“The Tale of Misfortune-Grief” is an ancient Russian work, the author of which remains unknown. It is this literary memo that will be discussed in the article. We will look at its brief content, provide an analysis and analyze the image of the main character.
About the product
The story of how the story was discovered is very unusual. Until 1856, no one had even heard of it. “The Tale of Woe-Misfortune,” the contents of which will be discussed below, was accidentally found by academician A.N. Pypin, when he studied the manuscripts of M.N. Pogodin, who collected folk legends and more.
The work dates back to the 17th century. It contained many new and unusual features for ancient Russian literature: a hero without a name, folk verse and language, a special attitude to moral values and a person’s spiritual choice.
“The Tale of Woe-Misfortune”: summary
The work begins with a biblical story, namely, with the fall of Adam and Eve. Thus, the author fits his history into the global one in religious terms. Then he compares the Lord, who, being angry with people, nevertheless showed them the path to salvation, with parents who, while raising their children, punish them.
Here the main character of the Tale appears - well done. From childhood, his parents teach him to be smart. They instruct their son not to go to feasts, not to drink too much, to beware of fools, to avoid temptresses, not to take other people's things, not to deceive when choosing friends, to look at their reliability and devotion, and not at praise.
All instructions and blessings of parents come down to following the traditional way of life. To live well, you need to follow the behests of your ancestors and not break ties with family and traditions.
How does the fellow live?
The young man from “The Tale of Misfortune” did not like to follow the advice of his parents. He wants to live by his own mind. The author explains this desire of the hero by the fact that he was still stupid and young, had not seen or known life. It is the lack of everyday experience that makes him contradict his parents.
Guided only by his own will, the young man makes new friends. He became so close to one of them that he began to call him brother. It was this “brother” who invited the young man to the nearest tavern. The hero, listening to the sweet speeches of his faithful friend, drinks a lot and quickly gets drunk. The drinking session ended with the young man falling asleep right in the tavern.
What does gullibility mean?
It wasn’t easy for the fellow from “The Tale of Misfortune” the next morning. While the hero was sleeping, he was robbed. “True friends” left him only worn-out bast shoes (“stomp shoes”) and rags (“tavern gunka”). Deceived, he wants to go to his “friends”, but they won’t let him in. Nobody wants to help the young man. The hero becomes ashamed, his conscience cannot allow him to return home to his parents, to his “family and tribe.”
As a result, he decides to go to distant lands. In his wanderings, he accidentally ends up in some town. There he wanders into a courtyard where a feast is taking place. When meeting new people, the young man now follows the “written teaching,” that is, following the science of his parents. The owners really liked this behavior. Therefore, the hero is invited to the table and begins to be treated.
However, the young man was not having fun at the feast. And after some time, he finally admits to his new acquaintances that he disobeyed his parents, and now he is ashamed to return to them. He also asks for advice on how to live now and what to do on a foreign side. Good people recommend that he live according to traditional laws, that is, follow the behests of his father and mother. Wisdom in the centuries-old experience of our ancestors.
Now the young man from “The Tale of Woe-Misfortune” can handle everything. Happiness appeared to him through awareness of the wisdom of his ancestors and obedience to his father and mother. Now he lives skillfully, so he quickly makes a fortune and finds a good bride for himself. Things are moving towards the wedding. However, here the fellow spoils everything - he begins to brag to the guests about everything he has achieved. The author condemns this act of his hero - words of praise are always “rotten.”
The hero’s praises are heard by Woe-Misfortune and immediately decides to kill the hero. From that moment on, it relentlessly follows the young man everywhere. Incites him to drink away all his acquired property in taverns, since only “naked and barefoot people are not driven out of heaven.” The young man begins to listen to Grief-Misfortune and goes to a tavern, where he spends all his money.
Only after being completely ruined does the hero come to his senses and begin to think about how to get rid of his obsessive companion. The first idea that comes to his mind is the thought of suicide. But the young man can’t drown himself in the river. The hero gets out to the shore, where Grief-Misfortune is already waiting for him. With sweet speeches it forces the young man to finally submit to his will.
Ending
The summary is coming to an end. “The Tale of Misfortune” is, at its core, an instructive story about how life itself punishes those who neglect the precepts of their elders. That is why the fellow found himself in such a difficult situation.
However, fate again gives the hero the opportunity for salvation. And this time good people help him. The carriers across the river listened to the young man’s story, took pity on him, warmed him and fed him. These same people transport him to the other side and give him parting advice - to go to his parents and ask for their blessing.
However, as soon as the hero is left alone, Grief-Misfortune reappears and begins his pursuit. To get rid of an unwanted companion, the young man turns into a falcon. But Grief does not retreat and becomes a gyrfalcon. The hero turns into a dove, and the ego companion becomes a hawk; well done - into a wolf, Grief turns into a flock, the hero becomes a feather grass, Grief-Misfortune turns into a scythe; The young man will turn into a fish, Grief relentlessly follows him with a net.
Finally, in despair, the young man regains his human appearance. But even here, Grief-Misfortune is next to him. Now it inspires the hero with thoughts of robbery and murder, so that he can be condemned and drowned or hanged.
The young man resisted for a long time, and then decided to go and become a monk. As soon as the hero crosses the doors of the monastery, Sorrow lags behind him. There is no way for him beyond the gates of the holy temple.
“The Tale of Woe-Misfortune”: analysis and genre originality
In the 17th century, short cautionary tales were common. They did not yet have clear genre characteristics, being united only by moral themes. The authors of such works turned to folk tales, ritual and lyrical songs, and anecdotes in search of a plot. “The Tale of Misfortune-Grief” belongs precisely to this type of ancient Russian literature (the summary serves as proof of this).
For the first time, these everyday stories moved away from medieval conventions in depicting people and events. In them, special attention began to be paid to the individual, and signs of psychologism appeared in the depiction of heroes. For the first time, the authors introduced several conflicts, including everyday ones, used ethnographic material, and paid attention to the social actions of the characters.
At the same time, folklore trends intensified. For example, in “The Tale...”, in addition to the folk language, there are fairy-tale elements: a young man turns into animals, trying to escape from Grief.
Folklore elements
“The Tale of Woe-Misfortune” (a brief summary illustrates this well) is permeated with folklore images and symbolism. The author himself constantly resorts to the techniques of folk song language, uses folk epithets and repetitions: “damp earth”, “valiant prowess”, etc.
However, “The Tale...” also has innovative elements for 17th century literature. For example, the author shows sympathy for his hero. However, the work does not contain a clear description of everyday life, there is no specific indication of the place of action and geographical names, and the time is not indicated. Even the hero remains nameless.
Household paintings
“The Tale of Misfortune” is replete with images of people’s lives, which paints a full-fledged everyday background against which the actions unfold. Thus, the values of the world of “The Tale...” become clear from the teachings of the young man’s parents, the practical ingenuity of the merchant people, the moral instructions of “good people” and their everyday advice. Despite the fact that all this creates a picture of the moral values of the Russian people and their way of life, there is no hint in the text of the historical specificity of the events described. The reader is not given a single clue to understand at what time the plot unfolds.
Pictures of everyday life are supplemented by some ethnographic details, although not very numerous: a “tavern yard”, a description of an “honest feast”. Also called items of clothing: “chiry” (shoes), “tavern gunka”, “paw shoes”, “expensive ports”.
The surrounding world, however, is depicted using exclusively folklore elements: “foreign country” without geographical names, “hail”, “hut”, “high tower”, etc.
Woe-Misfortune
First of all, the instructive story “The Tale of Misfortune.” Grief appeared in the work as the very force that punishes a person for unrighteous deeds, inclining him to even worse acts. This very image embodies the people's understanding of grief. In folklore, the fate of a person is often represented precisely in this image. That is, in its essence it contains an educational function.
In addition, in folk songs, Gorya is even credited with heroic traits (for example, voice), which indicates that he also performs a protective function. We can say that Grief appears as the protector of the human soul. So, Grief-Misfortune forces the young man to go to a monastery, abandoning worldly life. However, in order to get relief from suffering, it is necessary to pass a certain test - not to succumb to the persuasion of Grief and not to start doing even worse acts.
The image of the main character
The main character of “The Tale of Misfortune” is a fellow who has no name, which indicates the typicality of the character. He is not unique in his kind - there are many people like him among the people. From the narrative it becomes clear that this is a bifurcated character, inclined either to good deeds or to bad ones. However, the author himself is inclined to sympathize with his character, despite his sins.
The hero of “The Tale of Misfortune” is endowed with a rich inner world; he is at a crossroads. The reader sees his inner world and mental torment. The desperation of the young man is highly artistically depicted when Grief brought him to hunger and poverty. However, the hero’s small misdeeds, for which he bears such a serious punishment, force the reader to sympathize with him.
Thus, the genre of the everyday story, to which this work belongs, had a great influence on the development of all Russian literature, thanks to the rejection of canonical traditions and the inclusion of new elements in the narrative.
“The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” has come down to us in the only copy of the first half of the 18th century. According to the time of its origin, it presumably dates back to the first half of the 17th century.
“The Tale of the Mountain of Misfortune, how the Mountain of Misfortune brought a young man into the monastic rank” was discovered in 1856 by academician A. N. Pypin among the manuscripts of the collection of M. P. Pogodin in the Public Library in St. Petersburg. He found a handwritten collection of the first half of the 18th century, in which, among other works, there was “The Tale”.
“The Tale of the Mountain of Misfortune” is a work that, in its theme, occupies a kind of middle position in Russian literature: it combines the themes of ancient Russian with the themes of new Russian literature, the themes of folk art and writing, it is tragic and at the same time belongs to the folk culture of laughter . Preserved in one list and seemingly little noticeable, it is nevertheless connected by thin threads with the “Prayer” of Daniil the Sharpener of the 12th century. and with the works of Dostoevsky, with “The Tale of Hops” and with the works of Gogol, with “The Tale of Thomas and Erem” and with “Petersburg” by Andrei Bely. It seems to stand above its time, touches on the “eternal” themes of human life and fate, and at the same time is typical specifically for the 17th century.
Its author, as it were, looks from above with a philosophical gaze at a disadvantaged person, at his fate - with irony and pity, with condemnation and sympathy, considers him guilty of his death and at the same time as if doomed and not guilty of anything.
In all its contradictions, the story shows its exclusivity, and the author - his genius. He is a genius because he himself does not fully realize the significance of what he has written, but the story he created allows for different interpretations, evokes different moods, “plays” like a precious stone plays with its facets.
Everything in this story was new and unusual for the traditions of ancient Russian literature: folk verse, folk language, an extraordinary nameless hero, a high consciousness of the human personality, even if it had reached the last stages of decline. In the story, more than in many other works of the second half of the 17th century, a new attitude was manifested. It is not surprising that even the first researchers of this story sharply differed in their opinions about its very origin.
“The Tale of the Mountain of Misfortune” in the form in which it was preserved in the only copy that has come down to us is a complete literary work of art, all parts of which are inseparably connected by a single thought about the unfortunate fate of people. But in its morality it deviates far from the traditional instructions of church literature of its time.
For the first time in Russian literature, the participation of the author is used by a person who has violated the everyday morality of society, deprived of parental blessing, weak-willed, acutely aware of his fall, mired in drunkenness and gambling, who has made friends with tavern roosters and firemen, wandering to God knows where in the “tavern gunka”, in whose ears are “roaring with robbery.”
For the first time in Russian literature, the inner life of man was revealed with such power and insight, and the fate of fallen man was depicted with such drama. All this testified to some fundamental shifts in the author’s consciousness, incompatible with medieval ideas about man.
At the same time, “The Tale of the Mountain of Misfortune” is the first work of Russian literature that so broadly solved the problems of artistic generalization. Almost all narrative works of ancient Russian literature are devoted to isolated cases, strictly localized and defined in the historical past. The actions of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", the chronicle, historical stories, lives of saints, even the later stories about Frol Skobeev, Karp Sutulov, Savva Grudtsyn are strictly connected with certain localities, attached to historical periods. Even in those cases when a fictitious person is introduced into a work of ancient Russian literature, he is surrounded by a swarm of historical memories that create the illusion of his real existence in the past.
Sharply diverging from the centuries-old tradition of Russian literature, “The Tale of the Mountain of Misfortune” does not tell about a single fact, striving to create a generalizing narrative. For the first time, artistic generalization, the creation of a typical collective image, confronted a literary work as its direct task.
The unknown young man of the story bears no local or historical characteristics. In the story there is not a single proper name, not a single mention of cities or rivers familiar to Russian people; it is impossible to find even a single indirect hint of any historical circumstances that would allow us to determine the time of action of the story. Only by the casual mention of “living room dress” can one guess that the nameless fellow belonged to the merchant class.
The first work of Russian literature, which consciously set itself the goal of providing a generalizing, collective image, at the same time strives for the greatest breadth of artistic generalization. The homely life of the homely hero is realized in the story as the fate of all suffering humanity. The theme of the story is human life in general. That is why the story so carefully avoids any details. The fate of the nameless young man is depicted as a particular manifestation of the general fate of humanity, presented in few but expressive features in the introductory part of the story.
Taking the main external outlines of the image of Grief of Misfortune from lyrical songs, the author of the story uniquely rethought the folklore type of Grief - the fate of a person given to him from birth for the rest of his life. In the story, Grief appears during the young man’s wanderings, first in a dream, as if it were an image born of his upset thought. But at the same time, Grief itself is preliminarily shown as a creature living its own special life, as a powerful force that has “outwitted” people “and wiser” and “more idle” than the young man. It is also noteworthy that at each moment of the story the author timed the appearance of Grief next to the young man.
Yu.L. Vorotnikov
READING CIRCLE OF OUR ANCESTORS.
"A TALE OF Grief and Misfortune"
Yu. L. Vorotnikov
Vorotnikov Yuri Leonidovich- Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences,
Scientific Secretary of the Department of Language and Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In 1856, collecting materials for his master's thesis, literary critic and future academician A.N. Pypin worked in the so-called Pogodin "Ancient Storage". One day in February or March, Alexander Nikolaevich was looking through a handwritten collection of the 17th - first half of the 18th centuries. in a simple new binding. Among the various works included in the collection, his attention was attracted by an unusual story that occupied pages 295-306. After reading it, Alexander Nikolaevich reported the discovery to the historian N.I., who worked nearby. Kostomarov, who was so impressed by the story that he began to recite the “ancient poem” loudly. Pypin tried to reason with him, talking about the inappropriateness of such behavior in the library hall, but even the intervention of the official on duty could not moderate Kostomarov’s enthusiasm.
This is how the first and still the only list known to science was introduced into scientific circulation of the famous “Tale of Woe and Misfortune” - a work that, according to Academician A.M. Panchenko, "worthily completed the seven-century development of ancient Russian literature". The first edition of the story followed literally a few days after the discovery of the manuscript. It was published by N.I. Kostomarov in the March book of Sovremennik for 1856 under the title “Grief-Misfortune, an ancient Russian poem.” The publication was accompanied by an article in which N.I. Kostomarov was the first to raise questions that are still being discussed by scientists: about the genre of the story, about its relationship to literature and folklore, about the originality of the content of the work.
From the day of discovery of A.N. Pypin's text of "The Tale of Woe and Misfortune" has already passed more than 140 years, and if you collect all the works published during this time and in one way or another related to the study of this work, you will get a very impressive library. Bibliography compiled by V.L. Vinogradova and published in 1956 for the centenary of the opening of the list of the story, there are 91 titles [. Over the years since then, this bibliography has, of course, been significantly expanded.
What is the reason for the unflagging interest of more and more generations of researchers and readers in a work written by an anonymous author in the second half of the “rebellious” 17th century? Academician D.S. Likhachev answers this question like this: “Everything in this story was new and unusual for the traditions of ancient Russian literature: folk verse, folk language, an unusual nameless hero, a high consciousness of the human personality, even if it had reached the last stages of decline.”. If we single out the most significant from this series of reasons, then it will, without a doubt, be the last of those named: the story reflected the beginning of the formation of a new idea of a person and his place in the world, which marked a turning point in the history of Russian literature, and indeed of the entire Russian society.
The medieval picture of the world was imbued with the idea of a vertical, hierarchical organization of space. The top was opposed to the bottom as good - bad, valuable - worthless, heaven - hell, god - Satan. All objects and all places were located vertically, which was both a spatial reference point and an axiological scale: the higher, the more blissful, the lower, the closer to hell.
The vertical hierarchy also included sections of the real geographical space that surrounded medieval man. Geography in the Middle Ages was not just a natural science discipline. This, as Yu.M. writes. Lotman, "a type of religious-utopian classification"[ . Lands and countries are divided into saints and sinners; they are close to God to varying degrees and, therefore, are located at different levels of the vertical “ladder of righteousness.” Therefore, the real geographical movements of a person are thought of as a kind of ascent and fall. A medieval (including ancient Russian) traveler is not a tourist looking for exotic sensations, but a pilgrim thinking about the salvation of his soul and seeing one degree or another of the presence of the “spirit of God” in the places he visits. Therefore, the most revered journey was to the city about which the book of the prophet Ezekiel read: “Thus said the Lord God: “This is Jerusalem! I have placed him among the nations, and the lands around him!"
The space of everyday life of a person in Ancient Rus' was also ideologically comprehended and assessed. At the highest place in a city or village is a church, which itself is a microcosm, a symbol of the vast cosmos: “Standing in church, the worshiper saw the whole world around him: heaven, earth and their connections with each other.”. Nearby, and perhaps even in plain sight, is a monastery, a righteous place, pleasing to God, a place of solitude and salvation from a sinful life. One's own home also occupies a certain position in the vertical hierarchy of places. This is a kind of starting point, in a certain sense isomorphic to the earth's surface in the global three-member opposition of heaven-earth-hell. From home you can go to a church or monastery, that is, get closer to heaven and God, or you can go to a tavern or tavern, “get drunk,” fall and end up in hell. The tavern is, so to speak, the everyday underworld in the life of ancient Russian man, the “mouth of hell,” a failure in everyday space in the sense in which a church and a monastery are the “doors of heaven,” the path upward, to God.
There are more or less revered places inside the house, and their marking goes back to the most ancient periods of society. The center of the house is the hearth, where "from a ritual and economic point of view, the raw, undeveloped, unclean turns into cooked, mastered, pure". The marking of the red, or honorary, corner was determined by the placement of pagan symbols in it. Christian views overlapped with pagan ones, and the place of household gods in the red corner was taken by icons depicting saints. In a monastery or in a church there are also places differently located on the vertical axiological scale. In a monastery, the chapel is “higher” than the kitchen, and in a church the altar is “higher” than the porch.
So, any movement of an ancient Russian person in real space, all his paths down to the most insignificant transition from one point of the house to another are curved by the force field of the axiological vertical; he always seems to "stands on the path leading both to the spiritual city of the Lord, the highest Jerusalem or Zion, and to the city of Antichrist".
The so-called world of laughter, generated by folk laughter culture, closely associated with the elements of holidays, was of great importance in the ideological and everyday life of medieval people. This second world of the Middle Ages was characterized by its own well-defined cosmology, its own attitude to space, and favorite places of action. Laughter culture is characterized by a logic of reduction. Folk in its essence and origin, the element of laughter turns the officially approved picture of the world inside out and reveals its inconsistency with reality: "The existing world is destroyed in order to be reborn and renewed". Specific laughter areas of space, the actions in which were subject to the logic of the laughter world, were, first of all, the city square - the venue for various holidays, as well as a bathhouse and a tavern. The influence of this “wrong side” culture on the literature of medieval Europe and Ancient Rus' is enormous and has recently been actively studied.
Thus, the picture of the world of Russian Man in ancient times was a rather complex formation, which included elements of various natures. At a certain stage, after a long struggle, all these disparate elements were, as it were, brought to a common denominator, came into agreement with each other and formed a single, harmonious whole. Famous literary critic, representative of Russian diaspora P.M. Bicilli wrote about this:
“The world of medieval man was small, understandable and conveniently observable. Everything in this world was ordered, distributed in places; everyone and everything was given their own business and their own honor. There were no empty places or gaps anywhere... There were no unknown areas in this world , the sky was studied as well as the earth, and it was impossible to get lost anywhere" .The world of laughter, the world of anticulture, the “antiworld” that turns reality inside out, was thought of precisely as invalid, fictitious. The real world was subject to the laws of “decency and orderliness.”
This holistic picture of the world gradually became more and more official and by the 16th century. acquired the character of a state ideology.
Generalizing works of that time, written in the style of the “second monumentalism” (“Stoglav”, “Great Fourth Menaion”, “Facebook Chronicle”, “Degree Book”, “Domostroy”, etc.), created authority for the official picture of the world "grand all-interpretive worldview system".
This continued until the era that in our history was called the “Time of Troubles” and became a period of colossal changes in Russian society. A medieval picture of the world, imbued with the idea of a hierarchical organization of the universe, subject to laws "decency and orderliness" began to collapse. Everything was in a fluid state. The man felt the fragility and instability of the world and his position in it. The traditional perception of space as a vertically ordered harmonious hierarchy of places was deformed, and the position of individual objects in the hierarchy was rethought. This happened, for example, with the monastery as an ideal place of life for the righteous, pleasing to God. A new type of ascetic appears - the worldly one. A striking example of this is “The Tale of Juliania Lazarevskaya”. The monastery in the story recedes into the background, its place is taken by a house, and the “house structure” seems to be an act no less pleasing to God than monastic deeds. However, the perception of the house as a delimited, developed and inhabited space by man also does not remain unchanged.
The image of a home - an orderly, “one's own” space - is already characteristic of the earliest stages of the development of society. It is reflected in such archaic genres of folklore as conspiracies ( “There is an iron trench near the yard; so that neither a fierce beast, nor a reptile, nor an evil man, nor a forest grandfather could get through this tyn!”) and proverbs ( “Everything is fine at home, but living in someone else’s life is worse!”). The picture of the world formed under the influence of the Christian religion is characterized by the same perception of the image of the house; it even acquired greater significance, since the demiurge, the organizer of both the huge house of the universe and the small house of each person, was thought to be none other than the creator god himself: “The structure of existence is from God, but the way of life is also from God.” .
Many works of Christian literature, starting with the book of maxims and aphorisms of Jesus, son of Sirach, were devoted to the regulation of home life. On ancient Russian soil, a kind of encyclopedia of this kind became “Domostroy” by Silvestrov, in which Sylvester not only gives the good Christian the rules of pious behavior, but also, as the famous historian of Russian language and literature F.I. wrote. Buslaev, “with the naivety characteristic of our antiquity, he goes into some small details about the ability to live and conduct one’s affairs prudently”. And indeed, in Domostroy we will find the following sections, for example: “How can Christians believe in the Holy Trinity and the Most Pure Mother of God, and the cross of Christ, and the holy heavenly incorporeal powers, and all the saints, and honorable and holy relics, and venerate them?”(Chapter 2), and next to it: “Like any dress, take care of the leftovers and trimmings,” since those leftovers and trimmings "applies to everything in housekeeping"(Chapter 31). However, is it really so naive to combine in one book the statement that “It is fitting for every Christian to live in the Orthodox Christian faith,” and advice to the housekeeper, “how to keep every stock of longitudinal grain in the cellar, and in barrels, and in tubs, and in measuring cups, and in fabrics, and in buckets”? If we remember that life and being are equal to God’s institutions, then such a union will turn out to be legitimate.
In the minds of people in Ancient Rus', a house is the same microcosm, the same reflection of the universe as the church, and its structure must correspond to the same principles as the structure of the universe. However, in the 17th century. this view undergoes significant changes, as reflected in “The Tale of Woe and Misfortune.” The plot of the story is traced by many researchers to the plot of the parable of the Prodigal Son. However, in this case we have to talk, rather, not about the author of the story borrowing the motives of the parable, but about a dialogue with it, or rather, even a dispute. The parable takes place in a traditionally interpreted space. The father's house, which the prodigal son leaves and where he returns after joyless wanderings, represents an image of an orderly, harmonious universe. The ending, captured in Rembrandt’s famous “Return of the Prodigal Son,” symbolizes the possibility of a person’s salvation: he has a place to return to.
The hero of "The Tale of Woe and Misfortune" also leaves his parents' home due to a violation of the precepts of Domostroevsky morality, expressed in "tavern drinking" and undergoes various ordeals on a foreign side. However, he is not a habitual sinner. Following the advice of “good people”. A good man starts his own house, but even within its walls he cannot escape the grief. The house ceases to be a fortress. This is no longer a miniature reflection of the world organized by God’s providence, and the basic principles of regulating the household way of life paradoxically turn into an absurd opposite to themselves. In this sense, the episode with the unsuccessful marriage of Molodets is typical. Having looked for a bride “according to custom,” Well done had already decided to have a wedding. The following considerations stopped him:
In themselves, such warnings regarding the machinations of an evil wife are completely consistent with tradition, but the conclusion drawn from them is not at all traditional: if a wife can become "villain" then the only protection against this is "tavern drink" And if, as previously noted, the official picture of the world interpreted the tavern as the “mouth of hell,” the door to the underworld, then in “The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” it is given a different place. The collapse of the home structure, the idea of instability and “transformability” of family relationships, as well as the view of the tavern, coming from the folk laughter tradition, as a haven of carefree fun and general unofficial equality ( "In the tavern and in the bathhouse, Uxi are equal nobles") lead to the fact that within the house-tavern opposition the evaluative accents shift, both of its members seem to be equalized, and sometimes the second member can even be interpreted as positively colored. Tolerance of Russian society in the 17th century. to the tavern, moreover, his almost total commitment to drunkenness was noted by all foreigners who wrote about Muscovy of that time. Trying to philosophically comprehend this phenomenon of Russian life, V.N. Toporov writes: “Drunkenness became a kind of “escapism”, an escape from a place without changing place, but with a change in state: sobriety and clarity of vision interfered, and oblivion, immersion in a kind of euphoric or foggy state gave a feeling of relief, removal of everyday life. "concern" and, therefore, was a passive response to the demands of life, at least a temporary way out of the situation".
Traditional plot collisions in "The Tale of Woe and Misfortune" receive a non-trivial interpretation. Entering a monastery, previously interpreted as a path to ascent to one of the highest levels "ladders of righteousness" can be interpreted as equivalent to the death of the Young Man, and the path to the tavern, usually regarded as a fall into "mouth of hell" receives an ambivalent connotation in the story: in a tavern you can, on the one hand, lose your social face, break away from the social whole and thus perish as an individual, and on the other hand, having drunk yourself naked, it is easier to get to heaven, since “They won’t kick you out of paradise naked and barefoot, and they won’t let you out of the world here.”
Well done, he lives in a hostile, “alien” environment. If in the world of medieval man, according to P.M. Bicilli, "You couldn't get lost anywhere" then the world of “The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” is an environment with confused spatial reference points, the actions of the Young Man in it are precisely wanderings and delusions. He lives according to the laws of Domostroevskaya morality, and violating them, however, he cannot find his place either within the walls of the house, or in the tavern, or in the monastery. The world rejects a person; he is an outsider here.
“The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” reflects the moment of tragic discord, the discrepancy between man and the universe. The explanation for this must be sought, of course, not in the personal qualities of the hero, but in some deep, constructive features of the world in which he lives and acts. One of the prominent Eurasianists, Father Frolovsky, gave a stunningly profound description of Russian life in the 17th century: "The apparent stagnation of the 17th century was not lethargy or suspended animation. It was, rather, feverish oblivion, with nightmares and visions. Not hibernation, rather, dumbfounded... Everything was torn, moved from its place. And the soul itself was displaced. Wandering and strange is the Russian soul becomes precisely in Troubles"(quoted from:). The hero of the story lives in such a world.
Literary works have different fates: some of them are like one-day butterflies, others live for centuries. “The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” does not belong to the category of one-day events; it has firmly taken its rightful place among such masterpieces of Russian literature as “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”, “The Life of Archpriest Avvakum”, “Dead Souls” or “War and Peace” ". The modern reader looks in it for answers to questions other than those that worried the people of Ancient Rus', and finds them. This does not mean at all that we mentally complement the content of the work. To somewhat paraphrase the words of M.M. Bakhtin, we can say that the story itself grew due to what really was and is in this work, but that the readers of Ancient Rus' could not consciously perceive and appreciate in the context of the culture of their era.
“The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” entered the great Russian literature, and the works written after it shed a new light on it. It is not surprising that literary critic A.K. Doroshkevich used the image of the Molodets to explain the asceticism of Turgenev’s Liza Kalitina and compared him with the hero of Gogol’s “Portrait,” and literary critic D.G. Maidanov saw Molodets’ commonality with Gorky’s Foma Gordeev. Let these comparisons not satisfy us in some way. I repeat once again: each era looks for answers to its questions in the story. Like any great work of art, a story is like a living organism: it interacts with the environment, perceives something from it, changes itself and gives something new to life.
“The Tale of Woe and Misfortune” was repeatedly published separately or included in various collections and anthologies. But her poetic fate was not as successful as, for example, the fate of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” There are many poetic interpretations of the Lay made in the 19th and 20th centuries. Suffice it to recall the excellent translation by N. Zabolotsky. Major Russian poets did not turn to “The Tale of Woe and Misfortune.” The author knows of its only poetic adaptation, carried out by N. Markov and published in 1896 in Elisavetgrad. In order to give the reader some idea of this translation, I will give a small fragment from its final part:
The work of N. Markov did not become widely known and did not become a fact of the history of Russian poetry. So, worthy of the greatness of the “Tale of Woe and Misfortune” itself, its poetic translation into modern Russian remains the work of new generations of poets. The fragments presented to the reader’s attention do not pretend to play this role. They are only an additional (but still not a by-product) product of several years of work by the author in the field of philological research of one of the most remarkable works of ancient Russian literature.
A TALE OF Grief and Misfortune
How misfortune brought the Young Man to the monastic rank
| Wait, good fellow, stop! We'll play with you again. I became attached to you for more than an hour. Since hard times have brought us together, I won't leave you. Well done, I'll be by your side until the end. You will turn into thick grass - I'll rip you off in an open field, You'll fly into the sky like a rock dove - You will fall into my claws again. There were people in my gang And wiser than you, and more cunning, And they didn’t leave me. Bow down to the very ground For me on this steep bank, And then I will help you. We'll live happily with you, Robbery will make noise over you, I'll teach you how to rob and kill, To be hanged himself. You won’t leave me for a monastery! You won't lose a penny anyway. You met me by misfortune: I'll take you to the grave, I'll finish you off anyway. And when to the bottom of the grave I'll finally put you down Then I will please you. |
| Grief-Misfortune has many forms And there are many ways to ruin me. And now I'm back on the road, So that grief and misfortune can be eliminated on the road. I did not heed my parents’ wise precepts, Whether in other ports or in a tavern gunka, Will I go like a fish in the deep sea, My dear friend betrayed me, my fiancée forgot. Will I find salvation in a quiet monastery? My soul is dying, languishing in anguish. Woe will be extinguished beyond the grave. |
| And woe, woe to the mourner! Well done died. Even a nickname There is nothing left of the Well done. 18. Doroshkevich A.K. Critical notes on the teaching of ancient Russian literature. M., 1915. P. 19, 37,38. 19. Maidanov D.G. Repeated course on the history of Russian literature. Part 1. Issue. II. Odessa, 1917. pp. 211-215. 20. Grief-Misfortune. Ancient Russian poem. Translated into modern language by N. Markov. Elisavetgrad, 1896. P. 18. |
The “Tale” begins with the fact that the author fits his story into the general biblical context and talks about the first sin of humanity, the sin of Adam and Eve. And so, just as the Lord was once angry with people, but at the same time, punishing, leads them to the path of salvation, so parents raise their children. The parents teach the young man to live “with reason and goodness.” Parents instruct the young man not to go to “feasts and fraternities,” not to drink a lot, not to be seduced by women, to be afraid of stupid friends, not to deceive, not to take what belongs to others, and to choose reliable friends. All the instructions of parents are in one way or another connected with the traditional family way of life. The key to human well-being, therefore, is connection with family, clan, and tradition.
The fellow is trying to live by his own mind, and the author explains this desire by saying that the fellow “at that time was old and stupid, not fully sane and imperfect in mind.” He makes friends, and one of them is, as it were, a sworn brother, who invites the young man to the tavern. The young man listens to the sweet speeches of his “reliable friend,” drinks a lot, gets drunk and falls asleep right in the tavern.
The next morning he finds himself robbed - his “friends” leave him only “gunka tavern” (rags) and “lapotki-otopochki” (trodden bast shoes). Poor guy, yesterday’s “friends” no longer accept him, no one wants to help him. The young man becomes ashamed to return to his father and mother “and to his family and tribe.” He goes to distant countries, there he accidentally wanders into some city, finds a certain courtyard where a feast is taking place. The owners like that the young man behaves “according to the written teachings,” that is, the way his parents taught him. He is invited to the table and treated to food. But the young man gets upset, and then admits in front of everyone that he disobeyed his parents and asks for advice on how to live on a foreign side. Good people advise the young man to live according to traditional laws, that is, they repeat and supplement the instructions of his father and mother.
And indeed, at first things are going well for the young man. He begins to “live skillfully,” makes a fortune, and finds a good bride. It's getting close to the wedding, but this is where the hero makes a mistake: he brags about what he has achieved in front of the guests. “The word commendable has always rotted,” notes the author. At this moment, the young man is overheard by Grief-Misfortune and decides to kill him. From now on, Grief-Misfortune is an indispensable companion of the young man. It persuades him to drink away his property in a tavern, citing the fact that “even the naked and barefoot will not be kicked out of heaven.” The young man listens to Grief-Misfortune, drinks away all the money and only after that he comes to his senses and tries to get rid of his companion - Grief-Misfortune. The attempt to throw myself into the river was unsuccessful. Grief-Misfortune already lies in wait for the young man on the shore and forces him to completely submit to himself.
Thanks to a meeting with kind people, a turn in the fate of the young man is again outlined: they took pity on him, listened to his story, fed and warmed the carriers across the river. They take him across the river and advise him to go to his parents for a blessing. But as soon as the young man is left alone, Grief-Misfortune begins to pursue him again. Trying to get rid of Grief, the young man turns into a falcon, Grief turns into a gyrfalcon; well done - into a dove, Woe - into a hawk; well done - into a gray wolf, Grief - into a pack of hounds; well done - into the feather grass, Grief - into the braid; well done - into the fish, grief follows him with a net. The young man again turns into a man, but Grief-Misfortune does not lag behind, teaching the young man to kill, rob, so that the young man “would be hanged for that, or thrown into the water with a stone.” Finally, the “Tale” ends with the young man going to take monastic vows at a monastery, where Grief-Misfortune no longer has a way, and it remains outside the gates.
The Tale of Frol Skobeev
There lived a poor nobleman Frol Skobeev in the Novgorod district. In the same district there was the estate of steward Nardin-Nashchokin. The steward’s daughter, Annushka, lived there. Frol decided to “have love” with Annushka. He met the steward of this estate and went to visit him. At this time, their mother came to them, who was always with Annushka. Frol gave his mother two rubles, but didn’t say why.
Christmas time arrived, and Annushka invited noble daughters from all over the area to her party. Her mother also came to Frol to invite his sister to the party. The sister, at Frol’s instigation, announced to the mother that she would come to the party with her girlfriend. When she began to get ready to visit, Frol asked her to give him a girl’s outfit too. The sister was scared, but did not dare to disobey her brother.
At the party, no one recognized Frol in his girl’s attire, not even the mother. Then Frol Skobeev gave his mother five rubles and confessed everything... She promised to help him.
The mother offered the girls a new game - wedding. Annushka was the bride, and Frol Skobeev (whom everyone took for the girl) was the groom. The “young” were taken to the bedroom. There, Frol Skobeev revealed himself to Annushka and deprived her of her innocence. Then the girls came in to them, but didn’t know anything. Annushka quietly reproached her mother, but she rejected all accusations, stated that she knew nothing about it, and even offered to kill Frol for such a “dirty thing.” But Annushka felt sorry for Frol. The next morning she released all the girls, and left Frol and her sister with her for three days. She gave him money, and Frol began to live much richer than before.
Annushka's father, Nardin-Nashchokin, ordered his daughter to go to Moscow, because there were good suitors wooing her there. Having learned about Annushka’s departure, Frol Skobeev decided to follow her and marry the girl at all costs.
Frol stayed in Moscow not far from Nardin-Nashchokin’s yard. In church he met Annushka’s mother. The mother told the girl about the arrival of Frol Skobeev. Annushka was delighted and sent Frol money.
The steward had a nun sister. When her brother came to her monastery, the nun began to ask to be allowed to see her niece. Nardin-Nashchokin promised to let his daughter go to the monastery. The nun said that she would send a carriage for Annushka.
Getting ready to go on a visit, the father warned Annushka that a carriage from the nun sister could arrive at any time. Let, they say, Annushka get into the carriage and go to the monastery. Hearing about this, the girl immediately sent her mother to Frol Skobeev so that he could get a carriage somewhere and come to her.
Frol lived only by going about his business. Poverty did not allow him to have a carriage. But he came up with a plan. Frol went to the steward Lovchikov and asked for a carriage for a while “to view the bride.” Lovchikov complied with his request. Then Frol got the coachman drunk, dressed himself in a lackey's dress, sat on the box and went to Annushka. The mother, seeing Frol Skobeev, announced that they had come for Annushka from the monastery. The girl got ready and went to Frol Skobeev’s apartment. The father returned home and did not find his daughter, but was completely calm, knowing that she was in the monastery. Meanwhile, Frol married Annushka.
Frol brought the carriage with the drunken coachman to Lovchikov’s yard. Lovchikov tried to ask the coachman about where the carriage was and what happened, but the poor guy didn’t remember anything.
After some time, Nardin-Nashchokin went to the monastery to see his sister and asked her where Annushka was. The nun answered with surprise that she had not sent a carriage and had not seen her niece. The father began to grieve for his missing daughter. The next morning he went to the sovereign and reported what had happened. The Emperor ordered a search for the capital's daughter. He ordered Annushka’s kidnapper to show up. And if the thief does not show up himself, but is found, then he will be executed.
Then Frol Skobeev went to the steward Lovchikov, told about his action and asked for help. Lovchikov refused, but Frol threatened to accuse him of complicity: who gave the carriage? Lovchikov gave Frol advice: to throw himself at the feet of Nardin-Nashchokin in front of everyone. And he, Lovchikov, will stand up for Frol.
The next day, after mass in the Assumption Cathedral, all the attendants went out to Ivanovskaya Square to talk. Nardin-Nashchokin recalled the disappearance of his daughter. And at that time Skobeev came out in front of everyone and fell at the feet of Nardin-Nashchokin. The steward picked him up, and Frol announced to him his marriage to Annushka. The shocked steward began to threaten that he would complain about Frol to the king. But Lovchikov calmed Nardin-Nashchokin a little, and he went home.
At first the steward and his wife cried about the fate of their daughter, and then they sent a servant to find out how she was living. Having learned about this, Frol Skobeev ordered his young wife to pretend to be sick. Frol explained to the arriving servant that Annushka was sick from her father’s anger. The steward, having heard such news, felt sorry for his daughter and decided to at least bless her in absentia. He sent the young people an icon.
Since A. N. Pypin discovered in a collection of the first half of the 18th century in 1856. the poetic “The Tale of Grief and Misfortune, how Grief-Misfortune brought the hammer to the monastic rank,” no new copies of it were found. It is obvious that the only list that has reached us is separated from the original by intermediate links: this is indicated, in particular, by frequent violations of the verse model. It is obvious, therefore, that the original is much “older” than the list. But it is difficult to determine the duration of this time period. The characters in The Tale of Misfortune are almost entirely nameless. There are only three exceptions - Adam, Eve and the Archangel Gabriel, but these names are not relevant. The dating of any text is usually based on various kinds of realities. There are no such realities in the Tale. Its breeding ground is folk songs about Mountain and book “poems of repentance”; both lyrical songs and “penitential poems”, by their genre nature, do not need realities that refer to specific persons and events. Such is the “Tale of Misfortune,” which tells about the sad fate of a nameless Russian young man. If we were to rely on formal criteria, we would have to place the Tale within a broad chronological framework, including the first decades of the 18th century.
Meanwhile, the dating of the monument did not cause debate. Everyone who wrote about him agreed that the fellow to whom the “gray Gore-Gorinskoe” became attached was a man of the 17th century. Indeed, the signs of this “rebellious” era, when the old Russian way of life was breaking down, are evident in the story. Its hero despised the covenants of the family, became a “prodigal son”, a renegade, a voluntary outcast. We know that this is one of the most characteristic of the 17th century. types. The disintegration of family ties is reflected in such an impartial and eloquent genre of business writing as family memorials. “In the memoirs of the 17th century. we usually see only the closest parents, i.e. father, mother, brothers and sisters, the mother’s closest relatives, and less often grandfather and grandmother. Commemorations of the 15th century, and partly of the first half of the 16th century. usually contain a large number of people of many generations, sometimes for 200 years or more. This undoubtedly shows that the consciousness of the ancestral connection in the 17th century. significantly weakened and narrowed, the cult of veneration of distant ancestors fell out of use, and this was a reflection of the collapse of the old concepts of clan.”
Typical for the 17th century. and one of the speeches of Grief-Misfortune, the tempter, shadow, double of the young man:
Ali, well done, unknown to you
nakedness and barefootness immeasurable,
great lightness-bezprotoritsa?
What to buy for yourself will be lost,
And you, you’re a brave fellow, and you live like that!
Let them not beat or torture the naked and barefoot,
and the naked and barefoot will not be kicked out of paradise,
but they won’t leave here for the world,
no one will get attached to him, -
and the naked and barefoot should mock robbery!
This is the daring philosophy of the characters in 17th-century comic literature, the moral recklessness of mischief-makers from the “utter world,” for whom the tavern is their home, and wine is their only joy. Together with them, having drunk to the point of drunkenness, the young man from “The Tale of Grief-Misfortune” drowns his sorrows in wine, although in this noisy crowd he looks like a black sheep, an accidental guest.
In other words, the reader’s and scholar’s feeling, which forces us to place “The Tale of Misfortune” in the 17th century without doubts and reservations, is quite reasonable. This dating, which is both impressionistic and practical (such a combination is very rare in the history of literature), can be supported and clarified with the help of a comparative analysis of the Tale and the prose of Archpriest Avvakum. The author of “Grief-Misfortune” began his story with the theme of original sin. This is not simply a medieval inertia, according to which any particular event must be brought into the perspective of world history. This is the philosophical and artistic principle of the Tale (see below).
The story of original sin does not present a canonical legend, but a version of the apocrypha that diverges from Orthodox doctrine:
The human heart is senseless and insensitive:
Adam and Eve were deceived,
forgot the commandment of God,
ate the fruit of the vine
from the wondrous great tree.
It is not clear from the Bible what the sacred “tree of the knowledge of good and evil” was. There is a certain free-thinking in identifying it with an apple tree - the same as in identifying it with a grapevine, which is characteristic of folk fantasy and dates back to the times of Bogomilism. According to folk tradition, the first people, to put it simply, got drunk. God expelled them from Eden and cursed the wine. Therefore, Christ, the “new Adam”, who redeemed the fall of the “old” Adam, had to remove the condemnation from wine. Christ did this at the wedding feast in Cana of Galilee, turning water into wine. “Wine is innocent, drunkenness is guilty” - this is a proverb from the 17th century. accurately expresses the ancient Russian point of view on drunken drinking. A person must limit himself to the three cups that the holy fathers legitimized - those that are drunk at the monastic meal during the singing of troparions. In accordance with this, the parents instruct the young man from the “Tale of Woe-Misfortune”: “Don’t drink, child, two spells together!” But the fellow does not listen to them, just as Adam and Eve did not listen to the creator.
The same parallel image of the first people and Russian sinners of the 17th century. We find it in Habakkuk’s “Discovery and Collection of Deity and Creation and How God Created Man.” The idea of direct similarity is set out by Habakkuk very similar to the “Tale of Misfortune Woe”: Eve, “having listened to the serpents, approached the tree, took up its dreams, and its chills, and gave to Adam, because the tree was red in vision and good for food, red figs, berries sweet, weak minds, flattering words among themselves; They get drunk, and the devil rejoices. Alas, the intemperance of then and now!.. From then to this day, weak-minded people do the same thing, regale each other with flattery, undissolved potions, strained wine... And after a friend they laugh at the drunken one. Word for word it happens that in paradise under Adam and under Eve, and under the snake, and under the devil. Genesis again: And Adam and Eve tasted of the tree, from which God commanded, and was naked. Oh, dear ones, there is no one left to dress! The devil led into trouble, and he himself got into trouble. The crafty owner fed and watered him, and then rushed out of the yard. He's lying drunk and robbed on the street, but no one has mercy. Alas for the madness of both then and now! Packs Bible: Adam and Eve sewed together fig leaves from the tree, from which it tasted good, and covered their shame and hid themselves under the tree, near it. We overslept, poor things, with a hangover, but we’ve made a mess of ourselves: our beard and mustache are covered in vomit, and we’re covered in shit all the way down to our legs, our heads are spinning from our healthy bowls.”
Habakkuk, of course, could have found denunciations of drunkards and pictures of drunkenness not in “Grief-Misfortune”: in the literary everyday life of the 17th century. There were any number of works on this topic, in prose and verse. But the depiction of original sin as drunkenness is an extremely rare phenomenon. “The vine tree” in “The Tale of Misfortune” and “the red fig tree” in Avvakum are approximately the same thing for a Russian person of that era, because “fig” means a wine berry. It can be assumed that Habakkuk knew “Woe-Misfortune.” In this case, the Tale arose no later than 1672, when Habakkuk’s “Conquest and Assembly” was written.
So, the author of “The Tale of Misfortune” builds the plot on analogies between the fall of the first people and the sinful life of his contemporary. For the most part, these analogies are only implied, but they were clear to everyone who went to church, and in the 17th century. everyone went to church. (By the way, Avvakum in the “parallel places” is not at all as restrained as the author of the Tale, so “Seeking and Gathering” can be used as a guide to our monument).
The first people were deceived by the serpent, who was “more cunning than all the beasts of the field.” The “snake” also attacked the young man:
The hammer also had a dear, reliable friend -
called himself the named brother,
seduced him with sweet words,
called him to the tavern yard,
took him into the tavern hut,
brought him a spell of green wine
and brought a glass of Pyanov’s beer.
After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve “knew that they were naked” and sewed clothes for themselves from leaves. The same motif of nudity and cross-dressing appears in the Tale:
Well done, he awakens from sleep,
at that time the fellow looks around:
and that other ports have been removed from it,
Cheers and stockings - everything was filmed,
shirt and trousers - everything is peeled off...
He is covered with a tavern gunka,
at his feet there are shoe-shoes...
And the young man stood up on white legs,
the fellow taught me how to dress up,
he put on his shoes,
he put on a tavern gunka.
The first people knew shame, “and Adam and his wife hid from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of paradise,” and God drove Adam out of paradise, and commanded him to earn his daily bread by the sweat of his brow. The young man from the Tale “became ashamed ... to appear” in front of his father and mother, “he went to a foreign country, far away, unknown,” lived by his labors and “from his great intelligence he made ... a belly bigger than an old man.” This ends the direct similarity to the biblical story and the plot of the Tale. What the young man is destined to experience next is his individual fate, his “free choice.”
Human existence, taken as a whole, was interpreted in medieval Rus' as an echo of the past. Having been baptized, a person became “named after” a certain saint, became an “image” and “mark” of his guardian angel. This church tradition was to a certain extent supported by the secular one. It was believed that descendants, like an echo, repeat their ancestors, that there is a common destiny for all generations. Only in the 17th century. the idea of individual destiny is affirmed. In “The Tale of Woe-Misfortune” this idea becomes fundamental.
From the point of view of the author, a man of old school, faithful to the ideals of “Izmaragd” and “Domostroy”, individual fate is a “misfortune”, an evil part, a dashing lot, a mediocre life. This share is personified in Mountain, which appears before the hero after his secondary fall, when he decided to commit suicide:
And at that hour by the fast-flowing river
skochaya Woe because of the stone:
barefoot, there is not a single thread on the Mountain,
Grief is still belted with a stripe,
“Wait, well done; me, Grief, you won’t go anywhere!”
Now the young man can no longer escape the power of his double:
Well done, flew like a rock dove
and Woe follows him like a gray hawk.
Well done, he went into the field like a gray wolf,
and Woe is behind him with the polite greyhounds...
The good fellow went to the sea as a fish,
and Woe is behind him with thick nets.
Even the unfortunate Sorrow laughed:
“May you, little fish, be caught near the shore,
to be eaten by you
to die will be in vain!
This power is truly demonic, and only a monastery can get rid of it, within whose walls the hero eventually shuts himself up. Moreover, for the author, the monastery is not a desired refuge from worldly storms, but a forced one, the only way out. Why is Grief-Misfortune so “sticky”, so persistent? Why was he given complete power over the young man, for what were his sins? Of course, the good fellow fell, but he got up. As one poet of the mid-17th century wrote, accurately expressing Orthodox teaching,
What is Christian is - fall, rise,
but the devil is - fall, do not rise.
There is one god without sin, man lives alternating between “falls” and “rebellions”; any other life on earth is simply impossible.
Usually they pay attention to the fact that the young man, having arranged his affairs in a foreign land, “by God’s permission and by the work of the devil,” uttered “a word of praise” at the feast, and boasted of the wealth he had acquired.
And the word of praise always rotted,
Praise is a man's detriment!
It was then that Grief-Misfortune noticed him, since “bragging” is harmful both from a church point of view (this is “arrogance,” a type of pride, the first of the seven main sins), and from the people’s point of view: “in epics, heroes never boast , and extremely rare cases of boasting cause the most severe consequences.” But after “bragging”, Grief only noticed a suitable victim: “How can I appear as a hammer?” Now is the time to return to biblical events and their projection onto Russian life in the 17th century.
If at first the constructive principle of the author of the Tale was direct parallelism, then later it is replaced by negative parallelism. The projection of biblical history continues, but it is already an inverted projection. Note that the author talks about original sin in an epically calm tone. It's not hard to explain. As a Christian, the author knows that the “new Adam” has atoned for the guilt of the “old Adam.” As a person, the author understands that he owes his presence on earth to the first people, for Eve is life, God punished Eve with childbearing: “in illness you will give birth to children.”
And God drove out Adam and Eve
from holy paradise, from Eden,
and he settled them on the low land,
He blessed them to grow and be fruitful...
God made a lawful commandment:
ordered them to be married
for human birth and for beloved children.
Grief-Misfortune forced the young man to break this commandment. “According to custom,” he had his eye on a bride. Grief persuaded him to break up with her, having seen the Archangel Gabriel in a dream. (This character was not introduced into the Tale by chance: in the Gospel he brings Mary the good news of the birth of a son, in the Tale he turns the hero away from marriage “for the birth of a human being and for beloved children”). This is the ideological culmination of the work. The good fellow died completely, irrevocably, he will no longer get back on his feet, he will not throw off the yoke of Grief-Misfortune. Having chosen his personal destiny, he chose loneliness. This is stated in the song “Good fellow and the Smorodina River”, which has many motifs in common with the Tale:
The berry rolled down
from a sugar tree,
a branch broke off
from curly from an apple tree.
The theme of loneliness is one of the main themes not only of Russian, but also of Western European culture of the 17th century. The Moscow “walking man” is closely related to the baroque pilgrim lost in the labyrinth of the world. Of course, the author of “The Tale of Misfortune” condemns his hero. But the author is not so much indignant as sad. He is full of sympathy for the young man. A person is worthy of sympathy simply because he is a man, even if fallen and mired in sin.
Archpriest Avvakum
In the memory of the nation, Archpriest Avvakum exists as a symbol - a symbol of the Old Believer movement and Old Believer protest. Why did “national memory” choose this particular person? Habakkuk was a martyr. Of the sixty-odd years of his life (he was born “in the Nizhny Novgorod region” in 1620 or 1621), almost half were spent in exile and prison. Habakkuk was a rebel. He fearlessly fought with the ecclesiastical and secular authorities, with the tsar himself: “Like a lion, roar, tenacious, exposing their manifold charm.” Avvakum was the people's intercessor. He defended more than one old faith; he also defended the oppressed and humiliated “simple people.” “Not only for changing the holy books, but also for worldly truth... one must lay down one’s soul.” His martyrdom was crowned by martyrdom. On April 14, 1682, Avvakum was burned in Pustozersk “for great blasphemy against the royal house.”
As we see, Habakkuk became a symbolic figure on merit, and not on the whim of history. But at the beginning of the schism there were many thousands of both sufferers and warriors. Why did Russia choose Avvakum over all of them? Because he had a wonderful gift of speech and was head and shoulders above his contemporaries as a preacher, as a “man of the pen”, as a stylist. Of the writers of the 17th century, generally very rich in literary talents, only Avvakum was given the epithet “genius.” Since N. S. Tikhonravov published the “Life” of Avvakum in 1861 and it went beyond the limits of Old Believer reading, the artistic power of this masterpiece was recognized once and for all, unanimously and without hesitation.
Since Avvakum is both a writer and a schismatic teacher (this word is from the vocabulary of biased Orthodox polemicists, apologists for Nikon’s reform), the attitude towards his personality and his writings is inevitably influenced by the general assessment of the Old Believers. We inherited it from the 19th century, which dealt with the late Old Believer world, which had experienced its best times, fragmented into hostile agreements and rumors. Those who observed this world were struck by its isolation, conservatism, its narrowness and “ritualism.” These stagnant traits were also attributed to the “zealots of ancient piety” of the mid-17th century, including Avvakum. They were portrayed as fanatics and retrogrades, opponents of all changes.
Transfer of the situation of the 19th century. during the time of Tsar Alexei - an obvious mistake. The principle of historicism cannot be violated and facts cannot be ignored. Then the Old Believers defended not museum, but living values. It is true that Habakkuk stood up for the national tradition: “Hear, Christian, even if you have put aside a little of the faith, you have damaged everything... Hold, Christian, everything of the church is unchanged... And do not move church things from place to place, but hold. Whatever the holy fathers laid down, let it remain here unchanged, just as Basil the Great said: do not change the limits that the fathers laid down.” But the scope of this tradition was wide enough not to hinder creativity. Habakkuk could and did show himself as an innovator - both in church affairs and in literature. In the “Life” he insisted on his “calling” to innovation (in the system of meanings of Habakkuk, innovation was identified with the apostolic ministry: “It was different, it seems, during my life I don’t need to say that, yes ... the apostles proclaimed themselves”; therefore, fidelity Avvakum’s “holy Rus'” was so organically combined with freethinking). From this point of view, already the first autobiographical phrase of the “Life” is full of deep meaning.
“My birth was in the Nizhny Novgorod region, beyond the Kudma River, in the village of Grigorovo...” What did the Russian people of the 17th century think about when they read these words? The fact that the Nizhny Novgorod region since the Time of Troubles played the role of a zemstvo center, to a certain extent opposing boyar and bishop Moscow; that it was here that Kozma Minin, “the elected man of the whole earth,” managed to gather a militia and raise the banner of the liberation war; that in the 20-30s. here began the religious movement that foreign observers called the Russian Reformation. The very place of birth seemed to foretell the priest’s son Avvakum Petrov, who was ordained a priest at twenty-three years old, to take part in the fight against the episcopate, which did not care about the needs of the people. Ivan Neronov labored in Nizhny Novgorod, later the archpriest of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Kazan in Moscow and the patron of Avvakum, who was the first to dare to denounce the episcopate. “In the Nizhny Novgorod region” the destinies of the most prominent figures of the church and culture of the 17th century were intertwined. Ivan Neronov and Nikon, the future patriarch, were both students of the most popular priest Anania from the village of Lyskova. Nikon, a native of the village of Valdemanova, and Avvakum were fellow countrymen, almost neighbors.
Describing his Nizhny Novgorod youth, Avvakum recalled constant quarrels with the “bosses.” “The chief took away the daughter of the widow, and I prayed to him that he would return the orphan to his mother, and he, despising our prayer, raised a storm against me, and at the church, they came in a host and crushed me to death... The same chief, another time, he became furious with me, - he ran into my house, beating me, and bit off the fingers of my hand, like a dog, with his teeth... Therefore, he took the yard away from me, and knocked me out, robbing me of everything, and did not give me any bread for the road.” There is no reason to attribute these disputes solely to the rebellious nature of Avvakum - if only because the same conflicts accompanied the pastoral activities of all “God lovers” in general. A typical example is the behavior of one of their leaders, the royal confessor, Archpriest Stefan Vonifatiev, at the consecrated council in 1649. In the presence of the sovereign, he cursed the elderly Patriarch Joseph “a wolf, not a shepherd,” and “abused all bishops without honor”; they, in turn, demanded that Stefan be put to death.
What is the reason, what is the meaning of these attacks by Avvakum and his teachers on the “chiefs”, be they governors or archpastors? The lovers of God believed that the state and the church, whose weaknesses were exposed by the Troubles, needed transformation, and those in power resisted any changes, clinging to “ancient indecency.” The innovation of Ivan Neronov and his followers seemed to them “crazy teaching” and heresy. The lovers of God were engaged in social-Christian work: they revived personal preaching (an unheard-of innovation!), interpreted “all speech clearly and powerfully to simple listeners,” helped the poor, established schools and almshouses. The bishops saw this as an encroachment on their spiritual power, a rebellion of the flock against the shepherds: after all, the lovers of God represented the lower clergy, the provincial white clergy, who were much closer to the people than the bishops.
But when real church reform began, the lovers of God did not accept it: “We thought, having come together; we see how winter wants to be; my heart grew cold and my legs trembled.” On the eve of Lent in 1653, Nikon, a friend of the God-lovers, who with their support had become patriarch the year before, sent a patriarchal “memory” to the Kazan Cathedral, and then to other Moscow churches, in which he ordered to replace the two-finger sign of the cross with the three-finger one. Avvakum, who served in the clergy of the Kazan Cathedral, did not obey the patriarch. The rebellious archpriest defiantly gathered the parishioners in the hay barn (“in the drying room”). His adherents directly said: “At some time, even other churches are better.” Avvakum was taken into custody and put on a chain in one of the Moscow monasteries. This was Habakkuk’s first “prison sitting”: “They threw him into a dark tent, went into the ground, and sat for three days, neither eating nor drinking; sitting in the darkness, he bowed on his head, I don’t know - to the east, I don’t know - to the west. Nobody came to me, except mice, and cockroaches, and crickets screaming, and quite a few fleas.” Soon he was sent to Siberia with his wife Nastasya Markovna and children - first to Tobolsk, and then to Dauria.
How can we explain this opposition? First of all, by the fact that Nikon began the reform with his will and his power, as a patriarch, and not as a representative of the lovers of God. Of course, they were hurt, even insulted, but it was not their ambition. From their point of view, Nikon betrayed the main idea of the movement - the idea of conciliarity, according to which the management of the church should belong not only to the bishops, but also to the people of Bali, “as well as to those living in the world and living a virtuous life among people of every rank.” Thus, Nikon turned into a retrograde, returning to the idea of archpastoral superiority; lovers of God remained innovators.
The second aspect of the opposition is national. Nikon was overwhelmed by the dream of a universal Orthodox empire. This dream forced him to bring the Russian rite closer to the Greek one. Ecumenical claims were alien to God-lovers, and Nikon, with his grandiose plans, seemed to them something like the Pope. Thus began the split of the Moscow kingdom.
Avvakum wandered around Siberia for eleven years. Meanwhile, his enemy Nikon was forced to leave the patriarchal throne in 1658, because Tsar Alexei could no longer and did not want to tolerate the imperious guardianship of his “brother’s friend.” When Avvakum was returned to Moscow in 1664, the tsar tried to persuade him to make concessions: the trial of the defeated patriarch was approaching, and it was important for the sovereign to have the support of a man in whom the “simple people” had already recognized as their intercessor. But nothing came of the attempt at reconciliation. Avvakum hoped that Nikon’s removal would also mean a return to the “old faith,” the triumph of the God-loving movement, which was once supported by the young Alexei Mikhailovich. But the tsar and the boyar elite had no intention of abandoning church reform: they used it to subordinate the church to the state. The king soon became convinced that Avvakum was dangerous for him, and the rebellious archpriest’s freedom was again taken away. New exiles, new prisons, deprivation of the priesthood and the curse of the church council of 1666–1667 followed. and, finally, imprisonment in Pustozersk, a small town at the mouth of the Pechora, in “a tundra, cold and treeless place.” Avvakum was brought here on December 12, 1667. Here he spent the last fifteen years of his life.
Avvakum became a writer in Pustozersk. In his younger years he had no literary inclinations. He chose a different field - the field of oral preaching, direct communication with people. This communication filled his life. “I had a lot of spiritual children,” he recalled in Pustozersk, “to this day there will be about five or six hundred. Without resting, I, a sinner, diligently in churches, and in houses, and at crossroads, in cities and villages, also in the reigning city, and in the Siberian country, preaching.” In Pustozersk, Avvakum could not preach to his “spiritual children,” and he had no choice but to take up his pen. Of the works of Avvakum that have been found so far (totaling up to ninety), more than eighty were written in Pustozersk.
In the 70s Pustozersk suddenly became one of the most prominent literary centers of Rus'. Avvakum was exiled here along with other leaders of the Old Believers - the Solovetsky monk Epiphanius, the priest from the city of Romanov Lazar, the deacon of the Annunciation Cathedral Fyodor Ivanov. They made up the “great quartet” of writers. In the first years, the prisoners lived relatively freely, immediately established literary cooperation, discussed and edited each other, and even acted as co-authors (for example, Avvakum composed the so-called fifth petition of 1669 together with Deacon Fedor). They searched for and found contacts with readers on the Mezen, where Avvakum’s family lived, in Solovki and in Moscow. “And he ordered the archer to make a box in his ax handle,” Avvakum wrote to the boyar F.P. Morozova in the same 1669, “and he sealed that messenger’s poor hand in the ax handle..., and bowed low to him, and let him take it, God forbid, to the hands of my son-light; and Elder Epiphanius made the archer’s box.” Epiphany, very capable of all kinds of manual work, also made a lot of wooden crosses with hiding places in which he hid “letters” addressed “to the world.”
The authorities resorted to punitive measures. In April 1670, Epiphanius, Lazarus and Fedor were “executed”: their tongues were cut out and their right palms were cut off. Avvakum was spared (the king, apparently, had a certain weakness for him). He bore this mercy very hard: “And I spat against it and wanted to die without eating, and I didn’t eat for eight days or more, but my brothers ordered me to eat again.” Conditions of imprisonment deteriorated sharply. “You cut down the log cabins near our prisons and sprinkled earth in the prisons... and left us each with a single window where we could receive the necessary food and firewood.” Habakkuk, with proud and bitter mockery, depicted his “great peace” in this way: “There is great peace for both me and the elder... where we drink and eat, here... and we defecate, and put it on a shovel - and out the window!.. I see , and the Tsar, Alexei Mikhailovich, has no such peace.”
But even in these unbearable conditions, the “great quartet” continued intensive literary work. Habakkuk wrote many petitions, letters, epistles, as well as such extensive works as the “Book of Conversations” (1669–1675), consisting of ten discussions on doctrinal topics; as the "Book of Commentaries" (1673–1676) - it includes Habakkuk's commentaries on the psalms and other biblical texts; as “The Book of Reproof, or the Eternal Gospel” (1679), containing a theological polemic with Deacon Fyodor. In the “earth prison” Avvakum created his “Life” (1672), which he revised several times.
By ideology, Avvakum was a democrat. Democracy also determined his aesthetics - linguistic norms, visual means, and the writer's position in general. His reader is the same peasant or townsman whom Avvakum taught back “in the Nizhny Novgorod region”; this is his spiritual son, careless and zealous, sinful and righteous, weak and steadfast at the same time. Like the archpriest himself, he is a “natural hare.” It is not easy for him to understand Church Slavonic wisdom, he must be spoken to simply, and Avvakum makes vernacular the most important stylistic principle: “You who read and hear, do not despise our vernacular, for I love my natural Russian language... I do not worry about eloquence and do not disparage my Russian language.” Avvakum feels himself speaking, not writing, calling his style of presentation “blurring” and “grunting.” He spoke Russian with amazing freedom and flexibility. He then caressed his reader-listener, calling him “father”, “darling”, “poor thing”, “darling”; then he scolded him, as he scolded Deacon Fyodor, his opponent on theological issues: “Fyodor, you are a fool!” Avvakum is capable of high pathos, of “deplorable words”, which he wrote after the martyrdom in Borovsk of the boyar Morozova, Princess Urusova and Maria Danilova: “Alas for me, the orphan! You left me, my child, to be devoured by beasts!.. Alas, little children, who died in the underworlds of the earth!.. No one dares to ask the godless Nikonians for the body of your blessed, soulless, dead, vulnerable, shot at with slander, much less wrapped in matting! Alas, alas, my chicks, I see your lips are silent! I kiss you, kissing you, crying and kissing you!” He is no stranger to humor - he laughed at his enemies, calling them “grievers” and “fools”, and he laughed at himself, protecting himself from self-aggrandizement and narcissism.
It was not for nothing that Habakkuk was afraid of accusations that he was “self-praising.” Having declared himself a defender of “Holy Rus',” he essentially breaks with its literary prohibitions. For the first time, he unites the author and the hero of a hagiographic narrative in one person. From a traditional point of view, this is unacceptable; it is sinful pride. For the first time, Avvakum writes so much about his own experiences, about how he “grieves,” “cries,” “sighs,” and “grieves.” For the first time, a Russian writer dares to compare himself with the first Christian writers - the apostles. Habakkuk calls his “Life” “the book of the eternal life,” and this is not a slip of the tongue. As an apostle, Habakkuk has the right to write about himself. He is free to choose themes and characters, free to use the “vernacular”, to discuss his own and others’ actions. He is an innovator who breaks tradition. But he justifies himself by returning to the apostolic origins of this tradition.
Medieval literature is symbolic literature. Habakkuk also stands by this principle. But the symbolic layer of his “Life” is innovatively individual: the author attaches symbolic meaning to such “perishable”, insignificant everyday details that medieval hagiography, as a rule, did not note at all. Talking about his first “prison sitting” in 1653, Habakkuk writes: “On the third day I was hungry, that is, I wanted to eat, and after Vespers there was a hundred before me, I didn’t know the angel, I didn’t know the man, and yet I don’t know the time, except in the darkness he said a prayer and, taking me by the shoulder, brought me to the bench with a chain and sat me down and gave me a little loaf of bread and a piece of bread to sip on - they were very tasty, good! - and he said to me: “It’s enough, it’s time for strengthening!” And it’s not his flock. The doors didn’t open, but he was gone! It’s just amazing - man; what about the angel? Otherwise there is nothing amazing - everywhere he is not blocked.” “The miracle of cabbage soup” is an everyday miracle, just like the story about the little black hen who fed Avvakum’s children in Siberia.
The symbolic interpretation of everyday realities is extremely important in the system of ideological and artistic principles of the Life. Avvakum fought fiercely with Nikon not only because Nikon encroached on a time-honored Orthodox rite. Avvakum also saw the reform as an encroachment on the entire Russian way of life, on the entire national way of life. For Avvakum, Orthodoxy is tightly connected with this way of life. As soon as Orthodoxy collapses, it means that “Bright Rus'” also perishes. That’s why he so lovingly and so vividly describes Russian life, especially family life.
The connection between the Pustozersky literary center and Moscow was two-way. The “Great Quaternary” received regular information about European trends in the capital - about the court theater, “partes singing,” “perspective” painting, and syllabic poetry. Avvakum, of course, denied all this - as a violation of his father’s covenants. He sought to create a counterweight to Baroque culture (this is the main reason for his colossal productivity). In the fight against it, he was forced to respond in one way or another to the problems that this culture put forward. In it, the individual principle asserted itself more and more powerfully - and Avvakum also cultivates a unique creative style inherent only to him. Poetry was considered the “Queen of the Arts” in the Baroque - and Avvakum also begins to use measured speech, focusing on folk tale verse.
O my soul, what is your will?
Like you yourself in that distant desert
As if you were wandering homeless now,
And you have your life with the wondrous beasts,
And in poverty without mercy you exhaust yourself,
Are you now dying of thirst and hunger?
Why don’t you accept God’s creation with thanksgiving?
Ali you have no power from God
Do you have access to the sweets of this age and the joys of the body?
The verse about the soul is the reflection of a person who suddenly regretted the “sweetness of this age,” who felt sorry for himself. It was only a momentary weakness, and Avvakum later abandoned the poem “About my soul...”. He remained true to his convictions until his death, remained a fighter and accuser. He wrote only the truth - the truth that his “furious conscience” told him.
Moscow Baroque
The culture of the Middle Ages was characterized by the integrity of the artistic system and the unity of artistic tastes. In medieval art, the collective principle (“anonymity”) reigns supreme, preventing the development of competing trends. Aesthetic consciousness places etiquette and canon above all else, values novelty little and has little interest in it. Only in the 17th century. literature is gradually moving away from these medieval principles. Writer of the 17th century no longer content with the familiar, the established, the “eternal,” he begins to realize the aesthetic appeal of the unexpected and is not afraid of originality and dynamism. He is faced with the problem of choosing an artistic method - and, what is very important, he has the opportunity to choose. This is how literary movements are born. One of them in the 17th century. was Baroque - the first of the European styles presented in Russian culture.
In Europe, Baroque replaced the Renaissance (through a transitional stage, Mannerism). In Baroque culture, the place of Renaissance man was again taken by God - the root cause and goal of earthly existence. In a certain sense, the Baroque provided a synthesis of the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. Eschatology and the theme of the “dance of death” were resurrected again, and interest in mysticism intensified. This medieval current in Baroque aesthetics contributed to the adoption of this style by the Eastern Slavs, for whom medieval culture was by no means a distant past.
At the same time, the Baroque never (at least theoretically) broke with the legacy of the Renaissance and did not abandon its achievements. Ancient gods and heroes remained characters of baroque writers, and ancient poetry retained for them the meaning of a high and unattainable example. The Renaissance stream determined the special role of the Baroque style in the evolution of Russian culture: the Baroque in Russia performed the functions of the Renaissance.
The founder of the Moscow Baroque was the Belarusian Samuil Emelyanovich Sitnianovich-Petrovsky (1629–1680), who at the age of twenty-seven became a monk with the name Simeon and who was nicknamed Polotsk in Moscow - after his hometown, where he was a teacher at the school of the local Orthodox “brotherhood”. In 1664, at the same time as Archpriest Avvakum, who returned from Siberian exile, Simeon of Polotsk came to Moscow - and stayed here forever.