Petersburg of Dostoevsky. Description of Petersburg by Dostoevsky. Petersburg in the works of Dostoevsky

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

The city on the Neva, with all its majestic and sinister history, has always been the focus of Russian writers.

Peter's creation

According to the plan of its founder Peter the Great, St. Petersburg, called "from the swamp of swamps", was to become a stronghold of sovereign glory. Contrary to the ancient Russian tradition of building cities on hills, it was indeed built in a swampy lowland at the cost of the lives of many nameless builders, exhausted by dampness, cold, swamp miasma and hard work. The expression that the city "stands on the bones" of its builders can be taken literally. At the same time, the meaning and mission of the second capital, its magnificent architecture and daring mysterious spirit made St. Petersburg a truly “wonderful city”, which made its contemporaries and descendants admire themselves. It is no coincidence that today we have the opportunity to enjoy the many-sided "portraits" of this amazing city inworks of the greatest artists of the word and we mention such idioms as Petersburg of Dostoevsky, Pushkin, Gogol, Nekrasov, Akhmatova, Blok.

Twin City

Wrapped in mystery, sheltering on its straight, foggy avenues the surreal Major's Nose Kovalev and the afterlife shadow of the unfortunate Akaky Akakievich, the city itself seems like a ghost, ready to melt away with the fog. Petersburg in the works of Dostoevsky, as well as in the fantastic stories of Gogol, appears as a strange “obsessive dream”, a dream that will disappear at that very moment, as soon as he “suddenly wakes up, to whom everything is dreaming” (the novel “The Teenager”). Often, the Granite City in the works of writers is an almost animated being, capable of influencing people's destinies. He becomes the culprit of the broken hopes of poor Yevgeny in Pushkin's poem "The Bronze Horseman", and the desperate threat of the sufferer "You already!", thrown towards the statue, is addressed to the entire city of the offender. Petersburg in the work of Dostoevsky is not only a character, but also a kind of double of the heroes, strangely refracting their thoughts, experiences, fantasies and future. This theme originated on the pages of the Petersburg Chronicle, in which the young publicist Fyodor Dostoevsky sees with alarm the features of painful gloom that slip through the inner appearance of his beloved city.

Petersburg in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment

This work is a real textbook of human studies in the part that concerns the experience of acute mental crises,comprehension of extremely dangerous ideas. Raskolnikov's moral experiment lies in what he believes: a good person who wants to make humanity happy is allowed to sacrifice life - not his own, but someone else's, even, in his opinion, the most worthless. The hero tests his theory, and it becomes obvious to him that he is not a winner, but a victim: “he killed himself”, and not an “old woman”. Partly, Petersburg becomes the instigator of the murder. It is difficult to suspect Dostoevsky of hatred for this city, but here the writer mercilessly exposes the atmosphere of a cruel, fetid, drunken urban monster, strangling Raskolnikov and imposing on him the idea that only the strongest survive.

Accomplice City

The author masterfully intertwines the image of urban landscapes, street scenes and interiors. Petersburg of Dostoevsky is logically written out in the plot outline, and its details are the most accurate touches in the characterization of the characters and the development of the idea of the work. How does it happen?

Cityscapes

The first description of St. Petersburg by Dostoevsky we meet immediately - in the 1st chapter of the first part. The heat, the stuffiness, the stench, and the drunkards that every minute come across on the way painfully respond to Raskolnikov's upset nerves. In the 1st chapter of the second part, the same picture is repeated with terrifying details - the stench, stuffiness, heat, people scurrying past, and again the young man experiences difficult moments. The closeness and stuffiness of the city slums is also the spiritual atmosphere of almost the entire novel. Only now they are talking about the sun,unbearably cutting eyes. The motif of the sun will then acquire metaphorical completeness, but for now its bright light torments Raskolnikov, confused in his idea.

Magnificent panorama

In the second part of the novel, in Chapter 2, Raskolnikov is feverishly looking for a place to hide the valuables taken from the old woman. And here, suddenly, he freezes from a breathtaking panorama - clean air, a blue river and the domes of the temple reflected in it. Does it adore the hero? No, he never understood, could not decipher for himself this "magnificent picture", from which "an inexplicable coldness" and "dumb and deaf spirit" blew over him.

"Drunk" Petersburg

Dostoevsky was interested in the crime and punishment of the hero he created, of course, not only as an acutely psychological detective story. The path from the moral impasse to the light is spatially realized as a way out of a cramped dusty city into the expanse of the “boundless steppe drenched in the sun”, where “there was freedom” - not only physical, but freedom from ideas and delusions that infect the soul. In the meantime, in the 6th chapter of the second part of the novel, we see evening Petersburg through the eyes of Dostoevsky the humanist, piercingly pitying the degraded urban poor. Here a “dead drunk” ragamuffin is lying across the street, a crowd of women “with black eyes” is humming, and this time Raskolnikov inhales this languishing air in some kind of painful ecstasy.

Judge City

In the 5th chapter of the fifth part of the novel, Petersburg is shown on the edge, from the window of Raskolnikov's closet. The evening hour of the setting sun awakens ina young man with a "dead longing", which torments him with a presentiment of eternity curled up into a tiny point - eternity "on a yard of space." And this is the verdict that the logic of events passes on Raskolnikov's theory. Petersburg of Dostoevsky at this moment appears not only as an accomplice in crime, but also as a judge.

Thunderstorm

In the 6th chapter of the sixth part, a stuffy and gloomy evening is torn apart by a terrible thunderstorm, in which lightning flashes without interruption, and the rain "gushed like a waterfall", mercilessly lashing the ground. This is the evening on the eve of the suicide of Svidrigailov, a man who brought the principle of “love yourself” to an extreme point and ruined himself with this. The storm continues with restless noise, and then a howling wind. In the cold haze, an alarm sounds, warning of a possible flood. The sounds remind Svidrigailov of the once seen suicide girl in a coffin strewn with flowers. All this seems to be pushing him towards suicide. Morning greets the hero with a thick milky-white fog, covering the city, consciousness, spiritual emptiness and pain.

Thunderstorm sounds like the antithesis of the heat and stuffiness of St. Petersburg, outlines an inevitable turn in the worldview of the protagonist, who deftly destroyed the actual evidence, but failed to hide the mental catastrophe generated by the murder. This idea is brilliantly supported by the change in the weather that Dostoevsky's Petersburg experiences in the novel. "Crime and Punishment" is a work that strikes with the depth and accuracy of the use of psychological details. It is no coincidence that Raskolnikov brings down on his headpawnbroker butt of an ax, thereby directing the tip at himself. He seems to split himself, experiencing collapse and spiritual death.

Street scenes

In the 1st chapter of the first part, a remarkable scene takes place on a cramped street of the St. Petersburg slums: Raskolnikov, who was thinking, is suddenly marked with a heart-rending cry by some drunk in a huge cart drawn by a draft horse. Petersburg of F. M. Dostoevsky is not indifferent to the mental pathology that the hero is experiencing. The city watches closely and loudly denounces, teases and provokes. In the 2nd chapter of the second part, the city physically affects the hero. Raskolnikov was whipped tightly by a cab driver, and immediately after that some merchant's wife gave him two kopecks as an alms. This wonderful urban scene symbolically anticipates the entire subsequent history of Raskolnikov, who was still “immature” to humbly accept alms.

Do you like street singing?

In the 6th chapter of the second part of the novel, Rodion wanders around the streets, where poverty lives and drinking places of entertainment are crowded, and becomes a witness to the unpretentious performance of organ grinders. He is drawn into the midst of the people, he talks to everyone, listens, observes, with some kind of dashing and hopeless greed, absorbing these moments of life, as before death. He already anticipates the denouement and desires it, but he still pretends to himself and plays with others, riskily opening the veil of his secret. The same chapter ends with a wild scene: a drunken woman throws herself from the bridge into the river in front of Raskolnikov. And already here he becomes a conspirator and provocateur for the heroPetersburg. Dostoevsky is briefly characterized by critics as an incomparable master of arranging fateful "accidents". And indeed, how subtly the writer manages to focus on the change in the mood and train of thought of the hero, who accidentally ran into this woman, met her eyes with her inflamed gaze!

Destroying City

The idea of a city-accomplice in crime and a destroyer reappears in the 5th chapter of the fifth part, where the author draws a scene of Katerina Ivanovna's madness. On the street of a soulless city, Marmeladov was once crushed, Sonya is engaged in prostitution, the girl seen by Raskolnikov on the boulevard is experiencing a fall. On the streets of the city, Svidrigailov commits suicide, and now, from hopelessness and despair, Katerina Ivanovna goes crazy. And the stone pavement greedily absorbs her gushing blood.

Houses and interiors

In the 1st chapter of the first part, Raskolnikov, with trembling and bated breath, approaches the pawnbroker's house, which he sees as "immense", ugly towering and advancing on a little man. The human anthill of the profitable house terrifies the hero. Today, guides show tourists this house on the Griboyedov Canal, it is part of the culture of St. Petersburg.

In chapter 2 of the first part, Raskolnikov finds himself in a tavern and, among drunken cries and incoherent chatter, listens to Marmeladov's piercing confession. These are details that reinforce the hero in his sinister determination to test his theory. Raskolnikov's closet, described in the 3rd chapter of the first part of the novel,reminds not the closet, not the coffin. Once Dostoevsky mentions its resemblance to a sea cabin. All this eloquently testifies to the internal state of Raskolnikov, squeezed by poverty, unsatisfied pride and his monstrous theory, which takes away his balance and peace.

In the 2nd chapter of the first part and the 7th chapter, the second author presents the “passage room” of the Marmeladovs, where the life of an extremely impoverished family constantly appears before the eyes of a curious public, and there is nothing to say about solitude and peace. Alien glances, bursts of laughter, thick waves of tobacco smoke - the atmosphere in which life passes and the death of the Marmeladov spouses overtakes.

In the 4th chapter of the fourth part, we see Sonya's dwelling in the old green house of Kapernaumov (is it an accidental biblical consonance?). This building is also an attraction for fans of Fyodor Mikhailovich's books; to this day it is called the "house with an obtuse angle." Here, as elsewhere in the novel, a narrow and dark staircase leads to Sonya's room, and the room itself resembles a shed in the shape of an irregular quadrangle with an "extremely low ceiling." A wall with three windows that ugly cut across the room overlooked a ditch. Ugliness and wretchedness, conspicuous, paradoxically enhances the emotional characteristics of the heroine, who has a rare inner we alth.

The third chapter of the sixth part of the novel presents the scene of Svidrigailov's confession to Raskolnikov in a tavern, not far from Haymarket. This area in the century before lastserved as a "frontal place", in addition, there was a huge "pushy" open-air market. And it is precisely there that Dostoevsky now and then leads his heroes, who remain, despite the thick of the people, still in terrifying loneliness with their sick thoughts and feelings. The open windows of the tavern, however, are an anticipation of the public repentance of the hero, who failed in his anti-human selfish beliefs.

In conclusion

Having touched the famous novel, we were convinced that Dostoevsky's St. Petersburg is a full participant in the plot and ideological content of the work. The same can be said about other works of Fyodor Mikhailovich. It remains to add that the writer, according to the apt remark of the literary critic Yuri Lotman, at the beginning of his work sees in this city a concentrated image of all of Russia. In the final works, the dominance of the soulless government principle that captivated the sovereign northern capital is seen by him as the embodiment of the fears and illnesses of the entire great country.