Ministry of Education and Science of Ukraine

O. Honchar Dnipropetrovsk National University

Faculty of Correspondence and Distance Education

Report on the topic:

“The problem of love, marriage and family in Tolstoy’s novel“ Anna Karenina ”.

Compositional and Genre Features ".

Performed by a student of the group

Gernets Kristina Vitalievna

Checked

Candidate of Philology

Karabut Lyudmila Alekseevna

Dnepropetrovsk - 2010

Introduction

The problem of love, marriage and family in the novel by L. Tolstoy "Anna Karenina"

The plot and composition of the novel

Genre features of the novel

Conclusion

Bibliography

INTRODUCTION

In 1875, the first chapters of Anna Karenina were published in the January issue of the Russian Bulletin magazine. After "a book about the past," as Tolstoy called "War and Peace," his "novel from modern life" amazed readers with its "omnipresence" content.

“Now my thought is so clear to me,” Tolstoy said to Sofya Andreevna in 1877, finishing work on the novel. "... So in Anna Karenina I love family thought, in War and Peace I loved popular thought, as a result of the war of 1912 ..."

Anna Karenina is one of the great books of world literature, a novel of universal significance. It is impossible to imagine 19th century European literature without Tolstoy. He won world fame and recognition for his deep nationality, penetration into the dramatic destinies of the individual, devotion to the ideals of good, intransigence to social injustice, the social vices of the proprietary world.

For the first time, the idea of ​​the plot of "Anna Karenina" arises in Tolstoy's mind back in 1870. “Last night he told me,” writes Sofya Andreevna in her diary on February 24, 1870, “that he imagined a type of woman, married, from high society, but who had lost herself. He said that his task was to make this woman only miserable and not guilty, and that as soon as this type was introduced to him, all the faces and male types that had been introduced before found a place for themselves and grouped around this woman. "Now everything has become clear to me," he said. "

Tolstoy in his novel gave full scope for both the “poetry of passion” and the “poetry of marriage”, combining both of these principles with his burning “family thought”. He seemed to be pondering with dismay over what would become of Pushkin's Tatyana if she violated her duty.

THE PROBLEM OF LOVE, MARRIAGE AND FAMILY IN L. TOLSTOY'S NOVEL "ANNA KARENINA"

In the 70s L. “N. Tolstoy began to think more and more deeply about the problems of marriage and family. The surrounding reality gave a lot of materials for reflection on the issues of family life. In January 1872, Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, the illegitimate wife of the neighboring landowner Bibikov, threw herself under a train at the Yasenki station. The Tolstoy family knew the deceased woman well, and her tragic fate found an echo in the novel "Anna Karenina". Tolstoy worked on the new novel for over four years, from 1873 to 1877. The theme of the family, put forward at first, turned out to be connected with social, social, philosophical issues; the work grew into a large social novel, which reflected the life of the writer today.

In Moscow, at the Nikolaevskaya station railroad Count Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky met his mother who was coming from St. Petersburg. While waiting for the train, he was thinking of young Kitty Shtcherbatskaya, of her love for him, from which he "felt better, cleaner himself." “Vronsky followed the conductor in the first car and stopped at the entrance to the department to make way for the lady who was leaving. With the usual tact of a secular person, by one glance at the appearance of this lady, Vronsky determined her belonging to the high society. He apologized and went to the carriage, but felt the need to look at her again ... When he looked around, she also turned her head. Shiny, which seemed dark from thick eyelashes, grey eyes friendly, attentively rested on his face, as if she recognized him, and immediately transferred to the approaching crowd, as if looking for someone. " It was Anna Arkadyevna Karenina. Met by chance, Anna and Vronsky cannot forget each other.

Karenina is a married woman, mother of an eight-year-old son; she understands that Vronsky cannot and should not interest her. However, at the Moscow ball, Kitty, who was watching her, sees that "Anna is drunk with the wine of the admiration she arouses ...". Anna decides to leave Moscow and return home to St. Petersburg so as not to meet with Vronsky. She fulfilled her decision, and the next day her brother accompanied her to Petersburg. But at the stop in Bologoye, getting out of the carriage, Anna met Vronsky.

“I didn't know you were going. Why are you going? - she said ... And irrepressible joy and animation shone on her face.

Why am I going? he repeated, looking her straight in the eye,

You. you know, I am going to be where you are, he said, I cannot do otherwise.

... He said the very thing that her soul desired, but which she was afraid of with her mind. She did not answer, and on her face he saw the struggle. " Anna Tolstoy emphasizes the confusion and anxiety in her soul by describing the raging nature. “And at that time, as if overcoming an obstacle, the wind poured snow from the roofs of the cars, fluttered it with some torn iron sheet, and a thick whistle of a steam locomotive roared mournfully and gloomily ahead. All the horror of the blizzard seemed to her even more beautiful now. "

This meeting decided the fate of Anna Karenina. No matter how hard she tried, returning home, to live in the old way, she did not succeed. Love for Vronsky made her look differently at her married life. “… I realized that I can no longer deceive myself, that I am alive, that I am not to blame, that God made me such that I need to love and live,” Anna thinks. The inability to deceive, sincerity and truthfulness draw her into a difficult conflict with Karenin and the secular environment.

The fate of Aleksey Aleksandrovich Karenin, Anna's husband, is undoubtedly tragic, and much in her makes me sympathize with him. Karenin is not an "evil machine", as Anna calls her husband in a fit of despair. Tolstoy shows his sincerity, humanity in the scene of reconciliation with his wife. Even Vronsky admits that at the moment of reconciliation Karenin was "at an unattainable height." During his tenure as governor, already a middle-aged man, Aleksey Alexandrovich met with Anna Arkadyevna, who was twenty years younger than him. "He proposed and gave the bride and wife all the feeling he was capable of." Having created that "atmosphere of happiness" that had become his habit, Karenin suddenly discovered that it had broken down in an "illogical" way. Tolstoy compares Karenin to a man who calmly walked across the bridge and suddenly saw "that this bridge was dismantled and that there is an abyss." "This abyss was - life itself, the bridge - that artificial life that Alexey Alexandrovich lived." Karenin tests his living, natural feelings with the concepts and norms established by the state and the church. Having learned about Anna's betrayal, he, after "a strange feeling of physical pity for her," felt that he was now occupied with the question of "how in the best, most decent, most convenient for himself and therefore the most just way to shake off the dirt with which she splashed him into his fall, and - to continue to follow his own path of an active, honest and useful life. " However, methodicalness, caution. lifeless systematicity - features characteristic of the highest circles of the bureaucratic environment - proved to be powerless in the collision with life.

Adjutant wing Vronsky, an aristocrat and gentleman, "one of the best examples of the golden youth of St. Petersburg" fell in love with Anna Karenina and sacrifices in the name of love military career: he retires and, contrary to secular notions and morals (decisively "he announces to his brother that he looks at his relationship with Karenina as a marriage ...") leaves with Anna abroad.

The more Anna got to know Vronsky, "the more she loved him"; and abroad she was "unforgivably" happy. But "Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the full realization of what he had wished for so long, was not quite happy ... He soon felt that desires of desires, longing had risen in his soul." Attempts to engage in politics, books, painting did not give results, and, in the end, the solitary life in an Italian city seemed boring to him; it was decided to go to Russia.

Loving Anna, he always forgot what “constituted the most painful side of his relationship to her - her son with his questioning, disgusting, as it seemed to him, look. This boy was more often than anyone else a hindrance to their relationship. " In the scene of Anna's meeting with her son Serezha Tolstoy, with the unsurpassed skill of an artist-psychologist, he revealed the depth of the family conflict. The feelings of a loving mother for an abandoned child, passion for Vronsky, protest against the false morality of high society and the uncertainty of the situation form a knot of contradictions in Anna's fate that she is unable to untie. Her words, addressed to Dolly Oblonskaya, sound tragic: “… I'm not a wife; he loves me as long as he loves "..." You must understand that I love, it seems, equal, but both are more than myself, two creatures - Seryozha and Alexei ... Only these two creatures I love, and one excludes the other. I cannot connect them, but this is the only one I need. And if this is not the case, then all the same. Everything, all the same ... "And when Anna realized that her passionate, ... love was not enough for Vronsky's happiness, and he, for whom she sacrificed her son," more and more wants to leave her, "she realized her situation as hopeless, as tragic dead end.

The idea of ​​the writer to show a woman who has lost herself, but is not guilty, is emphasized by the epigraph to the novel: "Vengeance is mine and I will repay." The meaning of the epigraph is that it is not for secular bigots to judge a person, his life and deeds. The thought of the epigraph sounds several times in words actors novel. Anna's old aunt says to Dolly: "God will judge them, not us." Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev, meeting with Vronsky's mother, in response to her condemnation of Anna, says: "It is not for us to judge, Countess." The biblical dictum, taken for the epigraph, Tolstoy opposed state and religious legality and secular morality, which asserted "evil lies and deceit."

PLOT AND COMPOSITION OF THE NOVEL

Tolstoy called Anna Karenina “a wide and free novel,” using Pushkin’s term “free novel”. This is a clear indication of the genre origins of the work.

Tolstoy's "Wide and Free Novel" is different from Pushkin's "Free Novel". In Anna Karenina, for example, there are no lyrical, philosophical or journalistic digressions by the author. But between Pushkin's novel and Tolstoy's novel there is an undoubted successive connection, which manifests itself in the genre, and in the plot, and in the composition.

In Tolstoy's novel, as in Pushkin's novel, the primary importance belongs not to the plot completion of the provisions, but to the “creative concept”, which determines the selection of material and in the spacious frame of the modern novel presents freedom for the development of plot lines. “I can’t and don’t know how to put certain boundaries to my fictional persons - such as marriage or death, after which the interest of the story would be destroyed. I could not help imagining that the death of one person only aroused interest in other persons, and marriage seemed to be mostly a plot, not a denouement of interest, ”wrote Tolstoy.

"A wide and free novel" obeys the logic of life; one of his inner artistic goals is to overcome literary conventions. In 1877, in his article "On the Significance of the Modern Novel" F. Buslaev wrote that modernity cannot be satisfied with "pipe-tales, which until recently were passed off as novels with mysterious ties and the adventures of incredible heroes in a fantastic, unprecedented setting." Tolstoy sympathetically noted this article as interesting experience comprehension of the ways of development of realistic literature of the XIX century. ...

“Now we are interested in the reality around us in the novel, the current life in the family and society, as it is, in its active fermentation of unsteady elements of the old and the new, dying and emerging, elements excited by the great upheavals and reforms of our century,” wrote F. Buslaev ...

Fiction, creating a vivid and rich image, offers many wise reflections, deep discourses, which - put together - could constitute whole volumes. So the novel "Anna Karenina", the author of which is the great L.N. Tolstoy, created in the period 1873-1877. Anna appears in the novel "Seeking and Giving Happiness." But on her way to happiness there are active forces of evil, under the influence of which, ultimately, she dies. Anna's fate is therefore full of deep drama. The entire novel is also permeated with intense drama. Anna Karenina - married woman, mother of an eight-year-old son; she understands that Vronsky cannot and should not interest her. However, at the Moscow ball we see that “Anna is drunk with the wine of the admiration she arouses ...” Anna decides to leave Moscow and return home to St. Petersburg so as not to meet Vronsky. She fulfilled her decision, and the next day her brother accompanied her to Petersburg. But at the bus stop, getting out of the carriage, Anna met Vronsky ... Vronsky passionately fell in love with Anna, this feeling filled his whole life. An aristocrat and a gentleman, “one of the best examples of the golden youth of St. Petersburg,” he defends Anna before the world, takes on the most serious obligations in relation to his beloved woman. Decisively and bluntly, “he announces to his brother that he looks at his relationship with Karenina as a marriage ...” In the name of love, he sacrifices his military career: he retires and, contrary to secular notions and morals, leaves with Anna abroad. The more Anna got to know Vronsky, “the more she loved him”; and abroad she was unforgivably happy. But “Vronsky, meanwhile, despite the full realization of what he had desired for so long, was not completely happy. He soon felt a melancholy in his soul. " Attempts to engage in politics, books, painting did not give results, and, in the end, the solitary life in an Italian city seemed boring to him; it was decided to go to Russia.

Secular society forgave Vronsky, but not Anna, for the open connection between Anna and Vronsky. All the houses of her former acquaintances were closed to her. Vronsky, having found the strength to neglect the prejudices of his environment, does not completely break with this environment even when secular society began to persecute his beloved woman. The military-palace environment in which he rotated for a long time influenced him no less than the official and bureaucratic spheres on Karenin. And just as Karenin could not and did not want to understand what was going on in Anna's soul, so Vronsky was very far from this. Loving Anna, he always forgot what “constituted the most painful side of his relationship to her - her son with his questioning, disgusting, as it seemed to him, look. This boy was more often than anyone else a hindrance to their relationship. " In the scene of Anna's meeting with her son Serezha Tolstaya, with the unsurpassed skill of an artist-psychologist, he revealed the depth of the family conflict. Feelings of a mother and loving woman tested by Anna, Tolstoy shows as equivalent. Her love and motherly feeling - two great feelings - remain unconnected for her. She has associated with Vronsky the idea of ​​herself as a loving woman, with Karenin - as the impeccable mother of their son, as a once faithful wife. Anna wants to be both one and the other at the same time.

In a semi-conscious state, she says, addressing her husband:

“I am still the same ... But there is another in me, I am afraid of her - she fell in love with that one, and I wanted to hate you and could not forget about the one that was before. That’s not me. Now I am real, I am all. " “All,” that is, the one that was before, before meeting Vronsky, and the one that she later became. But Anna was not destined to die yet. She had not yet had time to experience all the sufferings that fell to her lot, she had not yet had time to try all the roads to happiness, to which her life-loving nature was so eager. She could not become Karenin's faithful wife again. Even on the verge of death, she understood that this was impossible. She was also unable to endure the position of "lies and deceit".

Following the fate of Anna, we notice with bitterness how one after another her dreams are crumbling. Her dream collapsed to go abroad with Vronsky and there to forget about everything: Anna did not find her happiness there either. The reality, from which she wanted to get away, overtook her there too. Vronsky was bored from idleness and weighed down, and this could not but weigh Anna. But most importantly, a son remained at home, apart from whom she could not be happy in any way. In Russia, she was in for agony even more severe than those that she had experienced before. The time when she could dream about the future and thereby, to some extent, reconcile herself with the present, is over. Reality now appeared before her in all its terrible appearance.

As the conflict develops, the meaning of everything that happened is revealed. So, Anna, recognizing the Petersburg aristocracy, soon realized that they were all hypocrites, pretending to be virtuous, but in fact evil and calculating. Anna broke with this circle after her acquaintance with Vronsky. The whole society that Anna faced was hypocritical. With each turn of her difficult fate, she became more and more convinced of this. She was looking for honest, uncompromising happiness. Around myself I saw lies, hypocrisy, hypocrisy, open and hidden debauchery. And Anna is not judging these people, but these people are judging Anna. That is the horror of her situation.

Having lost her son, Anna remained only with Vronsky. Consequently, her attachment to life was halved, since her son and Vronsky were equally dear to her. Here is the clue of why she now began to cherish Vronsky's love so much. For her, it was life itself. But Vronsky, with an egoistic nature, could not understand Anna. Anna was with him, and therefore was of little interest to him. Between Anna and Vronsky now more and more misunderstandings arose. And formally, Vronsky, like Karenin earlier, was right, but Anna was wrong. However, the essence of the matter was that the actions of Karenin, and then of Vronsky, were guided by "prudence," as the people of their circle understood him; Anna's actions were guided by her great human feeling, which in no way could agree with "prudence". At one time, Karenin was frightened by the fact that the "society" had already noticed the relationship between his wife and Vronsky, and that this threatened a scandal. So Anna behaved "unreasonably"! Now Vronsky is afraid of a public scandal and sees the reason for this scandal in the same “imprudence” of Anna.

In Vronsky's estate, in essence, the final act of Anna Karenina's tragic fate is played out.

Anna, a strong and cheerful person, seemed to many and even wanted to seem quite happy to herself. In fact, she was deeply unhappy.

A few minutes before her death, Anna thinks: “Everything is untrue, everything is a lie, everything is deception, everything is evil! ..” Therefore, she wants to “put out the candle,” that is, to die. "Why not put out the candle, when there is nothing more to look at, when it is disgusting to look at all this?"

Historically, the theme of love has turned out to be associated with philosophy and other sciences. Indeed, it is only in love and through love that a person comprehends himself, his potentialities and the world of his dwelling. About what is called love, they always pondered, argued, asked each other and answered, asked again and never found an exact answer. I really wanted to understand why it is unbearable for a person to live without love and why it is so difficult to love. Different philosophies, different religions seek to understand and take advantage of this unique ability to love a person. However, even today it is an area of ​​human existence that is poorly understood by philosophy. The theme of love has always been very close to Russian philosophical thought. Many deep and amazing pages were written about love by Vladimir Soloviev, Lev Tolstoy, V. Rozanov, I. Ilyin, E. Fromm and many others.

In the novel "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy puts actual problem on the relationship in life of human egoism, the natural human striving for personal happiness and a person's duty to others of his own kind, to society.

During the creation of War and Peace, Tolstoy believes that selfishness in a healthy, freely developing human personality does not carry anything immoral (for example, Natasha Rostova is able to abandon her personal interests - she gives carts to the wounded). During the period of writing "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy more and more

He is convinced that among the upper classes the pursuit of happiness acquires a perverse, idealistic character.

The tragedy "Anna Karenina" conveys the main character's retreat from the life position of conversion, love, and duty to other people.

The moral problem runs throughout the novel. Anna's tragedy is interpreted in many ways. She surrenders to selfish passion, disdaining duty, enters a moral and life impasse. The heroine loses her naturalness and charm. She concentrates all her strength on how not to lose Vronsky's love, how to make him belong only to her. She continues to wonder

Life, art. But she is not sincere and is interested in this only in order to look deep nature in Vronsky's eyes. Tolstoy, deciding what led Anna to a dead end, is far from simplistic conclusions. The blame rests entirely on society.

The antipode of Anna in the novel is Levin. The life fates of Anna and Levin accompany each other in denying the evil of life, but sharply diverge in their search for good. Throughout the novel, Levin approaches the origins of folk life, while Anna departs from them in the most fatal way, step by step. "Natural and simple" at the beginning of the novel (Anna in the first chapters speaks only Russian, the sincerity of her actions and thoughts contradicts the conventions of the world, the description of Russian nature in deep psychological subtext accompanies her), she gradually loses her naturalness and simplicity (French blush and English, French speech).

The trip abroad with Vronsky was for Anna an attempt to escape from herself. Anna feels empty inside. But, endowed by nature with truthfulness, honesty, she cannot deceive the people around her. It seems to Karenina that she looks like some kind of evil machine. She is natural and sincere by nature, cannot pretend, cannot live a completely false life. Her relationship with her husband is becoming more and more entangled, tied in a knot, which is resolved by an extreme situation - having a hard time giving birth to a daughter.

In the moments of the seeming onset of death, Anna understands the dedication and suffering of her husband. This is proof to her that he forgave her. Dostoevsky emphasized that at that moment she triumphed over everything. All heroes are reconciled in the face of death. However, Anna, having recovered, goes to Vronsky. Karenin, under the influence of secular circles, refuses to give up his son. Anna is presented with a false, unnatural morality before a choice: love for her son or love-passion. Tolstoy shows that she chose love-passion. The heroine is forced to isolate herself within the framework of her passion. She tries to build her happiness on the unhappiness of others. And she has to pay for it.

Tolstoy, a brilliant psychologist, exclusively reproduces the last hours of the heroine's life. Seized by a whirlwind of feelings, she realizes that she has made a terrible mistake, but nothing can be corrected.

Tolstoy speaks of her death in pathetic tones. Researchers of the writer's work have long and many debated how he evaluates his heroine. Many believed that Tolstoy refused to judge the heroine. But in the epigraph: "Vengeance is mine and I will repay" there is an element of condemnation. Vengeance by an external moral force is condemnation. Condemnation that she despised duty for the sake of happiness.

Family and marriage problems in the novel "Anna Karenina"

He said that his task was to make

this woman is only pathetic and not guilty. "

S. Tolstaya

After finishing work on the novel War and Peace, Lev Nikolayevich became “carried away” by the problems of family and marriage. The reality around him gave a lot of material about family life, and Tolstoy began work on a new novel "Anna Karenina".

The theme of the family, put forward at the beginning, turned out to be interconnected with social, social, philosophical issues - the work gradually grew into a major social novel, in which the writer reflected his contemporary life. The plot is simple, even banal. A married woman, mother of an eight-year-old child, is carried away by a brilliant officer. But everything is simple only at first glance. Anna suddenly realized that I cannot deceive myself, she dreams of love, that love and life are synonyms for her. At this decisive moment, she does not think about anyone except Alexei Vronsky. The inability to deceive, the sincerity and truthfulness of the heroine involve her in a serious conflict with her husband and the society in which she lives.

Anna compares her husband to a soulless mechanism, calls him “an evil machine”. Karenin tests all feelings with the norms established by the state and the church. He suffers from his wife's betrayal, but in a very peculiar way, he wants to “shake off the dirt with which she splashed him in her fall, and continue to follow her path of an active, honest and useful life”. He lives with his mind, not his heart. It is his rationality that prompts the path of cruel revenge on Anna. Alexey Alexandrovich Karenin separates Anna from her beloved son Serezha. The heroine has to choose, and she takes a “step” towards Vronsky, but this is a disastrous path, it leads to an abyss. Anna did not want to change anything in her life, it was rock that turned everything. She follows the path prepared for her, suffering and torment. Love for the abandoned son, passion for Vronsky, protest against the false morality of society were intertwined into a single knot of contradictions. Anna is unable to solve these problems. She wants to get away from them. Just live happily: to love and be loved. But how unattainable for her is simple human happiness!

Talking with her brother's wife, Anna confesses: “You must understand that I love, it seems, equally, but both are more than myself, two creatures - Seryozha and Alexei. Only these two creatures I love, and one excludes the other. I cannot connect them, but this is the only one I need. And if this is not the case, then all the same. All, all the same ... "

Anna realizes with horror that passionate love alone is not enough for Vronsky. He is a man of “society”. He wants to be useful, to achieve ranks and a prominent position. Quiet family life is not for him. For the sake of this man and his ambitious plans, she sacrificed everything: peace, position in society, her son ... Anna realizes that she has driven herself into a dead end.

The writer still in the epigraph: “Vengeance is mine and I will repay” said that his heroine is not to be judged by secular bigots, but by the Creator. In the novel, this idea is confirmed more than once. Anna's old aunt says in a conversation with Dolly: "They will be judged by God, not by us." Koznyshev, in a conversation with Vronsky's mother, asserts: "It is not for us to judge, Countess." Thus, Tolstoy contrasted the state and religious legality and secular morality, which affirmed “evil, lies and deceit,” the wisdom of the biblical dictum, taken for the epigraph.

Initially, the author wanted to portray a woman who has lost herself, but is not guilty. Gradually, the novel grew into a broad denunciatory canvas showing life post-reform Russia in all its diversity. The novel presents all strata of society, all classes and estates in the new socio-economic conditions, after the abolition of serfdom.

Speaking about Anna Karenina, Tolstoy showed that she was worried only about purely personal problems: love, family, marriage. Not finding a decent way out of this situation, Anna decides to leave this life. She throws herself under the train, as life in her current position has become unbearable.

Unwillingly, Tolstoy passed a harsh sentence to society with its false sanctimonious morality, which drove Anna to suicide. There is no place in this society sincere feelings, but only the established rules that can be circumvented, but hiding, deceiving everyone and yourself. Sincere, loving person society rejects like a foreign body. Tolstoy condemns such a society and the laws it has established.