Anna Karenina. Not God's creature

The choice of Nabokov's lectures on Tolstoy and his "Anna Karenina" as an occasion and source of inspiration for the performance may at first glance seem unique - although Yuri Lyubimov also used the same Nabokov along with Lotman in his wonderful mix from "Eugene Onegin", but, really , as a "seasoning" with comments on the literary source. Not to mention Volkostrelov with his "Lecture on Nothing" - although how not to remember on such an occasion:

However, Nabokov is more of a nominal author for Rozovsky: the composition of the play is still based on Tolstoy's novel, while Nabokov's lecture "highlights" and emphasizes some of its details. Moreover, Rozovsky is primarily interested in neither formalist literary studies, to which Nabokov the professor was by no means alien, but his evaluative, sometimes frankly subjective judgments about Tolstoy's heroes, their actions, and in general about literature, about the peculiarities of the reader's perception of a literary text.

Throughout the performance, Anna is accompanied by the Isolde theme from Wagner's opera, turned into a leitmotif among other music used - from Gounod and Bizet to Lehar and Strauss, as well as Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. The design of Alexander Lisyansky consists of several symbolic silhouettes of ladies and gentlemen riding on platforms with views of Moscow and St. Karenina", archival photos and canvases of the Wanderers. In such an environment, a lecture by a Cornell University professor would probably look too eccentric, but Denis Yuchenkov himself warns in the first lines that he does not play either Tolstoy or Nabokov, but acts as a "lecturer" from the theater, along with colleagues in the troupe (Anna - Natalya Troitskaya-Kungurova, Vronsky - Maxim Zausalin, Karenin - Alexander Masalov, Levin - Alexander Chernyavsky, etc.) especially in the second act, as an outside observer, as if reading enthusiastically from a book, then, on the contrary, actively involved directly in the action not only emotionally, but also mise-en-scene, fussily running between the characters of the novel, entering into a dialogue with them, and sometimes the heroes of Anna Karenina pick up, "appropriate" the lecturer's judgments, commenting primarily on the plot, and to a minimum extent the poetics of the original. In the light of Nabokov's notes, the heroes of the original source acquire to some extent caricature features, and the lecturer himself, in turn, at times looks smug and pompous, which Nabokov, in my deep conviction, just was, but Rozovsky is more interested in him in a different capacity.

It seemed to me that the main theme that Rozovsky takes and uses from Nabokov's lecture as an appendix to the text of Tolstoy's novel is "the struggle between the artist and the preacher." Here, some meaningful dissonance inevitably arises between the choice of material and the tasks that the director solves, since the lecturer, whose role Rozovsky gave Yuchenkov, the gentleman, judging by his behavior, manners, is very carried away, even somewhere exalted, and Nabokov’s cold irony is almost the age-old distance to the material under study sometimes turns not into lecturer's, but precisely into preaching pathos. If, according to Nabokov, morality is relevant at best as an applied, social phenomenon, but completely incompatible with creativity, with art, then Rozovsky in this opposition turns out to be much closer to Tolstoy, and tries (not only in this performance, but in all his directing and social activity) reconcile one with the other, combine as harmoniously as possible. Nabokov here hinders him more than helps, so the further Tolstoy's plot develops, the less room there is for the "lecturer" in it, regardless of whether he behaves like a professor at a prestigious American college or like a mass activist from a district center speaking in a red corner.

The plot of the novel, meanwhile, develops from beginning to end, gradually approaching the format of a fairly traditional dramatization of narrative prose. The line of Levin and Kitty is given relatively little space in the internal chronology of the production, but closer to the finale is Levin, without whom theaters that turn to Anna Karenina most often can easily do without, and certainly without him family history, which followed the death of Anna, suddenly comes almost to the fore, even if the director does not leave it for the epilogue, but takes it out before the episode of the suicide of the title character. The lecturer-Nabokov, of course, ironically over the Levin and Tolstoy utopias, but in the general context of the performance, Nabokov's irony, defiantly cynical (one can argue, feigned, masked, or coming from Nabokov's character), dissolves in morality and pathos, as if Nabokov is already ready for himself assign the biblical "vengeance to me ..." from the epigraph. A kind of post-epigraph to the performance is the "experiment" attributed to Nabokov with light sources during the lecture: they say that Pushkin is a candle, Dostoevsky is a table lamp, and Tolstoy is the light pouring from the open windows. Nabokov, even if this is a reliable episode, clearly did not put into his comparisons the same meaning as Rozovsky, and any candle must have seemed to him a metaphor for a creative impulse of a much more significant and subtle kind than the light of a broad day. The director's message is directed, if not literally moralistic, then humanistic, as Tolstoy understood it - but hardly Nabokov, all the more so in the period after 1940, to which his lecture cycle belongs. Nabokov constantly emphasizes how much more important and sympathetic to him is Tolstoy the artist Tolstoy the preacher - Rozovsky's alignment is less unambiguous.

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"Anna Karenina" L.N. Tolstoy in the literary-critical and artistic reception of V.V. Nabokov

Introduction

Chapter 1. Creativity of L.N. Tolstoy in the literary-critical interpretation of V.V. Nabokov

1.3 The artistic worlds of L. N. Tolstoy and V. V. Nabokov: general constants of poetics

Chapter 2 Creative dialogue with L.N. Tolstoy in novel and short prose by V.V. Nabokov

2.1 The problem of adultery in L.N. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina" and in the novel by V.V. Nabokov "Camera Obscura": a comparative aspect

2.2 The image of the "master of life" in the novel by L.N. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina" and in the novel by V.V. Nabokov "King, Queen, Jack": a comparative aspect

2.3 Motives and images of "Anna Karenina" in the stories of V.V. Nabokov "Word", "Music", "Revenge"

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

tolstoy nabokov creativity critical

Russian classical literature in the reception of Nabokov and its influence on the writer's work is a fairly broad problem that has actually been studied for thirty years in Russia. It was outlined by the émigré critics of the 1930s. (G.V. Adamovich, N.N. Berberova, P.M. Bitsilli); then continued by American scientists (S. Davydov, D.B. Johnson, S. Karlinsky, J.V. Connolly, G. Shapiro) and European (N. Books, P. Tammi). AT recent decades Russian Nabokovologists paid close attention to it: B.V. Averin, N.A. Anastasiev, A.A. Dolinin, A.M. Zverev, A.V. Zlochevskaya, A.V. Ledenev, N.G. Melnikov, A.S. Mulyarchik, L.N. Tselkov. To date, many aspects of the problem remain insufficiently studied, and many aspects of Nabokov's work, which are important for Russian literature, have not been commented on. One of these problems is the influence of L.N. Tolstoy on Nabokov's early prose, it remains unexplored to this day. Our study on Nabokov's reception of L.N. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", we hope, will influence the solution of this problem.

The degree of knowledge of the problem. To date, no works have been created that would highlight the problem of Nabokov's appeal at the Berlin stage of creativity to the novel "Anna Karenina" by L.N. Tolstoy. On the this moment defended one single dissertation by Mikhailova M.R.1, dedicated to the general reception by Nabokov of L.N. Tolstoy. Some aspects of the problem are touched upon in the articles by N.G. Melnikova, L.N. Tselkova, A.A. Valley.

Relevance work lies in the fact that the influence of Leo Tolstoy's work, in particular the novel "Anna Karenina", on the novel prose of Nabokov's Berlin period, as well as his stories, has not become the topic of a separate study today.

The researchers turned to Nabokov's reception of the novel "Anna Karenina" and the work of L.N. Tolstoy as a whole only within the framework of a comparative analysis in the context of Nabokov's entire work. Despite the value scientific papers illuminating the influence of Tolstoy's work on the formation of Nabokov's artistic method, the poetics of the early prose of the classic in the perception and interpretation of the author of the novels "Camera Obscura",

"King, Queen, Jack" and some stories did not become the subject of a separate study.

The thesis examines the impact of the novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" on Nabokov as an émigré writer who, admiring the work of the classic, bowing to him, imbued with the artistic world of the novel, its details, structure, and interpreted them in his prose, criticism, lectures.

Subject research - reception of the novel "Anna Karenina" in Nabokov's texts. object research is a detailed analysis of the mechanisms of reception. Reception is manifested in a comparative analysis of the novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" and Nabokov's early stories and novels "Camera Obscura", "King, Queen, Jack".

Target research - revealing the artistic relationship of two writers based on the experience of existing research. From this goal, the following tasks: 1) to analyze a large corpus of works by researchers of Tolstoy and Nabokov's work related to the problem of the diploma. 2) Classify similar features of the writers' artistic systems. 3) On the basis of Nabokov's lectures, interviews, reports, articles, and letters, characterize the features of his literary-critical reception of Tolstoy's work. 4) Through a comparative analysis of literary texts, to identify their commonality and differences.

Scientific novelty research lies in the fact that it defines the reasons why Nabokov, on the one hand, admires the work of L.N. Tolstoy, and on the other, criticizes the writer's work, but fully turned to the novel "Anna Karenina"; the picture of the reception of the novel "Anna Karenina" in Nabokov's Berlin novels is being restored; the observations of the researcher L.N. Tselkovy over

"Lectures on Russian Literature" as a step in Nabokov's reception of the novel "Anna Karenina".

In particular, the study provides a comparative analysis of the Lectures on Russian Literature and Lectures on foreign literature» V.V. Nabokov.

source base diploma work are: 1) the works of modern domestic and foreign Nabokovists and biographers: B.V. Averina, A.A. Dolinina, N.G. Melnikova, B.M. Spout, L.N. Tselkovaya; B. Boyd, and others. 2) Reviews of Nabokov's contemporaries: G.V. Adamovich, Yu.I. Aikhenwald, G.V. Ivanova, M.A. Osorgina, V.F. Khodasevich and others.

Methodology. The diploma work is based on the synthesis of research methods corresponding to its purpose and objectives: 1) receptive-aesthetic; 2) comparative historical; 3) biographical; 4) intertextual; The hypothesis method is also partially applied, since not all archival letters and documents are currently available that can shed light on Nabokov's reception of Tolstoy's work.

The theoretical and methodological basis of the work was the works of R. Ingarden, P. Tammy, Iser, and others.

The mechanisms of reception in the work are considered within the framework of "receptive aesthetics"? "aesthetics of dialogue between the text and the reader"2. R. Ingarden writes that "uncertainty" is characteristic of this or that artistic text of a work. Lack of completion - that's what it is

"charm of literature". In the process of perception, the work

"finished" by the reader. According to Ingarden, this kind

"completion" is called "concretization"? reader's addition to the text of the work 3.

In our work, we consider Nabokov both as a “real-historical” and as an “implicit reader” (according to the terminology of V. Iser) - a “theoretical construct”, a “transcendental model”, with the help of which the impact of the text on the reader can be represented. Thus, we regard Tolstoy's novel Anna Karenina in relation to Nabokov's novels and stories as a system that "awakens the activity of the perceiving subject"4. At the same time, we take into account the peculiarities of subjective perception.

The first chapter of the thesis is called “The work of L.N. Tolstoy in the literary-critical interpretation of V.V. Nabokov" and clarifies the reasons why Nabokov was so interested in Tolstoy's work, namely the novel "Anna Karenina", and why the motives of this particular Tolstoy novel by V.V. Sirin appeals when creating his own works. In this work, we take into account the Berlin period of Nabokov's work, since from childhood Nabokov was interested in the writer's work, and after emigrating to Berlin, memories of Russia, childhood, including the role of Tolstoy in it, were most fully expressed in his early lyrics, stories. The reception of Anna Karenina in Nabokov's Lectures on Russian Literature is interesting, where it is presented through a comparative analysis of the images and style of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Flaubert's Madame Bovary. We also highlight the main common constants of the poetics of "Anna Karenina" and the work of V.V. Nabokov.

In the second chapter “Creative dialogue with L.N. Tolstoy in the novel and smallproseV.V.Nabokov" mechanisms of reception are covered? the process of Nabokov's interpretation and transformation of the novel "Anna Karenina".

Comparative analysis of texts ("Anna Karenina"? "Camera Obscura", "Anna Karenina"? "King, Queen, Jack", "Anna Karenina"? "Music", "Revenge", "Word") in the work is not the only option demonstrations of receptive mechanisms in Nabokov's Russian prose. Influence on the early novels of the writer of other texts L.N. Tolstoy, as well as the works of Russian and foreign classics (A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, L.N. Tolstoy, I.S. Turgenev, G. Flaubert) are not excluded by us at all, as far as possible, it is indicated in text. According to P. Tammy, Nabokov's prose is characterized by "polygenetics", in other words: in a separate section of the text, not one literary source is updated, but "a whole multitude of sources", and "the identified quotation indicates a much wider field of citation"5. Nabokov introduces various authors in his texts in order to create an "unexpected thematic whole"6.

So, in this thesis, a development is proposed based on the provisions of the theory of receptive aesthetics, intertextual, comparative historical, biographical approaches to the concept of perception and interpretation of Nabokov's novel by L.N. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina". The concept of our work is to assert that Nabokov rethought and recreated Tolstoy's work in his prose.

Theoretical significance thesis is that it substantiates the need to use and tests the receptive approach to the novel "Anna Karenina" by L.N. Tolstoy on the example of Russian novels and stories by Nabokov, as well as expanded scientific ideas about the influence of Tolstoy's novel on Nabokov's work.

Scientific and practical significance the thesis is that it creates a basis for studying the creative heritage of Tolstoy and Nabokov in the senior classes of secondary schools. The material contained in the study can be used in the creation of articles, monographs on the work of writers, in the process of conducting practical classes, as well as elective courses and disciplines on the problem of links between emigre prose and the traditions of Russian classical literature. The research materials can be useful in the work on the commentary on Nabokov's novels of the Berlin period of creativity.

Structureandvolumework. The thesis consists of an introduction, two chapters, a conclusion and a bibliography. Workload? 99 pages. The bibliography consists of 44 titles.

Chapter 1. Creativity L.N. Tolstoy in the literary-critical interpretation of V.V. Nabokov

1.1 The role of L.N. Tolstoy in the formation of the views of V.V. Nabokov on art

Moving from country to country in many plans were difficult tests for Nabokov. The forced move from Russia to Berlin is a separation from your home and its loss. In the society of Russian emigration, he continues to write in his native language. The main problem of creativity in a foreign language faced the writer when he moved to the USA, where there was a need to write in English. Nabokov mastered it well enough, but it was difficult for him to create on it. “When, in 1940, I decided to switch to English, my misfortune was that before that, for more than fifteen years, I had been writing in Russian and over the years left my own imprint on my tool, on my intermediary »7. Nabokov divides language into two planes: language? creative tool and common language. Under the general language, the writer understands the Russian language: "... Avvakum, Pushkin, Tolstoy ...". In other words, the Russian language is perceived in this case as a link with Russian art creators, including L.N. Tolstoy.

Nabokov has repeatedly admitted that since childhood he was familiar with the work of Tolstoy, and his "Anna Karenina": "... of course, since childhood I was familiar with? Anna Karenina ...?". In correspondence with his friend and famous American literary critic, Edmund Wilson, he said that in his youth he was willingly interested in L.N. Tolstoy. “However, in my youth, I remember, I liked some of his memoirs about Tolstoy” (about Gorky’s work “Memoirs of Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy”).

Speaking about Nabokov's childhood in St. Petersburg, B. Boyd mentions the personality of L.N. Tolstoy. Nabokov's father himself was fond of the work of L.N. Tolstoy, knew him personally

Undoubtedly, Nabokov highly appreciated Tolstoy's genius: “But true art in itself is not something chaste or unsophisticated, and one glance at Tolstoy's style, worked out to perfection, to magical artistry, is enough ....

To analyze how V. Sirin turned to the work of L.N. Tolstoy, we must turn to the poem "Tolstoy" (1928)13, which most clearly reflects the author's attitude to the study of the writer's biography and his work.

Before proceeding to detailed analysis poems, it is worth mentioning the main themes of Nabokov's lyrics of the 20s, which Dolinin singled out. "one. Themes of consciousness: nostalgic memories of the lost paradise of childhood and youth with its St. Petersburg, dacha and Crimean localization

<…>2. Themes of the journey: homecoming in its various variants<…>3. Themes of own creativity: artistic imagination as a “gift, magnificent and heavy”, which makes it possible to overcome tragic losses and promises immortality<…>self-determination in relation to literary tradition<…>4. Themes of "otherworldliness": a secret, invisible connection between the dead and the living.

The themes highlighted by Dolinin are also fully represented in Nabokov's poem Tolstoy.

Analyzing the theme of an invisible connection with the dead, it is worth paying attention to how Nabokov compares two brilliant writers of the 19th century. For V. Sirin, not only Pushkin's work is attractive, but also his personality. His biography is of interest not only to researchers. As for Tolstoy, according to Nabokov, a completely opposite situation occurs with him: "A picture in an anthology: a barefoot old man ... my imagination remained cold." Tolstoy, of course, is not inferior to Pushkin in terms of talent, but his life has not yet been “overgrown” with legends, since he still remains close to his contemporaries: “But we still cannot refuse / from too flattering closeness to him / in time.” Nabokov demonstrates what hidden "threads" connect his modernity with L.N. Tolstoy.

Nabokov's childhood fell on a difficult time for the country. Death penalty continued in Russia. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, father of V. Sirin, in 1906 advocated the abolition of the death penalty. This law was supported by the Duma, but could not be implemented in the future due to the dissolution of parliament. The same position was held by many famous writers of that time, in particular L.N. Tolstoy, who in 1908 wrote the article "I can not be silent." Tolstoy and many other artists of that time had high level humanity, which somehow influenced the formation of Nabokov as a writer and as a person. The motive of death, execution and fate will run through almost all of Nabokov's works. Through the motive of death, V. Sirin seeks to know eternity. The motive of fate echoes the motive of death. We find a clear similarity in the line of the poem: "One day he came from a random station ...". This line has a real source, which we will write about later.

On the other hand, does Nabokov want a detailed study of Tolstoy's biography? Hardly. The process of studying the writer’s personal life seems to be very specific and negative: “And that’s to say: human memory / must lose its material connection with the past / in order to create an epic out of gossip / and turn silence into music.”

It should be noted that throughout his life Nabokov had a negative attitude towards the study of the biography of the writer, namely in the chapters

"Lectures on Russian Literature" dedicated to L.N. Tolstoy, he writes: “I can’t stand digging into the precious biographies of great writers, I can’t stand it when people peep through the keyhole of their lives, I can’t stand vulgarity? interest in a person?, I can’t stand the rustling of skirts and giggles in the corridors of time.”

It can be argued that Nabokov identifies his personality as a writer with the personality of Tolstoy. Zverev writes that Nabokov always sought to isolate his memories from the public. “Family memories never left him indifferent. He did not talk about painful things either in autobiographies or in interviews: about the story of his grandmother, about the drama of his grandfather’s younger sister, whose husband (also Korf, only from a different branch) three months after the wedding was killed in a duel by her brother and Dmitry Nikolayevich’s relatives ... ". Sirin is not interested in the personal life of the writer. In a poem

The “Tolstoy” author reworks the “carnal” image of Tolstoy, which was captured in historical documents, and gives it sublimity. In the magazine "Rul" 1928. No. 2374, September 16, several sources were cited that could serve as an impetus for creating the image of Tolstoy in V. Sirin's poem. For example, the authors of the article in the lines: “... an old man of modest stature, / with a beard disheveled by the wind, passes by with quick steps, / angry with the cameraman” find the motifs of the 1909 film by film director A. O. Drankov “Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy near the city of Tolstoy”. Chertkov and in Moscow. And in the lines: “He still keeps on the gramophone disk / the sound of his voice: he reads aloud ... and stutters on the word“ God ”” the authors of the magazine article find an analogy with Tolstoy’s 1909 recordings for the Gramophone Society

These sources keep the memory of Tolstoy as ordinary person, but Nabokov cannot perceive him in this way, so he takes the sources of Tolstoy's biography and creates the image of a writer who rises above human life. Nabokov draws a parallel between Tolstoy the man and Tolstoy the writer.

Here it is worth paying attention to the art with which Nabokov transforms fragments of Tolstoy's life into lyrical lines. For example,

“Once he left a random station? ... On October 28 (November 10), 1910, L. N. Tolstoy secretly left Yasnaya Polyana, caught a cold on the way and died at the Astapovo railway station”

Based on the content of the poem, the author is more attracted to the creative process of a genius - this is an incomprehensible mystery for a person. Considering this side of the issue, Nabokov develops the theme of writing talent, which gives immortality. According to Nabokov, Tolstoy is endowed with the divine right to create worlds that are taken from the subconscious, the depths, “where a vague dream will accept the inexpressible”, these worlds were close to Nabokov, and the images created by Tolstoy inspired V. Sirin: “I feel that I am blossoming with rhyme , / I surrender to the invisible wing ... ". In Dolinin's works, Nabokov's theme of creativity is presented as a heavy gift that can immortalize the creator. In turn, A.A. Zabiyako believes that the "inspiration" in Nabokov's lyrics is almost the main theme of his poetic work.

In general, the theme of writing in this poem is very philosophical. Nabokov envelops the image of Tolstoy with an aura of some mystery, he is the divine chosen one, to whom universal wisdom is transferred, accessible only to him alone: ​​"... the rumble of life, he understands the rumble ...". Nabokov himself aspires to this mystery. Speaking about the theme of creativity and inspiration, and the creative lyrical genius of Nabokov, it is worth remembering the words of Zabiyako: “Nabokov knew how to combine all this at one point, and, probably, it is precisely this ability that is the ultimate manifestation of Nabokov's maxim. The diverse hypostases of Nabokov's genius in their totality contributed to the formation of the artistic world, especially refracting in relief in the traditional poetic theme of poetic inspiration, attracting the author's attention throughout his life.

The theme of the motherland also deserves great attention. In Dolinin's system, this is not only the theme of "consciousness", memories, but also the theme of returning home. This topic was one of the leading themes in the Russian emigrant environment, its integral part is the appeal to Russian literary masterpieces, in particular to the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. In a review of Russkiye Zapiski, G. Adamovich writes: “... what happened to us, Russians, who still boast about the legacy of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky?” There is another point of view, A. Shleman believes that Nabokov refers to the Russian classics, reworks it and caricature the work of Tolstoy, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Chekhov in his reworking.

In an interview with the BBC, Nabokov said he would never return to Russia. “I will never return, for the simple reason that all the Russia I need is always with me: literature, language and my own Russian childhood.” And in the poem, Nabokov writes about Russia, created by Tolstoy, in which images familiar to the reader live, but at the same time, this is the Russia that the Nabokovs once left, the country in which V. Sirin spent his childhood, and it is she who remains to live on the pages Tolstoy's novels: "His creations, thousands of people, / shine through our lives wonderfully, / color the distance of memories - / as if we really lived next to them"

According to Averin, "the poet is free to intersperse his own poetic text in his biography." Nabokov had a brilliant memory. One way or another, he introduced memories of Russia into all his works. For Averin, the theme of remembrance in Nabokov's work is central. Aikhenvald, on the other hand, believed that "... that the emigrant present in Nabokov's books is "rather a ghost, shadow and fantasy than reality?"

Edmund Wilson recalled with what admiration Nabokov spoke about the work of Tolstoy, how deeply he was imbued with his work: “He came to the conclusion that The Death of Ivan Ilyich was the best thing ever written by Tolstoy. He is fascinated by exactly what I do not like about her (she does not reveal the whole truth of life). The way he talked about the book, savoring its cruel irony, made it look like Nabokov's own story. When I noticed that it talked too much about moral failure, he was surprised and indignant. He has forgotten about Tolstoy's view of life and thinks that this thing is one of those that he writes himself. Summing up the paragraph, we must say that the Russian language in exile began to be perceived by V. Nabokov as a link between him and the Russian classics, namely: Pushkin and Tolstoy. Nabokov from childhood was interested in the life and work of L.N. Tolstoy, re-read Anna Karenina many times.

In 1928, Nabokov wrote a poem that he dedicated to Tolstoy.

In this section, we consider the system of Nabokov's lyrical themes developed by Dolinin. In the poem "Tolstoy" a number of these themes are found. First, it is the theme of consciousness or memory. The theme of remembrance was the leading one in Nabokov's prose and lyrics. He often referred to his memories of Russia as a lost childhood, and Tolstoy's writings, especially his Anna Karenina, were significant part these memories. To the work and personality of L.N. Nabokov treated Tolstoy with great reverence. Tolstoy's personality is connected not only with the theme of the lost homeland, but also with the writer's genius, inspiration, which gives eternal life writer. Nabokov was interested in the process of creative genius not only at an early stage of his activity, but also throughout his life. The writer in his aesthetic concept is presented as a divine chosen one, who has access to the highest wisdom, who can create his own worlds.

Nabokov always hid episodes from his personal life, in his opinion, the writer should be studied only as a creator. He adhered to the same judgment when studying the work of Tolstoy, therefore, in the Lecture on Russian Literature, he does not include Tolstoy's life path.

1.2 Evaluation of the novel "Anna Karenina" by L.N. Tolstoy in the lectures of V.V. Nabokov on Russian literature

In his letter to Blanche Compf, Maurice Bishop wrote: “By the way, I am busy looking for a professor of Russian literature. I need a person who, with his creative attitude to literature, will suck the students in the audience.<…>The only one I think of is Vladimir Nabokov.”29

“Lectures on Russian Literature” is a unique work, since Nabokov, according to L.N. Tselkova, “represents them in a double guise: both as a writer and as a reader ... He constantly bifurcates: as a writer, he is busy with professional criticism of the object of study even when he should admire, like all writers? his rivals, and as a reader, he cannot hide his delight even when he finds out the shortcomings of the author being analyzed. In one of the interviews, Nabokov says: "A creative writer must carefully study the works of his competitors."

His "Lectures" are a galaxy of authors of the XIX century, for each Nabokov gives information from the biography and a critical analysis of their work. His work is “a writer's analysis for himself, and only then for students. Nabokov showed here an interest in everything that amazed him and what he would like to follow.

V.V. Nabokov described one of his favorite Russian novels as follows: "One of the greatest love books in world literature? Anna Karenina?"33. The central image of the lectures devoted to the novel by L.N. Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina", is his main character. This is Nabokov's favorite character and, in his opinion, the most charming heroine of Russian literature in general. She is young and kind. Her passionate nature sets her apart from others. secular ladies. Femininity, sensuality and love are concentrated in it. It is around the analysis of her image that Nabokov builds a chapter on this novel.

Simon Karlinsky wrote: “Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy for Nabokov is undoubtedly the greatest prose writer. I even remember him saying what? Anna Karenina? the greatest of all novels, nothing more, nothing less. ?War and peace? he also loved, but put a little lower? Anna Karenina?

First of all, we will turn to the structure of his lectures, which are dedicated to Leo Tolstoy. Nabokov, as a very attentive reader, refers to the details of the novel, time and space, the plot, compares episodes, gives extensive quotations, and so on.

Consider the chapter "Story". Despite the title, in this chapter, by and large, Nabokov reveals inner world heroes of Anna Karenina, gives them a subjective assessment. Through the image of Anna Nabokov

"pulls out" one by one the remaining characters. For example, he compares Anna and her brother Steve, compares the rich inner world of Anna and the empty world of Vronsky, the liveliness of the heroine and the stiffness of her husband, and so on.

In Nabokov's "Lectures" there is a rather fragmented structure, for example, at the beginning of the section, the author touched on the temporal analysis of the novel, and continued it already in the chapter "Composition" and "Chronology of Tolstoy".

As for the analysis of time. V.V. Nabokov in his "Lectures" with the painstakingness of an encyclopedist "unwinds the temporary ball of the novel." At the beginning of the Lectures, he considers time from the point of view of its artistic component. According to Professor Nabokov, Tolstoy discovered a way of depicting time and life that “corresponds most closely to our idea of ​​it”35. Time in Tolstoy's novel moves at the same speed as the reader's time. This is what captivates his reader.

In the chapter "Chronology of Tolstoy" Nabokov demonstrates how historical events of that time were reflected in the plot of the novel: “The action of the novel begins at eight o’clock in the morning, on Friday, February 11 (according to the old style), 1872. This date is not mentioned anywhere, but it is easy to establish.

1) Political events on the eve of the Turkish war, which are mentioned in the last part of the novel, date its end to July 1876. Vronsky becomes Anna's lover in December 1872. The episode at the races takes place in August 1873. Vronsky and Anna spend the summer and winter of 1874 in Italy and the summer of 1875 - at the Vronsky estate, then in November they go to Moscow, where Anna commits suicide on a May Sunday afternoon in 1876 ... Oblonsky reads in the morning newspaper about Count Beist, an Austrian after in London, who travels through Wiesbaden in England. This takes place before the thanksgiving service for the recovery of the Prince of Wales, which was served on Tuesday, February 15/27, 1872, and therefore the only possible Friday is February 11/23, 1872. In the chapter "Composition" Nabokov focuses exclusively on the time of the novel. He believes that the peculiarity of this "magical" description lies in the fact that the main lines of the novel develop at the same time, and the reader's task is to "explore their synchronization"

It is worth paying attention to how Nabokov interpreted the life of pre-revolutionary Russia in the chapter “Chronology”: “What was the daily routine in wealthy Moscow or St. Petersburg houses in the 70s. last century? Breakfast, at about nine o'clock, consisted of tea or coffee, bread and butter, or, as at the Oblonskys, kalach. A light lunch between two and three o'clock, followed by a hearty dinner at about half past six, with Russian liqueur and French wines. Evening tea with pies, jam and various Russian delicacies was served between nine and ten o'clock, after which the family retired to their chambers, but its most frivolous members could end the day with dinner in the city at eleven o'clock in the evening or even later. And fashion trends (sideburns that were fashionable in the 70s, red stockings, dresses and suits, fashionable games of spiritualism), and lifestyle are presented in more detail in the comments to the Lectures. Nabokov draws students' attention to two cities - Moscow, which is distinguished by its patriarchy and homeliness, and St. Petersburg - an administrative, cold city.

Ann Friedman called the Lectures a valuable contribution to the "dialogue of cultures". Nabokov skillfully draws students' attention to details, thereby demonstrating a completely different, Russian atmosphere of the novel, which is alien to American students. “... draws students' attention to certain places, introduces them to first-class railway cars, watchmakers who wind up the clock once a week, varieties of oysters, flowers in ladies' hairstyles and prefers ball gowns made of velvet. Notes and comments are not equal (the scheme of the railway car, I confess, did not captivate me at all) - but they all help to imagine a world that is completely different from ours. It should also be noted that Nabokov himself was part of this culture, not only because he spent his childhood in Russia, but also because the Nabokov family belonged to high society and retained the habits of several generations of the noble Russian class. B. Boyd writes that Nabokov V.D. calls his son Lody - "another manifestation of Anglophilia", which was characteristic of several generations of Russian nobles.

One of the brightest comments is detailed description of the train car Moscow - Petersburg, on which Anna was traveling home: "... but in 1872 the 1st class car (which Tolstoy calls a euphemism? sleeping car?") On the night train Moscow - Petersburg was arranged primitively, being something middle between the Pullman construction and the boudoir system? Colonel Mann. It had a side corridor, toilets, wood-burning stoves, and open platforms, which Tolstoy calls "porches" - vestibules did not yet exist, so snow flew through the outer doors when the conductors and stokers moved from car to car. There was a draft in the sleeping compartments, they were semi-fenced off from the rest of the car, and from Tolstoy's description it can be seen that six passengers occupied one compartment (and not four, as in later sleeping cars). The six ladies in the "sleeping" section sat reclining in armchairs, three opposite three, there was enough space between opposite armchairs to stretch out their legs ... To understand some of the important circumstances of Anna's night journey, the reader should clearly understand this: Tolstoy indiscriminately names plush seats in the car now? sofas?, then? armchairs?. Both names are correct - the sofa on each side of the compartment was divided into three chairs. Anna sits facing north in the right corner by the window, and can see the windows on the left opposite. To her left sits her maid, Annushka (who travels in the same carriage, not second class as she did on her trip to Moscow). On the other hand, even further east, at the very aisle on the left side of the carriage, sits a fat old woman, uncomfortable from the change of heat and cold. Directly opposite Anna, the old sick lady goes to bed, the other two take places opposite, and Anna exchanges brief remarks with them. Nabokov in his lectures always drew a diagram of this car on the board, he admitted this in a conversation with Alvin Toffler: “... the need to wake up at the set hour every second morning, fight snow on the road, walk along long corridors to the audience, draw maps on the board Joyce's Dublin or the construction of a semi-soft carriage of the fast train St. Petersburg-Moscow in the early 1870s - without knowledge of which neither "Ulysses" nor "Anna Karenina", respectively, make sense"3. The description of the carriage is closely connected with the analysis of the "stream of consciousness" and Anna's drowsiness, her emotional state. In the "Lectures" there is a description of another car, a suburban Moscow train. “You will see that the carriages of this out-of-town train are not like the Moscow-Petersburg night express train. In this suburban train, the carriages are much smaller and consist of five compartments. There is no corridor here. Each compartment has doors inside and out, so people get in and out by slamming the five doors on either side of the car. Since there is no corridor, the conductor between stops has to stand on the steps on one side or another of the car. The maximum speed of this type of suburban train is about 35 miles per hour.

V.V. Nabokov, having carefully analyzed the novel, finds many twists and turns between scenes. So, in the "Lectures" the episode of the death of the horse Frou-Frou and the death of Anna are compared. Nabokov draws attention to one important detail - Vronsky's trembling lower jaw. “Breaking Frou-Frou’s back and smashing Anna’s life, Vronsky essentially acts in the same way. You will see that expression? did his lower jaw tremble? is repeated in both episodes: in the scene of Anna's fall, when he bends over her sinful body, and in the scene of a real, real fall from a horse, when he stands over a dying animal. The whole tone of this chapter on horse racing, with its touching climax, will echo in the chapters where Anna's suicide takes place. Also V.V. Nabokov compares Kitty's birth and Anna's death. In his opinion, the scene of Kitty's birth is a brilliant depiction of the scene of the naturalness of life, which is shrouded in mystery, in which horror and beauty are synthesized. It should be noted that the author does not compare the births of Karenina and Kitty, namely death and birth, and finds in these two scenes an artistic image - the light that unites them.

Among other things, Nabokov draws attention to the significant change in Anna's behavior when she returns home to St. Petersburg. He juxtaposes two episodes. The first episode is about an official from her husband's department declaring his love, but Anna cheerfully tells her husband about this, and the second episode is an acquaintance with Vronsky, about which Anna is silent.

Nabokov believes that at the moment when Vronsky gives money to the family of the deceased, they secretly connect their lives. Another important detail is the meeting of Anna and her husband at the station, where the heroine will notice how his ears stick out. “Now everything has changed. Her passion for Vronsky is a stream white light in which her former world appears to her as a dead landscape on an extinct planet."

Dreams are carefully analyzed in the Lectures. Nabokov painstakingly collects a "mosaic" of dreams. At the same time, dreams are considered not from a psychological point of view, but from an artistic one. Nabokov believed that it was through dreams that one could understand the art of L.N. Tolstoy. In this case, Nabokov again proceeds from the method of comparison. He compares the bohemian dream of the frivolous Stiva Oblonsky (which he mentions twice) and the nightmare dream of Anna and Vronsky. “We must understand that a dream is a performance, a theatrical play staged in our minds in dimmed light before a stupid audience ... But at the moment we are interested in the fact that the actors, props and scenery are taken by the director of the dream from our daily life ... Time from time, the awakening brain discovers an island of meaning in yesterday's dream; ... a dream can form a single whole and be repeated, renewed, which happens with Anna. What are the impressions that the dream brings to the stage? It is obvious that they are stolen from our daily life, but have taken on new forms and turned inside out.

Through the motive of sleep V.V. Nabokov interprets the symbolism of the meeting between Anna and Vronsky.

“The nightmare of Anna and Vronsky takes the form of a terrible peasant with a red beard, leaning over a bag, swarming in it and muttering something in French, although he looks like a Russian proletarian. To understand the art of Tolstoy, it is important to pay attention to how the dream is built, to the connection of the fragments of which this nightmare should consist; the formation begins with their first meeting, when a railway watchman is crushed to death. I suggest looking through all the passages where the elements that make up this common sleep. These formative impressions I call the ingredients of sleep.

At the heart of their dream is a watchman crushed by iron, he is also the first link between Anna and Vronsky. Anna meets this image already on the way home. “The conductor, wrapped in snow, and the stoker, whom she sees in a dream, gnawing something in the wall with such a sound as if someone was being torn to pieces; it is still the same crushed man, only in a different guise, a symbol of something secret, shameful, tormenting, breaking and tormenting, lying at the bottom of her new passion for Vronsky. It is the wrapped man who announces the stop at which she meets Vronsky. The heavy iron idea is associated with all these pictures during her journey home”49. Tolstoy almost from the very beginning of the novel creates an atmosphere of tragedy and tension.

The image of Anna and the events associated with her are considered in more detail, unlike, for example, from Levin. "Lectures"? rather subjective work, and Anna, as mentioned earlier, ? Nabokov's favorite character, so it is not surprising that the author gives her a central place in his work. Levin is also one of Nabokov's favorite characters, as opposed to, say, Vronsky or Karenin, but

Anna is still more loved by the writer. It is worth mentioning here that Nabokov most of all valued the artistic style of the work, and not its ideological component, students should first of all pay attention “not to ideas”50, because “ideas in literature are not as important as images and the magic of style”. First of all, Nabokov is not interested in what L.N. Tolstoy and his character, "but a bug that so gracefully marked the turn, bend, movement of thought"51. Nabokov defines what is most important in Tolstoy's novel: Word, expression, image - this is the true purpose of literature. But not ideas. According to Nabokov himself, Levin's storyline is more associated with Tolstoy's diary entries, where ideas prevailed to a greater extent, of course, this does not impoverish her artistically, but does not attract as much attention as Anna Karenina's storyline. Nabokov, although he admired L.N. Tolstoy, could not help but pay attention to some of the shortcomings of the story. It is in this dual relationship to Tolstoy that one can see the dilemma of Nabokov - a reader who admires the novel, and a writer who criticizes his "competitor".

Nabokov, first of all, draws attention to some weak scenes of the novel, he finds them most of all in the storyline of his unloved character Vronsky. For example, in the scene of his “fake” suicide: “But the chapter is not convincing from an artistic point of view, from the point of view of the structure of the novel. This minor event wedged into the dream-death theme that runs throughout the book and stylistically disrupts the beauty and depth of Anna's suicide. If I'm not mistaken, in the chapter about the heroine's last journey, Vronsky's attempt to commit suicide never pops up in her memory. Isn't it strange? Anna should have remembered her, conceived her own fatal plan. Tolstoy the artist understood that the theme of Vronsky's suicide sounds in a different tone, that it is of a different shade and tone, solved in a completely different key and style, and artistically not connected with Anna's dying thoughts. Or the implausible departure to the front after Anna's death. Nabokov also finds the “telepathy” scene of Levin and Kitty somewhat artificial, but does not criticize it strongly: “It's all a bit stretched. Although love undoubtedly works wonders, bridges the edges of the abyss between people, and may be accompanied by cases of touching telepathy, yet such a detailed reading of thoughts is not very convincing. However, the gestures of the characters are charming, and the whole scene is artistically justified.

Nabokov reproaches Tolstoy for the lack of skillful transitions from chapter to chapter, in some dialogues, and so on. “In vain we will look in the pages of Tolstoy's novel for skillful Flaubert's transitions in the chapters from one hero to another. Structure? Anna Karenina? more traditional, although the book was written 20 years after "Madame Bovary". Conversation between the characters with reference to other characters, intermediary heroes arranging meetings between the main characters - these are Tolstoy's simple and sometimes rather clumsy tricks. Even simpler are his abrupt transitions from chapter to chapter when changing scenery. His "Lectures" demonstrated the perception of the novel "Anna Karenina" in comparison with Flaubert's novel "Madame Bovary".

Nabokov highly appreciated G. Flaubert, he includes an analysis of his personality and work in the cycle of Lectures on Foreign Literature. "As for suffering and joy, I have nothing to add after Flaubert, who has already written about it in his letters." As with Tolstoy, Nabokov became acquainted with Flaubert's work as early as early youth: “By the age of fourteen or fifteen I had read or re-read all of Tolstoy in Russian, all of Shakespeare in English, and all of Flaubert in French—not counting hundreds of other books.

Today I can determine with accuracy whether, in outline or intonation, the sentence I have composed resembles this or that phrase of some writer whom I loved or hated half a century ago; I, however, do not believe that any particular writer had a decisive influence on me.

Reading lectures on the work of L.N. Tolstoy, Nabokov draws an analogy between the key moments of the novels Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary, without naming the reasons for this analogy.

We have already found out that Nabokov considers the artistic style of G. Flaubert to be more elegant than the somewhat traditional style of Tolstoy. As for the moral side of the issue in the two compared novels, Nabokov defines it this way: “The moral is not that Anna has to pay for her husband’s infidelity (in a sense, can one formulate the morality that lies at the very bottom? Madame Bovary?). This is not the point, of course, and it is quite obvious why: if Anna had stayed with her husband, skillfully hiding her betrayal from the world, she would not have had to pay for it with either happiness or life. Nabokov, determining the date of Anna's death, draws a parallel with the death of Emma Bovary: "She decides to commit suicide and throws herself under the wheels of a freight train on this clear May Sunday evening in 1876, 45 years after the death of Emma Bovary." By the same principle, Nabokov compares the moral fall of the two heroines: “Now we come to what was denoted by the word? fall?. In a moral sense, this scene is very far from Flaubert, from Emma's bliss and Rodolphe's cigar in a small, sun-drenched pine forest near Yonville. Throughout the episode, a detailed semantic comparison of adultery with a brutal murder runs through - Anna's body is trampled and crushed by her lover, her sin. She's a victim of some crushing power." In both novels, the theme of adultery runs through, but Nabokov puts Anna Karenina on a higher level of moral development than Emma Bovary. Thus, Nabokov finds common ground in the plot lines of these two novels, discovers similarities and differences in the views of the two writers.

However, Nabokov treats the two heroines in completely different ways. In Lectures on Russian Literature, he compares Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary: “One of the most attractive heroines of world literature, Anna is a young, beautiful woman, very kind, deeply decent, but completely doomed. Having married an official with a promising career, Anna leads a carefree secular life in the most brilliant St. Petersburg society ... Anna is not an ordinary woman, not just a model of femininity, she is a deep nature, full of focused and serious moral sense Everything in her is significant and deep, including her love. She can't drive double life, unlike other ladies of secular society, such as Betsy Tverskaya or Countess Vronskaya. Her character does not allow secrets and intrigues. “She is not at all like Emma Bovary, a provincial dreamer, a sentimental whore, making her way along crumbling walls to the beds of alternating lovers. Anna gives Vronsky her whole life, decides to part with her adored son - despite the torment ... ". Nabokov gives the same characterization of the image of Emma in Lectures on Foreign Literature: “She is deceitful, she is a deceiver by nature: from the very beginning, even before all the betrayals, she deceives Charles. She lives among the philistines, and she herself is a philistine.”

Summing up our section, we draw several main conclusions. First, the Lectures reveal the double position of the author:

Nabokov is a critic who finds certain shortcomings in the work of writers, and Nabokov is a reader - an encyclopedist who, with all scrupulousness, analyzes, first of all, his favorite works. Secondly, "Lectures" have a heterogeneous, chaotic structure. In the chapters devoted to Tolstoy and his work, he analyzes the time, space, composition, vicissitudes of scenes, style, and the like of the novel Anna Karenina. It is also worth noting here that Tolstoy, as Nabokov's favorite writer, and his novel Anna Karenina (including the main character of the novel) occupy a central place in his work. Thirdly, in the Lectures, Nabokov illustrates the Russian way of life, which helped to better understand Anna Karenina and was unfamiliar to American students. L.N. Tolstoy wrote: “A perfect work of art will be only one in which the content is significant and new, and its expression is completely beautiful, and the artist’s attitude to the subject is completely sincere and therefore completely truthful. Such works have always been and will be rare. It can be assumed that for Nabokov "Anna Karenina" meets the requirements of a "perfect work". Fourthly, Nabokov considers the style of Tolstoy, his characters, the plot of Anna Karenina in comparison with Flaubert's Madame Bovary. He held both writers in high esteem and carried their traditions into his novels.

1.3 Artistic worlds of L.N. Tolstoy and V.V. Nabokov: general constants of poetics

Nabokov tried to reflect in his works the heritage of almost all Russian and foreign classics: G. Flaubert, L.N. Tolstoy, M. Proust, D. Joyce; A.S. Pushkin, M.Yu. Lermontova, N.V. Gogol, I.S. Turgenev and many others.

In the previous paragraphs, we considered the role of L.N. Tolstoy in the life of Nabokov, influence on his scientific activity. In this paragraph, we will consider what is the influence of the great classic on the work of V. Sirin, what are the similarities between the artistic worlds of V.V. Nabokov and L.N. Tolstoy.

First of all, it must be said that Nabokov and Tolstoy have both a number of similarities and differences in their worldview. B. Boyd writes about Nabokov as a self-confident person, while Tolstoy often felt disappointed in himself. Following the concept of Diderot, Tolstoy considered art evil, Nabokov, in turn, follows the opposite perception of art by Flaubert.

Nabokov told his students: “Ideas in literature are not as important as images and the magic of style. Aesthetic pleasure can be brought not by ideas, but only by details, and it was these details that V.V. Nabokov of his students. Nabokov paid much attention to the depiction of details in his works. V.F. Khodasevich called him "an artist of form, a writer's technique." Technical perfection, deft weaving of verbal matter was often perceived by critics and readers as an end in itself, and almost always obscured the ideological side of Nabokov's work. "Technology, turning into an end in itself, reduced his work to the construction of mirages",? wrote V.A. Kadashev66. In turn, Brian Boyd wrote about Nabokov's style in this way: "Nabokov's manner of presentation draws attention to itself so strongly<…>that the writer is no longer able to express genuine emotions, or simply say anything. B. Boyd found the similarity of the poetics of Nabokov and Tolstoy in the clarity of vision and the sensuality of the imagination.

However, the neglect of ideas does not deprive Nabokov's work of moral attitudes. In his "Lectures" V.V. Nabokov said that moral and ethical issues were of great concern to Tolstoy, for the most part they prevail in the novel "Anna Karenina", but this does not reduce the artistry of the novel. “The way Nabokov tries to formulate the moral problems of the novel is the key to his entire work… From the way Nabokov understands the novel Anna Karenina, one can conclude that he is a faithful follower of Tolstoy”69. After all, Nabokov's characters, succumbing to passion, get what they deserve - this is a direct borrowing of Tolstoy's tradition. Let us conclude that moral attitudes are characteristic of both Tolstoy's work and Nabokov's. “Tolstoy thinks about the moral responsibility of a person for his every word and every deed”70. Didn't Nabokov strive for the same goals in his works? He wrote: “In truth, I believe that one day a reappraiser will appear who will announce that I am not at all a frivolous firebird, but a convinced moralist, exposing sin, scourging stupidity, ridiculing vulgarity and cruelty ....

motives passions are strongly represented in both authors, and in both they have a negative connotation. Succumbing to passion, Anna cheats on her husband, loses her beloved son, becomes persecuted by society, experiences severe mental anguish and dies. She truly loved Vronsky, sacrificed everything for him, and he treated her suffering lightly. What can we observe in Nabokov's novel Camera Obscura?

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I am still in Moscow. Traveling home is the most important way (hence - "travel notes"), which frees from unnecessary, wrong fuss. Why, then, am I running around the world? Good question but rhetorical. A habit, perhaps a stupid one, but what can you do: women are not quite smart at all - this is what nature has decreed. And here is the time to remember about women, talk and argue about them, for example ... with Vladimir Nabokov himself. His lecture on Anna Karenina was a revelation, if not a shock, for me. I read and can’t believe my eyes: “Anna is not an ordinary woman, not just a model of femininity, she is a deep nature, full of concentrated and serious moral feelings, everything in her is significant and deep, including her love.” Or: "Anna is punished not for her sin (she could have lived with her husband further), not for violating social norms, very temporary, like all conventions, and having nothing to do with the timeless, eternal laws of morality..." (!?) 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Oh, how typical it is for most women to sacrifice themselves to an invented clay idol, while the idol itself, that is, just a man, does not need a sacrifice at all. Moreover, in this sacrifice he sees for himself a trap, a trap: what could be worse than this love bondage? When a woman loses her sense of superiority over a man, this is the end of her "I" as a woman and as a human being in principle: she will run after her unattainable idol all her life. Here Vronsky is just a man: superficial, narrow-minded, but sensual, which is very seductive for Anna. He is a hunter - he pursues the victim, he will catch up - he will grab, chew, bite, and even spit it out, because it’s boring, boring ... He would like a woman constantly slipping away, floating out of his hands, capable of creating a feeling of imaginary possession of her. Only after all, not every man deserves such happiness, and there are only a few such women. So he hangs around with a bored mistress, trying, by virtue of his innate aristocratic decency, to convince himself of the existence of some kind of almost karmic intimacy with Anna. Apparently, Tolstoy could not decide what to do with Vronsky after the death of Karenina. In order to somehow remove the touch of secular idiocy from the image of a windy lover, he sends him to the Russian-Turkish war, because the theater of operations is something very heroic. But back to Anna. "Vengeance is mine and I will repay." Anna, a pure-bred woman who had lost her sense of dignity somewhere, arrogantly rejecting the gift that fate kneelingly presents to her, took her revenge. Did she take revenge on Vronsky? - Certainly not. It is impossible to hurt such people - any grief bounces off their cheerfulness. Anna took revenge on her beloved son, leaving him an orphan. She did this only because Seryozha during all this love bacchanalia stood as a living reproach before her mind's eye. I interfered, that is, very much. And above all else, she took revenge on her own husband. She avenged his love for her, for her dislike for him. "Alexei Aleksandrovich Karenin is merciful and philanthropic. And he forgives, forgives and forgives again. However, there is another opinion about the character, in my opinion, dearly loved by Tolstoy himself. Nabokov:" Of course, one cannot forget about Karenin, the husband of the main character, a dry, respectable gentleman, cruel in his cold virtues, an ideal civil servant, an inert bureaucrat, a hypocrite and a tyrant who willingly accepts the counterfeit morality of his circle. At other times, he is capable of good impulses, of a grand gesture, but quickly forgets about it and cannot give up his career for them. "- Some textbook on literature from the times of stagnation. Well, well, Anna means:" attractive heroines of world literature ... a young, beautiful woman, very kind, deeply decent, but completely doomed. "I will not hide, for me these judgments from Nabokov's lecture are one of the main disappointments of recent times. "... Forgive me for some disrespect for the opinion of the great Nabokov. I agree with him, however, in the following: "The laws of society are temporary, while Tolstoy is interested in eternal problems. And here is his real moral conclusion: love cannot be only physical, because then it is selfish, and selfish love does not create, but destroys. So she is sinful. Tolstoy the artist, with his inherent power of figurative vision, compares two loves, putting them side by side and opposing each other: the physical love of Vronsky and Anna (beating in the grip of strong sensuality, but doomed and soulless) and genuine, truly Christian (as Tolstoy calls it) love Levina and Kitty, also sensual, but at the same time full of harmony, purity, selflessness, tenderness, truth and family harmony. "But this is a completely different story about love ...

Epithets.
Among the most amazing, we note the following: sloppy and rough"- adjectives that perfectly convey the slippery inside and rough surface of the oysters chosen by Oblonsky...

tulle-ribbon-lace-colored describing the crowd of ladies at the ball.

Princess Shcherbatskaya refers to listless, aging clubbers as sloops, a childish term for a hard-boiled egg that has become quite soft and crumbly from being rolled too long during the Easter games, where the eggs roll and bang against each other.

Gestures.
Anna, talking to Dolly about "the ability to forget everything," "makes a gesture in front of her forehead."

Anna: “I remember and know this blue fog, like the one on the mountains in Switzerland. This fog that covers everything at that blissful time when childhood is about to end, and from this huge circle, happy, cheerful, the path is becoming narrower and narrower ... ”(Chapter 20.)

The most amazing thing about Tolstoy's style is that whatever comparisons, similes or metaphors he uses, most of them serve ethical, not aesthetic purposes. In other words, his comparisons are utilitarian, functional, the author used them not to enhance the figurativeness, not to open a new angle of view on this or that scene, but in order to emphasize his moral position. That's why I call them Tolstoy's ethical metaphors or comparisons.

Comments

Another raw morning paper
According to the old system, adopted in Russia and around the world, good printing required paper to be soaked with moisture. Therefore, the newly printed newspaper was raw (p. 28).

Princess Shcherbatskaya [Prince Shcherbatsky] calls sluggish, aging clubgoers sloops, a childish term for a hard-boiled egg that has become quite soft and crumbly from being rolled too long during the Easter games, where the eggs roll and bang against each other.

Among educated Russian people, the most common and neutral form of address is not a name, but a patronymic name: Ivan Ivanovich or Nina Ivanovna. A peasant may call another Ivan or Vanka, but in general only blood relatives, childhood friends, or people who served in the same regiment call each other by name. I knew many Russians with whom I had been friends for decades, but I would never venture to call them anything other than Ivan Ivanovich or Boris Petrovich; therefore, the ease with which sedate Americans become Harry or Bill for each other after two glasses of whiskey seems completely unthinkable to the former Ivan Ivanovich.<...>

Oblonsky with several friends, including Vronsky and, probably, Alabin, gives a dinner in honor of famous singer(see note 75); these pleasant plans envelop his sleep and intertwine with the latest newspaper news: he is a big fan of political mishmash.

Count Beist, as is heard, has passed to Wiesbaden...
Oblonsky read about Beist's journey to England via Wiesbaden on a Friday, and the only suitable Friday is February 11/23, 1872, the day on which the novel begins.
Some of you are probably still wondering why Tolstoy and I mention such trifles. To make the magic of art, fiction seem real, the artist sometimes places them in a special historical frame of reference, referring to some fact that can be easily verified in the library, this citadel of illusions. The case of Count Bast is an excellent example in the dispute between so-called real life and so-called fiction. On the one hand, there is historical fact: a certain von Beist, statesman and diplomat, left two volumes of memoirs, where he lists with great detail all the witty remarks and political puns that he invented over the long years of his political career. On the other hand, we have Steve Oblonsky, created from head to toe by Tolstoy - and the question arises: which of them is more alive, more real, more reliable - the real, non-fictional Count Beist or the fictional Prince Oblonsky? Despite his memoirs - verbose, viscous, full of hackneyed clichés, the dearest Beist forever remained an unnatural and conditional figure; while Oblonsky, who never existed, is an immortal, living man. I will say more: Beist himself slightly comes to life, falling into Tolstoy's fictional world.

Watchmaker
In the homes of Russian masters, watchmakers (here it is a German) came once a week, usually on Fridays, to check and start the table, wall and grandfather clocks. In this passage, the day of the week when the action begins is named. In a novel where time is so important, the watchmaker is the most appropriate person to start the action in his own way.

The young women around Kitty never went outside without a governess or mother. They could be seen at a certain social hour on a certain fashionable boulevard, and then a footman followed them - for protection and for prestige.

In naming Natalie Shcherbatskaya's husband, a diplomat with exceptionally refined manners, Lvov, Tolstoy uses a derivative name from "Lev", thus emphasizing another side of his own personality, especially the youthful desire to be completely comme il faut.

Purple and red petticoats and stockings enjoyed great success with young Parisians around 1870 - and Moscow fashionistas, of course, imitated Parisian fashion. Kitty probably had linen or leather ankle boots with buttons.

Tolstoy's son, Sergei Lvovich, in his notes about Anna Karenina, says: "The ladies especially valued the mazurka: gentlemen invited those ladies who they liked best to her."

check... This literary dinner costs twenty-six rubles, including "tips," so Levin's share was 13 rubles (about $10 at the time). The two men took two bottles of champagne, some vodka, and at least one bottle of white wine (p. 62).

prince... The manner of addressing Princess Shcherbatskaya to her husband is old-fashioned "Muscovite". Note also that the prince calls his daughters "Katenka" and "Dashenka" in the old Russian way, without resorting to the anglicized newfangled abbreviations "Kitty" and "Dolly".

"The famous cancan ... just a quadrille danced by fat people." (Allen Dodworth. "Dance and its connection with education and social life", London, 1885)

The head of the station also ran in in his unusually colored cap. Clearly, something extraordinary has happened...
In fact, there is no connection between the two adjectives, but repetition is characteristic of Tolstoy's style, with its rejection of false prettiness and readiness to allow any heaviness, as long as it leads directly to the point. Compare a similar combination of the words "leisurely" and "hurriedly" that occur fifty pages later. The stationmaster's cap was bright red.

Tyutk and
With this plural noun, the rude prince calls young helicopters, narrow-minded and foppish. It does not fit very well with Vronsky, whom Kitty's father apparently has in mind; Vronsky may be vain and frivolous, but he is also ambitious, intelligent and persistent. The reader will hear a curious echo of this bizarre word in the surname of the hairdresser (“Tyutkin-kuafer”): driving through the streets of Moscow before her death, Anna glides with an absent-minded glance at the sign with this name, she is struck by the ridiculous discrepancy between the Russian comic surname and the stiff French noun “kuafer”, and in the next moment she is already thinking that she can amuse Vronsky with this joke.

In order to understand some of the important circumstances of Anna's nighttime journey, the reader must clearly understand this: Tolstoy indiscriminately calls the plush seats in the carriage either "sofas" or "armchairs." Both names are correct - the sofa on each side of the compartment was divided into three chairs. Anna sits facing north in the right corner by the window, and can see the windows opposite to the left. To her left sits her maid, Annushka (who travels in the same carriage, not second class as she did on her trip to Moscow). On the other hand, even further east, at the very aisle on the left side of the carriage, sits a fat old woman, uncomfortable from the change of heat and cold. Directly across from Anna, the old sick lady goes to bed, the other two take their places opposite, and Anna exchanges brief remarks with them.

torch
In 1872, this travel lantern was a primitive fixture with a candle inside, a reflector, and a metal handle that could be attached to the arm of a railway chair.

Dolly and Kitty Shcherbatsky and their parents combine the traditional ritualistic side of religion with the old-fashioned good-natured faith that Tolstoy favors. In the 70s, while writing a novel, he had not yet been imbued with a burning hatred for the ritual side of Orthodoxy.

Vronsky's teeth... Throughout the novel, Tolstoy returns several times to Vronsky's wonderful, regular teeth. When he smiles, solid teeth form an even row of ivory, but before he disappears from the pages of the novel, in the eighth part, his creator, punishing Vronsky, or rather his magnificent appearance, rewards him with a masterfully described toothache.

In each person, to one degree or another, two forces counteract: the need for solitude and the thirst for communication with people - which are usually called "introversion", that is, interest directed in oneself, to the inner life of the spirit and imagination, and "extraversion" - interest directed at the external world of people and tangible values.
From here it is already a stone's throw to the problems that occupied Tolstoy, in whom the artist struggled with the preacher, the great introvert - with a strong extrovert.
Tolstoy, of course, was aware that in him, as in many other writers, there was a struggle between the desire for creative solitude and the desire to merge with all of humanity, a struggle between the book and society. According to Tolstoy's definition, which he arrived at after finishing Anna Karenina, creative solitude is tantamount to selfishness, complacency, that is, sin. Conversely, the idea of ​​dissolving in the universal for Tolstoy meant God - God-in-people and God-universal-love. Tolstoy called for self-denial in the name of universal divine love. In other words, according to Tolstoy, in a personal struggle between a godless artist and a godlike person, the latter must win if he wants to be happy. One must clearly imagine these spiritual realities in order to understand the philosophical meaning of the story. "Death of Ivan Ilyich".

Ivan, of course, is the Russian version of the Hebrew name John, which means: "God is good, God is merciful." Ilyich - son of Ilya; this is the Russian version of the name "Elijah", which is translated from Hebrew as "Jehovah is God."<...>

Firstly, I believe that this is the story of the life, not the death of Ivan Ilyich. The physical death described in the story is part of mortal life, just its last moment. According to Tolstoy's philosophy, a mortal man, a person, an individual, a man in the flesh physically goes into the wastebasket of Nature, while the human spirit returns to the cloudless heights of universal Divine Love, to the abode of nirvana - a concept so precious to Eastern mysticism. Tolstoy's dogma says: Ivan Ilyich lived a bad life, and since a bad life is nothing but the death of the soul, then, therefore, he lived in death. And since after death the Divine light of life should shine, he died for a new life, Life with a capital letter.

Secondly, we must remember that the story was written in March 1886, when Tolstoy was about 60 years old and firmly believed in Tolstoy's position, which claimed that it was sinful to compose masterpieces of literature. He firmly decided that if he ever took up a pen after the great sins of his mature years, "War and Peace" and "Anna Karenina", he would write only simple-hearted stories for the people, pious instructive stories for children, edifying tales, and so on. similar.
In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, not entirely frank attempts of this kind come across every now and then, giving rise to examples of a pseudo-folk style, but on the whole the artist wins. This story is Tolstoy's brightest, most perfect and most complex work.

Perhaps, and even certainly, you have come across monstrous textbooks, written not by educators, but by demagogues - people who rant about a book instead of revealing its soul. They have probably already told you that the main goal of a great writer and, of course, the main key to his genius is simplicity. Traitors, not teachers.
In reading the examination papers of bewildered students of both sexes about this or that author, I often came across such phrases - perhaps sunk into their memory at a very tender age: “His style is charming and simple,” or: “He has a simple and refined style. ", or "His style is simple and utterly charming." Remember: "simplicity" is nonsense, nonsense. Every great artist is complex. Prost "Saturday Evening Post". Just a journalistic stamp. Prost Upton Lewis. Digestion and speaking are simple, especially foul language. But Tolstoy and Melville are anything but simple.
Tolstoy's style has one peculiar property, which can be called "the search for truth by touch." Wishing to reproduce a thought or feeling, he will delineate the contours of this thought, feeling or object until he is completely satisfied with his recreation, his presentation. This device includes the so-called artistic repetitions, or a dense chain of repeated statements, following one after another, each subsequent one is more expressive than the previous one, and closer and closer to the meaning that Tolstoy puts into it. He moves by touch, breaks the outer shell of the word for its inner meaning, clears the semantic grain of the sentence, sculpts the phrase, turning it this way and that, gropes best form to express his thoughts, gets bogged down in a quagmire of sentences, plays with words, interprets and thickens them. Another feature of his style is brightness, freshness of detail, juicy, picturesque strokes to convey the essence of life. So in the 80s. no one wrote in Russia.

Hanging a curtain and falling down the stairs, he [Ivan Ilyich] mortally injured his left kidney (this is my diagnosis, as a result he probably developed kidney cancer), but Tolstoy, who did not like doctors and medicine in general, deliberately obscures, putting forward other assumptions: wandering kidney, gastric disease, even the caecum, which certainly cannot be on the left, although it is mentioned several times. Later, Ivan Ilyich jokes gloomily, saying that on this curtain, as in an assault, he lost his life.

A noticeable feature of the story is that when the story begins, Ivan Ilyich is already dead. However, there is little difference between a dead body and people discussing this death and looking at the deceased, since, from Tolstoy's point of view, the existence of these people is tantamount to dying alive, not life. At the very beginning, we discover one of the many themes of the story - the insensitive vulgarity, senselessness and soullessness of the life of city officials, in which Ivan Ilyich himself recently took an active part.

Selfishness, falseness, hypocrisy and, above all, the stupid routine of life are its most characteristic properties. This stupid habit puts a person on the level of inanimate objects, so inanimate objects are also included in the narrative, becoming actors story.

Vladimir Nabokov. "Lectures on Russian Literature"

Anna Karenina. Not God's creature

novel about romance , script essay

Dedicated

Moscow City Clinical Psychiatric Hospital No. 4

named after P.B. Gannushkin;

Institute of Social and Forensic Psychiatry. V.P.Serbian;

tram stop “Clinic P.P. Kashchenko" on Zagorodnoye Highway.

Appeal to fools

I warn you right away: either close my essay immediately, or later don’t reproach me for once again rudely delivering you from some highly moral rose-colored glasses, which, as you thought, so successfully hid your flat-eyedness and round-mindedness.

Introduction. Myths about Karenina

It has always been interesting for me to find out what place literary critics, as well as writers, as well as poets, and, by and large, literary critics of all stripes think at the time of writing some of their criticism of literary criticism or, at worst, some catchy phrase like Dovlatov’s :" The biggest misfortune of my life is the death of Anna Karenina". I did not expect such a vulgar phrase from Dovlatov. Well, yes, a man almost drank cirrhosis of the liver, but he has no other misfortunes in life, except for the death of Karenina! ..

Or take Lectures on Russian Literature » Vladimir Nabokov. What a superficial reader one had to be to see in Tolstoy's novel "Anna Karenina" everything is exactly the opposite! And even worse... But I will dwell on Nabokov later, but for now I will continue to exclaim rhetorically: what do they think, these lovers of empty lectures and spectacular phrases?

For some time now I have known the sad answer: they think with their eyes. They read only what is easiest to read - that is, what the author deliberately puts on the very surface, and then pass off the product of their elementary visual process as some kind of intellectual creativity.

Here, for example, the hero of some play will say: “How I hate sausages!” - and then for two hundred pages it will be a pleasure to eat these sausages. And what will critics and lecturers write in one person? They will write that the hero hated sausages. Why? Because the hero said so. That's the whole argument.

Or, for example, vice versa: “I love sausages! - the heroine of a novel will loudly declare. “Without sausages there is no life, no happiness!” - and then she herself will throw out these sausages with a disgusted expression on her face. But critics of this disgusting expression will not even notice! And they will never guess that loud words about love for sausages are extremely contrary to the actions of the heroine, that this is not done with loved ones, which means that the heroine is lying - which means that the author really wants readers to understand this after all.

But the author has nothing to worry about. Readers don't get it either. Because readers analyze a work with the same organ as critics and literary critics - with their eyes. At the same time, they see only what catches their eye - it catches on purpose, and even too intentionally, so that, according to the subtle plan of the author, just arouse distrust in the reader, just to encourage the reader to look deeper, just to awaken thought in the reader.

The difference between creator and consumer is huge. It is an abyss that is almost impossible to cross. The creator creates - he thinks, he suffers, he adjusts one to the other, he changes, cuts off the superfluous, looks for the missing, rewrites again and again in search of that elixir of life that will make his novel first alive, and then immortal. The consumer does not create anything. He just comes, just looks at the menu and just eats. His brains do not produce anything, so he is always bored: at first he is bored for a long time, and then he gets bored in advance. The elixir of life, over which the writer struggled so painfully, is for the consumer just a sauce that he never knows about. myself- is it good? The consumer waits to be told. And they will definitely tell him - and he will definitely repeat it.

It was precisely such false critics and pseudo literary scholars that I encountered when reading their frankly superficial "judgments" about Maria Bashkirtseva's "Diary" and Shakespeare's play "Hamlet". And, as I have seen, the same is true of Anna Karenina. And even worse.

When the meaning of the novel finally became clear to me, and moreover: when the actions of the main character, which are precisely the meaning of her whole life and the only reason for her death, finally emerged from the twilight of contradictions and lies, I finally looked through the criticism dedicated to the novel and came to horror. Everyone literally unanimously murmured like crazy only that which was the first to pull out the eye and that in fact was not the truth at all, but only a reason to search for it.

Not one of them was able to distinguish truth from a pretext for the search for truth. Although the author did not hide the truth so much that, in addition to indirect facts - in addition to all these signs and notches, i.e. all this food for the necessary reflections - was even directly expressed by him. The only trouble is that this truth was directly expressed by him only once and at the very, very end - that's what the critics missed ...

As a result, even to this day, empty myths safely wander in the minds of readers, which continue to be slowly cultivated further by school teachers and teachers of higher educational institutions. Here are the crazy myths:

Anna is unhappily married to Karenin.

Anna does not love her husband because it is impossible to love him.

Anna loves Vronsky.

Anna sacrifices her position in society for the sake of love.

She sacrificed everything for the sake of Vronsky.

She boldly decides to defend her right to love.

She perishes under the influence of a soulless light that does not want to let her love.

Anna loves her son.

Anna is unhappy in separation from her son.

Anna is a deeply sensitive person.

Anna is an extremely conscientious person who has deep moral nature.

Vronsky is a vulgar egoist, for whom it is more important to have fun than to think about Anna, who sacrificed everything for him.

Karenin is a soulless cold creature who is sometimes, for some reason, capable of high deeds.

Karenin is incapable of love.

Karenina doesn't give a damn about Anna.

Karenin is concerned only with his position in the world, and nothing else interests him.

All this is a lie from the first to the last point - a lie generated by the laziness of the mind and the paucity of the literary instinct of those who created it. I was literally shocked when, refreshing my memory, I found all this bullshit in a textbook of Russian literature for the 9th grade high school (15th edition, revised; Moscow, ed. "Enlightenment", 1982., compilers M.G. Kachurin, D.K. Motolskaya).

And in this textbook - in this already fifteenth edition! - It was written in black and white that “Anna Karenina is one of the most charming female characters in Russian literature. Her clear mind, pure heart, kindness and truthfulness attract sympathy for her. the best people in the novel - the Shcherbatsky sisters, Princess Myagkaya, Levina, ”as well as other dregs, which I will certainly analyze below.

But Nabokov did his best. I was shivering with indignation when I read in his lecture that Anna, according to Nabokov, was a “very kind, deeply decent” woman, that “honest, unfortunate Anna” “adores her little son respects her husband,” and so on and so forth.

And it would be nice if some ordinary reader, from whom there is little demand, but a doctor of French and Russian literature at Cambridge University ... but a professor of Russian and European literature at Cornell University ... How could he not see what Tolstoy said a hundred times about Anna , or about her husband, but to take only the most superficial layer, only those remarks, those indirectly spoken words that are not at all an author's characteristic, but belong to most Anna - and pass off her words as the truth?!

How could it be possible to completely exclude, literally not notice and in no way analyze the completely clear causal relationship between her actions and the actions of her husband?! Amazing.

Throughout the novel, Anna only does what she does one meanness after another, while continually justifying herself and blaming others, as every scoundrel does, but Nabokov does not seem to notice this and tenderly tells that Anna Karenina - "a deep nature, full of concentrated and serious moral feeling."

However, in one place Nabokov almost let it slip ... " The dual nature of Anna shines through already in the role that she plays when she first appears in her brother's house, when, with her tact and feminine wisdom, she restores peace in him and at the same time, as an evil seductress, breaks the romantic love of a young girl.

Now I won’t even talk about the fact that neither tact nor female wisdom in Anna’s nature even spent the night, and family cunning and deceit helped her reconcile the spouses, but I’ll pay attention to the evil seductress. Because in the first version the phrase sounded a little different: ““It should be noted that Anna, with such wisdom and tact, reconciled the quarreling spouses, at the same time brings evil, subduing Vronsky and destroying his engagement to Kitty.”

Agree: it’s one thing “like an evil seductress”, here the effect of assumption (how) is strong, multiplied by the condescending meaning of the seductress, and another thing “brings evil” - there is categoricalness and no mitigation. Apparently, for this reason, this option was crossed out by Nabokov ...

In general, the superficiality of his reading, brought to the point of obscenity, made me literally goggle. Here, for example, is what Nabokov writes about the scene where the watchman was run over and Vronsky gave his widow 200 rubles:Vronsky coolly helps the family of the deceased only because Anna is worried about her. Married high-society ladies should not accept gifts from unknown men, and Vronsky gives Anna this gift.

This Nabokovian vulgarity, this professorial affectation, this literary swaying of the hips shocked me. What does "cold-blooded help" mean? I would also understand the use of this epithet when describing a murder and other atrocities, but to help in cold blood? Where, in what context did he dig up this sleaze?! First, Vronsky is by nature sensitive and compassionate - and he always was. It was these natural features of his that made him give money to the widow of the deceased watchman. It is these traits that will later make him stay with Anna even when she turns them into life together into the final hell for Vronsky - Vronsky, at that moment passionately dreaming of getting rid of her, will deeply feel sorry for her, and therefore will continue to sacrifice himself for his pity for Anna.

But this is just the first. And secondly, in the novel, everything was completely different. None of this vulgarity - this ugly gift invented by Nabokov - was not there. And there was this.

Crushed the watchman. Vronsky and Stiva ran to find out what had happened. Anna and Vronsky's mother entered the carriage and everyone recognized the men even earlier from the butler. The men are back. Stiva began to gasp and groan, tears in his eyes. Vronsky, on the other hand, "was silent, and his handsome face was serious, but completely calm."

Does this mean that Vronsky is an insensitive monster, and Stiva is a model of compassion? Doesn't mean at all! Stiva, who loves to cry, loves only himself and is absolutely indifferent to others. Vronsky's calm expression may indicate his unwillingness to put his emotions on public display.

Further, Stiva is loudly killed because of misfortune, Karenina excitedly asks if something can be done for the family. Hearing this, Vronsky seemed to wake up, for him these words sounded like a reminder of a necessary action, which not only did not occur to him without this reminder, but simply in a moment of real shock at what had happened, it fell out of his head. "Vronsky looked at her and immediately got out of the carriage." Moreover, we note, he left silently, without explaining anything to anyone. Then he returned, and no one would have known anything, if not for an accident - Vronsky was overtaken by the head of the station with the question of whom to transfer the money to.

By the way, when Vronsky returned, the pitiful Stiva, who ten minutes ago was killing himself over the dead watchman, “already talked with the countess about the new singer” ...

By the way, Vronsky will once again want to donate money to the poor artist Mikhailov. And even try to do it tactfully - ordering him a portrait of Anna.

So, was this whole affair with money for the widow from Vronsky some kind of vulgar gift, as Nabokov's act licked him? Of course not. It was the usual act of a kind person, fitting into Vronsky's code of honor. Imagine that it was you who donated money to a person dying of cancer - wouldn't it be disgusting to pass off this normal human act as some kind of gift to your beloved? Here I am about the same.

And, by the way, Tolstoy, who pays great attention to detail, did not show us Anna's reaction to this act of Vronsky in a word. He did not forget about Stiva - Stiva's reaction was painted by Tolstoy like clockwork. But about Anna - silence. Not a look, not a word. It was as if he wanted to immediately let the readers understand by this that Anna did not care at all that Vronsky helped someone there.

However, Professor Nabokov did not even notice any of this.

Nabokov allows himself exactly the same blatantly vulgar vileness twice more: in the characterization of Anna's suicide, and in the characterization of Vronsky's attempt to commit suicide.

Arguing that the chapter in which this attempt by Vronsky is described, " unconvincing from an artistic point of view, from the point of view of the structure of the novel” (complete nonsense), Nabokov calmly reports that this attempt by Vronsky to commit suicide is just an “insignificant event”, which for some reason uncomfortably “wedged into the theme of sleep-death” and thus "stylistically violates the beauty and depth of Anna's suicide."

Only a very indifferent and deceitful person is capable of seeing “beauty” in suicide, and an “insignificant event” in an attempted suicide of another person - to match Karenina herself.

After that, I was no longer surprised by his fake empty lecture on this novel, in which Nabokov convincingly proved that "the novel consists of 8 parts, and each part - an average of 30 short chapters of 4 pages."

Even the fact that in this lecture Nabokov suddenly discovered with delight that in his novel "Anna Karenina" the brilliant Tolstoy used the "gestures" of the characters, as well as "epithets", as well as "bright comedic features", "poetic comparisons”, “auxiliary comparisons”, “examples of fine craftsmanship”, “assimilations and metaphors” and even “moral and practical comparisons”. Yes, Nabokov managed to do a huge dead job and still not see the main thing.

Meanwhile, the truth - a simple, cold, truth not hidden by the author - is that Anna never loved anyone. No Vronsky, no son, no husband, no daughter. She is generally deprived of this feeling - she does not know how to love, and moreover: she does not want to love. And love directed not at her, and completely irritates her, she cannot calmly observe her, she infuriates her, turns her away from her.

In essence, this beautiful woman - I emphasize: a stunningly beautiful woman - is just an ordinary manipulator. Sneaky, of course, like all manipulators, and dangerous - if you believe his lies, but quite simple and harmless - if you know his laws and if you pay attention not to the words, but to the actions of the manipulator.

The beauty of Karenina, which is frankly contrasted with Dolly's ugliness, draws great attention in the novel, and this is no coincidence. Her beauty is a lure and a trap at the same time, hiding underneath an insatiable, evil, arrogant manipulator, obsessed with self-pity, a demon of superiority and a thirst for unconditional power over the victim.

Actually, superiority over everyone and unconditional power over the victim - this is the only life goal of Karenina. This is all that interests her and what she truly strives for.

Of course, such a goal gives rise to such actions, and they, in turn, need to be justified - and here self-pity becomes Karenina's assistant.

Self-pity is the only sincere feeling of Karenina, all her other experiences are false. She is literally obsessed with self-pity – and a complete lack of pity for others. She does not feel sorry for anyone, not even her son. Self-pity allows her to endlessly justify herself - endlessly blaming others and deliberately causing them a persistent sense of guilt. According to Karenina's invariable opinion, everyone except her is always to blame for all her misfortunes. In general, she does everything to avoid responsibility for her own actions and, at the first opportunity, shifts this responsibility onto another - someone who, out of gullibility, had the imprudence to love her or, out of innate decency, undertook to help her.

Decent gullible people are the breeding ground for any manipulator. And Karenina is no exception here - she plays on the best human feelings, such as kindness, gullibility, sincerity, decency and the ability to sympathize.

Decent people can be instilled with a sense of guilt and a sense of duty towards the manipulator for a very long time. Especially if this manipulator is a beautiful woman.

Of course, it is much more difficult for ugly manipulators in this sense - an ugly woman-manipulator is forced to continually convince her victims that she has a rich spiritual world, slowly conquering the victim, while for a beautiful woman-manipulator, the laborious demonstration of a rich spiritual world is absolutely impossible. why, she needs a light universal bait - beauty.

In addition to the bait, beauty in Karenina's life also performs two more important (for any manipulator) functions - her beauty forces the victim to see great spiritual meaning in every primitive meanness of Karenina, and when these meannesses are revealed, forgive her again and again.

Thus, the manipulator can lead the victim by the nose for a long time. But one day the victim inevitably sees the light ... Then the manipulator finds himself another victim. Or dies if all the victims are exhausted. There is no other ending for any manipulator.

Very definite - and, of course, not randomly derived in the novel and Anna's relatives. Brother, Stepan Arkadyevich Oblonsky, is a worthless person, incapable of making money, keeping it, or making a good deal. All he does is spree and mistresses, it takes not only his salary, but also Dolly's dowry (from which we can conclude that Steve married penniless).

Anna's aunt, Princess Varvara Oblonskaya, has a very bad reputation in the world as a hanger-on, who is ready to keep company with anyone for money, even those who have long been no longer accepted in decent houses.

Another aunt of Anna, who raised her, is known for the fact that, by means of ingenious combinations, she forced Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin to marry his niece almost by blackmail - the case was framed in such a way that the behavior of Karenin, who did not commit a single indecent act towards Anna, was deliberately exposed in ambiguous light.

Another parallel is not accidental: Anna achieves her goals through the professional use of her beauty, and her own brother through the same professional use of his charm.

Thus, all members of the Oblonsky family, to which Anna belongs, are presented by Tolstoy in a very specific light, leaving no doubt about them. The unscrupulousness of methods, greed, extravagance, inability to earn money on their own and a riotous lifestyle are the hallmark of all members of the Oblonsky family.

And it is no coincidence that all Oblonskys are the exact opposite of the Shcherbatsky family. The ugly Dolly and Kitty, bursting with charm of youth, cannot be compared with the well-groomed beauty of Karenina. However, what would she be without her beauty, what would she do without her, who would need her? Whereas Dolly and Kitty are capable of making the deepest, warmest impression on a person, which will not disappear over the years, but will only become stronger. Unlike Karenina. From which, after a short time, Vronsky already unbearably wants to get rid of, and he is almost ready to admit this even aloud.

So, the novel "Anna Karenina" is a novel about a woman-manipulator, about her life and death, triumph and fall, as well as about her two victims, her husband and lover, whom she - first due to her personal vicious inclinations, and then being under the constant destructive influence of a terrible drug (Anna was a complete morphine addict), she diligently dragged her into her fatal funnel. And if her first, fairly crippled victim still managed to stay alive - thanks to timely third-party intervention, then the second victim, finding herself in complete spiritual isolation and no longer able to get out of it on her own, turned out to be completely demoralized and in absolute, although at that time already posthumous, the power of the manipulator.

It is surprising that all these tragic results are the work of one stupid and empty woman. Stupid - because just out of a thirst, even a little, even momentary, but authorities over the life of another person, she several times refuses the most profitable deals for her. In her obsession with arrogance, she does not have the intelligence to give her lover even a respite in the endless chain of scandals and provocations she needs just to demonstrate her unquestioned power. Out of empty vanity, she manages to spoil relations with everyone who could give her support and help.

She is empty because she is not interested in life nothing at all- except for the desire to seduce. And that's it. This is where her interests end. Thus, her life in accordance with this single interest must be an endless chain of more and more admirers. If a new admirer is not found, the day is spent in vain.

Here it can be objected that the desire to seduce, brought to the sole meaning of all life, is the real purpose of a beautiful woman. I won't argue. But, in my opinion, it's like devoting your life to endless going to restaurants from morning to evening.

The ability to seduce is brought to perfection by Karenina. To pure mathematical calculation. For the enthusiasm for it never occurs by itself - it is always the product of its conscious influence. Why does she need it? Seduced is controllable. And the life of the seduced is in the hands of the seducer. That is, to seduce means to rule, to rule. Karenina very wants to rule. She wants someone else's life to depend solely on her, so that only in her right to execute and pardon. It gives her pleasure to see how the peace and happiness of another person is destroyed with one wave of her lovely hand. She enjoys her unpunished ability to take everything that is dear to another and destroy everything that brings joy to another.

Of course, all this is revealed in the novel - clearly and convexly. And, of course, critics, literary critics and professors did not notice this ... It’s scary to think how many generations, right from school to the last year of the institute, these 16 points of fakes were driven into their heads - after all, the teachers and professors themselves read the novel! So why did they so readily believe all sorts of stupid gentlemen, only capable of grabbing onto the most superficial layer - there is no such thing as superficial?

And the directors? How could they - reading the novel and fully imbued, so to speak, with the psychology of the characters, counting on the future cinematic masterpiece - how could they remain at the same primitive to burning vulgarity level of perception?

Not without spiritual trepidation, I opened F. Dostoevsky's article "A nna Karenina "as a fact of special significance", fearing not to find there what I saw with such clarity in the novel. It was with great relief that I read there what fully corresponded to my ideas about Karenina:

“... the human soul will remain the same<…>abnormality and sin come from within herself<…>at the end of the novel, in a gloomy and terrible picture of the fall of the human spirit, traced step by step, in the depiction of that irresistible state when evil, having taken possession of a person’s being, binds his every movement, paralyzes every force of resistance, every thought, every desire to struggle with darkness, falling on the soul and consciously, lovingly, with a passion for vengeance, accepted by the soul instead of light - in this picture there is so much edification for the human judge, for holding the measure and weight, that, of course, he will exclaim, in fear and bewilderment: “No, not always for me vengeance and I will not always repay ... "

Abnormality and sin - that's what Karenina is. The essence of a man who was possessed by evil and bound his every movement. And evil is nurtured by him consciously - "beloved." Such people exist to this day. They live among us, they cunningly influence us to take everything from us, suck everything out of us, all life and all soul - drop by drop. And sometimes they succeed quite well.