Main characters
- Pirogov is a lieutenant, a narcissistic, cheerful, superficial young man.
- Piskarev is a young talented artist with a subtle, vulnerable soul.
- Kovalev Platon Kuzmich is a collegiate assessor, a major, who lost his nose and suffered immensely from its absence.
- The nose is a revived part of Kovalev’s body, an ambitious careerist.
- Andrey Petrovich Chartkov is a young artist who traded his talent in pursuit of fame and money.
- Aksentiy Ivanovich Poprishchin is a middle-aged petty official, pitiful, worthless, and out of his mind.
- Akakiy Akakievich Bashmachkin is a petty official, a sickly-looking elderly man, unhappy and lonely.
Analysis of Gogol's "Petersburg Tales"
Nikolai Vasilyevich is a man and writer of three cultures: Little Russian, Russian and Italian. And when he comes from his Poltava region to St. Petersburg, he looks at this world of the Russian capital through the eyes of a guest and an outsider. That is why the name “Petersburg” in this cycle of stories means something more than just a place of action.
All the events described in these wonderful works are very simple; there are many everyday sketches. However, when analyzing Gogol’s “Petersburg Tales”, we see that the author consciously went to simplify the plot and texture. He attached great importance to this.
According to the writer himself, the more ordinary the object, the more talent and imagination you need to have in order to make something extraordinary out of it, but at the same time not devoid of truth. And this was precisely what was an important task for Nikolai Vasilyevich - to give the reader not only pleasure when reading his books, but also to bring him as close as possible to this truth.
Other characters
- The brunette is a young prostitute, very beautiful, selfish, arrogant.
- The blonde is a German, the wife of a German tinsmith, a pretty and stupid young woman.
- Schiller is a German, a tinsmith, punctual, conservative, thorough.
- Ivan Yakovlevich is a barber, an unkempt drunkard.
- The moneylender , a dark old man with a piercing gaze, depicted in the portrait, brought only grief to his owners.
- The director of the department is an important person, a taciturn and ambitious person.
- Sophie is the daughter of the director of the department, a young frivolous beauty with whom Poprishchin was in love.
Nevsky Avenue
Pirogov and Piskarev walk along Nevsky Prospekt. Piskarev liked the girl, but after following the stranger, he realized that she worked in a brothel. The young beauty fell so deeply into the hero’s soul that he decided to propose to her and pull her out of this rock bottom. The girl just laughed at his words, showing with all her contempt for the prospect of becoming his wife. The ashamed man runs home and locks himself in his room. A week later, concerned neighbors broke down the doors and found Piskarev with his throat cut.
At the same time, Pirogov met a beautiful young woman on Nevsky Prospect and also followed her to her house. She turned out to be the wife of the German Schiller, who immediately became jealous of his wife for the stranger who showed up at their house. Unable to overcome his desire to see the beauty, Pirogov again comes to their home and kisses her. At this moment, Schiller and his friends enter the room. The enraged men punished Pirogov in a very rude and humiliating way. In anger, Pirogov runs out of their apartment. (More details)
Summary
"Nevsky Avenue"
Two friends, Lieutenant Pirogov and artist Piskarev, went for a walk along Nevsky Prospect to innocently flirt with girls. Pirogov liked the charming blonde, and he, “confident that there was no beauty that could resist him,” went after her to try his luck.
The vulnerable and sensitive Piskarev was captivated by the sophisticated beauty of a brunette in an expensive raincoat. He was sure that the stranger was a noble lady, but in fact she turned out to be a prostitute. The girl was miraculously beautiful - “she was fresh; she was only seventeen years old; it was clear that terrible depravity had recently overtaken her,” but Piskarev was deeply disappointed.
Returning home, the artist did not stop thinking about the beauty. It pained him to realize that such unearthly, pure beauty could be at the mercy of depravity. When Piskarev fell asleep, he dreamed that the brunette was in fact not a prostitute, but a noble lady with a mysterious past.
This dream turned out to be so beautiful, and the reality so “disgusting,” that Piskarev decided to sleep as much as possible in order to enjoy the company of a beautiful girl in his dreams. From now on, he “one might say, slept in reality and was awake in a dream.” To cope with nervous breakdown and insomnia, the artist began taking opium. Thanks to the drug, dreams involving the brunette became even more vivid and colorful.
When Piskarev had a dream in which a stranger appeared in the form of his wife, he went to a brothel and proposed to her. The artist wanted to do a noble deed: to give the prostitute an honest life and at the same time return “to the world its most beautiful adornment,” but the girl resolutely refused him. She had no intention of marrying a poor man and working hard and living in poverty.
In terrible despair, Piskarev returned home, where he committed suicide by cutting his throat with a razor. His body was discovered only a week later. Over the artist’s grave, “only the guard soldier cried, and that was because he drank an extra bottle of vodka.”
Meanwhile, Pirogov, who went after the blonde, learned that she was German, the wife of the German tinsmith Schiller. The next day, the lieutenant ordered spurs from Schiller and began to regularly visit the workshop, flirting whenever possible with his blond wife.
“Schiller’s wife, for all her prettiness, was very stupid” and did not understand Pirogov’s hints. Then he, seizing the moment, began to open his arms. A drunken Schiller and two of his friends caught him doing this and gave the loving lieutenant a fair beating. Pirogov wanted to take cruel revenge on the offender, but by the evening of that day he walked away and completely forgot about this unfortunate incident.
"Nose"
One morning, the barber Ivan Yakovlevich discovered someone’s nose in the bread at breakfast and was very scared: “the nose was none other than the collegiate assessor Kovalev, whom he shaved every Wednesday and Sunday.”
Wanting to quickly get rid of the terrible discovery, he hurried to the embankment - “wouldn’t it be possible to somehow throw it into the Neva?” Throwing the rag with his nose into the river, the barber sighed with relief. Soon a quarterly supervisor appeared near him and began to strictly interrogate him about what had happened. What happened after this interrogation is “absolutely unknown.”
That same morning, Major Kovalev, looking at himself in the mirror, “to the greatest amazement, saw that instead of a nose he had a completely smooth place.” He decided to report his missing nose and “flew straight to the Chief of Police.”
Suddenly, Kovalev saw his nose in the rich uniform of a high-ranking official. The poor fellow did not know what to think: his own “nose, which only yesterday was on his face, could not ride or walk, was in his uniform.” Kovalev demanded from the nose that he return to his rightful place, but he pretended that he did not understand anything and hastened to hide.
Fortunately, the policeman was able to catch the nose in time, which “was already boarding the stagecoach and wanted to leave for Riga,” and return it to Kovalev. But the nose did not want to grow to the face for a long time, which caused its owner a lot of trouble.
Meanwhile, the story of the missing nose quickly spread throughout St. Petersburg, “all the socialites, necessary visitors to receptions who loved to make the ladies laugh, were extremely happy.”
"Portrait"
In an art shop, the poor artist Chartkov, for his last pennies, purchased a portrait that amazed him, which depicted “an old man with a bronze-colored face, cheekbones, and stunted.”
The most expressive part of the old man's face were his dark, piercing eyes, which seemed to be alive. At night, Chartkov dreamed that the old man came to life and began counting bundles of gold coins. The artist managed to take one of the packages, and with this money he decided to improve his skills.
Chartkov dressed up, rented a decent apartment and became a fashionable portrait painter in the city. In pursuit of fame and money, he lost his talent, because he painted portraits to please the customer.
The artist tried to regain the abilities he had lost, but “the brush involuntarily turned to rigid forms, the hands folded in one memorized manner.” Realizing his insignificance, Chartkov fiercely hated talented masters. He bought the most beautiful paintings in order to destroy them at home. Chartkov's mind became clouded from envy and hatred, and he died suddenly from fits of rage.
Subsequently it became known that the ill-fated portrait of an old man with piercing, lively eyes was painted by a self-taught artist. A greedy, evil moneylender, whose money evoked the most disgusting impulses in people, posed for him. After the death of the moneylender, his soul settled in the portrait, which drove all the owners crazy.
"Diary of a Madman"
On a rainy autumn day, minor official Aksentiy Ivanovich Poprishchin went, as usual, to the department. On the way, he met the young daughter of the director of the department, who captivated the heart of a modest official. Next to the girl walked her little dog Meji. Suddenly Poprishchin realized that he was hearing a conversation between Medzhi and the dog Fidel, who were discussing the latest news.
The next day, the director's daughter came to visit her father at the department. At the sight of her, Poprishchin was speechless. When the girl accidentally dropped her handkerchief, he “rushed as fast as he could, slipped on the damned parquet floor and almost broke his nose.”
Poprishchin’s feelings for the director’s daughter did not go unnoticed, and the head of the department scolded him for his daring dreams: “after all, you are a zero, nothing more.” But the happy Poprishchin did not pay any attention to his words; a much bigger problem for him was his poverty: “there is no income - that’s the problem.”
Finding himself in the house of the director of service affairs, Poprishchin tried to talk to Medzhi, but she only “tucked her tail between her legs and shrank in half.” Noticing the paper torn into shreds, he decided that this was correspondence between Meji and Fidel. From it, the lover learned that the director's daughter's name was Sophie, and she was going to marry the chamber cadet Teplov, and openly laughed at him.
Love experiences exhausted Poprishchin so much that he began to consider himself the king of Spain. He stopped standing up in the presence of the director, and began signing “Ferdinand VIII” on documents. When Poprishchin entered the director's house and greatly frightened Sophie with his behavior, he was taken to an insane asylum.
"Overcoat"
An elderly official, Akaki Akakievich Bashmachkin, served in the department all his life in one position, everyone believed that he “was born into the world completely ready, in a uniform and with a bald spot on his head.” Nobody respected him in the department, and the bosses “treated him in a cold, despotic way.”
When Bashmachkin discovered that his old overcoat was completely worn out and could not be repaired, he was very upset. In order to collect the required amount, he decided to “banish drinking tea in the evenings, not light candles in the evenings..., walking along the streets, step as lightly and carefully as possible... so as not to wear out the soles too soon; give the laundry to the laundress to wash the clothes as little as possible.”
After six months of all sorts of hardships, Bashmakin saved up money and sewed a new overcoat. But the official did not rejoice at the long-awaited new thing for long: that same evening he was robbed on the street.
The police did not even try to help the unfortunate official. He turned to the general for help, but was driven out with a shout. Frustrated, Bashmachkin rushed out into the street, where a blizzard was raging. The next day he “got all swollen and went to bed,” and soon died of a fever.
Soon after the death of the official, rumors spread throughout St. Petersburg that his ghost was wandering around the city and taking off the greatcoats of passers-by.
"Nose"
The story uses the technique of satire, with the help of which the author ridicules greed, stinginess, and bribery. One of the masterpieces representing “Petersburg Tales” is “The Nose”.
The summary is as follows: one day, collegiate assessor Kovalev wakes up in his apartment and discovers that he has no nose. He only has a “smooth spot” left. Kovalev, in a panic, rushes to various government officials to resolve this situation, but everyone brushes him off, because the matter seems extremely strange and frivolous to them. Then Kovalev decides to act on his own.
He finds his own nose and asks him to return to his place. The nose refuses the offer and declares that he is on his own, an individual personality. This work is part of the “Petersburg Tales” cycle. A summary of the story will allow students to better prepare for literature lessons.
