Speaking about the story “The House on the Embankment”, almost every time the connection between this text and the story “ Exchange", the first in a series of Moscow stories. And indeed, the contiguity and kinship of the themes is noticeable to the naked eye, and if in “Exchange” the problematic is not yet so obvious, then in “Home” the technique is naked - the author’s thought is transparent and undisguised. In both cases, the goal is the same: Trifonov is trying to find the origins of Soviet conformism.

The main character of the story is essayist and literary critic Vadim Glebov: a careerist and a prominent man, not deprived of social status and accompanying material benefits. One day, having gone through an acquaintance to buy some terribly scarce table, he meets his childhood friend, Levka Shulepnikov, who, it turns out, works as a loader in this furniture second-hand shop, and looks like a real, genuine, always hungover handyman, but For some reason, Glebova doesn’t want to find out at all. This chance meeting plunges the hero into long memories of the times of childhood and youth, to which, in fact, the story itself is dedicated. Then, in distant Moscow in the 40s, everything was different: Levka Shulepa and other Glebov friends lived in a high-rise elite building on the embankment, and Dimka himself, along with his grandmother and parents, huddled in a rickety rotten barracks, where in a cramped communal apartment there was no end the neighbors were making a fuss. In those days, Shulepa was completely different - thanks to his mother and stepfather, he had everything his peers could dream of, and everyone sought friendship with him (well, except perhaps Glebov).

The main conflict of the work unfolds around the relationship between the young student Vadim Glebov, who is writing a diploma and is about to enter graduate school, and the family of Professor Ganchuk, living in that very house on the embankment. The professor's daughter, the sophisticated and always pitying Sonya, is in love with Glebov, but for a long time he does not notice her affection, although he comes to the professor almost every day, but over time he finds the necessary feelings in himself and gets along with the girl. Glebov has been in contact with Professor Ganchuk since he entered the university, often visits him, and writes his thesis under his guidance. But at the institute, a conspiracy is brewing against the wayward old man, and Glebov is involved in it. He cannot kick off the new institute authorities, who are eager to remove Ganchuk, and he himself becomes a hostage to his own conformity. On one side of the scale is enrollment in graduate school, a Griboyedov scholarship and a start to a career, on the other is Sonya’s selfless love and good relationship with the professor. But our hero hesitates: it’s ugly to betray loved ones, but it’s also a pity to give up prospects at the institute. He is forced to make an accusatory speech at a meeting, and a group of defenders, on the contrary, asks to dispel the vile conspiracy by publicly defending their mentor, but the hero does not want to take anyone’s side, he wants to be good for everyone and is frantically looking for a way not to show up for reprisals.

Vadim Glebov is a striking example of a literary anti-hero, or so-called. negative protagonist. He combines those qualities that, despite their general neutrality and harmlessness, form a very impartial portrait: Glebov is smart, calculating and ambitious, he tries to become one of his own everywhere (he is friends with both the unusual children of an elite house and the hooligans from the alley), he is easy to girls fall in love, but he himself doesn’t really love anyone. But the main quality that determines his entire life paradigm is envy. Trifonov very competently and scrupulously describes the stages of the growth of envy in the hero’s soul. Glebov is very envious of Levka and the other guys from the high-rise building, who live in spacious, well-furnished apartments, and ride in elevators, he doesn’t understand why some are given everything from birth, and others nothing, already in his youth, drinking tea at the Ganchuks, he involuntarily evaluates their interiors, and when he first meets Sonya at the professor's dacha in Bruskovo, he suddenly realizes that all this - the house, the apartment and the fragile Sonya - can become his. Self-interest and the pursuit of one's own profit are evident from childhood: even when little Dimka, taking advantage of the fact that his mother got a job as a cashier at a cinema, carefully chooses among the children who to take to the show, he is guided only by those considerations of what and from whom he can subsequently screw.

The origins of Glebov’s character and his philosophy of life certainly lie in his parents. In the energy of the mother, who wants to get out of an unfavorable environment, in the cowardice of the father, who lives with the attitude of “not sticking his head out under any circumstances,” who curries favor with Lyovka, the stepson of a big official, who forbids his wife to ask for an accused relative, but who subsequently calmly gets along with his wife. The hyperplasia of characters is not accidental: the story has enough telling details and the most detailed descriptions of everyday life, and almost all of them work to reveal the characters.

The role of the veil Levka Shulepnikov, who appears in the story as the protagonist’s double, is interesting. They are similar in many ways: increased attention to material things, desire for position in society and in one’s environment, inability to love, but if Glebov’s career accelerates upward through betrayal, then Shulepa’s life path goes downward. From childhood, he had everything that Glebov only dreamed of, and disposed of it with ease. Both at school and at the institute, he was a local celebrity, a man whose favor was sought. But all his influence rested solely on his parents, or rather, on his mother’s ability to find another man in authority who could provide for her and her son. In general, Lyovka understands a lot about life, and he already knows (unlike Glebov) that while looking for his own benefit, one cannot help but get dirty, but his problem lies on a slightly different plane - behind the abundance of expensive foreign things, noisy parties and a carousel of acquaintances, he he is nothing of himself. And when the support of existence collapses (the second stepfather dies), his whole beautiful story ends.

Unfortunately, there are not many positive characters in the story. Conventionally, the family of Professor Ganchuk can be included among them, but they are not one of the pleasant ones: Yulia Mikhailovna is emphatically arrogant, and Nikolai Vasilyevich himself is distinguished by a fair amount of belligerence and keeps lamenting that he did not finish off Dorodnov in the twenties. However, their main problem is that they are extremely disconnected from life. The spiritualized Sonya feels sorry for everyone indiscriminately and does not understand people; her parents are so absorbed in their affairs and their thoughts that until the very end they do not notice their daughter’s love affair with a family friend, and Nikolai Vasilyevich himself does not feel Glebov’s betrayal, remains polite and friendly with him, and Yulia Mikhailovna realizes it too late and somehow awkwardly, naively trying to pay off Judas with money and jewelry. The only bright spot remains the lyrical hero, who is in love with Sonya, thanks to whom we see the description of Baton-Glebov from the outside. And this is a very interesting point, that in addition to the pair “author - main character”, there is also an unnamed character-narrator in the story, the so-called. a lyrical hero who gives his own assessment of the history of Glebov and the Ganchuk family. The unnamed hero is brought out in contrast to the negative protagonist: he is sincerely and unrequitedly in love with the sophisticated Sonya, respectful to her father, looks with adoration at the local prodigy Anton, but most importantly, from the very beginning he discerned the true essence of Baton and rightly argues that such people are always undecided , neither this nor that, and there are the most unpleasant, the most unreliable. And Baton, indeed, fails their boyish brotherhood more than once.

The story has a very heavy, depressing atmosphere. This is largely due to the main character (in general, gloom and existential hopelessness are not uncommon among texts with proof by contradiction), but also to the feeling of an underlying, deep-seated animal fear that determined the life of a huge country in the Stalinist era. The author does not say directly, but the construction of the composition and detailing play into the desired minor atmosphere.

The theme of the work is easily determined - it is the search for the origins of Soviet conformism. The story “The House on the Embankment” is a kind of self-response (if not repentance) to the very early novel “Students”, published in 1950, for which Yuri Trifonov, the son of repressed parents, received the Stalin Prize and all the cookies that accompany it. The novel “Students” dealt with the situation of the late 40s, when a campaign against cosmopolitans began in the institute environment (in fact, an anti-Semitic purge of the intelligentsia), about how progressive students, including, of course, Trifonov himself , took an active part in the fight against anachronistic, unpatriotic teachers. The result, as always, was broken destinies and tragically cut short lives, and the reward for the knights of the ideological front was the same ardently desired material benefits and career growth. And so in 1976, Trifonov writes an answer to himself: he paints the old situation again, from the inside and from a different angle, and this time he no longer tolerates sentimentality, he is free from blinders and merciless to himself, to his own actions and the philosophy of his generation, who, without a twinge of conscience, betrayed his teachers, betrayed himself.

Result: 7 out of 10.

That's all for today. As always, I look forward to your opinions in the comments. See you soon!

literary character of tryphons

INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1. INTERPRETATION OF THE CONCEPT OF “CHARACTER” IN LITERARY STUDIES

1.1 Definition of the term “character” in a work of fiction

1.2 Methods of revealing literary character

CHAPTER 2. THE PROBLEM OF CHARACTER IN YURI VALENTINOVICH TRIFONOV’S STORY “THE HOUSE ON THE EMBANKMENT”

2.1 Researchers about the uniqueness of the hero in the works of Yu.V. Trifonova

2.2 Analysis of the specifics of the hero in the story “House on the Embankment”

CONCLUSION

LITERATURE

INTRODUCTION

Yuri Trifonov was born in Moscow on August 28, 1925. He had a dazzlingly happy childhood in a close-knit family, with his father, a hero of the revolution and the Civil War, with friends the same age who lived in the same “government” house on the Moskva River embankment. This house grew up in the early 30s almost opposite the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, competing with it in size and, it seemed, gaining the upper hand in the competition: soon the temple would be blown up. But a few years later, the residents began to disappear one by one, usually at night. There was a wave of mass repressions. Trifonov’s parents were also arrested. The children and their grandmother were evicted to the outskirts. Yura never saw his father again, his mother only many years later...

During the Great Patriotic War, he worked at an aircraft factory, and in 1944 he entered the Literary Institute. A.M. Gorky. Once, when his toothy fellow students tore his story to smithereens, the head of the seminar, the famous writer Konstantin Fedin, suddenly flared up and even slammed his fist on the table: “And I’m telling you that Trifonov will write!”

Already in his fifth year, Trifonov began writing the story “Students.” In 1950, it was published in the magazine “New World” and immediately received the highest award - the Stalin Prize. “Success is a terrible danger... For many, the crown of their head could not stand it,” Alexander Tvardovsky, then editor-in-chief of Novy Mir, told Trifonov.

The author is very talented,” Ilya Erenburg noted about “Students.” - but I would like to hope that he will someday regret that he wrote this book. And indeed, many years later, Trifonov would respond extremely sharply to the story: “The book that was not written by me.” There was still almost no sense of the author's own view of what was happening around him, but only diligently and obediently reproduced those conflicts, the depiction of which enjoyed the approval of official criticism.

Trifonov was a writer and it is impossible to imagine him as anyone else. Behind the external looseness and phlegmatism, inner strength was hidden. A sense of conviction and independence came from his leisurely demeanor and thoughtful speech.

He began publishing early and became a professional writer early; but the reader truly discovered Trifonov in the early 70s. He opened it and accepted it because he recognized himself - and was touched to the quick. Trifonov created his own world in prose, which was so close to the world of the city in which we live that sometimes readers and critics forgot that this was literature and not reality, and treated his heroes as their direct contemporaries.

Hence the jealousy.

This is the devil knows what - some kind of kitchen squabbles, apartment gossip. corridor passions, where is the living image of our contemporary, active personality? - some were indignant.

Trifonov stigmatizes modern urban philistinism, semi-intellectuals, and distinguishes immoral vulgarities! - others objected.

He distorts the image of our intelligentsia! They are much cleaner and better than they appear in his image! This is some kind of charm, he doesn’t value the intelligentsia! - others were indignant.

This writer just doesn't like people. He is not kind, has not loved people since childhood, from the moment that deprived him of his usual way of life, the fourth analyzed.

Trifonov's world is hermetically sealed! You can't breathe in it! - stated lovers of Peredelkino walks and convinced admirers of their air.

Trifonov's prose is distinguished by internal unity. Theme with variations. For example, the theme of exchange runs through all of Trifonov’s works, right down to “The Old Man.” The novel outlines all of Trifonov’s prose - from “Students” to “Exchange”, “The Long Farewell”, “Preliminary Results” and “House on the Embankment”, all Trifonov’s motifs can be found there. “The repetition of themes is the development of the task, its growth,” noted Marina Tsvetaeva. So with Trifonov - the theme deepened, went in circles, returned, but on a different level. “I’m not interested in the horizontals of prose, but in its verticals,” noted Trifonov in one of his last stories.

Trifonov, like other writers, as well as the entire literary process as a whole, was, of course, influenced by time. But in his work he not only honestly and truthfully reflected certain facts of our time, our reality, but sought to get to the bottom of the reasons for these facts. Social historicism is a fundamental quality of his prose: the story “The House on the Embankment” is no less historical than the novel “Impatience,” written on historical material. R. Schroeder described Trifonov’s artistic method as “a novel with history,” and Trifonov defined this characteristic as “very apt.”

At the same time, Trifonov’s interest in the past was of a special, individual nature. This interest is not simply an expression of historical emotionality - a trait, by the way, quite common. No, Trifonov dwells only on those eras and those historical facts that predetermined the fate of his generation. So he “came out” during the civil war and then to the Narodnaya Volya. Revolutionary terror is what Trifonov’s latest essay, “The Riddle and Conduct of Dostoevsky,” is devoted to.

Yuri Valentinovich entered the history of Russian literature of the twentieth century as the founder of urban prose and earned a reputation as the creator of a unique artistic world that does not fit into the rigid framework of groups and movements. According to critic L. Anninsky, such thematic isolation was the reason for Trifonov’s “strange loneliness” in Russian literature. Since the emergence and establishment of tryphon studies as an independent branch of literary criticism, researchers have been talking about the integrity and systematicity of the entire literary body of his prose. I. Velembovskaya, reviewing the last lifetime editions of Trifonov’s works, called his entire prose “a human comedy,” in which “the destinies seemed to be intertwined, the situations complemented each other, the characters overlapped one another.” I. Dedkov, in a detailed article “Verticals of Yuri Trifonov,” defined the writer’s artistic world as “the focus of memory, ideas, moods, fictional and resurrected people, their torments, fears, heroic and base deeds, their high and everyday passions, where everything is tightly intertwined , socially and psychologically connected, historically brought together, fused until one grows into the other, to persistent repetitions and echoes, and where nothing now seems to exist and cannot be understood in complete isolation from the whole.” These observations were summarized by V. M. Piskunov, who outlined the world of Trifonov’s prose as a dialectical unity of two facets of talent: “So, on the one hand, the thirst for constant self-renewal, on the other, an emphasized cyclicality, repetition, persistent return to square one. The result is a unique, fully formed and at the same time flexible artistic system...”

One of the best, most studied is the work of Yu. Trifonov “House on the Embankment”. Researchers have not yet determined exactly its genre - whether it is a story or a novel. The explanation, in our opinion, lies in the following: what is novel in this story is, first of all, the socio-artistic development and understanding of the past and present as an interconnected process. In an interview that followed the publication of “House on the Embankment,” the writer himself explained his creative task as follows: “To see, to depict the passage of time, to understand what it does to people, how it changes everything around... Time is a mysterious phenomenon, to understand and imagine it is as difficult as imagining infinity... I want the reader to understand: this mysterious “thread connecting time” passes through you and me, which is the nerve of history.” “I know that history is present in every today, in every human destiny. It lies in broad, invisible, and sometimes quite clearly visible layers in everything that shapes modernity... The past is present both in the present and in the future.” Thus, the author managed to fit a huge array of depicted problems and ideas into the volume of the story, which places this work at the intersection of genres.

The purpose of our work is to consider the specifics of solving the problem of character in the work “The House on the Embankment” by Yu. Trifonov.

The object of study is the ways of embodying the images of the heroes in this story.

The subject is a system of characters in a work.

The purpose, object and subject determine the following research tasks in our work:

1. Identify the content of the concept of “literary character”, the main approaches to its definition in literary criticism;

2. Consider the ways of artistic embodiment of the characters’ characters in the work;

3. Analyze the different points of view of Trifonov researchers on the problem of the hero in the works of Yu. Trifonov;

4. Study the features of solving a literary problem in the story “The House on the Embankment” through consideration of specific characters and plot.

The scientific novelty of our work is determined by the fact that for the first time an attempt was made to study the specifics of the literary character in the story “The House on the Embankment” as a complex problem that has a cross-cutting basis in the entire work of Yu. Trifonov.

The practical significance of our research lies in the fact that the material and conclusions presented in it can be used for further study of the work of Yu. Trifonov and his other works. The theoretical part of the work can be used in preparation for classes in the course “Literary Studies” and “Theory of Literature” within the framework of the topics “Hero of a literary work”, “Character and character system”, “Type and character in a work of art”.

Mutual assistance is helping each other, supporting each other in any situation.

Each of us has moments when we cannot do something on our own and need help. It is very important to find someone who can support you. We must help each other if we want to live well. You need to show a kind attitude towards people, live in the interests of others.

In the text by Yu. Trifonov, Glebov, the main character, took some boys to the cinema for free and sought profit from this. He expected something in return and manipulated his friends. The author shows readers that this cannot be done. Sooner or later such a person will lose authority and self-respect. Good must be done selflessly.

The school often hosts meetings with veterans of the Great Patriotic War. I remember the performance of one of the veterans.

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He talked about the war and said that mutual assistance played a big role in it. It was impossible to survive alone during this difficult time. People got together and helped each other in any way they could. This was the only way to defeat the enemies. This story showed me that people must do good deeds to make this world a better, brighter place.

Mutual assistance is a selfless willingness to help others without hesitation.

Analysis of the specific character of the hero in the story “House on the Embankment”

The writer was deeply concerned about the socio-psychological characteristics of modern society. And, in essence, all of his works of this decade, whose heroes were mainly intellectuals of the big city, are about how difficult it is sometimes to preserve human dignity in the complex, sucking intertwining of everyday life, and about the need to preserve the moral ideal in any circumstances of life.

Trifonov’s story “The House on the Embankment,” published by the magazine “Friendship of Peoples” (1976, No. 1), is perhaps his most social work. In this story, in its sharp content, there was more “novel” than in many bloated multi-line works, proudly designated by their author as “novel”.

Time in The House on the Embankment determines and directs the development of the plot and the development of characters; people are revealed by time; time is the main director of events. The prologue of the story is openly symbolic in nature and immediately defines the distance: “... the shores change, the mountains recede, the forests thin and fly away, the sky darkens, the cold approaches, we must hurry, hurry - and there is no strength to look back at what has stopped and froze like a cloud at the edge of the sky” Trifonov Yu.V. House on the embankment. - Moscow: Veche, 2006. P. 7. Further references in the text are given from this publication. The main time of the story is social time, on which the hero of the story feels dependent. This is a time which, by taking a person into submission, seems to free the individual from responsibility, a time on which it is convenient to blame everything. “It’s not Glebov’s fault, and not the people,” goes the cruel internal monologue of Glebov, the main character of the story, “but the times. This is the way with times that doesn’t go well” P.9.. This social time can radically change a person’s fate, elevate him or drop him to where now, 35 years after his “reign” at school, a drunken man sits on his haunches, literally and figuratively In the sense of the word, Levka Shulepnikov has sunk to the bottom, having lost even his name “Efim is not Efim,” Glebov guesses. And in general, he is now not Shulepnikov, but Prokhorov. Trifonov considers the time from the late 30s to the early 50s not only as a certain era, but also as the fertile soil that formed such a phenomenon of our time as Vadim Glebov. The writer is far from pessimism, nor does he fall into rosy optimism: man, in his opinion, is an object and, at the same time, a subject of the era, i.e. shapes it.

Trifonov closely follows the calendar; it is important to him that Glebov met Shulepnikov “on one of the unbearably hot August days of 1972,” and Glebov’s wife carefully scratches in childish handwriting on jars of jam: “gooseberry 72,” “strawberry 72.”

From the burning summer of 1972, Trifonov returns Glebov to those times with which Shulepnikov still “says hello”.

Trifonov moves the narrative from the present to the past, and from modern Glebov restores the Glebov of twenty-five years ago; but through one layer another is visible. The portrait of Glebov is deliberately given by the author: “Almost a quarter of a century ago, when Vadim Aleksandrovich Glebov was not yet bald, plump, with breasts like a woman’s, with thick thighs, a large belly and sagging shoulders... when he was not yet tormented by heartburn in the morning, dizziness, a feeling of weakness throughout his body, when his liver was working normally and he could eat fatty foods, not very fresh meat, drink as much wine and vodka as he wanted, without fear of consequences... when he was quick on his feet, bony, with long hair, round glasses, his appearance resembled a commoner from the seventies... in those days... he was unlike himself and inconspicuous, like a caterpillar" P.14..

Trifonov visibly, in detail down to physiology and anatomy, down to the “livers”, shows how time flows like a heavy liquid through a person, similar to a vessel with a missing bottom, connected to the system; how it changes its appearance, its structure; shines through the caterpillar from which the time of today's Glebov, a doctor of sciences, comfortably settled in life, was nurtured. And, turning the action back a quarter of a century, the writer seems to stop the moments.

From the result, Trifonov returns to the reason, to the roots, to the origins of “Glebism”. He returns the hero to what he, Glebov, hates most in his life and what he does not want to remember now - to childhood and youth. And the view “from here,” from the 70s, allows us to remotely examine not random, but regular features, allowing the author to concentrate his influence on the image of the time of the 30s and 40s.

Trifonov limits the artistic space: basically the action takes place on a small heel between a tall gray house on Bersenevskaya embankment, a gloomy, gloomy building, similar to modernized concrete, built in the late 20s for responsible workers (Shulepnikov lives there with his stepfather, there is an apartment Ganchuk), - and a nondescript two-story house in the Deryuginsky courtyard, where Gleb’s family lives.

Two houses and a platform between them form a whole world with its own heroes, passions, relationships, and contrasting social life. The large gray house shading the alley is multi-story. Life in it also seems to be stratified, following a floor hierarchy. One thing is the Shulepnikovs’ huge apartment, where you can almost ride a bicycle along the corridor. The nursery in which Shulepnikov, the youngest, lives is a world inaccessible to Glebov, hostile to him; and yet he is drawn there. Shulepnikov’s nursery is exotic for Glebov: it is filled with “some kind of scary bamboo furniture, with carpets on the floor, with bicycle wheels and boxing gloves hanging on the wall, with a huge glass globe that rotated when a light bulb was lit inside, and with an old telescope on window sill, well secured on a tripod for ease of observation” P.25.. In this apartment there are soft leather chairs, deceptively comfortable: when you sit down, you sink to the very bottom, what happens to Glebov when Levka’s stepfather interrogates him about who attacked in the yard for his son Lev, this apartment even has its own film installation. The Shulepnikovs’ apartment is a special, incredible, in Vadim’s opinion, social world, where Shulepnikov’s mother can, for example, poke a cake with a fork and announce that “the cake is stale” - with the Glebovs, on the contrary, “the cake was always fresh,” otherwise it wouldn’t be maybe a stale cake is completely absurd for the social class to which they belong.

The Ganchuk family of professors also lives in the same house on the embankment. Their apartment, their habitat is a different social system, also given through Glebov’s perceptions. “Glebov liked the smell of carpets, old books, the circle on the ceiling from the huge lampshade of a table lamp, he liked the walls armored to the ceiling with books and at the very top the plaster busts standing in a row like soldiers” P.34..

Let's go even lower: on the first floor of a large house, in an apartment near the elevator, lives Anton, the most gifted of all the boys, not oppressed by the consciousness of his squalor, like Glebov. It’s no longer easy here - the tests are playful, half-childish. For example, walk along the outer eaves of the balcony. Or along the granite parapet of the embankment. Or through the Deryuginsky courtyard, where the famous robbers rule, that is, the punks from the Glebovsky house. The boys even organize a special society to test their will - TOIV.

What criticism, by inertia, denotes as the everyday background of L. Kertman’s prose. Line spacing of bygone times: rereading Y. Trifonov / L. Kertman // Issue. lit. 1994. No. 5. P. 77-103 Trifonova, here in “The House on the Embankment”, maintains the structure of the plot. The objective world is burdened with meaningful social meaning; things do not accompany what is happening, but act; they both reflect the destinies of people and influence them. So, we perfectly understand the occupation and position of Shulepnikov, the eldest, who gave Glebov a formal interrogation in an office with leather chairs, in which he walks in soft Caucasian boots. So, we accurately imagine the life and rights of the communal apartment in which the Glebov family lives, and the rights of this family itself, paying attention to such, for example, a detail of the material world: grandmother Nina sleeps in the corridor, on a trestle bed, and her idea of ​​​​happiness is peace and quiet (“so that they don’t snort for days”). A change in fate is directly associated with a change in habitat, with a change in appearance, which in turn even determines one’s worldview, as the text ironically says in connection with Shulepnikov’s portrait: “Levka became a different person - tall, with a forehead, with an early bald spot, with dark red, square, Caucasian mustache, which was not just the fashion of the time, but denoted character, lifestyle and, perhaps, worldview” P. 41.. So is the laconic description of the new apartment on Gorky Street, where Levka’s mother settled after the war with a new husband, reveals the whole background of the comfortable life of this family during a difficult war for the entire people: “The decoration of the rooms is somehow noticeably different from an apartment in a big house: modern luxury, more antiques and a lot of things on a nautical theme. There are sailing models on a cabinet, here the sea in a frame, there a sea battle almost by Aivazovsky - then it turned out that it was really Aivazovsky...” P. 50.. And again Glebov is gnawed by the old feeling of injustice: after all, “people sold the last thing during the war” ! His family life contrasts sharply with the life decorated by Aivazovsky’s memorable brush.

The details of the appearance, portraits and especially the clothes of Glebov and Shulepnikov are also sharply contrasting. Glebov is constantly experiencing his “patchedness”, his homeliness. Glebov, for example, has a huge patch on his jacket, albeit very neatly sewn on, causing tenderness to Sonya, who is in love with him. And after the war, he was again “in his jacket, in a cowboy shirt, in patched trousers” - a poor friend of the boss’s stepson, the birthday boy of life. “Shulepnikov was wearing a beautiful American jacket made of brown leather, with many zippers.” Trifonov plastically depicts the natural degeneration of feelings of social inferiority and inequality into a complex mixture of envy and hostility, the desire to become like Shulepnikov in everything - into hatred of him. Trifonov writes the relationships between children and adolescents as social.

Clothing, for example, is the first “home”, closest to the human body: the first layer, which separates it from the outside world, covers the person. Clothes determine social status as much as a house; and that is why Glebov is so jealous of Levka’s jacket: for him it is an indicator of a different social level, an inaccessible way of life, and not just a fashionable detail of the toilet, which in his youth he would like to have. And the house is a continuation of clothing, the final “finishing” of a person, the materialization of the stability of his status. Let's return to the episode of the lyrical hero's departure from the house on the embankment. His family is relocated somewhere to an outpost, he disappears from this world: “Those who leave this house cease to exist. I am oppressed by shame. It seems to me that it’s a shame to reveal the pitiful insides of our lives in front of everyone, on the street.” Glebov, nicknamed Baton, walks around like a vulture, looking around at what is happening. He cares about one thing: home.

“And that apartment,” asks Baton, “where will you move, what is it like?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

Baton asks: “How many rooms?” Three or four?

“Alone,” I say.

- “And without an elevator? Will you walk?” “He’s so pleased to ask that he can’t hide his smile.” P.56

The collapse of someone else's life brings Glebov an evil joy, although he himself has achieved nothing, but others have lost their home. This means that not everything is so tightly fixed in this one, and Glebov has hope! It is the house that determines the values ​​of human life for Glebov. And the path that Glebov takes in the story is the path to home, to the vital territory that he longs to capture, to a higher social status that he wants to gain. He feels the inaccessibility of the big house extremely painfully: “Glebov was not very willing to go to visit the guys who lived in the big house, not only reluctantly, he went willingly, but also with caution, because the elevator operators at the entrances always looked suspiciously and asked: “Who are you going to?” Glebov almost felt like an intruder caught red-handed. And you could never know that the answer was in the apartment...” P.62..

Returning to his place in the Deryuginskoe courtyard, Glebov “excitedly described the chandelier in the dining room of Shulepnikov’s apartment, and the corridor along which one could ride a bicycle.

Glebov's father, a firm and experienced man, is a convinced conformist. The main life rule that he teaches Glebov is caution, which also has the character of “spatial” self-restraint: “My children, follow the tram rule - don’t stick your head out!” And, following his wisdom, my father understands the instability of life in a big house, warning Glebov: “Don’t you understand that living without your own corridor is much more spacious?... Yes, I won’t move into that house for two thousand rubles...” P.69.. The father understands the instability, the phantasmogorical nature of this “stability”; he naturally experiences fear in relation to the gray house.

The mask of buffoonery and buffoonery brings Father Glebov closer to Shulepnikov, both of them are Khlestakovs: “They were somewhat similar, father and Levka Shulepnikov.” They lie loudly and shamelessly, receiving true pleasure from buffoonery chatter. “My father said that he saw in Northern India how a fakir grew a magic tree before his eyes... And Levka said that his father once captured a gang of fakirs, they were put in a dungeon and they wanted to shoot them as English spies, but when they came to the dungeon in the morning , there was no one there except five frogs... “We should have shot the frogs,” said the father” P. 71..

Glebov is gripped by a serious, heavy passion, there is no time for jokes, not a trifle, but fate, almost cancer; his passion is stronger even than his own will: “He did not want to be in the big house, and, however, he went there whenever he was called, or even without an invitation. It was tempting, unusual there...” P.73.

That is why Glebov is so attentive and sensitive to the details of the situation, so memorized for details.

“I remember your apartment well, I remember in the dining room there was a huge mahogany buffet, and the upper part of it was supported by thin twisted columns. And on the doors there were some oval majolica pictures. Shepherd, cows. “Huh?” he says after the war to Shulepnikov’s mother.

“There was such a buffet,” said Alina Fedorovna. - I already forgot about him, but you remember.

Well done! - Levka slapped Glebov on the shoulder. - Hellish powers of observation, colossal memory” P.77..

Glebov uses everything to achieve his dream, including the sincere affection of Professor Ganchuk’s daughter, Sonya, for him. Only at first does he chuckle internally; can she, a pale and uninteresting girl, really count on this? But after a student party in the Ganchuks’ apartment, after Glebov clearly heard that someone wanted to “lurk” in the Ganchuks’ mansion, his heavy passion finds a way out - he must act through Sonya. “... Glebov stayed at Sonya’s apartment at night and could not sleep for a long time, because he began to think about Sonya completely differently... In the morning he became a completely different person. He realized that he could love Sonya.” And when they sat down to have breakfast in the kitchen, Glebov “looked down at the giant bend of the bridge, along which cars were running and a tram was crawling, to the opposite bank with a wall, palaces, fir trees, domes - everything was amazingly picturesque and looked somehow especially fresh and clear from such a height, I thought that in his life, apparently, something new was beginning...

Every day at breakfast you can see the palaces from a bird's eye view! And sting all the people, all without exception, who run like ants along the concrete arc down there!” P.84.

The Ganchuks not only have an apartment in a large house - they also have a dacha, a “super-house” in Glebov’s understanding, something that further strengthens him in his “love” for Sonya; it is there, at the dacha, that everything finally happens between them: “he was lying on an old-fashioned sofa, with rollers and brushes, with his hands behind his head, looking at the ceiling, lined with clapboard, darkened with time, and suddenly - with a rush of all the blood, until dizziness - he felt that all this could become his home and maybe now - no one has guessed yet, but he knows - all these yellowed boards with knots, felt, photographs, a creaking window frame, a roof covered with snow, belongs to him! She was so sweet, half dead from fatigue, from hops, from all the languor...” P. 88..

And when, after intimacy, after Sonya’s love and confessions, Glebov remains alone in the attic, it is not a feeling - at least of affection or sexual satisfaction - that overwhelms Glebov: he “went to the window and with a blow of his palm opened it. The forest cold and darkness enveloped him; right in front of the window, a heavy spruce branch with a cap of damp snow - it barely glowed in the darkness - was blowing pine needles.

Glebov stood by the window, breathed, and thought: “And this branch is mine!”

Now he is at the top, and the look from top to bottom is a reflection of his new view of people - “ants”. But life turned out to be more complicated, more deceptive than Glebov, the winner, imagined; Father, in his tram wisdom, was right about something: Ganchuk, for whom Glebov was writing his thesis, the famous professor Ganchuk was staggering.

And here the main thing happens, no longer a childish, not a joke test of the hero. Those test of will decisions seemed to foreshadow what would happen later. This was a plot anticipation of Glebov’s role in the situation with Ganchuk.

I remembered: the boys invited Glebov to join a secret society testing will, and Glebov was delighted, but answered absolutely wonderfully: “... I’m glad to join TOIV, but wants to have the right to leave it at any time. That is, I wanted to be a member of our society and at the same time not be one. Suddenly the extraordinary benefit of such a position was revealed: he owned our secret without being completely with us... We found ourselves in his hands.”

In all childhood trials, Glebov stands a little to the side, in an advantageous and “exit” position, both together and, as it were, separately. “He was absolutely nothing, Vadik Baton,” recalls the lyrical hero. - But this, as I later realized, is a rare gift: to be nothing. People who know how to be nothing go far” P. 90..

However, the voice of the lyrical hero is heard here, and not the author’s position. The loaf is just “nothing” at first glance. In fact, he clearly carries out his line, satisfies his passion, achieves what he wants by any means. Vadik Glebov “crawls” upward with a persistence equal to the fatal “sinking” of Levka Shulepnikov down to the very bottom, lower and lower, right down to the crematorium, where he now serves as the gatekeeper, the guardian of the kingdom of the dead - it is as if he no longer exists in the living life, and even his name is different - Prokhorov; That’s why his phone call today, in the hot summer of 1972, seems to Glebov like a call from the other world.

So, at the very moment of Glebov’s triumph and victory, the achievement of the goal (Sonya the bride, the house is almost his own, the department is secured), Ganchuk is accused of sycophancy and formalism and at the same time they want to use Glebov: he is required to publicly refuse the leader. Glebov’s thoughts are painfully fussing: after all, it wasn’t just Ganchuk who was shaking, the whole house was shaking! And he, as a true conformist and pragmatist, understands that he now needs to provide for his home somehow differently, in a different way. But since Trifonov writes not just a scoundrel and a careerist, but a conformist, self-deception begins. And Ganchuk, Glebov convinces himself, is not so good and correct; and there are some unpleasant traits in him. This is how it already happened in childhood: when Shulepnikov Sr. is looking for “those responsible for the beating of his son Lev”, looking for the instigators, Glebov betrays them, consoling himself, however, with this: “In general, he acted fairly, bad people will be punished . But an unpleasant feeling remained - as if he, or something, had betrayed someone, although he told the absolute truth about bad people” P.92..

Glebov does not want to speak out against Ganchuk - and cannot avoid speaking out. He understands that now it is more profitable to be with those who are “rolling the barrel” against Ganchuk, but he wants to remain pure, on the sidelines; “It’s best to delay and patch up this whole story.” But it is impossible to delay it indefinitely. And Trifonov analyzes in detail the illusion of free choice (a test of will!) that Glebov’s self-deceptive mind builds: “It was like at a fairy-tale crossroads: if you go straight, you’ll lose your head, if you go to the left, you’ll lose your horse, to the right, there’s also some kind of death. However, in some fairy tales: if you go to the right, you will find a treasure. Glebov belongs to a special breed of bacteria: he was ready to stagnate at a crossroads until the last opportunity, until that final second when they fall to death from exhaustion. The hero is a waiter, the hero is a tire puller. What was it -... confusion in front of life, which constantly, day after day, throws up large and small crossroads? P.94. In the story, an ironic image of the road on which Glebov stands appears: a road that leads nowhere, that is, a dead end. He has only one way - up. And only this path is illuminated for him by a guiding star, fate, on which Glebov ultimately relied. He turns to the wall, withdraws (both figuratively and literally, lies on the couch at home) and waits.

Let's take a small step aside and turn to the image of Ganchuk, who plays such a significant role in the plot of the story. It is the image of Ganchuk, believes B. Pankin, who generally regards the story as “the most successful” among Trifonov’s urban stories, that is “interesting, unexpected.” What does B. Pankin see as the uniqueness of Ganchuk’s image? The critic puts him on a par with Sergei Proshkin and Grisha Rebrov, “as another hypostasis of the type.” I will allow myself a long quotation from B. Pankin’s article, which clearly indicates his understanding of the image: “... Ganchuk... was destined to embody in his own destiny both the connection of times and their break. He was born, began to act, matured and showed himself as a person precisely at that time when a person had more opportunities to express and defend himself and his principles (to defend or perish) than in other times... a former red horseman, a grunt turned into a into a rabfakov student, then into a teacher and scientist. The decline of his career coincided with a time, fortunately short-lived, when it was easier for dishonesty, careerism, opportunism, dressed in the clothes of nobility and integrity, to win their pitiful, illusory victories... And we see how he, even now, remains a knight without fear and reproach, and today trying, but in vain, to defeat his enemies in a fair fight, yearns for those times when he was not so unarmed.” Pankin B. In a circle, in a spiral // Friendship of Peoples, 1977, No. 5. pp. 251, 252.

Having correctly outlined Ganchuk's biography, the critic, in my opinion, was hasty in his assessment. The fact is that Ganchuk cannot be called a “knight without fear and reproach”, based on the full amount of information about the professor - the grunt, which we receive in the text of the story, and already the conclusion is that a positive author’s program is being built on Ganchuk, and completely unproven.

Let's turn to the text. In frank and relaxed conversations with Glebov, the professor “talks with pleasure” about “fellow travelers, formalists, Rappovites, Proletkult... he remembered all sorts of twists and turns of literary battles of the twenties and thirties” P. 97..

Trifonov reveals the image of Ganchuk through his direct speech: “Here we struck a blow at Bespalovism... It was a relapse, we had to hit hard, “We gave them a fight...”, “By the way, we disarmed him, do you know how?” The author’s comment is restrained, but significant: “Yes, those were really fights, not quarrels. True understanding was developed in a bloody cabin” P.98.. The writer clearly makes it clear that Ganchuk used methods in literary discussions, to put it mildly, that were not of a purely literary order: it was not only in theoretical disputes that he affirmed the truth.

From the moment when Glebov decides to “crawl” into the house using Sonya, he begins to visit the Ganchuks every day, accompanies the old professor on evening walks. And Trifonov gives a detailed external description of Ganchuk, which develops into a description of the professor’s internal image. What appears before the reader is not “a knight without fear or reproach,” but a person who is comfortably positioned in life. “When he put on an astrakhan hat, got into white burkas trimmed with chocolate-colored leather and a long fur coat lined with fox fur, he looked like a merchant from Ostrovsky’s plays. But this merchant, walking leisurely, with measured steps, along the deserted embankment in the evening, talked about the Polish campaign, about the difference between the Cossack cabin and the officer's cabin, about the merciless struggle with the petty-bourgeois elements and anarchist elements, and also talked about Lunacharsky's creative confusion, Gorky's hesitations, Alexei's mistakes Tolstoy...

And he spoke about everyone... although respectfully, but with a touch of secret superiority, like a person possessing some additional knowledge.”

The author's critical attitude towards Ganchuk is obvious. Ganchuk, for example, does not know or understand the modern life of the people around him at all, declaring: “In five years, every Soviet person will have a dacha.” About indifference and how Glebov, accompanying him in a student coat, feels in the twenty-five degree frost: “Ganchuk turned sweetly blue and puffed in his warm fur coat” P.101.

However, the bitter irony of life is that Trifonov gives Ganchuk and his wife, who talk about the petty-bourgeois element, not a proletarian origin: Ganchuk, it turns out, is from the family of a priest, and Yulia Mikhailovna with her prosecutorial tone, as it turns out, is the daughter of a bankrupt Viennese banker...

Just as then, in childhood, Glebov betrayed, but acted, as it seemed to him, “fairly” with “bad people,” so now he will have to betray a person, apparently not the best.

But Ganchuk is a victim in the current situation. And the fact that the victim is not the most sympathetic person does not change the vile unity of the case. Moreover, the moral conflict only becomes more complicated. And, in the end, the biggest and most innocent victim turns out to be bright simplicity, Sonya. Trifonov, as we already know, ironically defined Glebov as a “tire-pulling hero,” a false hero at a crossroads. But Ganchuk is also a false hero: “a strong, fat old man with rosy cheeks seemed to him a hero and a grunt, Eruslan Lazarevich” P.102. “Bogatyr”, “merchant from Ostrovsky’s plays”, “slasher”, “rosy cheeks” - these are Ganchuk’s definitions that are not refuted in any way in the text. His vitality and physical stability are phenomenal. After the defeat at the academic council, with bliss and genuine passion, Ganchuk eats cakes - Napoleon. Even when visiting his daughter’s grave - at the end of the story, he is in a hurry, rather, to go home in order to catch some television program... Personal pensioner Ganchuk will survive all the attacks, they do not hurt his “roddy cheeks.”

The conflict in the “house on the embankment” between the “decent Ganchuks, who treat everything with a “shade of secret superiority,” and Druzyaev-Shireiko, to whom Glebov internally joins, exchanging Ganchuk for Druzyaev, seems to return the conflict of “exchange” in a new round - between the Dmitrievs and the Lukyanovs. The pharisaism of the Ganchuks, who despise people, but live precisely in the way that they verbally despise, is just as little sympathetic to the author as the pharisaism of Ksenia Fedorovna, for whom other “low” people clean out the cesspool. But the conflict, which in “The Exchange” was predominantly ethical in nature, here in “The House on the Embankment” becomes a conflict not only moral, but also ideological. And in this conflict, it would seem. Glebov is located exactly in the middle, at a crossroads, he can turn this way or that way. But Glebov doesn’t want to decide anything, fate seems to decide for him. On the eve of the performance that Glebov’s Friends so demand from Glebov, Grandma Nina dies - an inconspicuous, quiet old woman with a tuft of yellowed hair at the back of her head. And everything resolves itself: Glebov doesn’t have to go anywhere. However, the betrayal has already happened anyway; Glebov is engaged in outright self-deception. Yulia Mikhailovna understands this: “It’s best if you leave this house...”. And there is no longer a home for Glebov here, it collapsed, fell apart, and now we must look for a home in another place. This is how one of the main moments of the story comes to an end: “In the morning, having breakfast in the kitchen and looking at the gray concrete bend of the bridge. At the little people, the cars, at the gray-yellow palace with a cap of snow on the opposite side of the river, he said that he would call after class and come in the evening. He never came to that house again” P.105.

The house on the embankment disappears from Glebov’s life, the house that seemed so strong, in fact turned out to be fragile, not protected from anything, it stands on the embankment, at the very edge of the land, near the water, and this is not just a random location, but deliberately thrown away by the writer symbol.

The house goes under the water of time, like some kind of Atlantis, with its heroes, passions, conflicts: “the waves closed over it” - these words addressed by the author to Levka Shulepnikov can be applied to the whole house. One by one, its inhabitants disappear from life: Anton and Himius died in the war, the elder Shulepnikov was found dead under unclear circumstances, Yulia Mikhailovna died, Sonya first ended up in a home for the mentally ill and also died.... “The house collapsed.”

With the disappearance of the house, Glebov deliberately forgets everything, not only surviving this flood, but also reaching new prestigious times precisely because “he tried not to remember, what was not remembered ceased to exist.” He then lived “a life that did not exist,” Trifonov emphasizes.

It’s not only Glebov who doesn’t want to remember, Ganchuk doesn’t want to remember anything either. At the end of the story, the unknown lyrical hero, “I,” a historian working on the book in the 20s, is looking for Ganchuk: “He was eighty-six. He shriveled, squinted, his head sunk into his shoulders, but on his cheekbones there was still a glimmer of Ganchuk’s blush, which had not been completely worn out” P.109. And in his handshake one can feel “a hint of the former power.” The unknown person wants to ask Ganchuk about the past, but encounters stubborn resistance. “And the point is not that the old man’s memory is weak. He didn't want to remember."

L. Terkanyan quite rightly notes that the story “The House on the Embankment” is built “on an intense polemic with the philosophy of oblivion, with crafty attempts to hide behind “times.” In this controversy is the pearl of the work" Terakanyan L. Urban stories of Yuri Trifonov. //Trifonov Yu. Another life. Stories, stories. - M., 1978. P. 683.. What Glebov and others like him are trying to forget, burn into memory, is restored by the entire fabric of the work, and the detailed descriptiveness inherent in the story is the artistic and historical evidence of a writer recreating the past, resisting oblivion . The author’s position is expressed in the desire to restore, not to forget anything, to immortalize everything in the reader’s memory.

The action of the story unfolds in several time layers at once: it begins in 1972, then descends into the pre-war years; then the main events fall in the late 40s and early 50s; at the end of the story - 1974. The author's voice sounds openly only once: in the prologue of the story, setting a historical distance; after the introduction, all events acquire internal historical completeness. The living equivalence of different layers of time in the story is obvious; none of the layers is given abstractly, by hint, it is unfolded plastically; Each time in the story has its own image, its own smell and color.

In “The House on the Embankment” Trifonov also combines different voices in the narrative. Most of the story is written in the third person, but Glebov’s inner voice, his assessments, his reflections are woven into the dispassionate protocol study of Glebov’s psychology. Moreover: as A. Demidov accurately notes, Trifonov “enters into a special lyrical contact with the hero.” What is the purpose of this contact? Convicting Glebov is too simple a task. Trifonov sets as his goal the study of Glebov’s psychology and life concept, which required such a thorough penetration into the hero’s microworld. Trifonov follows his hero as a shadow of his consciousness, plunging into all the nooks and crannies of self-deception, recreating the hero from within himself. The story “The House on the Embankment” became a turning point for the writer in many respects. Trifonov sharply re-emphasizes previous motives, finds a new type that has not been previously studied in the literature, generalizing the social phenomenon of “Glebism,” and analyzes social changes through an individual human personality. The idea finally found artistic embodiment. After all, Sergei Troitsky’s reasoning about man as a thread of history can also be attributed to Glebov, he is the thread that stretched from the 30s to the 70s, already in our time. The historical view of things developed by the writer in “Impatience”, using material close to modern times, gives a new artistic result. Trifonov becomes a historian - a chronicler testifying to modernity. But this is not the only role of “House on the Embankment” in Trifonov’s work. In this story, the writer subjected a critical rethinking to his “beginning” - the story “Students”. Analyzing this story in the first chapters of the book, we have already turned to plot motifs and characters who seem to have moved from “Students” to “House on the Embankment.” The transfer of the plot and the re-emphasis of the author’s attitude is traced in detail in the article by V. Kozheinov “The Problem of the Author and the Path of the Writer.”

Let us also turn to an important, in our opinion, private issue raised by V. Kozheinov and which is not only of purely philological interest. This question is connected with the image of the author in “The House on the Embankment.” It is in the voice of the author, V. Kozheinov believes, that the long-standing “Students” are invisibly present in “The House on the Embankment”. “The author,” writes V. Kozheinov, making the reservation that this is not the imperial Yu.V. Trifonov, and the artistic image, is a classmate and even a friend of Vadim Glebov... He is also the hero of the story, a youth, and then a young man... with grateful aspirations, somewhat sentimental, relaxed, but ready to fight for justice.”

“...The image of the author, which appears repeatedly in the prehistory of the story, is completely absent during the unfolding of its central conflict. But in the most acute, climactic scenes, even the very voice of the author, which sounds quite clearly in the rest of the narrative, is reduced, almost completely muffled.” Kozheinov V. The problem of the author and the path of the writer. M., 1978. P.75. V. Kozheinov emphasizes precisely that Trifonov does not correct Glebov’s voice, his assessment of what is happening: “The author’s voice exists here, in the end, as if only in order to fully embody Glebov’s position and convey his words and intonations. This is how and only Glebov creates the image of Krasnikova. And this unpleasant image is not corrected in any way by the author’s voice. It inevitably turns out that the author’s voice is, to one degree or another, echoed here by the voice of Glebov.” Right there. P. 78.

In the lyrical digressions, the voice of a certain lyrical “I” sounds, in which Kozheinov sees the image of the author. But this is only one of the voices of the narrative, from which it is impossible to fully judge the author’s position in relation to events, and especially to himself in the past - the same age as Glebov, the author of the story “Students”. In these digressions, some autobiographical details are read (moving from a large house to an outpost, loss of a father, etc.). However, Trifonov specifically separates this lyrical voice from the voice of the author - the narrator. V. Kozheinov supports his accusations against the author of “The House on the Embankment” not in literary criticism, but in fact, by resorting to his own biographical memories and Trifonov’s biography as an argument confirming his, Kozheinov’s, thought. V. Kozheinov begins his article with a reference to Bakhtin. Let us resort to Bakhtin: “The most common phenomenon, even in serious and conscientious historical and literary work, is to draw biographical material from works and, conversely, to explain this work with biography, and purely factual justifications seem completely sufficient, that is, simply the coincidence of the facts of life of the hero and the author “,” the scientist notes, “selections are made that pretend to have some kind of meaning, the whole of the hero and the whole of the author are completely ignored and, therefore, the most significant moment is ignored, the form of attitude to the event, the form of his experience in the whole of life and the world.” And further: “We deny that completely unprincipled, purely factual approach to this, which is the only dominant one at the present time, based on the confusion of the author as the creator, the moment of the work, and the author as the person, the moment of the ethical, social event of life, and on a misunderstanding the creative principle of the author’s relationship to the hero, resulting in misunderstanding and distortion, at best, the transfer of bare facts of the ethical, biographical personality of the author...” Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979. P. 11,12. A direct comparison of the facts of Trifonov’s biography with the author’s voice in the work seems incorrect. The author's position differs from the position of any hero of the story, including the lyrical one. He in no way shares, rather refutes, for example, the lyrical hero’s point of view on Glebov (“he was absolutely nothing”), taken up by many critics. No, Glebov is a very definite character. Yes, the author’s voice in some places seems to merge with Glebov’s voice, coming into contact with him. But the naive proposal that he shares Glebov’s position in relation to this or that character is not confirmed. Trifonov, I repeat once again, examines Glebov, connects, and does not join him. It is not the author’s voice that corrects Glebov’s words and thoughts, but Glebov’s objective actions and actions themselves correct them. Glebov’s life concept is expressed not only in his direct thoughts, because they are often illusory and self-deception. (After all, Glebov, for example, “sincerely,” is tormented over whether to go and speak out about Ganchuk. “Sincerely,” he convinced himself of his love for Sonya: “And he thought so sincerely, because it seemed firm, final and nothing else there won’t be. Their closeness grew closer and closer. He couldn’t live without her even a day.”). Glebov's life concept is expressed in his path. The result is important for Glebov, mastery of living space, victory over time, which drowns many, including the Dorodnovs and Druzyaevs - they only were, but he is, Glebov rejoices. He crossed out the past, and Trifonov scrupulously restores it. It is precisely this restoration that resists oblivion that constitutes the author’s position.

Further, V. Kozheinov reproaches Trifonov for the fact that “the author’s voice did not dare, so to speak, to speak openly next to Glebov’s voice in the climactic scenes. He chose to withdraw altogether. And this diminished the overall meaning of the story. Bakhtin M.M. Aesthetics of verbal creativity. M., 1979. P. 12.. But it was precisely the “open speech” that would have diminished the meaning of the story and turned it into a private episode of Trifonov’s personal biography! Trifonov preferred to settle accounts with himself in his own way. A new, historical look at the past, including himself in the study of “Glebism”. Trifonov did not define or distinguish himself - the past - from the time that he tried to comprehend and the image of which he wrote anew in “The House on the Embankment”.

Glebov comes from the lower social classes. But to portray a little man negatively, not to sympathize with him, but to discredit him, is, by and large, not in the traditions of Russian literature. The humanistic pathos of Gogol’s “The Overcoat” could never be reduced to giving life to a hero who has been eaten away by life. But that was before Chekhov, who reconsidered this humanistic component and demonstrated that you can laugh at anyone. Hence his desire to show that the little man himself is to blame for his unworthy position (“Thick and Thin”).

Trifonov follows Chekhov in this regard. Of course, there are also satirical arrows directed at the inhabitants of the big house, and the debunking of Glebov and Glebism is another aspect of the debunking of the so-called little man. Trifonov demonstrates the degree of baseness that can ultimately result in a completely legitimate feeling of social protest.

In “The House on the Embankment” Trifonov refers, as a witness, to the memory of his generation, which Glebov wants to cross out (“the life that never happened”). And Trifonov’s position is expressed, ultimately, through artistic memory, striving for socio-historical knowledge of the individual and society, vitally connected by time and place.

In the artistic world of Yuri Trifonov (1925 - 1981), a special place has always been occupied by images of childhood - the time of personality formation. Starting from the very first stories, childhood and adolescence were the criteria by which the writer seemed to test reality for humanity and justice, or rather, for inhumanity and injustice. Dostoevsky’s famous words about “a child’s teardrop” can be used as an epigraph to Trifonov’s entire work: “the scarlet, oozing flesh of childhood” - this is what they say in the story “The House on the Embankment”. Vulnerable, we would add. When asked in a 1975 Komsomolskaya Pravda questionnaire about what is the worst loss at sixteen years old, Trifonov answered: “Loss of parents.”

From story to story, from novel to novel, this shock, this trauma, this pain threshold of his young heroes passes - the loss of their parents, which divided their lives into unequal parts: an isolated, prosperous childhood and immersion in the general suffering of “adult life”.

He began publishing early and became a professional writer early; but the reader truly discovered Trifonov in the early 70s. He opened it and accepted it because he recognized himself - and was touched to the quick. Trifonov created his own world in prose, which was so close to the world of the city in which we live that sometimes readers and critics forgot that this was literature and not reality, and treated his heroes as their direct contemporaries.

Trifonov's prose is distinguished by internal unity. Theme with variations. For example, the theme of exchange runs through all of Trifonov’s works, right down to “The Old Man.” The novel “Time and Place” outlines all of Trifonov’s prose - from “Students” to “Exchange”, “The Long Farewell”, “Preliminary Results”; there you can find all Trifonov’s motifs. “The repetition of themes is the development of the task, its growth,” noted Marina Tsvetaeva. But with Trifonov, the theme deepened, went in circles, returned, but on a different level. “I’m not interested in the horizontals of prose, but in its verticals,” noted Trifonov in one of his last stories.

Whatever material he turned to, be it modernity, the time of the Civil War, the 30s of the twentieth century or the 70s of the nineteenth century, he was faced, first of all, with the problem of the relationship between the individual and society, and therefore their mutual responsibility. Trifonov was a moralist - but not in the primitive sense of the word; not a hypocrite or a dogmatist, no - he believed that a person is responsible for his actions, which form the history of the people, the country; and society, the collective cannot, does not have the right to neglect the fate of an individual. Trifonov perceived modern reality as an era and persistently searched for the reasons for changes in public consciousness, stretching the thread further and further - into the depths of time. Trifonov was characterized by historical thinking; He subjected each specific social phenomenon to analysis, relating to reality as a witness and historian of our time and a person deeply rooted in Russian history, inseparable from it. While “village” prose was looking for its roots and origins, Trifonov was also looking for his “soil”. “My soil is everything that Russia has suffered through!” – Trifonov himself could subscribe to these words of his hero. Indeed, this was his soil; his destiny was shaped in the fate and suffering of the country. Moreover: this soil began to nourish the root system of his books. The search for historical memory unites Trifonov with many modern Russian writers. At the same time, his memory was also his “home”, family memory - a purely Moscow trait - inseparable from the memory of the country.

Yuri Trifonov, like other writers, as well as the entire literary process as a whole, was, of course, influenced by time. But in his work he not only honestly and truthfully reflected certain facts of our time, our reality, but sought to get to the bottom of the reasons for these facts.

The problem of tolerance and intolerance permeates, perhaps, almost all of Trifonov’s “late” prose. The problem of trial and condemnation, moreover, moral terror, is posed in “Students”, and in “Exchange”, and in “The House on the Embankment”, and in the novel “The Old Man”.

Trifonov’s story “The House on the Embankment,” published by the magazine “Friendship of Peoples” (1976, No. 1), is perhaps his most social work. In this story, in its sharp content, there was more “novel” than in many bloated multi-page works, proudly designated by their authors as “novels”.

What was novel in Trifonov’s new story was, first of all, the social and artistic exploration and understanding of the past and present as an interconnected process. In an interview that followed the publication of “House on the Embankment”, the writer himself explained his creative task as follows: “To see, to depict the passage of time, to understand what it does to people, how it changes everything around... Time is a mysterious phenomenon, to understand and imagine it like this It’s as difficult as imagining infinity... But time is what we bathe in every day, every minute... I want the reader to understand: this mysterious “time-connecting thread” passes through you and me, that this is the nerve of history.” In a conversation with R. Schroeder, Trifonov emphasized: “I know that history is present in every day, in every human destiny. It lies in broad, invisible, and sometimes quite clearly visible layers in everything that shapes modernity... The past is present both in the present and in the future.”

Time in The House on the Embankment determines and directs the development of the plot and the development of characters; people are revealed by time; time is the main director of events. The prologue of the story is openly symbolic in nature and immediately defines the distance: “... the shores are changing, the mountains are receding, the forests are thinning and flying away, the sky is darkening, the cold is approaching, we must hurry, hurry - and there is no strength to look back at what has stopped and froze, like a cloud at the edge of the sky." This is an epic time, impartial to whether “those who rake with their hands” will float out in its indifferent stream.

The main time of the story is social time, on which the heroes of the story feel dependent. This is a time which, by taking a person into submission, seems to free the individual from responsibility, a time on which it is convenient to blame everything. “It’s not Glebov’s fault, and not the people,” goes the cruel internal monologue of Glebov, the main character of the story, “but the times. So let him not say hello at times.” This social time can radically change a person’s fate, elevate him or drop him to where now, thirty-five years after his “reign” at school, a person who has sunk to the bottom, drunk in the literal and figurative sense of the word, sits on his haunches. Trifonov considers the time from the late 30s to the early 50s not only as a certain era, but also as a fertile soil that formed such a phenomenon of our time as Vadim Glebov. The writer is far from pessimism, nor does he fall into rosy optimism: man, in his opinion, is the object and - at the same time - the subject of the era, that is, he shapes it.

From the burning summer of 1972, Trifonov returns Glebov to those times with which Shulepnikov was still “hello”.

Trifonov moves the narrative from the present to the past, and from modern Glebov restores Glebov of twenty-five years ago; but through one layer the other deliberately shines through. The portrait of Glebov is deliberately doubled by the author: “Almost a quarter of a century ago, when Vadim Aleksandrovich Glebov was not yet bald, plump, with breasts like a woman’s, with thick thighs, a big belly and sagging shoulders... when he was not yet tormented by heartburn in the morning, dizziness, a feeling of weakness throughout the whole body, when his liver was working normally and he could eat fatty foods, not very fresh meat, drink as much wine and vodka as he wanted, without fear of consequences... when he was quick on his feet, bony, with long hair, in round glasses, his appearance resembled a commoner from the seventies... in those days... he was unlike himself and inconspicuous, like a caterpillar.”

Trifonov visibly, in detail, right down to physiology and anatomy, down to the “livers”, shows how time flows like a heavy liquid through a person, similar to a vessel with a missing bottom, connected to the system; how it changes structure; shines through the caterpillar from which the time of today's Glebov, a doctor of sciences, comfortably settled in life, was nurtured.