Biographies Characteristics Analysis

The portrait of Lisa in the work is poor. Characteristics of the image of Lisa based on the story "Poor Lisa" by N.M. Karamzin

The story "Poor Lisa", written by Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin, became one of the first works of sentimentalism in Russia. The love story of a poor girl and a young nobleman won the hearts of many of the writer's contemporaries and was received with great enthusiasm. The work brought unprecedented popularity to the then completely unknown 25-year-old writer. However, with what descriptions does the story “Poor Liza” begin?

History of creation

N. M. Karamzin was distinguished by his love for Western culture and actively preached its principles. His role in the life of Russia was enormous and invaluable. This progressive and active man traveled extensively in Europe in 1789-1790, and upon his return he published the story "Poor Lisa" in the Moscow Journal.

Analysis of the story indicates that the work has a sentimental aesthetic orientation, which is expressed in interest in, regardless of their social status.

While writing the story, Karamzin lived in a dacha with his friends, not far from which he was located. It is believed that he served as the basis for the beginning of the work. Thanks to this, the love story and the characters themselves were perceived by readers as completely real. And the pond near the monastery began to be called "Lizina Pond".

"Poor Lisa" by Karamzin as a sentimentalist story

“Poor Liza” is, in fact, a short story, in the genre of which no one wrote in Russia before Karamzin. But the writer's innovation is not only in the choice of genre, but also in the direction. It was behind this story that the title of the first work of Russian sentimentalism was entrenched.

Sentimentalism arose in Europe in the 17th century and focused on the sensual side of human life. Questions of reason and society went by the wayside for this direction, but emotions, relationships between people became a priority.

Sentimentalism has always sought to idealize what is happening, to embellish. Answering the question about what descriptions the story “Poor Liza” begins with, we can talk about the idyllic landscape that Karamzin paints for readers.

Theme and idea

One of the main themes of the story is social, and it is connected with the problem of the attitude of the nobility towards the peasants. It is not for nothing that Karamzin chooses a peasant girl for the role of the bearer of innocence and morality.

Contrasting the images of Lisa and Erast, the writer is one of the first to raise the problem of contradictions between the city and the countryside. If we turn to what descriptions the story "Poor Lisa" begins with, then we will see a quiet, cozy and natural world that exists in harmony with nature. The city, on the other hand, frightens, terrifies with its “mass of houses”, “golden domes”. Lisa becomes a reflection of nature, she is natural and naive, there is no falsehood and pretense in her.

The author speaks in the story from the position of a humanist. Karamzin depicts all the charm of love, its beauty and strength. But reason and pragmatism can easily destroy this wonderful feeling. The story owes its success to the incredible attention to the personality of a person, his experiences. "Poor Lisa" evoked sympathy from her readers thanks to Karamzin's amazing ability to portray all the spiritual subtleties, experiences, aspirations and thoughts of the heroine.

Heroes

A complete analysis of the story "Poor Liza" is impossible without a detailed examination of the images of the main characters of the work. Liza and Erast, as noted above, embodied different ideals and principles.

Lisa is an ordinary peasant girl whose main feature is the ability to feel. She acts according to the dictates of her heart and feelings, which ultimately led her to death, although her morality remained intact. However, in the image of Lisa there is little peasant: her speech and thoughts are closer to the language of the book, however, the feelings of the girl who fell in love for the first time are conveyed with incredible truthfulness. So, despite the external idealization of the heroine, her inner experiences are conveyed very realistically. In this regard, the story "Poor Lisa" does not lose its innovation.

What descriptions begin the work? First of all, consonant with the character of the heroine, helping the reader to recognize her. This is a natural idyllic world.

Erast appears completely different to readers. He is an officer who is only puzzled by the search for new entertainment, life in the world tires and bores him. He is not stupid, kind, but weak in character and changeable in his affections. Erast truly falls in love, but does not think about the future at all, because Lisa is not his circle, and he will never be able to marry her.

Karamzin complicated the image of Erast. Usually such a hero in Russian literature was simpler and endowed with certain characteristics. But the writer does not make him an insidious seducer, but a sincerely fallen in love man who, due to weakness of character, could not pass the test and keep his love. This type of hero was new to Russian literature, but he immediately took root and later received the name "superfluous person."

Plot and originality

The plot of the story is pretty straightforward. This is the story of the tragic love of a peasant woman and a nobleman, the result of which was the death of Liza.

What descriptions begin the story "Poor Lisa"? Karamzin draws a natural panorama, the bulk of the monastery, a pond - it is here, surrounded by nature, that the main character lives. But the main thing in the story is not the plot and not the descriptions, the main thing is feelings. And the narrator must awaken these feelings in the audience. For the first time in Russian literature, where the image of the narrator has always remained outside the work, the hero-author appears. This sentimental narrator learns the love story from Erast and retells the reader with sadness and sympathy.

Thus, there are three main characters in the story: Liza, Erast and the author-narrator. Karamzin also introduces the technique of landscape descriptions and somewhat lightens the ponderous style of the Russian literary language.

Significance for Russian literature of the story "Poor Liza"

An analysis of the story thus shows Karamzin's incredible contribution to the development of Russian literature. In addition to describing the relationship between the city and the countryside, the appearance of an “extra person”, many researchers note the birth of a “little person” - in the image of Lisa. This work influenced the work of A. S. Pushkin, F. M. Dostoevsky, L. N. Tolstoy, who developed the themes, ideas and images of Karamzin.

The incredible psychologism that brought world fame to Russian literature also gave rise to the story "Poor Liza". With what descriptions does this work begin! How much beauty, originality and incredible stylistic lightness are in them! One cannot overestimate Karamzin's contribution to the development of Russian literature.

  1. What phrase do you think defines the idea of ​​the story "Poor Lisa"? Justify the answer.
  2. The phrase - "and peasant women know how to love." Sentimentalists, unlike the classicists, preferred the cult of feeling over the cult of reason. At the same time, they affirmed the extra-class value of a person, his high moral qualities. This key phrase in Karamzin gives a new look at the problem of social inequality. Differences in social and property status do not yet testify to the superiority of one estate over another. Lisa's father and mother had high moral values, she herself worked hard. The author describes in detail the development of her love feelings from inception to despair. For Lisa, the loss of love is tantamount to the loss of life. The idea of ​​the story is concentrated in the phrase we have cited, which has become the formula of sentimental literature.

    It is also important for understanding the author's position and the manner of expressing feelings, which is characteristic of the main character of the story: in terms of her vocabulary, concepts and ideas, she is no different from expressing the feelings of an educated young lady. V. I. Korovin explains this by the fact that “Karamzin’s artistic task was partly to bring the feelings of a peasant woman closer to the feelings of an educated young lady and thereby erase the differences in the content and forms of emotional experiences.”

  3. Describe the main character of the story. What artistic means are chosen by the author to create its external and internal appearance? How is the writer's attitude towards it expressed?
  4. The image of Lisa is described by the author in detail. The heroine inherited high moral qualities and beliefs from her parents: diligence, honesty, sincerity, kindness. She is pure, naive, disinterested and therefore poorly protected from the vices that dominate around her. It is open to the natural manifestations of feelings and therefore prone to delusions, after which comes a tragic insight. The author treats his heroine with a tender feeling, admires, deeply experiences her joys and tragedy, constantly worries about her fate. Memories of the deplorable fate of Lisa make him "shed tears of tender sorrow." And in the very title of the story, Karamzin's sympathetic and sentimental attitude towards Lisa is expressed.

    The characteristic of the external and internal appearance of Lisa is made up of the author's descriptions and comments on her actions, as well as through the indirect transmission of mother's reviews or the love outpourings of Erast himself. Karamzin notes that Liza worked without sparing "her rare beauty, without sparing her tender youth." Her beauty is also evidenced by the impression she "made in his heart." The kind old mother called Lisa the Divine mercy of the nurse, the joy of her old age, she prayed that the Lord would reward her for what she does for her mother. From this we learn that Lisa is virtuous, that she not only reveres her mother, but also frees her from all cares beyond her poor health.

  5. What verbal details convey the movement of Lisa's feelings for Erast - from timid affection to ardent passion?
  6. An essential detail with which the acquaintance of Lisa and Erast began was the flowers that Lisa traded. The request he dropped to pick flowers just for him planted the first feeling in the girl's soul. She turned out to be more significant for her than for Erast, and therefore the next day, when he did not come, she did not sell the lilies of the valley to anyone and threw them into the Moscow River. Another detail was the timid glances she threw at the young man. Karamzin notes the expression of Lisa's feelings in appearance - "her cheeks burned like a dawn on a clear summer evening" - as they grow. Erast's kiss and his first declaration of love echoed in her soul with delightful music. As you can see, color and sound details are of great importance in conveying the movement of feelings from timid affection to ardent passion. The achievement of the apogee of love, which, according to the writer, led to the death of the heroine's purity, is also accompanied by a number of important verbal details. A new word appears and rushes (into his arms). Before that, on dates they hugged, their hugs were pure and pure. Now changes are taking place around them both in nature and in the color-sound range: kisses have become fiery, the darkness of the evening (in contrast to the quiet moon, the bright month) nourished desires; "not a single star shone in the sky - no ray could illuminate delusions." After what happened, “lightning flashed and thunder struck. Lisa trembled. “The storm roared menacingly, the rain poured from black clouds - it seemed that nature was lamenting about Liza’s lost innocence.” After such a turning point in the relationship between Lisa and Erast, Karamzin began to convey in more detail the inner state of the young man, who was becoming more and more indifferent to his beloved. Since that time, natural symbols have practically disappeared in the narrative. Only twice are the ancient oak trees that witnessed their love mentioned. The epithet gloomy now belongs to the oak over the grave of poor Lisa.

  7. Pay attention to the role of gesture in revealing the internal state of the characters. Analyze this technique of the author.
  8. Gesture in literature is one of the important techniques in conveying the internal state of a character. Widely uses it and Karamzin. Let us analyze the scene of the meeting of Lisa and Erast in the city, when she saw him in a carriage driving up to the house. Her sense of joy from the meeting was expressed in gestures: she rushed, he felt himself in an embrace. Although it is said that he felt embraced, the author thereby emphasizes the swiftness of her joyful action. The swiftness of her movements is the swiftness in the expression of feelings. Further, his gestures become swift - he wants to get rid of Liza as soon as possible so that no one sees him in the arms of a simple peasant woman on the eve of a profitable marriage: he took him by the hand, led him into the office, locked the door, put the money in her pocket, took him out of the cab - she ordered the servant to escort the girl from the yard. And all this so quickly that Li-za could not come to her senses.

  9. Can Erast be considered a villain or an insidious seducer? How does Karamzin describe him, how does he reveal his attitude towards him? Compare the manner of depicting Erast with the manner of depicting heroes in the works of Russian classicism using the example of works known to you.
  10. The meaning of the fate of poor Lisa outlined in the story is precisely that Erast is not a villain and seducer, but a completely kind and sincere person, but weak and windy. He sought pleasure, led an absent-minded lifestyle, “read novels, idylls, had a rather vivid imagination and often moved his thoughts to those times (former or not former), in which, according to poets, all people They walked carelessly through the meadows, bathed in clean springs, kissed like mountain faces, rested under roses and myrtle trees, and spent all their days in happy idleness. He was attracted to Lisa not only by her external, but mainly by her spiritual beauty, her pure, undefiled expression of love. It seemed to him that he found in her what his heart had been looking for for a long time. Erast quite sincerely dreamed that he would live with her as a brother and sister, and with contemptuous disgust recalled the voluptuous pleasures already experienced earlier. To which the writer wisely commented: “Reckless young man! Do you know your heart? Can you always be responsible for your movements? Is reason always the king of your feelings? His vices are rooted not in his own soul, but in the mores of society. When the relationship between Lisa and Erast reached a sensual level, Lisa retained and even lived her love for him, and above all spiritual love, and Erast's feelings began to decline, because such relationships were not new to him. Erast turns out to be a slave to "circumstances" that force him to marry a rich bride and so unceremoniously part with Lisa, as he did. However, Karamzin sympathizes with him, because he still sees in him a "good fellow." Upon learning of Liza's suicide, Erast suffers deeply and sincerely and "considers himself a murderer." “So the “insensitivity” of society, fixed in social and property inequality, separates and destroys people who are good by nature and becomes an insurmountable obstacle to their happiness. But since the sad love story of two kind souls has been revealed to the reader, their reconciliation is possible where there are no social conventions and prejudices, where the human reigns in its true and pure form. Therefore, Karamzin's story ends with a pacifying chord ”(V. I. Korovin).

    In the works of classicism, positive and negative characters are sharply opposed to each other. And the hero in such situations, of course, was portrayed as a prudent and ruthless seducer.

  11. How do you see the image of the narrator?
  12. The narrator is a contemporary of the heroes of the story "Poor Lisa". He is familiar with Eras, who tells him this sad story. This is a kind-hearted, sensitive, sentimental person who deeply experiences the grief of people. The narrator is an educated person with life experience, observant, able to give people the right characteristics. The narrator loves Moscow, its environs, the nature of his native land, often walks on foot to admire the landscape beauties. material from the site

  13. What is the purpose of lyrical digressions in the story?
  14. There are not many lyrical digressions in the story. The author has more detailed judgments that accompany the depiction of the love of heroes, which, however, can also be attributed to digressions, for example: “Oh Liza, Liza! What happened to you? But there are also direct lyrical digressions, for example, at the beginning of "Poor Liza". The narrator often comes to the Danilov Monastery "in the gloomy days of autumn, mourn along with nature." This digression creates a lyrical-philosophical mood, the ground for sad reflections about life and death, about the bitter pages of the history of the fatherland.

  15. What is the role of landscape in the story? How is it connected with the mood and feelings of lovers?
  16. The landscape creates an emotional background for the perception of the plot of the story and the fate of its characters, harmonizes with the feelings of lovers. At the beginning of the story, for example, the majestic amphitheater located Moscow with golden domes and the green flowering meadows located at its foot and the wretched, ruined hut in which Liza lived with her mother thirty years ago. From the panorama of Moscow, the narrator casts a glance at the Simonov Monastery, recalls the story of poor Lisa in connection with it, indicates the nature of his mood, and then directs his gaze to her former dwelling. This is how the landscape compositionally builds approaches to the beginning of the sad story of Lisa and her love for Erast. The mood of the author (“tender sorrow”) is gradually transmitted to the reader through reading the landscape and the narrator’s thoughts about the pictures he has seen.

    Against the backdrop of beautiful landscape sketches, the love feeling of the characters is born and develops. They are found "on the banks of a river or in a birch grove, but most often under the shade of hundred-year-old oaks<…>- oaks, overshadowing a deep clean pond, dug up in ancient times. The quiet moon harmonizes with Lisa's hair, "silvering them." The fusion of love and nature is described in an interesting way: marshmallows and the hand of a dear friend play with Lisa's moonlight-silvered hair, which creates an airy chaste image of a love feeling. We hear about such a fusion of feelings with the perception of nature in the words of Liza, containing a declaration of love for Erast: “without your dark eyes, a bright month; without your voice, the singing nightingale is boring; without your breath, the breeze is unpleasant to me. The literary devices we observe are typical of sentimentalism.

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POOR LISA

(Tale, 1792)

Lisa (poor Lisa) - the main character of the story, which made a complete revolution in the public consciousness of the XVIII century. Karamzin, for the first time in the history of Russian prose, turned to a heroine endowed with emphatically mundane features. His words "and peasant women know how to love" became winged.

Poor peasant girl L. early becomes an orphan. She lives in one of the villages near Moscow with her mother - "a sensitive, kind old woman", from whom L. inherits his main talent - the ability to love devotedly. To support himself and his mother, L., "not sparing his tender youth," takes on any job. In the spring she goes to town to sell flowers. There, in Moscow, L. meets the young nobleman Erast. Tired of the windy secular life, Erast falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with the "love of a brother." So it seems to him. However, soon platonic love turns into sensual. L., “completely surrendering to him, she only lived and breathed them.” But gradually L. begins to notice the change taking place in Erast. He explains his cooling by natural concern: he needs to go to war. However, in the army, he does not so much fight the enemy as he plays cards. To improve things, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, L. drowns himself in the pond.

Sensitivity - so in the language of the late XVIII century. determined the main merit of Karamzin's stories, meaning by this the ability to sympathize, to discover "the tenderest feelings" in the "bends of the heart", as well as the ability to enjoy the contemplation of one's own emotions. Sensitivity is also a central character trait of L. She trusts the movements of her heart, lives by "gentle passions." Ultimately, it is ardor and ardor that lead L. to death, but morally it is justified. The idea consistently pursued by Karamzin that it is natural for a spiritually rich, sensitive person to do good deeds removes the need for normative morality.

The motive of seducing a pure and immaculate girl, found in one form or another in many of Karamzin's works, acquires an emphatically social sound in Poor Liza. Karamzin was one of the first to introduce the opposition of the city and the countryside into Russian literature. In the world folklore-mythological tradition, heroes are often able to actively act only in the space allotted to them and are completely powerless outside of it. In accordance with this tradition, in Karamzin's story, a village man - a man of nature - is defenseless, falling into urban space, where laws operate that are different from the laws of nature. It is not for nothing that L.'s mother says to her (thereby indirectly predicting everything that will happen later): “My heart is always out of place when you go to the city; I always put a candle in front of the image and pray to the Lord God that he save you from all trouble and misfortune.

It is no coincidence that the first step on the road to disaster is the insincerity of L.: for the first time she “retreats from herself”, hiding, on the advice of Erast, their love from her mother, to whom she had previously confided all her secrets. Later, it was in relation to his dearly beloved mother that L. would repeat the worst act of Erast. He will try to "pay off" L. and, driving her away, gives her a hundred rubles. But after all, L. will do the same, sending his mother, along with the news of his death, those “ten imperials” that Erast gave her. Naturally, L.’s mother doesn’t need this money just as much as the heroine herself: “Lizina’s mother heard about the terrible death of her daughter, and her blood cooled with horror - her eyes closed forever.”

The tragic outcome of the love of a peasant woman and an officer confirms the correctness of her mother, who warned L. at the very beginning of the story: “You still don’t know how evil people can offend a poor girl.” The general rule turns into a specific situation, poor L. herself takes the place of the impersonal “poor girl”, and the universal plot is transferred to Russian soil, while acquiring a special national flavor.
At the same time, the plot of "Poor Liza" is maximally generalized and compressed. Possible lines of development are in their infancy, dots and dashes sometimes replace the text, become its “equivalent”, “significant minus”. This conciseness is reflected at the level of the characters. The image of L. is marked with a dotted line, each feature of her character is a topic for a story, but not yet the story itself. This does not prevent the duet of L. and Erast from remaining the plot center of the story, around which all other characters are organized.

For the arrangement of characters in the story, it is also essential that the narrator learns the story of poor L. directly from Erast and himself often comes to be sad at Liza's grave. The coexistence of the author and his hero in the same narrative space before Karamzin was not familiar to Russian literature. The narrator of "Poor Liza" is mentally involved in the relationship of the characters. Already the title of the story is built on the combination of the heroine’s own name with an epithet characterizing the sympathetic attitude of the narrator towards her, who at the same time constantly repeats that he has no power to change the course of events (“Ah! Why am I writing not a novel, but a sad story?”). A kind of "self-sufficiency" of the hero, his "independence" from the author largely determines the specifics of the existence of the image in the text, more precisely, his going beyond the text, carried out in two main directions. In Poor Liza, the topographically concrete space of Moscow is connected with the conditional space of the literary tradition. At the point of intersection is the image of L. "Poor Lisa" is perceived as a story about true events. L. belongs to the characters with a "registration". “...increasingly attracts me to the walls of the Si...nova monastery - the memory of the deplorable fate of Liza, poor Liza" - this is how the author begins his story. For a gap in the middle of a word, any Muscovite guessed the name of the Simonov Monastery. (The Simonov Monastery, the first buildings of which date back to the 14th century, has survived to this day; it is located on the territory of the Dynamo plant at Leninskaya Sloboda, 26.) The pond, which was under the walls of the monastery, was called Lisiny Pond, but thanks to the story of Karamzin, it was popularly renamed to Lizin and became a place of constant pilgrimage for Muscovites. The paradox is the absence of a contradiction between Christian morality and L.'s innocence. Even the sin of suicide is "forgiven" to her. In the minds of the monks of the Simonov Monastery, who zealously guarded the memory of L., she was, first of all, a fallen victim. But in essence, L. was “canonized” by sentimental culture. Thus, the heroine of Karamzin stands not only at the intersection of fiction and were, but also at the intersection of two religions: the Christian and the sentimental religion of feeling.

To the place of Liza's death, the same unfortunate girls in love like L. herself came to cry and grieve. According to eyewitnesses, the bark of the trees growing around the pond was mercilessly cut with the knives of the "pilgrims". The inscriptions carved on the trees were both serious (“In these streams, poor Liza passed away for days; / If you are sensitive, a passerby, take a breath”), and satirical, hostile to Karamzin and his heroine (the following couplet gained special fame among such “birch epigrams”: "Erast's bride died in these streams. / Drown yourself, girls, there is enough space in the pond").

The very name Elizabeth is of Hebrew origin (with subsequent Greek-Latin adaptation) and is translated as "honoring God." The "world" context of the name Lisa / Elizabeth begins with biblical texts. This is the name of the wife of the high priest Aaron (Ex. 6:23), as well as the wife of the priest Zechariah and the mother of John the Baptist (Luke 1:5). In the gallery of literary heroines, Eloise, Abelard's friend, occupies a special place. After her, the name is associated with a love theme: the story of the "noble maiden" Julie d "Entage, who fell in love with her modest teacher Saint-Pre, J. J. Rousseau calls "Julia, or New Eloise ..." (1761). The Hermitage is located the famous bust of the innocent and naive "Little Lisa" by the French sculptor Houdon (1775), which could also have influenced the image created by Karamzin.

The name "Lisa" until the beginning of the 80s. 18th century almost never met in Russian literature, and if it did, then in its foreign language version. Choosing this name for his heroine, Karamzin went to break the rather strict canon that had developed in literature and predetermined in advance what Lisa should be like, how she should behave. This behavioral stereotype was defined in European literature of the 17th-18th centuries. the fact that the image of Lisa, Lisette (Lizette) was associated primarily with comedy. Lisa of the French comedy is usually a servant-maid (maid), the confidante of her young mistress. She is young, pretty, rather frivolous and understands everything that is connected with a love affair, with the "science of tender passion." Naivety, innocence, modesty are the least characteristic of this comedic role.

Breaking the reader's expectations, removing the mask from the name of the heroine, Karamzin thereby destroyed the foundations of the very culture of classicism, weakened the ties between the signified and the signifier, between the name and its bearer in the space of literature. With all the conventionality of the image of L., her name is associated precisely with the character, and not with the role of the heroine. Establishing a relationship between the "internal" character and "external" action was a significant achievement for Karamzin on the way to the "psychologism" of Russian prose.

What phrase do you think defines the idea of ​​the story "Poor Liza"? Justify the answer.

The phrase - "and peasant women know how to love." Sentimentalists, unlike the classicists, preferred the cult of feeling over the cult of reason. At the same time, they affirmed the extra-class value of a person, his high moral qualities. This key phrase in Karamzin gives a new look at the problem of social inequality. Differences in social and property status do not yet indicate the superiority of one estate over another. Lisa's father and mother had high moral values, she herself worked hard. The author describes in detail the development of her love feelings from inception to despair. For Lisa, the loss of love is tantamount to the loss of life. The idea of ​​the story is concentrated in the phrase we have cited, which has become the formula of sentimental literature.

It is also important for understanding the author's position and the manner of expressing feelings, which is characteristic of the main character of the story: in terms of her vocabulary, concepts and ideas, she is no different from expressing the feelings of an educated young lady. V. I. Korovin explains this by the fact that “Karamzin’s artistic task was partly to bring the feelings of a peasant woman closer to the feelings of an educated young lady and thereby erase the differences in the content and forms of emotional experiences.”

Describe the main character of the story. What artistic means are chosen by the author to create its external and internal appearance? How is the writer's attitude towards it expressed?

The image of Lisa is described by the author in detail. The heroine inherited high moral qualities and beliefs from her parents: diligence, honesty, sincerity, kindness. She is pure, naive, disinterested and therefore poorly protected from the vices that dominate around her. It is open to the natural manifestations of feelings and therefore prone to delusions, after which comes a tragic insight. The author treats his heroine with a tender feeling, admires, deeply experiences her joys and tragedy, constantly worries about her fate. Memories of the deplorable fate of Lisa make him "shed tears of tender sorrow." And in the very title of the story, Karamzin's sympathetic and sentimental attitude towards Lisa is expressed.

The characterization of the external and internal appearance of Lisa is made up of the author's descriptions and comments on her actions, as well as through the indirect transmission of mother's reviews or the love outpourings of Erast himself. Karamzin notes that Liza worked without sparing "her rare beauty, without sparing her tender youth." Her beauty is also evidenced by the impression that she "made in his heart." The kind old mother called Lisa the Divine mercy of the nurse, the joy of her old age, she prayed that the Lord would reward her for what she does for her mother. From this we learn that Lisa is virtuous, that she not only honors her mother, but also frees her from all the cares that are beyond her poor health.

What verbal details convey the movement of Lisa's feelings for Erast - from timid affection to ardent passion?

An essential detail that began the acquaintance of Lisa and Erast were the flowers that Lisa traded. The request he dropped to pick flowers only for him planted the first feeling in the girl’s soul. She turned out to be more significant for her than for Erast, and therefore the next day, when he did not come, she did not sell the lilies of the valley to anyone and threw them into the Moscow River. Another detail was the timid glances she threw at the young man. Karamzin notes the expression of Lisa's feelings in appearance - "her cheeks burned like a dawn on a clear summer evening" - as they grow. Erast's kiss and his first declaration of love echoed in her soul with delightful music. As you can see, color and sound details are of great importance in conveying the movement of feelings from timid affection to ardent passion. The achievement of the apogee of love, which, according to the writer, led to the death of the heroine's purity, is also accompanied by a number of important verbal details. A new word appears and is thrown (into his arms). Before that, on dates they hugged, their hugs were pure and pure. Now changes are taking place around them both in nature and in the color-sound range: kisses have become fiery, the darkness of the evening (in contrast to the quiet moon, the bright month) nourished desires; "not a single star shone in the sky - no ray could illuminate delusions." After the event, “lightning flashed and thunder roared. Lisa trembled. “The storm roared menacingly, rain poured from black clouds - it seemed that nature was lamenting about Liza’s lost innocence.” After such a turning point in the relationship between Lisa and Erast, Karamzin began to convey in more detail the inner state of the young man, who was becoming more and more indifferent to his beloved. Since that time, natural symbols have practically disappeared in the narrative. Only twice are the ancient oak trees that witnessed their love mentioned. The epithet gloomy now belongs to the oak over the grave of poor Lisa.

Pay attention to the role of gesture in revealing the internal state of the characters. Analyze this technique of the author.

Gesture in literature is one of the most important techniques in conveying the internal state of a character. Widely uses it and Karamzin. Let's analyze the scene of the meeting between Lisa and Erast in the city, when she saw him in a carriage driving up to the house. Her sense of joy from the meeting was expressed in gestures: she rushed, he felt himself in an embrace. Although it is said that he felt embraced, the author thereby emphasizes the swiftness of her joyful action. The swiftness of her movements is the swiftness in the expression of feelings. Further, his gestures become swift - he wants to get rid of Lisa as soon as possible so that no one sees him in the arms of a simple peasant woman on the eve of a profitable marriage: he took him by the hand, led him into the office, locked the door, put the money in her pocket, took her out of the office and ordered the servant to see her off. girl from the yard. And all this is so fast that Lisa could not come to her senses.

XVIII century, which glorified many remarkable people, including the writer Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin. By the end of this century, he publishes his most famous creation - the story "Poor Liza". It was it that brought him great fame and great popularity among readers. The book is based on two characters: the poor girl Liza and the nobleman Erast, which appear in the course of the plot in their attitude towards love.

Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin made a huge contribution to the cultural development of the fatherland at the end of the 18th century. After numerous trips to Germany, England, France and Switzerland, the prose writer returns to Russia, and while relaxing at the dacha of the famous traveler Pyotr Ivanovich Beketov, in the 1790s he takes on a new literary experiment. The local surroundings near the Simonov Monastery greatly influenced the idea of ​​the work "Poor Lisa", which he hatched during his travels. Nature was of great importance for Karamzin, he truly loved it and often changed the bustle of the city for forests and fields, where he read his favorite books and immersed himself in thought.

Genre and direction

"Poor Liza" is the first Russian psychological story that contains a moral disagreement between people of different classes. Lisa's feelings are clear and understandable to the reader: for a simple bourgeois, happiness is love, so she loves blindly and naively. Erast's feelings, on the contrary, are more confused, because he himself cannot understand them in any way. At first, the young man wants to simply fall in love just like in the novels he read, but it soon becomes clear that he is not able to live love. City life, full of luxury and passion, had a huge impact on the hero, and he discovers a carnal attraction that completely destroys spiritual love.

Karamzin is an innovator, he can rightfully be called the founder of Russian sentimentalism. Readers took the work admiringly, as society has long wanted something like this. The audience was exhausted by the moralizing of the classic direction, the basis of which is the worship of reason and duty. Sentimentalism, on the other hand, demonstrates the emotional experiences, feelings and emotions of the characters.

About what?

According to the writer, this story is “a rather uncomplicated fairy tale.” Indeed, the plot of the work is simple to genius. It begins and ends with an outline of the area of ​​the Simonov Monastery, which evokes in the memory of the narrator thoughts about the tragic turn in the fate of poor Liza. This is a love story of a poor provincial woman and a wealthy young man from the privileged class. The acquaintance of the lovers began with the fact that Lisa was selling lilies of the valley collected in the forest, and Erast, wanting to start a conversation with the girl he liked, decided to buy flowers from her. He was captivated by Lisa's natural beauty and kindness, and they began dating. However, soon the young man was fed up with the charm of his passion and found a more profitable party. The heroine, unable to withstand the blow, drowned herself. Her lover regretted it all his life.

Their images are ambiguous, first of all, the world of a simple natural person, unspoiled by city fuss and greed, is revealed. Karamzin described everything in such detail and picturesquely that readers believed in this story and fell in love with his heroine.

Main characters and their characteristics

  1. The main character of the story is Lisa, a poor village girl. At an early age, she lost her father and was forced to become a breadwinner for her family, accepting any job. The hardworking provincial is very naive and sensitive, she sees only good features in people and lives with her emotions, following the call of her heart. She takes care of her mother day and night. And even when the heroine decides on a fatal act, she still does not forget about her family and leaves her money. Lisa's main talent is the gift of love, because for the sake of her loved ones she is ready to do anything.
  2. Lisa's mother is a kind and wise old woman. She experienced the death of her husband Ivan very hard, as she devotedly loved him and lived happily with him for many years. The only consolation was the daughter whom she sought to marry to a worthy and wealthy man. The character of the heroine is internally solid, but a little bookish and idealized.
  3. Erast is a wealthy nobleman. He leads a wild life, thinking only about fun. He is smart, but very fickle, spoiled and weak-willed. Without thinking about the fact that Lisa is from a different class, he fell in love with her, but still he cannot overcome all the difficulties of this unequal love. Erast cannot be called a negative hero, because he admits his guilt. He read and was inspired by novels, was dreamy, looking at the world through rose-colored glasses. Therefore, his real love did not stand such a test.

Subject

  • The main theme in sentimental literature is the sincere feelings of a person in a collision with the indifference of the real world. Karamzin was one of the first to decide to write about the spiritual happiness and suffering of the common people. He reflected in his work the transition from the civil theme, which was common in the Enlightenment, to the personal one, in which the main subject of interest is the spiritual world of the individual. Thus, the author, having described in depth the inner world of the characters together with their feelings and experiences, began to develop such a literary device as psychologism.
  • Theme of love. Love in "Poor Liza" is a test that tests the heroes for strength and loyalty to their word. Liza completely surrendered to this feeling, her author exalts and idealizes for this ability. She is the embodiment of the feminine ideal, one that completely dissolves in the adoration of her beloved and is faithful to him until her last breath. But Erast did not stand the test and turned out to be a cowardly and miserable person, incapable of self-giving in the name of something more important than material wealth.
  • Contrasting city and countryside. The author prefers the countryside, it is there that natural, sincere and kind people who do not know temptation are formed. But in big cities they acquire vices: envy, greed, selfishness. Erast's position in society was more precious than love, he was fed up with it, because he was not able to experience a strong and deep feeling. Lisa, on the other hand, could not live after this betrayal: if love died, she follows her, because without her she cannot imagine her future.
  • Problem

    Karamzin in the work "Poor Liza" touches on various problems: social and moral. The problematic of the story is based on opposition. The main characters differ both in quality of life and in character. Liza is a pure, honest and naive girl from the lower class, and Erast is a spoiled, weak-willed, young man belonging to the nobility who thinks only about his own pleasures. Lisa, having fallen in love with him, cannot go a single day without thinking about him, while Erast, on the contrary, began to move away as soon as he got what he wanted from her.

    The result of such fleeting moments of happiness for Lisa and Erast is the death of a girl, after which the young man cannot stop blaming himself for this tragedy and remains unhappy until the end of his life. The author showed how class inequality led to an unhappy ending and served as a reason for the tragedy, as well as the responsibility a person bears for those who trusted him.

    the main idea

    The plot is not the most important thing in this story. Emotions and feelings awakening while reading deserve more attention. The narrator himself plays a huge role, because he tells about the life of a poor rural girl with sadness and sympathy. For Russian literature, the image of an empathic narrator who knows how to empathize with the emotional state of the characters turned out to be a discovery. Any dramatic moment makes his heart bleed, as well as sincerely shed tears. Thus, the main idea of ​​the story "Poor Liza" is that one should not be afraid of one's feelings, love, experience, sympathize with the full breast. Only then can a person overcome immorality, cruelty and selfishness in himself. The author starts with himself, because he, a nobleman, describes the sins of his own class, and gives sympathy to a simple village girl, urging people of his position to become more humane. The inhabitants of poor huts sometimes outshine the gentlemen from old estates with their virtue. This is the main idea of ​​Karamzin.

    The attitude of the author to the protagonist of the story also became an innovation in Russian literature. So Karamzin does not blame Erast when Lisa dies, he demonstrates the social conditions that caused the tragic event. The big city influenced the young man, destroying his moral principles and making him corrupt. Liza, on the other hand, grew up in the village, her naivety and simplicity played a cruel joke on her. The writer also demonstrates that not only Liza, but also Erast was subjected to the hardships of fate, becoming a victim of sad circumstances. The hero experiences guilt throughout his life, never becoming truly happy.

    What does it teach?

    The reader has the opportunity to learn something from the mistakes of others. The clash of love and selfishness is a hot topic, since anyone at least once in their life experienced unrequited feelings, or experienced the betrayal of a loved one. Analyzing Karamzin's story, we learn important life lessons, become more humane and more responsive to each other. The creations of the era of sentimentalism have a single property: they help people to enrich themselves spiritually, and also bring up the best humane and moral qualities in us.

    The story "Poor Lisa" has gained popularity among readers. This work teaches a person to be more responsive to other people, as well as the ability to sympathize.

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