, and describes the Prityny tavern - one of the village taverns. “Their arrangement is extremely simple. They usually consist of a dark passage and a white hut, divided in two by a partition ... A large longitudinal hole is made in this partition over a wide oak table. Wine is sold on this table, or rack. ", directly opposite the opening. In the first part of the hut ... there are benches, two or three empty barrels, a corner table. Village taverns are mostly rather dark, and you almost never see any brightly colored popular prints on their log walls, without which a rare hut costs" 4 .

Immersion in the folk element of Turgenev is also noticeable in the story "Bezhin Meadow". In it one can observe the signs of folk life, expressed to some extent in the ethnographic description of the village pasture - the departure of peasant boys at night. It also reproduces the features of the mythological consciousness of peasant children, their ideas, the source of which are the folk legends and traditions they heard, just terrible stories that exist in the peasant environment. The speech of peasant boys, their stories bear elements of folklore prose, folk art verbal creativity. It can be noted folk phraseology, elements of a tale. So, in Kostya's story about Gavril, a suburban carpenter, skaz elements are observed and the specificity of folk speech is manifested: “He already walked, walked, my brothers, no! in the morning, he sat down and dozed off. He dozed off and suddenly heard someone calling him. He looked - no one. He dozed off again - they called again. He looked again; and in front of him on a branch a mermaid was sitting, swaying and calling him to her ... " five . Boys' stories about mermaids, brownies, goblin, drowned men, beliefs about Tishka, following the author's narration, enter the structure of the artistic text, creating the style of "text in text", that is, a kind of literary and folklore synthesis.

The story is also characterized by ethnographic details. "Kasyan with Beautiful Swords". In it you can find a brief description of Yuda's settlements, and Beautiful Swords. "Yuda's settlements consisted of six low and small huts, which had already managed to twist on one side, although they were probably put up recently: not all of them had yards surrounded by wattle fences. Entering these settlements, we did not meet a single living soul ..." 6.

The main character is also the bearer of the folklore element in the story. As in folklore poetics, he merges with nature: he picks some herbs, sticks them in his bosom, mutters something under his breath, calls to birds, chirps after the powder. The hero picks up the lark's song, is addicted to nightingale singing. Kasyan himself sings a song composed by him: "And they call me Kasyan, but by the nickname of a flea." Here, in a folk-poetic vein, Turgenev also gives nicknames to the peasants. Kasyan knows medicinal herbs. "There are herbs, flowers help too," he tells the narrator. He believes in saving prayer. However, his way of life is unusual; in the peasant environment, the hero is assessed as "holy fool". This also brings it closer to the folklore tradition. Kasyan is not alien to the desire for truth-seeking. The hero's dream takes on a poetic character, reveals his poetic world, colored with ethnographic and folklore images: "... the steppes will follow Kursk, such steppe places, here is surprise, here is a pleasure for a person, here is expanse, here is God's grace! And they go, people say, to the warmest seas, where the sweet-voiced Gamayun bird lives, and the leaves do not fall from the trees either in winter or in autumn, and golden apples grow on silver branches, and every person lives in contentment and justice ... And now I would go there ", says Kasyan 7 . His story bears the features of a tale. Turgenev's hero is a dreamer, his image is covered with a romantic halo.

In poetic coverage, deeply folk traditions, Turgenev also draws the image of the peasant Kalinich (story "Khor and Kalinich"). Kalinich stands closer to nature. The folk hero of Turgenev is a continuation of the natural elements. He entered Khory's hut with a bunch of wild strawberries in his hands, sang quite pleasantly and played along on the balalaika, he knew folk signs: when it rains, "ducks are splashing, and the grass smells painfully strong." Could speak blood and expel worms. Turgenev emphasized the special enlightenment of Kalinych's appearance as the bearer of the moral and aesthetic principles of folk life: "... Kalinych's face was meek, clear, like the evening sky ... He himself kept looking and looking at the dawn." The influence of folklore on Turgenev's creative consciousness, primarily folk songs and legends, is also evidenced by such stories as "Raspberry Water", "Lgov", "Burgeon", "My Neighbor Radilov", "Lebedyan", "Office", "Death ". The landscape of the writer is also correlated with folklore. Separate landscape sketches in the artistic mind of Turgenev correlate with the images of folk poetry, with the scenes of epic heroes, with elements of historical and geographical realities. Describing the expanse grassy meadows, he is transferred to the folklore element, correlating it with the modern landscape, calling them "directly Russian, Russian people's favorite places, like those where the heroes of our ancient epics drove to shoot white swans and gray ducks" ("Knocks"). The landscape in the essay "Forest and Steppe" is presented as an element of ethnography by typical features of the landscape of the central black earth belt of Russia, indicating villages, places, etc. The folk element in Turgenev's stories also includes the folklore of the speech of the characters and the author's speech, drawn from oral folk art and presented in accordance with folk aesthetics.

In the artistic worldview of I. S. Turgenev, a huge role was played by school of German classical philosophy which he completed while studying at the University of Berlin. Schelling and Hegel gave the Russian youth of the 1830s a holistic view of the life of nature and society. Russia responded to the philosophical thought of Western Europe with life and destiny. It took upon itself the heavy burden of the practical realization of the most abstract dreams of mankind.

In accordance with Russian traditions, young Turgenev and his friends in Berlin, in Stankevich's circle, talked about the advantages of popular representation in the state, that "the mass of the Russian people remains in serfdom and therefore cannot enjoy not only state, but also universal human rights. ... And therefore, first of all, it is necessary to desire the deliverance of the people from serfdom and distribution in the environment of their mental development "

In January 1847, an essay from the folk life "Khor and Kalinich" was published in the Sovremennik magazine., which, unexpectedly for the author and some members of the editorial board, was a great success with readers. In two peasant characters, Turgenev presented the main the strength of the nation. Practical Khor and poetic Kalinich - serfs, dependent people, but slavery did not turn them into slaves; spiritually they are richer and freer than the miserable half-tykins.

Inspired by success, Turgenev writes other stories. Following "Khorem and Kalinych" they are published in "Sovremennik". And in 1852 "Notes of a hunter" published for the first time as a separate edition.

In this book Ivan Sergeevich acted as a mature master of the folk story, a peculiar anti-serfdom pathos of the book was determined here, which consisted in the depiction of strong, courageous and bright folk individuals, the existence of which turned serfdom into a disgrace and humiliation of Russia, into a social phenomenon incompatible with the moral dignity of a Russian person.

Turgenev's narrator plays an important role as the unifying beginning of the book.. He is a hunter, and hunting passion, according to Turgenev, is generally characteristic of a Russian person ; "Give a peasant a gun, even tied with ropes, and a handful of gunpowder, and he will go wandering ... through the swamps and through the forests, from morning to evening". On this common basis for the master and the peasant, a special, open character of the relationship between the narrator and people from the people is tied up in Turgenev's book.

Narration from the perspective of a hunter frees Turgenev from a one-sided, professional view of the world.. The book retains the unintended simplicity of spoken language. The author's creative efforts in it remain imperceptible, the illusion arises that it is life itself that shows us vivid folk characters, amazing pictures of nature.

The "Notes of a Hunter" depicts provincial Russia, but Turgenev opens the curtain of the provincial scene wide, it is clear what is happening there, behind the scenes, in state Russia.

Gradually, from essay to essay, from story to story, the thought of the incongruity and absurdity of the feudal system grows in the book. Any foreign native felt freer in Russia than a Russian peasant. For example, in the story Odnodvorets Ovsyannikov"French Sill turns into a nobleman. Particularly striking image Stepushki from Raspberry Water. Turgenev shows in this story the dramatic consequences of serf relations, their corrupting effect on the psychology of the people. A person gets used to the unnatural order of things, begins to consider it the norm of life and ceases to be indignant at his position: "So Stepushka sits under the fence and gnaws a radish ". In the same story, the lordly indifference, callousness, stupidity in relation to the peasant Vlas are shown who, having lost his son, goes to Moscow on foot and asks the master to reduce his quitrent. But instead of sympathy, the master drove poor Vlas away. The story of a meaningless meeting with the master for a reason leads Stepushka into an excited state, despite the fact that he is very downtrodden, unresponsive and timid. In the history of Vlas, he apparently found a repetition of his miserable fate. In Stepushka, sensitivity to the suffering of others suddenly breaks through.

Friendliness, compassion, a lively talent for mutual understanding, sharp to the point of humanity, brought up in the people by life,- these qualities attract the author of "Notes ..." in Russian life. Remarkable in this respect Death story. Russian people die surprisingly, because even at the hour of the last test they think not of themselves, but of others, of their neighbors.

In the "Notes of a Hunter" we observe the musical talent of the Russian people. Kalinich sings, and the sober, business-like Khor pulls him up, in "Singers" from Jacob's song breathed something familiar and boundlessly wide... The song brings people together, through individual destinies it leads to the fate of the all-Russian.

In a word, Turgenev is a realist. He shows how the singing of Jacob affects the souls of those around him, how this impulse is replaced by spiritual depression.

It is impossible not to notice the sharp observation of the writer for the finest details of the human soul, the enormous intense spiritual work in depicting human destinies, characters in connection with love for all living things, for "Goodness and Beauty", which is rooted not only in the natural softness of Turgenev's character.

The artistic integrity of the Hunter's Notes as a single book is also supported by the art of Turgenev's composition. Unusually sensitive to everything momentary, able to catch the wonderful moment of life, Turgenev was also free from everything personal and selfish. All of his works not only fell into the “present moment” of Russian public life, but at the same time were ahead of it. An impartial, unselfish love of life enabled him to be a prophet. In his works, he constantly runs ahead.

Character landowner Polutykin Turgenev sketches with light strokes. In passing, he reports about his passion for French cuisine and about another idle undertaking - the lord's office. The author speaks in passing about Polutykin for a reason: this landowner is so empty compared to the full-blooded characters of the peasants. Unfortunately, the Polutykin element is by no means accidental and harmless. Turgenev will resurrect French passions in a more significant image of a landowner Penochkin.

The main idea of ​​"Notes of a Hunter" is Turgenev's concept of the Russian national character: distrust of violent passions and impulses, wise calmness, restrained manifestation of spiritual and physical forces. Turgenev saw the "tragic fate of the tribe" in the civil immaturity of the people, born of centuries of serfdom. Russia needs enlightened and honest people, historical figures, called upon to enlighten "mute" Russia.

Images of serf-owners-tyrants "Notes of a hunter"

The images of feudal tyrants and capricious ladies, under the control of rogues and robbers-bourgeois groans of downtrodden and impoverished peasants, are interspersed with images of landowners of a different type. These are losers, people with a dislocated life, who have fallen out of the beaten track due to the grace of chance, the falsity and absurdity of their upbringing, or simply due to mismanagement and ruin. The theme of the landlord's ruin generally runs like a red thread in most of the stories of "Notes, a hunter”, giving Turgenev material for the images of impoverished, “former” landowners, who sometimes turned into accustomers with those who still survived and kept on the surface of life. So unfortunate was the fate of a man of a "kind and warm soul" - the landowner Radilov, who left his home and went somewhere with his sister-in-law. Clueless, of course, will become the whole life of the nephew of Tatyana Borisovna "artist" Andrei Ivanovich Belovzorov who fell on the wrong path and grew fat on free bread from his aunt. Pyotr Petrovich Karataev went crazy. His village was sold at auction, and he dreams of one thing: “to die in Moscow!”

whimsical uselessness, living out his life in the village, became Vasily Vasilyevich - "Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district". In poverty and loneliness lives out the last days " pillar nobleman Pantelei Chertop-hanov ", whose "last money was transferred, the last little people fled." To the type of "abandoned", "former", miserable habitants belongs Fedor Mikheich. “There was also a landowner,” Radilov says about him, “and rich, but he went bankrupt ... And at one time he was considered the first grip in the province; He took away two wives from their husbands, kept the songbirds, he himself sang and danced masterfully ... ”But everything has long been sung and danced, and the old Fyodor Mikheich, the former“ first grip ”, amuses Radilov’s guests in the role of a household jester. Nedopyuskin was also a lifelong dweller, the craft of an entertainer "who served in his lifetime a heavy whim, a sleepy and spiteful boredom of an idle nobility."

Two worlds - the peasant and the landowner - stand against each other in the "Notes of a Hunter", and the author's sympathy is undividedly given to the first of them.

"Notes of a Hunter" opened up a new world to the reader: peasant Russia, a people worthy of having human rights. In the closing essay (" Forest and steppe") Turgenev unfolds a wide landscape canvas. This compositionally closes the whole book. Cheerful youth, freshness of feelings is fanned and saturated here landscape: "Fresh, fun, love!"; “How freely the chest breathes ... how the whole person grows stronger, embraced by the fresh breath of spring!”; “The head is languidly spinning from an excess of fragrance ...”; “How cheerfully everything sparkles around!” Even in the autumn landscape there is no gloom, despondency, sadness, decay here. And in autumn the forest is “good”, and the blue waves of the river rush “joyfully”, and the smell of autumn is “like the smell of wine”, and the heart can suddenly tremble, beat and “passionately rush forward ...” In the landscape - in the final chord of the book - Turgenev revealed the life-affirming truth of nature, its inexhaustible power, its undying beauty. With the warm and soft light of poetry, he illuminates those who stood closer to nature: both the “romance” of Kalinych, and Kasyan, who knows how to “call in common” with birds, and Lukerya, who hears how “a mole is digging under the ground”, and the boys at the night fire on the Bezhin meadow.

In literary works we find the image of people, their way of life, feelings. In the 19th century, there were 2 classes in Russian society: peasants and nobles - with a dissimilar culture and language, so some writers wrote about peasants, while others wrote about nobles. In Krylov, Pushkin, Gogol and others, we will see the image of the peasants. They all portrayed the peasants as different, but they also had a lot in common. Krylov Ivan Andreevich, for example, in his fable "Dragonfly and Ant" shows the example of an ant - a hard worker peasant whose life is hard, and a dragonfly means the opposite. And we see this in many of Krylov's fables.

Another writer, one of the greatest representatives of the culture of the 19th century, Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. We know that Pushkin loved his Motherland and his people very much, so the writer was very worried about the problems of the Russian society. In Pushkin, the image of the peasantry is primarily manifested in his two most important works, The Captain's Daughter and Dubrovsky. In these works, Pushkin describes the life and customs of the peasants of that time, in his works he speaks of the simple Russian people not as a crowd, but as a close-knit team that understands that anti-serfdom sentiments are quite real. In the first work, we see how the author describes the peasant uprising of Pugachev, in the second we see the confrontation between the peasantry and the nobility. In each of the works, the writer emphasizes the difficult condition of the peasants, as well as the sharp disagreement between the two classes, arising from the oppression of one class by the other.

In addition to Pushkin, Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol raises this topic. The image of the peasantry that Gogol paints is presented, of course, in his work Dead Souls. Gogol in his poem presented Russian society not only in greatness, but also with all its vices. The author presents us in his work with many faces of different power structures and depicts terrible pictures of serfdom. Gogol says that the peasants are presented as slaves of the landlords, as things that can be given away or sold. But despite the fact that Gogol shows such an unflattering picture of the life of the peasantry and sympathizes with them, nevertheless, he does not idealize them, but only shows the strength of the Russian people. It is this idea that the author reflects in chapter 11:

"Oh, trio! bird troika, who invented you? to know that you could only be born among a lively people, in that land that does not like to joke, but spread out like a smooth smooth halfway across the world, and go and count miles until it fills your eyes. And not a cunning, it seems, road projectile, not captured by an iron screw, but hastily alive, with one ax and a chisel, a smart Yaroslavl peasant equipped and assembled you. The coachman is not in German boots: a beard and mittens, and the devil knows what he sits on; but he got up, but swung, and dragged on a song - the horses whirlwind, the spokes in the wheels mixed up in one smooth circle, only the road trembled and the stopped pedestrian screamed in fright! and there she rushed, rushed, rushed! .. And there you could already see in the distance, how something was dusting and boring the air.
Isn't that how you, Russia, that brisk, unbeatable troika, are rushing about? The road smokes under you, the bridges rumble, everything lags behind and is left behind. The contemplator, struck by God's miracle, stopped: is it not lightning thrown from the sky? What does this terrifying movement mean? and what kind of unknown power lies in these horses unknown to the light? Oh, horses, horses, what horses! Are whirlwinds sitting in your manes? Does a sensitive ear burn in every vein of yours? They heard a familiar song from above, together and at once strained their copper breasts and, almost without touching the ground with their hooves, turned into only elongated lines flying through the air, and rushes, all inspired by God! .. Russia, where are you rushing, give me an answer? Doesn't give an answer. A bell is filled with a wonderful ringing; the air torn to pieces rumbles and becomes the wind; everything that is on the earth flies past, and other peoples and states squinting aside and give it the way.

Gogol in this passage emphasizes the strength of the people and the strength of Russia, and also reflects his attitude towards the Russian simple working people.

Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, like previous authors, became interested in the topic of enslavement. The image of the peasantry is presented by Turgenev in his collection Notes of a Hunter. This collection consists of a number of stories not interconnected, but united by one theme. The author speaks about the peasantry. Many believe that the author painted images of peasants, emphasizing the most typical features of the Russian national character. Turgenev in his stories describes the life of the peasantry and the life of the peasants.

Nikolai Alekseevich Nekrasov expressed his views on serfdom in the work “Who is living well in Russia?”. Already in the title it is clear what the story is about. The main place in the poem is the position of peasants under serfdom and after its abolition. The author tells that several serfs set off on a journey to find out who in Russia should live well. The peasants meet with different people, through the meetings we see the attitude towards the peasant question and towards the peasants in general.

The theme of the peasantry played an important role in the work of Saltykov-Shchedrin. He expresses his criticism in satirical tales. The author truthfully reflected Russia, in which the landowners are omnipotent and oppress the peasants. But not everyone understands the true meaning of the tale. In his fairy tales, Saltykov-Shchedrin ridicules the landowners' inability to work, their negligence and stupidity. This is also discussed in the fairy tale "The Wild Landowner". In the tale, the author reflects on the unlimited power of the landowners, who oppress the peasants in every possible way. The author makes fun of the ruling class. The life of a landowner without peasants is absolutely impossible. The author sympathizes with the people.