This section will schematically outline the poetic space of Eugene Onegin, taken as a whole, and highlight the relationship between the empirical space depicted in the novel and the space of the text itself. The time of the novel has been repeatedly analyzed (R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, S.M. Bondi, N.L. Brodsky, A.E. Tarkhov, Yu.M. Lotman, V.S. Baevsky, etc.), but space I was less fortunate in this regard. In the works on Onegin there are, of course, an innumerable number of comments and observations on individual features of space, however, the question was not even specifically raised. However, the image of Onegin’s space arose in the fundamental research of Yu.M. Lotman and S.G. Bocharov, formally devoted to describing the artistic structure of the novel, so that the problem was still implicitly worked out. However, structure, understood as space, constitutes only part of the space of the text. This is a purely poetic space, or more precisely, the basic principle of its construction, which does not include modes and branches, as well as all the richness of the reflected empiricism. Therefore, there is every reason to review the Onegin space, which, in addition to the problems of structure and placement of the text, is a language for expressing various forms of exploration of the world.

“Eugene Onegin” is a complete poetic world, and, therefore, it can be imagined as a space of visual contemplation. In this case, three positions of perception are realized: a view of the novel from the outside, a view from the inside, and a combination of both points of view. The possibility of visual contemplation or at least sensory experience of poetic space is assumed to be unconditional: otherwise there is no point in talking about space as a language and meaning. The analysis will begin later.

From the outside, the novel is perceived as a single whole, without distinguishing its constituent parts. However, direct representation, let alone formulation, is impossible. Only a figurative substitution is possible, an intermediate symbol like “an apple in the palm” (2)*. The poems: “Onegin’s airy mass, like a cloud, stood above me” (A. Akhmatova) and “His novel Rising from the darkness, which the climate is not able to give” (B. Pasternak) go back to the spatial representation of the author himself: “And I have not yet clearly discerned the distance of a free novel through a magic crystal,” and in each case, a metaphor or comparison acts as an analogue of a reality that is not directly comprehended (3)*.

A point of view immersed inside Onegin reveals unity instead of unity. Everything is together, everything is nested, and everything embraces each other; an endless mosaic of details unfolds in all directions. The following verses speak well about the movement of the gaze in such a space:

* Fine-rib septum
* I’ll pass through, I’ll pass like light,
* I’ll pass as the image enters the image
* And how an object cuts an object.
* (B. Pasternak)

The spatial palpability of “Onegin” from the inside is not a film of internal visions of what is happening in the novel, where the imagination can stop at any “frame”. This is a “frame”, an episode, a picture, a stanza, a verse, an omission of a verse - any “point” of the text, taken in its extension to the entire text, including its background space formed by references, reminiscences, quotes, etc. It is also counter-directional a process in which the entire vast text of the novel, with its structure of overlapping, intersecting and heterogeneous structures, is felt to be directed precisely to the point on which attention is now focused. Consciousness, filled with the space of a poetic text, is capable, however, of simultaneously reproducing a whole series of such states, and counter beams of lines, piercing and colliding ensembles of local spaces, bring them into semantic interaction. The interweaving of spaces is the weaving of meaning.

The combined point of view should show the poetic text as space and as an ensemble of spaces in a single perception. As a visual analogue, a large bunch of grapes with grapes tightly pressed into each other is suitable - an image apparently inspired by O. Mandelstam. The second likening also goes back to it. He considers one of the best keys to understanding Dante’s “Comedy” to be “the interior of a mountain stone, the Aladdin-like space hidden in it, the lantern-like quality of a lamp, the luster-like pendant of fish rooms.”

The figurative likenings of Onegin's space are, of course, preliminary and quite general in nature, coinciding, moreover, with the spatial features of many significant poetic texts. However, we can already say that everything that happens in Onegin is immersed in a spatial continuum, filled with heterogeneous local spaces that can be divided in every possible way and have varying degrees of organization. Within the continuum, this set of qualitatively different spaces is necessarily coordinated, but not so much that they speak with the same voices. Moreover, according to Yu.M. Lotman, “at whatever level we look at a literary text - from such an elementary link as a metaphor, to the most complex constructions of integral works of art - we are faced with a combination of incompatible structures.” Therefore, the multi-component poetic space of “Onegin” is characterized by a strong counter-tension of individual fields and their simultaneous invasion of each other’s boundaries.

This property is clearly visible in one of the main characteristics of the Onegin space. Having well mastered Zhukovsky’s classic formula “Life and poetry are one,” Pushkin in “Onegin” and other works significantly complicated and expanded it. In Onegin this manifested itself as the unity of the world of the author and the world of the heroes. All life material is placed by Pushkin in a common spatial frame, but within it the depicted world develops, appears as a “split double reality.” Strictly speaking, the plot of “Onegin” is that a certain author is composing a novel about fictional characters. However, no one reads Onegin this way, because the story of Eugene and Tatiana in the novel simultaneously exists independently of the writing as equal to life itself. This is achieved by moving the author-writer from his own space into the space of the heroes, where he, as Onegin’s friend, becomes a character in the novel he himself writes. In this paradoxical combination of poetic and life spaces in the common novel space, life and poetry, on the one hand, are identified, and on the other, they turn out to be incompatible.

S.G. Bocharov writes about it this way: “The novel of the heroes depicts their life, and it is also depicted as a novel. We read in a row:

* At the beginning of our novel,
* In a remote, distant side...

Where did the event that is being remembered here take place? We are answered by two parallel verses, which only collectively give Pushkin’s image of space in Onegin. In the remote side, at the beginning of the novel, there is one event, precisely localized in one single place, but in different places. “In a remote, distant side” is framed by the first verse; we read them one after the other, and “see” one in the other, one through the other. And so is Eugene Onegin as a whole: we see the novel through the image of the novel.”

From this long excerpt it is clear that a significant literary text reduces to each other spaces that, by direct logic or common sense, are considered irreducible. The space of “Onegin,” so playfully and demonstratively put forward by Pushkin as split, essentially acts as a guarantee of the unity of the poetic world as a symbol of being in its non-disintegrating diversity. In such a space there is a lot of syncretism and simultaneity, and in its type it certainly goes back to the mythopoetic space. After all, spaces, diluted by the increasing complexity of being to the point of alienation, are nevertheless reduced, thereby returning to the original homogeneity or forgotten community.

It was created over seven years: May 1823 September 1830. The last author’s version of the novel was published in 1837. V. Baevsky in the article “Through the Magic Crystal” singles out time outside the novel and novel. He divides the latter into several time phases: The Infinite in the Finite: Chapter One begins with a sudden internal monologue. The time sequence is broken, and the impression of a beginningless flow of time is created - “like in life.” The open ending of chapter eight shows that the period of time that is presented to the reader has ended; it reminds us that infinite time continues beyond the period shown to the reader. Thus, in a text limited by a beginning and an end, the illusion of its infinity is created. The illusion of reality. Past narrative: the story is told in the past tense, but this is not an epic tense, which is far removed from the moment of the story. The past tense “E.O” is a typical novel narrative tense, intertwined with the narrator’s conventional present tense, non-linear. The past narrative tense is the main event tense of the novel. Internal chronological litters indicate the relationship of episodes to each other. Absolute internal chronological litters indicate the exact time intervals between episodes: “This is how he killed eight years, / Losing the best color of life.” “First”, “later”, “soon”. – relative chronological marks. External chronological marks connect the novel time with greater historical time. They are also absolute and relative. Absolute The year and date of the event are directly stated. Relative external ones allow us to correlate the time of the events depicted in the novel with greater historical time through intermediate calculations and considerations. The dates of Pushkin's biography cannot serve as chronological markers for the event outline of the novel. Past historical time. From the very beginning of the novel, digressions are made from the past narrative event time into the more distant past. The past narrative time covers the 1820s, the past historical time covers the first decades of the 19th century, the last quarter of the 18th century. It is not enough for the author to tell where Evgeniy was born, how he grew up and was brought up; a message about the father is included in the narrative. The fate of the son is determined, in particular, by the father; the roots of his fate go back to the past century. But not only the central characters are immersed in historical time. The talk comes about the sisters' nanny, and in her story a past arises, which explains not only her fate, but partly Tatyana, her mother, and her nanny are forced to marry. But not only people, but also social phenomena of very different scales are given in time dimensions. “Onegin flew to the theater,” and immediately follows a brief history of the Russian theater in distant historical times. Present tense of the narrator : The past narrative is connected not only with the past historical, but also with the present tense of the narrative. The author says about Zaretsky: “he lives and lives to this day.” “Now” is a conditional present tense, a point on the time axis from which the narrator looks at the events he is telling. The present time of action is clearly indicated by the previous stanza: “I am free, I am again looking for a union,” “I write, and my heart does not yearn.” The present tense of the narrator clearly appears in chapter eight, when, at the moment of the end of the novel, the author says goodbye to his work, to the characters and to the reader. Thus, the conventional present tense of the novel is correlated with the time of its writing. The past narrative and conditional present of the narrator belong to one period of great historical time - the 20s of the 19th century. Future tense: The stream of time—the distant historical past, the narrative past, the conventional present—flows through the novel, carrying the characters and rushing into the future. For Lensky, the dead young man, there is no future; but the future itself - the category of existence - is present in its two versions of its fate. The poet does not depict events in the future tense, but the future tense itself. Tatyana sees her life for many years ahead: “I will be faithful to him forever.” In stanzas 11-14 of chapter three, the change in literary styles and directions from sentimentalism through romanticism to realism is traced (“His own style in a gentle mood, There was a fiery creator”). Sentimentalism is the recent past of literature (“and now all minds are in the fog, Morality puts us to sleep”). Romanticism as the present of literature: “A new demon will take possession of me, And, despising Phoebus’ threats, I will humble myself to humble prose.” Biographical time of A. Pushkin. The structure is formed by another time flow - the biographical time of the poet. Tomashevsky was right when he noticed that life in Mikhailovskoye provided material for the middle chapters of the novel, Moscow impressions in 1826 and 1827 - for chapter seven, a trip to the Caucasus in 1829 - for describing Onegin’s wanderings, life in St. Petersburg in 1828-30 provided material for chapter eight . Image of space: Topoi are the largest areas of artistic space, the boundaries between which are difficult for characters to discern. The plot of “E.O” knows the topoi of the Road, St. Petersburg, the Village, Tatyana’s Dream, Moscow. The only extra-fabular topos of the novel, Odessa, stands outside the very border of the fable world: initially there the author was supposed to meet Onegin, but in the printed text Pushkin just ended the story with the first verse of the stanza, the final verses of which described the meeting of friends. In urban topoi, loci of public life are of predominant importance: Theater (St. Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa), restaurant (Odessa), ballroom (S.P., Moscow), the street as a place of communication (Moscow, Odessa, S.P.). In relation to various loci, the characters' personalities and even ideology are revealed. The image of the city in the novel is fragmented into a number of isolated episodes. It is given in chapters 1.7 and 8, in “Excerpts from Onegin’s Travels.” In contrast, the Village is presented as a single compact topos in chapters 1 to 7 and forms the compositional core of the novel. It is contrasted with the city as an area of ​​idyllic world. The role of an important differential feature is played by the cemetery and grave. This locus is organically inherent in the “idyllic chronotope” and alien to urban topoi. In the topos of the village, the main locus is the house: Onegin’s house, the Larins’ house. Slonimsky in “The Mastery of Pushkin” writes: “Tatiana’s entry into Onegin’s life is perceived as an entrance into his inner world, into his soul.” A special, strictly outlined topos is presented in Tatyana’s dream. He is given fabulous, mythological features. The topos of T.’s dream is a world of rural idyll recreated according to the laws of a folk tale. If the world of the rural idyll is depicted objectively, then in the dream, in accordance with the fairy-tale polarization of good and evil, almost only negative connotations are left. The topos of the dream is thus contrasted with the topos of the village. In the topos of St. Petersburg, the Neva plays an important role. Not a single landscape in the village topos is complete without streams. As soon as Onegin moved into the estate, his attention was attracted by “The Murmur of a Quiet Stream.” The topos of the road is contrasted with all the others. On the road, characters move from a more favorable topos to a less favorable one, and the topos itself is unfavorable for them.

Space "Eugene Onegin"

There is an abyss of space in every word.

N.V. Gogol

Spaces opened up endlessly.

This section will schematically outline the poetic space of Eugene Onegin, taken as a whole, and highlight the relationship between the empiric space depicted in the novel and the space of the text itself. The time of the novel has been repeatedly analyzed (R.V. Ivanov-Razumnik, S.M. Bondi, N.L. Brodsky, A.E. Tarkhov, Yu.M. Lotman, V.S. Baevsky, etc.), but space I was less fortunate in this regard. In the works on Onegin there are, of course, an innumerable number of comments and observations on individual features of space, however, the question was not even specifically raised. However, the image of the space of “Onegin” arose in the fundamental studies of Yu. M. Lotman and S. G. Bocharov, formally devoted to describing the artistic structure of the novel, so the problem was still implicitly worked out. However, structure, understood as space, constitutes only part of the space of the text. This is a purely poetic space, or more precisely, the basic principle of its construction, which does not include modes and branches, as well as all the richness of the reflected empiricism. Therefore, there is every reason to review the Onegin space, which, in addition to the problems of structure and placement of the text, is a language for expressing various forms of exploration of the world.

“Eugene Onegin” is a complete poetic world, and, therefore, it can be imagined as a space of visual contemplation. In this case, three positions of perception are realized: a view of the novel from the outside, a view from the inside, and a combination of both points of view. The possibility of visual contemplation or at least sensory experience of poetic space is assumed to be unconditional: otherwise there is no point in talking about space as a language and meaning. The analysis will begin later.

From the outside, the novel is perceived as a single whole, without distinguishing its constituent parts. However, direct representation, let alone formulation, is impossible. Only a figurative substitution is possible, an intermediate symbol like “an apple in the palm of your hand.” The poems “Onegin’s aerial mass, / Like a cloud, stood above me” (A. Akhmatova) and “His novel / Arose from the darkness, which the climate / was unable to give” (B. Pasternak) go back to the spatial concept of the author himself: “And the distance of a free novel / Through the magic crystal / I have not yet clearly discerned” - and in each case, a metaphor or comparison acts as an analogue of a reality that is not directly comprehensible.

A point of view immersed inside Onegin reveals unity instead of unity. Everything is together, everything is nested, and everything embraces each other; an endless mosaic of details unfolds in all directions. The following verses speak well about the movement of the gaze in such a space:

Fine ribbed septum

I'll pass through, I'll pass like light,

I'll pass as the image enters the image

And how an object cuts an object.

(B. Pasternak)

The spatial palpability of Onegin from the inside is not a film of internal visions of what is happening in the novel, where the imagination can stop at any “frame”. This is a “frame”, an episode, a picture, a stanza, a verse, an omission of a verse - any “point” of the text, taken in its extension to the entire text, including its background space formed by references, reminiscences, quotes, etc. It is also counter-directional a process in which the entire vast text of the novel, with its structure of overlapping, intersecting and heterogeneous structures, is felt to be directed precisely to the point on which attention is now focused. Consciousness, filled with the space of a poetic text, is capable, however, of simultaneously reproducing a whole series of such states, and counter beams of lines, piercing and colliding ensembles of local spaces, bring them into semantic interaction. The interweaving of spaces is the interweaving of meaning.

The combined point of view should show the poetic text as space and as an ensemble of spaces in a single perception. As a visual analogue, a large bunch of grapes with grapes tightly pressed into each other is suitable - an image apparently inspired by O. Mandelstam. The second likening also goes back to it. He considers one of the best keys to understanding Dante’s “Comedy” to be “the interior of a mountain stone, the Aladdin-like space hidden in it, the lantern-like quality of a lamp, the luster-like pendant of fish rooms.”

The figurative likenings of Onegin's space are, of course, preliminary and quite general in nature, coinciding, moreover, with the spatial features of many significant poetic texts. However, we can already say that everything that happens in Onegin is immersed in a spatial continuum, filled with heterogeneous local spaces that can be divided in every possible way and have varying degrees of organization. Within the continuum, this set of qualitatively different spaces is necessarily coordinated, but not so much that they speak with the same voices. Moreover, according to Yu. M. Lotman, “at whatever level we take a literary text - from such an elementary link as a metaphor, to the most complex constructions of integral works of art - we are faced with a combination of incompatible structures.” Therefore, the multi-component poetic space of “Onegin” is characterized by a strong counter-tension of individual fields and their simultaneous invasion of each other’s boundaries.

This property is clearly visible in one of the main characteristics of the Onegin space. Having well mastered Zhukovsky’s classic formula “Life and poetry are one,” Pushkin in “Onegin” and other works significantly complicated and expanded it. In Onegin this manifested itself as the unity of the world of the author and the world of the heroes. All life material is placed by Pushkin in a common spatial frame, but within it the depicted world develops, appears as a “split double reality.” Strictly speaking, the plot of Onegin is that a certain author writes a novel about fictional characters. However, no one reads Onegin this way, because the story of Eugene and Tatiana in the novel simultaneously exists independently of the writing as equal to life itself. This is achieved by moving the author-writer from his own space into the space of the heroes, where he, as Onegin’s friend, becomes a character in the novel he himself writes. In this paradoxical combination of poetic and life spaces in the common novel space, life and poetry, on the one hand, are identified, and on the other, they turn out to be incompatible.

S. G. Bocharov writes about it this way: “The novel of the heroes depicts their life, and it is also depicted as a novel. We read in a row:

At the beginning of our romance,

In a remote, distant place...

Where did the event that is being remembered here take place? Two parallel verses answer us, only collectively giving Pushkin’s image of space in Onegin(italics mine. – YU. Ch.). In the middle of nowhere, at the beginning of the novel- one event, precisely localized in one single place, but in different places. “In a remote, distant side” is framed by the first verse; we read them one after the other, but we see one in the other, one through the other. And so is Eugene Onegin as a whole: we see the novel through the image of the novel.”

From this long excerpt it is clear that a significant literary text reduces to each other spaces that, by direct logic or common sense, are considered irreducible. The space of “Onegin,” so playfully and demonstratively put forward by Pushkin as split, essentially acts as a guarantee of the unity of the poetic world as a symbol of being in its non-disintegrating diversity. In such a space there is a lot of syncretism and simultaneity, and in its type it certainly goes back to the mythopoetic space. After all, spaces, diluted by the increasing complexity of being to the point of alienation, are nevertheless reduced, thereby returning to the original homogeneity or forgotten community.

The mutual enclosure of the two poems of “Onegin” as spaces from the example of S. G. Bocharov shows what inexhaustible reserves of meaning are contained in this intense permeability-impenetrability. The enhancement of meaning-making in these types of spaces is somewhat similar to the function of semiconductors in a transistor device. At the same time, difficulties associated with spatial interpretations are also visible: what appears as combined can only be described as sequential.

The events depicted in the novel belong, as a rule, to several spaces. To extract meaning, an event is projected onto some background or sequentially onto a number of backgrounds. In this case, the meaning of the event may be different. At the same time, the translation of an event from the language of one space to the language of another always remains incomplete due to their inadequacy. Pushkin understood this circumstance perfectly well, and his “incomplete, weak translation,” as he called Tatyana’s letter, testifies to this. Moreover, it was a translation not only from French, but also from the “language of the heart,” as S. G. Bocharov showed. Finally, events and characters can transform when transferred from one space to another. Thus, Tatyana, having been “transferred” from the world of heroes to the world of the author, turns into a Muse, and a young townswoman reading the inscription on the Lensky monument, under the same conditions, becomes from an episodic character one of many readers. The transformation of Tatiana into a Muse is confirmed by a parallel translation in a comparative sense. If Tatyana, “silent like Svetlana / Came in and sat down by the window,” then Muse “Lenoroy, in the moonlight, / Jumped with me on a horse.” By the way, the moon is a constant sign of Tatyana’s space until the eighth chapter, where both the moon and dreams will be taken away from her, as she changes the space within her own world. Now Tatiana's attributes will be transferred to Onegin.

The duality of Onegin's space, in which poetry and reality, novel and life, irreducible in everyday experience, are brought together, is repeated as a principle at levels below and above the one considered. Thus, contradiction and unity are visible in the fate of the main characters, in their mutual love and mutual refusals. The collision of spaces plays a significant role in their relationship. Thus, “Pushkin’s novel itself is at the same time completed and not closed, open.” “Onegin”, during its artistic existence, creates around itself a cultural space of reader reactions, interpretations, and literary imitations. Roman comes out of himself into this space and lets him in. Both spaces on their border are still extremely expansive, and mutual permeability and mutual support lead them to closure according to the already known rules of irreducibility-reducibility. The novel, breaking off, goes into life, but life itself takes on the appearance of a novel, which, according to the author, should not be read to the end:

Blessed is he who celebrates Life early

Left without drinking to the bottom

Glasses full of wine,

Who hasn't finished reading Her novel...

Having cast a glance at the spatial unity of Onegin from the side of its qualitative heterogeneity, let us now move on to consider the integral space of the novel in relation to the largest formations that fill it. Here we will talk about a purely poetic space, the picture and structure of which will be different. The largest formations within the Onegin text are eight chapters, “Notes” and “Excerpts from Onegin’s Journey”. Each component has its own space, and the question is whether the sum of the spaces of all the components is equal to the poetic space of the novel. Most likely it is not equal. The total space of all parts of the novel taken together is significantly inferior in dimension or power to the integral space. Let’s imagine an eventual space that can be called “the distance of a free novel.” In this “distance” the entire “Onegin” already exists, in all the possibilities of its text, of which not all will be realized. Eventual space is not yet poetic space, it is proto-space, proto-text, space of possibilities. This is the space in which Pushkin does not yet “clearly distinguish” his novel, it does not yet exist, and yet it already exists from the first to the last sound. In this preliminary space, successive condensations of chapters and other parts arise and take shape. Formatted verbally and graphically, they pull space around themselves, structure it with their compositional mutual belonging and free up its peripheral and intermediate areas due to their increasing compaction. Such “Onegin” is truly like a “small universe” with its galaxy heads located in devastated space. Let us note, however, that “empty” space preserves eventuality, that is, the possibility of generating a text, the tense unexpandedness of meaning. These “voids” can literally be seen, since Pushkin developed a whole system of graphic indications of the “gaps” of verses, stanzas and chapters containing inexhaustible semantic potential.

Without delving further into the little-clarified processes within purely poetic space, we will dwell only on one of its rather obvious properties - the tendency towards compaction, concentration, condensation. In this sense, “Eugene Onegin” perfectly implements the repeatedly noted rule of poetic art: maximum compression of verbal space with an unlimited capacity of life content. This rule, however, applies primarily to lyric poems, but “Eugene Onegin” is both a novel in verse and a lyrical epic. “Dizzying laconicism” - an expression by A. A. Akhmatova in relation to Pushkin’s poetic dramaturgy - characterizes “Onegin” in almost all aspects of its style, especially in those that can be interpreted as spatial. One can even talk about a kind of “collapse” in Onegin as a particular manifestation of the general principle of Pushkin’s poetics.

However, the unidirectional compaction of a poetic text is not the author’s task, otherwise the “abyss of space” will eventually disappear from every word. The very compression and condensation of space is inevitably associated with the possibility of explosive expansion, in the case of “Onegin” - semantic. Education compressed to a point will necessarily turn into an old or new space. Pushkin, compressing the poetic space and capturing the enormity and diversity of the world, did not intend to close the abyss of meaning, like a genie in a bottle. The genie of meaning must be released, but only in the way the poet wants. The opposite direction of compression and expansion should be balanced both in the poetic space itself and - and this is the main task! – in its interaction with the space displayed, external to the text.

The reader reads the text of Onegin in a linear order: from beginning to end, stanza by stanza, chapter by chapter. The graphic form of the text is indeed linear, but the text as a poetic world is closed in a circle by the cyclical time of the author, and cyclic time, as is known, acquires the features of space. It is natural that the space of “Onegin” can be represented as circular or even, as follows from the previous description, spherical. If the space of Onegin is circular, then what is located in the center?

The center of space in texts of the Onegin type is the most important structural and semantic point. According to a number of researchers, in “Onegin” this is Tatyana’s dream, which “is placed almost in the “geometric center” (...) and constitutes a kind of “axis of symmetry” in the construction of the novel.” Despite its “extra-location” relative to the life plot of Onegin, or rather, thanks to it, Tatyana’s dream gathers the space of the novel around itself, becoming its compositional castle. The entire symbolic meaning of the novel is concentrated and compressed in the heroine’s dream episode, which, being part of the novel, at the same time contains the whole of it. It would seem that by its nature the world of sleep is hermetically closed and impenetrable, but these are not the conditions of the novel space. Tatyana's dream, spreading throughout the entire novel, connects it with the verbal theme of the dream and is reflected in many episodes. You can see the deep echoes of “Tatyana’s Night” with “Onegin’s Day” (the beginning of the novel) and “The Author’s Day” (the end of the novel). Here is another characteristic moment:

But what did Tatyana think?

When I found out between the guests

The one who is sweet and scary to her,

The hero of our novel!

Concentrating the poetic space of Onegin, Pushkin actualizes it semantically using a wide variety of means. The central place of Tatiana's dream in the novel is confirmed by the special position of the fifth chapter in the composition. The chapters of Onegin up to the hero's "Excerpts from the Journey" usually end with a switch to the author's world, which thus serves as a barrier between the fragments of the narrative. This rule is violated only once: the fifth chapter, without meeting the resistance of the author’s space and, as if this time even emphasizing the continuity of the narrative, transfers it to the sixth. The predominant narrative nature of the fifth chapter distinguishes its content as directly adjacent to the center, that is, to Tatiana’s dream, especially since at the “poles”, that is, in the first and eighth chapters, as well as in “Excerpts...”, we observe a complete outline of the narrative by the author’s space. It means, therefore, the outer boundary of Onegin’s text, occupying its periphery and encircling the world of the heroes as a whole.

The most interesting thing, however, is that the author’s ending was nevertheless preserved by Pushkin in the fifth chapter. In the manner of ironically free play with his own text, he “pushes” the ending into the chapter by a distance of five stanzas. It is not difficult to identify it, this is stanza XL:

At the beginning of my novel

(See first notebook)

I wanted Alban like him

Describe the St. Petersburg ball;

But, entertained by empty dreams,

I started remembering

About the legs of ladies I know.

In your narrow footsteps,

Oh legs, you are completely mistaken!

With the betrayal of my youth

It's time for me to become smarter

Get better in business and style,

And this fifth notebook

Clear from deviations.

Against the background of the narrative segment that concludes the chapter (after-dinner pastime of the guests, dancing, quarrel - stanzas XXXV–XLV), stanza XL is clearly isolated, despite the motivational support of the switch to the author’s plan: “And the ball shines in all its glory.” The author's speech, filling the entire stanza, gives it a relative scale. There are only two such stanzas in the fifth chapter (also stanza III), and they can be understood as an implicit compositional ring. Stanza XL is also a compositional link between chapters on top of the immediate context. The motif of the ball refers to the first chapter, and “betrayal of youth” echoes the end of the sixth, where the motif no longer sounds playful, but dramatic. The author's reflections on the creative process are a constant sign of the end of the chapter. The meaningful action of the stanza - self-criticism about “digressions” - is reinforced by the monotony of rhyming vocalism on “a” with only one interruption. However, self-criticism is quite ironic: the intention to retreat from retreats is expressed by a full-fledged retreat. And a lyrical novel is simply impossible without a broad-based author's plan.

The weight of stanza XL is thus obvious. Therefore, without stretching it, it can be read as an inverted ending. This does not mean that Pushkin ended the chapter with this stanza and then removed it inside. It's just that the ending was written before the chapter ended. Inversions of this type are extremely characteristic of Onegin. Suffice it to recall the parodic “introduction” at the end of the seventh chapter, the inversion of the former eighth chapter in the form of “Excerpts from a Journey”, the continuation of the novel after the word “end”, etc. The very possibility of such inversions is associated with shifts in various components of the text against the background of their well-known stability spatial "places". Thus, in the space of poetic meter, strong and weak points are constant, while specific stresses in a verse can deviate from them, creating rhythmic and intonation-semantic diversity.

“We dare to assure you that in our novel time is calculated according to the calendar,” wrote A.S. Pushkin in the notes to “Eugene Onegin.” But this does not mean that there is no difference between real time and its depiction in the novel. Any literary work is a “second reality” created by aesthetic means and subject to aesthetic laws. M. Bakhtin coined the term “chronotope” to denote the spatio-temporal unity in which the action of a work of art takes place.

Since time immemorial, people have thought about what time is: is it a kind of tape along which we move in a single direction, or, on the contrary, is it something moving first towards us, and then away from us, motionless. The spatial perception of time was expressed in words such as “previous”, “before” - earlier, that is, “ahead”. It is not difficult to notice that if such a perception remains today, then its orientation has changed: “everything is ahead,” i.e. “will be”, “everything is behind” - “in the past”. It is known that the subjective perception of time does not coincide with its objective rhythm. Pleasant moments seem shorter to us than they really are, and we tend to exaggerate the duration of unpleasant ones. In addition, everyone has a so-called individual second.

In reality, time is objective, independent of human consciousness, linear, asymmetrical in cause-and-effect relationships and irreversible. Fiction continually destroys these immutable principles. The reader accepts the game with pleasure, subordinating objectivity to his aesthetic needs.

In A.S. Pushkin, the features of artistic time are clearly connected with the genre nature of the works, with the artistic method of displaying reality, with the chronology of the creation of works, with the historical situation and the author’s views on history, with the aesthetic task.

Pushkin's artistic time combines the features inherent in new literature as a whole: the uneven course of plot time, delays at points of description, time shifts, retreats, parallel flow of time in different storylines - with the features of artistic time inherent in different genres of folklore and literature previous eras.

Much has been said about Pushkin as the founder of Russian literature, who not only was the first in chronology, but also, most importantly, managed to generalize previous experience and give the main line of development of literature for the future. Therefore, he was forced to constantly draw the reader’s attention to the specifics of literature, including the conventional nature of the depiction of time.
Such close attention of the author to the image of time is especially clear in the novel in verse “Eugene Onegin”. This work is central in Pushkin’s work both in meaning and chronologically. V. Nepomnyashchy emphasizes that the years of its creation (1823 - 1830) are the central seven years of the poet’s creative path, and the special, dual nature of the genre of the novel in verse. Conducting an objective story about characters and events, the author revels in lyricism, constantly bringing to the forefront his perception of the things described, his feelings, his inner world. And, although this inner world of the author must also be perceived as a “second reality,” it influences our national picture of the world and thus, to some extent, the “first” reality itself.

God, how many Pushkinists in our Soviet times fell for Pushkin’s bait, calculating the year of birth of Onegin (about 1796), Tatiana and Lensky (1802-1803), the time of action of each of the chapters... Soviet Pushkin studies, willingly or unwillingly, sought to squeeze the entire narrative into frames until December 14, 1825
According to Pushkin himself, the action of the first chapter takes place “at the end of 1819.” Oh? In winter, in a wide summer “hat”; la Bolivar” you can’t really flaunt it and you can’t put it on with a beaver collar. Here we immediately discover the discrepancy between the depicted time not only with the actual one, but also with the one declared by the author. The key to the peculiarities of the hero’s perception of time is given by the epigraph to the first chapter: “And he is in a hurry to live, and he is in a hurry to feel.” In the fourth chapter our guess is confirmed. The author himself says about the hero: “he killed eight years in the world,” while in the first chapter he showed us one day of Onegin - “and tomorrow is the same as yesterday.” Eight years are like one day. This method of generalization and typification can be called cyclic time.
The hero’s plot time can speed up its pace with the help of concise presentation and verbal formulas. So in “Onegin”: “They rode for seven days...”, “Having killed a friend in a duel, living without a goal, without labor, until the age of twenty-six...”, “The days rushed by...”

Along with this usual technique, Pushkin uses in the novel his own original technique of missing stanzas, which so excites our curiosity. Contrary to popular belief, some stanzas are replaced with dots or numbers not at all for censorship reasons, but in order to indicate that something was happening, although not depicted: something that is already clear, for example, the reception of Onegin and Lensky at the Larins in the third chapter, or something that is unimportant for the plot. A striking example is the numbers VIII and IX in the seventh chapter, followed by a description of Olga’s wedding with a lancer. How much time has passed since Lensky's death? “She didn’t cry for long”... A day, a month, a year, several years? Let the reader judge for himself.
The use of missing stanzas speeds up the passage of plot time. The dialogues keep pace with him. Descriptions are traditionally thought to slow down the passage of story time.
The peculiarity of “Eugene Onegin” is that the textbook descriptions of nature, which have entered almost into the subconscious, can serve, on the contrary, to speed up the plot time. For example, the beginning of the seventh chapter: “Driven by the spring rays...”. In fourteen lines - the whole spring from mid-March to the end of May, beginning of June. Moreover, the use of grammatical tenses is interesting: “already escaped”, “meets”, “shine”, “noisy”, “already sang”, that is, the author’s time coordinates move relative to the depicted process. The description of a summer evening in the village, Tverskaya Street in Moscow also does not stop the action, but moves with it, showing its duration: “Tatyana walked alone for a long time. Walked, walked..."; “An hour or two passes in this tiring walk...”

The author’s time interacts with the time of the heroes, either wedging into it: “So we were carried away in a dream to the beginning of a young life,” then taking the poetic plot aside in the so-called “lyrical digressions” (which do not retreat on anything, but - if we talk about the image time - transfer it to another plane). The author creates the illusion of the reality of events (“I became friends with him at that time...”, “Tatyana’s letter is in front of me...”), but he himself constantly destroys it, emphasizing the fictitious nature of literature (“I was already thinking about the form of the plan and as a hero I will call...", "the one from whom he keeps the letter...").

A.A. Potebnya rightly argued that the author’s time in lyrics is praesens, present; in the epic - perfectum, perfect past. The dual nature of the novel in verse manifests itself very clearly in this aspect. According to V. Nepomnyashchy, each of the main characters personifies the author’s attitude towards himself at different times. Lensky is the author’s outlived past, his youth, the purity of which he yearns for, but without pity he said goodbye to its delusions. Onegin is a recent, even not yet completely overcome past, for which one is ashamed and from which one wants to get rid of. Tatyana is the best in the author’s ideas about a person, the ideal to which the soul reaches.
Nepomniachtchi sees in the author's plot of Onegin a process of changing the soul through the creation of this very novel. A note in the manuscript at the end of the eighth chapter in Boldin: “7 years, 4 months, 17 days” - the author’s, one might even say, biographical time of writing the novel, but also the artistic time of the plot about the creation of the novel.

The reader's image plays a huge role in this storyline. Only when such an image is present in a work of art does one speak of a special reading time. Even before Pushkin, the authors of sentimentalist novels addressed the reader. Pushkin uses a traditional technique to form a new attitude of the public towards literature, to cultivate artistic taste, to outline the circle of those to whom the novel in verse is addressed.

Reading time here, according to the author’s calculations, includes not only the time required for reading, but also the time spent waiting for the next parts of the work to be published. So the first edition of Onegin was published in separate chapters. Knowing that there would be a long break (3 months) between the release of the third and fourth chapters, Pushkin stretched out the characters’ time at the expense of the reader’s time. The reader worries about Tatyana, before whom “with shining eyes, Evgeniy stands like a menacing shadow.” But here comes the author’s sly passage:

But the consequences of an unexpected meeting
Today, dear friends,
I am not able to retell it,
I owe it after a long speech
And take a walk and relax, -
I'll finish it sometime later.

And in the fourth chapter, the author does not immediately begin to describe the date. By stretching out the reader's time, Pushkin not only fuels interest in the story, but also shows how slowly time passed for Tatyana (while only “they were silent for two minutes...”).

The author of Onegin pushes the boundaries of the depicted time. He boldly looks into the “brilliant and rebellious age” of the Roman poet Ovid; in his own way greets the “divine” Homer, the idol of 30 centuries. Thanks to the association with the image of the “ancestor Eva,” the image of Onegin, striving for the forbidden fruit, receives colossal power of generalization.

The future is also under his control. At the end of the second chapter, the author addresses the descendant, the future reader, “whose benevolent hand will pat the old man’s laurels,” probably a thousand years from now. Pushkin recalls the expression of his favorite lyceum teacher Galich about ancient poets! The utopia in the seventh chapter about the roads that “will change immeasurably for us” “in five hundred years” is thoroughly imbued with such modern irony!

D.S. Likhachev named the perspective of time among the features of new literature (as opposed to ancient literature), i.e. the need, while narrating, not to forget about the moment in which the writer finds himself. For example:

Onegin, my good friend,
Born on the banks of the Neva,
Where might you have been born?
Or they shone, my reader.
I once walked there too,
But the north is bad for me *.

* Written in Bessarabia.

Pushkin here, as usual, weaves the time of the hero, the reader and the author into one knot. Artistic time always disguises itself as real time. As if from life itself, the “young city woman,” the reader of “Onegin,” rides into the sixth chapter on a horse. In the eighth chapter, Eugene himself reads magazines criticizing the novel. The effect of presence in the creation of the very novel that the reader holds in his hands - and in the ironic quatrain:

And now the frost is crackling
And they turn silver among the fields
(The reader is already waiting for the rhyme of the rose -
Here, take it quickly!).

Yakov Smolensky noted that time in the novel “Eugene Onegin” is enlivened by the genius of Pushkin. We don’t just read descriptions of winter, spring, summer moonlit night - it’s as if we are present at what is happening, he believes. Continuing his logic, we can say that the images of Russian nature created in the novel are reflected in the mind at the sight of the corresponding landscapes, thereby expanding the world of Onegin and spreading his artistic time to the present day.
“Pushkin enters into dialogue with us,” writes Yu.M. Lotman. In every new era, the poet remains a contemporary of the reader, starting from the first lines: “Without delay, this very hour, let me introduce you!” The moral and psychological types of Onegin, Tatiana, Lensky are found in any historical conditions. The openness of the artistic time of “Onegin” (a point of view in which a different reality is assumed, existing outside the space and time of the work) is limitless.

Openness is the basic principle of Pushkin’s depiction of time. “In essential space, everything lives simultaneously, side by side and is no longer connected by sequence, as in empirical time, but by a kind of distance - a hierarchy of objects” (V. Nepomnyashchiy, “Poetry and Fate”). In response to the awakening of the soul, a “genius of pure beauty” appears, in response to a “spiritual thirst” - a seraphim, and not vice versa. To notice them, you need to be prepared to meet them. Without understanding the cause-and-effect and value hierarchy, there is no adequate perception of Pushkin’s artistic system as a whole.

In the lyrics, time is presented in the most general way. Its specificity as a type of literature is the momentary experience of an intimate feeling. The action in poetry happens “always.” The reader, performer - poems are written to be read aloud - find consonance with the author’s feelings in their soul, identify the author’s time with their own. Pushkin’s lyrics reflect some facts of the author’s biography and his attitude towards the addressees, claims to be considered in the readers’ perception as the author’s lyrical diary (in an artistic way) and at the same time is interesting to us as an expression of our own feelings, experiences, attitudes towards people, phenomena and events. Thus, the image of time in it expands.

V. Nepomniachtchi sees in the poem “Autumn” (1833) an image of the universe. In 12 stanzas “open to the eternal,” he writes, the image of time is clearly presented in the form of an ascending spiral. The researcher believes that the time-spiral, which raises Pushkin along with itself, unites his entire work as a whole. Thus, the elegy “Desire” (1816) already contains the elegy of 1830. “The faded joy of crazy years...” “To the Brownie” (1819) is a home testament to descendants, as “I erected a monument to myself not made by hands...” (1836) is a poetic testament and a guide to action. You can go beyond the lyrics and continue that “Dubrovsky” (1833) is the seed from which “The Captain’s Daughter” (1836) grew. The exposure of "the romantic horrors of Mrs. Radcliffe" was replaced by a depiction of the "Russian rebellion, senseless and merciless."

The spiral, concentricity of Pushkin’s image of time can be illustrated by comparing the descriptions of the same landscape in the poem “Village” (1819), at the beginning of the 2nd chapter of “Eugene Onegin” (1823) and in the poem “Again I Visited...” (1835).

The “village” is all directed from the present, a la sentimentalism, to a wonderful future in which one wants to be: “May I see, oh friends, an unoppressed people...” and so on.

“The village where Eugene was bored” attracted the author exiled to the south with its inaccessibility, hence the punning epigraph from Horace. The entire 2nd chapter is imbued with a thirst for spiritual kinship with Russia, with the village.

The lyrical hero of the poem “Again I visited...”, wise by the experience of life, notes the submission of man and nature to the general law of generational change and the passage of time. While working on these poems, Pushkin strove to combine extreme sincerity, intimacy with generalization, again to the limit. Among the poems on Pushkin’s favorite theme of memories, this is one of the most striking. The lyrical hero at the moment of speech is covered in memories. He remembers the past and how he then “remembered with sadness...”, he imagines how in the future his grandson will “remember” him not as a poet, but as his ancestor. The feelings expressed in the poem are close to everyone, no matter where and whenever he was born. And at the same time, visiting Pushkin’s Mikhailovskoye, we very specifically relate all these lines to Pushkin’s life.

The result of extreme generalization in the lyrics is the “eternal” as the highest form of the timeless. Even at the Lyceum, Pushkin polemicized with the “Arzamasites,” his immediate predecessors, about time and the finitude of existence: “My testament. Friends" (1815, see Nepomnyashchy). The theme of death is one of the constants throughout Pushkin’s creative life. His lyrics developed this idea from the epicurean “Catch a moment of bliss forever” (1814) to the horror of the realization that everything is transitory: “Nothingness awaits me beyond the grave” (1823), from faith in the afterlife: “So sometimes a sad shadow flies into one’s native canopy ..." ("P.A. Osipova", 1825); “And, it’s true, a young shadow was already flying over me” (“Under the blue sky...”, 1826), to the awareness of eternity as a way of existence of the poetic gift: “The soul is in the treasured lyre...” (“I have erected a monument to myself. ..", 1836).

According to V.S. Nepomnyashchy, “his time was limitless,” he was a contemporary of everyone he wrote about...

The artistic time of drama is the time of the performers, and it is also the time of the audience. Pushkin deliberately chose a dramatic form for “Godunov” and spoke about the events of history: “It excites me vividly, like a fresh newspaper” (“C’est palpitant, comme un journal d’hier” - from a letter to N.N. Raevsky, son) . Theatrical convention helps Pushkin to confirm with concrete examples the eternal aspects of existence.

In drama, as in lyric poetry, everything happens now and in general. Pushkin's drama grew out of poetry. The poems “Conversation of a Bookseller with a Poet”, “Scene from Faust”, “Poet and the Crowd”, “Hero”, and the poem “Gypsies” have a dramatized form in whole or in part. In Pushkin's dramatic works, the effect of presence, the immediacy of what is happening is combined with extreme generalization.

In “Little Tragedies” and in “The Mermaid,” the timeless nature of what is depicted is emphasized by the names of the characters: Prince, Daughter, She, Baron, Duke, Chairman, Young Man... Don Juan’s name is taken as a common noun.
To understand the meaning of “Mozart and Salieri,” we must take into account that the playwright is interested in the characters not as specific historical figures (poisoned or not poisoned), but as two types of artists in general. The heroes of this tragedy live in different coordinate systems. Salieri lives “here and now” and stretches this point in time and space according to his interests.

“What good will it do if Mozart is alive?...
...What's the use of it? Like some cherub,
He brought us several songs of heaven,
So that, outraged by wingless desire
In us, the children of the dust, will fly away!
So fly away! The sooner the better!”

He considers himself eternal and Mozart mortal. Instead of a world with God at the center, he creates his own world with himself at the center and is angry that within his limits there is no truth “on earth” or “above.” He does not understand the inferiority and one-dimensionality of his world. Everything is mixed up there: there is poison - I need to find an enemy, there is no enemy - I will kill a friend. He remains, with his villainy, incompatible with the genius of Mozart, because by and large, in eternity, their “chronotopes” do not coincide. For Mozart, the main thing is the divine harmony of music, and not his own “deity.” Salieri's world is finite along with him, and Mozart's world is eternal, just as art is eternal.
There was practically no prose in Russian literature before Pushkin. Pushkin's prose began with autobiographical notes, the purpose of which was to capture important moments of his life in the overall picture of the era. Therefore, along with the descriptions, they have a strongly lyrical, personal element. Fragment<«Державин»>, for example, recreates the appearance of a frail old man, whom only poetry could revive. Here, Delvig’s inappropriately direct speech and his impression of the great poet of the past era are given with humor. “I read my “Memoirs in Tsarskoe Selo”, standing two steps from Derzhavin.” The clear, lively, excited voice of a man who has kept in his heart for many years the feelings caused by this meeting seems to sound “two steps away” from us. How old is this Pushkin if he saw Derzhavin and easily talks to us?!

You have to be careful with Pushkin's prose. “Journey to Arzrum” is based on the poet’s travel notes. But, they say, chronologically he could not meet the body of the murdered Griboyedov. This means that here, as in fiction, there is fiction.

In Pushkin's prose, one can always highlight the image of the narrator, be it a hero named by name, or a certain system of relationships to what is being described, expressed by linguistic means. For example, in the story “The Queen of Spades” (1833), the narrator is a man of high society, well acquainted with playing cards, a contemporary of Pushkin. In “The Captain's Daughter” the narrator is the main character himself, Grinev, with his speech stylized in the 18th century. In “Belkin’s Tales,” each narrator, I.P. Belkin himself, and the “publisher” have their own artistic time. This means that here we can highlight the time of the narrator, which may very well not coincide with the time of the heroes.

In the story “The Queen of Spades,” the narrator’s time is as close as possible to the time of writing. The time of heroes is constantly wedged into it. The plot time of chapters I – VI is past, perfect, although recent in relation to the moment of the narrator’s speech. The conclusion is real, ongoing. The time of playing cards is the time of interaction with infernal forces. The narrator does not give a clear answer to the question: are the recurring events a coincidence or the will of otherworldly forces?

The night in the countess's house and the day of the funeral are timed indicating hours and minutes - this is a means of creating the image of the punctual Hermann. In the image of the Countess - ignoring the passage of time. She, a fashionista sixty years ago, is trying to stop time for herself by following the fashion of her youth. Lizaveta Ivanovna, who lives repeating someone else’s life, is the Countess’s double, the guarantor of the absence of living life in the world. You can predict what will happen to her pupil.
To enhance reader interest, the author uses temporal shifts: plot time goes back to explain what happened - in “Belkin’s Tales”, in “Dubrovsky”. In “The Captain's Daughter”, in addition, the time of different storylines flows in parallel: Grinev under arrest - Masha in Tsarskoe Selo.

There is a temptation to compare the image of time, its assessment, etc. in the story “The Captain’s Daughter” and in the historical work “The History of Pugachev” (the censored title is “The History of the Pugachev Rebellion”). The objective view of Pushkin the historian horrified the aesthetic and moral feeling of Pushkin the poet, and a story appears (Marina Tsvetaeva called it a “fairy tale”) about a peasant king, humane and generous: “Execute, so execute, favor, so favor...” Attitude of the author-storyteller to the Pugachev era in these two works is very different. A dispassionate historian and sensitive poet, Pushkin balances the factual accuracy of one work with the “elevating deception” of another.

Feeding an intense interest in history, Pushkin looks at it from the perspective of a poet in other works of art: in Chapter X of Eugene Onegin, in Boris Godunov, in The Bronze Horseman, in Poltava, etc. The peculiarity of the historical time of the new literature, including Pushkin, is a generalization, fiction and conjecture. For example, the historical Matryona in Pushkin’s last romantic poem “Poltava” is called by the poetic name Maria.

Peter I was Pushkin's favorite historical figure. His image is given in many lyrical, lyric-epic and even prose works of Pushkin.

Figlyarin decided, sitting at home,
That my black grandfather is Hannibal
Was sold for a bottle of rum
And it fell into the hands of the skipper.

This skipper was that glorious skipper,
Who moved our earth,
Who gave a powerful run to the sovereign
The helm of my native ship...

(“My Pedigree”, 1830)

With the appearance of Pushkin, Russia responded to Peter's reforms. Pushkin returned to Russia a national language, a national spirit, a national character. He compared Nicholas I with Peter: “The beginning of Peter’s glorious deeds was darkened by riots and executions” (“Stanzas”, 1826). “Be like your ancestor in everything,” that is, knowing how to punish, also know how to forgive, Pushkin instructs the Tsar in his poems “Stanzas” and “The Feast of Peter the Great” (1835). The poems “Poltava” (1828) and “The Bronze Horseman” (1833) show the contradictory, “terrible” and “beautiful” appearance of Tsar Peter I, the conqueror of enemies and the elements, the founder of the city, who became “full of beauty and wonder of the countries.” Moreover, “The Bronze Horseman,” as a poem entirely permeated with symbols, brings to the fore the “eternal,” obscuring the connection of the events depicted to a specific time.

The beginning of the novel about Peter and his godson the Arab Ibrahim (1827, editorial title “The Arab of Peter the Great”) directly precedes “Peter I” (1945) by A.N. Tolstoy in terms of the broad historical picture.

For Pushkin, historical events are a reason for the development of his poetic thought.
Pushkin's innovation, which determined the main line of development of national literature, is connected with the literary traditions of previous eras. The artistic time of folklore genres, literature of antiquity and the Middle Ages, as well as literature contemporary to Pushkin, was wittily rethought by him, serving to construct an original image of time.
For example, in “The Captain's Daughter” he used ancient types of value situations as bricks to build his artistic world: an idyllic time in his father’s house (“I lived as a minor...”), an adventurous time of trials in a foreign land (service in the Belogorsk fortress and Pugachev’s rebellion ), the mystery time of the descent into hell (the military trial of Grinev).

The closed time of a fairy tale does not imply events other than those described. Children feel this feature in Pushkin’s fairy tales (“And the sea must have dried up” - about what happened after the end of “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish”). In a fairy tale, the events are obviously fictitious, the time and space are obviously fantastic. Descriptions drive the action of folk tales (D.S. Likhachev). And in Pushkin’s “The Tale of the Dead Princess...” the description, for example, of a mountain with a hole slows down the action. In “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish,” repeated descriptions with variations also slow down the action.

The fictional world “At Lukomorye” is not just a saying that introduces a fairy tale. This is a monument to nanny Arina Rodionovna, Pushkin’s people’s muse, an image of her “performing” time. This is also an image of the whole world, in which the author is his own person. Oak is the tree of life. “On the other side” of what is depicted, nothing happens, says the fairy tale. She always sings of eternal values, the triumph of good over evil, and love over envy - this is the meaning of the prologue to “Ruslan and Lyudmila.”

Calling his work a fairy tale, the author of the poem brings his time closer to the epic time of epics: “Deeds of days gone by, traditions of deep antiquity.” At the same time, this is a quote from Ossian, a connection with the Scandinavian epic and the works of Russian pre-romanticists...

In the poem "Ruslan and Lyudmila", unlike fairy tales and epics, time is not unidirectional - there are time shifts, inserted episodes. The story of Finn and Naina exposes the implausible passage of time in medieval chivalric romances: Finn sought the love of a beauty without thinking that both would grow old (and in chivalric romances, for example about Tristan and Isolde, no matter how much time passes, the heroes remain young and beautiful) .
Unlike folklore works, in “Ruslan” the author’s time is present (“Will I find colors and words...”, “my beautiful Lyudmila...” and much more). Among Pushkin’s fairy tales, “The Tale of the Dead Princess...” is distinguished by its distinct authorial beginning, which brings it closer to the poem (“Suddenly she, my soul, staggered without breathing...”).

Southern, romantic poems, by definition: “exceptional heroes in exceptional circumstances,” should be like fairy tales. The time in them is fantastic, obviously fictitious. But the location of the action is to some extent specified: the Caucasus, Bakhchisarai, Bessarabian steppe. Time is not closed in a fairytale way: the alien hero has a brief backstory. But the plot exhausts itself; after the end it doesn’t matter.
While working on “Boris Godunov,” Pushkin studied N.M. Karamzin’s “History” and chronicles. His tragedy reflected the features of ancient Russian chronicles. Events are given in chronological order, indicating dates and places, small and great events in the same row (for example, a woman with a child, drooling and a royal wedding). Cause-and-effect relationships are not emphasized compositionally (in the view of traditional dramaturgy). The chronicles thus demonstrated faith in Divine providence. But Pushkin also shows facts and events as a response “from above” to this or that action. For example, as a response to the illegal seizure of the throne by Boris, there follows a scene in the cell of the Chudov Monastery.
The chronicle is intended to be an objective record of events, but their assessment and understanding are contained in their very selection. Both Pushkin and his Pimen, one of the characters personifying the conscience of the people, cannot write, “listening to good and evil indifferently.” They write “without further ado,” i.e. without additions or varnishing.

However, in the chronicle, unlike drama, there is no unity of action - purposefulness, coherence and harmony of events and behavior of the characters. There is no intrigue in the chronicles, because... there is no opposition between private human interests and the divine meaning of existence. And in “Boris Godunov” the intrigue is almost detective, there are several plot lines. Pushkin took not contemporary events (like the chroniclers), but the past; chose a dramatic form in which the event is not described or recorded (as in a chronicle), but takes place before our eyes. In the chronicle the narrative is concretized, in Pushkin it is generalized.
“Belkin’s Tales” (1830), as a kind of parody of the sentimentalist and romantic genres that existed during Pushkin’s time, reveal and destroy their techniques. The illusionistic time of sentimentalism (“In dreams are all the joys of earth,” 1815) turns out to be either everyday as the lowest form of the timeless (“Young Peasant Lady”: “Readers will spare me the unnecessary obligation to describe the denouement”), or rises to the level of a symbol (“ Stationmaster"), etc. The story “Blizzard” exposes the adventurous time of chance - the time of intervention of irrational forces in human life (see M. Bakhtin). The girl K.I.T., the source of the joke, clearly believes in these irrational forces, but I.P. Belkin, in my opinion, does not.

In general, Pushkin often likes to make fun of his heroes, violating the objective characteristics of what we call time.
The irreversibility of the character's time is destroyed in "Imitations of the Koran" (Part IX) with cartoon virtuosity. “The past has come to life in new beauty”: faith in Allah turned back time, and the old man became younger, and the bones of the donkey turned into a living animal.
The devils in the passage “Today is Satan’s Ball” (1825) are sure that after “eternity” something else will be in store for them: “After all, we are not playing for money, but only to spend eternity!” – in anticipation, apparently, of something more interesting.
The unreal dream time in “Ruslan and Lyudmila”, in “Eugene Onegin”, in “Boris Godunov”, in “The Captain’s Daughter” turns out to be artistically symmetrical to the biographical time of the hero. What is the cause and what is the consequence? Dreams reveal a connection with the “other world”, and in realistic works - with the psychology of the character.

Yu.M. Lotman in several works (“The idea of ​​a poem about the last day of Pompeii”, etc.) considered the share of the fantastic in such images as “the stone guest”, “golden cockerel”, “bronze horseman”, etc. “Idols” come to life in the unreal time of heroes seized by passion, while for the author (“it seemed to him that the formidable king, instantly ignited with anger, his face quietly turned,” “the fairy tale is a lie ...”) or for other characters (“The statue in invite guests! Why?”) actual time continues. In The Queen of Spades, the unreal time of Hermann's visions parallels the real time of the narrator.
By what linguistic means does Pushkin create the image of time? Historical time requires historical flavor, archaisms, historicisms (boyars, assembly, know, help, etc.). For us, many words that describe Pushkin’s contemporary era are outdated (“strewn with bowls all around, a magnificent house glitters,” “the boy served cream,” runs, on post offices, a pit carriage, “it used to be that he was still in bed,” etc.) .

In Pushkin’s poetry, imbued with the light, the most common word with a temporary meaning is “day” (according to J.T. Shaw, it occurs 422 times in poetic lines). Next come “night” (345), “hour” (273), “suddenly” (262), “time” (247), “year” and “years” (100 + 145) as suppletive forms of one word. Then - the words “then” (157) and “time” (151).

In accordance with the poetics of the 19th century. words denoting the time of day or year were used figuratively. In “Eugene Onegin” we read: “the morning of the year” - meaning spring, “the spring of my days has flown by” - it says about youth, “my noon has come” - about maturity. Such paraphrases create the effect of poetic convention.
Metaphors in the poem “The Cart of Life” (1823) serve to mark the author’s philosophical ideas about death:

The cart is still rolling,
In the evening we got used to it
And, dozing, we go until the night,
And time drives horses.

“Overnight” is a metaphorical designation of death, “cart” is obviously a body (pun!), horses running is a subjective perception of time, while “the cart is still rolling,” i.e. the passage of time is always the same and does not depend on the wishes of the “passenger”.

A.S. Pushkin created in his work an image of artistic time, which contains the features of the past, present, future, mythological, fantastic, eternal. The main thing in Pushkin’s artistic world is not spatio-temporal, but moral relations.

Pushkin’s artistic time continues “always,” including the time of the reader, keeping pace with him and raising with him the author as a special, Pushkin’s point of view on the material and spiritual world. Here, in my opinion, it is appropriate to recall Gogol’s words “...in 200 years,” but, of course, they cannot be taken literally. Their meaning is that “Russian people in their development” should be guided by Pushkin, by the ideal of the Russian nation created by the poet.

"Eugene Onegin" is a difficult work.

The novel should be considered not as a mechanical sum of the author’s statements on various issues, a kind of anthology of quotes, but as an organic artistic world, the parts of which live and receive meaning only in relation to the whole.

In a purely methodological sense, the analysis of a work is usually divided into consideration of the internal organization of the text as such and the study of the historical connections of the work.

Both in life and in literature, space and time are not given to us in their pure form. We judge space by the objects that fill it (in a broad sense), and we judge time by the processes occurring in it. For practical analysis of a work of art, it is important to at least qualitatively (“more - less”) determine the fullness, saturation of space and time, since this indicator often characterizes the style of the work.

We find a somewhat less, but still significant saturation of space with objects and things in Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin”.

The intensity of artistic time is expressed in its saturation with events (by “events” we mean not only external, but also internal, psychological ones). There are three possible options here: average, “normal” time filled with events; increased time intensity (the number of events per unit of time increases); reduced intensity (saturation of events is minimal). The first type of organization of artistic time is presented, for example, in Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin.”

The novel in Pushkin's poems is characterized by a combination of plot and author's time.

The type of artistic narration of “Eugene Onegin” is one of the main innovative features of the novel. The complex interweaving of the forms of “alien” and author’s speech is its most important characteristic. However, the very division into “alien” and author’s speech only in its roughest form characterizes the construction of the novel’s style. In fact, we are faced with a much more complex and nuanced organization.

The artistic system is built as a hierarchy of relationships. The very concept of “meaning” implies the presence of a certain relative connection, i.e. fact of a certain direction. And since the artistic model, in its most general form, reproduces the image of the world for a given consciousness, i.e. models the relationship between the individual and the world (a special case - the cognizing personality and the cognizable world), then this orientation will have a subject-object character.

The novel, a genre that historically developed as a written narrative, is interpreted by Pushkin in the categories of oral speech, firstly, and non-literary speech, secondly. Both must be imitated by means of written literary storytelling. Such imitation created in the reader’s perception the effect of immediate presence, which sharply increased the degree of complicity and trust of the reader in relation to the text. It was here, in a space of heightened convention, that it was possible to create the effect of direct reader presence.

The social environment only in the most simplified sociological schemes appears as something undifferentiated, excluding a variety of facets and refractions. A society built from such social blocks simply could not exist, since it would exclude any development. Secondly, for each person, the sociocultural situation not only reveals a certain set of possible paths, but also makes it possible to have a different attitude towards these paths, from complete acceptance of the game offered to him by society to its complete denial and attempts to impose on society some new ones that have not been practiced by anyone before. types of behavior. By defending a higher degree of freedom for himself, a person, on the one hand, accepts a higher measure of social and moral responsibility, and on the other hand, he takes a more active position in relation to the reality around him.

Pushkin's novel in verse requires a fundamentally different perception.

• 1) The abundance of metastructural elements in the text of “Onegin” does not allow us to forget in the process of reading that we are dealing with a literary text: plunging into the immanent world of the novel, we do not receive the illusion of reality, since the author not only tells us about a certain course of events, but and all the time shows the scenery from its reverse side and draws us into a discussion of how the narrative could be constructed differently.
• 2) However, we only need to go beyond the internal position in relation to the text and look at it in the light of the opposition “literature - reality” in order to discover with a certain degree of amazement that “Onegin” breaks out of the purely literary series into the world of reality.
• 3) At the same time, we are faced with a process that is opposite in direction: although the entire immanent structure of “Onegin” is aimed at evoking in the reader a feeling of “non-novel” - the subtitle “Novel in Verse”, the initial arrangement of the characters, the setting on the narrative as the story of their life, love as the basis of the conflict is enough for the reader to include the text in a number of romantic works already known to him and to comprehend the work precisely as a novel. literary novel Onegin metastructural

Under these conditions, the reader's perception worked in the direction opposite to the author's efforts: it returned to the text of Onegin the qualities of a model of space located above the level of empirical reality.

In a realistic text, a traditionally coded image is placed in a space that is fundamentally alien to it and, as it were, extraliterary (“a genius chained to a desk”). The result of this is a shift in plot situations. The hero's sense of self is in conflict with those surrounding contexts that are set as adequate to reality. Onegin is not a “superfluous person” - this definition itself, just like Herzen’s “smart unnecessaryness,” appeared later and is some kind of interpretative projection of Onegin. Onegin of the eighth chapter does not imagine himself as a literary character. Meanwhile, if the political essence of the “superfluous man” was revealed by Herzen, and the social essence by Dobrolyubov, then the historical psychology of this type is inseparable from experiencing oneself as a “hero of a novel”, and one’s life as the realization of a certain plot.

Destroying the smoothness and consistency of his hero's story, as well as the unity of character, Pushkin transferred into the literary text the immediacy of impressions from communication with a living human personality. Only after the Onegin tradition entered the artistic consciousness of the Russian reader as a kind of aesthetic norm, it became possible for the author to transform the chain of instant visions of the hero into an explanation of his character: direct observation increased in rank and began to be perceived as a model. At the same time, the properties of simplicity, integrity, and consistency began to be attributed to life. If previously life was perceived as a chain of incoherent observations in which the artist, with the power of creative genius, reveals the unity and harmony of time, now everyday observation was equated with the statement that a person is simple and consistent; the superficial observer sees routine well-being.

The poet, who throughout the entire work appeared before us in the contradictory role of author and creator, whose creation, however, turns out to be not a literary work, but something directly opposite to it - a piece of living Life, suddenly appears before us as a reader (cf.: “and reading my life with disgust"), i.e. person associated with text. But here the text turns out to be Life. This view connects Pushkin’s novel not only with the diverse phenomena of subsequent Russian literature, but also with a deep and, at its origins, very archaic tradition.

When talking about Pushkin, we like to call him the ancestor, thereby emphasizing the connection with the subsequent and break with the era that preceded him. Pushkin himself in the works of the 1830s. was more inclined to emphasize the continuity of cultural movement. The sharp originality of the artistic construction of “Eugene Onegin” only emphasizes its deep two-way connection with the culture of previous and subsequent eras.