Chekhov's later works ("Thieves"," Hopalong"," Darling"," Rothschild's Violin"," In the Ravine"," Student", etc.) showed the possibilities of a new type of narrative, which took a leading position in the literature of the XX century. The writer explained its essence to A. S. Suvorin, responding to criticism of the story "Thieves": "You scold me for my objectivity, calling it indifference to good and evil, lack of ideals and ideas, and so on. You want me to portray horse thieves and say that stealing horses is evil. But this has long been known without me. (...) Of course, it would be nice to combine art with preaching, but for me personally it is extremely difficult and almost impossible due to the technical conditions. After all, to portray horse thieves in 700 lines, I must always speak and think in their tone and feel in their spirit (emphasis added). - E. P. ), otherwise, if I add subjectivity, the images will blur and the story will not be as compact as all short stories should be. When I write, I fully count on the reader, believing that he will add the subjective elements that are missing in the story himself" (Chekhov A. P. Sobr. soch.: In 12 vols. M., 1960-1964. Vol. 11. pp. 411-412; further-only volume and pages).
Chekhov's reader is free from the" pointing finger " (F. M. Dostoevsky's expression) of the author, the author's sermon, because of which the writer himself did not accept some of Tolstoy's works, is free from subjectivity, which, as Chekhov wrote in a letter to his brother Alexander, is "a terrible thing", since "it gives the poor author away with a lot of money." hands and feet" (11, 14).
In Chekhov's manner, there is neither an openly expressed author's position, nor an omniscient narrator, although traces of such can be found. For example, the events described in the story" Steppe "are presented mainly as perceived by Egorushka" here and now", i.e. related to the plot present or accomplished in the past, but reviving in the present. Intelligence
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about the boy and the past that a nine-year-old child remembers.
However, the narrator, having epic omniscience, sometimes opens the veil over the future of his character. For example, after the old man Pantelei told scary stories, which necessarily featured "long knives" and felt like fiction, the narrator notes:: "Now Yegorushka took everything at face value and believed every word, but later it seemed strange to him that a man who had traveled all over Russia in his lifetime, seen and knew a lot, a man whose wife and children were burned, devalued his rich life to the point that every time he sat by the fire, or was silent or he talked about something that didn't happen" (6: 80). The juxtaposition "now-later" is a sign of the narrator, who is above the characters and therefore knows everything about them.
Many of Chekhov's characters feel a longing for the past, which in their memories becomes beautiful. The carters with whom my uncle left Yegorushka consider themselves happy in the past and unhappy in the present: "While eating, there was a general conversation. From this conversation Yegorushka understood that all his new acquaintances, despite the difference in years and characters, had one thing in common that made them resemble each other: they were all people with a beautiful past and a very bad present; they all talked about their past with delight, and the present was the same. they were treated almost with contempt.
The Russian man likes to remember, but he does not like to live; Yegorushka did not yet know this, and before the porridge was eaten, he already deeply believed that people were sitting around the cauldron, offended and offended by fate. Pantelei said that in the old days, when there were no railways, he went with carts to Moscow and Nizhny Novgorod, earned so much that there was nowhere to put money. And what merchants there were at that time, what fish, how cheap everything was! Now the roads are shorter, the merchants are stingier, the people are poorer, bread is more expensive, everything is crushed and narrowed to the extreme. Emelyan said that before he had served as a chorister in the Lugansk factory, had a wonderful voice and could read music perfectly, but now he turned into a peasant and feeds on the favors of his brother, who sends him with his horses and takes half of his earnings for it. Vasya once worked in a match factory;
Kiriukha lived in the coachmen of good people and was considered the best troechnik by the whole district. Dymov, the son of a well-to-do peasant, lived to his heart's content, strolled about, and knew no sorrow, but scarcely twenty years had passed when his stern, hard-nosed father, wishing to teach him to work and fearing that he might not be spoiled at home, began to send him to the cab as a bobylya worker. Styopka alone was silent, but even his beardless face showed that he had lived much better before than now " (6: 70-71).
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The plot's present (now) is invaded by the past life of the characters (before, once, in the past time), which they themselves think is beautiful. The narrator in" Steppe " is not yet completely hidden behind the characters, he declares himself when, speaking on his own behalf, he does not mix his subject-speech sphere with the point of view of the characters. The statement Russian man likes to remember, but does not like to live belongs to the author-narrator, who has epic omniscience. This is labeled as follows: Yegorushka didn't know this yet (that the Russian person likes to remember, not live). I didn't know yet... And in the future he will find out. The past and future are connected before the eyes of readers. The narrator, acting as the subject of observation and the subject of speech, sees the past and future of the characters from a time distance.
But in general, this type of narrator is not typical for Chekhov's works. The leading position in the speech structure of his later novels and short stories is occupied by the figure of the speaker in the third person, the appearance of which means that the story about events is conducted "in the spirit" of the hero, but in the " tone "(voice) of an inconspicuous narrator, who is not above the heroes, but invisibly next to them. In other words, the character performs the function of the subject of consciousness, the narrator-the subject of speech.
So, the beginning of "The Rothschild Violin" is striking in its surprise, because it immediately introduces the reader to the stream of consciousness of the hero, whose name will be mentioned a little later: "The town was small, worse than a village, and there were almost only old people living in it, who died so rarely that it was even annoying. Very few coffins were needed in the hospital or in the prison castle. In a word, things were bad. If Yakov Ivanov had been an undertaker in a provincial town, he would probably have had a house of his own and been called Yakov Matveyich; here in the town they simply called him Yakov, for some reason he had a street nickname-Bronze, and he lived poorly, like a simple peasant, in a small old hut. where there was only one room, and in this room he, Martha, the stove, the double bed, the coffins, the workbench, and the whole household were placed"(7,364).
Formally, the narrator speaks, since the character's words are not enclosed in quotation marks, are not marked with xeno-indicators (from Greek. xenos-alien) type of particles de, they say, supposedly. But he speaks in the" tone " of the hero, conveys his words, not so much words as thoughts. It is from the undertaker that the estimates come: the town (worse than the village), the rare deaths of its inhabitants (they died so rarely that it was even annoying), their own affairs (bad). Yakov does not understand the meaning of his nickname (it conveys an indefinite adverb for some reason ), but he also has an assumption that is conveyed by the introductory word
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probably that in a provincial town he would have had his own house and a different name. Thus, the "texts" of the narrator and the character are combined, and the main structural and speech means of its implementation is non-direct speech. If one person speaks for another, then they assume communicative responsibility for the person whose words, thoughts, and feelings they convey. In this respect, the beginning of "Hopalong" is significant: "Olga Ivanovna had all her friends and good acquaintances at her wedding.
"Look at him: isn't there something in him?" "What is it?" she would say to her friends, nodding at her husband, as if to explain why she had married a simple, very ordinary, and unremarkable man.
Her husband, Osip Stepanych Dymov, was a doctor and had the rank of titular adviser. He served in two hospitals: one as a supernumerary resident, and the other as a dissector. Every day from nine o'clock in the morning until noon, he saw patients and studied in his ward, and in the afternoon he rode on a horse-drawn horse to another hospital, where he opened the deceased patients. His private practice was negligible, amounting to five hundred rubles a year. That's all. What else can you say about him? And yet Olga Ivanovna and her friends and good acquaintances were not quite ordinary people. Each of them was something remarkable and a little famous, already had a name and was considered famous, or although he was not yet famous, but nevertheless showed bright hopes. An artist from the drama theater, a great, long-recognized talent, an elegant, intelligent, and modest man, and an excellent reader, who taught Olga Ivanovna to read; a singer from the opera, a good-natured fat man, who with a sigh assured Olga Ivanovna that she was ruining herself: if she had not been lazy and pulled herself together, she would have come out of it a wonderful singer; then several artists, and at their head the genre painter, animalist and landscape painter Ryabovsky, a very handsome blond young man, about twenty-five years old, who was successful at exhibitions and sold his last painting for five hundred rubles, (...) then there was the cellist, whose instrument was crying and who frankly confessed that of all the women he knew, Olga Ivanovna was the only one who could accompany ( ... ). Well, then there was Vasily Vasilyich, a gentleman, landowner, amateur illustrator and vignetist, who had a strong sense of the old Russian style, epic and epic ( ... ). Among this artistic, free and spoiled by fate company, though delicate and modest, but who remembered the existence of some doctors only during illness and for whom the name of the artist was used. Dymov sounded as indifferent as Sidorov or Tarasov - among this group, Dymov seemed alien, superfluous and small, although he was tall and broad in the shoulders. It seemed that he was wearing someone else's tailcoat and had a clerk's bo-
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rodka. However, if he was a writer or an artist, they would say that he resembles Zola with his beard " (7, 51-52).
The above passage characterizes the subject-speech sphere of the heroine, for whom Dymov is an ordinary, simple, not remarkable person, and she and her friends, on the contrary, are remarkable, unusual, famous people. In the course of the story, we are convinced of the opposite. Olga Ivanovna, who constantly saw great people in her dreams, also understands that her husband was an extraordinary, rare and, in comparison with those she knew, a great man. But Olga Ivanovna made this discovery too late: Dymov died. In a cohesive narrative, i.e., one in which the narrator's and character's "texts" are combined due to non-direct speech, so the "zones" of intra-text subjects are not separated from each other, but are complexly intertwined, the degree of responsibility of the narrator for the characters is large, but still not absolute. The alienation of the" I " (narrator) from the "other" (character) is conveyed using words that form the subjective-modal and syntactic structure of the text from the point of view of the character ( however, it is true, and yet, it seems, it seems that ...); words and phrases with the meaning of evaluation-negative evaluation: simple, very ordinary, not remarkable (person), insignificant (practice), doctor, some doctors (an indefinite pronoun increases neglect), alien, superfluous, small, clerk's beard, etc.; positive assessment: not quite ordinary (people), celebrity, brilliant hopes, great, long-recognized talent, elegant, smart, modest (person), excellent (reader), wonderful singer, delicate, modest (company), artist, singer, artist, cellist, etc.; colloquial syntactic constructions ( That's all. What else can you say about him?; Who else? ); colloquial particle well. The semantics of these elements refer to the character who is named in the 3rd person (Olga Ivanovna, she). . Here, the narrator, using speech forms characteristic of the character, speaks and thinks in his "tone".
It is another matter to "feel in the spirit of the hero". In this case, the main thing is to reproduce the feelings, perceptions, and sensations of the hero, and not the subject-speech forms characteristic of him, which are either completely absent or reduced to a minimum in the narrator's speech. What the hero only experienced, but did not translate into the plan of speech, even if it was internal, is transmitted by the narrator in the form of his own speech. For example, in the last part of "Murder", the author combines his point of view with the point of view of the character, merges his voice with the consciousness of Yakov Terekhov: "Shivering from the autumn cold and sea dampness, wrapping himself in his short torn sheepskin coat, Yakov Ivanovich stared intently,
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without blinking, he looked in the direction of his homeland. Since he had lived in the same prison with people brought here from different parts of the world - Russians, Ukrainians, Tatars, Georgians, Chinese, Chukhna, Gypsies, Jews, and since he had listened to their conversations and seen enough of their suffering, he began to ascend again to God, and it seemed to him that he had finally learned the true faith, the very one that his entire family, beginning with his grandmother Avdotya, had been so longing for and searching for and not finding. He already knew everything and understood where God was and how he should be served, but the only thing that was incomprehensible was why the lot of people was so different, why this simple faith, which others receive from God for nothing along with their lives, had come to him so dearly, that from all these horrors and sufferings that would obviously befall them. continue without interruption until his death, his hands and feet shaking like a drunkard? He peered intently into the darkness, and it seemed to him that through thousands of miles of this darkness he could see his homeland, see his native province, his own district. A run-through (emphasis added by the author. - E. P. He saw the darkness, the savagery, the callousness, and the stupid, harsh, bestial indifference of the people he had left there; his vision was blurred with tears, but he kept looking into the distance, where the pale lights of the steamer barely shone, and his heart ached with homesickness, and he wanted to live, to return home, to tell them there about your new faith and save at least one person from destruction and live without suffering for at least one day " (8, 59).
Features of Yakov's speech are not preserved (maybe only the colloquial word death belongs to the hero), since it is not speech that is transmitted, but thoughts and feelings. In this regard, the boundaries between the minds of the narrator and the character cannot be drawn. The assessments of both subjects are also connected, for example, the faith that Yakov found is real, the indifference of people is stupid, harsh, bestial - these assessments do not belong to Yakov Ivanovich alone.
From the type of narration widely used by Chekhov came the literature of the XX century, in the texts of which the leading position belongs to non-direct speech. Chekhov's style of writing, which expanded the possibilities of artistic thinking, did not cancel out others. However, the miracle of literature, according to the French writer S. de Beauvoir, is that "someone else's truth becomes my own, without ceasing to be someone else's", i.e. the dialogue of the narrator (as a substitute for the author) with the reader largely depends on the ability of the writer to create an artistic hybrid in which the author's speech interacts organically with alien.
Lipetsk
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