Problems of morality in modern literature. To help a schoolchild

The events that occurred in the last decades of the last century affected all spheres of life, including culture. IN fiction Significant changes were also observed. With the adoption of the new Constitution, a turning point occurred in the country, which could not but affect the way of thinking and the worldview of citizens. New value guidelines have emerged. Writers, in turn, reflected this in their work.

The topic of today's story is modern Russian literature. What trends have been observed in prose in recent years? What features are inherent in the literature of the 21st century?

Russian language and modern literature

The literary language has been processed and enriched by great masters of words. It should be considered one of the highest achievements of the national speech culture. At the same time, it is impossible to separate the literary language from the folk language. The first person to understand this was Pushkin. The great Russian writer and poet showed how to use speech material created by the people. Today, in prose, authors often reflect the folk language, which, however, cannot be called literary.

Time frame

When using a term such as “modern Russian literature,” we mean prose and poetry created in the early nineties of the last century and in the 21st century. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, dramatic changes occurred in the country, as a result of which literature, the role of the writer, and the type of reader became different. In the 1990s, works by such authors as Pilnyak, Pasternak, Zamyatin finally became available to ordinary readers. The novels and stories of these writers have, of course, been read before, but only by advanced book lovers.

Liberation from prohibitions

In the 1970s, a Soviet person could not calmly walk into a bookstore and buy the novel Doctor Zhivago. This book, like many others, was banned for a long time. In those distant years, it was fashionable for representatives of the intelligentsia, even if not out loud, to scold the authorities, criticize the “correct” writers approved by it and quote “forbidden” ones. The prose of disgraced authors was secretly reprinted and distributed. Those who were involved in this difficult matter could lose their freedom at any time. But banned literature continued to be reprinted, distributed and read.

Years have passed. The power has changed. Such a concept as censorship simply ceased to exist for some time. But, oddly enough, people did not line up in long lines for Pasternak and Zamyatin. Why did it happen? In the early 1990s, people lined up at grocery stores. Culture and art were in decline. Over time, the situation improved somewhat, but the reader was no longer the same.

Many of today's critics speak very unflatteringly about prose of the 21st century. What the problem of modern Russian literature is will be discussed below. First, it is worth talking about the main trends in the development of prose in recent years.

The Other Side of Fear

During times of stagnation, people were afraid to say an extra word. This phobia turned into permissiveness in the early nineties of the last century. Modern Russian literature of the initial period is completely devoid of an instructive function. If, according to a survey conducted in 1985, the most read authors were George Orwell and Nina Berberova, 10 years later the books “Filthy Cop” and “Profession - Killer” became popular.

In modern Russian literature on initial stage Its development was dominated by such phenomena as total violence and sexual pathologies. Fortunately, during this period, as already mentioned, authors from the 1960s and 1970s became available. Readers also had the opportunity to get acquainted with foreign literature: from Vladimir Nabokov to Joseph Brodsky. The work of previously banned authors has had a positive impact on Russian modern fiction.

Postmodernism

This movement in literature can be characterized as a peculiar combination of ideological attitudes and unexpected aesthetic principles. Postmodernism developed in Europe in the 1960s. In our country, it took shape as a separate literary movement much later. There is no single picture of the world in the works of postmodernists, but there is a variety of versions of reality. The list of modern Russian literature in this direction includes, first of all, the works of Viktor Pelevin. In the books of this writer, there are several versions of reality, and they are by no means mutually exclusive.

Realism

Realist writers, unlike modernists, believe that there is meaning in the world, but it must be found. V. Astafiev, A. Kim, F. Iskander are representatives of this literary movement. It can be said that in last years so-called village prose regained popularity. Thus, there is often an image provincial life in the books of Alexey Varlamov. The Orthodox faith is, perhaps, the main one in the prose of this writer.

A prose writer can have two tasks: moralizing and entertaining. There is an opinion that third-rate literature entertains and distracts from everyday life. Real literature makes the reader think. Nevertheless, among the topics of modern Russian literature, crime occupies not the last place. The works of Marinina, Neznansky, Abdullaev, perhaps, do not inspire deep reflection, but they gravitate towards the realistic tradition. The books of these authors are often called “pulp fiction.” But it is difficult to deny the fact that both Marinina and Neznansky managed to occupy their niche in modern prose.

The books of Zakhar Prilepin, a writer and famous public figure, were created in the spirit of realism. Its heroes mainly live in the nineties of the last century. Prilepin's work evokes mixed reactions among critics. Some consider one of his most famous works - "Sankya" - a kind of manifesto for younger generation. And Nobel laureate Günter Grass called Prilepin’s story “The Vein” very poetic. Opponents of the Russian writer’s work accuse him of neo-Stalinism, anti-Semitism and other sins.

Women's prose

Does this term have a right to exist? It is not found in the works of Soviet literary scholars, yet the role of this phenomenon in the history of literature is not denied by many modern critics. Women's prose is not just literature created by women. It appeared in the era of the birth of emancipation. Such prose reflects the world through the eyes of a woman. Books by M. Vishnevetskaya, G. Shcherbakova, and M. Paley belong to this direction.

Are the works of Booker Prize winner Lyudmila Ulitskaya women's prose? Maybe just individual works. For example, stories from the collection "Girls". Ulitskaya’s heroes are equally men and women. In the novel “The Kukotsky Case,” for which the writer was awarded a prestigious literary award, the world is shown through the eyes of a man, a professor of medicine.

Not many modern Russian works of literature are actively translated into foreign languages. Such books include novels and stories by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Victor Pelevin. Why are there so few Russian-language writers today who are interesting in the West?

Lack of interesting characters

According to publicist and literary critic Dmitry Bykov, modern Russian prose uses outdated narrative techniques. Over the past 20 years, not a single living, interesting character has appeared whose name would become a household name.

Moreover, unlike foreign authors trying to find a compromise between seriousness and mass appeal, Russian writers as if they were divided into two camps. The creators of the above-mentioned “pulp fiction” belong to the first group. The second includes representatives of intellectual prose. A lot of arthouse literature is being created that even the most sophisticated reader cannot understand, and not because it is extremely complex, but because it has no connection with modern reality.

Publishing business

Today in Russia, according to many critics, there are talented writers. But there aren't enough good publishers. Books by “promoted” authors regularly appear on the shelves of bookstores. Out of a thousand works of low-quality literature, look for one, but worth a look, not every publisher is ready.

Most of the books of the writers mentioned above reflect the events not of the beginning of the 21st century, but of the Soviet era. In Russian prose, according to one of the famous literary critics, nothing new has appeared over the past twenty years, since writers have nothing to talk about. In conditions of family disintegration, it is impossible to create a family saga. In a society in which priority is given to material issues, an instructive novel will not arouse interest.

One may not agree with such statements, but modern literature there really are no modern heroes. Writers tend to turn to the past. Perhaps the situation in the literary world will soon change, authors will appear who are capable of creating books that will not lose popularity in a hundred or two hundred years.

The events that occurred in the last decades of the last century affected all spheres of life, including culture. Significant changes were also observed in fiction. With the adoption of the new Constitution, a turning point occurred in the country, which could not but affect the way of thinking and the worldview of citizens. New value guidelines have emerged. Writers, in turn, reflected this in their work.

The topic of today's story is modern Russian literature. What trends have been observed in prose in recent years? What features are inherent in the literature of the 21st century?

Russian language and modern literature

The literary language has been processed and enriched by great masters of words. It should be considered one of the highest achievements of national speech culture. At the same time, it is impossible to separate the literary language from the folk language. The first person to understand this was Pushkin. The great Russian writer and poet showed how to use speech material created by the people. Today, in prose, authors often reflect the folk language, which, however, cannot be called literary.

Time frame

Liberation from prohibitions

The Other Side of Fear

In modern Russian literature at the initial stage of its development, phenomena such as total violence and sexual pathologies prevailed. Fortunately, during this period, as already mentioned, authors from the 1960s and 1970s became available. Readers also had the opportunity to get acquainted with foreign literature: from Vladimir Nabokov to Joseph Brodsky. The work of previously banned authors has had a positive impact on Russian modern fiction.

Postmodernism

Realism

Realist writers, unlike modernists, believe that there is meaning in the world, but it must be found. V. Astafiev, A. Kim, F. Iskander are representatives of this literary movement. We can say that in recent years the so-called village prose has regained popularity. Thus, one often encounters depictions of provincial life in the books of Alexei Varlamov. The Orthodox faith is, perhaps, the main one in the prose of this writer.

The books of Zakhar Prilepin, a writer and famous public figure, were created in the spirit of realism. Its heroes mainly live in the nineties of the last century. Prilepin's work evokes mixed reactions among critics. Some consider one of his most famous works, “Sankya,” to be a kind of manifesto for the younger generation. And Nobel laureate Günter Grass called Prilepin’s story “The Vein” very poetic. Opponents of the Russian writer’s work accuse him of neo-Stalinism, anti-Semitism and other sins.

Women's prose

Are the works of Booker Prize winner Lyudmila Ulitskaya women's prose? Maybe only individual works. For example, stories from the collection "Girls". Ulitskaya’s heroes are equally men and women. In the novel “The Kukotsky Case,” for which the writer was awarded a prestigious literary award, the world is shown through the eyes of a man, a professor of medicine.

Not many modern Russian works of literature are actively translated into foreign languages today. Such books include novels and stories by Lyudmila Ulitskaya and Victor Pelevin. Why are there so few Russian-language writers today who are interesting in the West?

Lack of interesting characters

In addition, unlike foreign authors who are trying to find a compromise between seriousness and mass appeal, Russian writers seem to be divided into two camps. The creators of the above-mentioned “pulp fiction” belong to the first group. The second includes representatives of intellectual prose. A lot of arthouse literature is being created that even the most sophisticated reader cannot understand, and not because it is extremely complex, but because it has no connection with modern reality.

Publishing business

Today in Russia, according to many critics, there are talented writers. But there aren't enough good publishers. Books by “promoted” authors regularly appear on the shelves of bookstores. Out of thousands of works of low-quality literature, not every publisher is ready to look for one that is worth attention.

One may not agree with such statements, but there really are no modern heroes in modern literature. Writers tend to turn to the past. Perhaps the situation in the literary world will soon change, authors will appear who are capable of creating books that will not lose popularity in a hundred or two hundred years.

1) The problem of historical memory (responsibility for the bitter and terrible consequences of the past)

A.T. Tvardovsky in his poem “By Right of Memory” calls for a rethinking of the sad experience of totalitarianism. The same theme is revealed in the poem by A.A. Akhmatova "Requiem". The verdict on the state system, based on injustice and lies, is passed by A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

2) The problem of preserving ancient monuments and caring for them

D.S. Likhachev prevented Nevsky Prospect from being built up with standard high-rise buildings. The Kuskovo and Abramtsevo estates were restored using funds from Russian cinematographers. Caring for ancient monuments also distinguishes Tula residents: the appearance of the historical city center, churches, and the Kremlin is preserved.

The conquerors of antiquity burned books and destroyed monuments in order to deprive the people of historical memory.

3) The problem of attitude to the past, loss of memory, roots

A man who does not remember his kinship, who has lost his memory, Chingiz Aitmatov called mankurt ( "Stormy Station").

4) The problem of a false goal in life

"Gooseberry". Its hero, Nikolai Ivanovich Chimsha-Himalayan, dreams of purchasing his own estate and planting gooseberries there. This goal consumes him entirely. In the end, he reaches her, but at the same time almost loses his human appearance (“he’s gained weight, he’s flabby... - just behold, he’ll grunt into the blanket”).

I. Bunin in the story “Mr. from San Francisco” showed the fate of a man who served false values. Wealth was his god, and this god he worshiped. But when the American millionaire died, it turned out that true happiness passed the man by: he died without ever knowing what life was.

5) The meaning of human life. Finding your life's path

The image of Oblomov (I.A. Goncharov) is the image of a man who wanted to achieve a lot in life. He wanted to change his life, he wanted to rebuild the life of the estate, he wanted to raise children... But he did not have the strength to make these desires come true, so his dreams remained dreams.

M. Gorky in the play “At the Lower Depths” showed the drama “ former people”, who have lost the strength to fight for their own sake. They hope for something good, understand that they need to live better, but do nothing to change their fate. It is no coincidence that the play begins in a rooming house and ends there.

N. Gogol, exposer human vices, persistently searches for a living human soul. Depicting Plyushkin (dead souls), who became “a hole in the body of humanity,” he passionately calls on the reader entering adulthood to take with him all “human movements” and not to lose them on the road of life.

memory purpose life compassion

6) Self-sacrifice. Love for one's neighbor. Compassion and mercy. Sensitivity

M. Sholokhov has a wonderful story “The Fate of a Man.” It tells the story of the tragic fate of a soldier who lost all his relatives during the war. One day he met an orphan boy and decided to call himself his father. This act suggests that love and the desire to do good give a person strength to live, strength to resist fate.

7) The problem of indifference. Callous and callous attitude towards people

“People satisfied with themselves”, accustomed to comfort, people with petty proprietary interests are the same heroes Chekhov, "people in cases." This is Dr. Startsev in "Ionyche", and teacher Belikov in "Man in a Case". Let us remember how “chubby, red” Dmitry Ionych Startsev rides “in a troika with bells,” and his coachman Panteleimon, “also plump and red,” shouts: “Keep it right!” “Keep the law” - this is, after all, detachment from human troubles and problems.

8) The problem of friendship, comradely duty

In Gogol’s story “Taras Bulba” one of the heroes exclaims: “There are no brighter bonds than comradeship!” But most often this topic was discussed in the literature about the Great Patriotic War. In B. Vasilyev’s story “The Dawns Here Are Quiet...” both the anti-aircraft gunner girls and Captain Vaskov live according to the laws of mutual assistance and responsibility for each other. In K. Simonov’s novel “The Living and the Dead,” Captain Sintsov carries a wounded comrade from the battlefield.

9) The problem of scientific progress

In M. Bulgakov's story, Doctor Preobrazhensky turns a dog into a man. Scientists are driven by a thirst for knowledge, a desire to change nature. But sometimes progress turns into terrible consequences: a two-legged creature with a “dog’s heart” is not yet a person, because there is no soul in it, no love, honor, nobility.

10) The problem of the patriarchal village way of life. The problem of the charm and beauty of morally healthy village life

Much is said about the originality of the farm way of life in Sholokhov’s epic novel “ Quiet Don" In Rasputin’s story “Farewell to Matera,” the ancient village is endowed with historical memory, the loss of which is tantamount to death for the inhabitants.

11) The problem of labor. Enjoyment from meaningful activities

I.A. Goncharov "Oblomov". The hero of this work, Andrei Stolts, sees the meaning of life not as a result of work, but in the process itself. We see a similar example in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor.” His heroine does not perceive forced labor as punishment, punishment - she treats work as an integral part of existence.

12) The problem of the influence of laziness on a person

Chekhov's essay “My “she”” lists all the terrible consequences of the influence of laziness on people.

13) The problem of the future of Russia

For example, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, in a lyrical digression of the poem “Dead Souls,” compares Russia with a “brisk, irresistible troika.” The poet Eduard Asadov in his poem “Russia did not begin with a sword” writes: “The dawn is rising, bright and hot. And it will be so forever and indestructibly. Russia did not begin with a sword, and therefore it is invincible!” He is confident that a great future awaits Russia, and nothing can stop it.

14) The problem of the influence of art on a person

Scientists and psychologists have long argued that music can have different effects on nervous system, on human tone. It is generally accepted that Bach's works enhance and develop the intellect. Beethoven's music awakens compassion and cleanses a person's thoughts and feelings of negativity. Schumann helps to understand the soul of a child.

Dmitri Shostakovich's seventh symphony is subtitled "Leningrad". But the name “Legendary” suits her better. The fact is that when the Nazis besieged Leningrad, the residents of the city were greatly influenced by Dmitry Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, which, as eyewitnesses testify, gave people new strength to fight the enemy.

15) The problem of anticulture

The theme of “disculturation” is well explored in the novel “The Master and Margarita”. MASSOLIT employees write bad works and at the same time dine in restaurants and have dachas. They are admired and their literature is revered.

16) The problem of modern television

A gang operated in Moscow for a long time, which was particularly cruel. When the criminals were captured, they admitted that their behavior and their attitude to the world was greatly influenced by the American film “Natural Born Killers,” which they watched almost every day.

The problem of clogging the Russian language.

Admiral A.S. Shishkov, who for some time held the post of Minister of Education, proposed replacing the word fountain with a clumsy synonym he invented - a water cannon. While practicing word creation, he invented replacements for borrowed words: he suggested saying instead of alley - prosad, billiards - sharokat, replaced the cue with sharotik, and called the library a bookmaker. To replace the word galoshes, which he did not like, he came up with something else - wet shoes. Such concern for the purity of language can cause nothing but laughter and irritation among contemporaries.

17) The problem of destruction of natural resources

Ch. Aitmatov back in the 70s in his story “After the Fairy Tale” (“ White steamer") started talking about this problem. He showed the destructiveness and hopelessness of the path if a person destroys nature. She takes revenge with degeneration and lack of spirituality. The writer continues this theme in his subsequent works: “And the day lasts longer than a century” (“Stormy Stop”), “The Scaffold”, “Cassandra’s Brand”.

The novel “The Scaffold” produces a particularly strong feeling. Using the example of a wolf family, the author showed the death of wildlife due to human economic activity.

18) Imposing your opinion on others

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. “Lake, cloud, tower...” The main character, Vasily Ivanovich, is a modest employee who has won a pleasure trip to nature.

19) The theme of war in literature

The patriotic spirit of the Russian people was shown by L.N. Tolstoy in his epic novel War and Peace. Guerrilla warfare battle of Borodino- all this and much more appears before us with our own eyes. We are witnessing the terrible everyday life of war. Tolstoy talks about how for many, war has become the most commonplace thing. An entire city can get used to the idea of war and continue to live, resigning itself to it. Such a city in 1855 was Sevastopol. L.N. tells about the difficult months of the defense of Sevastopol. Tolstoy in his " Sevastopol stories" Here the events taking place are described especially reliably, since Tolstoy is their eyewitness B. Vasiliev “And the dawns here are quiet...”. Five girls and their combat commander F. Baskov find themselves on the Sinyukhin ridge with sixteen fascists who are heading to railway, absolutely confident that no one knows about the progress of their operation. At the cost of their lives, they stop the enemy.

Unified State Examination in Russian. Task C1.

The problem of responsibility, national and human, was one of the central issues in literature in the mid-20th century. For example, A.T. Tvardovsky in his poem “By Right of Memory” calls for a rethinking of the sad experience of totalitarianism. The same theme is revealed in A.A. Akhmatova’s poem “Requiem”. The verdict on the state system, based on injustice and lies, is pronounced by A.I. Solzhenitsyn in the story “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”

The problem of caring for cultural heritage has always remained at the center of general attention. In the difficult post-revolutionary period, when a change in the political system was accompanied by the overthrow of previous values, Russian intellectuals did everything possible to save cultural relics. For example, academician D.S. Likhachev prevented Nevsky Prospect from being built up with standard high-rise buildings. The Kuskovo and Abramtsevo estates were restored using funds from Russian cinematographers. Caring for ancient monuments also distinguishes Tula residents: the appearance of the historical city center, churches, and the Kremlin is preserved.

The conquerors of antiquity burned books and destroyed monuments in order to deprive the people of historical memory.

“Disrespect for ancestors is the first sign of immorality” (A.S. Pushkin). A man who does not remember his kinship, who has lost his memory, Chingiz Aitmatov called mankurt ( "Stormy Station"). Mankurt is a man forcibly deprived of memory. This is a slave who has no past. He does not know who he is, where he comes from, does not know his name, does not remember his childhood, father and mother - in a word, he does not recognize himself as a human being. Such a subhuman is dangerous to society, the writer warns.

Quite recently, on the eve of the great Victory Day, young people were asked on the streets of our city whether they knew about the beginning and end of the Great Patriotic War, about who we fought with, who G. Zhukov was... The answers were depressing: the younger generation does not know the dates of the start of the war, the names of the commanders, many have not heard about the Battle of Stalingrad, the Kursk Bulge...

The problem of forgetting the past is very serious. A person who does not respect history and does not honor his ancestors is the same mankurt. I just want to remind these young people of the piercing cry from the legend of Ch. Aitmatov: “Remember, whose are you? What is your name?"

“A person needs not three arshins of land, not an estate, but the entire globe. All of nature, where in the open space he could demonstrate all the properties of a free spirit,” wrote A.P. Chekhov. Life without a goal is a meaningless existence. But the goals are different, such as, for example, in the story "Gooseberry". Its hero, Nikolai Ivanovich Chimsha-Himalayan, dreams of purchasing his own estate and planting gooseberries there. This goal consumes him entirely. In the end, he reaches her, but at the same time almost loses his human appearance (“he has become plump, flabby... - just behold, he will grunt into the blanket”). A false goal, an obsession with the material, narrow, and limited, disfigures a person. He needs constant movement, development, excitement, improvement for life...

I. Bunin in the story “The Gentleman from San Francisco” showed the fate of a man who served false values. Wealth was his god, and this god he worshiped. But when the American millionaire died, it turned out that true happiness passed the man by: he died without ever knowing what life was.

M. Gorky in the play “At the Lower Depths” showed the drama of “former people” who have lost the strength to fight for their own sake. They hope for something good, understand that they need to live better, but do nothing to change their fate. It is no coincidence that the play begins in a rooming house and ends there.

N. Gogol, an exposer of human vices, persistently searches for a living human soul. Depicting Plyushkin, who has become “a hole in the body of humanity,” he passionately calls on the reader entering adulthood to take with him all “human movements” and not to lose them on the road of life.

Life is a movement along an endless road. Some travel along it “for official reasons,” asking questions: why did I live, for what purpose was I born? ("Hero of our time"). Others are frightened by this road, running to their wide sofa, because “life touches you everywhere, it gets you” (“Oblomov”). But there are also those who, making mistakes, doubting, suffering, rise to the heights of truth, finding their spiritual self. One of them - Pierre Bezukhov - the hero of the epic novel L.N. Tolstoy "War and Peace".

At the beginning of his journey, Pierre is far from the truth: he admires Napoleon, is involved in the company of the “golden youth”, participates in hooligan antics along with Dolokhov and Kuragin, and too easily succumbs to rude flattery, the reason for which is his enormous fortune. One stupidity is followed by another: marriage to Helen, a duel with Dolokhov... And as a result - a complete loss of the meaning of life. “What's wrong? What well? What should you love and what should you hate? Why live and what am I?” - these questions scroll through your head countless times until a sober understanding of life sets in. On the way to him, there is the experience of Freemasonry, and observation of ordinary soldiers in the Battle of Borodino, and a meeting in captivity with the folk philosopher Platon Karataev. Only love moves the world and man lives - Pierre Bezukhov comes to this thought, finding his spiritual self.

In one of the books dedicated to the Great Patriotic War, a former siege survivor recalls that his life, as a dying teenager, was saved during a terrible famine by a neighbor who brought him a can of stew sent by his son from the front. “I’m already old, and you’re young, you still have to live and live,” said this man. He soon died, and the boy he saved retained a grateful memory of him for the rest of his life.

The tragedy occurred in the Krasnodar region. A fire started in a nursing home where sick old people lived. Among the 62 who were burned alive was 53-year-old nurse Lidiya Pachintseva, who was on duty that night. When the fire broke out, she took the old people by the arms, brought them to the windows and helped them escape. But I didn’t save myself - I didn’t have time.

“People satisfied with themselves”, accustomed to comfort, people with petty proprietary interests are the same heroes Chekhov, “people in cases.” This is Dr. Startsev in "Ionyche", and teacher Belikov in "Man in a Case". Let us remember how plump, red Dmitry Ionych Startsev rides “in a troika with bells,” and his coachman Panteleimon, “also plump and red,” shouts: “Keep it right!” “Keep the law” - this is, after all, detachment from human troubles and problems. There should be no obstacles on their prosperous path of life. And in Belikov’s “no matter what happens” we see only an indifferent attitude towards the problems of other people. The spiritual impoverishment of these heroes is obvious. And they are not intellectuals, but simply philistines, ordinary people who imagine themselves to be “masters of life.”

Front-line service is an almost legendary expression; There is no doubt that there is no stronger and more devoted friendship between people. There are many literary examples of this. In Gogol’s story “Taras Bulba” one of the heroes exclaims: “There are no brighter bonds than comradeship!” But most often this topic was discussed in the literature about the Great Patriotic War. In B. Vasilyev’s story “The Dawns Here Are Quiet...” both the anti-aircraft gunner girls and Captain Vaskov live according to the laws of mutual assistance and responsibility for each other. In K. Simonov’s novel “The Living and the Dead,” Captain Sintsov carries a wounded comrade from the battlefield.

The problem of scientific progress.

The press reported that the elixir of immortality would appear very soon. Death will be completely defeated. But for many people this news did not cause a surge of joy; on the contrary, anxiety intensified. How will this immortality turn out for a person?

village life.

In Russian literature, the theme of the village and the theme of the homeland were often combined. Rural life has always been perceived as the most serene and natural. One of the first to express this idea was Pushkin, who called the village his office. ON THE. Nekrasov in his poems and poems drew the reader’s attention not only to poverty peasant huts, but also on how friendly peasant families are, how hospitable Russian women are. Much is said about the originality of the farm way of life in Sholokhov’s epic novel “Quiet Don”. In Rasputin’s story “Farewell to Matera,” the ancient village is endowed with historical memory, the loss of which is tantamount to death for the inhabitants.

The theme of labor has been developed many times in Russian classical and modern literature. As an example, it is enough to recall I.A. Goncharov’s novel “Oblomov”. The hero of this work, Andrei Stolts, sees the meaning of life not as a result of work, but in the process itself. We see a similar example in Solzhenitsyn’s story “Matryonin’s Dvor.” His heroine does not perceive forced labor as punishment, punishment - she treats work as an integral part of existence.

Chekhov's essay “My “she”” lists all the terrible consequences of the influence of laziness on people.

The problem of the future of Russia.

The topic of the future of Russia has been touched upon by many poets and writers. For example, Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol, in a lyrical digression of the poem “Dead Souls,” compares Russia with a “brisk, irresistible troika.” “Rus', where are you going?” he asks. But the author does not have an answer to the question. The poet Eduard Asadov in his poem “Russia did not begin with a sword” writes: “The dawn is rising, bright and hot. And it will be so forever and indestructibly. Russia did not begin with a sword, and therefore it is invincible!” He is confident that a great future awaits Russia, and nothing can stop it.

Scientists and psychologists have long argued that music can have various effects on the nervous system and human tone. It is generally accepted that Bach's works enhance and develop the intellect. Beethoven's music awakens compassion and cleanses a person's thoughts and feelings of negativity. Schumann helps to understand the soul of a child.

The problem of anticulture.

This problem is still relevant today. Nowadays there is a dominance of “soap operas” on television, which significantly reduce the level of our culture. As another example, we can recall literature. The theme of “disculturation” is well explored in the novel “The Master and Margarita”. MASSOLIT employees write bad works and at the same time dine in restaurants and have dachas. They are admired and their literature is revered.

Many modern athletes watched TV when they were children and wanted to be like the athletes of their time. Through television broadcasts they became acquainted with the sport and its heroes. Of course, there are also the opposite cases, when a person became addicted to TV and had to be treated in special clinics.

I believe that the use of foreign words in one's native language is only justified if there is no equivalent. Many of our writers fought against the contamination of the Russian language with borrowings. M. Gorky pointed out: “It makes it difficult for our reader to insert foreign words into a Russian phrase. There is no point in writing concentration when we have our own good word – condensation.”

Admiral A.S. Shishkov, who for some time held the post of Minister of Education, proposed replacing the word fountain with the clumsy synonym he invented - water cannon. While practicing word creation, he invented replacements for borrowed words: he suggested saying instead of alley - prosad, billiards - sharokat, replaced the cue with sarotyk, and called the library a bookmaker. To replace the word galoshes, which he did not like, he came up with another word - wet shoes. Such concern for the purity of language can cause nothing but laughter and irritation among contemporaries.

The novel “The Scaffold” produces a particularly strong feeling. Using the example of a wolf family, the author showed the death of wildlife due to human economic activity. And how scary it becomes when you see that, when compared with humans, predators look more humane and “humane” than the “crown of creation.” So for what good in the future does a person bring his children to the chopping block?

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. “Lake, cloud, tower...” The main character, Vasily Ivanovich, is a modest employee who has won a pleasure trip to nature.

The theme of war in literature.

In 1941-1942, the defense of Sevastopol will be repeated. But this will be another Great Patriotic War - 1941 - 1945. In this war against fascism, the Soviet people will accomplish an extraordinary feat, which we will always remember. M. Sholokhov, K. Simonov, B. Vasiliev and many other writers dedicated their works to the events of the Great Patriotic War. This difficult time is also characterized by the fact that women fought in the ranks of the Red Army along with men. And even the fact that they are representatives of the weaker sex did not stop them. They fought the fear within themselves and performed such heroic deeds that, it seemed, were completely unusual for women. It is about such women that we learn from the pages of B. Vasiliev’s story “And the dawns here are quiet...”. Five girls and their combat commander F. Basque find themselves on the Sinyukhina Ridge with sixteen fascists who are heading to the railway, absolutely confident that no one knows about the progress of their operation. Our fighters found themselves in a difficult situation: they couldn’t retreat, but stay, because the Germans were eating them like seeds. But there is no way out! The Motherland is behind us! And these girls perform a fearless feat. At the cost of their lives, they stop the enemy and prevent him from carrying out his terrible plans. How carefree was the life of these girls before the war?! They studied, worked, enjoyed life. And suddenly! Planes, tanks, guns, shots, screams, moans... But they did not break and gave for victory the most precious thing they had - life. They gave their lives for their Motherland.

The theme of war in Russian literature has been and remains relevant. Writers try to convey to readers the whole truth, whatever it may be.

From the pages of their works we learn that war is not only the joy of victories and the bitterness of defeats, but war is harsh everyday life filled with blood, pain, and violence. The memory of these days will live in our memory forever. Maybe the day will come when the moans and cries of mothers, volleys and shots will cease on earth, when our land will meet a day without war!

The turning point in the Great Patriotic War occurred during the Battle of Stalingrad, when “the Russian soldier was ready to tear a bone from the skeleton and go with it to the fascist” (A. Platonov). The unity of the people in the “time of grief”, their resilience, courage, daily heroism - this is the true reason for the victory. In the novel Y. Bondareva “Hot Snow” the most tragic moments of the war are reflected, when Manstein’s brutal tanks rush towards the group encircled in Stalingrad. Young artillerymen, yesterday's boys, are holding back the onslaught of the Nazis with superhuman efforts. The sky was blood-smoked, the snow was melting from bullets, the earth was burning underfoot, but the Russian soldier survived - he did not allow the tanks to break through. For this feat, General Bessonov, disregarding all conventions, without award papers, presented orders and medals to the remaining soldiers. “What I can, what I can…” he says bitterly, approaching the next soldier. The general could, but what about the authorities? Why does the state remember the people only in tragic moments of history?

The bearer of people's morality in war is, for example, Valega, Lieutenant Kerzhentsev's orderly from the story. He is barely familiar with reading and writing, confuses the multiplication table, will not really explain what socialism is, but for his homeland, for his comrades, for a rickety shack in Altai, for Stalin, whom he has never seen, he will fight to the last bullet. And the cartridges will run out - with fists, teeth. Sitting in a trench, he will scold the foreman more than the Germans. And when it comes down to it, he will show these Germans where the crayfish spend the winter.

Expression " folk character” most of all corresponds to Valega. He volunteered for the war and quickly adapted to the hardships of war, because his peaceful life peasant life there was no honey. In between fights, he doesn’t sit idle for a minute. He knows how to cut hair, shave, mend boots, make a fire in the pouring rain, and darn socks. Can catch fish, pick berries and mushrooms. And he does everything silently, quietly. A simple peasant guy, only eighteen years old. Kerzhentsev is confident that a soldier like Valega will never betray, will not leave the wounded on the battlefield and will beat the enemy mercilessly.

The heroic everyday life of war is an oxymoronic metaphor that connects the incompatible. War ceases to seem like something out of the ordinary. You get used to death. Only sometimes it will amaze you with its suddenness. There is such an episode: a killed fighter lies on his back, arms outstretched, and a still smoking cigarette butt is stuck to his lip. A minute ago there was still life, thoughts, desires, now there was death. And it’s simply unbearable for the hero of the novel to see this...

But even in war, soldiers do not live by “one bullet”: in short hours of rest they sing, write letters and even read. As for the heroes of “In the Trenches of Stalingrad,” Karnaukhov is a fan of Jack London, the division commander also loves Martin Eden, some draw, some write poetry. The Volga foams from shells and bombs, but the people on the shore do not change their spiritual passions. Perhaps that is why the Nazis did not manage to crush them, throw them beyond the Volga, and dry up their souls and minds.

The theme of the Motherland in literature.

Lermontov in the poem “Motherland” says that he loves his native land, but cannot explain why and for what.

In the friendly message “To Chaadaev” there is a fiery appeal from the poet to the Fatherland to dedicate “the beautiful impulses of the soul.”

The modern writer V. Rasputin argued: “To talk about ecology today means to talk not about changing life, but about saving it.” Unfortunately, the state of our ecology is very catastrophic. This is manifested in the impoverishment of flora and fauna. Further, the author says that “a gradual adaptation to danger occurs,” that is, the person does not notice how serious the current situation is. Let us recall the problem associated with the Aral Sea. The bottom of the Aral Sea has become so exposed that the shores from the sea ports are tens of kilometers away. The climate changed very sharply, and animals became extinct. All these troubles greatly affected the lives of people living in the Aral Sea. Over the past two decades, the Aral Sea has lost half of its volume and more than a third of its area. The exposed bottom of a huge area turned into a desert, which became known as Aralkum. In addition, the Aral Sea contains millions of tons of toxic salts. This problem cannot but worry people. In the eighties, expeditions were organized to solve the problems and causes of the death of the Aral Sea. Doctors, scientists, writers reflected and studied the materials of these expeditions.

V. Rasputin in the article “In the fate of nature is our fate” reflects on the relationship between man and the environment. “Today there is no need to guess “whose groan is heard over the great Russian river.” It is the Volga itself that is groaning, dug up length and breadth, spanned by hydroelectric dams,” the author writes. Looking at the Volga, you especially understand the price of our civilization, that is, the benefits that man has created for himself. It seems that everything that was possible has been defeated, even the future of humanity.

The problem of the relationship between man and the environment is also raised by the modern writer Ch. Aitmatov in his work “The Scaffold”. He showed how man destroys the colorful world of nature with his own hands.

The novel begins with a description of the life of a wolf pack that lives quietly before the appearance of man. He literally demolishes and destroys everything in his path, without thinking about the surrounding nature. The reason for such cruelty was simply difficulties with the meat delivery plan. People mocked the saigas: “The fear reached such proportions that the she-wolf Akbara, deaf from the gunshots, thought that the whole world had gone deaf, and the sun itself was also rushing about and looking for salvation...” In this tragedy, Akbara’s children die, but this is her grief doesn't end. Further, the author writes that people started a fire in which five more Akbara wolf cubs died. People, for the sake of their own goals, could “gut the globe like a pumpkin,” not suspecting that nature would also take revenge on them sooner or later. A lone wolf is drawn to people, wants to transfer her maternal love to a human child. It turned into a tragedy, but this time for the people. A man, in a fit of fear and hatred for the incomprehensible behavior of the she-wolf, shoots at her, but ends up hitting his own son.

This example speaks of the barbaric attitude of people towards nature, towards everything that surrounds us. I wish there were more caring and kind people in our lives.

Academician D. Likhachev wrote: “Humanity spends billions not only to avoid suffocation and death, but also to preserve the nature around us.” Of course, everyone is well aware of the healing power of nature. I think that a person should become its master, its protector, and its intelligent transformer. Favorite leisurely river, Birch Grove, restless bird world... We will not harm them, but will try to protect them.

In this century, man is actively interfering with the natural processes of the Earth’s shells: extracting millions of tons of minerals, destroying thousands of hectares of forest, polluting the waters of seas and rivers, and releasing toxic substances into the atmosphere. One of the most important environmental problems of the century has been water pollution. Sharp deterioration The quality of water in rivers and lakes cannot and will not affect human health, especially in areas with dense populations. The environmental consequences of accidents at nuclear power plants are sad. The echo of Chernobyl swept across the entire European part of Russia, and will affect people’s health for a long time.

Thus, as a result of economic activities, people cause great damage to nature, and at the same time to their health. How then can a person build his relationship with nature? Each person in his activities must treat every living thing on Earth with care, not alienate himself from nature, not strive to rise above it, but remember that he is part of it.

Man and state.

Zamyatin “We” people are numbers. We only had 2 free hours.

The problem of the artist and power

The problem of the artist and power in Russian literature is perhaps one of the most painful. It is marked with particular tragedy in the history of twentieth-century literature. A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, M. Bulgakov, B. Pasternak, M. Zoshchenko, A. Solzhenitsyn (the list goes on) - each of them felt the “care” of the state, and each reflected it in their work. One Zhdanov decree of August 14, 1946 could have crossed out writer's biography A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko. B. Pasternak created the novel “Doctor Zhivago” during a period of brutal government pressure on the writer, during the period of struggle against cosmopolitanism. The persecution of the writer resumed with particular force after he was awarded Nobel Prize for the novel. The Writers' Union expelled Pasternak from its ranks, presenting him as an internal emigrant, a person discrediting a worthy title Soviet writer. And this is because the poet told the people the truth about the tragic fate of the Russian intellectual, doctor, poet Yuri Zhivago.

Creativity is the only way for the creator to become immortal. “For the authorities, for the livery, do not bend your conscience, your thoughts, your neck” - this testament became decisive in the choice of the creative path of true artists.

Emigration problem

There is a feeling of bitterness when people leave their homeland. Some are expelled by force, others leave on their own due to some circumstances, but not one of them forgets their Fatherland, the house where they were born, their native land. There is, for example, I.A. Bunina story "Mowers", written in 1921. This story is about a seemingly insignificant event: Ryazan mowers who came to the Oryol region are walking in a birch forest, mowing and singing. But it was precisely in this insignificant moment that Bunin was able to discern something immeasurable and distant, connected with all of Russia. The small space of the story is filled with radiant light, wonderful sounds and viscous smells, and the result is not a story, but a bright lake, some kind of Svetloyar, in which all of Russia is reflected. Not without reason, during the reading of “Kostsov” by Bunin in Paris at literary evening(there were two hundred people), according to the recollections of the writer’s wife, many were crying. It was a cry for lost Russia, a nostalgic feeling for the Motherland. Bunin lived in exile for most of his life, but wrote only about Russia.

Third wave emigrant S. Dovlatov, leaving the USSR, he took with him a single suitcase, “an old, plywood, covered with cloth, tied with a clothesline,” - he went with it to the pioneer camp. There were no treasures in it: a double-breasted suit lay on top, a poplin shirt underneath, then in turn a winter hat, Finnish crepe socks, driver's gloves and an officer's belt. These things became the basis for short stories-memories about the homeland. They have no material value, they are signs of priceless, absurd in their own way, but the only life. Eight things - eight stories, and each is a kind of report on past Soviet life. A life that will remain forever with the emigrant Dovlatov.

The problem of the intelligentsia

According to Academician D.S. Likhachev, “the basic principle of intelligence is intellectual freedom, freedom as a moral category.” An intelligent person is not free only from his conscience. The title of intellectual in Russian literature is deservedly held by heroes and. Neither Zhivago nor Zybin compromised with their own conscience. They do not accept violence in any form, be it Civil War or Stalinist repressions. There is another type of Russian intellectual who betrays this high title. One of them is the hero of the story Y. Trifonova “Exchange” Dmitriev. His mother is seriously ill, his wife offers to exchange two rooms for a separate apartment, although the relationship between the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law was not the best. At first, Dmitriev is indignant, criticizes his wife for lack of spirituality and philistinism, but then agrees with her, believing that she is right. There are more and more things in the apartment, food, expensive furniture: the density of life is increasing, things are replacing spiritual life. In this regard, another work comes to mind - “Suitcase” by S. Dovlatov. Most likely, the “suitcase” with rags taken by journalist S. Dovlatov to America would only cause Dmitriev and his wife a feeling of disgust. At the same time, for Dovlatov’s hero, things have no material value, they are a reminder of his past youth, friends, and creative searches.

The problem of fathers and children.

The problem of difficult relationships between parents and children is reflected in the literature. L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, and A.S. Pushkin wrote about this. I would like to turn to A. Vampilov’s play “The Eldest Son,” where the author shows the attitude of children towards their father. Both son and daughter openly consider their father a loser, an eccentric, and are indifferent to his experiences and feelings. The father silently endures everything, finds excuses for all the ungrateful actions of the children, asks them only for one thing: not to leave him alone. The main character of the play sees how someone else's family is being destroyed before his eyes, and sincerely tries to help the kindest man - his father. His intervention helps to overcome a difficult period in the relationship of children with a loved one.

The problem of quarrels. Human enmity.

In Pushkin’s story “Dubrovsky,” a casually thrown word led to enmity and many troubles for former neighbors. In Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, the family feud ended with the death of the main characters.

“The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” Svyatoslav pronounces the “golden word”, condemning Igor and Vsevolod, who violated feudal obedience, which led to a new attack of the Polovtsians on Russian lands.

In Vasiliev’s novel “Don’t Shoot White Swans,” the modest klutz Yegor Polushkin almost dies at the hands of poachers. Protecting nature became his calling and the meaning of life.

A lot of work is being done in Yasnaya Polyana with only one goal - to make this place one of the most beautiful and comfortable.

Parental love.

In Turgenev’s prose poem “Sparrow” we see heroic deed birds. Trying to protect its offspring, the sparrow rushed into battle against the dog.

Also in Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”, Bazarov’s parents want more than anything in life to be with their son.

In Chekhov's play “The Cherry Orchard,” Lyubov Andreevna lost her estate because all her life she was frivolous about money and work.

The fire in Perm occurred due to the rash actions of the fireworks organizers, the irresponsibility of the management, and the negligence of fire safety inspectors. And the result is the death of many people.

The essay “Ants” by A. Maurois tells how a young woman bought an anthill. But she forgot to feed its inhabitants, although they only needed one drop of honey per month.

There are people who do not demand anything special from their life and spend it (life) uselessly and boringly. One of these people is Ilya Ilyich Oblomov.

In Pushkin’s novel “Eugene Onegin” the main character has everything for life. Wealth, education, position in society and the opportunity to realize any of your dreams. But he's bored. Nothing touches him, nothing pleases him. He does not know how to appreciate simple things: friendship, sincerity, love. I think that's why he's unhappy.

Volkov’s essay “On Simple Things” raises a similar problem: a person doesn’t need so much to be happy.

The riches of the Russian language.

If you do not use the riches of the Russian language, you can become like Ellochka Shchukina from the work “The Twelve Chairs” by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. She got by with thirty words.

In Fonvizin’s comedy “The Minor,” Mitrofanushka did not know Russian at all.

Unprincipled.

Chekhov's essay “Gone” tells about a woman who, within one minute, completely changes her principles.

She tells her husband that she will leave him if he commits even one vile act. Then the husband explained to his wife in detail why their family lives so richly. The heroine of the text “went... into another room. For her, living beautifully and richly was more important than deceiving her husband, although she says quite the opposite.

In Chekhov's story “Chameleon” the police warden Ochumelov also does not have a clear position. He wants to punish the owner of the dog that bit Khryukin’s finger. After Ochumelov finds out that the possible owner of the dog is General Zhigalov, all his determination disappears.

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Unified State Examination in Russian. Task C1.

The problem of historical memory (responsibility for the bitter and terrible consequences of the past)

The problem of preserving ancient monuments and caring for them.

The conquerors of antiquity burned books and destroyed monuments in order to deprive the people of historical memory.

The problem of relating to the past, loss of memory, roots.

“Disrespect for ancestors is the first sign of immorality” (A.S. Pushkin). A man who does not remember his kinship, who has lost his memory, Chingiz Aitmatov called mankurt ("Stormy Station"). Mankurt is a man forcibly deprived of memory. This is a slave who has no past. He does not know who he is, where he comes from, does not know his name, does not remember his childhood, father and mother - in a word, he does not recognize himself as a human being. Such a subhuman is dangerous to society, the writer warns.

The problem of a false goal in life.

“A person needs not three arshins of land, not an estate, but the entire globe. All of nature, where in the open space he could demonstrate all the properties of a free spirit,” wrote A.P. Chekhov . Life without a goal is a meaningless existence. But the goals are different, such as, for example, in the story"Gooseberry" . Its hero, Nikolai Ivanovich Chimsha-Himalayan, dreams of purchasing his own estate and planting gooseberries there. This goal consumes him entirely. In the end, he reaches her, but at the same time almost loses his human appearance (“he has become plump, flabby... - just behold, he will grunt into the blanket”). A false goal, an obsession with the material, narrow, and limited, disfigures a person. He needs constant movement, development, excitement, improvement for life...

The meaning of human life. Searching for a life path.

Self-sacrifice. Love for one's neighbor. Compassion and mercy. Sensitivity.

In one of the books dedicated to the Great Patriotic War, a former siege survivor recalls that his life, as a dying teenager, was saved during a terrible famine by a neighbor who brought a can of stew sent by his son from the front. “I’m already old, and you’re young, you still have to live and live,” said this man. He soon died, and the boy he saved retained a grateful memory of him for the rest of his life.

The tragedy occurred in the Krasnodar region. A fire started in a nursing home where sick old people lived.Among the 62 who were burned alive was 53-year-old nurse Lidiya Pachintseva, who was on duty that night. When the fire broke out, she took the old people by the arms, brought them to the windows and helped them escape. But I didn’t save myself - I didn’t have time.

The problem of indifference. Callous and soulless attitude towards people.

“People satisfied with themselves”, accustomed to comfort, people with petty proprietary interests are the same heroes Chekhov , “people in cases.” This is Dr. Startsev in"Ionyche" , and teacher Belikov in"Man in a Case". Let us remember how plump, red Dmitry Ionych Startsev rides “in a troika with bells,” and his coachman Panteleimon, “also plump and red,” shouts: “Keep it right!” “Keep the law” - this is, after all, detachment from human troubles and problems. There should be no obstacles on their prosperous path of life. And in Belikov’s “no matter what happens” we see only an indifferent attitude towards the problems of other people. The spiritual impoverishment of these heroes is obvious. And they are not intellectuals, but simply philistines, ordinary people who imagine themselves to be “masters of life.”

The problem of friendship, comradely duty.

The problem of scientific progress.

The problem of the patriarchal village way of life. The problem of beauty, morally healthy beauty

village life.

In Russian literature, the theme of the village and the theme of the homeland were often combined. Rural life has always been perceived as the most serene and natural. One of the first to express this idea was Pushkin, who called the village his office. ON THE. In his poems and poems, Nekrasov drew the reader’s attention not only to the poverty of peasant huts, but also to how friendly peasant families are and how hospitable Russian women are. Much is said about the originality of the farm way of life in Sholokhov’s epic novel “Quiet Don”. In Rasputin’s story “Farewell to Matera,” the ancient village is endowed with historical memory, the loss of which is tantamount to death for the inhabitants.

The problem of labor. Enjoyment from meaningful activity.

The problem of the influence of laziness on a person.

Chekhov's essay “My “she”” lists all the terrible consequences of the influence of laziness on people.

The problem of the future of Russia.

The problem of the influence of art on a person.

The problem of anticulture.

The problem of modern television.

The problem of clogging the Russian language.

The problem of destruction of natural resources.

If the press began to write about the disaster threatening humanity only in the last ten to fifteen years, then Ch. Aitmatov spoke about this problem back in the 70s in his story “After the Fairy Tale” (“The White Ship”). He showed the destructiveness and hopelessness of the path if a person destroys nature. She takes revenge with degeneration and lack of spirituality. The writer continues this theme in his subsequent works: “And the day lasts longer than a century” (“Stormy Stop”), “The Block”, “Cassandra’s Brand”.
The novel “The Scaffold” produces a particularly strong feeling. Using the example of a wolf family, the author showed the death of wildlife due to human economic activity. And how scary it becomes when you see that, when compared with humans, predators look more humane and “humane” than the “crown of creation.” So for what good in the future does a person bring his children to the chopping block?

Imposing your opinion on others.

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov. “Lake, cloud, tower...” The main character, Vasily Ivanovich, is a modest employee who has won a pleasure trip to nature.

The theme of war in literature.

Very often, when congratulating our friends or relatives, we wish them a peaceful sky above their heads. We don't want their families to suffer the hardships of war. War! These five letters carry with them a sea of blood, tears, suffering, and most importantly, the death of people dear to our hearts. There have always been wars on our planet. People's hearts have always been filled with the pain of loss. From everywhere there is a war going on, you can hear the moans of mothers, the cries of children and deafening explosions that tear our souls and hearts. To our great happiness, we know about the war only from feature films and literary works.
Our country has suffered many trials during the war. At the beginning of the 19th century, Russia was shocked by the Patriotic War of 1812. The patriotic spirit of the Russian people was shown by L.N. Tolstoy in his epic novel “War and Peace.” Guerrilla warfare, the Battle of Borodino - all this and much more appears before us with our own eyes. We are witnessing the terrible everyday life of war. Tolstoy talks about how for many, war has become the most commonplace thing. They (for example, Tushin) perform heroic deeds on the battlefields, but they themselves do not notice it. For them, war is a job that they must do conscientiously. But war can become commonplace not only on the battlefield. An entire city can get used to the idea of war and continue to live, resigning itself to it. Such a city in 1855 was Sevastopol. L.N. Tolstoy tells about the difficult months of the defense of Sevastopol in his “Sevastopol Stories”. Here the events taking place are described especially reliably, since Tolstoy is an eyewitness to them. And after what he saw and heard in a city full of blood and pain, he set himself a definite goal - to tell his reader only the truth - and nothing but the truth. The bombing of the city did not stop. More and more fortifications were required. Sailors and soldiers worked in the snow and rain, half-starved, half-naked, but they still worked. And here everyone is simply amazed by the courage of their spirit, willpower, and enormous patriotism. Their wives, mothers, and children lived with them in this city. They had become so accustomed to the situation in the city that they no longer paid attention to shots or explosions. Very often they brought dinners to their husbands directly to the bastions, and one shell could often destroy the entire family. Tolstoy shows us that the worst thing in war happens in the hospital: “You will see doctors there with their hands bloody to the elbows... busy near the bed, on which, with their eyes open and speaking, as if in delirium, meaningless, sometimes simple and touching words , lies wounded under the influence of chloroform.” War for Tolstoy is dirt, pain, violence, no matter what goals it pursues: “...you will see war not in a correct, beautiful and brilliant system, with music and drumming, with waving banners and prancing generals, but you will see war in its real expression - in blood, in suffering, in death...” The heroic defense of Sevastopol in 1854-1855 once again shows everyone how much the Russian people love their Motherland and how boldly they come to its defense. Sparing no effort, using any means, they (the Russian people) do not allow the enemy to seize their native land.
In 1941-1942, the defense of Sevastopol will be repeated. But this will be another Great Patriotic War - 1941 - 1945. In this war against fascism, the Soviet people will accomplish an extraordinary feat, which we will always remember. M. Sholokhov, K. Simonov, B. Vasiliev and many other writers dedicated their works to the events of the Great Patriotic War. This difficult time is also characterized by the fact that women fought in the ranks of the Red Army along with men. And even the fact that they are representatives of the weaker sex did not stop them. They fought the fear within themselves and performed such heroic deeds that, it seemed, were completely unusual for women. It is about such women that we learn from the pages of B. Vasiliev’s story “And the dawns here are quiet...”. Five girls and their combat commander F. Basque find themselves on the Sinyukhina Ridge with sixteen fascists who are heading to the railway, absolutely confident that no one knows about the progress of their operation. Our fighters found themselves in a difficult situation: they couldn’t retreat, but stay, because the Germans were eating them like seeds. But there is no way out! The Motherland is behind us! And these girls perform a fearless feat. At the cost of their lives, they stop the enemy and prevent him from carrying out his terrible plans. How carefree was the life of these girls before the war?! They studied, worked, enjoyed life. And suddenly! Planes, tanks, guns, shots, screams, moans... But they did not break and gave for victory the most precious thing they had - life. They gave their lives for their Motherland.

But there is a civil war on earth, in which a person can give his life without ever knowing why. 1918 Russia. Brother kills brother, father kills son, son kills father. Everything is mixed in the fire of anger, everything is devalued: love, kinship, human life. M. Tsvetaeva writes: Brothers, this is the last rate! For the third year now, Abel has been fighting with Cain...
People become weapons in the hands of power. Dividing into two camps, friends become enemies, relatives become strangers forever. I. Babel, A. Fadeev and many others talk about this difficult time.
I. Babel served in the ranks of Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army. There he kept his diary, which later turned into the now famous work “Cavalry.” The stories of “Cavalry” talk about a man who found himself in the fire of the Civil War. The main character Lyutov tells us about individual episodes of the campaign of Budyonny’s First Cavalry Army, which was famous for its victories. But on the pages of the stories we do not feel the victorious spirit. We see the cruelty of the Red Army soldiers, their composure and indifference. They can kill an old Jew without the slightest hesitation, but what is more terrible is that they can finish off their wounded comrade without a moment's hesitation. But what is all this for? I. Babel did not give an answer to this question. He leaves it to his reader to speculate.
The theme of war in Russian literature has been and remains relevant. Writers try to convey to readers the whole truth, whatever it may be.

The turning point in the Great Patriotic War occurred during the Battle of Stalingrad, when “the Russian soldier was ready to tear a bone from the skeleton and go with it to the fascist” (A. Platonov). The unity of the people in the “time of grief”, their resilience, courage, daily heroism - this is the true reason for the victory. In the novelY. Bondareva “Hot Snow”the most tragic moments of the war are reflected, when Manstein’s brutal tanks rush towards the group encircled in Stalingrad. Young artillerymen, yesterday's boys, are holding back the onslaught of the Nazis with superhuman efforts. The sky was blood-smoked, the snow was melting from bullets, the earth was burning underfoot, but the Russian soldier survived - he did not allow the tanks to break through. For this feat, General Bessonov, disregarding all conventions, without award papers, presented orders and medals to the remaining soldiers. “What I can, what I can…” he says bitterly, approaching the next soldier. The general could, but what about the authorities? Why does the state remember the people only in tragic moments of history?

Problem moral strength simple soldier

The bearer of people's morality in war is, for example, Valega, Lieutenant Kerzhentsev's orderly from the storyV. Nekrasov “In the trenches of Stalingrad”. He is barely familiar with reading and writing, confuses the multiplication table, will not really explain what socialism is, but for his homeland, for his comrades, for a rickety shack in Altai, for Stalin, whom he has never seen, he will fight to the last bullet. And the cartridges will run out - with fists, teeth. Sitting in a trench, he will scold the foreman more than the Germans. And when it comes down to it, he will show these Germans where the crayfish spend the winter.

The expression “national character” most closely matches Valega. He volunteered for the war and quickly adapted to the hardships of war, because his peaceful peasant life was not all that pleasant. In between fights, he doesn’t sit idle for a minute. He knows how to cut hair, shave, mend boots, make a fire in the pouring rain, and darn socks. Can catch fish, pick berries and mushrooms. And he does everything silently, quietly. A simple peasant guy, only eighteen years old. Kerzhentsev is confident that a soldier like Valega will never betray, will not leave the wounded on the battlefield and will beat the enemy mercilessly.

The problem of the heroic everyday life of war

The heroic everyday life of war is an oxymoronic metaphor that connects the incompatible. War ceases to seem like something out of the ordinary. You get used to death. Only sometimes it will amaze you with its suddenness. There is such an episodeV. Nekrasova (“In the trenches of Stalingrad”): the killed fighter lies on his back, arms outstretched, and a still smoking cigarette butt is stuck to his lip. A minute ago there was still life, thoughts, desires, now there was death. And it’s simply unbearable for the hero of the novel to see this...

The theme of the Motherland in literature.

Lermontov in the poem “Motherland” says that he loves his native land, but cannot explain why and for what.

It is impossible not to start with such a greatest monument of ancient Russian literature as “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” All thoughts and all feelings of the author of “The Lay...” are directed to the Russian land as a whole, to the Russian people. He talks about the vast expanses of his Motherland, about its rivers, mountains, steppes, cities, villages. But the Russian land for the author of “The Lay...” is not only Russian nature and Russian cities. These are, first of all, the Russian people. Narrating about Igor's campaign, the author does not forget about the Russian people. Igor undertook a campaign against the Polovtsians “for the Russian land.” His warriors are “Rusichs”, Russian sons. Crossing the border of Rus', they say goodbye to their Motherland, to the Russian land, and the author exclaims: “Oh Russian land! You’re already over the hill.”
In the friendly message “To Chaadaev” there is a fiery appeal from the poet to the Fatherland to dedicate “the beautiful impulses of the soul.”

The theme of nature and man in Russian literature.

This example speaks of the barbaric attitude of people towards nature, towards everything that surrounds us. I wish there were more caring and kind people in our lives.

Academician D. Likhachev wrote: “Humanity spends billions not only to avoid suffocation and death, but also to preserve the nature around us.” Of course, everyone is well aware of the healing power of nature. I think that a person should become its master, its protector, and its intelligent transformer. A beloved leisurely river, a birch grove, a restless bird world... We will not harm them, but will try to protect them.

In this century, man is actively interfering with the natural processes of the Earth’s shells: extracting millions of tons of minerals, destroying thousands of hectares of forest, polluting the waters of seas and rivers, and releasing toxic substances into the atmosphere. One of the most important environmental problems of the century has been water pollution. A sharp deterioration in the quality of water in rivers and lakes cannot and will not affect human health, especially in areas with dense populations. The environmental consequences of accidents at nuclear power plants are sad. The echo of Chernobyl swept across the entire European part of Russia, and will affect people’s health for a long time.

Man and state.

Zamyatin “We” people are numbers. We only had 2 free hours.

The problem of the artist and power

The problem of the artist and power in Russian literature is perhaps one of the most painful. It is marked with particular tragedy in the history of twentieth-century literature. A. Akhmatova, M. Tsvetaeva, O. Mandelstam, M. Bulgakov, B. Pasternak, M. Zoshchenko, A. Solzhenitsyn (the list goes on) - each of them felt the “care” of the state, and each reflected it in their work. One Zhdanov decree of August 14, 1946 could have crossed out the biography of A. Akhmatova and M. Zoshchenko. B. Pasternak created the novel “Doctor Zhivago” during a period of brutal government pressure on the writer, during the period of struggle against cosmopolitanism. The persecution of the writer resumed with particular force after he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his novel. The Writers' Union excluded Pasternak from its ranks, presenting him as an internal emigrant, a person discrediting the worthy title of a Soviet writer. And this is because the poet told the people the truth about the tragic fate of the Russian intellectual, doctor, poet Yuri Zhivago.

Creativity is the only way for the creator to become immortal. “For the power, for the livery, do not bend your conscience, your thoughts, your neck” - this is a testamentA.S. Pushkin (“From Pindemonti”)became decisive in the choice of creative path of true artists.

Emigration problem

There is a feeling of bitterness when people leave their homeland. Some are expelled by force, others leave on their own due to some circumstances, but not one of them forgets their Fatherland, the house where they were born, their native land. There is, for example, I.A. Bunin's story "Mowers" , written in 1921. This story is about a seemingly insignificant event: Ryazan mowers who came to the Oryol region are walking in a birch forest, mowing and singing. But it was precisely in this insignificant moment that Bunin was able to discern something immeasurable and distant, connected with all of Russia. The small space of the story is filled with radiant light, wonderful sounds and viscous smells, and the result is not a story, but a bright lake, some kind of Svetloyar, in which all of Russia is reflected. It is not for nothing that during the reading of “Kostsov” by Bunin in Paris at a literary evening (there were two hundred people), according to the recollections of the writer’s wife, many cried. It was a cry for lost Russia, a nostalgic feeling for the Motherland. Bunin lived in exile for most of his life, but wrote only about Russia.

Third wave emigrant S. Dovlatov , leaving the USSR, he took with him a single suitcase, “an old, plywood, covered with cloth, tied with a clothesline,” - he went with it to the pioneer camp. There were no treasures in it: a double-breasted suit lay on top, a poplin shirt underneath, then in turn a winter hat, Finnish crepe socks, driver's gloves and an officer's belt. These things became the basis for short stories-memories about the homeland. They have no material value, they are signs of priceless, absurd in their own way, but the only life. Eight things - eight stories, and each is a kind of report on past Soviet life. A life that will remain forever with the emigrant Dovlatov.

The problem of the intelligentsia

According to Academician D.S. Likhachev, “the basic principle of intelligence is intellectual freedom, freedom as a moral category.” An intelligent person is not free only from his conscience. The title of intellectual in Russian literature is deservedly held by heroesB. Pasternak (“Doctor Zhivago”) And Y. Dombrovsky (“Faculty of Unnecessary Things”). Neither Zhivago nor Zybin compromised with their own conscience. They do not accept violence in any form, be it the Civil War or Stalinist repressions. There is another type of Russian intellectual who betrays this high title. One of them is the hero of the storyY. Trifonova “Exchange”Dmitriev. His mother is seriously ill, his wife offers to exchange two rooms for a separate apartment, although the relationship between the daughter-in-law and mother-in-law was not the best. At first, Dmitriev is indignant, criticizes his wife for lack of spirituality and philistinism, but then agrees with her, believing that she is right. There are more and more things in the apartment, food, expensive furniture: the density of life is increasing, things are replacing spiritual life. In this regard, another work comes to mind -“Suitcase” by S. Dovlatov. Most likely, the “suitcase” with rags taken by journalist S. Dovlatov to America would only cause Dmitriev and his wife a feeling of disgust. At the same time, for Dovlatov’s hero, things have no material value, they are a reminder of his past youth, friends, and creative searches.

The problem of fathers and children.

The problem of quarrels. Human enmity.

Caring for the beauty of our native land.

In Vasiliev’s novel “Don’t Shoot White Swans,” the modest klutz Yegor Polushkin almost dies at the hands of poachers. Protecting nature became his calling and the meaning of life.

A lot of work is being done in Yasnaya Polyana with only one goal - to make this place one of the most beautiful and comfortable.

Parental love.

In Turgenev’s prose poem “Sparrow” we see the heroic act of a bird. Trying to protect its offspring, the sparrow rushed into battle against the dog.

Also in Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons”, Bazarov’s parents want more than anything in life to be with their son.

Responsibility. Rash acts.

In Chekhov's play “The Cherry Orchard,” Lyubov Andreevna lost her estate because all her life she was frivolous about money and work.

The essay “Ants” by A. Maurois tells how a young woman bought an anthill. But she forgot to feed its inhabitants, although they only needed one drop of honey per month.

About simple things. Theme of happiness.

There are people who do not demand anything special from their life and spend it (life) uselessly and boringly. One of these people is Ilya Ilyich Oblomov.

Volkov’s essay “On Simple Things” raises a similar problem: a person doesn’t need so much to be happy.

The riches of the Russian language.

If you do not use the riches of the Russian language, you can become like Ellochka Shchukina from the work “The Twelve Chairs” by I. Ilf and E. Petrov. She got by with thirty words.

In Fonvizin’s comedy “The Minor,” Mitrofanushka did not know Russian at all.

Unprincipled.

Chekhov's essay “Gone” tells about a woman who, within one minute, completely changes her principles.

Problems of development of modern literature

Literature, as we know, is a special way of understanding existence through an artistic image. The focus of her attention, starting from the most ancient times, is man. And if in painting there are genres where the presence of a person is not required (still life, landscape, animalistic works), then in literature this is almost impossible to achieve. And since the person is the central object of attention literary work, then the development of literature can be considered as development of image methods human personality in a work of art.

One of the main development paths that I found world literature, was the way of psychologizing the literary hero. Starting from ancient Greek literature, which greatly influenced the development of European literatures, right up to late XIX centuries, literature has found more and more new ways of in-depth depiction of the inner world, the mental and psychological life of a person. For this reason, one of the main problems in the development of literature is character problem. And Russian culture also “moved irresistibly towards a person understood in his historical, social, psychological concreteness.”

In order to understand what, in fact, we're talking about, it is extremely important to remember exactly how the way of depicting human character changed.

So, for example, I.S. Turgenev, a master of historical typification, in the novel “Fathers and Sons,” the main discovery was the character of Yevgeny Vasilyevich Bazarov, which defines the traits of an entire generation. Turgenev creates a literary character due to the fact that he grasped the structure of the corresponding historical character, the template of this character. L.Ya wrote about this. Ginzburg in his work “On Psychological Prose”.

The main, defining feature of this character is the principle of staticity. The image of Bazarov appears before the reader as an already established large and integral character.
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What means does Turgenev choose to portray him? This is a portrait, the speech of the hero, his thoughts. At the same time, Bazarov’s character is also revealed in his clashes with other characters in the novel: Bazarov - the Kirsanov brothers, Bazarov - Kukshina, etc.
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That is, the organization of the plot of a novel by the author is a way for him to reveal the character of the hero. In describing the character of Bazarov, Turgenev pursues the goal of giving this static, established character as completely and comprehensively as possible, to describe it from all sides.

Creativity L.N. Tolstoy is distinguished by unprecedented self-analysis. ʼʼThe work of Tolstoy - highest point analytical, explanatory psychologism. For this reason, Tolstoy’s heroes are different. Turgenev builds “unalloyed types”. In Bazarov he sees only a nihilist. And everything in the novel works to fully reveal this nihilism in Bazarov’s character. Tolstoy's heroes are complex. But their main difference from Turgenev’s hero is essentially that the character of Tolstoy’s heroes is dynamic. The character of his heroes lacks the static character that distinguishes Turgenev's heroes. Tolstoy's characters develop. The guess that a person is internally changeable, his character is not something formed and established once and for all, was the artistic discovery of L.N. Tolstoy. This is the discovery of Tolstoy N.G. Chernyshevsky very accurately called it “dialectics of the soul.”

F.M. Dostoevsky made another great discovery in the characterology of the literary hero. Dostoevsky discovered that inner world man consists of insoluble contradictions. That is, it contains polar opposite principles, the lightest and the darkest in their complex unity and confrontation. The psychological structure of the human soul in Dostoevsky is so complex that from the brightest motives in the shortest possible time a person can indulge in the darkest dictates of his soul, and vice versa. Almost all of Dostoevsky’s novels are built on this psychological discovery. There are not only positive or only negative heroes: Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov is both a criminal and a repentant sinner; in him, pride - the Napoleonic ideal, “I have the right” - and humility coexist side by side.

The novels of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy turned out to be the pinnacle achievements that were potentially contained in the phenomenon called the Russian psychological novel. Tolstoy and Dostoevsky discovered and implemented in artistic practice the most important, most profound possibilities of the psychological novel, which was characterized by a keen interest in mental contradictions and in the details of the mental process. Thus, basically, the idea of a psychological novel turned out to be exhausted. This exhaustion, as mentioned above, was felt on turn of the nineteenth-XX centuries and was called the “crisis of the novel genre”, associated with the collapse of humanistic ideology as a whole.

Then there were two possible paths. The first way is the continuation of the tradition of Tolstoy-Dostoevsky. That's how Main way“realistic prose” of the twentieth century. Development of creativity of such artists as A. Kuprin, A. Fadeev, A. Tolstoy, F. Abramov, V. Rasputin, V. Astafiev, A. Solzhenitsyn and others.
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proceeded mainly within the framework of a realistic psychological novel. The problems posed in the works of these writers were different from those in the literature of the 19th century, and the method of creating human character remained basically the same.

Another way is the way of radical rethinking of possibilities large shape, novel genre. A.A. Akhmatova once noted that for the development of twentieth-century literature, the work of three European writers turned out to be extremely important: Kafka, Joyce and Proust. The difference between their prose and a psychological novel is that it explores not so much the psychology, the character of the hero, but his consciousness, and consciousness as such, outside the uniqueness of an individual human personality. For this reason, this line of development of the European novel was called the “novel of consciousness”.

It is known that the era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Europe was marked by an explosion of interest in psychological science and great achievements in it. Here it is enough to name the names of such psychologists as Sigmund Freud, who discovered the sphere of the subconscious in the human psyche, and Carl Gustav Jung, who developed the ideas of his teacher Freud and gave definitions to such concepts as archetype and collective unconscious.

In the 20th century Attempts were made to get rid of psychological generalization. And in Western prose of the twentieth century. there is a process of consistent decrease in character. And if Tolstoy liberated processes by making them the subject artistic research, then in the twentieth century. they tried to reduce man only to processes. Literature of the 20th century. sought to explore more or less pure processes, processes without humans, ideally pure fluidity. The depiction of characters in psychological prose was now replaced by the depiction of “only states oscillating at the border of consciousness and the subconscious.”

Literature in late XIX V. developed parallel to contemporary psychological science. It was also aimed at discovering the basic laws of the work of the conscious and unconscious in the human psyche. In the short story genre, Kafka as an artist explores the depths of the subconscious in the human psyche. By his own admission, his short stories are just a record of his own dreams, containing no fiction. And sleep, according to Freud and Jung, is a manifestation of the subconscious at the moment when consciousness weakens its control over the unconscious manifestations of the human psyche.

Proust builds his novel “In Search of Lost Time” as a “stream of consciousness”. Proust is not interested in the uniqueness of the human personality, the uniqueness of his qualities, but in the laws of internal speech, which has not yet achieved organized embodiment in words. A technique that postmodernists are extremely fond of using in the modern literary situation.

Joyce, in turn, discovers associativity human perception and thinking, his novel “Ulysses” is built on this discovery. Inner monologue Marion Bloom in Joyce's novel is a gigantic plexus of unpredictable associations, which unfolds over dozens of pages, without a single punctuation mark.

That is, by the beginning of the twentieth century in the European novel there was an active transfer of artistic interest from building the character of a literary hero to the study and reconstruction of the mechanism of the subconscious and cognitive processes. At the same time, as a modern researcher correctly notes, “the titans of early modernism - Joyce, Kafka, Proust - created not only a new literary world, but also a different reader’s consciousness.” In the process of research, reproduction of the structure of consciousness in works of art These writers were re-creating the living, real, and not artificially recreated consciousness of literary heroes, the consciousness of their contemporaries. We can say that these writers, having identified the main structural features consciousness, became participants in the breakdown of the old, “nineteen” consciousness, and the creators of the new consciousness of man in the twentieth century.

However, this process also has another side. Already naturalism and positivism of the 19th century, and then the psychological discoveries of the 20th century. completely deny the integrity of the human personality. For a bundle of perceptions, a change of sensations, a fractional part of the cycle of nature is not a person. Psychology at the turn of the century abandoned the categories of personality and character. The personality dissolves in a continuously changing stream of mental states.

Russian writers of the early twentieth century sensed the enormous potential inherent in the so-called “novel of consciousness”. For this reason, they also conducted experiments in this direction. This trend can be observed in the works of Andrei Bely: in the story “Kotik Letaev” and in the novel “Petersburg”, in the novel “Little Demon” by F. Sologub, in the story “Childhood Eyelets” by B. Pasternak, etc. This was the way destruction of character. And in the era of the collapse of humanism, it could not be otherwise. Since the human personality in this period loses its own integrity and uniqueness, it breaks up into a number of components: consciousness, subconscious, psyche, gender, etc.

It is possible that on this path of crossing the traditional psychological novel with the new possibilities of the “novel of consciousness,” the main discoveries of Russian literature of the twentieth century awaited. But for objective socio-historical reasons this did not happen. The natural development of the literary process was interrupted and replaced by regulated and controlled literary creativity. For this reason, during the Soviet period of the development of literature of the twentieth century, only that literature was officially recognized that met the requirements of the method of socialist realism. This meant that Soviet literature was largely forced to exist within the framework of inheriting the traditions of the realistic psychological novel of the 19th century. She learned to make good use of those artistic discoveries that were made by the literature of the 19th century.

In the modern literary situation of the 80-90s, writers again turned to the achievements of the “novel of consciousness” and the experiments of Russian modernists. First of all, this applies to those artists who are usually called postmodernists. It is possible, and most likely, that they do not write pure “prose of consciousness,” but combine various elements of all the achievements and discoveries of literature, both realistic and modernist. But there is clearly a tendency to study a person not only and not so much from the side of character, but from the side of his consciousness. And of particular interest to modern literature are any pathological deviations from the average normal consciousness. This is, for example, “School for Fools” by Sasha Sokolov (see the corresponding lecture). Postmodernist prose is also subject to the law of character destruction, which, by its nature, destroys traditional plot structure.

Another important problem of twentieth-century literature is problem of perception.Realistic literature of the 19th century embodied in artistic forms a realistic way of perceiving reality. ʼʼTo the Nineteen-Eternal Consciousnessʼʼ this method seemed the most believable, capable of most faithfully conveying a person in the world around him.

At the same time, throughout its development, art also knew other ways of perceiving reality. For example, myth, from the point of view of a person of the 19th century, conveys reality not realistically, but fantastically, mythologically. From the height of the experience of the 19th century, reality, recreated in myth, was recreated incorrectly, it is fiction, fantasy, a fairy tale. But for consciousness itself ancient Greek, perceiving the myth, it fully corresponds to the reality that ancient man perceives with his senses.

The essence of the problem of perception for literature lies essentially in the fact that over the course of the millennia-long development of human civilization, there have been staged changes in human consciousness, and therefore in the perception of the surrounding reality. For this reason, the perception of reality by the medieval consciousness in the most radical way does not coincide with the perception of reality by a person of the 19th century. The perception of the Russian symbolists of the early twentieth century, for whom existence was revealed in a mystical, symbolic light, categorically did not coincide with the perception of the realists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The symbolists perceived what the realists, who did not have the reception organs to capture the mystical reality, were not able to perceive.

In Soviet literature, it was allowed to perceive the world exclusively realistically, but not symbolically, mystically, surrealistically, fantastically, etc.

Postmodern literature differs from realistic literature, first of all, in the way it perceives reality. In the works of postmodernists, the world is almost unrecognizable. The contours of space change, time flows both forward and backward. The simplest logical laws are not observed: cause-and-effect, unity-multiplicity, uniqueness-universality, etc. All this becomes the reason that the world around us, as depicted by postmodernists, loses its realistic outlines and acquires features of absurdity. Being, organized and developing according to certain laws - physical, chemical, biological, social, historical in postmodern literature, loses these laws and the world returns to its pre-organized, chaotic state.

The problem of conditioning. From the point of view of realistic literature, the image of a person will be described more accurately the more accurately his interactions with the outside world are explained and reproduced. In literary criticism, until recently, the formula was mandatory: “a typical hero in typical circumstances.” This formula precisely revealed the extreme importance of creating a human image in relationships with the outside world. At the same time, the concept of “typical circumstances” and the category of conditionality were not universal. Οʜᴎ changed based on those scientific and philosophical achievements and discoveries on the basis of which the worldview of any era was formed.

So, for example, for the ancient Greeks the surrounding world was directly space and the will of the gods. In the literature of the 19th century we see a different understanding. In accordance with the prevailing scientific, philosophical, sociological ideas of the 19th century. realism opened up a concrete, unified reality to artistic knowledge. For realism of the 19th century, unlike romanticism, reality is no longer divided into opposing spheres of high and low, ideal and material. The surrounding world is, first of all, nature in its physical laws, which corresponded to the prevailing philosophy of positivism in the minds of that time.

At first, realism discovered the conditioning of man by time and environment. Next, the refinement process began. Soon the realistic depiction of man came to the historical and social explanation of man. The fact is that the new concept of reality, which appeared in the 19th century, also gives rise to a new understanding of conditionality. Hence, the motivations for the actions of literary heroes change. In pre-realistic literature, the motives for actions were based on the initial principles of ideas about man. Man was understood as the sum of the ideal qualities of the mind and soul. Realistic literature, having abolished this initial premise, in the psychological interpretation of its characters was based on the infinitely diverse, unforeseen possibilities of the human personality itself and concrete reality. Realism was passionate about consistent determinism, the search for connections and causes in the construction of human character. Causality is the basic principle of the relationship of elements in the artistic structure of realism.

And what we now take for granted was once a discovery. So, for example, Germaine de Staël wrote that quite recently the discovery was made that climate, climatic conditions influence the formation of both human character, temperament and the national appearance of a particular people as a whole.

The character of Turgenev's Bazarov is determined, first of all, by history. According to the remark of L.Ya. Ginzburg, ʼʼHistory has penetrated inside the character and works from the inside. Its properties are generated by a given historical situation and outside of this they have no meaning. At the beginning of the novel, Turgenev intensifies Bazarov’s portrait features: “a long robe”, “a red hand”, which he is in no hurry to give to Kirsanov; he does not consider it necessary to wash and change clothes while on the road. If we remove these characteristics of Bazarov’s character from history, then we can conclude that the hero is sloppy. “But the signs of Bazarov’s appearance and behavior in the context of the novel can be read historically. Then instead of rudeness and sloppiness it turns out nihilismʼʼ. If Turgenev determines the very nihilistic character of Bazarov, then Tolstoy determines the very alternation of the mental states of his heroes.

Human consciousness of the twentieth century. compared to the nineteenth century. expanded the list of conditions of the surrounding world that influence a person, and vice versa, a person influencing these conditions. A person interacts with the space, time, surrounding him, numerous cosmic forces, forces generated by the absurd reality, the technocratic world, forces located in the person himself, but which he is unable to control, etc.

We will talk in more detail about these problems of modern literature in specific analyzes of the works of this or that author.

Literature 1985–1991

The starting point of the modern literary process is a political event - the Plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held in April 1985, at which M.S. Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. At the plenum the slogans were proclaimed: “Perestroika, Glasnost, Pluralism”.

It seemed that the country was on the verge of radical change. At the same time, it soon became clear that Gorbachev was internally only ready to reform and improve the existing communist system, and not destroy it, and build something fundamentally new. Yes, Gorbachev became the president of the Soviet Union, but at the same time he remained the general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee. Under him, the party remained the only power structure in the USSR, to which the army and the KGB were subordinate.

Let us recall the main events of these years.

April 25, 1986 - There was an explosion at Chernobyl, a fire in the reactor and the release of radioactivity into the atmosphere.

November 1986 ᴦ. – screening of Abuladze’s film “Repentance”

Summer 1988 ᴦ. – the problem of Nagorno-Karabakh. This mountainous region is part of Azerbaijan and is inhabited mainly by Armenians. The conflict traced back to the oppression of Armenians by the Azerbaijani authorities. The Armenians of Karabakh demanded independence and then annexation to Armenia.

In the spring of 1989. It became obvious that Gorbachev was beginning to lag behind the democratic wave that he himself had generated.

May 1989 – Creation of the first Parliament.

September 1989 ᴦ. Conflict and strikes in the Baltic states. Demand for independence. The situation is acute in Moldova. Continuation of the conflict in Azerbaijan.

November 1989 – abolition of Article 6 of the USSR Constitution. It stated that the CPSU directs all economic and social life country as the “ruling party”. Thus, the country overnight lost an all-pervasive instrument of coercion and control over all economic activity huge country. The people perceived this act as the onset of an era of anarchy. In a country with a destroyed mechanism of totalitarianism, the mechanism of democracy has not yet been built, which is why the power vacuum has intensified.

December 1989 ᴦ. The beginning of the liberation of Europe from socialism. The Berlin Wall collapsed. The East Germans united with the Federal Republic of Germany.

December 15, 1989 ᴦ. Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov, father, died hydrogen bomb and one of the leaders of the dissidence.

September 1990 ᴦ. – a plan for the transition to the market “500 days program” was created. G. Yavlinsky and others.

On the night of January 12-13, 1991. In Vilnius, troops of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and paratroopers seized the building of the television center. 10 tanks took part in the operation. 14 people were killed, 200 wounded.

By 1991 ᴦ. it became clear that the perestroika that began in 1985 had reached its logical end. It turned out to be impossible to increase the efficiency of the existing communist system; all possible resources had already been exhausted. This is evidenced by the political events of 1991.

August 19, 1991 ᴦ. there was a suppression of the coup of right-wing forces in Moscow, the so-called August putsch (B. Pugo, G. Yanaev, V. Pavlov, O. Baklanov).

On August 23, Yeltsin signed a decree “On the suspension of the activities of the Communist Party of the RSFSR for supporting the putsch.”

On August 24, M. Gorbachev announced his resignation from his title Secretary General party and called on the CPSU Central Committee to decide on self-dissolution. M. Geller notes: “The wise Stalin, when liquidating the communists, did not touch the structure of the party. Gorbachev demanded that the party itself, as such, commit harakiri to itself.

December 8, 1991 ᴦ. The presidents of Russia, Ukraine and the chairman of the Supreme Council of Belarus announced the dissolution of the USSR and the creation of the Community of Independent States. No right to dissolve Soviet Union they did not have, but as a result of this action, Gorbachev automatically ceased to be President of the USSR. And Yeltsin, the President of Russia, became the main figure in the political arena. So, almost simultaneously, Gorbachev ceased to perform the duties of both president and general secretary. The Gorbachev era was over.

M. Geller in his “Russian Notes” placed the remark of the American journalist Bill Keller that “perestroika fit between two phone calls: in December 1986. Gorbachev called Andrei Sakharov, starting new era; Lithuanian President Vytautas Landsbergis called Gorbachev on January 13, 1991, wanting to know the reasons for the provocative actions of the troops in Vilnius, but heard from the secretary that the president was sleeping and did not order to wake him up.

One can doubt almost all the achievements of Gorbachev's perestroika, except glasnost. It was allowed to talk about many things that had previously been under the strictest censorship ban. Censorship was abolished and virtually complete freedom of the press was established.

This meant, firstly, the legalization of dissidence (dissent) or, in other words, political opposition. Secondly, the refusal to strictly follow the political myth that was created over the course of seven decades of Soviet power, which, in turn, made it possible objective analysis ancient and recent history of the Russian state. And thirdly, this was a way out of the impasse of socialist realist literature.

Glasnost was understood by the Russian intelligentsia primarily as the right to freedom of opinion in both political and aesthetic areas. The practical fruits of this understanding were not long in coming and immediately radically changed the literary situation. Publications began to appear. Viktor Toporov noted in 1989: “What is happening in literature now is not so much the process of nominating new significant names<…>and not so much the process of returning names and works<…>as a designation - still very approximate - of the contours of our literature in its historical development. And further: “According to the subtle remark of T.S. Eliot, every essentially new work introduced or returned to literary use forces us to change our attitude towards all works previously recognized and existing in the collective reader's consciousness.

The period from 1985 to 1991 was marked, first of all, by that acute literature that stated the severe crisis of our time, by those works that, for censorship reasons, could not see the light of day earlier.

Immediately after the 1985 plenum. works appeared, the pathos of which can be called revealing. In the second half of 1985. came out "Fire" by V. Rasputin ("Our Contemporary" 1985. No. 7). In 1986 ᴦ. – “The Sad Detective” by V. Astafieva (October 1986. No. 1), “The Scaffold” by Ch. Aitmatova (New World.
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1986. № 6-8).

The works of Astafiev, Rasputin, Aitmatov, Belov, published in the second half of the 80s, exposed not only totalitarianism, the phenomena and consequences of Stalin and Brezhnev times, they stated the national spiritual crisis. And pointing to this crisis, they prophesied about irreparable disasters that could befall the people. Thus, V. Rasputin in “Fire”, within the framework of symbolic imagery, “predicted” both the Chernobyl events and the death of the empire. The fire in Rasputin's story did not arise as a result of a natural disaster; it was caused by human carelessness, debauchery and laziness.

The tasks of realist writers included an appeal to the moral norm of the nation, the memory of it, despite its virtual absence in modern reality. Hence the prophetic intonations of these writers. For this reason, the works of realist writers of this time acquire a journalistic orientation, often bypassing artistic imagery, which directly turns into a direct author’s statement. “The Sad Detective” is very close to the direct author’s thoughts of V. Astafiev. Why did I. Zolotussky rightly and very accurately call Astafiev’s novel “the cry of the author’s confession”. In his work, Astafiev assesses the level of morality of the entire society. And the main questions asked by district police officer Soshnin and, to a greater extent, Astafiev himself: How to continue to live? Why did people become like this? Who is guilty?

It should be noted that realist writers still set themselves the task of creating a three-dimensional, multi-colored, plastically perfect world that exists as if independently of the author. That is, the ideal for them remained the tradition of the 19th century, the desire to preserve the main thing for the 19th century. novel genre. This situation created a confrontation between realist writers and representatives of the so-called “other prose,” underground literature, postmodern literature, who sought radical transformations of traditional aesthetics. But postmodern literature fully emerges from underground already in the Yeltsin, and not Gorbachev, era, in the 90s, and not in the 80s.

Another feature of the second half of the 80s is the “rehabilitation parade”. The process of returning literature has begun. The picture of the literary process was rapidly losing its epic solidity, becoming more and more eclectic, more and more motley and mosaic.

The revealing works contained two extremely important ones for the literary situation of the 80s. internal tendencies that very soon showed themselves in literature of a somewhat different kind. In the second half of the 80s. the revealing fact turned out to be more important and necessary public opinion rather than an aesthetic fact. For this reason, the process in which journalism, which by its nature is designed to work not with fiction, but with fact, takes on the revealing function becomes completely legitimate. For this reason, it acquires such a loud sound at the turn of the 80s and 90s.

In parallel with journalism, the so-called so-called "hard" or “natural” prose, which is what the critics noted: “...the renewal of prose and journalism was ensured by the discovery of previously forbidden topics.”

Among its authors are L. Gabysheva, A. Golovin. One of the first such works, which was also a declaration of the aesthetics of “hard prose,” was the story S. Kaledina ʼʼHumble Cemetery ʼʼ.

Reader interest in this kind of work of “hard prose” is based on a special turn of the topic, unusual for socialist realist literature.

It cannot be said that the theme of death and cemeteries is new in Russian literature. Consciousness of the 19th century. suggested an elegiac, sometimes sentimental attitude towards death. Thus, the genre of elegy, turning to the theme of death, reflected on the frailty of human life, on the triumph of death over life (Pushkin, Baratynsky). The consciousness of the twentieth century brought new meanings to the traditional images of the grave and cemetery. Οʜᴎ could be perceived as a symbol, a mythologeme (see, for example, “The Pit” by A. Platonov). End of the 20th century unfolds the conversation about death in its own way.

Kaledin sees death from the literary, physiological, realistic, and, in fact, quasi-realistic side. He talks about the cemetery as it appears to a person at the end of the twentieth century, a resident of the capital city. Kaledin's interest is focused on those who serve the dead in one of the capital's giant cemeteries. And this description is read as a desire to create a model of life Soviet state in general, with its own hierarchy, with its own laws. More precisely, he strives to show those aspects of Soviet life, the depiction of which was taboo for a long time. Kaledin focused his interest primarily on the cruel, bloody, dirty, non-aesthetic side of cemetery existence. And he shows it as an everyday household norm.

The main character of the story is Alexey Sergeevich Vorobyov, Sparrow, as his comrades call him. Sparrow is a gravedigger. The manager of a funeral service bureau, Petrovich takes Sparrow to work despite the fact that Sparrow is a group II disabled person. He became disabled after his brother broke his skull in a drunken fight. And now on one place on Sparrow’s head the skin is stretched over a broken skull, without cranial bones.

The story opens with an episode in which Petrovich shows Sparrow the place where he needs to dig a grave hole. Sparrow immediately understands that they have “pushed the ownerless” (in professional jargon this means that in the place of an ownerless grave, which no one has visited for a long time and no one cares for, a new burial will be made). Naturally, big money is paid for breaking the rules.

The sparrow begins to dig a hole. And he does it with skill and daring, with special professionalism, with special beauty: “The sparrow spat on the left one, yellow with a solid callus, grabbed the fork of the shovel, and twisted it around the axis. With his right hand he grabbed the handle right next to the iron and, with a whistle, thrust the shovel into the ground. And went. I rarely dug like this, only when time was running out, when the coffin was already out of the church, but the grave had not been started.

The legs stay in place, do not twitch, all the work is done with the arms and body. Drive a shovel into the ground - and rip it to hell! He drove it in, tore it off - and onto the top all in one fell swoop, with one turn, using only his hands. Without a leg. Just like that!ʼʼ

And it’s a pity for Sparrow that no one sees his beautiful work. Because “in other cemeteries, no one can do this without a leg.” The sparrow saw all sorts of things, but so that the hole would be ready in 40 minutes, there are no more of them. And it won't. Only he is Sparrow!ʼʼ. In Sparrow’s reflections there is pride in his ability to work. He is also proud that he has his own professional digging technique - without a leg, with just his hands. At the same time, Sparrow does not always dig up the required 1.5 meters, only on special orders from the manager. For ordinary burials, he makes a hack: he pours loose soil around the perimeter of the grave, which creates the illusion of extremely important depth.

The cemetery has its own laws. You can look for “red”, that is, gold teeth, in graves, you can cheat on clients: make a gravestone, flower bed, fence, etc. to order. But a percentage of the income received must be sent to the excavator foreman, whose name is Molchok. The digger Garik, who did not want to obey these rules, ended up in the Sklifasovsky hospital with his head pierced with a spatula.

The gravediggers have completely atrophied normal human reactions. In the cemetery, life and death are devalued, moral concepts are inverted, and the gravediggers do not know the concept of “blasphemy.” The evil that the heroes of the story commit is not even motivated: it is out of boredom, to have fun. So Sparrow “jokes” with the dog. He puts her in the oven and laughs when the scorched dog begins to howl. And the old front-line soldier, the drunkard Kutya, dresses stray dogs in wreaths from the graves. But moral standards are distorted not only among those in cemeteries. And life outside the fence presents monstrous, from an ethical point of view, twists. An eighty-year-old man, for whom it is time to think about the eternal, wants to bury a cat in the grave of his mother. It doesn’t even occur to the old man that he is doing something unnatural.

What is striking here is not so much the naturalistic, detailed ordinariness of such existence, but rather the insensitivity of the heroes to it. It is worth saying that this is the norm for them. They don't know any other life.

According to the plot of the story, Petrovich is removed from his post for uncovering the ownerless grave that Sparrow was digging. The fact is that this ownerless grave was located next to the Decembrist memorial. And three years ago, the cultural department scheduled this ownerless building for demolition, and in its place planned to build steps to the memorial. When the question arises about who carried out Petrovich’s instructions, the gravediggers do not hand over Sparrow. There is a threat of dismissal of every second gravedigger from Petrovich's brigade. And then Sparrow gets up and admits that he was digging, after which he goes and gets drunk. Among the terrible cemetery life that the author depicts, Sparrow turned out to be capable of normal human action. There is a moment of glimmer of goodness in the midst of a terrible nightmare. And it seems that this leaves the reader some hope that not everything human has died in the world. But the ending of the story destroys illusions: if something bright comes through in the life of the same Leshka Sparrow, then it will be like the last step, like a sip of vodka, which turned out to be fatal for him.

Kaledin's story is written in naturalistic traditions. The description of life in the cemetery is given in deliberately physiological detail. And these details concern not so much human death as the struggle for the lives and money of those serving the cemetery.

Kaledin's interest is focused on the depiction of those who send the dead on their final journey, on their attitude to life and death. And it shows the harsh sides of cemetery existence. Shows them as the norm. This was S. Kaledin’s artistic discovery. At the same time, Kaledin’s artistic discoveries end here. If there is a theme in the story, strictly speaking, there is no conflict. For this reason, plot development, which would explore this conflict, is essentially absent; it is replaced by description.

It should be noted that the aesthetics of “natural” prose was brilliantly used by journalism in the first years of glasnost. And there it turned out to be more organic than in the “hard prose” itself. Kaledin very soon ceased to arouse active reader interest precisely because his journalism portrayed post-Soviet reality harsher, more unsightly, and more tragic than “natural” prose did. Kaledin, as an artist, turned out to be unable to evolve, preferring extensive (thematic) development to intensive. In the same traditions of naturalistic description, S. Kaledin’s “Stroibat”, also dedicated to

Problems of development of modern literature - concept and types. Classification and features of the category “Problems of the development of modern literature” 2017, 2018.