The image of Alexander Aduev (“Ordinary History”). The hero of the novel “An Ordinary Story” Alexander Aduev Several interesting essays

Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov was thirty-five years old when 1847 on the pages of the magazine “Contemporary" his first major work appeared, the novel “Ordinary story ”, after Belinsky’s warm approval. The novel was immediately noticed by critics and became an event in the literary and social life of Russia in those years.

In the story “A Happy Mistake,” Goncharov created a sketch of the image of a young romantic - Aduev. This image, as well as some situations in Goncharov’s early stories, were developed in the writer’s first major work, which brought him lasting literary fame. We are talking about the novel “An Ordinary Story”.

The story depicted in it really happened ordinary, but this did not prevent it from becoming the subject of fierce debate and clashes of a wide variety of views, and even the very understanding of the author’s intention was interpreted differently in different social circles.

Goncharov’s rapprochement with Belinsky’s circle and his desire to publish his first novel on the pages of the magazine, acquired shortly before by N.A. Nekrasov and I.I. Panaev and united the forces of the “natural school” around himself, naturally. It is also no coincidence that it was Belinsky who gave the first serious assessment of the novel.

One of Goncharov’s firm, deeply thought-out convictions, which served as the ideological basis for the writer’s rapprochement with Belinsky’s circle, was the belief in the historical doom of serfdom, in the fact that the social way of life, based on feudal relations, had become obsolete. Goncharov was fully aware of the kind of relationships that were replacing painful, outdated, in many ways shameful, but familiar, social forms that had developed over centuries, and did not idealize them. Not all thinkers in the 40s. and later, right up to the 60s and 70s, they recognized with such clarity the reality of the development of capitalism in Russia. Goncharov was the first writer who devoted his work to the problem of specific socio-historical forms of social progress and compared feudal-patriarchal and new, bourgeois relations through the human types they generated. Goncharov’s insight and the novelty of his view on the historical development of Russian society was expressed, in particular, in the combination, the organic fusion in his hero, who embodies St. Petersburg and progress, of the bureaucratic, career-administrative attitude to life and bourgeois entrepreneurship with its inherent monetary and quantitative approach to everything values.

Goncharov sociologically comprehended his observations of the officials of the foreign trade department - merchants of the new, European type - and artistically conveyed them in the image of Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev.

3.Image of Alexander Aduev, St. Petersburg and the province

Business and active administrative-industrial Petersburg in the novel “ An ordinary story“opposes the village frozen in feudal immobility. In the village, the time of the landowners is celebrated with breakfast, lunch and dinner (cf. in Eugene Onegin: “ he died an hour before lunch"), seasons - field work, well-being - food supplies, homemade cake. In St. Petersburg, the whole day is marked by hours, and each hour has its own work - classes at work, at a factory, or in the evening." mandatory» entertainment: theater, visits, playing cards.

Alexander Aduev, a provincial youth who came to St. Petersburg with intentions unclear to himself, obeys an irresistible desire to go beyond the enchanted world of his native estate. His image serves as a means of characterizing the local nobility and St. Petersburg life. The usual village life in its most vivid pictures appears before him at the moment of parting, when he leaves his native place for the sake of an unknown future, and then when he returns after the St. Petersburg sorrows and trials to his native nest.

It should be noted that the appearance of the younger Aduev was largely determined by the upbringing he received. His mother, who was by no means an extreme personification of serfdom, nevertheless rules her peasants quite despotically and not only with the help of severe reprimands and offensive nicknames, but sometimes, “according to anger and strength, with a poke.” Moreover, the main crime on Adueva’s estate was not to please Sashenka, “not to fulfill his wishes soon.” Under these conditions, selfishness, which is generally characteristic of young people who grew up under the wing of their mother, could not help but be especially developed in the younger Aduev, a typical son of a landowner.

« With fresh eyes"Young Aduev" saw" the writer and St. Petersburg - a city of social contrasts, bureaucratic careers and administrative callousness.

Goncharov was able to understand that St. Petersburg and the province, and especially the village, are two socio-cultural systems, two organically integral worlds and at the same time two historical stages of the state of society. Moving from village to city, Alexander Aduev moves from one social situation to another, and the very meaning of his personality in the new system of relations turns out to be unexpectedly and strikingly new for him. The integrity of the provincial serf environment and the serf village was composed of closed, disconnected spheres: provincial and district cities, villages, estates. On his estate, in his villages, Aduev is a landowner, a “young master” - regardless of his personal qualities, he is not only a significant, outstanding figure, but unique, the only one. Life in this sphere inspires a handsome, educated, capable young nobleman with the idea that he is “the first in the world,” the chosen one. Goncharov associated the romantic self-awareness, exaggerated sense of personality, and belief in one’s chosenness inherent in youth and inexperience with the feudal way of life, with the Russian serfdom, provincial life.

The sudden transition from the calm and carefree nature of his father’s home to a strange, cold, crowded world in which he had to win a “place in life” was far from simple for the hero of “An Ordinary History” Alexander Aduev, in those days when he first found himself in St. Petersburg , bringing with him from the village his mother’s gifts and a pile of naive, romantic ideas about the life that he had yet to enter.

« He went out into the street - there was turmoil, everyone was running somewhere, busy only with themselves, barely glancing at those passing by... he looked at the houses - and he became even more bored: these monotonous stone masses made him sad, which, like colossal tombs, were a continuous mass stretching one after another... Difficult first impressions of a provincial in St. Petersburg. He feels wild and sad; no one notices him; He lost here; neither news, nor variety, nor the crowd amuses him.”

It is necessary to pay attention to a detail that is persistently emphasized in the novel: Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev, while talking with his nephew, constantly forgets the name of the object of Alexander’s intense passion, calling the beautiful Nadenka all possible female names.

Alexander Aduev is ready from his failure, from “ betrayal“Nadya, who preferred a more interesting gentleman to him, draw conclusions about the insignificance of the human race, the treachery of women in general, etc., since his love seems to him to be an exceptional feeling that has a special meaning.

Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev, throughout the novel “ degrading" The nephew's romantic declarations to the ground make it clear that Alexander's novel is an ordinary youthful red tape. His tendency to “confuse” Nadenka with other girls outrages his nephew less and less, since the romantic aura with which he surrounded this young lady and his feelings fades in his own eyes.

It was the exposure of romanticism that Belinsky especially highly appreciated in “Ordinary History”: “And what benefits it will bring to society! What a terrible blow it is to romanticism, dreaminess, sentimentality, and provincialism.” Belinsky attached great importance to “Ordinary History” in the matter of cleansing society of outdated forms of ideology and worldview.

I. P. Shcheblykin

THE UNUSUAL IN I. A. GONCHAROV’S NOVEL “ORDINARY HISTORY”

Vissarion Belinsky called Alexander Aduev “thrice a romantic”: a romantic by nature, by upbringing and life circumstances. The great critic almost always had a negative attitude towards the romantic worldview. Therefore, the characterization of Aduev Jr. turned out to be mostly negative. The critic even complained that the writer did not make his hero a mystic or Slavophile in the finale. So, according to Belinsky, the internal worthlessness and inconsistency of the hero would be more clearly revealed. Belinsky apparently did not want to notice other Russian problems besides romanticism in the plot structures of the novel. Meanwhile, they are in Goncharov’s work; the novel with the simple title “An Ordinary Story” also had something extraordinary.

Let me start with the fact that Aduev, leaving his cozy Rooks, rushes to the very boil of everyday troubles - St. Petersburg, with the desire to devote himself to a noble public field. True romantics, as we know, behave differently. They flee from the “captivity of stuffy cities,” shun society, withdraw into themselves, creating in their imagination an ideal, extremely exalted world. Alexander, on the contrary, is open to society, wants to join it and even serve his homeland.

This is a completely unusual trait in our hero, and it is especially striking if we remember that the noble youth of the 30s and 40s of the 19th century were, as a rule, “shamefully indifferent to good and evil.”

Aduev Jr. is not like that. His noble impulses are explained not by book learning, but by the inner need of the soul. The following scene is indicative in this regard. Uncle Aduev asks: “Tell me, why did you come here?” (to St. Petersburg, that is - I. Shch.) Alexander, without hesitation, answers: “I came... to live... I was attracted by the thirst for noble activity, the desire to understand and fulfill... the hopes that were crowding was seething in me...” Here the uncle interrupted his nephew and brought everything together the usual course: “Don’t you write poetry?” Trusting Alexander was not offended by this “failure”; he immediately admitted that he writes poetry and prose. But

He did not finish the thought he had started earlier. And the idea was good and unusual for young generations of any era: to understand something, and having understood it, to realize their hopes. Is there something romantic or immature here? Is it really necessary to start life thoughtlessly, without hopes of any fulfillment? Unfortunately, this is how most of our educated ancestors started it, and sometimes we also begin this way, and this is considered “common” sense, a realistic, so to speak, approach to life. But Aduev Jr., as we see, is disgusted by such vulgar, let’s say, life experience.

Further. Alexander’s extraordinary and valuable quality was that in the activity itself, which he imagined, of course, vaguely, Aduev did not accept routine, formalism, and pettiness. Let us remember how, upon entering the service, Alexander immediately considered the hidden absurdity of bureaucracy, as a result of which such extensive red tape is sometimes started around one paper of a petitioner that the case itself disappears. We can say that this reaction is typical of all young people entering the clerical service. But that's not true. It is enough to recall the life practice of the “archive youths” of the 20s and 30s and 40s of the 19th century to recognize that the overwhelming majority of the youth of those years did not at all dislike the air of the office. On the contrary, the assimilation of formalism and respect for it contributed to rapid career advancement. The pure soul of Aduev, no stranger to impulses for glory, was horrified by the blatant discord that traditionally exists in all offices of the world between the work and the form of its implementation.

Even more significant for characterizing the “extraordinary” in the evolution of our hero will be the moment when Alexander, gradually getting used to St. Petersburg, but internally not accepting it entirely, began to enter the middle (semi-secular) circles of the northern capital. And what does he notice there?

“Are people decent?” - Uncle asks. “Oh, yes, very decent,” Alexander answers. “What eyes and shoulders!” “Shoulders? Who?" Alexander explains that he is talking “about girls.” “... I didn’t ask about them, but still - were there many pretty ones?” “Oh, very! - was Alexander’s answer, - but it’s a pity that they are all very monotonous. You can’t see either independence or character, you can’t hear a spontaneous thought, there’s no glimmer of feeling, everything is covered and painted over with the same color.”

This is almost Pushkin’s, even Lermontov’s, view of the tinsel of light - where is the “green”, naive romanticism here?

Where is Slavophilism? This is a sober and deep assessment of reality, in which “decently pulled masks” hide the squalor and emptiness of the mental horizon of regulars in aristocratic drawing rooms. Such understanding and perception of the secular environment can also be considered an extraordinary property of the hero, who (alas) had to carry out an “ordinary” story.

Finally, in the episodes with Nadenka Lyubetskaya, Alexander, of course, can be reproached for excessive ardor, intemperance, unfounded hopes for “eternal” and lasting love, for ignorance of the female heart, prone to “betrayal and change” - all this is true. But one cannot fail to note the sincerity of his feelings, the desire for constancy in his relationship with his beloved, his readiness to make sacrifices for her sake. And this, of course, is unusual (especially since it is completely devoid of pretense) and is so different from the usual logic of male behavior, where, as we know, the so-called “love for a period” is not excluded.

One could also cite a number of episodes confirming the presence of an unusual (essentially rare, if we bear in mind the mass noble youth of the 40s) in the character of Alexander Aduev. But it’s time to move on to generalizations and pose the question: doesn’t everything that was said contradict the character’s role that was planned and executed in the finale? And in general, where am I going with this, albeit brief, but hopefully objective analysis of the “unusual” in the image of Alexander Aduev?

I’ll answer the first question first, then everything else will become clear.

Noting Aduev’s negative attitude towards the tinsel of bureaucratic service, a critical look at the monotony and emptiness of social life, a thirst for real activity, I believe that the author did not at all contradict his plan, since in the image of Aduev Jr. he showed, of course, not a mystic and not a naive boy, but a very decent young man. A man who was not so much bookish as a sincere man, who wanted to build his life in accordance with the natural needs of the heart and the moral standards of his time.

But if so (and this is probably the case), then this is not a story about a “reformed” romantic who has achieved what an ordinary person should achieve, and the drama of a noble soul and a sensitive heart. A drama of hopes for finding a full-blooded existence, where personal harmony would be combined with social and, if you like, civil harmony.

True, the author himself translated this drama into a happy (relatively happy) ending: thirty-five-year-old Alexander already has an order on his neck, he even notices a small “paunch,” he has calmed down, and most importantly, he has a bride with a rich dowry. What else? And what happened 12-14 years ago - ardent, although deceived love, impulses towards activities useful for the fatherland, the search for beauty and ideal - so who doesn’t this happen to? All this passes, and everything returns to its usual norm, that is, the “prose” of life, material calculation, concern for personal, “earthly” well-being wins, in a word, “ordinary” history happens, what happens most often and, as it were, happens , God bless! The steam of idealism and excessive exaltation has been released, now you can live slowly, little by little...

But this external successful outline of events is still deceptive. The author hid in it his irony and - I will say more - his confusion... What can be done, who can establish in life the beauty, the naturalness of relationships, the opportunity to work usefully for the good of the Fatherland? After all, even Pyotr Aduev - the antipode of Aduev Jr., a man with many positive qualities - could not cope with the above-mentioned role. How to finally combine inspiration with prose, the contradictions of life, how to establish a moral ideal, including in love relationships - these are the main questions of the novel “An Ordinary Story”.

Alexander Aduev could not find the necessary line, although he began his life with an extraordinary impulse towards beauty, towards spiritual activity, he was distinguished by loyalty to other people, including in the sphere of love, but he ultimately became an ordinary businessman, and this is the ultimate, final point its evolution.

The author did not distort the ending, he completed it as a true realist. But painful thoughts about why everything ends this way for Russian people with good inclinations did not leave the writer. And in the new novel “Oblomov” I. A. Goncharov tried to solve the same issue. However, the second time the writer had to settle on approximately the same conclusions as in the first novel, although with a reverse plot development.

Oblomov is almost the same Alexander Aduev. It is not for nothing that Goncharov emphasized that in “Ordinary History”, “Oblomov” and “Precipice” he sees not three novels, but one. And this is true: the novels are united by the same hero, depicted in different variations. Based on this, we can say that Oblomov is, as it were, Alexander Aduev, but not accepting St. Petersburg reality, disconnected from it, and, therefore, from all reality, and therefore dying before his time. He and Aduev Jr. are brought together by impulses towards nobility, a craving for beauty and naturalness. In a sense, he turned out to be even stronger than Aduev, since he did not compromise with the unsightly reality, at the same time, he is immeasurably weaker than him, since he did not find the strength to enter this reality, to understand it, at least as Aduev understood.

Another solution is given in the image of Raisky (“Cliff”). To the author, he seemed like an “awakened” Oblomov. But it is not so. It is unlikely that anything could have come of Oblomov in a practical sense, at least during the years of his life.

Raisky is rather Alexander Aduev, who continued the extraordinary things that his older brother had. Raisky, like Aduev, wants to benefit people. What and how? Beauty!

This, of course, is a noble intention, but for real life it is insufficient and even harmful, if we take into account that at the beginning, as we remember, Raisky tried to establish abstract, abstract beauty in life. And all his work in this direction boiled down to ordinary rhetoric, nothing more. But then, through the drama of true love (love for Vera), through suffering, his artistic inspiration found soil, a true foundation. While in Italy, he felt the call of the Fatherland, he felt it within himself as something organic and heartfelt. He realized that serving beauty can only be done from the position of the Fatherland. Raisky “was warmly called to his place - his three figures: his Vera, his Marfenka, his grandmother. And behind them stood and attracted them more strongly to itself - another, gigantic figure, another great “grandmother” - Russia” 8.

This was the victory of the ideal noble spirit of Aduev. A truly “extraordinary story” happened when a Russian man with noble impulses finally realized that it was possible to realize them only by remaining on his native soil of Russia, and not on the basis of abstract book theories, often of Western origin. Happening,

of course, rare, but especially instructive these days, when unpatriotism, spiritual blindness and immorality have reached Homeric proportions. As a result, the evolution of Alexander Aduev, his impulses, the analysis of why the hero’s gracious and extraordinary aspirations received such a bland outcome, which is recorded by the writer in the novel - all this acquires new interest and a new heightened significance in our conditions.

Notes

1 Belinsky V. G. Collection op. in 9 vols., vol. 8. M., 1982. P. 386.

2 Pushkin A. S. Collection op. in 10 volumes, vol. 3. M., 1975. P. 146.

3 Lermontov M. Yu. Collection op. in 4 vols., vol. I. M., 1957. P. 23.

4 Goncharov I. A. An Ordinary Story: A Novel. - Novosibirsk: West Siberian book. publishing house, 1983. P. 44.

Writers explore life in two ways - mental, which begins with reflection on the phenomena of life, and artistic, the essence of which is the comprehension of the same phenomena not with the mind (or, rather, not only with the mind), but with all one’s human essence, or, as they say, intuitively.

Intellectual knowledge of life leads the author to a logical presentation of the material he has studied, artistic knowledge leads to the expression of the essence of the same phenomena through a system of artistic images. A fiction writer, as it were, gives a picture of life, but not just a copy of it, but transformed into a new artistic reality, which is why the phenomena that interested the author and illuminated by the bright light of his genius or talent appear before us especially visible, and sometimes even visible through and through.

It is assumed that a true writer gives us life only in the form of an artistic depiction of it. But in reality there are not many such “pure” authors, and perhaps there are none at all. More often than not, a writer is both an artist and a thinker.

Ivan Aleksandrovich Goncharov has long been considered one of the most objective Russian writers, that is, a writer in whose works personal likes or dislikes are not presented as a measure of certain life values. He gives artistic pictures of life objectively, as if “listening to good and evil indifferently,” leaving the reader to judge and pass judgment with his own mind.

It is in the novel “An Ordinary Story” that Goncharov, through the mouth of a magazine employee, expresses this idea in its purest form: “... a writer will only, firstly, write effectively when he is not under the influence of personal passion and passion. He must survey life and people in general with a calm and bright gaze, otherwise he will only express his own I, about which no one cares." And in the article “Better late than never,” Goncharov notes: “...I will first say about myself that I belong to the last category, that is, I am most interested in (as Belinsky noted about me) “my ability to draw.”

And in his first novel, Goncharov painted a picture of Russian life in a small country estate and in St. Petersburg in the 40s of the 19th century. Of course, Goncharov could not give a complete picture of life in both the village and St. Petersburg, just as no author can do this, because life is always more diverse than any image of it. Let's see whether the picture depicted turned out to be objective, as the author wanted, or whether some side considerations made this picture subjective.

The dramatic content of the novel is the peculiar duel waged by its two main characters: the young man Alexander Aduev and his uncle Pyotr Ivanovich. The duel is exciting, dynamic, in which success falls to the lot of one side or the other. A fight for the right to live life according to your ideals. But the uncle and nephew have exactly the opposite ideals.

Young Alexander comes to St. Petersburg straight from the warm embrace of his mother, dressed from head to toe in the armor of high and noble spiritual impulses, he comes to the capital not out of idle curiosity, but in order to enter into a decisive battle with everything soulless, calculating, vile. “I was attracted by some irresistible desire, a thirst for noble activity,” exclaims this naive idealist. And he challenged not just anyone, but the entire world of evil. Such a little home-grown quixotic! And after all, he has also read and listened to all sorts of noble nonsense.

The subtle irony of Goncharov, with which he describes his young hero at the beginning of the novel - his departure from home, vows of eternal love to Sonechka and his friend Pospelov, his first timid steps in St. Petersburg - it is this very mocking look of Goncharov at his young hero that makes the image Aduev Jr. is dear to our hearts, but already predetermines the outcome of the struggle between his nephew and uncle. The authors do not treat true heroes capable of great feats with irony.

And here is the opposite side: a metropolitan resident, the owner of a glass and porcelain factory, an official on special assignments, a man of sober mind and practical sense, thirty-nine-year-old Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev - the second hero of the novel. Goncharov endows him with humor and even sarcasm, but he himself does not treat this brainchild of his with irony, which makes us assume: here he is, the true hero of the novel, here is the one whom the author invites us to look up to.

These two characters, which interested the Gonchars, were the brightest types of their time. The founder of the first was Vladimir Lensky, the second was Eugene Onegin himself, although in a greatly transformed form. I will note here in parentheses that Onegin’s coldness and experience suffer exactly the same failure as the experience and significance of the life of Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev.

Still vaguely feeling the integrity of his novel, Goncharov writes: “... in the meeting of a gentle, dreamer-nephew, spoiled by laziness and lordship, with a practical uncle - there was a hint of a motive that had just begun to play out in the most lively center - in St. Petersburg. This motive is a faint flicker of consciousness of the need for work, real, not routine, but living work in the fight against all-Russian stagnation.”

Goncharov really wants to take this man of “living action” as a model, and not only for himself, but also to offer him to the reader’s attention as a model.

With what brilliance the dialogues between uncle and nephew are written! How calmly, confidently, categorically, the uncle crushes his hot-tempered nephew, but not armed with the terrible weapon of logic and experience! And every critical phrase is deadly, irresistible. Irresistible because he tells the truth. Hard, sometimes even offensive and merciless, but exactly the truth.

Here he makes fun of “material signs... of immaterial relationships” - a ring and a lock of hair, given by Sonechka as a farewell to her beloved Sashenka, who is leaving for the capital. “And you brought this one thousand five hundred miles?.. It would be better if you brought another bag of dried raspberries,” the uncle advises and throws symbols of eternal love, priceless for Alexander, out the window. Alexander's words and actions seem wild and cold. Can he forget his Sonechka? Never!..

Alas, my uncle turned out to be right. Very little time has passed, and Alexander falls in love with Nadenka Lyubetskaya, falls in love with all the ardor of youth, with the passion characteristic of his nature, unconsciously, thoughtlessly!.. Sonechka is completely forgotten. Not only will he never remember her, but he will also forget her name. Love for Nadya will fill Alexander entirely!.. There will be no end to his radiant happiness. What kind of business can there be that my uncle keeps talking about, what kind of work, when he, one might say, disappears day and night outside the city with the Lyubetskys! Oh, this uncle, he only has business on his mind. Insensitive!.. How he dares to say that Nadenka, his Nadenka, this deity, this perfection, can deceive him. “She will deceive! This angel, this sincerity personified…” exclaims young Alexander. “But she’s still a woman, and she’ll probably deceive,” the uncle replies. Oh, these sober, merciless minds and experience. It’s hard!.. But the truth: Nadenka deceived. She fell in love with the count, and Alexander receives his resignation. My whole life immediately turned black. And my uncle insists: I warned you!..

Alexander fails on all counts - in love, in friendship, in impulses to creativity, in work. Everything, absolutely everything that his teachers and books taught him, everything turned out to be nonsense and scattered with a slight crunch under the iron tread of sober reason and practical action. In the most intense scene of the novel, when Alexander is driven to despair, starts drinking, has become depressed, his will has atrophied, his interest in life has completely disappeared, the uncle retorts his nephew’s last babble of justification: “What I demanded of you - I didn’t invent all this.” “Who? – asked Lizaveta Aleksandrovna (wife of Pyotr Ivanovich - V.R.). - Century."

This is where the main motivation for the behavior of Pyotr Ivanovich Aduev was revealed. Command of the century! The century demanded! “Look,” he calls out, “at today’s youth: what great fellows! How everything is in full swing with mental activity, energy, how deftly and easily they deal with all this nonsense, which in your old language is called anxiety, suffering... and God knows what else!”

In Goncharov’s novel “An Ordinary Story,” the main character is the young nobleman Alexander Fedorovich Aduev. He is from a family whose estate is located one and a half thousand miles from St. Petersburg. His family is not very rich; Alexander and his mother have about a hundred serfs.

Alexander's father died long ago and Alexander is the only child in the family. He lives on the estate alone with his mother. He was raised with love and affection, so he turns out to be unprepared for the difficulties that awaited him beyond the threshold of adulthood.

At one time, the hero graduated from a university in the province, where he studied a lot. Alexander knows several foreign languages.

At the beginning of the work, Alexander is twenty years old. The author describes him as a young blond man in the prime of his life. At twenty years old, all young people are dreamers and Alexander is no exception. He sees the future in a bright light, wants to benefit the Fatherland and the world. He also dreams of becoming a writer or poet and writes poems that surprise his friends. Life without inspiration is boring for him; the hero calls such a life wooden.

Alexander is a kind and smart young man. His mother considers him a well-mannered and attractive young man with a soft soul. The hero listens to his heart more than his mind.

The hero believes that happiness cannot be found in money and that he has more money than he needs.

At the age of twenty, after graduating from university, Alexander leaves for St. Petersburg in search of fame. In the village, the hero leaves his beloved Sophia, whom he loves with a “little” love. Sophia's love is necessary for him until he meets great love.

In St. Petersburg, the hero has an uncle who helps him get a job and find a job in a magazine. But the hero’s uncle is a calculating man, and he is trying to re-educate his dreamy nephew for his own benefit.

In two years in St. Petersburg, Alexander successfully settled down and has a good job. His appearance also changed - he matured, the softness of his features disappeared. The youth turns into a man.

At twenty-three, Alexander falls in love with young Nadenka Lyubetskaya. Love turned the character’s head so much that he even abandoned his service. Alexander is even going to propose to the girl, but she prefers Count Novitsky to him. For Alexander this was a heavy blow.

The story with Nadenka led Alexander to become disillusioned with people, love and friendship. He became disgusted with himself.

The hero inexorably grows up, and his appearance also changes. At twenty-five years old, laziness and uneven movements fell as a shadow over Alexander. He was pale and thin from mental anxieties.

At twenty-five, the hero falls in love again. But when it comes to the wedding, his feelings cool and he breaks off the relationship. This situation turns the hero away from people even more.

Then Lisa, who is in love with him, appears in the hero’s life, but Alexander does not love her and over time stops all communication with her. After this, the hero dreams only of solitude and peace, wants to live as a hermit

Alexander, in dreams of fame as a writer, nevertheless composes a manuscript, but the publishing house refuses to print it, and the hero burns his manuscripts.

At twenty-nine years old, our hero grew old in soul and was completely disillusioned with life. He returns from St. Petersburg to his village, where he lived for a year and a half and after the death of his mother decided to leave for St. Petersburg again.

In St. Petersburg, the hero makes a fairly successful career, and then marries, on the advice of his uncle, according to convenience. In the end, nothing remains of the dreamy and loving young man; Alexander practically becomes a copy of his cold and calculating uncle.

Essay on the topic Alexander Aduev

One of the striking themes revealed in Russian literature is the theme of a hero reflecting the essence of his time. I. A. Goncharov, in his first major novel, “An Ordinary Story,” continues the tradition established by the classics. At the center of the story is the ordinary (typical) story of a young man, Alexander Aduev, a provincial who decided to conquer St. Petersburg. The author endowed the main character with many traits characteristic of a young man of the mid-19th century.

Alexander is a young landowner who lived quietly with his mother on his estate Grachi. He was used to everything around him being subordinate to his desires, his whims being fulfilled (mama kept a vigilant eye on this). Believing in his exclusivity and having read light French novels, he leaves for a large city, where his uncle Pyotr Ivanovich lives.

A romantic at heart, Alexander brings his mother’s gifts and dreams that he will be able to find a worthy place in his new life to St. Petersburg. But finding himself far from his native Rooks, he is faced with a harsh reality to which his uncle is constantly trying to open his eyes. With the help of the image of the main character, the author of the novel contrasts two worlds: the patriarchal world of the deep province and the world of the cold, arrogant and calculating capital.

In the city, Aduev encounters the careerism and callousness of officials, and sees the social contrasts on which life is built here. When the hero moves from one environment to another, the significance of his personality changes: from a respected “master” he turns into an ordinary provincial nobleman, of whom many come to St. Petersburg.

The transition from Alexander’s carefree, elevated state to the prose of life was not easy for him. This is shown especially well in the scenes where the hero’s mental torment is described after parting with Nadenka, for whose sake he broke up with Sonechka from his village. Love always seemed to him a sincere and lofty feeling. But the break with Nadenka showed that women are insidious and you can’t trust anyone.

Another blow of fate was a chance meeting with childhood friend Pospelov. The hero is glad to meet a kindred exalted soul. But life in the capital changed his friend a lot; he became mercantile and calculating.

To reduce Alexander’s romantic mood and show that in the modern world there is no place for sentimental romantics, the novel gives the image of an uncle - an absolutely down-to-earth person. He is trying to help his nephew adjust to life. But young Aduev does not always agree with him. Pyotr Ivanovich, trying to finally convince Alexander of the need to look at the world soberly, inflicts severe mental trauma on him. He wants to prove to his nephew that his gift for writing is insignificant and no one needs it. An uncle publishes his nephew's novel under his own name and receives a letter from the publisher. This essentially ruthless act of the uncle kills the romantic in the hero forever.

A few years later, Alexander Aduev becomes a collegiate adviser with a good income. He is going to marry a rich bride. Refined romanticism and childish daydreaming finally gave way to pragmatism and cold calculation that dominated society at that time. For the talented portrayal of changes in the hero’s worldview, V. G. Belinsky highly appreciated the first major work of I. A. Goncharov.

Several interesting essays

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• Essay The role of parental guidance in a person’s life

  For the most part, people spend their childhood and youth in the family, if you do not consider the situation with orphans and other similar options with not the best options for fate, then for a significant part of people the situation is exactly this way.

• Essay Conflict of generations in the novel Fathers and Sons of Turgenev

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• Why don't different generations understand each other? Final essay

  Sometimes parents, elderly people and children cannot understand each other. Why is this happening? The thing is that different generations were brought up differently.

• The history of the creation of the novel The Captain's Daughter of Pushkin

  The idea for this work came to Alexander Sergeevich at the beginning of 1833. At that time, he was still working on “Dubrovsky” and the historical essay “The History of Pugachev.”

Goncharov's first novel shows the degeneration of a dreamy romantic into a sober businessman under the influence of bourgeois commercial relations that penetrated Russian life in the 40s of the 19th century.

The hero of the novel, an enthusiastic young man, leaves the family estate - the village of Grachi - to experience “fortune” and find happiness in St. Petersburg. Confident in his talent, he hopes that doors will open for him everywhere, that fame awaits him in the public (primarily literary) field. He also had a secret dream of “colossal passion,” romantic love, and selfless friendship.

However, in St. Petersburg the young man had to experience bitter disappointments. It turned out that his poems, divorced from reality, are only suitable for pasting walls, that one cannot live on enthusiasm alone: ​​one must “get the job done.” The hero had to reluctantly translate articles about “potato molasses” and “land” and endlessly rewrite office papers. Dreams of great love also collapsed: he was cheated on in the most prosaic way by the one whom he considered the height of human perfection (the history of his relationship with Nadenka). The acquaintance with Tafaeva ended with everyday prose. Alexander is in despair. “The past is dead, the future is destroyed, there is no happiness: everything is a chimera - but live!” he exclaims. However, the suffering of the romantic hero, which arose, as Goncharov shows, due to the collision of a false dream with reality, was not deep. Having left St. Petersburg in a moment of grief, he soon returns to the capital, but with different intentions. Alexander renounces “sublime feelings”, reconciles himself with prosaic reality and wants to “get things done”). “You can’t die here! - he says about the Rooks. “Everyone came out into the open... I was the only one left behind.” In the epilogue we see Aduev as a successful person. He serves regularly and is preparing to marry a bride with a dowry of half a million. These changes also correspond to external signs: Alexander has gained weight, is a little bald and already has an order around his neck. Consequently, an “ordinary story” happened; practicality took precedence over youthful dreams. Lizaveta Aleksandrovna, a relative of Aduev Jr., regrets his loss of his former ideals. But Alexander Aduev himself thinks differently: “What can we do... this is the age. I’m keeping up with the times: I can’t lag behind!” In these words one can see the author’s hidden irony: having condemned the emptiness of noble dreamy romanticism, poetry, as he himself said, of “feigned feelings” and “idleness,” the writer did not accept dry practicality, practicality, which kills the manifestation of poetry in a person.

This position was revealed most clearly in the depiction of Pyotr Aduev, Alexander’s uncle. Pyotr Aduev is a major official and manufacturer-entrepreneur who knows a lot about people and commercial affairs. He is educated, smart, reads two languages, goes to the theater, and understands art. In a word, this is a man in the spirit of his time - he values ​​work, not phrases. He played a significant role in the sobering up of Aduev Jr. “Your stupid enthusiasm is no good: forget these sacred and heavenly feelings, and pay attention to the matter,” he says to his nephew. In disputes with Alexander, he convincingly shows the fallacy of romantic exaltation and introduces his nephew to real life. Pyotr Aduev is a representative of the new, European-educated bureaucratic-bourgeois stratum. The author is on the side of this businesslike, energetic man. At the same time, Goncharov understood that the development of new commercial relations could lead not only to the destruction of “noble nests”, but also to the attenuation of living human emotions. Alexander Aduev is bad with his tearful sensitivity and immoderate enthusiasm, but Aduev Sr. is not without holes in his character. He is too prosaic for all his intelligence, dry and calculating. Perhaps this is not the person’s fault: he is completely absorbed in his “business.” But his “business,” as it turns out, is devoid of poetry and color. This also affected family relationships. Lizaveta Aleksandrovna, the wife of Pyotr Aduev, living in comfort, was fading away every day, although physically she was quite healthy. The reason for the decline is that the woman felt the lack of spiritual work and a sublime goal. By depicting the victory of efficiency over poetry and beauty, the author thereby skeptically assessed the new bourgeois relations, which from the very beginning were far from perfect.

The novel “An Ordinary Story” was highly praised by his contemporaries. In the article “A Look at Russian Literature of 1847,” Belinsky ranked it among the remarkable achievements of Russian literature. He noted the artistic completeness of the image: “The main strength of Mr. Goncharov’s talent is always in the elegance and subtlety of the brush, the fidelity of the drawing; the language is clean, correct... flowing” (8, 398).