Sending truth-seekers on the road, N.A. Nekrasov not only shows us people of different classes, creating a portrait of Russia in the second half of the 19th century at one of the turning points in its development - the maturation and implementation of the reform of 1861. The main task of a poet writing for the people and speaking on their behalf is to show the Russian people as they are. “I decided to present in a coherent story everything that I know about the people,” wrote N. A. Nekrasov about his work on the main poem in his life, “everything that I happened to hear from his lips, and I outlined “To whom in Russia live well”... This will be an epic of modern peasant life...” Before us is a whole gallery of images, very different characters, very different outlooks on life. The righteous and the scoundrels, the toilers and the lazy, the rebellious and the dishonest, the rebels and the slaves, pass before the reader’s eyes, as if alive. The poet talks about someone in detail and vividly, someone is depicted in one expressive stroke. Even our truth-seeking peasants from places with such telling names - the Pulled up province, the Empty Volost, from different villages - Nesytov, Neyolova, Zaplatov, Dyryavina, Gorelok, Golodukhina, Neurozhaika, etc. - are not a homogeneous faceless mass, but people with their own past, their own preferences . Having abandoned their home and their affairs for the sake of a great goal - to find the meaning of peasant life, to find out who lives happily and freely in Rus' - they cannot imagine a life of idleness. Not only do they pay for Matryona Timofeevna’s confession with work - work becomes a necessity: The wanderers could not stand it: “We haven’t worked for a long time, Let’s mow!” Seven women gave them their braids. I woke up, the forgotten habit flared up. To work! Like teeth from hunger, everyone's nimble hand works. Men are moving away from looking for happy people among priests, landowners and other representatives of the hierarchical elite, perhaps because they do not respect slackers who do not distinguish “an ear of rye from a barley.” We ask God a little: Give us an honest deed, do it skillfully, and give us strength! Working life is a direct road to a friend's heart, away from the threshold, a coward and a lazy person! Pictures of the life of the long-suffering Russian people are formed from boastful stories at fairs, from songs composed by the people, from legends told by wanderers and pilgrims, from confessions - as if he is passing in front of us, bast shoes and barefoot, with backs bent from overwork, with sunburned faces, with with calloused hands, with a groan and a song in the soul, all of Russia. We are not gentle white-handed people, but we are great people in work and in play! This is how Russian men speak about themselves with dignity. Let the state not value their feats of arms: Come on, from the redoubt from the first number Well, come on, with George - around the world, around the world! But the full pension didn’t work out, all the old man’s wounds were rejected. The doctor’s assistant looked and said: “Second-rate! And a pension for them! There is no order to give them away in full: The heart is not shot through, but the common people respect and pity them. Let merchants and contractors profit from peasant labor, putting an unbearable burden on their shoulders, taking away their youthful strength, eroding their health, let it seem like happiness after working in a foreign land to go to their homeland, to die at home - their native land itself will support them. One of the heroes of the poem will say about himself bitterly and accurately: “In the village of Bosovo, Yakim Nagoy lives, He works until he’s dead, He drinks until he’s half to death!” The whole story of Yakim Nagogo is the fate of a talented craftsman, hard worker, rebel and poor thing, told in a few lines: Yakim, a wretched old man, Once lived in St. Petersburg, but ended up in prison: He decided to compete with a merchant! Like a peeling stick, he returned to his homeland and took up his plow. Since then, for thirty years he has been roasting on a strip under the sun, under a harrow he is saved from the frequent rain, he lives - tinkering with the plow, and death will come to Yakimushka - like a clod of earth falling off, that has dried up on the plow. N.A. Nekrasov describes Yakim as an exhausted sufferer: The chest is sunken, as if depressed, the Stomach; at the eyes, at the mouth, radiating like cracks on the dried earth; And he himself looks like Mother Earth: his neck is brown, like a layer cut off by a plow, his face is brick, his hand is like tree bark, and his hair is like sand. However, Yakim Nagoy is not a dark, not downtrodden man; he managed to maintain a pure, clear soul and individuality. While rescuing popular prints during a fire, he lost the money he had accumulated “over a century,” but did not “come to his senses” and did not betray his dream of beauty. Knowing how to talk to the people, to tell stories figuratively and vividly, it is Yakim who formulates the essence of the peasant protest, noting its great hidden strengths and weakness of expression: Every peasant has a Soul like a black cloud - Angry, menacing - and it would be necessary for Thunder to thunder from there, for bloody rains to pour A it all ends with wine. Yakim Nagoy stands at the very beginning of the path leading to awareness of his own dignity, his strength, and the need for unity before a common enemy. The image of Ermila Girin in the poem became a symbol of the highest authority among the people, upholding justice and peasant solidarity. When they want to take the mill away from him and the merchant Altynnikov, in collusion with the officials, demands to immediately pay money for it, the people, knowing Girin’s honesty, help him out by collecting the required amount at the fair. Yermilo is a literate guy, but there is no time to write down, Hurry up to count! They put on a hat full of tselkoviks, foreheads, burnt, beaten, tattered peasant banknotes. Yermilo took it - he didn’t disdain And a copper nickel. He would have become disdainful when he came across another copper hryvnia worth more than a hundred rubles! So people repaid him with kindness for his honest work as a clerk. For her honesty, people chose Ermila as burgomaster. And he, at seven years old, did not squeeze a worldly penny under his fingernail, at seven years old did not touch the right one, did not allow the guilty, did not bend his soul... And when Yermila slightly stumbled - he saved his younger brother from recruiting, he almost hanged himself because of remorse, managed to return his son to Vasilievna, who was taken as a recruit instead of his brother Ermila, atoned for his guilt and resigned from his position. At his mill he charged for grinding according to his conscience, did not detain the people - the clerk, the manager, the rich landowners and the poorest men - all the queues were obeyed, he maintained a strict order! Thanks to all this, Ermila Girin had an enviable, true Honor, not bought either by money or by fear: by strict truth. With intelligence and kindness! Even the authorities were aware of his great authority among the people and wanted to use him for their own purposes when the Estate of the Landowner Obrubkov, the Frightened Province, Nedykhanev Uyezd, the Village of Stolbnyaki rebelled... The authorities hoped that the former mayor Girin would help them and be able to pacify the rebels, but Ermila did not go against his conscience, as a result of which he ended up in prison, like most other fighters for truth and justice. The poem increasingly repeats the motif of rebellion, anger, and the inability to continue life in the old way - in submission and fear. To not endure is an abyss, To endure is an abyss! - these words begin the story about the life of Savely, a Holy Russian hero, who for a long time, together with his fellow villagers, resisted the landowner, and then buried alive the German manager who mocked him. We saw, although spontaneous, already organized resistance, a call for rebellion - the word thrown by Savely: “Give it up!” Having served hard labor, the peasant returns home unbroken (“branded, but not a slave!”), having not lost his sense of dignity, not resigning himself to vanity, greed, and petty quibbles of the family, retaining his kind soul and the ability to understand and support his young daughter-in-law. It is symbolic that outwardly it reminds Matryona of the monument to Ivan Susanin. But even peasant women, “much-suffering”, “long-suffering”, do not look downtrodden and submissive. In Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina there is not only the strength to endure all the trials, backbreaking work, bullying of the family, but also the readiness at any moment to protect her children, her husband, to accept punishment, reproaches from her husband’s relatives: There is no unbroken bone in me, no unstretched vein, > There is no unspoiled blood - I endure and do not complain! I put all my God-given strength into my work, and all my love into my children! Matryona Timofeevna speaks about herself: For me - quiet, invisible - A mental storm has passed, she considers herself an “old woman” at thirty-eight years old and is sure that it’s not a matter for women to look for a happy one!.. Noting the heroine’s ability to deal with circumstances, the desire of herself to be the mistress of her own destiny, Nekrasov shows the irresistible power of the system, which gives rise to a lot of evil. All the more dear to us are the words of a peasant woman who managed to preserve a living soul in this world: I carry a bowed head, an angry heart! Among the rebellious and freedom-loving peasants - the heroes of the poem, it is necessary to note the episodic image of the inflexible Agap (chapter “The Last One”), who hated the landowners so much that he could not even stand the “comedy” of punishment when, to please the Last One, Prince Utyatin, he was given a drink in the barn and forced to scream as if he was being severely flogged - he died from the humiliation he experienced. There are other heroes in the poem: People of the servile rank are real dogs sometimes: The more severe the punishment, the dearer the gentlemen are to them. This is a former footman who at the fair boasts that he licked the master’s plates and acquired the “lord’s disease” - gout, and the eternal “serf of the Utyatin princes” footman Ipat, and the exemplary servant Yakov the faithful. This is the “fake” mayor Klim, the most worthless man who voluntarily agreed to play this unseemly role in front of the Last One. Particularly noteworthy is the image of the elder Gleb, who, for money, destroyed the will of the late admiral, who gave his serfs manumission. For decades, until recently, the villain secured eight thousand souls, With the clan, with the tribe, whatever the people! What a lot of people! with a stone into the water! God forgives everything, but the sin of Judas is not forgiven. Oh man! man! You are the sinner of all, And for that you will suffer forever! The poem by N. A. Nekrasov “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is remarkable because it shows real life - the diversity of peasant types, two paths “in the middle of the world below.” And next to the “expensive thorn” along which the crowd “greedy” goes to temptation, there is another path: The honest road, Only strong, loving souls go along it, to fight, to work for the bypassed, for the oppressed. N.A. Nekrasov says that a lot of Rus' has already sent its Sons, marked with the Seal of God's gift, to honest paths, a lot of them mourned... In the image of Grigory Dobrosklonov, for whom Fate was preparing a glorious Path, the great name of the People's Intercessor, Consumption and Siberia, we clearly recognize the features of Nekrasov’s comrade-in-arms, Nikolai Dobrolyubov. Grigory Dobrosklonov is a poet who has embarked on the path of civil service to the fatherland, firmly deciding to whom he will give his whole life and for whom he will die. He, fed half-and-half bread with tears, brought up on mournful songs about the bitter lot of Vakhlachina, united in his soul love for his poor mother with love for his homeland, composing for her the radiant sounds of a noble hymn - He sang the embodiment of the people's happiness!.. It was thanks to reality and With the optimistic coloring of the image of Grigory Dobrosklonov, you perceive N. A. Nekrasov’s poem not only as an indictment of the state structure of that time, but also as a hymn to the courage and fortitude of the Russian people. Following the poet, I would like to repeat: Limits have not yet been set for the Russian people: There is a wide path before them.
The plot of the poem
Composition of the poem
Genre of the poem
The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” was conceived as an epic. An epic is a work of art that depicts an entire era in the life of a people. Nekrasov paints a broad canvas of people's life, assessing it from the perspective of the people.
The composition is built according to the laws of classical epic, i.e. consists of separate, relatively independent parts and chapters, interconnected by the theme of the road along which seven men travel in search of a happy man.
The order of the chapters in the poem is still controversial, as the work remained unfinished, and a number of fragments were not published due to censorship restrictions. In the complete works of A.N. Nekrasov's parts and chapters of the poem are arranged in the following order:
"Prologue"
"Part one"
Chapter I. Pop
Chapter II. Rural Fair"
Chapter III. drunken night
Chapter IV. Happy
Chapter V. Landowner
"Last One"
"Peasant Woman"
"Feast for the whole world"
In the “Prologue,” seven men from different villages meet and start an argument about happiness and a happy person in Rus'. The names of the villages indicate the general picture of post-reform devastation: “The tightened province, Terpigoreva district, Empty Porosity, from adjacent villages - Zaplatova, Dyryavina, Razutova, Znobishina, Gorelova, Neelova, Neurozhaika, etc.” The men decided to go in search of a happy man. An important image of the poem is the image of the road, which allows you to widely and fully show the life of the people. Many voices are heard in the poem, merging into one voice - the voice of the people of Russia.
The heroes of the poem are trying to find someone who “lives a happy, free life in Rus'.” The voices of the priest, the landowner, the last nobleman, and the peasants sound the same: there are no happy people in Russia.
Behind the dispute between the men, Nekrasov poses a completely different question: what is happiness in the eternal, Orthodox Christian understanding and are the Russian people capable of combining peasant politics with Christian morality?
In the chapter “A Feast for the Whole World,” Nekrasov brings out the central image of the poem - the image of Grisha Dobrosklonov, the people’s intercessor, who says: “The Russian people are gathering their strength and learning to be citizens.” These words contain the main pathos of the poem. Nekrasov shows how the forces that unite them are maturing among the people.
In the chapter “Rural Fair” Nekrasov shows a crowd of people - a motley, intoxicated, vociferous sea of people. In the image of a rural market woman there is the soul of a peasant, broad and many-sided, hundred-voiced and unrestrained.
In the chapter “Drunken Night,” the festive celebration reaches its climax, and the situation becomes tense. And here a man with a strong character, Yakim Naga, appears.
Yakim Nagoy- a peasant, an experienced man, in the past engaged in latrine work, who lived in cities. He is one of those “who works himself to death and drinks himself to death.” Yakim Nagoy appears before the reader as the son of a mother of damp earth, as a symbol of the labor foundations of peasant life: “at the eyes, at the mouth there are bends, like cracks in dry earth,” “the hand is tree bark, and the hair is sand.” Yakima Nagogo has his own peasant sense of honor and dignity. He sees social injustice towards the people; in his words about the people's soul one can hear a formidable warning.
The image of Yakim Nagogo reflected the contradictions of the people's soul. It helps to understand that judging a people’s grief or joy can only be done from within the people’s way of life.
Ermil Girin- a simple man who has earned universal respect for his justice and honesty. When Ermil and the merchant Altynnikov had a dispute over a mill and he had no money with him, he turned to the people for support. And the people, in a single impulse, collect money and win victory over untruth.
Yermil Girin is endowed with a keen sense of Christian conscience and honor. Only once did he stumble: he excluded his younger brother Mitri from recruiting. But this act cost Yermil great suffering and ended with popular repentance, which further strengthened his authority.
It would seem that Yermil had everything he needed for happiness: peace of mind, money, and honor. But at a critical moment, Yermil sacrifices everything for the sake of the people's truth and ends up in prison.
Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina- a Russian peasant woman with a proud and independent character, with a sense of self-esteem. Nekrasov showed in the poem the fate of a woman from the people: life in her home, matchmaking and wedding, life in her husband’s house, the birth of a child, the death of a child, seeing off her husband as a recruit, troubles for her husband, etc.
The image of Matryona Timofeevna is a symbol of the wisdom, hard work, and long-suffering of a Russian woman. She bears within herself the features of a great martyr, capable of backbreaking work and spiritual humility. She believes that her fate is happier than others, despite all the trials, since her life is improved by the kind governor Elena Alexandrovna. But the Russian peasant woman, according to Matryona Timofeevna’s convictions, in principle cannot be happy, because the keys to her happiness and free will have been lost to God himself.
Matryona Timofeevna’s speech is folklore; from her lips we hear folk songs and peasant cries. This is the voice of the people themselves.
Saveliy, Holy Russian hero- a hero who appears in the story of Matryona Timofeevna. He is a Kostroma peasant who grew up in a remote forest region and the Korega River. Savely personifies the mighty forest element. He went through both prison and hard labor. With other men, when the patience to endure the tyranny of the German manager ran out, Savely pushed him into a hole and razed it to the ground. Savely is the first spontaneous popular rebel in the poem. When they call him “branded, a convict,” Savely replies: “Branded, but not a slave!” In the people's patience itself, he sees the embodiment of Russian heroism. However, Savely's formidable power is not without contradictions. The tragedy that happened to Savely, who did not keep track of his beloved grandson Dyomushka, softens the heart of the hero. He perceives the boy's death as punishment for the past sin of murder. From a rebel he turns into a religious ascetic, going to a monastery to repent.
Thus, the peasants of post-reform Russia understand that they live unhappily and who is to blame for their plight, but this does not prevent them from maintaining their inner dignity, honesty, sense of humor and their inner rightness. The author's attitude towards the images of peasants does not evoke pity in the reader; the poet admires his heroes and believes that they are capable of participating in the peasant revolution.
Sending truth-seekers on the road, N.A. Nekrasov not only shows us people of different classes, creating a portrait of Russia in the second half of the 19th century at one of the turning points in its development - the maturation and implementation of the reform of 1861. The main task of a poet writing for the people and speaking on their behalf is to show the Russian people as they are. “I decided to present in a coherent story everything that I know about the people,” wrote N. A. Nekrasov about his work on the main poem in his life, “everything that I happened to hear from his lips, and I outlined “To whom in Rus' live well"... This will be an epic of modern peasant life..."
Before us is a whole gallery of images, very different characters, very different views on life. The righteous and the scoundrels, the toilers and the lazy, the rebellious and the dishonest, the rebels and the slaves, pass before the reader’s eyes, as if alive. The poet talks about someone in detail and vividly, someone is depicted in one expressive stroke. Even our truth-seeking peasants from places with such
Speaking names -
A tightened province,
Empty parish,
From different villages -
Nesytova, Neelova,
Zaplatova, Dyryavina,
Gorelok, Golodukhina,
Bad harvest too -
Not a homogeneous faceless mass, but people with their own past, their own preferences. Having abandoned their home and their affairs for the sake of a great goal - to find the meaning of peasant life, to find out who lives happily and freely in Rus' - they cannot imagine a life of idleness. Not only do they pay for Matryona Timofeevna’s confession with work - work becomes a necessity:
The wanderers could not stand it:
“We haven’t worked for a long time,
Let's mow!"
Seven women gave them their braids.
Woke up, got excited
A forgotten habit
To work! Like teeth from hunger,
Works for everyone
Nimble hand.
Men are moving away from looking for happy people among priests, landowners and other representatives of the hierarchical elite, perhaps because they do not respect slackers who do not distinguish “an ear of rye from a barley.”
We're a little
We ask God:
Fair deal
Do it skillfully
Give us strength!
Working life -
Direct to friend
Road to the heart
Away from the threshold
Coward and lazy!
Pictures of the life of the long-suffering Russian people are formed from boastful stories at fairs, from songs composed by the people, from legends told by wanderers and pilgrims, from confessions - as if he is passing in front of us, bast shoes and barefoot, with backs bent from overwork, with sunburned faces, with with calloused hands, with a groan and a song in the soul, all of Russia.
Not gentle white-handed ones,
And we are great people
At work and at play!
This is how Russian men speak about themselves with dignity. Let the state not value their feats of arms:
Come on, from the redoubt from the first number
Well, with George - around the world, around the world!
And the full pension
Didn't work out, rejected
All the old man's wounds.
The doctor's assistant looked
Said: “Second-rate!
And a pension for them!
It was not ordered to give out the full:
The heart is not shot through,
But the common people respect and pity them.
Let merchants and contractors profit from men's labor, putting an unbearable burden on their shoulders, taking away one's strength, undermining one's health, let it seem like happiness after working in a foreign land
Get to your homeland
To die at home, -
Their native land itself will support them.
One of the heroes of the poem will say about himself bitterly and accurately:
"In the village of Bosovo
Yakim Nagoy lives,
He works himself to death
He drinks until he’s half dead!”
The whole story of Yakim Nagogo is the fate of a talented craftsman, hard worker, rebel and poor soul, told in a few lines:
Yakim, wretched old man,
I once lived in St. Petersburg,
Yes, he ended up in jail:
I decided to compete with the merchant!
Like a piece of velcro,
He returned to his homeland
And he took up the plow.
It's been roasting for thirty years since then
On the strip under the sun,
He escapes under the harrow
From frequent rain,
He lives and tinkers with the plow,
And death will come to Yakimushka -
As the lump of earth falls off,
What dried up on the plow.
N. A. Nekrasov describes Yakim as an exhausted sufferer:
The chest is sunken, as if depressed,
Stomach; at the eyes, at the mouth
Radiated like cracks
On dry ground;
And to Mother Earth myself
He looks like: brown neck,
Like a layer cut off by a plow,
Brick face
Hand - tree bark,
And the hair is sand.
However, Yakim Nagoy is not a dark, not downtrodden man; he managed to maintain a pure, clear soul and individuality. While rescuing popular prints during a fire, he lost the money he had accumulated “over a century,” but did not “come to his senses” and did not betray his dream of beauty. Knowing how to talk to the people, to tell stories figuratively and vividly, it is Yakim who formulates the essence of peasant protest, noting its great hidden strengths and weakness of expression:
Every peasant
Soul, like a black cloud -
Angry, menacing - and it should be
Thunder will roar from there,
Bloody rains
And it all ends with wine.
Yakim Nagoy stands at the very beginning of the path leading to awareness of his own dignity, his strength, and the need for unity before a common enemy.
The image of Ermila Girin in the poem became a symbol of the highest authority among the people, upholding justice and peasant solidarity. When they want to take the mill away from him and the merchant Altynnikov, in collusion with the officials, demands to immediately pay money for it, the people, knowing Girin’s honesty, help him out by collecting the required amount at the fair.
Yermilo is a literate guy,
There's no time to write it down
Put your hat full
Tselkovikov, foreheads,
Burnt, beaten, tattered
Peasant bank notes.
Yermilo took it - he didn’t disdain
And a copper penny.
Still he would become disdainful,
When did I come across here
Another copper hryvnia
More than a hundred rubles!
So people repaid him with kindness for his honest work as a clerk. For her honesty, people chose Ermila as burgomaster. And he
In seven years the world's penny
I didn’t squeeze it under my nail,
At the age of seven I didn’t touch the right one,
He did not allow the guilty
I didn’t bend my heart...
And when Ermila slightly stumbled - he saved his younger brother from recruiting, he almost hanged himself due to remorse, managed to return his son to Vasilyevna, who was taken as a recruit instead of Ermila’s brother, atoned for his guilt and resigned from his position.
At the mill
He took it for the grind according to his conscience,
Didn't stop people -
Clerk, manager,
Rich landowners
And the men are the poorest -
All lines were obeyed
The order was strict!
Thanks to all this, Ermila Girin had
An enviable, true honor,
Not bought with money,
Not with fear: with the strict truth.
With intelligence and kindness!
Landowner Obrubkov,
Frightened province,
Nedykhanev County,
Village Stolbnyaki…
The authorities hoped that the former mayor Girin would help them and be able to pacify the rebels, but Ermila did not go against his conscience, as a result of which he ended up in prison, like most other fighters for truth and justice. The poem increasingly repeats the motif of rebellion, anger, and the inability to continue life in the old way - in submission and fear.
To be intolerant is an abyss,
To endure it is an abyss! -
These words begin the story about the life of Savely, a Holy Russian hero, who for a long time, together with his fellow villagers, resisted the landowner, and then buried alive the German manager who mocked him. We saw, although spontaneous, already organized resistance, a call for rebellion - the word thrown by Savely: “Give it up!” Having served hard labor, the peasant returns home unbroken (“branded, but not a slave!”), having not lost his sense of dignity, not resigning himself to vanity, greed, and petty quibbles of the family, retaining his kind soul and the ability to understand and support his young daughter-in-law. It is symbolic that outwardly it reminds Matryona of the monument to Ivan Susanin. But even peasant women, “much-suffering”, “long-suffering”, do not look downtrodden and submissive. Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina not only has the strength to endure all the trials, backbreaking work, and family bullying, but also the readiness at any moment to protect her children, her husband, to accept punishment and reproaches from her husband’s relatives:
There is no unbroken bone,
There is no unstretched vein,
> There is no unspoiled blood -
I endure and do not complain!
All the power given by God,
I put it to work
All the love for the kids!
Matrena Timofeevna says about herself:
For me - quiet, invisible -
The spiritual storm has passed,
She considers herself an “old woman” at thirty-eight years old and is sure that
It's not a matter - between women
Happy searching!..
Noting the heroine’s ability to deal with circumstances, the desire to be the mistress of her own destiny, Nekrasov shows the irresistible force of the system, which gives rise to a lot of evil. All the more dear to us are the words of the peasant woman who managed to save a living soul in this world:
I have my head down
I carry an angry heart!
Among the rebellious and freedom-loving peasants - the heroes of the poem, it is necessary to note the episodic image of the inflexible Agap (chapter “The Last One”), who hated the landowners so much that he could not even stand the “comedy” of punishment when, to please the Last One, Prince Utyatin, he was given a drink in the barn and forced to scream as if he was being severely flogged - he died from the humiliation he experienced. There are other heroes in the poem:
People of servile rank -
Real dogs sometimes:
The heavier the punishment,
That's why gentlemen are dearer to them.
This is a former footman who at the fair boasts that he licked the master’s plates and acquired the “lord’s disease” - gout, and the eternal “serf of the Utyatin princes” footman Ipat, and the exemplary servant Yakov the faithful. This is the “fake” mayor Klim, the most worthless man who voluntarily agreed to play this unseemly role in front of the Last One. Particularly noteworthy is the image of the elder Gleb, who, for money, destroyed the will of the late admiral, who gave his serfs manumission.
For decades, until recently
Eight thousand souls were secured by the villain,
With the family, with the tribe, whatever the people!
What a lot of people! with a stone into the water!
God forgives everything, but Judas sin
It doesn't say goodbye.
Oh man! man! you are the sinner of all,
And for that you will suffer forever!
The poem by N. A. Nekrasov “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is remarkable because it shows real life - the diversity of peasant types, two paths “in the middle of the world below.” And next to the “expensive thorn” along which the “greedy crowd” goes to temptation, there is another path:
The road is honest
They walk along it
Only strong souls
Loving,
To fight, to work
For the bypassed
For the oppressed.
N.A. Nekrasov says that
Rus' has already sent a lot
His sons, marked
The seal of God's gift,
On honest paths
I mourned a lot of them...
In the image of Grigory Dobrosklonov, to whom
Fate was preparing
The path is glorious, the name is loud
People's Defender,
Consumption and Siberia,
We clearly recognize the features of Nekrasov’s comrade-in-arms, Nikolai Dobrolyubov. Grigory Dobrosklonov is a poet who has embarked on the path of civil service to the fatherland, firmly deciding to whom he will give his whole life and for whom he will die. He, fed half-and-half bread with tears, brought up on mournful songs about the bitter lot of Vakhlachina, united in his soul love for his poor mother with love for his homeland, composing for her the radiant sounds of a noble hymn - He sang the embodiment of the people's happiness!.. It was thanks to reality and With the optimistic coloring of the image of Grigory Dobrosklonov, you perceive N. A. Nekrasov’s poem not only as an indictment of the state structure of that time, but also as a hymn to the courage and fortitude of the Russian people. Following the poet, I would like to repeat:
More to the Russian people
No limits set:
There is a wide path ahead of him.
Sending truth-seekers on the road, N.A. Nekrasov not only shows us people of different classes, creating a portrait of Russia in the second half of the 19th century at one of the turning points in its development - the maturation and implementation of the reform of 1861. The main task of a poet writing for the people and speaking on their behalf is to show the Russian people as they are. “I decided to present in a coherent story everything that I know about the people,” wrote N. A. Nekrasov about his work on the main poem in his life, “everything that I happened to hear from his lips, and I outlined “To whom in Rus' live well"... This will be an epic of modern peasant life..."
Before us is a whole gallery of images, very different characters, very different views on life. The righteous and the scoundrels, the toilers and the lazy, the rebellious and the dishonest, the rebels and the slaves, pass before the reader’s eyes, as if alive. The poet talks about someone in detail and vividly, someone is depicted in one expressive stroke. Even our truth-seeking peasants from places with such
Speaking names -
A tightened province,
Empty parish,
From different villages -
Nesytova, Neelova,
Zaplatova, Dyryavina,
Gorelok, Golodukhina,
Bad harvest too -
Not a homogeneous faceless mass, but people with their own past, their own preferences. Having abandoned their home and their affairs for the sake of a great goal - to find the meaning of peasant life, to find out who lives happily and freely in Rus' - they cannot imagine a life of idleness. Not only do they pay for Matryona Timofeevna’s confession with work - work becomes a necessity:
The wanderers could not stand it:
“We haven’t worked for a long time,
Let's mow!"
Seven women gave them their braids.
Woke up, got excited
A forgotten habit
To work! Like teeth from hunger,
Works for everyone
Nimble hand.
Men are moving away from looking for happy people among priests, landowners and other representatives of the hierarchical elite, perhaps because they do not respect slackers who do not distinguish “an ear of rye from a barley.”
We're a little
We ask God:
Fair deal
Do it skillfully
Give us strength!
Working life -
Direct to friend
Road to the heart
Away from the threshold
Coward and lazy!
Pictures of the life of the long-suffering Russian people are formed from boastful stories at fairs, from songs composed by the people, from legends told by wanderers and pilgrims, from confessions - as if he is passing in front of us, bast shoes and barefoot, with backs bent from overwork, with sunburned faces, with with calloused hands, with a groan and a song in the soul, all of Russia.
Not gentle white-handed ones,
And we are great people
At work and at play!
This is how Russian men speak about themselves with dignity. Let the state not value their feats of arms:
Come on, from the redoubt from the first number
Well, with George - around the world, around the world!
And the full pension
Didn't work out, rejected
All the old man's wounds.
The doctor's assistant looked
Said: “Second-rate!
And a pension for them!
It was not ordered to give out the full:
The heart is not shot through,
But the common people respect and pity them.
Let merchants and contractors profit from men's labor, putting an unbearable burden on their shoulders, taking away one's strength, undermining one's health, let it seem like happiness after working in a foreign land
Get to your homeland
To die at home, -
Their native land itself will support them.
One of the heroes of the poem will say about himself bitterly and accurately:
"In the village of Bosovo
Yakim Nagoy lives,
He works himself to death
He drinks until he’s half dead!”
The whole story of Yakim Nagogo is the fate of a talented craftsman, hard worker, rebel and poor soul, told in a few lines:
Yakim, wretched old man,
I once lived in St. Petersburg,
Yes, he ended up in jail:
I decided to compete with the merchant!
Like a piece of velcro,
He returned to his homeland
And he took up the plow.
It's been roasting for thirty years since then
On the strip under the sun,
He escapes under the harrow
From frequent rain,
He lives and tinkers with the plow,
And death will come to Yakimushka -
As the lump of earth falls off,
What dried up on the plow.
N. A. Nekrasov describes Yakim as an exhausted sufferer:
The chest is sunken, as if depressed,
Stomach; at the eyes, at the mouth
Radiated like cracks
On dry ground;
And to Mother Earth myself
He looks like: brown neck,
Like a layer cut off by a plow,
Brick face
Hand - tree bark,
And the hair is sand.
However, Yakim Nagoy is not a dark, not downtrodden man; he managed to maintain a pure, clear soul and individuality. While rescuing popular prints during a fire, he lost the money he had accumulated “over a century,” but did not “come to his senses” and did not betray his dream of beauty. Knowing how to talk to the people, to tell stories figuratively and vividly, it is Yakim who formulates the essence of peasant protest, noting its great hidden strengths and weakness of expression:
Every peasant
Soul, like a black cloud -
Angry, menacing - and it should be
Thunder will roar from there,
Bloody rains
And it all ends with wine.
Yakim Nagoy stands at the very beginning of the path leading to awareness of his own dignity, his strength, and the need for unity before a common enemy.
The image of Ermila Girin in the poem became a symbol of the highest authority among the people, upholding justice and peasant solidarity. When they want to take the mill away from him and the merchant Altynnikov, in collusion with the officials, demands to immediately pay money for it, the people, knowing Girin’s honesty, help him out by collecting the required amount at the fair.
Yermilo is a literate guy,
There's no time to write it down
Put your hat full
Tselkovikov, foreheads,
Burnt, beaten, tattered
Peasant bank notes.
Yermilo took it - he didn’t disdain
And a copper penny.
Still he would become disdainful,
When did I come across here
Another copper hryvnia
More than a hundred rubles!
So people repaid him with kindness for his honest work as a clerk. For her honesty, people chose Ermila as burgomaster. And he
In seven years the world's penny
I didn’t squeeze it under my nail,
At the age of seven I didn’t touch the right one,
He did not allow the guilty
I didn’t bend my heart...
And when Ermila slightly stumbled - he saved his younger brother from recruiting, he almost hanged himself due to remorse, managed to return his son to Vasilyevna, who was taken as a recruit instead of Ermila’s brother, atoned for his guilt and resigned from his position.
At the mill
He took it for the grind according to his conscience,
Didn't stop people -
Clerk, manager,
Rich landowners
And the men are the poorest -
All lines were obeyed
The order was strict!
Thanks to all this, Ermila Girin had
An enviable, true honor,
Not bought with money,
Not with fear: with the strict truth.
With intelligence and kindness!
Landowner Obrubkov,
Frightened province,
Nedykhanev County,
Village Stolbnyaki…
The authorities hoped that the former mayor Girin would help them and be able to pacify the rebels, but Ermila did not go against his conscience, as a result of which he ended up in prison, like most other fighters for truth and justice. The poem increasingly repeats the motif of rebellion, anger, and the inability to continue life in the old way - in submission and fear.
To be intolerant is an abyss,
To endure it is an abyss! -
These words begin the story about the life of Savely, a Holy Russian hero, who for a long time, together with his fellow villagers, resisted the landowner, and then buried alive the German manager who mocked him. We saw, although spontaneous, already organized resistance, a call for rebellion - the word thrown by Savely: “Give it up!” Having served hard labor, the peasant returns home unbroken (“branded, but not a slave!”), having not lost his sense of dignity, not resigning himself to vanity, greed, and petty quibbles of the family, retaining his kind soul and the ability to understand and support his young daughter-in-law. It is symbolic that outwardly it reminds Matryona of the monument to Ivan Susanin. But even peasant women, “much-suffering”, “long-suffering”, do not look downtrodden and submissive. Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina not only has the strength to endure all the trials, backbreaking work, and family bullying, but also the readiness at any moment to protect her children, her husband, to accept punishment and reproaches from her husband’s relatives:
There is no unbroken bone,
There is no unstretched vein,
> There is no unspoiled blood -
I endure and do not complain!
All the power given by God,
I put it to work
All the love for the kids!
Matrena Timofeevna says about herself:
For me - quiet, invisible -
The spiritual storm has passed,
She considers herself an “old woman” at thirty-eight years old and is sure that
It's not a matter - between women
Happy searching!..
Noting the heroine’s ability to deal with circumstances, the desire to be the mistress of her own destiny, Nekrasov shows the irresistible force of the system, which gives rise to a lot of evil. All the more dear to us are the words of the peasant woman who managed to save a living soul in this world:
I have my head down
I carry an angry heart!
Among the rebellious and freedom-loving peasants - the heroes of the poem, it is necessary to note the episodic image of the inflexible Agap (chapter “The Last One”), who hated the landowners so much that he could not even stand the “comedy” of punishment when, to please the Last One, Prince Utyatin, he was given a drink in the barn and forced to scream as if he was being severely flogged - he died from the humiliation he experienced. There are other heroes in the poem:
People of servile rank -
Real dogs sometimes:
The heavier the punishment,
That's why gentlemen are dearer to them.
This is a former footman who at the fair boasts that he licked the master’s plates and acquired the “lord’s disease” - gout, and the eternal “serf of the Utyatin princes” footman Ipat, and the exemplary servant Yakov the faithful. This is the “fake” mayor Klim, the most worthless man who voluntarily agreed to play this unseemly role in front of the Last One. Particularly noteworthy is the image of the elder Gleb, who, for money, destroyed the will of the late admiral, who gave his serfs manumission.
For decades, until recently
Eight thousand souls were secured by the villain,
With the family, with the tribe, whatever the people!
What a lot of people! with a stone into the water!
God forgives everything, but Judas sin
It doesn't say goodbye.
Oh man! man! you are the sinner of all,
And for that you will suffer forever!
The poem by N. A. Nekrasov “Who Lives Well in Rus'” is remarkable because it shows real life - the diversity of peasant types, two paths “in the middle of the world below.” And next to the “expensive thorn” along which the “greedy crowd” goes to temptation, there is another path:
The road is honest
They walk along it
Only strong souls
Loving,
To fight, to work
For the bypassed
For the oppressed.
N.A. Nekrasov says that
Rus' has already sent a lot
His sons, marked
The seal of God's gift,
On honest paths
I mourned a lot of them...
In the image of Grigory Dobrosklonov, to whom
Fate was preparing
The path is glorious, the name is loud
People's Defender,
Consumption and Siberia,
We clearly recognize the features of Nekrasov’s comrade-in-arms, Nikolai Dobrolyubov. Grigory Dobrosklonov is a poet who has embarked on the path of civil service to the fatherland, firmly deciding to whom he will give his whole life and for whom he will die. He, fed half-and-half bread with tears, brought up on mournful songs about the bitter lot of Vakhlachina, united in his soul love for his poor mother with love for his homeland, composing for her the radiant sounds of a noble hymn - He sang the embodiment of the people's happiness!.. It was thanks to reality and With the optimistic coloring of the image of Grigory Dobrosklonov, you perceive N. A. Nekrasov’s poem not only as an indictment of the state structure of that time, but also as a hymn to the courage and fortitude of the Russian people. Following the poet, I would like to repeat:
More to the Russian people
No limits set:
There is a wide path ahead of him.
“I dedicated the lyre to my people” - this line from the poem “Elegy” can serve as an epigraph to the entire work of N.A. Nekrasova. One of the pinnacles of the embodiment of the theme of the people in Nekrasov’s poetry was the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” which is a broad canvas of peasant life, captured in a whole gallery of bright, memorable, psychologically reliable folk types. Who makes up this gallery? In order to see the diversity of images created in the poem, let us turn to their consistent analysis.
The poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'” begins with a prologue that describes a dispute about “who lives happily and freely in Rus'?” The images of the disputants are noteworthy. These are seven men, seven “temporarily obliged”
A tightened province,
Terpigoreva County,
Empty parish,
From adjacent villages -
Zaplatova, Dyryavina,
Razutova, Znobishina,
Gorelova, Neelova,
Bad harvest too.
The names of the villages where the men “came from” create a sad panorama of people’s life, which is further detailed in the chapter “Drunk Night”, where the image of Yakim Nagogo appears.
The hero's telling surname emphasizes the plight of the Russian peasant.
He works himself to death
He drinks until he's half dead.
The destructive addiction of the Russian people to wine in the poem does not look vicious, but, on the contrary, finds its bitter justification:
There is no measure for Russian hops,
Have they measured our grief?
The fate of Yakima Nagogo is truly sad. Ruined by a lawsuit with a rich merchant, he loses his last property during a fire and is forced to pull the heavy burden of slave labor for the rest of his days. The daily work of a plowman leaves its indelible mark on his appearance:
Hand - tree bark,
And the hair is sand.
The example of the destitute existence of Yakim Nagoy is far from isolated. In the chapter “Happy”, a whole line of peasants passes before the reader’s gaze, after listening to whom the wanderers exclaim:
Hey, man's happiness!
Leaky with patches,
Humpbacked with calluses,
Go home!
Desperate to find someone happy among the men, the wanderers learn about Matryona Timofeevna Korchagina, who is popularly nicknamed the lucky one.
Not everything is between men
Find the happy one
Let's feel the women.
However, the aspirations of the wanderers were not justified. From Matryona Timofeevna’s story it is clear that her lot turned out to be the most bitter. In the chapter “Peasant Woman” there is a lot of terrible evidence of cruelty, gross tyranny and lack of rights in relation to serf women. The author of the poem bows to the courage of Matryona Timofeevna, who managed to go through all the trials and maintain her proud posture. Not slavish patience, not humility, but pain and anger are heard in the words with which the heroine ends the story about her life:
For me, grievances are mortal
Gone unpaid...
The indomitability of the people's spirit is expressed with particular force in the image of Savely, the Holy Russian hero. Having survived 20 years of hard labor for burying a hated manager alive in the ground, this hundred-year-old man did not break and retained a sense of inner freedom. He says with obvious pride: “Branded, but not a slave!”
A heroic people who can cope with any difficulties and who sacredly keep in their hearts the ideal of a free and happy life - this is the collective image of a working people in the poem “Who Lives Well in Rus'.”
Concluding the analysis of the central peasant images of the poem, we can come to the conclusion that a deep knowledge of the life of the Russian people, their strengths and weaknesses, their sufferings and disasters, their aspirations and aspirations, as well as the poet’s enormous artistic gift allowed N.A. Nekrasov to create imbued with inexhaustible optimism and faith in the great future of Russia lines:
You're downtrodden
You are omnipotent
Mother Rus'!
These famous words today can be likened to a life-giving source that is capable of reviving the fading tree of our national spirit, supporting steadfastness and courage at the next stage of severe historical trials.