A turning point in the fate of the writer Gorky. Traditions and innovations of the Gorky playwright. Gorky and Mkhat Monologues of characters from the plays of Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky is known to the older generation as the founder of socialist realism - the author of the novel “Mother” about the birth of the revolution in Russia. Later generations of readers are more fond of his early romantic works about proud, handsome gypsies who are ready to exchange their freedom only for death. But we must not forget about the dramaturgy of Alexei Maksimovich.

The play “At the Bottom,” created more than a hundred years ago, is still relevant.

Gorky’s first play was “The Bourgeois” (1901). The author himself initially defined his work

Like a dramatic sketch in 4 acts with the title “Bourgeois. Scenes in Bessemenov’s house.”

Over time, this play, staged by K. S. Stanislavsky at the Moscow Art Theater, acquired all the features of a real drama, especially since the actors, according to the recollections of contemporaries, were in a hurry with the premiere: they needed to play “The Bourgeois” so that “Gorky felt like a playwright and wrote further " As you know, everything turned out this way - Alexey Maksimovich later created many worthy plays that made the glory of Russian and world theater.

The very title of the play – “Philistines” – indicates a very specific class in Russia. This is the lower class of ordinary people, descended from artisans and small traders: this class was lower than the merchants in terms of their position in society.

In the center of the image is the family of Vasily Bessemenov, a wealthy tradesman, foreman of the painting shop. It was no coincidence that this dignified man, who wanted to become a deputy to the city duma from the guild organizations, bore such a surname. His daughter Tatyana, a school teacher, is still unmarried at 28 years old, and hopes of getting heirs to the family are fading every day.

Son Peter is a former student expelled from the university for participating in student unrest.

All this, of course, does not please the father, who had pinned his hopes on his children, so scandals constantly occur in the house between him and his children, who do not want to live according to their father’s orders. The hero himself is in a state of gloomy alertness and sees the reason for his children’s failures in life in the pride that has taken possession of them. The author, on the contrary, emphasizes that the education received by the children did not make them happier: the usual bourgeois guidelines for them are outdated, and they lack their own will to make any changes, so their interest in life is weakened.

Of course, the mood in the protagonist’s house is largely due to the philistine boredom characteristic of any provincial town. But in Gorky everything is complicated by the multifaceted nature of human relationships. Many people live in the Bessemenovs’ house: this includes the pupil of the head of the family, Neil, a young assistant driver, with whom his daughter Tatyana is hopelessly in love.

This is a distant relative, and a young widow of a prison warden who rents a room, and parasites - the singer Teterev and student Shishkin.

Such a number of people in the house should, apparently, diversify the boring life of a bourgeois family, concerned only with making money. Indeed, everything in the house is subordinated to the cult of money, because it is the basis of a comfortable existence. At the same time, there is no faith in the best, in any changes.

It is no coincidence that Tatyana, who has lost faith in the reciprocity of her feelings for Neil, complains to her friend: “I was born without faith in my heart.”

The author is sure that their uncertainty is generated by the fear of responsibility for their future, the fear of change, the inability to change anything even in their own own life. In this sense, Neil is opposed to everyone - a “progressive” hero and, as Vasily Vasilyevich clearly hints, “a future socialist-revolutionary.” He is used to struggle: even in the forge he likes to forge, not because he likes to work, but because he likes to fight with unruly metal and suppress its resistance.

However, in general the attitude towards the Nile is ambiguous. It emphasizes hidden power, calmness, but behind all this hides an insensitive nature, incapable of understanding beauty. For example, in the first Moscow Art Theater production, the actor who played Neil portrayed him as a rude and uncouth dork to emphasize the lack of emotional experiences.

Bessemenov himself involuntarily contrasts his son and pupil, and the comparison turns out to be not in Peter’s favor. The father says to his son: “I learned contempt for everything living, but did not acquire size in my actions.” And he speaks about Nile almost with love: “He is impudent, he is a robber, but a man with a face.”

Only even the “humanity” of the young driver does not save him from the tragic denouement of the play: Tatyana, realizing that the sympathies of her loved one are going to her younger rival, the seamstress Polya, tries to commit suicide.

After a failed suicide attempt, Tatyana understands her doom, so the play ends with a scene where she falls onto the piano keys, making a loud discordant sound. A little later, A. Chekhov in the play “ Cherry Orchard” using the sound of a broken string will emphasize the break with the previous life.

Gorky's entire play is permeated with accusations against philistinism. Residents, observing everyday boredom, reproach the owners that they “will die of boredom,” because they do nothing, have no inclinations. And the young widow, in a fit of despair, shouts: “You are some kind of rust, not people!”

Later, in Soviet era, the word “philistine, philistine” will become abusive, a synonym for philistinism. Consider, for example, the words of the heroine of the film “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears”: “That’s it, the bourgeois swamp has sucked us in!”

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Maxim Gorky

Simple thoughts are the most difficult and poorly understood. For example, a hundred years before our days, Goethe said: “The beginning of being is in action.”

Very clear and rich thought. As if on its own, the same simple conclusion emerges from it: knowledge of nature, change social conditions possible only through action. From here, Karl Marx said: “Philosophers have only explained the world in various ways, but the point is to change it.”

Simple thoughts are poorly understood because humanity has lived for centuries in the mists of seductive and crafty wisdom, which is absolutely necessary for the rulers of life in order to hide the shame, horror and irreconcilability of social-class contradictions, which in our days have developed to the point of disgusting obviousness - it is no longer possible to cover it up no superstition, no cunning lies. But since ancient times, this habit of philosophizing slyly still operates, and it sits especially firmly in the brains of people who do not consider themselves responsible for the abomination of life. To the minds of these people, simple truths are, as it were, chemically hostile.

The fabulist Ivan Khemnitser briefly but quite intelligibly spoke about what philosophers did and are doing in his fable “The Metaphysician.” The essence of this fable is this. A certain young man, walking in a field and thinking “about the beginning of all beginnings,” fell into a hole from which he could not get out on his own. They threw a rope to him, but he immediately posed the question: “Rope - what is it?” He was told that this was not the time to philosophize about the rope as a “thing in itself” - get out. But he asked: “What is time?” Then he was left in a hole, where he still argues to this day: is the universe necessary, and if necessary, then why?

Metaphysicians, separating thought from action, transfer it to the barren area of purely verbal, logical constructions, and time is comprehended only as a container of movement, that is, action.

The working class, now moving towards power over the world, is the founder of a new humanity and a completely new attitude towards the world - it fills its time with its work and recognizes the whole world as its economy.

An artist of words has the right to imagine the working class in the image of a historical, universal person, a source of the most powerful, all-conquering energy, the creator of a “second nature” - material and “spiritual” culture.

Work excites thinking, thinking transforms work experience into words, compresses it into ideas, hypotheses, theories - into temporary working truths.

Everyone knows that turning words into deeds is much more difficult than deeds into words.

A writer, while working, simultaneously turns deeds into words and words into deeds. The main material with which a writer works is the word.

Popular wisdom very correctly and aptly – in the form of a riddle – defines the meaning of the word: “What is it: not honey, but clings to everything?”

There is nothing in our world that does not have a name and is not enclosed in a word. All this is primitively simple, but it seems to me that the meaning of the word is not sufficiently mastered by young play writers.

A play - drama, comedy - is the most difficult form of literature - difficult because the play requires that each unit acting in it be characterized in word and deed independently, without prompting from the author. In a novel, in a story, the people portrayed by the author act with his help, he is with them all the time, he tells the reader how to understand them, explains to him the secret thoughts, hidden motives for the actions of the depicted figures, shades their moods with descriptions of nature, surroundings, and in general keeps them on the strings of his goals all the time, freely and often - unnoticed by the reader - very cleverly, but arbitrarily controls their actions, words, deeds, relationships, taking every possible care to make the figures of the novel the most artistically clear and convincing.

The play does not allow such free intervention by the author; in the play, his promptings to the viewer are excluded. Characters plays are created exclusively and only by their speeches, that is, purely verbal language, and not descriptive. This is very important to understand, because in order for the figures of the play to acquire artistic value and social persuasiveness on stage, in the portrayal of its artists, it is necessary that the speech of each figure be strictly original, extremely expressive - only under this condition will the viewer understand that each the figure in the play can speak and act only as stated by the author and shown by the stage performers. Let's take, for example, the heroes of our wonderful comedies: Famusov, Skalozub, Molchalin, Repetilov, Khlestakov, mayor, Rasplyuev, etc. - each of these figures is created in a small number of words, and each of them gives a completely accurate idea of its class , about his era. The aphorisms of these characters have entered our everyday speech precisely because in each aphorism something undeniable and typical is expressed with utmost precision.

It seems to me that from here it is quite clear what a huge and even decisive importance for the play is speech language to create a play and how imperative it is for young authors to enrich themselves with the study of spoken language.

A common and sad defect of our young dramaturgy is, first of all, the poverty of the authors’ language, its dryness, bloodlessness, and impersonality. All the figures in the plays speak with the same structure of phrases and unpleasantly surprise with the monotonous wear and tear of words, which does not at all coincide with our turbulent reality, with the tension of creative forces in which the country lives and which cannot but be reflected in the field of word creation. A vile and harmful or an honest, socially valuable deed turns on the theater stage into a boring noise of colorless, carelessly connected words.

We live in an atmosphere of hatred towards us from the savages of Europe, its capitalists, we also need to be able to hate - the art of theater should help us with this; Around and among us, upset philistinism hisses - the theater, exposing the most vile essence of the philistine to the viewer, should arouse contempt and disgust for him; we have something to be proud of, something to rejoice at, but all this is not reflected in artistic expression with due force. Our young dramaturgy is below our heroic reality, and the main purpose of art is to rise above reality, to look at the matter current day from the height of those wonderful goals that the working class, the founder of the new humanity, set for itself. We are interested in the accuracy of the depiction of what is only insofar as it is necessary for us to understand more deeply and clearly everything that we are obliged to eradicate and everything that must be created by us. A heroic deed requires a heroic word.

That art never was, could not be an “end in itself” for itself - in our days this is all too clear from how tragically it has weakened along with the decrepitude of the class, its old customer and consumer, and how quickly it is growing along with the cultural revolutionary growth proletariat. Just like religion, in bourgeois society it served certain class goals, just as in the field of religion, in art there were heretics who unsuccessfully tried to break out of the captivity of class violence and paid for the shame of blind faith in the “immutable truths” of the philistinism with the debilitating anxiety of disbelief into the boundless creative power of historical man, into his indisputable right to destroy and create.

Personally, I consider the lack of passion for knowledge and lack of knowledge to be the cause of unbelief. But, of course, I do not claim that knowledge requires belief in it, knowledge is a continuous process of study, research, and if it becomes a belief, it means it has been interrupted.

In our country, the thirst for knowledge is burning more and more ardently; This thirst manifests itself especially powerfully and productively in the field of science and technology. Our young scientists and technicians amaze with their maturity, the pathos of their love of knowledge, the abundance of their achievements and the boldness of their intentions. Young writers clearly underestimate the importance of knowledge. They seem to rely too much on “inspiration,” but it seems to me that “inspiration” is mistakenly considered the stimulator of work; it probably appears already in the process of successful work as a consequence of it, as a feeling of enjoyment of it. It is not entirely appropriate and too often that young writers use a loud and also not very specific church word - “creativity”. Writing novels, plays, etc. is a very difficult, painstaking, petty work, which is preceded by long-term observation of life phenomena, accumulation of facts, and study of language.

The first works of Maxim Gorky

Maxim Gorky(Alexey Maksimovich Peshkov) was born in March 1868 in Nizhny Novgorod in a carpenter's family. Primary education he received his education at the Slobodsko-Kunavinsky School, which he graduated from in 1878. From that time on, Gorky’s working life began. In subsequent years, he changed many professions, traveled and walked around half of Russia. In September 1892, when Gorky lived in Tiflis, his first story, “Makar Chudra,” was published in the newspaper Kavkaz. In the spring of 1895, Gorky, having moved to Samara, became an employee of the Samara Newspaper, in which he led the departments of the daily chronicle “Essays and Sketches” and “By the Way.” In the same year, such his famous stories, like “Old Woman Izergil”, “Chelkash”, “Once in the Autumn”, “The Case with the Clasps” and others, and in one of the issues of the “Samara Newspaper” the famous “Song of the Falcon” was published. Gorky's feuilletons, essays and stories soon attracted attention. His name became known to readers, and fellow journalists appreciated the strength and lightness of his pen.

A turning point in the fate of the writer Gorky

The turning point in Gorky’s fate was 1898, when two volumes of his works were published as a separate publication. Stories and essays previously published in various provincial newspapers and magazines were collected together for the first time and became available to the mass reader. The publication was an extraordinary success and sold out instantly. In 1899, a new edition in three volumes was sold in exactly the same way. The following year, Gorky's collected works began to be published. In 1899, his first story “Foma Gordeev” appeared, which was also met with extraordinary enthusiasm. It was a real boom. In a matter of years, Gorky turned from an unknown writer into a living classic, into a star of the first magnitude in the horizon of Russian literature. In Germany, six publishing companies immediately began to translate and publish his works. In 1901, the novel “Three” and “ Song about the Petrel" The latter was immediately banned by censorship, but this did not in the least prevent its spread. According to contemporaries, “Burevestnik” was reprinted in every city on a hectograph, on typewriters, copied by hand, and read at evenings among young people and in workers’ circles. Many people knew it by heart. But truly world fame came to Gorky after he turned to theater. His first play, “The Bourgeois” (1901), staged in 1902. Art Theater, then went on in many cities. In December 1902, the premiere of the new play “ At the bottom", which was an absolutely fantastic, incredible success among the audience. Its production by the Moscow Art Theater caused an avalanche of enthusiastic responses. In 1903, the play began to march across the stages of European theaters. It was a triumphant success in England, Italy, Austria, Holland, Norway, Bulgaria and Japan. “At the Lower Depths” was warmly welcomed in Germany. The Reinhardt Theater in Berlin alone played it to full houses more than 500 times!

M. Gorky’s work “At the Depths” touches on a huge layer of moral, ethical and spiritual problems of society. The author used the principle of the great minds of the past: truth is born in dispute. His play, a debate, is designed to raise the most important questions for a person so that he can answer them for himself. Full analysis works can be useful for 11th grade students in preparing for literature lessons, test assignments, and creative works.

Brief Analysis

Year of writing– end of 1901 – beginning of 1902.

History of creation- the play was created specifically for production in the theater; Gorky put the most important questions of life into the mouths of his characters, reflecting his own view of life. The period of the late 19th century is shown, a deep economic crisis, unemployment, poverty, ruin, and the collapse of human destinies.

Subject- the tragedy of rejected people who found themselves at the very bottom of life.

Composition– linear composition, the events in the play are built in chronological order. The action is static, the characters are in one place, the play consists of philosophical reflections and debates.

Genre– social and philosophical drama, debate play.

Direction – critical realism(socialist realism).

History of creation

The play was conceived by Gorky a year before its creation; once in a conversation with Stanislavsky, he mentioned that he wanted to create a play about the inhabitants of a shelter who had sunk to the very bottom. In 1900 -1901 the author made some sketches. During this period, Maxim Gorky became seriously interested in the plays of A.P. Chekhov, their production on stage and the acting. This was crucial for the author in terms of working in a new genre.

In 1902, the play “At the Depths” was written, and in December of the same year it was staged on the stage of the Moscow Art Theater with the participation of Stanislavsky. It should be noted that the writing of the work was preceded by a crisis that happened in Russia in the late 90s of the 19th century, factories and plants stopped, unemployment, ruin, poverty, hunger - all this is a real picture in the cities of that period. The play was created with a specific goal - to raise the level of culture of all classes of the population. Its production caused a resonance, largely due to the genius of the author, as well as the controversial nature of the problems voiced. In any case - they talked about the play, with envy, dissatisfaction or admiration - it was a success.

Subject

The work intertwines several topics: fate, hope, the meaning of life, truth and lies. The heroes of the play talk about lofty topics, being so low that it is no longer possible to sink further. The author shows that a poor person can have a deep essence, be highly moral, and spiritually rich.

At the same time, any person can sink to the very bottom, from which it is almost impossible to rise; it is addictive, gives freedom from conventions, allows you to forget about culture, responsibility, education and moral aspects. Gorky only voiced the most acute problems modernity, he did not solve them, did not give a universal answer, did not show the way. Therefore, his work is called a debate play; it is based on a dispute in which the truth is born, unique for each character.

Issues The works are varied, perhaps the most pressing are the characters’ dialogues about saving lies and bitter truths. Meaning of the name The play is that the social bottom is a layer where there is also life, where people love, live, think and suffer - it exists in any era and no one is immune from this bottom.

Composition

The author himself defined the composition of the play as “scenes,” although its genius corresponds to the masterpiece plays of Russian and foreign classics. The linearity of the play's construction is due to the chronological sequence of events. The plot of the play is the appearance of Luka in the rooming house with his dissimilarity and facelessness. Then, in several acts, events develop, moving to the most powerful intensity - a dialogue about the meaning of existence, about truth and lies. This is the culmination of the play, followed by the denouement: the suicide of the Actor, the loss of hopes of the last inhabitants of the shelter. They are unable to save themselves, which means they are doomed to death.

Genre

In the play “At the Lower Depths,” the analysis allows us to draw a conclusion about the uniqueness of Gorky’s genre – the debate play. The main thing in the development of the plot is conflict; it drives the action. The characters are in a dark basement and dynamics are achieved through the collision of opposing points of view. The genre of the work is usually defined as socio-philosophical drama.