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- Satire and humor of Saltykov-Shchedrin
The works of Mikhail Evgrafovich Saltykov-Shchedrin are varied in their style, but the works of the satirical genre brought him real recognition. It was the satirical orientation of his works that put him on a par with world-famous writers - Aesop, Mark Twain, Francois Rabelais, Jonathan Swift.
The main direction of his satirical works is a sharp criticism of general social problems in Russia at that time. In their works, Saltykov-Shchedrin satirically ridiculed all the vices of the autocratic serfdom regime of the 19th century. The object of ridicule was the way of life and wild customs of society, the moral and physical “decay” of landowners, the vegetation of ordinary people, the development of culture and much more. But to a greater extent, the writer’s satire was aimed at two vectors of society - the ruling autocracy and the common people, criticizing both the oppressors for their tyranny and cruelty, and the oppressed for their meekness and fear.
The satire of Saltykov and Shchedrin is imbued with revolutionary sentiments and liberation theories. He actively intervenes in the events described, imbuing his works with a journalistic focus.
As a continuer of Gogol's traditions, Mikhail Evgrafovich tries to portray the monstrous reality of what is happening in an extremely critical light. The author skillfully finds his own style of satire - fantastic grotesque. This gives him the opportunity to give the images a symbolic and absurd character. The characters acquire implausible qualities that help to perfectly reveal the essence of the situation being described.
A great creative success is the writer’s ability to express his critical attitude towards life in the country through fairy tales. By choosing this form of storytelling, Saltykov-Shchedrin skillfully adds a new, brighter meaning to the ancient form of folk art. The writer is excellent at expressing himself in allegorical Aesopian language to depict the complete meaninglessness of what is happening. His tales are a formidable and instructive satire for all the troubles and sorrows that happen around.
The tales of Saltykov and Shchedrin “for children of a fair age” are a protest of the patriotic author against the surrounding outrage, a unique way of combating it. In his tales, as expected, there is edification for the reader. The main characters are animals, but in a strange way they resemble people! They live the same ordinary life as people, doing simple everyday things: reading the press, working in departments, getting an education in cadet corps and paying taxes. This one adds a special whimsicality to Satykov’s “Fairy Tales” - Shchedrin. The writer depicts the life of animals in the smallest detail, giving the reader the opportunity to realize that he is conveying the current problems of Russia at the end of the 19th century.
In his works, the writer very actively uses the technique of “speaking surnames”. His characters are truly alive, not just made up. He copied many images and characters from close and dear people - his mother and brothers.
Saltykov-Shchedrin's ability to express his thoughts with the help of allegory allowed him to bypass the strict court of censors in a roundabout way. He could express his revolutionary thoughts without hiding. The phrases and ideas were so disguised that not everyone could recognize the true theme of the work. This is especially true for fairy tales. Since fairy tales are, as a rule, reading material for children, few people will look for the truth in them, simply enjoying reading them.
It is very difficult to classify works into any genre. Saltykov-Shchedrin masterfully wields all styles, intertwining them into one of his own, special narrative systems, opening up new spaces for imagination for the readership. This is what impresses and inspires readers. The works of Saltykov and Shchedrin are still quite popular and relevant today.
Option 2
Saltykov-Shchedrin is best known as a satirical writer. In his works, he ridiculed the very vices of his contemporary society, from which it has not yet gotten rid of. But I am sure that his work was not in vain, and his satirical tales are still relevant today.
Everyone knows his wise minnow and idealistic crucian carp or philanthropic eagle, for example. Also in animals, birds and fish, which acted like people in his stories, he showed human vices. But sometimes even the vices themselves became characters. In the fairy tale “Virtues and Vices” there live Flattery, Honesty, Adultery... They have their own old people who, for example, believe that vices should proudly carry their banner, and there are also young people who think that they can pretend to be virtuous in order to enter a good home. These almost abstract, but such living characters have communication, relationships, and their own habits. Virtues are humiliated, they try to throw away the “trick” in order to live in gold - no worse than vices. Saltykov-Shchedrin's tales are precisely aimed at, on the one hand, surprising the reader, and on the other, showing him familiar situations.
Writers and ordinary people act less often in stories. For example, his deceiving newspaperman, in the story of the same name, complains that the truth has fallen in price. And the gullible reader, through the fault of the deceiver, ends up in prison, where within a day he catches an illness from which he immediately dies. And the newspaperman lives happily ever after!
In the story “Liberal” the hero is greeted with joy and allowed to carry out reforms, but only with “permission”. Not all at once! And the liberal abandons his principles step by step.
Saltykov-Shchedrin criticized society, state institutions - in fact, officials. All this is allegorical, but accessible. The author uses various literary devices, for example, hyperbole.
Satire permeated the entire work of Saltykov-Shchedrin, his name is completely associated with it in Russian literature. I personally like this author’s fairy tales, but it’s difficult to read too many of them at once. At least for me.
Satire as a creative principle of “fairy tales” by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin
Saltykov-Shchedrin's "Fairy Tales", with a few exceptions, were created in the last years of the writer's life (1883-1886) and appear before us as a kind of result of his path in literature. And in terms of the richness of artistic techniques, and in terms of ideological significance, and in terms of the diversity of recreated social types, this book can fully be considered an artistic synthesis of the writer’s entire work.
Having addressed “Fairy Tales” “for children of a fair age,” Shchedrin immediately introduces the reader to the special atmosphere of his book. In these pages, “children of a fair age,” that is, adults who have retained the naive illusions of beautiful youth, are treated harshly. They are not sympathized with - they are cleverly and evilly ridiculed; the rose-colored glasses that protect their tender eyes from harsh reality are mercilessly broken.
Shchedrin's satire is a special phenomenon in Russian literature. Laughter is organically inherent in our culture. And if Pushkin could rightfully say: “From the coachman to the first poet, we all sing sadly,” then with no less reason we can talk about laughter: just like sadness, it is characteristic of everyone, “from the coachman to the first poet.” Pushkin wrote good jokes and sharp epigrams; sometimes with gaiety, sometimes with gloomy irony, the bilious Lermontov sparkles; laughter and tears are inextricably fused in the work of the great sadder and satirist Gogol; sometimes funny - although not always likable - characters come straight from the pages of Ostrovsky... And Russian folklore is full of laughter: from jokes and jokes to an integral system of the laughter world, the deepest analysis of which is given by D. S. Likhachev in the book “The Laughter Culture of Ancient Rus'”.
The writers of the nineteenth century, who belonged to the camp of democratic revolutionaries, cultivated a special laughter culture in their work: they gave priority to satire, called for ridiculing and castigating the vices of society, “the ulcers of modern life.” The work of Saltykov-Shchedrin can rightfully be called the highest achievement of social satire of the 1860-1880s, the quintessence of the satirical direction of the natural school.
It is not without reason that Gogol, who created a satirical and philosophical picture of the modern world, is considered to be Shchedrin’s closest predecessor. However, Shchedrin is also very, very far from this closest predecessor, for he set himself a fundamentally different creative task: to track down, expose and humiliate the object of satire. So, for example, V. G. Belinsky, discussing the work of Gogol, defined his humor as “... calm in his indignation, good-natured in his slyness,” comparing it with others - “formidable and open, bilious, poisonous, merciless.” This second characteristic deeply reveals the essence of Shchedrin's satire. A remarkable confirmation is the following note by I. S. Turgenev: “I saw listeners writhing with laughter when reading some of Saltykov’s essays. There was something scary in that laughter. The audience, laughing, at the same time felt like a scourge was lashing itself.” Thus, for Gogol, laughter was the path to the moral correction of people, to the revival of true spirituality. Saltykov-Shchedrin saw the purpose of satire in a different way: it is designed to arouse indignation, to form active fighters against slavery and despotism. Shchedrin did not strive to heal Russia, but to completely destroy the existing social-state system and build a new one in its place.
The form of a fairy tale gave Shchedrin the opportunity to speak openly about the problems that worried him and his comrades. If we turn, for example, to Nekrasov’s poem “Who Lives Well in Rus',” we can speculate about the role and significance of folklore genres in author’s literature and determine that folklore elements within the author’s work do not lose their foreignness, their belonging to another art. And here, turning to folklore, Saltykov-Shchedrin strives to preserve its genre and artistic features, with their help to attract the reader’s attention to the main problem of his work. Saltykov-Shchedrin's "Fairy Tales" by genre nature represent a kind of fusion of two different genres of folklore and original literature - fairy tales and fables. Free form of presentation, magical transformations, place and time of action, defined as “in a certain kingdom” and “once upon a time” - all this was borrowed by the writer from the fairy tale genre.
However, Shchedrin's heroes are not fairy tales at all - they are allegories, satirical masks of fables, where the wolf, hare, bear, eagle, crow and other animals, birds and fish clearly do not belong to the animal world. Following the traditions of Krylov, Shchedrin does not put on certain masks arbitrarily on his characters, but strives to “give everyone what they deserve”: in his fairy tales, each mask contains characteristic features that precisely define in their unity a common social or human type.
Let us recall, for example, the fairy tale “The Selfless Hare.” All the usual “fairy-tale” and “everyday” traits of the characters “play” there. The wolf and the hare not only symbolize the hunter and the prey: the wolf is bloodthirsty, strong, tyrannical, and angry; the hare is cowardly, cowardly, weak. But these images are filled with topical social content. The wolf enjoys the position of a ruler, a despot: “Because you didn’t stop at my first word, here’s my decision for you: I sentence you to be deprived of your belly by being torn to pieces. And since now I’m full, and my wolf is full, and we have enough reserves for another five days, then sit under this bush and wait in line. Or maybe... ha ha... I’ll have mercy on you.”
In fact, this wolf not only uses the right of the strong: his image embodies the features of representatives of government at all levels - from the gendarmerie “grab and don’t let go!” to judicial, gubernatorial and other manipulation of the law. The entire wolf family lives according to “wolf” laws: the wolf cubs play as victims, and the she-wolf, ready to devour the hare, pities him in her own way... (How can one not recall Griboyedov’s: “In a Christian way, he is worthy of pity”!) However, Shchedrin does not at all arouse sympathy for the hare - after all, he also lives according to wolf laws, and resignedly goes into the wolf’s mouth! Shchedrinsky's hare is not just cowardly and helpless, he is cowardly, he gives up resistance in advance, making it easier for the wolf to solve the “food problem.” And here the author’s irony turns into caustic sarcasm, into deep contempt for the psychology of a slave.
Evil, angry ridicule of slave psychology is one of the main objectives of Shchedrin’s fairy tales. He not only states the characteristic features of the psychology of the Russian people (their long-suffering, irresponsibility), not only anxiously seeks their origins and limits, as was typical of Nekrasov. Saltykov-Shchedrin mercilessly denounces, caustically ridicules, castigates them, because he sees this as the main misfortune of the time. Fairy tales are a genre accessible to the people and loved by them. And it was a satirical fairy tale, Shchedrin believed, that would reach the people faster and more effectively.
The satirist needs animal masks not only as an allegory. Researcher of the work of Saltykov-Shchedrin M. Goryachkina rightly Fr. Shchedrin himself diligently leads the reader to this thought: “... even if he is an eagle, even an arch-eagle, he is still a bird. He is such a bird that comparison with him can only be flattering for a policeman due to a misunderstanding.” This is an excerpt from the fairy tale “The Eagle Patron,” in which another important idea for Saltykov-Shchedrin sounds especially clearly. Please note: the author does everything to de-romanticize, de-poeticize familiar images: “Poets write a lot about eagles in poetry, and always with praise. And to become an eagle of indescribable beauty, and a quick glance, and a majestic flight. It does not fly like other birds, but soars or spreads; Moreover: he looks at the sun and argues with thunder... And now I think about eagles like this: “Eagles are eagles, that’s all. They are predatory, carnivorous... And eagles always live in isolation, in inaccessible places, they do not engage in hospitality, but they commit robbery, and in their free time from robbery they doze.”
Why did the satirist need this debunking of habitually romantic images? He considers the very admiration of a predator, even a bird of prey, to be harmful. Of course, the poets did not glorify the mouse eater in the form of an eagle; they created a symbol of proud loneliness, power, craving for freedom, and so on. But despite all this, the eagle did not cease to be carnivorous and still, in the words of Pushkin, “pecked bloody food.” This is why Shchedrin is outraged by admiring the predator. The killer is shrouded in an aura of romantic traits - and the author destroys this aura. God be with them, with the birds - they “have their justification that nature itself has made them exclusively anti-vegetarians.” But by romanticizing the eagle, people simultaneously romanticize and justify the authorities/trees, the powerful of this world. And Saltykov-Shchedrin sarcastically ridicules this “harmful delusion,” not allowing one to see in the enslaver a hero who “has the right.” And one cannot help but see that this is his solution to the “Napoleonic theme”, that Shchedrin’s wolf and hare, eagle and mouse, crucian carp and pike illustrate the same global theme, central to Russian literature, to which Dostoevsky dedicated “Crime and Punishment”: “ Am I a trembling creature or do I have the right?
It is significant that Dostoevsky subsequently practically resorted to the “Shchedrinsky” technique, forcing Raskolnikov in his theory to divide humanity into “Napoleons” and “anthill”, that is, into people and insects. Thus, the great satirist Saltykov-Shchedrin passed the baton to the great psychologist and philosopher Dostoevsky.
The famous fairy tales “about animals” are just one type of Shchedrin’s fairy tales. In fairy tales of another type, only people appear ("The Wild Landowner", "The Tale of How One Man Fed Two Generals"). Their characters are not covered with masks of animals, fish and birds, and the author uses other satirical techniques: hyperbole, grotesque. The heroes of these fairy tales, however, are also revealed as mask-symbols: the author creates collective images of social types.
Russia, as you know, has always been famous for its roads and fools, and the latter, paradoxically, very often achieve more than smart and gifted people. And, perhaps, the most terrible fools-tyrants of our time are officials.
The works of the classics reflect the entire history of Russian bureaucracy, and this history differs from others in its monotony, since all officials at all times retained their main quality: they worked only for themselves, while pretending to care about the people. The works of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin reflected the same familiar problem: officials and the people. Strange as it may seem, everything is incredibly simple: without officials, that is, without the “chief” people who run the state or city, the people cannot live, since without them anarchy sets in, in which, as we know, it is impossible to achieve either the truth or lies, and at the same time the people themselves suffer from these officials.
These same moments are reflected in the works of writers who developed the satirical tradition developed by M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin. One of them is playwright Evgeny Schwartz.
So, for example, in the play “Dragon” by Evgeniy Schwartz, the people appear before us as a crowd of submissive, obedient servants of their master. It is amazing what kind of relationships arise between relatives as a result of one of them approaching the Dragon. The son denounces his father, but the father is not stupid: he sees that the son is trying to get information from him, and plays along with him. Complete humility, submission to the inevitable - this is what distinguishes the people of this city from all others. It’s amazing how people get used to evil and even fall in love with it, but this is understandable in its own way: if you drive away or destroy one evil, then it can be replaced by another, even greater and more terrible than the previous one.
Both M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin and Evgeniy Schwartz showed that the arbitrariness of officials and the slavish awe of people before power are eternal and ineradicable phenomena.
In general, the satire of M. E. Saltykov-Shchedrin is distinguished by its timelessness, since it exposes not the specific vices of 19th-century society, but the vices of humanity in general.
Humor in the works of Saltykov-Shchedrin
M.E. Saltykov-Shchedrin is a great Russian writer. His creativity is diverse. From the pen of the author, poetic and prose works were published. Even in his youth, Mikhail Evgrafovich began to compose satirical poems. Through them he expressed his disapproval of this or a phenomenon. In order to avoid censorship, the writer uses the technique of allegory.
Fairy tales occupy a special place in the series of works of Saltykov-Shchedrin. It is fairy tales that are the satirical pinnacle of the author’s creativity. By creating fairy-tale images, the writer gives his characters a satirical meaning. Thus, through satire and allegory, Saltykov-Shchedrin tries to convey to the reader the depth of social phenomena. Animal images have long been used in fables and fairy tales. The author used this well-known technique. Through images of animals endowed with the most disgusting, base and ridiculous qualities, human vices are ridiculed.
Using Aesopian language, the writer ridicules stupidity, greed, cruelty, and laziness. Without the use of allegory, it would be impossible to show the existing social system and established orders. Only with the help of animal “masks” and allegory techniques can Saltykov-Shchedrin ridicule the tsarist officials and give a full assessment of the existing government.
Internal contradictions tearing apart society provide food for plots and the creation of caricatured images. Each hero of the work is endowed with character and actions inherent only to people. But at the same time, each image retains the characteristic qualities and characteristics of a particular animal. These images are not just funny. They carry an instructive message.
The topics addressed in Shchedrin's works are varied. Thus, in “The Tale of How One Man Fed Two Generals,” images of parasites are shown. Finding themselves on an island rich in natural resources, the two generals were unable to improve their lives. Without the man nearby, they would simply die of hunger. Drawing a parallel, one can ask a logical question: what benefit do these parasitic creatures bring to society? What good is the state if they are worthless even in everyday life?
Laughter and satire became formidable weapons in the hands of the writer. With their help, he exposes and ridicules everything that is base and unworthy in man and society. Parody is the meaning of the satirical works of Saltykov-Shchedrin.
The tales of Saltykov and Shchedrin are better known. The themes of these works are varied:
1. Satire on the top government, autocratic and exploitative classes (“The Tale of a Zealous Chief”)
2. Tsarist autocracy and the position of the oppressed people (“Bear in the Voivodeship”)
3. The tragic situation of the people, their robbery and hard labor (“Horse”)
4. Ridicule of the philistine (“The wise minnow” hiding from everything, the “crucian carp is an idealist” who wanted to change society by raising a predator)
5. Ridicule and denunciation of the liberal intelligentsia, who in words advocate the interests of the people, and not in deeds who served the autocracy (“Liberal”)
6. The relationship between a man and a master, for example, “The Tale of How One Man Fed Two Generals.” Two former officials rose to the rank of general in the registry, which was abolished as unnecessary. For no apparent reason, the stupid generals found themselves on a desert island full of fish, fruits, and vegetables, but they almost died of hunger. A man saved them from starvation, and when they got back to the city they forgot about the savior. The author not only proves that the ruling class is lazy and stupid, greedy and soulless, but also that the Russian peasant, despite his selflessness, kindness, and ingenuity, evokes bitter regret. He is too calm and weak-willed. And in the fairy tale “The Wild Landowner,” the writer not only exposes the landowners who live at the expense of the peasants and even despises them, but also proves that one can easily degrade if a person is deprived of the desire to work.
In his satirical works, Saltykov-Shchedrin resorts to Aesopian language, so it is easy to notice real people in the images of animals. This is a wise gudgeon who “lived and trembled and died trembling,” and the crucian carp is an idealist who naively believes in the possibility of re-educating a predator for the sake of harmony. Here the satire is not of the government leaders (pike). In the fairy tale “The Bear in the Voivodeship” there is a satire on the government: Toptygin – 1 – on cruelty, ignorance, persecution of the press, science, art. A characteristic feature is ambition (Stalin). Toptygin – 2 – cruelty and stupidity in its purest form (Beria). Toptygin – 3 – inaction, lack of initiative and cowardice (Brezhnev).
That is, satire on the government occupies an important place. The ruling class, ordinary people, various political camps, and the vices of society are also ridiculed.
As if the generalizing work of the entire work of Saltykov-Shchedrin is “The History of a City,” the goal of which is to create a holistic image of Russia, which summarizes the weaknesses of its history, the fundamental vices of the Russian state, the shortcomings of the Russian people, he commits stupid things to confirm the name of the city: It’s stupid to replace the Volga with oatmeal, to caulk sharp pancakes, to prop up the sky with cells. And the satire of Saltykov-Shchedrin is helped by the fantastic nature of the images, the grotesque and Aesopian language.
