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Objective of the lesson: show the specifics of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, using the technique of comparison, turning to other authors and artists; update students' knowledge about St. Petersburg in Russian XIX literature century; continue to develop students’ ability to carefully read the text, comment and analyze it, the ability to compare, reflect, and express their judgments; know the content of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”; the main images of the work.
Lesson equipment:
2) presentation;
Students should know:
Main images;
Students should be able to:
Highlight the main points in the text.
Lesson progress
I . Organizational moment(message topic and purpose)
II. Preparation for perception.
Teacher:
III. The main content of the lesson.
Teacher: What does the name Peter mean?
Students:
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The city is lush, the city is poor,
Spirit of bondage, slender appearance,
The vault of heaven is pale green,
Fairy tale, cold and granite...
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Scenery;
Scenes of street life;
Interior.
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Scenery.
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Teacher: Scenes of street life.
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Screening of an excerpt from the film “Crime and Punishment.”(Death of Katerina Ivanovna).
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this is a killer city
and a ghost town
and a dead-end city.
Raskolnikov thinks about him.
IV. Summing up the lesson.
V. Homework:
VI. Ratings.
IMAGE OF THE CITY
Essay writing algorithm
1. Stage principle;
4. Details of urban life.
IV. The writer’s traditions in creating the image of the city in his work and in Russian literature in general.
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Brief description document:
The theme of the lesson is Dostoevsky’s Petersburg or “The Face of This World.”
Objective of the lesson:show the specifics of Dostoevsky’s St. Petersburg, using the technique of comparison, turning to other authors and artists; update students' knowledge about St. Petersburg in Russian literature of the 19th century; continue to develop students’ ability to carefully read the text, comment and analyze it, the ability to compare, reflect, and express their judgments; know the content of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”; the main images of the work.
Lesson equipment:
1) technical teaching aids (computer, TV);
2) presentation;
3) texts of F.M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment”;
4) Notebooks for works on literature.
Students should know:
The main idea of the work;
Main images;
The role of the city in the lives of the heroes;
The basic scheme of depicting the city of St. Petersburg in the novel (landscape, scenes of street life, interior).
Students should be able to:
Answer the questions correctly;
Summarize and systematize educational material;
Highlight the main points in the text.
Lesson progress
I. Organizational moment (message topic and purpose)
II . Preparation for perception.
Teacher: What is a city? (student answers: settlement; political, economic, administrative and cultural center).
It is the city that will be the hero of a great epic work in today’s lesson.
St. Petersburg... When you pronounce this name, a parallel immediately arises - Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky.
Petersburg by Dostoevsky... These words, like an aphorism, have firmly entered Russian classical literature.
The great writer presented us with the image of St. Petersburg “The Face of This World”, as he himself saw it, in which he lived then, in the mid-60s of the 19th century, when capitalism was emerging in Russia.
Today, together with the writer and his hero, Rodion Raskolnikov, we will walk through the streets of St. Petersburg, see the landscape and scenes of street life, and look into the corner rooms where his heroes live.
Dostoevsky is a St. Petersburg writer. The image of St. Petersburg is present in almost every one of his works. The main thing for Dostoevsky in St. Petersburg is that European and Russian civilizations came together in it, that it was a city built by force, unnaturally created. Therefore, Petersburg is a city of poor, unhappy people, a city of poverty and a city of extreme wealth.
III . The main content of the lesson.
Teacher: What does the name Peter mean?
Students: If you look at what the name Peter means, you can see one very interesting feature that to some extent explains Dostoevsky’s perception of this city. The name Peter means stone, so Petersburg is a bag of stones, a dead, faceless, cold, scary city. The image of the bronze horseman, taken from Pushkin, symbolizes the power and strength of this terrible city. For Dostoevsky, this power lies in the power of the city’s influence on people. It is no coincidence that Petersburg was built on the site of a swamp, the bronze horseman is a symbol of St. Petersburg, that is, for Dostoevsky, Petersburg is a bronze horseman in the middle of a swamp.
Teacher: In the novel “The Teenager” this is precisely the perception of the city. “And what if this fog scatters and goes up, won’t that whole rotten, slimy city go with it, rise with the fog and disappear like smoke, and the old Finnish swamp will remain, and in the middle of it, perhaps, for beauty’s sake, bronze horseman on a hot-breathing, driven horse.”
"Crime and Punishment" is called a "St. Petersburg novel." You remember that the image of St. Petersburg was created in their works by Pushkin and Gogol, and Nekrasov, revealing more and more of its facets.
Teacher: - Which of the Russian writers and poets touched on the topic of depicting St. Petersburg in their work?
Students: The theme of St. Petersburg was set in Russian literature by Pushkin. It is in his “Bronze Horseman”, in “The Queen of Spades” that we are faced with a two-great city: beautiful, mighty Petersburg, the creation of Peter, and the city of poor Eugene, a city whose very existence turns into a tragedy for little man.
Pushkin's Petersburg is contradictory: the poet loves this city - a source of creativity, but debunks the “sovereign city” - a symbol of power that brings troubles to people. A.S. Pushkin composed a hymn to the great city in “The Bronze Horseman”, lyrically described its magnificent architectural ensembles, the twilight of the white nights in “Eugene Onegin”:
The city is lush, the city is poor,
Spirit of bondage, slender appearance,
The vault of heaven is pale green,
Fairy tale, cold and granite...
In the same way, Gogol’s Petersburg has two faces: a brilliant, fantastic city is sometimes hostile to a person whose fate can be broken on the streets of the northern capital.
N.V. Gogol continues tragic theme Petersburg, but here reality and nonsense, reality and nightmare merged together. “He lies all the time, this Nevsky Prospect.” This is a city of fantastic contrasts, growing into an unreal symbol of a ghost town.
Nekrasov's Petersburg is sad - the Petersburg of the ceremonial soulless entrances, the bloody Sennaya Square.
Belinsky admitted in his letters how much he hated Peter, where it was so difficult and painful to live.
Teacher: Dostoevsky has his own Petersburg. The writer’s meager material resources and wandering spirit force him to often change apartments on the so-called “middle streets,” in cold corner houses where people “teem with people.”
This is a city of the humiliated and insulted, a city in which crimes are committed, a city whose very existence prompts a person to kill, either himself or another.
From a tiny cell along Sadovaya, Gorokhovaya and other “middle” streets, Raskolnikov goes to the old woman pawnbroker, meets Marmeladov, Katerina Ivanovna, Sonya... He often passes through Sennaya Square, where at the end of the 18th century a market was opened for the sale of livestock , firewood, hay, oats... A stone's throw from the dirty Sennaya was Stolyarny Lane, which consisted of sixteen houses in which there were eighteen drinking establishments. Raskolnikov wakes up at night from drunken screams when regulars leave the taverns.
Scenes of street life lead us to the conclusion: people have become dull from such a life, they look at each other “with hostility and distrust.” There can be no other relationship between them except indifference, animal curiosity, and malicious mockery.
The interiors of the “St. Petersburg corners” do not resemble human habitation: Raskolnikov’s “closet”, the Marmeladovs’ “passage corner”, Sonya’s “barn”, a separate hotel room where Svidrigailov spends his last night - all these are dark, damp “coffins”.
All together: landscape paintings Petersburg, the scenes of its street life, the interiors of the “corners” - create the general impression of a city that is hostile to man, crowds him, crushes him, creates an atmosphere of hopelessness, pushes him to scandals and crimes.
Teacher: - Where does the action take place in the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky.
Students: Drinking bars, taverns, slums, police offices, brothels, back streets, palaces, wells, coffin rooms and closets, back stairs doused with slop. Sennaya Square and Kanava.
Teacher: Petersburg in the novel is not just a place of action or a background of events, it is the soul, a participant in the events. Can you name the places where the action takes place in the novel?
Students:
Sennaya Square, Stolyarny Lane, Ekaterininsky Canal, Bolshaya and Malaya Neva, Petrovsky Island, “Raskolnikov’s house”, “Sonya’s house”, “house of the old pawnbroker”.
Teacher: The novel takes place in the summer. Summer in St. Petersburg is northern. summer. Summer in the novel is hot, so hot that it’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to breathe on the streets, it’s hard to breathe in taverns, apartments, corners.
This suffocating atmosphere becomes a symbol of the city, where the thought of Raskolnikov’s murder is ripening, where the crime is being committed.
The work in the lesson will go according to the following scheme:
Scenery;
Scenes of street life;
Interior.
Teacher: - What is a landscape? (View of an image of some area).
What is the atmosphere like on the streets of the city? (Let's confirm with quotes from the novel).
Scenery.
Part 1, chapters 1,2 - “disgusting and sad coloring” of a city day; first day with Raskolnikov in St. Petersburg, pp. 121, 126.
Part 2, chapter 1 – repetition of the previous picture, page 189.
Part 2, chapter 2 – magnificent panorama of St. Petersburg, page 204.
Part 2, chapter 6 – evening Petersburg, p. 235.
Part 6, chapter 6 – stormy evening and morning on the eve of Svidrigailov’s suicide, pp. 496, 505.
Through the eyes of Raskolnikov we look at summer Petersburg: “It’s hot outside...... the nerves of a young man.”
Reading by students of the indicated episodes.
Teacher: The general meaning of this landscape and its symbolic meaning will be further developed in the novel. From this point of view, the images of summer Petersburg are interesting. “Near the taverns on the lower floors, in the dirty and smelly courtyards of the houses on Sennaya Square, and especially near the taverns, there were crowds of many different types of industrialists and rags.” “The heat outside was unbearable again; at least a drop of rain all these days. Again dust, brick and limestone, again the stench from the shops and taverns, again the constantly drunk Chukhon peddlers and dilapidated cab drivers.” “It was about eight o’clock, the sun was setting. The stuffiness remained as before; but he greedily breathed in this stinking, dusty, city-polluted air...” “In this garden there was one thin, three-year-old fir tree and three bushes - in addition, a “station” was built, essentially a drinking establishment, but you could also get tea there ..." All these excerpts from the novel leave the same impression of stuffiness, conveying this state as something common in the description of the urban environment.
Teacher: Name the general patterns in these landscape descriptions.
Students: All descriptions are based on the same details - terrible heat, dust, bad smells, crowds.
Teacher: The landscape in the novel is firmly connected with the image of Raskolnikov, passed through his perception. “The middle streets of St. Petersburg, where people are “teeming with people,” evoke in Raskolnikov’s soul “a feeling of deepest disgust.” The same response gives rise to a different kind of landscape in his soul. Here he is on the banks of the Neva:
Students: “...looks from the Nikolaevsky Bridge at St. Isaac's Cathedral and the Winter Palace.”
An inexplicable chill blew over him from this magnificent panorama; This magnificent picture was full of a mute and deaf spirit for him. This is the same Petersburg that surrounds Eugene in The Bronze Horseman, but here it is deprived of all the beautiful features that Russian history has endowed it with; It is no longer possible to say to this Petersburg, as Pushkin said: “I love you.”
You can’t talk to him at all - even as the unfortunate Eugene spoke to the “miraculous builder”, as the dreamer of “White Nights” spoke to the city. Before Raskolnikov, before all the heroes of the novel, there is a “mute and deaf” city, crushing all living things.
“The sky was without the slightest cloud, and the water was almost blue,” the shining “dome of the cathedral,” on which “even every decoration could be clearly seen through the clean air.”
Teacher: Maybe the hero likes this picture and finds peace and satisfaction from what he sees?
Students: And the beautiful space presses, torments, and oppresses Raskolnikov just as much as the stuffiness, cramped space, heat and dirt of the streets: “for him this magnificent picture was full of a dumb and deaf spirit.” In this respect, Raskolnikov's attitude to nature is his attitude to the world. The hero is suffocating in this dead, cold and indifferent city and world.
Teacher: Is there a place where Raskolnikov likes to visit?
Students: The hero prefers Sennaya Square, in the vicinity of which the poor live. Here he feels like he belongs.
Teacher: - Tell us about the appearance of the people he met on these streets. What impression did they make on you and why?
Students: This is Raskolnikov himself, “remarkably good-looking,” but “he has fallen down and become unkempt”; these are “drunks”, “all kinds of industrialists and rags”; Marmeladov with a yellow, swollen, greenish face, reddish eyes and “dirty, greasy, red hands with black nails; an old pawnbroker with “sharp and evil eyes”; Katerina Ivanovna.
Teacher: So, from meeting these people you are left with a feeling of something dirty, pathetic, ugly.
Teacher: The fate of the heroes is sometimes decided on the street, thereby the city of St. Petersburg becomes a city of death. Who dies on the streets in Dostoevsky's novel?
Students:
Dies under the wheels of Marmeladov's stroller;
Consumptive Katerina Ivanovna dies on the street;
Sonya goes out into the street to sell herself;
On the avenue, in front of the watchtower, Svidrigailov commits suicide;
A drowned woman is found on the Neva;
On Konnogvardeisky Boulevard, Raskolnikov sees a drunk girl;
Raskolnikov comes out to Sennaya Square to repent before people and before God;
He wanders the streets of the city even after the murder.
Teacher: Scenes of street life.
1) Part 1, chapter 4 – meeting with a drunk girl, pp. 153 – 155.
2) Part 2, chapter 2 – scene on the Nikolaevsky Bridge, blow of the whip and alms, pp. 203 – 204.
3) Part 2, chapter 6 – a) an organ grinder and a crowd of women at a tavern, b) a scene on ... a bridge, a drowned woman, pp. 235 – 237, + 246.
4) Part 5, chapter 5 – death of Katerina Ivanovna, pp. 441 – 447.
Screening of an excerpt from the film “Crime and Punishment.”(Raskolnikov’s meeting with a drunk girl).
Teacher: The novel often depicts street scenes. Here is one of them. Raskolnikov stands in deep thought on the bridge and sees a woman “with a yellow, elongated, worn-out face and reddish, sunken eyes.” Suddenly she rushes into the water. And you can hear the screams of another woman. “I drank myself to hell, fathers, to hell... I realized I wanted to hang myself too, they took me off the rope.” It’s as if the door to someone else’s life, full of hopeless despair, opens for a moment.
Teacher: The symbolic image of the tortured horse from Raskolnikov’s dream echoes the image of the dying Katerina Ivanovna (“They drove away the nag... she was torn!”).
Screening of an excerpt from the film “Crime and Punishment.”(Death of Katerina Ivanovna).
Teacher: Retell Raskolnikov's dream about a slaughtered nag.
Raskolnikov's dream. Part 1, chapter 5 – about the downtrodden nag.
Students: He sees in a dream how drunken men beat a helpless horse to death, he cries, tries to protect it, but finds himself helpless in front of the unleashed evil.
Teacher: Let's read an excerpt from the novel “Scene on the Nikolaevsky Bridge, the blow of the whip and alms.”
Teacher: The city is also the houses in which people live. The houses where the heroes live are terrible.
Leaving the noisy, dirty streets, the writer leads us to the houses where his heroes live. Usually these are apartment buildings, typical of capitalist St. Petersburg. We enter “dirty and smelly courtyards, wells, and climbed dark stairs.
It’s scary to live in these rooms, theories like Raskolnikov’s are born here, both adults and children die here.
Teacher: How do Dostoevsky's heroes live in these rooms?
Here is one of them - “narrow, steep and covered in slop. All the kitchens, all the apartments, on all four floors opened onto this staircase and stood like that for almost the whole day. That’s why it was so stuffy.”
What about the rooms? They are usually drawn in semi-darkness, dimly lit by the slanting meadows of the setting sun or the dimly flickering stub of a candle...
Teacher: Let's read excerpts from the work that depict the characters' homes.
Part 1, chapter 3 – Raskolnikov’s closet, page 139.
Part 1, chapter 2 – room – “passage corner” of the Marmeladovs, p. 136.
Part 4, chapter 4 – room – Sonya’s “barn”, page 355.
Teacher: - What is your strongest impression when, “leaving” the street, “entering” Raskolnikov’s room, the Marmeladovs’ room, etc.?
Students: Here is Raskolnikov's room. ""It was a tiny cell, six mages long, which had the most pitiful appearance with its yellow, dusty wallpaper that was falling off the wall everywhere, and so low that even a slightly tall person felt terrified in it, and everything seemed to be... he hits his head on the ceiling. The furniture matched the room: there were three old chairs, not quite in good condition, a painted table in the corner... There was a small table in front of the sofa.”
Students : They will note the suffocating closeness of the room and point out that Raskolnikov’s closet is in miniature the world in which a person is oppressed and destitute.
The Marmeladovs’ room: “The small, smoky door at the end of the stairs, at the very top, was open. The cinder illuminated the poorest room, ten steps long; all of it could be seen from the entryway. Everything was scattered in disarray, especially various children's rags...")
When Raskolnikov comes to Sonechka, he is amazed by her room, which looks more like a barn.
Teacher: So, we can say that the image of the city landscape and interiors steadily pursues one goal: to leave the impression of something wrong, discordant, dirty, ugly.
The backdrop against which the novel unfolds is St. Petersburg in the mid-60s. Raskolnikov hatches his theory in the “cabin”, “closet”, “coffin” - this is the name of his kennel. Raskolnikov's tragedy begins in a tavern, and here he listens to Marmeladov's confession. Dirt, stuffiness, stench, drunken screams - a typical tavern environment. And the corresponding audience is here: “drunken Munich German”, “princesses” of entertainment establishments. The tavern and street elements - unnatural, inhuman - interfere with the fate of the novel's heroes. “It’s rare where you will find so many dark, harsh and strange influences on a person’s soul as in St. Petersburg,” Dostoevsky declares through the mouth of Svidrigailov. A man suffocates in Dostoevsky’s Petersburg, “like in a room without windows,” he is crushed in a dense crowd, and in a tavern, “packed,” and in closets.
Teacher: How did we see St. Petersburg in the novel “Crime and Punishment”?
Students : Everything bears the stamp of general disorder, the poverty of human existence.
St. Petersburg is a city of half-crazy, lonely people. The painter Mikolka said that in St. Petersburg you can find everything except father and mother.
Many heroes of St. Petersburg are homeless, and home, as you know, is a place where a person can find repentance, find a loving, necessary person, but people in St. Petersburg are a crowd that has fallen below moral standards, hearing and not understanding anything. A man in the city is lonely, no one needs him. In the city, isolation of man from man and overcrowding coexist.
It is also characteristic that Dostoevsky describes his heroes living between the Catherine Canal and the Fontanka, in one of the poorest and most terrible areas of the city. The writer never shows the beauty of the city. There is almost no nature, and if there is one (lawn, Petrovsky Island), its absence in other places is only emphasized.
Petersburg of closets, staircases, brothels, taverns, market squares, terrible Petersburg puts pressure on a person, is deeply hostile and unpleasant to everything healthy. Dostoevsky's Petersburg is a peculiar hero of the novel, cruel and inhumane.
Teacher: The image of St. Petersburg, the image of Dostoevsky’s contemporary life becomes the embodiment of this crisis of humanity. Dostoevsky's Petersburg is a city in which it is impossible to live: it is inhuman. Wherever the writer takes us, we do not end up in human habitation. After all, it’s creepy to live not only in the “coffin” that Raskolnikov rents, but also in Sonya’s “ugly barn”, and in the “cool corner” where Marmeladov lives, and in a separate room, “stuffy and cramped”, in which he spends his last night of Svidrigailov. This is a city of street girls, beggars, homeless children, tavern regulars - those who are doomed to everyday tragic life. The atmosphere of Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg is an atmosphere of dead end and hopelessness.
Student’s message “The symbolism of color in Dostoevsky’s novel.”
Teacher:
Dostoevsky practically does not talk about beautiful Petersburg, even when he writes about a beautiful city, he immediately returns to dirty Petersburg.
Part 1, chapter 6 – Dream of a happy city. "Passing past Yusupov."
Teacher: Dostoevsky’s Petersburg is a city of contrasts: “the humiliated and insulted” and the “powerful of this world”, it is a city where one can’t breathe, a city of indifference and inhumanity,
this is a killer city
And a ghost town
And the city is a dead end.
But Dostoevsky also has a dream of a happy city.
Raskolnikov thinks about him.
But this is a dream, and the city is horror and madness.
But the dream of a beautiful city, created for the happiness of people, lives in the soul of the writer and his hero, along with the idea of a crazy, ugly city.
In the most terrible moment of his life, when going to commit a crime, Raskolnikov thinks “about installing high fountains and how well they would freshen the air in all squares. Little by little he came to the conviction that if the Summer Garden were extended to the entire Field of Mars and even connected to the palace Mikhailovsky Garden, it would be a wonderful and most useful thing for the city.”
Dostoevsky's dream of a beautiful city.
IV . Summing up the lesson.
What can you say about Dostoevsky's Petersburg?
The motif of stuffiness, crowding, crowding, stench, dirt, which is born of the landscape, continues and is intensified by the description appearance people, their lives and the closets in which they live. Man is suffocating in this city. The atmosphere of Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg is an atmosphere of dead end and hopelessness. This is a city that is impossible to be in.
V . Homework:
VI. Ratings.
IMAGE OF THE CITY
Essay writing algorithm
I. Most often, the city depicted in a literary work is an independent artistic image (specific, collective or allegorical).
II. The image of the city reveals the most characteristic aspects of life in Russian reality of the depicted period.
1. City authorities, officials, landowners, merchants, ordinary people and other social strata of society;
2. Pastime of city residents;
3. A comprehensive picture of government;
4. A comprehensive image of all spheres of life of citizens and their activities;
5. Emphasizing or violating the typical life of the city and its inhabitants;
6. City customs: gossip, balls, fights, etc.;
III. Means of revealing a generalized image of the city.
1. Stage principle;
2. “Unifying” principle - heroes as an image of the city as a whole;
3. Details of the city “portrait”: colors, sounds, descriptions of buildings, streets, interiors, etc.;
4. Details of urban life.
IV . The writer’s traditions in creating the image of the city in his work and in Russian literature in general.
ATTENTION TO ALL TEACHERS: in accordance with Federal Law N273-FZ “On Education in Russian Federation» pedagogical activity requires the teacher to have a system of special knowledge in the field of teaching and raising children with disabilities. Therefore, it is important for all teachers to improve their qualifications in this area!
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To ask questions.
Goals:
1. Expand information on the visual and expressive role of landscape in works of Russian literature in the 19th century; contribute to a deeper understanding of the work through the aesthetic impact of illustrations by famous artists.
2. Development of figurative perception; developing interest in a work through a deep analysis of artistic details; deepen the skills of independent analysis of a work of art, improve students’ thinking abilities; work on speech culture.
3. Fostering a love of art through a literary work.
Methodical techniques:
1. The main technique is a conversation including student messages.
2. Selective work with text.
3. Elements of creative work.
“...As if in an instant, I found myself in another world:
And, as if from a Dostoevsky novel...”
Cherkashina Arina “Two-faced Petersburg”
Each era in the history of Russian society knows its own image of St. Petersburg. Each individual person, creatively experiencing it, refracts this image in his own way. For the poets of the 18th century: Lomonosov, Sumarokov, Derzhavin, Petersburg appears as a “glorious city”, “Northern Rome”, “Northern Palmyra”.
It is alien to them to see some kind of tragic omen in the city of the future. Only writers of the 19th century gave the image of the city tragic features. Where did they come from and why were they so rooted in the consciousness of Pushkin, Nekrasov, Gogol, Dostoevsky?
Undoubtedly, one of the main roles in this was played by the St. Petersburg legend, which appeared in the era of St. Petersburg reforms: “Petersburg will be empty!”
“Even in the time of Peter I, a sexton from the Trinity Church, coming down from the bell tower, in the dark, saw a kikimora - a thin woman with bare hair - was very frightened and then shouted in the tavern: “Petersburg, they say, should be empty,” for which he was captured and tortured in The secret office and the whip mercilessly. So from then on, it must have been the custom to think that something was wrong with St. Petersburg. What eyewitnesses saw was like walking down the street Vasilyevsky Island The devil was driving a cab. Then at midnight, in a storm and high water, the copper emperor fell from a granite rock and galloped over the stones. Then a dead man, a dead official, stuck to the glass and pestered a privy councilor passing in a carriage. Many such tales circulated around the city. With despondency and fear, the Russian people listened to the delirium of the capital. People said that a city built on the bones of hundreds of thousands of people was sinful, and nature would certainly take revenge for the martyrdom of the forced builders of the city.”
While studying Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment,” we more than once drew attention to the fact that the events in this work unfold in St. Petersburg. The depiction of St. Petersburg in the novel carries a significant ideological and artistic load.
Today we will conduct with you a lesson-research “Petersburg by F.M. Dostoevsky in the novel “Crime and Punishment”, where, using the example of landscape analysis, we will show the mechanism of transition from perception artistic images works to a system of conceptual generalizations; in order to return to the reality depicted by the author at a new, higher level of perception and we will try to prove that the wider our knowledge of literature, the more perfect the process of cognition of the work becomes.
Before exploring Dostoevsky's Petersburg, let's remember how other Russian writers of the 19th century depicted Petersburg in their works. Some guys received homework to prepare messages “Petersburg in the works of Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov.”
In the course of these messages, we will compile a comparative table: “Petersburg in the description of A.S. Pushkin, N.V. Gogol, N.A. Nekrasov, F.M. Dostoevsky.”
Comparison table
So let's summarize our message; firstly, the St. Petersburg theme, raised by Russian writers in the 18th century, in the 19th century became a topic of paramount importance, which was often called “Petersburg.” Secondly, writers of the 19th century gave the image of St. Petersburg new tragic features that arose on the basis of the legend.
The image of St. Petersburg also occupies a prominent place in the works of F.M. Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky lived in St. Petersburg for about thirty years. Created here most his works, including the novels “Notes from the House of the Dead”, “Humiliated and Insulted”, “Crime and Punishment”, “The Brothers Karamazov”.
Many places in St. Petersburg are associated with the name of the great writer. Among them is a house in the city center on the corner of Kuznechny Lane, where F.M. Dostoevsky lived in 1846 and from 1878 to the day of his death on February 9, 1881.
In his approach to depicting St. Petersburg, Dostoevsky is close to Gogol and Nekrasov, especially Nekrasov. And we will see this today.
Many critics call Dostoevsky’s novel “Crime and Punishment” a “St. Petersburg novel.” And this title fully characterizes the work. On the pages of “Crime and Punishment” the author captured the entire prose of life in the capital of Russia in the 60s XIX century. Cities of apartment buildings, bankers' offices and trading shops, cities of gloomy, dirty, but at the same time beautiful in their own way.
In order to find out what role the image of St. Petersburg plays in the work, we must first of all define the word “landscape”.
What is landscape? What do we know about the role of landscape in a work of art?
In order to expand and deepen information about the landscape, let's get acquainted with the article in the dictionary of literary terms .(Write it down in a notebook).
The role of the landscape:
Image characteristic features locality, region, country (creating local color). (Gogol “Evenings on a farm near Dikanka”)
An additional tool for a more expressive image characters: by contrast, by matching natural phenomena with the feelings and thoughts of the character. (Pushkin “Belkin’s Tales”, “Shot”, “Blizzard”.)
Symbolic meaning.
Now let's find out what the role of landscape is in the novel “Crime and Punishment”. While reading the novel, did you notice many descriptions of nature? What functions do you think the landscape performs in a novel by a realist writer?
To comprehend the artistic skill of the writer, to penetrate into the unique world of his images, the individuality of his style, you need to know the text literary work. We will turn to him.
But first, let's select definitions for the word “landscape” that characterize it in relation to the time of year, day, and place of action.
Time of year
spring
Times of Day
evening
midday
morning
Location:
rural
urban
What landscape is most often found in Dostoevsky?
And now the task will be this: write down in a notebook the epithets and comparisons that the author uses in various landscape sketches. To do this, we will divide into groups: (After completing the work, the following entry appears on the board as students report).
Part 1 (1). S.5. The heat is terrible; summer stench; unbearable stench; disgusting, sad coloring; deepest disgust.
Ch.!.(5).P.43.The time is gray; the day is suffocating; the road is dusty; black dust.
Ch.!! (6) P.95. The stuffiness is the same; stinking, dusty, city-polluted air.
Part 11 (6). P.103. The pink glow of sunset; last ray; darkening, deepening twilight, darkening ditch water, a wild, ugly vision.
Part 6 (6). P.308. Milky, thick fog: slippery, dirty pavement; wet paths.
What pictures are drawn in our imagination when reading these landscapes?
How depressing are these gloomy pictures Are they related to the theme of the novel, and do they help to penetrate deeper into the author's intention?
Let's look at illustrations by artists from the series “Petersburg by Dostoevsky”.
A record of all the pages on which the reader encounters the landscape opens on the board.
Are all the landscapes depicted in the novel real paintings?
Next to the indicated pages, write down the time of day and indicate whether the real landscape is depicted on these pages or from a dream.
In Dostoevsky's Petersburg, life takes on fantastic shapes. The real seems like a nightmare vision, and delirium and sleep seem like reality. Reality and delirium, reality and nightmares - everything is intertwined in St. Petersburg, it is no coincidence that Svidrigailov called it “a city of half-crazy people.”
On the night after the murder, Raskolnikov woke up from oblivion - this is reality. His nonsense is depicted in the same way. In his delirium he imagines the ugly scene of the beating of his mistress. Raskolnikov's painful dream is realistically accurately and specifically described. Lively, impressive details. None of this feels like a dream.
Is there any pattern in the change of time of day, after which event does the evening landscape appear?
Which character acts against the backdrop of the night landscape?
For what purpose does Svidrigailov wander through the night Petersburg in the mud and fog?
Let's pay attention to this detail:
Svidrigailov wants to commit suicide and wanders in the fog (and thick, milky, because of which nothing is visible ahead) along the slippery, dirty pavement.
Do you think it was accidental that Dostoevsky used the epithets “thick”, “slippery”, “dirty”?
Is Raskolnikov depicted anywhere against the backdrop of a night landscape? Why do you think?
Are all the landscapes in the novel painted in dark colors? Let's look at the landscapes in part 1 (6) p.46; Part 3 (6) p.167; part 6 (60) p. 306.
What colors predominate in them, what epithets does the author use?
Do the characters see these landscapes in real life?
Now let's listen to one short excerpt from the novel: part 1 (5) p. 38.
In depicting nature here, Dostoevsky uses bright colors, the hero plunges into a state of peace and silence, he sees a bright red sun, a bright sunset. But this is not a dream.
Now let’s listen to another excerpt from the novel, part 2 (2) p. 70.
Which artistic technique is the basis for the image of this lush panorama of St. Petersburg?
Yes, indeed, the picture that opened from this vantage point not only awakened historical memory, but also wrote important information. On one bank, the Academy of Arts, the University, and the Academy of Sciences reminded of the century of the Russian Enlightenment and the hopes of the enlighteners to improve the socio-political life of Russia, educating the minds and souls of their contemporaries. But the perspective of the embankment was closed by the spire visible in the distance Peter and Paul Fortress, which we visited the best minds Russia.
On the opposite bank, as if in contrast, the Winter Palace, St. Isaac's Cathedral, the Senate and the Synod were concentrated. In Dostoevsky's description, the cathedral is especially highlighted. The shining dome attracted the hero’s gaze not only to the building itself, but also to Senate Square in front of the Cathedral, associated with memories of the Decembrist uprising. Raskolnikov, peering intently at this architectural landscape, “was amazed...every time at his gloomy and mysterious conclusion that a figure who seeks to influence the course of history must certainly be ready to fearlessly step over the spilled blood.
So, let’s look once again at the illustrations depicting real landscapes, against which the action of the novel unfolds, and let’s try to “draw” with words the picture that appears in the hero’s imagination.
But in the novel there is a morning landscape. Where and for what purpose does the author use it, what role does this landscape play?
Let's listen to another excerpt from the novel - the epilogue p.330.
What conclusion can we draw from this passage?
Let's summarize. Landscape in Dostoevsky's novel is used:
- to create local flavor;
- acts as a background against which events unfold and emphasizes the internal state of the hero, reflecting his feelings and experiences;
- serves as an additional means for a more expressive depiction of characters (the technique of contrast or correspondence of natural phenomena to the feelings and thoughts of the character).
With the help of a landscape, the author more vividly and reliably reflects the state of hopelessness and loneliness of the “little man” in a big and soulless city, emphasizing that living in such conditions, people become wild, embittered, lose their human essence, kindness, mercy, therefore cruelty arises in their minds. inhuman ideas. But the morning comes, when the soul, infected by the stuffy, stinking city air, is cleansed through suffering, opened towards love, hope, and turns to people. And this is the symbolic meaning of the landscape.
Thus, St. Petersburg in the novel “Crime and Punishment” is not just a city, the background of everything that happens, but even to some extent a character. (Complete table).
Dostoevsky's Petersburg is a tragic and fantastic city. His city lives a separate independent life and influences the feelings, thoughts, and actions of people. Sometimes it seems like some kind of dream, a dream that disappears after waking up, as if confirming the prophecy: “Petersburg will be empty!” on its streets, along with Prince Christ, criminals and murderers wander, pondering their plans in “the most abstract and deliberate city on the entire globe.”
And now I offer you a small creative work - write a mini-essay “Dostoevsky’s Petersburg”. Before studying the novel “Crime and Punishment,” you imagined St. Petersburg differently and this is reflected in your drawings.
Summing up the lesson.
So, the myth of the city, which appeared in the era of realism, can continue to exist in subsequent literature, or disappear, or change altogether, as, for example, the myth of St. Petersburg has changed - now it is a “gangster city”, the center of the criminal world of Russia and the antipode of this city, claiming to be the capital of Russia.
End the lesson with a poem.
Two-faced Petersburg.
IN northern capital first time me
Drunk with the beauty of stone,
This city is eternal, proud, powerful,
He looks at me with a burning gaze.
And the Kazan and St. Isaac's Cathedrals,
Hermitage, Fontanka, Summer Garden.
Your story, as if in a fairy tale,
They talk about beauty with their appearance.
Suddenly, I turned into a narrow alley,
It was as if I had suddenly entered another world:
Dark, dusty, creepy, drunk
Petersburg appeared before me.
And, as if from a Dostoevsky novel
“depressed by poverty” people,
Not the same as on Nevsky Prospekt,
Silently, gloomily, he wanders into the darkness.
I'm walking through Dostoevsky's Petersburg,
As if I've been here more than once:
The narrow alley is dark gray,
Dampness, filth, street dirt.
Everyone is used to singing the praises of our northern city,
Our beautiful, proud “royal city”,
But no one knows about the “humiliated”
Or don’t they want to know about it?!
Cherkashina Arina (10th grade student).
Homework:
1. Find descriptions of the environment in which Raskolnikov, Sonya, and the Marmeladov family lived. (Write down in your notebook the epithets and comparisons that the author uses).
2. Find scenes of street life Part 2 (2); Part 2 (6); Part 5 (6). Prepare a retelling. Think about what the following “scenes of street life” mean and whether they are relevant in our time.
This image is extremely important for understanding the novel and, first of all, for explaining certain actions of the characters.
Petersburg appears in the novel as gloomy, painful, and hostile to people. This is a city of narrow, cramped streets populated by artisans and impoverished officials, dirty and scary courtyards in which everyday tragedies are played out. This painful gray landscape becomes the background, the everyday environment in which the action of the novel takes place, and gives it a particularly gloomy flavor.
But St. Petersburg, described in Dostoevsky’s novel, is not only the backdrop against which dramatic events. His image becomes, as it were, a symbol of a dysfunctional, immoral life, clearly comparable to the events described in the work. Almost all the action of the novel takes place in the part of the city where the poor lived. St. Petersburg is a city in which there are drinking bars on every corner, inviting the poor to drown their sorrows, drunken crowds on the streets, women throwing themselves from the bridge, this is a terrible kingdom of poverty, lack of rights, illnesses, both physical and mental.
The city landscape in the novel is connected with the author’s state of mind, with inner world his heroes. He corresponds to the sick, wild thoughts the main character of Raskolnikov’s work and contributes to the emergence of an inhuman theory in his mind. The reader, wandering around St. Petersburg with him, first of all acutely feels the unbearable stuffiness. This feeling of lack of air becomes the leitmotif of the novel and takes on a comprehensive meaning. A man is suffocating in the city “under the heavy St. Petersburg sky.” It’s just as hard for an insolvent person in the rooms where he lives. In stuffy and dark apartments, people starve, their dreams die, and in their place criminal thoughts arise in their minds. Life in St. Petersburg is tragic. Wandering around it, Raskolnikov sees the boundless grief of people, their crippled destinies: either an underage girl who was “drunk and deceived,” or the bourgeois Afrosinyushka, who is once again trying to commit suicide.
In St. Petersburg, depicted by Dostoevsky, life takes on extremely ugly shapes. The real often seems like a nightmare vision, and delirium and sleep seem like reality. On the night after the murder, Raskolnikov heard “desperate screams from the street, which, however, he listened to under his window every night at three o’clock.” This happens to him in real time. In Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg everything was mixed up: reality and delirium, reality and nightmare. That's why Svidrigailov calls it "a city of half-crazy people." He also talks about St. Petersburg as a city where there are so many “dark, harsh and strange influences on the human soul.” Svidrigailov prophesies a terrible fate for St. Petersburg - flood.
F. M. Dostoevsky, tracing the origin and development of Raskolnikov’s idea in the novel “Crime and Punishment,” shows that, along with other factors, the landscape of St. Petersburg itself contributed greatly to this. Thus, at the beginning of the novel, it describes what impression the Neva Islands made on the hero: “The greenery and freshness first pleased his tired eyes, accustomed to city dust, to lime and to the huge, crowding and oppressive houses. There was neither stuffiness nor stench here, or drinking bars. But soon these new, pleasant sensations turned into painful and irritating ones. Sometimes he stopped in front of some dacha decorated with greenery, looked into the fence, saw in the distance, on the balconies and terraces, dressed-up women and children running in the garden. he was occupied with flowers; he looked at them for the longest time. He also met magnificent carriages, riders and riders. 45; further - only volume and page).
The archipelago of the Neva Islands (Petrovsky, Aptekarsky, Krestovsky, Kamenny, Elagin) was the outskirts of the city. There were dachas of the St. Petersburg nobility and palaces that belonged to royal family. The landscapes of the islands aroused ambivalent feelings in Raskolnikov. They seemed to show to the hero’s eyes that ideal of harmonious unity with nature, to which the human heart eternally strives. But it is no coincidence that Raskolnikov’s first, immediate “pleasant sensations” soon gave way to embitterment. He remembered that this bright beautiful world created for a narrow circle of the social elite and fenced off by a strong fence from the rest of the people, doomed to poverty and suffering in small dirty closets and stuffy city alleys. And he himself, counting his entire fortune in the palm of his hand (“about thirty kopecks”), can only contemplate from afar, through the fence, the blessed earthly paradise inaccessible to him.
The artistic primary source for this scene was most likely a poem by F.I. Tyutchev "Send, Lord, your joy..." (1850):
Send, Lord, your joy
To those who, in the summer heat and heat,
Like a poor beggar, passing by the garden
Walking along the hot pavement;
Who glances casually through the fence
In the shade of the trees, the grass of the valleys,
To the inaccessible coolness
Luxurious, bright meadows.
Not hospitable for him
The trees have grown into canopy,
Not for him, like a smoky cloud,
The fountain hung in the air.
The azure grotto, as if from fog,
In vain his gaze beckons,
And the dewy dust of the fountain
The chapters will not refresh him.
Send, Lord, your joy
To the one who follows the path of life,
Like a poor beggar, passing by the garden
Walking along the sultry pavement.
This poem was included in Tyutchev's poetry collection, published in 1854 as a supplement to the Sovremennik magazine. Dostoevsky, having become acquainted with this collection, wrote to A.N. Maikov on January 18, 1856: “I’ll tell you a secret, big secret: Tyutchev is very wonderful; but... etc. (...) However, many of his poems are excellent" (Dostoevsky F.M. Index. collected works. Letters. T. 28. Book 1. P. 210). Tyutchev mentions a fountain twice. This image contrasts with others that open and ending the poem: “to the summer heat and heat,” “the sultry pavement.” Dostoevsky’s novel opens with the following description of St. Petersburg: “The heat on the street was terrible, and besides, it was stuffy, crowded, there was lime everywhere, forests, bricks, dust, and that special summer stench. , so well known to every St. Petersburger who does not have the opportunity to rent a dacha...” (6, 6). And later the hero, passing by the Yusupov Garden, “began to think about the construction of high fountains and how well they would refresh the air in all squares.” (6.60). But if Tyutchev trusts in God’s mercy (“Send, Lord, your joy...”), then Dostoevsky’s hero is convinced that no one will decide for their people. social problems and only on them can the transformation of the surrounding reality depend. Raskolnikov's dreams of what he would like to see human life, also conveyed with the help of the St. Petersburg landscape: “Little by little he came to the conviction that if the Summer Garden were extended to the entire Field of Mars and even connected with the palace Mikhailovsky Garden, it would be a wonderful and most useful thing for the city” (Ibid.).
This is not just about the aesthetic redevelopment of one of the St. Petersburg landscapes; the subtext of this passage is much deeper and more complex. The Champ de Mars was the site of military exercises and parades, a place for demonstrating the military power of the Russian autocracy. Raskolnikov’s desire to destroy the very memory of this field, turning it into a garden, hints at the essence of the hero’s idea, unspoken right on the pages of the novel. The main thing in it is the desire to free people from autocratic-bureaucratic oppression, to find ways to create a new society based on social justice and attention to needs common man. Then it would be possible to dispose of the palace gardens, which have become public property.
The mention of the Mikhailovsky Garden is also not accidental. Here stood the palace-castle of Paul I, a silent witness to the political conspiracy that resulted in the assassination of the emperor. Russian herself history XVIII — early XIX century, palace coups, carried out with enviable ease, could lead the hero to the conviction that in Russia everything is possible, you can “simply take everything by the tail and shake it to hell.” The only question is whether there will be someone who dares to take the decisive step. No wonder Raskolnikov tells Sonya that “power is given only to those who dare to bend down and take it. There is only one thing, one thing: you just have to dare!” (6, 321).
One of the landscapes depicted in the novel is particularly significant. It was probably he who contributed to the emergence of Raskolnikov’s theory of “extraordinary” personalities who could influence the course of history. The novel says that “it happened to him, maybe a hundred times, to stop at this very same place, gaze intently at this truly magnificent panorama, and each time he was almost surprised by one unclear and insoluble impression of his.” Raskolnikov stood on the Nikolaevsky Bridge, along which he usually walked to the university, and “turned to face the Neva, in the direction of the palace” (6, 90, 89).
In the draft versions, Dostoevsky emphasized that his hero, returning from the university, “even took into the habit of stopping for two minutes on the bridge...” (7, 39). The perspective of buildings located on both banks of the Neva from this vantage point not only awakened historical memory, but also carried certain socio-political information. On one bank, the buildings of the Academy of Arts, the University, the Academy of Sciences, the Kunstkamera (the first Russian museum) were associated with the age of Russian Enlightenment and reminded of the naive hopes of Russian enlighteners to improve the political system and social life of Russia, educating the minds and souls of their contemporaries, and above all - rulers. But the perspective of the embankment was closed by the spire of the Peter and Paul Fortress, visible in the distance, where the best minds of Russia visited as prisoners. In the 18th century, the same enlighteners (N.I. Novikov, A.N. Radishchev) ended up there; in the 40s of the 19th century, Dostoevsky languished, awaiting his death sentence, along with his fellow Petrashevites, who also paid for their passion for educational ideas .
During the creation of the novel “Crime and Punishment,” D. I. Pisarev was in the fortress, who had already managed to attract the attention of the public with his sharp and original critical articles. And a little earlier there he wrote the novel “What to do?” declared a state criminal N. G. Chernyshevsky. IN last chapter In the novel, Chernyshevsky expressed the hope that in 1865, when the reforms were completed and the people were finally convinced of how cruelly they had been deceived, a social explosion could occur, which would lead to a “change of scenery.” Dostoevsky, writing his novel in the same year of 1865 and recalling Vera Pavlovna’s fourth dream, stated with bitter irony that Chernyshevsky’s hopes were in vain and instead of “crystal palaces” the people received only taverns. “The Crystal Palace” is the name of one of the unsightly taverns in the novel where Raskolnikov meets Zametov. Moreover, this significant name was not invented by Dostoevsky at all, but was taken from real life in St. Petersburg.
Thus, the historical experience of Russia has shown that enlightenment is powerless to help people’s troubles, since the intellectual and spiritual life of society is under the vigilant control of the ruling authorities, who categorically suppress the spread of ideas they dislike. This is the chain of far-reaching thoughts that a reader could formulate when he imagined one of the banks of the Neva, seen by Raskolnikov from the Nikolaevsky Bridge.
On the other bank, as if in contrast, there were concentrated buildings that symbolized all forms of power with the help of which the state rigidly subjugated people: the Winter Palace (imperial power), St. Isaac's Cathedral (ideological), Senate and Synod (bureaucratic). In Dostoevsky’s description, Isaac is especially highlighted: “The dome of the cathedral, which is not better outlined from any point than when looking at it from here, from the bridge, not reaching twenty steps from the chapel, was shining, and through the clear air one could clearly see even every its decoration" (6, 89-90).
The shining dome attracted the hero’s gaze not only to the cathedral building, but also to the place that had a place in the history of St. Petersburg special meaning. This is Senate Square in front of the cathedral, associated with the memory of the failed Decembrist uprising. In essence. Raskolnikov, who wanted to restore social justice, faced the same problems that the Decembrists had tried but failed to solve. And it’s not for nothing that Raskolnikov, “closely” peering at this landscape, “was amazed (...) every time at his gloomy and mysterious impression...” (6, 90). It was this view that could cause the hero to painfully conclude that a figure seeking to influence the course of history must certainly be ready to fearlessly step over the spilled blood. The Decembrists, wanting to avoid bloodshed, abandoned the discussed plan of armed seizure Winter Palace- and were defeated. But Nikolai Pavlovich was not embarrassed by such moral problems - and he became a Russian ruler. Raskolnikov once thinks: “The “prophet” is right, right, when he places a good-sized battery somewhere across the street and blows on the right and wrong, without even deigning to explain himself! Obey, trembling creature, and - do not desire, because - It’s none of your business!...” (6, 212).
Commentators usually attribute this statement to one of the episodes of Napoleon’s struggle for power. But Senate Square suggested to the hero (and with him to the reader) a closer analogy from Russian history, when Nicholas I, putting forward his cannons, coldly shot his political opponents in the middle of his own capital, and with them, random onlookers and craftsmen who fell under grapeshot. on the construction of St. Isaac's Cathedral. For Raskolnikov, the monument to Peter I, towering in the middle of Senate Square, could also serve as confirmation of the patterns concerning the destinies of “extraordinary” personalities. The rise to power of Peter, who willfully changed the life of Russia, was accompanied by the brutal suppression of Streltsy revolts and Cossack riots. In the original plan of the novel, it was not Napoleon, but Peter I who was the main reference point for Raskolnikov, against which he tested his theory. This is evidenced by the draft editions. So, in his confession to Sonya, Raskolnikov said: “I need power. (...) I want everything I see to be different (...) I don’t want to dream, I want to do. I want to do it myself.” And after this, in parentheses, Dostoevsky gave a historical example to which the hero refers: “Dutch Peter” (7, 153).
If in final version Raskolnikov looks at Senate Square from the Nikolaevsky Bridge, then in drafts he comes to the square, and his attention is focused on the monument to Peter: “Then I walked along Senate Square. There is always wind here, especially near the monument. A sad and difficult place. Why on everything "Have I never found anything more depressing and painful than the sight of this huge square?" (7, 34). In the final edition, Russian analogies, inconvenient for censorship reasons, were replaced by European examples. But in the subtext of the novel, Peter’s shadow accompanies Raskolnikov everywhere. The city itself, created by him and named after him, reminds us of Peter. Returning from the islands, Raskolnikov falls asleep on Petrovsky Island. “One hundred times” stopping on the Nikolaevsky Bridge, he sees the sculpture of the Bronze Horseman. Even in his thoughts about connecting the Summer Garden with Mikhailovsky, the image of Peter is also latently present. After all, in the Summer Garden stood the Petrovsky Palace, and near the Mikhailovsky Castle, opposite the Summer Garden, Paul I ordered to erect another equestrian statue Petra.
Narrating how Raskolnikov became entangled in the contradictions of his theory and committed an absurd, senseless crime, Dostoevsky debunked the hero’s ideas that one can become a “good” Napoleon or Peter. Raskolnikov dreamed of power in order to benefit disadvantaged people. He confessed to his sister: “I myself wanted good for people and would do hundreds, thousands of good deeds...” (6, 400). And in the drafts, the author formulates the hero’s dream this way: “to rake them into your hands and then do good to them” (7, 83). But, according to Dostoevsky, any ruler who imposes his individual will on an entire people (even if this is done with the best intentions) inevitably turns out to be a despot, indifferent to the needs and troubles of the “little man.” And it is no coincidence that an excerpt from the early editions of the novel, when Raskolnikov found himself on the deserted Senate Square in front of the monument to Peter, while experiencing “melancholy” and “heavy” sensations, echoed the climax scene of Pushkin’s poem “ Bronze Horseman"The city itself, filled with historical memories, suggested to writers different eras similar topics.
Gracheva I.V. Russian speech No. 5 (..2001)
Landscape and its functions in the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment".
The specificity of the subject of the image (the city) determines a certain monotony of Dostoevsky’s landscapes. As a rule, these are typical landscapes. Thus, in the novel “Crime and Punishment” we encounter two types of landscapes. The first is stuffy, dusty, smoky streets, the mercilessly scorching sun, hot asphalt... The second is a gloomy, gloomy, cloudy city, enveloping in cold, sharp gusts of wind, monotonously drumming rain, black water in the Neva...
These pictures are drawn dirty, dull, gray paints. This is already the first landscape of the novel. “The heat outside was terrible, besides the stuffiness, the crowd, there was lime everywhere, scaffolding, brick, dust and that special summer stench, so familiar to every St. Petersburger who does not have the opportunity to rent a dacha - all this at once unpleasantly shook the already frayed nerves young men. The unbearable stench from the taverns... and the drunks who constantly appeared, despite it being a weekday, completed the disgusting and sad coloring of the picture.”
The symbol of the sun in the novel
Pulcheria Alexandrovna, who came from the provinces, also notes the extraordinary stuffiness of St. Petersburg. Leaving her son’s apartment, she notices: “... it’s terribly stuffy... and where is there any air to breathe here? Here and on the streets, as in rooms without windows. Lord, what a city!” Yu. V. Lebedev notes that the unbearable stuffiness of St. Petersburg is “a part of the general atmosphere of the novel, stuffy and hopeless.”
The only bright touch found in landscapes of the first type is the bright, blood-red sun. However, this dazzling, red sun against the backdrop of a stuffy, dusty city leaves not a joyful, but a depressing impression. “The sun shone brightly in his eyes, so that it became painful to look at, and his head began to spin completely - the usual feeling of a feverish person who suddenly goes out into the street on a bright sunny day.”
The image of the sun in the novel has several meanings. It hurts Raskolnikov to look at the sun, the sun seems to blind him. In this description of the hero's perception of nature, Dostoevsky hints that Raskolnikov is blinded by his idea, and the hero's entire worldview is distorted.
Speaking on this topic, I would like to talk about the connection that existed between the author and his future hero even before the creation of the novel. Dostoevsky was not understood during his lifetime, the problems and questions that tormented him were inaccessible to his contemporaries, and global prophecies seemed to be the fruit of a morbid imagination. And in this sense, Dostoevsky could repeat after Raskolnikov that “truly great people must feel great sadness in the world.”
"I could never understand the idea that one tenth of the people should get higher development, and the remaining nine-tenths should only serve as material and a means for this, while they themselves remain in the shadows, in the darkness... I believe... that the kingdom of thought and light is capable of establishing itself among us, in our Russia, even sooner, perhaps, than anywhere else... I don’t know how it will all happen, but it will come true.” These lines, which came from the pen of Dostoevsky himself, reflect the main idea of the novel and define the relationship between the author and the hero. Dostoevsky through the images he created, storylines, actions, landscapes gradually overthrows, shows the inconsistency and monstrosity of the theory of the protagonist, a theory generated by various social factors, a theory that rejects the equality of people and divides society into “chosen ones,” “those with power” and “trembling creatures.”
Critic rating
Such assessments of Crime and Punishment reduce it to a depiction of a random pathological phenomenon of life.
DI. Pisarev saw in the author of the novel a major writer - a realist. Approaching Crime and Punishment from the perspective of " real criticism“D.I. Pisarev was the first to understand and show the social significance of the novel as a realistically faithful reproduction of some “disastrous circumstances” of Russian life in the 60s. The strength of Pisarev’s article lies in the fact that the critic focused on the analysis moral problems. He revealed the spiritual relationships between the degenerate Marmeladov and Raskolnikov, who found himself in an exceptional position. Marmeladov was not always pitiful, and “from the remainder of his humanity,” Raskolnikov understands that “there is a path leading to Marmeladov’s fall, and that it is possible to descend onto this slippery path even from that height of mental and moral development, which he, the student Raskolnikov, managed to climb." These pages of Pisarev’s article reveal the depth of his humane thought.
The critic views the image of Raskolnikov as a victim, social injustice, while muting his sense of individual protest.
Final questions
1. How did you understand the role of landscape in the novel?
3. What did critics say about the novel?
Homework
1).Reading a novel.
2). Write an essay - a discussion on given topics.
