Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin is the greatest historian of his time, as well as a writer of the era of sentimentalism.

Karamzin's work interested me, since he is such a multifaceted and amazing person that Russian people are simply obliged to know about the activities of their compatriot. Karamzin was a poet, journalist, public figure and reformer of the Russian literary language.

He was born on December 1, 1766 in a noble family near Simbirsk, and therefore he received a good education. First, he studied at a private boarding school in his hometown, and later in Moscow at the boarding school of I. M. Shaden, after which he entered Moscow University. After serving a year after university in the Preobrazhensky regiment, he devoted himself entirely to literature, and later to historical essays.

In 1792 "Poor Liza" was written, which was the first work of that time, written in the genre of Russian prose

The narrator begins the narration of this story thirty years after the events that took place. His memories take place in Moscow near the Simonov Monastery, where once a peasant girl Liza lived with her mother in a poor house. They lived poorly, since their husband and father had died long ago and there was no one to help. At the age of fifteen, Liza had to weave canvases, knit stockings, and sell all sorts of things in Moscow. On one of these days, selling lilies of the valley in Moscow, she met Erast. Erast bought her flowers and wanted to give a whole ruble for them, but the girl did not take such a large fee, but took only the real cost of a bunch of several kopecks. It was this artlessness and simplicity of his grandfather that interested Erast. The next day he appeared under the windows of her hut. Soon the young nobleman and the peasant girl began to meet often, confessed their love to each other. So a week passed. A week later, Lisa informed Erast that her mother was forcing her to marry another, the one who had married her. But for her it is unbearable, since she loves her Erast.

Since then, their love became even stronger, and the girl, not knowing what she was doing, gave Erast her innocence. Since then, Erast's interest in Lisa began to gradually fade, as happens with those who got what they wanted. She no longer fascinated him so much, since she ceased to be an immaculate angel. He began to see her less and less and, finally, said that he would not come to her for some time, since the affairs of military service required this. Lisa believed him and said goodbye with tears.

After a while, the poor girl met a carriage with Erast in Moscow, he coldly informed her that he was engaged to another and soon a wedding, gave Lisa a hundred rubles of money and sent her home. He himself was forced to marry a rich old widow. Poor Liza could not bear her grief and threw herself into the river, where she immediately drowned. The mother, having learned about what had happened to her daughter, also died of grief. The hut was empty.

This work ends on such a tragic note. No one has happiness.

The heroes of this work are ordinary people. The peasant Lisa and her mother, the nobleman Erast, and the narrator, telling about the unfolding events. The story, unfortunately, is sad and even tragic.

So Liza is a poor peasant woman of fifteen years of age. This is an honest girl who worked from dawn to dawn, earning a living for herself and her mother. With all her heart she fell in love with Erast. When he confessed his love to her, her heart and soul were given to him forever. She fulfilled all the desires of her beloved, and therefore ceased to be interesting to him. The tragedy of this work is not only that the young nobleman defamed the girl, depriving her of her innocence, but that he left her in the end.

I think that even if Lisa had not lost her innocence at the moment when she found out that her beloved was engaged to another, she would still drown herself, since she could not imagine happiness with the other.

Erast is a young nobleman. He has a kind heart, which is why he stops next to Lisa for the first time. However, the character of the young man is windy, capable only of entertainment and revelry. Communication with a poor girl is interesting to him only at first, as a new extraordinary adventure in his life. At first, he perceives Lisa as a bright angel of purity. However, as soon as all the young man's desires were satisfied, the halo of magic immediately disappeared, and the girl became ordinary, like many others. Once again, Erast became interested only in revelry and cards. The lost estate and the debts that appeared were the result of his riotous lifestyle. Erast is also unhappy, as he is forced to marry an old widow only to get rid of debts.

A separate hero in this story is the narrator. No, this is not a story on behalf of Karamzin, this is a separate character. It is his memoirs that we read. The narrator describes the beauty of Moscow very beautifully, especially the Simonov Monastery.

Since the work "Poor Lisa" is sentimental prose, we often read about how everyone in turn weeps from an overabundance of feelings. And mother, and Lisa, and even Erast are overly sensitive heroes. However, despite such tearful pages, I really liked the work.

This work is recommended for study at school in the ninth grade. I believe that at this age it is high time to study such works, since girls at this age should already think about their honor and have a correct judgment about it. Therefore, the story of Lisa is, of course, tragic, but useful for young girls to read. After all, a girl must observe herself in purity and innocence.

Young men also need to understand the dangers of a riotous lifestyle. Indeed, Erast drove himself into a hole in debt. I had to work myself, like a real man, and not spend all the time on entertainment.

This work I would compare with the foreign work of Shakespeare "Romeo and Juliet". In this work, the lovers are also young, like Erast and Lisa, and the ending of their story is also tragic. Here, however, Erast remains alive in fact, but the feeling is such that he, too, seemed to have died. After all, marrying an old woman is like burying yourself alive. So I feel very sorry for poor Erast too. After all, he cannot be called a completely negative character. He has a kind, sympathetic heart, does not spare money for his beloved and is ready to buy all her knitted socks and all the flowers on sale every day. We must pay tribute to Lisa, who does not seek to take extra money from her lover. She takes exactly as much as she earned. So why are two lovers, who have a lot of merits and positive qualities, waiting for such a difficult and tragic ending ?! I believe that Erast's frivolity and spinelessness are to blame. Lisa's mother can also be blamed for such an ending, who, after the death of her father, dropped her hands so much that the poor girl had to earn on both of them herself. in addition, the mother saw Erast repeatedly and knew about the relationship between two young hearts, so she could warn her daughter about the possible expected consequences of a man and a girl alone.

Liza (Poor Liza) is the main character of the story, who, along with other works published by Karamzin in the Moscow Journal (Natalia, the boyar's daughter, Frol Silin, a beneficent man, Liodor, etc.), is not easy brought literary fame to its author, but made a complete revolution in the public consciousness of the 18th century. For the first time in the history of Russian prose, Karamzin turned to a heroine endowed with emphatically ordinary features. His words "... and peasant women know how to love" became winged.

Liza, a poor peasant girl, is an orphan at an early age. She lives in one of the villages near Moscow with her mother, a "sensitive, kind old woman," from whom she inherits her main talent - the ability to love. To support himself and his mother, L. 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 social life, Erast falls in love with a spontaneous, innocent girl with "brother's love." So it seems to him. However, soon platonic love turns into sensual. L., "completely surrendering to him, they only lived and breathed." But gradually L. begins to notice the change taking place in Erast. He explains his cooling by the fact that he needs to go to war. To improve matters, Erast marries an elderly rich widow. Upon learning of this, L. drowned in a pond.

Sensitivity - so in the language of the end of the XVIII century. determined the main merit of Karamzin's stories, meaning by this the ability to sympathize, to reveal in the "bends of the heart" "the most tender feelings", as well as the ability to enjoy the contemplation of one's own emotions. Sensitivity is also the central character trait of L. She trusts the movements of her heart, lives "tender passions." Ultimately, it is ardor and fervor that lead L. to death, but it is morally justified.

Karamzin was one of the first to introduce the opposition of town and village into Russian literature. In Karamzin's story, a village man - a man of nature - turns out to be defenseless, falling into an urban space, where laws differ from those of nature. It is not for nothing that L.'s mother tells her (thereby indirectly predicting everything that will happen later): “My heart is always out of place when you go to town; I always put a candle in front of the image and pray to the Lord God to keep you from any misfortune and misfortune. "

It is no coincidence that the first step on the road to disaster is L's insincerity: for the first time she “retreats from herself,” hiding, on the advice of Erast, their love from her mother, whom she had previously confided in all her secrets. Later, it was in relation to his dearly beloved mother that L. would repeat Erast's worst act. He tries to "buy off" L. and, chasing her away, gives her a hundred rubles. But L. does the same, sending his mother, along with the news of his death, those "ten imperials" that Erast gave her. Naturally, L.'s mother needs this money as much as the heroine herself: "Liza's mother heard about the terrible death of her daughter, and her blood cooled with horror - her eyes closed forever."

The tragic result of the love of a peasant woman and an officer confirms the mother's rightness, 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, acquiring a national flavor.

For the arrangement of the 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 author and hero in the same narrative space was not familiar to Russian literature before Karamzin. The narrator of Poor Lisa is emotionally involved in the relationships of the heroes. 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 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?").

Poor Liza is perceived as a story about true events. L. belongs to the characters with a "registration". "... More and more often attracts me to the walls of Si ... the new monastery is a memory of the deplorable fate of Liza, poor Liza" - this is how the author begins his story. Behind the gap in the middle of the word, any Muscovite guessed the name of the Simonov Monastery, the first buildings of which date back to the XIV century. (to date, only a few buildings have survived, most of them were blown up in 1930). The pond, located under the walls of the monastery, was called the Lisin Pond, but thanks to Karamzin's story it was popularly renamed Lizin and became a place of constant pilgrimage for Muscovites. In the minds of the monks of the Simonov Monastery, who zealously guarded the memory of L., she was primarily a fallen victim. Essentially, L. was canonized by sentimental culture.

First of all, the same unfortunate girls in love as L. herself came to the place of Lisa's death. 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 died her days; / If you are sensitive, passer-by, breathe a sigh"), and satirical, hostile to Karamzin and his heroine (the couplet acquired special fame among such "birch epigrams": "Erastov's bride perished in these streams. / Drown yourself, girls, there is enough room in the pond").

Karamzin and his story were certainly mentioned when describing the Simonov Monastery in Moscow guidebooks and special books and articles. But gradually these references began to bear an increasingly ironic character, and already in 1848 in the famous work of MN Zagoskin "Moscow and Muscovites" in the chapter "A Walk to the Simonov Monastery" not a word was said either about Karamzin or about his heroine. As sentimental prose lost its charm of novelty, Poor Liza ceased to be perceived as a story about true events, and even more so as an object for worship, but became in the minds of most readers (a primitive invention, a curiosity reflecting the tastes and concepts of a bygone era.

The image of "poor L." immediately sold out in numerous literary copies of Karamzin's epigones (cf. Dolgorukov's "Unhappy Liza"). But the image of L. and the ideal of sensitivity associated with it received serious development not in these stories, but in poetry. The invisible presence of "poor L." perceptibly in the Zhukovsky elegy "Rural cemetery", published ten years after the Karamzin story, in 1802, which laid, in the words of V. S. Solovyov, "the beginning of truly human poetry in Russia." Three major poets of the Pushkin era refer to the very plot about the seduced villager: E. A. Baratynsky (in the plot poem "Ed", 1826, A. A. Delvig (in the idyll "The End of the Golden Age", 1828) and I. I. Kozlov (in the "Russian story" "Mad", 1830).

In "Belkin's Tales" Pushkin twice varies the plot of the story about "poor L." The connection between Poor Liza and The Queen of Spades, whose heroine bears the name Lizaveta Ivanovna, is very complicated. Pushkin develops the Karamzin theme: his “poor Liza” (like “poor Tanya”, the heroine of “Eugene Onegin”) is going through a catastrophe: having lost hope for love, she marries another, quite worthy person. All the heroines of Pushkin, who are in the "force field" of the heroine Karamzin, are destined to be happy or unhappy - but life. PI Tchaikovsky returns Pushkin's Lisa to the origins, to Karamzin, in whose opera The Queen of Spades Liza (no longer Lizaveta Ivanovna) commits suicide by throwing herself into the Winter Canal.

The fate of L. in different versions of its resolution was carefully spelled out by F.M.Dostoevsky. In his work, both the word "poor" and the name "Liza" acquire a special status from the very beginning. The most famous among his heroines - the names of the Karamzin peasant woman - Lizaveta ("Crime and Punishment"), Elizaveta Prokofievna Epanchina ("The Idiot"), blessed Lizaveta and Liza Tushina ("Demons"), and Lizaveta Smerding ("The Brothers Karamazov"). But Swiss Marie from "The Idiot" and Sonechka Marmeladova from "Crime and Punishment" also would not have been without Liza Karamzin. The Karamzin scheme also forms the basis of the history of relations between Nekhlyudov and Katyusha Maslova, the heroes of Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection.

In the XX century. "Poor Liza" has by no means lost its significance: on the contrary, interest in Karamzin's story and his heroine has grown. One of the sensational productions of the 1980s. became the theatrical version of "Poor Lisa" in the theater-studio of M. Rozovsky "At the Nikitsky Gate".

Characteristics of the hero

Lisa is a poor peasant girl. She lives with her mother ("sensitive, kind old woman") in the village. To earn her living, Lisa takes on any job. In Moscow, selling flowers, the heroine meets the young nobleman Erast and falls in love with him: "completely surrendering to him, she only lived and breathed." But Erast betrays the girl and marries another for the sake of money. Upon learning of this, Lisa drowns in a pond. The main trait in the character of the heroine is sensitivity, the ability to love devotedly. The girl lives not by reason, but by feelings ("tender passions"). Lisa is kind, very naive and inexperienced. She sees only the best in people. The mother warns her: "You still do not know how evil people can offend a poor girl." Liza's mother connects evil people with the city: "My heart is always out of place when you go to the city ..." Karamzin shows bad changes in Lisa's thoughts and actions under the influence of the depraved ("urban") Erast. The girl hides from her mother, whom she had previously told everything, her love for the young nobleman. Later, Lisa, along with the news of her death, sends the old woman the money that Erast gave her. "Liza's mother heard about the terrible death of her daughter, and ... - her eyes closed forever." After the death of the heroine, pilgrims began to visit her grave. To the place of Lisa's death, the same unfortunate girls in love came to cry and grieve, as she herself was.

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"Poor Liza" - perhaps the calling card of Nikolai Mikhailovich Karamzin. This story was written at the end of the 18th century - during the heyday of the literary fashion for sentimentalism.

A few words about the plot of the story

Lisa's story is certainly sad. Having lost her father, Lisa - the main heroine of the story - at one point is forced to part with her usual way of life. She has no one else to rely on but herself.

Lisa is forced to sell flowers in order to be able to feed herself. Somehow, trading lilies of the valley on Moscow streets, the girl meets her love - Erast.

A young handsome aristocrat, Erast falls in love with Lisa. In a fit of passion, he is ready for anything for her, even to lose his position in the social hierarchy of their environment. However, having received Lisa's innocence and her heart, Erast realizes that she is no longer of his former interest.

The girl is left alone, and her lover leaves with the regiment. But one day - after several months - Liza again finds herself in Moscow and accidentally notices Erast: he is passing by in a luxurious carriage in the company of a certain rich widow. From the text of the story it becomes clear that the young man squandered all his fortune, lost his estate and was forced to agree to a profitable party for marriage. Desperate, Lisa rushes into the pond and dies. All that remains are memories of how once - not so long ago - lovers walked here, near this very pond, naive and happy.

On the originality of sentimentalism

Of course, it is impossible to characterize the work, designated as one of the brightest examples of sentimentalism, without a couple of words about the originality of this trend. Its very name speaks of the importance of feelings, which are declared here the highest value. Much attention is paid to the daily life of people, to what remained behind the scenes before this turn in literature. What kind of person is interesting to a sentimentalist writer? This is, of course, a simple person and his inner world.

The main characters of the story

It is curious that there are not so many main characters in this work. The main character is a peasant girl Liza, whose reflections are associated with landscapes of decline and dilapidation, abandonment of the monastery monastery. Lisa is a vivid example of the ideal heroine of a sentimental novel. She is financially poor but spiritually rich. Her inner world, like the romantic world, is directly opposite to the limitations of the outer world: a bottomless, deep, sensual, open and boundless inner world.

The girl lives with her mother in a village near Moscow. Once Lisa's family was not so poor, because the most difficult times for Lisa and her mother came in connection with the death of the breadwinner - the girl's father.

Lisa's mother, too, one way or another, is at the center of the story. She is an elderly woman who sincerely hopes that Lisa will be able to marry profitably.

Actually, Lisa's mother is not a selfish woman: she simply wishes her daughter happiness, which at that time was thought to be inseparable from the ability to make a successful party. The unhappy woman was already too weak to work as she did in the old days, and therefore Liza did not disdain any work: she was a jack of all trades - she knew how to weave, knit stockings, in the fall she picked and sold berries, and in the spring - flowers.

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Along with the lack of egocentric qualities, one can note such traits of Lisa as purity, devoted love and the ability to take care, not wanting to receive anything in return. These features of Lisa, like her openness to the world, prevent her from seeing darkness in people: she believes that all people are good and cannot accept the words of her mother that the world consists of polarities, and that good is always complemented by bad. The mother was very kind and sensitive, like her daughter, but she could not make Lisa's life easier: her health no longer allowed her to work, in addition, her eyesight was weakening, and gradually her daughter took the place of a wet nurse in the family. It is curious that after meeting Erast Lizin, his mother spoke of him extremely warmly and affably, since the young man suggested that Lisa take the work done on her own so that she would not go to the city too often. After the death of her daughter, the old woman dies, unable to withstand the blow.

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Finally, Erast is Lisa's lover, who later betrayed her, like the girl's love. Erast is an extremely ambivalent character. He has his own virtues: it is an extraordinary and sharp mind, noble origin, external attractiveness and a kind, soft heart. But these advantages were sometimes overridden by his shortcomings: frivolity and frivolity, weak will, which pushed the young man to gambling, secular pleasures and a depraved, morally reprehensible way of life. His frivolity does not allow him to find peace of mind with any one girl. Lisa does not know that a young nobleman falls in love and is carried away as easily as she is later disappointed.

It happened with Lisa: when he conquered the girl's heart and body, she lost her former charm for him. Liza, however, had a chance to have a completely different life: once a well-to-do peasant wooed her - a match for a girl in status. However, Erast made enough efforts to dissuade Lisa from this marriage, showered her with promises to stay with her forever. Thus, Erast's ambivalence affects not only his life, leading to destructive processes in his inner world, but also affects the lives of the people around him.

The individual figure is the storyteller. He is kind and sentimental, as if he collects images, but only those that cause tenderness and a special kind of pain, grief and sadness. However, he builds a specific topography of the story.

So, the topography of Poor Lisa

The work begins with a description of the desolate atmosphere of the hill on which the old monastery stands. The Simonov Monastery, standing on a hill, thus offers an amazing view of Moscow. The narrator draws us a map on which the events of the story will unfold. A dilapidated hut that is about to collapse, because the walls are all that remains of the past life. Its inhabitants have died, and the place in which their daily life took place no longer causes anything but melancholic sadness. For more than thirty years, no one else has lived here: however, the narrator remembers all the sad and mournful events that took place here. It is a place of memory and eternity.

Moscow, which can be seen from the hill we have already mentioned, is a place of raging life, oblivion in the shortness of everything that happens here. Fleetingness, brightness, "high hopes" and quickly forgetting disappointments - this is what Moscow brings to people.

The binary opposition permeates all the structures of this story.

Outcomes

Nikolai Karamzin, creating "Poor Lisa", sought to turn his gaze down and inward: down - because in the center of the work are not nobles and high society, the heroes of the past texts of Russian literature, but deep - because we are not talking about external events, not about the dynamics of successive circumstances, but about the development of the inner world. In fact, sentimentalist authors are making the same revolution in anthropology that the sophists and Socrates once did in antiquity. But the bottom line remains simple - no matter what origin a person has, he is equally worthy of happiness.

Liza is the main character of NM Karamzin's story Poor Liza, a poor young peasant woman from a village near Moscow. Lisa was left early without a father, who was the breadwinner of the family. After his death, she and her mother quickly became impoverished. Lisa's mother was a kind, sensitive old woman, but already incapable of work. Therefore, Lisa took up any job and worked without sparing herself. She weaved canvases and knitted stockings, picked berries and flowers, and then sold them in the city. The main character traits of Liza are sensitivity, naivety, purity and the ability to love faithfully. She sees only good in people, although her mother warned her that there are also "evil" people who can offend.

Once, selling flowers in Moscow, she met a young rich nobleman, who asked to continue to sell his products only to him. Lisa's mother was delighted with this news, because her daughter will no longer have to travel so often to the city. Lisa's new acquaintance named Erast begins to visit the girl often and young people fall in love. They often meet and walk by the pond. However, Erast later betrays Lisa. Having said that he is leaving for the service, he no longer returns to her. During the service, he played a lot of cards and lost his entire fortune. As a result, he had to marry a wealthy widow. Liza's heart could not stand such news, and the girl drowned herself in a deep pond.

After her death, other unfortunate girls began to come to the girl's grave. Erast until the end of his life was unhappy and considered himself guilty of the death of Lisa.