being afraid
Katerina Akhmakova in Dostoevsky’s “Teenager”
To the unearthly friend of his, Sofia Andreevna, the main character of the “Teenager” Versilov faces a bright face. Dark, he turned to the earth of his love – Katerina Nikolaevna Akhmakova. Throughout the first two parts of the novel, the truth of this love is closed from us by a thick veil of gossip, slander, and vile suspicion. Versilov’s son, Arkady, heard that his father abroad had some kind of suspicious history with this woman and that they were shared by an old feud. He is prejudiced against Akhmakova and, having met her for the first time at Prince Sokolsky, sees him as an enemy. “She somehow raised her face, looked at me badly and. smiled cheekily. And yet its beauty strikes him. The author repeats the technique he used in “Idiot” to portray Nastasya Filippovna: the hero first sees a portrait of a beautiful woman, and then her own. Continue reading
The value of “Hunter’s notes” in Russian literature
The artistic significance of Turgenev’s Hunter’s Notes is very great: there are many beautiful descriptions of the “endless” nature of the middle part of Russia – the nature whose beauty was first appreciated by Pushkin — a long series of types that are characteristic, purely folk, well-worn Russian life, and , at the same time, often marked by the features of “universal”. In the descriptions of nature, Turgenev was able to identify the most diverse moods, because the content of the story, usually, he responds and mood, the nature of the landscape, against which one or the other, a scene from human life. Continue reading
Vasily Belov “Everything is ahead”
“Everything is ahead” (1986). – After a ravnavnogo immersion in the irrevocable Russian past, Belov, the more painful it was to feel inappropriate in the uncomfortable present, in the swarming stream of modern life, could not but feel himself in conflict with it. And then – he bravely took to resist this flow? and even affect its course? By comparing the 1st and 2nd parts of this little novel, it can be understood that the resolution did not immediately gain in it. Continue reading
