Along with other high moral qualities of the Russian person, Turgenev showed his deep aesthetic sensitivity. In the story “Singers,” he depicted the attitude of the Russian people to art in the form that is most accessible to them, i.e. in the form of a song. He describes a competition of singers in a village tavern, in front of an audience consisting mostly of tavern regulars. The personalities of both competitors are very different from each other, and this difference is reflected in the singing techniques, in the tone and character of the songs and in the impression they make.
One of them, a tradesman, a lively and self-satisfied fellow, performs in a competition with a cheerful dance song, full of strength and daring. Another, Yakov Turok, a factory worker, a man with a deep, enthusiastic and passionate nature, an “artist at heart” according to the author’s own definition, chose a sad, mournful song, and immediately attracted everyone’s attention. The deep sincerity of feeling and the power of lyrical inspiration ensured his victory over his opponent. Yakov himself gets carried away with his singing, forgets about the listeners, about the purpose of the competition, puts his whole soul into the sounds of singing. Russian folk song in general is distinguished by a sad, minor mood: obviously, this mood corresponds to the mood that prevails in the national character and, perhaps, brought up by the entire totality of the conditions of Russian folk life.
This deeply national character of the singing, together with the genuine sincerity of the invested feeling, decided the dispute in favor of Yakov. From his singing, each of the listeners felt something familiar and close, infinitely broad and infinitely dear; it awakened the best feelings in them, penetrated to the depths of their souls. While the row-man’s singing only “amused” the listeners, as Stunned put it, Yakov’s singing deeply touched everyone: even the Wild Master had tears in his eyes, not to mention the kisser’s wife and the “gray man,” who were crying bitterly. The end of the rower’s song evoked a noisy expression of delight and approval from everyone, but after Yakov’s singing, in the first minute no one could utter a word, and the listeners stood as if enchanted: everyone was so deeply moved by his song.
A pure, soul-elevating spirit of art burst into the stinking and dark village tavern and forced those present to at least for a moment detach themselves from everyday vulgarity, pettiness and dirt. Among these present there were people of different character, occupation and way of life; but they all turn out to be equally accessible to the enlightening influence of art, and at the moment of such influence they are united in one feeling of pure, non-egoistic pleasure. That is why Turgenev dwelled in more detail on the characteristics of each of the listeners (in more detail than on the characteristics of the singers themselves), in order to show the sensitive responsiveness to art characteristic of the ordinary Russian person, no matter what position fate may place him in.
The first writer who comes to his mind is, of course, Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. The second portrait that appears before the inner gaze of the domestic bookworm is the face of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy. But there is one classic who, as a rule, is forgotten in this context (or not mentioned so often) - Nikolai Semenovich Leskov. Meanwhile, his works are also saturated with the “Russian spirit,” and they also reveal not only the peculiarities of the Russian national character, but also the specifics of all Russian life.
In this sense, Leskov’s story “Lefty” stands apart. It reproduces with extraordinary accuracy and depth all the flaws in the structure of domestic life and all the heroism of the Russian people. People, as a rule, now do not have time to read the collected works of Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, but they should find time to open a book on the cover of which it is written: N. S. Leskov “Lefty”.
Plot
The story supposedly begins in 1815. Emperor Alexander the First, on a voyage across Europe, also visits England. The British really want to surprise the Emperor, and at the same time show off the skills of their craftsmen, and for several days they take him around different rooms and show him all sorts of amazing things, but the main thing they have in store for the finale is a filigree work: a steel flea that can dance. Moreover, it is so small that without a microscope it is impossible to see it. Our Tsar was very surprised, but his accompanying Don Cossack Platov was not at all. On the contrary, he kept bawling that ours could do no worse.
He soon died, and ascended the throne who accidentally discovered a strange thing and decided to check Platov’s words by sending him to visit the Tula masters. The Cossack arrived, instructed the gunsmiths and went home, promising to return in two weeks.
The masters, including Lefty, retired to the house of the main character of the tale and worked there for two weeks, until Platov returned. Local residents heard the constant knocking, but the craftsmen themselves never left Lefty’s house during this time. They became recluses until the work was done.
Platov arrives. They bring him the same flea in a box. He furiously throws the first craftsman he came across into the carriage (he turned out to be left-handed) and goes to St. Petersburg to see the Tsar “on the carpet.” Of course, Lefty did not get to the king right away; he was first beaten and kept in prison for a short time.
The flea appears before the bright eyes of the monarch. He looks and looks at her and cannot understand what the Tula people did. Both the sovereign and his courtiers struggled with the secret, then the Tsar-Father ordered to invite Lefty, and he told him that he should take and look not at the whole flea, but only at its legs. No sooner said than done. It turned out that the Tula people had shoed the English flea.
Immediately the wonder was returned to the British, and in words something like the following was conveyed: “We, too, can do something.” Here we will pause in the plot presentation and talk about what the image of Lefty is in the tale of N. S. Leskov.
Lefty: between the gunsmith and the holy fool
Lefty’s appearance testifies to his “supremeness”: “he’s left-handed with an oblique look, the hair on his cheek and temples was torn out during training.” When Lefty arrived to the Tsar, he was also dressed in a very peculiar way: “in shorts, one trouser leg is in a boot, the other is dangling, and the leg is old, the hooks are not fastened, they are lost, and the collar is torn.” He spoke to the king as he was, without observing manners and without fawning, if not on an equal footing with the sovereign, then certainly without fear of power.
People who are at least a little interested in history will recognize this portrait - this is a description of the ancient Russian holy fool; he was never afraid of anyone, because Christian Truth and God stood behind him.
Dialogue between Lefty and the British. Continuation of the story
After a short digression, let’s turn again to the plot, but at the same time let’s not forget the image of Lefty in Leskov’s tale.
The British were so delighted with the work that they demanded that the master be brought to them without hesitating for a second. The king respected the British, equipped Lefty and sent him with an escort to them. In the protagonist's voyage to England there are two important points: conversation with the British (Leskov’s story “Lefty” is perhaps the most interesting in this part) and the fact that, unlike Russians, our ancestors do not clean the barrel of guns with bricks.
Why did the British want to keep Lefty?
The Russian land is full of nuggets, and they are not paid attention to special attention, but in Europe they immediately see “diamonds in the rough.” The English elite, having once looked at Lefty, immediately realized that he was a genius, and the gentlemen decided to keep our man, teach him, clean him up, enrich him, but that was not the case!
Lefty told them that he didn’t want to stay in England, he didn’t want to study algebra, his education—the Gospel and the Half-Dream Book—was enough for him. He doesn't need money, nor women.
It was with difficulty that the left-handed man was persuaded to stay a little longer and look at Western technologies for the production of guns and other things. Our craftsman was of little interest in the latest technologies of that time, but he was very attentive to the storage of old guns. Studying them, Lefty realized: the British do not clean the barrel of their guns with bricks, which makes the guns more reliable in battle.
Despite this discovery, main character Skaz still felt very homesick for his homeland and asked the British to send him home as soon as possible. It was impossible to send by land, because Lefty did not know any languages other than Russian. It was also unsafe to sail on the sea in the fall, because it is restless at this time of year. And yet they equipped Lefty, and he sailed on a ship to the Fatherland.
During the trip, he found himself a drinking buddy, and they drank all the way, but not out of fun, but out of boredom and fear.
How bureaucracy killed a man
When friends from the ship were put ashore in St. Petersburg, the Englishman was sent to where all foreign citizens are supposed to be - to the “messenger house”, and Lefty was sent in an ill state through the bureaucratic circles of hell. They couldn’t admit him to any hospital in the city without documents, except the one where they were taken to die. Moreover, various officials said that Lefty needed to be helped, but here’s the problem: no one is responsible for anything and no one can do anything. So the left-handed man died in a hospital for the poor, and on his lips there was only one phrase: “Tell the Tsar Father that guns cannot be cleaned with bricks.” He nevertheless told it to one of the sovereign’s servants, but it never reached the Almighty. Can you guess why?
That's almost all on the topic “N.S. Leskov “Lefty”, brief content.”
The image of Lefty in Leskov’s tale and the model of the fate of a creative person in Russia
After reading the work of the Russian classic, a conclusion involuntarily arises: a creative, brilliant person simply has no hope of surviving in Russia. He will either be tortured by unchristian bureaucrats, or he will destroy himself from within, and not because he has some unresolved issues, but because Russian people are not able to simply live, his lot is to die, burning up in life like a meteorite in the earth’s atmosphere . This is how the image of Lefty in Leskov’s tale turns out to be contradictory: on the one hand, a genius and a craftsman, and on the other hand, a person with a serious destructive element inside, capable of self-destruction in conditions when you least expect it.
A.M. PANCHENKO.
LESKOVSKY LEFT-HANDER AS A NATIONAL PROBLEM
Russia met Lefty more than a hundred years ago: “The Tale of the Tula Oblique Lefty and the Steel Flea” with the subtitle “The Workshop Legend” was published in the autumn 1881 issues of I. S. Aksakov’s magazine “Rus”. Since then, Lefty has managed, and for a long time, to become a national favorite and a national symbol.
National symbols consist of various series. Where to classify Lefty? This figure is fictional, a literary character. Consequently, he should fall into the same row as Mitrofanushka, Chatsky and Molchalin, Onegin and Pechorin, Oblomov and Smerdyakov. However, in reality, Lefty is perceived as a folklore or semi-folklore character, as a version of Ivan the Fool, who, in the end, turns out to be smarter than everyone else, as relatives - in appearance - of Vaska Buslaev's associate Potanyushka Khromenky or his doubles from the historical songs about Kostryuk "Vasyutka the Short" " and "Little Ilyushenka" (A.A. Gorelov drew attention to this similarity in his excellent book, published in 1988, "N.S. Leskov and Folk Culture"). The reader associates Lefty with the epic and religious archetype “last shall be first.”
Leskov seemed to be striving for such a perception, which is (again, seemingly) indicated by the preface to the first publication, repeated in a separate edition in the printing house of A.S. Suvorin (1882). Leskov claims that he “recorded this legend in Sestroretsk according to a local tale from an old gunsmith, a native of Tula...”. But when critics, especially radical ones, began to scold Leskov for lack of originality, for “simple shorthand” (reviewer for the magazine “Delo”), he began to come up with “literary explanations.” From them it was clear that the preface was an ordinary hoax and that the “folk” in the tale was only a “joke and a joke”: “The British made a flea out of steel, and our Tula people shod it and sent it back to them.” This is a teaser, and a very old one, which existed in Russia even without the “Aglitsky” element: “The Tula people chained a flea” or “The Tula people shod a flea.”
Leskov agreed with those critics who believed that “where “left-handed” stands, one should read “Russian people.” But Leskov strongly objected to the fact that Lefty personifies the best qualities of the Russian people: “I cannot accept without objection reproaches for the desire to belittle the Russian people or flatter them. Neither one nor the other was in my intentions...” What did Leskov want to say? Let's turn to the text.
The hero’s appearance is very colorful: “He’s left-handed with an oblique eye, there’s a birthmark on his cheek, and the hair on his temples was torn out during training.” “Slanting left-hander” evokes complex associations – and primarily negative ones. “Oblique” as a noun in Russian means not only a hare, but also “enemy”, “devil”. “To squint is to plot intrigues” [Dal, II]. In addition, the hero of the tale is a blacksmith, a farrier, a forger, and in the language and in the popular consciousness he is associated with “intrigues” and “treachery.”
But much more important sign leftism, a sign of wrongness and spiritual destruction. The righteous go to the right, to eternal bliss, unrepentant sinners go to the left, to eternal torment. In conspiracies, in lists of bad people who should be feared, along with “plain-haired women,” crooked, askew, and left-handed people are named. In the Bible, the attitude towards left-handers is also negative (the only exception is Judges 3:15). The ungodly army, for example, is described as follows: “Of all this people there were seven hundred chosen men, who were left-handed, and all these, when they threw stones with slings... did not throw them by” (Judges 20:16).
However, inversion is possible when “the left-handedness of the heroes emphasizes their unusualness and serves as a symbol of another world” [Ivanov, 44]. This applies not only to pagans, at least the ancient Roman augurs, but also to Christians, including Orthodox Christians, which is most important for understanding Leskov. In the Life of the holy fool Procopius of Ustyug it is said that he “carried three pokers in his left hand...”. If he raised them up, it was a prophecy of a good harvest, if he lowered them down, it was a prediction of a bad harvest. Every holy fool, according to the unwritten conditions of his “supralegal” feat not provided for by monastic charters, violates the norms of Orthodox behavior - he exposes himself, laughs (even in church), and mocks the splendor of the temple. This is truly “leftist behavior”: “neither a candle to God nor a poker to the devil.” But Lefty is not a holy fool.
Meanwhile, this is how he behaves in England, accepting a glass of wine from his hosts: “He stood up, crossed himself with his left hand and drank their health to all of them.” This is simply scary to read, because shuytsa, the left hand, is an “unbaptized hand” [Dahl], and it is difficult to sin more than to make the sign of the cross with it. This gesture of Lefty is from black magic, from the black mass, downright diabolical. By the way, I did not find a single similar case in works on Russian ethnography. Leskov “invented” this, and not by chance: he was from an old priestly family and knew perfectly well what was what.
Is there any justification for the “unbaptized hand”, because Lefty, after all, is very, very attractive to the reader and the author (and to me, a sinner): unselfish, smart, unpretentious, gentle... Ethnography knows something about “normal leftism”. Here is an Orthodox hunter going into the forest to hunt a bear. The hunter takes off his pectoral cross and places it in his boot or bast shoe under his left heel. The hunter reads the “Our Father” at the edge of the forest “falsely and renounced” - not inverted, from left to right, as was done in the Catholic West, but with a negation to each word: “Not-Father, not-ours, not-like, not-thou , not-in-heaven...” This is necessary in order to deceive the devil (his hair is combed to the left, sometimes his caftan is buttoned from right to left), to force him to recognize the hunter as “his own”, “left”.
In the same way, Lefty is baptized with a shuitsa in England, in a “foreign space.” “They noticed that he crossed himself with his left hand, and asked the courier: “What is he, a Lutheran or a Protestant?” The courier replies: “No, he... is of the Russian faith,” - “Why does he cross himself with his left hand?” The courier said: “He is left-handed and does everything with his left hand.”
Indeed: the left hand in inverted mythology is a skilled hand, but in Orthodoxy it is an unbaptized hand. Whatever you don’t do with it turns out to be both bad and bad; it turns out, to use Leskov’s expression, “verbal chirunda.”
So the British gave Emperor Alexander Pavlovich a clockwork flea with a key, so the sovereign “inserted the key.” The flea “begins to move its antennae, then began to move its legs, and finally suddenly jumped and in one flight a straight dance and two variations to the side, then to the other, and so in three variations it danced the whole cavril.”
There is a well-known expression “just cause”. But there is also a now rare, and once also commonly used expression “left business” (now in the language all that remains of it is “to be used up to the left”, i.e. to shoot, “left goods”, “left trip”, etc. “ beliefs"). Let’s look at Dahl [Dal II]: “Your work is left, wrong, crooked.” Tula craftsmen did the right thing. Previously, the flea danced, but now “it moves its antennae, but does not touch its legs... it does not dance and does not throw out any dances, as before.” We surprised the world, we defeated the British, but we ruined a good product, a very funny trinket. A.A. correctly noted in his book. Gorelov that the victory of the Tula people “looks like defeat” [Gorelov, 249].
If we formalize the plot of Leskov’s tale, the following chain will be built: first victory (“the head of the tsars” Alexander I travels around Europe after the defeat of Napoleon), then a dubious, “defeat-like” victory over the British (the flea is savvy), then an indication of defeat in the Crimean campaign - from the same, in particular, the British. The faithful and intelligent Lefty could not prevent the collapse in the Crimea, although he tried: “Tell the sovereign that the British don’t clean their guns with bricks: let them not clean ours either, otherwise, God bless the war, they’re not good for shooting.” And with this fidelity, the left-hander crossed himself and died. (I wonder which hand he used to cross himself for the last time? I hope it was his right hand.)
So, the tale of Lefty is a tale of the Russian national fall. The fault lies with Nicholas I, who more than once surprised Europe and ended his ceremonial reign in disgrace. The circumstances of Russian life are also to blame, as Leskov wrote in his “explanation”: “The left-hander is sharp-witted, quick-witted, even skillful, but he doesn’t know the “calculation of strength” because he has not mastered the sciences and instead of the four rules of addition from arithmetic, he still wanders around The Psalter (so! - A.P.) and the sleep book. He sees how in England, for those who work, all the absolute circumstances in life are better open, but he himself still strives for his homeland and still wants to say a few words to the sovereign about what is not being done as it should be, but this is not for a left-handed person. succeeds because they “drop him onto the paratha.” That's what it's all about."
I think not only this, otherwise it would be enough to limit ourselves to common social complaints about poverty, lack of education, lack of rights and overcrowding of Tula guild masters. The fact is that Russian common civilization, predominantly rural, shuns and fears industrial labor. This fear was expressed by Nekrasov in “ Railway": "And on the sides there are all Russian bones.." Any construction is a religious act (in folk mythology), it requires a construction sacrifice, extreme effort. In the 20th century this mythology has become reality. We surprised the world. They destroyed their own country. The White Sea-Baltic Canal, which cannot be navigated... The ruined Aral Sea, the half-ruined Baikal and Ladoga... The useless BAM... Finally, the tragic Chernobyl...
The distant descendants of Lefty, the Russian tragic hero, had a hand in them.
LITERATURE
Gorelov. Gorelov A.A. N.S. Leskov and folk culture. L., 1988.
Dahl I-IV. Dal V.I. Dictionary alive Great Russian language: In 4v. M., 1955. T. 2.
Ivanov. Ivanov Vyach. Sun. Left and right // Myths of the peoples of the world: In 2 volumes. M., 1988 T.2.