The meaning of the work “Petersburg Tales” by Gogol
“Petersburg Tales” by N.V. Gogol includes five short works. They are united by one theme - the life of a “little man”. The “little man” is quite easy to identify - he is almost always a conformist, blindly believes what those he considers above himself say, his thoughts are practical and unspiritual, his actions are petty, strong passions are alien to him.
The “Petersburg Tales” cycle includes five unrelated works:
Nevsky Avenue
The story is simple. Two friends are walking along Nevsky Prospekt. They notice two pretty girls. One of the friends, an artist, decides to go after the brunette, the other, a lieutenant, decides to go after the blonde. The dark-haired beauty gives the artist a sign to follow her and leads him to, where would you think?, that's right - to a brothel. The young man rushes away in horror. As a dreamy nature (he is also a man of art), the artist decides to rescue his chosen one from the nest of vice. In his purity of soul, he believes that with such a noble act he will win her heart. But he does not know that such women do not strive for self-realization - life for them is just a series of days spent in relative poverty and spiritual emptiness. Of course, the girl refuses him. The artist finds nothing better than cutting his own throat.
But his friend, the lieutenant, thinks much more simply. Even if he had been in the artist’s place, he would not have shot himself and within a day would have forgotten about the failed romance. The blonde he met turned out to be, although married, quite an accessible woman. During their date, the husband appears with his friends, and the lieutenant is subjected to physical pressure from them. As if nothing had happened, the victim goes to a social party where he dances a mazurka. In one short story, Gogol showed the nature of some women and the difference in their perception by men with different mentalities.
Nose
A fantastic story about a collegiate assessor whose nose took on a life of its own. One version of the story about split personality. The nose, having gained independence, behaves like the master of life, and the poor assessor chases after him and begs him to take his rightful place. Even having acquired a nose, an official cannot make it a habitual attribute of his face. The unexpected organ of smell itself finds itself in the same place, and the assessor receives peace of mind.
Portrait
This story traces two independent stories. One of them is about the portrait itself, although according to chronology it is the second. This is a story about a curse that an event that carries a negative aura places on a person. An old moneylender orders his portrait from the artist, but dies before the work is completed. Since then, the painter has lost peace of mind, and people in all his canvases, against their will, have the creepy eyes of a moneylender. Only after parting with the portrait does the artist find peace, become a monk and begin to paint pictures on divine themes. The curse haunts its subsequent owners. The portrait eventually disappears somewhere.
The first story is about an artist who traded his talent for wealth. Although everything happened by chance, and he did not make a deal with the devil, the consequences are natural. The moment of realizing one’s mediocrity coincides with the purchase of a portrait of a moneylender with creepy eyes. This becomes the impetus for the destruction of the mind. The artist goes crazy and dies.
Overcoat
The quintessence of the life story of the “little man.” The insignificant titular adviser dreams of only one thing - a new overcoat. Having saved money with great difficulty, he sews a new overcoat. But his happiness does not last long - soon the robbers take away from him the essence of his life - a new overcoat. Then follows the natural ending - the official catches a cold and dies, although, as is clear, not from illness at all, but from the loss of the meaning of life.
Diary of a Madman
A phantasmagoric story about how a man loses his mind. His madness stems from the previous life of a useless and uninteresting “little man”, also a titular adviser. All his thoughts and actions are connected with the unenviable position in society, which he received by the will of fate. The hero, in his own way, tries to get out of the illusory dead end. Imagining himself as the king of Spain, he finds peace of mind.
Petersburg stories by Gogol
In the fall of 1833, Pushkin’s “The Bronze Horseman” was written. The poem had a subtitle: “Petersburg Tale.” And at the same time, Gogol began to create his St. Petersburg stories. Pushkin and Gogol, simultaneously in poetry and prose, began to illuminate the great St. Petersburg theme in our literature, which was continued after them by Nekrasov, Dostoevsky, and Blok. This topic opened up a special genre of “St. Petersburg” works for our writers. In Russian literature, the northern capital is shown as a fantastic city: in it extremely opposite images were combined and transformed into each other - greatness and insignificance, the bureaucratic colossus of imperial power and the dark, petty life of the “St. Petersburg corners.” “The city is lush, the city is poor...” - this is how Pushkin united the contrasting St. Petersburg “faces” in one poetic line and in simple words. We see, reading Gogol's stories, how this contradiction grows in him in exorbitant hyperbole, in the colossal scope of Gogol's laughter and in the lyrical tension of grief.
In each of the St. Petersburg stories there is one person - “a being outside the citizenship of the capital”, who feels exceptional, who disappears and dies. This fate is shared equally by both the St. Petersburg artist and the most petty official. The artist was a favorite figure among romantic writers as a man out of this world, different in everything from ordinary people. But the St. Petersburg artists in Nevsky Prospekt are kind, meek, very timid people, the star and thick epaulet confuse them, they answer incoherently and out of place. In a word, the dreamer Piskarev and the wretched Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin turn out to have a lot in common. This similarity sheds light on both of them: in Piskarev his human simplicity and democracy become more noticeable, and Bashmachkin turns out to be a kind of dreamer and “romantic.” The ordinary and the extraordinary are very closely connected in their fate.
The story “Portrait” tells about an artist who succumbed to the temptations of wealth and fame, exchanged his gift for money, and sold his soul to the devil. Art is not an easy ability, but a feat of difficult comprehension of life. Therefore, for art, only skill is not enough: if - we read about Chartkov - he was an expert on human nature, he would have read a lot in the face of the young girl whom he painted to order; but the artist saw only the tenderness and almost porcelain transparency of the face, which his art tried to convey. It is very important that Chartkov was also “seduced” by a work of painting - an extraordinary portrait with lively eyes. “It was no longer art: it even destroyed the harmony of the portrait itself.” The riddle of the portrait leads in the story to a reflection on the nature of art, on the difference between a creation, where nature appears “in some light,” and a copy, where “however, it is nature, this living nature,” but it evokes in the viewer some kind of a more painful, more tormenting feeling - like those eyes in the portrait, as if cut out from a living person. For Gogol, the “liveness” of an image by a copyist is not just superficial art: it is an instrument of world evil and its concrete social embodiment - monetary power: the living eyes of a usurer look out from the portrait. This turns art away from the depth that it is designed to reveal in the phenomena of life.
Gogol called St. Petersburg a city of “boiling commercialism,” therefore, along with specific social motivations, which the writer makes very clear, the motif of devilish temptation plays a major role in the story. What is the significance of this motive? The author says that the pious painter, who created a strange portrait with lively eyes, suddenly changed his character for no reason: he became vain and envious. But the same inexplicable facts happen everywhere in life: “There, an honest, sober man became a drunkard... there, a cab driver, who had been driving honestly for several years, killed his rider for a penny.” Soon after Gogol, Dostoevsky will portray such prosaic, common facts as extraordinary, fantastic. Where there are no visible reasons for the transformations taking place before our eyes, simple observation and description, a “copy,” are powerless; the penetrating power of the artist’s imagination is needed, which in these cases can be helped by a fantastic image.
After the serious fiction of “Portrait,” the events in the story “The Nose” seem like complete nonsense. Let us note that the author of the story himself is so surprised by what is happening, who, together with his characters, also does not know what to think about all this. To anyone who reproaches him for complete improbability, the narrator says in advance: “Yes, complete nonsense, no verisimilitude.” The author refuses to explain in advance how it can be that Major Kovalev’s nose ended up baked in dough, was thrown into the Neva, but at the same time traveled around St. Petersburg with the rank of state councilor, and then returned to its rightful place - “between Major Kovalev’s two cheeks " In those places where fragments of even such an impossible plot could still somehow connect, Gogol suddenly declares: “But here the incident is completely obscured by fog, and absolutely nothing is known what happened next.”
The author seems to be telling us that there is no need to look for verisimilitude, the essence of the matter is not in it, the end and beginning of the story will not meet within the “plausible” boundaries. As a result, considering the plot of the story from the point of view of plausibility, he makes a compromise, solving a difficult issue in such a way that such incidents are “rare, but they do happen.”
It is interesting that in the original version of the story the incident ultimately turned out to be Kovalev’s dream. But in the published text, Gogol excluded this motivation, and everything described began to happen in reality, although indeed as if in a dream. It must be said that the story would have lost a lot in its comic effect and serious meaning if it turned out that this was after all a dream, where all sorts of fantastic logic is in the order of things. Another thing is a real event occurring “as in a dream.” Here the hero has to pinch himself several times and make sure that this is not a dream. The whole strangeness of “The Nose” is that it shows real life, in which an unprecedented event occurs in the most ordinary, everyday setting.
The stories of Western European romantics told how a person lost his shadow or reflection in a mirror; it marked a loss of personality. Gogol's major lost his nose from his face. However, for the major himself, what happened has the same meaning of the loss of his entire personality: “everything that is” is gone, without which one cannot get married or get a job, and one has to cover oneself with a scarf in public. Kovalev “lost face” and found himself outside of society, “outside the citizenship of the capital,” like other rejected and truly dying heroes of St. Petersburg stories.
Gogol in one letter joked about the human nose, “that it sniffs everything indiscriminately, and then it ran out into the middle of the face.” It is this special, prominent, central position of the nose on the face that “plays” in Gogol’s plot. Kovalev explains in the newspaper that he cannot live without such a noticeable part of his body. The nose is a kind of focus, the “peak” of external dignity, in which the major’s entire existence lies. Let us note for comparison that in the tragic “Portrait” the living eyes played a fatal role.
So, Nose's nonsense has its own logic. It turns out that we are talking about things that are important for a person: how to “save face”, “not lose yourself”; it is about the human personality and “one’s own place in society.” Nonsense comes from the transformation of these concepts into some kind of self-sufficient external things. The nose, as a prominent part, becomes the center of these transformations: from a part of the body to a whole master, from a thing to a face.
“Notes of a Madman” revolve around the same questions about personality and its dignity. In Gogol’s work, this is the only work written as a confession, as a hero’s story about himself. Poprishchin conducts his internal monologue, speaks “to himself,” but in external life, in front of the general and his daughter, he would like to say and ask a lot, but his tongue cannot move. This contradiction between external position and internal self-awareness permeates his notes, and it drives him crazy.
In Gogol's first St. Petersburg story on Nevsky Prospekt, mustaches and sideburns appear independently. The hero of “Notes of a Madman” discovers that his department director is “a cork, not a director... That’s what they use to seal bottles.” We understand that in his crazy mind the comparison is being realized. In the unrealized plan of the comedy “Vladimir III Degree,” the hero imagined himself with this order. The artist Piskarev dreams of some official who is at the same time an official and a bassoon. Gogol's artistic world is full of similar transformations of the human image into something external, inanimate, material. But if there is real truth hidden in these comparisons, in dreams and madness, then it arises as a signal of some kind of discord in reality, of its inconsistency with some internal laws. And this is the strength of Gogol’s writing talent.
From the history of the creation of the story
“Nevsky Prospekt” was first published in the collection “Arabesques” (1835), which was highly appreciated by V.G. Belinsky. Gogol began working on the story during the creation of “Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka” (around 1831). His notebook contains sketches of “Nevsky Prospekt” along with rough notes of “The Night Before Christmas” and “Portrait”.
Gogol's stories "Nevsky Prospekt", "Notes of a Madman", "Portrait" (1835), "The Nose" (1836), "The Overcoat" (1842) belong to the cycle of St. Petersburg stories. The writer himself did not combine them into a special cycle. All of them were written at different times, do not have a common narrator or fictional publisher, but entered Russian literature and culture as an artistic whole, as a cycle. This happened because the stories are united by a common theme (the life of St. Petersburg), problems (reflection of social contradictions), the similarity of the main character (“little man”), and the integrity of the author’s position (satirical exposure of the vices of people and society).
Subject of the story
The main theme of the story is the life of St. Petersburg and the fate of the “little man” in the big city with its social contrasts that cause discord between ideas about the ideal and reality. Along with the main theme, the themes of people’s indifference, the replacement of spirituality with mercantile1 interests, the corruption of love, and the harmful effects of drugs on humans are revealed.
Plot and composition of the story
They become clear during the conversation. Sample questions.
— What role does the description of Nevsky Prospekt play at the beginning of the story?
- What moment is the beginning of the action?
— How is Piskarev’s fate?
— How does Pirogov’s fate turn out?
— What role does the description of Nevsky Prospekt play in the ending of the story?
Gogol combines in the story the image of general, typical aspects of life in a big city with the fate of individual heroes. The general picture of life in St. Petersburg is revealed in the description of Nevsky Prospect, as well as in the author’s generalizations throughout the narrative. Thus, the fate of the hero is given in the general movement of the life of the city.
The description of Nevsky Prospect at the beginning of the story is an exposition. The unexpected exclamation of Lieutenant Pirogov addressed to Piskarev, their dialogue and following the beautiful strangers is the beginning of the action with two contrasting endings. The story also ends with a description of Nevsky Prospekt and the author’s reasoning about it, which is a compositional device that contains both a generalization and a conclusion that reveals the idea of the story.
Description of Nevsky Prospekt
Considered during the conversation. Sample questions.
— What role does Nevsky Prospekt play in the life of the city, how does the author feel about it?
— How are the social contrasts and disunity of the city residents shown?
— How is the discrepancy between the ostentatious side of the life of the noble class and its true essence revealed? What qualities of people does the author ridicule?
— How does the motif of the demon appear in the description of the evening Nevsky Prospect at the beginning of the story? How is it continued in the subsequent narrative?
— How are the descriptions of Nevsky Prospekt at the beginning of the story and at the end connected?
The author begins the story with solemnly upbeat phrases about Nevsky Prospekt and notes that this is “universal communication2 of St. Petersburg”, a place where you can get “true news” better than in the address calendar or in the information service, this is a place for walking, this is an “exhibition all the best works of man." At the same time, Nevsky Prospekt is a mirror of the capital, which reflects its life, it is the personification of the whole of St. Petersburg with its striking contrasts.
Literary scholars believe that the description of Nevsky Prospekt at the beginning of the story represents a kind of “physiological” sketch of St. Petersburg. Its depiction at different times of the day allows the author to characterize the social structure of the city. First of all, he singles out ordinary working people, on whom all life rests, and for them Nevsky Prospekt is not a goal, “it serves only as a means.”
Ordinary people are opposed to the nobility, for whom Nevsky Prospect is the goal - this is a place where one can show oneself. The story about the “pedagogical” Nevsky Prospekt with “tutors of all nations” and their students, as well as about nobles and officials walking along the avenue, is permeated with irony.
Showing the falsehood of Nevsky Prospect, the seamy side of life hidden behind its ceremonial appearance, its tragic side, exposing the emptiness of the inner world of those walking along it, their hypocrisy, the author uses ironic pathos. This is emphasized by the fact that instead of people, the details of their appearance or clothing act: “Here you will find wonderful mustaches, impossible to depict with any pen or brush <...> Thousands of varieties of hats, dresses, scarves <...> Here you will find such waists that even you never dreamed of <…> And what kind of long sleeves you will see.”
