Description of nature in the works of I. S. Turgenev. Literary magazine Some features of the landscape in the story "Bezhin Meadow"

"Hunter's Notes" was an event in literary life early 1850s. Turgenev showed the deep content and spirituality of the Russian peasant, the variety of characters that are most fully manifested against the backdrop of the landscape.

Nature in "Notes ..." performs several functions. First of all, Turgenev depicts nature in order to show the beauty of Russia, its greatness and mystery. The writer creates lyrical pictures of morning, sunrise, beautiful July day. With love, Turgenev describes a thunderstorm, endless expanses of fields, meadows and forests of places close to him. Such descriptions are especially vivid in the stories "Raspberry Water", "Yermolai and Melnichikha". In the essay "Forest and Steppe", the writer unfolds a wide canvas of the landscape. The steppe breathes freedom, freshness; spring brings renewal to everything, a person feels more cheerful, happier. But even in autumn the forest is devoid of gloom and despondency. Its smell intoxicates, makes the heart beat faster. Turgenev reveals the life-affirming power of nature, its immortal beauty. He writes with love about those who live in harmony with nature, who know how to feel and understand it. The images of Kasyan, who knows how to “talk” with birds, Lukerya, who hears how “the mole digs under the ground”, the amazing Kalinich, endowed with a subtle sense of beauty, are fanned with poetry.

The second function of nature is psychological. Describing the actions, characters of people, the internal state of a person, Turgenev shows their reflection in nature. In the story “Biruk”, the state of the narrator before meeting the hero is conveyed through a picture of pre-stormy nature, which is as gloomy and gloomy as the author going to the village. The state of joy, intoxication with one's own talent, the creative rise of the hero are reflected in the summer landscape in the story "Singers".

The third function of the landscape is to prepare the reader for the perception of events and characters. This function is especially clearly manifested in the story "Bezhin Meadow". The boys sitting by the fire seem to be dissolved in nature. Nature for them is both a sphere of life and something mysterious, imperishable, incomprehensible. The children's mind is not yet able to explain a lot in nature, so the boys come up with their own explanations of the incomprehensible, compose different scary stories, "bylichki" about mermaids, brownies, goblin.

Those phenomena of nature that children can explain become close to them, but they treat the inexplicable with caution and superstition. They master the unknown in fantastic forms. Each "strange" story of the boys is preceded by an image of something disturbing, obscure, secret in nature. material from the site

Turgenev psychologically correctly shows how the perception of nature in children is changing. What was mysterious at night, fraught with danger, caused fear, in the morning seems alive and cheerful. The sequence of describing nature and its perception by children in the morning, afternoon, and night prepares them for understanding the causes of bylichki and beliefs. In Bezhin Meadow, Turgenev shows how a peasant boy, subject to the forces of nature, seeks to understand and explain everything around him, using his mind and imagination. What is close to peasant children is alien to the narrator. He feels his "non-merging" with nature, estrangement from it and people's world. But "the chest was sweetly embarrassed, inhaling that special, lingering and fresh smell - the smell of a Russian summer night." And Turgenev writes about the thirst for connection with the outside world, about love for all living things.

The collection of I. Turgenev "Notes of a Hunter" consists of twenty-five small prose works. In their form, these are essays, short stories and short stories. Essays (“Khor and Kalinych”, “Odnodvorets Ovsyanikov”, “Raspberry Water”, “Swan”, “Forest and Steppe”), as a rule, do not have a developed plot, contain a portrait, a parallel description of several heroes, pictures of everyday life, landscape, sketches of Russian nature. The stories (“My Neighbor Radilov”, “Office”, “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District”, etc.) are built on a certain, sometimes very complex plot. For example, in the story “My Neighbor Radilov”, the action is based on the incomprehensible activity of the predator Olga, disguised from the reader, destroying the family of this “glorious” landowner. Finally, Yermolai and the Miller's Woman, Biryuk, and especially Knocking! In these works, the plot is based on sharp and unexpected incidents. The whole cycle is narrated by a hunter who tells about his observations, encounters and adventures. The humanity of the narrator imposes on the narrative of the "Notes of a Hunter" a soft shade characteristic of this writer.

Passionately in love with nature, Turgenev widely used descriptions of nature in his Notes of a Hunter. Turgenev treated nature as an elemental force living an independent life. Turgenev's landscapes are strikingly concrete and at the same time fanned by the experiences of the narrator and the characters, they are dynamic and closely connected with the action.

A distinctive feature of many stories from the "Notes of a Hunter" was the "Aesopian manner" of writing skillfully deployed in them, expressed in all sorts of omissions and allegories. In order to deceive the suspicious censorship, Turgenev used an ambiguous expression, a subtly used allusion, sometimes even a compositional rearrangement of events. A remarkable example of such a "deceptive" manner is the short story "Yermolai and the Miller's Woman", in which the story of the unfortunate Arina is deliberately "hidden" in the middle of a seemingly ordinary essay on a hunting theme. The "Aesopian manner" of writing helped The Hunter's Notes to pass through the barriers of censorship. The greater was the dissatisfaction of the government after the publication of the Hunter's Notes. The censor, who let the book go to print, was dismissed from his post.

The "Hunter's Notes" arose in the atmosphere of a broad movement towards the people that emerged in a number of European literatures. It is generally accepted that the Turgenev cycle has something in common with the peasant stories “Devil's Puddle”, “Little Fadette” by J. Sand.

I.S. Turgenev in his cycle of stories is similar in genre to the physiological essay. The writer, as it were, writes his characters from nature, but at the same time he creates special types of characters, which later formed, as it were, the inner psychological core of the heroes of his famous ideological novels. These are the types of a rationalist, a skeptical thinker close to nature. So, for example, in the story "Khor and Kapinich" the same tasks were solved that were set by the authors of the "natural school", but were solved by other artistic means. From the very first page, the reader is drawn into what would seem to be a “physiological essay” discussion about how the peasant of the Oryol province differs from the peasant of the Kaluga province. The author specifically compares the two main psychological types - and this is what makes the plot of the essay. Men appear here as some kind of objects of study, worthy of the most scrupulous, detailed descriptions (appearance, lifestyle, etc.).

“On the threshold of the hut, an old man met me - bald, short, broad-shouldered and dense - Khor himself ... The warehouse of his face was reminiscent of Socrates,” the author writes, thereby emphatically elevating the hero and placing him in a number of great characters worthy of the memory of the whole generations of people. "Khor was a positive, practical man, an administrative head, a rationalist ..." - Turgenev notes further. With the same bold, unexpected colors, although with the help of a completely different comparison, Kapinich is depicted - a dreamy man, an idealist, full of innate love for beauty. He comes to his Friend Khoryu with a bunch of strawberries, as an "ambassador of nature." And although the heroes of the story are opposite types, nevertheless "they constitute a unity, whose name is humanity." For the first time in world literature, peasants appear as bearers of the best features of the national character.

"Hunter's Notes" - this kind of "encyclopedia folk life". They also had the theme of revenge on the oppressors, as far as the writer under Nicholas I could touch it, they also contained the apotheosis of the great love of life and talent of the Russian people, they also contained the truth about an unacceptable plight, which could no longer be reconciled. The writer considered this truth to be the “main character” of his “Notes of a Hunter”.

Turgenev in his novels and stories continues Gogol's traditions, and in this area the writer exposes the feudal lords as a spiritually poor class, surrounded by "little things in life", entangled in lies and hypocrisy. The landowner Penochkin is depicted as a sophisticated oppressor of the peasants in the "Notes of a Hunter". Angloman, he has established himself in foreign orders, maintains an excellent cook, his valets go around in liveries and gloves. But Penochkin hides behind his ostentatious civility: he keeps all the serfs in awe. In Penochkino, a landowner of the latest model, a "Westernizer" was bred, copying the external forms of European comfort, sometimes inclined to be liberal in words and all the more disgusting in his cynicism. In the spirit of "physiology" Turgenev also bred other characters of the landowner's world: retired Major General Vyacheslav Illarionovich Khvalynsky and Mardarii Apollonovich Stegunov. The major general has a very magnificent, as if something promising name, patronymic and surname, but in fact his life is extremely insignificant: it all came down to a uniform, “uniform”, arrogance, scolding inferiors, purely external observance of decency. The combination of the name, patronymic and surname - Mardariy Apollonovich Stegunov - suggests that this person is a master of his "work". Outwardly, he did not seem to resemble Khvalynsky, but the internal resemblance is clear: the ability to restore order: “Whose chickens are these? Whose chickens are these? Whose chickens are walking in the garden? And then the guilty are punished. Turgenev also ridiculed the false significance of noble provincial education. The stupid, caricature Andryusha Belovzorov, who has not lived up to expectations, returns to his aunt's estate to live out his life in idleness ("Tatyana Borisovna and her nephew").

A true artist looks next to this barich, an artist-loser, the serf Yakov Turk. The master's serene life developed idleness and apathy of the mind. Such is the philanthropist Benevolensky: a man “positive, even a dozen ... with short legs and plump arms”, who smiled pleasantly, had a kind heart and “flamed with a disinterested passion for art”, not understanding anything about it. Such is the "old maid" Tatyana Borisovna's guest, screeching incessantly about German philosophy, about Goethe, understanding nothing of it. The vulgarization of high tastes and concepts is also a kind of luxury that one can afford in idleness. Turgenev was the first to speak about this terrible misfortune, about the counterfeiting of spirituality, which manifested itself in the most new-fangled forms among the mass of the nobility.

But protesting personalities were also born in the noble environment, whole and persistent natures appeared, remaining themselves to the end, despite the dramatic circumstances of life. The Wild Master from the story "Singers" is a mysterious, obscure figure, but, undoubtedly, fraught with some powerful elemental forces. “There was a lot of mystery about this man; it seemed that some enormous forces gloomily rested in it, as if knowing that, having once risen, that having once broken free, they must destroy both themselves and everything they touch ... ". It is no coincidence that Turgenev makes the Wild Master a judge in the competition of singers. This outstanding person, who "broke out" from his environment, is an artist in every sense of the word. Everything in Panteley Chertopkhanov - words and deeds - "breathed with extravagant courage and exorbitant pride." Tchertop-hanov is truly noble: he saves the downtrodden Nedopyuskin from bullying, upsets Rostislav Shtoppel, who decided to spy on his rival heir. His boundless affection for the Don horse, romantically named Malek-Adel (named noble hero, a brave warrior from the novel by Sophie Cotten), betrays the full measure of his loneliness; he resembles Gerasim from Mumu. Tchertop-hanov perishes, as many open, honest people perished in Russia.

A special theme of the "Hunter's Notes" is the spiritual quest of the developed, thinking part of the nobility. These people seemed to be supposed to say to Russia “the almighty word “forward!”. But in the 1940s, the first serious doubts already appeared about the ability of the Russian freethinker, a philosopher from the nobility, to find the right paths for practical activity. Turgenev made an important contribution to debunking the claims of the Russian Hamlets to answer the question: "To be or not to be?" The idealistic philosophy, popular among student youth of the late 30s and early 40s, on which they relied, was subjected to critical examination.

It seems that here all the heroes are generated by nature itself, its inviolable laws, and not by a vicious society. "Notes of a Hunter" begins with a "physiological" statement of the difference between the types of peasants in neighboring counties, while the cycle ends with a kind of types of Russian nature, a hymn to its glory, a symbolic story "Forest and Steppe". For Turgenev, nature is the main element, it subjugates a person and forms his inner world. The Russian forest, in which “stately aspens babble”, “a mighty oak stands like a fighter, next to a beautiful linden”, and the boundless steppe are the main elements that define the national features of a Russian person in the “Notes of a Hunter”. This is perfectly in line with the overall tone of the cycle. The true salvation for people is nature. If in the first essay-prologue the narrator asked to pay attention to the peasants, then the final story is a lyrical confession of the author's love for nature.

The image of the narrator in the "Notes of a Hunter", very necessary and active, appears in several guises. Like a hunter who encounters interesting faces, when his belonging to a privileged class is not at all important, this is a variant of the “naturalness” of a meeting and conversation (such are his relations with Yermolai). Either he is an accidental spectator or an involuntary witness of a meeting, a conversation (“Date”, “Office”). Then one feels the class distance: he is a gentleman meeting with the gentlemen, recalls previous meetings with persons who shed light on what is happening (“Yermolai and the Miller’s Woman”). Then the narrator, as it were, completely dissolves in the narrative (“Singers”). But he is always sympathetic, noble, stands closer to the righteous peasants than to the gentlemen. He even takes the side of the oppressed: he persuaded Biryuk to pardon the peasant, he is disgusted with Penochkin and his ilk. This, undoubtedly, is an enlightened "friend of mankind" in the spirit of the forties, preaching social equality, seeing the vices of the feudal system that oppresses the humiliated and offended.

Questions about the report:

1) How many stories were included in the cycle of I.S. Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter

2) Into what genres can all the works of Turgenev's cycle "Notes of a hunter" be divided?

3) Why can we say that the “Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev - ""encyclopedia of folk life"?

4) How are landowners and nobles depicted in the Turgenev cycle?

5) What guises does the narrator take in the cycle of I.S. Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter

Growing up in a village in central Russia, fond of hunting and therefore walking around several provinces with a gun, Turgenev could not help but get used to Russian nature, could not help but fall in love with her. Turgenev's love for nature is clearly reflected in those stories that were later combined under the general title "Notes of a Hunter".

These stories describe those pictures of nature that Turgenev most often observed both in childhood and later. Meadow, steppe, forest - not only are they generally significant for the writer, but every tree, every hillock - they are all part of the overall picture. The meadow landscape described by the author in the story “Knocking!” Is so captivating that even the peasants who take a closer look at it still vividly feel its beauty. Steppe grass, always fresh and green, thanks to numerous streams and rivers, is clean, pleasant, caresses and soothes the soul. In addition to its beauty, the nature of the meadows is very rich and varied. The meadows provide excellent food for domestic animals, the best hay in Russia, the rivers that feed the meadows abound with fish.

Such are meadows and steppe. The forest presents a different picture. Huge centuries-old trees, occupying vast spaces, make it look like the sea. At the same time, the calmness of this green sea, its immobility, strikes the soul. A person feels that nature does not share either his sufferings or his joys, that the harsh mysterious forest will survive many more generations, everything is just as calm and indifferent. The immensity of the majestic green kingdom puts pressure on the human consciousness, one wants to leave these shady vaults and go out into the sunny expanse.

IN different times days and years Turgenev described nature. In the story "Bezhin Meadow" there is a description of a summer evening, which is observed by peasant children in the "night". They see the forest, the fields and the river, the starry sky above their heads. It is not surprising that children's souls tune in to a poetic mood, and seven-year-old Vanya enthusiastically compares bright stars with bees. The story "Kasyan with a Beautiful Sword" describes a morning in the forest, when the sky resembles a bottomless sea, and the leaves on the trees shine like emeralds. In the story "Date", the author compares the feelings of an abandoned girl with autumn and gives a colorful description of this time of year.

This connection between man and nature turns Turgenev's descriptions into an elegant frame in which all the stories are inserted, united by the common title "Notes of a Hunter". What makes all these descriptions particularly charming is their simplicity and artlessness, which are highly characteristic of the author's talent. Turgenev in his images of nature reaches the highest degree of brightness and liveliness, without resorting anywhere to exaggerations and amplifications,

In the later period of the great writer's work, that complete fusion with nature, which critics noticed in the "Notes of a Hunter", especially in the story "Bezhin Meadow", was even more clearly manifested.

MBOU Olkhovatskaya secondary school

ESSAY

The role of the landscape in the "Notes of a hunter" by I.S. Turgenev

Completed by: 8th grade student

Rodionova Anna

Supervisor:

teacher of Russian language and literature

Burlutskaya Olga Alekseevna

Olkhovatka 2018

1. Introduction ……………………………………………………………..…. 3

2. I.S. Turgenev - a master of landscape (on the material of the "Notes of a hunter")..4

3.Landscape in the "Notes of a hunter"……………………………………..……..7

4. Night landscape in the story "Bezhin Meadow"……………………………….10

5. Conclusion……………………………….………………………….….13

6. List of used literature……………………………………...14

Introduction

“…Do you know, for example, what a pleasure it is to leave in the spring before dawn? You go out onto the porch ... In a dark gray sky, somewhere, stars are blinking; a damp breeze occasionally runs in a light wave; a restrained, indistinct whisper of the night is heard; the trees faintly rustle, drenched in shadow ... "

The author of these lines is Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev - famous writer, singer of Russian nature, master of landscape, author of many stories, short stories and novels. We got acquainted with the work of the writer at the lessons of literature and extracurricular reading. In his books, we found many landscape sketches that help to better understand ideological content works. Impressed by what we read, we decided to learn more about the role of landscape on the example of I.S. Turgenev’s cycle of stories “Notes of a Hunter”.

When working on the abstract, we set a goal - to show the mastery of the landscape in the "Notes of a Hunter" by I. S. Turgenev.

Based on the goal, the following tasks were identified:

To reveal the role of the landscape in I.S. Turgenev;

Consider the language means of transmitting artistic sketches.

The main source of information was the “Notes of a Hunter” by I.S. Turgenev, in particular, the story “Bezhin Meadow”. On the example of this work, we understand that solitude with nature is a special state. A person who happens to be alone with nature, to feel its beauty, strength, begins in these moments to think about many things, think about his actions, about his attitude towards loved ones and himself. Such moments of communication between man and nature make him spiritually richer, purer, wiser.

Our work consists of a table of contents, introduction, main body, conclusion and list of references.

I.S. Turgenev - a master of landscape (on the material of "Notes of a hunter")

Russian nature under Turgenev's pen sparkles with all sorts of colors and colors, it appears before readers in all its splendor, continuous movement and renewal. The author paints pictures of nature with skill. Under his pen, she seems much more beautiful than the pictures that we see. Our worldview is more limited, we do not notice those little things that surround us. Therefore, let us follow how I. S. Turgenev sees nature.

Turgenev's nature is not indifferent to man, but is also strict in her relations with him: she takes revenge for too unceremonious and rational intrusion into her secrets, for excessive courage and self-confidence in communicating with her. She influences the lives of the characters, constantly surrounds them and watches them. She learned to feel people and experience their pain with them. Majestic and regal, but still dependent on man, nature continues to live its own life and delight us with its beauty.

It should be noted that in the work there are such pictures of nature that contrast or harmonize with the events described in the story, which is very important when considering the features of the landscape.

Analyzing the story "The Singers", we noticed a sharp contrast between the picture of beautiful endless Russian distances, which is born in the imagination of the narrator listening to Yakov's singing, and the description of the unbearable heat and stuffiness of the July day, whenthe sun flared up in the sky, as if fierce , when soared and burned relentlessly And the air was saturated with stuffy dust. .

And the feeling of heaviness, unbearable heat, oppression spoke of tragic fate Yakov, his talent, ruined in serf Russia.

In Yermolai and the Miller's Woman, Turgenev speaks of the tragic fate of Arina, so typical of a serf woman, ruined by the whims of her masters. The story about Arina is preceded by a lyrically painted landscape of a wonderful picture of an evening forest and have a nice night. Evening and night picture are not taken by chance. The writer needs not bright, joyful colors here, as he does when describing the coming morning, but darkening evening tones in order to illuminate the picture of the sunset of the ruined life of a young woman with a sad light. And if the charm and beauty of nature contrast with the tragic fate of Arina, then the tones and colors chosen by the writer are as sad as her life.

Due to the fact that language is the main means of transmitting information, we will consider language features present in the story "Bezhin Meadow".

The creative concept of I. S. Turgenev in the story “Bezhin Meadow” has two areas that are internally connected: the author gives a description of the bewitching beauty of simple Russian nature, and he also wants to show love for this nature, spiritual sensitivity, inquisitiveness and curiosity of simple peasant children grazing herd at night.

The first part of the creative concept is divided into separate pictures of nature in accordance with the time of day: first day, then evening, then night and, finally, dawn. The second part is also divided into characters: each of the five boys has his own personality traits who are speaking. Consequently, the analysis of the language means of I. S. Turgenev's story "Bezhin Meadow" is connected with two topics: 1) the image of nature and 2) the image of peasant boys.

Pictures of nature I. S. Turgenev gives in vivid clarity. To do this, he uses words with a visual semantic meaning. These are the nouns: sky, sun, dawn, cloud, fog, cloud, snakes, shine, silver, rays, blue, stripes, clubs, radiance, candle, star, darkness, darkness, bushes, aspen, shadows, dusk, plain, cliff , semicircle, circle of light, streams of light, diamonds, dew drops.

Turgenev widely uses adjectives and participles in the description of nature, also with a visual semantic meaning.

a) morning:

The sky is clear, the sun is not fiery ... not dull crimson, bright, radiant, lilac fog of a stretched cloud, forged silver. .

b) noon:

Many round high clouds, golden gray, with delicate white edges, like islands scattered along an endlessly overflowing river, transparent sleeves of even blue, they are azure; the color of the sky is pale lilac, bluish stripes. .

c) evening:

The clouds are blackish and indefinite... pink puffs against the setting sun; scarlet radiance over the darkened earth. .

d) night:

The bats... vaguely clear sky ... night, like a thundercloud ... huge clubs, gloomy darkness ... pale sky. .

From this we can conclude that Turgenev, depicting nature in the story "Bezhin Meadow", used words with tinted meanings of light, smell, sound.

Rich art world"Notes" is filled with the author's love for his native nature and for people living nearby, filled with a special Turgenev atmosphere and creative passion, which "irresistibly seizes the reader's sympathy, from the first page rivets his thought and feeling to the story ...

Landscape in the "Notes of a hunter"

"Notes of a hunter" have a rather complex ideological and figurative content. In the work, you can find a significant number of descriptions of Russian nature, which performs a complex function in the work. Nature here serves not only as a landscape background, it is to some extent a protagonist, who is also characterized by change of mood, sociability, and mystery.

Landscape is a drawing, a description of nature, which in artistic creativity performs various functions depending on the ideological and artistic intention of the author, on the style and method of the writer; means of artistic expression.

The abundance and brightness of emotional epithets, comparisons, metaphors used by the narrator in the "Notes of a Hunter" and exclamatory sentences convey his enthusiastic attitude to nature. The author wants to show nature in motion, animates it, admires it.

The "Notes of a Hunter" opens with the story "Khor and Kalinich", which is not very rich in landscape descriptions. These are only the first steps of Turgenev, leading to the further development of his plan. This story is like a preface, which slightly touches on descriptions of nature. At the beginning of the story, we see a description of two villages, which gives us the opportunity to imagine what kind of inhabitants they inhabit. Then we come across these lines:

“We washed down transparent warm honey with spring water and fell asleep under the monotonous buzz of bees and the chatty babble of leaves. "A light gust of wind woke me up..." Not a single detail goes unnoticed by the author. We see perfectly how closely nature and man are intertwined. We know that people are able to influence nature, and nature is able to influence a person: it calms, immerses in dreams, lulls and at the same time awakens, but very gently. Also, the weather is predictable:“... the dawn was just flaring up. “Glorious weather will be tomorrow,” I remarked, looking at the bright sky. “No, it will rain,” Kalinich objected to me, “the ducks are splashing over there, and the grass smells painfully strongly ...”. People have learned to predict the weather. Mankind has been studying nature all the time of its existence, trying to understand it, and here is the result: they know what it will bring tomorrow.

This is followed by a more saturated landscape descriptions of the story "Yermolai and the Miller". We have an evening picture:“The sun has set, but it is still light in the forest; the air is clean and transparent; birds chattering babble; the young grass glistens with the merry brilliance of emerald... The interior of the forest gradually darkens; the scarlet light of the evening dawn slowly glides over the roots and trunks of trees, rises higher and higher, passes from the lower, almost still bare, branches to the motionless, falling asleep tops ... So the very tops have faded; the ruddy sky turns blue. The smell of the forest intensifies, there is a slight breeze of warm dampness; the wind that has flown in near you stops. Birds fall asleep - not all of a sudden - by breed: here the finches calmed down, after a few moments the robins, followed by the oatmeal. In the forest everything is getting darker and darker. The trees merge into great blackening masses; the first stars timidly appear in the blue sky ... ". Turgenev describes every little thing that happens in nature in the evening, like an artist skillfully using his brush, under which nature comes to life.

A very beautiful picture appears before us when the author describes the spring in the story "Raspberry Water":“This spring beats from a cleft in the bank, which gradually turned into a small but deep ravine, and twenty paces from there, with a cheerful and chatty noise, flows into the river. Oak bushes grew over the slopes of the ravine; short, velvety grass grows green near the spring; the sun's rays almost never touch its cold, silvery moisture ... ". Perhaps the author introduced this picture because he wanted to introduce us to his, in my opinion, rather unusual hero. Free and independent of anything, the spring lives its own life just like Styopushka. This hero has no position in society, no connections, no relatives (at least nothing is known about them). He is as free and free as a spring. So Turgenev correlates his heroes with nature, he connects their destinies with each other, compares them.

Many images of nature are found in the story "Kasyan from the Beautiful Sword". While the heroes were hunting, they met unusually beautiful pictures on the way:High and sparse clouds barely rushed across the clear sky, yellow-white, like late spring snow, flat and oblong, like lowered sails. Their patterned edges, fluffy and light, like cotton paper, slowly but visibly changed with every moment: they melted, these clouds, and no shadow fell from them ... everything rippled in the eyes from the sharp metallic sparkle of young, reddish leaves on the trees; everywhere were blue clusters of crane peas, golden cups of night blindness, half lilac, half yellow flowers Ivana da Marya; in some places, near the abandoned paths, on which the tracks of the wheels were marked by stripes of red fine grass, heaps of firewood towered, darkened from the wind and rain, stacked in sazhens; a faint shadow fell from them in oblique quadrangles - there was no other shadow anywhere. A light breeze first woke up, then subsided: it suddenly blows in the face and seems to play out - everything makes a merry noise, nods and moves around, the flexible ends of the ferns gracefully sway - you will be delighted with it ... but now it froze again and everything again calmed down. Some grasshoppers crackle in unison, as if embittered - and this incessant sour and dry sound is tiring. He goes to the relentless heat of noon; it is as if he was born by him, as if called by him from the hot earth. The described picture first evokes a romantic mood: it warms the warm color of the clouds, which the author compares with belated snow and sails.

"Forest and Steppe" is the last compositional point of the cycle, the finale of a powerful symphony, despite all the lyricism, apparent pastelness and sad sound of the collection. But this essay is not only a hymn to nature, it is also a story about the journey of the “strange hunter” through nature and his feelings caused by nature. .

Night landscape in the story "Bezhin Meadow"

Due to the fact that "Bezhin Meadow" is a very vivid story in which the landscape plays important role, we will touch it separately.

The story of I. S. Turgenev “Bezhin Meadow” occupies a special place in the composition of “Notes of a Hunter. It should be noted the great role of nature in this story. Nature under the pen of I. S. Turgenev rises as if alive in all its visual clarity.

The work opens with a landscape summer day. The colors used to describe nature by the author amaze with their sophistication and variety: welcoming radiant, lilac, shimmer of forged silver, golden gray, pale lilac. Nature is regal and benevolent... There is no man in the landscape, he has no power to control this power and beauty, but only gazes with delight at God's creation. . The abundance of light is like opposition to darkness. The light increases from morning to noon and decreases towards evening. There is an abundance of vegetation (bushes, thick, tall grass, buckwheat, sagebrush, compressed rye), birds and animals (pistachios, dogs, horses, hawks, quails, doves, herons), familiar sounds and smells that are associated with the living world (voices , living sounds, quails were screaming, the sounds of a bell, they sang, rustled, spoke, it smells of wormwood, compressed rye, buckwheat). .

And in fact, the night nature plays a very important role in the story. The Turgenev night is not only creepy and mysterious, it is also royally beautiful with its “dark and clear sky, which “solemnly and immensely high” stands above people, “languishing smells”, sonorous splashes of large fish in the river.

Nature, taking place in the darkness of its night life, pushes children around the fire to beautiful, fantastic plots of legends, dictates their change, offers children one riddle after another, and often itself suggests the possibility of solving them. The story about the mermaid is preceded by the rustling of reeds and mysterious splashes on the river, as well as the flight of a shooting star - the human soul, according to peasant beliefs. The image of the mythical mermaid is surprisingly pure and, as it were, woven from a wide variety of natural elements. She is bright and white, like a cloud, silver, like the light of the moon poured the sparkle of a fish in the water. And "her voice ... she has such a thin and plaintive", like the voice of that mysterious "animal", which "weakly and plaintively squeaked among the stones."

So, after short-term fears, the summer night brings glimpses of hope to the hunter and peasant children, and then a peaceful sleep and calm. Omnipotent in relation to man, the night itself is only a moment in the living breath of the cosmic forces of nature, restoring light and harmony in the world:“A fresh stream ran down my face. I opened my eyes: the morning was beginning... Before I had gone two versts, it was already pouring all around me... first scarlet, then red, golden streams of young hot light... Everything stirred, woke up, sang, rustled, spoke. Large drops of dew blushed everywhere like radiant diamonds; towards me, clean and clear, as if also washed by the morning coolness, the sounds of a bell came, and suddenly a rested herd rushed past me ... ". .

The world of boys in the story "Bezhin Meadow" is a poetic world and in many ways attractive to the narrator. The attitude of children to nature differs significantly from the position of the hunter at the beginning of the story. For peasant boys, nature is a single whole, each point of which is connected to the rest, and they are comprehended in a number of cases.

The rising of the mighty luminary opens and closes Bezhin Meadow. We see the onset of evening, the sunset. Night shadows thicken, the area becomes ghostly, the exhausted hunter and dog go astray, lose self-control, experiencing an acute sense of loneliness and loss. The mysterious and enigmatic life of nocturnal nature comes into its own, over which man is by no means omnipotent. The silent flight of frightened birds reminds him of this, the gloomy, swirling darkness, weak and plaintive squeak of some animal between the stones.

Arousing superstitious feelings first in the soul of a hunter, and then in the minds of peasant children, Turgenev's night gives only hints of the possibility of a realistic explanation of its mysteries and mysteries. She is omnipotent and omnipotent, she protects the final word of the solution from a person in her dark depths.

Conclusion

I.S. Turgenev is a master of language and psychological analysis created works that played an important role in Russian literature. "Notes of a hunter" became one of his most amazing creations. The work is filled with colorful landscape sketches, which are real pictures of nature, animated by the author's pen and no less amazing and beautiful than they actually are in reality. Nature is active and dynamic, it lives its own life and solves its problems, but does not lose its beauty and charm. All the same magical and alluring, unpredictable and energetic nature in Turgenev played a special role in the work.

They noted the peculiarity of the language, which served as a means of conveying the intention and idea of ​​the author.

We paid attention to the presence of detail in the description of the landscape, the abundant use of unusually beautiful epithets, comparisons and metaphors that enlivened sounds, smells and images.

Thus, Turgenev appeared before us as a real master of the landscape, in which every word knows its place and does not go beyond what is permitted. He is an artist who knows how to revive his images and breathe life into them with all the accompanying properties: sound, smell, movement. The personified nature in the cycle of "Notes of a Hunter" does not give way even to a person who is considered stronger than her, but she fights for her primacy and eventually takes precedence over a person. I. S. Turgenev depicted nature as unusually beautiful, dynamic and unpredictable, as he himself admires it amazing beauty, the description of which is subject only to him, a true specialist in the field of the word.

List of used literature

1. Valagin, A. P. I. S. Turgenev “Notes of a hunter”: An experience of analyzing reading / A. P. Valagin / / Literature at school. - 1992. - No. 3-4. - S. 28-36.

2. Vvedensky, D. I. Language skill of I. S. Turgenev in the story "Bezhin Meadow". (Accounting record. Moscow. In-t. vol. LXXV. Issue 4. - 1994.

3. Dmitriev, Yu. V. Students' impressions of the landscape in the "Notes of a Hunter" / Yu. V. Dmitriev//Lit-ra at school. - 2001. - No. 5. - S. 36-37.

4. "Notes of a hunter" // History of Russian literature XIX century: Textbook: In 3 hours - Part 2: 1840 - 1860 / Ed. Korovin V. I. - M .: Humanit. ed. Center VLADOS. - 2005. - S. 399-408.

5. Kapralova, S. G. Color vocabulary in I. S. Turgenev’s story “Bezhin Meadow” / S. G. Kapralova//Rus. at school, 2006. -#5. - S. 18-21.

6. Kikina, E. A. Man between light and darkness: materials for lessons based on the story by I. S. Turgenev “Bezhin Meadow” / E. A. Kikina // Lit-ra: Supplement to the newspaper "First of September". - 2009. - No. 21. - S. 3-4.

7. Lebedev, Yu. V. Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev / Yu. V. Lebedev//Lit. at school. - 2002. - No. 1. pp. 11-28.

8. Moshchenskaya, L. G. Real and mythopoetic pictures of the world in the story of I. S. Turgenev “Bezhin meadow” / L. G. Moshchenskaya //Rus. Or T. - 2010. - No. 6. - S. 74-87.

9. Nikolina, N. A. Compositional and stylistic originality of the story by I. S. Turgenev “Bezhin meadow” / N. A. Nikolina//Rus. at school. - 2003. - No. 4. - S. 53-59.

10. Turgenev, I. S.: "Notes of a hunter." /D. V. Grigorovich, A. F. Pisemsky. The first stories of L. N. Tolstoy / / History of Russian literature of the XI - XIX centuries: In 2 hours. - M., 2012. - Part 2. - S. 9-15, 52-55, 102-104.

11. Turgenev, I. S. Notes of a hunter: Stories./I. S. Turgenev. - Minsk: Urajay, 1979. - 320s.

39. Hunter's Notes

I.S. Turgenev is a descendant of an ancient noble family a. The childhood years of the future writer were spent in the village of Spasskoe-Lutovinovo, Oryol province. Life on the estate left painful memories of the cruel morals that poisoned relations in the Turgenev family and dominated the management of serf servants and peasants. Turgenev's mother, Varvara Petrovna, a domineering and impatient woman, was especially quick to punish. Many years later, childhood and youthful impressions of domestic arbitrariness will form the basis of the story "Mumu", which Turgenev will write "on the exit" (in a prison cell), where he will be assigned for publishing an obituary to Gogol in March 1852. The story about the moral atmosphere of the manor's estate was written in prison, in conditions of lack of freedom. What a terrible and convincing truth in this hidden psychological parallel!

In 1833, Turgenev entered the verbal department of Moscow University, then transferred to St. Petersburg University. As a student, he tries his hand at lyricism, the genre of the poem ("Steno", 1834), begins to be published in magazines, however, without much success. In St. Petersburg, in the house of Professor Pletnev, young Turgenev glimpsed Pushkin, which he will reverently remember all his life, and will revive his impressions in a memoir essay " Literary evening at Pletnev. In 1838, Turgenev went abroad with the intention of continuing his education. In Berlin, he listens to lectures on philosophy, classical philology, experiencing a strong passion for Hegel, Schelling, Feuerbach, and intensively studies classical languages. The period of stay in Germany is the period of formation of the aesthetic position of the future writer. At this time he travels a lot: Austria, Italy, Switzerland. A brilliantly educated European is Turgenev in Petersburg. Here he makes attempts to engage in service: he intends to pass the master's exam and get a chair of philosophy, for some time he serves under the supervision of V.I. Dahl at the Ministry of the Interior. The publication of the poem "Parasha" (1843) and the sympathetic assessment by V. Belinsky played an important role in his life: the writer and critic began to converge, more and more

strengthened over time. In the same year, Turgenev and Polina Viardot met on tour of the Italian opera in St. Petersburg. The meeting became a fate for Turgenev for the rest of his life.

Since 1847, Turgenev has been collaborating with Sovremennik, publishing in it the story “Khor and Kalinych”, which opens the cycle of “Notes of a Hunter”. In late 1847 - early 1848, Turgenev became an eyewitness to the French Revolution. Winter in Paris and Courtavenel turned out to be fruitful in many respects: he met Georges Sand, P. Mérimée, F. Chopin, wrote most of the stories from the Hunter's Notes, Diary extra person”, the comedies “The Bachelor” and “The Freeloader”, the drama “A Month in the Country”. We can say that the writer Turgenev left France in 1850, a mature man who experienced the romantic delight of love, who knew the power of the elements of revolutionary upheavals.

The mid-50s for Turgenev - the time of work on the first novel "Rudin" (1855), created in Spassky, conceived in Rome and partially written " Noble Nest"(1858), the success of which was unconditional.

The sixties responded in Turgenev's work with the first "public" novel "On the Eve" (1860), which was not accepted by the democratic "Contemporary", but nothing in the criticism of Turgenev's works was equal in reaction to "Fathers and Sons" (1861), where, as he explained later a writer himself, he wanted to be just fair and observant. The 60s are the time when Turgenev's life is determined: he begins to equip his life abroad, in Baden. From the complex and bitter feelings of understanding their relationship with Russia, the novel "Smoke" is born.

In the early 70s, Turgenev lived abroad almost all the time, mainly in Paris, occasionally visiting Russia to resolve money issues. He does a lot of public work, helping Russian emigrants with money, letters of recommendation, getting medical treatment, reading manuscripts, and establishing the first Russian library in Paris. This decade of Turgenev's life is marked by the appearance in his work of the stories "Hours", "Dream", "The Story of Father Alexei". They reflect the growing confidence of the writer in the existence of another world, but not divinely beautiful and harmonious, but hostile to man, killing him. Outwardly, everything was going very well: in 1878, at the international literary congress in Paris, Turgenev was elected vice-president, like V. Hugo. Here he read a speech on Russian literature, the very fact of delivering which put it on the level of European literatures.

The originality of the psychological image of a romantic nature was fully manifested in I. Turgenev's first significant work, Notes of a Hunter. The main character of the cycle is the author-narrator, the complexity inner world which is determined by the combination of two narrative planes: a sharply negative image of feudal reality and a romantically direct perception of the secrets of nature. In one of the best stories of the Bezhin Meadow cycle, nature appears in the perception of the characters (it is no coincidence that these are children) and the narrator as a living force that speaks to a person in its own language. Not everyone can understand this language. In the perception of the author, the real detail becomes a symbol of the mystical dove - the “soul of the righteous”, and the “groaning sound”, which inspires awe in those gathered around the fire, is the voice of a marsh bird. The narrator, wandering through the forest, lost his way in the dark (a real detail) and “suddenly found himself over a terrible abyss” (a romantic touch), which turned out to be a prosaic ravine. The ability to perceive the miraculous, the desire to join the mystery of nature and man becomes the emotional key of the story, performing the function of characterizing the narrator.

Literary fame Turgenev brought the story "Khor and Kalinych"(1847), published in Sovremennik and highly appreciated by readers and critics. The success of the story stimulated Turgenev's decision to continue his work, and in subsequent years he created a series

The critical pathos of the image of the Russian nobility in this work is due to Turgenev's negative attitude to the moral foundations of serfdom, to its social function. In all the essays and stories in Notes, Turgenev uses some general principles of depiction: each essay or story is based on a few plot episodes and descriptive characteristics of the characters. The writer conveys the details of the postures, gestures, speech of the characters, and the selection and sequence of their appearance before the reader is motivated by the figure of the narrator, his movement in space and time. Therefore, the main semantic load falls on descriptive elements: on the portrait and everyday characteristics of the characters and the arrangement of their stories about their lives in the past and present.

The comedy of situations is very often combined with the comedy of situations that reveal the discrepancy between the claims of the characters and their essence. Often this form of the comic manifests itself in the monologues of the characters, which turn out to be a means of self-disclosure of the character. So, in the “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky district”, the hero of the essay, Vasily Vasilyevich, confesses at night, in the dark, to a stranger, opening his heart to him. The famous Hamletian “to be or not to be, that is the question...” in the atmosphere of the Shchigrovsky district does not elevate the hero above the crowd, but, on the contrary, becomes an occasion to expose the inconsistency of the protest “under the pillow”. The object of ridicule is the whole system of greenhouse education of the nobility, which gives rise to worthless idealists, incapable of anything.

In the story "Ovsyannikov's Odnodvorets" we see a Slavophil landowner dressed in a coachman's caftan, evoking a feeling of bewilderment and laughter in the peasants with his attempts at "nationality". And the landowner Penochkin from the story "The Burmister" - a refined European and a "progressive" owner - does not flog the servant himself for insufficiently warmed wine: he simply gives the order: "order about Fyodor."

An important feature of Turgenev's artistic method is formed in the "Notes of a Hunter": detailed characteristics of everyday life, environment, descriptive fragments of the narrative that are significant in volume - the path to mastering the skill of generalization.

The anti-serfdom socially denunciatory essence of the Hunter's Notes was noted not only by contemporary criticism of Turgenev. The Minister of Education A. Shirinsky-Shikhmatov described them to Emperor Nicholas I as follows: “A significant part of the articles placed in the book has a decisive direction to humiliate the landowners, who are either presented in a ridiculous and caricatured form, or more often in a form reprehensible to their honor.” The publication of The Hunter's Notes caused irritation and dissatisfaction in official circles: a pretext was needed to punish the writer. Turgenev himself gave the occasion by publishing in Moskovskie Vedomosti a Letter from Petersburg, an article in connection with the death of Gogol, which the censors had not previously allowed. Turgenev was arrested and sent to the “moving out”. The exile to Spasskoe-Lutovinovo, which followed the arrest (without trial or investigation), lasted two years, and only in 1854 did Turgenev receive his freedom.

Hunter's Notes»

In 1847, Turgenev wrote and published in the Sovremennik magazine the essay “Khor and Kalinich” - the first sign of the future famous cycle “Notes of a Hunter”, published as a separate edition in 1852. In this cycle, he appears as a mature, established artist with his original - actually Turgenev- poetics and a well-defined ideological concept. By this time, he fully shares the views of the writers of the Sovremennik circle, most of whom: V. G. Belinsky, N. A. Nekrasov, A. I. Herzen, T. N. Granovsky are his close friends. The ideology of this circle of like-minded people, the artistic expression of which was the aesthetics of the natural school, was the so-called Western liberalism, which implies an orientation towards Western Europe as a spiritual model of genuine political, economic and cultural progress. Russia, according to Western liberals, is infinitely behind Europe and needs significant social transformations for its further development. In the 1840s, the institution of serfdom was considered the main brake on the path of these transformations. It is he who becomes the main object of criticism in Turgenev's Notes of a Hunter. “Notes of a Hunter” is the same consciously ideological and even, one might say, socially engaged work, like many other works of the natural school, in which, in accordance with the call of its main ideologist Belinsky, the pathos of the social exposure of the ulcers and vices of the modern Russian society . A notable feature of Russian Western liberalism was its constant intertwining with more radical socialist ideology, be it in its relatively moderate (Christian and utopian socialism of M. V. Petrashevsky, A. N. Pleshcheev, early F. M. Dostoevsky and M. E. Saltykov Shchedrin) or a potentially revolutionary, rebellious version (“Jacobin” socialism of A. I. Herzen, partly V. G. Belinsky, “anarchist” socialism of M. A. Bakunin), an ideology whose common source was the same Rousseauist criticism "vicious" hierarchical society, infringing on the rights of the democratic lower classes. Although Turgenev was a classical liberal in his views (like such members of the Westernizing circle as the historian T. N. Granovsky and the critic P. V. Annenkov), the breadth of the democratic demands of the Russian socialist Rousseauists attracted him in his own way, since it seemed historically natural. Hence the distinctly Rousseauist tones of the entire ideological concept of The Hunter's Notes. The plot-compositional basis of a number of essays in the cycle, such as Yermolai and the Miller's Woman, Raspberry Water, Burmister, Office, Lgov, Pyotr Petrovich Karataev, becomes a rather rigid social scheme: rude, despotic landowners , corrupted by the authorities, break the fate and disfigure the souls of serfs, powerless to oppose anything to their tyrannical arbitrariness. Moreover, it is specially emphasized that the landowners violate the elementary rights that are given to man by nature itself, thereby distorting the natural course of human development. Yard girls Arina in Yermolai and the Miller's Woman and Matryona in Pyotr Petrovich Karataev, at the whim of their masters, are deprived of ordinary human happiness - the happiness of living in a loving union with the one whom their heart has chosen; their timid attempts to protect themselves only lead to an aggravation of the master's anger and, as a result, to a complete collapse of life. Another characteristic victim of feudal arbitrariness, portrayed by Turgenev, is the type of serf with a trampled sense of dignity, who has lost his "I", his personality and finally resigned himself to his fate. Such are the old Suchok from Lgov, who lives in constant fear of any possible lordly shout (his willingness to respond to any new name that the gentlemen give him, once again emphasizes the complete absence of a personal beginning in him), and the barman Vasya from Two Landowners. , with ardent conviction answering the question of the narrator-hunter, for which he was so cruelly punished with rods by order of the master: “And rightly so, father, rightly so. We don't get punished for nothing."

These examples clearly show how committed Turgenev is to the new European ideal of a free individual who perceives his dependence on the structures of traditional society that suppress him as slavery. Such a position sharply separates Turgenev, as well as other Western liberals, from their main ideological opponents among the thinking Russian intelligentsia of that time - the Slavophiles, who, on the contrary, saw the salvation of Russia from its disastrous modern situation in a return to the ideals of the Russian pre-Petrine past and are extremely hostile treated all the latest European trends, seeing their main danger precisely in the cult of a separate, independent personality, striving to emancipate itself as completely as possible from all traditional, primarily religious, institutions. Finishing "Two Landowners" with a phrase directly addressed to the reader: "Here it is, old Russia!", Turgenev ridicules the Slavophil ideal of "old Russia" as the embodiment of spiritual world and public well-being: for him, as for a Westerner, everything that happened in the Russian past before the transformations of Peter I, who tried to introduce Russia to the humane values ​​of European culture, was based on barbaric disrespect for a person, when any bearer of power and strength could afford to mock with impunity over his uncomplaining victim. Turgenev's ironic attitude to the idea of ​​the Slavophiles to return the Russian Europeanized nobility to Russian national roots and forms of life found expression in the essay "Ovsyannikov's Odnodvorets", where in the figure of the young landowner Lyubozvonov, dressing in front of his serfs in Russian the National costume and inviting them to sing a “folk song”, K. S. Aksakov, the most ardent defender of national customs in the Slavophil circle, is recognizably, although not without satirical exaggeration.

But the type of peasant victim is not the most characteristic in the peasant world of the Hunter's Notes. Unlike Grigorovich, another prominent representative of the natural school of the 1840s, who portrayed the peasants (in the well-known stories The Village and Anton Goremyka) exclusively as unfortunate sufferers, unwitting martyrs of the serf-owning way of life, Turgenev focuses his main attention on depicting peasants who, despite extremely unfavorable social circumstances for them, managed to “not lose face”, retaining in all its fullness and diversity that colossal potential of spiritual and creative forces, which, as all Westerners, who had mastered Rousseau’s ideas well, believed, lives like in a sealed vessel, in the soul of the people, and passionately awaits its release. In the Russian peasant environment, Turgenev shows, there are people who, in terms of the wealth of their inner world, are not inferior to the best representatives of the Russian educated nobility, but in terms of strength of nature and ability for active and productive activity, approaching the bearers of the European spirit of new freedom and volitional transformation of existing forms of life. So, Khor from the essay "Khor and Kalinych" for his practical acumen, ability to reasonably and economically manage the economy and genuine interest in the issues of the European state system is awarded by the storyteller-hunter with such unusually high for a peasant cultural epithets like "rationalist", "skeptic", "administrative head". In the business executive Khora Turgenev, he sees a certain Russian equivalent of representatives of the European third estate - honest and enterprising burghers who have transformed the economic face of Europe. The teenager Pavlusha from Bezhin Meadow, who delights the hunter with his exceptional courage and readiness to give rational and sober explanations of those miracles and mysteries about which, crossing and trembling with fear, boys tell each other in the night, is presented as strong personality a new type, capable of challenging Destiny itself, a secret power beyond human control that controls his life and death. Pavlusha is an obvious peasant parallel to the image of the “extraordinary” person Andrei Kolosov, and therefore, to some extent, to Byron’s heroes who boldly challenge God; Critic A. A. Grigoriev wittily called Pavlusha a “Byronic boy”. Turgenev himself often resorts to such a method of elevating his heroes as comparing them with the great figures of Russian or world culture and history, as well as with the classic " eternal images» European Literature. It is interesting that this technique extends to him not only to the peasants, but also to noble heroes cycle, of which not all belong to the type of cruel landowner - "tyrant": the noble characters in the "Notes of a Hunter" are also very numerous and diverse. The "rationalist" Khor is compared with the philosopher Socrates and indirectly with Peter I; the one-palace Ovsyannikov from the essay of the same name - with the fabulist Ivan Krylov; Lukerya from the essay "Living Powers", a woman with a difficult fate and incredible spiritual self-control - with Joan of Arc burned at the stake; there is also a Hamlet in the cycle - a young man who has lost faith in romantic values, but nevertheless is not able to get rid of romantic egocentrism a nobleman from the essay “Hamlet of the Shchigrovsky District” (a character psychologically related to Chulkaturin from “The Diary of a Superfluous Man”), and the Russian Don Quixote - completely ruined, but still chivalrously devoted to the high concept of noble honor, always ready to protect the weak and suffering, the landowner Chertopkhanov , the hero of the essays "Chertop-hanov and Nedopyuskin" and "The End of Chertop-hanov."

The extension of the same technique to representatives of different classes allows Turgenev, on the one hand, purely artistic means to express the idea defended by the liberals of the legal equality of all people, regardless of their origin and degree of wealth, and on the other hand, which is especially close to the teachings of Rousseau, to hint at the significant advantages of the representatives of the unprivileged peasant class over the privileged nobility: for all their outward ignorance, they internally already have everything that that the bearers of an enlightened noble mind mistakenly believe hallmark only his circle, - spiritual culture, moreover, in its “natural”, original form, which the enlightened consciousness either grossly distorted or hopelessly lost. In the essay “Singers”, Dikiy-Barin, who judges the competition of singers (and, accordingly, the author behind him), does not accidentally give the palm not to a city dweller, a tradesman from Zhizdra, who sang beautifully in his own way, but to a simple guy from the people Yashka Turku, whose singing , which did not know any external formal tricks, as if flowing from the depths of his soul. An important feature of Yakov's singing, specially noted by Turgenev, is also the fact that he sang without looking at others, at what impression he makes, he sang, forgetting himself - a feature that reveals in him a type that is not only opposite to the type of romantic-egocentric , but in many ways also to that “rational” peasant type to which Khor and Pavlusha belong. If the latter are characterized by a consciousness of the significance of their own personality, based on respect for their critically thinking "I", which gives reason to call them peasant "Westerners", then the basis of the human significance of Yashka Turk, on the contrary, is the fundamental rejection of his "I", which, however, it does not turn him into a likeness of the spiritually broken and downtrodden hero of Lgov, but paradoxically becomes a condition for the manifestation of his powerful spiritual strength. In contrast to the "Western" type, it would be fair to call this type "Eastern", and it should also be noted that Turgenev, as an artist and psychologist, is no less interested in him than the first. Many peasant characters of the hunting cycle, described with visible love, belong to this "eastern" type. Its most striking representatives are: Kalinich from "Khorya and Kalinych", who is close to nature (unlike his friend Khory, who is more involved in social and economic issues), subtly feels her beauty and, thanks to a special gift for penetrating into her secrets, has a wonderful ability to speak blood , get along with the bees, predict the weather; and the dwarf hunchback Kasyan from the essay “Kasyan with a Beautiful Sword” - a strange person “out of this world”, combining the features of a forest “wizard” who understands the language of birds and plants, and a natural mystic, with almost Buddhist compassion relating to every doomed to the death of a living being.

The same trust and love for natural living beings, animals and birds, combined with faith and deep conviction that only those who meekly, without indignation or complaining, endure their fate, no matter how tragic it may be, will be saved, form the basis of Lukerya's character. from the essay "Living Relics". In the essay "Death" Turgenev depicts a whole gallery of heroes - carriers of the "eastern" soul, who are united by the ability to calmly and easily relate to their own death, which becomes possible, as the author makes clear, only if a person is not attached to his "I" , is not fixed on it as on the highest value. It is curious that representatives of different classes are again displayed in Death: in addition to peasant images, there are images of a noble landowner and a home teacher, a commoner Avenir Sorokoumov, but they are all united not by the “Western” idea of ​​legal equality, but by involvement in the “Eastern” idea of ​​sacrifice. and renunciations. Sacrifice of one's "I" for the sake of another and selfless service to him, whether it be a person or some Higher Truth, - main feature in the character of Avenir Sorokoumov, causing sincere admiration of the author. In this hero there is something of the sensitive, or "sentimental" romanticism of Zhukovsky - the creator of the poetic image of a melancholy youth, ready to renounce illusory earthly goods in the name of uniting with the ideal world. There. Such romanticism, with its ardent and sacrificial striving for the ideal, always aroused Turgenev's sympathy and, unlike Byronic romanticism, was accepted by him unconditionally. It is in this - sublime, and not discrediting - sense that Kalinich, with his enthusiastic and extremely open attitude towards the world and people, is called a "romantic" and "idealist".

Turgenev's sharpened attention to the people of the "Eastern" soul is in a certain contradiction with his liberal-Western ideals: it is no coincidence that the Slavophiles, who always actively opposed the "proud mind" of the atheistic West to the "meek soul" of the Russian Christian East, much in the "Notes of a Hunter" was to their taste. , so that even an opinion arose about Turgenev as a secret supporter of their camp. Turgenev himself strongly disagreed with such a judgment about himself, but the “eastern” bias of the hunting cycle, nevertheless, is beyond doubt; the same applies to his latent romantic tendencies. One gets the impression that the "Notes of a Hunter" is a fusion or, more precisely, a complex coexistence of several ideological angles at once.

Similarly, the poetics of the Notes includes aesthetic layers of various origins. According to numerous external signs of the artistic order, the Turgenev cycle is a typical work of the natural school, which most tangibly expressed its orientation towards the “scientific” paradigm. According to the genre, "Notes of a Hunter" - a series of essays, as well as the famous collection of 1845 "Physiology of St. Petersburg", a literary manifesto of the "natural" direction, in which for the first time in Russian literature samples of a "physiological" description were proposed, dating back to the French "Physiology", originally conceived as artistic analogues of meticulous and impartial "scientific" descriptions of the natural object to be studied. The “physiological” style is answered in the “Notes” by the very figure of the hunter, presented as a direct eyewitness to the events, fixing them, as it should be for an essayist, with protocol, “photographic” accuracy and a minimum of the author’s emotional assessment. Turgenev's portrait and landscape descriptions are also brightly "physiological" - an indispensable part of the overall stylistic composition of each essay. They are “scientifically” detailed, detailed and finely detailed, in full accordance with the requirements of the “microscopic” method of the natural school, when the described object was depicted as if seen through a microscope – in all the numerous small details of its external appearance. According to K. Aksakov, Turgenev, describing the appearance of a person, "almost counts the veins on the cheeks, the hairs on the eyebrows." Indeed, Turgenev's portrait is almost excessively detailed: information is given about the hero's clothes, the shape of his body, general build, while depicting the face in detail - with an accurate indication of color, size and shape - the forehead, nose, mouth, eyes, etc. are described. In the landscape, the same refined detail, designed to recreate a “realistically” truthful picture of nature, is complemented by a mass of information of a special nature.

At the same time, in Turgenev's portrait and landscape, despite all their conspicuous "realistic" naturalness, another is hidden - a romantic tradition of depicting nature and man. Turgenev, as if for this reason, cannot stop in listing the features of the character’s external appearance, which depicts not so much a variety of a certain human type, as it was with the authors of "Physiology of Petersburg", how much what the romantics called secret identity. The means of representation - in the positivist era - became different: "scientific" and "realistic", the subject of the image remained the same. The heroes of the "Notes of a Hunter", whether they are peasants or nobles, "Westerners" or "Easterners", are not only types, but every time a new and in a new way, alive and mysterious individual soul, microcosm, small universe. The desire to reveal the individuality of each character as fully as possible also explains such a technique constantly used in essays as “pair composition”, which is reflected, among other things, in their names (“Khor and Kalinich”, “Yermolai and the Miller’s Woman”, “Chertophanov and Nedopyuskin” ), and the method of comparing the hero with a "great personality". In the same way, nature in the "Notes of a Hunter" has its own soul and its own secret. Turgenev's landscape is always spiritual, nature in it lives its own special life, often reminiscent of a human one: it yearns and rejoices, mourns and rejoices. The connection between the natural and the human, which Turgenev discovers, has no “scientific” confirmation, but can easily be interpreted in the spirit of the resurrected romantics (primarily Jena and Schellingian romantics) of the archaic concept of the relationship between the human micro- and natural macrocosm, according to which the soul of each of man is connected by mysterious threads with the World Soul spilled in nature. An obvious tribute to this concept is Turgenev's technique of psychological parallelism, when a certain state in which the "soul" of nature finds itself directly correlates with the state of the hero's soul that is similar in internal content. Psychological parallelism underlies the composition of such essays as Biryuk, Date, and partly Bezhin Meadow. It can be said that he defines overall composition cycle opening human essay "Khor and Kalinich" and completed by a fully dedicated nature essay "Forest and Steppe" (with the same principle of "pairing" in the title).

In the poetics of A Hunter's Notes, signs of Turgenev's already begun reorientation from Gogol's "negative" style to Pushkin's "positive" style are obvious. Following Gogol in the circles of supporters of the natural school was considered the norm: a writer depicting the brute truth of life should at least to some extent be an accuser. The accusatory tendency is felt in the frankly "social" essays of the Turgenev cycle, where the social roles of the characters are clearly distributed and, as a rule, significant surnames are given to the "negative" ones (Zverkov, Stegunov, etc.). But the main Turgenev's attitude is still not accusatory. He is closer to Pushkin's desire to reconcile contradictions while maintaining the bright individuality of the characters portrayed. Not only "scientific" objectivity, not only the liberal idea of ​​respect for the rights of the individual, but also Pushkin's "aesthetics of reconciliation" force Turgenev to depict the life of peasants and nobles, "Westerners" and "Easterners", people and nature with equal interest and benevolent attention.